THE PROBLEM BEING...:

The moral of the play is framed by the riddle of the Sphynx: What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? The answer is Man, who crawls as an infant and hobbles with the help of a stick in old age. The riddle serves, therefore, as an aphoristic portrayal of Man himself whose life begins and ends in weakness and utter dependence on others, with an interlude of seeming strength in between. The riddle provides what might be called the ecce homo symbolic epigraph, enabling Sophocles to present the axiomatic truth of Man's pathetic weakness as the core of the tragedy. Behold Man!  

Oedipus is the man who not only answers the riddle but is himself the answer to it. As we discover in the play's denouement, he was utterly helpless as a baby and is left to die by those responsible for caring for him; he comes of age as King of Thebes and then is doomed to being utterly dependent on others following his act of self-mutilation. As the answer to the riddle, he becomes not merely the tragic figure of one man doomed by circumstance but a representative of Everyman who is similarly doomed. In this sense, at least in some sense, Oedipus is us. The lessons he learns are applicable to all of us.  

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