The Play of Sophocles
The Play of Sophocles
The Play of Sophocles
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Classical World Series
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The Plays of Sophocles, A. F. Garvie
Political Life in the City of Rome, J. R. Patterson
Religion and the Greeks, Robert Garland
Religion and the Romans, Ken Dowden
Roman Architecture, Martin Thorpe
The Roman Army, David Breeze
Roman Britain, S. J. Hill and S. Ireland
Roman Egypt, Livia Capponi
Roman Frontiers in Britain, David Breeze
The Roman Poetry of Love, Efi Spentzou
Slavery in Classical Greece, N. Fisher
Spectacle in the Roman World, Hazel Dodge
Studying Roman Law, Paul du Plessis
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The Plays of Sophocles
Second Edition
A.F. Garvie
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
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Bloomsbury Academic
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
A.F. Garvie has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
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ISBN : PB : 978-1-47423-335-4
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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
vii
Preface
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
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
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
8 The Plays of Sophocles
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
10 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
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
16 The Plays of Sophocles
19
20 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
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
28 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
32 The Plays of Sophocles
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
34 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
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
42 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
46 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
50 The Plays of Sophocles
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
54 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
58 The Plays of Sophocles
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
60 The Plays of Sophocles
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).
62 The Plays of Sophocles
63
64 The Plays of Sophocles
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
66 The Plays of Sophocles
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,
68 The Plays of Sophocles
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
70 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
76 The Plays of Sophocles
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
Oedipus at Colonus 77
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
78 The Plays of Sophocles
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.
Oedipus at Colonus 81
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.
82 The Plays of Sophocles
83
84 The Plays of Sophocles
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
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
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
(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
(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
Tragedy, London 2004).
Lloyd, M., Sophocles: Electra (Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman
Tragedy, London 2005).
Musurillo, H., The Light and the Darkness: Studies in the Dramatic Poetry of
Sophocles (Leiden 1967).
Suggestions for Further Reading 91
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
93
94 Glossary
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
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100
101
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