Sophocles (c. 496 BC – c. 406 BC) was a famous playwright from Ancient Greece, considered one of the greatest representatives of Greek tragic theater and one of the greatest classical poets of Antiquity. From a wealthy but not aristocratic family, he witnessed the period of greatest cultural development in Athens. His works date back to Aeschylus (c. 525-c.456 BC) and before Euripides (c. 480-406 BC). He was a friend of the Greek historian Herodotus (484 BC-425 BC) and Ion of Chios (c. 490 BC-422 BC). Almost everything that is known about his life comes from an anonymous biography entitled Life of Sophocles, composed in the 1st century AD.
Private life
Sophocles was born in the Greek city of Colonus, near Athens, around 496 BC, a few years before the Battle of Marathon. Sophilus, his father, was a wealthy armor maker and member of a rural government or Deme. Therefore, he received a very good education under the guidance of musicians such as Lampro of Athens, an ancient Greek musician with excellent skill in playing the lyre.
As a child, he was the main dancer at festivities to celebrate the victory over the Persians in 479 BC. Early in his career, he performed in his own plays, but due to his weak voice, he dedicated himself solely to the role of writer. As a teenager, he enjoyed dancing and gymnastics and felt deeply Athenian despite not having been born in Athens. Due to his youth, good looks, and ability to perform, at the age of sixteen he was chosen for a hymn (choral singing) about the victory at the Battle of Salamis. The production involved singing, dancing, and playing the lyre.
According to Plato, the great Athenian philosopher and contemporary, Sophocles had a robust appetite for physical pleasures that did not diminish until old age. Like many Greeks of the time, he liked young men. He was married to Nicostrata and with her he had a son named Iphlon (Iofonte), who also became a playwright. It is said that shortly before his death, Iofonte filed a lawsuit against his father over an inheritance issue alleging his mental incapacity due to old age. The simple reading of his last work, Oedipus at Colonus, put an end to the process.
Sophocles was married until he was fifty, when he fell in love with Theoris of Sicyon, a prostitute, whom he married and had a son named Ariston, who was the father of Sophocles the Younger, also a playwright and for whom his grandfather had great esteem. He had three more illegitimate children, but nothing is known about them. Towards the end of his life, he had a relationship with a hetaera (courtesan) named Archippe.
Public life
Sophocles was a citizen involved in Athenian politics. His level of patriotism was such that he rejected invitations from other kingdoms to visit his courts and offer his works. The scant information about his civic life suggests that he was a popular favorite, actively participated in his community, and displayed notable artistic talents.
He was state treasurer (hellenotamiai) between 443 BC and 442 BC and served as one of the treasurers responsible for receiving and administering tribute money from Athens' allied subjects in the Delian League. In c. 440 BC he was chosen to join the ten strategos or executive commanders of the military forces, a committee that administered civil and military affairs in Athens. During the Samos War, together with Pericles, he commanded a small fleet that was defeated in the Mediterranean by the naval commander Melissus of Samos (fifth century BC).
In 413 BC, at the age of around eighty-three, he was part of the Supreme Council of the ten Probolos convened to organize the financial and internal recovery of Athens after Athens' failed Sicilian expedition against Syracuse, in Sicily. Sophocles' last recorded act was to lead a chorus of public mourning for his late rival, Euripides, before the festival of 406 BC.
Literary career
At the age of twenty-seven, he achieved his first triumph competing with Aeschylus in the Great Dionysias of 468 BC, festivals in honor of Dionysus that took place every year and included dramatic performances. In the Life of Cimon, the Roman historian Plutarch (c. 40 - 120 AD) narrates the first triumph of the talented young Sophocles against the famous and until then undisputed Aeschylus, which ended in an unusual way without the usual draw of the referees. After the defeat, Aeschylus chose voluntary exile in Sicily.
