Sophocles (c. 497/6-406 B.C.), with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the three great tragic poets of Athens. The subjects of his plays were drawn from mythology and legend. Each play contains at least one heroic figure, a character whose strength, courage, or intelligence exceeds the human norm--but who also has more than ordinary pride and self-assurance. These qualities combine to lead to a tragic end.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones now gives us a masterful new translation of the seven surviving plays of Sophocles. The facing Greek is the corrected version of the Oxford Classical Text edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Nigel Wilson (1990). Volume I contains Oedipus Tyrannus (which tells the famous Oedipus story), Ajax (a heroic tragedy of wounded self-esteem), and Electra (the story of two siblings who seek revenge on their mother and her lover for killing their father). Volume II contains Oedipus at Colonus (the climax of the fallen hero's life), Antigone (a conflict between public authority and an individual woman's conscience), Philoctetes (Odysseus' intrigue to bring an unwilling hero to the Trojan War), and The Women of Trachis (a fatal attempt by Heracles' wife to regain her husband's love).