Oedipus is a fabula crepidata (Roman tragic play with Greek subject) of c. 1061 lines of verse that was written by Lucius Annaeus Seneca at some time during the 1st century AD.

The play opens with a fearful Oedipus lamenting a vicious plague which is affecting Thebes, the city over which he rules.

Creon returns from the Oracle at Delphi with the instruction that Thebes is required to avenge the death of the former King Laius if the citywide plague is to end.

An elderly messenger comes from Corinth to tell Oedipus that his father King Polybus has died and for him to come and take his throne.

This second point is made much more forcefully in their speech in Act 5, where they stress that neither God nor prayer can alter the life that is predestined for the individual.

)[1] During the English Renaissance in Elizabethan England, Oedipus, along with Seneca's other plays, was regarded as a model of classical drama.

[7] The influential early 20th Century French Theatre critic Antonin Artaud considered Seneca's Oedipus and Thyestes models for his Theatre of Cruelty, originally speaking and writing about Seneca's use of 'the plague' in Oedipus in a famous lecture on 'Theatre and the Plague' given at the Sorbonne (April 6, 1933) and later revised and printed in "Nouvelle Revue Française" (no.

"[8] The play, particularly with its theme of one's powerlessness against stronger forces, has been described as being as "relevant today in a world filled with repeated horrors against those who are innocent, as it was in ancient times".

[9] In 2008, translator Frederick Ahl wrote that in comparison with Sophocles's Oedipus the King, Seneca's version of the myth "is today among the least commonly read of ancient tragedies, largely because the scholarly world regards it as a dull and vastly inferior work".

[10] Although it is debated whether the play was written for performance in Antiquity,[11] it has been successfully staged since the Renaissance and music for the choruses by Andrea Gabrieli survives from a 1585 production.

[12] The director Ovliakuli Khodzhakuli made his cinematic debut in 2004 with the Kirghiz language film, Edip, which is based on Seneca's play.