Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Policing language is Sophocles's way of policing fate. "Hush!" lands like a hand clamped over the mouth, an urgent stage direction embedded in dialogue. In Greek tragedy, speech is never just speech; words are actions that can summon consequences. To "check those words" is not etiquette so much as survival. Characters talk themselves into doom, and the audience knows it. That gap between what a person feels entitled to say and what the world will punish is where Sophoclean tension lives.

The line's moral logic is blunt: retaliation compounds suffering. "Do not cure ill with ill" rejects the ancient reflex of answer-for-answer justice that fuels so many tragic spirals. Sophocles is suspicious of the satisfying symmetry of payback; he treats it as a trap that makes private anguish metastasize into public catastrophe. The phrase "make your pain still heavier" is telling: pain already has weight, and vengeance is depicted not as relief but as added burden. It's less about sanctimony than about physics. Harm accrues. Anger feels like motion but often functions like gravity.

Contextually, this fits a theatrical culture obsessed with moderation, civic order, and the dangers of excess (hubris) in a democracy that could turn volatile. The subtext is anxiety about escalation: one heated sentence can become an oath, a curse, a challenge - and in Sophocles, those are essentially contracts with disaster. The warning isn't "be nice". It's "don't write the next scene for your enemy."