The Sophoclean Drama

Scope: This lecture continues our examination of Sophocles, the second great tragedian. We summarize what we know about
his life, discuss his possible contributions to stagecraft, then examine the often-made statement that Sophocles’s
heroes are notable for their extreme isolation.
Outline
I. Sophocles, the second of the three great tragedians, was born in 496 B.C. and died in 406. We know more about his life
than we do about Aeschylus’s, though the reliability of some of the details is questionable.
A. He held several important positions in Athenian political life.
1. He was one of the Treasurers of Athena in 443–442.
2. He was a general (one of the others was Pericles) in 441/440. At this time, the island of Samos was rebelling against
Athenian authority.
3. He was one of ten advisers appointed to deal with Athens’s crisis after the defeat of her expedition against Sicily in
413.
B. Sophocles was also active in religious life.
1. He was a priest of a local hero, Halon.
2. When the cult of the healing god Asclepius was introduced into Athens, Sophocles housed the snake that symbolized
the god in his own house while the god’s sanctuary was being constructed.
3. Because of his service to Asclepius, Sophocles was revered as a hero after his death (that is, a spirit who could help
the living). He received sacrifices under the new name “Dexion,” the Receiver.
C. Our sources also contain references to his friendships with various other important literary figures of fifth-century
Athens.
II. Sophocles first competed at the City Dionysia in 468 B.C. and last entered the competition in 406, shortly before his
death. During this long career, he wrote 123 plays.
A. Sophocles won at least twenty victories and perhaps more. Unfortunately, only seven of his plays have survived.
1. This lack of extant work is even more of a handicap in our assessment of Sophocles than it is in our assessment of
Aeschylus.
2. Because Sophocles wrote more plays than Aeschylus, we have an even smaller percentage of his work.
3. Most of the plays cannot be securely dated, which means that making any statements at all about the development of
Sophocles’s style or about contemporary events is difficult.
B. Sophocles seems to have abandoned the trilogy form and, instead, entered plays that were only loosely, if at all,
connected to one another.
1. A common mistaken assumption is that Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus were presented at one
time as a unified trilogy.
2. In fact, these plays were written a good many years apart.
3. Because he did not write unified trilogies, we are on firmer ground discussing Sophocles’s plays as self-contained
works than we were with Aeschylus.
C. According to Aristotle, Sophocles was responsible for two very important innovations.
1. He introduced the third actor, who became standard in all later tragedy.
2. He is also credited with inventing skenographia.
3. Whatever this was, it and the introduction of the third actor are evidence that the possibilities for significant
innovation still existed when Sophocles began writing.

III. Almost anyone who has ever read them will agree that Sophocles’s plays are very different from Aeschylus’s. The
difference has often been summed up by saying that Sophocles concentrates attention on the individual, typically
characterized by a kind of heroic or splendid isolation. In short, as the great critic Bernard Knox put it, Sophocles
invented the “tragic hero.”
A. Of Sophocles’s seven plays, only one is named for its chorus; the rest take their names from their
protagonists. Knox points out that the plots of these six plays all fit a basic pattern.
1. The circumstances differ, but in each case, the main character is faced with a crisis in which disaster can only be
averted by a compromise that, in the protagonist’s view, would constitute betrayal of something that he or she holds
to be supremely important.
2. The protagonist refuses to compromise, despite being urged to by persuasive speeches, threats, actual violence, or all
three.
3. The end result is usually his or her destruction.
B. In all six of these plays, the protagonist is referred to as deinos, a Greek word that means “terrible, wondrous,
strange.”
1. The protagonists are often paired with another character who is more normal, more like an everyday person.
2. This second character often pleads with the protagonist to yield and is harshly rebuffed.
3. These protagonists are indeed deinos: they are both repellent and admirable.
C. The isolated protagonist is not the only important characteristic of Sophocles’s tragedies; equally obvious is the
almost total absence of the gods.
1. With the exception of Athena in Ajax, the gods do not appear as characters in Sophocles’s plays.
2. Instead, the characters must try to determine the will of the gods through omens, prophecies, and oracles, which are
often ambiguous or unclear.
3. Clearly, this situation serves to underscore the isolation of the characters.
IV. Most scholars think that Ajax is Sophocles’s earliest extant play, probably dating to some time in the 440s. In it,
Sophocles dramatizes the story of Ajax’s suicide.
A. The background story is quite simple.
1. Ajax was the second greatest Greek warrior in the Trojan War; the only greater fighter was Achilles.
2. After Achilles’s death, the Greeks voted to decide who should be awarded his armor.
3. The two contestants were Ajax and Odysseus.
4. The armor was awarded to Odysseus, and Ajax committed suicide.
B. Sophocles focuses on Ajax’s reaction to the loss of the armor.
1. In Sophocles’s treatment, Ajax is driven mad by the goddess Athena.
2. In his madness, he slaughters sheep, thinking they are his fellow Greek soldiers, and captures other sheep.
V. Ajax is unique among Sophocles’s surviving plays in featuring a goddess, Athena, as a character.
A. As the play opens, Athena tells Odysseus that it is she who drove Ajax mad.
B. Athena’s role as Odysseus’s protector and patron derives from the Odyssey.
C. However, there seems to be no precedent for her driving Ajax mad elsewhere.
D. Furthermore, she brings Ajax out of his tent while he is still mad, so that she may mock him in front of Odysseus and
goad him into boasting of his prowess.
E. The one appearance of an Olympian deity in Sophocles’s extant plays is a profoundly disturbing one.
VI. When Ajax returns to his senses, he is overcome with shame at his folly in killing the sheep. Despite the pleas of his
wife, Tecmessa, he decides to kill himself.
A. It is noteworthy that neither he nor anyone else ever calls into question his desire to murder all his fellow soldiers
over Achilles’s armor.
1. In other versions of Ajax’s story, he did not go mad but killed himself immediately after the contest over the armor,
out of shame at losing to Odysseus.
2. In Sophocles’s play, however, the main impetus for Ajax’s shame is that he failed in his attempt at revenge and
killed only animals; shame at losing the armor is secondary.

