Sophocles completed Oedipus at Colonus and passed away in 405–406 B.C.E., just before the utter defeat of Athens by Sparta at the end of the Pelopponesian War. The defeat led to the replacement of Athenian democracy by a harsh, Spartan-controlled dictatorship known as the Thirty Tyrants. When Oedipus at Colonus was first performed, four years later, at the festival of Dionysus in 401 B.C.E., the Athenian audience may have watched the play’s celebration of the glory of Athens through misty eyes. Theseus, in the play, is the mythical founder and reformer of the Athenian state, and Oedipus, through his death, offers the city protection. The audience would have been painfully aware that Athens’s golden period had just ended. (by LitCharts)