Sophocles & Milton

Sophocles wrote his great works two and a half millennia ago, and yet today they are still fresh and powerful. This is because Sophocles deals with deep and important human situations and emotions. Even though we can no longer imagine what it would be like to live in the world which Sophocles inhabits, we can completely understand his characters because they are fully human and human nature does not change much over time. Though he writes about kings and queens and the wealthy of Greece, his characters have the sense of being representatives of every man and woman, in every era. His characters struggle with pride and with sin and with accepting the will of the gods -- when they do things they should not do, in the end they are punished, and accept this punishment. This gives them a greater morality than sinners who are portrayed...
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