Sophocles I

Name: Sophocles I
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Unknown Author
ISBN: 9780226307923

by Unknown Author

4.0

(1 ratings)

212 pages1991University of Chicago PressISBN 9780226307923

Drama

About this book

"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

Publication Details

Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1991
Pages: 212
ISBN: 9780226307923
Language: en

About Unknown Author

Sophocles (circa. 496 BCE - 406 BCE) was the second of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived to the present day. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 120 or more plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form, namely Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-awarded playwright in the dramatic competitions of ancient Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. Sophocles competed in around thirty drama competitions; he won perhaps twenty four and never received lower than second place. Aeschylus won fourteen competitions and was defeated by Sophocles at times. Euripides won only four competitions.