Sophocles

Life and writing

Romantic Circles identifies Sophocles with the Athenian tragic tradition and lists seven plays surviving in full. Its biographical heading gives 496–406 BCE; this profile treats those conventional ancient lifetime coordinates as approximate. The linked Campbell edition itself describes the birth year differently, as probably 495 BCE. Neither convention establishes when an individual English anthology excerpt was composed. The profile preserves the archive’s original author and entry records while making the limits of its life context visible.

In Antigone, Haemon asks Creon to hear other views instead of assuming that only his own judgement can be right. The selected anthology sentence is a different English rendering from Campbell’s paired lines on printed page 23. In The Trachinian Maidens, Deanira begins with a familiar maxim about waiting until death to judge a life, then says she already knows her distress. That continuation complicates a detached reading of the maxim. Character speech, translator wording and the compiler’s extraction remain separate from a direct claim about Sophocles’ own beliefs.

Reading this voice

Read Antigone’s Haemon–Creon conversation on printed page 23, then Deanira’s opening on page 177 of The Trachinian Maidens. Both English renderings differ from the anthology. In the second, continue beyond the maxim to the speaker’s immediate objection. Lifetime coordinates are approximate, and the linked edition gives a different probable birth year. Related reading is context, not verification of every supplied Sophocles quotation or identification of the anthology translator.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• Think not that thy word and thine alone must be right.
• There is an ancient saying, famous among men, that thou shouldst not judge fully of a man's life before he dieth, whether it should be called blest or wretched.