Tragedy in Ovid's Metamorphoses common one throughout the world of ancient tragedy. This theme is most clearly illustrated in Aeschylus' great trilogy the Oresteia and in Sophocles' trilogy on Oedipus. As in Hecuba's speech, characters from the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles both lament their great losses and what has led them to this point. One of the best examples of this theme that Ovid so clearly draws upon is the speech given by a messenger in Oedipus Rex that tells of the death of Jocasta and the blinding of Oedipus. This famous speech follows in the same theme of that given by Hecuba,
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