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Sophocles: c. 496-406 BCE Sophocles was born circa 496 BCE in Colonus, the scene of one of his more famous plays outside of Athens, to his father "Sophillus [who] sent Sophocles to school in Athens" (historyforkids.org). He died approximately 90 years later, circa 406 BCE, while -- during or after, depending on who you ask -- composing his final extant play: Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles is perhaps the most studied and, arguably, the most intriguing playwright of ancient Greece. This is probably due to his glorification in Aristotle's Poetics, one of the earliest recorded instances of liteary criticism. While only 7 of his plays are extant today (Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax, Philoctetes, The Trachiniae, Electra), he is believed to have authored somewhere between 80 to 120 plays, of some, a few fragments still remain. Others are known merely as a passing reference in such works as Aristotle's Poetics -- an issue of authorship unto itself. The best body of evidence for plays authored by Sophocles are the records from the Festival of Dionysus, where most plays were performed. Records of winners and runners-up have been invaluable in the effort to identify ancient playwrights' bodies of work. According to August Wilhelm von Schlegel, an admittedly dated classical critic (Germany, 1767-1845), Sophocles won a total of 20 victories and never finished worse than second. "Once only did he make his appearance on the stage in the character of the blind singer Thamyris (a very characteristic trait) playing on the cithara" (Schlegel, from Dawe). It also seems likely that, when Sophocles was buried, it was done so at the permission of the Spartans, who controlled the land in which Sophocles was interred during the last decade of the fifth century. The Chronology of Sophocles' life according to Harold Bloom's (1990) Mondern Critical Views series: Sophocles: 497-96 B. C. E. Sophocles born. 468 First prize for tragedy at festival of the Great Dionysia. 443-42 Sophocles serves as imperial treasurer. c. 442 Antigone produced. 441-40 Sophocles serves as general. 440-30(?) Ajax produced. 430-20(?) Trachiniae produced. 429-25(?) Oedipus Rex produced. After 420(?) Electra produced. 413 Sophocles serves as special state commisioner. 409 Philoctetes poduced. 406-5 Sophocles dies. 401 Oedipus at Colonus produced posthumously. The first noticeable abnormality in Sophocles' life is the shear length of it. If modern historians are correct -- and they do generally agree on this point -- Sophocles lived to be approximately 90 years old! That's 20 years longer than the average life expectancy of a male U. S. citizen today. And those 90 years were pivotal in the history of Athens, Greece, and the world in general. Sophocles was still a child when Athens defeated the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, thus halting a Persian invasion of all of Greece and the turning point of the First Persian War. During the Second Persian War, Sophocles was probably still too young to serve in the military (approximately 16), but he likely witnessed the destruction of Athens by the Persians and, no doubt, looked on as the united Greek navy defeated the Persians at Salamis, the major turning point in the Second Persian War. Sophocles' political career is somewhat of a mystery, but it is generally agreed upon that he held some minor political office(s) and that he was an acquaintance of Pericles, the leader of Athens during its most prosperous era. Again, Sophocles is believed to have played a minor role in the Athenian military -- as all male citizens were required to do. His socio-political status must have been highly affluent, an aristocrat. The evidence for this is circumstantial but fairly convincing. First of all, he was a playwright, which necessitated that he be wealthy: The author of a slate of tragedies in the festival of Dionysus also served as director, producer, musical composer, choreographer, and sometimes even one of the actors. Only men of some wealth could afford the prodigious amounts of time such work demanded because the prizes in the tragedy competition were probably modest. (perseus.tufts.edu) Secondly, he lived to be 90 years old! The 90 year mark is rare in the 21st Century. How much more rare must it have been in the 5th Century? Compound that with the chances of an underprivilaged person, to whom even the ancient equivalents of "modern healthcare" were not readily available. Aeschylus was the first [known] great playwright. Sophocles was the second. Sophocles' ascendancy to the position of premiere Athenian playwright took place c. 468 at the Festival of Dionysus where he won his first victory over Aeschylus. Aeschylus was, reportedly, none too pleased by this upstart tragedian's success, but that little anectdote has been relegated to the realm of historical hyperbole. I am inclined to wonder what play it was with which Sophocles stripped the defending champion, Aeschylus, of his crown? It obviously hasn't survived intact today. Was Aeshylus just having the first documented case of writer's block? Or had Sophocles come up with such a powerful piece of artestry so as to overcome not only Aeschylus' bid for that year, but the almost mythical renown Aeschylus had built up from his early domination of the event? It has been argued by scholars, and I have made the argument myself, that tragedy was an early attempt at philosophy -- not exactly a ground breaking assertion. Few people doubt that tragedy was a forerunner to philosophy. For the first time, it became possible to observe a noticeable shift toward what would soon