The Theban Plays - Sophocles

Fifth century bce Greece was, perhaps, one of the most important single centuries in the history of western civilization. In a scant one hundred years, Athens was transformed from little more than a trading town, to the power in the Mediterranean. While the city's might was constantly being challenged, what remains unquestioned was the extent to which thought - the progression of the western intellectual life - was to be set upon on a course that we can see around us every single day. As such, Athens, and the Greek world at large, was a place in transition. Gone would be the old kingdom and confederations of tribes. In their place would rise the polis, the Greek city-state, and with it, the first widespread experiments in democracy. Citizens saw the changes around them and many intuited that they were living in a world that was being drastically changed.

Few understood the resulting conflicts between old ways of being and new ways of living and organizing one's life than Sophocles. His Theban Plays (King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) are about precisely how people make sense of conflicting social and moral ideals of right and wrong, good and bad, duty and honor. How is Creon to treat the burial of Polydices? To whom does he primarily owe allegiance? What is his role as sovereign and as a family man?

At its core, of course, Sophocles' work is that of tragedy and, at this remove, we know that none of this will end well. For his characters are bound down by their circumstances and an inability to escape what the gods have decreed must come to pass. All that is certain is that man is fated to die. Other than that each can only put himself in the hands of the gods and to act right as the situation dictates. We cannot escape who we are: truly a timely message for a society going through epochal transformation. It is a testament to Sophocles' insight into the human condition that his message hardly seems dated.