Sophocles

Sophocles remains the most elusive of the three great tragedians. Ancient sources mention 113 or 123 plays produced in a career of over sixty years, and more than 120 titles can be listed, including perhaps a few duplicates (Radt 1991, 85-87; Lloyd-Jones 1994-96, 3: 4-9). But only about eight hundred complete lines or adjacent half-lines survive from his tragedies, and only three dozen fragments run to more than four lines. The only extensive tragic papyrus fragments, from Eurypylus, yield a hundred lines offering some kind of sense, but this play is otherwise almost totally unknown. The only dated lost play is Triptolemus (placed, by a casual remark of the elder Pliny, in 468, the year of Sophocles’ first, or at least first prize-winning, Dionysia production; there is also a confusing papyrus scrap recording a production of Sophocles in the same competition as Aeschylus’ Danaid tetralogy). In no case can we say which plays were produced with which. Yet Sophocles clearly played a pivotal role in developing the scope and design of tragedy, anticipating at least to some degree what may at first sight look like Euripides’ innovations. As Ruth Scodel points out in this volume (chapter 15), our impression of Sophocles has been distorted by the labels ‘‘classic’’ and ‘‘conservative.’’ On closer inspection his drama seems to have embraced the conservative and the innovative, the classic and the eccentric, just as his poetic style could seem elegant and Homeric to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but extravagant and Pindaric to Longinus.

Sophocles both followed and diverged from Aeschylean subjects (Radt 1991). He relied heavily on Trojan War material (well over thirty tragedies, even without the Returns), but generally avoided simple reworking; only six plays show duplications of Aeschylus’ Trojan plots ( Telephus, Iphigenia, Palamedes, Memnon/Ethiopians, Ajax,

Philoctetes; perhaps also Phrygians). Many others explored episodes from the cyclic epics, some quite incidental and not obviously ‘‘tragic.’’ On the other hand, he used a Dionysiac subject only once (one of two obscure Athamas plays), favored the legends of Mycenae (Tantalus, Oenomaus, Atreus, three Thyestes plays, Clytemnestra, Iphi-genia, Hermione) and the Cretan king Minos (Polyidus, Minos, Daedalus, Men of Camicus), and helped to shape an Athenian mythology with Triptolemus, Aegeus, Theseus, Ion/Creusa, Procris, and Phaedra. Heracles appears first as a tragic figure in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and his birth story may have been the subject of Amphitryon.

Sophoclean drama concentrated on the formation of tragic events, preparing and amplifying their impact through twists and turns of decision and action, revelations of latent truths, limitations and changes in the characters’ awareness of their circumstances. Thus where Aeschylus’ Niobe featured a static Niobe reacting to her children’s deaths, Sophocles’ Niobe (known through a fragmentary hypothesis and papyrus-fragments from its climactic scene) dramatized Niobe’s initial provocation and its fatal consequences. At the outset Niobe was shown boasting about her sons’ excellence while sending them off on a hunting trip - exemplifying her offence as Hippolytus does in conversation with the servant in Euripides’ play. The climax came in three stages: first a messenger reported the killing of Niobe’s sons by Apollo in the country, then their father Amphion wildly challenged Apollo to combat and was killed by him (also a messenger-report?), and finally the audience saw Artemis standing with Apollo on the palace-roof and shooting down Niobe’s daughters in the palace-yard behind the skene (fr. 441a-44), while the agonized chorus witnessed the massacre and the flight of a girl who, it seems, was to be a lone survivor.

Two Trojan War tragedies illustrate this point further. The Gathering of the Achaeans (probably identical with Syndeipnoi [Fellow-Feasters]) dramatized an episode from the lost epic Cypria in which Achilles quarreled with the Greek leaders after arriving late at their gathering on the island of Tenedos before the assault on Troy. According to Sommerstein’s reconstruction, Odysseus encouraged Agamemnon to denounce Achilles and exclude him from the leaders’ feast, and Achilles’ violent reaction threatened to disrupt the expedition until a resolution was effected, perhaps by an intervention of Thetis. This quarrel foreshadowed the famous quarrel of the Iliad, dramatizing the conflicts of proud and jealous leaders and their final subordination to the will of the gods. The pattern recalls the extant Ajax and Philoctetes, and can be seen again in Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women and several of Euripides’ lost plays. Similarly too, Sophocles’ Locrian Ajax focused on the Greek leaders’ conduct in victory, dramatizing their dispute over the punishment of the lesser Ajax for his assault on Cassandra, Ajax’s denial of guilt and flight to Athena’s altar, and the acquittal he secured with a false oath. In the only coherent piece (fr. 10c) of a very disjointed papyrus text, Athena addresses the Greeks with a denunciation of Ajax’s crime similar to her speech at the beginning of Euripides’ Trojan Women. The placing of this scene at the end of the play has been questioned, but since the Greeks could hardly have ignored Athena’s condemnation, it must at least have followed their decision to acquit Ajax and permit him to sail for home. Thus the tragedy hinged on their ill-judged decision and the revelation ‘‘too late’’ of the divine punishments awaiting Ajax and those who condoned his crime.

Other plays of Sophocles developed the common tragic topic of familial and dynastic strife. Aeschylus’ Eleusinians, Epigoni, and probably Women of Argos had dramatized episodes from the Theban saga, part of which concerned Eriphyle, who was bribed by Polynices to send her husband, the seer Amphiaraus, to a certain death in the campaign of the Seven. Their son Alcmeon led the heirs of the Seven in sacking Thebes, but like Orestes he was required by Apollo to avenge his father by killing his mother. Seeking release from persecution by the Furies, Alcmeon betrayed his wife Alphesiboea and was ultimately killed by her father. Sophocles’ Eriphyle, Epigoni, Alcmeon, and satyric Amphiaraus could have been a connected tetralogy; the first two have often been considered identical, but Eriphyle may well have been about Eriphyle and Amphiaraus, Epigoni about Alcmeon’s revenge, and Alcmeon about his madness. The few fragments of Epigoni, supplemented by Accius’ derivative Latin Epigoni, suggest a large narrative scope including Alcmeon’s decision to lead the campaign and accept the matricide as the price of success, and confrontations of Alcmeon with his mother before the killing and Adrastus after it.

