In 468 BC, a young man named Sophocles walked into the theater of Dionysus and did something that no one had ever done before: he defeated the reigning master of Athenian drama, Aeschylus, in a public competition. This was not a minor upset; it was a seismic shift in the cultural landscape of Athens. Sophocles, barely in his thirties and from the wealthy rural deme of Hippeius Colonus, had just produced his first play, possibly Triptolemus, and the judges, chosen by the archon Cimon rather than by lot, declared him the winner. The victory was so shocking that Plutarch later claimed Aeschylus left for Sicily immediately after, though modern scholars know the older playwright continued to write for another decade. This moment marked the beginning of a fifty-year reign where Sophocles would never place lower than second in thirty competitions, winning twenty-four times. He was not just a playwright; he was a political force, a general, and a treasurer, all while crafting the most enduring stories of the ancient world.
The General And The Playwright
Sophocles was not content to merely write plays; he immersed himself in the very machinery of the Athenian state. In 443 BC, he served as a Hellenotamiai, one of the treasurers of Athena, managing the city's finances during the political ascendancy of Pericles. By 441 BC, he was elected one of the ten generals, a junior colleague to Pericles, and served in the campaign against Samos. The tradition holds that his election was partly due to the popularity of his play Antigone, though the classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones calls this connection improbable. His influence extended even to religious matters; in 420 BC, he was chosen to receive the image of Asclepius in his own house when the cult was introduced to Athens, earning him the posthumous epithet Dexion, or receiver. Even in his final years, during the catastrophic destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily, he was elected in 411 BC as one of the commissioners who responded to the crisis. He lived to see both the triumph of the Persian Wars and the bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War, dying at the age of ninety or ninety-one in the winter of 406 or 405 BC.The Three Stages Of Art
Sophocles viewed his own career as a deliberate evolution through three distinct stages of artistic development. In his early years, he imitated the bigness and pomp of Aeschylus, adopting the grandiose language of the master. He then moved into a second stage of painful ingenuity, where he developed his own unique style, introducing new ways to evoke emotion from the audience, such as the moment in Ajax where the stage is emptied so the hero may commit suicide alone. Finally, in his third stage, he shifted his focus to diction, crafting characters who spoke in a way that was more natural and expressive of their individual feelings. This evolution is evident in the surviving plays, where the chorus, once the dominant force in drama, was reduced in importance by the addition of a third actor, a innovation attributed to Sophocles by Aristotle. This change allowed for greater character development and conflict, transforming the theater from a choral spectacle into a vehicle for complex human drama.