Sophocles
c. 497/496–406/405 BCE
Biography
Sophocles was a tragic playwright of ancient Athens, born around the 490s BCE and dying around 406 BCE. Together with Aeschylus and Euripides, he is one of the few tragedians of that age whose complete plays survive. For almost fifty years he was the most successful writer at the city's dramatic festivals, the Lenaea and the Dionysia, winning first prize in most of the contests he entered. He wrote more than a hundred and twenty plays, but only seven survive in full: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus.
The best known of his surviving plays are the three Theban dramas: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They share a mythic family, but each belonged to a different set of tragedies, and the rest of those sets are lost. Aristotle credits Sophocles with adding a third actor to the stage, which gave dialogue more room and reduced the part of the chorus, and his characters are drawn with more depth than those of the dramatists before him.
His reputation has held for more than two thousand years, and the plays are still staged and studied. On this site, the three Theban plays appear together in The Plays of Sophocles, in Francis Storr's English translation, so a reader can follow Oedipus from his discovery of the truth to his last days at Colonus in one book.
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Books
The Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
by Sophocles (translated by Francis Storr)
Oedipus the King, who has sworn to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, discovers that he is the man himself; Oedipus at Colonus follows the blind exile to his death in Athens, and Antigone defies Creon to bury her brother. Each play is one chapter. This book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.