Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

Rhetoric is a seductive costume: it can make a bad idea look inevitable, even noble. Sophocles’ line turns that seduction into an ethical warning. The “terrible thing” isn’t merely being mistaken; it’s being mistaken with style, armed with the very skill that persuades others to follow you. Speaking well is power. If you’re wrong, that power becomes misdirection, and the damage scales with your eloquence.

The subtext is deeply Greek: a suspicion of cleverness unmoored from truth. In Sophocles’ world, words aren’t harmless; they set fates in motion. Tragedy is crowded with characters who can argue brilliantly while courting catastrophe. Think of the confident justifications, the tidy moral logic, the authoritative pronouncements that feel airtight until reality breaks them. The line needles at hubris: the belief that a polished argument equals correctness, that verbal mastery can bend the moral universe.

Contextually, it also reflects Athens’ cultural anxiety about public speech. In a democracy where persuasion governs policy and honor, the gifted speaker can shape outcomes more than the careful thinker. Sophocles, writing for an audience trained to admire eloquence, quietly asks them to fear it too. His sentence is compact but cutting: it indicts not only the speaker who’s wrong, but the listeners who confuse fluency for truth. It’s an old warning that reads like a modern one: charisma is not a credential, and a well-delivered mistake can be a civic tragedy.