Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When did Sophocles write Antigone?
Seven works of Sophocles have survived, the most acclaimed of which are the three Theban plays, which center around the story of Oedipus and his offspring. The Theban Trilogy consists of "Oedipus the King", "Oedipus at Colonus", and "Antigone". Although the plays are often called a "trilogy," they were actually written many years apart. "Antigone", the last of the three plays sequentially, was actually first to be written, having been composed in 441 BC, towards the beginning of Sophocles's career. "Oedipus the King", the most famous of the three, was written around 429 BC at the midpoint of Sophocles's career. "Oedipus at Colonus", the second of the three plays chronologically, was actually Sophocles's last play and was performed in 401 BC, after Sophocles's death.
Liliana Cavani's 1970 "I Cannibali" is a contemporary political fantasy based upon the Sophocles play, with Britt Ekland as Antigone and Pierre Clémenti as Tiresias.
Socrates, believed to have been born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in ancient Greek philosophy. Athens was a center of learning, with sophists and philosophers traveling from across Greece to teach rhetoric, astronomy, cosmology, geometry, and the like. The great statesman Pericles was closely associated with this new learning and a friend of Anaxagoras, however, and his political opponents struck at him by taking advantage of a conservative reaction against the philosophers; it became a crime to investigate the things above the heavens or below the earth, subjects considered impious. Anaxagoras is said to have been charged and to have fled into exile when Socrates was about twenty years of age. There is a story that Protagoras, too, was forced to flee and that the Athenians burned his books. Socrates, however, is the only subject recorded as charged under this law, convicted, and sentenced to death in 399 BCE (see Trial of Socrates). In the version of his defense speech presented by Plato, he claims that it is the envy he arouses on account of his being a philosopher that will convict him.
Music was an important part of social and cultural life in Ancient Greece. We know that composers wrote notated music during the Ancient Greek era because scholars have found the Seikilos epitaph. The epitaph, written around 200 BC to around AD 100 is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, in the world. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone, a stele, near Aydın, Turkey (not far from Ephesus). It is a Hellenistic Ionic song in either the Phrygian octave species or Iastian tonos.
Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Barry B. Powell dates the composition of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus, who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" (καὶ οὐ πλέοσι), and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation, or literacy. At the other extreme, scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as the middle of the second century BC. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the "Iliad" echoes the poetry of Hesiod, and that it must have been composed around 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the "Odyssey" up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the "Iliad" as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC.
Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Barry B. Powell dates the composition of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus, who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" (καὶ οὐ πλέοσι), and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation, or literacy. At the other extreme, scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as the middle of the second century BC. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the "Iliad" echoes the poetry of Hesiod, and that it must have been composed around 660-650 BC at the earliest, with the "Odyssey" up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the "Iliad" as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC.
Gorgons were a popular image in Greek mythology, appearing in the earliest of written records of Ancient Greek religious beliefs such as those of Homer, which may date to as early as 1194–1184 BC. Because of their legendary and powerful gaze that could turn one to stone, images of the Gorgons were put upon objects and buildings for protection. An image of a Gorgon holds the primary location at the pediment of the temple at Corfu, which is the oldest stone pediment in Greece, and is dated to c. 600 BC.
The decades that followed became known as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, during which time Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations for Western civilization. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during this time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Guided by Pericles, who promoted the arts and fostered democracy, Athens embarked on an ambitious building program that saw the construction of the Acropolis of Athens (including the Parthenon), as well as empire-building via the Delian League. Originally intended as an association of Greek city-states to continue the fight against the Persians, the league soon turned into a vehicle for Athens's own imperial ambitions. The resulting tensions brought about the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which Athens was defeated by its rival Sparta.
Several Oxyrhynchus Papyri fragments were found to contain parts of the Republic, and from other works such as Phaedo, or the dialogue Gorgias, written around 200-300 CE. Fragments of a different version of Plato's Republic were discovered in 1945, part of the Nag Hammadi library, written ca. 350 CE. These findings highlight the influence of Plato during those times in Egypt.
