Sophocles

—Sophoclean /sof'euh klee"euhn/, adj.

/sof"euh kleez'/, n.

495?-406? B.C., Greek dramatist.

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born с 496, Colonus, near Athens

died 406 BC, Athens

Greek playwright.

With Aeschylus and Euripides, he was one of the three great tragic playwrights of Classical Athens. A distinguished public figure in Athens, he served successively in important posts as a treasurer, commander, and adviser. He competed in dramatic festivals, where he defeated Aeschylus to win his first victory in 468 BC. He went on to achieve unparalleled success, writing 123 dramas for dramatic competitions and achieving more than 20 victories. Only seven tragedies survive in their entirety: Antigone, Ajax, Electra, The Trachinian Women, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, and Oedipus the King, his best-known work. He increased the size of the chorus and was the first to introduce a third actor onstage. For their supple language, vivid characterization, and formal perfection, his works are regarded as the epitome of Greek drama.

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▪ Greek dramatist

Introduction

born c. 496 BC, Colonus, near Athens [Greece]

died 406, Athens

 with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of classical Athens' three great tragic playwrights. The best known of his 123 dramas is Oedipus the King (Sophocles).

Life and career

      Sophocles was the younger contemporary of Aeschylus and the older contemporary of Euripides. He was born at Colonus, a village outside the walls of Athens, where his father, Sophillus, was a wealthy manufacturer of armour. Sophocles himself received a good education. Because of his beauty of physique, his athletic prowess, and his skill in music, he was chosen in 480, when he was 16, to lead the paean (choral chant to a god) celebrating the decisive Greek sea victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis (Salamis, Battle of). The relatively meagre information about Sophocles' civic life suggests that he was a popular favourite who participated actively in his community and exercised outstanding artistic talents. In 442 he served as one of the treasurers responsible for receiving and managing tribute money from Athens' subject-allies in the Delian League. In 440 he was elected one of the 10 stratēgoi (high executive officials who commanded the armed forces) as a junior colleague of Pericles. Sophocles later served as stratēgos perhaps twice again. In 413, then aged about 83, Sophocles was a proboulos, one of 10 advisory commissioners who were granted special powers and were entrusted with organizing Athens' financial and domestic recovery after its terrible defeat at Syracuse in Sicily. Sophocles' last recorded act was to lead a chorus in public mourning for his deceased rival, Euripides, before the festival of 406. He died that same year.

      These few facts are about all that is known of Sophocles' life. They imply steady and distinguished attachment to Athens, its government, religion, and social forms. Sophocles was wealthy from birth, highly educated, noted for his grace and charm, on easy terms with the leading families, a personal friend of prominent statesmen, and in many ways fortunate to have died before the final surrender of Athens to Sparta in 404. In one of his last plays, Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), he still affectionately praises both his own birthplace and the great city itself.

      Sophocles won his first victory at the Dionysian dramatic festival in 468, however, defeating the great Aeschylus in the process. This began a career of unparalleled success and longevity. In total, Sophocles wrote 123 dramas for the festivals. Since each author who was chosen to enter the competition usually presented four plays, this means he must have competed about 30 times. Sophocles won perhaps as many as 24 victories, compared to 13 for Aeschylus and four for Euripides, and indeed he may have never received lower than second place in the competitions he entered.

Dramatic and literary achievements

      Ancient authorities credit Sophocles with several major and minor dramatic innovations. Among the latter is his invention of some type of “scene paintings” or other pictorial prop to establish locale or atmosphere. He also may have increased the size of the chorus from 12 to 15 members. Sophocles' major innovation was his introduction of a third actor into the dramatic performance. It had previously been permissible for two actors to “double” (i.e., assume other roles during a play), but the addition of a third actor onstage enabled the dramatist both to increase the number of his characters and widen the variety of their interactions. The scope of the dramatic conflict was thereby extended, plots could be more fluid, and situations could be more complex.

