Oedipus / Edition 1

by Sophocles Sophocles

Overview

The great masterpiece on which Aristotle based his aesthetic theory of drama in the Poetics and from which Freud derived the Oedipus complex. King Oedipus puts out a sentence on the unknown murderer of his father Laius. By a gradual unfolding of incidents, Oedipus learns that he was the assassin and that Jocasta, his wife, is also his mother.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781854596109
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	09/01/2001
Series:	Drama Classics , #47
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Sophocles (496
BC–406 BC), one of the great Greek dramatists of the ancient world, was born to a wealthy family at Colonus, near Athens. He had a charmed childhood, was highly educated and a personal friend of prominent statesmen, and, as a good
Athenian, served faithfully as a treasurer and general for Athens when it was expanding its empire and influence. Though he wrote approximately 123 plays,
only seven tragedies survive in their entirety: Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra,
Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.
With Sophocles, Greek tragedy reached its most characteristic form; he frequently beat out rivals Aeschylus and Euripides in annual drama competitions.