Characterization

If at some levels Sophocles is difficult, at others he is eminently approachable. The frequent ambiguity and complexity of language in details make it difficult to judge his great characters precisely, but there is no ambiguity in their outlines. Sophocles is famous for his use of contrasts in characterization. Antigone is set against Ismene, Electra against Chrysothemis. Contrast goes far beyond these obvious pairings. The guard’s concern for his own safety in Antigone helps define not only Antigone but Ismene, whose motives for not helping her sister go beyond simple cowardice. The chorus may often sympathize with a character while trying to persuade her to act very differently. Antigone, lamenting how she will be immured in rock, neither living nor dead, compares herself to Niobe, who wept until she became stone. The chorus tries to make the comparison a consolation, since Niobe was descended from gods. Antigone thinks they are laughing at her (839-40). Clearly, they are genuinely trying to console her, but the inability of either side to communicate with the other, even in lament, is telling.

Sophocles’ characters do not have complex personalities in a modern, novelistic sense. There is no reason to attribute unconscious motives to them; Oedipus has no Oedipal desires. They are not, however, flat. They have specific, intense, vivid traits, and these are usually extremely consistent. Oedipus in Oedipus the King is the conscientious ruler of a city gripped by plague, confident in his ability to solve problems through energy and intelligence. Oedipus shows an obvious concern for his people, and the early scenes win him sympathy as he asks for advice (always a sign of wisdom), and then turns out to have already done what he is advised. As the play continues, this energy turns out to have a darker side. Oedipus is impatient, hot-tempered, prone to jump to conclusions. When he speaks about his past, it is evident that the same qualities of character governed his actions: he killed Laius and his followers with the same anger he displays toward Creon and Tiresias. After the revelation, he vigorously defends his self-blinding to the chorus and unsuccessfully tries to convince Creon that he should be expelled from Theban territory; he still thinks he knows best what to do.

That the characters do not have complex personalities does not mean that they lack inner conflict. Deianira is determined not to be angry with her husband for taking Iole as a concubine. It is impossible not to hear resentment when she speaks of how ‘‘Heracles, called the faithful and noble, has sent such a payment for my long time of keeping his house’’ (540-42). At the same time, she insists that she is not angry. The conflict is easy to understand: she wants to be a perfect wife and a wise mortal, who understands human limits; she is also in anguish about being displaced. Sophoclean characters regularly face choices that seem to them impossible. Neoptolemus cries out in frustration at his inability to solve his dilemma at Philoctetes 969-70, and Philoc-tetes is even more distressed at 1348-57. Ajax runs through and rejects all alternatives except suicide at 457-80 (Fowler 1987 suggests that Sophocles first developed the tragic ‘‘desperation speech.’’) The nearest Sophocles comes to a formula is the phrase oimoi, ti drasO, ‘‘Alas, what should I do?’’

Sophocles’ characters, then, are relatively uncomplicated characters who must act in complex situations. The opening scene of Antigone, for example, represents the single-minded determination of one sister and the helpless goodwill of the other, beginning the action with a dramatic tension that is sustained throughout. At the same time, it evokes an impressive array of moral categories and cultural stereotypes. Antigone sees her family as noble, while Ismene speaks of its history of incest and fratricide: how are we to place the Labdacids? Ismene insists that as women, she and her sister should not naturally fight with men, while Antigone’s eagerness to die nobly evokes traditional male battlefield heroism: does Antigone’s willingness to ignore female limits make her better than other women, or dangerously transgressive? The culture could see women who undertook male roles either way. Ismene criticizes Antigone for trying to do the impossible, a familiar theme of Greek morality. Antigone succeeds in burying Polynices, so perhaps her success shows that Ismene’s rebuke is wrong; but she is caught by Creon and cannot hope to protect the corpse from scavenger animals, so maybe Ismene is right. There is no simple rule to define what is ritually or socially adequate as a burial. Later, the chorus will suggest that Antigone’s fierceness is inherited from her father (471-72), but is this true, and what does it mean if it is? The elders will also raise the possibility that divine hatred for the family has affected Antigone. She herself seems to accept the suggestion that she ‘‘repay[s] an ancestral ordeal’’ (856). Yet when the chorus in this context sings of her as deluded, in accordance with a traditional scheme of archaic Greek morality - because the gods hate her family, they help lead its members to self-destructive acts (615-25) - the audience may wonder whether it is not Creon who is truly deluded. Both the underlying causes of her being as she is, and the correct judgment of her, are in doubt. Ambiguity often gives a sense of depth to Sophoclean characters: they seem more real because we do not fully understand them (Easterling 1977).

