“Numberless are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man.”
Antigone
Sophocles wrote around 120 plays and won first prize at least eighteen times, though only seven survive whole. He added a third actor to the stage, which let dialogue carry the drama rather than the chorus alone.
His Theban plays are the definitive telling of the house of Oedipus: a man who solves every riddle except his own, and a daughter who buries her brother against the law of the state. Aristotle treated Oedipus Rex as the perfect tragedy.
Legacy
Oedipus, Antigone and Electra became permanent figures of European drama and, through Freud, of psychology.