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26 books match the query 'Sophocles'

cover of A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles

A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles

James C. Hogan

Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

James C. Hogan introduces each play by highlighting specific and interpretive problems relevant to that play before turning to a line-by-line analysis. The line analysis is comprehensive, ranging from the meanings of words and phrases that pertain to a variety of Greek ideas and institutions to metaphor and imagery specific to each play as well as plots and borrowings from earlier poetry, styles, and characterizations.

Along with his examination of the seven extant plays of Sophocles in English translations, Hogan provides a general introduction to the theatre in Sophocles’ time, discussing staging, the conventions of the Greek theatre, the text of the plays, and mythology and religion.

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cover of Antigone

Antigone

Sophocles; A verse translation by David Mulroy, with introduction and notes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Sophocles’ Antigone ranks with his Oedipus Rex as one of world literature’s most compelling dramas. The action is taut, and the characters embody universal tensions: the conflict of youth with age, male with female, the state with the family. Plot and character come wrapped in exquisite language. Antagonists trade polished speeches, sardonic jibes and epigrammatic truisms and break into song at the height of passion.
    David Mulroy’s translation of Antigone faithfully reproduces the literal meaning of Sophocles’ words while also reflecting his verbal pyrotechnics. Using fluid iambic pentameters for the spoken passages and rhyming stanzas for the songs, it is true to the letter and the spirit of the great Greek original.
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cover of Antigone

Antigone

Sophocles

University of Chicago Press, 2013

A stand-alone edition of Sophocles’s Antigone taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.
 
Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s Complete Greek Tragedies series, this stand-alone edition of Elizabeth Wyckoff’s elegant rendition of Antigone reminds readers why it endures as one of the most widely read and admired of Sophocles’s plays. Though the story unfolds in the aftermath of Oedipus the King, Antigone was the first of the Theban Plays written by Sophocles.
 
Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most’s introduction to the story of one woman’s brave resistance in the face of unfathomable loss provides essential information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity.
 
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cover of Antigone as Political Philosophy

Antigone as Political Philosophy

Gregor Moder, Tanja Dominko

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Offering a new perspective on Sophocles’s Antigone as a model for reimagining humanity’s future—and its end

Why read Antigone today? The premise of this accessible, essayistic work is that humanity finds itself at a crossroads, where it must reinvent itself or perish—a condition similar to Antigone’s own. Rereading Antigone via Hegel’s engagement with the text can help us understand what it means for a human age to come to an end: that is, to think of our age as an episode whose collapse is also an engine of historical change.

Gregor Moder argues that the task of humanity today may not be to defend the minimal remnants of our civilization but to say farewell to it—to give it a proper burial. As Moder explicates, the central problem of this foundational tragedy lies in the positions of brother and sister, man and woman, representing human and divine law and the institutions of the state and the family. Through a fresh reading of both Sophocles’s play and Hegel’s productive reworking of the Greek myth, Moder’s analysis shows that sometimes the only way through deep social contradictions is in unraveling the framework that has constructed them.
 

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cover of City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire

City of Suppliants

Tragedy and the Athenian Empire

By Angeliki Tzanetou

University of Texas Press, 2012

After fending off Persia in the fifth century BCE, Athens assumed a leadership position in the Aegean world. Initially it led the Delian League, a military alliance against the Persians, but eventually the league evolved into an empire with Athens in control and exacting tribute from its former allies. Athenians justified this subjection of their allies by emphasizing their fairness and benevolence towards them, which gave Athens the moral right to lead. But Athenians also believed that the strong rule over the weak and that dominating others allowed them to maintain their own freedom. These conflicting views about Athens’ imperial rule found expression in the theater, and this book probes how the three major playwrights dramatized Athenian imperial ideology.

Through close readings of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Euripides’ Children of Heracles, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, as well as other suppliant dramas, Angeliki Tzanetou argues that Athenian tragedy performed an important ideological function by representing Athens as a benevolent and moral ruler that treated foreign suppliants compassionately. She shows how memorable and disenfranchised figures of tragedy, such as Orestes and Oedipus, or the homeless and tyrant-pursued children of Heracles were generously incorporated into the public body of Athens, thus reinforcing Athenians’ sense of their civic magnanimity. This fresh reading of the Athenian suppliant plays deepens our understanding of how Athenians understood their political hegemony and reveals how core Athenian values such as justice, freedom, piety, and respect for the laws intersected with imperial ideology.

