The Play of Sophocles

The Plays of Sophocles
i
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The Plays of Sophocles, A. F. Garvie
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iv
The Plays of Sophocles
Second Edition
A.F. Garvie
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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ISBN : PB : 978-1-47423-335-4
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Names: Garvie, A. F., author.
Title: The plays of Sophocles / A.F. Garvie.
Description: Second edition. | London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017644 (print) | LCCN 2016018431 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781474233354 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781474233361 (epdf) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Sophocles--Criticism and interpretation.
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vi
Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
Chronology 5
Ajax 7
Women of Trachis 19
Antigone 31
Oedipus the King 41
Electra 53
Philoctetes 63
Oedipus at Colonus 75
Epilogue 83
Suggestions for Further Reading 89

Glossary 93
Index 95
vii
Preface
The first edition of this book appeared in 2005. I am grateful to

Bloomsbury for its decision to publish a second edition, on a larger scale
than the first, which has enabled me to make not only various minor
corrections and improvements, but also some more substantial additions
in keeping with the development in my thinking about Sophocles since
2005. The main addition, perhaps, concerns the staging of his plays, a
matter which was to some extent passed over in the first edition. In
particular I have said more about Sophocles’ treatment of space, and
about the dramatic significance which, for the original audience of his
plays, seems often to underlie a character’s entry or exit by the skene
door rather than by an eisodos, or by one eisodos rather than the other.
In this regard I owe a particular debt to all the participants in an
international conference on ‘Staging Ajax’s Suicide’, held in 2013 at the
Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Their stimulating and friendly
contributions and discussion caused me to modify, though not to change
entirely, my views of the staging of Sophocles’ Ajax which I had expressed
in the first edition of this book, and earlier in my 1998 Aris & Phillips
edition of the play. My understanding of Women of Trachis and Electra
has in recent years been influenced by the recognition that they belong
to a very long tradition of ‘return-poetry’, the conventional themes of
which would be familiar to, and would certainly affect the expectation
of, their original audiences. In our own study we ought to take Sophocles’
use of such themes into account. I have not changed my view that it is
wrong to expect Sophocles to provide simple answers to the deep
problems of human life; if anything, I emphasise it more strongly in this
second edition.
I thank all the Staff of Bloomsbury and RefineCatch for their patience
and care in the production of this book, especially Alice Wright, Lucy
Carroll, Chloe Shuttlewood, Merv Honeywood and Paul King. It has
viii
Preface ix
been a pleasure to work with them all. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to my wife for her assistance at various stages, and not least for her
indefatigability in the production of the Index.
A.F. Garvie
Glasgow
(2016)
x
Introduction
The format of this book is based largely on that of James Morwood’s

The Plays of Euripides (2002) in the same series. I have kept to a bare
minimum references to the secondary literature on Sophocles, and I
have supplied line references to the text of the plays only where it
seemed to be essential. I have tried as far as possible to avoid technical
terms. The translations, which are my own, are based, for the most part,
on the 1990 Oxford Classical Text of H. Lloyd-Jones and N.G. Wilson.
I acknowledge with thanks the kind permission of Oxbow Books to
use for the chapter on Ajax my translation of that play which was
published in 1998 by Aris & Phillips as Sophocles Ajax: edited with
introduction, translation and commentary.
In the course of his long life (he was about ninety when he died in
406 BC ) Sophocles is thought to have written about 120 plays. His first
victory in the competition for best tragedian of the year was in 468 BC .
This may also have been his first production. In terms of victories he
was the most successful of the three great fifth-century Athenian
tragedians. Only seven of his tragedies, together with a large number
of fragments, survive intact. This volume deals with the seven plays in
the order in which they may have been first produced. But only two
dates are certain: Philoctetes was produced in 409 BC , Oedipus at
Colonus posthumously in 401. A story in Plutarch (first to second
centuries AD ) which connects Antigone with Sophocles’ appointment
as a general in 441/440 would point to 442 as the date of that play, but it
may not be reliable. Oedipus the King has usually been dated to the early
420s, largely on the dubious grounds that the plague with which the
play begins must have been based on the real plague in Athens in 431.
1
2 The Plays of Sophocles
Most, but not all, scholars believe, on grounds of style and structure,
that Ajax, Women of Trachis and Antigone can be grouped as the earliest
surviving plays, and that they all belong probably in the 440s, but there
is less agreement about the order in which the three were produced.
Electra is usually believed to come between Oedipus the King and
Philoctetes, probably between 420 and 410. All of this uncertainty
renders very hazardous any attempt to trace a development in Sophocles’
dramatic technique or tragic thinking, and no such attempt will be
made in these essays. A single papyrus find could upset many cherished
views.
All of Sophocles’ plays were presented for the first time in the theatre
of Dionysus, below the south side of the Athenian Acropolis, at the City
Dionysia, the spring festival of the god, and performed by three speaking
actors (plus any number of non-speaking extra-numeraries) and a chorus
of fifteen members. The orchestra (literally ‘dancing place’) was a large,
circular (for some scholars rectangular) area occupied by both chorus
and actors. It is uncertain whether behind it there was a raised stage
which would be the principal, but not exclusive, location of the actors. If
so, it cannot have been high, as there is much coming and going between
the two areas. A temporary wooden building, the skene, served as a
backcloth for the action, its central doorway leading into the palace or
temple or other building in front of which the play was set. The roof of
the skene could be used as a further stage-area, particularly for the
appearance of a god, and a crane-device, the mechane, could swing a
stage-god above the roof into the sight of the audience. Not all the
important dramatic action took place in the view of the spectators.
Sometimes they are invited to imagine what is happening behind the
skene-door, but on other occasions a trolley, the ekkyklema, could be
rolled out of the door carrying a tableau of an interior scene. Important
action may take place off-stage altogether, and is reported to the audience
in a formal, and often long, messenger speech, a striking convention of
Greek tragedy. Entrances and exits are made, if not through the door, by
means of the two side-passages (eisodoi) which led into the orchestra, one
regularly from an adjacent, the other from a more distant, area. Which
Introduction 3
eisodos is used by a character is sometimes dramatically significant, as is

the general relationship between the varying acting spaces.
The most difficult element of Greek tragedy for a modern reader or
spectator to appreciate is probably the use of the chorus. The scale of
this volume has precluded any attempt to deal with the lyric metres of
the chorus’s songs and of those passages in which a chorus and an actor
join in a lyric exchange. Most scholars agree that, although the chorus-
leader may engage in spoken dialogue with a character, the chorus itself
never speaks, but always sings and dances – a vital element of Greek
tragedy which is largely lost to a modern audience or reader. In fourth-
century tragedy the songs of the chorus could provide mere interludes
in the drama, but in the fifth century they are always relevant to
the dramatic action, serving to guide the audience’s intellectual and
emotional response to that action. Sometimes they reflect on traditional
wisdom or the wisdom of the common man. One should, however, be
wary of the view that, as the ‘ideal spectator’, they simply act as the
mouthpiece of the poet himself. Recent scholarship rightly emphasises
the complexity of the choral identity, its ability to shift from one
perspective to another, and the dramatic effects that can be achieved by
the transitions between the lyric (sung) and the iambic (spoken) voices.
4
Chronology
496–495 Birth of Sophocles

480s Birth of Euripides
468 Sophocles’ first victory, and perhaps his first production, in
the tragic competition at the City Festival of Dionysus
462–461 Democratic reforms at Athens
456–455 Death of Aeschylus
440s Probably the decade in which Ajax, Women of Trachis
and Antigone were produced, but not necessarily in that
order. The evidence that connects Antigone with Sophocles’
appointment as a general in 441/440 is unreliable
431 Beginning of Peloponnesian War between Athens and
Sparta
430 Outbreak of plague in Athens
420s The most likely decade for the production of Oedipus the
King. But the argument that the date must be close to the
outbreak of the plague in Athens is weak
420–410 Probably the first production of Electra. Equally uncertain
is the date of Euripides’ Electra, as is the question of which
came first
411 Oligarchic revolution at Athens
410 Democracy restored
409 First production of Philoctetes
406 Death of Sophocles
404 End of Peloponnesian War with the defeat of Athens
401 Posthumous first production of Oedipus at Colonus
5
6
Ajax
After the death of the Greek hero Achilles at Troy, Ajax committed suicide
because Achilles’ armour was awarded not to him but to Odysseus, as
the next best warrior after Achilles. The story was known to Homer, who
in Odyssey 11 presents a memorable encounter between Odysseus and
Ajax in the Underworld, with the latter refusing his enemy’s offer of
reconciliation. It was treated more fully in some of the lost poems of the
post-Homeric Epic Cycle, and it was a popular subject in art from the
seventh century onwards. In Sophocles’ version Ajax commits suicide, not
only because of the dishonour done to him by the refusal to award him
Achilles’ arms, but because he has failed in his attempt to avenge himself
by killing the commanders of the army, Agamemnon and Menelaus.
A modern audience or reader might be expected to find it difficult to
sympathize, or identify, with a man who, for apparently selfish reasons,
behaves so disloyally towards his comrades, and who, when his attempt
is foiled by the goddess Athena, regrets not his murderous intentions
but only his failure to carry them out. For the ancient audience too,
living in a democracy in which self-centred ‘heroic’ individualists
represented a threat to civic cohesion, Ajax’s behaviour must have
seemed problematic. At the same time even in fifth-century Athens
such individualists were needed and admired. Ajax belongs to a long
line of Sophoclean heroes who, in one way or another, are isolated from
their community, who fall because they insist on remaining true to
themselves, and whom, because of their determination, we are invited
to pity and admire. Ajax embodies, albeit in an extreme form, the code
of the Homeric warrior, for whom honour depended on success, and
failure led to disgrace.
7
The original audience also took it for granted that one should do
good to one’s friends, but as much harm as possible to one’s enemies
(see pp. 38–9). His enemies will naturally object to his behaviour, and
we may continue to have doubts about it, but it is broadly true that
‘Sophocles does not judge the morality of Ajax’s action in trying to
attack the Greek leaders’ (March 1991–3). Moreover, as the play
progresses, increasing stress is laid on Ajax’s positive qualities, rather
than on the negative aspects of his attempted revenge. In a very real
sense the play presents the rehabilitation of Ajax, as we see him restored
to his status as a great man. For the Athenian audience Ajax was a hero
in the Greek sense of that word, a great man who after death was
elevated to a status between human and divine, and who was worshipped
with a state-cult. Not much is made of this for most of the play, but
the cult is certainly implied at 1176–7 and in the tableau in the final
scene, in which Ajax’s son Eurysaces clings in supplication to his father’s
corpse.
The play is set outside the hut of Ajax at Troy, and the central door of
the skene represents the entrance to it. The audience would know from
Homer’s Iliad that it lay at one end of the Greek camp, which is a matter
of some importance later in the play. One eisodos leads to the rest of the
camp, the other to the area which lies away from the camp.
When the play opens Ajax is inside the hut, and, before we see him,
we are introduced to him first through the words of his enemies, the
goddess Athena and her favourite, Odysseus, who had robbed him of
his prize. Athena exults in her triumph over her enemy; she has driven
him mad, so that he has slaughtered sheep and cattle, under the delusion
that they are Agamemnon and Menelaus, and is now about to torture a
sheep, thinking that it is Odysseus. She proposes to call Ajax out of his
hut so that Odysseus can enjoy the spectacle of the mad Ajax and laugh
at him in his misfortune. In the final words of the scene she draws what
too many scholars have taken to be the moral of the play: ‘it is the
sound-minded (sophrones) whom the gods love, while they hate the
wicked’ (132–3). ‘Sound-mindedness’ (sophrosyne) implies moderation,
modesty, self-control, prudence, common sense, discipline, and these
Ajax 9
tame virtues certainly do not characterize Ajax. But is this really the
reason for his fall? And in what sense is he ‘wicked’? Athena seems to
mean little more than that the gods honour those who pay them proper
respect.
The word hybris is often in antithesis with sophrosyne. It is applied to
any kind of outrageous behaviour, for example ridicule, which is
calculated to bring dishonour on another person. The term occurs more
often in Ajax than in any other surviving play of Sophocles. It is not
used in this scene, but the laughter of one’s enemies is often seen as a
form of hybris, and that laughter will be a recurring theme in the play.
In inviting Odysseus to laugh at Ajax Athena is thus in effect inviting
him to commit hybris, which surely undermines the supposed pious
moral that she expounds. So too does her statement that the alternation
of fortune affects the good and the bad alike. Even more significant is
the response of Odysseus, traditionally Ajax’s greatest enemy (78). One
is expected to do good to one’s friends, and to harm one’s enemies. But
Odysseus surprises us; he declines to laugh, but rather pities Ajax, on
the grounds (121–6) that they share a common humanity. Odysseus’
sympathy is much more attractive than the triumphalism of the
goddess, and it prepares us for the final scene of the play, in which it is
Odysseus who persuades Agamemnon to allow Ajax’s burial. The
rehabilitation of Ajax has already begun.
For most of the rest of the play we see Ajax through the eyes, and in
the presence, of his friends, who are naturally sympathetic to him – the
Chorus of sailors from his island of Salamis (part of Athens since the
sixth century), his concubine Tecmessa, and, after his suicide, his half-
brother Teucer. To these we must add his little son, Eurysaces, to whom,
in a moving speech (545–82) he bequeaths the great shield (sakos) for
which he is famous in the Iliad, and from which the boy derives his
name. It is in these central scenes that most of the occurrences of the
term hybris are to be found. The Chorus uses it in its entrance-song
(parodos) at 151–3, and at 196–9 as it envisages the laughter of Ajax’s
enemies at his misfortune; Ajax himself employs it at 560–1 when he
forecasts their treatment of Eurysaces, and Teucer later at 971. In all of
them the word is used by Ajax and his supporters of his enemies’
behaviour, and no one has yet described his behaviour in these terms.
What worries his friends is the suspicion that Ajax is about to
commit suicide. When he returns to sanity they do their best to comfort
him, and to make him see sense, but, as always in Sophocles, the hero
refuses to be persuaded or to compromise or to yield. The word ‘yield’ is
a keyword in most of Sophocles’ plays, always put in the mouths of
minor characters, the ordinary people, but it is what the hero cannot
bring himself to do. The strongest pressure is put on him by the modest
and faithful Tecmessa, who, in a speech carefully calculated to appeal to
his sense of honour and fear of disgrace (485–524), challenges Ajax’s
view of the obligations of the great man, insisting that it should include
the notions of gratitude and responsibility to his dependants. But for
Ajax it is his failure and consequent disgrace alone that matter, and it is
clear that suicide is for him the only solution: ‘The noble man should
either live well or die well. You have heard my whole account’ (479–80).
Of Ajax’s four great monologues the most famous, and the most
difficult to interpret, is that at 646–92, in which he appears to have
changed his mind about committing suicide. Much of it has the ring of
a soliloquy in which he is talking to himself, but the many ambiguities
in the language show that he is conscious of the presence of Tecmessa
and the Chorus. He has after all, he says, been softened, like a woman,
by Tecmessa’s words, and ‘I shall go to the bathing-place and the
meadows by the shore, to wash away my defilement and escape from
the heavy anger of the goddess’. Just as in the natural world, the principle
of alternation reigns: winter gives way to summer, night to day, and
sleep to wakefulness, so he too will change and yield, and he will learn
to be sophron. ‘We shall know in future to yield to the gods, and we shall
learn to reverence the sons of Atreus’. The exaggerated language of at
least this sentence should put us on our guard as to his sincerity. He
goes on to say that friends change into enemies, and enemies into
friends. The speech has been the subject of intense debate. Some have
argued that Ajax means exactly what he says; he really has changed in
character, he has learnt sophrosyne, and no longer means to kill himself.
Ajax 11
But it then becomes impossible to explain why he does in fact commit

suicide later in the play. For others the ambiguous language shows a
conscious intention to deceive. His hearers certainly are deceived. After
his exit, by means of the eisodos that leads away from the camp – the
first time that anyone in the play has used it – the Chorus sings a joyous
ode, of a kind which frequently in Sophocles comes immediately before
the catastrophe. On the other hand, the language of the speech is so
beautiful that it is hard to believe that it is all expended on a lie. I have
argued in my 1998 edition that Ajax does feel intellectually the attraction
of sophrosyne and submission, and that he is tempted to give in to it, but
that emotionally he resists. The world which he describes is not one in
which he feels that he has a place. The Sophoclean hero must remain
true to himself, and we admire him for doing so. A modest, humble Ajax
would be a disappointment to the audience.
The Chorus’s happy ode is followed by the arrival of a messenger
from Teucer, who has come from the camp to report the warning of the
prophet Calchas that Ajax will be saved only if he can be kept inside his
hut for the remainder of the day; tomorrow Athena’s anger will have
passed. Immediately the anxiety returns. The Messenger reports two
occasions in the past on which Ajax angered Athena by his foolish
boasting. This is certainly consistent with Ajax as we have seen him.
Critics who look for a simple moral seize on these occasions as providing
the reason for Ajax’s fall. Avoid such arrogance and impiety, and you
will live a happy and successful life. But we have already seen reason to
suspect Athena’s judgement, and it is hardly credible that Ajax falls
because of something that happened long ago, and is not related to
anything in the action of the play itself. How too can we take seriously
a divine anger that will last only for today? The point of all this is
dramatic; it increases our sense of urgency. Since Ajax has already left
the hut, Tecmessa and the Chorus all depart, too late, in a frenzied
search for him, leaving the stage empty for Ajax to return to the stage to
deliver his final great soliloquy before his death. Such a departure by a
chorus in the middle of a play is very rare in tragedy. But Sophocles
wants Ajax to die alone, isolated in his death as in his life.
So, for Ajax’s suicide, during the absence of the Chorus the scene
shifts to the lonely, untrodden place to which Ajax has told us that he
was going (654–5). Scullion (1994 and 2015), followed by Heath and
OKell, are alone in arguing that there is no change of scene at all; the
whole play is enacted in front of, or beside, Ajax’s hut. But the different
scenarios that they envisage are unconvincing. If we are not now in the
lonely place when Ajax unexpectedly returns to the stage for his suicide,
the reason would have to be explained to the audience. And if the
suicide takes place a few metres from the hut, the whole point of the
lonely place is ruined. Ajax is to be isolated in death as he was in life.
How the change of scene was managed, and whether the audience
actually sees Ajax fall on his sword, which would be a rare event on the
tragic stage, are related and much-debated questions. Most modern
scholars probably favour the view that the audience simply takes it for
granted that the change has happened, and that we are now to assume
that the door has turned into the entrance to the untrodden place
(alternatively that an additional door in the skene served that purpose).
Some suppose also that complicated manoeuvres with the ekkyklema
were involved. The obvious objection to this is that lonely, untrodden
spaces in the countryside do not have doors. Everywhere else in Greek
tragedy the door is the entrance to a specific building (or cave), and the
ekkyklema is used only to present a tableau of what has been happening
in the interior of that building. In any case, earlier in the play the door
has been firmly established in the audience’s mind as the entrance to
Ajax’s hut. Without any clear statement that its purpose has changed,
the audience would be impossibly confused. It still seems to me (Garvie
2015) that the least unsatisfactory solution is to suppose that the skene
and its door have to be removed from sight altogether by the erection
by scene-shifters of a screen in front of it. This would take only a few
moments, while the audience was kept in suspense. It is true that the use
of scene-shifters in the middle of a play in the Athenian theatre is not
securely attested, but this is clearly an exceptional play. In the nearest
parallel, Aeschylus’ Eumenides, the temple in Delphi is easily transformed
into the temple of Athena at Athens, so no such screen is required.
Ajax 13
Equally controversial is the question of whether Ajax commits

