Sophocles and His Literary Works

The ancient Greek tragic dramatist Sophocles lived during the Athenian Golden Age, when the military power, artistic glory, and philosophical achievements of Athens were at their zenith. The most generally admired of the ancient Greek dramatists, Sophocles was also acknowledged for his musical skill and his handsome appearance.

Sophocles also held political and military positions. He served, for example, as a general with the Athenian statesman Pericles and was a commissioner of the Athenian empire. He was also a priest of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine. It is for his plays, however, that Sophocles is best known and most widely admired.

Sophocles wrote more than one hundred plays, only seven of which have survived. Many of his plays were entered in competition with plays by other Greek tragic dramatists, including Aeschylus and Euripides, whose work Sophocles surpassed on at least twenty occasions. More conservative than the other Greek dramatists who were his contemporaries, Sophocles emphasized the individual's uncompromising search for truth, which is evident in both his plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Of the three great Greek tragic dramatists, Sophocles is perhaps the most widely read today. Unlike his forebear Aeschylus, Sophocles focused his plays on human rather than religious concerns. As theater historian Peter ARnott has noted, he wrote "for a generation whose religious faith was waning." His most famous plays center on a crisis and portray characters under duress. Antigone, which takes place in Thebes, a city prostrated by war, turns on the difficult decisions both Antigone and Creon must make. In Oedipus Rex, set against a background of the plague-stricken city of Thebes, Sophocles examines the behavior of Oedipus, who has been destined to murder his father and marry his mother. Though the two tragedies differ in the way their calamities ensue, both raise questions about inescapable human problems and portray characters confronting them with dignity and courage.

The Athenian audience that watched performances of Oedipus Tyrannus would have been familiar with Oedipus's story from sources as early as Homer's Odyssey. They would have known, for example, that Oedipus was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, and that to prevent this from happening, the infant Oedipus was given up by his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta, and left in the wilderness to die. This plan went awry when Oedipus was taken by a shepherd to Corinth, where he was adopted by a childless couple, King Polybus and Queen Merope. The Athenian audience would also have been aware of the reason for Oedipus's club foot. They would have known too of how upon hearing the oracle pronounce his grisly fate, Oedipus had left Corinth, where he had been raised as a prince, thinking that he had to get as far away as he could from Polybus and Merope, who he assumed were his biological parents. For the Athenian audience, then, the play's power resides less in the surprising twists and the turns of plot than in its relentless tragic action.

Oedipus begins at the point when Thebes is undergoing a series of catastrophes, most important of which is a devastating plague. Prior to this series of events, Oedipus had saved Thebes from the Sphinx, a winged creature with the body of a lion and the head of a woman. The Sphinx had terrorized the city by devouring anyone who crossed its path and who was unable to answer its riddle correctly: What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? Oedipus solved the riddle by answering "Man." After he slew the Sphinx, he was given in reward the kingship of Thebes and the hand of its recently widowed queen, Jocasta. Unknown to Oedipus, but known to the Athenian audience, was the fact that Jocasta was his mother and that her recently slain husband Laius, had been killed by Oedipus himself. All this and more Oedipus soon discovers.

"Sophocles." Imagination.com.

"Sophocles." Sophocles.net.

Sophocles, "Oedipus Rex."