Sophocles

Sophocles won his first victory against Aeschylus at twenty-eight and his last in his eighties, served Athens as treasurer and general, and wrote more than a hundred and twenty plays, of which seven survive. He added the third actor and painted scenery, and made the individual, rather than the house or the city, the subject of tragedy. Oedipus the King is the play Aristotle’s Poetics treats as the model of the form; Antigone sets the family’s law against the city’s; Oedipus at Colonus, produced after his death, brings the old king to rest outside the Athens Sophocles loved.