Sophocles
Sophocles
497/6-406/5 b.c.e.
Tragic playwright
Significance. With Sophocles tragedy reached what many in the ancient and modern world have felt to be its highest point. The second of the three surviving Athenian tragedians, he was born in Colonus, just outside Athens, a generation after Aeschylus. It is recorded that in 480 b.c.e. he was chosen to lead a choral celebration of the great victory over the Persians at Salamis, an event which begins his continued involvement with both the artistic and the civic aspect of Athenian life. In 468 b.c.e. he put on his first play and defeated Aeschylus, but the production dates of few of his other works are known. Seven of his approximately 123 plays survive, and two can be dated accurately: Philoctetes was produced in 409 b.c.e. and Oedipus at Colonus posthumously in 401 b.c.e. (There is some reason for thinking that Antigone was produced around 441 b.c.e., but the date cannot be determined exactly.) Besides writing plays with great success (he won 20 competitions), he took part in political office; he was treasurer of the Athenian empire in one year, twice a general, and a member of a special council during the grimmest time of the Second Peloponnesian War (431-404 b.c.e.) against Sparta. He held a priesthood in Athens and was widely known and liked for his easygoing disposition.
Character . Two surviving statements from Sophocles himself about his own work indicate that he was particularly interested in the presentation of character on stage. He distinguished his mature plays from the “grandeur and harshness” of Aeschylus (which he claims to have followed when younger), and contrasts his own style as “most expressive of character”; he also claimed that, while he represented people as they should be, Euripides represented them as they were. As one critic put it, his protagonists are often people fiercely determined beyond argument, even with themselves; the minor characters serve their main purpose in providing a contrast with the play’s hero (for example, Chrysothemis in Electro, and Ismene in Antigone). Through the isolation and moral certainty that his great figures like Antigone, Oedipus, and Ajax experience, Sophocles brings us closer to Homer than he does to his predecessor Aeschylus, whose plays are built on family relationships as worked out through several generations and on ethical crises: his Orestes, in stark contrast to Sophocles’, is wracked with uncertainty about the morality of avenging his father’s death on his mother. However, it is interesting to note that in the twilight of his career the older poet could still learn from the younger. Sophocles’ most important technical innovation was the introduction of a third speaking actor, and Aeschylus made use of this breakthrough to present three actors on stage in his surviving trilogy, the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.).
Sources
R. D. Dawe, Sophocles, The Classical Heritage (New York & London: Garland, 1996).
G. H. Gellie, Sophocles: A Reading (Carlton, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1972).
G. M. Kirkwood, A Study of Sophoclean Drama, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 31 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958).