Sophocles has suffered two great misfortunes in his reception. First, he became canonical too easily and blandly. Only a few months after his death in 405 bce, Aristophanes’ Frogs dramatized a contest in Hades between the noble but primitive Aeschylus and the clever but decadent Euripides. The play excludes Sophocles completely; he is too ‘‘good-tempered’’ to want to leave the underworld (82) and has too much respect for Aeschylus to claim the honor of being the best tragedian (788-90). The play was very influential, defining Sophocles as a nice guy and a great tragedian, but not controversial. Furthermore, Sophocles had a long life and a distinguished public career. He served as a treasurer for the Athenian alliance in 443/42, and was elected general, Athens’ highest office. An anecdote told by the contemporary poet Ion of Chios has him joking that his skill in amatory affairs disproved Pericles’ criticism of his strategic inability. The biography also describes him as very pious; he gave hospitality to the god Asclepius when the cult was introduced in Athens. So Sophocles quickly became a symbol of Athens and its most perfect cultural product in its greatest period. The poet’s genial character was transferred into the texts he had left. When Aristotle in the Poetics made Oedipus the King his favorite source of examples, Sophocles was doomed to be a classic, too perfect to be really interesting. Ever since, Sophocles has stood for moderation, neither too archaic nor too innovative. Inevitably, the voice of the middle is worthy, but not so exciting.
The surviving selection of his works is also unfortunate, because the three plays about Thebes give a false impression of his range. The scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (around 200 bce) referred to 130 plays, of which seventeen were spurious (another source says there were 123), and the biographies list twenty or twenty-four victories. We can see from the fragments that his favorite subject matter was the Trojan War, not Thebes, though the surviving titles and quotations cover a broad range. Papyri have yielded extensive fragments from Trackers, a satyr-play about the birth of Hermes, and some of a Trojan play, Eurypylus (on Trackers see Seidensticker, chapter 3 in this volume). He first produced in 468, but none of his surviving plays is
Likely to be early. Ajax and Antigone probably belong to the 440s. Women ofTrachis shows the influence of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458) and Euripides (first production 455), while it may have influenced Bacchylides, who probably died at the end of the 450s. Philoctetes was produced in 409, and Oedipus at Colonus was posthumously produced; Electra is not too long before Philoctetes. Oedipus the King is usually put in the 420s, but this is a guess (Reinhardt 1979, 1-8).
Almost all translations of Sophocles present the ‘‘Theban plays’’ together, as if they were a trilogy, although they were probably composed over a space of almost forty years. It is not easy for the nonspecialist to realize that the man who composed Antigone could hardly know that he would write Oedipus the King, and that when he wrote Oedipus the King he is very unlikely to have already planned Oedipus at Colonus. Indeed, we should not immediately assume that the first audience of Oedipus at Colonus would have understood allusions to earlier and later Theban legend as references to Sophocles’ earlier tragedies. There were many other versions, including, for example, Euripides’ Antigone (in which Antigone and Haemon had a son).
Still, the surviving plays are wonderfully diverse. The single character Odysseus is evaluated quite differently in different plays. In Ajax, Odysseus, because he is able to adapt to changing situations, refuses to continue his enmity with Ajax after Ajax’s death. His flexibility is admirable. In Philoctetes, Odysseus is so willing to adapt to any situation that he has no principles at all except utility (Nussbaum 1976), and the character is loathsome. Or consider Sophocles’ treatment of women and sexuality. Antigone and Electra are about virgins who assume heroic roles and are criticized for exceeding female boundaries. Haemon in Antigone is in love, but Antigone is not. Women of Trachisis a tragedy of eros, about a woman who is in love with her husband. Philoctetes has no women at all. Among Sophocles’ lost plays we know of two about Tyro, who bore twin sons to Poseidon. She exposed her children, and was persecuted by her stepmother, but ultimately reunited with her children (see Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume). In Hermione the heroine, married to Orestes during the Trojan War, was taken away from him and given to Neoptolemus in accordance with a promise her father Menelaus had made. Neoptolemus was killed at Delphi, and Hermione went back to Orestes. In Eriphyle Sophocles dramatized the story of the woman who was bribed to convince her husband, the prophet Amphiareus, to take part in the expedition of the Seven, although he knew he would die.
