Sophocles

• 1. Introduction

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  Sophocles competed in thirty dramatic competitions across his lifetime and was never judged lower than second place. That record, sustained over nearly fifty years, belongs to a man who also led troops in battle, managed the finances of Athens, and harbored foreign gods in his own home. The questions his life raises are not small ones. How does a single playwright come to dominate an entire art form for half a century? What did he change about the way stories are told? And what survives from a body of more than 120 plays when only seven remain whole? Born around 497 or 496 BC in the rural deme of Hippeius Colonus in Attica, Sophocles left behind a world transformed by his hand.

• 2. A Life in Public

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  In 480 BC, Sophocles was chosen to lead the paean celebrating the Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis. He was a young man then, not yet a seasoned playwright, but already visible enough to be trusted with a ceremonial role at one of the defining moments of Greek history. His father, Sophillus, was an armour manufacturer, and the family's wealth gave the young Sophocles access to an elite education.

  His first artistic triumph came in 468 BC, when he defeated Aeschylus at the Dionysia festival. Plutarch records that the archon bypassed the usual custom of choosing judges by lot and instead asked the general Cimon and his fellow strategoi to decide the winner. Plutarch adds that Aeschylus, stung by this defeat, soon left for Sicily. Though Plutarch called this Sophocles's first production, scholars now think his first work appeared around 470 BC, with a play called Triptolemus among the offerings.

  Public life followed Sophocles at every turn. In 443 or 442 BC, he served as one of the Hellenotamiai, the treasurers of Athena, helping manage the city's finances during the political rise of Pericles. In 441 BC, according to the Vita Sophoclis, he was elected one of Athens's ten generals and served as a junior colleague of Pericles in a campaign against Samos. The classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones found it most improbable that his election was owed to his production of Antigone, as some ancient sources claimed. In 420 BC, he hosted the image of Asclepius in his own house while the healing god's cult was finding its footing in Athens, earning him the posthumous epithet Dexion, meaning receiver. Eleven years before his death, in 411 BC, he served as one of the commissioners responding to the catastrophic loss of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.

• 3. The Art of Winning

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  Twenty-four victories out of thirty competitions is a record that collapses any comparison. Aeschylus, the master Sophocles defeated in his very first contest at the Dionysia, won thirteen competitions. Euripides, who came after, won four. Sophocles won at both major Athenian dramatic festivals: eighteen victories at the Dionysia and six at the Lenaia.

  After Aeschylus died in 456 BC, Sophocles became the dominant playwright in Athens, a position he held without serious challenge for decades. Foreign rulers sent invitations for him to visit their courts, the kind of honour extended to Aeschylus, who died in Sicily, and to Euripides, who spent time in Macedon. Sophocles declined every one. He seems to have understood that his place was Athens, and Athens repaid that loyalty with its highest honours.

  Aristotle, writing in the Poetics around 335 BC, chose Sophocles's Oedipus Rex as the model of what tragedy at its highest could achieve. That endorsement from the most influential critic of antiquity shaped how subsequent generations read and staged Sophocles for centuries.

• 4. What He Changed

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  Aristotle credited Sophocles with two technical innovations that reshaped Greek drama. The first was the addition of a third actor. Before Sophocles, plays were built around two speaking figures, with the chorus carrying much of the narrative weight. A third actor opened up new geometries of conflict: two characters could now be in tension with each other while a third observed, intervened, or was deceived. Aeschylus himself, despite being the older man, adopted the third actor into his own work after Sophocles introduced it. The philosopher Themistius attributed the innovation to Aeschylus, but Aristotle's attribution to Sophocles holds the stronger ancient authority.

  The second credited innovation was skenographia, or scenery-painting, though Vitruvius attributed that to Agatharchus of Samos. Whether or not Sophocles originated every technique bearing his name, the direction of his influence is clear. He deepened the interiority of his characters in ways earlier playwrights had not attempted. One moment in his Ajax, when Ajax is mocked by Athene and then the stage is cleared entirely so that he can commit suicide alone, shows a playwright thinking about isolation and theatrical space in a new way.

  Sophocles also described his own development in a passage preserved by Plutarch, in which C. M. Bowra argues the key line should be translated as: "After practising to the full the bigness of Aeschylus, then the painful ingenuity of my own invention, now in the third stage I am changing to the kind of diction which is most expressive of character and best." Three stages, in his own account: imitation of Aeschylus, a phase entirely his own, and then a third approach in which characters spoke in ways more natural to themselves.

