D. G. Beer - Sophocles and The Tragedy of Athenian Democracy (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies - Lives of The Theatre) - Praeger (2004)

SOPHOCLES AND
THE TRAGEDY OF
ATHENIAN
DEMOCRACY
JOSH BEER
PRAEGER
Sophocles and the Tragedy
of Athenian Democracy
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SOPHOCLES AND THE
TRAGEDY OF
ATHENIAN
DEMOCRACY
JOSH BEER
Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 105

LIVES OF THE THEATRE
SIMON WILLIAMS and CHRISTOPHER INNES, Series Advisers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beer, Josh
Sophocles and the tragedy of Athenian democracy / Josh Beer.
p. cm.—(Contributions in drama and theatre studies, ISSN 0163–3821 ; no. 105.
Lives of the theatre)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–313–28946–8 (alk. paper)
1. Sophocles—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Political plays, Greek—History and
criticism. 3. Sophocles—Homes and haunts—Greece—Athens. 4. Politics and
literature—Greece—Athens. 5. Sophocles—Political and social views. 6. Mythology,
Greek, in literature. 7. Theater—Greece—Athens. 8. Democracy in literature.
9. Tragedy. I. Title. II. Contributions in drama and theatre studies ; no. 105.
III. Contributions in drama and theatre studies. Lives of the theatre.
PA4417.B37 2004
882⬘.01—dc28 2003060423
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2004 by Josh Beer
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003060423
ISBN: 0–313–28946–8
ISSN: 0163–3821
First published in 2004
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Contents
Series Foreword vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xi
Chronology xiii
1. Tragedy, Athens, and the Greek Cultural Mosaic 1
2. Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings 19
3. Sophocles’ Theatre 31
4. Ajax 49
5. Antigone 67
6. Trachiniae 81
7. Oedipus Rex 97
8. Electra 115
9. Philoctetes 135
10. Oedipus at Colonus 153
Conclusion 171
Glossary of Terms 173
Select Bibliography 177
Index 183
Series Foreword
Lives of the Theatre is designed to provide scholarly introductions to

important periods and movements in the history of world theatre from the
earliest instances of recorded performance through to the twentieth cen-
tury, viewing the theatre consistently through the lives of representative
theatrical practitioners. Although many of the volumes will be centered on
playwrights, other important theatre people, such as actors and directors,
will also be prominent in the series. The subjects have been chosen not
simply for their individual importance, but because their lives in the the-
atre can well serve to provide a major perspective on the theatrical trends
of their eras. They are, therefore, either representative of their time, figures
whom their contemporaries recognized as vital presences in the theatre, or
people whose work was to have a fundamental influence on the develop-
ment of theatre, not only in their lifetimes but after their deaths as well.
Although the discussion of verbal and written scripts will inevitably be a
central concern in any volume that is about an artist who wrote for the the-
atre, these scripts will always be considered in their function as a basis for
performance.
The rubric Lives of the Theatre is therefore intended to suggest biogra-
phies of people who created theatre as an institution and as a medium of
performance as well as the life of the theatre itself. This dual focus will be
illustrated through the titles of the individual volumes, such as Christo-
pher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy, George Bernard Shaw and
the Socialist Theatre, and Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre, to name
just a few. At the same time, although the focus of each volume will be dif-
ferent, depending on the particular subject, appropriate emphasis will be
given to the cultural and political context within which the theatre of any
viii Series Foreword
given time is set. Theatre itself can be seen to have a palpable effect on the
social world around it, because it reflects the life of its time and helps to
form that life by feeding it images, epitomes, and alternative versions of
itself. Hence, we hope that this series will also contribute to an under-
standing of the broader social life of the period in which the theatre that is
the subject of each volume was a part.
Lives of the Theatre grew out of an idea that Josh Beer put to Christo-
pher Innes and Peter Arnott. Sadly, Peter Arnott did not live to see the inau-
guration of the series. Simon Williams kindly agreed to replace him as one
of the series editors and has played a full part in its preparation. In com-
memoration, the editors wish to acknowledge Peter’s own rich contribution
to the life of the theatre.
Josh Beer
Christopher Innes
Simon Williams
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank Christopher Innes and Simon Williams, the coeditors
of the Lives of the Theatre, for their unflagging patience as well as their
suggestions for improving this manuscript. I have used the Greek text of
Sophocles’ Plays and Fragments, edited and translated by Sir Hugh Lloyd-
Jones in three volumes in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Sophocles
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994–96). Except for one passage of Thucydides in
chapter 8, where I have used the well-known translation of R. Crawley,
first published in 1876, the translations in the book are my own. They are
intended purely to be functional without any pretensions to literary merit.
In chapter 7, I have incorporated some material I originally used in an arti-
cle titled “The Riddle of the Sphinx and the Staging of Oedipus Rex,”
Essays in Theatre 8 (1990): 105–20. I should like to thank the editors for
permission to use this material.
I have a number of other acknowledgments. Three friends—Victor
Valentine, Steve Kupfer, and Bill McGrahan—kindly read parts of the
manuscript and suggested improvements where they did not think my text
was easily comprehensible to the general reader. Mrs. Catherine Andreadis,
with great patience, helped to make the manuscript ready for the publisher.
I also owe acknowledgments to the Office of the Dean of Arts and Social
Sciences and the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies at Carleton Uni-
versity, Ottawa, Canada, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for subventions toward the research and pub-
lication of this book.
There is one other acknowledgment to be made of a different order.
Before his death in 1990, Peter Arnott and I discussed matters related
to Greek tragedy on many occasions. I still look at his marionette perfor-
x Acknowledgments
mance of Euripides’ Bacchae on video to remind myself that the characters

of Greek tragedies were masks, something admirably suggested by his
marionettes. There is much in this book that I know Peter would have dis-
agreed with, but it has been written in homage to someone who was a man
of the theatre in every sense. Finally, I dedicate the book to Barnaby and
Carmel.
[James Barrett’s Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek
Tragedy, Berkeley, Calif. (2002), Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, eds., Greek
and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge (2002),
and Rush Rehm’s The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek
Tragedy, Princeton, N.J. (2002), reached me after this book had gone to
press. In conformity with The Lives of the Theatre series, I have not bur-
dened the text with an overabundance of endnotes. My debts to many
scholars are too numerous to acknowledge personally. I hope that the bib-
liography serves as a token of my indebtedness.]
Introduction
Although there are dissenters, there has been an increasing consensus that
the Greek tragic theatre played an important role in the political life of
Athenian democracy in the fifth century. The way in which the theatre was
funded and its institutional context within the life of Athenian democracy
point to its public importance. Soon after the democratic reforms of Cleis-
thenes at the end of the sixth century, the Athenians, at the beginning of the
fifth century, immediately gave recognition to the theatre by erecting a
large, permanent, public building for dramatic and choral performances on
the southeast slope of the Acropolis. This space provided a larger gather-
ing place for citizens to meet than did all other public places in Athens
except the agora, which was not a building. The theatre itself could hold
considerably more people than could the area on the hill called the Pnyx
where the ecclesia, the main political assembly of the Athenians, met.
At first, only tragedies, satyr plays, and dithyrambs—which were orga-
nized around the new tribes of the polis created by Cleisthenes’ democratic
reforms—were performed in this theatre. Comedy was introduced later, in
486. Because the satyr play became subsidiary to tragedy, tragedy pro-
vided the main dramatic fare. The emotional dangers inherent in tragedy
were soon realized, for in the late 490s, the playwright Phrynichus put on
his Capture of Miletus, which so upset the Athenians that he was heavily
fined and all future performances of the tragedy were banned. Tragedy as
a theatrical art form intended for a large audience of citizens survived that
crisis. It is difficult to imagine, however, that something as potentially sub-
versive as tragedy—in which there is created an imaginary space within a
public place, where different models of human behavior and conflict are
presented for a mass audience to witness—would have been allowed to
xii Introduction
continue to flourish under tyrants or oligarchs in the same way as it did

under the democracy, and been given public subsidy to boot. The new
democracy, however, needed a means for the presentation of just such
problems and conflicts, so that its citizens might bring an informed, criti-
cal response to the kinds of political and moral dilemmas that were thrown
up regularly in its various assemblies and law courts. Tragedy helped to
provide that education.
Moreover, through the institution known as the choregia—by which a
large part of the funding of the theatrical activities was placed on the very
rich as a public service—wealthy elites, mainly aristocrats whose families
had provided the leaders and rulers of the predemocratic polis, were given
the means to foster their political ambitions and/or desires for public honor
through legally instituted contests of public rivalry. This institution helped
to offer a less dangerous outlet to these aristocratic rivalries than had
occurred in the previous century. In the first part of the fifth century, at
least, the Athenians were powerfully aware of the threat of a return to
tyranny that had been the upshot of aristocratic rivalries in the past.
At approximately the same time as there has been a growing recognition
of tragedy as a political art form, there has been an increasing interest in
the performative aspects of tragedy. The two interests, however, have not
always gone hand in hand. Because this book is primarily aimed at stu-
dents of theatre, I have tried, insofar as a general introduction permits, to
discuss some of the more significant problems of staging. In particular, I
have redefined the notion of skenographia and have always tried to keep in
mind that the Greek theatre was a theatre of masks. Much of what I have
to say on these matters will, no doubt, seem highly contentious. I can only
hope that my discussion provokes debate.
Sophocles provides the main focus of this volume. Many may feel that a
volume on Aeschylus or Euripides is equally deserving in a series of vol-
umes entitled Lives of the Theatre. In choosing Sophocles, I did not suc-
cumb merely to personal preference. Rather, I believed that, although we
know few details of his personal life, by using Sophocles as the biograph-
ical focus, I could cover many of the salient details of the great age of
Greek tragedy, because his dramatic career overlapped, in important ways,
with that of both Aeschylus and Euripides. All dates are B.C.E., unless oth-
erwise noted.
Chronology
Date Sophocles Cultural Events Political Events

c. 650? Iliad and Odyssey
594 Solon’s Reforms
c. 546 Tyranny of
Pisistratus begins
c. 534 Traditional date of
first performance of
tragedy by Thespis
527 Death of Pisistratus.
Rule of Hippias and
Hipparchus begins
525? Birth of Aeschylus
514 Conspiracy of
Harmodius and
Aristogiton.
Assassination of
Hipparchus
510 Expulsion of
Hippias and end of
tyranny
508–507 Cleisthenes’
democratic reforms
507–506? Reorganization of
City Dionysia?
xiv Chronology
c. 500 Construction of first

theatre of Dionysus
on southeast slope of
Acropolis. Aeschylus’
dramatic career begins
c. 499 “Ionian” revolt
begins
c. 498 Burning of Sardis
c. 496 Birth of Sophocles
c. 495 Birth of Pericles
494 Persian capture of
Miletus
c. 492? Production of Archonship of
Phrynichus’ Capture Themistocles
of Miletus
490 Eretria sacked.
Battle of Marathon
487–486 Comedies introduced Archons appointed
at Dionysia by lot
485 Death of Darius.
Xerxes becomes
Persian king
484 First victory of
Aeschylus at Dionysia
480 Persian invasion.
Athens abandoned.
Battles of
Thermopylae and
Salamis
479 Battles of Plataea
and Mycale. “Ioni-
ans” revolt from
Persia
478–477 Formation of Con-
federacy of Delos.
Rise of Cimon at
Athens
476 Phrynichus’ Phoenician
Women performed.
Themistocles choregus
Chronology xv
472 Aeschylus wins tragic

prize with Persians.
Pericles choregus
471? Ostracism of
Themistocles
469 Birth of Socrates
468 Sophocles’ first entry at
Dionysia? Defeats
Aeschylus
467 Aeschylus victorious
at Dionysia with
Theban Trilogy, Laius,
Oedipus, Seven
against Thebes
464 Revolt of Spartan
helots
463 Aeschylus’ victory Cimon goes to aid
with Suppliants? Spartans
Sophocles wins
second prize
463–461 Ephialtes’ demo-
cratic reforms at
Athens. Areopagus
deprived of political
powers. Athens
allies herself with
Argos. Ephialtes
assassinated. Cimon
ostracized. Influence
of Pericles begins
458 Aeschylus victorious
with Oresteia
456 Death of Aeschylus
455 Euripides competes at
Dionysia for the
first time
454 Treasury of Confed-
eracy of Delos
moved to Athens
451 Periclean citizenship
law at Athens
xvi Chronology
449–440? Production of Ajax and Prize introduced Peace made

of Trachiniae for lead tragic with Persia
(dates unknown) actors
447 Sophocles victorious Building of Parthenon
at Dionysia begins
(plays unknown)
445 Birth of Aristophanes? Thirty Years’ Peace
between Athens and
Sparta
445–438? Production of Antigone
(date of 441 is dubious).
Wins first prize
443–442 Treasurer of Athena Ostracism of
Thucydides (not the
historian)
441–440 Strategos with Pericles? Euripides’ first tragic Revolt of Samos
victory (plays unknown)
438 Sophocles wins victory Alcestis, first extant
at Dionysia play of Euripides
(plays unknown)
c. 435–425 Oedipus Rex?
(Production date
unknown.) Second prize
431 Sophocles wins second Production of Beginning of
prize at Dionysia Euripides’ Medea Peloponnesian War
and Philoctetes.
Gains third prize.
Victory of Euphorion,
son of Aeschylus
429? Birth of Plato
428 Euripides wins first Revolt of Mytilene
prize at Dionysia
with Hippolytus
427 Surrender of
Mytilene
425 Acharnians, first
extant comedy of
Aristophanes
421 Truce in Pelopon-
nesian War (Peace of
Nicias)
c. 420? Euripides’ Electra
Chronology xvii
416 Destruction of
Melos
415 Trojan Women of Beginning of
Euripides (second Sicilian expedition.
prize) Alcibiades deserts to
Sparta
413 Disaster of Atheni-
ans in Sicily
413–412 Sophocles as Proboulos Euripides’ Helen Athenian allies
revolt
411 Sophocles’ Electra? Establishment of
Committee of 400.
Later overthrown
410 Democracy restored
409 Sophocles’ victory
with Philoctetes
408 Euripides’ Orestes
407 Alcibiades returns to
Athens
407–406 Death of Euripides
406 Death of Sophocles Battle of Arginusae
(either 406 or 405) (generals tried on
bloc)
405 Posthumous Battle of
production of Aegospotami
Euripides’ Bacchae?
Aristophanes’ Frogs,
first prize at Lenaea
405–404 Blockade of Athens
404 Surrender of Athens
to Spartan Lysander.
Tyranny of Thirty
set up
403 Defeat of Thirty.
Restoration of
democracy
401 Posthumous victory
of Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus
399 Trial and death of
Socrates
Chapter 1
Tragedy, Athens, and the

