Sophocles

Born around 496 BC in Colonus, a village just outside Athens, Sophocles was the son of Sophillus, a wealthy arms manufacturer. Handsome and accomplished, he was chosen at sixteen to lead the chorus celebrating the Greek victory at Salamis. He wrote his first plays in the 460s BC and went on to compose more than 120 dramas, of which only seven survive complete: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. He dominated the dramatic competitions at the festivals of Dionysus for nearly fifty years, winning twenty-four times in thirty entries and never finishing lower than second place, a record that neither Aeschylus nor Euripides could approach. His most celebrated innovation was the addition of a third actor, which allowed for more complex dramatic interactions and reduced the role of the chorus. Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle held up in the Poetics as the model of tragic construction, remains the most analyzed play in Western literature. Antigone dramatized the conflict between divine law and the state with a clarity that has made it a touchstone for political resistance from Hegel to the French Resistance. He served Athens not only as a playwright but as a public citizen, he held the office of strategos (general), served as a treasurer of the Delian League, and was appointed to a special commission after the Sicilian disaster in 413 BC. He died in 406 or 405 BC, reportedly at the age of ninety, and Dionysus himself was said to have appeared to the Spartans besieging Athens to request that the playwright be given proper funeral rites.