become philosophy, particularly in Sophoclean drama. Sophocles has long been labeled as the "psychological playwright" (of the three: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides). This is a dubious title which one could arguably bestow on any one of the three tragedians, but it does work fairly well in distinguishing Sophocles from his predecessor. Where Aeschylus' plays were more plot-oriented and affirming of socio-political values, Sophocles' plays began to question them and the individual's place in them. Both tragedians wrote plays raising serious moral and ethical questions, but Sophocles' plays included more, for lack of a better term, "open-ended" resolutions whereas Aeschylus' plays seemed to supply "the correct answer" to a given dilemma. It is likely that this debate is largely a modern one. Clearly, to modern readers, Sophoclean drama asks its audience highly ambiguous questions as compared to his predecessor(s). Traditionally, however, scholars have believed that Sophocles intended to assert a very strong, pious theme throughout his works. One clear distinction of Sophocles' plays are their reliance upon, and meditations on, fate and destiny. Perhaps the ambiguous resolutions of Sophocles' plays were what led later readers to designate him as the "psychological playwright." An undisputed, and distinctly Sophoclean invention, was the use of a third speaker in the tragic performance. Before Sophocles' monumental transformation of the form, the performance included only the chorus and two speakers at any given time. Later playwrights would institue further transformations to include more characters and, if one looks to the evolution of the stage today, we can see the virtual non-existence of the chorus. Likewise, Aristotle and modern critics alike speculate that the tragic form originated out of lyric poetic performances where the chorus was the only speaker, narrator or character. Perhaps it was Aeschylus who instituted the separation of chorus and character, thus giving birth to tragedy? This is how Aristotle lays it out for us in the Poetics. Of course, it is all speculative. We do know that Sophocles' structural contribution was the addition of a third speaker. It was no coincidence that philosophy came into the foreground of Athenian culture at the same time tragedy was fading into the background. Sophocles was a contemporary of Socrates, the most famous of philosophers, who was eventually condemned to death. If he did not witness the younger Socrates' execution -- which, unless we've seriously erred in classical dating, he did not -- he certainly witnessed the socio-political atmosphere which eventually led to Socrates' death. Early in his life, Sophocles bore witness to Athens' -- and probably Greece's -- greatest triumph: the defeat of the Persians. This upbeat, optimistic point of view is mirrored in Aeschylus' extant plays, specifically the Orestia wherein, upon resolution of the trilogy, a "true," just, and above all else, optimistic resolution is reached. What happened in the more than half century between Aeschylus's Orestia and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus? In the Antigone, for example, a resolution is also reached. The gods' will continues to prevail. But the optimism of Aeschylus is replaced with the somber mood of Creon who has assumed the role of the more famous Oedipus or who, for a modern analogy, was the Job-like figure of the Theban world, fallen from grace and cursed to walk the earth bereft of joy, punished by divine will. If the success of the Persian Wars fomented an atmosphere of optimism that filtered through to the world of drama, then so too must the atmosphere of disorder, confusion and turmoil of the Peloponnesian Wars have filtered into the writings of Sophocles and Euripides. But Sophocles wrote, to a large extent, before things really began to denigrate for Athens. He wrote his "psychological" drama during the height of Athens' empire. Surely, the moral and ethical concerns and anxieties affecting Sophocles in his day are reflected in his writing, just as those of Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare and Stephen King were and are reflected in their writing. For Sophocles, many critics argue, the issue was empire and the polis. Countless articles, accounts and dissertations have focused on the idea that Sophoclean drama is a meditation on the place of the polis, the body politic, in the life of the individual. What are its claims? What are its domains? What are its limitations? All of these questions were of the utmost importance in mid-fifth century Athens as she moved from the position of a prosperous city-state to an imperialistic empire. These anxieties manifest themselves in plays such as the Antigone and Ajax. The plot of Antigone can be simplified to the polis, the state, in opposition to the personal or the individual, the "moral" -- moral in quotes because both arguments contended to be morally just. The relevance that the themes of tragedy could have to issues affecting the city-state even in plays whose plots had ostensibly nothing to do with life in a polis shows up clearly in Sophocles' play entitled Ajax, presented in the early 440's B.C. The play bore the name of the second-best warrior (Achilles had been preeminent) in the Greek army that besieged Troy in the Trojan War. When his fellow Greek soldiers voted to award the armor of the dead Achilles to the wily Odysseus instead of himself, Ajax went on a berserk rampage against his former friends which the goddess Athena thwarted because Ajax had once rejected her help in the battle. Disgraced by his failure to secure revenge, Ajax committed suicide. Odysseus