Search results for ""author sophocles""

With the Trojan War won, the Greeks' last great hero, Arias, has suddenly become obsolete. The world is changing - as he witnesses when the armor of his fallen cousin Achilles is awarded not to him but to his crafty comrade Odysseus. When Aias swears vengeance, the goddess Athena clouds his mind with madness - and when his senses clear, he discovers that men he believed he fought and murdered were only the helpless animals and defenseless herdsmen seized by his own army as spoils of war. Shamed beyond redemption, Aias takes his own life, an act that leaves his friends and fellows to cope with the realities of his burial, the shock of his downfall, and the questions of whether a warrior can ever return from the wars that define his life. In "Aias", Sophocles challenges his society's ideals of heroism, exposing the unseen costs of war upon those who fight and those who are left behind. In this masterful translation, James Scully brings readers and actors inside the drama, enabling an exploration of these same issues within our modern cultural context - and offering a text that allows the emotions and arguments of Sophocles' era to strike a chord with a contemporary audience.

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Sophocles was the dominant Athenian playwright of the fifth century BCE. His best-known work, the three-play "Oedipus cycle" ("Oedipus the King", "Oedipus at Kolonos", and "Antigone"), traces three generations of a family ravaged by the inscrutably vindictive god Apollo, who manipulates his victims into committing unforgivable acts of incest, patricide, and kin murder. In "Elektra and the Women of Trakhis" Sophocles portrays two women who act righteously to save themselves and support those they love, yet do so in ways that betray and diminish their own humanity. In his less familiar but riveting war-zone dramas, "Philoktetes" and "Aias", Sophocles works through the political and moral crises of war-weary, traumatized soldiers-a fact of life not only for the Trojan War-era protagonists of these plays but for war veterans and their families in Sophocles' Athens. All are caught up in situations we recognize - including the feeling of being played by powers beyond our control. The effectiveness and timeliness of Sophocles' dramas depend on translations such as these to resonate, intellectually and emotionally, with a contemporary audience. For a new generation entering the turbulent arena of ancient Greek drama, translators Robert Bagg and James Scully have produced a vivid, dynamic, and eminently readable translation in "The Complete Plays of Sophocles".

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Oedipus the King * Aias * Philoctetes * Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. In these four tragedies he portrays the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Oedipus the King follows Oedipus, the 'man of sorrow', who has unwittingly chosen to enact his prophesied course by murdering his father and marrying his mother. In Aias, the great warrior confronts the harrowing humiliation inflicted upon him, while Philoctetes sees a once-noble hero nursing his resentment after ten years of marooned isolation. In Oedipus at Colonus the blind Oedipus, who has wandered far and wide as a beggar, finally meets his mysterious death. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Demonstrating Sophocles' aptitude for humanising figures from Greek myth and transforming simple fables into complex high tragedy, Electra and Other Plays is translated by David Raeburn with an introduction and notes by Pat Easterling.The plays collected in this volume show Sophocles' ability to create complex human characters struggling with profound moral issues. In Women of Trachis the agonizing death of the mighty Heracles is brought about by a tragic mistake made by his jealous wife Deianeira, as she attempts to regain his love. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, Ajax depicts a warrior driven into a homicidal rage that leads to his undoing, and Electra shows the grief-stricken children of the murdered Agamemnon and their plot to avenge him, while Philoctetes portrays the cunning Odysseus' attempt to convince a famed archer to rejoin the Greek expedition against Troy, undermined by the honesty of his young comrade Neoptolemus.David Raeburn's translation captures the rhythms of the original Greek, while remaining accessible to modern readers. Pat Easterling's general introduction discusses Athenian dramatic festivals, and the structure and tensions of the plays and their characters. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading, prefaces to each play and notes.Sophocles (496-405 BC) was born at Colonus, just outside Athens. 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, Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays, drawing on a wide and varied range of themes, and winning the City Dionysia eighteen times; though only seven of his tragedies have survived, among them Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus.If you enjoyed Electra and Other Plays, you might like Sophocles' The Three Theban Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

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King Oedipus/Oedipus at Colonus/AntigoneThree towering works of Greek tragedy depicting the inexorable downfall of a doomed royal dynastyThe legends surrounding the house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create this powerful trilogy about humanity's struggle against fate. King Oedipus is the devastating portrayal of a ruler who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realize he has committed and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. Oedipus at Colonus provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while Antigone depicts the fall of the next generation, through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident of his own authority.Translated with an Introduction by E. F. WATLING

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Three of the most famous tragedies from Ancient Greece, all featuring female protagonists - in modern, much-performed translations. This volume, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classic Collections series, contains: Antigone by Sophocles, translated by Marianne McDonald. The first great 'resistance' drama, and perhaps the definitive Greek tragedy. Bacchae by Euripides, translated by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael. The story of revenge by the half-man half-god Dionysos on Pentheus, King of Thebes, and all his people. Medea by Euripides, translated by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael. The powerful myth of Medea, who murders her children as revenge for her husband's infidelity.

