Sophocles, son of the wealthy Sophilus of Colonus,
was born near Athens. He was good-looking and a
talented dancer and musician who led public victory
hymns as a teenager. His lyre instructor was Lamprus,
who was a widely celebrated master of traditional
Greek music. Sophocles’ true love, however,
was the theater, and after a few appearances as an
actor in his own youthful productions, he devoted
himself entirely to the writing of Greek tragedies.
Sophocles was widely admired and his work
was a popular success. His first of 24 competitive
dramatic victories came in 468 B.C., when he
bested the venerable AESCHYLUS in a theatrical contest.
He penned nearly 125 dramas—of which a
mere seven survive—and supplanted Aeschylus as
the poet of Athens.
Sophocles was also active in public life, serving
as treasurer of the Athenian Empire (443–442 B.C.)
and as general (441–440 B.C.). During the unsuccessful
revolt of Samos around 412 B.C., he was appointed
to a board of commissioners in the
aftermath of the doomed Sicilian expedition. He
was also a lay priest in the cult of Asclepius, a deity
of healing, and was associated with other wellknown
men of letters, including the historian
HERODOTUS; Archelaus, a natural scientist and
teacher of SOCRATES; and the many-talented and
prolific Ion of Chios.
Upon the death of his fellow tragedian EURIPIDES
in 406 B.C., Sophocles expressed his respect and
grief by clothing actors in mourning dress during a
rehearsal for a drama competition.He himself died
not long after, and his play Oedipus at Colonus was
produced posthumously by his grandson.Yale professor
Eric A. Havelock writes that Sophocles “was
remembered and celebrated as an example of the
fortunate life, genial, accomplished, and serene.”
Sophoclean tragedy is tense, startling, and disquieting.
The cast of characters tends to be comparatively
small, and the individuals’ personal
natures are boiled down to the essentials, so the
significance of each action is intensified. Action in
Sophocles’ plays is always indicative of character.
Causality is a prominent theme, with separate factors
often combining to produce to an inevitable
result. Sophocles’ tragic vision is that life exists
only at the price of suffering.
Ajax was produced around 442 B.C. and is
thought to be Sophocles’ earliest extant play. Its title
character is a Trojan warrior whose bitterness over
losing the armor of the legendary Achilles to a rival
drives him mad, and he slaughters a flock of sheep,
believing they are his Greek foes.When Ajax regains
his reason, shame drives him to take his own life.
His compatriots are persuaded to give him an honorable
burial in a typically Sophoclean scene that
sees an outcast reconciled with God and society.
The Women of Trachis (ca. 420s B.C.) is one of
the few Greek tragedies that features Heracles
(Hercules in Latin). Although a stunningly popular
mythological figure, Heracles was rarely a theatrical
subject. The play takes place during the last
of Heracles’ famed 12 labors. His wife is duped
into giving him a poisoned garment that so scalds
his skin he chooses to be burned alive on a pyre.
In Electra (ca. 415 B.C.), the playwright tells of
the familial curse on the House of Atreus that
Aeschylus so thoroughly dramatized. The title character
in Philoctetes (ca. 409 B.C.) is a Greek hero
who has angered the gods by accidentally stumbling
onto one of their sacred sites. He suffers divine
retribution but is mysteriously rescued from
his punishment. Critics, including ARISTOTLE, have
censured the play’s use of the artificial device of
DEUS EX MACHINA to bring the play to a conclusion.
Oedipus the King (ca. 427 B.C.) dramatizes the
deeply tragic yet fascinating story of the King of
Thebes and how he unwittingly brought pestilence
to his realm and ruin to his family and himself. In
Oedipus at Colonus, the erstwhile sovereign—aged,
exiled, blinded, and broken—is sent by the gods to
his death, but not before finding redemption. Produced
at roughly the same time as Ajax, Antigone
follows one of the daughters of the late king,whose
only crime is wishing to see her slain brothers
buried properly, and who pays for it with her life.
These three productions are collectively known as
the “Theban Plays.”
Critical Analysis
As Oedipus the King opens, a group of suppliants
stands before the royal palace beseeching their
ruler to save Thebes from a deadly blight that has
ravaged the city: plants are not bearing fruit, livestock
are sick, and women are barren.