Greek Cultural Mosaic
What is commonly known as Greek tragedy is sometimes more precisely

called Athenian or Attic tragedy, because tragedy as we usually understand
the term was an Athenian invention. The three major tragic playwrights
were all Athenians who composed their plays, with few exceptions, for
production in Athens in the fifth century. The fifth century witnessed both
the flowering of Athenian democracy and the rise and fall of the Athenian
empire. However, even when their political power was at its height, the
Athenians did not achieve complete mastery over the Greek world,
because there were many poleis that never succumbed to their sway and
there was always the countervailing power of the Spartans and the Pelo-
ponnesian League. The Athenian empire—which was founded on, and
largely maintained by, the strength of the Athenian fleet—was acquired in
the years following the unsuccessful Persian invasion of Greece in 481–79.
This empire reached its peak in the middle decades of the century, but in
431, the Athenians became embroiled with the Spartans and their allies in
the long and exhausting Peloponnesian War that led finally to Athens’
defeat and the loss of her empire in 404.
The years between 479 and 404 are central to our study. All the surviv-
ing tragedies, with the possible exception of Rhesus—whose Euripidean
authorship is seriously debatable—fall within these years, as do the dra-
matic careers of Sophocles and Euripides. Although Aeschylus’ dramatic
career had begun earlier, in about 500, it seems more than simple chance
that all his extant works were composed in the decades following the
expulsion of the Persians. In fact, it could well be argued that the demo-
cratic reforms that had been instituted by Cleisthenes at Athens in 508 and
the major role that the Athenians had played in the liberation of Greece
2 Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy
from the Persians served as the catalyst for the maturing of tragedy in the
hands of Aeschylus and Sophocles. At the very least, it is symbolically
significant that the plot of the earliest surviving tragedy, Aeschylus’ Per-
sians, produced in 472, is centered on the actual historical events of the
Persian invasion and enacts the tragedy of oriental despotism against the
background of the Greeks’ struggle for freedom.
Even though the Athenians failed to gain complete military and politi-
cal dominance over the other Greeks in this period, their cultural superi-
ority nevertheless became unrivaled—to such an extent that on many
occasions, when we talk about the achievements of the Greeks in this era,
we are really talking about the achievements of the Athenians. If we may
believe the historian Thucydides (2.41), Pericles, the main architect of
Athens’ imperial policy and her most successful statesman, claimed that
Athens was “the School of Greece.” In the visual and performing arts,
history, philosophy, and science, Athens provided a unique cultural
milieu. Even though not all of the most important writers, artists, and
thinkers of the era were Athenian, Athens provided the cultural center that
they frequented.
Most significant from our point of view is that by the middle of the fifth
century, the City Dionysia, the main festival at which the tragedies and
comedies were performed in Athens, had become the major annual show-
case for the demonstration of Athenian cultural achievements as well as
Athenian wealth and power. Not only did it attract an Athenian audience in
the thousands, but also visitors and dignitaries from many quarters of the
Greek world. Although strictly speaking, unlike the Olympic games and a
few other festivals, the Dionysia was not a Panhellenic festival, it never-
theless assumed a Panhellenic significance. In the wake of its success, the-
atres were to spread throughout the Greek world and come to hold a
central place among the civic structures of many Greek poleis.
For all of Athens’ distinctiveness, culturally the Athenians shared much
in common with other Greeks. Tragedy provides a case in point. Although
it was essentially an Athenian creation, the Athenian tragedians were the
heirs of a larger Greek poetic tradition, in which no Athenian stands out
prominently, with the exception of Solon, a sixth-century Athenian states-
man. The themes of Solon’s political poetry undoubtedly had an influence
on the moral discourse of tragedy, but it is archaic choral lyric, on the one
hand, and archaic narrative poetry (especially the epics of Homer) on the
other, that helped to shape the dramatic structure of tragedy as it came to
exist in fifth-century Athens. Homer—used as shorthand for the two epic
poems the Iliad and the Odyssey—was “the poet” whom no Greek polis
could claim as uniquely its own. Whatever the origins of the Homeric
Tragedy, Athens, and the Greek Cultural Mosaic 3
epics, such was their towering influence that, in no small measure, they
helped to forge the common cultural identity of the Greeks.
At the same time, the other great cultural cum political institution that
was essential in shaping the classical Greeks was the polis. Although a
nascent form of the polis is detectable in Homer, what is much more impor-
tant for the poems is the conception of the heroes as individuals. The Athe-
nian tragedians, especially Sophocles, were greatly influenced by the
Homeric heroes in creating their dramatis personae. In Sophocles, however,
unlike in Homer, the fate of these heroic figures has to be seen squarely
from the point of view of the value structure of the classical polis, even
when the polis does not form the immediate physical setting of the play.
The larger background of tragedy, then, is the world of the Greek polis.
Although the setting of most tragedies is mythical, because the plays are set
in a legendary past, the concerns of tragedy arose from the moral, political,
and religious issues of the contemporary polis. Myth was not simply a vehi-
cle for preserving the memory of a legendary past, even if the memory of
that past had helped to form the consciousness of the Greeks. Rather, the
myths were constantly subject to change and were a dynamic means whereby
current concerns could be explored by the playwright and presented to the
audience for their scrutiny and examination or re-examination. Thus, it was
open to a Sophocles or a Euripides to dramatize a myth that an Aeschylus
had already dramatized and to re-present it from a radically different moral
or political point of view. Myths did not admit of closure. Although the
main narrative outlines of a particular myth may have been formed in the
preceding archaic age, there was always the possibility of introducing
important variations. Therefore, in spite of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Euripi-
des, in his Phoenician Women, chose not to have Jocasta commit suicide on
learning of her incestuous marriage with her son, but to have her live on. In
Euripides’ lost Antigone, unlike Sophocles’ Antigone, it seems that Creon
handed Antigone over to Haemon to kill, but he fell in love with her and
they had a child together. There could even be important extensions to the
more commonly known versions to emphasize a specifically Athenian
dimension such as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus at
Colonus. In some cases, such as Euripides’ Orestes or Iphigenia in Tauris,
the plot seems to have been almost completely invented.
What helped to give the treatment of the myths in tragedy a “political”
dimension was the presence of the chorus. In Greek tragedy, the fate of the
mythical characters was acted out against the sounding board of a chorus
who both sang and danced. The chorus commonly comprised an individu-
ally anonymous group that was representative of some part of the commu-
nity, whether they were elders, sailors, women, or slaves. The distinction
between the actors proper, who portrayed the mythological characters, and
the members of the chorus became clearly differentiated in the fifth century.
Whereas the actors became professionals, the chorus was always formed of
ordinary citizens, even if their training was rigorous and extensive. In a real
sense, the chorus could be said to represent the polis “onstage.”1
Because the individual poleis constituted the main foundation on which
the political culture of classical Greece was built, Greece did not constitute
a nation-state in a modern sense of the term, because there were more than
a thousand individual poleis. Although the Greeks collectively called
themselves Hellenes, each polis aspired to be politically autonomous and
economically self-sufficient. Thus, a Greek citizen was an Athenian or a
Corinthian first and foremost and only secondly a Hellene.
By the standards of modern nation-states, the size of these poleis was
tiny, consisting of no more than a few hundred or so people at one end of
the spectrum, to a few very large ones like Athens, which consisted of a
few hundred thousand people. Although the figures are conjectural, the
Athenian population in about 431 was probably somewhere between
250,000 and 350,000 people. Even though Athens was a democracy, only
about 15 percent of that number were citizens in the full sense of the word,
because possibly as many as one-third of the population was slaves and
there was a large number of resident aliens (metics) who—whether born
elsewhere or born in Athens of metic parents—were not entitled to citi-
zenship. In addition, women were always legally minors, subject to a male
kurios (master), and had no direct access to political power. In fact, Athe-
nian democracy has sometimes been described as a “men’s club.” There-
fore, the size of the actual citizen population, even of a very large polis that
had a democracy, was relatively small; however, size was of the essence of
the polis. Indeed, Aristotle was so preoccupied with the size of an ideal
polis that, when discussing its constitution, he claimed: “In deciding ques-
tions of justice and the allocation of offices by merit, citizens must know
each other’s characters, since where this condition is not met, the election
of political officials and judicial proceedings will go awry” (Politics 7.4).
For him, if a community consisted of too few people, it did not meet the
requirements of a polis in being self-sufficient. However, if, like a nation,
it consisted of too many people, although it might be self-sufficient, it
would not be a polis, because its size would make it incapable of having a
constitutional government.
Reduced to its bare essence, a polis was a small, close-knit community
of citizens (politai, free adult males), even if they were dependent on oth-
ers (e.g., women and slaves, etc.) for their existence and survival. More-
over, although each polis occupied a certain territory (which is discussed
below), this was, in a sense, secondary. As Thucydides has the Athenian

general, Nicias, say: “Men make a polis and not walls or ships” (7.77). If
the polis in essence was a community of citizens, these citizens were
bound together by a complex of social, political, religious, and military
ties that were forged, in part, by local conditions and traditions. Potentially,
there was no worse political evil for members of a polis than stasis (polit-
ical strife), because there was no secure protection from death or slavery
beyond the polis. To be apolis (without a polis) was a terrible fate. Stasis
and exile are recurrent themes in tragedy. Therefore, it was in the interests
of citizens to defend their polis at all costs and to be ready to die for it.
Thus, citizen armies were the norm and the army—whether mustered on
land or sea—was essentially nothing more than the polis under arms.
Each polis was built at root on a collection of oikoi. The word oikos
may be variously translated as “house,” “family,” or “household.” The
oikos was not simply a “nuclear family,” but was also the primary eco-
nomic unit on which the polis was built. It consisted of house and prop-
erty, including slaves and domestic animals. The head of the oikos was the
male kurios to whom everyone else was subordinate, and his prime
responsibility was to preserve the economic and social interests of the
oikos. Marriages were arranged between the male heads of different
oikoi, without there being any “romantic” involvement between the bride
and groom, primarily so that marriage might provide for the continuation
of the husband’s oikos through the begetting of children. The oikos was a
cooperative enterprise in which the interests of each individual were sub-
ordinate to those of the larger whole, although the master had overriding
authority. Wives were usually considerably younger than their husbands
for, as Cynthia Patterson says, “The key determining factor in the struc-
ture of the ancient Greek family—or, more properly, the ancient Greek
household—is clearly life expectancy.”2 How women may have regarded
these marital arrangements is a moot point, but in tragedy, marriage was
often an arena of violent conflict.
Because many aristocratic oikoi had their own traditions that predated
the emergence of the democratic polis, there was always the potential for
tension between the interests of members of an oikos and the polis, partic-
ularly when the polis began to encroach upon things that had traditionally
been the preserve of the oikos. In this world, what constituted dike (com-
monly translated as “justice,” although the Greek word has an extensive
range of meanings) was a matter of ongoing debate and forms a central
issue of many tragedies.
If the first duty of members of the oikos was to ensure its collective sur-
vival, the oikoi collectively needed the polis for defense against hostile
intrusion. Thus, it was incumbent on the various oikoi to provide the polis
with able-bodied soldiers. Even when a polis, like Athens, became a
democracy and gave all its politai the freedom to have an equal share in the
day-to-day government of the polis (as much as was reasonably possible),
that freedom was premised on an active participation in what the polis
required. The idea that an individual could simply opt out and do his own
thing, without performing the minimum requirements of his duty as a cit-
izen, was scarcely countenanced. Even Socrates fought in the Athenian
army and served on the boule (the Council).
This “communitarian” notion of a person finding fulfilment in his duties
to a larger entity, whether it be to the oikos or the polis, contrasts with the
notion of the individual we gain from Achilles, in the Iliad, who fought at
Troy for his own personal glory and who, for later Greeks, became the par-
adigm of aristocratic manhood. The contrast between the two conceptions
of the individual—the Achillean and the communitarian—is one that helps
to provide Sophoclean tragedy with many a fruitful tension. More gener-
ally speaking, it is built into the structure of the tragedies with their indi-
vidual protagonists and the collectivity of their chorus members.
Let us briefly consider the polis as a territorial unit. Basically, the polis
consisted of an urban center with an agora, where trade could take place
and political concerns could be discussed and resolved, and rural envi-
rons, that were cultivated as much as possible because good, arable land
was at a premium. Although the territories of the Athenians and the Spar-
tans were large by Greek standards, the territories of most poleis were
restricted, whether because of the sea or nearby mountains or the territory
of a neighboring polis. War was a common occurrence among neighbor-
ing poleis and warfare was accepted as a fact of life. In the fifth century,
Athens was at war on average every one year in two. The constant threat
of war meant, of course, that although poleis valued their political inde-
pendence, not all could survive alone without help; thus, many were
joined together in alliances over which they might exercise a greater or
lesser degree of control.
Although the Greeks were not politically united, there were certain
important things shared in common that distinguished them in their own
minds from other peoples. In his Histories (8.144), Herodotus has some
Athenian envoys state succinctly what these things are: their religion, their
racial kinship, their language, and their common way of life. Religion is a
large topic that we shall have to treat separately and, for our purpose, what
we have said about the polis can suffice for the moment about the Greek
“common way of life.” However, we should briefly state something about
the Greeks’ “racial kinship” and “language.”
The two topics are not wholly separable. Race, as we all know, is a
loaded term. Although the Greeks regarded themselves as racially akin,
Greek-speaking peoples had not all migrated into the central and southern
parts of the Greek peninsula at the same time, but had settled there through
different waves of migration between c. 2000 and c. 1000. Then, through
pressures of one sort or another, many migrated overseas, inhabiting the
littoral of a considerable part of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. As
a result, even though the Greeks spoke a mutually intelligible language,
there were distinct tribal groupings among them. These tribal groupings
were underscored by different dialects that can be clearly witnessed in dif-
ferent types of poetry. We mentioned earlier that tragedy was heavily
indebted to archaic choral lyric, much of which was composed in Doric
Greek, the dialect of the Spartans and Corinthians among others. Thus,
Doric forms of Greek are found extensively in the choral parts of tragedy,
even though the main tragic playwrights were Athenian whose local dia-
lect was Attic, the dialect that predominates in the spoken parts of tragedy.
The language of tragedy, therefore, was eclectic.
A common language, in spite of dialectic variations, was an important
factor in helping the Greeks to feel a sense of common ethnic identity and
in separating Greeks from non-Greeks. In fact the Greek word that comes
closest to expressing the modern notion of foreigner is the word bar-
baros(oi), a word that may have originally suggested for the Greeks some-
one who did not speak Greek. After the Persian Wars, however, the word
took on largely pejorative overtones with the implication that to be non-
Greek was to be culturally inferior. Thus, the Persians were often collec-
tively termed barbaroi. In this regard, tragedy not only reflected but no
doubt helped to foster the cultural chauvinism of the Greeks. The term
barbaros(oi) is found in Aeschylus’ Persians and is pervasive throughout
the tragic corpus. Myth was harnessed in the interests of Greek or, more
particularly, Athenian ideology. Thus, in the Homeric epics, we gain no
sense that the Trojans are barbarians but—because, by the time of the Per-
sian Wars, the area around Troy had become part of the Persian Empire—
we frequently find famous Trojans called barbarians.3
Thus far, we have considered the polis almost wholly from a secular
point of view, but the citizens shared the polis with their gods, whose altars
and shrines were visible everywhere. The Greek temple that, together with
the oikos, forms the most frequent backdrop of the tragedies was the house
of a god. It was not used, however, as a place of communal worship, like a
Christian church; instead, it housed a statue of the god that served to
acknowledge his or her presence. Much of the life of the polis was devoted
to religious rites and festivals. At Athens, more than a hundred days of the
year were given up to religious festivals of one sort or another. Both the
tragedies and comedies were performed at religious festivals in honor of
Dionysus, who was honored at other festivals as well.
Greek religion was polytheistic. The most well-known of these gods were
the twelve Olympians (Zeus, Apollo, etc.). In Homer, the presence of these
anthropomorphic deities exerts a powerful influence on the actions of the
heroes. According to Herodotus, it was the poets Homer and Hesiod who
first “created theogonies for the Greeks by giving the gods their names and
defining their honors, powers and forms” (2.53). The poets, then, through
their genealogies and stories of the gods, helped to forge for the Greeks a
shared religious identity because—in the absence of an overriding religious
authority, like the Christian Church, or a canonical religious text, like the
Koran—the poets were often thought to provide insights into the ways of
the gods. However, even if their poetry could be conceived as being
divinely inspired, the poets did not constitute a group of religious authori-
ties in any formal sense. In fact, if we used the poets as our only source for
understanding Greek religion, we would gain a distorted view of it, because
the poets—although they drew heavily, at times, on a common store of reli-
gious experience—used the gods either for their own artistic purposes or as
a means of presenting their own vision of human life and its problems. It is
a contentious issue, for instance, to what extent we can use tragedy as evi-
dence for understanding Greek religion as it was experienced in the daily
life of the Greeks.4 All we can say positively is that, insofar as the tragedies
present a Weltanshauung in which the human and the divine are inextrica-
bly interrelated, they reflect—albeit in a refracted manner—a Greek view
of the world. When we examine the life of the Greek polis, therefore, there
is often no easy disjunction to be made between the secular and the divine
or between politics and religion.
Except at certain religious centers such as Delphi, where the priests of
Apollo presided over the administration of the oracle, there was no for-
mally constituted class of priests who told the Greeks how to lead their
lives. The function of a priest, as the occasion demanded, could be fulfilled
by the head of an oikos, the general of the army, or the civic official who
was in charge of the rites of a particular religious cult. For example, it was
the 10 generals who, at the City Dionysia, poured libations to the god on
behalf of the citizens. True, there were such people as soothsayers and ora-
cle mongers who might read divine signs as manifested in sacrifices or in
the sky, but these commanded no more authority than was credited to them
by individuals or groups of individuals.
In essence, Greek religion was not expressed by any overriding religious
credo, but through a variety of religious observances (e.g., a sacrifice or a
prayer, the construction of an altar or temple, or the holding of a festival)

