Sophocles

How Sophocles won his first contest

The judges were not drawn in the ordinary way. Partisanship was running high when the young Sophocles presented his first plays, so the archon Apsephion stopped Cimon and the nine other generals after their libation. He swore them in as judges. Sophocles defeated Aeschylus.

Plutarch preserves the incident in his Life of Cimon, but he does not establish the titles of the plays Sophocles entered. The contest took place on the institutional ground of Athenian drama, at the Theatre of Dionysus above the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Acropolis. Plutarch’s passage identifies the unusual judges and the result. It leaves the plays untitled.

Seven plays by Sophocles survive, and they do not come from a single connected production. Most of their dates remain uncertain. Philoctetes is securely dated to 409 BC, while Oedipus at Colonus was produced after Sophocles’s death in 401 BC by his grandson. That incomplete record matters. Sophocles is a mythological source through individual dramas, each of which gives a disputed story an exact sequence of actions and a particular end.

Why the burial of Ajax depends on an enemy

Ajax has killed himself, but his fate is still undecided. Agamemnon refuses to let the body be buried, turning the end of the warrior’s life into a dispute over what may be done to the dead. The man who changes the decision is Odysseus, Ajax’s enemy in the contest for the arms of Achilles.

Odysseus argues that denying burial would violate divine law. Sophocles gives this appeal to the man who had opposed Ajax in the dispute over Achilles’s arms. Agamemnon yields, and the burial is allowed.

This is the surviving Ajax’s settlement of the story. The suicide alone does not complete it. Sophocles makes the final outcome depend on argument, and gives the decisive argument to the enemy of the man whose burial he defends.

How Oedipus becomes Athens’s suppliant

Oedipus enters Colonus as an exile and sits within ground sacred to the Eumenides. A local man tells him that the place is the Bronze-Step Threshold and the Protection of Athens. The names make the ground more than a refuge. Oedipus has crossed into a place whose sacred status requires a decision from the city that controls it.

Theseus accepts Oedipus as a suppliant and promises not to betray him. In return, Oedipus promises that his presence in Attic land will give Athens power over the people who cast him out. A man driven from his former home gains protection because Theseus receives him, and his death becomes consequential for the city that accepts him.

Oedipus at Colonus was produced at Athens in 401 BC, after Sophocles’s death. The play was produced in the same city whose protection it stages, but it should not be treated as the sole Greek account of Oedipus’s death. It is Sophocles’s version, in which Colonus, suppliancy and Theseus determine what the ending will mean.

Who is allowed to know where Oedipus dies

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

The death itself remains unseen. The final messenger says that only Theseus witnessed it, and neither its manner nor the place of burial is disclosed. The knowledge of the tomb remains guarded.

Sophocles fixes the end by restricting who can know it. Oedipus has moved from an exile without protection to a presence promised as a power for Athens. That promised power is attached to knowledge kept by its king. His daughters are not given the location. Theseus alone holds the secret.