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Why Should I Buy This Book?
Greek Classics have long been the bedrock of a proper and
thorough education. Reading about the tracks and lives of our ancestors
cannot help but uplift us in our current life's path as it arms us with
lessons of the past. Tomes have been written on the subject, but to put it
in very modern, even economic terms, a recent article in the NY Times put it
into such a perspective with an article on what books one finds on the
shelves of the world’s most successful CEO’s. The article points out that
one doesn’t find “how-to-business books” on their shelves, but rather works
of philosophy, poetry, Greek classics, and other books of general knowledge.
Oedipus at Colonus,
the last work written by the great Athenian dramatist
Sophocles (497-406 BC), was first produced at Athens a few
years after the playwright’s death. The play depicts the
last day in the life of Oedipus, once king of Thebes, who
after years of wandering as a blind vagrant guided by his
daughter Antigone, has reached Colonus out the outskirts of
Athens. There he seeks a final resting place in a sacred
grove of the Furies, offering the Athenians a divinely
promised future security against their Theban neighbours if
they will prevent him being forcibly carried back to
Thebes. Throughout the play Oedipus reviews the tragic
events of his own life—killing his father, marrying his
mother, and fathering children with her—and passionately
insists upon his own innocence. He also denounces Creon, the
Theban ruler who forced him into exile, and scathingly
repudiates his elder son Polyneices, who is about to attack
Thebes. Then, in a fitting climax to his life of
extraordinary suffering, Oedipus moves unaided into the
heart of the grove and dies. This new translation by Ian Johnston
is a fresh version of this famous work in a language that
remains faithful to the original Greek and that offers the
modern reader or performer an immediately accessible entry
into a complex vision of the moral ambiguities at the heart
of heroic conduct.
This play can be previewed by following the link to the
preview page for this title.
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