virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or

depravity, but by some error in judgment… the change in the hero’s fortune must not be

from misery to happiness, but on the contrary, from happiness to misery’. From this

definition, he further expanded it by defining the profile of the Classical Greek tragic

hero, basing it on what he considered the best tragedy ever written, Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex.

According to Aristotle, a tragedy should comprise of the hero’s goodness and superiority, a

tragic flaw in which the hero makes fatal errors in judgment which eventually lead to his

downfall, a tragic realization in which the main character understands how he has

unwittingly helped to bring about his own destruction and the absence of freewill in the

Oedipus was a good ruler: just, compassionate and sympathetic. When the priests

of Thebes approached him, pleading for help on behalf of the people of Thebes who were

suffering from death and famine, Oedipus immediately agreed and promised them that he

would do his best in solving the problem

riddle of the Sphinx, he could not have known that he would end up marrying his own

leaving Corinth when he found out that the King and Queen were not his natural parents,

own’ and ‘all of his people’s sorrows’. He promised to ‘bring everything to light’. Oedipus

There, the ‘leader’ of the horse-drawn carriage ordered him ‘out of the way’. Oedipus lost

Thebes. When the gods could ‘no longer break in silence the affront of Oedipus’s

Some topics in this essay:
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