Sophocles (ca 495 – ca 405)
Wrote 120 dramas
7 recoverable tragedies available today
Antigone ca 442
Oedipus the King ca 429
Dionysian festivals honoring the God of human and agricultural fertility began around 1200 BC
Were an annual Spring religious ritual by 600 BC
534 BC A drama competition was added, leading to the tragedies, comedies, and satyrs of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles
Tragedy: Signature Cultural Symbol of Athenian Democracy (under Pericles) – A Duty to attend
- Helped involved all citizens in active political participation (an essential goal of the Athenians) helped highlight political and moral themes
- Helped in the process of lifelong education for the tremendous responsibility of democracy (“ruling and being ruled”)
- Tragedy for the Greeks was a religious and moral undertaking
- For Aristotle, “the imitation of an action that is complete and noble”
- Wisdom is learned through suffering. How else is it learned?
- Fear, pity, empathy all processed through catharsis
- First great play: Aeschylus’s The Persians (472); last great tragedies appear at the end of the Peloponnesian War around 404.
Sophocles plays were based on themes found in ancient lore, unlike Aeschylus & Euripides, but this safe distance from contemporary events allowed him to comment all the more powerfully on 5th Century Athenian politics and morals.
Sophocles’ audiences were all too familiar with the Oedipus legend
Sophocles renders the legend so as to expose essential questions in the emergent Athenian democracy.
- Critique of Pericles’ leadership in the Peloponnesian War and to show the importance for establishing civil law in harmony with divine law
- Warning to the Athenians – and Pericles -- at the height of their power
- The stories work on 4 levels: Mythology (History), Moral Dimension: Actions have consequences, Contemporary Meaning, Timeless
Oedipus the King
Performed in 429 during a great plague in Athens
Pericles declared war on Sparta, & refused the Spartans negotiations. Plague was partly induced by the bodies left by the fighting.
Pericles was confident and saw the war as ineluctable. Sophocles is commenting on Pericles’ hubris in the tragedy.
Oedipus: Valorizes human agency
Chorus: Traditional or conventional wisdom
Oedipus – A commanding figure – Periclean in nature, insofar as he was the only one to solve the Sphinx
He tells the Sphinx, “It is man who speaks with one voice, crawls in the morning, walks on 2 legs at noon, and walks on three legs at night.”
Oedipus, at the top of his power, send Creon to determine the cause of plague. He, like Pericles, is supremely confident in his ability to determine, and solve the causes of the plague.
Oedipus: Pursue truth, in the open.
Direct reference to Pericles: The blind soothsayer declares Oedipus to be the pollution.
Oedipus responds that it must be a plot by Teriesias and Creon to take his throne.
At every turn, Oedipus insists on using reason and disavowing the Gods. His tragic flaw: A hubristic belief in the power of his own mind.
One moral: Problem of stubborn belief in one’s own reason and abilities
There is a higher morality than earthly law
Oedipus refusal of divine wisdom causes absolute ruin upon his house.
Might not have married Jocasta in Thebes – who was old enough to be his mother
Might have immediately removed himself from Thebes upon Teriesias’s identification of
him as the source of the plague.
Does Oedipus redeem himself? How? What further morals might we glean?