<P> Seneca's play on the myth was intended to be recited at private gatherings and not actually performed . It has however been successfully staged since the Renaissance . It was adapted by John Dryden in his very successful heroic drama Oedipus, licensed in 1678 . The 1718 Oedipus was also the first play written by Voltaire . A version of Oedipus by Frank McGuinness was performed at the National Theatre in late 2008, starring Ralph Fiennes and Claire Higgins . </P> <P> In 1960, Immanuel Velikovsky (1895--1979) published a book called Oedipus and Akhnaton which made a comparison between the stories of the legendary Greek figure, Oedipus, and the historic Egyptian King of Thebes, Akhnaton . The book is presented as a thesis that combines with Velikovsky's series Ages in Chaos, concluding through his revision of Egyptian history that the Greeks who wrote the tragedy of Oedipus may have penned it in likeness of the life and story of Akhnaton, because in the revision Akhnaton would have lived much closer to the time when the legend first surfaced in Greece, providing a historical basis for the story . Each of the major characters in the Greek story are identified with the people involved in Akhnaton's family and court, and some interesting parallels are drawn . </P> <P> In the late 1960s Ola Rotimi published a novel and play, The Gods Are Not To Blame, which retell the Oedipus myth happening in the Yoruba kingdom . </P> <P> It has been suggested by Robert Graves and others that in the earliest Ur - myth of the hero, he was called Oedipais: "child of the swollen sea". He was so named because of the method by which his birth parents tried to abandon him--by placing him in a chest and tossing it into the ocean . The mythic topos of forsaking a child to the sea or a river is well attested, found (e.g.) in the myths of Perseus, Telephus, Dionysus, Romulus and Remus and Moses . Over the centuries, however, Oedipais seems to have been corrupted into the familiar Oedipus: "swollen foot". And it was this new name that might have inspired the addition of a bizarre element to the story of Oedipus' abandonment on Mt . Cithaeron . Exposure on a mountain was in fact a common method of child abandonment in Ancient Greece . It can thus be argued that the ankle - binding was grafted onto the Oedipus myth to update its relevance . </P>

Who does oedipus unknowingly place a curse on