PREFACE Oedipus is known today mainly for the "complex" to which Freud gave his name. It is not this aspect of the Oedipus legend that Marie Delcourt seeks to explore in her book, first published in 1944 and now translated into English for the first time. She sees the Oedipus complex as nothing more than the latest version of the myth of a Theban hero whom the Greek poets had made the murderer of his father and the husband of his mother. It is the Oedipus of ancient tragedy and epic, not of modern psychoanalysis, that Delcourt wishes to consider.