Sophocles

In 468 the 57-year-old Aeschylus was defeated in the Dionysia by a man nearly thirty years his junior, Sophocles (496-406). The result almost certainly had political undertones. The Athenian aristocracy was still influential and Sophocles may have been used to displace a man of democratic sympathies. Aeschylus had his revenge when he won first prize in the following year.

Sophocles may have been of a younger generation but in many ways he looks back to an earlier age than Aeschylus. With Sophocles the focus turns from the city and community to the individual, both male and female. It was Sophocles who introduced the powerful independent woman into tragedy, a revolutionary move in a city where women were kept largely in seclusion. Sophocles writes of an earlier archaic world, one of heroes where loyalties are to clans and kin rather than to a city. It is a cruel and inflexible one with the ways of the gods incomprehensible to man. Most of Sophocles’ characters have flaws in their personalities which lead them inexorably to their doom, and he shows the full range of torments that human beings can undergo, symbolized perhaps in the moment when Oedipus, king of Thebes, returns to the stage just having gouged out his eyes.

In Antigone, the heroine, Antigone, is rooted in the kinship system in which the religious duties of the clan predominate. She finds the body of her brother Poly-neices and she must bury him as sacred custom demands. But Polyneices has been a traitor to his city and the king, Creon, has forbidden his burial. Antigone, with supreme moral conviction, goes ahead, ritually scattering dust on her brother’s body. She is arrested and taken off to die by being buried alive. At the last moment Creon tries to change the decision but it is too late, Antigone has committed suicide and so have Creon’s own wife and his son who has been engaged to her. The tragic individual is now Creon himself, but perhaps the underlying warning of the play is that inflexibility in support of absolute values does not provide the best guide for life. A ship, suggests Sophocles, would never arrive if it tried to sail head to wind.

The acknowledged masterpiece of Sophocles is King Oedipus. There is a contrast here with Antigone. While Antigone is trapped by the dictates of her own conscience, Oedipus has done everything he can to escape the prophecy that he will murder his father and sleep with his mother. In what is a spare, beautifully controlled play he learns to his horror that this is just what he has done. Polluted in spite of himself, he gouges out his eyes when he comes across the body of his wife and mother Jocasta, who has committed suicide. (Nowhere else in Greek mythology is this incest/parricide theme explored, and Freud’s influential interpretation that Oedipus unconsciously wished to kill his father is questionable, as Oedipus, an orphan from birth, did not even know that the man he killed was his father.)

In his last known play, Oedipus at Colonus, written when he was over 8o, Sophocles comes back to Oedipus, now an old man, pathetic in his blindness, polluted by his ‘crimes’. Death is near, and Oedipus makes his way to the sacred grove at Colonus for his last days. (Colonus was where Sophocles himself was born. The spot, swallowed up in recent years by the suburbs of Athens, has been replanted.) His daughters join him as others shun him and he finally meets death with nobility. That, suggests Sophocles, is the only appropriate response to the mysteries of fate. It is a profoundly Humanist moment in European literature; even the gods cannot rob a man of his dignity.

Sophocles was writing at darker times for Athens. The city was visited by plague and in the poet’s final years was succumbing to the power of Sparta. Many have seen Sophocles’ emphasis on the inexorable nature of suffering as arising from these experiences. Sophocles shows little enthusiasm for the city as a political entity. He suggests that democracy presents as many problems as it solves and can do little to sustain the individual at his time of need. Among those who reject Oedipus is a representative of the polis.