The order of tragedies at the Great Dionysia

The question, how did a tragic poet choose the three tragedies which he put together at the Great Dionysia, was forced on me by twice seeing Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus produced on the same night with another play of Sophocles and finding myself so shattered by the Oedipus Tyrannus that I could not appreciate the second play at all: the second play was the Oedipus Coloneus in Berlin and the Antigone in Dunedin, N.Z. At least we know that Sophocles did not produce either the O.C. or the Antigone with the O.T., but the problem, what came after the O.T. still remains, since the O.T. was surely not a third play. We assume reasonably that the normal practice at competitions was for each of the three competing poets to produce three tragedies and a satyr play. We know that in 472 Aeschylus produced the Phineus, Persae, Glaukos Potnieus, and as satyr play Prometheus. No principle of connection can be seen here, and the Persae, which drama tised the events of 480, was sandwiched between two plays dealing with the generation before the Trojan War (I want to establish the point that chronological order was not necessarily followed in arrang ing plays for production.) In 467, however, Aeschylus produced the Laius, Oedipus, Septem, with the Sphinx as the satyr play. Here the story of the tragedies ran through three generations of a single family; only the satyr play is out of step because it switched back from Oedipus' sons to Oedipus himself. But for the tragedies the connection is clear, three chapters to show the working out of an initial disastrous choice to an end in the extinction of the male line. In the same year Polyphrasmon produced his Lykourgeia, presumably a series of con nected plays on the story of Lykourgos; but the third set of plays, Pratinas' Perseus, Tantalos, and Palaistai, produced by his son Aristias,