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.