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There are seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles. Three of them form the Theban Plays, which recount the story of Thebes during and after the reign of Oedipus. Here, David Slavitt translates the remaining tragedies - the "other four plays:" Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes. Punchy and entertaining, Slavitt reads Athena's opening line in Ajax as: "I've got my eye on you, Odysseus. Always." By simplifying the Greek and making obscure designations more accessible - specifying the character Athena in place of "aegis-wearing goddess," for example - his translations are highly performable. The Other Four Plays of Sophocles will help students discover underlying thematic connections across plays as well. Praise for David R. Slavitt: "Slavitt's translation is ...lively and sometimes witty." (Times Literary Supplement, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Seneca). "The best version of Ovid's Metamorphoses available in English today...It is readable, alive, at times slangy, and actually catches Ovid's tone." (Philadelphia Inquirer, reviewing Slavitt's translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid). "Slavitt's ability is clearly in evidence...These translations are rendered in lucid, contemporary English, bringing before us the atrocities, horrors, and grotesqueries of Imperial Rome. " (Classical Outlook, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Seneca). "Excellent translations that suit the ear and strengthen the feeble spirit of the time...One will do well to read these hymns, these poems, and find nourishment in them in Slavitt's translations." (Anglican Theological Review, reviewing Slavitt's translation of Hymns of Prudentius).

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When her dead brother is decreed a traitor, his body left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone refuses to accept this most severe of punishments. Defying her uncle who governs, she dares to say ‘No’. Forging ahead with a funeral alone, she places personal allegiance before politics, a tenacious act that will trigger a cycle of destruction. Renowned for the revelatory nature of his work, Ivo van Hove first enthralled London audiences with his ground-breaking Roman Tragediesseen at the Barbican in 2009. Drawing on his 'ability to break open texts calcified by tradition' (Guardian), the director now turns to a classic Greek masterpiece.

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Sophocles' tragedies--from Antigone to Oedipus Tyrannus--are filled with highly wrought, vivid, and emotionally powerful poetry. Yet most translations sacrifice the poetry to convey only the sense of the lines as dramatic speech. This is the first book in English to present Sophocles exclusively as a poet, and the only volume to reveal the full force and beauty of his verse. With a fresh and consistent attention to structure, language, and rhythm across Sophocles' writings, Reginald Gibbons has translated a selection of odes from Sophocles' surviving plays as well as fragments from his lost works. What emerges is a genuinely new sense of a Sophocles who was as much poet as dramatist. Bringing the Greek poet and his world surprisingly close to us, these translations also restore a sense of the long continuity of poetry. Complete with an introduction, this edition reveals Sophocles' poetic brilliance as never before.

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'It's a dreadful thing to yield...but resist now?Lay my pride bare to the blows of ruin?That's dreadful too.'The remarkable story of Greek tragedy's most intrepid heroine.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Sophocles (496 BC-406 BC). Sophocles's works available in Penguin Classics are The Theban Plays and Electra and Other Plays.

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Translated and edited by Peter D. Arnott, this classic and highly popular edition contains two essential plays in the development of Greek tragedy-Oedipus the King and Antigone-for performance and study. The editor's introduction contains a brief biography of the playwright and a description of Greek theater. Also included are a list of principal dates in the life of Sophocles and a bibliography.

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Ancient Athens’ most successful tragedian.Sophocles (497/6–406 BC), the second of the three great tragedians of Athens and by common consent one of the world's greatest poets, wrote more than 120 plays. Only seven of these survive complete, but we have a wealth of fragments, from which much can be learned about Sophocles' language and dramatic art. This volume presents a collection of all the major fragments, ranging in length from two lines to a very substantial portion of the satyr play The Searchers. Prefatory notes provide frameworks for the fragments of known plays. Many of the Sophoclean fragments were preserved by quotation in other authors; others, some of considerable size, are known to us from papyri discovered during the past century. Among the lost plays of which we have large fragments, The Searchers shows the god Hermes, soon after his birth, playing an amusing trick on his brother Apollo; Inachus portrays Zeus coming to Argos to seduce Io, the daughter of its king; and Niobe tells how Apollo and his sister Artemis punish Niobe for a slight upon their mother by killing her twelve children. Throughout the volume, as in the extant plays, we see Sophocles drawing his subjects from heroic legend.This is the final volume of Lloyd-Jones's Loeb Classical Library edition of Sophocles. In Volumes I and II he gives a faithful and very skillful translation of the seven surviving plays. Volume I contains Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, and Electra. Volume II contains Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, and Philoctetes.

