This is one of the seven plays of Sophocles in the full editions by R.C. Jebb, all of which will be reissued under the BCP imprint. They have occasionally been reprinted but never before in affordable paperback versions. In this set, each volume contains a foreword by P.E. Easterling, concerned with Jebb and his contribution to Sophoclean scholarship; there follows an introduction by a noted Sophoclean scholar dealing with Jebb's treatment of the individual play and its value for - and contrast with - subsequent interpretations, for which a select bibliography is included.

Richard Clavarhouse Jebb, Regius Professor of Greek and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was one of the foremost classicists of the Victorian era. His editions of Sophocles' plays appeared in the last fifteen years of the 19th century. They are distinguished by the sensitivity of Jebb's literary and dramatic interpretations, and the neat translation facing the Greek text. They have had a profound influence on subsequent Sophoclean scholarship. P.E. Easterling, editor of this series and author of the new Foreword to each volume, is Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College. She is general editor of the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. Barbara Goward, who provides the new Introduction to this volume, teaches Greek and Latin at the City Literary Institute, London. Her publications include 'Island Transformations: metabole and metagnoia in Shakespeare's Tempest and Sophocles' Philoctetes' in Homer, Tragedy and Beyond (London 2002) and Telling Tragedy (Duckworth 1999; ppr ed. 2002).