Talk:Sophocles

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Sophocles article.
Article policies
Good article Sophocles has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
This article has been reviewed by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team.

Contents

[edit] old discussion

the ancient Life of Sophocles [...] says the boys were naked and shiny with oil sophocles the man

Somebody apparently disapproved of this and deleted the word naked from the article. I am re-inserting the word (with link).

Sebastjan [S's lk fixed by Jerzy(t) 19:04, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)]

[edit] Plagerism

The entire introduction (2 paragraphs) is copied word for word from http://www.biblio.com/authors/598/_Sophocles_Biography.html . I don't have time to fix this, but I'd appreiciate if someone took the initiative. Bifgis 02:45, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name

I've given a brief breakdown of Sophocles' name. I'm pretty sure it's accurate. However, if it is inaccurate, please remove it. -Yazeed

[edit] Removed Notes

Footnotes are not standard in WP, and not needed here. (& BTW, if there are places where they are needed, this is hypertext and they should exploit links.) The text has been fixed w/o footnotes, but the following info is retained here for use in further research:

With regard to his DoB:

1. The Life of Sophocles gives the date 495, while the Suda gives 488.

Re

He wrote 123 plays and had 24 victories2 in the dramatic competitions in the Festival of Dionysus, more than any other.
2. Some sources say 20, while others say 19.

--Jerzy(t) 19:04, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)

The use of footnotes and reference is growing more standard. Please don't remove them. See Wikipedia:Cite Sources Rmhermen 03:47, Apr 20, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removed "Biography"

The removed external link to the male homosexual site and its material used in the article

  • was not a biography, but only discussed allegations about Sophocles' sex life
  • the website demonstrates grounds of being unreliable
    • it didn't make use of proper citations so the information can be checked
    • it mis-cited Plato as if he were the primary source of his alleged opinions about Sophocles
  • the source that the website did cite was unreliable
    • it took the form of after-dinner gossip
    • it was written 7 centuries after Sophocles after contemporary sources.
Information about Sophocles is fair game for the article, and the accounts were presented as just that, accounts. Considering that none of the other information in this article is properly sourced, it is not clear on what grounds you chose to delete the material you removed. I will look up the sources so as to have a more solid grounding in the scholarship and then will repost. I will not suggest to you that you also look up the sources for any other material you may want to keep in the article. The fact is that if you have chosen Sophocles as the man to defend against accusations of sodomy you have probably picked a lost cause. Claudius may be a better bet. Haiduc 23:40, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] BC

This article had BC/AD dates until 2 days ago. No information was added. I believe that this should be reverted to the version of December 5th...but am waiting for others to vote. Chooserr

I support this proposed revert JG of Borg 00:56, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
BC/AD is the common usage in English. Dominick (TALK) 01:45, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

BCE is just as plausible as BC/AD, and in this case it's the only appropriate dating system. I am that "loser", but I am not doing it to please myself. I am doing it to defend encyclopedic standards from pov pushers like you. Aecis praatpaal 22:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

23:00, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Is this the Encyclopedia Britannica? No, this is wikipedia. So Britannica is irrelevant here. Yes, the rules allow for the dating system to remain the system. But they also allow for the dating system to be edited. And in this case, they need to be edited. Aecis praatpaal 23:02, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
Aecis, I would normally agree with you about BCE/CE being more appropriate than BC/AD for many articles, but revert warring is a terrible way to go about it (Don't forget WP:3RR). I can't support changing the date system on an article, once it's consistent, because this inevitably leads to edit wars, which help no one, and you should know that. As long as both sides continue to stoop to such tactics, this will continue to be an unpleasant stalemate. What we need is disciple from both sides about leaving date conventions the heck alone, once they're consistent in an article (which is still a stalemate, but a less combative one). All IMO, of course. -GTBacchus(talk) 23:52, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
That rule does not exist. Perhaps it should, and some of us are talking about adding such a "rule" to MoS, but at present it is incorrect to quote a non-existent policy as the reason for your reverts. I don't care what format any article is in, and I have no problem with Christianity. I just have a problem with edit wars. I can't believe I'm witnessing people actually go through the equivalent of a school-yard "is not!" - "is so!" - "is not!" - "is so!" argument. What do you think you're going to do, outlive the other side? Be so stubborn everyone else just goes away? When two people revert each other's edits more than once, they both lose the ability to claim that they're working for consensus, or displaying maturity. The appropriate action is for everyone on both sides to stop editing date formats, get over to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), and help hammer out a good rule like Pitchka is assuming already exists. There are some details that will need to be worked out, and you can do much more good for the Wikipedia by helping to work those out than by changing articles, even if they're currently wrong. -GTBacchus(talk) 05:23, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

