Οἰδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus Rex)

Oedipus Rex is Aristotle's model tragedy in the Poetics. He uses it as the best example of recognition coinciding with reversal, the messenger who comes to relieve Oedipus and instead reveals who he is, and of a plot so constructed that merely hearing it told arouses pity and fear.

Miller published the argument. Tragedy and the Common Man appeared in the New York Times in February 1949, weeks after Salesman opened, and it is a direct answer to the critics who said a salesman was too small to be tragic. His case is that the classical requirement of rank is an accident of who was writing, not a law: the tragic feeling comes from a man laying down his life to secure his sense of personal dignity, and a salesman can do that as completely as a king. Willy's insistence that he is well liked is the flaw held in exactly the place Sophocles puts Oedipus's certainty. Recorded as a reaction rather than an influence because the play is written to contradict the model, and because Miller said so in print at the time.

Two of Sophocles' Theban plays, on the same family: Oedipus, Creon and Antigone. Antigone's defiance of Creon over her brother's burial follows from the fall of Oedipus's house.