Style

Despite the clumsiness of trying to describe style in a foreign language, it is worth starting there, because Sophocles’ Greek, ferociously energetic and sometimes eccentric, warns us not to make him bland. The ancient critic Longinus describes Sophocles as ‘‘sometimes burning everything in his impulsive drive, but often losing all fire absurdly and failing completely’’ (33). Plutarch tells us that Sophocles divided his own style into three periods: first he imitated the weighty grandeur of Aeschylus, then he used a style that was harsh and contrived, but at last developed a style that was ‘‘most revealing of character and best’’ (Progress in Virtue 7.79). Probably all his surviving plays belong to the last period, but there is still plenty of weight and harshness. Jebb translates the first line of Antigone ‘‘Ismene, my sister, my own dear sister,’’ Lloyd-Jones, ‘‘My own sister Ismene, linked to myself.’’ The verse begins d, in Greek a marker of direct address in ordinary speech, then koinon, ‘‘shared,’’ a common Greek word, but poetic when it refers to the shared blood of relatives. The second is autadelphon, a distinctly poetic compound meaning ‘‘true brother/sister’’ or ‘‘full brother/sister.’’ Then the genitive of Ismene’s name, and kara, ‘‘head.’’ Everyday speech used ‘‘dear head’’ as an affectionate mode of address, but kara is not the regular word but a special, poetic form. Heads are not what relatives are normally said to share. Using a full line of verse for a direct address is in itself a poetic, formal mode. The phrase conveys Antigone’s love for Ismene, but also how for Antigone her feelings for her sister are not separable from their shared origin. Autadelphon may remind the audience that the sisters are the children of incest, even more closely related than sisters should be. The Greek hearing the line in performance would immediately have understood it as affectionate address emphasizing family ties; but there would be no time to unpack its strangeness.

Sophocles’ style, even in songs, is only occasionally pretty. His lyrics have an astonishing power to convey both thought and emotional nuance, and to work for both their singers and the playwright who sings through them. In Ajax, the Salami-nian sailors sing ‘‘Famous Salamis, you, surely, dwell sea-beaten, happy, to everyone conspicuous forever’’ (596-99). The singers idealize their home and its glory in contrast to the now tarnished fame of Ajax and their own misery in Troy, where they expect to come to ‘‘Hades who-makes-invisible’’ (with a wordplay - a'idelon Haidan - the name ‘‘Hades’’ means ‘‘invisible’’). The poet invites the audience to remember the glory of their victory at Salamis. Especially the particle pou, which I have translated ‘‘surely,’’ conveys the depth of the chorus’s homesickness. It literally means ‘‘somewhere,’’ but is often used to express vagueness or lack of certainty. Here it conveys the chorus’s difficulty in even imagining adequately the very place they belong.

In spoken verse, he drives one verse into the next without a break more fiercely than any other Greek poet (known as Sophoclean enjambment). He revels in antithesis and in contrasts both subtle and overt, but his parallelism is often untidy. Sometimes he composes lines in which parallelism itself becomes harsh. When Antigone says to Ismene, su men gar heilou zen, ego de katthanein (‘‘you chose to live, I to die,’’ 555), the infinitives almost rhyme, and the echo accentuates the break in the middle of the line, where Greek iambic trimeters are not supposed to break. His speeches sometimes have a simple, rolling grandeur, in which related ideas come one after the other with a careful balance between plain language and metaphor, while his dialogue is often staccato.

Sophocles’ difficulty goes beyond such basics of style. His language often carries multiple levels of irony, and signifies differently for speakers, internal audiences, and the external audience. The Ode on Man in Antigone (332-75) announces ‘‘Many things are awesome, but nothing more awesome than a human being [anthropos, unmarked for gender].’’ Following contemporary speculation, the song enumerates the achievements of‘‘this thing,’’ humanity: seafaring, agriculture, subduing animals, civic life. In the middle, it uses aner, ‘‘man.’’ In its last stanza, it expresses the fear that human contrivance leads to evil if a man ignores ‘‘the laws of the land and justice sworn in the name of the gods’’; ‘‘no city has he who, for his rashness, lives with wrong.’’ (Is he cityless because he is driven out, or because he destroys the city?) The elders have in mind the clever but lawless man who has buried Polynices. The audience may think of Creon (Crane 1989). The song subtly develops the gender issues that are overt elsewhere in the play.

In the prologue of Ajax, Athena displays Ajax to Odysseus. When Ajax went out at night to kill his enemies, the sons of Atreus and Odysseus, she drove him mad and led him to attack cattle instead; the mad Ajax thinks Athena is his friend. When Ajax has gone back into his tent, she uses him as an instance of divine power. Inviting Odysseus to compare the man he has just seen to the man he knew, she asks, ‘‘Would anyone have been found who had more forethought, or was better at doing what was appropriate [ta kairia]?’’ Odysseus seems to agree with the assessment. This fits the situation in one way. In driving Ajax mad, the goddess has not taken away his physical strength, but his ability to use it appropriately. Yet it is a curious description of Ajax, whether the traditional character or the Ajax this play will reveal. The great heroic qualities of Homer’s Ajax are his courage and loyalty. While there is no reason to think that he is less intelligent than others, he is not one of the orators of the Greek army: his speeches are brief, and mostly rally or rebuke other warriors. He is not a strategist. The association of ta kairia (the right things to do in a particular situation) with Ajax is surprising, because he stands for values that do not change. The hero noted for ‘‘foresight’’ and being able to do what changing circumstances require is Odysseus himself, Ajax's enemy and opposite. The scene concludes with Athena’s warning, ‘‘the gods love the sophronesand hate the kakoi’ (133). To be sophron is, literally, to be sane, to be aware of one’s limits and social obligations, and to respect the claims of others. It is easy to see that Odysseus is sophron and Ajax is not. To be kakosmost often means to be ‘‘bad’’ in ways defined by aristocratic values, to be cowardly or base. Most of Sophocles’ contemporaries might well have agreed if Socrates had asked them whether all those who are not soophroon are kakos. Yet applying kakos to Ajax does not seem right, because the tradition has always treated him as a great hero. He was the recipient of cult in Athens as one of the heroes after whom the political divisions of the citizens were named. His appearance so far has been repellent. Yet how could someone who excelled at forethought and doing what was fitting be among the kakoi the gods hate? Normally one would associate sOphrosune with foresightedness, since those who anticipate the consequences of their actions avoid excess. Everything Odysseus and Athena say here corresponds to traditional Greek morality, and it is delivered as if it were to be the moral of the play. So pietists interpret the play as a lesson in soOphrosuneO, and hero-worshippers insist that these cliches are too hackneyed to mean much. But the real problem seems to be that the categories do not entirely fit Ajax. They fit other characters. Odysseus behaves well at the end of the play, arguing that Ajax, though his enemy, should be buried, since he, like Ajax, will someday need others to bury him. It is the most attractive side of the morality Athena has preached. Equally, Menelaus has shown his own folly, when he insists that it is his turn to be arrogant as Ajax was arrogant once (1087-88). In invoking Ajax’s lack of sOphrosunO, he reveals his own. These men are sOphrOn or kakos. Ajax is neither.