ABSTRACT
The medium of tragedy, coming into existence in Athens at the end of the sixth century, puts the Oedipus myth in a new trajectory, the one which, with the rediscovery of Greek tragedy in the Renaissance, carries it up to the present. The new dramatic form, highly compressed in comparison with epic, focuses on the climactic events of a single day. The audience already knows the stories, and narrative comes in only when a character has to explain something that happened earlier, before today’s events.