There is no one kind of Sophoclean drama. Oedipus the King, Electra, and Philoctetes have tight plots. In Electra, there are two precipitating events: Orestes decides to seek his revenge by stealth, without communicating with his sister, and Clytemnestra has an ominous dream. Everything else is the seemingly inevitable response and counter-response of the characters. Oedipus the King begins with what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: the plague at Thebes initiates the action, but the oracle transforms the problem into the search for Laius’ killer, and the plague is ignored once its job is done. Through the arrival of the messenger from Corinth (the one flaw in the tight construction), this search becomes joined with the search for Oedipus’ origins. Because the same slave who is summoned as a witness of Laius’ death also saved the infant Oedipus, when he arrives Oedipus interrogates him only about his birth. Once he proves that Oedipus is Laius’ son, the murder is regarded as solved, and the play avoids any anticlimactic fixing of details. In Philoctetes, the prophecy of Helenus requiring that Philoctetes come to Troy ‘‘willingly,’’ along with Odysseus’ awareness that he will not be willing to come, causes everything. Yet the action almost concludes the ‘‘wrong’’ way, so that Heracles must appear as the god from the machine. Other dramas divide into two parts. In Ajax and Women of Trachis, the most important character dies halfway through. The second part of Ajax is a protracted dispute about his burial, dominated by the body of the dead hero, while Women ofTrachis shifts its attention to Heracles. The last part of Antigone focuses on Creon. Oedipus at Colonus keeps its attention on the title character throughout, but the action is episodic, as different threats to the divinely sanctioned outcome arise and are removed.
We must be careful of demanding too quickly that Sophocles be what we want him to be. Much Sophoclean criticism of the second half of the twentieth century engaged in a debate between ‘‘hero-worshippers’’ and ‘‘pietists’’ (these widely used terms come from Winnington-Ingram 1980, 13): those who admire the stubborn, self-directed protagonists and those who claim that we should perhaps pity, but clearly recognize the folly of, characters who ignore their proper limits and defy the gods. This debate is not worth continuing. The responses of critics are heavily influenced by their own attitudes to authority, convention, and religion. Each side has to ignore something. Hero-worshippers tend to dismiss choral moralizing as ethically trivial, mere conventionality. Pietists tend to ignore the plays’ emotional weight and moral complexity, finding trite judgments where the spectator open to the drama is carried away by sympathy or deeply troubled. The extreme differences of opinion show just how tricky this author is.
Still, the argument makes salient some central issues. The tragedies explore situations in which women’s loyalties to their families conflict with their appropriate social roles; in which the boundaries between the will of the gods and human attempts to achieve their ends are unclear; in which the central characters are in various ways isolated or displaced. Ajax has attacked the leaders of the Greek army, but has a chorus of loyal Salaminians, a devoted concubine, and a loyal brother; Philoctetes has been abandoned by those who should have been his friends; Oedipus the King plays almost as much with the ambiguities of the protagonist’s relationship to Thebes - savior and destroyer, native and immigrant - as with those of incest; Deianira is far from her native city and family and her husband is absent, while the chorus members are sympathetic but too young to be wise; Electra is isolated within her family but has a friendly chorus.
We would be foolish to ignore the biographical information. An interpretation that denied Sophocles’ Athenian patriotism or his support of civic religion would be absurd. Oedipus at Colonus not only idealizes Athens, but refers to specifics of cult with obvious affection. That does not mean that we know his political or religious opinions: the plays emphasize leadership more than democracy (Szlezak 1994), mysterious more than helpful gods. Of the great tragedians, Sophocles holds most strictly to purely dramatic laws. Once he has created a particular situation, with all its theological or political implications, he has his characters act in accordance with the demands of the situation and with the traits that he has assigned them. Unlike his rival Euripides, he does not frame passages of special contemporary relevance or draw audience attention to his own manipulations. On the one occasion his characters have a formal debate, in Electra, it concerns mostly the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the killing of Agamemnon, and it concentrates on specifics rather than generalities. Certainly
Sophocles was interested in intellectual developments. For example, in the second half of the fifth century teachers of rhetoric developed the argument from probability; Creon in Oedipus the King argues this way (584-602), claiming that he would not have plotted against Oedipus because his position as the king’s brother-in-law is preferable to being king.
World History
