Aithiopes
The fragmentary tragedy probably dramatized the Trojan War story of Ethiopian prince Memnon, who killed Antilochus before being killed by Achilles. The surviving plot is almost entirely unknown.
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The fragmentary tragedy probably dramatized the Trojan War story of Ethiopian prince Memnon, who killed Antilochus before being killed by Achilles. The surviving plot is almost entirely unknown.
After Achilles’ armor is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax attempts to kill him and the Greek commanders. Athena’s delusion makes Ajax slaughter livestock instead; when he regains his senses, shame leads him to suicide. The play then follows the dispute over his burial, which Odysseus resolves by persuading the commanders to honor Ajax in death.
In this lost satyr play, the Argonauts encounter Amycus, a king who challenges travelers to boxing matches before allowing them water. Polydeuces defeats him; the play's ending is uncertain.
Judy Miller, a Jewish college senior, submits an updated anti-nuclear play about Antigone instead of the assigned paper. Her refusal to yield brings her into conflict with Professor Henry Harper, while she stages the work on campus and challenges his decision through the university grievance process.
After Oedipus leaves Thebes, his sons Eteocles and Polynices kill each other in combat over the throne. Creon orders Eteocles buried with honor but forbids burial of Polynices. Their sisters Antigone and Ismene grieve; Antigone resolves to bury Polynices despite the decree. She cremates him at night, and Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s beloved, is wrongly arrested. Antigone admits responsibility and Creon orders her walled alive in a cave. Believing Haemon dead, Creon repents and reverses the sentence. Haemon reaches Antigone in the cave, and the lovers are rescued and married.
Gambaro recasts Antigone as a dissociated figure reliving her defiance of Creon while two men mock and reenact the story around her. Their performance implicates the spectators in the punishment of dissent and evokes Argentina’s government terror and disappearances.
After Creon forbids the burial of Polynices, Antigone defies his decree to honor her brother with funeral rites. Creon condemns her, and his refusal to heed warnings from his son Haemon and the prophet Tiresias leads to the deaths of Antigone, Haemon, and Creon's wife Eurydice.
Brecht reframes Sophocles’ tragedy through a modern opening in which two sisters shelter their deserter brother before he is lynched, paralleling this death with Polynices’ fate. Creon is presented as a Nazi-style dictator.
Opera adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.
Set in a modernized Thebes, Kreon is portrayed as a dictator whose immoral laws and administration lead the state toward ruin. His son Haimon argues that being human means refusing to function blindly. Antigone arrives late for her brother’s funeral but stands in solidarity with women who uphold the old order; she is ready to die for her appeal. The chorus closes by reflecting on humanity’s capacity for horror.
Scenes from Greek tragedies trace the violence within the House of Atreus: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s revenge, and the retaliatory killing by Orestes and Electra. The sequence follows Orestes through his pursuit by the Furies to his eventual reunion with Iphigenia.
After Agamemnon returns from Troy, his wife Clitennestra kills him, ostensibly to avenge their daughter Iphigenia but also to be with her lover Egisto. Seven years later, Orestes returns in disguise and, aided by his sister Elettra, kills Clitennestra and Egisto before going into exile.
In Thebes, Eteocles and Polynices kill one another in a struggle for the throne, and the people make Creonte ruler. He honors Eteocles but leaves Polynices unburied. Antigone secretly buries her brother and is sentenced to die sealed in a cave. Creonte’s son Haemon, who loves Antigone, enters the cave to share her fate. The people rebel against Creonte’s cruelty and proclaim Antigone queen. Freed, she forgives him, and the opera ends with hope for peace in Thebes.
The wife of a military commander waits for his return as reports of his campaign become increasingly troubling. A young woman brought from the war zone reveals how public violence and private desire have become entangled.
After Hercules kills King Eurytus and sacks Oechalia, he intends to marry the king’s daughter Iole. Iole loves Philoctetes, and agrees to marry Hercules to save her lover’s life. Phénice urges Hercules’s wife Déjanire to leave him, but she instead tries to win him back. When that fails, she gives Iole a tunic soaked in the blood of Nessus, believing it will restore an unfaithful lover. Iole gives it to Hercules on their wedding day; the poisoned tunic causes unbearable pain, and Hercules dies in the flames of the pyre before ascending to Olympus.
An Italian opera based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, with most of the original play’s choruses omitted.