suicide in front of the eyes of the audience, which would be an act of
violence unparalleled on the Athenian stage. In the first edition of this
book I accepted that he does so, but since then I have been persuaded
that the suicide is unseen by the audience. Otherwise the corpse has
somehow to be later removed, and a dummy substituted, in order to
allow the actor playing Ajax to reappear as Teucer in the final scenes, in
which three actors are required. It is much easier to envisage how this
was done with the use of a screen; the substitution has already taken
place off-stage when it is revealed by Tecmessa to the Chorus and the
audience when she returns from her fruitless search.
It has sometimes been said that the scenes which follow the suicide
are anticlimactic, because with the removal of the main character the
real interest of the play has gone. It was once common to label as a
diptych-play the kind of drama which, like Women of Trachis and
Antigone, seemed to fall in this way into two parts. If the label implies
that a play is badly constructed and lacking in dramatic unity, it is better
avoided. The question is whether Ajax does in fact lack dramatic unity.
The chief concern from now on is the refusal of the sons of Atreus,
Agamemnon and Menelaus, to allow Ajax to be buried. It is not enough
to argue that for an ancient audience a proper burial for the dead was a
matter of supreme importance. So it was, as we shall see again in
Antigone, but so it is also in more modern societies. What matters is the
audience-expectation that Sophocles has built up throughout the play.
Ajax has died true to his own values, superbly confident of his own pre-
eminence. And this pre-eminence has been acknowledged by his
friends. But that is not enough. It has to be acknowledged by others too.
The first, sorrowful, reaction to his death is that of Tecmessa and the
Chorus, and of the long-awaited Teucer when he at last arrives.
Throughout all this we are kept waiting for the reaction of his enemies.
Ajax’s excellence was denied by those who, in his eyes, robbed him of
Achilles’ arms, and his failure to take vengeance has brought him into
disgrace. Now his rehabilitation, and in a sense his restoration to society,
depend upon a proper funeral. That he understood this on the point of
death is clear from his final speech (827–30), ‘that [Teucer] may be the
first to lift me up when I have fallen round this freshly-sprinkled sword,
and that I may not be spotted first by any of my enemies and cast out as
a prey for the dogs and birds’. The original audience may have been
divided as to whether the suicide was by itself a way for Ajax to restore
his honour. Belfiore argues that for many Greeks male (as opposed to
female) suicide was not a noble or heroic death. Without his burial his
suicide may turn out to be an empty gesture. Throughout the final
scenes all our concentration is still on Ajax, his corpse the centrepiece
of the action. The powerful tableau contrasts with the earlier tableau in
which we saw Ajax sitting in the midst of the slaughtered animals.
Now, for the first time since the prologue, we see him through the
eyes of his enemies. His friends’ expectation that they will laugh and
treat him with hybris (see p. 9) is duly fulfilled when first Menelaus
and then Agamemnon appear, via the eisodos that leads to the camp.
They are adamant that Ajax is to be left unburied on the ground. Neither
is impressive, and the contrast between his true greatness and their
blustering could hardly be greater. Menelaus’ arguments are in
themselves not unsound, but he starts, in the eyes of an Athenian
audience, from the disadvantage of being a Spartan. That he is in favour
of sophrosyne, and of the need for discipline in an army and a state, is
not in itself surprising, but for him it means little more than the duty of
‘a bad man’ and a ‘commoner’ (1071–2, a grossly inadequate description
of Ajax) to obey his rulers. It does not help his case that we are reminded
of the words of Athena at 132–3 (see p. 9).
Menelaus is the first to describe Ajax’s behaviour in terms of hybris,
which in itself is not unreasonable, given that he was his intended
victim. But the effect is spoilt by his boast that it is now his turn to
‘think big’, i.e. in effect to commit hybris against his enemy. After his
departure the Chorus sings a melancholy ode in which it contrasts the
misery of life in camp at Troy with the pleasures of life at home on
Salamis. These two environments have made Ajax what he is, and
throughout the play they are constantly in the thoughts of both Ajax
and the Chorus.
Ajax 15
Agamemnon, like his brother, and probably played by the same actor,
is a bully. Unlike him, he at least pays some attention to Ajax’s services
at Troy, but he does so only to decry them, on the grounds that Ajax is
no better than himself. Sophocles’ audience may well disagree. He
gratuitously insults Teucer, who, says Agamemnon, is committing hybris
(1258) and ought to learn sophrosyne; he is a slave and Agamemnon
cannot understand his barbarian tongue. Teucer was in fact the son of
Telamon and Hesione, daughter of Laomedon king of Troy. He is
certainly not a slave, and he has been speaking normal Greek. Teucer,
who is probably played by the same actor as Ajax, and who in a sense
represents him, does his best to defend his half-brother. In his attitude
to his friends he is more attractive than was Ajax, and on the whole he
has the better of the verbal argument with both Menelaus and
Agamemnon. Nevertheless, he descends himself to the petty level of his
opponents, and, the crucial point, ultimately he is unsuccessful in his
attempt to secure the burial.
It is the intervention of Ajax’s enemy Odysseus that provides the
breakthrough. To Ajax’s friends this comes as a complete surprise. It is
less of a surprise to the audience, which has already noted the reaction
of Odysseus in the prologue. But, since then, we have seen him only
through the eyes of his enemies, and we have come to think of him as
an unscrupulous villain, ready to use any means to gain his ends. In his
encounter with Agamemnon he does indeed display his traditional
cleverness, but now uses it to persuade Agamemnon to allow the burial,
in accordance with the laws of the gods that all men should be buried.
Odysseus pays little attention to what Ajax has done. All that matters is
what he was, and the common humanity which both men shared. ‘The
man was my enemy, but he was noble once’ (1355), and ‘his excellence
prevails with me more than his enmity’ (1357). Odysseus has learnt the
lesson of alternation: he forgets his enmity, and becomes Ajax’s friend.
But Agamemnon never understands. He yields only because Odysseus
persuades him to put his desire to help his friend (Odysseus) above his
wish to harm his enemy. The play ends with the procession in which the
corpse is duly carried off for burial. And ‘Teucer’s final words are an
invitation to the audience to join imaginatively and emotionally in the

funeral’ (March 1991–3).
In one sense the play has a happy ending. Ajax has got what
he wanted, and his reputation has been restored. Odysseus has
acknowledged him, in the final testimony to his greatness, as ‘the most
excellent man of all the Argives . . . except for Achilles’ (1340–1). And
yet the closure is somehow incomplete. We cannot quite forget Ajax’s
disloyalty to the army, and much in his character has been unattractive
– his gloating over the details of his supposed vengeance on his enemies,
his treatment of the faithful Tecmessa, his refusal to listen to his friends.
Ajax’s excellence has been recognized, and we admire him for it. But we
do not have to like him. Much more attractive is the character of the
flexible Odysseus. It is ironical that for his burial Ajax has had to depend,
not on his friends, but on his enemy, and that he secures it only because
that enemy has become a friend. We recall the words of Ajax about this
kind of alternation (679–82), and we feel that it is one that he could
never accept for himself. Just as Agamemnon refuses to become the
friend of Ajax, so the rigid Ajax could never acknowledge Odysseus as
his friend.
Even the final procession is somehow flawed. The fact that anyone
from the army is invited to participate in the funeral marks, in a sense,
Ajax’s (and the Chorus’s) reintegration into the community. But Teucer,
despite his gratitude to Odysseus, in deference to Ajax allows him only
a restricted part in the ceremony. Odysseus departs before the
procession begins, and Agamemnon and Menelaus will certainly not be
present. As so often, Sophocles combines optimism with pessimism.
The gods provide little comfort. Athena makes no appearance at the
end. One feels that, like Ajax himself, she would not have understood
Odysseus’ magnanimity.
By which of the two eisodoi does the procession leave the orchestra?
If it is by the one which leads to the camp, the one which was used a few
minutes earlier by Menelaus and Agamemnon, it confirms the, at least
partial, reintegration of Ajax into the community. Taplin (2015),
however, has recently thrown serious doubts on that scenario. The
Ajax 17
original audience (perhaps one should say ‘many in the original

audience’) would be familiar with the traditional site of Ajax’s tomb in
the Troad, and would know that to reach it from the place of the suicide
one would have to walk eastwards, i.e. further away from the camp into
a region still more remote than the setting of the second half of the play.
So the procession must leave by the opposite eisodos from that used by
Menelaus and Agamemnon. With this scenario the reintegration of
Ajax becomes even more questionable. We know that he did not want to
die within the community. Would he be pleased to know that his tomb
too was outside that community?
If, finally, we ask why Ajax falls, the answer is not that it is because of
the wrong which he has done. Rather, he is ruined because of the
qualities for which we admire him. If he had not been the kind of man
he was, he would not have fallen.
18
Women of Trachis
Like Aeschylus’ Persians and Agamemnon, and a small group of other

plays, Women of Trachis presents the tragedy of a long-awaited
homecoming. It belongs therefore to a very old tradition of ‘return-
poetry’, which for us, and doubtless for Sophocles’ audience, is
represented primarily by Homer’s Odyssey. Given the nature of the
genre of tragedy, it is not surprising that its homecomings are usually
ultimately unhappy. At the beginning of the play, which is set in front of
Heracles’ home at Trachis, Heracles, the mortal son of Zeus, after
completing the labours forced upon him by Eurystheus, has been
abroad for fifteen months, but nobody at home in Trachis knows where
he is. In ‘return-poetry’ the waiting woman is a characteristic figure
(Penelope in the Odyssey, Xerxes’ mother in Persians, Clytaemnestra in
Agamemnon). So here most of the play concentrates on the effect of
Heracles’ absence on his wife Deianeira, and we are kept waiting until
the final scene for the hero’s arrival on the stage. We are two-thirds of
the way through the play before Deianeira makes her final exit, while
Heracles is on-stage for only about the last quarter of the play. The
result of this is that, as in Antigone (see pp. 35–6), there is no single
dominant character, and it is idle to argue over who is ‘the hero’ of the
play. The tragedy concerns a relationship between two characters,
husband and wife, both of them ruined by the power of Eros (Love).
Heracles more closely resembles the ‘typical’ Sophoclean hero, but it is
Deianeira who has the bigger part, and more lines to speak. Not
surprisingly, this play, like Ajax and Antigone, has been unhelpfully
labelled by some critics as a diptych-play (see p. 13), with its first part
devoted to Deianeira’s tragedy, the second to that of Heracles. But it
19
certainly displays a structural unity. From the very beginning we look

forward to Heracles’ return, and that return will form the dramatic
climax at the end. The effect of his absence on Deianeira, and the steps
which she takes to prepare for Heracles’ return, will make that return all
the more horrific.
The minor characters too have their role to play in the tragedy: the
Nurse, whom we meet in the prologue, as Deianeira’s faithful supporter;
the equally sympathetic Chorus of young Trachinian women, from
whom the play takes its title; the Messenger; the herald Lichas; Iole,
brought back by Lichas to be Heracles’ concubine; and Hyllus, the son of
Heracles and Deianeira. Lichas and Hyllus in particular will be involved
in the tragedy. The whole play presents a tangle of misunderstandings.
Good people set out to do what they think is right, but their actions have
the opposite effect to what they intended. Deianeira, in particular,
destroys the husband whom she loves and yearns to see. And behind
it all is the gradual revelation of the mysterious oracles, which the
characters misinterpret, and the enigmatic attitude of the gods to the
suffering of the human participants.
All the other surviving plays of Sophocles begin with a prologue
in the form of dialogue. Here Deianeira enters with the Nurse, but
her opening speech of forty-eight lines is not addressed to her; it is a
soliloquy addressed in effect to the audience, Euripides’ preferred
method of beginning his plays. The obvious function of the monologue
is to set the scene for the audience. More important, it introduces us
at the very beginning to Deianeira’s state of mind. Her opening lines
present the theme of alternation in human fortunes, as important in this
play as in Ajax. But she herself has been uniformly unhappy, and the
keynote of her unhappiness is marriage. Before her marriage to Heracles
she had experienced the attentions of the repulsive river-god Achelous.
It was Heracles who fought the god and saved her from that marriage,
and thus brought her joy. Married now to Heracles she ought to be
happy, but instead she is afraid. Her husband is always away from home,
and, since for the past fifteen months no message has arrived from him,
she does not know what has happened to him. So the play begins with
Women of Trachis 21
forebodings which centre on Deianeira’s marriage, forebodings which

are intensified when at the end of her speech she mentions a tablet
which Heracles had left with her on his departure; ‘I often pray to the
gods that trouble will not result from my receiving it’ (47–8). Our
curiosity is aroused, but we shall have to wait for a little while to learn
more about this tablet.
The Nurse advises Deianeira to send her son Hyllus to see if he can
find news of his father. Hyllus conveniently arrives at this very moment,
and Deianeira explains her trouble to him. He has heard rumours that
Heracles, after being enslaved to a Lydian woman, Omphale, is now, or
will soon be, in Euboea, making war on Eurytus. Deianeira tells him
about the oracles which predicted that Heracles would either die, or,
if he managed to complete his present task, would henceforth have a
happy life. Deianeira takes this to mean that, if Hyllus finds his father
still alive, all will be well. Only later will it be revealed that there is no
real alternative: it is death itself that will bring peace to Heracles. Why
did she not tell Hyllus about the oracles before? If it was to spare him
from anxiety, this is the first instance in the play of someone acting with
the best of intentions but getting it wrong. If Hyllus had known about
the oracles he would have gone long ago to find his father.
In its entrance-song the Chorus picks up the burning question,
‘where is Heracles?’ Deianeira yearns for him. The word for ‘yearning’
(the noun is pothos, the verb potheo), used twice in the same stanza
(103–7), emphasizes the main theme that runs right through the first
part of the play. The Chorus tries to console Deianeira. As with the
cyclic rhythm of night and day, of sea and stars, so Heracles may have
had his troubles, but they should give way to joy. Up till now some god
has always kept him from death. And when was Zeus unmindful of his
own children? What part will the gods play in what is about to happen?
And can we be so confident that for Heracles there will be an alternation
from trouble to happiness, the alternation which Deianeira has already
denied in her own case (Easterling)?
At the beginning of the following episode Deianeira tells the Chorus
more about the tablet, the significance of which is becoming clearer and
clearer. Again we hear that the period of fifteen months is crucial: at the
end of it Heracles is fated either to die or to live henceforth a painless
life. That time has now arrived. The mood is one of pessimism. When
Heracles gave her the tablet, it was as if he were already dead, and he
made arrangements for the division of his estate. It is not surprising that
Deianeira fears the worst, that she is about to lose her husband, the ‘best’
of all men (177).
The arrival of a messenger, garlanded to show that he brings good
news, provides a dramatic contrast of mood. ‘Lady, Deianeira,’ he begins,
‘I shall be the first of messengers to release you from your fear.’ Heracles
will soon be safely home, or so the Messenger has heard from the herald
Lichas, who is on his way to give the news in full. Immediately Deianeira
moves from pessimism to joy. But the audience perhaps wonders why
it needs both the Messenger and Lichas to bring the happy news, and
we suspect that the joy will be short-lived. We have been waiting for
Heracles, but first, as the Messenger remains on-stage, we have to wait
for Lichas, while the Chorus sings a joyous song of thanksgiving to the
gods. At 207, according to one interpretation of the difficult Greek, the
house is said to be waiting for a marriage. If this is correct, the Chorus
is thinking of the reunion of husband and wife as a kind of remarriage.
We shall soon learn that Heracles has in mind a different marriage.
Lichas at last appears, bringing with him a group of female prisoners.
He begins by confirming the good news that Heracles is alive, and
explains that he is in Euboea sacrificing to Zeus. Deianeira is curious
about the prisoners, and shows some pity for them. But at first this
theme is not developed. Instead, we hear from Lichas about what
Heracles has been doing – how for a year he was a slave in Lydia, a
punishment from Zeus because he had deceitfully killed Iphitus, the
son of Eurytus, king in Euboea. It was in revenge for this, says Lichas,
that Heracles attacked Eurytus’ city, and the prisoners have come from
it. Now Deianeira, who has waited so long for her husband, has to wait
again until he completes his sacrifices.
She again expresses her happiness, but this time qualifies it immediately
with the thought that happiness cannot last; one must always expect
Women of Trachis 23
alternations in human affairs. Given the nature of Greek tragedy, unhappy

people rarely believe that their misery will ever end. With that thought in
mind she turns again to the prisoners, who must once have been free and
happy. One of them in particular strikes her by her beauty and her noble
bearing, and she pities her the most. She tries to speak to her, but Iole does
not answer. Lichas explains that she has not uttered a word, but has wept
continuously, since she was enslaved. There are already three speaking
actors on the stage, and Greek tragedy did not permit a fourth. Iole
is therefore played by a mute. But, at the same time, the silence of the
character who is to play so large a part in the tragedy is extraordinarily
effective. We never hear her express her own point of view, but here her
plight is revealed to us through the sympathetic words of the woman
who does not want to add to her pain, but who will be destroyed by her.
Lichas takes the captives into the house, but Deianeira is detained by
the Messenger. Now we learn why Sophocles required both Messenger
and Lichas. We probably thought that the former’s role was finished, but
his intervention now is all-important, in that once more it completely
reverses the mood. The Messenger reveals that Lichas has not told
the truth. Heracles’ real motive for attacking Eurytus’ city was his love
for Iole. He was inflamed by desire (pothos 368, cf. 431), the very word
used by Deianeira of her own feelings for her husband. Now she is
reduced again to utter misery, made all the worse when Lichas returns
to be questioned by the Messenger, who reminds him of his statement
that Heracles has brought Iole home to be his wife (or concubine –
her legal status is never entirely clear). Seaford has shown that many
things in this play, as in other tragedies, suggest a perversion of
normal marriage-ritual. Here the audience may think of the traditional
procession of the bride and bridegroom to the latter’s house. But it is
Deianeira, Heracles’ existing wife, not his mother, who stands in front
of the house to welcome the bride, like Clytaemnestra welcoming
Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
In a long speech Deianeira, a model of sophrosyne, displays remarkable
magnanimity. After another reference to the theme of alternation, she
goes on to talk about the power of Eros (’Love’). She cannot blame either
Heracles or Iole. All she wants is to know the truth. She has put up with
Heracles’ previous sexual conquests, and she pities Iole. We have no real
reason to doubt her sincerity. Lichas confesses. Heracles had not told
him to conceal the truth, but he did so because he did not want to hurt
Deianeira. Lichas is no villain, but his attempt to do right has gone
horribly wrong. He ends his speech with the bitter thought that Heracles,
who in everything else had proved himself supreme, has been completely
defeated by his love for Iole. After declaring that she has no intention of
fighting against the gods, Deianeira, with Lichas, retires into the house
to prepare gifts, as yet unspecified, for Lichas to carry to Heracles, and
thus sets in motion the whole inevitable course of the tragedy.
The power of Love, a common theme in Greek tragedy (see p. 34) is
the subject of the Chorus’s next song. It recalls the fight between the
monstrous Achelous and Heracles, each eager to win Deianeira for his
bride. Aphrodite, goddess of love, was the umpire, while Deianeira sat
waiting for the victor. All her life since then she has been waiting.
The next episode begins with her return to the stage with a sealed
casket which contains the gift that she has devised. She has become
less sympathetic to Iole, whom she thinks of as already ‘yoked’ to
Heracles (contrast 309 where she judged Iole to be inexperienced in
such matters). She finds it hard to tolerate the thought of sharing
Heracles’ bed with Iole. Still, she is not angry with Heracles, for whom it
is natural to prefer a younger woman. Her gift to him is a new robe, a
traditional gift for the homecoming hero in ‘return-poetry’. In the
Odyssey, when the shipwrecked Odysseus arrives naked on the beach in
the land of the Phaeacians, he is bathed and clothed by the princess
Nausicaa, and this marks the first step in his restitution to his proper
status as a hero, When he finally reaches home on Ithaca, disguised in
rags, it is only when he is properly dressed after his bath that he is able
to claim his rightful place in Penelope’s bed, his homecoming now
complete. In tragedy the theme is less benign. In Aeschylus’ Persians
Atossa, having heard that her son Xerxes is returning home in rags, sets
out to meet him carrying a robe that is appropriate to his royal status.
Her failure to meet him is a clear sign to the audience that for Xerxes
Women of Trachis 25
there is to be no rehabilitation; at the end of the play he will leave the

