Sophocles - Oedipus the King - 1980

Sophocles – Oedipus the King – Easton Press – 1980
100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series

Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) was, with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of the three great tragedians of fifth-century Athens, and the figure in whom Greek tragedy reached its classical equilibrium. He was born at Colonus, served as a general alongside Pericles and as a treasurer of the Delian League, and lived through almost the whole of the Athenian golden age. Of the some one hundred and twenty plays he is said to have written, seven survive, including Antigone, Electra, Ajax, Philoctetes, and the two Oedipus plays. According to ancient tradition, his first victory at the Dionysia in 468 BC came against the reigning master Aeschylus and inaugurated a career in which he won the first prize more than twenty times. Aristotle, in the Poetics, took Oedipus the King as the supreme example of tragic form.

This volume presents Oedipus the King in a parallel-text edition, with the original Greek of Sophocles on the verso and Francis Storr's English verse translation on the recto throughout. The play, first performed in Athens around 429 BC, follows the king of Thebes as he sets out to lift the plague from his city by uncovering the murderer of his predecessor Laius — an inquiry that leads him, step by step, to the discovery that he has killed his own father and married his mother. It is the founding text of the Western tragic tradition and the work on which Aristotle's account of tragedy chiefly rests. The introduction is by the American novelist and dramatist Thornton Wilder.

The illustrations are wood engravings by Demetrios Galanis (1879–1966), the Greek-born French artist who was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and one of the most distinguished engravers of the School of Paris. His engravings for Oedipus the King were first published by the Limited Editions Club in 1955 and are reproduced here in full, drawing on the imagery of archaic vase painting and classical sculpture.

Full genuine leather binding in deep aubergine
Front and back covers with double gilt rule borders framing a central gilt laurel wreath medallion
Spine without raised bands, decorated with gilt rules, stylised olive-leaf motifs, and gilt title and author lettering
Easton Press monogram stamped in gilt on the lower spine panel
All edges gilt
Frontispiece portrait of Sophocles, specially commissioned
Parallel Greek and English text throughout
Printed on archival-quality acid-neutral paper
Printed and bound in the United States of America

Condition is as new. A well-preserved collector's copy.

Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.