‘Imagine Mozart had lived into old age: we'd be referring to The Marriage of Figaro, the Requiem, and the Jupiter Symphony as early Mozart.’ This poignant remark (not quoted verbatim) made to me by the late Derek Parfit evokes not only the frustrated sense of loss which we feel when contemplating the premature passing of an artistic genius, but also the impact which the contingent fact of an artist's death date can have on our overall characterization of their output. In the case of Sophocles, the genius did live on, and continued to produce masterworks right up until the end of his life. The counterfactual here is to imagine that he died rather before the age of approximately ninety in 405. His dying only five years earlier would have denied us Philoctetes, performed first in 409 and likely written not long before then, and Oedipus at Colonus, produced posthumously in 401 by Sophocles’ homonymous grandson, himself a tragedian of some note. But his reputation was by then secure, and we may hope (to pile counterfactual on counterfactual) that some other plays, now lost to us, would have survived in their stead; in which case our picture of Sophocles today would be rather different. A still earlier death, say at the age of fifty, would not only have meant that his Electra and, quite probably, Oedipus the King were never written, but also that plays sometimes often seen today as ‘early’, especially Trachiniae and Ajax, would have been regarded as mature works standing at the summit of a still substantial career.

Sophocles was an outstandingly successful playwright in his lifetime, with a most impressive number of victories (pp. 5–6 above); he was even Socrates’ favourite tragedian. Shortly after his death he received praise in Aristophanes’ Frogs of 405, and in Phrynichus’ Muses of the same year, in which a character refers to his ‘many beautiful tragedies’. In particular, the sweetness of his poetry was remarked on while he was still alive, and would become a frequent image in later criticism, paradoxical though that may seem given the dark tones of so many of his plays. For the rest of antiquity he retained his popularity, though from now on he would always be overshadowed by a playwright who during his lifetime had only rarely beaten him. The greater favour enjoyed by Euripides is visible as early as the fourth century, when his plays seem to have been reperformed more often than those of Sophocles, and then in later times is reflected by the considerably larger numbers of papyri, as well as quotations from his plays in other authors. Aeschylus, on the other hand, was far less popular than either Sophocles or Euripides, as measured by the same criteria. The reason for these relative standings, which were to remain consistent, will lie partly in the relative difficulty of the Greek used by each playwright. Aeschylus’ lexicon is the furthest removed from everyday language; Sophocles’ vocabulary may be easier to grapple with, but his syntax is still difficult, certainly more difficult than that of Euripides. Aeschylean tragedy was also less suited to displaying the bravura abilities of individual actors who played such a part in the transmission of tragic texts; in addition, his fondness for connected trilogies may have proved challenging in dramatic contexts unsuited to that elaborate form.

Roughly three centuries lie between our youngest ancient manuscript and oldest medieval manuscript of Sophocles: Laurentianus 32.9 (abbreviated as L), from the middle of the tenth century, which also contains our earliest extensive text of the surviving plays of Aeschylus, and of Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica. This manuscript provides several unique readings likely to be true, and overall the best text of the dramas. However, it is not the case that all other medieval manuscripts were descended from L, and can thus be set aside by editors. Many manuscripts, or manuscript groups, are unique witnesses to parts of the tradition. A manuscript contemporary with L, Leiden B.P.G. (Λ), survives only as a palimpsest – it was reused by having another text written on top of the Sophoclean text, which can now be read only partially. Its readings are especially useful where L's are obscure or illegible. The next-oldest, Laurentianus 31.10 (K), dates from the last third of the twelfth century; it contains some unique correct readings and in general a good text, usually close to that of L(Λ).

