v. Σοφοκλέης.

Proper name: SO′PHOCLES (Σοφοκλῆς). 1. The celebrated tragic poet. The ancient authorities for the life of Sophocles are very scanty. Duris of Samos wrote a work Περὶ Εὐριπίδου καὶ Σοφοκλέους (Ath. iv. p. 184, d.); Ister, Aristoxenus, Neanthes, Satyrus, and others are quoted as authorities for his life; and it cannot be doubted that, amidst the vast mass of ​Alexandrian literature, there were many treatises respecting him, besides those on the general subject of tragedy; but of these stores of information, the only remnants we possess are the respectable anonymous compilation, Βίος Σοφοκλέους, which is prefixed to the chief editions of the poet's works, and is also contained in Westermann's Vitarum Scriptores Graeci Minores, the very brief article of Suidas, and the incidental notices scattered through the works of Plutarch, Athenaeus, and other ancient writers. Of the numerous modern writers who have treated of the life, character, and works of Sophocles, the chief are:—Lessing, whose Leben des Sophokles is a masterpiece of aesthetic disquisition, left unfortunately incomplete; Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Criticism, which are now familiar to English readers; F. Schultz, de Vita Sophoclis, Berol. 1836, 8vo.; Schöll, Sophokles, sein Leben und Wirken, Frankfort, 1842, 8vo., with the elaborate series of reviews by C. F. Hermann, in the Berliner Jahrbücher, 1843: to these must be added the standard works on Greek tragedy by Böckh (Poet. Trag. Graec. Princ.), Welcker (die Griechischen Tragödien), and Kayser (Hist. Crit. Tragicorum Graec.), and also the standard histories of Greek Literature in general, and of Greek Poetry in particular, by Müller, Ulrici, Bode, and Bernhardy. i. The Life of Sophocles.—Sophocles was a native of the Attic village of Colonus, which lay a little more than a mile to the north-west of Athens, and the scenery and religious associations of which have been described by the poet, in his last and greatest work, in a manner which shows how powerful an influence his birth-place exercised on the whole current of his genius. The date of his birth, according to his anonymous biographer, was in Ol. 71. 2, B. C. 495; but the Parian Marble places it one year higher, B. C. 496. Most modern writers prefer the former date, on the ground of its more exact agreement with the other passages in which the poet's age is referred to (see Clinton, F. H. s. a.; Müller, Hist. Lit. p. 337, Eng. trans.). But those passages, when closely examined, will be found hardly sufficient to determine so nice a point as the difference of a few months. With this remark by way of caution, we place the birth of Sophocles at B. C. 495, five years before the battle of Marathon, so that he was about thirty years younger than Aeschylus, and fifteen years older than Euripides. (The anonymous biographer also mentions these differences, but his numbers are obviously corrupt.) His father's name was Sophilus, or Sophillus, respecting whose condition in life it is clear from the anonymous biography that the grammarians knew nothing for certain. According to Aristoxenus, he was a carpenter or smith; according to Ister, a swordmaker; while the biographer refuses to admit either of these statements, except in the sense that Sophilus had slaves who practised one or other of those handicrafts, because, he argues, it is improbable that the son of a common artificer should have been associated in military command with the first men of the state, such as Pericles and Thucydides, and also because, if he had been low-born, the comic poets would not have failed to attack him on that ground. There is some force in the latter argument. At all events it is clear that Sophocles received an education not inferior to that of the sons of the most distinguished citizens of Athens. To both of the two leading branches of Greek education, music and gymnastics, he was carefully trained, in company with the boys of his own age, and in both he gained the prize of a garland. He was taught music by the celebrated Lamprus (Vit. Anon.). Of the skill which he had attained in music and dancing in his sixteenth year, and of the perfection of his bodily form, we have conclusive evidence in the fact that, when the Athenians were assembled in solemn festival around the trophy which they had set up in Salamis to celebrate their victory over the fleet of Xerxes, Sophocles was chosen to lead, naked and with lyre in hand, the chorus which danced about the trophy, and sang the songs of triumph, B. C. 480. (Ath. i. p. 20, f.; Vit. Anon.) The statement of the anonymous biographer, that Sophocles learnt tragedy from Aeschylus, has been objected to on grounds which are perfectly conclusive, if it be understood as meaning any direct and formal instruction; but, from the connection in which the words stand, they appear to express nothing more than the simple and obvious fact, that Sophocles, having received the art in the form to which it had been advanced by Aeschylus, made in it other improvements of his own. His first appearance as a dramatist took place in the year B. C. 468, under peculiarly interesting circumstances; not only from the fact that Sophocles, at the age of twenty-seven, came forward as the rival of the veteran Aeschylus, whose supremacy had been maintained during an entire generation, but also from the character of the judges. It was, in short, a contest between the new and the old styles of tragic poetry, in which the competitors