Sophocles

Sophocles was born around 497 BCE in Colonus, a deme on the outskirts of Athens that he would later memorialize in his final play. His father, Sophillus, was a wealthy manufacturer of armor, which placed the family among the Athenian propertied class and gave Sophocles the kind of education — music, dance, gymnastics, poetry — reserved for citizens with means. He came of age during the high noon of Athenian power, between the Persian Wars and the catastrophes of the Peloponnesian War, and he lived long enough to see Athens lose its empire. He died in 406 BCE, around the age of ninety, shortly before the city's final defeat at Aegospotami.

He wrote at least 123 plays over a career of more than sixty years, of which only seven survive complete: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. He first competed at the City Dionysia, the great Athenian dramatic festival, in 468 BCE, and reportedly defeated Aeschylus — then the dominant figure in tragedy — on his debut. He won the first prize approximately twenty-four times and was never placed lower than second, an unprecedented record. He also held public office, serving as a treasurer of the Delian League and as one of the ten generals elected during the Samian War alongside Pericles.

Oedipus Rex (sometimes Oedipus Tyrannus, c. 429 BCE) is the play Aristotle treated as the formal model of tragedy in the Poetics, and it remains the work by which Sophocles is most often introduced. Oedipus, king of Thebes, is a man of decisive intelligence who set out to escape an oracle and discovers, through his own investigative will, that he has fulfilled it: he has killed his father and married his mother. The plot is structured as a detective story in which the detective is also the criminal, and the dramatic irony — the audience knows what Oedipus does not — produces the particular pressure that Aristotle named pity and fear. The play is short, formally tight, and almost surgical in its construction; the recognition scene remains one of the most studied passages in dramatic literature.

The other plays develop a recognizable Sophoclean concern: the collision between an individual will and an order — divine, civic, familial — that the protagonist cannot fully see. Antigone defies Creon's edict to bury her brother and is destroyed; Ajax, denied the arms of Achilles, kills himself; Philoctetes, abandoned on Lemnos with a festering wound, becomes the moral center of a play about deception and obligation. The protagonists are not innocent victims, exactly, but they are not adequately punished by their circumstances either. The plays sit with that disproportion rather than resolving it.

For new readers, the Robert Fagles translations (Penguin) read fluently and have long introductions by Bernard Knox that are themselves worth the price of the book; the David Grene translations (University of Chicago) are closer to the Greek and slightly more austere. Read Oedipus Rex first, then Antigone. The plays are short — most can be read in an hour — and they were written to be performed; reading them aloud, even alone, recovers something the page tends to flatten.