his sons, were mentioned by Homer, and several epics on this Theban cycle are known to have survived past the fifth centuryb.c.e. Knowledge of these epics is scanty, but Sophoclean innovations in this mythic cycle may include the blinding of Oedipus, the dramatic use of a local Athenian legend concerning the death of Oedipus in Sophocles’ native deme of Colonus, and the development of the story of Antigone.

Antigone

Antigone concerns the events after the deaths of her brothers Eteocles and Polyneices and her decision to bury Polyneices despite the decree of Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, that the body remain unburied as a lesson to traitors. Sophocles begins the play with a dramatic prologue in which Antigone announces her decision to her sister Ismene, asks for her help and is refused, and finally determines in anger to act alone. This scene between the sisters, which Sophocles later skillfully imitated in Electra, demonstrates Sophocles’ ability to employ action to develop his characters. Absent are the long, choral, narrative beginnings of Aeschylus’s Persai (472 b.c.e.; The Persians, 1777) and Agamemnn (Agamemnon, 1777; one of three parts of Oresteia, 458 b.c.e.), and the expository prologues of Euripides. Within one hundred lines of dialogue, Sophocles not only has significantly advanced the action but also has vividly depicted Antigone’s character. Antigone’s stubbornness, isolation, and strong sense of self-righteous nobility are well developed in this scene and help to define not only her character but also that of the Sophoclean hero in general. Much like the Homeric hero, especially Achilles, the Sophoclean hero projects arete, an untranslatable Greek word implying a “pattern of virtue.” Arete sets the hero apart from other people and is inevitably self-destructive through its greatness. Thus, from the outset, Antigone is determined to face death for what she believes to be the noble course of action.

By contrast to the gloom of the prologue, the parodos, or choral entrance song, is a jubilant victory song celebrating the end of the siege of Thebes by Polyneices and is a striking example of Sophoclean manipulation of mood through choral passages. The chorus in Sophocles is usually considered to be a mouthpiece for the playwright’s own views, but the interest in dramatic effect that Sophocles demonstrates in this chorus and others should be sufficient warning against reading such direct authorial intrusion into the dramatic text. Therefore, the chorus’s Aeschylean sentiments in the parodos, that an insolent—that is, hubristic—Polyneices has been justly punished by Zeus, cannot necessarily be applied to Antigone’s situation or to Sophocles’ belief. Rather, the Sophoclean chorus tends to speak in character and with little extradramatic insight. Antigone’s chorus of elders express their own views in the parodos, views that serve as an excellent dramatic transition from Antigone in the prologue to Creon in the next scene.

In the first episode, Sophocles once again moves events along swiftly while developing character, this time that of Creon. Hardly has Creon finished his long and self-revealing inaugural address as ruler of Thebes and announced his decree concerning Polyneices, than a messenger arrives to report that this decree has already been disobeyed. Hegel used Creon’s insistence in this scene on the primacy of the state and positive law over the individual to argue that the meaning of Antigone lay in the inevitable resolution or synthesis of Creon’s conflict with Antigone, who stands for the right of the individual and the family and for the superiority of divine law. This interpretation of Antigone, however, is Hegelian, not Sophoclean, for there is no real synthesis in Antigone. Rather, there is a constant affirmation of the righteousness of the heroine that is evident even in this first episode, in which the messenger’s suggestion that certain bizarre circumstances surrounding Polyneices’ burial may hint at divine complicity is roundly rejected by Creon. Divine sanction for Antigone’s action is inherent in the ancient Greek belief that all human corpses must be buried, a law to be challenged only under pain of punishment by the gods.

The choral ode that follows, often called the “Ode to Man,” is probably the most famous ode of Sophocles, if not of all Greek tragedy. With its thematic links with Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) and Aeschylus’s Chophoroi (Libation Bearers, 1777; one of three parts of Oresteia, 458 b.c.e.), as well as its philosophical connections with Protagoras and other thinkers of that time, this ode is a poetic statement of the wonder of humankind, of the ability of the human intellect to surmount the limitations of nature, and of the dangers inherent in such a powerful intelligence. Application of this ode to the dramatic events of Antigone is ambiguous. Clearly, the chorus is thinking of the unknown lawbreaker who buried Polyneices and whose deeds are a good example of humankind’s dangerous intellect. As early as Homer, a hero’s greatness had led to self-destruction, and this is no less true of Antigone. On the other hand, later events in the play will prove the relevance of the chorus’s words as well to Creon, whose decree has dishonored the “sworn right of the gods.” The multiplicity of interpretations that can be applied to this ode enhances its dramatic value and emphasizes once again Sophocles’ skilled use of the chorus.

The “Ode to Man” also illustrates the power of Sophocles’ so-called diptych structure and shows the futility of searching for a single main character in this or several other Sophoclean plays. Antigone and Creon complement each other. Antigone could not be Antigone without Creon, who, like Antigone, possesses some of the qualities of a Sophoclean hero, including stubbornness, isolation, and a self-righteous nobility. Creon’s encounter with his son Haemon in the third episode is particularly revealing of the king’s character. The scene is a brilliant combination of set speeches by both Creon and Haemon followed by rapid and emotional stichomythia, or line-by-line interchange, between father and son. This dialogue reveals Creon’s stubborn inability to yield to reason and a lack of understanding of and isolation from his son Haemon that lead inevitably to disaster.