The basic position, as outline by the ArbCom in their ruling about this issue, is that date formats should not be changed once they are clearly established. This should be returned to BC/AD, if that is how it was originally set up. Also, if BC is ever appropriate (and current policy says it is), it seems to me that classical subjects are the ones it is most clearly appropriate for, since the usual argument against BC is that it is insulting to other religious traditions. Since nobody still believes in the religion of ancient Greece, this doesn't apply here. john k 05:34, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

  • There was no conflict at all until chooserr dropped out of the blue and arbitrarily changd all the dates to BC, this has nothing to do with content, and he seems to select his targets at random, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just googling BCE and wiki, and edit warring at the first article that just happens to show up, he was blocked for this stupidity, many times--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 06:00, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
    • I should also point out that his reverts almost always wipe out days worth of edits, so entire lines of content tend to disappear in between each, I should also point out that he was making the same pointless reverts with regards to miles vs kilometers, which wouldn't be so bad, if he at least knew how to convert between miles and kilometers--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 06:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Do you (john k, or anyone) have a link for that ArbCom decision? Maybe I'll find it myself before you reply. -GTBacchus(talk) 06:26, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • This article seems to have consistantly used BCE/CE since around 2002, according to the edit history, also according to the edit history every few months a random troll comes along and insists that it was always written in BC, reverts several times, get's blocked, rinse, and repeat, and up until 'dwain' and 'chooserr' it was always the same person doing this--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 07:27, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • What's slightly disturbing, is that someone could actually carry out a 2 and a half year long edit war over something this pointless--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 07:28, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
In fact, it seems that chooserr didn't even exist until Jguk was blocked from making BC/BCE reverts, and on that note, I bid you a 'I really don't care about this issue at all', and goodnight--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 07:40, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
You might want to re-check those facts, Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused. According to the edit history, this article was begun in 2002 with "BC", not "BCE". "BCE" was introduced here in October, 2004. So, your summary above is false. Were you looking at some other article's history, perhaps? No, your link points to the diff where policy was correctly implemented, as the previous edit to that one was the very first to introduce BCE; you must be misrepresenting it accidentally. Please be more careful. On a different note, thank you for finding a link to that ArbCom decision - good reading! -GTBacchus(talk) 07:48, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough, it's not like I read every edit between 2002 and 2005, I skimmed, but to be fair, it 'begun' as a one line stub, it's a bit of a stretch to describe that as an article--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 07:57, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, it began, or was begun, whichever you prefer, in BC format, and stayed faithful to that format for every single edit for thirty-two months. Like you said, good night. We'll get this sorted out. I'm not reverting any date formats until the MoS is changed; I propose that other editors involved in this dispute do the same, as a gesture of good faith. -GTBacchus(talk) 08:15, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
The only revision I made was to remove the trainwreck of a revert done by a user evading a 36 hour block, this was not content related--Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused 11:21, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Speaking of which, does somebody mind re-blocking him for a few hours, since he violated his 36 block a half a dozen times--Aolanonawanabe 17:32, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Looking at the history, the article seems to have been at "BC" until User:Neutrality changed it to "BCE" on 22 October 2004. There was a lengthy period of squabbling until, apparently, 15 November 2004, when it once again settled down into "BC". It remained at "BC" for over a year, until 6 December 2005, when Anon user 65.93.106.44 changed it again to BCE. john k 17:33, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

