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play.
    Despite the fact that other writers have given variations on the story of the unwittingly incestuous king and his rash promise to bring justice to the person whose sin is tainting the city, Sophocles’ version remains
the
Oedipus. To what can the enduring fascination be attributed? In literary terms, one might point to the extreme economy of the plot—the embedded irony that the villain is revealed to be the hero. Even the protagonist’s name is slick with double meaning: the Greek
oida
means “I know”; and yet the king is in the dark until the denouement, when he blinds himself. The play raises, without answering, profound questions about fate and free will. Oedipus cannot avert his destiny, nor can he merely submit to his doom.
    Sigmund Freud, of course, famously claimed that there was something about the play that “a voice within us [is] ready to recognize,” namely the repressed incest urges of the subconscious. But, as Robert Graves wittily observed, though Plutarch mentions that the hippopotamus is unique in the animal kingdom for murdering its father and impregnating its mother, Freud did not call his theory the hippo complex.
Oedipus Rex
is more than its story.
    Though critics can cavil about the unfeasibility of the various messengers adhering to the drama’s unity of time, it is very close to perfection. If we had any number of Sophocles’ other, lost dramas, the preponderance of second-bests and inferior offerings might make him less, not more, respected. As Longinus said, “Yet would anyone in their right mind put all of Ion of Chios’ tragedies on the same footing as the single play of
Oedipus
?”

Euripides
    {480–406 B.C.E.}
    AT THE TIME of the battle of Salamis, Aeschylus was fighting, Sophocles was preparing to sing in the victory procession, and Euripides was being born, or so the legend goes. Most biographical details about the third member of classical Greek drama’s mighty triumvirate have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Take, for example, the
Life and Race of Euripides
by one Satyrus. This work was thought to be lost, and our only traces of it were contained in commentaries, lexicons, and other authors, until a near-complete papyrus from Oxyrhynchus was pieced together in 1911. Until then, it would have been acceptable for any critic to quote these marginalia without too much worry about the source.
    Among the tidbits we learn in the intact work, about Euripides’ mother being a vegetable seller and about his often stormy relationship with his wife, we also learn that at one point the women of Athens became so frustrated with Euripides’ supposedly misogynistic depiction of heroines that they convened a meeting to decide upon his punishment. Euripides persuaded his father-in-law, Mnelisochus, to attend the assembly, disguised as a woman, to learn what they were scheming. On the surface an amusing, if improbable, anecdote, until we remember that this is exactly the plot of Aristophanes’ comedy the
Thesmophoriazusae.
The name “Satyrus” may well indicate we should not take the text too seriously.
    Though Aristophanes put Euripides onstage at least twice, and peppered his own plays with parodic versions of
Melanippe the Wise,
Stheneboea, Oeneus,
and other plays now known only through their travesty, some writers thought the two men more similar than divergent. Cratinus slated an aspiring poet character in one of his plays as “a hair-splitting master of niceties, a regular Euripidaristophanist.” They moved in the same intellectual circles. Both Aristophanes and Euripides grew up during Athens’ cultural and political heyday, and became opposed to its increasingly imperial policies as the war in the Peloponnese lingered and festered.
    Aristophanes’ criticisms of Euripides’ plays exaggerate, but they do not invent. Euripides had shocked his audience by showing kings dressed as beggars, in the