In the play "Oedipus the King" Sophocles depicts Oedipus' inevitable downfall, which represents man's struggle between free will and fate. In an attempt to use the audience's knowledge to his advantage, Sophocles opens the play seventeen years after Oedipus murders his father, Laius and marries his mother, Jocasta. The sequence in which the story unravels reveals the strong psychological focus towards Oedipus' character. In search of his identity, Oedipus' enigmatic quality and moral ambiguity compels readers ... now, then a beggar; stick-in-hand, groping his way to a land of exile" (38). Wit...

• Word Count: 631
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... 1/3 of all Athens' inhabitants and their beloved Pericles (who was a close friend of Sophocles). As all who were in the audience of this play were intimately aware of the Sparta's siege of Athens, the plague catastrophe, and Athens' fall as the greatest civilization of its time, Oedipus can be seen as a metaphor for Sparta's King who, unlike Pericles, was concerned mainly with humanistic or corporal answers given at ... the point of a sword. Sparta maintained that "force and brutality were "truth " and death at the point of a sword is the will of ... ...

• Word Count: 653
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate