Sophocles: A Mythic Life

The facts of Sophocles’ life are difficult to separate from legend. According to one version of his death, the ninety-year-old dramatist was giving a public reading of Antigone when he tried and failed to recite a fatally long sentence in a single breath. Similar myths surround the final moments of the other Athenian playwrights; Euripides was eaten by a pack of wild dogs, and Aeschylus was killed by a falling turtle, dropped by an eagle who mistook the tragedian’s bald head for a rock. But of the three, Sophocles lived most fully in the public eye, and more details of his biography were recorded than of almost any other figure in Periclean Athens.

Born in about 496 BC to a wealthy factory-owner in the Athenian suburb of Colonus, Sophocles encountered fame at an early age. At fifteen he led an official dance to celebrate the Athenian victory at the battle of Salamis, wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and playing a lyre. Boys chosen for this role were picked according to criteria of both talent and physical beauty, so the young Sophocles must have been an attractive youth.

According to an anonymous four-page Life that first surfaced in the third century BC, Sophocles was known throughout Athens for his charm and good humor. His popularity was such that, in the weeks prior to his first playwriting competition, excitement in the city reached fever-pitch. To prevent a riot, the panel of judges had to be replaced by a council of generals. The Life tells us that Sophocles was awarded first prize at the competition, even defeating Aeschylus. His success as a playwright was not, however, matched by his skills as an actor; while most dramatists took part in their own productions, Sophocles was forced to abandon the stage when audiences complained that his voice was thin and reedy.

Although Sophocles completed more than a hundred and twenty tragedies, only seven survive, of which Antigone is the earliest. In the play he demonstrated such political acuity, it is said, that the city made him a general in the Athenian army. Though his father’s wealth could have assured him of a life of self-directed leisure, Sophocles spent many years serving in public office, as a treasurer and foreign emissary.

Sophocles was a close friend of Pericles, the greatest ruler of fifth-century Athens, and it is not hard to read his plays as subtle cautions regarding the governance of the polis. The plague that ravages Thebes in Oedipus the King, for example, mirrored an epidemic that had recently swept through Athens, a city less than thirty miles from the mythical home of Oedipus and Antigone. The plays retained political resonance for decades; sixty years after Sophocles’ death, the orator and statesman Demosthenes quoted the entirety of Creon’s first speech from Antigone as an object lesson on the appropriate loyalty due a city by its citizens.

Despite his political interests, Sophocles was no stuffy statesman. His twentieth-century biographer F.J.H. Letters described his personal habits as “eerily Wildeish.” He was a connoisseur, a wit, and enjoyed an eclectic love-life; in the Republic, Plato characterized Sophocles as a hostage to the tyrannous yoke of Eros. He married a woman named Nicostrata, though many of his lovers were young men, and one report tells of a banquet at which Sophocles tricked a handsome serving boy into giving him a kiss.

In addition to his work as playwright, general, and public servant, the Life tells us that Sophocles served as a priest to Asclepius, god of healing and medicine. In the center of Asclepius’ temple lived a great serpent, an embodiment of the god himself. Once, during the relocation of the temple to Athens, the snake lived in Sophocles’ house till his new quarters were ready. After his death, a hero cult sprang up around Sophocles, and his spirit was credited with the power to lull storms. At the time of his burial, Athens was under Spartan occupation, and Sophocles’ body could not be entombed in his ancestral plot outside the city. It is said that the god of theatre, Dionysus himself, appeared to the Spartan leader Lysander, commanding that the burial be allowed to take place.

The most celebrated story of all occurs shortly before Sophocles’ death at the age of ninety. The playwright’s son Iophon took him to court, claiming that his father was too doddering to manage his financial affairs. To prove his sanity, the poet recited a portion of Oedipus at Colonus, which he was composing at the time. “If I am Sophocles,” he is supposed to have said, “I am not senile, and if I am senile, I am not Sophocles.” The court was so moved by his recitation that the case was immediately dismissed.

Helen Shaw is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.