Sophocles

How Sophocles won his first contest

Sophocles was an Athenian who wrote tragedies, serious plays performed in competition. When the young Sophocles put on his first plays, the judges were not chosen in the usual way. Feelings between rival supporters were running high. So the archon Apsephion, a chief official of Athens, stopped the general Cimon and the nine other generals after they had poured their libation, a drink offering to the gods. He swore them in as judges. Sophocles defeated Aeschylus.

The writer Plutarch keeps this story in his Life of Cimon. He names the unusual judges and the result, but not the plays Sophocles entered. The contest took place at the home of Athenian drama: the Theatre of Dionysus, above the sanctuary, or holy ground, of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Acropolis.

Seven plays and their dates

Seven plays by Sophocles survive. They do not come from one connected set, and most of their dates are uncertain. Philoctetes is securely dated to 409 BC. Oedipus at Colonus was staged in 401 BC, after Sophocles’s death, by his grandson.

The gaps in the record matter. Sophocles is a source for myth through separate plays. Each one gives a disputed story an exact order of events and a particular ending. Two of those endings show how he works: the burial of Ajax and the death of Oedipus.

Why the burial of Ajax depends on an enemy

The warrior Ajax has killed himself, but his fate is still undecided. Agamemnon refuses to let the body be buried. The end of the warrior’s life becomes a dispute over what may be done to the dead.

The man who changes the decision is Odysseus. He was the enemy of Ajax in the contest for the armour of Achilles. Odysseus argues that refusing burial would break divine law. Sophocles gives this appeal to the very man who had opposed Ajax over the armour. Agamemnon gives way, and the burial goes ahead.

This is how the surviving Ajax settles the story. The suicide alone does not complete it. Sophocles makes the outcome depend on argument, and he gives the deciding argument to the enemy of the man whose burial he defends.

How Oedipus becomes a suppliant of Athens

Oedipus comes to Colonus, in Attic land, as an exile. He sits down on ground sacred to the Eumenides. A local man tells him the names of the place: the Bronze-Step Threshold and the Protection of Athens. The names make the ground more than a place of refuge. Oedipus has entered sacred ground, and its status needs a decision from the city that controls it.

Theseus, the king, accepts Oedipus as a suppliant, someone who asks for protection, and promises not to betray him. In return, Oedipus promises that his presence in Attic land will give Athens power over the people who drove him out. A man forced from his old home gains protection because Theseus takes him in. His death will matter to the city that accepts him.

The play was staged in Athens in 401 BC, after Sophocles’s death. It was performed in the same city whose protection it shows on stage. Even so, it should not be treated as the only Greek account of the death of Oedipus. It is the version of Sophocles, in which Colonus, the rite of the suppliant and Theseus decide what the ending will mean.

Who is allowed to know where Oedipus dies

Near the end, Oedipus leads Theseus and his daughters towards the chosen place. He tells them not to touch him. He alone can find the sacred tomb made ready for him in Attic land.

The audience never sees the death. A messenger reports that only Theseus witnessed it. Neither how Oedipus died nor where he is buried is revealed. The knowledge of the tomb stays guarded.

Sophocles fixes the ending by limiting who can know it. Oedipus has gone from an exile with no protection to a presence promised as a power for Athens. That promised power rests on knowledge kept by the king of Athens. His daughters are not told the place. Theseus alone holds the secret.