Sophocles Influences

Sophocles What would it be like to be one of the most renown, well recognized, and all around greatest poets of your time period? Only a few very gifted and special people have every had the honour of this title but the few that have been able to call themselves this have gone down in history. William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Sophocles have had a major impact on the english language and all things written in it. These renown writers and poets have very different writing styles due to their surroundings and I see this come out the most in Sophocles´s writings. Sophocles´s writings were affected by many things, such as the influences gained from growing up in the ¨Golden Age¨ of Greece, living in an
¨The Golden Age¨ in Greece, also called the ¨Age of Pericles,¨ was a time period just more than a century long, beginning with the unlikely defeat of the Persian army and the age ended with the war between AThens and Sparta but this time period, being as short as it was, laid all of the foundations for modern civilizations (¨The Golden Age of Greece¨). During this time period there was a substantial number of advances were made in fields such as government, art, philosophy, drama, and most importantly literature . Sophocles´s writings were affected by these advances in ways such as the creation of drama. Sophocles´s writings were a popular drama of the time called greek tragedies. Another part of Sophocles's writing where you can see the influence of the golden age is his view on women in writing. Many of Sophocles´s writings have women status that was slowly rising to be respectful and this was showing the view of women in ¨The Golden Age (¨Greek Society¨). In the story ¨Oedipus the King,¨ Sophocles has very female characters and the ones he has are in minor roles such as Thebes, a winged creature with a lion´s body and a woman's head (Wilhelm, Jeffrey). This is just one example of how Sophocles life in ¨The Golden Age¨ affected his