Electra and her brother Orestes plot revenge for the murder of their father Agamemnon by their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes returns in disguise, and the siblings carry out their plan.
At the palace of Mycenae, Elektra mourns her murdered father Agamemnon and urges her sister Chrysothemis to help avenge him by killing their mother Klytaemnestra and her lover Aegisth. Chrysothemis refuses. Elektra meets Orest, returned in disguise, and learns he will carry out the revenge. Orest and his followers kill Klytaemnestra and Aegisth. Elektra celebrates the deaths in a frenzied dance and collapses, dead.
Sophocles' lost tragedy concerns the next generation's war against Thebes and the aftermath of Amphiaraus's death. Fragments indicate a confrontation between Alcmaeon and his uncle Adrastus over Alcmaeon's killing of his mother Eriphyle.
This five-act opera concerns Hercules and draws on Sophocles' The Trachiniae and Book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Berkoff relocates the Oedipus story to a decaying modern Britain and London’s East End, reframing Sophocles’ tragedy through social disaffection and the bleakness of urban life.
Hercules returns from his labors with captives, and his son Hyllus falls in love with Iole. Believing Hercules intends to leave her for Iole, Deianira sends him a robe dipped in the blood of the dying centaur Nessus. The robe burns and poisons Hercules; Deianira dies by suicide, and Hercules asks Hyllus to marry Iole and light his funeral pyre. Jupiter’s lightning ignites it, and Hercules ascends to heaven.
Hercules returns from war with Princess Iole, provoking his wife Dejanira’s jealousy. Believing a blood-soaked cloak will restore his fidelity, she sends it to him; the poison kills Hercules, and Dejanira descends into madness. Iole pities her, while Hercules is taken to Olympus and his son Hyllus is promised to Iole.
A chorus of satyrs pursues Apollo's stolen cattle, hoping to win freedom and gold. They track the animals to a cave, hear the infant Hermes playing his newly invented lyre, and learn from the nymph Cyllene what the strange instrument is. The surviving papyrus breaks off as Apollo returns.
Eteocles and Polynices fight for control of Thebes despite the pleas of their mother Jocasta, sister Antigone, and their relatives. The conflict ends in the deaths of the principal characters.
Farnace usurps the throne of Pontus, kills the king, and marries his widow, Stratonica. The king’s daughter Laodice is married to Nicomede, while her brother Mitridate has taken refuge in Egypt. Mitridate and his wife Issicratea return disguised as Egyptian ambassadors. After revealing his identity to Laodice, Mitridate and Issicratea kill Farnace and Stratonica, and Nicomede announces the rightful king’s return.
Sophocles' lost tragedy shows Niobe boasting of her children before Apollo and Artemis kill them. Surviving fragments suggest one daughter survives, while the final lines and ending are lost.
In Sophocles’ lost tragedy, Telegonus arrives in Ithaca to meet his father Odysseus. They fight without recognizing one another, and Telegonus kills Odysseus with a spear tipped by a stingray spine; the surviving fragments also refer to Odysseus’s oar and an oracle at Dodona.
Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle and becomes king of Thebes, where a plague leads him to investigate the unsolved murder of the former king, Laius. The seer Tiresias identifies Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus gradually learns that Laius and Jocasta were his parents and that he killed his father and married his mother, as foretold. Jocasta dies by suicide; Oedipus blinds himself and is banished by Creon, leaving his children behind. Rihm fragments and reframes the myth across scenes drawing on Sophocles, Nietzsche and Heiner Müller.
When a plague strikes Thebes, King Oedipus investigates the unsolved murder of his predecessor Laius. Evidence reveals that Oedipus himself killed his father and married his mother, fulfilling a prophecy; Jocasta dies by suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.
Blinded and exiled, Oedipus arrives at Colonus with Antigone and Ismene and seeks refuge in a sacred grove. Theseus protects him from Creon’s attempt to seize the daughters; Oedipus rejects Polynices, then dies secretly after promising Athens the blessing of his burial place.
To end a plague in Thebes, Oedipus seeks the killer of the former king Laius and gradually discovers that he himself killed Laius and is the son and husband of Jocasta. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself; he asks for exile and entrusts his daughters to Creon before returning to the palace.
To end a plague in Thebes, Oedipus vows to find Laius’s murderer. Clues reveal that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, Jocasta, who kills herself. Oedipus blinds himself and leaves Thebes.
