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Oedipus Rex Reflection

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Truth is always there, one just has to look for it. “My past has not defined me, destroyed me, deterred me, or defeated me… It has only strengthened me.” - Deborah Tindle. Learning from the past has one of the most important skills mankind has ever learnt because if they didn’t they would keep making the same mistakes as they wouldn’t know what the right thing to do is. The idea of learning from our mistakes is literally in our blood in the form on natural selection. This skill of adapting has become very significant in the twentieth century as the world around us changes everyday, and to compete in this competitive world one has to change to survive. This great teachings of the past don’t just come in form of experiments and calculations, they can also be learnt from the plays and books people left behind. One great example of this tool would be the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. This play has many complex ideas and …show more content…

The reader has seen many situations where Oedipus had to suffer due to his hubris, however, he was not the only one suffering as his hubris brought agony to the whole city in the shape of the deadly plague. The people had to suffer so much that the people, who once worshipped Apollo as their everything, started saying things like “Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now [and] / the gods go down” (996-97). Through this excerpt Sophocles indirectly showed the influence of the king on his people because if their king didn’t act hubristically, then the plague would have never hit the city and the people of Thebes would have never questioned the god. This leads the reader back to the theme as ignorance in Oedipus has spread within his kingdom, which is blinding the Thebans from seeing the truth as Apollo has already said that the plague was due to the doings someone from Thebes, yet the people blame god for the

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