were the greatest dramatists, with one exception, who ever lived, and the umpires were the first men, in position and education, of a state in which almost every citizen had a nice perception of the beauties of poetry and art. The solemnities of the Great Dionysia were rendered more imposing by the occasion of the return of Cimon from his expedition to Scyros, bringing with him the bones of Theseus. Public expectation was so excited respecting the approaching dramatic contest, and party feeling ran so high, that Apsephion, the Archon Eponymus, whose duty it was to appoint the judges, had not yet ventured to proceed to the final act of drawing the lots for their election, when Cimon, with his nine colleagues in the command, having entered the theatre, and made the customary libations to Dionysus, the Archon detained them at the altar, and administered to them the oath appointed for the judges in the dramatic contests. Their decision was in favour of Sophocles, who received the first prize; the second only being awarded to Aeschylus, who was so mortified at his defeat that he left Athens and retired to Sicily. (Plut. Cim. 8; Marm. Par. 57.) The drama which Sophocles exhibited on this occasion is supposed, from a chronological computation in Pliny (H. N. xviii. 7. s. 12), to have been the Triptolemus, respecting the nature of which there has been much disputation: Welcker, who has discussed the question very fully, supposes that the main subject of the drama was the institution of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the establishment of the worship of Demeter at Athens by Triptolemus. From this epoch there can be no doubt that Sophocles held the supremacy of the Athenian stage ​(except in so far as it was shared by Aeschylus during the short period between his return to Athens and his final retirement to Sicily), until a formidable rival arose in the person of Euripides, who gained the first prize for the first time in the year B. C. 441. We possess, however, no particulars of the poet's life during this period of twenty-eight years. The year B. C. 440 (Ol. 84, 4) is a most important era in the poet's life. In the spring of that year, most probably, he brought out the earliest and one of the best of his extant dramas, the Antigone, a play which gave the Athenians such satisfaction, especially on account of the political wisdom it displayed, that they appointed him one of the ten strategic of whom Pericles was the chief, in the war against the aristocratical faction of Samos, which lasted from the summer of B. C. 440 to the spring of B. C. 439. The anonymous biographer states that this expedition took place seven years before the Peloponnesian War, and that Sophocles was 55 years old at the time. A full account of this war will be found in Thirlwall's History of Greece, vol. iii. pp. 48, foll. From an anecdote preserved by Athenaeus from the Travels of the poet Ion, it appears that Sophocles was engaged in bringing up the reinforcements from Chios, and that, amidst the occupations of his military command, he preserved his wonted tranquillity of mind, and found leisure to gratify his voluptuous tastes and to delight his comrades with his calm and pleasant conversation at their banquets. From the same narrative it would seem that Sophocles neither obtained nor sought for any military reputation: he is represented as good-humouredly repeating the judgment of Pericles concerning him, that he understood the making of poetry, but not the commanding of an army. (Ath. xiii. pp. 603, 604; Anon. Vit. Soph.; Aristoph. Byz. Arg. in Antig.; Plut. Per. 8; Strab. xiv. p. 446'; Schol. ad Aristoph. Pac. 696; Suid. s. v. Μέλητος; Cic. Off. i. 40; Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 2; Val. Max. iv. 3.) On another occasion, if we may believe Plutarch (Nic. 15), Sophocles was not ashamed to confess that he had no claim to military distinction; for when he was serving with Nicias, upon being asked by that general his opinion first, in a council of war, as being the eldest of the strategi, he replied 'I indeed am the eldest in years, but you in counsel.'[1] (Ἐγὼ, φάναι, παλαιότατός εἰμι, σὺ δέ πρεσϐύτατος). Mr. Donaldson, in his recent edition of the Antigone (Introduction, § 2), has put forward the view, that, at this period of his life, Sophocles was a personal and political friend of Pericles; that the political sentiments expressed in the Antigone were intended as a recommendation of the policy of that statesman, just as Aeschylus, in the Eumenides, had put forth all his powers in support of the opposite system of the old conservative party of Aristeides; that Pericles himself is circumstantially, though indirectly, referred to in various passages of the play (especially vv. 352, foll.); and that the poet's political connection with Pericles was one chief cause of his being associated with him in the Samian War. A still more interesting subject connected with this period of the poet's life, is his supposed intimacy with Herodotus, which is also touched upon by Mr. Donaldson (l. c.), who has discussed the matter at greater length in the Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. i. No. 15. We learn from Plutarch (An Seni sit Gerend. Respub. 3, p. 784, b.) that Sophocles composed a poem for Herodotus, commencing with the following inscription:— Ὠιδὴν Ἡροδότῳ τεῦξεν Σοφοκλῆς ἐτέων ὢν πεντ᾽ ἐπὶ πεντήκοντα (Wikisource | public domain)

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v. Σοφοκλέης.