Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC)

Athenian dramatist. He is credited with having developed tragedy by introducing a third actor and scene-painting, and ranked with Aeschylus and Euripides as one of the three great tragedians. He wrote some 120 plays, of which seven tragedies survive. These are Antigone (443 BC), Oedipus the King (429), Electra (410), Ajax, Trachiniae, Philoctetes (409 BC), and Oedipus at Colonus (401; produced after his death).

Sophocles lived in Athens when the city was ruled by Pericles, a period of great prosperity; he was a devout man, and assumed public office. A regular winner of dramatic competitions, he first defeated Aeschylus at the age of 27. In his tragedies heroic determination leads directly to violence unless, as in Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, it contains an element of resignation. Among his other works are a lost treatise on the chorus, and a large surviving fragment of one of his satyr-dramas, Ichneutai.