through which the power of a god was recognized. Because Greek religion
did not constitute a closed system of belief, it was always possible to accept
a new god. Thus, the Olympians were not the only gods; there were a host
of other deities, many of whom may have only been felt as vague presences
and not conceived as anthropomorphic beings. In fact, the common Greek
terms for a god (theos and daemon) often imply simply some kind of power
immanent in human life, without the corollary that monotheistic religions
commonly assume—that god is transcendent. Therefore, what we might
regard as abstract ideas could be personified as gods: Poverty, Wealth, and
Persuasion, for example. Thus, although Peitho (Persuasion) was some-
times associated with Aphrodite, she had her own cultic status at Athens
and could be worshipped either for her sexual power or, as we might expect
in a democracy heavily dependent on the spoken word, as a political deity.5
Because the day-to-day religion of the Greeks was mainly polis based,
each polis had its own calendar, built around its own religious festivals and
cults. Several of these cults and festivals were agricultural in origin, because
the economy of the Greeks was largely based on agriculture. Related to this,
there were gods specifically connected with the earth, known as chthonic
deities. These gods could also be connected with the Underworld and the
kingdom of Hades, whose name means “unseen,” so that their power could
be conceived as potentially sinister as well as beneficent.
In each polis, the rites and festivals of the gods might take their own par-
ticular form and, in every polis, some gods could assume a greater promi-
nence than others. If, for example, Athena held a special place at Athens as
Polias, guardian of the community, Hera assumed a similar position in
Argos and Poseidon in Corinth. In the final analysis, it was the polis that
determined how and what gods should be worshipped. Thus, the polis
became the ultimate arbiter of what constituted eusebeia and asebeia
(what was correct or incorrect behavior toward the gods), words usually
translated as “piety” or “reverence” and “impiety” or “irreverence,”
respectively. Even if the evidence, in some instances, is unreliable, there
are several cases recorded of people who were put on trial at Athens for
asebeia. Socrates, who was accused of “corrupting the young and not
acknowledging the gods,” is the most famous.
In addition, there were, of course, some festivals and religious centers
that were Panhellenic, such as the festival at Olympia, where the famous
games were held every four years, or the Oracle at Delphi. Because
prophecies and oracles loom large in Greek tragedy—Sophoclean tragedy
being a special case in point—we should briefly say a few things on the
subject, without going into the complex issue of how and why oracles
(Delphi in particular) came to occupy such an important place in the Greek

world.
In real life, oracles such as Delphi seem to have largely confined them-
selves to giving advice or offering explanations in the face of disasters or
what seemed inexplicable. As the spokesman of his father Zeus, Apollo,
the chief god of Delphi, was felt to know the hidden meaning of events and
causes of things that were obscure to human beings. However, the gods
were not believed to offer up their knowledge easily and thus oracular pro-
nouncements often took the form of riddling statements and were open to
different interpretations. Therefore, if an oracle seemed to be proved
wrong, that did not mean (for the believer in oracles) that Apollo was a
false prophet, but rather a wrong interpretation could well have been put
on the oracular pronouncement. The Greeks were also aware that even if
Apollo spoke the truth, this did not mean that the priests at Delphi, who
produced a written form of the oracle based on the utterances of an illiter-
ate prophetess in a trance-like state, were infallible or could not be influ-
enced. A not-uncommon charge against prophets and oracles was that they
could be bribed. Confronted with an oracle, therefore, one always had to
exercise caution. Moreover, there is no doubt that, although Delphi still
commanded great influence in the fifth century and many still believed in
oracles, in the wake of the “intellectual revolution” of the second half of
the century, there was a growing scepticism about the truth of oracles.
When we turn to tragedy, we see that oracles and the prophets of the
gods do not confine themselves to offering advice and explanations, but
frequently predict the future. The classic example is Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex, in which the oracular pronouncements of Apollo at Delphi are central
to the tragedy and prove all too true. Because of the truth of these oracles
and their importance in the tragedy, it is not uncommon for it to be
assumed that Sophocles was an upholder of the belief in oracles. However,
it is also possible that Sophocles used oracles and prophecies in his
tragedies primarily as an artistic device to serve the dramatic needs of his
plot. We do not have to think that Shakespeare believed in witchcraft
because he used the three witches to predict Macbeth’s future.
There are three other aspects of Greek religion that should be mentioned
because they are relevant to understanding some aspects of Sophocles:
hero-cults, the concept of “pollution,” and the unwritten laws that gov-
erned the relationship between strangers. Unlike the gods, who were
immortal, heroes were the famous dead, whether real or mythical. The
Greeks did not really distinguish between the two, because the heroes of
myth were regarded as the legendary dead. The bones of a dead hero were
thought to be endowed with special powers and a cult could grow up
around his supposed grave. I say “supposed” purposely, because, in most

instances, these graves were fictitious, but the shrines at which the heroes
were worshipped were commonly treated as their actual tombs. Thus, it
was quite possible for a hero to have a “tomb” in more than one place. It
was thought that these heroes could be the workers of great benefit to a
community but, if they were offended in some way or neglected, could also
work harm. The exceptional power that heroes had manifested when they
were alive was believed to continue after their death and that power was
commonly believed to reside in the place where they were buried. The pos-
session of a hero’s bones, therefore, was regarded as a matter of great
importance.
Two historical examples must suffice to illustrate this point. Once, when
the Spartans were at odds with the Tegeans and were faring badly, they
were informed by the Delphic oracle that they would only be successful in
their struggle if they recovered the lost bones of Orestes (Herodotus
1.67–68). Although the wording of the oracle was cryptic as to where these
bones were to be found, eventually some bones were found that seemed to
fit the oracle’s description, and Sparta became victorious. If Sparta had
been unsuccessful, the oracle might have replied that the captured bones
were not those of Orestes. Similarly, the Athenians were told by an oracle
to recover the bones of their legendary king, Theseus, from the island of
Scyros (Plutarch Cimon 8). When the Athenian general Cimon went to
Scyros, he reputedly discovered where the bones of Theseus were buried
and brought them back to Athens, where he was received with great honor.
There was probably a personal political motive behind Cimon’s actions,
but the important point is that this is no legendary event; it happened in the
fifth century, within Sophocles’ own lifetime. Two of Sophocles’ tragedies,
Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus, seem to foreshadow the heroization of the
protagonist. Moreover, both Ajax and Oedipus came to be worshipped as
heroes at Athens.
Let us now turn to pollution, what the Greeks called miasma. The seri-
ousness of a miasma varied, depending on the type of event that was felt to
induce it. Thus, contact with childbirth and death could be construed as
causing pollution in those directly involved. This pollution could be
cleansed through the observance of appropriate rituals. Much more seri-
ous, however, was the type of pollution associated with such things as mur-
der and acts of sacrilege. In these cases, the perpetrators, and even those
who were associated with them, could be felt to have a moral stain that
made them religiously impure and with whom contact of any kind could be
extremely dangerous, affecting the whole family or community. Thus,
the person(s) involved were, in a sense, “cursed.” In myth, Oedipus, the
subject of two of Sophocles’ surviving seven tragedies, is the most famous

example.
Lastly, we should mention the unwritten laws that governed the relation-
ship between strangers. There are a number of references in Greek litera-
ture to unwritten laws and there is some dispute as to what constituted
them, but the unwritten law governing the relationship between strangers
was clearly one of them. In Greek, the word for a stranger (xenos) was the
same word as for a “host” or a “guest,” because from earliest times—there
are many examples in Homer—a traveler could be put up as a guest in a
stranger’s home. Any violation of the code of correct behavior between
host and guest was believed to be punishable by Zeus. Closely related is
the idea of Zeus as the god of suppliants. A suppliant could throw himself
on the mercy of a stranger, an enemy, or a god and ask for his protection.
Because the suppliant was helpless and entrusted his life to the supplicated
person, it was a crime against Zeus to harm him. Several tragedies are built
around the theme of suppliants and strangers.
Fifth-century tragedy, then, drew inspiration widely from the common
traditions of Greek culture, whether it was from language, poetry, myth,
religion, or politics. Whatever the precise origins of tragedy, however, it
would not have blossomed and flourished in the way that it did without
what transpired politically and culturally in Athens. It is in this sense that
tragedy is a uniquely Athenian creation, so much so that it became an inte-
gral part of the public life of Athenian democracy.
The main structural framework of Athenian democracy was established
by Cleisthenes in c. 508. Outside of his political reforms and the general
background to them, little is known about Cleisthenes except that he came
from a famous aristocratic Athenian family, the Alcmaeonids, who had had
a curse put on them in the late seventh century and had, during the sixth
century, suffered periods of exile. Toward the end of this period, they had
bribed the Delphic oracle to persuade the Spartans to intervene in Athe-
nian affairs and drive out the Pisistratids, tyrants who had ruled Athens for
more than 30 years.
During the sixth century, Athens had suffered times of great stasis.
Although in the early part of the century, Solon—the poet statesman—had
been appointed as a mediator to solve the severe economic problems of the
poor and had instituted a number of important reforms, he had failed to put
an end to the unrest. As a result, factions had re-emerged among aristo-
cratic leaders until in c. 546, one Pisistratus finally established himself as
tyrant at Athens.
Tyranny was not an uncommon phenomenon among the Greeks. In fact,
it was one of the three most common forms of government, the other two
being oligarchy and democracy. Nor was tyranny always regarded in the
same negative fashion as it is now considered. Originally, a tyrant was
simply someone who had seized power unconstitutionally. Although the
Spartans were generally opposed to tyrants, and tyranny became a pejora-
tive term at Athens once the democracy had taken firm root, tyrants had
quite often overthrown oppressive regimes. Thus, tyrants could command
wide popular support, and their policies were, at times, enlightened.
Pisistratus is a case in point. The evidence suggests that his rule was
moderate and popular. As much as possible, Pisistratus sought to preserve
the political system that Solon had introduced. He took measures to pro-
tect the livelihood of the poor; he expanded Athens’ economic base by
developing foreign trade; he introduced a vigorous building program and
tried to create a greater sense of unity among the people of Attica, by
introducing new religious cults or expanding pre-existing ones—the
Dionysia and the Panathenaia, the main festival in honor of Athena, being
two signal examples. Before the time of the Pisistratids, Athens had been
something of a cultural backwater. All this changed under their rule: poets
and artists were invited to Athens; Athenian sculpture gained greater dis-
tinction; Attic black-figure vase-painting began to rival the more famous
ware of Corinth; and the poems of Homer were written down (the first
written version of them that we know of), and provision was made for their
recitation at the Panathenaia by rhapsodes, whose highly histrionic perfor-
mances must have had an important influence on the art of acting. Finally,
Thespis produced his one-actor tragedies. In short, the Pisistratids did
much to lay the foundation of later Athenian success.
Pisistratus died in 527, but his policies were continued by his sons, Hip-
pias and Hipparchus. When, however, Hipparchus was assassinated in 514
by Harmodius and Aristogiton—probably because of a homosexual lovers’
quarrel—the rule of his brother turned oppressive and the popularity of the
tyranny waned. Later, Hipparchus’ two assassins were made “heroes” as
the liberators of the Athenians. Such are the myths of history.
In 510, Hippias was driven out of Athens with the help of the Spartans. In
the power struggle that ensued, ultimately Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid,
emerged victorious. However, in order to win, Cleisthenes had to enlist the
help of the Athenian demos, the common people, who, until this time, had
had little say in governing the polis. Traditionally, Athenian society was
divided between aristoi (members of aristocratic oikoi), and the demos. The
main political power had resided with the Areopagus, which had originally
been a wholly aristocratic council, but whose membership had been opened
up to the very wealthy by Solon. The Athenians were also divided into four
tribes, in which the influence of the aristoi would have been paramount.
We cannot be sure what Cleisthenes’ ultimate intentions were in institut-

