The Complete Plays

The art of Sophokles stands as one of the high points in the history of Western Civilization. Born at the start of the 5th century B.C., his life spans the whole of that amazing century known as the Golden Age of Athens, in which the arts of drama, poetry, sculpture, architecture and philosophy reached meteoric heights. Sophokles’ contribution was to show human beings at the peak of their form as thinking, feeling, and sentient members of the race. His subject is always the mind, but the inner spark of divinity as well, the daimon that propels humans into heroic actions that beat at the gates of the gods.