A priest reminds Oedipus that he rescued the
city once before, directly upon his arrival in
Thebes, when he freed the people from the tyranny
of the cruel Sphinx by solving the beast’s riddle.
(The riddle asks what walks on four legs in the
morning, two in midday, and three at night, and
the answer is “Man”: as a crawling infant, as an
adult, and as an elderly person with a cane.)
Oedipus’s brother-in-law, who has just paid
tribute at the temple of Apollo, reports that, according
to the god, the land has been defiled by the
presence of the slayer of King Laius,who was killed
by robbers while in an embassy. Shortly thereafter,
Oedipus muses how, having restored order in
Thebes, he had won the hand of Laius’s widowed
queen, Jocasta.
The murderer must be located and either exiled
or executed, according to the report; only then
will Thebes be purified and fruitfulness restored.
Oedipus promises that anyone who comes forth
with knowledge of the homicide will not be
harmed, but all Thebans are forbidden to shelter
the guilty man. As for the killer himself, Oedipus
proclaims:
Upon the murderer I invoke this curse—
whether he is one man and all unknown,
or one of many—may he wear out his life
in misery to miserable doom! If with my
knowledge he lives at my hearth
I pray that I myself may feel my curse.
(ll. 246–251)
Little by little, the awful saga unfolds. Jocasta reveals
that, years ago, an oracle had warned Laius
that he would die at the hands of their son; so
when a son was born, they left him abandoned on
a hillside. Oedipus, with growing dread, recalls
that, although he was reared by the king and queen
of Corinth and considered them his parents, he
was once accused by a drunken dinner guest of
being illegitimate. Furthermore, an invocation of
Apollo foretold his doom: to murder his father and
lie with his mother.With horror, monstrous realization
dawns: Oedipus was the abandoned son.
He had encountered Laius that fateful day and
murdered him in a fit of pique, then married his
wife—Oedipus’s mother. A tortured Jocasta hangs
herself, while Oedipus puts out his own eyes with
her brooches and banishes himself:
I do not know with what eyes I could look
upon my father when I die and go
under the earth, nor yet my wretched
mother—
those two to whom I have done things
deserving
worse punishment than hanging. . . .
And my city,
its towers and sacred places of the Gods,
of these I robbed my miserable self
when I commanded all to drive him out,
the criminal since proved by God impure
and of the race of Laius.
(ll. 1372–1383)
Sophoclean audiences would have been familiar
with the tale of Oedipus, so the tragedian’s task was
to make the narrative interesting in a new way. He
did this by introducing irony into every possible
situation to create intense dramatic tension. Oedipus,
the famed solver of riddles, is stumped by the
circumstances of his own birth, marriage, and
kingship. He is symbolically blinded by pride and
arrogance when he is literally a seeing man, and
after he “sees” the truth, he blinds himself physically.
He accuses a blind prophet, a “seer” who
grasps that Oedipus killed his father and married
his mother, of lying in an effort to seize the throne.
However, like Sophocles’ other protagonists, Oedipus
is shown ultimately to be a man of some
honor, as he refuses to take his own life, but rather
accepts the fate that he himself meted out and the
gods ordained.
“A full study of the influence of Sophocles on
modern literature has yet to be written,” according
to Harvard professor Ruth Scodel. “The task would
be immense, touching on the histories of scholarship,
reading and education. . . .While works which
use explicitly Sophoclean themes are not hard to
find, often those where Sophocles has been used
less obviously have used him more profoundly. . . .
At once satisfying, disturbing, and frightening, the
Sophoclean world seems inexhaustible.”
English Versions of Works by Sophocles
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King,
Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone. Translated by
Robert Bagg. Introduction by Mary Bagg. Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Sophocles I. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991.
Theban Plays. Translated by Peter Meineck and Paul
Woodruff. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Works about Sophocles
Beer, Josh. Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian
Democracy. Oxford, U.K.: Greenwood Publishing,
2004.
Budelmann, Felix. Language of Sophocles: Communality,
Communication and Involvement. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Scodel, Ruth. Sophocles. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1984.