ing his reforms, but these reforms completely redrew the political map of
Attica and laid the basis for Athenian democracy, although Athens was not
to become a radical democracy for about another half century. Cleisthenes
did not abolish the Areopagus that still commanded extensive power, and
the aristoi still provided leadership, because one still needed wealth—
most of which was based on inherited land—to hold certain high offices
for which there was no financial remuneration. In order to break the stran-
glehold of the old tribal divisions, Cleisthenes created 10 new tribes, based
on artificial divisions. For this purpose, Attica was divided into three geo-
graphical areas: urban, coastal, and nonurban inland. Each of these three
areas was further divided into 10 subdivisions, making 30 in all. In the
future, each new tribe was to be composed of three trittyes (thirds), one
drawn from an urban, another from a coastal, and another from an inland
area. He also created a new council for the 10 tribes. This boule had 500
members, 50 appointed by lot from each of the 10 new tribes. Every mem-
ber served on the boule for a year, and no citizen could serve on it more
than twice in a lifetime. The main function of the boule was to draft
motions and to prepare the agenda for the ecclesia, which was the assem-
bly of all the citizens, whose will was to be sovereign and who had the
responsibility for passing laws and making all major political decisions.
The main executive officers of the polis, however, were the nine archons
(leaders or rulers), who were in charge of religious, legal, and military
affairs. In order to become one, a property qualification had to be fulfilled.
Under Cleisthenes, these officials were elected for a year and, on comple-
tion of their term of office, became members of the Areopagus, the tradi-
tional aristocratic council. However, in 487, appointment by lot replaced
election as the means of choosing these archons and thus their political
power was seriously diminished. From that time on, the strategia became
the most powerful political office. Each of the new tribes elected, annually,
a strategos (a general), creating a board of 10. Warfare was one area in
which the Athenians could not rely on mere chance.
Cleisthenes’ reforms were far reaching. Because the boule consisted of
500 annually appointed members who could only serve twice in a lifetime,
given the small size of the citizen population, this meant that, within a rel-
atively short time, a significant percentage of the citizenry would have held
an important executive position within the polis. Furthermore, since the
ecclesia (the sovereign assembly of the Athenians) was open to all citizens
to vote on whatever motion was brought before it, Athens became a direct,
rather than a representative, democracy, and thus there was no true dis-
tinction between rulers and the ruled. The citizens were the government.
The Athenians were the polis. Finally, in breaking the old aristocratic tribal
divisions, Cleisthenes joined together people of different regional, eco-
nomic, and political interests. Because the organization of space helps in
profound ways to shape people’s perception of reality, Cleisthenes’
redrawing of the spatial divisions of the Athenians radically affected the
way in which they came to view their polis.
Cleisthenes’ reforms were also to have a significant influence on the
organization of the Athenian theatre, because—however it had been orga-
nized before, whether on a rural or urban basis—the Dionysia, the festival
at which the tragedies were performed, was at least partially reorganized,
taking into account Cleisthenes’ new tribal divisions. All 10 new tribes
were required to submit, every year, two dithyrambic choruses, one adult
male and one boys’, each consisting of 50 members, for competition at the
Dionysia. If we can believe Aristotle (Poetics 49a), the dithyramb was
important in the origins of tragedy. Be that as it may, what is of interest is
its cultural significance in the new democratic polis. In the archaic era,
choral performances tended to be of aristocratic provenance. The dithy-
rambs at Athens, however, were choral performances in honor of Dionysus
(a popular god), that were designed to cement the new divisions of the
democratic polis. The training of these dithyrambic choruses lasted the
better part of a year and, during the period of their training, the adult males
were released from military service. Because there were a thousand per-
formers, altogether, in these dithyrambs—500 adult males and 500 boys—
this meant that most likely, as in the case of service on the boule, a large
percentage of the citizens at the theatre had also acted as performers at one
time or another. Athletics and mousike (not simply music, but song, dance,
and poetry) formed the basis of traditional Athenian education. Given the
rigorous training that the performers underwent, participation in a dithy-
rambic chorus was not simply a musical experience but also hard physical
training. Among other things, it trained the members of the chorus how to
function as a coordinated group. As such, it must have been an excellent
preparation, in the case of the boys’ choruses, for military service, not the
least because at Athens, in the army, the citizens served in tribal divisions.
As Athenaeus reports Socrates to have written: “Those who honor the gods
best in choruses are the finest in war” (14.628). Did the Athenians march
into battle with musical accompaniment? It is possible, but we do not
know. In any case, the dithyrambic choruses based on Cleisthenes’ new
tribes served as an important form of training and education in Athens’
new democracy.
One final point should be made. The performances of the dithyrambs
took the form of a competition, with prizes for the winning choruses. The
competitive aspect no doubt helped to cement loyalty to the new tribes.

Because the theatre held some 15,000 spectators, the atmosphere at times
must have been more like that of a major sporting event than that of a mod-
ern theatre. Competition was a vital part of the Greek way of life, because
so many aspects of it took the form of an agon (contest): war was an agon,
the Olympic games were agons, law cases were agons, several of the reli-
gious festivals contained agons. The life of a democratic polis like Athens
was both a cooperative and a competitive enterprise. When the playwrights
presented their tragedies and comedies, they, too, were engaged in an agon
for a prize with their fellow tragedians and comedians, respectively. The
winners took all, the losers received nothing. Greek culture has been vari-
ously called a “song culture” and a “performance culture”; it was also, in
large measure, a “competition culture.”6 This competitive spirit was instru-
mental in the Greek invention of politics. The fifth-century theatre that
came to hold such a central place in the life of Athenian democracy was
one manifestation of their zest for the political life.
In summary, tragedy was both a Greek and an Athenian creation.
Although it drew much of its lifeblood from the rich wellsprings of Greek
culture, only after it had taken firm root in Athenian soil did it fully mature.
Through the use of muthos (word as story), it fed the Athenians with
images of alternative versions of life and its problems and thus made a
vital contribution to the logos (word as discourse) of the democratic polis.
NOTES
1. On this point, see especially S. Goldhill’s reply, “Collectivity and Other-
ness—The Authority of the Tragic Chorus,” 244–256, to J. Gould’s “Tragedy and
Collective Experience,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. Silk (Oxford, 1996),
217–43.
2. C. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 43.
3. See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through
Tragedy (Oxford, 1989). As she writes: “To an archaic Greek Priam was a king,
Hector a hero, Memnon the son of Dawn, and Medea a sorceress; to the fifth cen-
tury theatre-goer, an essential aspect of such figures’ identities was that they were
barbarians” (54).
4. On this question, see C. Souvrinou-Inwood, “Tragedy and Religion: Con-
structs and Readings,” in Greek Tragedy and the Historian, ed. C. Pelling (Oxford,
1997), 161–86.
5. On Peitho and a discussion of persuasion in Greek tragedy, see R. G. A.
Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1982).
6. See J. Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic
Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 3–5, on song culture; and R. Rehm, Greek
Tragic Theatre (London, 1992), 3–11, on performance culture. Jacob Burckhardt

was the first to emphasize the importance of competition for Greek culture. See,
for example, his History of Greek Culture, trans. P. Hilty (New York, 1963), 133;
see also, A. W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social
Theory (New York, 1965), 41–77.
Chapter 2
Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings
Sophocles was born c. 496 into the world of the emerging Athenian
democracy. He died in 406–405, shortly before the Athenians were finally
defeated in the Peloponnesian War that brought about the end of their
empire in 404. His life thus spanned most of the century that witnessed
Athens’ greatest achievements. Although the biographical information on
Sophocles is scanty and largely unreliable,1 we can nevertheless set his life
against the political and cultural background of the time. What reliable
evidence we have indicates that Sophocles, unlike Aeschylus and Euripi-
des, had a political as well as a dramatic career.
Sophocles, the son of Sophillus, was born at Colonus, an Attic deme
about a mile and a quarter northwest of Athens. A number of anecdotes
speak of his musical and athletic achievements in his youth. Whether true
or not, Sophocles must have enjoyed the traditional fare of Athenian edu-
cation of the time, which, as previously described, was comprised of
mousike and physical training. At the time, Athens was no bookish culture.
Poetry was taught orally and committed to memory.
Sophocles’ early years were scarcely a time of political stability. We
should not assume that, with Cleisthenes’ reforms, Athens made a simple
and smooth transition from tyranny to democracy. The possibility of
Hippias’ restoration, through the intervention of outside forces, was
always a threat and only receded once the Persians had been soundly
defeated. Moreover, various aristocratic leaders must have vied for power,
not necessarily with any democratic ends in mind. In the 480s, there were
a number of ostracisms, a peculiarly Athenian practice whereby a promi-
nent politician could be banished from Athens for 10 years through a pub-
lic vote in the assembly. Whether this institution was established by
Cleisthenes himself or was introduced a little later, it was instituted as a

safeguard against tyranny and as a means of avoiding stasis among polit-
ical leaders.
What must have lent charge to the air of instability was the growing
menace of Persia. In 499, the Athenians had embarked on a risky foreign
venture that was to have grave consequences. In that year, some of the
Greeks of Asia Minor who, in the sixth century, had become subject to
Persian domination, revolted and appealed to other Greeks for help. Only
Athens and Eretria responded by sending an expeditionary force of ships.
Although this force soon withdrew, in the meantime it burnt the Persian
city of Sardis. The “Ionian revolt” continued to 494, before it was finally
quelled by the Persians. However, Darius, the Persian king, had not taken
kindly to the Athenian and Eretrian intervention and launched a punitive
expedition against them in 490.
At the time, the Persian Empire was vast and expansionist in its designs,
something to be feared by mainland and Aegean island Greeks, who
resided in all too close a proximity. The Athenians, in view of their actions,
had special reason to fear the Persians, and the measure of their fear may
well be gauged by the reception of a tragedy by Phrynichus, an early Athe-
nian tragic playwright whose works have not survived. The collapse of the
Ionian revolt came when the Persians sacked the city of Miletus, on the
island of Lesbos, in 494. Sometime shortly afterward—possibly 492—
Phrynichus produced his tragedy centered on the sacking of Miletus.
According to Herodotus (6.21), the Athenian audience was so affected by
it that they burst into tears. Phrynichus was fined a thousand drachmas,
and a ban was put on any further production of the tragedy. Although
Sophocles himself would probably have been too young to have seen
Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus, this play may possibly, as we shall con-
sider below, have had an important influence on the direction of tragedy
and thus on Sophocles himself.
Athens survived the Persian assault when it came, although Eretria was
not so lucky. When a Persian force landed on the plain of Marathon on the
east coast of Attica, the Athenians drove them back to their ships. The
Athenians then had to beat a hasty retreat the 30 miles back overland to
Athens to prevent the Persians from anticipating their arrival by sailing
around the south coast of Attica and taking Athens in their absence. When
the Persian fleet arrived and found the Athenians waiting for them, they
sailed home. Apart from a small contingent of troops who had come to
help from the neighboring polis of Plataea, the Athenians had stood alone
against the might of Persia and had won. Later, these Marathon veterans—
among them, Aeschylus—became the stuff of legend.
Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings 21
The Persian threat, however, was by no means over. In the following

decade, the Persians planned a full-scale conquest of Greece. If the Greeks
were to have any chance of resisting the Persian menace, it was imperative
that they overcome their customary differences and unite in some kind of
concerted military effort. Some Greeks, such as the Thebans, sensing the
futility of resistance, submitted to the Persian invaders without a fight, but
those who decided to resist combined under the leadership of Sparta, the
strongest military power in Greece, to oppose the Persians. For the sake of
unity, the Athenians acquiesced in the Spartans taking overall command.
Nevertheless, the Athenians provided by far the largest number of ships.
Thanks to the strategy and leadership of their general, Themistocles, who
earlier had persuaded them to invest their resources in building a fleet, the
Athenians were to play a crucial role in helping to defeat the invaders.
When the Persians actually invaded in 481, it was a combined land and
sea operation. After some initial encounters, notably at Thermopylae and
Artemisium, the Greek fleet met the Persians in the narrows of the Saronic
Gulf between the island of Salamis and the mainland, in 480. Although the
Athenians played the decisive role in the naval victory of Salamis, victory
did not come without serious cost, because the Athenians, after transport-
ing their women and children to safety, abandoned their city to the Per-
sians. After the defeat, Xerxes—who had succeeded his father, Darius, to
the Persian throne—fled back to Persia, but left a large land army under his
general, Mardonius, to continue the war. Mardonius retreated north for the
winter before advancing south again in the following year. Once more the
Athenians were forced to abandon their city; but Mardonius was no more
successful than the Persian fleet had been. In 479, the Greek and Persian
land forces met near Plataea, and the Persians were resoundingly defeated,
thanks in large measure to the Spartans, although the Athenians acquitted
themselves with honor. Mardonius himself was killed. Meanwhile, the
Greek fleet had crossed the Aegean sea, landed at Mycale, and burnt the
remnants of the Persian fleet, thus paving the way for the liberation of
the Greeks under Persian control.
If these Greeks were to gain and maintain their freedom, they needed
leadership. When the Spartans proved unsuited for the task, they turned
to the Athenians who, in spite of the destruction of their city, willingly
accepted the offer. Thus, in 478, the Delian Confederacy was formed. Each
member contributed ships or made a monetary contribution assessed
according to its size and power. From then on, Athens was to become the
most dynamic power in the Greek world. Here lay the origins of her empire.
The psychological and cultural effects of the Persian Wars on the Athe-
nians and other Greeks were enormous. Nothing less than the Greek way
of life had been at stake. We have to gain an insight into these psychologi-
cal and cultural effects largely from the art and literature of the subsequent
era, because the main historical sources are tantalizingly sparse. Hero-
dotus ends his history with the repulse of the Persians and Thucydides only
gives a brief sketch of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian
wars. However, there can be no doubt that the Persian Wars provided a
major watershed in Greek culture. Conventionally, art historians use the
term “Archaic” to describe the period before the Persian Wars, and “Clas-
sical” to describe the one that came after. Although such a demarcation is,
to some extent, more one of convenience than of absolute precision, there
was a beginning of a new era in sculpture, architecture, and vase painting.
As J. J. Pollitt expressed it:
Archaic Greek art had never lost touch with the artistic traditions of the
ancient Near East from which it had borrowed certain schemes of composi-
tion and a good many decorative details. . . . After 480/79 B.C. the Orient was
increasingly viewed as barbarous and contemptible; and Archaic art, which
had been fostered in many cases by Greek tyrants who had been on good
terms with the oriental monarchs and had set themselves up in power some-
what on the oriental model, was tainted by these associations.2
The fact that tragedy was affected by the new Zeitgeist can scarcely be
doubted, but quite how it was affected is not easy to determine because
evidence of what tragedy was like between the first performance of a one-
actor tragedy by Thespis in c. 534 and Aeschylus’ Persians in 472 (the ear-
liest surviving play) is confusing and meager. There are three types of
information, however, that we can look at in slightly more detail: what
Aristotle says in the Poetics; what we know of Phrynichus’ tragedies; and,
lastly, the fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus that can, in part, be sup-
plemented by his post-Persian Wars, extant tragedies.
In an elusive passage of the Poetics (49a 9–21), Aristotle summarizes
the evolution of tragedy. He informs us that tragedy arose as a form of
improvisation on the part of the leaders of the dithyramb and only gradu-
ally grew as improvements were made, but in the process it underwent sev-
eral changes until it found its natural form. Aeschylus added a second
actor, reduced the choral component, and made the spoken part the most
important. Sophocles added a third actor and skenographia. Moreover, it
was only at a late date that tragedy became serious, after abandoning short
plots and ridiculous language through changing from the “satyr-like.”
Although I will not go into tragedy’s possible relationship with the
dithyramb, if Aristotle is reliable, tragedy began as a form of improvisation
and did not become serious until quite late. It is an interesting point that, at
least by some time in Aeschylus’ dramatic career, each tragic playwright at
the City Dionysia was required to produce four plays for performance on a
single day: three tragedies and a satyr play. When this number became fixed
cannot be ascertained but, presumably, it was not fixed when Thespis first
began producing tragedies. If, as Aristotle suggests, the plots of the tragedies
were slight and the language ridiculous, then we have to assume that the ear-
liest tragedians produced a series of lighthearted, rather sketch-like perfor-
mances with a single actor and chorus. At some later point, perhaps when
tragedy became more serious, four became the established number of plays
for a tragedian to produce—three tragedies and a satyr play as an afterpiece,
which may have preserved the spirit of the original performances.
When did the change take place in the tone of tragedy from nonserious
to serious? Virtually nothing is known about the tone of the tragedies of
Thespis and his immediate successors until Phrynichus—and what is
known about Phrynichus is very limited. Aristophanes attests to the para-
mount importance of the choral element in his plays, something we would
naturally suspect, because he only used one actor. He is also said to have
been the first to introduce female characters. However, it is only when we
come to his Capture of Miletus in c. 492 that we have the first evidence of
a tragedy that treated a serious subject in a serious manner. Phrynichus’
tragedy created a storm of protest, and his play was banned in perpetuity,
its subject matter being too close to home. The Capture of Miletus, how-
ever, may have been the first attempt to have a tragedy make a politically
meaningful statement. Was it Phrynichus who was instrumental in chang-
ing the tone of tragedy from less to more serious and was his Capture of
Miletus a harbinger of later developments, once the Athenians had weath-
ered the Persian threat and were buoyed up by a new spirit of confidence?
We do not know, but it remains a tantalizing possibility. What we do know
is that Phrynichus did not abandon historical subjects, because he pro-
duced his Phoenician Women in 476 with the backing of no less a person
than Themistocles, who served as choregus. This tragedy, like Aeschylus’
Persians later in 472, dealt with the defeat of the Persians. Furthermore, it
is quite possible that Themistocles was the archon who had given Phryn-
ichus permission to produce his Capture of Miletus.3 Although we know
that Phrynichus also produced tragedies on mythological themes, we do
not know how he treated these myths.
If we wish to speculate about what tragedy was like in the early part of
the fifth century, we have to turn to the fragments of the lost plays of
Aeschylus, a rather unsatisfactory source, admittedly. Aeschylus was born
in 525 under the Athens of the tyrants. He began his dramatic career c. 500
after the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes, but he had to wait about 15

