Sophocles

Sophocles appears as a cited tragic poet whose words sharpen the passage’s account of the past and death. In the Trachiniae, he gives Deianeira a long-standing proverb: a mortal’s life cannot be judged happy or unhappy until that person has died. The reference makes the play’s formulation a hinge between the argument’s philosophical account of personal identity and its claim that death fixes a life as a completed whole.

The Tragic Proverb

The passage introduces Sophocles through Deianeira rather than through biographical detail or a retelling of the tragedy. Her words present judgment of a life as necessarily deferred: while a person lives, the life remains unfinished, but death makes it possible to assess the whole. The proverb therefore does more than offer a maxim about happiness. It establishes the temporal condition under which a life can be treated as complete and judged in its entirety.

Death and the Completed Past

The surrounding argument explains the proverb through the relation between a living person and their past. A person does not merely possess earlier actions and moods as detachable records; the person is bound to them, and remains affected when others recall or judge them. Although someone may claim to have changed, that attempt to separate the present self from the past is itself a later response within the person’s continuing life.

Death ends that possibility of response. The passage says that at death a person is no more than their past: the past becomes the totality through which the person is defined, and others can judge without the dead person having another chance to alter or reassume it. Sophocles’ proverb thus resonates with the claim that death changes a life into a completed destiny, while the living remain responsible for how they continue to take up what they have been.

Dramatic and Philosophical Function

Deianeira’s proverb lends the philosophical discussion a compact dramatic voice. Its contrast between an unfinished life and a judgment made only after death makes temporal closure legible as a human predicament, not merely an abstract distinction between past and present. The passage uses Sophocles to show why a final verdict cannot be reached while a person still lives: the living remain engaged with their past, whereas death removes the possibility of further action and leaves the completed life open to others’ judgment.