• 5. The Theban Plays

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  Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone are grouped together today as the Theban plays, but Sophocles wrote them for separate festival competitions many years apart, and the three were never performed together in his lifetime. They are not a proper trilogy. The order in which he wrote them runs against the order of their events: Antigone came first, then Oedipus Rex, then Oedipus at Colonus, the last of which was staged posthumously in 401 BC by his grandson.

  The inconsistencies that follow from this are real. At the end of Oedipus Rex, Creon rules Thebes unchallenged and is told by Apollo what to do; in the later plays, Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices are also in contention for the throne. Sophocles addressed this directly in Oedipus at Colonus, where Ismene explains that the brothers were at first willing to let Creon rule, given the tainted family lineage, but eventually decided to contest the succession themselves. The play even pinpoints a specific charge at line 429 of Theodoridis's translation: both sons consented to their father's exile, which Oedipus regards as one of his bitterest grievances.

  In Oedipus Rex, the plague afflicting Thebes is revealed through the prophet Tiresias to originate with Oedipus himself. He had unknowingly killed his father Laius on the road to Thebes, and had been left as an infant on Mount Cithaeron after his parents received a prophecy that their son would kill his father and marry his mother. A childless couple found and adopted the child. When the truth comes out after Creon returns from consulting the Delphic Oracle, Jocasta takes her own life and Oedipus blinds himself. In Antigone, the consequences ripple outward through another generation: Antigone's decision to bury her brother Polyneices leads to her death sentence from Creon, and her suicide triggers the deaths of Creon's son Haemon and his wife Eurydice.

• 6. The Lost and the Found

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  Aristophanes of Byzantium, a scholar at the Library of Alexandria working between the third and second centuries BC, recorded that 130 titles were attributed to Sophocles, of which seven or seventeen were considered doubtful. More than 120 play titles are known today, though some may be alternate titles for the same work. Of the four surviving plays outside the Theban group, Philoctetes won first prize at the Dionysia in 409 BC, and is one of only two of the seven surviving works that can be dated securely.

  Philoctetes concerns an archer abandoned on the island of Lemnos by the Greek fleet on the way to Troy. When the Greeks learn they cannot win the war without his bow, they send Odysseus and the young Neoptolemus to retrieve him; only the divine intervention of Heracles as a deus ex machina ultimately persuades Philoctetes to return. Ajax dramatizes the proud hero of the Trojan War driven to treachery and suicide after Achilles's armour is awarded to Odysseus rather than to him. Women of Trachis follows Deianeira, who accidentally kills Heracles by applying what she believes to be a love charm to his clothing, not knowing it is poison. Electra recounts how Electra and her brother Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon's murder.

  Fragments of a satyr play, Ichneutae, or Tracking Satyrs, were discovered in Egypt in 1907 and amount to roughly half the work, making it the best-preserved satyr play after Euripides's Cyclops. Fragments of the Epigoni, a tragedy about the second siege of Thebes, were found in April 2005 by classicists at Oxford University using infrared technology developed for satellite imaging. Dozens more titles survive only as names.

• 7. Death and Its Stories

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  Sophocles died in the winter of 406 or 405 BC, at the age of 90 or 91. He had lived long enough to see the Persian Wars end in Greek triumph and the Peloponnesian War bleed Athens into exhaustion. His death, like much about famous men in classical antiquity, attracted a cluster of stories that may say more about how people wished to remember him than about what actually happened. One account holds that he died from the strain of reciting a long sentence from Antigone without pausing to breathe. Another says he choked on grapes at the Anthesteria festival. A third claims he died of happiness after winning his final victory at the City Dionysia.

  A few months after his death, a comic poet wrote in a play titled The Muses: "Blessed is Sophocles, who had a long life, was a man both happy and talented, and the writer of many good tragedies; and he ended his life well without suffering any misfortune." The tone is striking for a eulogy. It sounds almost envious.

  One story cuts against this warm farewell: some accounts say his own sons attempted to have him declared legally incompetent near the end of his life. According to these accounts, Sophocles refuted the charge in court by reading aloud from his new Oedipus at Colonus. One of his sons, Iophon, became a playwright. His grandson, also named Sophocles and the son of a man called Ariston, became a playwright too, and it was this grandson who staged Oedipus at Colonus posthumously in 401 BC, five years after his grandfather's death.