Seneca’s Oedipus draws from a well-known cycle about the Theban king Oedipus who murdered his father and married his mother. The play begins many years later, when Thebes is struck by the plague, which, according to the Delphic oracle, will only be stopped by the expulsion of Laius’ killer and end with Oedipus’ blindness and expulsion. This is followed by “crumbs from the lavishly laid-up Homer’s table” – Hecuba, Rhesus and Cyclops. The red thread is the Trojan War; Odysseus appears in all three plays: the tragedy of Rhesus, with its disputed authorship, drawing from the tenth book of the Iliad; Hecuba by Euripides dramatizing the events after the end of the Trojan War, between the Iliad and the Odyssey, while the inspiration for Cyclops is Odysseus’ story about escaping from the cave of the cannibal Polyphemus, as found in the ninth book of the Odyssey; Euripides also involved Silenus and satires in the story, thus spicing up the events with a fine dollop of obscene humour along the lines of a satirical play.