Sophocles

Sophocles was born around 497 BC in Colonus, a village just outside the walls of Athens that he would later make the setting of his last play. His father, Sophillus, was a wealthy craftsman or arms manufacturer, and the boy received the best education Athens could offer in music and gymnastics. According to ancient biographers he was chosen, as a handsome sixteen-year-old, to lead the boys' chorus that celebrated the Greek victory at Salamis in 480 BC.

In 468 BC he entered the drama competition at the City Dionysia for the first time and defeated the great Aeschylus. From then on he won about twenty times at the Dionysia, plus several more at the smaller Lenaia festival, and he is said never to have come last. Unlike Euripides, he was also a public figure: in 443/2 he served as one of the treasurers of the Delian League, in 441/0 he was elected general alongside Pericles during the war against Samos, and after the Sicilian disaster of 413 he sat on the emergency committee that ran the city. He was also a priest of a healing cult, and tradition says that after his death the Athenians worshipped him as a hero under the name Dexion.

He lived to about ninety, through almost the whole of the Peloponnesian War, and died in 406 BC, a few months after Euripides. The comic poet Phrynichus wrote that he was blessed: a long life, many fine plays, and a death without suffering.

Of about 120 plays, seven tragedies survive complete: Αίας (Ajax), Αντιγόνη (Antigone, c. 441 BC), Τραχίνιαι (Women of Trachis), Οιδίπους Τύραννος (Oedipus the King, c. 429 BC), Ηλέκτρα (Electra), Φιλοκτήτης (Philoctetes, 409 BC) and Οιδίπους επί Κολωνώ (Oedipus at Colonus, staged in 401 BC after his death). A large part of a satyr play, Ιχνευταί (The Trackers), turned up on a papyrus in Egypt in 1912.

Antigone buries her brother against the king's orders and chooses death over obedience; her clash with Creon is the oldest and clearest drama about conscience against the state. Oedipus the King shows a clever ruler investigating a crime and discovering that the criminal is himself: Aristotle took it as the model tragedy, and Freud borrowed its name for the Oedipus complex. Electra waits years to avenge her father, Philoctetes is a wounded man abandoned on an island whom the Greeks need back, and Oedipus at Colonus shows the blind old king finding peace in Sophocles' own village.

Aristotle credits Sophocles with adding a third actor to the stage and with introducing painted scenery; he also enlarged the chorus from twelve to fifteen. His heroes are stubborn, lonely people who refuse to bend, and his plots are built so tightly that every scene turns the screw. The famous chorus of Antigone, «Πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει» (Many things are wondrous, and none more wondrous than man), is the ancient world's hymn to human intelligence and its limits.

Antigone is a set text in the second year of the Greek Lyceum, so every Greek adult has translated Creon and Antigone's quarrel line by line; the Οιδίπους Τύραννος is studied at university. Each summer the Athens Epidaurus Festival stages Sophocles in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, and seeing Antigone or Oedipus there, under the stars, is a rite of passage. The term «οιδιπόδειο σύμπλεγμα» (Oedipus complex) is everyday Greek, and Antigone, Electra and Ismene are still common girls' names. Streets named Σοφοκλέους exist in central Athens and most Greek cities. Modern directors from Dimitris Rontiris in the 1930s to Theodoros Terzopoulos today have built their reputations on his plays.

• His first entry in the competition, in 468 BC, beat Aeschylus; the story goes that the general Cimon and his colleagues were asked to judge instead of the usual jury.
• He was elected general in 441/0 BC, reportedly because the Athenians were so delighted by Antigone.
• According to Cicero, when his son accused him in court of senility, the old poet read the judges a chorus from Oedipus at Colonus and was acquitted at once.
• Of his roughly 120 plays, 113 are known by title, but only seven have reached us complete.