Sophocles

Sophocles (496–406 BC), Greek tragic dramatist, born of good family at Colonus near Athens. As a boy he was celebrated for the beauty of his voice and figure, and took part in a boys' dance which celebrated the victory of Salamis in 480 BC. (Athenian tradition linked its three great tragic poets to this battle; Aeschylus fought in it, and Euripides was said, inaccurately, to have been born while it was in progress.) Sophocles is said to have written over 100 plays, of which seven tragedies are extant, as well as substantial parts of a satyr-drama, the Ichneutae (The Trackers), dealing with the theft by Hermes of Apollo's cattle. He held important civic and military offices, and seems always to have enjoyed the respect and esteem of his fellow-Athenians. The extant plays are: Ajax and Antigone (perhaps written closely together, c.442–441), the Trachiniae, Oedipus the King (c.429), Electra, Philoctetes (409), and Oedipus at Colonus (written at the end of his life, and produced posthumously by his son).

Sophocles' life embraced the most vital and crucial period of Athenian history, from the defeat of the foreign menace in the Persian wars, through the subsequent economic and cultural expansion, to the years of decline; he died just before the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Although his plays were performed side by side with those of Euripides they reveal a serenity which his younger contemporary lacked—a serenity that comes from triumph over suffering, not avoidance of it. Few moments in drama are more poignant than Sophocles' tragic climaxes. His language is clearer and more incisive than that of Aeschylus; his characters are more fully rounded; but he inherited his predecessor's concern with questions of moral law, though he set those questions in a framework with which his audience could more immediately identify. His technique is often to isolate powerful, resourceful individuals against a background of crisis—Oedipus the King is set in a city ravaged by plague, Antigone in the same city decimated by war; the chief character in Philoctetes is a desperate castaway on a desert island—and to show their response to the various demands upon them.

Writing in an age when many hailed expediency as the only guiding principle, he constantly reaffirmed the necessity to respond to a higher moral imperative; though he is always ready to pay tribute to purely human attributes, contriving to hold a balance between the old religion and the new morality. His final play exemplifies his serenity—Oedipus, after a life of torment, goes at last to a tranquil rest—but also foreshadows the closing of an age; although great spirits such as Oedipus may continue to live in legend and tradition, the living world is left to lesser men.

The analysis of tragedy made by Aristotle in his Poetics is based in the main on Sophoclean drama, which he regarded as the mature form of tragedy, therefore neglecting the earlier Aeschylean form.