Sophocles I: The Theban Plays
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Many 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. The updated third editions of these classic works were designed to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.
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About this book
This volume collects three plays by the Athenian dramatist Sophocles, all set in or around the city of Thebes: Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus. Written in the fifth century BCE, these tragedies follow the royal house of Thebes across generations, tracing conflicts between family loyalty and civic law, between human will and fate, and between knowledge and self-deception. Oedipus the King, perhaps the most widely studied Greek tragedy, centers on a ruler's investigation into a plague afflicting his city, an inquiry that turns inward with devastating consequences.
The translations in this third edition are part of the University of Chicago Press series originally overseen by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, a project that aimed to produce accurate, readable English versions of all the surviving Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most updated this edition, adjusting the English to follow the ancient Greek more closely while preserving the directness the series is known for.
Each play stands on its own dramatically, but reading all three together reveals how Sophocles returned to the same family and city at different points in his career, reworking questions of guilt, burial rights, and political authority from shifting angles.