Similarly, Electra’s basic qualities of loyalty to her father, intense hatred for his killers, and complete dedication to an aristocratic ethos are not at all complicated in themselves. They are put in a complex context, however. Electra admits that her behavior, governed by one set of norms that she accepts, conflicts with the norms of proper female behavior, which she also accepts. (Unlike Antigone, she expresses embarrassment at 616-21.) Furthermore, Electra’s violations of female norms may make her resemble her mother, whom she detests. Chrysothemis raises the additional question of whether Electra’s resistance to those in power will have any useful practical effect. If Electra’s struggle does not harm her enemies, but only brings her more suffering, the audience’s very sympathy for Electra may distance them from her. Electra, however, sees value in her making her enemies uneasy (355-56), even if she can do no more. In Oedipus at Colonus, there can be no question that Oedipus takes the audience’s sympathy from the start, and keeps it. Subordinate characters - Antigone, Ismene, Theseus, the chorus - direct the audience to pity him and respect him. Oedipus is pathetic but dignified. Furthermore, the play makes Oedipus a permanent part of a sacred landscape whose details the play evokes with exceptional feeling. Yet this pathetic Oedipus, despite the claims his physical weakness makes on the audience, is immensely powerful in his power to bless and curse, a power he uses with terrifying ferocity. The same subordinate characters whose feelings for him guide those of the audience also distance the spectator from him by their greater humanity. When Oedipus curses his son, Polynices may deserve no less, but the audience sees Antigone’s suffering in her brother’s doom. The character is not complicated, but the response of an audience to him may be.

An extremely consistent character may offer a very rich set of moods. Ajax initially appears in despair. When Tecmessa tries to convince him to live, he is brusque and harsh. Yet in his famous Deception Speech (646-92), as he describes the cycles of nature as a model for the importance of ‘‘yielding’’ in human life, he sounds both wise and eloquent. Although there are distinct notes of bitterness in the speech, it is calm and resolved. Tecmessa and the chorus are reassured as much by the tone of the speech as its content, since the resignation it expresses seems to indicate that Ajax, now so rational, will not kill himself. (Realistically, many suicides appear calm and not unhappy once they have decided to die.) In his final soliloquy before he kills himself, he begins with a quiet detachment: he seeks to demonstrate how perfect a situation for his death this is. He goes in quick succession from cursing his enemies to speaking a moving and dignified farewell to the natural world.

Like the other tragedians, Sophocles tends to explore different aspects of a character and a situation in separate speeches and songs. In the first part of Antigone, Antigone shows no fear of death, and even insists that the miseries of her life make death desirable (461-64), but before her final exit she delivers a protracted lament that emphasizes her failure to marry or have children (806-82). It is entirely reasonable that a young woman in her position should feel that death is desirable; it is also reasonable that any young woman would lament a death that deprived her of the usual goals of a maiden’s life. The play has Antigone show no fear of death when she argues with Ismene, since she is trying to persuade her sister to risk her life, or when she confronts Creon, since by doing so she denies him any power to harm her. If the audience is to feel the pathos of her death, however, somebody has to express it. Sophocles mitigates the change in Antigone in three ways. First, Haemon is introduced only after the passages in which she expresses eagerness to die, so that the horror of her family history can have its full effect in motivating her wish to die before

Her best possible reason to want to live appears. Second, Creon says that everyone would lament interminably before dying, if it were possible (883-84), and although Creon is not sympathetic, the audience may recognize his statement as true. Third, Antigone is not condemned to die by stoning, as Creon’s original decree announced. Instead, she is immured in a rock tomb. The change is thematically rich in making Antigone, like Polynices, anomalous (he is dead but not buried, while she is buried without being dead). It marks difficulties in Creon’s position (he is concerned about pollution, despite his denials, and he perhaps worries that a public and participatory execution would not go well). But it also helps explain Antigone’s reluctance to die both practically and thematically, for it deprives her of the sense of clearly belonging to the dead. That her transition from life to death is distorted resonates with her loss of the transition from maiden to wife: she laments being trapped in in-betweenness. Her lament, however, is also a continuing argument with the chorus. If the elders are to understand her position (as they never do), they must be brought to sympathize with her suffering, and she tries the power of song.

Sophoclean characters, then, do not exactly develop, but they show different aspects of themselves as their situations change, and they can surprise an audience. Oedipus at the opening of Oedipus at Colonus describes himself as having learned from suffering, time, and his nobility to be satisfied with the ‘‘less than little’’ that he receives as a beggar (58), but he is furious when provoked. There is no real contradiction in being gracious in response to small kindnesses and furious in reaction to injuries, but the angry Oedipus is not predictable from the long-suffering Oedipus, either. He is also only in some ways predictable from the myth. The Oedipus of Oedipus the King also had a hot temper, for the killing of Laius implies it; it is essential to the story. However, when the Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus responds to the pleas of Antigone and Theseus to see his son Polynices (1205), he is quite unlike the earlier Oedipus who yielded to Jocasta and the chorus (‘‘For I pity your pathetic speech, not his - he will be hated wherever he is,’’ Oedipus the King 671-72). Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus is fearful (113-16, 651-56, and 1206-7), as the earlier Oedipus never is. The two dramas move the protagonist in opposite directions: the first Oedipus goes from utter self-confidence to pathetic gratitude for Creon’s common humanity, though he still trusts his own understanding (1517-19); the anxious later Oedipus makes his last exit confidently leading Theseus and his entourage.