stage still in his rags. In Agamemnon the royal robe that the hero expects
to put on after his bath turns into the net in which he is entangled by the
murderous Clytaemnestra in the bath. So in Women of Trachis Deianeira
has smeared the robe with what she intends to be a love-potion or
aphrodisiac which will restore his love for her. It is, however, the blood
of the Centaur Nessus, like Achelous a monster from Heracles’ past.
Nessus was carrying Deianeira across a river, and, when he tried to
rape her, Heracles killed him, but before he died Nessus gave her drops
of his blood, promising that if she used it Heracles would never prefer
any other woman to herself. But the blood was infected with the poison
of the Hydra (yet another monster from the past), in which Heracles
had dipped his arrows. Deianeira certainly does not want to harm
her husband, and she is uneasy: ‘May I never come to know or learn
about deeds of wicked daring; I hate those women who indulge in them’
(582–3). When she does understand her folly it will be too late. The
Chorus approves, but Deianeira, in asking it to keep her secret, already
shows some misgivings about the morality of her action: ‘If it is in the
dark that you act shamefully, you will never fall in shame’ (596–7).
Lichas enters to receive his instructions, and Deianeira, who had
criticized him for concealing the truth, now herself misleads him as to
her motive for sending the robe: she wants Heracles, she says, to be well
dressed when he comes home and sacrifices to the gods. She ends the
episode by ordering Lichas not to tell Heracles of her yearning (pothos)
for him until she knows if it is reciprocated.
So Deianeira has taken the fatal step which will ruin both Heracles
and herself. Her sophrosyne will not save her. She is ‘a modest wife
of conventional virtue who performs a daring deed. She acts out of
character . . . she makes the inevitable disastrous mistake’ (Winnington-
Ingram). Or, as Segal (1995) puts it,‘endowed with the soul of a Penelope,
she executes, unwittingly, the deed of a Clytaemnestra or a Medea’.
The Chorus, left alone, sings the kind of happy ode which Sophocles
likes to place immediately before disaster strikes (see p. 47). It waits in
joyful expectation for the return of Heracles who is hurrying home
bearing all the spoils of his valour (arete). Instead of Heracles, however,
it is once more Deianeira who appears, through the door of the skene, in
a state of apprehension that contrasts with the joy of the ode. She is
afraid that, although she meant well, she may have committed a great
wrong. The tuft of wool with which she had anointed the robe crumbled
away when it met the sunlight. By the end of her long account her
apprehension has turned to certainty: ‘I see that I have done a terrible
deed’ (706). Too late she realizes the truth: Nessus had deceived her, and
the ‘love-potion’ is in fact a deadly poison, which kills everything that it
touches. No longer indecisive, she resolves to die with Heracles; for life
is intolerable for a woman who is not evil to have it said of her that she
is evil (721–2). She remains uncomforted by the Chorus-leader’s urging
that she should not abandon hope, and by the argument that people
make allowances for those who do wrong unintentionally.
All Deianeira’s fears are soon justified by the entry, via an eisodos, of
Hyllus, the third person in the play to come with news of the long-
awaited Heracles. He begins by denouncing his mother, whom now he
hates, before launching into his long story of how glad he had been to
find his father whom he had yearned to see (pothos). But then Lichas
had arrived with the robe, and we hear at length of the disastrous effect
of the poison on Heracles. As it began to consume him he blamed the
unfortunate Lichas and killed him instantly, the first innocent victim of
Deianeira’s plan. He cursed his marriage to Deianeira who had ruined
him. Her gift has had the opposite result to that which she intended.
Hyllus has brought his tortured father home. ‘You will see him
immediately, either alive or newly dead’ (805–6). Once more we are
encouraged to look forward to Heracles’ homecoming, but now it will
clearly be a very different homecoming from that which was expected.
Hyllus too curses Deianeira. He wants to do what is right, and it must
be right to curse his mother, because she spurned the right by killing
the most excellent man in all the earth (811 aristos). So Hyllus departs,
with the sarcastic wish that Deianeira may have the same joy as she
bestowed on his father. He too has got it all wrong, and he will later
bitterly regret his curse. That next stage is already prepared by the silent,
Women of Trachis 27
but not unnoticed, departure of Deianeira into the house before Hyllus
leaves the stage. For similar ominous exits see pp. 33 and 47.
The Chorus in its song is the first to understand the fulfilment of the
old prophecy: Heracles’ labours will now end, because he will be dead.
We are reminded that he is the son of Zeus himself. The Chorus finds
it difficult to apportion the responsibility. It was Deianeira who tried to
solve the problem of Heracles’ proposed marriage, but it was Nessus
who ensured that her solution would be so disastrous, and the Hydra
who supplied the poison. And finally it is Aphrodite, goddess of love, who
has been ‘clearly revealed as the doer of these deeds’ (860–1).
Cries of lamentation are heard from inside the house. Enter the
Nurse to report that Deianeira has killed herself by the sword, an
unusual form of suicide for a woman in Greek tragedy; hanging is more
normal. Deianeira’s heroic ‘male’ death will contrast with the dying
Heracles who weeps like a woman (1070–5). The Nurse narrates how,
when Deianeira saw Hyllus preparing a litter for Heracles, she rushed to
make up her marriage-bed. But the only bed that Heracles now requires
is a litter, and he, whose homecoming has been so eagerly awaited, will
never enter his house. It is on the marriage-bed that Deianeira sits to
kill herself, having first said goodbye to it, the symbol of her ruined
marriage. Hyllus, having learnt too late from the servants of Deianeira’s
good intentions, blames himself for her death. He has lost both his
father and his mother.
After a song of lamentation from the Chorus, as it waits for the last
time for the arrival of Heracles, the hero, probably played by the same
actor as Deianeira (for this kind of perhaps significant doubling of the
roles see p. 15 on Ajax), finally enters, carried on the litter, with an old
man and attendants. Hyllus enters from the house. Heracles is still alive,
at first asleep, but then in agony as he wakes up and feels the poison
destroying him. The whole of this final scene presents extreme physical
suffering in a way that is paralleled, among Sophocles’ surviving plays,
only in Philoctetes. Why, Heracles wonders, has Zeus rewarded him
in this way for his sacrifices, and what hope is there of Zeus coming
to save him? Hyllus agrees that Zeus is responsible for his father’s
anguish (1022). Heracles now turns his wrath against Deianeira, Hyllus’
‘godless mother’, and longs to see her fall, even as she has destroyed him.
Of all his labours Deianeira is responsible for the worst.
Sophocles presents Heracles as callous and self-centred, and
Winnington-Ingram writes that ‘it might be admitted that he is one of
the most unpleasant characters in Greek tragedy’. The structure of this
play has, however, determined that we see him only in his suffering, and
can appreciate his heroic status only through the eyes of the other
characters earlier in the play, and through his own account in this final
scene of his heroic exploits and benefactions. Heracles himself points
out the irony: he, the great hero, has been destroyed, not on the
battlefield, nor by any of his opponents in his labours, but by a woman
and without a sword. He himself in his weeping has become a woman
(1070–5).
Heracles begs Hyllus to bring Deianeira so that he can kill her, and
thus punish the wicked in death as he had done in life. It takes some
time before Hyllus manages to convince his father that his anger is
misplaced, that Deianeira ‘erred unwittingly’ (1123), and ‘she erred
through aiming to do good’ (1136). It was Nessus’ fault. At last Heracles
understands the oracles, which now include a prophecy that he would
be killed by someone already dead. This turns out to be Nessus, and the
oracles which seemed to predict for him a happy life meant instead his
death, since the dead have no more troubles.
Heracles wants Hyllus to burn him alive on Mount Oeta, but his
shocked son demurs, and agrees only to carry him there and to arrange
his funeral pyre. Heracles says that Hyllus must also marry Iole. He is
not thinking of his son’s welfare, but evidently sees him merely as an
extension of himself. Hyllus is reluctant to do so, as Iole shares the
responsibility for his mother’s death and his father’s suffering. As always,
Hyllus wants to do what is pious and right, but Heracles persuades him
that it cannot be impious or wrong to please his father. As the play ends
the only joy for Heracles will apparently be the release from his agony
through death. Hyllus and Iole will marry. According to the myth they
will found the famous line of the Heracleidae, ‘the sons of Heracles’. But
Women of Trachis 29
Sophocles says nothing about this. He leaves us to speculate on their

chances of married bliss.
Who is responsible for all this suffering? At some point Nessus, the
Hydra, Lichas, Deianeira and Hyllus are all blamed by somebody. We
may be inclined to blame also the Messenger. If he had not told
Deianeira the truth about Iole, perhaps she would never have devised
her plan. There is at the same time an undercurrent of criticism of the
gods, most obviously of Aphrodite, whose power no person can resist,
but also of Zeus himself, Heracles’ father, who has done nothing to
prevent his own son’s suffering. On this theme the play ends, in words
delivered probably by Hyllus. The final line runs, ‘there is nothing in this
that is not Zeus’.
Scholars are divided as to whether, as the funeral procession leaves
for Oeta, the original audience perhaps derived some comfort from
its knowledge that Heracles after his death would turn into a god,
worshipped on Oeta with a cult. Some find a hint of the apotheosis at
1270, ‘no one can foresee the future’. Others deny it, on the ground that
throughout the play Heracles has been consistently presented as entirely
mortal, and at the end as dying a fully mortal death. But, if modern
scholars cannot agree on such an important matter, it is difficult to
understand how an ancient audience, familiar with the apotheosis story
and with the cult of Heracles, could be prevented from thinking of it
here. The opinion of the original spectators is therefore likely to have
been at least as equally divided as that of modern scholars. It looks as if
Sophocles might be deliberately reminding his audience that there is
another version of the story, one which those with a taste for happy
endings might prefer. All the emphasis, however, is on the suffering, on
the blindness and errors of the human characters, and on the indifference
of the gods. Sophocles does not attempt to explain why these things
happen. How could he? This is simply the way things are.
30
Antigone
After the death of Oedipus, king of Thebes, his sons Eteocles and
Polyneices disputed the throne. Polyneices brought an army from Argos
to attack Thebes in the hope of displacing his brother, but the two of
them kill each other in single combat. The play opens on the morning
after the battle. Creon, the brother of Oedipus’s wife Jocasta, has become
king, and he immediately issues an edict stating that Eteocles is to be
given an honourable funeral, but that Polyneices, as a traitor, is to be left
unburied on the ground: anyone who disobeys him will be stoned to
death. In the opening scene of the play we meet Antigone and Ismene,
the sisters of the two brothers. Antigone, against Ismene’s advice,
announces her intention of disobeying the edict. She goes ahead and is
eventually caught, and shut up by her uncle alone in a rock-cut tomb,
where she hangs herself.
The play is set in front of the royal palace at Thebes. One of the two
eisodoi leads to the rest of the city, the other to the city-gates and the
countryside beyond, where much of the important action will take
place off-stage. It has been pointed out by Griffith (22) that the central
door of the skene is used in this play mostly by the female characters,
the eisodoi by the male. This would make sense to the original audience,
for whom the interior of the house represents the private world of the
women, while the outside public world is reserved for the men. So the
fact that Antigone and Ismene come out of the house into the public
space would from the very beginning suggest for the audience a degree
of infringement. It is more striking that when at the end of the prologue
Ismene, having reminded her sister that ‘we should consider this that
we are women, and so not meant to fight against men’ (61–2) retires
31
decorously into the house, Antigone exits by the eisodos that leads to the
space outside the gates. The significance of this will become clearer as
the play progresses (see p. 34).
Is Antigone right or wrong to bury her brother, Creon to forbid the
burial? Some critics have accepted the compromise of the nineteenth-
century philosopher Hegel, who held that there is right and wrong on
both sides. After the Chorus of Theban elders in its parodos has rejoiced
over the Theban victory, in a mood of optimism that contrasts with
what is to follow, Creon enters, via the eisodos that leads to the city, to
announce the rational principles by which he intends to rule. An
Athenian audience would find much of which to approve in these.
Indeed, part of the speech was quoted by the fourth-century orator
Demosthenes as a model of good statesmanship. But already the
audience may feel that Creon is unpleasantly obsessed with his own
status and position as the new king, while his rejection of the universal
right to a funeral is worrying (see pp. 13 and 15). At Athens in the fifth
century exceptions in the case of public enemies were not unknown,
and traitors too could be denied burial at home in Attica. Their bodies,
however, could be thrown across the border into a neighbouring state
and buried there. Creon’s treatment of Polyneices must have caused at
least some unease among the audience. The Chorus is less than
enthusiastic in response to his announcement of his edict.
As Antigone progresses, the question of right and wrong becomes
more and more clear-cut, as Creon begins to reveal the characteristics
of the typical tyrant. It is significant that he expects opposition, and
attributes the basest of material motives to those who may defy him. He
sees his citizens as slaves who are to be broken in like horses (477–9). He
threatens with torture and death the terrified Guard, who reluctantly
reports that the corpse has been buried by someone unknown, and he
angrily rejects the suggestion of the Chorus-leader that the burial may
have been the work of the gods. Later the same Guard, when he brings
Antigone under arrest to Creon, though glad to have saved his own skin
by catching the culprit, shows some sympathy towards her (436–40).
Creon jumps to the false conclusion that Ismene is equally responsible
Antigone 33
for the burial, and condemns her too to death. Haemon, Creon’s son,
who is engaged to be married to Antigone, tells him that he is wrong,
that the man in the street is on Antigone’s side, and tries ineffectually to
persuade him to change his mind. ‘The one whom the city establishes’, he
says, ‘must be obeyed in little things and in what is right as in its opposite’
(666–7). Eventually the blind prophet Teiresias reports that the gods
have already shown their anger by rejecting his sacrifices, and delivers a
chilling prophecy that, because Creon has buried the living and denied
burial to the dead, he will be punished by the death of his own child.
When Creon finally yields and goes off to bury Polyneices and to
release Antigone from her tomb, he discovers that he has left it too late.
Haemon has committed suicide beside Antigone’s corpse. Creon’s wife
Eurydice, having heard the news, leaves the stage silently, like Deianeira
in Women of Trachis and Jocasta in Oedipus the King, in order to kill
herself, like Deianeira with a sword. Creon is left a broken man, himself
fully admitting that he was wrong (1317–25).
When all seems so clear, one may wonder why it has ever been a
matter for debate. One reason, perhaps, has been a failure to distinguish
between the rightness of a person’s actions, and the attractiveness, or
otherwise, of that person’s character. There is indeed much to dislike in
Antigone. When Ismene promises to keep secret her sister’s intention,
Antigone replies, ‘Oh no, denounce it; you will be much more my enemy
if you keep silent, if you do not proclaim it to the whole world’ (86–7).
‘Permit me and my folly to suffer this terrible fate; for I shall suffer
nothing so great as to rob me of a noble death’ (95–7). It may be that for
Antigone Polyneices’ honour will not be restored unless his burial is
publicly witnessed. But one is left with an uneasy feeling that she wants
a martyr’s death. This may be one reason for the double burial. The first
time Antigone fulfils the required ritual by sprinkling dust on her
brother’s corpse. It should make no difference that Creon orders the
dust to be removed. But Antigone goes back to repeat the symbolic
burial. It is almost as if she wants to be caught, so that she may receive
the glory for her action. In the first line of the play she addresses Ismene
in terms which suggest the closest of unions between the sisters. But
already by the end of the prologue she is treating Ismene as an enemy.

Ismene is certainly the more attractive, and the more human, of the two.
If Antigone had been more like her sister, four deaths would have been
avoided. Ismene, the conventional woman, is too weak to follow her in
her defiance of the king’s power. Later, after Antigone has been arrested
and confronts Creon, Ismene plucks up courage and tries to share with
her sister the responsibility for the deed. ‘How can I desire life if I am
abandoned by you?’ she asks (548), but Antigone scornfully replies, ‘Ask
Creon; for he is the one you care for.’ The unfortunate Ismene, caught
between Creon and Antigone, is rejected by both. Antigone does what
is right, but we do not have to like her.
Antigone might appeal more obviously to a modern audience if
there were greater emphasis in the play on romantic love. She never
mentions Haemon, to whom, as we learn only from Ismene (568, 572),
she is betrothed, and the two never meet on-stage. It is true that the
Chorus devotes its song at 781–800 to the theme of Eros, the god of
love. But, as in Women of Trachis (p. 24), it is the destructive power of
love that is stressed, and the ode is already preparing us for its effect on
Haemon as much as on Antigone. Still, it would be wrong to suppose
that she will abandon her fiancé easily. When she is on her way to her
death she is already singing her own dirge, as one who is about to marry
Death (or Acheron). Antigone and Haemon will after all be united, but
only in the Underworld. Their marriage-rites will be achieved when the
two corpses lie together in each other’s arms. Haemon, then, provides
the link between the tragedies of Antigone and Creon.
For a fifth-century Athenian audience, which may or may not have
included women, the position is more complicated. Athenian society
was, by modern standards, deeply chauvinistic. Except on special
occasions women were expected to stay at home, and certainly they had
no part to play in the political life of the city. As we saw on pp. 31–2, the
staging of the prologue must already have made at least some members
of the audience uneasy about Antigone’s behaviour. Moreover, obedience
to the laws was a matter of supreme importance in a fifth-century polis
(city-state), not least one with a democratic constitution like Athens.
Antigone 35
For at least two reasons, therefore, the original audience would be

inclined to look askance at Antigone, a woman who interferes in matters
which are the men’s concern, and who defies the laws of the city. There
is perhaps a third reason. A woman was expected to marry, and when
she did so, she left her father and her natal family and came under the
authority of her husband. Some have thought that, by rejecting marriage
in favour of her brother and her natal family, Antigone is refusing to
make the conventional transition, and therefore not behaving as a
woman should. The paradox is that the character who starts off with all
these disadvantages is the one who makes the right decision.
Some critics have explained that, while in the eyes of the gods Creon
was wrong to leave the corpse unburied, Antigone, as a woman, was
wrong to bury it. Certainly the gods will not reward her for her action
(see p. 38); they will leave her to her fate. But it is wrong to conclude
from this that the gods think that she deserves her punishment. When
no male relative is available, or willing, to do what is right, the woman is
morally obliged to do it. ‘Antigone’s moral difference in the end serves
to raise questions about, and expose contradictions in, Creon’s mode of
morality, and hence indirectly to problematize, as tragedy often does,
Athenian civic values and discourse’ (Foley).
As with Women of Trachis (p. 19), scholars have disagreed as to
which is the principal character of the play. On the one hand, Creon has
by far the larger number of spoken lines, and only he is, except for the
prologue, on stage in every scene of the play. Antigone disappears some
two-thirds of the way through the play, and she is hardly mentioned by
Creon in the final scene. The bodies of Haemon and Eurydice will be
brought on to the stage, Eurydice’s perhaps by means of the ekkyklema,
but not Antigone’s.
On the other hand, the play is called Antigone, and everything in it
springs from her refusal to obey Creon’s edict. More important, it is she
who behaves like the hero whom we recognize from other Sophoclean
plays, the person who is resolute in doing what he or she believes to be
right, who refuses to listen to the common-sense advice of the minor
characters, or to learn moderation or restraint (sophrosyne). Antigone
never changes her mind, but Creon does. He refuses, indeed, to listen to
Haemon, who, in the kind of language found in other Sophoclean plays
(715–18), begs him to yield. But then he reprieves Ismene, and betrays
his uneasiness by announcing that, instead of stoning Antigone (cf.
p. 31), he will shut her up in the rock-cut tomb: she will die ‘naturally’ of
starvation. After the intervention of the seer Teiresias he finally agrees
to yield (1096–9), an extraordinary change of mind for a Sophoclean
hero, and goes off to bury Polyneices and to release Antigone from her
tomb. Creon’s problem is that, while he has at last decided to do the
right thing, he has left the decision too late. Even now, if he had gone
first to the tomb, he might have arrived before Antigone had time to
commit suicide. In the final scene Creon, as he acknowledges his error,
is led away a broken man. Contrast the dignity of Oedipus at the end of
Oedipus the King, or of Ajax in his final suicide-speech. It is Antigone,
not Creon, who behaves as we expect a Sophoclean hero to behave.
The attempt to distinguish a single principal character is probably
doomed to failure (see p. 19). In this play it is the interaction between
two characters that leads to tragedy for them both. This does not entirely
eliminate the problem of Antigone’s disappearance so early in the play,
and one can understand why for some critics this is another diptych-
play (pp. 13 and 19). In Ajax we could at least see the corpse of Ajax
while the wrangling proceeded over the question of its burial. But, if
this is a defect in the structure of the play, it should not be exaggerated.
In the final scenes, although our attention is concentrated on Creon, we
do not forget Antigone. It is Creon’s repentance that indirectly proves
that Antigone was right, in the eyes of gods as well as men, to bury her
brother, just as in Ajax it was the final decision to allow the burial that
vindicated Ajax’s heroic status.
For both characters, then, the outcome is tragic, but in very different
ways. Creon’s tragedy is that of a sincere but misguided man, who,
confident in his own intellectual powers of reasoning, accuses Antigone
of folly, but learns in the end that he himself is the fool. Proud of his
rationality, he reveals his irrational prejudices against women, young
men like Haemon, and any citizen who may oppose him, and in his
Antigone 37
lyric lamentation at the end he is emotionally shattered. He thinks that

