He wrote over 120 plays; seven survive complete
Sophocles (c. 497/496–406/405 BC) dominated Athens's dramatic festivals for nearly fifty years—entering thirty competitions, taking twenty-four wins, and never finishing below second place. Of more than 120 plays he wrote, only seven still remain whole, including Oedipus Rex.
Son of armour-maker Sophillus in the Attic deme Colonus, Sophocles likely debuted around 470 BC and took first prize at the Dionysia in 468, beating Aeschylus—Plutarch says generals including Cimon judged that contest. In 480 he led the paean after Salamis. He served as Hellenotamias treasurer in 443/2 under Pericles, as general in 441 against Samos, and as proboulos after the Sicilian disaster in 411. Athenians supposedly lodged Asclepius's image in his house in 420, earning the epithet Dexion—though some doubt the tale. He died winter 406/5 at ninety or ninety-one, having seen Persian victory and Peloponnesian slaughter; apocrypha blame grape choking or joy after a final win. One son and a grandson also wrote plays.
Aristotle credits him with adding a third actor (Themistius credits Aeschylus) and with skenographia; Aeschylus adopted the third actor. After Aeschylus's death in 456, Sophocles ruled Athens's stage—eighteen Dionysia and six Lenaia victories—yet refused foreign court invitations. The seven survivors are Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes (409 BC), and Oedipus at Colonus (staged 401 BC by his grandson). The so-called Theban plays were written years apart for separate festivals, not as one trilogy, and contain inconsistencies. Aeschylus won thirteen contests; Euripides four.
Oedipus Rex unfolds the plague-bound king who discovers he killed Laius and married Jocasta—his parents—then blinds himself. Oedipus at Colonus brings the exile to Sophocles's own deme under Theseus's protection. Antigone buries Polyneices against Creon's edict and dies, triggering Haemon's and Eurydice's suicides. Deeper characters and reduced chorus changed drama's balance. Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC) still holds Oedipus Rex as tragedy's peak—twenty-four wins distilled into seven scripts that never stopped being read.
Source: Sophocles