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Ancient Athens’ most successful tragedian.Sophocles (497/6–406 BC), with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the three great tragic poets of Athens, and is considered one of the world's greatest poets. The subjects of his plays were drawn from mythology and legend. Each play contains at least one heroic figure, a character whose strength, courage, or intelligence exceeds the human norm—but who also has more than ordinary pride and self-assurance. These qualities combine to lead to a tragic end. Hugh Lloyd-Jones gives us, in two volumes, a new translation of the seven surviving plays. Volume I contains Oedipus Tyrannus (which tells the famous Oedipus story), Ajax (a heroic tragedy of wounded self-esteem), and Electra (the story of siblings who seek revenge on their mother and her lover for killing their father). Volume II contains Oedipus at Colonus (the climax of the fallen hero's life), Antigone (a conflict between public authority and an individual woman's conscience), The Women of Trachis (a fatal attempt by Heracles' wife to regain her husband's love), and Philoctetes (Odysseus' intrigue to bring an unwilling hero to the Trojan War). Of his other plays, only fragments remain; but from these much can be learned about Sophocles' language and dramatic art. The major fragments—ranging in length from two lines to a very substantial portion of the satyr play The Searchers—are collected in Volume III of this edition. In prefatory notes Lloyd-Jones provides frameworks for the fragments of known plays.

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Agememnon is the first part of the Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy in which the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan war to be murdered by his treacherous wife Clytemnestra. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex the king sets out to uncover the cause of the plague that has struck his city, only to disover the devastating truth about his relationship with his mother and his father.Medea is the terrible story of a woman's bloody revenge on her adulterous husband through the murder of her own children.

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Ancient Athens’ most successful tragedian.Sophocles (497/6–406 BC), with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the three great tragic poets of Athens, and is considered one of the world's greatest poets. The subjects of his plays were drawn from mythology and legend. Each play contains at least one heroic figure, a character whose strength, courage, or intelligence exceeds the human norm—but who also has more than ordinary pride and self-assurance. These qualities combine to lead to a tragic end. Hugh Lloyd-Jones gives us, in two volumes, a new translation of the seven surviving plays. Volume I contains Oedipus Tyrannus (which tells the famous Oedipus story), Ajax (a heroic tragedy of wounded self-esteem), and Electra (the story of siblings who seek revenge on their mother and her lover for killing their father). Volume II contains Oedipus at Colonus (the climax of the fallen hero's life), Antigone (a conflict between public authority and an individual woman's conscience), The Women of Trachis (a fatal attempt by Heracles' wife to regain her husband's love), and Philoctetes (Odysseus' intrigue to bring an unwilling hero to the Trojan War). Of his other plays, only fragments remain; but from these much can be learned about Sophocles' language and dramatic art. The major fragments—ranging in length from two lines to a very substantial portion of the satyr play The Searchers—are collected in Volume III of this edition. In prefatory notes Lloyd-Jones provides frameworks for the fragments of known plays.

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Meineck and Woodruff's new annotated translations of Sophocles' Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes combine the same standards of accuracy, concision, clarity, and powerful speech that have so often made their Theban Plays a source of epiphany in the classroom and of understanding in the theatre. Woodruff's Introduction offers a brisk and stimulating discussion of central themes in Sophoclean drama, the life of the playwright, staging issues, and each of the four featured plays.

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This volume offers the fruits of Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's dynamic collaboration on the plays of Sophocles' Theban cycle, presenting the translators' Oedipus Tyrannus (2000) along with Woodruff's Antigone (2001) and a muscular new Oedipus at Colonus by Meineck. Grippingly readable, all three translations combine fidelity to the Greek with concision, clarity, and powerful, hard-edged speech. Each play features foot-of-the-page notes, stage directions, and line numbers to the Greek. Woodruff's Introduction discusses the playwright, Athenian theatre and performance, the composition of the plays, and the plots and characters of each; it also offers thoughtful reflections on major critical interpretations of these plays.

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Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff’s collaboration on this new translation combines the strengths that have recently distinguished both as translators of Greek tragedy: expert knowledge of the Greek and of the needs of the teaching classicist, intimate knowledge of theatre, and an excellent ear for the spoken word. Their Oedipus Tyrannus features foot-of-the-page notes, an Introduction, stage directions and a translation characterized by its clarity, accuracy, and power.