he is acting in the interests of the polis, but brings pollution upon it. His
rejection of family ties results in the deaths of his own son and his wife.
Eurydice, who is hardly a character in her own right, is brought in
merely to deepen Creon’s suffering. He has lost his entire family. His
sententious and rhetorically constructed speeches reveal his intellectual
pride. ‘I know’, he says repeatedly. Sophocles’ famous irony is sometimes
verbal, but often it is deeper. It marks the gap between appearances,
what the characters believe, and the reality of which only the audience
is aware. So here, the man who prides himself on his knowledge turns
out to be the man who knows nothing.
Antigone shows much less concern for rational arguments. For her it
is all a matter of feeling. As early as the opening scene with Ismene she
makes it clear that she will bury Polyneices simply because he is her
brother and Creon has no right to keep her from doing so. That the gods
demand a proper funeral for all corpses is an argument merely hinted
at (77), and will be used by Antigone only in the confrontation-scene
with Creon (450–60), when, forced to give some kind of rational excuse
for her action, she argues that the unwritten divine laws must take
precedence over human edicts. But by the end of that speech she has
returned to her feelings: it would have pained her to leave her brother
unburied on the ground (466–8). In her final speech she says that it was
only because Polyneices was her brother that she buried him. If he had
been her husband or her child, she would not have bothered; for these
would have been replaceable. Critics have been puzzled by the frigid
calculation that her words imply, and some have even thought that this
part of the speech must be a later interpolation in the text, modelled
perhaps on a story in Herodotus. Rather, we should see the speech as a
final desperate attempt to justify her action logically. It does not succeed
because in this area Antigone is out of her depth. What is more
important is that she remains confident to the end that she was right.
Some critics have found a moment of self-doubt when, at the end of her
speech (925–6), she says that if the gods approve of her death she will
learn after she has suffered it that she was wrong. But the tone is rather
one of indignation, and all the emphasis is on the following clause, ‘but
if they [my enemies] are wrong . . .’ Antigone’s tragedy is that she suffers
for doing what is right.
Moreover Sophocles has taken care to show us that, although she is
right, she, like other Sophoclean heroes, is isolated in her suffering.
Usually in Greek tragedy a heroine is supported by a female chorus.
Here the Chorus of male elders, while it shows some sympathy, is more
disposed to criticize Antigone. Earlier she had envisaged a heroic
martyr’s death by public stoning. What she now faces is quite a different
matter. She goes to it without ever hearing Haemon’s report of public
opinion, and she does not understand why the gods have let her down
(922–4). Sophocles does not explain why the gods let her suffer for
doing what is right. What answer could there be? It is this that makes
Antigone’s tragedy deeper than Creon’s.
The play presents not so much a clash of principles as a conflict
between two people, each of whom is incapable of understanding the
other’s point of view. As Mary Blundell has shown most thoroughly, the
theme of friends and enemies provides the key to the understanding of
the play. These English words are inadequate to translate the Greek
philoi and echthroi. The former, for a Greek audience, include not only
friends but also one’s family, one’s nearest and dearest, all those with
whom one enjoys a positive relationship, while the rest of the world
may be expected to be hostile. It was a cardinal principle of Greek ethics
that one should do good to one’s friends, and harm to one’s enemies. We
have met it already in Ajax. But the potential for conflict arises when
loyalties clash, when the categories become confused.
The opening scene makes it clear that relationships are going to be
all-important, when Antigone tells Ismene that ‘the troubles of enemies
are coming on friends’ (10). The language is enigmatic, but she seems to
mean that her brother Polyneices, who as a member of the family, ought
to be a friend, is being treated by Creon as an enemy (or perhaps, that
her enemies [Creon] are bringing trouble on her friends [Polyneices]).
The play begins with Antigone claiming to be a friend of her sister, but
already by the end of the prologue she is treating her as an enemy.
Antigone 39
Ismene, on the other hand, declares (99), according to the best

interpretation, that she will always be her friend. For Creon it is all a
matter of politics; the only true friend is the friend of the city (182–91).
Polyneices is a traitor, so he cannot be his friend. The conflict comes to
a head when Antigone and Creon, members of the same family but now
enemies, confront each other in brisk, line-by-line dialogue (508–25).
Antigone, with no interest in political friendship, says that Polyneices
died not as Eteocles’ slave but as his brother, while Creon declares, ‘an
enemy will never be a friend, even when he is dead’. Antigone replies,
‘my nature is not to join in hating, but to join in loving’. Again the words
are enigmatic, but the tangle of relationships is clear. Creon’s final words
are, ‘well, go do down below, and love them if love you must; as long as
I live, no woman will rule over me’.
With such a gulf between them tragedy is inevitable for them both.
It is sometimes said that they should have looked for a compromise, but
in such a conflict compromise would be impossible. Either it was right
or it was wrong for Antigone to bury Polyneices; there was no middle
road. The double burial allows Sophocles to have the Chorus sing a
famous song at 332–75. It has heard that someone has sprinkled dust on
the corpse, but does not yet know who the culprit is. In its uncertainty
it celebrates the supreme achievements of the human intellect, the
intellect on which Creon has prided himself. Beginning with man’s
mastery of sailing and agriculture and of his control over animals, the
Chorus moves on to more social and intellectual skills, especially his
disposition to live in cities, for a Greek audience the height of civilization.
But at the end there is a moment of doubt: there is, as well as the
technological, a moral sphere, in which human ingenuity has not always
been so successful. Cleverness can lead to disaster.
The theme of the ode at 781–800 (pp. 24 and 34) is the irrational
power of love. And at 1115–54 it is the equally irrational Dionysus
whom the Chorus celebrates, in the mistaken belief that everything is
going to end happily. It is the emotional, irrational Antigone, not the
intellectual, rational Creon, who turns out to be right. Human wisdom
is not necessarily the answer to our problems.
40
Oedipus the King
Oedipus the King is perhaps the most celebrated of all Sophocles’ plays.
It was also evidently the favourite of the fourth-century philosopher
Aristotle, for whom in his Poetics it illustrates perfectly his theory of the
best kind of tragedy, one which presents someone of high reputation
and prosperity who falls into misfortune, not because he is wicked, but
because of some mistake. At the beginning of the play he is at the height
of his powers as king of Thebes, the father of his people, the good king
to whom it naturally turns when afflicted by plague and sterility. Though
not equal to the gods (it would be blasphemous to call him that), he is
regarded as the first and the best of men (33, 46), the saviour who once
before had rescued the city from the ravages of the monstrous Sphinx
(48). By the end of the play he has discovered that he has committed
the most terrible crimes of killing his own father and marrying his
own mother, and that he himself, through his unnatural procreation
of children by his mother, is responsible for the plague and sterility in
the land.
Before Oedipus was born, Laius, king of Thebes, received an oracle
from Apollo at Delphi, which said that he would have a son who would
kill him and marry his mother Jocasta. To prevent the fulfilment of the
prophecy, Laius and Jocasta arranged for their new-born baby to be
exposed on Mount Cithaeron. However, the servant entrusted with the
task handed him over to a shepherd from Corinth, who took him home
and presented him to the king and queen of Corinth, Polybus and
Merope, who brought him up as their own son. When he grew up,
taunted with illegitimacy by a drunken man at a party, he went to
Delphi to enquire about the truth of his birth. But the oracle told him
41
only that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Thinking that
they were Polybus and Merope, he resolved never to return to Corinth.
Instead he turned towards Thebes, but on the way, at a place where three
roads met (i.e. where the road forked) he encountered an old man with
his retinue, and in a brawl he killed them all, except for one servant who
escaped. The unrecognized old man was his father Laius, on his way to
Delphi to consult the oracle. Oedipus proceeded to Thebes, where
he killed the monstrous Sphinx by solving her riddle (What goes on
four feet, two feet, and three feet? The answer is ‘man’), and received
from the grateful Thebans the throne of Laius and his own mother in
marriage.
All of this happened before the play begins. The subject of the play
itself is not Oedipus’s crimes, but his discovery that he has committed
them, and his reaction to that discovery. Much of its appeal for modern
readers may derive from its resemblance in some respects to a detective-
novel. The play is set in front of the royal palace at Thebes. One of the
two eisodoi leads to the countryside, and beyond that to both Delphi
and Corinth, the other to the rest of the city of Thebes. The distinction
between an entry via the first of these eisodoi and an entry via the skene-
door will be crucial at a vital stage in Oedipus’s investigation (see p. 46).
The place where three roads meet is not technically part of the action,
but just as important dramatically as the on-stage space.
The play begins when Oedipus comes out through the door to
address a group of suppliants who have processed into the orchestra, via
the eisodos that leads to the city, with a Priest as their representative. As
a good king he is eager to help them, and informs them that he has
already sent Creon, Jocasta’s brother, to Delphi to ask Apollo’s oracle for
advice as to how the city can be saved from the plague. On this cue
Creon enters, to report the response of the oracle: the city will be saved
if the pollution caused by the presence of Laius’s unknown killer can be
driven out. Oedipus, so proud of his intellectual powers, is confident of
his ability to find the killer, as his cleverness in solving the riddle has
already saved the city from the Sphinx. But he does not know that the
polluted person, and the one responsible for the plague, is himself.
Oedipus the King 43
When, therefore, he issues his public proclamation against the ‘unknown’

killer(s), it is his own fate that he is sealing.
In this play Sophoclean irony is more prominent than in any other. It
is almost overpowering in Oedipus’s speech at 132–46 as he begins his
investigation: ‘it is not on behalf of distant friends [he means Laius] but
on my own behalf that I shall eliminate this pollution . . . in helping him
I help myself ’. The irony is more than verbal (cf. p. 37). It springs from
Sophocles’ deep conviction that human beings by their very nature are
flawed and incapable of full understanding. The gap between seeming
and reality is nowhere clearer than here, where the man who thinks that
he knows, or can find out, everything, is in fact ignorant even of his own
identity. Only Teiresias, with his divine insight, and the play’s audience
know the truth. The audience is, as it were, in the position of the gods
themselves. While we identify largely with the characters, Sophoclean
irony requires also that we remain to some extent detached.
We might expect that the truth will only gradually be revealed to
Oedipus. Perhaps he will find out first that he was the killer of Laius,
and then the further revelation will follow that Laius was his father and
Jocasta his mother. But this is not what happens. By a daring dramatic
stroke Sophocles has the prophet Teiresias reveal the truth quite early in
the play. Having been sent for by Oedipus to help with his investigation
into the killer of Laius, Teiresias arrives determined to say nothing.
Oedipus, then, is ignorant but determined to know, whereas Teiresias
knows the truth but is determined to suppress it. He is the first of three
persons in the play who will attempt to stop Oedipus from going on
with his investigation. Note again the irony: Teiresias is physically blind
(the leader of the Chorus of Theban elders draws attention to the
paradox at 284–6), while Oedipus, the physically sighted, knows
nothing. Late in the play, when at last he discovers the truth, he will
blind himself, in his horror unable to face the world, and will thus be in
the position of Teiresias here. Teiresias’ refusal to help him save the city
naturally angers Oedipus, whose taunts then have the effect of enraging
the prophet, so that before the scene ends he who was resolved to say
nothing about the killer of Laius not only reveals (362) that it was
Oedipus himself but also gratuitously adds a strong hint of the latter’s
true parentage: ‘He will turn out to be living with his own children as
alike their brother and their father, both the son and husband of the
woman who gave him birth, who sowed seed in the bed of, and who
killed, his father’ (457–60). Oedipus has been told the truth but he
refuses to believe it. Human blindness could hardly be displayed more
strongly.
Sophocles’ dramatic strategy will succeed only if he can convince us
that Oedipus’s inability to grasp the truth is reasonable, given his
character and the circumstances in which the truth is revealed to him.
He is, after all, supposed to be a clever intellectual, and we know that he
solved the riddle of the Sphinx. From very early on Sophocles makes it
clear that his failure is almost inevitable. When Creon tells him about
the killing of Laius, Oedipus asks if there was no eyewitness. Creon’s
reply is crucial: ‘They [i.e. Laius’s retinue] all died, except for some one
man, who fled in fear, and he was unable to tell with knowledge anything
of what he saw except one thing’ (118–19). Oedipus seizes upon this
one clue, seeing it as the key to the discovery of the truth. But the one
thing that the servant was able to reveal was that Laius had been
murdered, not by an individual, but by a large band of robbers. Out of
shame at his failure to defend his master he had doubtless suppressed
the truth. So from the very beginning the investigation has got off to a
false start; all of Oedipus’s confidence is based upon a lie. Totally
unaware of the crucial distinction between singular and plural, he goes
on to surmise that the ‘robber’ (singular – Segal (1981) calls it ‘a kind of
Freudian slip of the tongue’) must have been bribed by political
conspirators.
In the quarrel-scene with Teiresias this false, but entirely reasonable,
suspicion of an attempted political coup becomes the second obstacle
to Oedipus’s discovery of the truth. His anger may remind us
uncomfortably of that which he had displayed when he killed Laius, but
it is also the natural response to Teiresias’ refusal to co-operate. Teiresias’
only possible motive, it seems to Oedipus, is that he was an accomplice
in the conspiracy. Since, however, being blind he could not carry it out
Oedipus the King 45
himself, the suspicion must point to Creon, who was next in line to the
throne. It was Creon too who had suggested the consultation with
Teiresias (288; cf. 555–6). Why, in any case, should Oedipus believe the
prophecies of Teiresias (390–400)? It was Oedipus, not Teiresias, who in
his wisdom had solved the riddle of the Sphinx. We can understand
why he jumps to all the wrong conclusions. The irony, however, is that
this natural anger is preventing him from grasping the truth. In the ode
that follows the Chorus refuses to condemn its king; prophets, after all,
can be wrong. Everyone, except for Teiresias, is still trapped in the world
of delusion.
In the following episode Oedipus confronts Creon with his
suspicions, and finally condemns him to death. The quarrel in a sense
parallels the earlier one with Teiresias, but there is an important
difference. Unlike Teiresias, Creon, a model of sophrosyne, does not lose
his temper with his brother-in-law, but argues calmly and reasonably
that he has no ambitious desire for the throne. As so often in Sophocles,
it is the minor characters whose behaviour is more attractive than the
hero’s. Oedipus, the good king, is not a tyrant, but he is acting more and
more as if he were. Yet it is Oedipus, with his relentless search for the
truth, whom we admire. Creon is a little too complacent. He is unwilling
to accept the responsibilities of kingship, but Oedipus knows that he
himself ‘must rule’ (628).
Jocasta now makes her first appearance from the palace. She has
come to learn what all the noise is about. She succeeds in calming the
quarrel, and the reluctant Oedipus is persuaded by the Chorus to repeal
his death-sentence against Creon. His death would serve no dramatic
purpose in the play. To reassure her husband that there is no need to
believe human prophets such as Teiresias, she narrates, for the first time
in the play, the story of the oracle given to Laius (but omitting the
prophecy that his son will marry his mother), and of the killing at the
place where three roads meet. Laius was killed not by his son but by
robbers, so the oracle, as presented by its human interpreters, was
wrong. However, instead of reassuring Oedipus, by mentioning the
scene of Laius’s killing she merely increases his anxiety. Unintentionally
Jocasta has initiated the move from the world of appearance to that of
reality.
Oedipus explains his worry by narrating his visit to Delphi, and his
killing of an elderly stranger at the place where three roads meet. He
includes also the prophecy that he will marry his mother and kill his
father, but as yet he has no suspicion of his true parentage. His fear now
is that he may after all be the killer of Laius, and that, if so, he has cursed
himself. At last the significance of the number of robbers becomes clear
to him. The servant, already summoned at 765, must be fetched as
quickly as possible from the countryside where he now lives. There is
still room for hope. If he confirms that there was a plurality of robbers,
Oedipus will be set free from his growing anxiety. Jocasta, in reassurance,
adds that, even if he changes his story, Apollo (she no longer distinguishes
the god from his human interpreters) was wrong to tell Laius that he
would be killed by his son.
After a difficult but important ode from the troubled Chorus (see
pp. 49–50), Sophocles presents one of his most startling dramatic
strokes. The Chorus has ended its song by deploring the decline in
religious belief (909–10), but now a worried Jocasta appears, her
scepticism forgotten, engaged in the practices of conventional religion,
on her way to offer sacrifices and praying to Apollo for help. Religion is
not perishing after all. Immediately, however, a man dressed in country
clothes appears. He enters by the eisodos from the countryside. When
we learned at 757–64 from Jocasta that the servant who had witnessed
Laius’s killing had asked to be sent away from the palace to the country,
Sophocles was already preparing us for the present moment. If the
servant had still been living in the palace he would have emerged
through the central door. If he had been living elsewhere in the city, he
would have entered, like Teiresias, by the other eisodos. As it is, the
audience, already expecting him to enter by the eisodos from the
country, naturally assumes that here is the long-awaited eyewitness, and
that he will immediately be questioned about the number of the killers.
Oedipus will learn that he is indeed the killer of Laius, and Sophocles
will then turn to the revelation of his parentage. But that is not what
Oedipus the King 47
happens. The countryman turns out, quite unexpectedly, to be a

messenger from Corinth, with the news that Polybus is dead and
Oedipus has succeeded to the throne. Jocasta and, on his arrival,
Oedipus are naturally delighted. The latter’s ‘father’ has died naturally,
and Oedipus is freed from the fear of killing him. Apollo’s oracle has
proved to be false, not just its human interpreters, and Jocasta’s pious
exercise of conventional religion has turned out to be unnecessary.
However, Oedipus is still troubled by the fear that he may marry his
mother. To reassure him the Messenger reveals that he is not the son of
Polybus and Merope, and explains how he himself had received the
baby from a Theban shepherd. But his attempt at reassurance has the
opposite effect on Jocasta, just as earlier her own attempt at reassuring
Oedipus had had the opposite effect on him (see pp. 45–6). Jocasta
immediately grasps the truth, and at the end of the episode departs, via
the door, silently like Deianeira and Eurydice (pp. 27 and 33), to commit
suicide inside the palace. Before she goes, she, like Teiresias earlier
(p. 43), tries unsuccessfully to stop Oedipus from seeking to learn more.
But Oedipus is completely preoccupied now with discovering the secret
of his birth. His excitement contrasts with her horror, which itself
contrasts with the joyous mood with which the episode began. This new
preoccupation is the final obstacle to Oedipus’s search for the killer of
Laius. That search has turned into the search for his own identity. Laius
is forgotten, as is his earlier determination to save the city from the
plague.
The Chorus, caught up in Oedipus’s excitement and sharing in his
final delusion, speculates in a happy ode about his possible parentage.
As in other plays (pp. 25 and 39), the cheerful mood comes immediately
before the horror, and makes the final revelation all the darker. The
Theban Shepherd, summoned for interrogation about the killing of
Laius, arrives, via the eisodos that leads to the countryside, knowing
only that the killer is Oedipus. Now he confronts the Messenger, who
knows only that Oedipus is the baby who should have died on Cithaeron.
It is the combination of their knowledge that reveals everything to
Oedipus. The Theban Shepherd, who is the first to grasp the truth, is the
third character to urge Oedipus to abandon his investigation. But