years before he won his first victory at the City Dionysia in 484. From then
on, however, he was victorious on 13 occasions and, after his death in 456,
he was granted the signal honor of having anyone who wanted to, restage
his plays. Although we commonly associate tragedy with the heroic figures
of legendary places like Argos, Troy, and Thebes—places that do indeed
form the backdrop of some of his late plays that survive—the extant frag-
ments reveal a rather different view of his dramatic imagination. As J. Her-
ington once expressed it:
Such now familiar heroic themes occupied scarcely a quarter of Aeschylus’

dramatic output as it originally stood. The titles and fragments of the
remaining three-quarters open up a wild mythological landscape that seems
to be bounded by no horizons of space, time, or credibility—a very ancient
landscape, which few later European dramatists, or even Attic dramatists,
were ever to explore again on the stage.4
Although none survive, in later times, Aeschylus was recognized as the

greatest writer of satyr plays. Even in his late surviving tragedies there can
be seen clear evidence of a world of archaic imagination both in his lan-
guage and in the grotesque appearance of some of his stage characters. In
Eumenides, the last play of his famous Oresteia trilogy, side by side with
Orestes, a figure from heroic myth, and the Olympian gods Apollo and
Athena, stands the chorus of Furies. So appalling is their appearance that
the priestess of Apollo, on seeing them, is reduced to crawling on all fours
out of terror. The Furies are described as having snakes in their hair, snort-
ing with foul breath, and letting flow a dreadful ooze from their mouths.
First compared with Gorgons and then with Harpies, they feed on human
blood and are the ghoulish daughters of Night. Only when we turn to
Sophocles’ surviving tragedies do the protagonists of heroic myth come
more firmly into their own.
Sophocles is said to have learned his tragic art from Aeschylus (Life 4).
According to Plutarch (de Profectu in Virtute 7), he divided his own works
into three stylistic periods, in the first of which he adopted the high-flown
style of Aeschylus. Although we have no way of proving this claim, we can
detect Aeschylean echoes in much of his work.5 However, the younger
playwright may equally well have had an important influence on the older
one, because all of Aeschylus’ datable, surviving tragedies except the Per-
sians were first produced after Sophocles’ dramatic career had begun.
Unlike Aeschylus’ dramatic career, Sophocles’ was highly successful
from the beginning and was to remain so throughout his life. Out of the
123 plays that he most likely composed—there are some variations in the
figures in our sources—he was the victor in the tragic competition at least
18 times and possibly as many as 24. This success was unprecedented.
Moreover, he never placed lower than second. According to Plutarch
(Cimon 8), Sophocles was the victor with his first productions at the City
Dionysia in 468, defeating Aeschylus. Although this, in fact, may not have
been his first appearance at the festival,6 the rivalry between the supporters
of the two playwrights on this occasion was so great that the 10 generals
had to be called in to serve as the 10 judges. The following year, however,
Aeschylus came back and was victorious with his Theban trilogy, of which
there survives the last tragedy, Seven against Thebes. Moreover, we know
that Aeschylus defeated Sophocles with his Danaid trilogy, of which Sup-
pliants is extant.
These last two mentioned tragedies of Aeschylus, together with the Per-
sians of 472, only require two actors, whereas Aeschylus’ last trilogy,
Oresteia, first produced in 458, and Prometheus Bound—if indeed it is by
Aeschylus, because its Aeschylean authorship is disputed7—require three
actors. Furthermore, the two-actor tragedies do not seem to require a clearly
defined skene (backdrop), because their action takes place in a rather gen-
eralized dramatic space, whereas in Oresteia, there is a clearly defined
skene, which in the first two parts of the trilogy represents the accursed
House of Atreus. As we have seen earlier, Aristotle (Poetics 49a 9–21)
claimed that the two innovations that Sophocles brought to tragedy—the
introduction of the third actor and skenographia—carried tragedy to a more
fully evolved form. If Aristotle’s testimony is reliable, it is possible that
Sophocles introduced both of these innovations sometime toward the end of
Aeschylus’ dramatic career, before the first production of Oresteia in 458.
Let us first look at the three-actor rule. Greek tragedy never used more
than three actors, who divided up all the speaking roles between them-
selves, even if this meant—as in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus at
Colonus at least—a particular role had to be shared by more than one
actor. This doubling of parts was facilitated by the use of masks, which is
discussed in the next chapter. Even though Aeschylus adopted the third
actor in his last plays, the manner in which he used his actors is, in many
ways, different from that of Sophocles. To talk about character interaction
at all in much Aeschylean tragedy is misleading, because dramatic mood
and tension is created partly through the chorus or the interaction of the
chorus and actor(s). In Persians, for example, which seems to show defi-
nite vestiges of the single-actor tragedy, there is no stage conflict between
actor and actor or between actor(s) and chorus, but tension is created
through what the actor and/or chorus say and do.8 Although in Oresteia,
there are confrontation scenes such as the famous “carpet scene” between
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, or in the trial scene of the
Eumenides, Aeschylus’ dramaturgy much of the time still shows remark-
able similarities to what is found in the Persians. Moreover, even in scenes
in which Aeschylus has three actors onstage at one time, the third actor
rarely speaks in the presence of the other two. In the carpet scene men-
tioned above, the actor playing Cassandra remains silent throughout, a
silence that becomes all the more pregnant in meaning when she does
finally speak while alone onstage with only the chorus present.
Sophocles’ dramaturgy is very different. If we think of drama as primar-
ily involving dramatis personae in conflict with one another, then, in some
ways, it is Sophocles who could lay claim to being the founder of the West-
ern dramatic tradition.9 Moreover, in introducing the third actor, Sophocles
often used that actor to change, enlarge, or deepen the meaning of the con-
frontation of other characters. For instance, in Oedipus Rex, in the middle
of the angry dispute between Oedipus and Creon when Oedipus accuses
Creon of plotting against him, Jocasta suddenly appears from the house
and, like a mother, shuts them up almost as if they were two squabbling
children. Not only does she mediate between them, but what she will later
tell Oedipus will make him see things from a totally new perspective.
Although the irony of her position—she is, of course, Oedipus’ mother,
though neither she nor Oedipus knows it—is not conveyed through any
explicit verbal suggestion, it is brilliantly realized by her dramatic entrance
and the attitude she adopts with Oedipus and Creon.
Skenographia presents difficult problems of interpretation. It is usually
translated as “ scene painting” or “painted scenery.” We first find the word
in Aristotle, and he may well have coined the term. However, what did he
actually mean by it and why did he regard it as so important in the matur-
ing of tragedy? Skenographia implies the existence of a skene, a word that
originally meant a “booth” or a “tent,” but came to refer to a stage build-
ing situated at the back of the orchestra. What this building was like in the
fifth century is difficult to determine, because it was a wooden structure
that was not like the stone structure of later Hellenistic theatres, and thus
virtually all traces of it have disappeared. It probably had a single central
doorway leading into it and was made variously to stand for a house, tem-
ple, tent, cave, and so forth. There is dispute as to whether a skene actually
existed for the plays of Aeschylus before the production of Oresteia in
458, because the earlier surviving plays do not seem to require one, unless
it was needed for the staging of the ghost scene in Persians.
Each tragic playwright produced four plays in succession on a single
day. Because each play might require a different dramatic location and
sometimes there could be a change of dramatic location during the action

of a single play, the idea that skenographia means “painted scenery” has
generally been discredited. If, however, skenographia simply implies that
the facade of the skene was painted, this scarcely seems worthy of the
importance that Aristotle attributes to it. Moreover, elsewhere in the Poet-
ics, Aristotle states that spectacle is the least important element in drama,
and we may wonder what Aristotle, writing in the second half of the fol-
lowing century, knew about what the skene actually looked like in the fifth
century. Although this is not the place to examine the history of the prob-
lem of skenographia, I should like to suggest that Aristotle did not have
painting of any sort in mind when he used the term.
Skenographia is a compound of skene and graphe, which is related to
the Greek verb, grapho. Originally, grapho meant something like to “make
line markings”; hence, to “draw” or “paint.” Later, it became the standard
word for to “write.” By the fourth century, to distinguish between painting
and writing, the verb zographeo became used for painting. In many com-
pound nouns derived from the root graph, the meaning implies a “written
description” rather than a “visual depiction.” For example, Isocrates (15.2)
uses dikographia for the “composition of legal speeches,” Plato (Phaedrus
278e) uses nomographos for one who “makes laws,” and Strabo (8.1.3)
employs topographia for the “description of a place.” Later, Plutarch (Ara-
tus 15) uses skenographia itself in the metaphorical sense of “illusion.” It
seems quite possible, therefore, that by skenographia, Aristotle did not
mean “ scene painting” in a literal sense but in the sense of describing the
setting. This sense of skene, although not listed in the standard Greek lex-
ica, seems to be the natural implication of the word in many of the Alexan-
drine hypotheses attached to some of the tragedies. Thus, the hypothesis of
Antigone, literally translated, says, “the skene of the drama is set in Boeo-
tian Thebes.” In other words, “the setting of the play is Boeotian Thebes.”
This notion makes eminent sense when applied to Sophoclean tragedy and
has important implications.
It is a notable feature of all of Sophocles’ extant tragedies that the pro-
logues—which, for a modern audience, are the first scene—provide the
audience with a clear notion of the topographical setting. In Electra, on
returning home after having grown up in exile, Orestes is told by his tutor,
pointing toward the skene that, “this is the bloodthirsty house of the
Pelopidae from which I once took you after the death of your father. . . .”
(11–14). “Antigone, daughter of a blind old man, to what place have we
come or city of what men?” asks Oedipus in the opening two lines of
Oedipus at Colonus. “Wretched father, Oedipus,” Antigone replies later,
“the towers of the city from my viewpoint are far off, but this place is
sacred. . . .” (16–17). The audience soon learns that the skene represents
the sacred grove of the Eumenides at Colonus. In Philoctetes, as soon as
Odysseus and Neoptolemus enter at the beginning of the play, Odysseus
tells his companion that they are on the shore of the desert island of Lem-
nos, and asks him to look for the entrance to Philoctetes’ cave, repre-
sented by the skene. In a very significant way in Sophoclean tragedy, the
skene helps to define the dramatic situation of the protagonists and often
conceals the root causes of the tragic dilemma. We do not find this in the
early tragedies of Aeschylus, which are set in a rather generalized dra-
matic space. In contrast, the prologue of Agamemnon situates the dra-
matic action clearly against the background of the house of Atreus,
represented by the skene.
Whether the skene preexisted as a neutral backdrop before the introduction
of skenographia or whether skenographia was Aristotle’s way of expressing
the introduction of a skene as part of the dramatic setting, if my argument
above has any validity, skenographia helped to focus the dramatic action onto
the skene. In turn, this movement gave greater prominence to the actors at the
expense of the chorus, and helped to redefine the notion of space and time in
tragedy. The dramatic importance of the skene with its doorway into a dark
interior cannot be minimized. Ruth Padel expressed it well:
From one point of view, it is the action that happens on the stage that is
important to the audience. The act off-stage is fleshed out in the audience’s
imagination only by attention given to it onstage. But from another point of
view, the onstage actions are there to create invisible (more obsessing, more
terrible) space and action in the audience’s mind. . . . The important tragic act
will happen unseen and mostly within. We think of unseen acts as performed
offstage. For the Athenians it was within-stage, inside something within the
spectators’ field of vision, but into which they could not see. They inferred
what they could not see from what they could.10
We may illustrate Padel’s general point from Oedipus Rex. Usually, the
central door of the skene represents the opening into a cul-de-sac, a blind
alley.11 In Oedipus, many of the significant events of Oedipus’ life take
place in this invisible space: his birth before being exposed as a child; the
sowing of his children with his wife/mother, Jocasta; his final confronta-
tion with his mother, when he witnesses her dead body hanging from a hal-
ter; and the gouging out of his eyes with the brooch from his mother’s
dress. On one level, even the solution to the riddle of the Sphinx is found
within the dark interior of the house. As a child on all fours, Oedipus was
expelled from the house; as a man in the prime of life he became both a
husband and a father; and as a beggar, groping his way on a stick, blind as
the day before he was born, he will leave the house.
In many of the greatest tragedies—such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or
Sophocles’ Oedipus—the skene almost becomes like a fourth actor, loom-
ing at the back of the other actors, articulating not a word in a spoken
sense, except, perhaps, for some “offstage” scream at a climactic moment,
but finding a voice in the comings and goings of the actors in and out of it.
When Jocasta makes her first entrance in Oedipus from the skene, it is the
first true indication that the house is going to open up its secrets. Before
that, Oedipus’ entrances and exits from and to the skene are made in total
ignorance of what he is doing and who he is.
It is my contention, then, that what Aristotle meant by skenographia was
“setting the scene.” By this invention, Sophocles revolutionized tragic
action and, together with the introduction of the third actor, brought
tragedy to maturity. He introduced these innovations early in his dramatic
career and, in so doing, paved the way for Aeschylus, in Oresteia, to create
perhaps the greatest of all European dramatic masterpieces.
We have traced Sophocles’ life against the background of the early years
of Athenian democracy, the Persian Wars, and early fifth-century tragedy,
through to his major theatrical innovations. With this last mentioned point,
we have brought him squarely into his theatre. We must now look at this
theatre from a more general perspective.
NOTES
1. On the unreliability of the biographical data, see M. Lefkowitz, The Lives of
the Greek Poets (London, 1981), 75–87.
2. J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 1972), 43.
3. See A. J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1966), 14.
4. J. Herington, Aeschylus (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 49.
5. R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980),
would go even further. He writes: “I have been led to assume that, from first to
last, Sophocles was reacting, one way or another, to the influence of that great
predecessor [i.e., Aeschylus] who had shown how the categories and formulations
of traditional Greek thought could convey a profound vision of a tragic world” (3).
6. On the problems of dating Sophocles’ first performances at the City
Dionysia and the problems of dating Aeschylus’ Suppliants, see S. Scullion,
“Tragic Dates,” Classical Quarterly 52 (2002): 81–101.
7. See especially, M. Griffith, The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (Cam-
bridge, 1977). However, there is far from being a scholarly consensus on the subject.
8. On the dramatic technique of the Persians, see A. Michelini, Tradition and

Dramatic Form in Persians of Aeschylus (Leiden, Holland, 1982); and M. J.
Smethurst, The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek
Tragedy and Nō (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 81–147.
9. As B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy
(Berkeley, Calif., 1964), writes: “Aeschylus is indeed, as Gilbert Murray called
him, the ‘creator’ of tragedy, but Sophocles, in his less flamboyant way, is equally
original. Not only did he abandon the trilogy and add the third speaking actor, he
also invented tragedy as we know it” (7).
10. R. Padel, “Making Space Speak,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athe-
nian Drama in its Social Context, ed. J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J.,
1990), 345.
11. See O. Taplin, “Sophocles in His Theatre,” in Sophocle, Fondation Hardt,
ed. J. de Romilly, vol. 29 (Geneva, 1983), 158.
Chapter 3
Sophocles’ Theatre
At Athens, the dramatic festivals were held in honor of Dionysus.

