Oedipus in exile, searching for his identity and achieving immortality; his daughter, Antigone, defending her integrity and ideals to the death--these heroic, tragic figures have captivated theatergoers and readers since the fifth century B.C.
Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, the three plays that tell the story of the fated Theban royal family—Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus—are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written.
Translated and with an Introduction by David Grene
Editorial Reviews
"These authoritative translations consign all other complete collections to the wastebasket." —Robert Brustein, The New Republic
"This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody." —Kenneth Rexroth, The Nation
"The translations deliberately avoid the highly wrought and affectedly poetic; their idiom is contemporary....They have life and speed and suppleness of phrase." —Times Education Supplement
"These translations belong to our time. A keen poetic sensibility repeatedly quickens them; and without this inner fire the most academically flawless rendering is dead." —Warren D. Anderson, American Oxonian
"The critical commentaries and the versions themselves...are fresh, unpretentious, above all, functional." —Commonweal
"Grene is one of the great translators." —Conor Cruise O'Brien, London Sunday Times
"Richmond Lattimore is that rara avis in our age, the classical scholar who is at the same time an accomplished poet." —Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review
About the Author
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.
David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited the University of Chicago Press’s prestigious series The Complete Greek Tragedies.
