Sophocles

Sophocles (ca. 496-406 BCE) lived in an Athens advanced in power and prosperity: a time of reevaluation of tradition and new intellectual standards — a critical and rationalist movement, confident in the power of human intelligence. He took an active role as a citizen and politician, dying two years before Athen’s surrender to Sparta. Oedipus the King was a later play, probably produced sometime after the start of the Peloponnesian War, 431 BCE.

Sophocles was born around 496 B.C., in Colonus, a suburb outside of Athens. He was the son of a wealthy merchant named Sophillus, who provided him with a great aristocratic education. Not only that, be he had the pleasure of being friends with political leaders Pericles and Herodotus. Sophocles was active in public life starting at a very early age. When he was sixteen, he was chosen to lead a choir of boys at a celebration of the victory of Salamis. Years later, he began to enter contests in which plays were presented. His first year competing in the City Dionysia which was an annual festival, he took first prize. He defeated Aeschylus, which was an astonishment. Aeschylus was known for his tragic poetry and had been the undisputed champ of these competitions. Sophocles went on to write more than 120 plays, taking home first place eighteen times and would never take less than second. Sophocles not only wrote these great dramatic plays, but would prove his acting ability by performing in them. In the play Nausicaa or The Women Washing Clothes, Sophocles performed a juggling act which had the townspeople talking for years.

Sophocles didn’t limit himself only to theatre. He served as an ordained priest for many years, served jointly as a general with Pericles during the Samian revolt, and may have served as a general during the Peloponnesian War. He was also one of the ten commissioners who governed Athens after the Sicilian Expedition.

Being known as an innovator of theatre, Sophocles takes credit for eliminating the trilogic form, which is basically using three different tragedies to tell one story. There were seven tragedies out of all the plays written which were completely preserved. The seven extant plays are Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King), Electra, Ajax, Trachiniae (Maidens of Trachis), Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus (produced posthumously in 401 BC). Also preserved is a large fragment of the Ichneutae (Investigators), a satiric drama discovered on papyrus in Egypt about the turn of the 20th century. Ajax, the earliest play, dramatizes nobility and the heroic ideal. Antigone, written around the same time, is a drama about a woman who fights authority for a proper burial for her brother. “It has often been regarded as the classical statement of the struggle between the law of the individual conscience and the central power of the state.”(Grene, 3) Oedipus the King may be considered Sophocles’ greatest work. “It is powerful in its conjunction of character and destiny, its relentless recognition of hidden truth, and its paradoxes of human knowledge and ignorance” (Segal).

“In every way Sophocles is the embodiment of what we know as Greek, so much so that all definitions of the Greek spirit and Greek art are first of all definitions of his spirit and his art.”(Hamilton, p163) Sophocles was a natural in dramatic theatre, but some say he was even a better poet than dramatist."Sophocles' great dramatic achievement was to reinterpret the ancient myths through a fuller development of individual character and to endow surface detail with deeper symbolic significance" (Segal). In 406, after the production of Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles passed away.

Works Cited

Grene, David. Et. Al. Sophocles, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959
Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way, New York, W.W. Norton and Co. 1971
Segal, Charles <www.honors.montana.edu>