c. 496–406 BCE
Athenian tragedian who tightened drama around a single catastrophic recognition. His Theban plays remain the West’s most concentrated studies of knowledge that arrives too late.
Perfected tragic irony and the hero whose excellence is also the engine of ruin.
Tragedy · c. 429 BCE
Sophocles
A plague-stricken Thebes waits while its king hunts a murderer and discovers he has been hunting himself. Knowledge arrives as blindness.
Theban play
Tragedy · c. 441 BCE
Sophocles
Antigone buries her brother against Creon’s edict and forces a collision between family rite and civic law. Neither claim leaves the stage intact.
Theban play