The text is accompanied by a wealth of carefully chosen background materials and essays.

"Passages from Ancient Authors" includes selections from Homer's Odyssey, Thucydides' account of the plague, and Euripedes' Phoenissae.

The best of ancient and modern criticism is represented, encouraging discussion from psychological, religious, anthropological, dramatic, and literary perspectives.

Under the heading "Religion and Psychology" are included writings on the Oedipus myth by Martin P. Nilsson, Meyer Fortes, Gordon M. Kirkwood, Thalia Phillies Feldman, and Sigmund Freud.

The authors of the selections in "Criticism" are Aristotle, C. M. Bowra, R. C. Jebb, S. M. Adams, A. J. A. Waldock, Albin Lesky, Werner Jaeger, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Jones, D. W. Lucas, Bernard M. W. Knox, Cedric H. Whitman, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Cohen, Francis Fergusson, and H. D. F. Kitto.

The special question of Oedipus's guilt or innocence is addressed in essays by J. T. Sheppard, Laszlo Versenyi, P. H. Vellacott, E. R. Dodds, Thomas Gould, and Philip Wheelwright.