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cover of Electras: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Electras

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Michael Davis

St. Augustine's Press, 2023

Michael Davis revisits questions of interpretation in Greek tragedy emerging in the thought of the late Seth Benardete. While this is not the book Benardete would have written, it wrestles with problems that bear his indelible mark.  In the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, only one story is treated by all three––the tale of Electra. Davis endeavors to develop Benardete's understanding of the story's deeper meaning, as well as the connections that might be drawn between the three authors. He follows a thread that brings Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides closer together according to a powerful and shared theme––namely, that the female is the deeper (even if less easily accessible and articulated) of the pair of fundamental principles constituting human beings.

Davis accomplishes much more than an exegetical bridge as he connects us with ancient memory and wisdom. "When we cannot resist the temptation to recoil morally from their terminology, we risk the tragedy of losing their profound thoughts about our humanity––their philosophical anthropology." Davis has remarkably made of a niche study a stunning source material for more universal questions. This is a book that is as timely as it is ageless.
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cover of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy

Exchange and the Maiden

Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy

By Kirk Ormand

University of Texas Press, 1999

Marriage is a central concern in five of the seven extant plays of the Greek tragedian Sophocles. In this pathfinding study, Kirk Ormand delves into the ways in which these plays represent and problematize marriage, thus offering insights into how Athenians thought about the institution of marriage.

Ormand takes a two-fold approach. He first explores the legal and economic underpinnings of Athenian marriage, an institution designed to guarantee the legitimate continuation of patrilineal households. He then shows how Sophocles' plays Trachiniae, Electra, Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus Tyrannus both reinforce and critique this ideology by representing marriage as a homosocial exchange between men, in which women are objects who may attempt—but always fail—to become self-acting subjects.

These fresh readings provide the first systematic study of marriage in Sophocles. They draw important connections between drama and marriage as rituals concerned with controlling potentially disruptive female subjectivities.

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cover of Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

Intimate Commerce

Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

By Victoria Wohl

University of Texas Press, 1997

Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy—and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous?

Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

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cover of Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus

Late Sophocles

The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus

Thomas Van Nortwick

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Only a few plays by Sophocles—one of the great tragic playwrights from Classical Athens—have survived, and each of them dramatizes events from the rich store of myths that framed literature and art. Sophocles’ treatment evokes issues that were vividly contemporary for Athenian audiences of the Periclean age: How could the Athenians incorporate older, aristocratic ideas about human excellence into their new democratic society? Could citizens learn to be morally excellent, or were these qualities only inherited? What did it mean to be a creature who knows that he or she must die?

Late Sophocles traces the evolution of the Sophoclean hero through the final three plays, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The book’s main thesis, that Sophocles reimagined the nature of the tragic hero in his last three works, is developed inductively through readings of the plays. This balanced approach, in which a detailed argument about the plays is offered in a format accessible to nonspecialists, is unusual—perhaps unique—in contemporary Classical scholarship on Sophocles.

This book will appeal to nonspecialist readers of serious literature as well as scholars of classical and other literatures. While including ample guidance for those not familiar with the plays, Late Sophocles goes beyond a generalized description of “what happens” in the plays to offer a clear, jargon-free argument for the enduring importance of Sophocles’ plays. The argument’s implications for longstanding interpretational issues will be of interest to specialists. All Greek is translated.
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cover of Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater

Musical Design in Sophoclean Theater

William C. Scott

Dartmouth College Press, 2000

William C. Scott extends concepts set forth in his Goodwin Award-winning Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater (1984) by examining scansion patterns in the odes of the seven surviving Sophoclean tragedies. Analyzing the play as performed-its full expression in words, music, and dance-Scott finds that Sophocles' metrical patterns are not a secondary detail of the plays but a central feature of their musical organization. Just as the playwright enhanced awareness of themes with a series of recurring and developing verbal images, he also designed the music to guide the audience's understanding of unfolding, often ambiguous events. The fabric of music and meaning is so tightly woven, Scott argues, that significant portions of the plays cannot be fully realized on stage unless the musical effects created by the poet are incorporated. While his work necessarily centers on the chorus, Scott carefully integrates that role into the meaning of the play as a whole, asserting that the chorus becomes a single persona, a character with partial knowledge, limited perspective, and inconsistent responses. The combination of words, meters, and forms provides a new perspective on each play.
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cover of Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex

David Sophocles

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Oedipus Rex is the greatest of the Greek tragedies, a profound meditation on the human condition. The story of the mythological king, who is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, has resonated in world culture for almost 2,500 years. But Sophocles’ drama as originally performed was much more than a great story—it was a superb poetic script and exciting theatrical experience. The actors spoke in pulsing rhythms with hypnotic forward momentum, making it hard for audiences to look away. Interspersed among the verbal rants and duels were energetic songs performed by the chorus.

            David Mulroy’s brilliant verse translation of Oedipus Rex recaptures the aesthetic power of Sophocles’ masterpiece while also achieving a highly accurate translation in clear, contemporary English. Speeches are rendered with the same kind of regular iambic rhythm that gave the Sophoclean originals their drive. The choral parts are translated as fluid rhymed songs. Mulroy also supplies an introduction, notes, and appendixes to provide helpful context for general readers and students.
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cover of Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau

Oedipus and the Sphinx

The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau

Almut-Barbara Renger

University of Chicago Press, 2013

When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle—he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture’s central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with the concepts of liminality and otherness.
 
Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and functions in classical antiquity—from its presence in ancient vase painting to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at two of its major reworkings in European modernity: the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. Through her readings, she highlights the ambiguous status of the Sphinx and reveals Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, providing key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and establishing a theoretical framework that organizes evaluations of the myth’s reception in the twentieth century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition experienced by all of humankind, Renger situates myth between the competing claims of science and art in an engagement that has important implications for current debates in literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural history, and aesthetics.
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cover of Oedipus at Colonus

Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles, A verse translation by David Mulroy, with introduction and notes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Oedipus at Colonus is the third in Sophocles' trilogy of plays about the famous king of Thebes and his unhappy family. It dramatizes the mysterious death of Oedipus, by which he is transformed into an immortal hero protecting Athens. This was Sophocles' final play, written in his mid-eighties and produced posthumously. Translator David Mulroy's introduction and notes deepen the reader's understanding of Oedipus' character and the real political tumult that was shaking Athens at the time that Sophocles wrote the play. Oedipus at Colonus is at once a complex study of a tragic character, an indictment of Athenian democracy, and a subtle endorsement of hope for personal immortality.
            As in his previous translations of Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Mulroy combines scrupulous scholarship and textual accuracy with a fresh poetic style. He uses iambic pentameter for spoken passages and short rhymed stanzas for choral songs, resulting in a text that is accessible and fun to read and perform.
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cover of Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King

Sophocles

University of Chicago Press, 2010

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’s classic series.

Praise for David Grene and Richmond Lattimore’s Complete Greek Tragedies

“This is it. No qualifications. Go out and buy it everybody.”—Kenneth Rexroth, 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

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cover of Oedipus the King, Second Edition

Oedipus the King, Second Edition

Sophocles

University of Chicago Press, 2013

An updated stand-alone edition of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King taken from Chicago’s renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.
 
Over the years, David Grene and Richmond Lattimore’s Complete Greek Tragedies have been the preferred translations of millions of readers—for personal libraries, individual study, and classroom use. Drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press’s classic series, this updated stand-alone edition of Grene’s Oedipus the King renders the original Greek in clear, vivid, and poetic English for a new generation to savor.
 
Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most’s introduction to Sophocles’s searing tale of jealousy, rage, and revenge provides essential information about the play’s first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond.
 
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cover of Sophocles I: The Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles I

The Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus

Edited and Translated by Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Sophocles I contains the plays “Antigone,” translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff; “Oedipus the King,” translated by David Grene; and “Oedipus at Colonus,” translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

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.

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’s 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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cover of Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers

Sophocles II

Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers

Edited by Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Sophocles II contains the plays “Ajax,” translated by John Moore; “The Women of Trachis,” translated by Michael Jameson; “Electra,” translated by David Grene; “Philoctetes,” translated by David Grene; and “The Trackers,” translated by Mark Griffith.

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.

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’s 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.

[more]
cover of Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Great Soul Robbery

Norman Austin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Norman Austin brings both keen insight and a life-long engagement with his subject to this study of Sophocles’ late tragedy Philoctetes, a fifth-century BCE play adapted from an infamous incident during the Trojan War. In Sophocles’ “Philoctetes” and the Great Soul Robbery, Austin examines the rich layers of text as well as context, situating the play within the historical and political milieu of the eclipse of Athenian power. He presents a study at once of interest to the classical scholar and accessible to the general reader. Though the play, written near the end of Sophocles’ career, is not as familiar to modern audiences as his Theban plays, Philoctetes grapples with issues—social, psychological, and spiritual—that remain as much a part of our lives today as they were for their original Athenian audience.

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cover of The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 2: Sophocles

The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volume 2

Sophocles

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Grene and Lattimore edition of the Greek tragedies has been among the most widely acclaimed and successful publications of the University of Chicago Press. On the occasion of the Centennial of the University of Chicago and its Press, we take pleasure in reissuing this complete work in a handsome four-volume slipcased edition as well as in redesigned versions of the familiar paperbacks.

For the Centennial Edition two of the original translations have been replaced. In the original publication David Grene translated only one of the three Theban plays, Oedipus the King. Now he has added his own translations of the remaining two, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, thus bringing a new unity of tone and style to this group. Grene has also revised his earlier translation of Prometheus Bound and rendered some of the former prose sections in verse. These new translations replace the originals included in the paperback volumes Sophocles I (which contains all three Theban plays), Aeschylus II, Greek Tragedies, Volume I, and Greek Tragedies, Volume III, all of which are now being published in second editions.