Sophocles wrote approximately one hundred and twenty dramas for the festivals in about thirty appearances. It is believed that he obtained around twenty-four victories, eighteen in the City Dionysia, compared to thirteen by Aeschylus and four by Euripides. He came second many times and was never chosen third and last in competitions. At least in terms of victories, he was the most successful of the three great tragedians.
His works were presented for the first time in groups of three (not necessarily trilogies) at religious festivals such as the competitions of Dionysius Eleutherius, notably the Dionysia of the City, in Athens. Plays were often performed again in smaller theaters throughout Greece, and the best were distributed in written form for public reading, kept as official state documents for posterity, and studied as part of standard Greek education.
Sophocles' work is not just a record of Greek theater, as it provides invaluable insight into many of the political and social aspects of Ancient Greece, from family relationships to details of Greek religion. Furthermore, his innovations in theatrical presentation would provide the foundation for all future Western dramatic representations. His plays continue to be performed in theaters around the world.
Dramatic and literary achievements
Ancient authorities attribute to Sophocles several important and minor dramatic innovations. Among the latter is the invention of some type of “scene painting” or other pictorial support to establish the location or atmosphere. He may also have increased the size of the chorus from twelve to fifteen members.
The introduction of a third actor in the dramatic representation was his main innovation. Previously, two actors were allowed to “double,” that is, take on other roles during a play. This allowed the playwright to increase the number of characters and expand the variety of their interactions. The scope of the dramatic conflict was thus expanded, the plots could be more fluid and the situations more complex.
Characteristics of Sophocles' dramaturgy
Sophocles' typical drama presents characters impressive in their determination and power, possessing strongly drawn qualities or defects that combine with a particular set of circumstances to lead them inevitably to a tragic fate. He develops his characters' rush to tragedy with great economy, concentration, and dramatic effectiveness, creating a coherent, suspenseful situation whose sustained, unyielding advance epitomized the tragic form for the classical world.
He emphasized that most people lacked wisdom and presented truth in collision with ignorance, illusion, and madness. Many scenes dramatize flaws in thinking such as misleading reports and rumors, false optimism, hasty judgment, and madness. The main character commits something that involves a serious mistake and that affects other people. Each of them reacts in its own way, causing the main agent to take another step towards ruin – his own and that of others as well.
Equally important is that those who will suffer the tragic wrong are usually present at the time of the action or belong to the same generation. It was this kind of more complex tragedy that required a third actor. Sophocles thus abandoned the spacious Aeschylus structure of the connected trilogy. Instead, he packed all the action into one piece. The term “trilogy” meant no more than three separate tragedies written by the same author and performed at the same festival.
Human destiny, or the destiny of the hero who suffers and is destroyed, is Sophocles' theme. His tragedies are marked by two types of suffering, that which comes from excess pain and that which comes from an accident. Although Sophocles did not worship the Greek gods, they did not affect his philosophy. His oldest play, Ajax, still has influences from Aeschylus and a quite simple dramatic structure.
In his subsequent works, he gradually took an opposite direction, adopting an excessively concise and abrupt form to finally find the middle ground between two styles, finding a slow method and not yet the content that characterizes all his more recent works.
Approach and technical and stylistic innovations
Sophocles was more interested in realistic action than his predecessors, but he retained the chorus segment, a group of up to fifteen actors who sang rather than spoke, as a more participatory cast member than his successors. The choir, for him, became the protagonist and commentator on the events of the play, creating a closer relationship with the audience.
Compared to Aeschylus, Sophocles' tragic choirs’ distance themselves from the action, participate less and less actively and become spectators and commentators on the facts. Sophocles introduced the monologue. Those of Ajax or Oedipus that allowed the actor to show his skill and the character to fully express his thoughts.
Language and dramatic tension
Sophocles' language responds flexibly to the dramatic needs of the moment; it can be heavy or fast, emotionally intense, or relaxed, highly decorative, or perfectly clear and simple. His command of form and diction was highly respected by his contemporaries. He was universally admired for the sympathy and vivacity with which he delineated his characters; especially notable are his tragic women, such as Electra and Antigone.