then stepped in to convince the Greek chiefs to bury Ajax despite his attempted treachery because the future security of the army and the obligations of friendship demanded that they obey the divine injunction always to bury the dead. Odysseus' arguments in favor of burying Ajax anachronistically treat the army as if it were a polis, and his use of persuasive speech to achieve accommodation of conflicting individual interests to the benefit of the community corresponds to the way in which disputes in the polis were supposed to be resolved. (perseus.tufts.edu) It is this world of Greek versus Greek conflict that Sophocles wrote. It is also in this world that philosophy was born -- Socrates. "In the second half of the fifth century B.C., a new kind of teacher became available to young men who sought to polish their skills for politics. They were called sophists. They were so clever at public speaking and philosophic debates and were feared by traditionally-minded men whose political opinions they threatened. The earliest sophists arose in parts of the Greek world other than Athens, but from about 450 B.C. on they began to travel to Athens" (perseus.tufts.edu). Socrates was adamant about the distinction between himself, a philosopher, and a sophist: sophists provided a service for a fee; philosophy was free. There was clearly tension between the traditionalists in Athens and the practice of sophistry, and as Socrates' eventual execution verifies, toward philosophy as well. Sophocles bore witness to the situation presented by the sophists, taking place in the middle of his career, which no doubt influenced his own work. For instance, in the Antigone both Creon and Antigone present moral and ethical arguments that are in direct opposition to each other. Is this situation any different from a sophist coming into Athens and teaching an ambitious young Athenian how to manipulate the populous for his own gain? How to argue in the realm of politics? How to, dare I say, create a moral or ethical argument that is in direct opposition to the argument being forwarded by his political opponent? Who is to say which argument is truly correct? How can one judge? Oligarchy versus Monarchy versus Democracy? Which is preferable? There is no clear, absolute answer, but the questions were very real for fifth-century Athenians.

Whatever philosophical questions Sophocles' plays raise, it seems as though he was a devout religious man. He was believed to have held some sort of a pseudo political religious office; others have claimed that a like office of state was created especially for him. The following is excerpted from a lecture on Sophocles given by John Keble, British poet, 1792-1866: If we may trust tradition, such was his rooted attachment to his home and native ground, so "extremely fond of Athenians" (to use their own description of him) was he, that he would accept no invitation, not even of the greatest monarch, which involved leaving his own country. (Lecture XXVIII, Dawe) Whether Sophocles' perceived piety and national sentiment was projected onto him or whether it was intrinsic in him is a question we must continue to ask ourselves as more contradictory and affirming evidence becomes available. What we are left with in the end are his seven completed plays and mountains of critical -- and at times not so critical -- reaction to them: Sophocles approves himself to the great majority of readers mainly for two reasons: either because he is so finished and subtle in his diction, and easily stands out as the most learned among the whole learned Greek race: or because he weaves the general sequence of his plot so cleverly and cunningly. (Lecture XXVIII, Dawe) Sophocles lived in Athens during the rise and fall of its golden age, he outlived his successor Euripides and met such figures as Aeschylus, Pericles and Socrates, much of Aristophanes career, much of Alcibiades' turbulent career, Thucydides, Plato, Xerxes, Leonidas, and many others. Thanks to the work of such past historical figures as Plato, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Jacques Lacan, Sophocles' plays continue to arouse heated debates in the 21st Century. Despite the continual decline of the preeminence of classical texts in modern curriculums, most American citizens will have read at least one of Sophocles' plays before graduating high school. Today, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone are valued as highly as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey -- in terms of literary value. What value, exactly, his plays actually bear seems to depend more upon the critic and the culture valuing it than the works themselves. But there is little question that something beyond the limited culture of fifth century Athens lies embedded within his work. And scholars have struggled with it, on and off, for the past three millennia to identify exactly what it is. Bibliography Bloom, Harold. ed. Modern critical views: Sophocles. Chelsea House: New York. 1990. Dawe, R. D. ed. Sophocles: The classical heritage. Garland: New York. 1996. History for kids.org: http://www.historyforkids.org. Perseus project: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Click here for a more critical analysis of tragedy & philosophy in Mythology, Philosophy and Antigone: The Contextual Significance of Fifth Century Athenian Tragedy. © Copyright notice: all information on this web page is considered common knowledge. When precise wording is taken directly from one specific, outside source, that source has been cited using the home web site (or book) it came from with in-text citations. Please be courteous and do the same for anything you copy from here.