As with all ancient writers, we can know little for certain about Sophocles' life: sources are few and far between, and many of the conclusions that scholars have reached are derived from probability and good guesswork rather than any biographical fact. Some of the sources directly contradict each other.
Sophocles, usually considered the most accessible of the central triangle of Greek tragedians (the other two being Euripides and Aeschylus), was probably born in or around 496 BCE near Athens at Colonus, the setting of his Oedipus at Colonos.
Sources tell us that Sophocles wrote 123 plays in his lifetime, of which we know the titles of 118. Of this huge output of plays (Shakespeare, in...
