Tyranny connections the political and the family crime. The choral ode (Mason 2001) sees the tyrant as the transgressor of "laws that step on high, born in the heavenly aether, whose only father is Olympus, and which the mortal nature of men did not give birth to;" (Mason 2001) these laws are the prohibitions against incest and patricide. The tyrant's misdeeds are incest and patricide, for the tyrant's is the paradigm of the illegal, and illegality appears best exemplified in the two misdeeds that stand nearest to the unnatural both in the family and in the city.
Oedipus violates identically the public and personal with a single crime. He is the paradigm of the tyrant. Oedipus is a completely public man (Mason 2001) with no room for the private and secret (Mason 2001); Oedipus suffers collectively for the city; the citizens suffer individually. The crippling was considered a sign of tyrannical ambition (Mason 2001). Oedipus' name, the sign of his defect, displays the general reality conveyed in the riddle of the Sphinx does not request to himself. His defect by placing him out-of-doors of the species-characteristic of man permitted him to glimpse the species-characteristic. Oedipus has not ever echoed on his divergence from the species or appreciated why he alone can explain the riddle. The answer of the riddle depends on seeing that only one of three types of feet literally hold. we are told Oedipus sees clearly for the first time in the play but his eyes cannot bear the clarity his intelligence has created and he rushes off to put them off Triads make their first appearance in Oedipus' first speech, "The city is altogether full of incense, paeans, groans." The public, the ...