  • I've served my block, and am contributing. If you weren't so damn insistent about changing an article which was consistent under BC/Ad dates until just a few days ago then there wouldn't be a problem. Chooserr 17:34, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Editing under an anon ip is not serving your block--Aolanonawanabe 17:38, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • I didn't edit the whole time I was blocked. If I were able to edit which do you think would be more Important to me. You vandalising the Image:Vaticastar.png, replacing it with a picture of human fetal tissue, or this fucking dating system? Chooserr 17:45, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Replacing one unsourced image with another is not vandalism--Aolanonawanabe 17:46, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
  • I made it. It doesn't need any source by my computer. Chooserr 17:48, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Aolanaonwaswronglyaccused...um...I find it astonishing that a user account which began editing, um, yesterday, and who seems to know so much about wikipedia policies, would be so eager to accuse other people of being sockpuppets...Let he who is without sin... john k 17:55, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I was never blocked for anything, and I'm not exactly hiding my old account, I got frustrated with this chooserr nonsense, and retired my user name, unfortunatly the bit about randomly changing my password was true, that's easy enough to verify--Aolanonawanabe 17:59, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
What was your old username? john k 18:11, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
{{User:Aolanonawanabe/goodbye_folks}}--Aolanonawanabe 18:12, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Got it. Sorry to have (kind of) accused you of being a sockpuppet. At any rate, we should all be careful of making unsupported allegations of sockpuppetry. And changing Chooserr's image wasn't very nice. john k 18:14, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] hun??

all the brackets take away from the article IMHO making it harder to read. It chops it up into little sections so it doesn't flow naturally. Is this the kind of article we want on wikipedia? The information might be necessary, but isn't there another way we can write it out? Chooserr 06:55, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sophocles and the pederastic tradition

At this point this article does not present any of the information relating to Sophocles' attraction to youths. I have reworked the paragraph I had offered here a while ago, in the hope of satisfying the requirements of good editorial practice. I append it below (with the cites exposed) for your comments, before inserting it into the article. Several ancient writers have commented on Sophocles' fame as a lover of youths. Athenaeus reported that Sophocles loved boys like Euripides loved women.(ref>Athenaeus: The Deipnosophists, Book XIII (603)(/ref> He relates an anecdote involving Sophocles seducing a serving boy at a symposium, as well as another, ascribed to Hieronymus of Rhodes (Historical Notes) in which Sophocles is tricked by a hustler.(ref>ibid. (604E)</ref) Plutarch, in his "Life of Pericles" mentions an incident, during a naval expedition, in which Sophocles praised the beauty of a young recruit. Pericles's rebuked him by warning that a general must keep not only his hands clean, but also his eyes.<ref)Plutarch, The Lives, "Life of Pericles" 8.5</ref) Haiduc 01:53, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] attic bee

There's a redirect here from Attic bee, but no explanation. Just Googled it, but it'd be better if someone with a clue added the information. 87.113.72.250 23:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Obvious Nonsense

Just a question about the following lines: "He was my babydaddy. he grew wings and flew at night. he also consealed that he was really a woman named Donna. Recents studies show that he loved little boys as much as most men love girls." I am assuming that this is not true and just thought it should be brought to peoples attention I have looked back at previous versions and cant actually find something that sounds feasably true so wondered if people could offer suggestions of what I should change it too or for someone else to change it themselves.

Thanks

[edit] Citation mixing

There's an odd combination of parenthetical referencing and footnote referencing. Seeing as how the footnote referencing was here first, I'd reccommend a return to that method, but I'd really just like to see one consistent style, parenthetical or otherwise. If whoever is most involved in this article would care to do so, I'd be quite thankful. Thanks for your time, Geuiwogbil 02:31, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some problems with the article

  • in a post above there's a complaint about plagiarism. The article text has been altered enough that I suppose there's no copyright violation, but it is still obvious that the WP text depends on another website. The first three paragraphs need to be completely rewritten; I don't have time to do that right now, but I will try to do so soon.
  • Sophocles was a priest of the hero Halon, and was involved in welcoming the cult of Asclepius to Athens (well, that's what Plutarch says, anyway). He was also given hero cult after his death, under the name Dexion. All of this is worth mentioning, and I will add it when I can.
  • I can't stand the notion of a "Theban cycle" or "Theban trilogy" (see also Three Theban plays). Here I'll quote the OCD: "the plays are sometimes called the 'Theban plays' or even the 'Theban trilogy'; both titles mislead, the second grossly: if the traditional chronology has any basis in fact the plays were written in the order: Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonos and may well have been separated by decades." Unfortunately, there are plenty of classicists & publishers who are happy to group these plays together, but maybe we can at least set out a chronology and avoid implying that Soph. ever intended them to go together as parts 1, 2, and 3. --Akhilleus (talk) 05:35, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Good article review

