Sophocles brief biography of albert

And the easy-going birds , and the gangs of savage beasts, and the salty sea creatures, he catches them all in nets he weaves , he catches them, man is so smart. And he knows how to catch wild animals, who wander in the hills; man breaks shaggy wild horses , he tames tireless bulls and yokes their necks. And man taught himself to talk, and to think quicker than the wind blows, and all the moods that make a town a city.

Nothing finds him hopeless, only against Death he is helpless; but even for mysterious diseases he finds cures. His fertile skill is cunning beyond dreams of cunning; it brings him sometimes to bad, sometimes to good. Sophocles wrote over plays in his lifetime, but only seven survive. This is because sometime around AD , when Greece was under Roman rule , somebody chose seven plays of Aeschylus and seven plays of Sophocles and ten of Euripides and put them together in a book which was used in school classes.

The only plays which survived were these ones which teachers assigned in Roman schools. Greek Theatre , by Stewart Ross Easy reading. Greek and Roman Theater , by Don Nardo. For teenagers. Continuing to write plays he wrote more than Every play he entered in competitions won either first or second prize. One of the plays, Oedipus the King is not only his most famous but also arguably the greatest Greek drama.

Electra is just about equally famous. Two of his plays, Antigone and The Women of Trachis are famous for having fully rounded female characters in the way that appeals to the modern taste where psychological drama tops the bill in popular theatre. But the secret of his skill depends in large measure on the profound way in which the central situation in each of his fables has been conceived and felt.

Concentration is the distinguishing note of tragedy, and it is by greater concentration that Sophocles is distinguished from other tragic poets. But in following a Sophoclean tragedy we are carried steadily and swiftly onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left; the more elaborately any scene or single speech is wrought the more does it contribute to enhance the main emotion, and if there is a deliberate pause it is felt either as a welcome breathing space or as the calm of brooding expectancy.

The result of this method is the union, in the highest degree, of simplicity with complexity, of largeness of design with absolute finish, of grandeur with harmony. Superfluities are thrown off without an effort through the burning of the fire within. Crude elements are fused and made transparent. What look like ornaments are found to be inseparable from the organic whole.

Each of the plays is admirable in structure, not because it is cleverly put together, but because it is so completely alive. The seven extant tragedies probably owe their preservation to some selection made for educational purposes in Alexandrian times. Of these four the Antigone seems to have been the most popular, while an inner circle of readers were specially attracted by the Oedipus Coloneus.

Modern readers have thought it strange that Creon when convinced goes to bury Polynices before attempting to release Antigone. Antigone is the martyr of natural affection and of the religion of the family. But, as Kaibel pointed out, she is also the high-born Cadmean maiden, whose defiance of the oppressor is accentuated by the pride of race.

Sophocles brief biography of albert

She despises Creon as an upstart, who has done outrage not only to eternal ordinance, but to the rights of the royal house. The Ajax , that tragedy of wounded honour, still bears some traces of Aeschylean influence, and may be even earlier than the Antigone. The construction of the Ajax has been adversely criticized, but without sufficient reason.

In the King Oedipus the poet attains to the supreme height of dramatic concentration and tragic intensity. The drama seems to have been produced soon after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, but certainly not in the year of the plague—else Sophocles, like his predecessor Phrynichus, might be said to have reminded his countrymen too poignantly of their home troubles.

The worship of the Delphic Apollo is associated with a profound sense of the value and sacredness of domestic purity, and in the command to drive out pollution there is possibly an implied reference to the expulsion of the Alcmaeonidae. The Electra , a less powerful drama, is shown by the metrical indications to be somewhat later than the Oedipus Rex.

The harshness of the vendetta is not relieved as in Aeschylus by long drawn invocations of the dead, nor, as in Euripides, is it made a subject of casuistry. But nothing can exceed the tenderness of the recognition scene—lines , and the description of the falsely reported chariot race is full of spirit. The fate of Deianira is tragic indeed. But in her treatment of her rival, Iole, there are modern touches reminding one of Shakespeare.

The tragic catastrophe of the Oedipus Tyrannus and the Trachiniae is absent here. The contending interests are reconciled by the intervention of the deified Heracles. But even more clearly than in the Ajax the heroic sufferer, rejected by men, is accepted by the gods and destined to triumph in the end. The Philoctetes is known to have been produced in the year B.

The Oedipus Coloneus is said to have been brought out after the death of Sophocles by his grandson in the archonship of Micon, B. The question naturally arises, why a work of such surpassing merit should not have appeared in the lifetime of the poet. The answer is conjectural, but acquires some probability when several facts are taken into one view.

It is surely remarkable that in a drama which obviously appeals to Athenian patriotism, local sanctities should obtain prominence to the exclusion of the corresponding national shrines on the Acropolis. It has been thought that the aged poet felt a peculiar satisfaction in celebrating the beauty and sacredness of his native district. This may well have been so, but could hardly supply a sufficient motive for a work destined to be presented to the assembled Athenians in the Dionysiac theatre.

Those who organized the constitution of the Four Hundred made the precinct of Poseidon at Colonus the place of meeting, and probably sacrificed at the very altar which is consecrated by Theseus in this play. There must have been some reason for this. May it not have been that the occupants of the whole region, including the Academy, belonged mostly to the oligarchic faction?

May not those who honoured Colonus by frequenting it—lines 62 and 63—have belonged to the order of knighthood? In times of political agitation Colonus would then be regarded like St Germain, as the aristocratic quarter, while the Peiraeus was that of the extreme democracy, a sort of Faubourg St Antoine. It was there that the counter-movement reached its culmination.

If so much be granted, is it not possible that this play, so deeply tinged with oligarchic influence, may have been thought too dangerous, and consequently withheld from production until after the amnesty, when the name of Sophocles was universally beloved, and this work of his old age could be prudently made public by his descendant? Continue reading.

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