Although records from the ancient world are fragmentary Sophocles is generally credited with authorship of more than 100 plays, including Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. These three plays, known as The Oedipus Trilogy, were written separately, but they are often read and studied together. The order in which they are generally studied is Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, but the third play was written and performed first.
Only a small fraction of the work credited to Sophocles survives, including the three complete plays discussed here, four other complete plays, and fragments of about 100 other works.
Standard biographies of Sophocles agree that he was born in the year 496 B.C., in Colonus, and lived to be 90 years old. Raised in a wealthy family, he was well educated for his time and enjoyed all the advantages of his social status. His family’s connections, combined with the prestige he earned as a public figure and as a playwright, won him honor and fame during his lifetime. Then and now, Sophocles ranked as one of the leading dramatists of the ancient world. His work is studied today for its tragic power, its dramatic strengths and its human richness.
Sophocles first became known as a leading author of the Greek theater when he defeated the reigning playwright, Aeschylus, in a public contest in 468 B.C. The public playwriting contests were the ancient cultural equivalent of our Academy Awards, Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prize all rolled into one.
Sophocles went on to win 20 first-place prizes in Athenian drama competitions, making him a leading cultural figure of his time. The theater of the ancient world grew out of religious festivals, and the surviving scripts have a liturgical elegance and formality. The plays of Sophocles are firmly rooted in the formal traditions of his era.
The main themes of the plays Sophocles wrote—human strength, human weakness, divine power and divine will, fate and free will—are still important in modern literature and popular culture. The spectacle of a hugely gifted yet greatly flawed human being struggling to do the right thing is still as theatrically powerful now as it was when Sophocles crafted his versions of the timeless human story. Whether the tragically flawed heroes of modern entertainment make their stands in the arenas of politics, science fiction or opera, the mighty are still brought low by hubris, or pride, and fate is still inescapable.
There is one major difference between ancient entertainment and the popular culture we consume today. That difference is not Hollywood’s wondrous technology; what’s different is the scripts. From movies to television sit-coms, today’s dramas typically have happy endings. It was not always thus.
Sophocles worked from the premise that the mechanisms of drama must inexorably deliver characters to destruction. The inevitability of the journey was what made it tragic.
Watching these tragedies build toward their inescapable conclusions, audiences experienced powerful, primal emotions—grief, pity and fear—in the controlled setting of the theater. What they got from the experience was the ritualistic purification and release called catharsis of emotion.
