Sophocles

Works and legacy

Sophocles is known for innovations in dramatic structure; deeper development of characters than earlier playwrights; and, if it was not due to Aeschylus, the addition of a third actor, which further reduced the role of the chorus, and increased opportunities for development and conflict. Aeschylus, who dominated Athenian playwriting during Sophocles's early career, adopted the third actor into his own work. Besides the third actor, Aristotle credits Sophocles with the introduction of skenographia, or scenery-painting; but this too is attributed elsewhere to someone else (by Vitruvius, to Agatharchus of Samos). After Aeschylus died, in 456 BC, Sophocles became the pre-eminent playwright in Athens, winning competitions at eighteen Dionysia, and six Lenaia festivals. His reputation was such that foreign rulers invited him to attend their courts; but, unlike Aeschylus, who died in Sicily, or Euripides, who spent time in Macedon, Sophocles never accepted any of these invitations. Aristotle, in his Poetics (c. 335 BC), used Sophocles's Oedipus Rex as an example of the highest achievement in tragedy.

Only two of the seven surviving plays can be dated securely: Philoctetes to 409 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus to 401 BC (staged after his death, by his grandson). Of the others, Electra shows stylistic similarities to these two, suggesting that it was probably written in the later part of his career; Ajax, Antigone, and The Trachiniae, are generally thought early, again based on stylistic elements; and Oedipus Rex is put in a middle period. Most of Sophocles's plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism, and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy.

Theban plays

The Theban plays comprise three plays: Oedipus Rex (also called Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus the King), Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. All three concern the fate of Thebes during and after the reign of King Oedipus. They have often been published under a single cover; but Sophocles wrote them for separate festival competitions, many years apart. The Theban plays are not a proper trilogy (i.e. three plays presented as a continuous narrative), nor an intentional series; they contain inconsistencies. Sophocles also wrote other plays pertaining to Thebes, such as the Epigoni, but only fragments have survived.

Subjects

The three plays involve the tale of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, not knowing they are his parents. His family is cursed for three generations.

In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is the protagonist. Thebes is suffering from a plague, and Oedipus has sent Creon, the brother of his wife Jocasta, to seek advice from the Delphic Oracle. It is gradually revealed, partly through the testimony of the prophet Tiresias, that Oedipus himself is the reason for the plague. Unknown to himself, he is the son of Jocasta and the former king, Laius; having received a prophecy that their son would kill his father and marry his mother, the parents ordered a slave to kill him as a baby. However, the slave instead left the child on Mount Cithaeron, where he was found and adopted by a childless couple. As a young man, Oedipus had met and killed a man on the road to Thebes; unknown to either of them, this man was his father, Laius. Oedipus became the ruler of Thebes after solving the riddle of the Sphinx and in the process, marries the widowed queen, his mother Jocasta. When the truth comes out, following Creon's return from Delphi, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus blinds himself. Creon becomes king, Oedipus goes into exile, and Creon forbids him to take his children with him.

In Oedipus at Colonus, the banished Oedipus and his daughter Antigone arrive at the town of Colonus, where they encounter Theseus, King of Athens. Creon demands that Oedipus return to Thebes, since an oracle has foretold that the city shall not know peace unless Oedipus is buried there. Theseus protects Oedipus, who refuses to return, and also refuses the exhortation of his son Polynices to help him overthrow Creon. At the end of the play, Oedipus dies peacefully.

In Antigone, the protagonist is Oedipus's daughter, Antigone. Her brother, Polyneices, has been killed shortly before the opening of the action, as part of the unsuccessful attack of the Seven against Thebes. Creon has forbidden his body to be buried, and Antigone is required to choose between leaving it outside the city walls, exposed to the ravages of wild animals, or to bury him and face death. Antigone decides to bury his body and face the consequences of her actions. Creon sentences her to death. Eventually, Creon is persuaded to free Antigone from her punishment, but his decision comes too late and Antigone commits suicide. Her suicide triggers the suicide of two others close to King Creon: his son, Haemon, who was to wed Antigone, and his wife, Eurydice, who commits suicide after losing her only surviving son.

Composition and inconsistencies

The plays were written across 36 years of Sophocles's career and were not composed in chronological order, but instead were written in the order Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus. Nor were they composed as a trilogy – a group of plays to be performed together, but are the remaining parts of three different groups of plays. As a result, there are some inconsistencies: notably, Creon is the undisputed king at the end of Oedipus Rex and, in consultation with Apollo, single-handedly makes the decision to expel Oedipus from Thebes. Creon is also instructed to look after Oedipus's daughters Antigone and Ismene at the end of Oedipus Rex. By contrast, in the other plays there is some struggle with Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices in regard to the succession. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles attempts to work these inconsistencies into a coherent whole: Ismene explains that, in light of their tainted family lineage, her brothers were at first willing to cede the throne to Creon. Nevertheless, they eventually decided to take charge of the monarchy, with each brother disputing the other's right to succeed. In addition to being in a clearly more powerful position in Oedipus at Colonus, Eteocles and Polynices are also culpable: they consent (l. 429, Theodoridis, tr.) to their father's going to exile, which is one of his bitterest charges against them.

