Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 30, two legs in the afternoon.

This is the first of three episodes on the three Theban plays of Sophocles.

Today we're going to explore Sophocles' play, Edipus the King, first performed in the city of Athens, probably during

the dark, terrifying spring of 429 BC. During a year in which Athens fell from its commanding position as the sovereign

city of the Aegean world and into the meat grinder of the Peloponnesian war.

A lot of people know about Eppus from the work of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.

A lot of people know the terrible secret at the center of Etypus's identity.

But far fewer people know this.

Etypus the King, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, is a story about an old figure from folklore.

But unlike the Iliad or the Odyssey, the story of Ettipus the King neatly parallels very specific and very singular

events in the history of one city, the city of Athens. If you read Ettpus the King alone, it is a marvelous, structurally flawless story.

But if you braid Etypus's tragedy together with the story of what was happening behind the siege walls of Athens in the

four-20s. You have a moment in which literature so perfectly embodies the sentiments, the horrors and fears of a time and place,

that after you hear this show, you'll never forget Sophocles' most famous play or the faltering, shocked,

and mortified civilization embodied by the story of Ettipus the King. So what's going to follow will be a summary of Ettipus the King and then some historical analysis of the play's events. But before we do

this I want to give you some context. Ancient Greece had a vast store of circulating stories.

Stories most often delivered orally in metered verse and accompanied by the lyre and aolos or double flute. This means that when ancient

Athenians went to the theater to see a play and the play was about some common ancestral tales they already knew

the main characters of the production and the general storyline and they had

certain expectations about how things were going to

shake out. You and I don't have that background. So we need to do a bit of

...