Although several festivals were devoted to the god, not all were urban fes-
tivals. In fact, the earliest performances of tragedies may have taken place
at a rural Dionysia, but throughout the fifth century, the most important
dramatic festivals were held in the city, and those plays performed at rural
Dionysias were probably repeats of urban performances. The important
urban festivals were the City/Great Dionysia and the Lenaea, a winter fes-
tival more important for comedy than for tragedy.1 The traditional dating
for the organization of the City Dionysia is 534, when Thespis is supposed
to have presented the first tragedy. However, there are problems with this
dating and it may be that the City Dionysia was not organized until after
the reforms of Cleisthenes.2 At first, only tragedies and dithyrambs were
performed, but comedies were included in 486.
The connection between the dithyramb and Dionysus is not in dispute;
the relationship between tragedy and Dionysus, however, is far less clear.
Later writers in antiquity, unable to see any connection between the two,
quoted the oft-repeated phrase, “Nothing to do with Dionysus.” If Aristotle
is reliable, the association is simply a matter of chance, because tragedy
arose as an improvisation on the part of the leaders of the dithyramb. This
has not prevented some modern scholars from trying to find in the form of
tragedy more ritual connections with Dionysus.3 Although tragedies con-
tain ritual elements, these are dramatically functional and not necessarily
connected with Dionysus. Moreover, the tragedies themselves are more
noteworthy for their diversity of form and content than for any underlying
uniformity.
At the festival, Dionysus was celebrated under the cult title Eleuthereus,
because the cult seems to have originated at Eleutherae, a village on the
border of Attica that was incorporated into the territory of the Athenians
some time in the latter part of the sixth century. However, “Eleuthereus” is
close in form to the Greek word eleutheria, which means (political) free-
dom, and thus the title may also allude to the freedom the Athenian demos
gained after the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias in 510. This might help to
explain the general political content of tragedy.
Dionysus himself is arguably the most complex of Greek gods. Since the
publication of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music
in 1872 C.E., there has been a vigorous debate about the god’s nature. To
quote Albert Heinrichs, “Dionysus was essentially the god of wine and
vitality; of ritual madness; of the mask and theater; and of a happy after-
life.”4 If any unified conception of the god underlies this diversity, it is
probably in the notion of transformation.
The overall administration of the City/Great Dionysia fell under the
jurisdiction of the eponymous archon who took office in summer. One of
his first duties was to select the tragedies and comedies for inclusion in the
festival to take place the following spring, roughly corresponding to late
March or early April in our calendar. The preparations therefore took the
greater part of a year. The works of three tragic poets and five comic poets
were chosen. What criteria he used for his selection is by no means clear.
Although Euripides was only victorious four times during his lifetime, he
was never refused entry, whereas on one occasion Sophocles was, in spite
of his many successes.
Even before the playwrights themselves were chosen, choregoi were
appointed whose duty it was to underwrite the main financial expenses of
the various productions. Although the role of the playwright may seem
seminal, that of the choregus was almost equally important to the final suc-
cess of a production. The choregus took on his role as a public service, a
liturgy. His task was to pay for the maintenance of the chorus during the
months of rehearsal. In addition, he had to find a rehearsal place, pay for
the costumes and the stage props, and provide other technical support as
well as possibly finance the aulos player, who provided the main musical
accompaniment for the chorus—the aulos being a twin-reed instrument.5
Aulos players who were assigned to the various productions by lot, how-
ever, may have been paid for by the polis.
There is also some uncertainty with regard to the financing of actors
proper. In early times, the playwright was his own lead actor, but Sopho-
cles reportedly abandoned the practice because of the weakness of his
voice. After 449–48, at least, when a special acting prize was instituted for
Sophocles’ Theatre 33
lead actors (protagonists), it would seem that lead actors who were
assigned to the playwrights by the archon were funded by the polis. This no
doubt marked the beginnings of a professional recognition of actors. In
spite of this, we hear of particular actors being specifically associated with
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Were the second and third actors chosen by the
playwrights themselves?
For the moment, we shall focus on the role of the choregus. Liturgies
could take several forms and served as a wealth tax on the very rich. Apart
from the choregia, liturgies might consist, for example, of equipping and
manning an Athenian warship for a year. Should anyone object to his being
asked to perform a liturgy, he did have a legal recourse through a process
known as antidosis, which literally means “exchange.” He could argue that
another’s wealth was greater than his own. If the matter was not settled
beforehand out of court, and he won his case, he was not absolved from his
duty, but was required by the polis to exchange properties with the other
person and fund the liturgy out of that person’s estate. In the case of chore-
gia, in spite of the heavy expenses entailed, we hear of few people who,
once they had been given the task, were mean in their expenditure. The
choregia was a means of courting favor and recognition among the demos,
and could be used as a stepping-stone for a political career. We know of
several famous politicians who undertook such duties, including Themis-
tocles, Pericles, Cimon, Nicias, and Alcibiades. Indeed Nicias is said to
have been so generous that any production for which he served as chore-
gus was victorious (Plutarch Nicias 3).
In addition to the tragic and comic competitions, there were two
dithyramb competitions—one for boys and one for adult males—that were
organized around the 10 tribes created by Cleisthenes. For the dithyrambs,
the choregoi were appointed by the tribes themselves. Altogether, there-
fore, 28 choregoi were required for each Dionysia, except possibly during
the Peloponnesian War, when the number of comedies may have been
reduced from five to three. At the City Dionysia, the tragic choregia
became the most prestigious.6
The Greeks did not have a general term meaning playwright or dramatist,
because the activities of a tragic and comic playwright were regarded as dis-
tinct. At the end of Plato’s Symposium (223d), Socrates tries to make Aris-
tophanes, the comic playwright, and Agathon, a tragic playwright, admit that
someone who can compose tragedies should also be able to create comedies
and vice versa. As far as we know, however, this never happened. A play-
wright might simply be referred to as a poet, but this did not distinguish him
from other poets of a different kind. In the case of tragedy—because origi-
nally the tragic playwright and actor were one and the same—the same term
tragoidos referred to both the tragic playwright and the tragic actor. Aeschy-
lus, for instance, had been his own lead actor. Later, the term tragoidos gen-
erally designated a tragic actor or a member of a tragic chorus.
Because the tragic playwright also filled the role of what we would call
the artistic director, (he trained both actors and chorus), he was sometimes
called a tragoididaskalos (teacher of tragedies) or simply a didaskalos
(teacher). In this role, the dramatist not only taught the actors and the cho-
rus their lines, but had to serve as musical composer and choreographer,
because most of the choral parts of tragedy were both sung and danced,
and the actors, at points of high emotion, would join in, singing with the
chorus in antiphonal refrains.
Toward the end of the fifth century, in a practice particularly associated
with Euripides, an actor might sing a monody, something that no doubt can
be associated with the increasing professionalism of actors. We have an
example of this in Sophocles’ Electra. When Electra first enters, she sings
a lament about her own wretched plight and the dishonorable death of her
father before the chorus of Mycenaean women appear, who then join with
her in a sung antiphonal exchange.
Given the range of activities that had to be tried and tested during the
rehearsals over a period of months, it is not surprising that tragic play-
wrights on average only competed at the festival every other year during
their dramatic careers, possibly spending alternate years conceiving and
drafting four plays and then, in the following year, directing the plays.
There was, however, no hard and fast rule, because we know that play-
wrights did sometimes compete in back-to-back years.
What kind of written text did the various members of the cast have to
work with at rehearsals? Quite possibly none, because it is almost certainly
misleading to talk of a formal text. If the playwright, as director, had some-
thing written down, he no doubt revised it considerably during the
rehearsal period, changing it as he discovered what did and did not work.
For all we know, the text may have existed simply in the playwright’s head.
Menander, who admittedly wrote comedies at a later period, is reported to
have said that he had his plot all worked out, and just had to provide the
words. Certainly we should not assume that each of the actors had his own
copy of the script or that the actors and chorus were literate in a modern
sense. Much of Greek education was aural and oral. The teacher either
read out or simply spoke the lines of Homer or another poet to the pupils,
who in turn memorized them. Speaking—in the form of recitation—and
singing, rather than reading and writing, were more common. The main
requirement of an actor was to be able to deliver his lines as dramatically
effectively as possible, no matter how he was fed those lines.
The festival proper lasted the better part of a week. A day or two before
the main activities began, the cult statue of Dionysus was carried into the
city proper from a temple on the road to Eleutherae. Sacrifices and hymns
were performed at various points before it was brought into the theatrical
precinct in a torch-lit procession led by young men of military age. On
possibly the same day, the Proagon was held in the Odeon, a music hall
that was constructed adjacent to the theatre in the late 440s. At the
Proagon, the playwrights spoke about the plays they were to present. They
appeared with their actors and chorus, and all wore garlands. The per-
formers appeared without their masks. It is recorded that when Euripides
died in 406, Sophocles appeared at the Proagon dressed in black and intro-
duced his chorus without their customary garlands.
The main festival activities began on the 10th of the Athenian month
known as the Elaphebolion. It began with a formal procession in which
different segments of Athenian society—both male and female—were rep-
resented. The procession was led by a virgin of a leading family, but also
included citizens and metics (resident aliens) who wore purple robes. The
choregoi donned special apparel for the occasion. It is reported that Alci-
biades was the object of admiration by both men and women as he entered
the theatre, and, in the fourth century, the orator Demosthenes had made
for himself a golden crown and gold-embroidered cloak. Also in the pro-
cession were young men of military age who led a choice bull that was to
be the main sacrifice to Dionysus. At the back of the procession, men car-
ried large phalloi in honor of the god. Sometime during the celebration,
possibly after the sacrifice, there was a komos (feast).
Because the festival was a sacred time, all the courts were closed down
and prisoners were given leave to attend. Once in the theatre proper, certain
important preliminary ceremonies took place. As in meetings of the Athe-
nian assembly, the theatre was purified by the slaughter of young pigs. The
10 generals poured libations to the god. During the festival, the allies
brought to Athens their tribute, which was displayed in the theatre. The Athe-
nians also took the opportunity to honor both citizens and foreigners who
had performed distinguished services for Athens in the past year. At the
same time, those who had been orphaned as a result of their fathers having
fallen in battle and had been brought up at state expense, on reaching man-
hood were paraded in the theatre to receive the blessings of the citizenry and
were given suits of armor before being seated in the front rows. What all this
suggests is that the Dionysia was an event during which the Athenians took
great pride in their own political and military achievements and used the
occasion, in the presence of foreign guests, to incite admiration. Looked
upon within this cultural context, the competitions that followed—whether
dithyrambic, tragic, or comic—should be seen as a part of a showcase pre-

sented by the Athenians of the splendors of their democracy.7
The precise order of the various competitions is unclear. The following
order is tentative: day 1, boys’ and men’s dithyrambs; days 2 through 4,
three tragedies and a satyr play produced by a single playwright, respec-
tively; day 5, five comedies by five different comic playwrights. The com-
petitors in the various competitions drew lots for the order of their
presentations and a herald introduced each new competitor. However long
each day’s events were—disputed like so much else—the audience must
have been prepared to sit, with intervals, in the theatre for a minimum of
six to seven hours a day.8
Although we cannot construct in minute detail the way in which the var-
ious competitions were judged, it is known that every attempt was made to
ensure fairness and to avoid bribery influencing the judges’ decisions.
Some time before the festival began, each of the 10 tribes selected a list of
names for consideration as judges. What special qualifications these peo-
ple may have had is unknown, but the choregoi had some say in vetting the
candidates. Aristophanes (Ecclesiazusae 1154 ff.) divides judges into two
classes: those who enjoy good jokes and the sophisticated. The names of
the chosen candidates from each of the 10 tribes were sealed in separate
urns, one urn for each tribe, and the urns were placed in the safekeeping of
the public treasurer on the Acropolis. It was a capital offence to tamper
with them. When the competitions were about to begin, the 10 urns were
brought into the theatre and the eponymous archon drew out one name
from each of the urns. These 10 people were to serve as the judges.
Whether the same people acted as judges for all of the competitions is pos-
sible, but unlikely. In any case, the judges were made to swear that they
would give an impartial verdict. Plato (Laws 659a-c) suggests that the
judges could be influenced by the clamor of the audience, although Aelian
(2.13) records that, in spite of the demands of the spectators to award the
first prize to Aristophanes’ Clouds, the judges only placed it third. There is
much uncertainty about the actual voting process and the procedure by
which the winners were declared, but it is clear that only a random selec-
tion of the votes cast by the judges, who put their verdicts into an urn, was
made.9 The victorious playwright was given an ivy crown; the victorious
tragic choregus was given a goat to sacrifice to Dionysus. Presumably the
victorious actor, who did not necessarily perform in the winning plays, was
given a financial reward.
So far we have spoken of how theatre was organized in the time in which
Sophocles produced his plays. We must now consider the physical structure
and spatial arrangements of the theatre before looking at some of the more
important performative aspects. As in so much else we have been consider-

