Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 31, The Requiem at Athens.

This is the second of three episodes on the three Theban plays of the Greek playwright Sophocles.

In this episode, we're going to cover the play Ettipus at Colonists, produced in the mid-spring of 401B.C. at the theatre of Dionysus

in Athens a few years after the death of its author. If you're just jumping in you might want to begin with episode 30 which tells the story of Ettipus from the beginning.

The life of the playwright Sophocles stretched through the most famous and spectacular period of history in ancient

Athens.

Sophocles' life spanned the Persian Wars at the beginning of the 400s, the rise of Athens

to preeminence in the Aegean world in the middle four hundreds and then the slow and violent decline of

Athens in the last three decades of the four hundreds during the

and Asian war.

Sophocles wrote one hundred and twenty-three plays and three out of the seven that survive now are the Theban plays being covered in this podcast.

Between 441 B.C. and the end of his life, for a period of over 40 years, Sophocles returned to the story of Ettipus and his children.

During the darkest most harrowing months faced by the Athenian people, Sophocles found in the old stories of

Eppus something that spoke to him and explained the increasingly bleak course of his civilization's history.

Ettipus at Colonists, the work we're going to explore today,

it was probably the last play Sophocles ever wrote. It was the old man's

swan song, his last parting gift to Athens, his requiem for a Passing Empire.

Like any Requiem, Edipus at Colonis is dark and reflective.

But also, like any Requiem Ettipus at Colonus moves beyond the darkness of loss and searches

for a way to move forward, to bury the ugliness of the past and then lay the first few small

paving stones of a new age. You're going to be. You remember Ettipus, don't you? Last time we heard his origin story and the story of his rise and fall in the previous episode on Sophocles's earlier play,

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