There are several reasons throughout myth for such wrath: in Aeschylus ' play Agamemnon, Artemis is angry for the young men who will die at Troy, whereas in Sophocles ' Electra, Agamemnon has slain an animal sacred to Artemis, and subsequently boasted that he was Artemis ' equal in hunting.

Aeschylus (, Aiskhulos ; c. 525 / 524 BC – c. 456 / 455 BC ) was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides.

Euripides () ( c. 480 – 406 BC ) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles.

The identity of the threesome is neatly underscored by a patriotic account of their roles during Greece's great victory over Persia at the Battle of SalamisAeschylus fought there, Sophocles was just old enough to celebrate the victory in a boys ' chorus and Euripides was born on the very day of the battle.

Aeschylus had written his own epitaph commemorating his life as a warrior fighting for Athens against Persia, without any mention of his success as a playwright, and Sophocles was celebrated by his contemporaries for his social gifts and contributions to public life as a state official, but there are no records of Euripides's public life except as a dramatisthe could well have been " a brooding and bookish recluse ".

His plays and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles indicate a difference in outlook between the three mena generation gap probably due to the Sophistical enlightenment in the middle decades of the fifth century: Aeschylus still looked back to the archaic period, Sophocles was in transition between periods, and Euripides was fully imbued with the new spirit of the classical age.

The difference between Euripides and his older colleagues was one of degree: his characters talked about the present more controversially and more pointedly than did those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, sometimes even challenging the democratic order.

Like Euripides, both Aeschylus and Sophocles created comic effects contrasting the heroic with the mundane but they employed minor supporting characters for that purpose whereas the younger poet was more insistent, using major characters too.

Aeschylus gained thirteen victories as a dramatist, Sophocles at least twenty, Euripides only four in his lifetime, and this has often been taken as an indication of the latter's unpopularity with his contemporaries, and yet a first place might not have been the main criterion for success in those times ( the system of selecting judges appears to have been flawed ) and merely being chosen to compete was in itself a mark of distinction.

However, " his plays continued to be applauded even after those of Aeschylus and Sophocles had come to seem remote and irrelevant ", they became school classics in the Hellenistic period ( as mentioned in the introduction ) and, due to Seneca's adaptation of his work for Roman audiences, " it was Euripides, not Aeschylus or Sophocles, whose tragic muse presided over the rebirth of tragedy in Renaissance Europe.

In the seventeenth century, Racine expressed admiration for Sophocles but was more influenced by Euripides ( e. g. Iphigenia at Aulis and Hippolytus were the models for his plays Iphigénie and Phèdre ).

Many more errors came from the tendency of actors to interpolate words and sentences, producing so many corruptions and variations that a law was proposed by Lycurgus of Athens in 330 BC "... that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be written down and preserved in a public office ; and that the town clerk should read the text over with the actors ; and that all performances which did not comply with this regulation should be illegal.

Athenaeus, in Deipnosophistae or Banquet of the Learned, has one of the diners quoting Hieronymus of Cardia who confirms the view was widespread, while offering Sophocles ' comment on the matter.

A papyrus bearing a long fragment of a satyr play by Sophocles, given the title ' Tracking Satyrs ' ( Ichneutae ), was found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, 1907.

Philoctetes stayed on Lemnos for ten years, which was a deserted island according to Sophocles ' tragedy Philoctetes, but according to earlier tradition was populated by Minyans.

On Alcaeus (), and Summaries of the plots of Euripides and Sophocles (), but may have been the works of Dicaearchus, a grammarian of Lacedaemon, who, according to the Suda, was a disciple of Aristarchus, and seems to be alluded to in Apollonius.

< cite > Amphitryon </ cite > was the title of a lost tragedy of Sophocles, but most others who have used this story have rendered comic treatments instead.

A popular theme, The Request of Helen ( Helenes Apaitesis, Ἑλένης Ἀπαίτησις ) was the subject of a drama by Sophocles, now lost.

In his play Peace, Aristophanes imagined that the tragic poet Sophocles had turned into Simonides: " He may be old and decayed, but these days, if you paid him enough, he'd go to sea in a sieve.

At least three other 5th century BC authors who were younger than Sophocles wrote plays about Oedipus.

