Perhaps more than any other Athenian, Sophocles typified the ancient Greek ideal that a man, no matter what his ambitions and accomplishments, should live fully in the present. He has won immortality as the most human of Greek tragic poets, but during his long life he busied himself with many activities. 

Because he mingled with all classes of people, it seems almost inevitable that this great Greek playwright should have concerned himself primarily with the human fortunes of his characters, with the effect of life on a man’s soul. The English essayist and poet Matthew Arnold summed it up rather exactly when he described Sophocles as the supreme example of a tragic poet “who saw life steadily and saw it whole.”

Here are presented the three powerful tragic dramas that make up that Theban Saga: Oedipus the King, Oedipus ar Collonus, and Antigone.  In an introduction, Professor Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr., scholar and authority on the ancient Greek world, has written of Sophocles and his world and of the ancient Greek theater. 

From the dust jacket