Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Silence, in Sophocles, is never neutral; it is a moral posture that gets tallied like evidence. "Don't you know that silence supports the accuser's charge?" reads less like advice than a courtroom cudgel: a rhetorical question that corners its listener into motion. The phrasing assumes the rule is already common knowledge, turning quiet into culpability by default. It weaponizes social expectation the way Greek tragedy so often does, where the community's gaze is as punishing as any god.

The intent is pragmatic and coercive: speak now, defend yourself, or accept the story being told about you. Sophocles understands that accusations don't merely describe reality; they create it, especially when they go unanswered. The subtext is anxiety about narrative control. In a culture where honor and public reputation are fragile, the refusal (or inability) to speak becomes indistinguishable from confession. Silence is interpreted not as dignity or restraint but as a tacit admission that the accuser's version is the only version.

Context matters because Sophoclean drama is built from collisions between private knowledge and public judgment. Characters are trapped by vows, shame, lineage, or divine law; when they cannot speak freely, others fill the vacuum. The line exposes a harsh civic logic: the polis prefers a clean story to a complicated truth. It's a warning about how quickly legitimacy migrates toward whoever talks first and loudest, and how tragedy begins not only with wrongdoing, but with the fatal misreading of restraint as guilt.