When was Oedipus Rex written?
The date usually given for the first public performance of Oedipus Rex is 429 BCE, but this date is purely conjectural, since no records exist from that time attesting to the actual date of the first performance of the play.
As for the date that Sophocles (c. 496–c. 406 BCE) wrote Oedipus Rex, that, too, is based on conjecture, but there is circumstantial evidence to support a possible range of dates for the writing of the play.
At the beginning of Oedipus Rex, a devastating plague is infecting the city of Thebes. The people of Thebes gather in front of Oedipus's palace, and a Priest appeals to Oedipus for help in relieving the suffering of the people.
PRIEST. For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State,
Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head,
Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood.
A blight is on our harvest...
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in the ear,
A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds,
A blight on wives in travail; and withal
Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague
Hath swooped upon our city ... (Oedipus Rex, Prologue, 25–32)
In 430 BCE, in the second year of the Second Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a plague infected and devastated the city of Athens, where Sophocles likely wrote Oedipus Rex and where it was first performed. It is estimated that in the three years of the plague (430–427 BCE), as many as 75,000 to 100,000 people died, which was about twenty-five percent of the population of Athens at the time.
The ancient Greek myth of Oedipus, on which Sophocles based Oedipus Rex, makes no mention of a plague in Thebes during the time that Oedipus was king there. Sophocles very likely invented the plague in Oedipus Rex but based the plague in Thebes on the very real plague in Athens. Everyone living in Athens at the time was keenly aware of the plague, and the audience who attended a performance of Oedipus Rex could relate to the plague in Thebes that Oedipus was called upon to end.
The date of the beginning of the plague in Athens, in 430 BCE, provides a possible "no-earlier-than" date for Sophocles's writing of Oedipus Rex.
An event occurred in 429 BCE which might also have influenced Sophocles's writing of Oedipus Rex. Pericles, a highly respected Greek statesman, orator, and general, ruled Athens for thirty years, from about 461 BCE until his death in 429 BCE. Sophocles is said to have been a friend of Pericles's, and he would have been personally affected by Pericles's death. Some scholars believe that Sophocles modeled the nobler aspects of Oedipus on Pericles as a tribute to his friend and a great leader of the Athenian people.
Interestingly, early in 429 BCE, two of Pericles's sons died of the plague, and later in that year, Pericles, too, died in the plague that spread through Athens. Pericles's death, caused by the plague, might have prompted Sophocles to include both the plague and a tribute to Pericles in Oedipus Rex.