Unknown to the Priest and to Oedipus-but known to the audience-is that this king’s experience also includes killing his father and marrying his mother. The hints of his coming failure are numerous.In the Priest’s first long speech, when he begs Oedipus to save the city, he appeals to the king’s long experience-as a statesman, as a wanderer, as a ruler and as a vagrant. The play begins with Oedipus again attempting to reshape the arc of his life that was described by prophecy.

Years later, he discovers that the dead man is his natural father, Laius, and that he has unwittingly performed the act he was trying to avoid. By attempting to escape a prophecy that he would kill his father, and leaving the palace at Corinth where he was raised, he sets the machinery of doom in motion.Traveling along the highways, he soon enough meets and murders a man he thinks is merely an overly aggressive stranger. Before the action of this play begins, Oedipus has already attempted to outrun fate, marking himself early for destruction. One theme of Oedipus the King is based on his hubris, but there is also the importance of his search for knowledge, the truth of his own being. But the relentless, clockwork motion of the play kept theatergoers rapt then, as it does now, because watching fate unfold when it is known to you but not to the people who are its prisoners is a privilege borrowed from the gods.Oedipus is portrayed bold, mighty, and just, as the Priest claims him 'greatest in all men's eyes'.(l 40) Yet he also has human foibles and it is soon clear he has a destiny that, in spite of his actions, cannot be avoided.

The oral traditions of Greece included the mythos of the life of Oedipus long before the first performance of this play, and the audience knew exactly what would happen before the gears of the plot begin turning.

The Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles