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Informationen zum Autor Sophocles was born just outside Athens, in 496 BC, and lived ninety years. His long life spanned the rise and decline of the Athenian Empire; he was a friend of Pericles, and though not an active politician he held several public offices, both military and civil. Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays for the Athenian theater, and is said to have come first in twenty-four contests. Only seven of his tragedies are now extant, these being Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes , and the posthumous Oedipus at Colonus . He died in 406 BC. Pat Easterling was Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge from 1994 until her retirement in 2001; before that she taught in Manchester, Cambridge and London (UCL). Her main field of research is Greek literature, particularly tragedy; she also has a special interest in the survival of ancient texts and the history of performance; her most recent book is Greek and Roman Actors: aspects of an ancient profession (Cambridge 2002), which she co-edited with Edith Hall. She is currently writing a commentary on Sophocles' for the series Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, of which she is a general editor. Klappentext Four seminal tragedies by the master Greek dramatist, in sparkling new translations Of the more than one hundred plays Sophocles wrote over the course of his long life, only seven survive. This volume collects four of them, all newly translated. Electra portrays the grief of a young woman for her father, Agamemnon, who has been killed by her mother's lover. Ajax depicts the enigma of power and weakness vis-àvis the fall of the great hero. Women of Trachis dramatizes the tragic love and error of Heracles's deserted wife, Deianeira; Philoctetes examines the conflict between physical force and moral strength. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Zusammenfassung Sophocles' plays transformed Greek myths into dramas featuring complex human characters, through which he explored profound moral issues. This title contains plays such as: "Electra", "Ajax", "Women of Trachis" and "Philoctetes"....