Oedipus, as always, is determined to know. The two servants, whose
combined knowledge has destroyed Oedipus, depart appropriately
together, back into the countryside, and the distraught Oedipus rushes
into the palace. The Theban Shepherd has never been interrogated
about the killing of Laius. That question has been overtaken by the
much more serious revelation. The Chorus’s ode on the transitory
nature of all human happiness contrasts strongly with its previous song.
Perhaps the most debated problem of the play concerns the
responsibility for Oedipus’s fall. Many modern readers and audiences
have a strong impression that everything was fated, and that it was
therefore not his fault. Even before he was born the oracle predicted that
Laius would have a son, who would kill his father and marry his mother.
In other versions of the story the oracle said that if Laius had a son, that
son would kill him. But in Sophocles there is no if. The parents thought
that they could thwart the oracle by exposing the baby, but oracles cannot
be frustrated, as Oedipus and Jocasta discover in the play. Oedipus, when
he receives his response from the same oracle at Delphi, avoids going
back to Corinth, but, by what we might call a terrible coincidence,
encounters his real father at the place where three roads meet, and duly
kills him. It is then through the virtuous act of saving Thebes from the
Sphinx that he is rewarded with his mother in marriage. How can he be
blamed for what he did in ignorance? Even the killing of the supposed
stranger can be justified as an act of self-defence. Sophocles never tries to
explain whether or why Apollo wanted all this to happen. The relationship
between the gods and fate is inconsistently described as early as Homer.
Sometimes fate seems more powerful than the gods, while at other times
it is apparently identified with the will of the gods themselves. Here it is
possible to argue that Apollo, being as a god omniscient, knew what
would happen in the future, but did not himself plan that future. He
knew that a man with a certain character, when he found himself in a
certain situation, would inevitably behave in a certain way.
For other readers it is the character of Oedipus that is all-important,
and it is true that he himself never denies responsibility for his actions.
Oedipus the King 49
It is not so much his crimes as his discovery of them that leads to his
fall, and the oracle did not predict that discovery or his fall. It is Oedipus
himself, in his admirable desire to save his city, who begins the
investigation, and who, in publicly cursing the unknown killer of Laius,
inadvertently curses himself. Throughout the play he persists in his
investigation, despite the three attempts by other characters to make
him abandon it. When the Theban Shepherd cries, ‘alas, I am on the
terrible brink of speaking’, Oedipus replies, ‘and I of hearing; but still I
must hear’ (1169–70; cf. 1065). His desire to save the city and his search
for the truth seem wholly admirable, and the play gives little reason to
suppose that, if he had not insisted on it, fate, or Apollo, would have
found some other means of bringing him down. But no Sophoclean
hero is perfect, and some critics have suggested that his pride in his
intellectual powers is excessive, and that the gods are punishing him for
that. It is hard to reconcile this judgement with the fact that his crimes
were foretold before his birth.
Others point to his hybristic behaviour towards Teiresias and Creon,
which may be in the mind of the pious Chorus in its ode at 863–910, the
starting point of which seems to be Jocasta’s scepticism about oracles.
The Chorus is worried that those who commit hybris may escape
punishment, and that if oracles are not fulfilled religious practice and
belief will decline (see p. 46). But Sophocles is not using the Chorus as
his mouthpiece to condemn Oedipus (or Jocasta), or to preach a simple
sermon. Nor does the Chorus seriously hope that the oracle can still be
saved through the discovery that Laius was killed by his son, and so not
by Oedipus – still less that Oedipus will turn out to be both killer and
son; for at this stage the Chorus ‘knows’ that Laius has no surviving son.
No one can really suppose that Oedipus falls because he loses his temper
with Teiresias and Creon. Rather, Sophocles is using his Chorus to
express a deeply-felt human yearning for a clear link between morality
and prosperity. We would all like the wicked to be punished, and the
good to prosper. If this does not happen, what is the good of religion?
In fact the oracle will turn out to have been fulfilled, and conventional
piety will after all be saved, but at the cost of Oedipus’s ruin. In a sense
the Chorus puts the question the wrong way round. Instead of worrying
about the wicked who escape punishment, it should perhaps be
worrying about the innocent Oedipus who is heading for a fall. But
then, if we think more deeply, is he really innocent? He did not know
what he was doing, but could any of us feel free from guilt, if we
discovered what Oedipus discovered? Sophocles gives no simple
answers, but, by means of his Chorus, he indicates the insoluble
questions which underlie his tragic conception.
It seems that both fate and Oedipus’s own character are responsible
for his fall. Some have argued that, while his crimes were wholly fated,
he himself is entirely responsible for his investigation of the truth and
for his self-blinding. However, our own experience contradicts the
notion that at one stage of his life a man’s actions are wholly determined
by outside forces, while at another he must accept full responsibility for
them. It is contradicted also by the play itself. Oedipus would never
have begun his investigation had it not been for the plague, which it is
not unreasonable to ascribe to Apollo, the god who causes the plague in
the Greek army at Troy in Book 1 of the Iliad. It is a mysterious divine
power that leads Oedipus to the scene of Jocasta’s suicide. And, when
the Chorus at 1328 asks him which of the gods caused him to blind
himself, he replies, ‘it was Apollo, Apollo, my friends, who brought to
completion these my cruel, cruel sufferings’, but then he adds, ‘but my
eyes were struck by no one else’s hands; I did it, wretched me, myself ’.
Oedipus sees the whole complex of events as doubly determined, by the
outside power represented by Apollo, and by his own deliberate actions.
This may seem illogical, but it is consistent with our own experience. All
that we do is, to a greater or lesser extent, predetermined by our genes,
by our environment, by the pressure of circumstances or other people,
and by our own earlier choices and decisions. But we are still responsible.
Oedipus would not have fallen if he had not been the kind of man
he was.
So far we have talked about Oedipus’s fall. Yet something has been
gained. We may assume that the city has been saved from its plague and
infertility, though nothing is made of this at the end of the play. More
Oedipus the King 51
important, in one sense Oedipus does not fall at all. He set out to
uncover the truth, and by the end of the play he has succeeded in his
quest. It is the minor characters who try to stop him. Teiresias says, ‘how
terrible it is to have wisdom when it brings no profit to the man who has
it’ (316–17), and Jocasta, ‘ill-fated man, may you never learn who you
are’ (1068). We might be inclined to agree, but Oedipus himself does
not. As the play ends Oedipus has lost his throne, he is blind, and has to
say a poignant goodbye to his beloved daughters as he prepares to leave
them. Oedipus seems to have lost everything, and of course he is
devastated by the discovery of what he has done. But he never says, ‘I
wish I had not found out’; for he has gained what he values most –
knowledge no matter what it costs. He is the only character for whom
to live a painless lie is worse than to accept a painful truth. So to the end
of the play Oedipus remains true to himself, and it is he, not Teiresias,
Creon, or Jocasta, whom we admire. Pessimism and optimism, as so
often in Sophocles, are combined at the end of the play.
The actual ending, however, is strangely enigmatic. Throughout the
play the audience has been led to believe that we shall see Oedipus
departing, as he wishes, into exile. It comes therefore as a total surprise
when he exits into the now hated palace to wait upon the advice of
Apollo (as Creon, correct but cold to the end, decrees at 1438–43).
Sophocles leaves us wondering whether the exile is only delayed or
ruled out altogether. And what are we to make of Oedipus’s own
puzzling prophecy (1457) that ‘some strange (or ‘terrible’) misfortune’
still awaits him? The sense of closure is not complete.
52
Electra
On his return home from the Trojan War Agamemnon was murdered
by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes,
Agamemnon’s son, comes home from exile, is recognized by his sister
Electra, and takes vengeance on his father’s murderers. The story,
already alluded to in Homer’s Odyssey, was the subject of Aeschylus’
Libation Bearers, produced in 458 BC . It was treated also by Euripides
in his Electra. The dates of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ plays are
unfortunately unknown, so that, while it is clear that they were both
influenced by Aeschylus’ version, it is impossible to know for sure which
of the two younger playwrights had the other’s play in front of him.
Since, however, Euripides’ version represents the more radical departure
from the traditional story, one may argue that it was the last of the three
to be composed.
All three plays, like Women of Trachis, can be assigned to the group
of tragedies which deal with the homecoming of a hero after a long
absence abroad. In Libation Bearers the main action focuses on Orestes’
vengeance, and Electra disappears from the stage before that vengeance
takes place. But both Sophocles and Euripides shift the focus, as the
titles of their plays indicate, from the hero to Electra, the subordinate
waiting woman in the traditional ‘return-story’ (see p. 19). Whereas in
Aeschylus the recognition-scene between Orestes and Electra occurs
early in the play, and in Euripides comparatively early, the most notable
feature of Sophocles’ play-construction is that it comes almost at the
end, and is given an unusually full treatment, while the actual killing
of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus is handled very briefly, and almost
perfunctorily, in the final scene. If we can find the answer as to why
53
Sophocles has arranged matters in this way, we may have found also the
key to understanding his whole dramatic concept.
It may be helpful to work backwards from the recognition-scene to
the beginning of the play, as Sophocles may conceivably have done
himself as he planned its construction. The recognition cannot come
until Electra, in a scene climactic for her emergence as a Sophoclean
hero, has made her great decision to kill the murderers herself. But that
scene has to follow the false news brought by the old Paedagogus (the
servant who had looked after Orestes as a child) that her beloved
brother Orestes is dead. Until now she has depended on Orestes to
carry out the vengeance, but now she ‘knows’ that she is alone, so that
she will have to do the job herself. If, however, we are to understand the
effect of the ‘Messenger-scene’ on Electra, Sophocles must first present
to us her emotional state when she still hopes that her brother will
return. Every scene is in exactly the right place, and the structure of the
play seems almost inevitable.
We have not yet, however, gone back quite to the beginning. The play
is set in front of the royal palace at Mycenae, the door of which will be
the relentless focus of most of the action. First, in the prologue we meet
Orestes and the Paedagogus, who has brought him up for this moment
when he is at last old enough to take vengeance on his father’s murderers.
Orestes is accompanied by his faithful companion Pylades, who has no
speaking part in this play. They enter by the eisodos that has brought
them from distant Phocis, where Orestes has spent his boyhood in
exile. The plan is made. Apollo’s oracle has told him to use deceit. The
Paedagogus, therefore, will come to the palace with the news that
Orestes has been killed in a chariot-race at the Pythian Games at Delphi,
and then Orestes himself will appear carrying an urn which will be
supposed to contain his ashes. The time for action has come, and there
is a strong sense of urgency. Orestes looks forward to the glory that his
deed will bring him. It will be his first act of manhood, and his role in
the play has been compared to the rite of passage which young Athenian
males underwent as ephebes in their transition from adolescence to
adult maturity (cf. pp. 66–7). Orestes is emotionally detached. He
Electra 55
expresses no scruples at the thought that he is about to kill his mother,

and the audience is not encouraged to think about the horror of the
deed. The tone as a whole is brisk and business-like. There is a job to be
done, and we look forward to the fulfilment of the plan. But we will be
kept waiting for that fulfilment until the very end of the play. The
preparation and the fulfilment provide the framework of the play. All
that happens in between concerns Electra rather than Orestes.
Suddenly the mood changes. Electra’s voice is heard from behind the
door inside the palace, and it is significant that it is a cry of lamentation.
The unemotional Orestes is about to be replaced on-stage by his highly
emotional sister. Orestes (if we may trust the distribution of the lines in
the manuscripts) thinks that it may be his sister’s voice – already he
is unconsciously drawn towards her. But the Paedagogus hurries him
away so that they can make offerings at Agamemnon’s tomb, thereby
frustrating the recognition-scene which for a moment we expect.
It is usually assumed that, while the Paedagogus departs by the
eisodos by which they have all entered, to prepare for his later entry via
the same eisodos, Orestes and Pylades leave by the opposite one, on
their way to visit Agamemnon’s tomb, the one which leads to the space
inside the city, and which will be used shortly by the Chorus of women
of Mycenae, and at the very end of the play by Aegisthus. There is no
reason why the tomb should not be conceived as being somewhere in
the city. But the next entrance of Orestes and Pylades, when they claim
to come from distant Phocis, must surely be via the original eisodos, and
it would be unusual for any character in Greek tragedy to leave by one
eisodos and to return by the other. One should therefore not dismiss the
possibility that all three men leave together, and that they will go in
their separate directions after they have left the stage.
After their departure the door opens and Electra appears. While
her brother is anxious to enter the palace, Electra hates her life inside
it surrounded by her enemies, and complains that she can express
her feelings only when she can come outside into the open air; but
that means into the public space which is normally reserved for men
(see p. 34 on the similar situation of Antigone), and that is possible only
when Aegisthus is away from home (312–13, 911–12). So she now takes
up her position in front of the door, where she will remain as the focus
of our attention until almost the end of the play. In an anapaestic
soliloquy she reveals to the audience the two themes which dominate
her existence, the one in the past, the other in the future – her father’s
murder, which she will lament for ever, and her longing for her brother
to return and take vengeance on behalf of them both. Orestes’ return
and her desire for vengeance are inseparable in Electra’s mind. For the
audience the irony is that Orestes has returned, and is already planning
the vengeance.
The Chorus of women of Mycenae enters, and joins Electra in an
emotional lyric song. Though sympathetic to her plight, it urges her to
restrain her lamentation, to learn moderation, as excess will bring her
only further trouble. The attempt by a chorus, or a minor character, to
teach the hero sense and moderation, we have already met in Sophocles’
earlier plays. Electra’s feeling of isolation and her refusal to listen or to
compromise are equally typical of the Sophoclean hero. If she were to
take the Chorus’s advice she feels that she would no longer be true
to herself, and we admire her for her single-mindedness. Yet, unlike
Orestes in the prologue, she is herself aware that there is something
unnatural about her behaviour: ‘In a terrible situation I have come
under a terrible compulsion – I know, I am aware of my temper’ (221–
2). She picks up the same theme in her iambic speech to the Chorus at
254–7, when she says that she is ashamed of her excessive lamentation,
but she has been forced into it. So she will continue to lament and to
long for her brother’s return. The trouble is that he never comes (168–
72; cf. 303–6, 319). For the present she can annoy the usurpers by her
behaviour and her words, so that for Electra words are a form of action,
but, until Orestes returns, there is nothing that she can do that will
really avenge her father’s death in the way that matters.
Chrysothemis, Electra’s sister, comes out of the house through the
door, carrying offerings. She has come to make a further attack on
Electra’s resolution. In many ways she plays the same role as Ismene in
Antigone. While accepting that Electra is right (338–9, an important
Electra 57
admission for guiding the sympathy of the audience), she explains that
she is too weak to follow her, and prefers a comfortable life inside the
palace. Her sister, she reports, is to be imprisoned because of her
behaviour. Electra, she argues, would do well to follow her own path of
compromise, to yield to those who are stronger than she is (396), and to
learn common sense and moderation. Like Antigone, Electra refuses to
take the advice. Her idea of a good life is very different from that of her
sister (392–5). There is not yet, however, a complete breakdown in the
sisters’ relationship. Chrysothemis explains that she is on her way to
Agamemnon’s tomb, with propitiatory offerings from Clytaemnestra.
The latter has had a nightmare which has warned her of her husband’s
anger. Electra persuades her sister to hide, or throw away, the offerings,
and to substitute a lock of hair from each of the girls, with the prayer
that Orestes may come and triumph over her enemies. Chrysothemis
agrees to do so. For the first time in the play Electra has been able to
move forward from largely passive lamentation and hoping, and to take
a positive practical step. If Clytaemnestra is afraid, that must mean that
things are going well for Electra. It may be the spirit of the dead
Agamemnon that has sent the dream from below the earth. The audience
knows that, with Orestes already home, her confidence is justified. So
Chrysothemis sets off for Agamemnon’s tomb, while Electra remains
on-stage. With equal confidence the Chorus, in a brief ode, looks
forward to the coming of Justice (476). We are not invited to remember
that Justice in this case means the murder of a mother by her son. The
only disquieting notes are a reference to the avenging Fury (491; see
p. 62), and a reminder of the ancient curse on the family.
So far we have seen Electra in the company only of her sympathizers.
It is time now to see her resolution tested in a confrontation with her
enemy, Clytaemnestra. In a long speech the latter sets out her justification
for murdering her husband, and in an even longer speech Electra
demolishes her arguments. The audience may feel some misgivings when
even Clytaemnestra can claim to have Justice on her side (528), and
Electra does not seem to think that the question is important (‘whether
[you killed Agamemnon] justly or not’ 560). She even concedes that her
own behaviour may be shameless, but claims that she has inherited it
from her mother (606–9). ‘Shameful deeds’, she says (621), ‘are taught by
shameful deeds’. We might say, ‘like mother, like daughter’. The audience,
then, may have some nagging doubts, but on the whole it is clearly Electra
who comes off better in the quarrel. Her mother deserves her punishment.
Clytaemnestra prays to Apollo that her dream may turn out after all to
portend good for her, that she may continue to enjoy the fruits of her
crime, and that the god will grant her what she cannot express openly,
meaning clearly that Orestes will die. The prayer is both blasphemous
and futile. We know that Orestes is already home, brought by the very god
to whom she prays.
At this moment the Paedagogus appears, as if in immediate answer to
her prayer, with the news that Orestes is indeed dead. One might compare
the sudden appearance of the Corinthian Messenger in Oedipus the King
(p. 47) with news that apparently relieves Jocasta of all her fears. But the
effect is quite different. There the audience shuddered at its knowledge of
the true situation. Here we enjoy watching Clytaemnestra so deluded.
Soon Electra will be reunited with her brother, and Clytaemnestra will
get what she deserves. The immediate first reaction is that of the totally
despairing Electra. Clytaemnestra asks for details of Orestes’ death. The
Paedagogus, in accordance with Orestes’ orders in the prologue, recounts
how Orestes, after winning many prizes in the Pythian Games, displayed
supreme skill in the chariot-race, only to crash at the end. This is the
longest formal messenger-speech in the surviving plays of Sophocles,
which makes it all the more remarkable that from beginning to end it is
a lie. Why is it so long? The main reason is, no doubt, that Sophocles
wants to keep us waiting for Clytaemnestra’s full reaction and for the
development of that which really matters, the reaction of Electra. If her
hope has gone, what is she going to do now? At the same time the story
presents to us Orestes as a natural victor, the true son of his father, and
thus foreshadows the real victory which the Paedagogus and the audience
expect him to achieve. Yet it is told in such a way as to arouse a few
misgivings. The spectators at the Games called Orestes blessed (693), a
dangerous title for any mortal to receive, as it might attract the resentment
Electra 59
of the gods. And then he crashed his chariot, having made an error in
rounding the turning-post, the very manoeuvre at which he had seemed
to be most skilful. Success, in Greek thought, is so often followed by a fall.
We may think of Oedipus, who prided himself on his intellectual skill,
but who turned out to know nothing. It is, of course, all a lie, but can we
be completely satisfied that his real victory will be unsullied? At the very
least, we are involved with Electra in her despair.
Clytaemnestra’s reaction may surprise us slightly. She does not know,
she says, whether to mourn her son or to rejoice. Even Clytaemnestra is
not entirely black. She takes the Paedagogus into the house, so the first
stage of Orestes’ plan has now succeeded, while Electra remains outside
with the Chorus. This is almost her darkest moment. Gone is the hope
that was roused by the report of Clytaemnestra’s dream. For years she
has longed for the return of her brother and for vengeance. Without
Orestes there can be no hope of vengeance. If Electra was isolated
before, she now feels totally alone and friendless. The audience can have
little idea of what will happen next, but certainly the play cannot end
with Electra standing in front of the door, outside the palace, vowing
never to enter it again.
We have probably forgotten Chrysothemis, whom we last saw
departing to Agamemnon’s tomb. She now makes an entrance which is
as startling as that of the Paedagogus earlier (p. 58). In the last line of
her lyric dialogue with the Chorus (870) Electra has complained
that she was unable to lament at her brother’s funeral. In her first line
Chrysothemis speaks of joy; she has found Orestes’ offerings at the
tomb, and so he must have come home safely. If this had happened
before the Paedagogus scene, it would have fed the hope inspired in
Electra by Clytaemnestra’s dream. But now Electra ‘knows’ that Orestes
is dead, and her sister’s joy makes her despair all the blacker. This is her
lowest moment. Ironically she who is deluded pours scorn on
Chrysothemis’ delusion, which is in fact the truth, and she reduces her
sister to her own despair.
Then, very quietly, an upward movement begins. There is something,
she says, that they can do to alleviate their present trouble. Chrysothemis
is eager to help, until she finds out what that something is. Electra’s
proposal is that they kill Aegisthus by themselves. We sense that she is
glad when Chrysothemis refuses, so that the glory of her deed will be
hers alone. The relationship between the sisters has turned to enmity,
but for Electra it is now the moment to rise to her full stature as a
Sophoclean hero. In her total isolation she rejects the advice of the
‘normal’ woman, Chrysothemis, and, like Antigone, finds the resolution
to adopt the role of the male. She looks forward to being honoured for
her ‘courage’ (983), a word (andreia) which means literally ‘manliness’.
If, in her invitation to Chrysothemis, she says nothing about killing
Clytaemnestra, this is not because she really means to kill only
Aegisthus, or because she does not want to put her sister off. Rather, it is
Sophocles who omits Clytaemnestra for the sake of the audience. We
are to admire Electra for her great decision, and he is not yet ready for
us to think about the horror of matricide. And admiration is the keynote
of the choral song which follows.
The audience remains uncertain as to how the plot will develop. ‘Will
Electra launch a single-minded attack on the palace before Orestes
makes his presence known?’ (Budelmann). At this crucial moment
Orestes and Pylades enter, and at last the recognition can take place. We
may feel relieved that after all Electra will not have to act alone. Orestes
carries the urn which is supposed to contain his ashes. She begs to hold
it in her hands, and, as she weeps over it in intensely moving fashion, he
comes to realize that his sister is before him. He gradually reveals his
identity to Electra, and her joy is unrestrained. At this great emotional
climax Electra expresses herself in song, while Orestes tries to restrain
her in spoken iambic metre. All our attention is fixed on her. With
superb irony, Electra, in whose hopes the return of Orestes and the act
of vengeance had been inseparable, now forgets the vengeance
altogether, until the Paedagogus comes out of the palace to insist, as
he had insisted in the prologue, that the time for action has come.
The audience has looked forward to the joy of recognition from the
beginning of the play, and we too have put to the back of our minds the
knowledge of what is still to come.
Electra 61
The three men enter the palace, while Electra remains on-stage to
pray for success to Apollo, the same god who had rejected Clytaemnestra’s
prayer for the death of her son. Then Electra too goes into the palace,
leaving the stage for the first time since she entered it in the prologue.
Will she, we wonder, take part in her mother’s murder? But, after a brief
excited song from the Chorus, she re-emerges to stand once more by
the door, on guard against Aegisthus’ arrival. We hear Clytaemnestra’s
death-shrieks off-stage. Electra interprets for us what is happening
inside the palace, and calls encouragement to her brother. Traditionally
the matricide is Orestes’ concern, but in this play, as he carries it out off-
stage, it is Electra whom we watch, so that she is still at the centre of our
attention. The victorious Orestes emerges from the palace with the
covered corpse. At this moment Aegisthus returns home, via the eisodos
that leads from the city, and at first takes the body to be that of Orestes.
He discovers the truth, and the play ends with Orestes leading him into
the palace to his death. It is all finished in just over a hundred lines.
Why is this final scene so short? On the answer to this question
depends our whole interpretation of the tragedy. For some critics this is
a happy play, and ‘the horizon is free of all clouds’ (Waldock); we rejoice
with Orestes and Electra, and we feel that justice has been done, and the
city has been rightly saved from the usurpers. In the traditional version
of the story, followed by both Aeschylus and Euripides, Aegisthus
is killed before Clytaemnestra, but in Sophocles Clytaemnestra is
murdered first, so that her killing is not the last thing in our minds as
we leave the theatre. This, we are told, is why the scene is so short.
Sophocles hurries over it so that it may not leave too deep an impression
upon us. Wanting to write a happy play, but being constrained by his
tradition to include a matricide, he does his best to ensure that no one
notices it.
It is hard to believe what all of this implies, that Sophocles was not
wholly in control of his material, or that in any culture matricide could
be seen as unproblematic. Indeed, at various points in the play we have
noted hints that the vengeance will not be morally straightforward.
For other critics, therefore, ‘this is a grim play’ (Winnington-Ingram).
Without going as far as Wheeler, who misinterprets Electra’s great