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Treating ancient plays as living drama. Classical Greek drama is brought vividly to life in this series of new translations. Students are encouraged to engage with the text through detailed commentaries, including suggestions for discussion and analysis. In addition, numerous practical questions stimulate ideas on staging and encourage students to explore the play's dramatic qualities. Antigone is suitable for students of both Classical Civilisation and Drama. Useful features include full synopsis of the play, commentary alongside translation for easy reference and a comprehensive introduction to the Greek Theatre. Antigone is aimed primarily at A-level and undergraduate students in the UK, and college students in North America.

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First published in Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's Sophocles: Four Tragedies, this riveting translation by Peter Meineck of Sophocles' Philoctetes features a new Introduction by Paul Woodruff. "Peter Meineck has given us a superbly vivid rendering of the play, informed throughout by his practical experience in the theater. His is a Philoctetes that is supremely alive, from start to finish. . . . [I]deal for classroom use . . . accompanied by a new and thoughtful introduction from philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff. Woodruff anchors the play in the complex web of fears and anxieties of 409 BCE, as both Sophocles' life and Athens' imperial heyday drew to a close. . . . [A]n exceptionally fine work of translation and scholarship that will go far toward demolishing dismissals of the play as inaccessible or unengaging for the modern reader. Sophocles, Meineck and Woodruff eloquently remind us, speaks to every age, not least our own."—Thomas R. Keith, Loyola University Chicago in CJ-Online

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Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, Sophocles' The Three Theban Plays are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. This Penguin Classics edition is translated by Robert Fagles with introductions and notes by Bernard Knox.Collected here are Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, in a translation by Robert Fagles which retains all of Sophocles' lucidity and power: the cut and thrust of his dialogue, his ironic edge, the surge and majesty of his choruses and, above all, the agonies and triumphs of his characters. Oedipus in exile, searching for his identity, desperately trying to avoid his fate, seeking the truth of his origins and achieving immortality; his daughter, Antigone, defending her integrity and ideals to the death - these heroic, tragic figures have captivated theatregoers and readers since the fifth century BC. It is Sophocles' characterisation of Oedipus that would, in the nineteenth century, inspire Sigmund Freud to a revolutionary conception of the human mind, and the tragedies in this volume continue to move and inspire us to this day.Sophocles (496-405 BC) was born at Colonus, just outside Athens. 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, Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays, drawing on a wide and varied range of themes, and winning the City Dionysia eighteen times; though only seven of his tragedies have survived, among them Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus.If you enjoyed The Three Theban Plays, you might like Aeschylus' The Oresteia, also available in Penguin Classics.'I know of no better English version'Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford University'The most impressive verse translations of Sophocles that have been made'Stephen Spender

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Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is the most famous of ancient tragedies and a literary masterpiece. It is not, however, the only classical dramatization of Oedipus' quest to discover his identity. Between four and five hundred years after Sophocles' play was first performed, Seneca composed a fine, but neglected and often disparaged Latin tragedy on the same subject, which, in some ways, comes closer to our common understanding of the Oedipus myth. Now, modern readers can compare the two versions, in new translations by Frederick Ahl.Balancing poetry and clarity, yet staying scrupulously close to the original texts, Ahl's English versions are designed to be both read and performed, and are alert to the literary and historical complexities of each. In approaching Sophocles anew, Ahl is careful to preserve the richly allusive nature and rhetorical power of the Greek, including the intricate use of language that gives the original its brilliant force. For Ahl, Seneca's tragedy is vastly and intriguingly different from that of Sophocles, and a poetic masterpiece in its own right. Seneca takes us inside the mind of Oedipus in ways that Sophocles does not, making his inner conflicts a major part of the drama itself in his soliloquies and asides. Two Faces of Oedipus opens with a wide-ranging introduction that examines the conflicting traditions of Oedipus in Greek literature, the different theatrical worlds of Sophocles and Seneca, and how cultural and political differences between Athenian democracy and Roman imperial rule affect the nature and conditions under which the two tragedies were composed. This book brings two dramatic traditions into conversation while providing elegant, accurate, and exciting new versions of Sophocles' and Seneca's tragedies.

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A translation of Sophocles's play Electra, from the Greek into Welsh. Electra tells the story of the revenge Orestes and Electra take on their mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of their father Agamemnon, after he returns from the Trojan War. Reprint; first published in January 1984.

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Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price The story of the mythical Greek king of Thebes, the archetypal tragic hero who accidentally fulfills a prophecy that he will end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster down upon his city and family. This volume, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, contains two plays by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonos, in English translations by Kenneth McLeish. It also includes an introduction to the plays.