Few playwrights have been able to manage the situation and the plot with more power and certainty; the frequent references in Aristotle's Poetics to Oedipus the King show that he considered the play a masterpiece of construction. Sophocles is also unsurpassed in his moments of high dramatic tension and in his revealing use of tragic irony.
He was a great user of theatrical metaphors such as blindness in the Oedipus plays and bestiality in Women of Trachis. He sought to provoke and disturb the audience based on their ready acceptance of what is and is not "normal", forcing them, through the characters in the play, to make difficult or even impossible choices.
Other techniques he used to convey meaning and emphasis were the actors' dramatic entrances and exits and the repeated use of significant props such as the urn in Electra and the sword in Ajax. The rich, highly formalized language, but with flexibility added by the execution of sentences and the inclusion of segments of more "natural" speech, and the unusual use of pauses give greater rhythm, fluidity, and dramatic tension than those of his contemporaries.
His plays and those of his contemporaries were based on classic tales from Greek mythology. The convention of tragedy (tragōida) and the familiarity of the story and setting allowed the writer to focus on specific elements and interpret them in a new way. He was often not so concerned with what happens, but rather with how these events unfold.
Among the main characters there is usually a hero figure with exceptional abilities whose overconfidence and pride guarantee a tragic ending. In Antigone, one of his most famous works, the main character pays the ultimate price for burying her brother Polyneices against the will of King Creon of Thebes.
It is a classic situation of tragedy - the political right to be denied funeral rites to the traitor Polyneices is contrasted with the moral right of a sister seeking to bury her brother. A theme that permeates Sophocles' work is the struggle between the certain and the uncertain in which the characters make mistakes in their interpretation of events. Only when it is too late do the characters recognize the truth.
Humans and gods
There is a criticism that Sophocles was an excellent artist and nothing more; he struggled neither with religious problems as Aeschylus did, nor with intellectual problems as Euripides had done. He accepted the gods of Greek religion in a spirit of unreflective orthodoxy and was content to present human characters and human conflicts. But it must be stressed that, for Sophocles, “the gods” seem to have represented the natural forces of the universe to which human beings are voluntarily or involuntarily subject.
For him, most human beings live in dark ignorance because they are isolated from these permanent and immutable forces and structures of reality. Yet it is pain, suffering, and the persistence of tragic crises that can bring people into valid contact with the universal order of things. In the process, a person can become more genuinely human, more genuinely themselves.
Sophocles' hero
The psychology of the characters deepens, an unprecedented analysis of reality and man emerges. Sophocles tried to de-emphasize (onkos) his characters, to completely restore their drama, in a world described as unfair and devoid of light. In Oedipus at Colonus, the chorus repeats “the best fate is not to be born.” The events that destroy the heroes' lives are in no way explainable or justifiable.
Its heroes are immersed in a world of irreconcilable contradictions, of conflicts with forces inevitably destined to dominate them. His original contribution to the development of Greek tragedy was represented by the accentuation of the humanity of the characters because everyone has something broken within them, a physical and psychic divide.
His characters are also generous and good, but immensely alone and driven to tragedy by the evil they carry within themselves. However, they never appear completely crushed by destiny, more precisely in the vein struggle against it, they receive a full human dimension, carrying a destiny of condemnation and, at the same time, of glory.
The characteristics of the hero protagonist of Sophocles' tragic events will distinguish the new theatrical era from the previous archaic one and those to come. He is isolated from everything, both from his peers and from the religious sphere, forced to face suffering due to the cruel and inevitable fate that afflicts his life, as well as that of all humanity.
With his commendable talents and faculties, incomparable to any other character in the story, he becomes the “center” in the development of the tragedy. Being in the spotlight inevitably implies a change in your psyche throughout the story, an act strange to the well-known playwright Aeschylus, but capable of involving the viewer even more, who can now compare the protagonist to himself.
