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The Seven Plays in English Verse by Sophocles
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had been narrated in a long poem, in which one version of that hero's
multiform legend was fully set forth.

The subjects of the King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonos, and Antigone,
are taken from the Tale of Thebes, the Aias and the Philoctetes are
founded on incidents between the end of the Iliad and the taking of
Troy, the Electra represents the vengeance of Orestes, the crowning
event in the tale of 'Pelops' line', the Trachiniae recounts the last
crisis in the life of Heracles.

4. Of the three Theban plays, the Antigone was first composed,
although its subject is the latest. Aeschylus in the Seven against
Thebes had already represented the young heroine as defying the
victorious citizens who forbade the burial of her brother, the rebel
Polynices. He allowed her to be supported in her action by a band of
sympathizing friends. But in the play of Sophocles she stands alone,
and the power which she defies is not that of the citizens generally,
but of Creon, whose will is absolute in the State. Thus the struggle
is intensified, and both her strength and her desolation become more
impressive, while the opposing claims of civic authority and domestic
piety are more vividly realized, because either is separately embodied
in an individual will. By the same means the situation is humanized to
the last degree, and the heart of the spectator, although strained to
the uttermost with pity for the heroic maiden whose life when full of
brightest hopes was sacrificed to affection and piety, has still some
feeling left for the living desolation of the man, whose patriotic
zeal, degenerating into tyranny, brought his city to the brink of
ruin, and cost him the lives of his two sons and of his wife, whose
dying curse, as well as that of Haemon, is denounced upon him.

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