The protagonist of the most famous tragedy of antiquity, Sophocles' Oedipus experiences in extreme terms the separateness of person and destiny: on the one hand, the precipitous embodiment of the highest human values, reason and social belonging, and on the other, the transgressor of the highest prohibitions, parricide and incest. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud would see in these violations the fulfillment of every man's childhood desires, reinterpreting in this sense the Aristotelian dogma of the universality of poetry. Oedipus, in short, becomes the litmus test of the succession of different civilizations and the corresponding different images of human self-consciousness.