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his beauty, lead the victory procession naked, to commemorate the Greek defeat of Xerxes at Salamis. At the age of twenty-seven, he won his first dramatic victory against the renowned Aeschylus, who left Athens, mortified at the result. The decision was taken by Cimon, the military leader who had recently returned from Scyros with the bones of the legendary King Theseus. In an unexpected departure from normal procedure, the archon insisted that Cimon and his nine officers be appointed as the arbiters of the dramatic festival. Such a break with tradition was mirrored in the sudden toppling of the preeminent Aeschylus by the fledgling Sophocles.
    Sophocles went on to write 120 plays, and was only ever awarded first or second prize in the festivals. Of these plays, only seven survive, with substantial fragments from one of his satyr plays,
The Trackers.
He was a close friend of Pericles. Like Pericles, Sophocles had a foreign mistress, Theoris, as well as an Athenian wife. His legitimate son, Iophron, was apparently infuriated by his father’s favoritism toward Sophocles the Younger, his grandson through Theoris’ child. The family feud ended in court, with Iophron claiming his father was senile. The ninety-year-old Sophocles read from his as yet unperformed
Oedipus at Colonus:
the judges summarily dismissed the case and punished Iophron for his unfilial behavior. It was perhaps at the same time that Sophocles made the pronouncement attributed to him by Plato: “I bless old age for releasing me from the tyranny of my appetites.”
    We do not have in Sophocles’ seven plays an intact trilogy, as we do with Aeschylus’
Oresteia.
Although
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus,
and
Antigone
all deal with the ramifications of a single story, they were written at different times of his life, and were originally linked to other plays. Aristophanes mentions a play called
Tereus,
of which Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles wrote a derivative imitation. There is the lost
Orithyia,
a single line of which survives. Longinus, in his essay on literary style
On
the Sublime,
favorably compared the death of Oedipus with the ghostly appearance of Achilles at the end of the lost
Polyxena.
(The scene was apparently only bettered in a poem by Simonides, which is lost as well.) There was an
Athamas,
about a father who vowed to sacrifice his children, and was himself nearly sacrificed when they escaped, and a
Meleager,
which may have dealt with the prophecy that the hero’s life would last only as long as a burning branch. His mother, after having preserved and treasured the charred wood, destroys it in a vengeful fury.
    Our knowledge of Greek dramaturgy would no doubt be greatly enhanced if Sophocles’ essay
On the Chorus
had survived. As it is, all we know is that he increased the Chorus from twelve to fifteen, and that they acted as a substitute audience, rather than as a character (as in Aeschylus) or as an interlude (as in Euripides). Sophocles also wrote a paean on the god of medicine, Asclepius, and was known to be such a devout adherent of that divinity that the statue of Asclepius was left in his safekeeping. This too has perished.
    Given that he was so successful, and so well loved by the Athenians, it may seem mysterious that more of Sophocles’ plays, let alone his prose or his poems, have not survived. One possible reason may be that of the plays that did, one was considered perfect. Only the best was saved.
    Coleridge wrote that
Oedipus Rex,
along with Jonson’s
The Alchemist
and Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
were the three perfect plots in existence. A similar opinion was held by Aristotle, who frequently used
OedipusRex
as an exemplar in his treatise
The Poetics.
When discussing the importance of the epiphany and peripeteia, or revelation and reversal, or when expounding on the role of fear and pity, it is to
Oedipus Rex
that Aristotle instinctively refers. Longinus, too, quotes approvingly from the