      The typical Sophoclean drama presents a few characters, impressive in their determination and power and possessing a few strongly drawn qualities or faults (hubris) that combine with a particular set of circumstances to lead them inevitably to a tragic fate. Sophocles develops his characters' rush to tragedy with great economy, concentration, and dramatic effectiveness, creating a coherent, suspenseful situation whose sustained and inexorable onrush came to epitomize the tragic form to the classical world. Sophocles emphasizes that most people lack wisdom, and he presents truth in collision with ignorance, delusion, and folly. Many scenes dramatize flaws or failure in thinking (deceptive reports and rumours, false optimism, hasty judgment, madness). The chief character does something involving grave error; this affects others, each of whom reacts in his own way, thereby causing the chief agent to take another step toward ruin—his own and that of others as well. Equally important, those who are to suffer from the tragic error usually are present at the time or belong to the same generation. It was this more complex type of tragedy that demanded a third actor. Sophocles thus abandoned the spacious Aeschylean framework of the connected trilogy and instead comprised the entire action in a single play. From his time onward, “trilogy” usually meant no more than three separate tragedies written by the same author and presented at the same festival.

      Sophocles' language responds flexibly to the dramatic needs of the moment; it can be ponderously weighty or swift-moving, emotionally intense or easygoing, highly decorative or perfectly plain and simple. His mastery of form and diction was highly respected by his contemporaries. Sophocles has also been universally admired for the sympathy and vividness with which he delineates his characters; especially notable are his tragic women, such as Electra and Antigone. Few dramatists have been able to handle situation and plot with more power and certainty; the frequent references in the Poetics to Sophocles' Oedipus the King show that Aristotle regarded this play as a masterpiece of construction, and few later critics have dissented. Sophocles is also unsurpassed in his moments of high dramatic tension and in his revealing use of tragic irony.

      The criticism has been made that Sophocles was a superb artist and nothing more; he grappled neither with religious problems as Aeschylus had nor with intellectual ones as Euripides had done. He accepted the gods of Greek religion in a spirit of unreflecting orthodoxy, and he contented himself with presenting human characters and human conflicts. But it should be stressed that to Sophocles “the gods” appear to have represented the natural forces of the universe to which human beings are unwittingly or unwillingly subject. To Sophocles, human beings live for the most part in dark ignorance because they are cut off from these permanent, unchanging forces and structures of reality. Yet it is pain, suffering, and the endurance of tragic crisis 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 himself.

The plays

      Only seven of Sophocles' tragedies survive in their entirety, along with 400 lines of a satyr play, numerous fragments of plays now lost, and 90 titles. All seven of the complete plays are works of Sophocles' maturity, but only two of them, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, have fairly certain dates. Ajax is generally regarded as the earliest of the extant plays. Some evidence suggests that Antigone was first performed in 442 or 441 BC. Philoctetes was first performed in 409, when Sophocles was 90 years old, and Oedipus at Colonus was said to have been produced after Sophocles' death by his grandson.

Ajax

      The entire plot of Ajax (Greek Aias mastigophoros) is constructed around Ajax, the mighty hero of the Trojan War whose pride drives him to treachery and finally to his own ruin and suicide some two-thirds of the way through the play. Ajax is deeply offended at the award of the prize of valour (the dead Achilles' armour) not to himself but to Odysseus. Ajax thereupon attempts to assassinate Odysseus and the contest's judges, the Greek commanders Agamemnon and Menelaus, but is frustrated by the intervention of the goddess Athena. He cannot bear his humiliation and throws himself on his own sword. Agamemnon and Menelaus order that Ajax' corpse be left unburied as punishment. But the wise Odysseus persuades the commanders to relent and grant Ajax an honourable burial. In the end Odysseus is the only person who seems truly aware of the changeability of human fortune.