B. His character is marked by fierceness and emotional coldness; he is unresponsive to the pleas of his wife that he
should think of her and their little son and not kill himself.
1. Ajax clearly operates by the Homeric code of action in which insults require bloody vengeance and death is preferable
to shame.
2. In contrast, Odysseus adheres to a more modern worldview that allows for compromise.
3. Odysseus feels pity for Ajax when Athena displays him, even though Ajax is his enemy.
4. Thus, Athena, though Odysseus’s patron, shares her Homeric moral framework (in which rejoicing over an enemy’s
shame and mocking him are perfectly acceptable) with Ajax.
C. Although Ajax remains a troubling figure to modern audiences, in the play, he is spoken of with love and reverence,
not only by his wife but also by the chorus and by his brother Teucer.
1. These characters see him as their protector and their strength.
2. Remember the significance of Salamis (480 B.C.) for the Greek victory in the Persian Wars; it was reported that Ajax,
who was revered as a hero on Salamis, had helped win that victory.
3. Part of his protective power as a hero was derived from the fact that he had lived in the age of the Trojan War.
4. The very disjunction that troubles modern audiences between the heroic code of Ajax and the more modern code of
Odysseus may have endowed Ajax with a kind of archaic grandeur in the original audience’s eyes.
D. Ajax kills himself little more than halfway through the play, after making a long and deceptive speech to Tecmessa
and the chorus that implies that he will not commit suicide. The rest of the play is taken up with the question of
whether or not to bury him honorably.
VII. For the theatre historian, the most fascinating thing about Ajax is its stagecraft.
A. When Ajax recovers his senses, he is first heard groaning from inside the skene. Then he is revealed, almost definitely
on the ekkyklema.
B. This play also includes one of the most surprising and controversial scenes in all extant tragedy: Ajax’s suicide.
1. The suicide is introduced by a change of scene, analogous to the one in Eumenides.
2. Ajax clearly describes what he is doing; he says that he plants his sword in the ground, then falls on it.
3. How this action would have been managed is unclear.
4. The situation is even more complicated when we realize that his body must be visible throughout the second half of
the playbut three speaking actors are also needed in the rest of the play, so the actor playing Ajax cannot have
remained “dead” in the orchestra.
C. We will probably never know exactly how Sophocles managed Ajax’s suicide, the presence of the body, and the
absence of the actor. However, the text has some clues that may be helpful.
1. The chorus and Tecmessa both look for Ajax after his suicide. The fact that they do not immediately find him may
indicate that his body is somehow obscured.
2. When Tecmessa finds him, she says that he is behind a copse or thicket. It is possible that there was some indication
of bushes, behind which the actor playing Ajax fell.
3. If the body was indeed only partially visible, or not visible at all, the actor may have slipped away and a dummy (or a
silent actor) may have been substituted.
4. Another possibility is that the chorus’s dancing would have provided enough screening for the actor to leave the
orchestra, allowing a substitution to be made.
D. One theory frequently put forward is that Ajax killed himself on the ekkyklema, which would be withdrawn and
then reappear for Tecmessa to discover. Some critics demur. In any case, Ajax should remind us that there is a great
deal we do not know about the staging of Greek tragedy and that some often-repeated statements, such as that
violence always happens offstage, are simply incorrect.