Sophocles

Anyone asking who was Sophocles begins at Colonus, a rural deme just outside the walls of Athens, where he was born around 496 BCE ^[1]. His father, Sophillus, is described in ancient sources as a prosperous manufacturer, possibly of armor or weapons, which placed the family comfortably among the Athenian well-to-do ^[2]. Wealth of that kind bought the boy a thorough education in music, dance, and athletics, the standard training of a young Athenian gentleman.

His childhood coincided with the Persian Wars, the defining crisis of his generation. According to a tradition preserved in the ancient Life of Sophocles, the teenage Sophocles was chosen to lead the boys' chorus that celebrated the Greek naval victory at Salamis in 480 BCE, singing and dancing around the trophy ^[2]. Whether or not every detail of the story is accurate, it captures how the ancients saw him: a figure whose life bridged the heroic age of Marathon and Salamis and the imperial Athens of Pericles.

Colonus itself never left his imagination. At the end of his life he set his final play, Oedipus at Colonus, in the sacred grove of his birthplace, describing its nightingales, olives, and horses with an affection unusual in Greek tragedy ^[3].

Sophocles announced himself in 468 BCE at the City Dionysia, the great dramatic festival of Athens, where his first competition ended with a victory over Aeschylus, the reigning master of the tragic stage ^[1]. Plutarch records that feeling ran so high that the presiding official asked the general Cimon and his colleagues to serve as judges rather than risk a disputed verdict ^[4]. A win at first attempt against the most celebrated dramatist alive made the young poet famous almost overnight.

He never lost that standing. Ancient records credit Sophocles with roughly twenty victories at the Dionysia, more than Aeschylus and Euripides combined, and he is said never to have placed lower than second ^[2]. Since each entry consisted of three tragedies and a satyr play, those victories represent dozens of prize-winning dramas across a career of more than sixty years.

Early in his career he acted in his own plays, as playwrights conventionally did, but ancient biographers report that a comparatively weak voice led him to give up performing ^[2]. The withdrawal proved consequential: it helped separate the craft of the dramatist from that of the actor, a division that has defined theatre ever since.

Any list of Sophocles achievements starts with sheer output. Ancient catalogues assign him over 120 plays, of which seven tragedies survive complete: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus ^[1]. Substantial fragments of a satyr play, the Trackers, were recovered from Egyptian papyri in the early twentieth century ^[3].

Aristotle treated Oedipus the King as the model tragedy in the Poetics, praising the way its recognition scene and reversal of fortune arise from the logic of the plot itself ^[5]. The play's structure, in which a ruler investigating a crime discovers that he is the criminal, has been imitated and analyzed for more than two millennia. Antigone, staged around 441 BCE, set a sister's duty to bury her brother against a king's edict, and the clash between conscience and state power it dramatizes still anchors debates in political philosophy and law ^[3].

Sophocles also changed how tragedy was made. Aristotle credits him with introducing the third actor, an innovation Aeschylus adopted in his own late work, and with adding painted scenery to the stage ^[5]. He raised the chorus from twelve members to fifteen and, unlike Aeschylus, generally abandoned the connected trilogy in favor of self-contained plays, concentrating each drama on a single hero's crisis ^[1]. These choices pushed Greek tragedy toward tighter plots and sharper individual characterization, qualities that later drama inherited directly.

Athens asked more of Sophocles than plays. In 443 or 442 BCE he served as a Hellenotamias, one of the treasurers who managed the tribute of the Athenian empire, and in 441 BCE he was elected general, serving alongside Pericles during the campaign against the revolt of Samos ^[1]. Some ancient sources connect the generalship to the success of Antigone, though modern scholars treat the link cautiously. After the catastrophic failure of the Sicilian expedition in 413 BCE, the elderly poet was appointed one of the ten probouloi, special commissioners charged with steadying the state ^[2].

He held religious office as well. Sophocles was a priest of a healing hero, and tradition credits him with welcoming the cult of Asclepius, god of medicine, when it arrived in Athens around 420 BCE, sheltering the god's sacred snake in his own house until a temple was ready ^[2]. After his death the Athenians honored him with a hero cult under the name Dexion, the Receiver.

His family life is documented in outline. By his wife Nicostrate he had a son, Iophon, who became a tragedian in his own right, and by Theoris of Sicyon another son, Ariston, whose child, the younger Sophocles, also wrote tragedies ^[2]. Contemporaries describe the poet as sociable and even-tempered. The comic playwright Aristophanes, rarely gentle with anyone, has a character in the Frogs call him contented among the living and contented among the dead ^[6].

Old age slowed him hardly at all. Philoctetes, which won first prize in 409 BCE, was composed when its author was in his late eighties, and Oedipus at Colonus was finished shortly before his death ^[1]. An often-repeated anecdote, reported by Cicero among others, claims that Iophon brought a suit alleging his father was no longer competent to manage the family property, and that Sophocles answered by reading the jurors a choral ode from the new Oedipus, whereupon the case collapsed ^[7]. The story may be embroidered, but its survival shows how ancient readers viewed the late plays: proof of a mind undimmed.

Sophocles died in 406 BCE, aged about ninety, only months after Euripides ^[1]. Athens was then in the final agony of the Peloponnesian War, and one tradition holds that the Spartan commander besieging the city allowed safe passage for the burial party so the poet could rest in his family tomb on the road to Decelea. In the Frogs, produced the following year, Aristophanes staged a contest in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides while treating Sophocles with conspicuous reverence ^[6].

Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously in 401 BCE by his grandson and won first prize ^[3]. In it the blind, exiled Oedipus arrives at Colonus, the playwright's own birthplace, and is received into the earth as a protecting hero: a valediction from a dramatist who had spent his life examining how suffering and dignity coexist.

Basic Sophocles facts hint at his afterlife but do not measure it. Alongside Aeschylus and Euripides he forms the canonical trio of Greek tragedians, and in the fourth century BCE the statesman Lycurgus had official texts of all three deposited in the Athenian archives, an early act of literary preservation ^[2]. Alexandrian scholars later selected the seven plays that survive today for use in schools, which is why those particular dramas endured while more than a hundred others were lost ^[3].

His influence runs through the entire Western tradition. Aristotle built much of the Poetics around Oedipus the King, and through Aristotle the Sophoclean model of plot shaped Renaissance and neoclassical drama ^[5]. In the twentieth century Sigmund Freud borrowed the name of Sophocles' most famous hero for the Oedipus complex, lodging the playwright permanently in the vocabulary of psychology ^[8]. Antigone has been rewritten by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, and many others, often as a vehicle for resistance to tyranny.

A Sophocles biography ultimately describes two things at once: a public man who served his city as treasurer, general, and priest, and an artist who asked what happens when intelligent, stubborn human beings collide with limits they cannot move. Hamlet, Lear, and the protagonists of modern tragedy all descend, in part, from his heroes. Few writers of any era have been so honored while alive and so continuously read after death.