The Three Theban Plays

Sophocles’s three Theban plays in Robert Fagles’s translation — Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus — printed in the order of the story rather than the order they were written, which is late, earlier, latest. Oedipus the King is the tragedy of an investigator who is the criminal; Antigone is the direct collision between a family’s duty to bury its dead and a ruler’s order not to.

Antigone is the reason this volume shows up on a citizenship list at all: it is the canonical Western text on the collision between conscience and the law, and it refuses to hand either side a clean win.

Context: Listed under Drama at Lexile 1100. Two of these plays also appear, in other translations, in the Chicago Greek Tragedies volumes the same list cards.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Sophocles — the playwright.
• Greek Tragedies, Volume 1 — carries Oedipus the King and Antigone in the Grene translations.
• Greek Tragedies, Volume 3 — carries Oedipus at Colonus in Fitzgerald’s.
• Democracy — Antigone’s standing quarrel with the law it breaks.