How Oedipus Rex drew on The Odyssey
A documented line of influence: Sophocles demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Odyssey
Homer · c. 725 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles · c. 429 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
6/10
On Oedipus Rex’s page
- The Oedipus myth's earliest written form is in the Odyssey (Book 11, Epicaste in the underworld) — Sophocles dramatized a story Homer had already fixed in writing
- Tiresias, the blind seer who knows the truth Oedipus can't bear, comes straight out of Homer's Nekyia
- Reading the Odyssey first shows you the raw myth before Sophocles turned it into a tragedy of a man uncovering himself
On The Odyssey’s page
- The earliest surviving telling of the Oedipus myth is buried in the Odyssey — Book 11, where Odysseus meets Epicaste (Jocasta) among the dead
- Homer also fixes the seer Tiresias here, in the same underworld descent — the prophet Sophocles will build his tragedy around
- The myth-kernel was Homer's; Sophocles reshaped it into a drama of self-discovery