In Sophocles’ lost tragedy, Phaedra’s desire for her stepson Hippolytus leads to a rejected proposal and a rape accusation. Theseus returns from the Underworld; surviving fragments and scholarly reconstructions suggest Hippolytus dies and Phaedra later confesses and takes her own life, though the sequence and details remain uncertain.
On Lemnos, Odysseus and Neoptolemus try to bring the abandoned, wounded archer Philoctetes and Heracles' bow to Troy. Neoptolemus deceives him, then returns the bow and agrees to take him home; Heracles appears and persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy, where he will be healed and help win the war.
In the reconstructed tragedy, Tereus rapes and mutilates Philomela, his wife Procne's sister. Philomela reveals the crime through a woven message; Procne takes revenge by killing their son Itys and serving him to Tereus. The sisters and Tereus are transformed into birds. The surviving play is lost, and this account is reconstructed from an ancient hypothesis and fragments.
After Creon forbids burial of Polyneices, Antigone argues that divine law requires it and performs the rites despite her sister's warning. Creon seals her in a tomb; after Tiresias warns him, Creon relents too late. Antigone, Haemon and Creon's wife die by suicide, leaving Creon isolated.
A verse reworking of the Philoctetes myth set near the end of the Trojan War. Abandoned on Lemnos because of a wound, the archer Philoctetes is approached by Odysseus and Neoptolemus, who need his bow to fulfil the prophecy that Troy cannot be taken without it.
On an antebellum South Carolina plantation, Amalia’s infant son Augustus is sold into slavery and later returns as an educated, rebellious young man. Unaware that Amalia is his mother, he becomes her lover while joining a planned slave revolt; a prophecy and the truth of his birth lead to tragedy.
The lost play probably followed Triptolemos on the mission Demeter gave him: to teach agriculture to peoples across the world. Fragments describe Demeter outlining his journey and the winged, serpent-drawn chariot she provides.
In Sophocles’ version of the Argonauts’ quest, Medea advises Jason on obtaining the Golden Fleece and kills her young brother Absyrtus inside the palace as the heroes prepare to flee Colchis.
Deianeira, fearing that Heracles has taken a new lover, sends him a robe treated with what she believes is a love charm. The poisoned robe kills him; after learning the truth, their son Hyllus helps Heracles fulfill his final requests as Deianeira dies by suicide.
The fragmentary tragedy probably dramatized the Trojan War story of Ethiopian prince Memnon, who killed Antilochus before being killed by Achilles. The surviving plot is almost entirely unknown.
After Achilles’ armor is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax attempts to kill him and the Greek commanders. Athena’s delusion makes Ajax slaughter livestock instead; when he regains his senses, shame leads him to suicide. The play then follows the dispute over his burial, which Odysseus resolves by persuading the commanders to honor Ajax in death.
In this lost satyr play, the Argonauts encounter Amycus, a king who challenges travelers to boxing matches before allowing them water. Polydeuces defeats him; the play's ending is uncertain.
Judy Miller, a Jewish college senior, submits an updated anti-nuclear play about Antigone instead of the assigned paper. Her refusal to yield brings her into conflict with Professor Henry Harper, while she stages the work on campus and challenges his decision through the university grievance process.
After Oedipus leaves Thebes, his sons Eteocles and Polynices kill each other in combat over the throne. Creon orders Eteocles buried with honor but forbids burial of Polynices. Their sisters Antigone and Ismene grieve; Antigone resolves to bury Polynices despite the decree. She cremates him at night, and Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s beloved, is wrongly arrested. Antigone admits responsibility and Creon orders her walled alive in a cave. Believing Haemon dead, Creon repents and reverses the sentence. Haemon reaches Antigone in the cave, and the lovers are rescued and married.
Gambaro recasts Antigone as a dissociated figure reliving her defiance of Creon while two men mock and reenact the story around her. Their performance implicates the spectators in the punishment of dissent and evokes Argentina’s government terror and disappearances.
After Creon forbids the burial of Polynices, Antigone defies his decree to honor her brother with funeral rites. Creon condemns her, and his refusal to heed warnings from his son Haemon and the prophet Tiresias leads to the deaths of Antigone, Haemon, and Creon's wife Eurydice.
Brecht reframes Sophocles’ tragedy through a modern opening in which two sisters shelter their deserter brother before he is lynched, paralleling this death with Polynices’ fate. Creon is presented as a Nazi-style dictator.
Opera adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.
