The greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, surpassing his older contemporary Aeschylus and the younger Euripides not only in the number of plays he wrote but also in the number of prizes awarded his works. Only the seven works in this volume have survived intact. From the complex drama of Antigone, the heroine willing to sacrifice life and love for a principle, to the mythic doom embodied by Oedipus, the uncommonly good man brought down by the gods, Sophocles possessed a tragic vision that, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, saw life steadily and saw it whole.
