Sophocles

Sophocles lived through almost the whole of Athens’s golden fifth century. Born around 497 BCE at Colonus, a village just outside Athens, to a wealthy family (his father owned a workshop of armourers), he was chosen as a boy to lead the chorus celebrating the victory at Salamis over the Persians (480). He won his first victory in the tragic competition in 468, defeating the great Aeschylus, and for sixty years was the most successful dramatist in Athens. He served the city as a treasurer of the Delian League and as one of the ten generals, alongside Pericles, in the Samian War (441–439). He was a priest of a healing hero and, it is said, received the god Asclepius (as a sacred snake) into his house. He died in 406, just before Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, aged about ninety. Aristophanes, in The Frogs, called him “easygoing here, easygoing there”.

Tragedy in Athens

Greek tragedy was performed at the City Dionysia, a religious festival for the god Dionysus, in the open-air theatre on the slope of the Acropolis, before perhaps fifteen thousand citizens. Three playwrights each presented three tragedies and a satyr play; judges awarded prizes. Actors (at most three, all men) wore masks; a chorus of twelve or fifteen sang and danced odes between the episodes. Violence happened offstage and was reported by messengers.

Sophocles’ innovations: he added the third actor, increased the chorus from twelve to fifteen, introduced painted scenery, and abandoned the connected trilogy so that each play stands alone. Of his roughly 123 plays, seven survive:

Play	Subject
Ajax	The great warrior, shamed, goes mad and kills himself
Antigone (c. 441)	A sister buries her brother against the king’s decree — see Antigone
The Women of Trachis	Heracles’ death through his wife’s poisoned robe
Oedipus the King (c. 429)	The king who discovers he killed his father and married his mother — see Oedipus the King
Electra	Electra and Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon
Philoctetes (409)	A wounded archer abandoned on an island; Odysseus tries to trick him
Oedipus at Colonus (401, posthumous)	The old, blind Oedipus finds sanctuary and a mysterious death at Colonus

The Theban plays

Three plays about the house of Oedipus — Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone — are often read together as the “Theban plays”, though they were written decades apart and were not a trilogy. In story-order: Oedipus discovers his crimes and blinds himself; old and wandering, he dies at Colonus; his sons kill each other fighting for Thebes, and his daughter Antigone buries the “traitor” brother.

Sophocles’ vision

The hero who will not bend

Sophocles’ central figures are isolated, intransigent, magnificent: Ajax, who would rather die than live shamed; Antigone, who defies the king; Electra, who will not stop mourning; Philoctetes, who will not forgive; Oedipus, who will not stop searching. Bernard Knox, in The Heroic Temper (1964), showed how each faces pressure to yield — from friends, the chorus, rulers — and refuses. Their greatness and their destruction are the same thing.

Knowledge and blindness

The deepest Sophoclean irony is about knowledge. Oedipus, the man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, is blind to the truth about himself; the blind prophet Tiresias sees it. When Oedipus finally sees, he blinds himself. Sophocles was a contemporary of Socrates and the Sophists; the play questions the confidence of the new rationalism.

The ode to man

The most famous choral ode in Greek, from Antigone (332–375), begins: “Many things are wonderful (deina), but nothing is more wonderful than man.” Man crosses the stormy sea, ploughs the earth, snares birds and beasts, tames horses, has taught himself speech, thought and the laws of cities, and has found escape from every illness — except death. But deinos also means “terrible”: with his skill he may come to good or to evil. Heidegger devoted a famous lecture to this ode (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935).

The gods

Sophocles’ gods are not cruel tricksters, but they are inscrutable. Oracles always come true; human beings cannot escape what is fated, but they act freely within it, and their character determines how they meet it. The final chorus of Oedipus the King warns: “Count no man happy until he has passed the end of life free from pain.”

Influence

Aristotle‘s Poetics took Oedipus the King as the model tragedy — its reversal (peripeteia) coinciding with recognition (anagnōrisis). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s reading of Antigone as the collision of two rights became the most influential theory of tragedy. Friedrich Nietzsche saw in Oedipus the Dionysian wisdom that knowledge kills. Freud named the Oedipus complex after him (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). Hölderlin translated both Oedipus and Antigone; Brecht, Anouilh (during the German occupation of France), Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes, 2004) and Kamila Shamsie (Home Fire, 2017) rewrote Antigone.

Using Sophocles in conversation

• On self-knowledge: Oedipus, who solved the riddle of man but not the riddle of himself.
• On civil disobedience: Antigone, who obeys the unwritten laws of the gods over the decree of the king.
• On human greatness and danger: “Many things are wonderful, but nothing more wonderful than man.”
• On happiness: “Count no man happy until he is dead.”