The least important aspect of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is the question of who killed Laius. This becomes clear when you consider that almost everyone who sees or reads the play already knows the answer to this question.

A classic work is one which, in terms of simple plot, is a victim of its own success, since it is too well-known to surprise the audience. Oedipus the King certainly falls into this category. No one who goes to see the play does so in order to find out who killed Laius. If you were curious on this point and happened not to know, you could look the answer up on Google or read a two-minute summary of the play. To do this, however, would not mean that you had read or seen Sophocles’s play or derived a tiny part of what it has to offer.

Oedipus the King is often called the world’s first and greatest detective story, but it is also perhaps the greatest extant Athenian tragedy. Tragedy is a genre in which knowing the ending does not matter. It may even increase the power of the play that the audience knows what Oedipus does not and sees him relentlessly pursuing his own destruction. The subject of the first Chorus is the helplessness of man before capricious fate, one of the great themes of tragedy, and this is only one aspect of the way in which the play explores a much deeper mystery than the simple facts of the case.