Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 279
At the end of his life, Sophokles is said to have been taken to
court by one of his sons, who tried to have him declared insane.
The poet successfully refuted the charge by reading out one of the
choruses from the play that he was currently working upon. He
then turned to the jury and inquired, “Do you consider that to be
the work of an idiot?”
Despite the fact that his plays illustrate the inscrutable will of the gods, Sophokles
was a humanist. The following lines, which are delivered by the chorus in Antigone,
seem to echo the poet’s own judgment on human achievement:
Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, who traverses the
grey deep in wintery storms, making his way through waves that crash around
him, wearing away the oldest of the gods, Earth, the indestructible, ploughing
the soil year in and year out with his horses. . . . Only Death he has found no
way to escape, though from irresistible sickness he has devised a way out. His
ingeniousness and contriving are beyond everything. Now he makes his way to
destruction, now to greatness. When he establishes laws and divine oaths and
justice, his city rides high. (lines 322ff.)
Nineteen dramas of Sophokles’ younger contemporary Euripides
(480–406 b.c.e. ) survive, out of about 92. Euripides consistently
depicts the gods as violent and inhumane. There is a tradition that
he caused so much offense in Athens that he was prosecuted for
atheism, though we do not know whether this is true. In the Bacchai,
which was produced posthumously by his son in 405 b.c.e. ,
the god Dionysos takes terrible revenge on the royal house of
Thebes for having denied his divinity by causing a mother to tear
her son limb from limb. The poet became so alienated and embittered
at the end of his life that he abandoned Athens for Macedon,
where the Bacchai was performed. It is said that he met his death
by being torn apart by hunting dogs—another story of dubious
authenticity.
All but one of the surviving tragedies are set in Greece’s heroic
past and depict the fortunes of its royal houses. Only a few are set
in Athens. This does not mean that they were devoted to the exploration
of outworn themes, however. Rather, the heroic past served
as a backdrop for the lively investigation of contemporary political,
moral, and social issues. Aeschylus’s Eumenides, for instance,
the third play in the Oresteia, contains what superficially at least
appears to be an endorsement of the democratic revolution that