ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORLD WRITERS BEGINNINGS THROUGH THE 13TH CENTURY

Dr. Thierry Boucquey

GENERAL EDITOR Department of French Scripps College Claremont University Consortium

Dr. Gary Johnson

ADVISER Department of English University of Findlay

Dr. Nina Chordas

ADVISER Academic Programs University of Alaska Southwest

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Sophocles

playwright Sophocles, son of the wealthy Sophilus of Colonus, was born near Athens. He was good-looking and a talented dancer and musician who led public victory hymns as a teenager. His lyre instructor was Lamprus, who was a widely celebrated master of traditional Greek music. Sophocles true love, however, was the theater, and after a few appearances as an actor in his own youthful productions, he devoted himself entirely to the writing of Greek tragedies. Sophocles was widely admired and his work was a popular success. His first of 24 competitive dramatic victories came in 468 B.C., when he bested the venerable AESCHYLUS in a theatrical contest. He penned nearly 125 dramasof which a mere seven surviveand supplanted Aeschylus as the poet of Athens. Sophocles was also active in public life, serving as treasurer of the Athenian Empire (443442 B.C.) and as general (441440 B.C.). During the unsuccessful revolt of Samos around 412 B.C., he was appointed to a board of commissioners in the aftermath of the doomed Sicilian expedition. He was also a lay priest in the cult of Asclepius, a deity of healing, and was associated with other wellknown men of letters, including the historian HERODOTUS ; Archelaus, a natural scientist and teacher of SOCRATES; and the many-talented and prolific Ion of Chios. Upon the death of his fellow tragedian EURIPIDES in 406 B.C., Sophocles expressed his respect and grief by clothing actors in mourning dress during a rehearsal for a drama competition. He himself died not long after, and his play Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously by his grandson. Yale professor Eric A. Havelock writes that Sophocles was remembered and celebrated as an example of the fortunate life, genial, accomplished, and serene. Sophoclean tragedy is tense, startling, and disquieting. The cast of characters tends to be comparatively small, and the individuals personal natures are boiled down to the essentials, so the significance of each action is intensified. Action in

Sophocles (ca. 496 B.C.ca. 405 B.C.)

Sophocles plays is always indicative of character. Causality is a prominent theme, with separate factors often combining to produce to an inevitable result. Sophocles tragic vision is that life exists only at the price of suffering. Ajax was produced around 442 B.C. and is thought to be Sophocles earliest extant play. Its title character is a Trojan warrior whose bitterness over losing the armor of the legendary Achilles to a rival drives him mad, and he slaughters a flock of sheep, believing they are his Greek foes. When Ajax regains his reason, shame drives him to take his own life. His compatriots are persuaded to give him an honorable burial in a typically Sophoclean scene that sees an outcast reconciled with God and society. The Women of Trachis (ca. 420s B.C.) is one of the few Greek tragedies that features Heracles (Hercules in Latin). Although a stunningly popular mythological figure, Heracles was rarely a theatrical subject. The play takes place during the last of Heracles famed 12 labors. His wife is duped into giving him a poisoned garment that so scalds his skin he chooses to be burned alive on a pyre. In Electra (ca. 415 B.C.), the playwright tells of the familial curse on the House of Atreus that Aeschylus so thoroughly dramatized. The title character in Philoctetes (ca. 409 B.C.) is a Greek hero who has angered the gods by accidentally stumbling onto one of their sacred sites. He suffers divine retribution but is mysteriously rescued from his punishment. Critics, including ARISTOTLE, have censured the plays use of the artificial device of DEUS EX MACHINA to bring the play to a conclusion. Oedipus the King (ca. 427 B.C.) dramatizes the deeply tragic yet fascinating story of the King of Thebes and how he unwittingly brought pestilence to his realm and ruin to his family and himself. In Oedipus at Colonus, the erstwhile sovereignaged, exiled, blinded, and brokenis sent by the gods to his death, but not before finding redemption. Produced at roughly the same time as Ajax, Antigone follows one of the daughters of the late king, whose only crime is wishing to see her slain brothers buried properly, and who pays for it with her life.

