Sophocles is supposed to have said that Aeschylus wrote well without knowing it; Euripides portrayed people as they were; and he painted people as they ought to be.


Roman copy of Ancient Greek bust of Sophocles. Detail of 2008 photograph by shakko, issued on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

"The Young Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Victory after the Battle of Salamis" (1889), sculpture by John Talbott Donoghue. He is shown playing a lyre made from oxhorn and tortoise shell. The real Sophocles later specialized in the kithara, a professional concert version of the lyre with as many as 12 strings.

Detail of 2010 photograph by Hiart, released into the public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

Probably the best known myth about Sophocles concerns his last year, when he was 90. After the death of his wife Nikostrate, he had taken a mistress and doted on her and their offspring. His legitimate son Iophon, fearing he would lose his inheritance, sued to gain control of the estate, charging that his father was too old and feeble-minded to manage his affairs. Sophocles responded in court by reading excerpts from "Oedipus at Colonus", which he had just finished writing. The judges instantly ruled in his favor.

The problem with this anecdote is the fact that Classical Athenian law prohibited parents from disinheriting their children. Sophocles aided his son Iophon and grandson Sophocles in their own careers as tragedians; it was the grandson who produced the posthumous "Oedipus at Colonus" in 401 BC. When it won first prize at the City Dionysia festival, an additional inscription was added to the playwright's grave that further refutes the above tale: "Sophocles waged a glorious contest with the Nature of Things in that he produced generously his magnificent works, and Nature liberally furnished the time for his works: for he nearly reached his hundredth year, when at the very verge of the transition to death, he wrote his "Oedipus at Colonus", a play which by itself snatched the glory away from all those poets who practiced his art. His son, Iophon, did not wish for this to go unknown and engraved on his father's tomb what I have reported".
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Statue of Sophocles at King's College in London. Replica of a Roman era sculpture at the Lateran Museum in Rome, which itself was copied from a now lost Greek original. Detail of 2006 photograph by Salamander4000, released into the public domain on Wikimedia Commons.

Circa 430 BC Greek vase painting showing Thamyris being blinded by the muses. Historians believe this is a reproduction of a 450s BC mural by the artist Polygnotus, quite possibly his famous portrait of Sophocles as Thamyris at the Stoa Poikile in Athens. It was still visible there in the 3rd Century AD.