Oedipus; or, The Legend of a Conqueror

Marie Delcourt’s brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert’s influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later. Delcourt studies the legend in its various aspects, six episodes that have equal weight and that stress the same themes: greatness, conquest, domination, the right to rule...