He was given strength by God to combat his enemies and perform heroic feats. However his attraction to untrustworthy women caused him to lose his way with God, therefore causes his downfall. What cause great men like Samson to fall? For more than two thousand years readers of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus have debated this question. Three of the most talked about theories include hamartia, free will, and fate. Although many critics support the fate and hamartia to be the causes of Oedipus’ downfall, free will best explains his tragedy. 1.1 Background The question of what causes Oedipus’s downfall in Sophocles Oedipus Rex has been surrounded by controversy for almost two-thousand years. In Oedipus Rex, not knowing his identity and not realizing the truth about his life, marrying his mother and killing his father, cause the downfall of Oedipus. In his essay, “The Guilt of Oedipus,” P. H. Vellacott explains how knowledge is what many readers have been using to analyze the difficulties in the play “which may after all be insoluble” (207). Vellacott sought to deal with some of these difficulties in the play. While many seem to create their own theories, the three main theories people believe that cause Oedipus’s downfall are hamartia, fate, and free will. People believe that hamartia is the main cause of Oedipus’s downfall because he created some type of mistake or error for himself. Others argue that free will, which has the capability to act at one’s own judgment, is the main cause of Oedipus’s downfall. 1.2 Definition of Key Terms To completely understand these theories, hamartia, fate, and free will, they will need to be defined to fully understand what has been argued. Aristotle, the founder of term hamartia, defines it as some sort of “mistake” (Aristotle 77). Laszlo Versenyl labeled it as an “error”. Barbara McManus also translates hamartia as a “mistake” or “error”. These are some of the few scholars that have acknowledged the definition of hamartia. A great example can be found in The Poetics when it mentions that many tragic heroes fall or go from “prosperity to misfortuneby some great mistake” (Aristotle 78). In other words this sentence is saying, that the many tragic heroes fall is because of some sort of mistake he made in his life. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary as the power of acting without constraint or at one’s own discretion’. Individuals have the right to choose their actions without the use of force. Therefore, these individuals are aware of what they decide and what the possible outcome will be. Determinism is the circumstance of a higher being decreeing a man's life from the day he was born until the day he dies. In other words, man has a predetermined destiny that can’t be altered by himself. In his essay, “Oedipus and Job”, Fortes gives us the concept of Fate as a restatement of the Greek term Moira, “a very complex notion,” but its primary meaning was “portion” or “lot” (50). This however, in Fortes’ perspective, has two forms: an unbiased force and its “reference to the individual” (50). The reference to the individual depends on how much ‘luck’ a person has, and eventually is passed on like any trait (Fortes 50). In other words, "an individual's fate is in part determined by the fate of his parents and in turn affects that of his offspring" (Fortes 50). The fate of one’s parents sets a role in their offspring’s fate because it is influenced by them. Oracles also play a role in the Greek understanding of fate. There are three different types of oracles, according to Gordon M. Kirkwood: oracles that present truths about a person’s life or character through religious context, oracles that give advice, and oracles that will simply tell what will occur (53). In Sophocles Oedipus Rex, there are two oracles being presented: where Creon goes to Delphi to find out how to save Thebes, and an oracle of what will happen, where Jocasta is told that her child would kill his own father and marry his mother. Section II: Opposing Arguments 2.1 Fate Many well-known critics believe that fate causes Oedipus’s downfall. In his essay, “Fate and Divine Working in Sophocles’ Oedipus,” Scheepers summarizes that “Moira [establishes] the personification of fatea law which [all] gods cannot break without endangering the [balance of nature].” What Scheepers is saying is that fate is an “inescapable force” that follows man through his entire life and tells what, “[will] happen [or what] is going to happen”. No matter where Oedipus goes, his fate would follow right behind him. For example, when Oedipus left for Delphi after the drunk man told him that his parents were not his actual parents, he ended up killing his father at the place where three roads meet, which the oracle given to him from Tiresias said he would do. Another scholar, J. T. Sheppard of, “The Innocence of Oedipus,” also suppo