The Theban Plays

Ancient Athens produced three great tragic writers: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Of the three, Sophocles has in many ways remained the most accessible and may have had the most extensive influence on Western culture. Freud, for instance, took the name and the idea of the Oedipus complex from the Theban Plays.

Of Sophocles’ hundred odd plays, only seven have survived, of which three are printed here. The Theban Plays make up a trilogy, as was common at the time, in which the st…