Haemon’s appearance in the play may have been another Sophoclean innovation in the myth. As Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, Haemon serves an an excellent illuminator not only of Creon’s but also of Antigone’s character. Sophocles does not present Haemon’s relationship to Antigone in a romantic manner; the two are certainly not “lovers” in the modern sense because they never meet onstage. If the manuscript attribution of line 572 to Ismene is correct, Antigone never even speaks of her betrothed. Rather, Haemon’s loyalty for Antigone, even unto death, serves as another, and perhaps the most vivid, proof of the heroine’s isolation from all human contact in pursuit of her noble goal.

Antigone ends as quickly as it began, with a decision to free Antigone forced on Creon by the seer Teiresias, but not before it is too late. In rapid succession, the suicides of Antigone, Haemon, and his mother, Eurydice, are announced, and Creon returns in the exodos, or last scene, as a broken man. It is Creon, not Antigone, who comes closest to fitting the requirements of an Aristotelian tragic hero, with a peripeteia, or “fall,” caused by hamartia, a “tragic flaw.” Like both Xerxes in The Persians and Agamemnon in the first play of Oresteia, Creon’s hamartia may be a form of faulty thinking that is punished by the gods. (Creon himself realizes this and uses the word “hamartemata.”) By contrast, Antigone has no true peripeteia; while she does die, she dies as a Sophoclean hero in the glory and isolation of her self-conscious nobility. An Aristotelian tragic hero can thus be found in this play, but only at Antigone’s expense.

Oedipus Tyrannus

Oedipus Tyrannus concerns an earlier stage in the same myth, with the discovery by Oedipus, Antigone’s father, that he has fulfilled a Delphic oracle by unwittingly killing his father, Laius, and marrying his mother, Jocasta. The play is perhaps better known by its Latin title, Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King, but the Greek title, while probably not Sophoclean (fifth century b.c.e. playwrights apparently did not title their plays, which were usually identified by their first lines), is more dramatically accurate. Technically, the Greek word tyrannos, means not a “harsh ruler” but an “unconstitutional” one. At the beginning of the play, Oedipus, having gained power by solving the Sphinx’s riddle, rules Thebes as a true tyrannos; yet, dramatic events prove that Oedipus is also Thebes’s true basileus or “king” because he is really the son of the late King Laius. This irony in Oedipus’s situation is the focus of the drama, which was so admired by Aristotle for its depiction of peripeteia caused directly by anagnorisis or “recognition.” Sophocles further developed this irony, if not by actually inventing the blinding of Oedipus (who does not blind himself in Homer), then by using the theme of sight and blindness to great dramatic effect in the famous scene with Teiresias, in which the blind prophet is forced by Oedipus to contrast his own true knowledge with the ruler’s ignorance; Teiresias tells Oedipus: “You have eyes but cannot see in what evil you are.” In an ironic sense, then, the action of the play is directed toward an Oedipus, who sees with his eyes but not with his mind, becoming like Teiresias, who sees with his mind but not with his eyes. Oedipus Tyrannus is a true tragedy of discovery.

Many of the same dramatic skills found in Antigone can also be seen in Oedipus Tyrannus. In this play, too, Sophocles combines rapid action and dialogue with careful character development. One striking difference between Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, however, is structural: Oedipus Tyrannus lacks the diptych form and vacillation between two main characters that are found in Antigone. Rather, Oedipus Tyrannus is focused entirely on Oedipus and the development of his personality. This development is accomplished through a series of dialogues between Oedipus and most of the other dramatis personae, beginning in the prologue and not ending until Oedipus learns the fatal truth of his identity in the fourth episode. In these scenes, the qualities of a Sophoclean hero are again and again revealed in Oedipus: in his heroic intransigence, his determination to discover the murderer of Laius and his own identity, in his sense of nobility and self-worth, in his angry alienation from all who try to help. Oedipus’s own heroic nature—like that of Antigone—leads him on to self-destruction.

Aristotle’s admiration of Oedipus Tyrannus as the ideal tragedy has, in a sense, been a Trojan horse for this play, because it has directed too much scholarly attention to Aristotle’s interpretation of the play, an interpretation that is more Aristotle’s reaction to Plato’s prohibition of tragedy in Politeia (388-368 b.c.e.; Republic, 1701) than it is a close reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. Aristotle sought to counter Plato’s objections to tragedy by making Oedipus into a morally satisfying character, by seeing in Oedipus a man, neither outstandingly virtuous nor evil, who falls into misfortune through hamartia. By doing this, Aristotle has created several thorny questions for the play: Does Oedipus really have a tragic flaw? Could he have acted any differently and still have been himself? Finally, is Oedipus of only average virtue? The Sophoclean answer to all these questions could only have been negative. Oedipus is not an ordinary person. He is the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle and a man of superior intelligence. He is a man of outstanding virtue. In short, he is a Sophoclean hero. To have acted other than he did would have meant a denial of his heroic identity, a denial of himself. This heroic firmness is a remarkably constant theme in the Sophoclean corpus. It can be found in the suicide of Ajax, in the desperate love of Deianeira, in the civil disobedience of Antigone, in the inquest of Oedipus the tyrannus, in the hatred of Electra, in the suffering of Philoctetes, and in the mysterious death of Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles’ primary contribution to the history of drama, then, is his masterful focus on character development, and, in particular, his portrayal of the unyielding hero.