Sophocles biography facts

Owing to his practical gifts with language he was involved in negotiations with the allies of Chios and Samos. During the Peloponnesian War he was one of the generals.

Sophocles biography facts: Sophocles, the son of a wealthy

In B. He also filled a priestly office. The charm and the refinement of his character seem to have won him many friends. Among them was the historian Herodotus. He was also deemed by antiquity as a man especially beloved by the gods, particularly by Asclepius, god of medicine, whose priest he probably was, and who was said to have granted him health and vigor of mind to extreme old age.

By the Athenian Nicostrate he had a son, Iophon, who won some repute as a tragic poet, and by Theoris of Sicyon another son, Ariston, father of another Sophocles who gained fame for himself by writing tragedies of his own, and afterwards by the production of his grandfather's dramas. There was a legend that a quarrel arose between Sophocles and his son Iophon, on account of his preference for this grandson, and that, when summoned by Iophon before the court as weak in mind and unable to manage his affairs, he obtained his own absolute acquittal by reading the chorus on his native place in the Oedipus Coloneus [Plutarch, Moralia, p.

The tales of his death, in B. According to one account, he was choked by a grape. His first play won the playwriting competition at the Dionysia theatre festival, beating Aeschylus himself. Continuing to write plays he wrote more than Every play he entered in competitions won either first or second prize. One of the plays, Oedipus the King is not only his most famous but also arguably the greatest Greek drama.

Electra is just about equally famous. In subsequent competitions, Sophocles claimed the sophocles biography facts place 20 times without ever ranking third. Sophocles Playwright Country: Greece. Contact About Privacy. Charles Vildrac. Wendy Wasserstein. Iakovos Kambanellis. In Antigonethe protagonist is Oedipus' daughter, Antigone. She is faced with the choice of allowing her brother Polyneices' body to remain unburied, outside the city walls, exposed to the ravages of wild animals, or to 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 persuaded to free Antigone from her punishment, but his decision comes too late and Antigone commits suicide.

Sophocles biography facts: Sophocles (c. / – winter

Her suicide triggers the suicide of two others close to King Creon: his son, Haemon, who was to wed Antigone, and his wife, Eurydice, who commits suicide after losing her only surviving son. The plays were written across thirty-six years of Sophocles' career and were not composed in chronological order, but instead were written in the order AntigoneOedipus Rexand Oedipus at Colonus.

Nor were they composed as a trilogy — a group of plays to be performed together, but are the remaining parts of three different groups of plays. As a result, there are some inconsistencies: notably, Creon is the undisputed king at the end of Oedipus Rex and, in consultation with Apollo, single-handedly makes the decision to expel Oedipus from Thebes.

Creon is also instructed to look after Oedipus' daughters Antigone and Ismene at the end of Oedipus Rex. By contrast, in the other plays there is some struggle with Oedipus' sons Eteocles and Polynices in regard to the succession. In Oedipus at ColonusSophocles attempts to work these inconsistencies into a coherent whole: Ismene explains that, in light of their tainted family lineage, her brothers were at first willing to cede the throne to Creon.

Nevertheless, they eventually decided to take charge of the monarchy, with each brother disputing the other's right to succeed. In addition to being in a clearly more powerful position in Oedipus at ColonusEteocles and Polynices are also culpable: they consent l. In addition to the three Theban plays, there are four surviving plays by Sophocles: AjaxWomen of TrachisElectraand Philoctetesthe last of which won first prize in BC.

Ajax focuses on the proud hero of the Trojan War, Telamonian Ajaxwho is driven to treachery and eventually suicide. Despite their enmity toward him, Odysseus persuades the kings Menelaus and Agamemnon to grant Ajax a proper burial. The Women of Trachis named for the Trachinian women who make up the chorus dramatizes Deianeira 's accidentally killing Heracles after he had completed his famous twelve labors.

Tricked into thinking it is a love charm, Deianeira applies poison to an article of Heracles' clothing; this poisoned robe causes Heracles to die an excruciating death. Upon learning the truth, Deianeira commits suicide. Electra corresponds roughly to the plot of Aeschylus' Libation Bearers. It details how Electra and Orestes avenge their father Agamemnon 's murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

Philoctetes retells the story of Philoctetesan archer who had been abandoned on Lemnos by the sophocles biography facts of the Greek fleet while on the way to Troy. After learning that they cannot win the Trojan War without Philoctetes' bow, the Greeks send Odysseus and Neoptolemus to retrieve him; due to the Greeks' earlier treachery, however, Philoctetes refuses to rejoin the army.

It is only Heracles' deus ex machina appearance that persuades Philoctetes to go to Troy. Although more than titles of plays associated with Sophocles are known and presented below, [ 43 ] little is known of the precise dating of most of them. Philoctetes is known to have been written in BC, and Oedipus at Colonus is known to have only been performed in BC, posthumously, at the initiation of Sophocles' grandson.

Sophocles biography facts: Sophocles was an ancient

The convention on writing plays for the Greek festivals was to submit them in tetralogies of three tragedies along with one satyr play. Along with the unknown dating of the vast majority of more than plays, it is also largely unknown how the plays were grouped. It is, however, known that the three plays referred to in the modern era as the "Theban plays" were never performed together in Sophocles' own lifetime, and are therefore not a trilogy which they are sometimes erroneously seen as.

Fragments of Ichneutae Tracking Satyrs were discovered in Egypt in The tragedy tells the story of the second siege of Thebes. 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; but a Hellenistic dialogue about tragedy, in which Sophocles appeared as a character, is also plausible.

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 which is most expressive of character and best. 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.