Set in a modernized Thebes, Kreon is portrayed as a dictator whose immoral laws and administration lead the state toward ruin. His son Haimon argues that being human means refusing to function blindly. Antigone arrives late for her brother’s funeral but stands in solidarity with women who uphold the old order; she is ready to die for her appeal. The chorus closes by reflecting on humanity’s capacity for horror.
Scenes from Greek tragedies trace the violence within the House of Atreus: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s revenge, and the retaliatory killing by Orestes and Electra. The sequence follows Orestes through his pursuit by the Furies to his eventual reunion with Iphigenia.
After Agamemnon returns from Troy, his wife Clitennestra kills him, ostensibly to avenge their daughter Iphigenia but also to be with her lover Egisto. Seven years later, Orestes returns in disguise and, aided by his sister Elettra, kills Clitennestra and Egisto before going into exile.
In Thebes, Eteocles and Polynices kill one another in a struggle for the throne, and the people make Creonte ruler. He honors Eteocles but leaves Polynices unburied. Antigone secretly buries her brother and is sentenced to die sealed in a cave. Creonte’s son Haemon, who loves Antigone, enters the cave to share her fate. The people rebel against Creonte’s cruelty and proclaim Antigone queen. Freed, she forgives him, and the opera ends with hope for peace in Thebes.
The wife of a military commander waits for his return as reports of his campaign become increasingly troubling. A young woman brought from the war zone reveals how public violence and private desire have become entangled.
After Hercules kills King Eurytus and sacks Oechalia, he intends to marry the king’s daughter Iole. Iole loves Philoctetes, and agrees to marry Hercules to save her lover’s life. Phénice urges Hercules’s wife Déjanire to leave him, but she instead tries to win him back. When that fails, she gives Iole a tunic soaked in the blood of Nessus, believing it will restore an unfaithful lover. Iole gives it to Hercules on their wedding day; the poisoned tunic causes unbearable pain, and Hercules dies in the flames of the pyre before ascending to Olympus.
An Italian opera based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, with most of the original play’s choruses omitted.
Electra and her brother Orestes plot revenge for the murder of their father Agamemnon by their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes returns in disguise, and the siblings carry out their plan.
At the palace of Mycenae, Elektra mourns her murdered father Agamemnon and urges her sister Chrysothemis to help avenge him by killing their mother Klytaemnestra and her lover Aegisth. Chrysothemis refuses. Elektra meets Orest, returned in disguise, and learns he will carry out the revenge. Orest and his followers kill Klytaemnestra and Aegisth. Elektra celebrates the deaths in a frenzied dance and collapses, dead.
Sophocles' lost tragedy concerns the next generation's war against Thebes and the aftermath of Amphiaraus's death. Fragments indicate a confrontation between Alcmaeon and his uncle Adrastus over Alcmaeon's killing of his mother Eriphyle.
This five-act opera concerns Hercules and draws on Sophocles' The Trachiniae and Book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Berkoff relocates the Oedipus story to a decaying modern Britain and London’s East End, reframing Sophocles’ tragedy through social disaffection and the bleakness of urban life.
Hercules returns from his labors with captives, and his son Hyllus falls in love with Iole. Believing Hercules intends to leave her for Iole, Deianira sends him a robe dipped in the blood of the dying centaur Nessus. The robe burns and poisons Hercules; Deianira dies by suicide, and Hercules asks Hyllus to marry Iole and light his funeral pyre. Jupiter’s lightning ignites it, and Hercules ascends to heaven.
Hercules returns from war with Princess Iole, provoking his wife Dejanira’s jealousy. Believing a blood-soaked cloak will restore his fidelity, she sends it to him; the poison kills Hercules, and Dejanira descends into madness. Iole pities her, while Hercules is taken to Olympus and his son Hyllus is promised to Iole.
A chorus of satyrs pursues Apollo's stolen cattle, hoping to win freedom and gold. They track the animals to a cave, hear the infant Hermes playing his newly invented lyre, and learn from the nymph Cyllene what the strange instrument is. The surviving papyrus breaks off as Apollo returns.
Eteocles and Polynices fight for control of Thebes despite the pleas of their mother Jocasta, sister Antigone, and their relatives. The conflict ends in the deaths of the principal characters.