The idea is not new. Eustathius of Thessalonica recounted an ancient fiction in which both epics were composed by an Egyptian priestess, Phantasia; Samuel Butler, in "The Authoress of the Odyssey", attributed the "Odyssey" to a Sicilian woman between 1150 and 1050 BC; and Robert Graves in his novel "Homer's Daughter" made a similar proposal.
The Odyssey (; "Odýsseia", in Classical Attic) is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the "Iliad", the other work ascribed to Homer. The "Odyssey" is fundamental to the modern Western canon; it is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature, while the "Iliad" is the oldest. Scholars believe the "Odyssey" was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the Greek coastal region of Anatolia.
Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality:The scene is set in Phlius where Echecrates who, meeting Phaedo, asks for news about the last days of Socrates. Phaedo explains why a delay occurred between his trial and his death, and describes the scene in a prison at Athens on the final day, naming those present. He tells how he had visited Socrates early in the morning with the others. Socrates' wife Xanthippe was there, but was very distressed and Socrates asked that she be taken away. Socrates' relates how, bidden by a recurring dream to "make and cultivate music", he wrote a hymn and then began writing poetry based on Aesop's Fables.
Many think that "Clitophon" is a fragment or draft written by Plato. Grube believes "Clitophon" to have been a draft of Plato as a reflection of his dissatisfaction with his earlier methods, a tone seen in the middle period of Plato's works, but was abandoned as is attested to in its lack of revision. Bury believed that, if indeed it was written by Plato, "Clitophon" would be a fragmentary preface of "Republic", a stance held by Shorey and Grote. However, Slings makes note that no ancient author ever indicated that "Clitophon" was incomplete or unfinished. In "Parallel Lives", Plutarch, fully aware of "Clitophon", mentions that Plato's life ended before finishing his work (32.2), namely "Critias", not "Clitophon"; this indicates that "Clitophon" was finished in the opinion of ancient authors.
The Athenian public associated Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) with the trends in pre-Socratic philosophy towards naturalistic inquiry and the rejection of divine explanations for phenomena. Aristophanes' comic play "The Clouds" (performed 423 BCE) portrays Socrates as teaching his students that the traditional Greek deities do not exist. Socrates was later tried and executed under the charge of not believing in the gods of the state and instead worshipping foreign gods. Socrates himself vehemently denied the charges of atheism at his trial and all the surviving sources about him indicate that he was a very devout man, who prayed to the rising sun and believed that the oracle at Delphi spoke the word of Apollo. Euhemerus ( 300 BCE) published his view that the gods were only the deified rulers, conquerors and founders of the past, and that their cults and religions were in essence the continuation of vanished kingdoms and earlier political structures. Although not strictly an atheist, Euhemerus was later criticized for having "spread atheism over the whole inhabited earth by obliterating the gods".
In the mid-5th century BC, when the Athenian Acropolis became the seat of the Delian League and Athens was the greatest cultural centre of its time, Pericles initiated an ambitious building project that lasted the entire second half of the century. The most important buildings visible on the Acropolis today — the Parthenon, the Propylaia, the Erechtheion and the temple of Athena Nike — were erected during this period. The Parthenon was built under the general supervision of the artist Phidias, who also had charge of the sculptural decoration. The architects Ictinos and Callicrates began their work in 447 BC, and the building was substantially completed by 432, but work on the decorations continued until at least 431.
Friedrich August Wolf's "Prolegomena ad Homerum", published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the sixth century BC by literate authors. After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities. Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences. Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory," which held that the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", which later poets expanded and revised. A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".
Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the "Iliad" and "Odyssey". It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterizations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles's shield in the "Iliad" exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterized Phoenician crafts, they are characterized in the "Odyssey" as "manifold scurvy tricksters".
"Romeo and Juliet" belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale translated into verse as "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in "Palace of Pleasure" by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, particularly Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected the text to conform more closely with Shakespeare's original.