Female revenges for male crimes of ambition, greed, or passion were a tragic theme at least from the time of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and Sophocles’ Tereus stands with Euripides’ Hecuba and Medea as a lurid portrayal of such a revenge, although its chronological relationship with them is uncertain (we know only that it was produced before 414). Sophocles adapted the old myth of the origin of the swallow and the nightingale, making its two female characters Athenians and their persecutor a barbarous Thracian. Tereus, a Thracian king married to the Athenian princess Procne, rapes her sister Philomela while escorting her to Thrace for a visit, and cuts out her tongue to keep her silent. Philomela reveals the crime to her sister in a piece of weaving, and together they punish Tereus by killing his and Procne’s son Itys and feeding his flesh to Tereus. As Tereus retaliates, all three become birds - the lamenting nightingale, the voiceless swallow, the reclusive hoopoe. A papyrus hypothesis suggests that in Sophocles’ play Philomela was in the palace when she wove the message, not imprisoned in a rustic cabin as in Ovid’s telling of the story; thus Tereus may have pretended she had died and brought her into the house disguised as a slave, so that the weaving - like the urn in Sophocles’ Electra or the letter in Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians - served to reveal Philomela’s identity as well as her mutilation. It may, then, have been Procne’s belief that her sister was dead that motivated her famous complaint about married women’s exile from their own families (fr. 583), and the consolation offered to her in fr. 585.

Tragedy also embraced the story pattern of the son fated to bring death to his father or ruin to his community, a pattern comprehensively fulfilled in the story of Oedipus, which was handled by Aeschylus, Euripides, Achaeus, Philocles, and others, as well as Sophocles. Sophocles probably preceded Euripides with an Alexandros in which Paris, exposed at birth and raised as a slave, proved his nobility in athletic games and was recognized as the son of Priam and Hecuba, and with an Aegeus on the story of Theseus’ return to Athens, capture of the Marathonian bull, and recognition by his father (perhaps also introducing Medea’s plots against Theseus into the story). Other tragedies dramatized the births of gods and heroes who narrowly survived extinction to realize their destinies, and whose mothers suffered tribulations or death (as in Aeschylus’ Semele and Women of Aetna). Heracles’ birth and Alcmene’s rescue from her husband’s wrath were probably treated in Aeschylus’ Alcmene, Sophocles’

Amphitryon, and Ion’s Alcmene, as well as Euripides’ better-known Alcmene. Choer-ilus’ Alope presumably anticipated Euripides’ Alope, the heroine being killed by her father after bearing Poseidon’s son Hippothoon, who survived exposure twice to become an Athenian tribal hero. Other such stories were told in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Danae (the heroine cast out by her father after bearing Zeus’ son Perseus) and Euripides’ Auge (cast out with her son Telephus after being rescued from her father’s wrath by her seducer Heracles) and Wise Melanippe.

Dramatic sequels reuniting such mothers with their long-lost sons seem to have been a late development and can be illustrated mainly from Euripides, but something can be said of Sophocles’ first and second Tyro, respectively a hero-birth and a mother-sons reunion drama. The Thessalian princess Tyro’s seduction by Poseidon and the birth of her sons Pelias and Neleus were well known from Odyssey 11 and the Hesiodic Catalogue, and the first Tyro probably elaborated this story so that the birth was discovered, the infants abandoned by Tyro in a skaphe (probably a basket or cradle) on the river where they had been conceived, and Tyro punished by her father. In the second Tyro the twins, saved and raised by a herdsman, rediscovered their mother and rescued her from the persecution of her wicked stepmother Sidero, whom Pelias killed. It was probably the second play that presented Tyro in a special mask showing the bruises on her pale complexion and her beautiful hair shorn like a slave’s, and included her striking speech comparing herself with a foal whose mane has been sheared (fr. 659). Some papyrus-fragments (fr. 649 = adesp. fr. 626) probably represent an early scene, with Tyro consoled by a sympathetic chorus as she goes to fetch water to purify Sidero from an ominous dream. This errand presumably led to her meeting her sons and identifying them ‘‘by means of the skaphe’ (Poetics 1454b25: one of the twins carries the skaphe in later depictions of their meeting at the spring).

Divine eras formed the background of the tragedies just discussed and was a staple of satyr-plays, but did not in itself constitute a subject for tragic plots. Eros between mortals also seems to have been rare in early tragedy, and important only as a contributing factor in the treachery or devotion of wives (Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, Phrynichus’ Alcestis), or in the weightier social problems of marriage and procreation (as in Aeschylus’ Danaid tetralogy). By contrast, Euripides’ explorations of eras are well documented and highly diverse. Women of Trachis gives us some sense of how Sophocles contributed to the opening up of this realm, but almost nothing is known of his treatment of Phaedra's fatal love for Hippolytus in Phaedra, or the marital devotion of Procris which led to her accidental killing by Cephalus in Procris; and while some vivid vase-paintings suggest that his Andromeda was produced as early as the 440s and anticipated the exoticism of Euripides' later and more celebrated treatment, the role of eroes in the play remains uncertain. As so often, our knowledge of Sophocles' work falls far short of its probable importance.