Wit & Attitude Quote by Sophocles

A lie never lives to be old: Sophocles delivers the moral verdict with the brisk certainty of a stage sentence. It works because it sounds like a proverb, but it behaves like a threat. The line doesn’t argue that lies are wrong; it suggests they are structurally unstable, doomed by time the way a cracked beam is doomed by weight. In Sophoclean drama, time is never neutral. It’s the slow-turning mechanism that brings hidden crimes into daylight, not because the universe is nice, but because human systems (families, courts, gods, gossip) keep grinding until contradiction surfaces.

The subtext is less “truth wins” than “deception can’t withstand narration.” Greek tragedy is built around disclosure: messengers arrive, witnesses speak, tokens are recognized, the past re-enters the present like a debt collector. A lie is young because it depends on momentum and control of the story. It needs everyone to keep playing along. Aging requires durability, repetition, inheritance. Truth can be retold without collapsing; lies require maintenance, patching, intimidation, and increasingly elaborate revisions. Sophocles understands the corrosive logistics of cover-ups.

Context matters: in a civic culture where reputation, oaths, and public speech carried real consequences, lying wasn’t just private vice; it was social sabotage. Onstage, falsehood doesn’t simply fail; it multiplies calamity. The irony is that Sophocles also shows how “truth” can arrive as catastrophe. The lie may die young, but what replaces it isn’t comfort. It’s clarity with a body count.