Tragedy

The issue of epic authority was also important on the tragic stage, with the topics found in epic constituting a large percentage of tragic composition as well. Estimates vary, but we will not be too far wrong if we suggest that approximately one-third of the plays put on by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dealt with subjects figuring prominently within epic. (Cf. Gould 1983: 32-3; Farmer 1998: 24.) Nevertheless, playwrights seem to have avoided competing directly with the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, as many fewer plays are devoted to the specific topics covered by these poems as they exist today (Lamberton 1997: 41). Such reluctance to treat Homeric themes did little, however, to keep ancient critics from noticing what affinities of content still surfaced between the tragedians and Homer: Athenaeus provides the anecdotal claim that Aeschylus declared his tragedies to be ‘‘cuts taken from Homer’s mighty dinners’’ (8.347e), and Diogenes Laertius judges Homer as the epic Sophocles and Sophocles as the tragic Homer (4.20), probably because of Sophocles’ great interest in heroic behavior and Homeric character. (Cf. Easterling 1984: 1; Farmer 1998: 24.)

Further borrowing from epic may have been involved in the actual diction of the tragic poets (see, e. g., Sideras 1971; Garson 1985), but for modern scholars the primary focus of tragedy’s relationship with epic material has been in the area of allusion. An ever-increasing number of studies have been directed at determining how the tragedians incorporated indirect references to epic texts within their own works in order to allow audience members to better interpret the action playing out in front of them, with one especially thoroughgoing analysis being that of Richard Garner (1990), who enumerates dozens of tragic passages that seem to involve reference to Homer. The range of subtlety involved in the allusions varies, but of special interest are the discovered patterns that (1) the Iliad is alluded to twice as often as the Odyssey, (2) the most common location for allusions is within dramatic speech, and (3) the epic passages most often referenced are Homeric similes (1990: 22-4).

Of course, the loss of much epic material as well as the changes that even Homer’s epics have undergone since the classical period make it impossible to determine with certainty what constitutes an epic allusion that an average audience member would have been able

To understand. Indeed, it is difficult to know even how classical playwrights and their audiences experienced epic in general. In his Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides refers to stories found ‘‘in the writing-tablets of the Pierian Muses’’ (en deltois Pierisin, 798), and it therefore seems likely that tragedians had texts of Homer and perhaps other poets at their disposal. Additionally, as Lamberton points out (1997: 42), it is likely that by this time elementary education in reading and writing had become reasonably widespread in Athens among the wealthy, and Plato makes it clear that such education was expected to include hexameter poetry (Laws 809e-810a); therefore, it is probable that not only playwrights but also many members of their audiences would have been well versed in at least Homer, probably Hesiod, and maybe many other poets, having an understanding of their poetry even beyond what would be gained simply by listening to contemporary rhapsodes perform. However, it is difficult to know what the exact contents of such educational texts might have been, and though they seem to have corresponded well with our received texts in terms of length and episode arrangement, there can be no doubt that individual lines still varied greatly from text to text at this time (Lamberton 1997: 33, 39).