City & War & Hero

Sophocles’ life encapsulates the Golden Age of Athens, from its rise to its downfall.

Each Greek city-state occupied its own plain. Mountains cut them off from easy contact with one another; each was a world apart, with its own customs, dialect, government, and laws. These settlements were often at war with their neighbors over grazing land, borderlines, or cattle raids. 

Born in 496 BCE in Colonus (coincidentally the final sanctuary of our hero Oedipus), the young Sophocles witnessed the 50-year-long Greco-Persian Wars (499-449 BC), in which the scattered Greek kingdoms, for the first time in history, formed an alliance under the leadership of Athens. In the decisive naval battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, Athenian fleet defeated its Persian enemy, and the 15-year-old Sophocles lead the singers in the hymns of celebration and thanksgiving for the victory. 

Athens’ victory represents the triump of democry over Persian despotism, marking the start of its Golden Age under the rule of Pericles. Thebes was the only Greek city-state to ally with Persia in the war, and, indeed as Oedipus prophecized, defeated by Athens.

Eight years after the war, while Athens flourished as the intellectural and artistic center of Greece, Sophocles would turn to this ancient kingdom, and wrote the first work of his Theban Trilogy: Antigone (442 BCE). 

Of the 123 plays Sophocles wrote, only seven have survived intact. Luckily, the Theban Trilogy are all among them. Sophocles’ composed the stories yeas apart and out of order: Oedipus Rex in 427 BCE, and finally Oedipus at Colonus at the end of his life. 

Yet by then, Athens’ hegemony was in great peril. The Golden-Age Athens demanded loyalty and tributary from its allies as a virtual despot. In 431 BCE, the Peloponnese cities, led by Sparta, provoked a war that lasted 27 years and ended in Athenian defeat. Sophocles witnessed it almost to the end. He died in 406 BCE – fortunately, before his beloved city starved into surrender in 404 BCE.