Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative for ever, beyond man utterly. I knew I must die, even without your decree: I am only mortal. And if I must die Now, before it is my time to die, Surely this is no hardship: can anyone Living, as I live, with evil all about me, Think Death less than a friend?

His reputation was such that foreign rulers invited him to attend their courts although unlike Aeschylus who died in Sicily or Euripides who spent time in Macedon Sophocles never accepted any of these invitations. Sophocles mentions a third stage distinct from the other two in his discussion of his development. Most of Sophocles' plays show an undercurrent of early fatalism and the beginnings of Socratic logic as a mainstay for the long tradition of Greek tragedy.

The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays although each play was actually a part of a different tetralogy the other members of which are now lost. Aeschylus won 14 competitions and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles while Euripides won only 4 competitions.