During the fifth century B.C., the Golden Age of Athens, new forms of art and literature were being developed with extraordinary speed and energy. One of the most important of these forms was Tragedy, and the preeminence of Aeschylus. Sophocles, and Euripides in this innovative field was instantly recognized by their contemporaries. The second named of these three dramatists is often taken, perhaps too conveniently, as the benchmark by which the other two are judged.
Sophocles' date of birth is variously given, within narrow limits, by the ancient authorities, but 497 B.C. or 496 B.C. is the likeliest inference. The date of his death is more secure: 406 B.C. or 405 B.C. His lifetime thus spanned the fifth century B.C., that period of history which, more than any other, deserves the adjective classic; and Sophocles is often thought of among poets as the embodiment of that classicism. (If, though, by that term one means a perfection of form characterized by symmetry and restraint, with Sophocles as a kind of literary counterpart to the Parthenon, one will be in danger of going seriously astray.) Other details of Sophocles' life that scholars are inclined to accept as true from the notoriously unreliable ancient biographies are that his father was a businessman called Sophillus; that he had a musical education and achieved success in that sphere (he sang a solo part in the victory paean after the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.); that his first victory in the principal dramatic festival, the Greater Dionysia, occurred in 468 B.C.; and that he never won less than second prize and came in first on at least eighteen occasions.
