Oedipus Rex

Sophocles was born around 496 BCE in Colonus, a small town just outside Athens, and lived to nearly ninety years old, which in fifth century Greece was an almost implausible lifespan. He lived through the Persian Wars, the golden age of Athenian democracy under Pericles, and the early devastation of the Peloponnesian War, which means he wrote his greatest plays against a backdrop of both extraordinary civilisational confidence and gathering catastrophe. That tension between human achievement and human fragility is everywhere in his work.

He wrote approximately 123 plays over his lifetime, of which only seven survive complete. That ratio of loss to survival is one of the quiet tragedies of literary history. What we have is Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax, Electra, Trachiniae, and Philoctetes. Oedipus Rex is widely considered not just his greatest work but the greatest tragedy ever written. Aristotle used it in the Poetics as the definitive example of how tragedy should be constructed, which is roughly the equivalent of being used as the textbook case of perfection.

Sophocles was not just a playwright. He was a general, a priest, and a prominent public figure in Athenian civic life, which perhaps explains why his plays are so deeply interested in the relationship between the individual and the state, between personal conscience and public duty, between what a person believes is right and what the world actually allows. He competed in the dramatic festivals of Athens, winning first prize at least eighteen times, which by any measure makes him the most successful playwright in Athenian theatrical history. His great rival Aeschylus won thirteen times. Euripides, who came after him, won four.

What distinguishes Sophocles from his contemporaries is his profound interest in character. His plays are not primarily about the gods or fate in the abstract. They are about specific people, with specific flaws and specific strengths, navigating worlds that do not accommodate them. Oedipus is brilliant and that brilliance destroys him. Antigone is principled and that principle kills her. Sophocles understood, with a clarity that still feels modern, that the things that make us most ourselves are often the things that bring us down.