ing are commonly and accurately described as tragic, but they are not tragedies in the literary sense of the term (page 1221). A literary tragedy presents courageous individuals who confront powerful forces within or outside themselves with a dignity that reveals the breadth and depth of the human spirit in the face of failure, defeat, and even death (page 1221). When real events are compared to a Greek tragedy it is almost always this play which lurks behind the comparison.Many biographies have been written about the life and writings of Sophocles. The criticism has been made that Sophocles was a brilliant artist and nothing more (The Encyclopedia Britannica). He struggled with neither religious problems or with intellectual ones. He accepted the gods of Greek religion in a spirit of undeniable principle, and in his writing he took pleasure in presenting human characters and human conflicts. To Sophocles "the gods" appear to have represented the natural forces of the universe to which human beings are unsuspectingly or reluctantly subject. Consequently, he believed that human beings live for the most part in the shadow of ignorance because they are cut off from these permanent, unchanging forces and structures of reality. Yet it is pain, suffering, and the endurance of tragic crisis that can bring people into valid contact with the universal order of how things appear to be and how things really are. In the process, a person can then become more genuinely human, more genuinely himself. Sophocles' extraordinary style and ability to portray exceptional characters under stress was his trademark. His dramas were built around strong-willed, highly principled, and passionate characters that encounter seemingly insurmountable ethical and moral circumstances. Sophocles thus created characters of heroic magnitude but his plays also demonstrated that having a heroic persona might very well lead to disaster. Whatever perspective is taken...