GA review (see here for criteria)
  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    a (fair representation): b (all significant views):
  5. It is stable.
  6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic.
    a (tagged and captioned): b lack of images (does not in itself exclude GA): c (non-free images have fair use rationales): [[Image:|15px]]
  7. Overall:
    a Pass/Fail: [[Image:|15px]]

Good article nomination on hold.

  • Inline citations: Clean up the foot notes. There is one that just says "Lloyd-Jones" with no title, page number, or anything else.
  • Stability: It seems to still be settling in, largely becuase there are still unsourced statements with fact tags. Cite everything, and it should pass.

--Selket Talk 23:25, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template added

I'm adding the navigation template for Sophocles plays for easy linking to the individual articles.

DionysosProteus 17:52, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Did some editing...

The line that Sophocles "used female characters" is meaningless. So did Aeschylus. Perhaps the writer meant that women were main characters in some of Sophocles' plays; but, again, so did Aeschylus. The chorus of Danaids are the protagonist of the Suppliants; Despite its title, Clytemnestra is the main character of Agamemnon. Aeschylus' lost Niobe surely featured her as the protagonist.

Changed "Tyrannos" to "Tyrannus" to match Oedipus. I know its a Greek word, but it should be Latinized just like Oidipous---> Oedipus.

The date of Oedipus the King is uncertain. I changed the text to reflect that uncertainty.Ifnkovhg 03:58, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

I too was surprised by the mention of women characters. I would suggest that mayve the title with the Greek word should not be latinised. After all, we already have Oedipus Rex as the Latin name. However a lot of the other names are Latinised too i.e. "Troilus" is listed not "Troilos".
Do we want to give recommended sources for the fragments? There is a link to the project under Sommerstein and to an advert for a book of articles he edited. The first volume of his edition of the fragments themselves is now out. (I'm currently using it to add a few more details to Troilus.) He has roughly a page per surviving word on the Troilos. This mean there is much more information on the plays covered than in the Loeb edition.--Peter cohen 11:05, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Further Reading-Ramfos

Hello. I am suggesting the following book as Further Reading on the Sophocles page: Ramfos, Stelios. Fate and Ambiguity in Oedipus the King. Boston: Somerset Hall Press, 2006. ISBN 0972466193 Disclosure: I am the publisher of this book. To avoid overstepping conflict of interest guidelines, I am bringing this up on the talk page. I believe this book adds to the scholarly discussion of this topic. Stelios Ramfos is a prominent modern Greek philosopher. More info about this book and other books by Ramfos is available on Amazon.com. Look up Stelios Ramofs (alternative spelling Ramphos). I'll avoid further marketing language here. ;) I made a similar suggestion on the Oedipus the King talk page. Thank you for your consideration. Summer612 (talk) 18:10, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A discrepancy

Sophocles competed in around thirty drama competitions; he won perhaps twenty four and never received lower than second place. Aeschylus won fourteen competitions and was defeated by Sophocles at times. Euripides won only four competitions (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.).

If he entered 30 competitions, he could not have been defeated 14 times by Aeschylus and 4 times by Euripedes. I suggest inserting 50 copetitions, the amount of time he was an active playright. Although it could also mean that Aeschylus and Euripides didnt' overlap and showed that he won 24, the others won that many over their lifetime. So because of this, I am asking someone else to look at this. Yialanliu (talk) 01:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Aeschylus became active as a playwright earlier than Sophocles, so could have won several competitions before S entered any. However I do think it is worth checkign the sourcing of this fact, if only to get proper ref details. I shall, at least, move the mention of Britannica to the footnotes.--Peter cohen (talk) 09:51, 8 April 2008 (UTC)