ing, there is much uncertainty and little agreement among scholars.
The stone theatre of Dionysus, as it exists in Athens today, is the product
of rebuilding in later times that has virtually obliterated the archaeological
evidence of what the original fifth-century theatre was like. Thus, we can
only form a generalized idea of its basic conformation. Apart from the
covered skene, it was a large open-air space constructed mainly of earth
and wood. Although we may divide it into three basic sections—skene,
orchestra, and auditorium—the structure was conceived as a unified whole
in which performers and spectators participated in a communal celebra-
tion in honor of Dionysus. A person who was a spectator one year, might
well find himself a performer the following year and vice versa. As Peter
Walcot has written:
The chorus in the orchestra shows that no physical barrier separated per-
former from audience; the presence among the spectators of the cult statue of
a god who might also be active on the stage further reveals that the absence of
a physical barrier was matched by the absence of any ‘spiritual’ barrier. Stage,
orchestra and auditorium formed a single unit and so too did actors, chorus
and spectators, all of whom were sharing in a common act of devotion.10
It is important to note that whereas I have used the term “skene,” Walcot
speaks of a “stage.” Because the skene and the area immediately in front of
it present problems that have been the subject of acrimonious dispute, we
will begin our discussion there.
The skene, as described in the previous chapter, originally was simply a
tent or booth in which the actors changed, but by the time of Sophocles, it
was a wooden building, one side of which faced toward the orchestra and
auditorium. Depending on the tragedy, imaginatively it could be made
most commonly to represent a house or a temple, although it could also
represent other things. It had at least one central doorway with double
doors. This doorway is all the tragedies seem to demand, although some
scholars have argued for either two or three.
Whatever the skene actually looked like, it had a roof that could support
actors, when required. This roof was mainly used for the appearance of
gods, although not exclusively. Presumably, there was either an opening in
the roof with a ladder leading up to it or a ladder at the back of the skene
out of the view of the audience. In spite of the recent objections of Ashby,11
this roof was probably flat, allowing for easy use by more than one actor,
as in the battlement scene in Euripides’ Phoenician Women. At some point
(we cannot be sure when), a crane (mechane) was introduced to bring gods
in airborne, hence the Latin expression deus ex machina. On the surviving

evidence, Sophocles seems to have been more sparing in the introduction
of gods than was Euripides. In his seven surviving tragedies, there are only
two entrances of gods—Athena in Ajax and Heracles in Philoctetes—but
it has been disputed whether Athena actually appeared on the roof of the
skene. In both cases, the mechane may have been used, but we cannot be
sure.
There was also a device related to the skene, called the ekkuklema—lit-
erally “a thing rolled out.” This contraption was used to reveal scenes
inside the skene. Again, what it was like and how exactly it worked is not
clear. It may have been a kind of low trolley that was rolled out, but several
sources describe it as “revolving.” Nor do we know when it was first intro-
duced; thus, some scholars would argue for its use for the tableau of the
murder scenes in Aeschylus’ Oresteia of 458, whereas others would claim
that it was not introduced until later. Sophocles may have used it in Ajax,
Antigone, and Electra.
Perhaps nothing has caused greater scholarly controversy than the area
immediately in front of the skene. Was there a raised stage or was the skene
on the same level as the orchestra? If there was a raised stage, it was
(unlike in later Hellenistic theatres) low, allowing for easy interaction
between stage and orchestra. The evidence of one vase painting may seem
to suggest the existence of a low, wooden stage and some would regard this
as conclusive. Those against its existence usually argue that the tragedies
demand the complete intermingling of the actors and chorus in the orches-
tral area. If there was any kind of raised area, it probably consisted of no
more than a couple of steps.
There is also dispute about the configuration of the orchestra, which lit-
erally means “the dancing area,” taking its name from the space where the
chorus sang and danced. The traditional idea that the orchestra was fully
circular cannot be positively proved. Evidence from other early rural Attic
theatres informs us, at least, that a circular orchestra was not de rigeur,
because they are more rectilineal or trapezoidal. Moreover, the archaeo-
logical traces of the fifth-century theatre cannot automatically be made to
sustain the idea of a fully circular orchestra.12
The theatre of Dionysus was first constructed on the southeast slope of
the Acropolis c. 500. When part of the slope of the hillside was hollowed
out to serve as a substructure to support the spectators who looked down
on the orchestra from above, this may have influenced the tendency toward
a more circular configuration of the theatre as a whole, which, in turn,
influenced the shape of the orchestra at Athens, but this need not mean that
it was fully circular. On the other hand, if the shape of the orchestra was
constructed with the dithyrambs in mind, a fully circular orchestra would

have been beneficial, because a dithyrambic chorus of 50 members danced
in circular formation.13 The smaller tragic and comic choruses, whether
rectangular in formation or not, would not present a problem fitting into
such a space.
Whatever the precise shape the orchestra may have had, the distance
between the central door of the skene and the front row seats directly oppo-
site seems to have been about 60 feet. The floor of the orchestra was made
of packed earth, and somewhere there was an altar that conventionally has
been regarded as being situated in the middle, but even the position of the
altar is disputed.14
Leading into the orchestra from the sides closest to the skene were two
passageways, conventionally called parodoi, although they are sometimes
termed eisodoi. If we can believe later sources, one parodos, the one to the
right of the audience, was thought to lead into town and the other, to the
left, out of town. This works for several tragedies set in a polis, but each
tragedy had to establish its own topographical arrangement. In the early
part of Ajax, for instance, the skene represents Ajax’s tent, set at one end of
the Greek encampment at Troy. Thus, we should imagine one parodos
leading out of the camp and the other leading into its center.
A reasonably conservative estimate is that the theatre of Dionysus held
about 15,000 spectators. An assembly of so many people was huge by
Athenian standards. The area on the hill called the Pnyx, where the Athe-
nian assembly met and which was half bowl shaped like the theatre of
Dionysus, only held about 6,000 people. The majority of spectators at the
Dionysia would have been Athenian citizens. However, slaves, metics,
and boys were also present. In addition, as previously described, some of
the audience would have been non-Athenian Greeks. Whether women
formed part of the audience or not has been the subject of lively debate.
The evidence, drawn from a variety of disparate sources, is by no means
conclusive either way. We have seen that certain women participated in
the procession in a formal religious capacity and that women were among
the spectators of this procession as it made its way through the streets of
Athens. Moreover, women are conspicuous for their participation in cer-
tain rites honoring Dionysus, and we know of no law that formally for-
bade them from attending. However, this cannot be construed as
conclusive evidence that they attended as spectators for the various the-
atrical performances.
If we leave out female slaves and children, women fall into two main
categories: “citizen” women and foreign women, including metic women.
A citizen woman was subject to a male kurios. Although she had legal
rights, she had no political rights, playing no formal part in the public life
of the polis except in certain religious capacities. As a result, women
tended to lead somewhat segregated lives. If any citizen woman did attend
the theatre, therefore, it would probably have only been with the consent of
her kurios. Thus, it is unlikely that they would have been present in any
great numbers. Such restrictions need not have applied to foreign women
who, as in the case of hetairai (non-Athenian women), could be highly
educated and enjoy more freedom. It may well have been that if there was
no law forbidding women to attend, the women present were foreign, a
point that finds support in some pieces of evidence.15
The audience sat on wooden seats that surrounded about two-thirds of
the orchestra. Although there were some special seating arrangements, we
do not know how extensive these were. The priest of Dionysus Eleuthereus
occupied the central seat in the front row and there was other special seat-
ing for important officials, public benefactors, and foreign dignitaries.
There also seem to have been separate sections for members of the boule
and ephebes (young men of military age). Separate sections may also have
been reserved for each of the 10 tribes.
Many of the spectators would have served as performers at some time
in their life. Let us not forget that each year alone the dithyrambic cho-
ruses required more than 1,000 performers, if we include the aulos play-
ers, and the tragedies and comedies about 200 more. The audience,
therefore, must have had a keen theatrical sense and could be very vocif-
erous or even disorderly in expressing their feelings, whether by hissing
and whistling or kicking the seats with their heels. Special officials who
carried batons were in charge of crowd control, and charges could be laid
for offensive behavior.
There was a small charge for admission to the theatre and, at some
point, a state fund (theorikon) was established to provide for citizens the
cost of theatre tickets. It is disputed, however, when this fund was intro-
duced, how it operated, and what exact purpose it served. Some later
sources ascribe the introduction of the theorikon to Pericles, but this has
been doubted. Supposedly, the fund was introduced especially to allow
poor citizens to attend.
When we consider acting in the theatre of Dionysus, the crucial point,
bar none, is the sheer size of the structure and the scale of the actors in
relationship to the size of the facility. Those sitting in the back rows were
at a distance of about 300 feet from the actors in front of the skene. This
was not a theatre that admitted intimate gestures. Rather, gestures had to
be large and expansive. Even if the actors had not worn masks, their facial
expressions would not have been visible to many of the audience.
Although the mask precluded what is an essential part of the modern

actor’s equipment—the face—mask acting can be quite sophisticated, and
also brings its own advantages.16 It draws attention not simply to the face
but to the whole body, so that all physical movements take on meaning.
Gestures, therefore, in a masked theatre are more stylized and can have
special meanings. As Martha Johnson has written:
The angle and stance of the actor’s head affects the emotional expression of
the mask. In illustrations of tragedy, various head movements appear to give
variable expression to the apparently expressionless mask. For example,
oblique angles of the head can be expressive of sorrow mixed with surprise;
a lowered head, of pain and helplessness; a raised head, of joy or worship.17
Furthermore, unlike in modern representational theatre, there was not the

same notion of a willing suspension of belief as if the actors were acting in
a real world of their own, with the audience sitting in darkness, being priv-
ileged hidden viewers. The same daylight shone on actors, chorus, and
audience alike who were participating in a common celebration in a com-
munal space. One was visible to the other, even if the mask may have
deprived the actor of some peripheral vision. Moreover, the audience was
not slow to make its dissatisfaction known, if an actor did not perform up
to scratch. Thus, there was not the same pretence that the actor was not act-
ing. It was more what has been called presentational theatre rather than
representational theatre.18 When the actor donned his mask and costume,
although his role was different, in a sense he was doing what the priest of
Dionysus was doing, sitting in the front row, dressed in priestly regalia; or
the choregoi, decked out in finery; or the elaborately dressed aulos player,
who provided the musical accompaniment to the performance. Because
the lead actors were competing for a prize, it was essential, in their case at
least, that the actor qua actor could be recognized behind the mask by the
audience—all the more so when the protagonist was required to play more
than a single role in a tragedy.19 This notion that the actors made it self-
evident that they were performing may seem more obvious in Aristophanic
comedy, where the actors commonly addressed the audience directly in
their capacity as spectators rather than in tragedy, where a greater sense of
dramatic illusion was maintained. Nevertheless, the presentational aspects
of tragedy should not be minimized.
An actor was called a hypokrites. When a tragic actor put on his mask
and costume, that very act was the major part of the creation of the char-
acter to be presented. There are a number of artistic representations of an
actor studying the mask, which—for the Greeks—was the character. Vase
representations suggest that the masks, which were made of stiffened linen
and covered the whole of the head, were naturalistic. Nevertheless, they
were stereotypical in the sense that they defined the age, sex, and status of
the characters. Although there were variations in the masks to differentiate
between, for example, Antigone and her twin sister Ismene, in the Greek
theatre, the mask revealed immediately to the audience whether the char-
acter was meant to be young, mature, or old. There were no subtle grada-
tions in age. Oedipus and Creon are adult kings. Orestes and Neoptolemus
are young men. There were of course some special masks, the blind mask
being the most important for Sophocles.
The Greek word for a mask was the same as the word for face—proso-
pon. In the Alexandrine hypotheses that have come down to us attached to
several tragedies, the characters of the plays, the dramatis personae, are
simply called prosopa (faces or masks). The masks were the characters
being presented. A tragic actor—part of a troupe of three when he per-
formed in three tragedies and a satyr play on a single day—might find him-
self playing as many as a dozen roles. Thus, there was no question, as in
the case of a modern method actor, of internalizing the character. Quick
changes of mask and costume with the presentation of a new role were
often required. Because a mask had to be easily identifiable to the audi-
ence, it was mainly through the words given to the masks by the playwright
that the audience was given a particular nuance to a type character. So it is
not a question of creating a personality in a modern sense, but rather a
question of “ethical colouring,” as John Jones once termed it.20 Thus, types
of characters often have certain character traits in common. We go wrong
if we approach the aged Oedipus as if he were similar to Shakespeare’s
Lear, or Orestes as if he were like Hamlet. Their situations may have some-
thing in common, but there is no real sense of an inner self to Greek char-
acters. They are simply caught up in extraordinary events that define their
fates. As Aristotle rightly said, it is the action (praxis), not characteri-
zation, that is the primary ingredient of tragedy.
If the mask is, in essence, the character, what is the implication when the
mask is altered in some way during the course of the performance, or the
costume which is part of the mask? They imply that the stage character has
suffered a profound change of status, even to the point of destruction. In
Euripides’ Helen, Helen is not the fallen woman of traditional myth, but has
miraculously been transported to Egypt where she has remained faithful to
her husband, Menelaus, throughout the Trojan War. She is dressed in white,
with long hair. Menelaus makes a comical entrance, dressed in rags from a
shipwreck, after having fought the whole war to recover his wife who turns
out to have been a phantom. He is then reunited with the real Helen. When
they plan an escape from the importuning Egyptian king by a ruse, Helen
changes her mask from a long-haired one to a short-haired one and her
dress from a white to a black one, and Menelaus exchanges his rags for the
dress of a warrior. Thus, as they leave the fantasy world of Egypt, they are
changed into costumes more suited to their roles in traditional myth, under-
lying the point that the archetypal fallen woman of Greek myth has been
deliberately whitewashed in the play. Is the real Helen the long-haired
woman who appears in white in the first part of the play or the cropped-
haired woman dressed in black who leaves toward the end?
In Oedipus Rex, after Oedipus blinds himself, his mask is changed to a
blind one and probably his costume is changed as well. We are told by the
messenger who reports his blinding that Oedipus is covered in blood that
streamed down him. He is both pitiable and wretched to see. Oedipus is no
longer the great king, savior of his people, but an accursed wreck of a man
who has been the destroyer of his people. By extension, and in similar
fashion in Antigone, when Creon reappears at the end of the play, he is car-
rying the body of his son, Haemon, who becomes part of his costume. He
is no longer the arrogant ruler who neglects the importance of the family,
but a grief-stricken father. There are numerous such examples.21
Modern audiences often find Greek tragedies too wordy. This is due, in
part, to the problems of translating from a language that works on princi-
ples very different from those of modern English. More significantly, some
of the conventions of tragedy can often not be made to work easily on a
modern, more intimate stage, most notably the chorus, which is discussed
below. What we would call stage directions often form part of the actual
text. We have seen how Sophocles uses the prologue scene to provide the
dramatic setting. New characters arriving are usually announced or are
quickly identified. With regard to the actors, the mask probably prevented
much of the audience from seeing their lip movements. Therefore, the
audience had to be helped in being able to determine who was speaking,
whether through gesture or through the meter of the verse. The main meter
of spoken dialogue was the iambic trimeter, a meter closely resembling the
pattern of everyday speech. Verse in ancient Greek was not based on stress
or rhyme, however, but on quantity. In dialogue exchanges, actors engaged
in line-by-line dialogue, called stichomythia, in which an actor spoke a
whole line of verse to which there was a response by a second actor who
spoke another line in an equivalent metrical response. In English, these
whole lines can amount to the equivalent of words like “yes” or “no,” a
constant problem for a translator, but which for the Greek audience helped
to determine who was speaking. At times, the actors might exchange anti-
labai—half lines used to quicken the pace and heighten the tension. In any
case, it is usually a question of a metrical give and take. Only the rich
screams or cries of the characters at moments of stress, which take many
forms and are irreproduceable in English, can be ametrical. If a third joins
in a dialogue exchange, his participation is usually carefully prepared for.
Given the size of the theatre, the actor’s voice had to be very strong and
was the most important aspect of his own physical equipment. Although the
acoustics at the theatre at Epidauros have aroused wonder, the acoustics at
the somewhat larger theatre in Athens do not seem to be as good, and clar-
ity of delivery was important and took considerable training.22 The mask
itself did not contain any kind of loudspeaker effect. In addition to dialogue
exchanges, actors often had to make lengthy, set speeches (rheseis) in
which they could demonstrate their ability and versatility. Such long
speeches can be off-putting to a modern audience, but in the fifth century,
Athens was still predominantly an oral culture in which the spoken word
assumed a paramount importance unparalleled in our own age of television
and the 10-second sound bite. In this respect, tragedy was heavily influ-
enced by the political and forensic speeches of its various assemblies and
law courts, respectively. Several scenes in Sophoclean and Euripidean
tragedy take the form of agons (debates) that have a political or forensic
ring to them. At the end, there is often an angry stichomythic exchange.
There were also more descriptive speeches—most commonly associated
with vivid messenger speeches—that no doubt gave the third actor a chance
to show his virtuosity. All these speeches became influenced by the new art
of rhetoric in its various forms. It is no wonder that we hear how actors in
the following century were employed as foreign ambassadors.
The influential Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin proposes that dialogue
provides a dynamic basis for all communication.23 In his view, all writing,
language, and social gesture should be regarded not as fixed forms, but
rather as kinds of “speech acts,” which he termed “utterances.” Seen in this
way, works of literature are always political and cultural by nature and live
a socially charged life in which they engage in a discourse with past and
future utterances. This discourse creates room for several voices, not only
that of the author, but also those of the fictional characters, of other writ-
ers, and of society in general. Such voices might work in unison, coopera-
tion, or opposition, producing works that have a heterogeneous effect.
Bakhtin termed this effect heteroglossia. Although he was particularly
interested in the polyphonal tone of Dostoevsky’s novels, what he says is
equally applicable to Greek tragedy, whose dialogic nature and polyphonal
tone were enshrined from the beginning in the dichotomy between actor
and chorus, in the juxtapositioning and melding of archaic choral lyric
with epic narration, transformed into spoken dialogue.
In the relationship between individual and group, the individual stands

