Sophocles and the Necessity of Family

“Instead of the gods being our deliverance, the family is the instrument of salvation and the bulwark against tyranny in his surviving plays.”

Introduction

Sophocles (496 BC-406 BC), like his slightly younger contemporary Euripides, lived in exciting and transformative times. But where Euripides blasphemously ridiculed the gods and showed their callous cruelty, Sophocles—at least among the handful of plays that have survived—leaves the gods conspicuously absent from his dramas. Instead of the gods being our deliverance, the family is the instrument of salvation and the bulwark against tyranny in his surviving plays—but not without harrowing darkness before ascending into the light.

Amending Ancient Wisdom

Sophocles was closer to Aeschylus than Euripides in his content and message. Like Aeschylus, Sophocles was also more frequently honored at the festivals and playwright competitions than the younger and more impetuous tragedian who exposed the hollowness of the dark sacristy of the Athenian pantheon. This bears out in his plays where love and filial piety, themes that were present in Aeschylus, become the major themes in Sophocles. However, unlike Aeschylus—who located filial piety as contingent with the gods—Sophocles located the nexus of filial piety purely between humans. Electra’s deliverance with the advent of Orestes, or Antigone’s heartbreaking devotion to Polyneices which awakens Creon, the ruler of Thebes, to his failures, even the sympathy the reader has for isolated Philoctetes, all point to the importance of family life in providing meaning, comfort, and civilizational stability in Sophocles’ works.

Beyond filial piety and deliverance, the other great theme that concerned Sophocles was the tyranny of the state. Creon embodies statist tyranny in Antigone. Even pitiable Oedipus is the strongman of the state in Oedipus Rex, going as far as boldly eulogizing himself as the “ruin that saved the state.” Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, in Electra, are equally statist agents who are interested in the lust for power that characterizes the naked reality of human politics.