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Oedipus: A True Tragic Hero In his Poetics, Aristotle defined the term ‘tragedy’ as ‘a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity, but by some error in judgment… the change in the hero’s fortune must not be from misery to happiness, but on the contrary, from happiness to misery’. From this definition, he further expanded it by defining the profile of the Classical Greek tragic hero, basing it on what he considered the best tragedy ever written, Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex. According to Aristotle, a tragedy should comprise of the hero’s goodness and superiority, a tragic flaw in which the hero makes fatal errors in judgment which eventually lead to his downfall, a tragic realization in which the main character understands how he has unwittingly helped to bring about his own destruction and the absence of freewill in the tragic hero’s fated life. Oedipus was a good ruler: just, compassionate and sympathetic. When the priests of Thebes approached him, pleading for help on behalf of the people of Thebes who were suffering from death and famine, Oedipus immediately agreed and promised them that he would do his best in solving the problem