Oedipus Rex reveals the prophecy which caused him to leave Corinth (791-93): "that I was fated to lie with my mother," "and show to daylight an accursed breed" "which men would not endure, and I was doomed" "to be murderer of the father that begot me." The implication of Laius's oracle is ambiguous. One interpretation considers that the presentation of Laius's oracle in this play differs from that found in Aeschylus's Oedipus trilogy produced in 467 BC. Helaine Smith argues: Sophocles had the option of making the oracle to Laius conditional ("if" Laius has a son, that son will kill him) or
Oedipus his revision of Egyptian history that the Greeks who wrote the tragedy of Oedipus may have penned it in likeness of the life and story of Akhnaton, because in the revision Akhnaton would have lived much closer to the time when the legend first surfaced in Greece, providing a historical basis for the story. Each of the major characters in the Greek story are identified with the people involved in Akhnaton's family and court, and some interesting parallels are drawn. In the late 1960s Ola Rotimi published a novel and play, "The Gods Are Not To Blame", which retell the