Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oedipus Rex is thought to have been first performed around 429 BC, though this date is highly uncertain. At its original performance at the City Dionysia, it took second prize, with first prize going to Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus.
In his Poetics, Aristotle returned to Oedipus Rex repeatedly as the example that best matched his prescription for how tragedy should be made. He valued its plot construction above all others. Scholars such as Richard Claverhouse Jebb later agreed, calling it the masterpiece of Attic tragedy for the art shown in developing its plot.
The name Oedipus means swollen foot in Greek. It was given to the infant by the shepherd who found him after Laius had ordered his feet bound together with a pin before exposing him on a mountaintop. The name is a permanent physical trace of the act meant to kill him.
Tiresias is physically blind but sees the truth about Oedipus from the beginning, while the clear-sighted Oedipus remains blind to his own crimes. At lines 495-500, Tiresias expresses this irony directly to Oedipus after being mocked for his lack of sight. Only after Oedipus blinds himself physically does he begin to gain a form of prophetic understanding, as later dramatized in Oedipus at Colonus.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote that Oedipus's destiny moves audiences because it might have been their own, arguing the oracle's curse enacts universal unconscious drives. He also distinguished the play from the myth, calling Oedipus Rex a further modification of the legend shaped by theological purposes, and locating the primordial material in the myth itself rather than in Sophocles's text.
Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex premiered at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1927, with a Latin libretto translated by Abbe Jean Danielou from Jean Cocteau's French text. Carl Orff's opera Oedipus der Tyrann followed in 1959. Martha Graham's ballet Night Journey premiered in 1947, centering the story on Jocasta. Robert Icke's stage adaptation opened in 2018 and transferred to Broadway's Studio 54 in 2025 with Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.