Cicero says Sophocles' son sued to take his estate on the ground that he was senile, and Sophocles read his new play to the court

Sophocles kept writing tragedies into his nineties. Cicero says his sons took him to court and asked the judges to remove his control of the family property because he was neglecting it through dementia. William Smith's history, following the ancient Life of Sophocles, names the plaintiff as Iophon, his legitimate son by an Athenian wife. Iophon feared that his father would leave much of the property to a favoured grandson, the son of Ariston, a son by a woman from Sicyon. Iophon summoned him before the phratores, the clan court. Sophocles answered by reading from Oedipus at Colonus, which he had just written and not yet staged, and asked whether it was the work of a madman. The judges acquitted him. Plutarch says he read the choral song beginning at line 668 and left the court "as if from a theatre", with applause. Plutarch's manuscripts say "many" accused him; some editors read "sons". Sophocles died in 406 BC, about 90 years old. Oedipus at Colonus was staged after his death, in 401 BC, and the ancient introduction to the play says his grandson produced it^†. The story is an anecdote recorded centuries later, not a court record.