It consists of the progressive acceptance of the fact that it is not possible to escape evil destiny (metabolé) and the gradual maturation of the suffering that will afflict the character throughout the story, sometimes leading him to suicide. This type of “psychic evolution,” which will obviously always result in a worsening of the situation, due to the birth of a negative feeling in the protagonist's mind, such as jealousy in Deianira from the well-known tragedy Women of Trachis.
Sophocles' thoughts
The tragic current from which Sophocles draws inspiration is now an integral part of the classical period and this playwright is an important representative of it. Oedipus the King and Antigone show and exemplify the new and typical criteria observed by the complex structure of new age tragedy.
A key component of general classical theater and very present in Sophocles' tragedy is ambiguity, its perfect and rational form also hides other, sometimes even surprising, concepts. Sophocles' characters live alone, without being accompanied by any deity or victims of any divine will. Despite the playwright's religiosity, the divine has the sole function of guaranteeing the fulfillment of the destinies of every man on Earth.
The plots usually contain themes debated in the period in which he lives, such as justice, politics and the connection between citizens and the polis. The influence that these tragedies received from the philosophical current that was widespread at the time is also not negligible. Sophistry, argument, or reasoning designed with the aim of producing the illusion of truth, which, although simulating an agreement with the rules of logic, presents, in reality, an internal structure that is inconsistent, incorrect, and deliberately misleading.
Sophocles' work also escaped the borders of theater and provoked discussion and reaction in other fields, namely psychology and the work of Sigmund Freud, which is perhaps a testimony to the depth and difficulties of interpreting his plays.
Works of Sophocles
Sophocles wrote approximately 120 plays, but only these eight complete tragedies have stood the test of time: Antigone (c. 442 BC), Oedipus the King (429 BC - 420 BC), Philoctetes (409 BC), Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC), Ajax ( unknown date), Electra (unknown date) and Women of Trachis (unknown date). Among those that deserve to be highlighted are Antigone and Oedipus the King.
Antigone (c. 442 BC) – Antigone, daughter of the former king Oedipus, is willing to face the capital punishment decreed by her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, as a penalty for anyone who bury her brother Polyneices. Antigone defies Creon and buries her brother's corpse. Convinced that reasons of state outweigh family ties, Creon refuses to commute Antigone's death sentence. Tiresias convinces the king to give in, but when she had already committed suicide in her prison cell. Haemon, Creon's son also commits suicide, as does Eurydice, Creon's wife. In his close and excessively rigid adherence to his civic duties, Creon defied the gods through his denial of humanity's common obligations to the dead.
Oedipus the King (429 BC - 420 BC) - is a structural marvel that marks the pinnacle of formal achievements in classical Greek drama. The city of Thebes is struck by a plague and its citizens beg Oedipus to find a remedy. The oracle at Delphi declares that the plague will only cease when the murderer of Jocasta's first husband, King Laius, is found and punished. Oedipus decides to find him.
Oedipus's investigation turns into an obsessive reconstruction of his own hidden past, as he begins to suspect that he himself had killed Laius, without knowing that he was his own father. Oedipus discovers that he was abandoned as a baby by Laius and Jocasta because they feared a prophecy that their son would kill his father.
He survived and was adopted by the ruler of Corinth. Unwittingly, he fulfilled the prophecy of the Delphic oracle, killed his real father, married his own mother, and fathered children who are also his own brothers. Jocasta hangs herself upon seeing this shameful web of incest, parricide and attempted child murder, and Oedipus, full of guilt, sticks needles in her eyes, blinding himself.
End of life
It is believed that Sophocles died in 406 BC, at the age of ninety, a few months after the death of his colleague and rival Euripides. His death was celebrated by his fellow citizens as that of a Greek hero and his name exalted by the writers and playwrights who followed him. He was buried in his family's tomb near Deceleia, approximately one kilometer from Athens. His last tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, was performed posthumously in the same year (or a few years later) as a sign of great honor.
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