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In Sophocles' Oedipus Frederick Ahl, a classics professor at Cornell University, provides a radically new reading of one of the world's most influential dramas. Within a masterful depiction of the play's literary, linguistic, and historical contexts, Ahl studies the interpretive process by which Oedipus convinces himself that he is the fated world criminal, the man doomed to slay his father and marry his mother.
Relentlessly and exhaustively, Ahl argues that Sophocles knowingly revised the Oedipus tradition in order to depict the king as a self-deceived man craving punishment for crimes he probably did not commit, and that credulous readers, including Freud, have bought into this deception. That is, Sophocles' contemporaneous audience would have recognized his deviations from tradition, but later audiences read into his drama the traditional assumption that Oedipus did indeed fulfill his prophesied destiny of killing his father and marrying his mother. Sophocles' version, then, depicts an Oedipus whose investigation into his origins is warped by his own irrational desire to convict himself.