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Don’t shun theme number two just because it sound like the stuff of Harry Potter and other fantasies. In Sophocles’ day, prophecy was legit. And believe it or not, Sophocles’ theme about prophecy is still legit today. We’ll prove it to you—in 60 seconds.

Video Transcription:

In many tragedies, the hero has a fatal flaw. Which means you get to blame him for all the bad stuff that happens. Oedipus, by contrast, is off the hook—and all thanks to theme number two.

Oedipus never even stood a chance. Even if he’d wanted to be a good guy, to do the right thing, even if he’d wanted to keep his father alive and to stay far, far away from his mother’s bed, he couldn’t have done it. That’s because of Sophocles’s second theme: The power of prophecy.

If you watched Recap 4, you know that Oedipus, the play, is driven by prophecy. It’s prophecy that creates the whole backstory for the play—the ugly history that Oedipus discovers. And it’s prophecy that reveals that backstory and sets the play in motion. (That prophecy would be the one Creon brings back to Oedipus, the one which says that the plague will be lifted if the murderer of the former king is discovered.)

So what kind of a point was Sophocles trying to make? Keep in mind that he was writing in a very different time, when prophecy was legit. But in modern terms, think of Sophocles’ theme about the constraints on free will this way: Human beings are essentially powerless. Though the one power we do possess is the power to seek the truth and not to shun it.