The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles

The Three Theban Plays by Sophocles

A collection of all three of Sophocles' three Theban plays, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Each work was part of a tetralogy, a composition made up of four distinct works. The other three works of each tetralogy are now lost. Although these are published under a single cover, they are not a trilogy and do not contain a continuous narrative. The three plays were written for different festivals, sometimes years apart. Nonetheless, the three plays cover the fate of the royal family of King Oedipus at the city state Thebes during and after the reign of King Oedipus.Sophocles is one of three ancient Greeks tragedy writers, whose works have survived for posterity. Along with Aeschylus and Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven manuscripts have survived. During his life at Athens, Sophocles competed in over thirty competitions at the festival of Dionysus. He won twenty-four, and never placed lower than second. Sophocles e is remembered as the founding father of western tragedy.

Sophocles was born at Colonus, just outside Athens, in 496 BC, and lived ninety years. His long life spanned the rise and decline of the Athenian Empire; he was a friend of Pericles, and though not an active politician he held several public offices, both military and civil. The leader of a literary circle and friend of Herodotus, he was interested in poetic theory as well as practice, and he wrote a prose treatise On the Chorus. He seems to have been content to spend all his life at Athens, and is said to have refused several invitations to royal courts.Sophocles first won a prize for tragic drama in 468, defeating the veteran Aeschylus. He wrote over a hundred plays for the Athenian theater, and is said to have come first in twenty-four contests. Only seven of his tragedies are now extant, these being Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, and the posthumous Oedipus at Colonus. A substantial part of The Searches, a satyr play, was recovered from papyri in Egypt in modern times. Fragments of other plays remain, showing that he drew on a wide range of themes; he also introduced the innovation of a third actor in his tragedies. He died in 406 BC.

Robert Fagles (1933-2008) was Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was the recipient of the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His translations include Sophocles's Three Theban Plays, Aeschylus's Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award), Homer's Iliad (winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by The Academy of American Poets), Homer's Odyssey, and Virgil's Aeneid.

Bernard Knox (1914-2010) was Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He taught at Yale University for many years. Among his numerous honors are awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His works include The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His Time and Essays Ancient and Modern (awarded the 1989 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781774260081
ISBN 10	1774260085
Title	The Three Theban Plays
Author	Sophocles
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	East India Publishing Company
Year published	2020-08-20
Number of pages	212
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable