The Complete Plays of Sophocles

Sophocles (c. 496-c. 405 BCE) was the most important Athenian playwright of his era. He lived an active public life, as politician, general, and founder of a healing society. His dramas won the annual dramatic competition twenty-four times, regularly defeating his great rivals Aeschylus and Euripides. Aristotle praised his Oedipus the King as the finest single example of Greek tragedy. Today Sophocles' seven surviving dramas loom larger than at any time since they were first staged in Athens. They are continually re-interpreted and revived, on Broadway and off, and in regional, university, and community theaters, and remain a permanent fixture in school and college curriculums.
In the three Oedipus plays ( THE KING, OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, and ANTIGONEas well as in ELEKTRA and WOMEN OF TRAKHIS, Sophocles embodies cosmic and human forces that ravage lives and cities in narratives of emotional and physical mayhem played out within a stricken family. and AIASboth of which dramatise political and moral crises historically present in Sophocles' Athens, have obvious counterparts in our current world, where soldiers kill innocents and suffer PTSD (AIAS) and are wounded and abandoned
Yet the effective timeliness of Sophocles' dramas depends not on recognisable themes but on translations that will resonate, intellectually and emotionally, with a contemporary audience. Award-winning translators Robert Bagg and James Scully have produced a vivid, dynamic, and eminently readable new translation of THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF SOPHOCLES for a new generation of readers.