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Sophocles

Sophocles

c. 496 BCE–c. 406 BCE · Athens

Sophocles (c. 496 - 406 BCE) was one of the three great tragic playwrights of classical Athens, alongside Aeschylus and Euripides. Seven of his plays survive complete, including the celebrated Theban dramas "Oedipus the King," "Antigone," and "Oedipus at Colonus." Admired for masterful plotting and profound, dignified characters facing inescapable fate, he was the most honored tragedian of his day and remains a cornerstone of the Western dramatic tradition.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Aeschylus, Themistocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Gorgias of Leontini, Herodotus

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Sophocles’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sophocles’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(8)