First published in 1971, this early second-century papyrus, POxy. 2805, was soon identified as coming from Sophocles’ Niobe. It portrays the killing of Niobe's children by Apollo and Artemis during a tragic drama, the staging of which, as we will see, seems to have been among Sophocles’ most striking dramatic creations. This killing, an unvarying element of the myth, was punishment for Niobe's boast that she had borne many children (fourteen, seven sons and seven daughters, is the number specified in Sophocles’ play: fr. 446), Leto only two. A further papyrus, from a mummy case at El-Hibeh (though quite possibly written at Oxyrhynchus) and dated to between 280 and 240 bc, PGrenf. ii.6(a)+PHib. 11, is from the same drama. Aeschylus wrote a Niobe, set after the killings; Euripides is not known to have written such a play. That leaves Sophocles’ Niobe (whose citation fragments indicate that it included the killings) or a play by a minor tragedian; but it is much more likely that two papyri of a Sophoclean drama should survive, from different times and perhaps places too, than that a work by another tragedian should be so unexpectedly favoured. A decade after Barrett argued this, a hypothesis of Sophocles’ play was published which refers to the event described in POxy. 2805: case closed.

The character delivering this speech was not attempting a dispassionate assessment of the relative merits of two genres; rather, as often, a comic poet was asserting his rivalry with practitioners of an art form at once closely related and quite distinct. Nevertheless, the sentiments voiced here probably occur to anyone aware of how serious Greek literature generally confined itself to well-known myths. Can a literature based on such restricted subject matter really deserve its place among the world's classics? More specifically, to what extent can Sophocles be reckoned an original artist, when so many of his plays are based on myths already treated by an earlier tragic virtuoso, namely Aeschylus?

The mangled second-century papyrus which preserves this passage from Sophocles’ Eurypylus is powerful testimony to an extraordinarily passionate scene. Before the passage above comes the opening of a messenger speech, little of which is preserved. It seems to describe the death of Eurypylus, who brought his soldiers to Troy to support Priam, but was slain by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. Eurypylus’ father was Telephus (mentioned, by a virtually certain restoration, at line 26), king of the Mysians, who was wounded by Achilles’ spear when the Greeks mistakenly landed in his country on the way to Troy, and was later cured by the same weapon; his mother was Astyoche, Priam's sister. After the account of Eurypylus’ death follows an emotional exchange in song between two speakers; their names are not preserved, but paragraphoi indicate speaker change. One speaker suffers a particularly intense reaction to Eurypylus’ death, such as would suit only his mother, Astyoche. The other speaker comments on the character's grief, fulfilling the chorus's role. After this lyric exchange or kommos, Astyoche, now speaking, asks the Messenger about the treatment of her son's body and (another likely restoration) of a companion of his, perhaps Antenor's son Helicaon. The ‘impassioned rhetoric’ of the Messenger's reply is clear; in particular, his account of the lamentation over Eurypylus’ corpse, especially Priam's, rises to the fraught occasion.

At the end of the parodos of Ajax, the chorus urge their lord to leave his hut and appear: in vain, since when the door opens not Ajax but Tecmessa comes on stage. This failure reflects no lack of intensity in their appeal; one phrase in particular showcases the density of Sophoclean language. μακραίωνι…τᾷδ᾿ ἀγωνίῳ σχολᾷ literally means ‘in this long leisure related to conflict/struggle (agônios)’, and that expression takes the phrase in several directions. An obvious initial sense is ‘rest from battle’: Ajax the warrior is not fulfilling his duty to fight. Yet the phrase evokes not just his withdrawal, but its cause: Ajax's ‘rest from battle’ results from his furious reaction to the Judgment of the Arms, in which Odysseus, not he, received the dead Achilles’ armour. That Judgment was itself a conflict, later explicitly designated as an ἀγών (936, 1240): so here ‘idleness provoked by the Judgment of the Arms’ is a natural additional translation. A third sense arises from a third conflict of Ajax's: with the Greeks, his erstwhile comrades, who acquiesced in what Ajax regards as a crooked decision. His failure to fight the Trojans is a form of conflict against his fellow-soldiers, which suggests the meaning ‘contentious inactivity’, with a powerful paradox: this is σχολή, ‘leisure’, with a purpose. Fourthly, the conflict or struggle is one that Ajax is having with himself: ‘however his leisure was employed, it was becoming full of danger to him’.

