| Sophocles' first victory in the dramatic competitions at the festival of Dionysus came in 468 B.C. He would have been between twenty-five and thirty. For the next sixty years and more he wrote and directed over a hundred plays, seven of which survive. His last, the Oedipus at Colonus, was produced posthumously in 401 B.C., five years after his death. Until midcentury, like most playwrights, he also acted in his plays. Aristotle (Poetics, chap. 4) credits him with adding the third actor and with the introduction of painted scenery, innovations already assimilated by the time of the Oresteia (458 B.C.). If we may believe the tradition, Sophocles was actively involved in the political and religious life of fifth-century Athens, perhaps serving as a state treasurer, general, and, in the crisis following the Sicilian disaster, select committeeman. A priest, he was particularly associated with the reception into Athens of a cult for Asclepius. Although ancient biographical learning is seldom completely trustworthy, Sophocles' popularity and civic-mindedness seem more secure than most such traditions. |
| Sophocles' career began when Aeschylus was still writing and directing for the theater, and for the last fifty years of his life he competed with Euripides, who died in 406, less than a year before Sophocles himself. Born a little before the first Persian invasion, Sophocles lived to see the rise of the Athenian empire and only missed by a scant two years witnessing the final defeat of his city in the Peloponnesian War (431404 B.C.). He was the friend of Herodotus and Pericles, watched the building of the Parthenon, attended the plays of Aristophanes, and was a contemporary of the Sophists and Socrates. At least four of the extant plays ( |
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