decision as a grave transgression and a mark of her derangement, we
may still agree that the ending is far from happy. The justice of the
killings and the legitimacy of Apollo’s oracle may not be questioned
(though we may note at 1424–5 the conditional clause in Orestes’ ‘all is
well inside the house, if Apollo’s prophecy was well spoken’), but we are
surely struck by the horror. At 1415 Electra’s cry to her off-stage brother,
‘Strike her a second blow, if you have the strength’, is one of the nastiest
lines in Greek tragedy. And, though we may not care much about the
fate of Aegisthus, the way in which Orestes and Electra enjoy deceiving
him is hardly pleasant. The play ends as he is led away to die off-stage,
so that the killing carries on beyond the end.
The final scene, then, is short and abrupt, not because Sophocles
wants us not to notice it but because he wants to shock us. Everything
has built up to the joyous recognition-scene, but immediately after it
the mood changes dramatically. We suddenly realize what is still to
come, and, far from suppressing the horror, Sophocles takes care to
emphasize it. In the traditional story, as in Aeschylus and Euripides,
Orestes is pursued by his mother’s avenging Furies. There are no such
Furies at the end of this play, but perhaps Sophocles intends us to take
them for granted. Furies, indeed, have been mentioned at several points
in the play (see for example p. 57), which would be surprising if they
formed no part of his conception. When at 1497–8 Aegisthus speaks of
troubles still to come upon the family, Sophocles must have been aware
that at least some members of his audience would think of the Furies’
traditional pursuit of Orestes. The real reason why nothing is specifically
said about them at the end is that they traditionally concern only
Orestes, and this is Electra’s play, not his. The tradition knows of no
unhappy consequences for her so we are not told what will happen
to either of them, but we can hardly be sure that they will live happily
ever after.
Philoctetes
Philoctetes is a tragedy about the effect of man’s cruelty on man. On

their way to Troy the Greek army stopped off at the island of Chryse to
make an offering to the goddess of the same name. Philoctetes, however,
went too close to the altar, and was bitten in the foot by its guardian
snake. The rest of the Greeks, finding his cries of pain and the smell
from the wound unbearable, carried him over to the neighbouring
island of Lemnos and abandoned him there. Nearly ten years later a
Trojan prisoner, Helenus, prophesies that the Greeks will win the war
only with the help of Philoctetes’ invincible bow and arrows, the gift of
Heracles. In Sophocles’ version of the story Odysseus and the young
Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, are sent to fetch him, and the play
opens with their arrival on Lemnos, which, by a dramatic convention
which the audience easily accepts, is reckoned to be an uninhabited
island.
Among the surviving plays of Sophocles Philoctetes is remarkable
for the complexity of both its characterization and its plot. We are
presented with a tangle of relationships among all three men, Philoctetes,
Neoptolemus and Odysseus, while Neoptolemus in particular is hardly
less important a character than Philoctetes himself (some critics would
argue that he is more important).
If Philoctetes is to be brought to Troy, to help those who abandoned
him and whom he now considers to be his enemies, there are only three
possible ways of securing him: he must be tricked or forced or
persuaded. It is this that determines the structure of the play, which falls
into three unequal parts, in each of which one of these methods is tried.
The long first section is devoted to the attempt of Neoptolemus, coached
63
by Odysseus, to deceive Philoctetes into going on board his ship, on the

pretence that he means to take him home to Greece. At this stage the
other two methods are simply dismissed (102–5) by Odysseus;
Philoctetes hates the Greeks so much that he will never be persuaded,
and violence cannot work as long as Philoctetes has in his hands the
invincible bow. However, deceit in the end fails, and Odysseus, in the
shortest of the three sections, has after all to resort to violence. But this
too is unsuccessful, and the climax of the play takes the form of a series
of attempts to persuade Philoctetes to come to Troy. The pressure on
him gradually mounts, but in the end he resists all persuasion, and
Neoptolemus agrees to take him, not to Troy, but home to Greece. It is
only the intervention of Heracles, the deus ex machina, at the very end
of the play, that causes Philoctetes to change his mind.
The complexity of the characterization is probably one of the reasons
that the Chorus, which consists of the crew of Neoptolemus’s ship, is
given so little to do in this play. Its entrance-song is shared with
Neoptolemus, and in the whole play it sings only one formal ode (676–
729). It is, however, by no means purely decorative. Apart from its
obvious role of demonstrating loyalty to, and support for, Neoptolemus,
it allows us to see him not simply as the young subordinate of Odysseus
but as a commander of men in his own right. Moreover, at crucial points
in the play, its attitude will have a crucial effect on our understanding of
the mind of Neoptolemus himself. In this sense, unusually for Sophocles,
the Chorus is ‘integral to the action of the play’ (Goldhill 130).
It is the complexity of the plot that leads to one of the puzzles of the
play: what exactly did the prophecy say? Did Helenus tell the Greeks
that they must bring both Philoctetes and the bow, or would the bow by
itself be enough, and did he say that he must be persuaded to come? If
so, deceit and violence would seem to be ruled out from the very
beginning. And did he prophesy that Philoctetes would go to Troy and
that the Greeks would win the war, or that Troy would not fall unless
Philoctetes were fetched? We may say, if we like, that the prophecy was
somehow ambiguous, and that each character chose to interpret it
according to what seemed to him to be the needs of the moment. We
Philoctetes 65
may then conclude that the final version, given by Neoptolemus near
the end of the play, is the definitive one: Philoctetes will be persuaded to
go to Troy, and the Greeks will win the war. But this is not real life, and
it is better not to treat the prophecy as if there were an objective reality
behind it. The three stages of the plot all depend on different conceptions
of the prophecy, and it is Sophocles himself who had no compunction
about varying its details to suit his dramatic purpose.
The play is set in front of the cave in which Philoctetes lives, and it
begins with the arrival there of Odysseus and Neoptolemus (accompanied
by a non-speaking sailor).We learn that it has two entrances, one of
which, according to a fairly general consensus, is visible to the audience,
while we have to understand that the other is located at its other end,
invisible through the skene. (An alternative view, that a screen is set in
front of the skene, with an opening at both ends, making visible the two
doors of the cave, is less popular among modern scholars.) The problem
of how all this was managed has never been satisfactorily solved. When
Neoptolemus goes into the cave to reconnoitre it, he shouts to Odysseus
that he is on a higher level than his companion. Perhaps the audience has
to use its imagination here, but later in the play, when Philoctetes
threatens to commit suicide by throwing himself off the cliff on which he
is standing, that hardly seems feasible. If the higher level was simply the
upper half of the usual skene-door, or the ekkyklema, or the slightly
raised stage (the existence of which is by no means certain), we might
expect the audience to laugh. Schein (2013), the latest editor of the play,
presents an elaborate arrangement of two or possibly three different
levels, with the cave itself high up through the door of an elevated skene.
But whether all this could be constructed/taken down after/before the
previous/next play to be presented, remains doubtful. For the suicide
attempt some kind of artificial rock constructed in the orchestra is
perhaps worth considering. In this play only one of the two eisodoi seems
to be used. It links the cave with the shore where the ship (or two ships)
of Odysseus and Neoptolemus is beached.
The prologue presents us with an unusually detailed description of
the space that lies behind the skene-door, the miserable cave in which
Philoctetes lives. It is dramatically important. Many Sophoclean heroes

are in some way or another cut off from their society. On his uninhabited
island Philoctetes is physically, as well as spiritually, isolated. It is this
environment that has helped to make him what he has now become,
and that will be a constant theme running through the play. Here, in the
prologue, we see the environment before we see Philoctetes, the
loneliness before the man, and our sympathy is already aroused.
Odysseus explains to Neoptolemus his plan for tricking Philoctetes,
and persuades him to play the major part in it. Odysseus cannot do so
himself, because Philoctetes will at once recognize him as one of his
greatest enemies. Neoptolemus is to pretend that the Greeks at Troy
have robbed him of the arms of his father, Achilles, and in anger he has
left the army and is now on his way home to Greece. Without the bow
Troy will not be conquered (68–9); at this stage the prophecy appears to
be conditional.
Neoptolemus, however, is hard to persuade. Deceit does not seem to
him to be consistent with the heroic code which he has inherited from
Achilles. The expression ‘son of Achilles’ will be heard throughout the
play, always as a kind of symbol of Neoptolemus’ better nature, whereas
the names of Odysseus, and of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the sons of
Atreus, will stand for all that is evil. The character of Odysseus has sadly
deteriorated from his presentation in Ajax. It is now his cleverness, in
the worst sense, that has come to the fore, and, if Neoptolemus favours
an epic and slightly old-fashioned model of heroic nobility, Odysseus
behaves like a late fifth-century sophist who uses clever rhetoric to gain
his ends. For him the means are unimportant: ‘when you are acting for
gain, you should not hesitate’ (111).
Neoptolemus is eventually persuaded by Odysseus’ promise that if
he co-operates he will gain a reputation for wisdom and at the same
time for arete (‘excellence’), the highest term of commendation for the
Homeric hero (119). But he remains uneasy, and the conflict between
his sense of duty to the army and his natural nobility will become
clearer and clearer as the play progresses, until his true nature finally
asserts itself. Vidal-Naquet and others have seen all this in terms of the
Philoctetes 67
initiation of a young man (an ephebe, see p. 54) into adult male
Athenian society. The prologue ends with the departure of Odysseus,
who promises to send a sailor to help Neoptolemus should he take
too long to succeed in his mission. It will be the same sailor as the one
who accompanies them in the prologue, but, when he returns to the
stage, he will, as Odysseus explains, be disguised as the captain of a
merchant-ship,
In the lyric dialogue between the Chorus and Neoptolemus, which
forms the entrance-song of the former, the Chorus guides our emotional
response by expressing sympathy for Philoctetes, whom we have still to
meet. Neoptolemus, while not unsympathetic, expresses the view that
Philoctetes’ sufferings are not surprising; they are all part of a divine
plan to ensure that the invincible bow could not be used at Troy before
the fated time had come for Troy to be captured. The conditional version
of the prophecy is now dropped. Neoptolemus insists that Troy will fall.
We may note that this is more than Odysseus told him in the prologue.
It is almost as if he is trying to reassure himself that he has no
responsibility in the matter; the gods know what they are doing, and all
is for the best. His equivocation contrasts with the simple and sincere
sympathy of his men.
At last Philoctetes, having entered the cave through the end invisible
to the audience, emerges into our full view, dragging his painful foot. He
is overjoyed to discover that the stranger is Neoptolemus, the son of his
old friend Achilles. He tells his pitiable story, not forgetting to mention
(258) what upsets a hero more than anything else, the laughter of his
enemies (see p. 9). Neoptolemus responds by telling his lying tale,
convincing Philoctetes that they are both on the same side. Philoctetes
questions Neoptolemus about the fortunes of his former colleagues at
Troy. When he learns that the best of them are dead, while the villains
survive, Philoctetes pours out his bitterness: why are the gods so unfair
(446–52)? The speaker is, of course, Philoctetes, not Sophocles, but
these lines are strangely overlooked by those who believe that the
playwright’s religion was one of simple, unquestioning piety.
Neoptolemus expresses agreement with the other’s sentiment (436–7,
456–7). This is no doubt part of the deceit, but we suspect that, ironically,
in his heart of hearts he is really closer to Philoctetes than he is to
Odysseus. At the same time the exchange demonstrates Philoctetes’
loyalty to the good men, whom he considers to be his friends. Supported
by the Chorus, he begs Neoptolemus to take him on his ship to Greece,
and the latter, after a show of reluctance, agrees to do so. Odysseus’ plan
seems to have worked.
At this moment, however, two men arrive. The audience knows that
one is the sailor, disguised as the captain of a merchant-ship, whom
Odysseus promised to send, and now played by the actor who was
Odysseus in the prologue. The other is a mute companion. By the end of
the scene everything is changed. At 431–2 Neoptolemus has remarked
that ‘even clever plans are often thwarted’. In the words of Robert Burns,
‘the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’. With splendid
Sophoclean irony it is Odysseus’ clever scheme for hastening his plan
that will begin to sway Neoptolemus against it and ultimately cause it to
fail. The Merchant pretends to reveal to Neoptolemus that he must leave
as quickly as possible, because two parties of Greeks are on their way,
the one to bring back Neoptolemus to Troy, the other, consisting of
Diomedes and Odysseus, to fetch Philoctetes. The Merchant repeats
the prophecy of Helenus (again it is conditional – Troy will not fall
unless . . .), but adds a new piece of information: Philoctetes has to be
brought in person (so the bow by itself will not be sufficient), and he
must be persuaded to come. Philoctetes, who has heard the whole
conversation between the other two, now knows for the first time that
there is a plan to bring him to Troy. The effect on him is predictable.
Now that he is faced with the arrival of his enemies, we see for the first
time his strength of will and the depth of his hatred. He would as soon
be persuaded to come back from the dead as to go to Troy to help his
enemies (623–5). Persuasion can, therefore, be ruled out as impossible.
Much more subtle is the effect that the scene has on Neoptolemus. After
the Merchant’s departure Philoctetes calls on his new friend to set sail
immediately with him for Greece, but Neoptolemus wants to delay:
‘when the headwind drops, then we shall set out; for now it is against us’
Philoctetes 69
(639–40). Sophocles’ audience did not need a map to tell it that, if the
wind was against a ship sailing south-west towards Greece, it was an
ideal wind for one heading for Troy. Neoptolemus’ excuse is a sign of his
inner torment, and the first clear indication that the deception is going
to fail. Philoctetes, however, for the moment overrules him, and the two
men go into the cave to collect his few belongings in preparation for
departure.
The Chorus, left alone in the orchestra, sings the only formal ode in
this play. It dwells again, with sympathy, on the background to
Philoctetes’ sufferings, but the final stanza presents a puzzle; Philoctetes,
it sings, will now be relieved of all his troubles; for he is going home to
Greece. Either it has temporarily forgotten Philoctetes’ real destination,
or, more probably, since the latter is now within earshot the Chorus has
to resume the pretence.
As the two men prepare to depart to the ship Philoctetes has a
sudden attack of pain, which can be alleviated, he explains, only if he
goes to sleep. He hands over the precious bow to Neoptolemus for safe-
keeping while he sleeps. It is only now, when the latter has the bow in
his hands, that the exact wording of the prophecy becomes an important
issue. If the bow, without its owner, is sufficient, Neoptolemus is now
free to depart, abandoning Philoctetes to his fate, robbed of the bow on
which he relied to shoot birds for his food. The tension for the audience
is immediately increased by the Chorus when it urges its commander to
do precisely what we are afraid that he will do. This is certainly not to
the Chorus’s credit, but the characterization of the Chorus is not the
important issue. What matters is that the failure in its sympathy is
balanced by a further increase in the sympathy of Neoptolemus (in the
entrance-song it was the other way round; see p. 67). He insists that
the bow by itself is not enough, and that Philoctetes himself must be
brought. The Chorus is not convinced. The difference may simply be
one of interpreting a prophecy that was vague on details. Some critics
suppose that Neoptolemus here reveals a new, and better, understanding.
But it is hard to see where that new understanding comes from. The
Merchant has mentioned persuasion, but the Merchant is a liar, and
Neoptolemus says nothing about persuasion here. The important point

is that Neoptolemus refuses to play the shabby trick recommended by
his men. He is beginning to return to his true self.
Philoctetes on awakening is full of gratitude to his friend for standing
by him, but Neoptolemus is now in an agony of indecision. ‘What am I
to do?’ he cries, like so many tragic heroes. Eventually he blurts out that
he is taking Philoctetes not to Greece but to Troy. This has to be, he says
(921–6); it is his duty. It is also expedient for him, so the end still justifies
the means. There is, then, some way to go before he finally gives in to
Philoctetes’ appeals. In an impassioned speech Philoctetes begs
Neoptolemus to give him back his bow. He curses the ‘son of Achilles’
(940) and, when the latter remains silent (934–5, 951), appeals to the
Lemnian landscape, the constant background to his tragedy. He begs
Neoptolemus at least to give him back his bow. Again the latter cries,
‘What am I to do?’ (969, 974). At the very moment when he is evidently
advancing across the stage to return the bow, Odysseus enters, in time
to foil Neoptolemus’ act of generosity. So abrupt is his entry that it can
hardly be by the eisodos that leads to the ship. Some scholars suppose
that he emerges from the cave, having entered it through the other door
unseen by the audience. It would, however, be unusual for an actor on
returning to the stage to use a different entrance from the one by which
he has left it (see p. 55). More probably he has been hiding behind a
stage rock or bush, and it would not have mattered greatly if the
audience has seen him taking up his position behind it.
At last the two enemies confront each other, and we move into the
short second stage, in which Odysseus attempts force. Philoctetes
threatens to commit suicide, and Odysseus has him seized to prevent it.
But then he releases him, on the grounds that now they have the bow,
and that is all they need. In all of this Neoptolemus speaks not a word,
until the very end, when he gives the Chorus permission to remain
behind temporarily, in the hope that Philoctetes may change his mind,
while he and Odysseus depart to prepare for sailing.
Odysseus must really believe that the bow by itself is sufficient. Some
critics have thought that in releasing Philoctetes he shows a new
Philoctetes 71
awareness that persuasion, not violence, is required; he still hopes that

Neoptolemus will somehow be successful, and allows the Chorus to
begin the process of persuasion. If so, the new awareness comes
remarkably suddenly. For others the threat to abandon Philoctetes is
merely bluff. Odysseus is confident that, when he realizes what he is
losing, Philoctetes will come running after him. But, apart from being
over-subtle, this would ruin the tension which will underlie the
following lyric dialogue between Philoctetes and the Chorus. The
audience must believe that there is a real possibility that he will be
abandoned on Lemnos without his bow. At the same time, we do not
want him to become untrue to himself by yielding to his enemies.
In the lyric dialogue the Chorus shows sympathy for Philoctetes in
his plight, but tells him that it is in his own power to put an end to it by
going to Troy. The final, climactic, stage is thus prepared. Neoptolemus
and Odysseus reappear, the former with the intention of returning the
bow to Philoctetes. With a new-found self-confidence and authority, he
soon discomfits the horrified Odysseus, who hurriedly leaves the stage.
Philoctetes, emerging from the cave, is at first reluctant to trust
Neoptolemus. When the latter manages to prove his sincerity by at last
handing over the bow, Odysseus appears for the final time (probably
from the same hiding-place as before). But, as Philoctetes now has the
invincible bow, there is nothing that Odysseus can do. He makes his last
exit. Neoptolemus has at last shown himself worthy of his father Achilles
(1310–13).
It is now time for us to concentrate on the method of persuasion,
and on the idea that Philoctetes must go willingly to Troy (1332).
Already at 919–20 Neoptolemus had pointed out that it was in
Philoctetes’ interests to go to Troy, where he would be saved from his
misery and would share in the glory of winning the war. Even Odysseus,
in the midst of his violence, had used the latter argument (997–8), but
with no hope of success. In the lyric dialogue the Chorus too has tried
persuasion, and at least it was sympathetic to Philoctetes. But it is only
Neoptolemus, now that he has proved himself to be a true friend, who
can apply persuasion effectively. According to Helenus’s prophecy, he
says, Troy will fall this summer (1340–1). Not only will Philoctetes have
the glory of capturing it; there are also doctors there, the sons of
Asclepius, who can cure the wound in his foot. Philoctetes is strongly
tempted; he understands what he is missing, just as earlier (1125) he has
pictured the laughter of Odysseus with the bow in his hands. It is now
Philoctetes’ turn to cry, ‘What shall I do?’ He wants to co-operate with
his friend, but in the end it is his wish to harm his enemies that triumphs
over his obligation to help his friends (for the opposite decision see
p. 15). As the typical Sophoclean hero, he refuses, therefore, to learn
sense or to yield. In the first stage of the play deceit, by its very nature,
could make no impact on his will. In the second stage violence could
affect him only externally. But this third stage involves a fundamental
struggle for his character, as we see him facing, but resisting, the
strongest pressure to do what he feels to be wrong.
That the audience is meant to admire Philoctetes for his decision is
shown by the fact that, having returned to his true self, Neoptolemus
finally agrees to take him home to Greece. The effect of Philoctetes on
Neoptolemus is ultimately important for what it tells us about
Philoctetes. We may compare in Ajax the recognition by Odysseus of
the heroic stature of Ajax (see p. 16). The point is important for the
interpretation of the final sixty-three lines of the play. Just as it seemed
to be coming to an end, with the two men preparing to depart for
Greece, that departure is abruptly and surprisingly interrupted by
the appearance (either on the roof of the skene, or on the mechane,
for which see p. 2) of the deified Heracles, the previous owner of
the bow and the friend of Philoctetes. In his role of deus ex machina,
the only one in Sophocles’ surviving plays, but common in those of
Euripides, he orders them to fulfil the purpose of Zeus by going
instead to Troy, where Philoctetes will be healed and, together with
Neoptolemus, win the glory of capturing the city. Philoctetes agrees
to go. His sudden change of mind may disappoint us, and we may
think of a modern film in which the script-writer has tacked a happy
ending onto a novel which originally ended tragically. Why does
Sophocles do it?
Philoctetes 73
It may be simply that the original audience, familiar with the

