Abstract: People associate tragedy with murder, monstruous deeds or suicide. If we look at Sophocles’ remaining tragedies, this seems indeed a pretty good definition of the genre. But tragedies with a happy ending existed. This is already attested by the preserved tragedy Philoctetes. Focusing on the lost plays of Sophocles, for which we have ancient testimonies concerning their ending or a specific scene, this presentation aims at showing that the plots had much more variety than people usually think and contained motifs such as unexpected rescue, salvation, and marriage.
Link to the Loeb edition of Sophocles’ fragments: