[4] For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens, which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia.

[5] The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, though each was part of a different tetralogy (the other members of which are now lost).

His first artistic triumph was in 468 BC, when he took first prize in the Dionysia, beating the reigning master of Athenian drama, Aeschylus.

[2][10] According to Plutarch, the victory came under unusual circumstances: instead of following the usual custom of choosing judges by lot, the archon asked Cimon, and the other strategoi present, to decide the victor of the contest.

[8] In 480 BC, Sophocles was chosen to lead the paean (a choral chant to a god), celebrating the Greek victory over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis.

[2] In 443/2, Sophocles served as one of the Hellenotamiai, or treasurers of Athena, helping to manage the finances of the city during the political ascendancy of Pericles.

[2] In 441 BC, according to the Vita Sophoclis, he was elected one of the ten generals, executive officials at Athens, as a junior colleague of Pericles; and he served in the Athenian campaign against Samos.

[14] In 420 BC, he was chosen to receive the image of Asclepius in his own house when the cult was being introduced to Athens and lacked a proper place (τέμενος).

[15] He was also elected, in 411 BC, one of the commissioners (probouloi) who responded to the catastrophic destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.

"[19] According to some accounts, however, his own sons tried to have him declared incompetent near the end of his life, and he refuted their charge in court by reading from his new Oedipus at Colonus.

A very ancient source, Athenaeus's work Sophists at Dinner, contains references to Sophocles' sexuality.

In that work, a character named Myrtilus claims that Sophocles "was partial to boys, in the same way that Euripides was partial to women"[22][23] ("φιλομεῖραξ δὲ ἦν ὁ Σοφοκλῆς, ὡς Εὐριπίδης φιλογύνης"),[24] and relates an anecdote, attributed to Ion of Chios, of Sophocles flirting with a serving-boy at a symposium:βούλει με ἡδέως πίνειν; [...] βραδέως τοίνυν καὶ πρόσφερέ μοι καὶ ἀπόφερε τὴν κύλικα.

[30] In response, Sophocles composed this elegy: Ἥλιος ἦν, οὐ παῖς, Εὐριπίδη, ὅς με χλιαίνωνγυμνὸν ἐποίησεν· σοὶ δὲ φιλοῦντι † ἑταίραν †Βορρᾶς ὡμίλησε.

[7] Aeschylus, who dominated Athenian playwriting during Sophocles' early career, adopted the third actor into his own work.

[7] Besides the third actor, Aristotle credits Sophocles with the introduction of skenographia, or scenery-painting; but this too is attributed elsewhere to someone else (by Vitruvius, to Agatharchus of Samos).

[33] After Aeschylus died, in 456 BC, Sophocles became the pre-eminent playwright in Athens,[2] winning competitions at eighteen Dionysia, and six Lenaia festivals.

Most of Sophocles' plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism, and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy.

[40] The three plays involve the tale of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, not knowing they are his parents.

He becomes the ruler of Thebes after solving the riddle of the Sphinx and in the process, marries the widowed queen, his mother Jocasta.

When the truth comes out, following from another true but confusing prophecy from Delphi, Jocasta commits suicide, Oedipus blinds himself and leaves Thebes.

In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles attempts to work these inconsistencies into a coherent whole: Ismene explains that, in light of their tainted family lineage, her brothers were at first willing to cede the throne to Creon.

In addition to being in a clearly more powerful position in Oedipus at Colonus, Eteocles and Polynices are also culpable: they consent (l. 429, Theodoridis, tr.)

[44] Fragments of the Epigoni were discovered in April 2005 by classicists at Oxford University with the help of infrared technology previously used for satellite imaging.

[40] A number of other Sophoclean works have survived only in fragments, including: There is a passage of Plutarch's tract De Profectibus in Virtute 7 in which Sophocles discusses his own growth as a writer.

C. M. Bowra argues for the following translation of the line: "After practising to the full the bigness of Aeschylus, then the painful ingenuity of my own invention, now in the third stage I am changing to the kind of diction which is most expressive of character and best.