One of the three great playwrights of
Classic Greece (the others being
Aeschylus and
Euripides). Born in app. 497
BCE to a
noble family, in the small town of Colonus near
Athens. He wrote 132 plays, of which only seven survived. Sophocles was also a priest of the Medicine God, Asclepios.
His surviving plays are: 'Oedipus the King' (aka 'Oedipus Rex' or 'Oedipos Tyrannos'), 'Women of Trachis' (Trachiniai), 'Philoctetes', 'Antigone', 'Aias' (aka 'Ajax'), 'Electra' and 'Oedipus in Colonus'