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Sophocles

Time in Sophocles is linear and irreversible. The past is fixed — Oedipus cannot undo the killing of Laius or the marriage to Jocasta. Fate is determined before the action begins; the drama is the protagonist's progressive discovery of what has already happened. Time is the medium of tragic irony: the audience knows before the hero does.

Sophocles

Space is the bounded civic world — Thebes, Colonus, the palace. The stage itself is a threshold between seen and unseen: violence happens offstage (the blinding, the suicide), reported by a messenger. Inside/outside is morally loaded.

Sophocles

Matter is the body, subject to pollution (miasma) and suffering. Oedipus blinds himself — a physical act answering a metaphysical crisis. The body is the site where fate becomes visible.

Sophocles

The Sophoclean observer is an embodied individual with drastically limited knowledge. The hero acts in confidence and discovers too late the truth about himself. Agency is real but constrained by an inscrutable fate. The gods are Cosmic-ordering — Apollo's oracle governs the Oedipus cycle — but their justice is opaque, not transparent as in Aeschylus.

Sophocles

Not addressed as a physical concept. The dramatic tension is moral and epistemological, not physical.

Sophocles

Tragic knowledge is the central theme. Information in Sophocles is always partial, delayed, and catastrophic when it arrives. The oracle knows; the hero does not; the audience knows before the hero. Personal information is not conserved beyond death: Antigone's burial rites aim to secure honour for the dead, but not continued personal existence.