Sophocles, the Athenian tragic poet, was born in 496 B.C., and died in 405 at the age of ninety-one. His father's name was Sophillus, and his native district was Colonus, a suburban quarter on the banks of the Cephissus, much frequented by the knights and wealthy citizens of Athens. He partook in full measure of the highest education of his time, and was especially distinguished in music, which he learned from Lauprocles. At sixteen he was chosen to lead the choros of youths who celebrated the naval victory of Salamis (480). At the age of twenty-eight he came to the front by entering into competition with Æschylus, his elder by thirty years, whose pre-eminence as a tragic poet had long been undisputed. The judges on this occasion, according to an oft-repeated tradition, were Cimon and his fellow-generals, just returned from Scyros. The younger poet was preferred; and his triumph had a decisive influence on the future of the tragic art. For not only are the mature works of Sophocles and those of Euripides, his younger brother in poetry, the fulfilment of the promise then given, but the Orestean trilogy of Æschylus, in which Greek tragedy attained its highest limit, was brought out ten years after this, and bears unmistakable proofs of the impression which the art of Sophocles had made upon his elder and greater rival. Sophocles never forsook Athens as both Æschylus and Euripides did, but he was repeatedly employed on embassies to other Grecian states, and in the Samian war of 440 he was appointed general in a joint command with Pericles. This choice is said to have been due to the success of the Antigone, one of the earliest of the poet's seven extant plays, as the Edipus Coloneus and Philoctetes are certainly the latest. The probable order is Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Edipus Tyrannus, Trachinæ, Edipus Coloneus, Philoctetes. Less than a tithe of the work of Sophocles remains to us; but of the seven plays each one has superlative excellences, and stands prominently forth amongst the master-works of the human spirit. The characteristics of Sophocles are a dramatic structure all but faultless, the combination of wonderful subtlety with intense fire, and of a noble ideal with truth and naturalness. His subjects were necessarily drawn from Hellenic legend. His motives in selecting them were mainly artistic, but to some extent also religious or patriotic. In his treatment of them he never loses sight of the main principles of tragic art. His method turns largely on pathetic contrasts (1) of situation, (2) of character.
(1) The change of fortune which forms the crisis of each play is often rendered more impressive through the profound unconsciousness, at the beginning of the action, of the persons who are to be affected by it. The case of Edipus is the capital illustration of this remark; but it applies also to Creon in the Antigone, to Electra, Deianira, Philoctetes, and to the chorus in the Ajax and Edipus Coloneus. Sometimes the chief agent, Antigone for example, is fully conscious of the real position of things, but in every case appearance and reality are strongly opposed.
(2) The persons in Sophocles are most skilfully adapted to the main situation and action of each play. The addition of a third actor to the two that had formerly sufficed enabled the poet not only to contrast opposed natures, such as Antigone and Creon, but to introduce finer shades of difference, as between Antigone and Ismene, or Agamemnon and Odysseus. Perhaps the most notable instance of such delicate portraiture occurs in the Philoctetes, where Neoptolemus, the ingenuous youth, is contrasted equally with the politic Odysseus and with the hero of the play, in whom a generous nature has been embittered by ill-treatment and solitude.
The Ajax may be described as the tragedy of wounded honour. Ajax and Odysseus had recovered the dead body of Achilles, whose armour, the miraculous work of Hephestus, was then awarded not to Ajax, the most valiant of the surviving Greeks, but to Odysseus, the wisest. Half-maddened by repulse, Ajax would have assassinated the generals; but, to defend Odysseus, Athena made the Telamonian warrior wholly mad, and turned his violence against the flocks and herds belonging to the army. On awakening from his delirium, finding his honour lost, he resolves on death. Agamemnon would have refused him burial; but Teucer vindicates him, and Odysseus, with becoming magnanimity, ends the strife. Tecmessa, the captive bride, who in her helplessness defies the Argives and protects the hero's child, is one of those female characters which Sophocles portrays with so much skill.
In the Antigone the claims of piety and natural affection are seemingly overborne by the exaggerated assertion of state-authority in the person of the ruler, but in the end it is the ruler who succumbs. The virgin martyr is vindicated.
In the Electra, in place of the fiery Theban maiden, the poet represents the faithful endurance of the Argive princess, who in the Oresteia of Æschylus had played a subordinate part, but here rises to the height of female heroism.
The Edipus Tyrannus was regarded by Aristotle as the chef d'œuvre of tragedy, and nowhere else is there to be found an equal combination of constructive ingenuity with tragic power. The hero is represented as the most loyal and affectionate, but also the most passionate, and, partly for that reason, the most unfortunate of men. Doomed to misery in his very birth, he appears to himself and others at the opening of the play to be at the height of prosperity. A stranger, he has earned the affection of Thebes, and lightly he undertakes the quest imposed by the god. In the sequel he discovers that he is the forbidden child of the king—whom he has slain—and of the queen—whom he has married! The poignancy and pathetic interest which Sophocles extracts from this unnatural story is a triumph of poetic skill. In the construction of the piece the employment of the Theban slave, who had been charged with the exposure of the child, and had also witnessed the death of Laius, is especially noteworthy.
