Sophocles
c.496 B.C. – c.405 B.C.

Sophocles, Athenian tragic poet, at twenty-eight entered into competition with Aeschylus, his elder by thirty years, and was preferred by the judges. He never forsook Athens but repeatedly went on embassies to other Greek states, and in the Samian war of 440 B.C. was general jointly with Pericles. Of his seven extant plays, the probable order is Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, Trachiniæ, Oedipus Coloneus and Philoctetes. Less than a tenth of the work of Sophocles remains to us; but of these seven plays each one stands prominently forth amongst the master-works of human genius. The characteristics of Sophocles are a dramatic structure all but faultless, and the combination of wonderful subtlety with intense fire, of a noble ideal with truth and naturalness. His subjects were necessarily drawn from Hellenic legend. In his treatment of them he never loses sight of the main principles of tragic art. His method turns largely on pathetic contrasts of situation and of character. Sophocles has not impressed the world with superhuman grandeur, as Aeschylus has done. Nor, like Euripides, has he charmed mankind by the witchery of style in particular scenes and descriptive passages. But to the greatest critics his merits as a dramatic artist have seemed supreme.