Characters have a particular nature, but external pressures may keep them from following it. The timid Deianira, with the encouragement of the chorus, decides in her desperation to see whether a love-potion will win Heracles back to her. Neopto-lemus goes against his nature in agreeing to deceive Philoctetes (though he does it very well). When Ajax begins, Ajax has already violated his nature, which rejects trickery of all kinds, in attacking his enemies at night; he does so again in tricking them in order to find an opportunity to kill himself. The bitter resignation of the Deception Speech, in which he acknowledges that all things change, seems to express his own frustration that he himself is implicated in change.

We have access only to the voices and actions of the characters, and Sophocles is a master of simultaneous clarity and ambiguity. When Antigone later refuses Ismene’s attempt to say that she joined in the burial, and says to Ismene, ‘‘You chose to live, I to die’’ (555), we simply do not know whether she is trying to save her sister, and cares about her, or whether she has rejected Ismene’s affection. Haemon in Antigone argues that he defends Antigone out of concern for his father, not because he is in love with her; but Creon insists that sexual desire is Haemon’s only motivation. The chorus appears to agree with Creon. The messenger speech describes how Haemon, finding Antigone dead, first attempted to kill his father, then stabbed himself. Evidently, he is passionately in love with Antigone. Yet that does not mean that he is hypocritical when he approaches his father. Sophocles is fascinated by the dynamic of conflict and of rhetoric itself.

In Ajax, Teucer and Menelaus loathe each other from the start. Menelaus is rude from his first word. Still, their debate becomes more vulgar as it continues, reaching the generic limits of tragic decorum. They conclude their argument by hurling pseudo-fables at each other as if each thought the other beneath real argument. In their growing anger, they show less and less control. In other vehement exchanges, characters often put themselves into extreme positions, and in long speeches, like Achilles in the Iliad, they sometimes seem to be carried away by the passion of their own language. This can complicate our judgment of them, since it is impossible to be certain when characters express convictions that they fully endorse and when they are, like real people, drifting into hyperbole or worse. Hyllus in Women of Trachis curses his mother in his anger, only to lament when he realizes the truth (808-20, 932-35). When Antigone insists that she, and Polynices, will hate Ismene for her refusal to help in the burial, does this mean that her later claim to be of a nature to ‘‘join in love rather than hatred’’ (523) is false? Perhaps not. When Creon invites scavenger birds to carry bits of Polynices’ corpse to the throne of Zeus (1040-41), he would surely not speak this way if he were not enraged. Yet the belief that mortals cannot pollute the gods is serious.

Argument from probability was only one aspect of the fifth century’s fascination with clever argument. Critics usually associate paradoxical argument with Euripides, but it is there in Sophocles, too. In Sophocles, however, it flows so smoothly from and into intense feeling that it does not stand out as argument. In Oedipus the King, after Oedipus sings a lament with the chorus, the chorus-leader comments, in spoken verse, that he cannot agree that Oedipus has planned well, since suicide would be preferable to blindness. Oedipus, in response, catalogues those he would prefer not to see (his parents, his children, Thebes), then says that he would prefer not to be able to hear, either, and addresses Cithaeron, asking why he was not allowed to die. Then he begs to be killed or driven out (1367-1415). The paradoxical cleverness of the argument is almost invisible. Ajax’s great speech before his death begins by noting that someone with leisure to calculate would see that the sword is ideal for killing: a gift of his enemy Hector, fixed in hostile soil, carefully positioned (815-23). In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus argues that not only was he justified in killing his father unknowingly, since he was attacked first, but that he would have been justified had he known that his victim was his father (270-72) - a stunningly bold argument. Most surprisingly, Antigone gives a final argument for the wisdom ofher actions just before her death, claiming that she would not have defied the citizens for a husband or child, but did so for her brother because her brother was irreplaceable (904-15). The argument is borrowed from Herodotus (3.119), where it makes better sense, since the woman who speaks it is explaining which member of her family she will have saved from death. It seems ill-suited to the earlier breadth of Antigone’s claims about the unwritten laws. Antigone, however, has not yet succeeded in persuading the chorus using more general arguments, so she tries to make them understand why she had to act as she did in this particular case.