About This Site

Reading Sophocles is a companion site to Oedipus the King, the tragedy by Sophocles, the Athenian dramatist of the fifth century BC. RavensEdge Publishing publishes the site. It prints the play in the English translation of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, with material from Jebb’s own edition; how the text is presented is set out in the notes at the head of The Play.

What the site adds

Reading Sophocles adds reference pages on the play: a scene-by-scene synopsis, the characters and the house of Laïus, the Theban myths, Athens and the theater, a glossary of terms, and the play’s later history from Aristotle to the modern stage, with a guide to translations and books.

Jebb’s Preface, Introduction and scene and ode notes are kept apart from these pages, which do not draw on his edition.

Sources for the reference pages

The reference pages draw on the ancient sources themselves: the play, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristotle’s Poetics, Pausanias, Apollodorus and others, read in public-domain or openly licensed translations, mainly from the Perseus Digital Library and Project Gutenberg. The page on the play’s later history also draws on the later works and witnesses themselves: Seneca’s Oedipus, the versions of Corneille, Dryden and Lee, and Voltaire, Voltaire’s letters on his play, and Henry Norman’s account of the Harvard production of 1881.

Each statement on a reference page is checked against the source it rests on. Wikipedia is used only to find sources: a statement taken from it is checked against the reference the article cites.