The ancients called the dramatic poet Sophocles a pupil and rival of Aeschylus. In 468, the twenty-eight-year-old Sophocles first won dramatic competition against Aeschylus and has reigned on stage for 60 years without knowing a single defeat. In his youth, Sophocles used to appear in the theater as an actor.
Sophocles' literary heritage was 123 dramas. Of these, only 7 have been fully preserved, not counting the large number of isolated passages.
In 409 B.C. Sophocles composed the tragedy "Philoctetes", the plot of which is borrowed from Trojan tales. Philoctetes, one of the participants of the Trojan campaign, was stung by a snake on the way, and since the wound did not heal, the Greeks landed him alone on the island of Lemnos. In the tenth year of the war, Agamemnon received a prediction that Troy would not be taken without Philoctetes’s bow, and the Greeks had to go to Philoctetes. This tale was used by three tragic poets, but only the tragedy of Sophocles is fully preserved.
Unlike the characters of Aeschylus and Euripides’s plays, Sophocles’s Philoctetes lives on a deserted island. The absence of human society increases his physical and moral suffering and deepens the grievance against the Greeks. Odysseus and young Neoptolemus, Achilleus’s son come to the island. Odysseus tries to convince the noble and honest Neoptolemus to save the Achaean army to deceive Philoctetes and steal his bow. After long and painful hesitations Neoptolemus agrees with the arguments of Odysseus. But then, having become an eyewitness to the torment of Philoctetes, he refuses. Finding it possible to act only honestly, Neoptolemus unexpectedly succeeds. The gods send their messenger to Philoctetes and order him to go with Neoptolemus to Troy.
In the society of that time, Athenians talked a lot and argued about the principles of education. According to the traditional point of view, which was supported by Sophocles, virtue is an inherent property of a person. Opponents of this view believed that virtue is comprehended by learning and is successfully replaced by wisdom. According to Sophocles, the basis of society should not be education in the rules of wisdom, the carrier of which he makes Odyssey, but the innate properties of human nature, revealed through education. Using the example of Neoptolemus, he shows that a noble person is not capable of meanness, even if it is necessary for the most noble purposes. Depicting in the tragedy the inner struggle of the young hero, Sophocles reveals the contradictions of a human nature, to which all the work of Euripides will be devoted.
Antique critics called Sophocles a tragic Homer and admired the classic clarity of his dramatic language, his amazing skillfulness.