traditional story, knew that Philoctetes did go to Troy and that the
Greeks did win the war. Somehow Sophocles had to reconcile his
tragedy with the story as the audience knew it. In that sense the ending
was ‘fated’, but it requires a miracle to bring it about.
More important, the ‘second’ ending raises the question of Philoctetes’
status as a hero. Heracles, who had won glory after suffering, and who
had received divine status after death, serves as a kind of prototype for
Philoctetes himself. He does not condemn him, either for committing
sacrilege on Chryse or for his refusal to accept his destiny. He merely
commands him, and states what is going to happen. Philoctetes will not
become a god, but his recognition by the gods, and the glory that awaits
him, mean that his heroic greatness is assured. There may even be a hint
of a future hero-cult on Chryse, although the evidence for this is late.
Harrison puts it well: ‘Philoctetes . . . like the Oedipus of Oedipus
Coloneus combines physical infirmity with grand passions and
sufferings which transcend the measure of mortality and suggest
daemonic stature.’ Similarly in Ajax it was the burial of the hero that
restored him to his heroic status (see p. 13).
The ‘second’ ending of the play is, then, a happy one. But it is not
entirely happy, and the play remains a tragedy. The divine plan hardly
seems to justify the suffering that it involves. Philoctetes will return to
society, but the cruel Odysseus, Agamemnon and Menelaus have not
changed, and Philoctetes never secures the justice for which he has
longed; instead, his enemies will get what they want.
In his final words Heracles warns against impiety, and many, if not
all, of the spectators will recall the brutality of Neoptolemus who,
according to the tradition, will kill Priam at an altar. In his last speech
Philoctetes addresses the landscape of Lemnos, looking not forward to
the glory that awaits him but back, to the scene of his sufferings, the
environment to which we were introduced at the beginning of the play.
74
Oedipus at Colonus
This play deals with the end of Oedipus’s life, and thus comes
chronologically between the events presented in Oedipus the King and
in Antigone. Probably many years separate the three plays from each
other, and it is unhelpful to think of them as a ‘Theban trilogy’, as if
they were conceived as a unity, and written for a single continuous
performance. Each has its own dramatic purpose, and one should resist
the temptation to interpret one in terms of another. Two differences
may be mentioned. The role of Creon, a character in all three plays, is
different in each. First, in Antigone he is a king who means well, but
who, apparently for the best of motives, deludes himself into thinking
that wrong is right; in Oedipus the King he is an honest, decent, though
not very admirable man, who does his best for Oedipus at the end;
while in Oedipus at Colonus he is an unscrupulous villain, worthy to be
equated with the Odysseus of Philoctetes. Secondly, the problem of
Oedipus’s guilt and responsibility, which bulked so large in Oedipus the
King, has ceased to be an issue in this last play. Oedipus now insists, at
three points in the play, that he is morally innocent because his crimes
were committed in ignorance, and that in any case his killing of the
stranger at the place where three roads met was a lawful act of self-
defence. He now regrets his self-blinding. It is not that at the end of his
life Sophocles believes that he has found a simple answer to a question
which had earlier seemed so intractable. Rather, Oedipus’s assertion of
his innocence is Sophocles’ way of telling us that he has other concerns
now than the question of responsibility.
Oedipus at Colonus presents the transformation of Oedipus into a
‘hero’, in the Greek sense of that word – a man who after death is granted
75
a status between that of god and mortal, and who will be honoured by
the living with a cult.
At the beginning of the play he arrives with his faithful companion,
Antigone, at the grove of the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Goddesses’, at
Colonus near Athens, the birthplace of Sophocles himself. It is in and
on the edge of that sacred grove that the whole action of the play is set.
The front of the skene may perhaps have panels painted to represent it,
but probably the central door is never used. Some scholars believe that
it serves as the entrance to the grove, and that it is used by Oedipus and
Antigone when they hide from the Chorus as it enters the orchestra. A
door which leads to an open space would perhaps be less problematic
than in Ajax, where it would be complicated by a change of scene (see
p. 12). But it still cannot be correct; the text makes it clear that they are
already on, and not just in front of, the sacred ground of the grove as
soon as they enter the stage. So the door would lead to nowhere in
particular, which is scarcely credible. They probably hide behind an
artificial bush, and there are certainly at least two stage-rocks, on one of
which Oedipus sits on his arrival. The other, to which he is persuaded
by the Chorus to move, is probably conceived as standing just outside
the grove. The eisodos by which father and daughter enter after their
long wanderings leads to distant Thebes, the other to the immediate
neighbourhood of Colonus and to the city of Athens.
Oedipus is a helpless, blind old man, and he arouses first the horror
of the stranger of Colonus who finds him trespassing on holy ground,
and then the much deeper horror of the Chorus of old men of Colonus
when it arrives and discovers that he is the notorious and polluted
outcast, Oedipus. Yet it has already appeared that this helpless old man
has certain knowledge. The oracle which so long ago predicted that he
would kill his father and marry his mother told him also that he would
one day find rest near such a seat of the Eumenides, who, under another
name, are the Furies, the Erinyes. His body is to be a source of blessing
to those who receive him, and a source of trouble for those who have
cast him out of Thebes. The theme of friends and enemies is clearly
going to be important in this play, as in others. Nothing was said about
this prophecy in Oedipus the King; the oracle has changed to suit the
requirements of the new play.
In one sense, however, the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus mirrors
its predecessor; for the blind and helpless, but spiritually sighted,
Oedipus reminds us of Teiresias in Oedipus the King. There Oedipus’s
vaunted human wisdom had turned out to be ignorance. Now, as this
play proceeds, and as he is eventually granted asylum by King Theseus,
the favourite Athenian hero, it becomes more and more evident that in
this play his knowledge and wisdom are very real. ‘All that I say I shall
say with vision’, he tells the Stranger in the prologue (74). When the
time comes for him to depart, summoned by the thunder, no longer
leaning on Antigone’s arm, he himself, the blind man, leads Theseus and
his daughters from the stage, and we learn from the Messenger how the
gods finally took him to themselves, how he disappeared from sight,
with only Theseus to preserve the secret of his resting-place. His passing
is impressive and mysterious. The whole play is full of religious awe and
sanctity, from the description of the grove of the Eumenides in the
prologue, through the ritual for Oedipus’s atonement for trespassing on
that grove, to the final climactic scene.
On a superficial level the play seems easy to interpret. Oedipus the
King presented the passing of a man from the height of prosperity and
success to ruin. Here the process is reversed, as we watch him pass from
misery and weakness to glory and triumph. Aristotle, in his discussion
of the different types of tragic plot in his Poetics, does not even consider
the possibility of a tragedy in which a good man passes from unhappiness
to happiness. A modern reader too may have doubts about a tragedy
which apparently ends so happily. The structure of the play is also very
different from that of Oedipus the King. There is no Aristotelian ‘reversal’
or ‘recognition’. Its plot seems to be what Aristotle would call ‘simple’, in
that it progresses in a gradual and straightforward manner to an end
that was already foreseen at the beginning. It appears too to be much
looser in construction. There are two scenes which seem to break the
orderly progression to the appointed end, the first (prepared by the
arrival of Antigone’s sister Ismene) in which Creon arrives in the vain
hope of persuading Oedipus to return with him to Thebes, and thus be

a source of blessing to that city; the second in which his son Polyneices
comes, equally vainly, to seek his father’s blessing in the coming struggle
with his brother Eteocles for the throne of Thebes; whichever side
Oedipus supports will win.
The plot has, not surprisingly, been labelled episodic, the kind of
‘simple’ plot which Aristotle seems to have disliked the most. Consider
in particular the moment in which Creon has Antigone carried off as a
hostage by his men, to join Ismene whom, he tells us, he has already
captured, and is prevented only by the arrival of Theseus from laying
hands on Oedipus himself. This is a moment of excitement and violence,
uncommon in Sophoclean drama, but what is its relevance to the plot?
Is it merely, as Waldock says, ‘a gripping interlude’?
And what are we to make of the praise of Athens which pervades the
play? One thinks especially of the famous ode at 668–719, in which the
Chorus pays tribute to all the varied aspects of Attic life. It is one of
the most beautiful of all Sophocles’ songs, and no doubt it would give
much pleasure to his Athenian audience. But what has it to do with the
play? Is it simply the work of an old man, weary after many years of
the Peloponnesian War, and looking back with longing to Athens as it
used to be, or perhaps seeking to bolster his fellow-citizens’ morale at a
critical period in their national fortunes? How too should we regard the
almost equally famous ode at 1211–48, in which the Chorus dwells
upon the miseries of old age? Is the aged Sophocles merely using the
Chorus as the mouthpiece for his own personal complaints?
If we look closely at the construction of the plot we may decide that
it is not after all so simple, and that the ending of the play is not as happy
as it seemed at first sight. Over against the straightforward progression
from misery to glory Sophocles has set another movement, one of
increasing violence and foreboding.
Oedipus, like every Sophoclean hero, has to face a series of attacks
on his resolution. First he has to overcome the horror of the old man of
Colonus who wants to remove him from the sanctuary. Next he has to
persuade the Chorus to let him stay. But the main problem is presented
first by Creon and then by Polyneices, both of them anxious to secure

his person for their own advantage.
The two scenes in which we meet them form a dramatic climax. The
villainous Creon tries three methods, deceit, violence and persuasion,
a pattern that Sophocles has already used in Philoctetes. Oedipus has
little difficulty in disposing of him. He has already learnt from Ismene
(399–400) that Creon’s offer to bring him home is not sincere; he is
to be established outside Theban territory, in a place where he can be
controlled. Theseus goes off with his men, via the road that leads to
Thebes, to rescue the kidnapped girls, and successfully restores them to
their father.
Polyneices will be more difficult. Oedipus does not want to receive
the suppliant at all, but he yields to the persuasion of Antigone, who is
so much softer and more human than himself. Oedipus blames his sons
for his exile. Polyneices, who begins by pitying his father’s helpless state,
now says that he is sorry, but Oedipus is utterly relentless. Instead of
blessing his son, he utters, as he did earlier at 421–7, a terrible curse
against the two brothers, which, as we know, will be fulfilled when they
kill each other in single combat. This is the angry Oedipus whom we
encountered in Oedipus the King. He may now perhaps be using his
anger in the service of the gods, but the fact remains that this Oedipus,
in his towering rage, cursing his own family, is a much less attractive
figure than his own daughter Antigone, who has words of sympathy for
Polyneices: ‘Wretched am I’, she says (1442–3), ‘if I am to be deprived of
you.’ Polyneices reciprocates her love.
According to the Greek moral code one should help one’s friends
and relations (philoi) and harm one’s enemies (echthroi), and we have
seen (pp. 8 and 38–9) that tragedy often arises when the characters
confuse these categories. So here Antigone and Polyneices treat each
other as philoi, and the mutual love between Oedipus and his daughters
is very real. But this serves only to intensify by contrast Oedipus’s bitter
relationship with his sons, whom he treats as echthroi. Nowhere else in
surviving tragedy is such a formal supplication rejected. So Polyneices
goes off, hoping that the curse will not be fulfilled, just as Oedipus in
former days had hoped that Apollo’s oracle would never come to pass.
As the play ends there is tragedy ahead, not only for Polyneices and
Eteocles, but also for the innocent Antigone and Ismene.
It is because there are two contrary movements in the play that we
have such contrasts of mood. Indeed it is these contrasts that provide the
structure of the play. Each is carefully contrived. The first part of the play
builds up to Theseus’ courteous granting of asylum to Oedipus. This is
followed by the Colonus ode, in which the Chorus praises Colonus and
Attica, the land which has given asylum to Oedipus, and which will
prosper as a result. The mood is one of beauty and peace. Then Creon
enters, and from the peace of Athens we are thrown into the turmoil
of Thebes. The kidnapping of the two girls is exciting, but it is not
excitement for its own sake. It is the anger and the violence themselves
that matter, in contrast with the peace that has gone before. The girls are
duly returned to Oedipus, but the joy is only momentary. Theseus brings
news of the arrival of Polyneices, and we prepare for a still angrier scene.
Before he enters the Chorus sings its ode on the miseries of old age. This
too is relevant. The troubles which it describes may soon be over for
Oedipus, but they are not over yet. Its picture of fighting and strife is an
appropriate prelude to the Polyneices scene. That scene is both parallel
with, and an intensification of, the Creon scene. In the latter we saw
Oedipus refusing to help his country, but now we see him cursing his
own family. He has won rest and friendship in Athens, but at the cost of
eternal enmity with his own native city and with his family.
The final contrast of the play is the most dramatic of all. The religious
exaltation and the mysterious splendour of Oedipus’s passing do not
mark the end of the play. What comes last is the lamentation of the
sisters, and their fears for themselves and the future of the family. It is
the story of Antigone that is in our minds as the play comes to its end.
Oedipus’s curse will destroy Antigone, whom he loves, as well as those he
hates. So the movement towards Oedipus’s glory is matched throughout
by a contrary movement that leads towards the further ruination of the
house. Oedipus the King ends on a note of hope, but Oedipus at Colonus
on one of pessimism.
Still, the audience no doubt rejoices that Oedipus has won his rest,
and the gods have granted him recognition as a hero. We may wonder
why they have done so. Is it that they have decided to make amends to
him for his past sufferings, a view perhaps underlying the words of the
Chorus at 1565–7, ‘for though many troubles came upon him without
cause, a just god may lift him up again’? The gods, according to some
critics, having (belatedly?) realized that Oedipus was after all morally
innocent in killing his father and marrying his mother, now do their
best to make it up to him. But we saw on p. 75 that the question of his
moral responsibility is not a major issue in this play. Some scholars have
found in it a general, and pious, theological statement about the justice
of the gods. ‘Oedipus’ individual destiny’, says Bowra, ‘is an example of
the gods’ ultimate justice to men’. But it does not seem to be because
Oedipus is good that the gods reward him. At the beginning of the play
he gives an impression of a humility that was largely lacking in Oedipus
the King: ‘my sufferings and the long passage of time, my companion,
and thirdly my nobility, teach me patience’ (7–8), and indeed he seems
quite unheroic. But his old character soon reasserts itself, and for most
of the play he is as stubborn and bad-tempered as ever. Nor is there any
sign that the gods love Oedipus or show tenderness towards him. As
Kirkwood says, the grace in this play is human grace, the grace which
we see in the new relationship between Oedipus and Theseus, a highly
sympathetic character who may remind us of Odysseus in Ajax. There
is little softness in the gods or in heroes like Oedipus. As so often in
Sophocles’ plays, we may admire the hero, while finding other characters
more attractive, and we ourselves could never hope to emulate him. We
shall not be given the status of ‘heroes’ when we die.
What the gods recognize in Oedipus is, then, not his moral goodness
but his moral endurance, his strength of spirit, and his integrity, the
qualities for which we too, as the audience, admire him. Already in his
earlier plays Sophocles has experimented with different ways of granting
some kind of recognition to his heroes. In Ajax the granting of burial
to the hero marked that recognition. In Antigone the admission of Creon
that he was wrong assures us that Antigone was right to bury her brother.
In Philoctetes, the play closest in date to Oedipus at Colonus, it is the

epiphany of Heracles that promises the hero glory. At the end of Oedipus
the King there is little reassurance for the future, but at least Oedipus has
remained true to himself and has now acquired what he values most,
true knowledge and understanding. Nowhere is this idea more clearly
expressed than in Oedipus at Colonus, where it is in our minds from the
very beginning of the play. Oedipus has maintained his integrity, and at
the end he becomes a ‘hero’ in the Greek sense of that word.
Oedipus, then, has his reward, not indeed the promise of a blessed
existence in paradise, but the promise of a cult and the power to harm
his enemies and help his new friends, a valuable power in the eyes of the
Greeks. This is the culmination of the principal movement of the play.
But Sophocles gives no answer (how could he?) to the problem of why
throughout his life he had to endure such suffering. And, as we have
seen, it is with the other movement that the play ends. We are brought
down from religious mysticism to the world of human concerns, as
we look forward to the continuing tragedy of Oedipus’s family. As
always in Sophocles, the optimism and the pessimism are finely mixed.
But it is clearly an over-simplification to describe Oedipus at Colonus as
a ‘happy’ play.
One final question remains: how does Oedipus make his final exit
from the stage? It was surely not through the door of the skene, as Seale
maintains, the door which, as I have argued earlier (p. 76), is not used at
all in this play. Even if I was wrong to do so, the door could lead only
into the grove of the Eumenides, and there is no suggestion in the play
that that is where Oedipus’s grave lies. Nor can it be that he leaves by
the eisodos that leads to Thebes. The Messenger who reports on his
disappearance at the end of the play makes it clear, especially to an
audience familiar with the topography, that he was last seen still in
Colonus, somewhere near to the setting of the play. So Oedipus departs
by the eisodos that leads to the rest of Colonus and to Athens. The road
to Thebes, which is taken by Antigone and Ismene, as well as Polyneices
and Creon, is the road only to trouble. It is in Attica that Oedipus has
found his rest.
Epilogue
As the younger contemporary of Aeschylus and the older contemporary

of Euripides (who died before him), and as the favourite tragedian of
Aristotle, whose theory of the best kind of tragedy is based largely on
Oedipus the King, Sophocles has always occupied a central position in
the study of Greek tragedy. With a reputation in antiquity for religious
piety, and apparently exempt from the satire inflicted on Aeschylus and
Euripides by fifth-century comedy, he has often, until comparatively
recent times, been praised as a fine example of Classical perfection, a
model of reason and enlightenment, worthy, in his own sphere, to be
compared with the Parthenon and all the other achievements of
Periclean Athens. In books written a few decades ago he appears as a
political and religious conformist, a pious believer in the gods, a man
for whom the highest virtue is sophrosyne (moderation, discipline, self-
control), and who wrote his plays to inculcate in his fellow-citizens that
dullest of all virtues. If all this were true, we should have to characterize
Sophocles as someone who did not have much to say, but who managed
to say it in fine poetry in well-constructed plays. More recently scholarly
attitudes to Sophocles have changed.
Scholars, on the whole, are less eager to look for simple morals or
messages in Greek tragedy in general, and in the particular case of
Sophocles they have come to recognize that the tragic vision which he
presents is a good deal more complex and profound than their
predecessors were willing to acknowledge. It is true that much is said
about sophrosyne in his plays, but it is usually the ordinary, mediocre
people, or the secondary characters, or the chorus, who advocate it,
often in the most platitudinous of forms, and sometimes, as with
83
Menelaus in Ajax, it is a villain who sings its praises. Usually we hear of

sophrosyne in the context of an attempt at persuading the self-centred
hero to change his mind, to compromise, to learn common-sense, to
yield to forces that are stronger than himself or herself. The Sophoclean
hero always refuses to do so, and it is the Sophoclean hero whom
Sophocles forces us to admire.
Some recent critics have warned us against a ‘hero-worshipping’
approach to Sophocles, and yet some at least of his characters (Ajax,
Oedipus, perhaps Philoctetes) were worshipped in Greek hero-cult, as
men who after death were raised to a status between that of man and
god, while Heracles actually became a god. So far, however, as the plays
themselves are concerned, to say that we admire a character should not
imply that Sophocles intends us to worship him, or to set him up as a
role model for us lesser mortals. ‘In ordinary life we seek, so far as lies in
our power, to keep ourselves remote from tragedy, but we also stay
remote from greatness, aspiring to the condition of a Creon and not an
Oedipus’ (Winnington-Ingram). The secondary characters, such as
Ismene or Chrysothemis, or Jocasta, are often more attractive, while the
hero, one feels, would be impossible to live with. In almost every play
the hero, by his very nature, is in one way or another isolated from, and
presents problems for, his society. This was doubtless a matter of
particular concern for the fifth-century Athenian democratic audience,
for whom outstanding men were naturally suspect. In that sense the
plays are political (from time to time attempts have been made to
identify specific Athenian statesmen as the models for Sophocles’
characters, but none have commanded much assent; uncertainty about
the dating of the plays makes such attempts particularly hazardous). Yet
even Athenian society needed and admired its ‘heroes’.
In ancient literary criticism the word ‘hero’ is never used to designate
the principal character of a play. It is, however, hard to deny that,
although no Sophoclean play is a doublet of another, in all of them
there is a character who stands out, to a greater or lesser degree, from
the rest in the way described above. This is most obvious in the two
Oedipus plays, and in Electra, where Orestes does little more than
Epilogue 85
provide the framework for Electra’s tragedy. In these plays the

