Chapter 36 A Study of Sophocles
I depict men as they ought to be …
Not all things are to be discovered; many are better concealed.
Sophocles lived a long, productive life (496?–406 B.C.) in Athens. During his life Athens became a dominant political and cultural power after the Persian Wars, but before he died, Sophocles witnessed the decline of Athens as a result of the Peloponnesian Wars and the city’s subsequent surrender to Sparta. He saw Athenian culture reach remarkable heights as well as collapse under enormous pressures.
Sophocles embodied much of the best of Athenian culture; he enjoyed success as a statesman, general, treasurer, priest, and, of course, prize-winning dramatist. Although surviving fragments indicate that he wrote over 120 plays, only a handful remain intact. Those that survive consist of the three plays he wrote about Oedipus and his children — Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone — and four additional tragedies: Philoctetes, Ajax, Maidens of Trachis, and Electra.
His plays won numerous prizes at festival competitions because of his careful, subtle plotting and the sense of inevitability with which their action is charged. Moreover, his development of character is richly complex. Instead of relying on the extreme situations and exaggerated actions that earlier tragedians used, Sophocles created powerfully motivated characters who even today fascinate audiences with their psychological depth.
In addition to crafting sophisticated tragedies for the Greek theater, Sophocles introduced several important innovations to the stage. Most important, he broke the tradition of using only two actors; adding a third resulted in more complicated relationships and intricate dialogue among characters. As individual actors took center stage more often, Sophocles reduced the role of the chorus (see “Theatrical Conventions of Greek Drama”). This shift placed even more emphasis on the actors, although the chorus remained important as a means of commenting on the action and establishing its tone. Sophocles was also the first dramatist to write plays with specific actors in mind, a development that many later playwrights, including Shakespeare, exploited usefully. But without question Sophocles’ greatest contribution to drama was Oedipus the King, which, it has been argued, is the most influential drama ever written.
Map of Ancient Greece. During Sophocles’ time, the city-state of Athens (roughly in the center of this map) was the leading cultural and intellectual center of Greece — until the Peloponnesian Wars (431– 404 B.C.) and Athens’s defeat in 404 B.C. by the city-state of Sparta (below Athens, to the left).