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These three productions are collectively known as the Theban Plays.

Critical Analysis
As Oedipus the King opens, a group of suppliants stands before the royal palace beseeching their ruler to save Thebes from a deadly blight that has ravaged the city: plants are not bearing fruit, livestock are sick, and women are barren. A priest reminds Oedipus that he rescued the city once before, directly upon his arrival in Thebes, when he freed the people from the tyranny of the cruel Sphinx by solving the beasts riddle. (The riddle asks what walks on four legs in the morning, two in midday, and three at night, and the answer is Man: as a crawling infant, as an adult, and as an elderly person with a cane.) Oedipuss brother-in-law, who has just paid tribute at the temple of Apollo, reports that, according to the god, the land has been defiled by the presence of the slayer of King Laius, who was killed by robbers while in an embassy. Shortly thereafter, Oedipus muses how, having restored order in Thebes, he had won the hand of Laiuss widowed queen, Jocasta. The murderer must be located and either exiled or executed, according to the report; only then will Thebes be purified and fruitfulness restored. Oedipus promises that anyone who comes forth with knowledge of the homicide will not be harmed, but all Thebans are forbidden to shelter the guilty man. As for the killer himself, Oedipus proclaims:
Upon the murderer I invoke this curse whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of manymay he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearth I pray that I myself may feel my curse.
(ll. 246251)

that he would die at the hands of their son; so when a son was born, they left him abandoned on a hillside. Oedipus, with growing dread, recalls that, although he was reared by the king and queen of Corinth and considered them his parents, he was once accused by a drunken dinner guest of being illegitimate. Furthermore, an invocation of Apollo foretold his doom: to murder his father and lie with his mother. With horror, monstrous realization dawns: Oedipus was the abandoned son. He had encountered Laius that fateful day and murdered him in a fit of pique, then married his wifeOedipuss mother. A tortured Jocasta hangs herself, while Oedipus puts out his own eyes with her brooches and banishes himself:
I do not know with what eyes I could look upon my father when I die and go under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother those two to whom I have done things deserving worse punishment than hanging. . . . And my city, its towers and sacred places of the Gods, of these I robbed my miserable self when I commanded all to drive him out, the criminal since proved by God impure and of the race of Laius.
(ll. 13721383)

Little by little, the awful saga unfolds. Jocasta reveals that, years ago, an oracle had warned Laius

Sophoclean audiences would have been familiar with the tale of Oedipus, so the tragedians task was to make the narrative interesting in a new way. He did this by introducing irony into every possible situation to create intense dramatic tension. Oedipus, the famed solver of riddles, is stumped by the circumstances of his own birth, marriage, and kingship. He is symbolically blinded by pride and arrogance when he is literally a seeing man, and after he sees the truth, he blinds himself physically. He accuses a blind prophet, a seer who grasps that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, of lying in an effort to seize the throne.

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However, like Sophocles other protagonists, Oedipus is shown ultimately to be a man of some honor, as he refuses to take his own life, but rather accepts the fate that he himself meted out and the gods ordained. A full study of the influence of Sophocles on modern literature has yet to be written, according to Harvard professor Ruth Scodel. The task would be immense, touching on the histories of scholarship, reading and education. . . . While works which use explicitly Sophoclean themes are not hard to find, often those where Sophocles has been used less obviously have used him more profoundly . . . . At once satisfying, disturbing, and frightening, the Sophoclean world seems inexhaustible. English Versions of Works by Sophocles
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone. Translated by Robert Bagg. Introduction by Mary Bagg. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Sophocles I. Translated by David Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Theban Plays. Translated by Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Works about Sophocles

Beer, Josh. Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy. Oxford, U.K.: Greenwood Publishing, 2004. Budelmann, Felix. Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication and Involvement. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Scodel, Ruth. Sophocles. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

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