The "Theban Plays" is a singular academic construct denoting a corpus of three extant Athenian tragedies by Sophocles—*Oedipus Rex*, *Oedipus at Colonus*, and *Antigone*—that are unified by their shared focus on the mythological events and familial curse surrounding the city of Thebes, thereby distinguishing it from other tragic trilogies through its thematic coherence and collective exploration of fate, power, and divine will within a specific Theban narrative cycle.