Sophocles on stylistic elements, with "Oedipus Rex" coming in Sophocles' middle period. Most of Sophocles' plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy. The Theban plays consist of three plays: "Oedipus Rex" (also called "Oedipus Tyrannus" or "Oedipus the King"), "Oedipus at Colonus" and "Antigone". All three plays concern the fate of Thebes during and after the reign of King Oedipus. They have often been published under a single cover. Sophocles, however, wrote the three plays for separate festival competitions, many years apart. Not only are
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