* Antigone, adaptation of Sophocles ' play by Peruvian poet José Watanabe ( b. 1946 )

The Roman poet Statius recounts a differing version of Creon's assumption of power from that followed by Sophocles, in his late first century epic, the Thebaid.

A more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting to transform this note of sadness into " a higher order of experience ".

* Sophocles: A renowned tragic poet, he wrote a play Tereus that is the basis for The Hoopoe's unfortunate appearance ( line 100 ).

Some of the most important figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the physician Hippocrates, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Phidias, The leading statesman of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens.

* Philocles: A tragic poet ( who won first prize when Sophocles competed with Oedipus Rex ), yet satirized by comic poets for a harsh style, he is said in line 462 to have an embittering influence on old men.

428 BC – 405 BC ) was a Greek tragic poet and son of Sophocles.

* Sophocles: A famous tragic poet, he is mentioned here because his verses are evocative of the good times that will come with peace ( line 531 ) even though he has become as greedy as Simonides ( 695-7 ).

Williams is also an acclaimed translator, notably of Sophocles ’ Women of Trachis and Euripides ’ The Bacchae, as well as of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and the French poet Francis Ponge.

With the introduction of the third actor ( an innovation attributed to Sophocles ), acting also began to be regarded as a skill to be rewarded with prizes, requiring a long apprenticeship in the chorus.

The debt may have been repaid by Sophocles because there appear to be echoes of The Histories in his plays, especially a passage in Antigone that resembles Herodotus's account of the death of Intaphernes ( Histories 3. 119 ~ Antigone 904-20 )-this however is one of the most contentious issues in modern scholarship.

These authors, in such works as The Republic and Laws by Plato, and The Politics and Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, analyzed political systems philosophically, going beyond earlier Greek poetic and historical reflections which can be found in the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and dramatists such as Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides.

These characters can be found in the only complete remaining satyr play, Cyclops, by Euripides, and the fragments of Sophocles ' Ichneutae ( Tracking Satyrs ).

Though the playwright romanticizes Antigone's sense of honor and duty to what is morally right, in this case resisting the Nazi forces, it can also be said that Anouilh, like Sophocles before him, makes a convincing argument for Creon ’ s method of leadership.

Sophocles wants to warn his countrymen about hubris, or arrogance, because he knows this will be their downfall.

Some explanation for these discrepancies in personality may be drawn from his characterization in the third of the Oedipus plays by Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus.

Another tradition, followed by Sophocles in his play Ajax and by Euripides in the lost play Kressai, was that Catreus found Aerope in bed with a slave and sent her to Nauplius to be drowned.

In Sophocles ' version Orestes pretends to be dead and Pylades carries the urn supposedly holding his friend's remains.

According to the tradition followed by Sophocles in his play Ajax and by Euripides in his lost play Cretan Women ( Kressai ), Catreus found Aerope in bed with a slave and handed her over to Nauplius to be drowned, but Nauplius spared Aerope's life and she married Atreus, the son of Pelops, and king of Mycenae, though in the version of the story used by Euripides, she married Pleisthenes instead.

Variants to the story are found in later poets: for example, in a tragedy by Sophocles, Odysseus Acanthoplex ( which also does not survive ), Odysseus finds out from an oracle that he is doomed to be killed by his son.

In the timeline of the plays, the events of Oedipus at Colonus occur after Oedipus the King and before Antigone ; however, it was chronologically the last of Sophocles ' three Theban plays to be written.

Of the ART's 31st season, Artistic Director Diane Paulus said, " I promise that our 2010 / 2011 season will be another year of theatrical events — from rock stars to a robot chorus, mosh pits to the geodesic dome, Sophocles to Lewis Carroll — there will be something for everyone.

Motifs may also be used to establish mood ( as the blood motif in Shakespeare's Macbeth ), for foreshadowing ( as when Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, mentions the moon almost every time the creature is about to appear ), to support the theme ( as when, in Sophocles ' drama Oedipus Rex, the motif of prophecy strengthens the theme of the irresistibility of the gods ), or for other purposes.

Aristarchus or Aristarch of Tegea was a contemporary of Sophocles and Euripides, who lived to be a centenarian, composed seventy pieces and won two tragic victories.