The play Oedipus the King depicts the theme of fate and knowledge, king’s power and relations between people. Factual explanation can be given: he now knows himself to be a foundling; he has lived through many vicissitudes, and feels his achievements can cancel any shame of lowly origin. But this supreme of Greek tragedies operates at more than one level of meaning. Oedipus, born a royal babe in the city of Thebes, had yet been transferred crippled and helpless to the mountainside. There under the weather, in earth’s bosom, he had somehow survived, to be transferred back again to an adopted royalty in Corinth. Thence he comes back to Thebes and solves the famous riddle and conquers the Sphinx. He has now become technical, resourceful, and political, exercising a skill of mind which has identified the nature of man and paved the road to political power. Thesis “Unconscious knowledge” exists but in the play it cannot be used to justify actions and behavior of the king. Unconscious events cannot be used to justify actions of Oedipus as he is a man of power driven by personal gain and desire to use his power. Elected king of Thebes, he is the source of her security and the symbol of her law; state and society repose in his keeping. He is to be returned to the mountain side, to the lonely natural earth whence he came. This is his destiny, and for this he prays in abnegation at the close of the play. There is something in the symbolism of his career, and in the words with which it is memorialized, which is evocative of drama not upon the tragic stage but in the theories and speculations of Greek science. It is possible to refute these arguments and use examples of Jocasta’s telling Oedipus that he resembles her late husband; the fact that Oedipus walks with a limp and that his name means “swollen foot”; the fact that he marries a woman old enough to be his mother. These are unconscious actions which free a personal from moral responsibility of his actions. Oedipus had an ambivalent character and a doubtful destiny. He too had been a foundling, discovered on the earth’s surface mysteriously alive, whose early existence had been nasty, brutish and brief. Moreover, both in his origin and in his historical development, he seemed to exhibit like Oedipus the two contrary forces of chance and intelligence: his life as an animal organism was a physical thing, biologically determined, yet it could embrace the discovery of technologies, the building and ruling of cities, the moulding of custom and law. Oedipus remarks: ”I do have some hope left, at least enough to wait for the man we’ve summoned from the fields” (Sophocles). The tragedy shows that for the norms by which his behavior is governed, while they lie within the cosmos, lie outside history and process. They are as eternal as the cosmos itself. If the cosmos had a history, well and good. But it was always a history which exhibited a complete intelligence already present in the beginning. By its standards, Oedipus the King, instrument of salvation for Thebes and source of political authority in the state, is a ‘great’ man, typical exponent of the eternal norms of justice, political authority and wisdom as applied in a given social context. He is a fixed quantity. If he falls, there is either, in his otherwise perfect virtue, a tragic flaw, an excess or a blindnes