Sophocles was born at Colonus, just a mile outside Athens, in the year 496 B.C.E. The son of a wealthy family, he was raised with every possible educational and social advantage. At age 16 he made his debut in the theater by performing in a chorus that celebrated an Athenian victory (at Salamis), and soon afterward he began composing original poems and songs. Sophocles entered his first dramatic competition at the age of 28, where he took the top prize over Aeschylus, who was then considered the reigning master of tragedy. Apart from his dramatic interests, Sophocles was quite civic minded; he held a variety of political and military offices in his lifetime, including appointments to embassies, a position as an official of a religious organization, and two generalships, one under Pericles and once under Nicias. Sophocles’ long life of 90 years spanned the Peloponnesian War and Athens’s corresponding rise and fall as a great empire. He meanwhile is credited with the writing of 123 plays, only seven of which have survived intact. These plays are widely considered perfectly structured dramatic masterpieces. His tragedies (including Antigone, also in Literature and Its Times) question inexorable forces of fate that frustrate humanity’s best laid plans, and the justness of a cosmos that allows individuals and cities to experience undeserved reversals of fortune.
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