Chapter 13, Sophocles: Quintessence of the Greek Summary and Analysis

About twenty years after Aeschylus wrote his tragedies, Sophocles began to write tragedy for a new day in Athens. For Sophocles, suffering and pain and struggle were not just to be endured with courage. Rather they were to be actively embraced and accepted. Passive endurance is not encompassed in Sophocles' point of view. "To strive to understand the irresistible movement of events is illusory; still more so to set ourselves against what we can affect as little as the planets in their orbits. Even so, we are not mere spectators. There is nobility in the world, goodness, gentleness. Men are helpless so far as their fate is concerned, but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly."

During the twenty years that separated...