Sophocles
Ancient Greek playwright · Writers · Lived 496 BC to 406 BC · aged 90
Sophocles is read about 1,546 times a day, in 155 languages.
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Something wrong?He dominated Athens' dramatic competitions for half a century, winning 24 out of 30 contests and never placing lower than second. Of the 120-plus plays he wrote, seven survive - and two of them, Oedipus Rex and Antigone, became the template for tragedy itself.
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Sophocles was writing in Athens around 497/496 BC, entering a field already occupied by Aeschylus and soon to include Euripides. Over nearly fifty years he became the most celebrated playwright at the Lenaea and Dionysia festivals, racking up a competitive record no peer could match. He changed the form itself: Aristotle credits him with adding a third actor to the stage, which shifted weight from the chorus to the unfolding plot and let him develop characters with a depth earlier playwrights hadn't reached. More than 120 plays came from him, but only seven made it through intact - Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus. The Theban plays, centered on Oedipus and Antigone, weren't written as a set but became the most famous, each belonging to a different tetralogy now otherwise lost. He died in the winter of 406/405 BC, leaving behind a blueprint for how humans break under the weight of fate.
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