Sophocles

Sophocles or Sofokles (pronounced /ˈsɒfəkliːz/; ancient Greek Σοφοκλῆς, pronounced [sopʰoklɛ̂ːs]; circa. 496 BC - 406 BC) was the second of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived to the present day. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 120 or more plays during the course of his life,^[1] but only seven have survived in a complete form, namely Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-awarded playwright in the dramatic competitions of ancient Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. Sophocles competed in around thirty drama competitions; he won perhaps twenty four and never received lower than second place. Aeschylus won fourteen competitions and was defeated by Sophocles at times. Euripides won only four competitions.^[2]

The most famous of Sophocles's tragedies are those concerning Oedipus and Antigone: these are often known as the Theban plays or The Oedipus Cycle, although each play was actually a part of different trilogy, the other members of which are now lost. Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third actor and thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights such as Aeschylus.^[3]

Life

Sophocles, the son of Sophillus, was a wealthy member of the rural deme (small community) of Colonus Hippius in Attica, which would later become a setting for his plays, and was probably born there.^[4] ^[5] His birth took place a few years before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC: the exact year is unclear, although 497/6 is perhaps most likely.^[6]^[4] His artistic career began in earnest in 468 BC when he took first prize in the Dionysia theatre competition over the reigning master of Athenian drama, Aeschylus.^[4]^[7] The victory came under unusual circumstances. At the time, the remains of the hero Theseus were being removed by Cimon from the isle of Scyros to Athens. Instead of following the custom of choosing judges by lot, the archon asked Cimon and his associates to decide the victor of the contest. Aeschylus soon left for Sicily following this loss to Sophocles. The production probably included Triptolemus.^[5] Although Plutarch says that this was Sophocles' first production, it is now thought that this is an embellishment of the truth and his first production was most likely in 470 BC.^[5]

Sophocles became a man of importance in the public halls of Athens as well as in the theatres. Sophocles was chosen to lead the paean, a choral chant to a god, at the age of 16 celebrating the decisive Greek sea victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. This rather insufficient information about Sophocles’ civic life implies he was a well-liked man who participated in activities in society and showed remarkable artistic ability. He was also elected one of ten strategoi, high executive officials that commanded the armed forces, as a junior colleague of Pericles. Sophocles was born highly wealthy (his father was a wealthy armour manufacturer) and was highly educated throughout his entire life. Early in his career, the politician Cimon might have been one of his patrons, although if he was there was no ill will borne by Pericles, Cimon's rival, when Cimon was ostracized in 461 BC.^[4] In 443/2 he served as one of the Hellenotamiai, or treasurers of Athena, helping to manage the finances of the city during the political ascendancy of Pericles.^[4] In 420 he welcomed and set up an altar for the icon of Asclepius at his house, when the deity was introduced in Athens. For this he was given the posthumous epithet Dexion (receiver) by the Athenians.^[8] He was also elected, in 413 BC, to be one of the commissioners crafting a response to the catastrophic destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.^[9]

Sophocles died at the venerable age of ninety in 406 or 405 BC, having seen within his lifetime both the Greek triumph in the Persian Wars and the terrible bloodletting of the Peloponnesian War.^[4] He was so respected by the Athenians that two plays performed at the Lenea soon after his death paid homage to him, and his unfinished play Oedipus at Colonus was completed and performed years later.^[4] Both Iophon, one of his sons, and a grandson, also called Sophocles, followed in his footsteps to become playwrights themselves.^[10]

Works and legacy

In Sophocles' time, the Greek art of the drama was undergoing rapid and profound change. It had begun with little more than a chorus, but earlier playwrights had added first one and then two actors and thereby shifted the action of the plays away from the chorus.^[11] Among Sophocles' earliest innovations was the addition of a third actor, further reducing the role of the chorus and creating greater opportunity for character development and conflict between characters.^[3] In fact, Aeschylus, who dominated Athenian playwrighting during Sophocles' early career, adopted this third character into his own playwriting towards the end of his life.^[3] It was not until after the death of the old master Aeschylus in 456 BCE that Sophocles became the preeminent playwright in Athens.^[4]

Thereafter, Sophocles emerged victorious in dramatic competitions at 18 Dionysia and 6 Lenaia festivals.^[4] In addition to innovations in the structure of drama, Sophocles' work is known for deeper development of characters than earlier playwrights, whose characters are more two-dimensional and are therefore harder for an audience to relate to.^[3] His reputation was such that foreign rulers invited him to attend their courts, although unlike Aeschylus who died in Sicily, Sophocles never accepted any of these invitations.^[4] Aristotle used Sophocles's Oedipus the King as an example of perfect tragedy, which suggests the high esteem in which his work was held by later Greeks.^[12]

Only two of the seven surviving plays have securely dated first or second performances: Philoctetes (409 BC) and Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC, put on after Sophocles' death by his grandson). Of the others, Electra shows stylistic similarities to these two plays, and so was probably written in the latter part of his career. Ajax, Antigone and The Trachiniae are generally thought to be among his early works, again based on stylistic elements, with Oedipus the King coming in Sophocles' middle period. Most of Sophocles' plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy.^[13]^[14]

The Theban plays (The Oedipus Cycle)

The Theban plays or The Oedipus Cycle consists of three plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King (Oedipus Tyrannus), and Oedipus at Colonus.

