In today's day and age, plays, movies, and novels seem to follow the same formula: there is the "hero" and the "villain." Everything is pretty much either black or white. The hero saves the day and receives all the glory, and the villain is punished with either shame or even death. But the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, did not always hand out justice in the utopian sense that society is accustomed to seeing. Greek authors and playwrights favored adding intricacies and shades of grey to their works. Oftentimes, these "shades of grey" were added by one character. This character was known as the tragic hero.
             Aristotle defined the term tragic hero "as a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity, but by some error in judgment... the change in the hero's fortune must not be from misery to happiness, but on the contrary, from happiness to misery (www.classics.mit.edu/Aristotle). He felt that a tragedy should comprise of the hero's goodness and superiority, a tragic flaw in which pride or hubris leads to the hero's downfall, a tragic realization helped to bring about his/her own destruction, and the absence of free will in the tragic hero's life. Clearly, for Aristotle's theory to work, the tragic hero must be a complex and well-constructed character, as in Sophocles' "Oedipus the King." A careful examination of Oedipus and how he meets and exceeds the parameters of the tragic hero reveals that he legitimately deserves this title.
             At first sight, Oedipus is introduced to the audience as a just, compassionate, and sympathetic ruler. When the priests of his kingdom came to him, pleading for help on behalf of the people of Thebes who were suffering from death and famine, Oedipus immediately promised them that he would do his best to aid his people. Being the dramatic character that Sophocles intended him to be, Oedipus even went as far as to say th...