The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet ultimately sprang from Ovid's story. Here the star-crossed lovers cannot be together because Juliet has been engaged by her parents to another man and the two families hold an ancient grudge. As in Pyramus and Thisbe, the mistaken belief in one lover's death leads to consecutive suicides. The earliest version of Romeo and Juliet was published in 1476 by Masuccio Salernitano, while it mostly obtained its present form when written down in 1524 by Luigi da Porto. Salernitano and Da Porto both are thought to have been inspired by Ovid and Boccaccio's writing. Shakespeare's most famous 1590s adaptation is a dramatization of Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet", itself a translation of a French translation of Da Porto's novella.
Socrates was born in Alopeke, and belonged to the tribe Antiochis. His father was Sophroniscus, a sculptor, or stonemason. His mother was a midwife named Phaenarete. Socrates married Xanthippe, who is especially remembered for having an undesirable temperament. She bore for him three sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus.
When Cyrus of Persia defeated Croesus of Lydia in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus fell under Persian rule. In 499 BC Miletus's tyrant Aristagoras became the leader of the Ionian Revolt against the Persians under Darius the Great, who quashed this rebellion and punished Miletus by selling all of the women and children into slavery, killing the men, and expelling all of the young men as eunuchs, thereby assuring that no Miletus citizen would ever be born again. A year afterward, Phrynicus produced the tragedy "The Capture of Miletus" in Athens. The Athenians fined him for reminding them of their loss.
In "Antigone", Sophocles asks the question, which law is greater: the gods' or man's. Sophocles votes for the law of the gods. He does this in order to save Athens from the moral destruction which seems imminent. Sophocles wants to warn his countrymen about hubris, or arrogance, because he believes this will be their downfall. In Antigone, the hubris of Creon is revealed.
An important issue still debated regarding Sophocles' "Antigone" is the problem of the second burial. When she poured dust over her brother's body, Antigone completed the burial rituals and thus fulfilled her duty to him. Having been properly buried, Polyneices' soul could proceed to the underworld whether or not the dust was removed from his body. However, Antigone went back after his body was uncovered and performed the ritual again, an act that seems to be completely unmotivated by anything other than a plot necessity so that she could be caught in the act of disobedience, leaving no doubt of her guilt. More than one commentator has suggested that it was the gods, not Antigone, who performed the first burial, citing both the guard's description of the scene and the chorus's observation.
The extant fragments of Euripides' "Antigone" do not reveal much of the plot, but Aristophanes of Byzantium has written that Euripides' play differed from Sophocles' in three major ways:Modern scholars interpret Aristophanes comment to indicate that Euripides' play developed along similar lines to Sophocles', except that Haemon's participation in, or at least knowledge of, Antigone's burial of Polynices led to the happy resolution of their marriage in Euripides' play instead of their deaths in Sophocles' play. One extant fragment is a plea to the god Dionysus, suggesting the possibility that Dionysus was the "deus ex machina" who saved Antigone and Haemon and prophesied the birth of Maeon. Several extant fragments deal with love and marriage, and John Homer Huddilston believed that this, and hint from other fragments (although some of these are now believed to be from plays other than Antigone) indicate that Antigone and Haemon were married secretly.
In this play Sophocles raises a number of questions: Should Polyneices, who committed a serious crime that threatened the city, be given burial rituals, or should his body be left unburied as prey for scavenging animals? Should someone who attempts to bury him in defiance of Creon be punished in an especially cruel and horrible way? Are Creon’s actions justified? Are Antigone’s actions justified? In this play, Creon is not presented as a monster, but as a leader who is doing what he considers right and justified by the state. The chorus is presented as a group of citizens who, though they may feel uneasy about the treatment of the corpse, respect Creon and what he is doing. The chorus is sympathetic to Antigone only when she is led off to her death. But when the chorus learns that the Gods are offended by what Creon has done, and that Creon’s actions will result in the destruction of their city, then they ask Creon to change course. The city is of primary importance to the chorus. Once the initial premises behind the characters in "Antigone" have been established, the action of the play moves steadily and inevitably towards the outcome. Once Creon has discovered that Antigone buried her brother against his orders, the ensuing discussion of her fate is devoid of arguments for mercy because of youth or sisterly love from the Chorus, Haemon or Antigone herself. Most of the arguments to save her center on a debate over which course adheres best to strict justice.