Antigone

       Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. She is willing to face the capital punishment that has been decreed by her uncle Creon, the new king, as the penalty for anyone burying her brother Polyneices. (Polyneices has just been killed attacking Thebes, and it is as posthumous punishment for this attack that Creon has forbidden the burial of his corpse.) Obeying all her instincts of love, loyalty, and humanity, Antigone defies Creon and dutifully buries her brother's corpse. Creon, from conviction that reasons of state outweigh family ties, refuses to commute Antigone's death sentence. By the time Creon is finally persuaded by the prophet Tiresias to relent and free Antigone, she has killed herself in her prison cell. Creon's son, Haemon, kills himself out of love and sympathy for the dead Antigone, and Creon's wife, Eurydice, then kills herself out of grief over these tragic events. At the play's end Creon is left desolate and broken in spirit. In his narrow and unduly rigid adherence to his civic duties, Creon has defied the gods through his denial of humanity's common obligations toward the dead. The play thus concerns the conflicting obligations of civic versus personal loyalties and religious mores.

Trachinian Women

      This play centres on the efforts of Deianeira to win back the wandering affections of her husband, Heracles, who is away on one of his heroic missions and who has sent back his latest concubine, Iole, to live with his wife at their home in Trachis. The love charm Deianeira uses on Heracles turns out to be poisonous, and she kills herself upon learning of the agony she has caused her husband. Thus, in Trachinian Women (Greek Trachiniai) Heracles' insensitivity (in sending his mistress to share his wife's home) and Deianeira's ignorance result in domestic tragedy.

Oedipus the King

 The plot of Oedipus the King (Greek Oidipous Tyrannos; Latin Oedipus Rex) is a structural marvel that marks the summit of classical Greek drama's formal achievements. The play's main character, Oedipus, is the wise, happy, and beloved ruler of Thebes. Though hot-tempered, impatient, and arrogant at times of crisis, he otherwise seems to enjoy every good fortune. But Oedipus mistakenly believes that he is the son of King Polybus of Corinth and his queen. He became the ruler of Thebes because he rescued the city from the Sphinx by answering its riddle correctly, and so was awarded the city's widowed queen, Jocasta. Before overcoming the Sphinx, Oedipus left Corinth forever because the Delphic oracle had prophesied to him that he would kill his father and marry his mother. While journeying to Thebes from Corinth, Oedipus encountered at a crossroads an old man accompanied by five servants. Oedipus got into an argument with him and in a fit of arrogance and bad temper killed the old man and four of his servants.

      The play opens with the city of Thebes stricken by a plague and its citizens begging Oedipus to find a remedy. He consults the Delphic oracle, which declares that the plague will cease only when the murderer of Jocasta's first husband, King Laius, has been found and punished for his deed. Oedipus resolves to find Laius' killer, and much of the rest of the play centres upon the investigation he conducts in this regard. In a series of tense, gripping, and ominous scenes Oedipus' investigation turns into an obsessive reconstruction of his own hidden past as he begins to suspect that the old man he killed at the crossroads was none other than Laius. Finally, Oedipus learns that he himself was abandoned to die as a baby by Laius and Jocasta because they feared a prophecy that their infant son would kill his father; that he survived and was adopted by the ruler of Corinth, but in his maturity he has unwittingly fulfilled the Delphic oracle's prophecy of him; that he has indeed killed his true father, married his own mother, and begot children who are also his own siblings.

      Jocasta hangs herself when she sees this shameful web of incest, parricide, and attempted child murder, and the guilt-stricken Oedipus then sticks needles into his eyes, blinding himself. Sightless and alone, he is now blind to the world around him but finally cognizant of the terrible truth of his own life.

