An Introduction to Oedipus Rex by Sophocles.
Greek and Roman plays, and even Indeed ancient Indian plays (a common Indo-European Tradition), usually had a pivotal character that “held the play together”. Also there would be a Chorus that would come into play when the tragedy would begin unfolding. The Greco-Roman variants were almost always tragedies.
Be it Homer’s Iliad or Odessey. The hero after long travails always seemed to return to nothing and would come to grief. Achilles, Priam, Agamemnon, Oedipus, all came to grief. In the Greco-Roman tradition, it seems to be a common practice by the Bards and playwrights, to depict their heroes as strong and upright men who fell prey to either their fates or to the whims and fancies of jealous gods (the plight Medusa & Cassandra).
It appears the Greeks and the Romans looked to tragic plays as a sort of vent for their pent up emotions. Not surprisingly, the Indian answers to Homer’s works are also tragedies in keeping with the ancient Indo-European custom. Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are tragedies on an epic scale, where great wars are fought over matters of honor and virtue, and great armies decimated and cities sacked, and where great heroes come to naught. Sophocles takes us back to the times when Kings made their decisions based on oracles, and made propitiatory sacrifices. Sometimes even of their near and dear ones, as the sacrifice of a child, made by the Greeks at the outset of the Trojan war, for favorable winds. It was a period when the oracle of Delphi held sway. Even Alexander the great no less, visited Delphi and had the oracle predict his conquering of the world.
Oedipus Rex (King Oedipus) brings out the worst fate any society can think of, as it deals with the societal taboo of incest. So deep is the taboo, that a mental condition in psychology has been named as the “Oedipus Rex Complex”!