": And thou didst indeed dare to transgress that law?: Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth."

“R. C. Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, 3rd ed. (Cambridge UP, 1893)”

“E. H. Plumptre, The Tragedies of Sophocles: A New Translation (1865, 1878)”

“H. Lloyd-Jones, Sophocles: Fragments, LCL 483 (Harvard UP, 1996)”

“The Philoctetes is a most noble play; conspicuous even among the works of Sophocles for the grace and majesty of effect produced by the most simple means. There is more character in it than in any play in the Greek language; two or three of Euripides's best excepted.”

“I have been less pleased with this perusal of the Œdipus Tyrannus than I was when I read it in January; perhaps because I then read it all at one sitting. The construction seems to me less perfect than I formerly thought it. But nothing can exceed the skill with which the discovery is managed. The agony of Œdipus is so unutterably grand; and the tender sorrow, in which his mind at last reposes after his daughters have been brought to him, is as moving as anything in the Greek Drama.”

“The first part of the Ajax is prodigiously fine. I do not know that the agonies of wounded honour have ever been so sublimely represented... But the interest of the piece dies with Ajax. In the debates which follow, Sophocles does not succeed as well as Euripides would have done. The odes, too, are not very good.”