The Complete Plays of Sophocles (Annotated)

All Seven Surviving Tragedies — Including Oedipus the King, Antigone, and the Complete Theban Plays — with a Critical Study

De: Sophocles

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition includes:

• A 16,000-word critical study of Sophocles and tragedy
• All seven surviving plays — everything that came down to us
• The complete Theban cycle: Oedipus the King, Colonus, Antigone
• A life of Sophocles (c. 497–406 BCE)
• The Campbell verse translation, public domain worldwide

A king hunts the murderer whose crime has plagued his city, swearing to bring him to justice — and discovers, scene by scene, that the man he is hunting is himself.

Oedipus the King is the play on which Aristotle built the theory of tragedy, the play Freud reached for to name his complex, the first and still the greatest detective story — one in which the detective is the criminal, and the truth he uncovers destroys him. It is here, entire, and it is only the beginning. This volume gathers all seven surviving plays of Sophocles — everything that has come down to us from a man who wrote some hundred and twenty and won the prize more often than any tragedian in Athens. What survives is a fraction, rescued from the shipwreck of centuries; it is also enough to have shaped the Western imagination ever since.

Here is the complete Theban cycle — Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, the young woman who defies a king and chooses death rather than leave her brother unburied, the play every age restages when conscience collides with the state. And here are the four less famous and equally unsparing tragedies: Ajax, the great warrior undone by shame; Electra, consumed by the need for vengeance; The Women of Trachis; and Philoctetes, the abandoned man whose wound will not heal.

This Erato Press edition gives all seven plays in the public-domain verse translation of Lewis Campbell, and surrounds them with a substantial critical study — of Sophocles the innovator, of fate and character, and of the terrible Sophoclean irony in which the audience knows what the hero cannot — with a life of the poet. Everything of Sophocles that time has left us, in a single volume.