Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A marble relief of a poet, perhaps Sophocles. Sophocles, the son of Sophillus, was a wealthy member of the rural deme (small community) of Hippeios Colonus in Attica, which was to become a setting for one of his plays; and he was probably born there, [2] [8] a few years before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC: the exact year is unclear, but 497/6 is most likely.
Of Sophocles' three Theban plays that have survived, and that deal with the story of Oedipus, Oedipus Rex was the second to be written, following Antigone by about a dozen years. However, in terms of the chronology of events described by the plays, it comes first, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone .
Within poetry there were three super-genres: epic, lyric and drama. The common European terminology about literary genres is directly derived from the ancient Greek terminology. [ 5 ] Lyric and drama were further divided into more genres: lyric in four ( elegiac , iambic , monodic lyric and choral lyric ); drama in three ( tragedy , comedy and ...
Sophocles influenced the development of drama, most importantly by adding a third actor (attributed to Sophocles by Aristotle; to Aeschylus by Themistius), [147] thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights. [148]
[3]: ix In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry, and more literally, "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker," ποιητής. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry, and epic.
Still, R.P. Winnington-Ingram points out that we can easily trace various influences from other genres. [7] The stories that tragedy deals with stem from epic and lyric poetry, its meter—the iambic trimeter—owed much to the political rhetoric of Solon, and the choral songs' dialect, meter and vocabulary seem to originate in choral lyric ...
Electra, also Elektra or The Electra [1] (Ancient Greek: Ἠλέκτρα, [2] Ēlektra), is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles.Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes (409 BC) and the Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC) lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career.
J.T. Sheppard argues in the second half of his Aeschylus and Sophocles: Their Work and Influence that Aeschylus and Sophocles have played a major part in the formation of dramatic literature from the Renaissance to the present, specifically in French and Elizabethan drama.