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“Oedipus Tyrannos is the first Greek play many readers encounter, and this version is their ideal gateway. Emily Wilson's verse line is effortlessly graceful, whether in taut, tense dialogue exchanges or in the lyrical choral odes.” —JAMES ROMM, Bard College

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Available for the first time as an independent work, David Grene's legendary translation of "Oedipus the King" renders Sophocles' Greek into cogent, vivid, and poetic English for a new generation to savor. Over the years, Grene and Lattimore's "Complete Greek Tragedies" have been the preferred choice of millions of readers - for personal libraries, individual study, and classroom use. This new, stand-alone edition of Sophocles' searing tale of jealousy, rage, and revenge will continue the tradition of the University of Chicago Press' classic series.

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Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. His plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, refusing to present firm answers to the questions of human existence, or to provide a redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men or women. These three tragedies portray the extremes of human suffering and emotion, turning the heroic myths into supreme works of poetry and dramatic action. Antigone's obsession with the dead, Creon's crushing inflexibility, Deianeira's jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra's obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination... Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or silence: they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of music and poetry. These original and distinctive verse translations convey the vitality of Sophocles' poetry and the vigour of the plays in performance, doing justice to both the sound of the poetry and the theatricality of the tragedies. Each play is accompanied by an introduction and substantial notes on topographical and mythical references and interpretation.

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The text is accompanied by a wealth of carefully chosen background materials and essays. "Passages from Ancient Authors" includes selections from Homer's Odyssey, Thucydides' account of the plague, and Euripedes' Phoenissae. The best of ancient and modern criticism is represented, encouraging discussion from psychological, religious, anthropological, dramatic, and literary perspectives. Under the heading "Religion and Psychology" are included writings on the Oedipus myth by Martin P. Nilsson, Meyer Fortes, Gordon M. Kirkwood, Thalia Phillies Feldman, and Sigmund Freud. The authors of the selections in "Criticism" are Aristotle, C. M. Bowra, R. C. Jebb, S. M. Adams, A. J. A. Waldock, Albin Lesky, Werner Jaeger, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Jones, D. W. Lucas, Bernard M. W. Knox, Cedric H. Whitman, Richmond Lattimore, Robert Cohen, Francis Fergusson, and H. D. F. Kitto. The special question of Oedipus's guilt or innocence is addressed in essays by J. T. Sheppard, Laszlo Versenyi, P. H. Vellacott, E. R. Dodds, Thomas Gould, and Philip Wheelwright.

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Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides' "Medea", "The Children of Heracles", "Andromache", and "Iphigenia among the Taurians", fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles' satyr-drama "The Trackers". New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.

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First published in Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's Sophocles: Four Tragedies , this riveting translation by Peter Meineck of Sophocles' Philoctetes features a new Introduction by Paul Woodruff. "Peter Meineck has given us a superbly vivid rendering of the play, informed throughout by his practical experience in the theater. His is a Philoctetes that is supremely alive, from start to finish. . . . [I]deal for classroom use . . . accompanied by a new and thoughtful introduction from philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff. Woodruff anchors the play in the complex web of fears and anxieties of 409 BCE, as both Sophocles' life and Athens' imperial heyday drew to a close. . . . [A]n exceptionally fine work of translation and scholarship that will go far toward demolishing dismissals of the play as inaccessible or unengaging for the modern reader. Sophocles, Meineck and Woodruff eloquently remind us, speaks to every age, not least our own." —Thomas R. Keith, Loyola University Chicago in CJ-Online

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Meineck and Woodruff's new annotated translations of Sophocles' Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes combine the same standards of accuracy, concision, clarity, and powerful speech that have so often made their Theban Plays a source of epiphany in the classroom and of understanding in the theatre. Woodruff's Introduction offers a brisk and stimulating discussion of central themes in Sophoclean drama, the life of the playwright, staging issues, and each of the four featured plays.

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This volume offers the fruits of Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's dynamic collaboration on the plays of Sophocles' Theban cycle, presenting the translators' Oedipus Tyrannus (2000) along with Woodruff's Antigone (2001) and a muscular new Oedipus at Colonus by Meineck. Grippingly readable, all three translations combine fidelity to the Greek with concision, clarity, and powerful, hard-edged speech. Each play features foot-of-the-page notes, stage directions, and line numbers to the Greek. Woodruff's Introduction discusses the playwright, Athenian theatre and performance, the composition of the plays, and the plots and characters of each; it also offers thoughtful reflections on major critical interpretations of these plays.

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