They all concern the fate of Thebes during Greece's Mycenaean prehistory. They have often been published under a single cover (for instance: Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing Company, March 2003). However Sophocles wrote the three plays for separate festivals, possibly over a duration of forty years or more. Also he wrote other Theban plays, like The Progeny, which survived only in fragments. Not only are the Theban Plays not a true trilogy (three plays presented as a continuous narrative) but they are not even an intentional series.

The tale of Oedipus takes up the themes of being trapped by fate and family. Oedipus, in Ancient Greek mythology killed his father and married his mother without knowledge that they were his parents. His family is fated to be doomed for three generations.

In Sophocles’ first drama of the trilogy, Oedipus the King, the main character, Oedipus, becomes the ruler of Thebes after solving the riddle of the sphinx. However before solving this riddle, Oedipus had met at a crossroads a man accompanied by servants, Oedipus and the man got in an argument and Oedipus killed the man. Oedipus continued on to Thebes to marry the widowed Queen, although unknown to him, his mother. Oedipus eventually learns that his mother and father gave him up when he was just an infant in fear that he would kill his father and fulfill the Delphic Oracle’s prophecy of him. Upon learning of the complete prophecy, his mother, Jocasta, realizes the incest and commits suicide. However, they had four children before this occurred.

Sophocles’ drama, Antigone, focuses on Oedipus’ daughter Antigone. Antigone is faced with the choice of allowing her brother Polyneices’ body to get eaten by savage dogs or bury him and face death. The king of the land, Creon, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices for he was a traitor to the city. Antigone decides to bury his body and face the consequences of her actions. Creon sentences her to death. Eventually, Creon is convinced to free Antigone from her punishment, but his decision comes too late and Antigone commits suicide. Her suicide triggers the suicide of two others close to King Creon, his son, Haemon, who loved Antigone, and his wife who commits suicide after losing her only son. Antigone focuses on the conflicting duties of civic versus spiritual loyalties.

Other plays

Ajax focuses on the prideful hero of the Trojan War. He is driven to treachery and eventually his own death. Ajax becomes gravely upset when Achilles’ armor is presented to Odysseus instead of himself. However, Odysseus persuades the kings Menelaus and Agamemnon to grant Ajax a proper burial.

Fragmentary plays

Fragments of The Tracking Satyrs (Ichneutae) were discovered in Egypt in 1907.^[16] These amount to about half of the play, making it the best preserved satyr play after Euripides' Cyclops, which survives in its entirety.^[16] Fragments of The Progeny (Epigonoi) were discovered in April 2005 by classicists at Oxford University with the help of infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging. The tragedy tells the story of the siege of Thebes.^[17] A number of other Sophoclean works have survived only in fragments, including:

Sophocles' opinion of himself

There is a passage of Plutarch's tract De Profectibus in Virtute 7 in which Sophocles discusses his own growth as a writer. A likely source of this material for Plutarch was the Epidemiae of Ion of Chios, a book that recorded many conversations of Sophocles. This book is a likely candidate to have contained Sophocles' discourse on his own development because Ion was a friend of Sophocles, and the book is known to have been used by Plutarch.^[18] Though some interpretations of Plutarch's words suggest that Sophocles says that he imitated Aeschylus, the translation does not fit grammatically, nor does the interpretation that Sophocles said that he was making fun of Aeschylus' works. C. M. Bowra argues for the following translation of the line: "After practising to the full the bigness of Aeschylus, then the painful ingenuity of my own invention, now in the third stage I am changing to the kind of diction with is most expressive of character and best."^[19]

Here Sophocles says that he has completed a stage of Aeschylus' work, meaning that he went through a phase of imitating Aeschylus' style but is finished with that. Sophocles' opinion of Aeschylus was mixed. He certainly respected him enough to imitate his work early on in his career, but he had reservations about Aeschylus' style,^[20] and thus did not keep his imitation up. Sophocles' first stage, in which he imitated Aeschylus, is marked by "Aeschylean pomp in the language".^[21] Sophocles' second stage was entirely his own. He introduced new ways of evoking feeling out of an audience, like in his Ajax when he is mocked by Athene, then the stage is emptied so that he may commit suicide alone.^[22] Sophocles mentions a third stage, distinct from the other two, in his discussion of his development. The third stage pays more heed to diction. His characters spoke in a way that was more natural to them and more expressive of their individual character feelings.^[23]

Notes

^ Suda (ed. Finkel et al.): s.v. Σοφοκλῆς.
^ Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Freeman: 247
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j Sommerstein (2002): 41
^ ^a ^b ^c Sommerstein (2007): xi
^ Lloyd-Jones 1994: 7
^ Freeman: 246
^ Clinton, Kevin "The Epidauria and the Arrival of Asclepius in Athens", in Ancient Greek Cult Practice from the Epigraphical Evidence, edited by R. Hägg, Stockholm, 1994.
^ Lloyd-Jones: 12-13
^ Sommerstein (2002): 41-42
^ Freeman: 242-243
^ Aristotle. Ars Poetica.
^ Lloyd-Jones 1994: 8-9
^ Scullion, pp. 85–86, rejects attempts to date Antigone to shortly before 441/0 based on an anecdote that the play led to Sophocles' election as general. On other grounds, he cautiously suggests c. 450 BC.
^ Freeman: 247–248
^ ^a ^b Seaford: 1361
^ Murray, Matthew, "Newly Readable Oxyrhynchus Papyri Reveal Works by Sophocles, Lucian, and Others", Theatermania, 18 April 2005. Retrieved 9 July 2007.
^ Bowra: 386
^ Bowra: 401
^ Bowra: 389
^ Bowra: 392
^ Bowra: 396
^ Bowra: 385–401

Contents