Sophocles places questions of judgement, duty and suffering in dramatic conversations. Follow the speaker and situation before reading a character’s line as the playwright’s personal rule.
Printed page 8 · quotation 26 · Sophocles · Fragment
Life and writing
Romantic Circles identifies Sophocles with the Athenian tragic tradition and lists seven plays surviving in full. Its biographical heading gives 496–406 BCE; this profile treats those conventional ancient lifetime coordinates as approximate. The linked Campbell edition itself describes the birth year differently, as probably 495 BCE. Neither convention establishes when an individual English anthology excerpt was composed. The profile preserves the archive’s original author and entry records while making the limits of its life context visible.
In Antigone, Haemon asks Creon to hear other views instead of assuming that only his own judgement can be right. The selected anthology sentence is a different English rendering from Campbell’s paired lines on printed page 23. In The Trachinian Maidens, Deanira begins with a familiar maxim about waiting until death to judge a life, then says she already knows her distress. That continuation complicates a detached reading of the maxim. Character speech, translator wording and the compiler’s extraction remain separate from a direct claim about Sophocles’ own beliefs.
Read Antigone’s Haemon–Creon conversation on printed page 23, then Deanira’s opening on page 177 of The Trachinian Maidens. Both English renderings differ from the anthology. In the second, continue beyond the maxim to the speaker’s immediate objection. Lifetime coordinates are approximate, and the linked edition gives a different probable birth year. Related reading is context, not verification of every supplied Sophocles quotation or identification of the anthology translator.
Subjects to explore
Editorial reading connections, distinct from the archive’s word matching.
Original agent-assisted editorial profile, checked 2026-10-05. No human review is recorded. Life dates are approximate; they do not date individual quotations.
Limited original factual paraphrase and explicitly approximate lifetime context. Modern article text and images are not reproduced. Profile identity does not authenticate all associated quotations. Reference checked 2026-10-05.
Catalogue US-public-domain declaration, translation metadata and selected English passages checked with retained hashes. Original reading guidance; translation variants and dramatic speakers distinguished. Reference checked 2026-10-05.