Athens in the fifth century B.C. was a golden age of drama for Greece and the world. For Sophocles to emerge as the most popular playwright among his contemporaries—the older Aeschylus and the younger Euripides—attests to his genius for moving audiences with powerful poetry and stagecraft.
Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, but only seven complete tragedies survive. Of the rest, only some titles and fragments remain. As late as 1907, a papyrus with several hundred lines of a Sophoclean play called The Ichneutae turned up in Egypt.
Perhaps someday other lost plays will come to light, although the prospect seems unlikely. But for now, Sophocles’ modern reputation rests on the seven surviving plays: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus the King, The Trachinae, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.
Originally produced around 445 B.C., Ajax tells the story of the legendary Trojan War hero who is driven mad by the vengeful goddess Athena. In Antigone (440 B.C.), Sophocles dramatizes a tragic conflict between human and divine law in the story of Oedipus’ daughter and King Creon. Electra (440 B.C.) takes for its subject the revenge of Agamemnon’s children on their father’s killers.
Oedipus the King (430 B.C.), generally regarded as Sophocles’ masterpiece, presents the myth of Oedipus, the man fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Sophocles dramatizes the story of the death of Hercules in The Trachinae (413 B.C.) and returns to the subject of the Trojan War in Philoctetes (410 B.C.). Sophocles’ last work, Oedipus at Colonus, presents the death of Oedipus; it was produced in 401 B.C., five years after the playwright’s own death.
Of all the surviving plays, the tragedies of the Oedipus Trilogy—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—are the best known and most often produced. Although all three plays are part of the same story, Sophocles did not create them to be performed as a single theatrical production. Instead, the three tragedies represent separate dramas on related subjects.
Many people choose to read the plays of the Oedipus Trilogy in the chronological order of the story—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone—while others prefer the order in which Sophocles wrote them—Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus. In any order, readers will note the unique qualities in each drama, especially the important differences in character and tone.
In his Poetics, Aristotle writes that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear in the audience, and so create a catharsis—or cleansing of emotions—that will enlighten people about life and fate. Each of the plays of the Oedipus Trilogy achieves this catharsis that Aristotle defined as the hallmark of all tragedy.
