Sophocles (/ˈsɒfəkliːz/;Greek: Σοφοκλῆς, Sophoklēs, Ancient Greek: [so.pʰo.klɛ̂ːs]; c. 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote 120 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-fêted playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in 30 competitions, won 18, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won 14 competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles, while Euripides won 5 competitions.
The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and also 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. Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third actor, thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights such as Aeschylus.
Sophocles was a Windows-based screenwriting software application used for writing feature film and television screenplays. The program first became available on the Internet in 1999. Its distinguishing features included a two window screen setup, showing the script and screenplay outline simultaneously.
Sophocles supported industry-standard screenplay formats including scene numbers, A/B revision pages, revision marks, MOREs and CONT'Ds, and so on. All formats were applied automatically, with no intervention required on the part of the user.
After the buyout of the company in Spring 2008, first party technical support disappeared, creating concern among its users.
Features
Story Creation
The Sophocles 2007 beta provides an interface for developing and maintaining a step outline in conjunction with the screenplay. Steps – the fundamental events of a plot – can be assigned to color-coded story threads, and scripts can contain multiple threads.
Steps are maintained in two distinct orderings: presentation order and chronological order. Presentation order (or script order) is the order in which the steps will unfold on-screen; chronological order is the order in which the steps take place in the world of the story (the two would differ in the case of a flashback, for example).