Other plays

In addition to the three Theban plays, there are four surviving plays by Sophocles: Ajax, Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes, the last of which won first prize in 409 BC.

Ajax focuses on the proud hero of the Trojan War, Telamonian Ajax, who is driven to treachery and eventually suicide. Ajax becomes gravely upset when Achilles's armor is presented to Odysseus instead of himself. Despite their enmity toward him, Odysseus persuades the kings Menelaus and Agamemnon to grant Ajax a proper burial.

The Women of Trachis (named for the Trachinian women who make up the chorus) dramatizes Deianeira's accidentally killing Heracles after he had completed his famous twelve labors. Tricked into thinking it is a love charm, Deianeira applies poison to an article of Heracles's clothing; this poisoned robe causes Heracles to die an excruciating death. Upon learning the truth, Deianeira kills herself.

Electra corresponds roughly to the plot of Aeschylus's Libation Bearers. It details how Electra and Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon's murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

Philoctetes retells the story of Philoctetes, an archer who had been abandoned on Lemnos by the rest of the Greek fleet while on the way to Troy. After learning that they cannot win the Trojan War without Philoctetes's bow, the Greeks send Odysseus and Neoptolemus to retrieve him; due to the Greeks' earlier treachery, however, Philoctetes refuses to rejoin the army. It is only Heracles's deus ex machina appearance that persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy.

Fragmentary plays

Aristophanes of Byzantium, a scholar of the Library of Alexandria who worked between the third and second centuries BC, wrote that 130 titles were attributed to Sophocles, of which either seven or seventeen were considered spurious. Although more than 120 titles of plays (some of which may have been alternative titles for the same work) associated with Sophocles are known, little is known of the precise dating of most of them. Philoctetes is known to have been written in 409 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus is known to have only been performed in 401 BC, posthumously, at the initiation of Sophocles's grandson. By the time of Sophocles, the convention on writing plays for the Greek festivals was to submit them in tetralogies of three tragedies along with one satyr play. Along with the unknown dating of the vast majority of more than 120 plays, it is also largely unknown how the plays were grouped, or if Sophocles consistently followed this convention. It is, however, known that the three plays referred to in the modern era as the "Theban plays" were never performed together in Sophocles's own lifetime, and are therefore not part of the same tetralogy.

Fragments of Ichneutae (Tracking Satyrs) were discovered in Egypt in 1907. These amount to about half of the play, making it the best preserved satyr play after Euripides's Cyclops, which survives in its entirety. Fragments of the Epigoni were discovered in April 2005 by classicists at Oxford University with the help of infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging. The tragedy tells the story of the second siege of Thebes. A number of other Sophoclean works have survived only in fragments, including:

Sophocles's view of his own work

There is a passage of Plutarch's tract De Profectibus in Virtute 7 in which Sophocles discusses his own growth as a writer. A likely source of this material for Plutarch was the Epidemiae of Ion of Chios, a book that recorded many conversations of Sophocles; a Hellenistic dialogue about tragedy, in which Sophocles appeared as a character, is also plausible. The former is a likely candidate to have contained Sophocles's discourse on his own development because Ion was a friend of Sophocles, and the book is known to have been used by Plutarch. Though some interpretations of Plutarch's words suggest that Sophocles says that he imitated Aeschylus, the translation does not fit grammatically, nor does the interpretation that Sophocles said that he was making fun of Aeschylus's works. C. M. Bowra argues for the following translation of the line: "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."

Here Sophocles says that he has completed a stage of Aeschylus's work, meaning that he went through a phase of imitating Aeschylus's style but is finished with that. Sophocles's opinion of Aeschylus was mixed. He certainly respected him enough to imitate his work early on in his career, but he had reservations about Aeschylus's style, and thus did not keep his imitation up. Sophocles's first stage, in which he imitated Aeschylus, is marked by "Aeschylean pomp in the language". Sophocles's second stage was entirely his own. He introduced new ways of evoking feeling out of an audience, as in his Ajax, when Ajax is mocked by Athene, then the stage is emptied so that he may commit suicide alone. Sophocles mentions a third stage, distinct from the other two, in his discussion of his development. The third stage pays more heed to diction. His characters spoke in a way that was more natural to them and more expressive of their individual character feelings.

Reception

Signs of an early reception of Sophocles' work can be found in a greater number of quotations or allusions in ancient Greek literature starting with some of his contemporaries.

Locations named after

• Sophocles (crater), a crater on Mercury.