The subject of the Trachinæ is the death of Heracles, but the fatal act of Deianira in sending the poisoned robe (which she believes to be a charm for recovering the affection of her lord) forms the central motive. She is one of the most charming of poetic creations, 'the rival of Imogen in purity, of Katharine of Aragon in her great patience, and of both in wifely spirit.'
There was an interval probably of at least ten years between the Edipus Tyrannus and the composition of the Edipus at Colonus, which indeed is said to have been exhibited for the first time only after the death of the poet. Meanwhile the genius of Sophocles had mellowed, and the spirit of the age had undergone some change. What in Euripides becomes a sort of moral casuistry appears in Sophocles at this period as a serenely contemplative mood immersed in ethical reflection. He has adorned the legend of his birthplace with undying beauty. But the moral dignity of the Coloneus is different in kind from the tragic fire of the Tyrannus.
The Philoctetes was produced in 409. It is a marvellous work for one in his eighty-seventh year to have composed. The characters are powerfully distinguished, and their mutual interaction is a new thing in dramatic poetry. Philoctetes, like the Edipus of the Coloneus, is rejected by man, but accepted by the gods. Ill-usage and solitary musing have fixed in him the resolution never to return. The policy of Odysseus and the affectionate pleading of Neoptolemus are alike in vain, until the hard knot is loosed by the apparition of Heracles (in Euripidean style), who had been the hero's master and patron in the world of men. The interest of the action, which would else be stationary for so long, is sustained by the conflict in the soul of Neoptolemus, in whom ambition and public duty are straggling with pity for Philoctetes, and with the love of truth which the young chief inherits from his father Achilles. The victory of his better nature forms the culminating point in the action of the play.
Of other subjects known to have been treated by Sophocles those most suggestive of tragic interest are Alcmaon, Atreus, Danaë, Hermione, Thamyras, Thyestes in Sicyon, Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, Creusa, Laocoön, Meleager, Niobe, Oenomaüs, Peleus, Telephus, Tereus, Troilus, Phœdra, Phineus. The remaining fragments of these and other plays are on the whole disappointing. Sophocles even less than other poets can be fairly represented by isolated passages.
Amidst much variety, the dramatic work of Sophocles presents some constant features. Each play has a preliminary scene in which the main situation is set forth. This is followed by the entrance of the chorus, consisting of persons who stand in some well-considered relation to the chief agent. Then fresh complications supervene, and the action rises in steady climax to the turning-point. The reverse of fortune is generally announced by a messenger, after whose speech the commos or interchange of lamentation between the stage and orchestra naturally comes in. Between the scenes choice odes or stasina are interposed. But the lyric numbers are not confined to these. At suitable moments the chorus, and sometimes the actors themselves, break out into song, which on the part of the chorus is sometimes accompanied with dancing of a more or less animated description. This takes effect particularly in the hyporchema, or dancing-ode, which Sophocles is fond of employing at some conjuncture where the dramatis persone have been deceived for the moment into a false and short-lived joy. This relieves the monotony of gloom while ultimately rather heightening tragic effect, by emphasising the contrast above noticed between appearance and reality.
Sophocles has not impressed the world with superhuman grandeur, as Æschylus has done. Nor has he charmed mankind by the witchery of style in particular scenes and descriptive passages, as appears to have been the case with Euripides. But to some of the greatest critics—e.g. Lessing—his merits as a dramatic artist have appeared to be supreme. The purely human note in tragedy is dominant for the first time in him. Matthew Arnold in an early sonnet described him well:
Be his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus and its child.
If not quite holding the first rank with Homer, Æschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare, Sophocles is at least one of the immortals.
The editio princeps was printed at Venice in 1502. In the long list of editors of the whole or part of the seven the most important names are Brunck, Gottfried Herrmann, Wunder, Dindorf, Schneidewin, Hauck, Bergk, Lobeck (Ajax), Böckh, Meineke, Elmsley, Buttmann, Linwood, Kennedy, Wolff, O. Jahn. The chief modern English annotated editions are those of F. H. M. Blaydes and F. A. Paley (2 vols. 1859–80), Prof. Lewis Campbell (2 vols. 1873–81), and Prof. Jebb (Cambridge Press, vols. i–vii., 1884–97)—a masterly edition, in which Sophocles is treated with admirable thoroughness and clearness. Of English translations may be named those of Franklin, Potter, Dean Plumptre, Sir G. Young, R. Whitelaw (1883), and Prof. Lewis Campbell (complete, 1883) in verse; and those given in Prof. Jebb's edition, in admirable prose.
There is an excellent Lexicon Sophocleum by F. Ellendt (2d ed. by H. Genthe, Berlin, 1867–72), supplemented by an 'Index Commentationum' (1874). See
Hense, Studien zu Sophocles (1880); Patin, Études sur les Tragiques Grecs (vol. ii., new ed. 1877); Prof. Lewis Campbell, Sophocles in Green's 'Classical Writers' (1879), and A Guide to Greek Tragedy (1891); also Schlegel's Lectures, and Bishop Thirlwall's Remains for a famous essay on the Irony of Sophocles.