ADVERTISEMENT. THE object of the following Translation has been to give an English Version of Sophocles, chiefly from the text of Wunder, as Literal as the difference of idiom in the two languages will allow it to be. Wherever the Notes that have been subjoined are not original, the source from whence they have been taken is acknowledged at the foot of each note. LONDON, April 1844. THE ARGUMENT, BY ARISTOPHANES THE GRAMMARIAN. EDIPUS having left Corinth, being reproached by all as a foreigner, and a supposititious child of his father, went to consult the Pythian oracle, enquiring who he was and who was his father, and unhappily meeting Laius his father in a narrow carriage road, he unintentionally slew him; and having solved the fatal song of the terrible Sphinx he polluted the bed of his mother who knew him not, and a plague and long disease destroyed Thebes. And Creon being sent to the shrine of Delphi to ask a remedy for the evil, was told by a prophetic voice from the God that the murder of Laius must be avenged. From which the miserable Edipus learning who he was, put out his eyes with two clasps, and his mother died by her own hands by hanging. The play was called Οἰδίπους ὁ τύραννος to distinguish it from the Edipus Coloneus. Some writers called it Oidíπоvç д πρóτeрosit must have been one of the latest plays of Sophocles, as is apparent from the Chorus 845, which is supposed to refer to Alcibiades. 1. Homer calls the mother of Edipus, Epicasta. Μητέρα τ ̓ Οἰδιπόδαο ἴδον, καλὴν Ἐπικάστην B |