Mythology at Oedipus RexE. T. Owen in "Drama in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus" comments on the mythological beginnings of Oedipus Rex: Professor Goodell says: "Given an old myth to dramatize, Sophocles' main question was: 'What kind of people were they? ? they were, who naturally did and suffered what the tales say they did and suffered? This was his method of analysis (38). The Sophoclean Greek tragedy Oedipus the King is based on a myth from the Homeric epic of Odysseus. With his tragic flaw, the protagonist Oedipus experiences the main episodes of the Homeric myth. In his essay “The Tragedy of Sophoclea”, Friedrich Nietzsche explores the mythology of this drama and discovers that the story has its origins in Persia: Oedipus who murders his father and marries his mother. Oedipus who solves the riddle of the Sphinx! What does this mysterious trinity of fateful acts tell us? An ancient legend, present in its purest form among the Persians, relates that a wise magician is born only as a result of incest - which we cannot hesitate to explain, thinking back to Oedipus, solver of riddles, courtier of his mother. . . .(17).Nietzsche's tracing of the origin of Oedipus the King contradicts that of Immanuel Velikovsky, who describes his discoveries in his book, Oedipus and Akhenaten: Myth and History: The First Reference to the Legend of 'Oedipus is found in Homer's Odyssey. . The epic was most likely written in the early 7th century BCE. . . . “And I saw the mother of Oedipode, the beautiful Epicstus, who performed a monstrous act in ignorance of the spirit in that she married her own son, and he, after having killed her own father married her, and immediately..... . middle of paper......Essays, edited by Thomas Woodard. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.ET Owen in "Drama in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus." In Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Oedipus Rex, edited by Michael J. O'Brien. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968. Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: tragic heroism and the limits of knowledge. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. “Sophocles” in Literature of the Western World, edited by Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984. Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. by F. Storr. no page.http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed new?tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&part=0&id=SopOediVan Nortwick, Thomas. Oedipus: the meaning of a masculine life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.