The Theban Plays

Oedipus the King,Oedipus at Colonus, JACKET LO D2K

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Ancient Athens produced three great tragic writers - Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Of the three Sophocles has in many ways remained the most accessible and may have had the most extensive influence on Western Culture, not least because Freud took from the Theban Plays the name and the idea of the Oedipus complex. Of Sophocles' hundred odd plays only seven have survived, of which three are printed here. The Theban Plays make up a trilogy as was common at the time, in which the story of Oedipus' downfall and its aftermath is explored in three stages.

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The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

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About Sophocles

Sophocles was born 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. Sophocles 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. He died in 406 BC.

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