Sophocles the Athenian was born in 496 B.C. and lived ninety years. A memoir written by an anonymous scholar of a later age – perhaps two hundred years after the poet’s death – gives us a picture of his life which we may take to be substantially  true in outline and in spirit, though some of its circumstantial details may be apocryphal: a picture of a childhood spent under the best influences of a prosperous and enlightened home, a youth educated in a harmonious physical and intellectual, discipline  and endowed with grace and accomplishment, a manhood devoted to the service of the state in art and public affairs, and an old age regarded with affectionate respect.