In the study of Greek plays, one tries to recreate for an experience, to recapture something of what is meant to those for whom it was written. We know more about the life of Sophocles than we know do about the lives of any other Greek playwright, but this still is not a lot. Sophocles’ work has been said to be the pinnacle of Greek tragedy. Oedipus the King is something like the literary Mona Lisa of ancient Greece. It presents a nightmare vision of a world turned upside down; a decent man, Oedipus, becomes the king of Thebes, whilst in the process unknowingly fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother.
As scholars, we are bound to relate this story through history, to ask what the writer really meant, how they worked, what their attitude was toward their age and its effect on them. Born around 496 BCE in the town of Colonus, Sophocles witnessed the rise and fall of the Athenian Golden Age in his 90 year lifespan. He had a good childhood, being the son of a wealthy manufacturer. He grew up during the Persian wars and was chosen, suggesting that young Sophocles was particularly gifted and handsome, to participate in the victory celebrations for the Greek naval victory at Salamis in 480 BCE.
As a result of the patriotism and popularity he developed at a young age for and in Athens, he remained there his entire life. In addition to being a leading dramatist, he was a close friend to Pericles (the high statesmen), Sophocles himself holding several public offices throughout his life. Not only is he highly valued by modern scholars for the complex issues that his plays address and his treatment of the individual, he is also revered by his contemporaries. He received the first prize for tragic drama over Aeschylus at the City Dionysia drama festival eld in 468 BCE when he was twenty-eight years old.
He wrote around 123 plays for the Athenian theatre and won 24 festivals, only seven of his plays surviving. From the fragments that remain and from references to lost plays in his other works, scholars have discovered that Sophocles wrote on an vast array of topics. He also introduced several key innovations; ending the ritual of writing trilogies on connected topics at the City Dionysia, painted background scenery, changing the number of actors from two to three, and enlarging the chorus from twelve to fifteen men.
The Golden Age of Athens is the finest example of democracy in the ancient world. Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King during a period of both unusual intellectual and artistic energy and great crisis. Under its astute and ambitious statesmen, Pericles, Athens became the most powerful polis in Greece. By 440 BCE, Athens was acknowledged as the leader in almost every area of cultural activity and was known as the center for philosophy, literature, architecture, sculpture, and painting. In 431, the Peloponnesian War broke out between Athens and Sparta.
A great plague ravaged Athens between 429 and 425, spreading quickly among both the country and city folks whom were crammed behind the walls of Athens when the Spartans invaded, destroying a quarter of the population. Pericles himself died in 429, a loss the city felt keenly because of his much lesser intellectual successors. Oedipus is often regarded as a response to the events of this period. An unforeseen, supernatural-seeming disaster suddenly sweeps away a cities hopes, confidence in human reason shattered, and greatness swiftly turns into misery.
Sophocles was able to capture contemporary moods, even when dealing with mythical or historical events. Visiting Athens in 427, the Sicilian orator and philosopher, Gorgias, made a sensation by dealing with questions of causality and responsibility, which lay at the heart of Oedipus. A few years later, another orator by the name of Protagoras visited Athens. One of his sayings, “Of all things man is the measure, of the things that are, that they are, and the things that are not, that they are not,” expresses a humancentered, rationalistic speculation that is embodied by the hero in Oedipus.
So besides its artistic merit, Oedipus is a major document in one of the most far-reaching intellectual revolutions in Western history. Sometimes called the FifthCentury enlightenment, this period is marked by a shift from the mythical and symbolic thinking characteristics of archaic poets to a more conceptual and abstract mode of though. According to this new mode, the world operates through non-personal processes that follow predictable, scientific law. Sophocles’ Oedipus the king reflects helplessness and morality in the face of destiny, as the characters are often caught between divine and human law.
But, as mentioned previously, Sophocles was also an important man in Athenian government, his play demonstrating an overall obedience to the law. In Oedipus the King, for example, although Oedipus cannot escape his fate, nowhere is his rule of Thebes called into question. Oedipus, at first a stranger to Thebes, is accepted as king because he is deemed the noblest among them. “I became a citizen among you, citizens,” reveals that he has been chosen to be king, not out of some divine right, but through some democratic process.