The Seven Plays in English Verse

HON. LL.D., HON. D.LITT. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS HON. FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
NEW EDITION, REVISED
The present translation was first published in ‘The World’s Classics’ in 1906.
The seven extant plays of Sophocles have been variously arranged. In the order most frequently adopted by English editors, the three plays of the Theban cycle, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Coloneus, and Antigone, have been placed foremost.
In one respect this is obviously convenient, as appearing to present continuously a connected story. But on a closer view, it is in two ways illusory.
1. The Antigone is generally admitted to be, comparatively speaking, an early play, while the Oedipus Coloneus belongs to the dramatist’s latest manner; the first Oedipus coming in somewhere between the two. The effect is therefore analogous to that produced on readers of Shakespeare by the habit of placing Henry VI after Henry IV and V. But tragedies and ‘histories’ or chronicle plays are not in pari materia .
Footnote
The fresh and unimpaired enjoyment of the Beautiful is certainly the aspect of ancient life and literature which most attracted the humanists of the sixteenth century, and still most impresses those amongst ourselves who for various reasons desire to point the contrast between Paganism and Judaism. The two great groups of forces vaguely known as the Renaissance and the Revolution have both contributed to this result. Men who were weary of conventionality and of the weight of custom ‘heavy as frost and deep almost as life,’ have longed for the vision of ‘Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade,’ or to ‘hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.’ Meanwhile, that in which the Greeks most resembled us, ‘the human heart by which we live,’ for the very reason that it lies so near to us, is too apt to be lost from our conception of them. Another cause of this one-sided view is the illusion produced by the contemplation of statuary, together with the unapproachable perfection of form which every relic of Greek antiquity indisputably possesses.