sonally and professionally, as a playwright, among the most highly honored men in Athens. But perhaps, like Marcus Aurelius, he was too intelligent a man to feel satisfied by public adulation if he perceived problems in Athens that were not being solved. Certainly the on-going warfare with Sparta, which Athens was losing, was as difficult for them as, say, the Cold War was for America.
Perhaps one can consider the Oedipus cycle to be a way of commenting on, among other things, Athenian politics, which by modern standards were very nasty, although at the time they were certainly much milder than those in, say, Rome or many other Mediterranean cities. Perhaps the fate of Oedipus, brought low by his attempt to oppose the will of Apollo (if one interprets the play thus), is intended as a comment on the fates of the Great Athenian leaders, brought low by popular opposition or military setbacks. Or perhaps it comments on the struggles between the autocrats and the democrats within Athens. One is reminded of current politicians who preach lofty sentiments about how wonderful ôtraditional family valuesö are, when no one any longer knows exactly what those values are, or how to pursue them, or whether they even work in society as it exists.
This dilemma is even clearer in PlatoÆs descriptions of the trial and death of Socrates. Socrates too seems to have been brought low by his attempt to evade the judgment of him pronounced by the Delphic Oracle of Apollo, the same one that pronounced OedipusÆ fate. All of Athens knew that SocratesÆ whole goal in life seemed to be to prove Apollo wrong, and no doubt they would have regarded such an attitude as impious. This would have been at the base of the accusation that Socrates did not worship the traditional gods of Athens, but was instead attempting to introduce new gods, as Aristophanes portrays him doing in the Clouds.
One can fairly easily make out a case that Sophocles, Socrat...