Sophocles composed about 120 plays, of which seven are preserved, together with fragments of eighty or ninety others. (1) Ajax. brooding upon the dishonor done him by the award ing of the arms of Achilles to Odysseus. is bereft of his reason by Athena, whom he has offended by presumptuous speech. In his frenzy he wreaks his wrath upon the cattle of the Greeks. At this point the action begins. Awakening to the in tolerable humiliation of his position. he slays himself after a touching farewell to his infant son and a noble apostrophe to earth and sea and sky. The debate on the question of granting him honor able burial, which fills the last third of the play, is an anticlimax to modern feeling, but effectively displays the conciliatory temper of the sagacious Odysseus and the vindictive spirit of Menelaus. (2) The Antigone, perhaps the first problem play in literature, presents the moral antinomy that arises from a conflict between political authority and the law of the individual conscience. Anti gone, in obedience to Greek religious feeling and the dictates of her woman's heart, bestows the rites of burial upon her rebel brother Polynices in defiance of the edict of King Creon, and so brings about her own death, and, by tragic com plication. that of her lover, Hannon, the King's son. (3) The Electra corresponds to the middle play of .Eschylus's trilogy the Oresteia, and to the Electra of Euripides. It treats of the slaying of Clytemnestra and her paramour, _Egisthus, by her children, Orestes and Electra, in revenge for the murder of their father, Aga memnon. The psychological interest centres in the character of Electra, a sort of ancient Co lomba, nerving her brother to the prosecution of the blood fend. (4) The (Edipus 7110711)1118 is the most ingeniously constructed of Greek plays and a typical example of the so-called Sopho clean o• dramatic irony. The plot turns on the gradual inevitable revelation to (Edipus. through his own insistent inquiry, of the dreadful truth, already known to the audience, that he has un wittingly fulfilled the oracle which doomed him to slay his father and live in incestuous mar riage with his mother. (5) The Traellinice, named from the Traehinian maidens of the chorus, treats of the poisoning of Hercules by the Nessus robe sent to him as a love charm by his jealous wife. Deianira, and his translation to heaven from the funeral pyre on Mount (Eta. (6) The Philoctetes was produced in 409. Phi loctetes, bitten by a serpent and afflicted with a.
disgusting wound, had been abandoned by the Greeks on the desert shore of Lemnos. After
many years an oracle declares that he, the pos sessor of the bow of Hercules, is indispensable to the besiegers of Troy. Odysseus and Neoptol meus, the son of Achilles, are sent to fetch hint if need be against his will. Very beautiful are the descriptions of nature and the account of Philoetetes's lonely life. But the chief interest of the play lies in the psychological study of the final revolt of the frank nature of Neoptol emus against the treachery which Odysseus re quires him to practice upon the unsuspecting Philnetetes. (7) The (Edipus at Colonies (first produced in 401) depicts the reconciliation of (Edipus with destiny and his sublime and mys terious death at Colones after years of wander ing as a blind exile, sustained by the loving ten dance of his (laughter, Antigone.
As a poet Sophoeles cannot vie with the im aginative sublimity of .cEschylus. As a thinker he may be less fertile in suggestion than the ingenious Euripides. But regarded as a Greek artist, shaping Greek legends in the conventional molds of Attie tragedy, lie holds the just and perfect mean between the titanic symbolism of the older poet and the sentimental, rhetorical real ism of the younger. He is reported to have said that .Eschylus did right without knowing it, and that Euripides painted men as they are, while he himself represented them as they ought to be. A slight plot suffices him for the creation of a because his subtle dramatic art and his exhaustive psychological analysis elicit from a simple situation a complete revelation of character and destiny. Fate. the prime motive of ancient tragedy, is no longer felt as a ca pricious external power, but as the inevitable outcome of character and the unavoidable con dition of life. Tragic pathos is refined to a sense of the universal human fellowship in frailty and suffering. And beauty, the all-per vading, gracious serenity of an unfailing and unobtrusive art. takes from pathos and tragedy their sting and dismisses us from the scene calmed, elevated, and reeoneiled. Sophoeles is the most truly Hellenic of the Greek tragedians, and for those who have drunk deeply of the Hellenic spirit the most human too.
The best edition is that of ,Tebb, in seven vol umes, with elaborate commentary and English translation facing the Greek. There is a good annotated edition by Campbell, and an excellent monograph by the same author. Plumptre's verse translation is much esteemed. That of Whitelaw is perhaps better.