In its interpretation of the myth of Oedipus, great king of Thebes and tragic victim of fate, Sophocles's play has served Aristotle as the model for tragedy, Freud as the paradigm for the psychosexual development of a male child, Nietzche as a pattern of cultural decline and advancement, and Rene Girard as the apotheosis of scapegoating and collective persecution. For Sophocles, the myth of Oedipus was the treatment of the generic aspect of human dilemmas.

For example, even the most intelligent among us cannot foresee all, account for all, and comprehend all of the dark, mysterious, and nonsensical forces at work in our lives. Moreover, while the sin of Oedipus is very real, will and consciousness are also some measure of sin; when the sinner sins necessarily and unwittingly like Oedipus, his suffering can be compensation enough for his guilt.

For Freud, the power of the myth, its "profound and universal validity," was in and of itself significant. Following his observation that the series of disclosures which make up the action of the play are not unlike the revelations of the psychotherapeutic process, Freud argues that it is not only the conflict between fate and free will that moves "a modern reader or playgoer no less . . . than the contemporary Greeks" but also the peculiar nature of the conflict: "It may be that we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers." ( Sigmund Freud, "Oedipus and Hamlet," in European Theories of the Drama, ed. Barrett H. Clark, New York: Crown, 1973, pp 304-307.)

Nietzche envisioned a pattern of cultural development and advancement in the decline and fall of the doomed but noble Oedipus: "a man destined to error and misery despite his wisdom but exercising a beneficient influence on his environment by virtue of his boundless grief." (Friedrich Nietzche, "The Birth of Tragedy From the Spirit of Music," in European Theories of the Drama, pp 296-303.)

Finally, Rene Girard explicates the transcultural pattern of scapegoating and collective persecution that is so vividly enacted in Oedipus the King: loss of social order due to an external circumstance such as epidemic; transference of disorder and disease onto a victim not selected randomly; violence directed towards that victim; restoration of order. The human need to assign cause and explain disaster is driven by the human tendency to moralize, and Oedipus the King dramatizes this tendency to equate bodily disease and physical disability with internal corruption and moral transgression.