Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Athenian tragedy doesn’t flatter its audience; it drafts them. Sophocles’ line lands less like a Hallmark virtue and more like a civic assignment: goodness is not an interior glow, it’s a public obligation enacted under pressure. The phrasing is telling. “Task” makes morality sound like labor, not sentiment. “Good man” is not a compliment so much as a job title, one measured by what you do when someone else’s life falls apart.

In Sophocles’ world, misfortune is rarely private. It spreads through family lines, city walls, and divine entanglements. Tragedy stages people who are unlucky, cursed, exiled, shamed - and it tests whether the surrounding community will treat their ruin as contamination or as a call to responsibility. The subtext is political: a functioning polis depends on citizens willing to absorb costs for strangers, rivals, even the disgraced. Help is a stabilizer, not charity.

There’s also a quiet rebuke embedded here. If aid is the “task” of the good, then refusing to help isn’t neutral; it’s a moral failure disguised as prudence. Sophocles writes for an audience proud of its democracy and anxious about its fragility. This line leverages that anxiety: misfortune is inevitable, and the only control you have is whether you meet it with solidarity or with scapegoating.

Read this way, Sophocles isn’t idealizing goodness. He’s defining it operationally, in the only arena tragedy trusts: what you choose when the easy option is to look away.