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“Sophocles:—Son of Sophillus; an Athenian of the deme of Colonus; tragic poet; born in the 73rd Olympiad （488-5 B.C.） and thus seventeen years older than Socrates. He was the first to employ three actors and the tritagonist, as he is called, and to bring in a chorus of fifteen youths instead of twelve. He was called the Bee because of his sweetness. And he himself originated the custom of making play compete with play, rather than tetralogy, or group of four plays, with tetralogy. He also wrote an Elegy and Paeans and a prose-treatise On the Chorus , competing with Thespis and Choerilus... He died later than Euripides, at the age of ninety. He produced a hundred and twenty-three plays —indeed some writers say many more —and was victorious twenty-four times.” Suidas Lexicon
“From the time when Sophocles son of Sophillus, of Colonus, won the prize for tragedy at the age of twenty-eight, 206 years, in the archonship of Apsephion at Athens （469 B.C.）.” Parian Chronicle
“From the time when the poet Sophocles died at the age of ninety-two, and Cyrus marched up-country1 [43 years,] in the archonship of the second Callias at Athens （406 B.C.）.” Parian Chronicle
1 the Anabasis described by Xenophon
Elegy and Iambus. with an English Translation by. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1931. 1.
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