Sophocles

[Anonymous No.17798055]

>Wrote his first play at 28 years old, then went on to write a total of over 120 plays until he died peacefully of old age at 91
>Held the offices of general and state treasurer
>Remembered as one of, if not the greatest tragedian in history even though only 7 of his plays survive
How did he do it?

[Anonymous No.17798097]

>>17798055
Every time I'm reminded of how much we lost of the Tragedians I cry.

At least Heraclitus and Parmenides can be pieced back together (though their loss is almost as great), and we know Aristotle's philosophy pretty exactly from all the other resources.

[Anonymous No.17798159]

>>17798055
chad

[Anonymous No.17798167]

>>17798055
I'm always amazed that the Greeks were able to start so late in life everything that they did.

[Anonymous No.17798172]

>>17798097
>The rest of the trojan cycle
>The theban epics
The greatest losses of mankind.

[Anonymous No.17798199]

>>17798167

It's common knowledge that men peak creatively around age 30. Jesus memed the world for all time at 33. Bobby Fischer won his chess championship at 29. Musicians. Etc, etc. He would have brought his life experience up to that point to bear on the 28 debut. And since so much was lost he clealry must have done earlier experiments which informed the purported first play.

[Anonymous No.17798255]

>>17798055
>still mogged by Aeschylus

[Anonymous No.17798304]

>>17798255
>all three tragedians get mogged by aristophanes

[Anonymous No.17798333]

>>17798304
>>17798255
Classic nazi chuds underrating Euripedes

[Anonymous No.17798357]

>>17798167
The majority of great artists started to produce their great stuff "late". The modern world has some weird obsessed with youth and young prodigies, but it's actually extremely rare for some 20 year old to be a great artist.

[Anonymous No.17798426]

>>17798357
Artists tend to peak later in life, but scientists and mathematicians seem to peak in their early to mid 20s and then perpetually go downhill.

[Anonymous No.17798436]

>>17798167
Because the Greeks valued wisdom and we, the 21st century degenerates, value youth.

[Anonymous No.17798456]

>>17798055
It's been thousands of years, why care?

[Anonymous No.17798693]

Which one of his tragedies is on par with the ones in the Theban cycle?

[Anonymous No.17798704]

>>17798357
But it's saying Sophocles didn't even become a dramatist until 28, that's really late. Even for someone who had been writing poetry prior.

[Anonymous No.17798715]

>>17798426
Newton was a mediocre student who had to self-study the philosophy of his time and Kepler to develop calculus.

[Anonymous No.17799089]

>>17798715
Really??

[Anonymous No.17799116]

>>17798715
>>17799089
Really what? Was the other anon's comment meant to belittle Newtons accomplishments? Nigga invented calculus, something none has done, to describe the planetary motions, before he turned 21. The fact he did it by self-study makes it all the more impressive.

[Anonymous No.17799133]

>>17798167
Plato was also 28 when he was introduced to philosophy I believe.

[Anonymous No.17799151]

>>17798704
It’s really not that late. It’s barely late at all.

>>17798357
>>17798436
It’s more like we make sure people are thoroughly enslaved by the time they are 24 so they are not capable of writing great plays.

[Anonymous No.17799169]

>>17798055
Cicero relates a story of him on how Sophocles' sons tried to get him removed as paterfamilias due to being an old fuck, around 80ish. When they went to the law courts, Sophocles presented to the judges a tragedy he just wrote, recited it to them, and asked if that was a product of a feeble mind. The judges, who were greatly impressed, said no and BTFO his ungrateful sons.

[Anonymous No.17799187]

>>17798715
>Newton was a mediocre student
No, more likely all he had access to were mediocre teachers.
When it comes to geniuses, lack of investment in schooling shouldn't blind you to their aptitude for education. The autodidact is a "poor student" in only the narrow sense of conformity to established expectations.

[Anonymous No.17799192]

>>17798097
You could say that the loss of his work is a true tragedy.

[Anonymous No.17799220]

>>17799151
>It’s really not that late. It’s barely late at all.
I can't think of a single artist in modern times who started their art that late, going hundreds of years back I still can't.

[Anonymous No.17799274]

>>17799220
Van Gogh

[Anonymous No.17799284]

>>17799220
Woolf wrote her first novel at 33

[Anonymous No.17799297]

>>17798172
>The rest of the trojan cycle

Apparently they were pretty mediocre. There's a reason about half of all papyrus fragments found have been Homer.

[Anonymous No.17799341]

>>17799274
Van Gogh was painting and drawing from a young age.

>>17799284
But she began writing as a young girl.

[Anonymous No.17799403]

>>17799341
No he didn't. He started his first painting at the age of 28, and he didn't start drawing seriously before the age of 27 when he discovered his vocation and talent for art after having a crisis of faith.

[Anonymous No.17799407]

>>17799220
Depends what you mean by "start" I suppose. If you mean first published/exhibited/whatever, then yeah its not really late in the slightest. However if you mean first having begun writing/painting/whatever or taking an interest in the vocation, then yeah an age like 28 would be rather late.

[Anonymous No.17799434]

>>17799220
Van gogh started painting at 27
David Lynch started making movies by that time too

[Anonymous No.17799458]

>>17798097
Why did we lose them, anyway? Was it just due to a failure to preserve them? Or was it a specific event that destroyed them? Or do we just not know what happened?

[Anonymous No.17799476]

>>17799458
Scholars didn't care for some works enough to copy them so the prototype was lost when the library was burned

[Anonymous No.17799488]

>>17799458
according to some scholar, the ancient scrolls or papyrus were fragile and had to be recopied every 50 years or so at Alexandria due to the humidity and heat. in that case, one lapse and a great deal could be lost. thankfully we have chads like Charlemagne, who created a factory of scribes to hunt for manuscripts and copy them in mass, saved a lot from the ruins of time.

[Anonymous No.17799499]

>>17798255
Aeschylus has even less surviving works than him. The Suppliant Maidens isn't even complete.

[Anonymous No.17799509]

>>17799403
He was drawing regularly quite young anon. He didn't really try to become a better artist until 27, yes, but he still was naturally drawing.

[Anonymous No.17799513]

>>17798693
He has seven that survive. Read them all.

[Anonymous No.17799520]

>>17799458
I've heard that story that one goes just didn't preserve any of Aristotle's dialogues because they were so numerous but took the care to do it with Plato and Aristotle's lesser known works.

[Anonymous No.17799521]

>>17799220
There are tons. Murakami literally never wrote anything until he was exactly 28. Now, I’m not comparing Murakami to Sophocles. I’m just saying it happens all the time. There are even more still who dabble here and there but don’t really get big into it until they’re much older. Houllebecq was 40 before he was even making a full-time living from writing.

[Anonymous No.17799527]

>>17799220
>>17799521
Also, I already said in my comment why you’re not observing this so much, at least among the greats. In the modern era, 28 year olds are pushed into enslavement into various other things.

[Anonymous No.17799535]

>>17799509
Every kid draws you fucking retard

[Anonymous No.17799549]

>>17799535
I'm pretty sure he was drawing up to his twenties.

[Anonymous No.17799551]

>>17799220
None of these are "artists" strictly speaking, but plenty of writers started late. From top of my head:

Sapkowski - 35
Burroughs - 39
Chandler - 44

Not getting published, but actually started writing at that age.

[Anonymous No.17799572]

Please stop with the age thing. I didn’t discover my creative interests until I was 26 years old already and it haunts me every single day of my life.

[Anonymous No.17799594]

>>17799549
Do you have evidence of that? Because up until that point he had several odd jobs (one of which was being an art dealer) and then attempted to become a pastor (which failed miserably) and there isn't a single source that mentions him having any creative interest at all before the age of 27.