Farnace usurps the throne of Pontus, kills the king, and marries his widow, Stratonica. The king’s daughter Laodice is married to Nicomede, while her brother Mitridate has taken refuge in Egypt. Mitridate and his wife Issicratea return disguised as Egyptian ambassadors. After revealing his identity to Laodice, Mitridate and Issicratea kill Farnace and Stratonica, and Nicomede announces the rightful king’s return.
Sophocles' lost tragedy shows Niobe boasting of her children before Apollo and Artemis kill them. Surviving fragments suggest one daughter survives, while the final lines and ending are lost.
In Sophocles’ lost tragedy, Telegonus arrives in Ithaca to meet his father Odysseus. They fight without recognizing one another, and Telegonus kills Odysseus with a spear tipped by a stingray spine; the surviving fragments also refer to Odysseus’s oar and an oracle at Dodona.
Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle and becomes king of Thebes, where a plague leads him to investigate the unsolved murder of the former king, Laius. The seer Tiresias identifies Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus gradually learns that Laius and Jocasta were his parents and that he killed his father and married his mother, as foretold. Jocasta dies by suicide; Oedipus blinds himself and is banished by Creon, leaving his children behind. Rihm fragments and reframes the myth across scenes drawing on Sophocles, Nietzsche and Heiner Müller.
When a plague strikes Thebes, King Oedipus investigates the unsolved murder of his predecessor Laius. Evidence reveals that Oedipus himself killed his father and married his mother, fulfilling a prophecy; Jocasta dies by suicide and Oedipus blinds himself.
Blinded and exiled, Oedipus arrives at Colonus with Antigone and Ismene and seeks refuge in a sacred grove. Theseus protects him from Creon’s attempt to seize the daughters; Oedipus rejects Polynices, then dies secretly after promising Athens the blessing of his burial place.
To end a plague in Thebes, Oedipus seeks the killer of the former king Laius and gradually discovers that he himself killed Laius and is the son and husband of Jocasta. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself; he asks for exile and entrusts his daughters to Creon before returning to the palace.
To end a plague in Thebes, Oedipus vows to find Laius’s murderer. Clues reveal that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, Jocasta, who kills herself. Oedipus blinds himself and leaves Thebes.
In Sophocles’ lost tragedy, Phaedra’s desire for her stepson Hippolytus leads to a rejected proposal and a rape accusation. Theseus returns from the Underworld; surviving fragments and scholarly reconstructions suggest Hippolytus dies and Phaedra later confesses and takes her own life, though the sequence and details remain uncertain.
On Lemnos, Odysseus and Neoptolemus try to bring the abandoned, wounded archer Philoctetes and Heracles' bow to Troy. Neoptolemus deceives him, then returns the bow and agrees to take him home; Heracles appears and persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy, where he will be healed and help win the war.
In the reconstructed tragedy, Tereus rapes and mutilates Philomela, his wife Procne's sister. Philomela reveals the crime through a woven message; Procne takes revenge by killing their son Itys and serving him to Tereus. The sisters and Tereus are transformed into birds. The surviving play is lost, and this account is reconstructed from an ancient hypothesis and fragments.
After Creon forbids burial of Polyneices, Antigone argues that divine law requires it and performs the rites despite her sister's warning. Creon seals her in a tomb; after Tiresias warns him, Creon relents too late. Antigone, Haemon and Creon's wife die by suicide, leaving Creon isolated.
A verse reworking of the Philoctetes myth set near the end of the Trojan War. Abandoned on Lemnos because of a wound, the archer Philoctetes is approached by Odysseus and Neoptolemus, who need his bow to fulfil the prophecy that Troy cannot be taken without it.
On an antebellum South Carolina plantation, Amalia’s infant son Augustus is sold into slavery and later returns as an educated, rebellious young man. Unaware that Amalia is his mother, he becomes her lover while joining a planned slave revolt; a prophecy and the truth of his birth lead to tragedy.
The lost play probably followed Triptolemos on the mission Demeter gave him: to teach agriculture to peoples across the world. Fragments describe Demeter outlining his journey and the winged, serpent-drawn chariot she provides.
In Sophocles’ version of the Argonauts’ quest, Medea advises Jason on obtaining the Golden Fleece and kills her young brother Absyrtus inside the palace as the heroes prepare to flee Colchis.
Deianeira, fearing that Heracles has taken a new lover, sends him a robe treated with what she believes is a love charm. The poisoned robe kills him; after learning the truth, their son Hyllus helps Heracles fulfill his final requests as Deianeira dies by suicide.