Sophocles
Greek playwright (c. 496–406 BCE), born in Colonus, near Athens, into a well-to-do family, he enjoyed public recognition and dramatic success throughout his long life, winning more victories at the tragic competitions of the City Dionysia than either of the other two great Athenian tragedians, and also holding significant political and military offices in Athens, including the treasurership of the Delian League and, according to tradition, a position as general alongside Pericles. Of his vast dramatic output, estimated at more than one hundred and twenty-five plays, only seven survive complete, among them the three tragedies making up the so-called Theban cycle —Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone— though these were not conceived as a unified trilogy but composed at very different points in his career. Sophocles introduced decisive technical innovations in the development of Greek theatre, particularly the addition of a third actor on stage (previously limited to two by Aeschylus), which allowed for far richer dramatic complexity and character interaction, as well as a more elaborate use of painted scenery. His tragedies explore with exceptional psychological intensity the conflict between human will and an inexorable fate often unknown to the protagonist himself, as paradigmatically illustrated in Oedipus Rex, where the hero unknowingly investigates his own crime; the tension between the law of the state and the unwritten law of the gods and family, as dramatised in Antigone through the conflict between Creon and the protagonist; and human dignity in the face of suffering and social ostracism, a central theme of Electra —included in this corpus— and of Philoctetes. His work, transmitted and commented upon continuously since antiquity, exerted a decisive influence on later dramatic theory, especially through Aristotle's analysis in the Poetics, where Oedipus Rex becomes the paradigmatic model of the perfect tragedy.