[Anonymous No.17799638]

>>17799220
Pynchon published V. at age 26 and Gravity's Rainbow at age 36.

[Anonymous No.17799713]

>>17799572
Don't worry Anon, age doesn't matter much unless you want to be a pop singer or edgy street artist. The decisive factor is, as Anon points out >>17799527 that people are forcefully corralled into the NPC lifestyle after college age, and that's when 99% give up on their artistic ambitions.

[Anonymous No.17799732]

[Anonymous No.17799749]

>>17799732
Thanks for posting this.

Ageist zoomer BTFO

[Anonymous No.17799766]

>>17799527
it's this. it's been crazy watching once passionate, creative, brilliant individuals just fucking abandon their entire personalities and interests to just settle for the job+girlfriend+video games trap.

[Anonymous No.17799773]

>>17799749
don't listen to zoomers, they're actual teenagers who have been raised in the post-apocalypse, the world's going down the fucking drain and they are the most advertised-to generation to ever live, of course they're going to value youth above everything else.

[Anonymous No.17799788]

>>17799773
Agreed

[Anonymous No.17799789]

>>17799766
It’s not their fault. I don’t know about you but the amount of social pressure Inhad to actually go into student loan debt and get a corporate job was overwhelming.

[Anonymous No.17799795]

>>17799116
Leibniz also did it.

[Anonymous No.17799802]

>>17799713
I don’t care about being a pop singer or street artist but when I look around, it does look like everyone great started young. Add on to that the inability to focus in on one specific thing and you can see why I carry just a tinge of despair about it.

[Anonymous No.17799901]

>>17799458
who knows. requires constant recopying that things just get lost when no one cares to do it or there is a lull in people to do it. i'm sure some things were lost in specific events like fires and such but that's partly because there weren't more than one copy.

imagine all the oral traditions that never really made it to text or made it but no one bothered to copy or didn't preserve fast enough in modern times and were forever lost.

[Anonymous No.17800000]

>>17799476
>>17799458
Alexandria wasn't the only place that stored copies of these works and it wasn't even a relevant academic center anymore the first time it was destroyed, let alone the next two times. The actual issue is that papyrus is fragile and degrades over time. No one bothered to copy them so we only have fragments from most of his plays.

[Anonymous No.17800013]

>>17799901
They probably didn’t realize we’d be such sterile cataloguers and figured it was for the best. The Greeks were right. We only want the records of the plays because we’ve transformed our world into a museum.

[Anonymous No.17800047]

>>17800013
Nonsense. The Greeks practically invented cataloguing, Herodotus wrote the histories so that these things would not be forgotten to time. And they were the first westerners to care enough about preserving their oral traditions to put it into writings. Socrates was the only one who had a problem with writing things down but even his students and successors understood it was important.

[Anonymous No.17800226]

>>17800047
>this pleb hasn't heard of the Library of Ashurbanipal

[Anonymous No.17800786]

>>17800047
Depends which Greeks you’re talking about...

[Anonymous No.17801290]

>>17799220
Tchaikovsky was in his mid-20s when he started composing and Bruckner was nearly 40 when he really started composing

[Anonymous No.17801304]

>>17799297
What contemporaries think is mediocre future generations could see as masterpieces
The elizabethians thought hamlet was disappointing

[Anonymous No.17801702]

>>17798055
do we have any idea as to the quality of the lost plays
any "all timers" lost

[Anonymous No.17801717]

>>17801702
>any "all timers" lost
For certain, considering the three Theban plays were each individually part of their own trilogies. And considering Antigone was an early work by Sophocles, I think we can say most of them were of incomparable value.

[Anonymous No.17801746]

>>17801304
eh I'm skeptical. They were written after Homer, and while Homer told two very specific stories /set/ during the Trojan war, the rest of the cycle's goal was to tell the entire story of the war. That's just an entirely different aim than Homer had, and, while interesting, would not be nearly as good as Homer