Sophocles
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A fresh look at the ancient world.
Natalie Haynes, critic, writer and reformed stand-up comedian, brings the ancient world entertainingly up to date. In each of the four programmes she profiles a figure from ancient Greece or Rome and creates a stand-up routine around them. She then goes in search of the links which make the ancient world still very relevant in the 21st century.
Episode 2: Sophocles invents modern drama with Oedipus the King. Spoiler alert! – it doesn't end well. This episode includes handy hints on how to get in the mood for a classical tragedy (bring a bottle.) With Professor Edith Hall, poet and playwright Frank McGuinness and TV critic Andrew Collins.
Producer Christine Hall
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2014.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | He scored goals, lifted trophies and broken records along the way. |
| 0:05.4 | And now he's got a podcast. |
| 0:07.2 | Welcome to the Wayne Rooney show. |
| 0:09.1 | Twice a week, Wayne Rooney, Kay Kerd and me, Kelly Summers, |
| 0:12.6 | break down the biggest stories in the Premier League and beyond. |
| 0:15.6 | As much as you'd like to say, |
| 0:16.7 | loyalty in football now is no existence, whether that's fun players or managers. |
| 0:20.5 | Plus, we'll hear the funniest, wildest and most outrageous stories from Wayne's career. |
| 0:25.5 | The Wayne Rooney show. |
| 0:26.5 | Everybody's talking about it. |
| 0:28.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.2 | Hello, thank you very much for coming. |
| 0:31.6 | Today I would like to talk to you about the Greek Tragidian Sophocles. So Sophocles is born in 496 BC in Colonnais. It's near Athens. |
| 0:47.4 | He lives to be 90 years old. He dies in 4, 645. I always feel like this is worth mentioning because |
| 0:52.6 | life expectancy in the ancient world is incredibly short and it sort of makes people think there aren't any old people. There are loads of old people. It's just loads of people die really young. So basically the chances are you probably won't make it out of being born. Chances of making it to one really slim. If you make it to one, you're still going to get to five. That's a lot of childhood |
| 1:11.1 | diseases. If you make it to five, you stand a pretty good chance of making it to your early teens. At which point, if you're a boy, you probably go off and fight in a war, and if you're a girl, you start giving birth. Once again, high mortality. So what you get is loads of people dying before they're 20 and some old people. |
| 1:28.9 | So, Sophocles, 90. |
| 1:30.3 | Eastclos, very old when he died. So what you get is loads of people dying before they're 20, and some old people. |
| 1:28.9 | So Sophocles, very old when he died. |
| 1:31.7 | It's the same in Rome. |
| 1:33.1 | There are old people, I merely mention it. |
| 1:35.4 | Sofocles wrote well over 100 plays. |
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