presentation of the minor characters is all intended to illuminate, by
contrast, that of the principal character. It is less obvious in those plays
in which we find another character, not really minor at all, whom
Sophocles has made almost as interesting as the ‘hero’ – Creon in
Antigone, Deianeira in Women of Trachis, Odysseus in Ajax, in all of
which the characters illuminate one another. This double focus can
affect a play’s construction, and it has led some critics to label such plays
unhelpfully as diptych-plays. From this point of view Philoctetes is the
most complicated play of all, as we watch the interaction of the three
main characters, Philoctetes, Neoptolemus and Odysseus. Some critics
have even been tempted to suppose that Creon, not Antigone, is the
principal character of Antigone, Deianeira of Women of Trachis, and
Neoptolemus of Philoctetes. It is better to recognize that Sophocles
could write tragedies in which there is no one hero, but which are
concerned entirely with relationships between two or more characters.
And yet, in every case one of the two (or three) characters stands out by
behaving in the manner which I have described as that of the typical
Sophoclean hero, while the other behaves differently – more attractively
perhaps, but also less heroically. No play presents a conflict between
two equally characterized heroes. That Odysseus agrees to Ajax’s burial
is a measure of the latter’s greatness, rather than his own, while
Neoptolemus’s decision to take Philoctetes home is a confirmation that
the latter was right to refuse to yield to Odysseus.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the Sophoclean hero suffers
because of his greatness, but one may certainly feel that if he had not
been great he might have avoided his suffering. If Antigone had been
more like Ismene, would it really have mattered? As Aristotle well
understood, the greater and the more prosperous the hero, the more
striking is his fall. Why then does he suffer? Sometimes it is because of
other people’s mistakes or cruelty, sometimes because of his insistence
on doing what he believes to be right, sometimes because of his own
mistakes. He never falls because he is wicked. If one asks why he makes
mistakes, Sophocles’ answer would seem to be that this is just the way
that things are, and there is nothing that we can do about it. Only the
gods are omniscient. Human beings, by virtue of their very humanity,
never attain to full understanding. Sooner or later they are bound to
make a mistake, a mistake which may lead to suffering and even tragedy,
for themselves and other people. They cannot avoid making their
mistakes, and yet they must accept responsibility for the consequences.
The idea that we live in a world of appearances, and often illusion, is
related to the tragic irony which is so characteristic of Sophocles’ plays.
The characters may think that everything is going well, but the audience,
which, like the gods themselves, knows the truth, sees that they are
moving ever closer to disaster. Irony is evident in most of Sophocles’
tragedies, for example in Antigone where Creon, in his aim to be a good
king, ends up by bringing pollution on his city and losing his own wife
and son, and in Women of Trachis, where Deianeira, in her plan to
reignite her husband’s love succeeds only in destroying them both. But
in no play does it so dominate the plot as in Oedipus the King. Oedipus
sets out to save his city, and ruins himself. He curses the unknown
murderers of Laius, and so curses himself. Jocasta tries to reassure her
husband in his anxiety, but instead makes him more worried. The
Corinthian Messenger tries to reassure him by revealing that Polybus
was not his father, and thus inadvertently leads to the full revelation of
the dreadful truth.
Why the world of human beings is so imperfect Sophocles makes no
attempt to explain. How could he? The great problems of human life
are, as Goethe once said, insoluble; if they could be solved, there would
be no tragedy. Sophocles’ reputation for piety has already been
mentioned, and there is certainly no reason to doubt that he believed in
the existence of the gods. But that does not mean that he accepts them
unquestioningly, or that he finds much comfort in their dealings with
mortals. Their ways are inscrutable for human beings. Athena in the
prologue of Ajax maintains that the gods love those who practise
sophrosyne, but we have seen reason to doubt her sincerity, and, in any
case, we have to set such a statement against the bewilderment of
Philoctetes as to why the gods have allowed the best men to die at Troy,
Epilogue 87
while the wicked have survived. Deianeira and Ismene receive no

reward for their sophrosyne. We would all like to live in a world in which
virtuous people (like ourselves) are guaranteed prosperity, happiness
and success, while wicked people (our enemies) meet with their just
deserts. It is this longing that underlies the difficult ode in Oedipus the
King (pp. 49–50), in which the Chorus searches desperately for a
connection between morality and success in life.
Sophocles’ plays contain no simple lessons, and we should beware of
looking for them in the choral odes. The chorus, usually but not always
(Antigone) composed of supporters of the principal character, can be
just as blind and mistaken as everyone else. Its function is to create
atmosphere and mood, often through the medium of beautiful poetry
(as in the Colonus ode in Oedipus at Colonus, or, in the same play, the
ode on the miseries of old age), and to ensure that we ask the right
questions about the tragedy as it unfolds. It guides, then, both our
emotional and our intellectual response to the action.
It would be wrong to suppose that Sophocles’ plays all end on a note
of utter despair. Usually something has been gained. Oedipus has lost
his kingdom, his wife, and his sight, but he has achieved that which he
values most – knowledge and understanding. Ajax has his funeral and
is restored to his status as a hero, while Philoctetes will be restored to
health and will share with Neoptolemus the glory for capturing Troy.
Moreover, in various ways Sophocles almost always leaves us with a
feeling of admiration for the heights to which his heroes can rise. But
even in the plays which may seem to have a ‘happy’ ending the happiness
is by no means unalloyed. In Electra it is not the joy of the recognition
but the horror of the murders that ends the play. In Women of Trachis
we may look forward to the apotheosis of Heracles, but little stress is
laid on it in the final scene. Nor can we ever forget the suffering that has
gone before, or, at least in Oedipus at Colonus, the suffering that is still
to come, and there are too many uncertainties for our comfort. A blend
of optimism and pessimism is characteristic of Sophoclean tragedy.
It is not so long since scholars took it for granted that: (a) Greek
tragedy always aimed at complete closure, that no play ended with loose
ends still hanging, with questions left unanswered; and (b) that the
tragedians thought that, by not explicitly mentioning different versions
of the stories that they were presenting, they could stop their audiences
from thinking about them, and comparing their own versions to
them. In recent years critics have come to realize that the tragedians,
perhaps especially Sophocles, can positively encourage their audiences,
sometimes by a mere hint, to remember that other endings are possible,
and more generally that they can invite them to ask difficult questions
at the end.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Commentaries and translations
All the plays may be found in two volumes in the Loeb Classical Library,
edited, with introduction, Greek text, and English translation, by
H. Lloyd-Jones (1994). For one or several plays consult in the Focus
Classical Library series (Newburyport): Blondell, R., The Theban Plays
(2011); H.M. Roisman, Electra (2008); S.L. Schein, Philoctetes (2003). See
also P. Meineck and P. Woodruff Ajax, Electra, Women of Trachis and
Philoctetes (Indianapolis 2007), and The Theban Plays (Indianapolis
2003). The following individual plays appear in the Aris and Phillips series
(Warminster), with introduction, Greek text and English translation, and
with a commentary based not on the Greek text but on the translation:
Ajax, A.F. Garvie (1998); Antigone, A. Brown (1987); Electra, J. March
(2001); Philoctetes, R.G. Ussher (1990). J. Wilkins and M. Macleod,
Sophocles’ Antigone & Oedipus the King (Bristol Classical Press 1987) is a
commentary based on the English translation of R. Fagles (Penguin 1984).
Books
The following list is highly selective, and is restricted to those titles in

which a knowledge of the language is not essential, most or all of the
Greek being translated into English.
(a) General
Easterling, P.E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge
1997).
Heath, M., The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London 1987).
Kitto, H.D.F., Form and Meaning in Drama: a Study of Six Greek Plays and of
Hamlet (London 1956): especially Ajax, Antigone, Philoctetes.
89
90 Suggestions for Further Reading
Kitto, H.D.F., Greek Tragedy (3rd edn London 1961).

Rehm, R., Greek Tragic Theatre (London 1992).
Roisman, H.M. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy (Malden MA , Oxford
2013).
Rutherford, R.B., Greek Tragic Style (Cambridge 2012).
Scodel, R., An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 2010): especially
Antigone and Oedipus the King.
Taplin, O., Greek Tragedy in Action (London 1978): especially Ajax, Oedipus
the King, Philoctetes.
(b) Sophocles
Bernidaki-Aldous, E.A., Blindness in a Culture of Light: Especially the Case of
Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles (New York, Berne, Frankfurt am Main,
Paris 1990).
Blundell, M.W., Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: a Study in Sophocles
and Greek Ethics (Cambridge 1989).
Budelmann, F., The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication and
Involvement (Cambridge 2000).
Buxton, R.G.A., Sophocles (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics,
Oxford 1995).
Cairns, D., Sophocles: Antigone (Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and
Roman Tragedy, London 2016).
Gellie, G., Sophocles: a Reading (Melbourne 1972).
Goldhill, S., Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford 2012).
Hesk, J., Sophocles: Ajax (Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman
Tragedy, London 2003).
Kelly, A., Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (Duckworth Companions to Greek
and Roman Tragedy, London 2009).
Kirkwood, G.M., A Study of Sophoclean Drama (Cornell 1958).
Knox, B.M.W., The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (California
1964)
Levett, B. Women of Trachis, (Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman
Lloyd, M., Sophocles: Electra (Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman
Musurillo, H., The Light and the Darkness: Studies in the Dramatic Poetry of
Sophocles (Leiden 1967).
Suggestions for Further Reading 91
Roisman, H,M., Sophocles: Philoctetes (Duckworth Companions to Greek and

Roman Tragedy, London 2005).
Scodel, R., Sophocles (Twayne’s World Author Series, Boston 1984).
Seale, D., Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (London and Canberra 1982).
Segal, C., Tragedy and Civilization: an Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge,
MA 1981).
Segal, C., Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA
1995).
Tyrrell, W.B. and Bennett, L.J., Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone (Lanham,
Boulder, New York, Oxford 1998).
Whitman, C.H., Sophocles: a Study of Heroic Humanism (Cambridge, MA
1951).
Winnington-Ingram, R.P., Sophocles: an Interpretation (Cambridge 1980).
Other scholars mentioned by name in the text
Belfiore, E.S., Murder among Friends: Violation of philia in Greek Tragedy

(Oxford 2000).
Bowra, C.M., Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford 1944).
Foley, H.P., ‘Antigone as moral agent’, in M.S. Silk (ed.) Tragedy and the Tragic:
Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford 1996), 49–73.
Garvie, A.F., ‘The Death of Ajax’ in G.W. Most and L. Ozbek (eds) Staging
Ajax’s Suicide (Pisa 2015), 31–46.
Griffith, M., Sophocles: Antigone (Cambridge 1999).
Harrison, S.J., ‘Sophocles and the cult of Philoctetes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies
109 (1989), 173–5.
Heath, M. and OKell, E. ‘Sophocles’ Ajax: expect the unexpected’, Classical
Quarterly 57 (2007), 363–80.
March, J.R., ‘Sophocles’ Ajax: the death and burial of a hero’, Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies 38 (1991–3), 1–36.
Schein, S.L., Sophocles: Philoctetes (Cambridge 2013).
Scullion, S., Three Studies in Athenian Dramaturgy (Stuttgart and Leipzig 1994).
Scullion, S., ‘Camels and gnats: assessing arguments about staging’, in
G.W. Most and L. Ozbek (eds) Staging Ajax’s Suicide (Pisa 2015), 75–107.
Seaford, R., ‘The tragic wedding’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987),
106–30.
92 Suggestions for Further Reading
Taplin, O., ‘Stage directions leading towards the tomb of Aias’, in G.W. Most
and L. Ozbek (eds) Staging Ajax’s Suicide (2015), 181–90.
Vidal-Naquet, P., ‘Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the Ephebeia’, in J.-P. Vernant
and P. Vidal-Naquet Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (English tr.
J. Lloyd, Brighton 1981), 161–79.
Waldock, A.J.A., Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge 1951).
Wheeler, G., ‘Gender and transgression in Sophocles’ Electra’, Classical
Quarterly 53 (2003), 377–88.
Glossary
anapaests in this book the term always describes a sequence consisting

basically of ∪∪– ∪∪–, neither spoken nor sung, but delivered in a kind of
recitative chant, and often (but not exclusively) used by a chorus as it
processes into the orchestra, or as a prelude to a sung choral ode.
andreia courage (literally manliness).
arete excellence, virtue (the highest term of commendation for a Homeric
hero).
echthroi (s) (singular echthros) enemies (generally all those who are not one’s
philoi (s.v.)).
eisodoi (singular eisodos) the two side-passages which led into the orchestra
(s.v.)).
ekkyklema a kind of trolley which could be rolled out through the central
door of the skene carrying a tableau to represent an indoor scene.
ephebe a young Athenian male who was undergoing the rite of passage from
adolescence to adult maturity.
hybris behaviour which is calculated to humiliate another person or a god
and to assert one’s own superiority. It is often misleadingly translated as
‘pride’ or ‘arrogance’. In this book the assumption is that it only secondarily
denotes a state of mind rather than an action, and that it does not
primarily describe the crossing of a line that separates man from god.
iambics in this book the term describes the usual metre of spoken dialogue,
in which each line consists of × – ∪ – three times (with × representing a
syllable which may be either long or short, and with a long syllable often
resolved into two shorts).
mechane a kind of crane which could lift an actor, often playing the part of a
god, over the roof of the skene (s.v.).
orchestra literally ‘the dancing-place’ of a chorus, the term is used to describe
the whole of the circular (some would say rectangular) space occupied by
actors as well as chorus (see skene).
paedagogus the slave who accompanied a boy to and from school.
parodos as used in this book the term describes the entrance anapaests (s.v.)
(in Ajax) and the first song of the chorus.
philoi (singular philos) friends, but including family and all those with whom
one enjoys a positive relationship; often contrasted with echthroi (s.v.).
93
94 Glossary
protagonist the leading actor of the company of three.

skene the wooden building at the back of the orchestra, in which the actors
could change their costumes and their masks. Its central door often
represented the entrance to a palace or temple. Whether it had more than
one door is disputed. The roof could be used for the appearance of a god
or other character. It is unlikely that in this period there was a raised stage
(skene in a different sense) which would be the principal area for the actors’
performance, as opposed to the orchestra (s.v.) of the chorus.
sophrosyne (adjective sophron) moderation, discipline, self-control, modesty,
good behaviour, chastity (depending on context).
Index
Achelous, 20, 24, 25 fate, 22, 43, 48–51, 67, 73

Achilles, 7, 13, 16, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71 friends and enemies, 8–10, 15–16, 33,
actors, doubling of roles, 15, 27 38, 60, 72, 76, 79
number of, 2, 13 funerals, see burial
Aeschylus, 19, 23–4, 61–2, 83; see also Furies, 57, 62, 76
Furies
alternation, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23 gods, 20, 32, 35–7, 67, 73, 77, 81, 86
apotheosis, see hero-cult and Apollo, 41, 42, 46–51, 54, 58, 61–2,
apotheosis 80
Aristotle, 41, 77–8, 83, 85 Athena, 7, 8–9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 86
Athens, 76, 78, 80, 82–3; see also Eros (love), 19, 23–4, 34, 39
democracy Zeus, 21, 22, 27, 29, 72
blindness and delusion, 8, 29, 37, 43–5, hero cult and apotheosis, 8, 29, 73,
50–1, 58, 59, 75–7, 86–7 75–6, 81–2, 84
burial and funeral, 13–16, 28–9, 31–9, heroes, 19, 28, 36, 56, 84–6
73, 87 rehabilitation of, 8–9, 13–14, 16, 25,
73, 81–2, 87
Chorus, departure of, 11 isolation of, 7, 11–12, 38, 54, 56,
ideas of odes, 2, 46, 49–50 59–60, 66, 84
mood of odes, 11, 14, 26, 32, 78 homecoming, see return-poetry
relationship with characters, 2, 32, Homer, 7, 8, 48, 53, 66; see also return-
38, 56, 64, 67, 69 poetry
contrast of mood, 22–3, 55, 59, 62, 80; honour and disgrace, 7–10, 13, 33
see also Chorus, mood of odes hybris, 9, 14–15, 49
Hydra, 25, 27, 29
delusion, see blindness
democracy, 7, 32, 34, 84 irony, 16, 28, 37, 43, 45, 56, 59–60, 68,
Demosthenes, 32 86
deus ex machina, 64, 72
diptych-plays, 13, 19, 36, 85 laughter, 8–9, 14, 65, 67, 72
disgrace, see honour and disgrace
marriage, 20–3, 26–8, 34–5, 41–2, 48
endings and closure, 16–17, 29, 61–2, minor characters, 10, 20, 35, 45, 51, 56,
73, 77–8, 82, 86–8; see also 83–5
pessimism and optimism morals of plays, 8–9, 11, 49–50, 83, 87
ephebes, 54, 67
Euripides, 20, 53, 61–2, 72; see also Nessus, 25–9
Furies
excellence, 13, 15–16, 26, 66 optimism, see pessimism
95
96 Index
oracles and prophecy, 11, 20–1, 27–8, staging, door (significant use of), 2, 8,
33, 41–3, 45–9, 51, 54, 62, 63–9, 12, 31, 54–6, 59, 61, 65, 76, 82
71–2, 76–7, 80 eisodos(-oi) (significant use of), 2, 8,
11, 16–17, 31–2, 42, 46–7, 55, 76,
persuasion, 63–4, 68–72, 79 82
pessimism and optimism, 16, 22, 32, ekkyklema, 2, 12, 35, 65
51, 80, 82, 87 mechane, 72
pity, see sympathy screen, 12, 65
politics, 32, 34–5, 39, 44, 83–4; see also suicide, 7, 9–14, 17, 27, 33, 36, 47, 50,
democracy 65, 70
prophecy, see oracles supplication, 8, 42, 79
sympathy, 7, 9, 23–4, 32, 38, 66–7, 69,
recognition-scene, 53–5, 60, 62 71, 79
return-poetry, 19, 25
baths in, 24–5 too late motif, 11, 26, 27, 33, 36
clothes in, 24–7 tyranny, 32, 45
waiting woman in, 19, 53
reversal of intention, 19, 21, 24, 26–7, vengeance, 7–8, 53–4, 56
45–7, 86
responsibility, 27–9, 48–50, 75, 81, waiting, 13, 19–20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 53, 55,
85–6 58
women, 10, 26–8, 31, 35, 60
scene, change of, 12
sophrosyne, 8–11, 14–15, 23, 25, 35, 45, yearning, 21, 25–6, 49
83–4, 86–7 yielding, 10, 15, 33, 36, 57, 71–2, 79,
Sphinx, 41–2, 44–5, 48 84–5
97
98
99
100
101
102

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The Plays of Sophocles

Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd, Paul Cartledge

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First edition published 2005

© A.F. Garvie, 2016

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: Classical World

Cover image © INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Suggestions for Further Reading 89

The ﬁrst edition of this book appeared in 2005. I am grateful to

The format of this book is based largely on that of James Morwood’s

eisodos is used by a character is sometimes dramatically signiﬁcant, as is

496–495 Birth of Sophocles

But it then becomes impossible to explain why he does in fact commit

Equally controversial is the question of whether Ajax commits

invitation to the audience to join imaginatively and emotionally in the

original audience (perhaps one should say ‘many in the original

Like Aeschylus’ Persians and Agamemnon, and a small group of other

certainly displays a structural unity. From the very beginning we look

forebodings which centre on Deianeira’s marriage, forebodings which

alternations in human aﬀairs. Given the nature of Greek tragedy, unhappy

there is to be no rehabilitation; at the end of the play he will leave the

Sophocles says nothing about this. He leaves us to speculate on their

already by the end of the prologue she is treating Ismene as an enemy.

For at least two reasons, therefore, the original audience would be

lyric lamentation at the end he is emotionally shattered. He thinks that

Ismene, on the other hand, declares (99), according to the best

When, therefore, he issues his public proclamation against the ‘unknown’

happens. The countryman turns out, quite unexpectedly, to be a

third character to urge Oedipus to abandon his investigation. But

expresses no scruples at the thought that he is about to kill his mother,

Without going as far as Wheeler, who misinterprets Electra’s great

Philoctetes is a tragedy about the eﬀect of man’s cruelty on man. On

by Odysseus, to deceive Philoctetes into going on board his ship, on the

Philoctetes lives. It is dramatically important. Many Sophoclean heroes

Neoptolemus says nothing about persuasion here. The important point

awareness that persuasion, not violence, is required; he still hopes that

It may be simply that the original audience, familiar with the

hope of persuading Oedipus to return with him to Thebes, and thus be

ﬁrst by Creon and then by Polyneices, both of them anxious to secure

In Philoctetes, the play closest in date to Oedipus at Colonus, it is the

As the younger contemporary of Aeschylus and the older contemporary

Menelaus in Ajax, it is a villain who sings its praises. Usually we hear of

provide the framework for Electra’s tragedy. In these plays the

while the wicked have survived. Deianeira and Ismene receive no

Commentaries and translations

The following list is highly selective, and is restricted to those titles in

Kitto, H.D.F., Greek Tragedy (3rd edn London 1961).

Roisman, H,M., Sophocles: Philoctetes (Duckworth Companions to Greek and

Other scholars mentioned by name in the text

Belﬁore, E.S., Murder among Friends: Violation of philia in Greek Tragedy

anapaests in this book the term always describes a sequence consisting

protagonist the leading actor of the company of three.

Achelous, 20, 24, 25 fate, 22, 43, 48–51, 67, 73

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