Sofocles

Sofocles the classical Greek tragedian of Athens (c. 496-406 BC), known in the standard spelling as Sophocles, who wrote more than a hundred plays and is regarded with Aeschylus and Euripides as one of the three great masters of Attic tragedy. His surviving works, above all Oedipus Rex and Antigone, are among the most influential dramas ever written.

Life and Times

Sophocles was born at Colonus, a suburb of Athens, around 496 BC, into a wealthy family; his father was a maker of armour or a prosperous craftsman. He lived almost to the end of the fifth century, witnessing the rise of the Athenian empire, the long and ruinous Peloponnesian War and the final defeat of his city by Sparta in 404 BC. He was a man of many talents and of public standing, and as a young man he is said to have led the chorus that celebrated the Greek victory over Persia at the battle of Salamis.

He served Athens as a general alongside Pericles in the Samian War, held a priestly office connected with the healing hero Asclepius and took part in public religious life. He was a friend of Pericles and of the historian Herodotus, and he enjoyed extraordinary professional success. He is said to have won the dramatic competition at the festival of Dionysus eighteen times, an unrivalled record, and he never placed lower than second, a distinction that testifies to the consistent admiration of his contemporaries.

Dramatic Innovations and Technique

Sophocles transformed the art of tragedy in ways that shaped the whole subsequent history of drama. He increased the number of speaking actors from two to three, allowing richer interaction and conflict among characters, and he reduced the role of the chorus, making it a reflective body rather than a principal agent of the action. He is credited with the introduction of scene painting and with improvements in stagecraft, and he perfected the use of dramatic irony.

This device, by which the audience knows a truth hidden from the characters on stage, gives his plays their peculiar tension, as in Oedipus Rex, where every word of the protagonist carries a meaning he cannot perceive. His structure is famously tight. Each of his surviving plays unfolds a single action with relentless logic, and the plot moves by a series of revelations that expose the gulf between human intention and divine will. Aristotle praised Oedipus Rex as the model tragedy, citing its perfect construction.

The Theban Plays and Other Works

Only seven of Sophocles' plays survive complete, though he wrote well over a hundred. The three so-called Theban plays, Antigone, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, treat the fate of the house of Oedipus, though they were written at different times, in different circumstances and as separate works rather than as a continuous trilogy. Oedipus Rex follows the king of Thebes as he investigates the murder of his predecessor and discovers that he has killed his father and married his mother.

Antigone, written earlier, dramatises the conflict between the heroine's duty to divine law and the edict of her uncle Creon, who forbids the burial of her brother. Oedipus at Colonus, composed in old age, ends the cycle with the hero's mysterious death and transfiguration. Among other surviving plays, Ajax portrays the madness and suicide of the proud warrior, Electra dramatises the murder of Clytemnestra by her children, and Philoctetes is admired for its moral complexity and its influence on later drama.

Themes and Vision

Sophocles' tragedy turns on the limits of human knowledge and power. His characters, often proud and quick to act, are brought low by forces they do not understand, and the plays repeatedly confront the gap between what mortals believe and what the gods have decreed. Suffering, in his vision, is bound up with ignorance and with the fatal confidence of the human will. He is deeply concerned with the conflict between individual conscience and the claims of the community, between the laws of the city and a higher, unwritten law.

Antigone's defiance of Creon has been read for centuries as a defence of personal morality against political power, and the play has been taken up by thinkers and revolutionaries across the ages. Yet his work is not simply bleak. His choruses celebrate the wonders of the world, and his later plays, especially Oedipus at Colonus, move toward reconciliation and a dignified acceptance of fate. Heroism, for Sophocles, lies in the courage with which human beings bear their suffering and meet their end.

Influence and Legacy

Sophocles exercised a profound influence on the theory and practice of drama. Aristotle based much of his Poetics on his plays, and the analysis of Oedipus Rex as the ideal tragedy shaped the understanding of dramatic form for centuries, from the Renaissance to modern criticism. His plays have been continually performed, translated and adapted, and they have spoken to each era in its own terms, offering each generation a mirror for its own anxieties.

The twentieth century in particular turned to them for language adequate to catastrophe, and writers and thinkers from Nietzsche to psychoanalysts and modern playwrights have engaged with his vision of fate, knowledge and guilt. He died in 406 BC, before the final defeat of Athens, and he was honoured as a hero. Oedipus, Antigone and Electra remain living figures in world literature, and Sophocles is recognised as perhaps the most technically perfect of the ancient tragedians.

See also

• Oedipus Rex
• Antigone
• Oedipus at Colonus
• Attic tragedy