Inspirational Quotations by Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

Sophocles (c. 496–c. 406 BCE) was a Greek tragic dramatist. He is one of the trio of major Greek tragedians, with Aeschylus and Euripides.

Sophocles was very much at the center of Athenian public life; he served as an imperial treasurer and diplomat, and was elected general twice. Sophocles’ long life embraced the most crucial epoch of Athenian history—from the defeat of the foreign threats in the Persian wars, through the ensuing economic and cultural expansion, to the years of decline. He died just ahead of the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.

Sophocles wrote 120 plays, of which seven survive, including Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, and Philoctetes . The group known as the Theban plays—(Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) have long been influential in English literature, either directly or in adaptations by Seneca, John Dryden, Nathaniel Lee, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Matthew Arnold, A. C. Swinburne, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound.

Sophocles’ seven surviving plays are significant for their addition of a third actor to the previous two (plus the chorus.) This allowed a better complexity of plot and a much fuller depiction of the characters’ personalities.

At their essence, Sophocles’ tragedies are basically moral and religious dramas that pit the tragic hero against unalterable fate and the divine will of the gods. Human strength and achievement must be balanced by a susceptibility to circumstance.

In his masterpiece Oedipus Rex, arguably the most influential play ever written, Oedipus is the model leader whose strengths and human fallibility set in motion the revelation that he has violated social and divine order through patricide and incest. The play dramatizes Oedipus’s heartbreaking journey toward self-understanding-exposing human nature and its implications.

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