All other volumes contain the translations of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for the most part from the original versions first published in the 1940s and 1950s. These translations have been the choice of generations of teachers and students, selling in the past forty years over three million copies.
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cover of The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Sophocles I

Edited by David Grene

University of Chicago Press, 1991

"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
[more]
cover of The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles II

The Complete Greek Tragedies

Sophocles II

Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

University of Chicago Press, 1969

"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
[more]
cover of The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

The Greek Tragedies

Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

University of Chicago Press, 2025

The most authoritative, accessible, and poetic translations of the Greek Tragedies ever produced, now in one volume!
 
Drawn from the authoritative third editions of David Grene and Richmond Lattimore’s collections of the complete Greek tragedies, expertly updated by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most, this collection brings together seventeen of the greatest surviving plays of ancient Greece. Combining accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation, the masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides have been rendered so compellingly in English that they remain the definitive translations. Each text has been carefully updated to bring it even closer to the ancient Greek original while retaining the vibrancy for which Chicago’s versions are famous.
 
Alongside the plays, this edition includes an introduction to the life and work of each tragedian; an introduction to each play offering essential information about its first production, plot, and reception through the centuries; and notes addressing textual uncertainties. Featuring lively translations by eminent classicists and authors including Anne Carson, Robert Fitzgerald, David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Oliver Taplin, Emily Townsend Vermeule, and Elizabeth Wyckoff, this is an indispensable anthology for any reader of the foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
 

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cover of The Hero and the City: An Interpretation of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

The Hero and the City

An Interpretation of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

Joseph P. Wilson

University of Michigan Press, 2003

This work of seemingly conventional, philologically based criticism challenges many of the traditional views of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Joseph P. Wilson disputes the received wisdom that Oedipus was a suppliant of the Athenians, arguing rather that the primary relationship that governed Oedipus's dealings with his hosts was xenia (hospitality), not hiketeia (supplication). Likewise, he considers in detail the disputed reading of empolin or empalin in verse 637 and the vexed question of whether Oedipus ever became a citizen of Athens. He concludes by investigating the matter of Oedipus' heroic and oracular capabilities and the role that Oedipus' own will plays in creating his heroic persona. Wilson's study offers a radical rereading of the Oedipus riddle and concludes with a substantial discussion of the play's (and playwright's) role in providing a political and moral education for the troubled Athenian polis in the last decade of the tumultuous fifth century.
Joseph P. Wilson is Professor of Foreign Languages at the University of Scranton.
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cover of The Oedipus Casebook: Reading Sophocles' Oedipus the King

The Oedipus Casebook

Reading Sophocles' Oedipus the King

Mark R. Anspach

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves. The Greek word for tragedy means “goat song.” Is Oedipus the goat? Helene Peet Foley calls him “the kind of leader a democracy would both love and desire to ostracize.” The Oedipus Casebook readings weigh the evidence against Oedipus, place the play in the context of Greek scapegoat rites, and explore the origins of tragedy in the festival of Dionysus. This unique critical edition includes a new translation of the play by distinguished classics scholar Wm. Blake Tyrrell and the authoritative Greek text established by H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson.
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cover of Tragic Rites: Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama

Tragic Rites

Narrative and Ritual in Sophoclean Drama

Adriana E. Brook

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

Presenting an innovative new reading of Sophocles' plays, Tragic Rites analyzes the poetic and narrative function of ritual in the seven extant plays of Sophocles. Adriana Brook closely examines four of them—Ajax, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus—in the context of her wide-ranging consideration of the entire Sophoclean corpus. Exploring the playwright's dramatic technique, she shows how he used elements of ritual to guide the perceptions and expectations of his fifth-century audience about plot and character.

Employing both modern ritual theory and Aristotle's Poetics, Brook exposes the deep structural analogies between ritual and narrative, the parallels between mistakes in ritual and deviations from the expected in the plot, and the relationship between ritual content and dramatic closure.
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cover of Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles

Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles

David Seale

University of Chicago Press, 1982

In this study, David Seale argues that Sophocles’s use of stagecraft, which has thus far received little attention, was as sophisticated as that of Aeschylus or Euripides. His discussions of the physical and visual elements of Sophocles's seven plays center around the theme of sight; he demonstrates that each play is staged to maximize the implications and effects of “seeing” and not “seeing,” of knowledge and ignorance. This emphasis on visual perception, Seale maintains, harmonizes with Sophocles’s use of verbal and thematic techniques to create dramatic movements from delusion to truth, culminating in climaxes that are revelations—moments when things are truly “seen” by both audience and characters.
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