Electra

      As in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, the action in Electra (Greek Ēlektra) follows the return of Orestes to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus in retribution for their murder of Orestes' father, Agamemnon. In this play, however, the main focus is on Orestes' sister Electra and her anguished participation in her brother's plans. To gain admittance to the palace and thus be able to execute his revenge, Orestes spreads false news of his own death. Believing this report, the despairing Electra unsuccessfully tries to enlist her sister Chrysothemis in an attempt to murder their mother. In a dramatic scene, Orestes then enters in disguise and hands Electra the urn that is supposed to contain his own ashes. Moved by his sister's display of grief, Orestes reveals his true identity to her and then strikes down his mother and her lover. Electra's triumph is thus complete. In the play Electra is seen passing through the whole range of human emotions—from passionate love to cruel hatred, from numb despair to wild joy. There is debate over whether the play depicts virtue triumphant or, rather, portrays a young woman incurably twisted by years of hatred and resentment.

Philoctetes

      In Philoctetes (Greek Philoktētēs) the Greeks on their way to Troy have cast away the play's main character, Philoctetes, on the desert island of Lemnos because he has a loathsome and incurable ulcer on his foot. But the Greeks have discovered that they cannot win victory over Troy without Philoctetes and his wonderful bow, which formerly belonged to Heracles. The crafty Odysseus is given the task of fetching Philoctetes by any means possible. Odysseus knows that the resentful Philoctetes will kill him if he can, so he uses the young and impressionable soldier Neoptolemus, son of the dead Achilles, as his agent. Neoptolemus is thus caught between the devious manipulations of Odysseus and the unsuspecting integrity of Philoctetes, who is ready to do anything rather than help the Greeks who abandoned him. For much of the play Neoptolemus sticks to Odysseus' policy of deceit, despite his better nature, but eventually he renounces duplicity to join in friendship with Philoctetes. A supernatural appearance by Heracles then convinces Philoctetes to go to Troy to both win victory and be healed of his disease.

Oedipus at Colonus

      In Oedipus at Colonus (Greek Oidipous epi Kolōnō) the old, blind Oedipus has spent many years wandering in exile after being rejected by his sons and the city of Thebes. Oedipus has been cared for only by his daughters Antigone and Ismene. He arrives at a sacred grove at Colonus, a village close by Athens (and the home of Sophocles himself). There Oedipus is guaranteed protection by Theseus, the noble king of Athens. Theseus does indeed protect Oedipus from the importunate pleadings of his brother-in-law, Creon, for Oedipus to protect Thebes. Oedipus himself rejects the entreaties of his son Polyneices, who is bent on attacking Thebes and whom Oedipus solemnly curses. Finally Oedipus departs to a mysterious death; he is apparently swallowed into the earth of Colonus, where he will become a benevolent power and a mysterious source of defense to the land that has given him final refuge. The play is remarkable for the melancholy, beauty, and power of its lyric odes and for the spiritual and moral authority with which it invests the figure of Oedipus.

Trackers

      Four hundred lines of this satyr play survive. The plot of Trackers (Greek Ichneutai) is based on two stories about the miraculous early deeds of the god Hermes: that the infant, growing to maturity in a few days, stole cattle from Apollo, baffling discovery by reversing the animals' hoof marks, and that he invented the lyre by fitting strings to a tortoise shell. In this play the trackers are the chorus of satyrs, who are looking for the cattle; they are amusingly dumbfounded at the sound of the new instrument Hermes has invented. Enough of the play survives to give an impression of its style; it is a genial, uncomplicated travesty of the tragic manner, and the antics of the chorus were apparently the chief source of amusement.

Additional Reading

Influential interpretations of Sophocles' works include G.M. Kirkwood, A Study of Sophoclean Drama (1958, reissued 1994); Bernard M.W. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (1957, reissued 1998), and The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (1964, reissued 1983); G.H. Gellie, Sophocles: A Reading (1972); and R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (1980).Valuable studies of specific works in context include Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (1981, reissued 1999), Sophocles' Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (1995), and Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (2001). Specialized studies are presented in David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (1982); Mary Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (1989); and Jasper Griffin (ed.), Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1999).Thomas M. Woodard Oliver Taplin

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