Reacting to the death of his supposed father, Polybus, Oedipus’ dismisses the power of Apollo's shrine in Delphi at the very point when that god is inexorably bringing him to his destruction. The immense relief which Oedipus feels on learning that after all he will not kill his father is strikingly marked by the metre. An iambic trimeter usually scans ×—⏑—×—⏑—×—⏑— (where — represents a long syllable, ⏑ a short, and × an anceps which can be long or short); but line 967 scans ⏑—⏑— —⏑⏑⏑⏑⏑⏑⏑⏑⏑—, with three successive resolutions, or substitutions of a long syllable by a double short (⏑⏑). With the intervening short ancipites, this gives fully nine consecutive short syllables, something unparalleled among the few tragic instances of threefold resolution, and indicative of the impact of the news: Oedipus is giddy with relief. The vivid metrical effect coincides with the phrase ‘my father’ and the reference to his death: this is what has triggered the outburst of joy from this previously frantic man.

The first twelve lines of this text were ascribed to Sophocles’ Tereus by the fifth-century ad anthologist Stobaeus, whose works, unlike Sophocles’ play, did survive antiquity; they appear in Radt's edition of the fragments as fr. 583. Scholars have long supposed, rightly, that they were delivered by Procne, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, and wife of Tereus, king of Thrace. After living with her husband for a while she grew lonely, and asked him to fetch her sister Philomela from Athens. Tereus did so, but on the return journey he raped her, cutting out her tongue to prevent her accusing him. She was, however, able to communicate to her sister what had happened by weaving the story into a tapestry; together, the sisters conspired to kill Tereus’ child by Procne, Itys, and served the poor boy's flesh as a meal to his unsuspecting father. Once he discovered the truth he pursued them, and the gods turned all three into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow. Procne in her new form became a byword for misery: the nightingale's call was thought to symbolize her perpetual lamentation for her own child, whom she had killed in pursuit of a terrible revenge.

Antigone's defiant words might be regarded as an archetypal statement of tragic heroism. Faced with a human instruction to leave her dead brother unburied, she fulfils the rites owed to the corpse knowing that this will lead to her death; when the time comes, she treats the tyrant who menaces her, Creon, with disdain. She does this as a powerless young woman, facing an older man in a position of total authority; the contrast between the figures on stage, evident in their costumes and masks, will have accentuated the shocking nature of her response. The chorus show her no sympathy. They are even older men, which makes the female Antigone seem all the more alone; other female characters who challenge the power of males, such as Procne or Euripides’ Medea, at least have a supportive chorus of the same gender. So the circumstances in which Antigone finds herself emphasize the bravery evident in her speech, where she shows herself willing to give up her life to treat her brother's corpse as she believes the laws of the gods demand.

This song comes from Antigone's final moments on stage, ahead of being buried alive. Forcefully rejecting the chorus-leader's qualification of her attempt to compare her fate with Niobe's, she calls upon the chorus as the wealthy citizens of Thebes; ‘then, convinced that they have no word of comfort for her, she calls upon inanimate things’ – the streams and grove of the Theban landscape. The invocation of the city emphasizes her sense of rejection at its hands; her enemy is not simply Creon, but society as a whole, which has acquiesced in her punishment. Before calling on the city she appeals to her ancestral gods, which hints at a division fundamental to the play – between Antigone's birth family, for which she dies, and the city and its ordinances, which she defies.

The final words of Sophocles’ Trachiniae confront modern interpreters with questions of different kinds. First, who speaks the last four lines? The manuscripts give them to Hyllus, Heracles’ son, who has been speaking since line 1264; but the ancient scholia attribute them to the chorus, adding that ‘some’ (τινες) give them to Hyllus. Second, who is the παρθένος (‘maiden’) addressed in line 1275? Iole, the girl with whom Heracles was infatuated and whom Hyllus has promised to marry? Or the chorus, addressed by Hyllus or the chorus-leader?