out. The group can act in concert with the individual, can connive at his
actions, can act in opposition, can respond to his actions, and so forth, or
can merely act as spectator. Thus, the chorus’ role is fluid, being—to a
greater or lesser degree—involved in the “speech act” of the actor. In this
sense, the chorus is composed of both actors and spectators. In their more
“passive” role as spectators, the members of the chorus merge in spirit, if
not physically, with the other onlookers, the audience. They can act as both
insiders and outsiders of the dramatic illusion, even to the extent of draw-
ing attention to themselves as performers—as, for example, in the famous
choral ode of Oedipus Rex, when they question their function as dance
performers. 24
Although actors and the chorus could engage in spoken exchanges or
join in antiphonal song and—in late tragedy—actors sang solo, in large
measure, the actor spoke his words, whereas the chorus sang and danced.
Although there is no standard formula to apply to all tragedies, after the
prologue scene, those parts in which speech predominates are called
episodes and those parts in which the chorus members sing and dance are
called stasima, apart from their entrance song, which is called the parodos.
Although this arrangement makes things appear far too schematic, never-
theless episodes and stasima stand in a kind of dialogic relationship to
each other. Educated though the Athenians were to be attentive and acute
listeners of the spoken word, they were not to be expected to sit through
whole tragedies without relief from the spoken word. Thus, we might con-
jecture that a typical episode in a Sophoclean tragedy lasted about 10 to 15
minutes before giving way to a choral song. Through the singing and the
dancing, the whole action was transposed into a different medium, giving
respite to the audience’s concentration on the spoken word by placing
greater emphasis on the visual through the choreography of the dancers
and soothing the ear through the power of the music.
Because the music and the choreography of tragedy are lost to us and all
that we have left is what we might call the libretti of the chorus, too often
in modern productions the choral parts of tragedy fall flat by being spoken,
because directors do not easily find a suitable equivalence in their produc-
tions. Although we hear of innovations in the music of tragedy in the latter
part of the fifth century, traditionally the music was made to subserve the
words rather than the words made to subserve the music. The lyric meters
of Greek tragedy are complex, varying from ode to ode and even within
odes. As J. Herington has shown,25 one of the most innovative things about
tragedy is that unlike other forms of choral lyric, in which the meter
remains the same throughout, tragedy employs several meters.
The stasima of tragedy were divided into stanzas of verse in which a first
stanza, known as a strophe, found an exact metrical correspondence in a
second stanza, known as an antistrophe. There was usually more than one
of these strophes and antistrophes in a stasimon, and the whole ode was
sometimes capped off with an epode in a different meter. This strophe and
antistrophe formation may have reflected the original dance movements of
the chorus, although we know virtually nothing about what they were like.
Dance movements seem to have been highly mimetic and hand gestures
were an important part. Sometimes, however, the chorus could sing an
astrophic song. In their entrance song, the parodos, they might chant,
rather than sing, to a marching meter known as anapests. Did the 15 mem-
bers of a Sophoclean chorus stand in a rectangular formation with the
stronger members standing in the front row and the weakest in the middle
of three rows, reflecting something of a military hierarchy? This is com-
monly assumed, but cannot be proved. The configuration of the chorus was
probably much more flexible. It is also usually assumed that the leader of
the chorus, the coryphaeus, alone engaged in spoken dialogue with the
actors, although we cannot even be certain of this. How the chorus stood
and what they did when they were not part of the spoken exchanges of the
play is also not clear.26
Because the members of a tragic chorus had to perform in four plays in
a single day, the chorus was composed of young men who had to be
extremely fit. Plato (Laws 665b) suggests it would be strange for someone
over the age of 30 to serve as a chorus member, and the pictorial evidence
supports this view. Although the size of the part given to the chorus may
have declined throughout the fifth century, possibly due to the increasing
importance of the professional actors at the expense of the amateur chorus
members, the choruses of tragedy remained an integral part of the overall
theatrical effect, greatly enhancing the visual and musical dimension of
the performance.
When we consider the visual dimension of a tragic performance, we
should not, like Aristotle, underestimate the importance of spectacle, even
if most of the violence takes place “offstage.” Aeschylus, in particular, was
noted for his elaborate costumes and spectacular effects that seem borne
out by the text of his plays. Although Sophocles seems to have been more
sparing in his use of stage props, those that he used—leaving aside the
crane, the ekkuklema, and the mask (which were discussed earlier)—
assume a fundamental importance. The sword of Ajax, the urn of Orestes,
the bow of Philoctetes, or the horses of Oedipus at Colonus—whether in
the form of the horseman statue of the local hero or the live horse on which
Ismene enters—are integral to Sophocles’ theatrical meaning.27
NOTES
1. On the Lenaea and other Dionysian festivals apart from the City Dionysia,
see E. Csapo and W. J. Slater, The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1995), 121–38.
2. See W. R. Connor, “City Dionysia and Athenian Democracy,” Classica et
Mediaevalia 40 (1989): 7–32.
3. For example, see R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy
in the Developing City State (Oxford, 1994).
4. A. Heinrichs, “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of
Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88
(1984): 205.
5. On the aulos, see P. Wilson, “The aulos in Athens,” in Performance Cul-
ture and Athenian Democracy, ed. S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (Cambridge, 1999),
58–95.
6. For an important treatment of the choregia, see P. Wilson, The Athenian
Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge,
2000).
7. On the relationship of tragedy to the preceding ceremonies, see especially
S. Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” Journal of Hellenic Studies
107 (1987): 58–76.
8. C. Ashby, Classical Greek Theatre: New Views of an Old Subject (Iowa
City, Iowa, 1999), 118–127, has recently challenged the idea that the perfor-
mances began at dawn and lasted for about 12 hours. A shorter time has also been
proposed by P. Walcot, Greek Drama in Its Theatrical and Social Context (Cardiff,
Wales, 1976), 11–21.
9. See Csapo and Slater, Ancient Drama, 157–59.
10. Walcot, Greek Drama, 4–5.
11. Ashby, Classical Greek Theatre, 95.
12. See Csapo and Slater, Ancient Drama, 410–11, for references to modern
discussions of the problem.
13. On the circular shape of the dithyramb, see A. d’Angour, “How the
Dithyramb Got Its Shape,” Classical Quarterly 47 (1997): 331–51.
14. See Ashby, Classical Greek Theatre, 42, and J. P. Poe, “The Altar in the
Fifth Century Theatre,” Classical Antiquity 8 (1989): 116–39.
15. Those in favor of this viewpoint include A. J. Podlecki, “Could Women
Attend the Theatre in Ancient Athens? A Collection of Ancient Testimonia,” The
Ancient World 21 (1990): 27–43; and J. Henderson, “Women and the Athenian
Dramatic Festivals,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 121
(1991): 133–47. For a different point of view, see S. Goldhill, “Representing
Democracy: Women at the Great Dionysia,” in Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian
Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis, ed. R. Osborne and S. Horn-
blower (Oxford, 1994), 347–69.
16. On masks, in general, in the Greek theatre, see C. Marshall, “Some Fifth-
Century Masking Conventions,” Greece and Rome 46 (1999): 188–202.
17. M. Johnson, “Reflections of Inner Life: Masks and Masked Acting in

Ancient Greek Tragedy and Japanese Noh Drama,” Modern Drama 35 (1992): 30.
18. On the terms “presentational” and “representational,” see P. Arnott, The
Theatre in Its Time (Boston, 1981), 47–49.
19. See F. Jouan, “Réflexions sur le rôle du protagoniste tragique,” in Théâtre
et spectacles dans l’antiquité: Travaux du Centre de Recherche, Strasbourg 7
(Leiden, Holland, 1983).
20. J. Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London, 1962), 31–32.
21. See P. Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre (London,
1989), 168–79. On Helen, see p. 178, especially.
22. See B. Hunningher, Acoustics and Acting in the Theatre of Dionysus
Eleuthereus (Amsterdam, 1956).
23. See, for example, P. Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader (London, 1994).
24. See A. Heinrichs, “‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral Self-Referentiality in
Greek Tragedy” Arion 3.1 (1995): 57–111.
25. J. Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tra-
dition (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 103–24.
26. For a discussion of the problem, see C. P. Gardiner, The Sophoclean Cho-
rus: A Study of Character and Function (Iowa City, Iowa, 1987), 6–10.
27. See C. Segal, “Visual Symbolism and Visual Effects in Sophocles,” Clas-
sical World 74 (1980): 125–42. There is no standard work on the stage props of
Greek tragedy in English. Students should consult J. Dingel, Das Requisit in
Griechischen Tragodie (Tubingen, Germany, 1966).
Chapter 4
Ajax
In the years after the repulse of the Persians, Themistocles, who had played
a crucial role in the Persian defeat at Salamis, lost influence and was ostra-
cized from Athens in about 471. Later, he was accused of plotting with
Persia, where he eventually fled. At Athens, in his absence, he was con-
demned to death for treason. When he died in 459, his body was refused
burial in Attica, although his bones were later secretly brought home and
buried.
The most influential politician at Athens in the two decades after the Per-
sian defeat was Cimon, first elected strategos in 478. Cimon was the son of
Miltiades and a Thracian princess. Miltiades had been instrumental in the
defeat of the Persians at Marathon in 490. His family claimed descent from
a son of Ajax, the Homeric hero and eponymous hero of Sophocles’ play
(Herodotus 6.35). Some scholars, therefore, have tried to see allusions to
Cimon in Ajax.1
Cimon successfully commanded most of the naval operations of the
Delian Confederacy and pursued a vigorous policy against the Persians,
while maintaining a pro-Spartan policy in Greece itself. In domestic mat-
ters, Cimon was conservative. In 464, however, the Spartans were faced
with a serious revolt of their helots (serfs) and appealed to the Athenians
for aid. Cimon led an expeditionary force of Athenian hoplites to help
them. Although the details are sketchy, after Cimon’s departure, there
arose at Athens a serious political crisis. Ephialtes, a reformer, took the
opportunity of Cimon’s absence to attack the remaining political powers of
the Areopagus, the old aristocratic council, thus paving the way for Athens
to become a radical democracy. The conservative-minded Spartans, no
doubt having got wind of the revolutionary developments at Athens,
summarily dismissed the Athenian expeditionary force. In the ensuing

events, the Athenians broke their alliance with Sparta and formed an
alliance with Argos, Sparta’s main enemy in the Peloponnese. Cimon him-
self was disgraced and ostracized, but Ephialtes was mysteriously assassi-
nated. The attack on the Areopagus and the alliance with Argos inform the
background of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, performed in 458.
In the wake of these events, Pericles, who was to become Athens’ most
famous statesman, rose to prominence. However, for well over a decade,
he faced opposition from an oligarchic-minded faction and did not achieve
indisputable leadership of the Athenians until the late 440s when, finally,
his main political opponent, Thucydides—a relation of Cimon’s by mar-
riage—was ostracized. Meanwhile, Athens and Sparta, in 445, made an
uneasy Thirty Years’ Truce.
An insuperable problem with trying to relate Sophocles’ Ajax in some
way to Cimon—or, indeed, any other Athenian politician—is that it is not
possible to date the first performance of the tragedy. Although many schol-
ars think that Ajax is the earliest surviving play of Sophocles, there is no
consensus. Be that as it may, the fate of politicians—like Themistocles,
Cimon, Thucydides, and others—who suffered ostracism, demonstrates
the potential fickleness of political fortune in democratic Athens. What-
ever brilliant services a Themistocles or a Cimon had performed for the
Athenian polis in the past did not save them from their fates. This fickle-
ness of political fortune informs Ajax.
The story of Ajax’s suicide is briefly mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey and
the details were treated, at greater length, in subsequent eras, in art and lit-
erature, most of it entirely lost. We can glean enough information, how-
ever, to be sure that, whatever he found in earlier treatments of the myth,
Sophocles recast the story to suit his own dramatic and theatrical vision.
The bare bones of the myth as treated by Sophocles may be briefly sum-
marized. After the death of Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes at
Troy, the Greeks awarded his arms to Odysseus, much to the indignation of
Ajax who regarded himself as the greatest warrior in the army after
Achilles. The actual voting may have been rigged, as is suggested at one
point in the play but not confirmed. Outraged by the insult to his honor,
Ajax resolves to kill the leaders of the army. When he tries to attack them,
however, the goddess Athena deludes his mind so that he slaughters the
cattle of the army instead. Athena had punished Ajax for refusing her help
in battle earlier, when the Greeks had been hard pressed by the Trojans.
The tragedy opens with Ajax in his tent, surrounded by his slaughtered
animal victims, believing them to be, in his madness, the Greek leaders.
When he recovers his sanity, realizing his dishonor, he resolves to die.
Ajax 51
Leaving the camp of the Greeks, he kills himself near a grove close to the
sea. His body is discovered by his wife, Tecmessa, and the chorus of
sailors from Salamis. When Menelaus and Agamemnon attempt to deny
burial to Ajax as a traitor, his body is defended by Teucer, Ajax’s half-
brother, who intends to bury the body no matter what the cost. The angry
dispute over the fate of Ajax’s body is only settled by Odysseus, Ajax’s per-
sonal enemy, who persuades Agamemnon to allow Ajax to be buried
against his inclinations.
The structure of Ajax has been termed “diptych.” What this means is that
the action falls into two distinct parts. Ajax commits suicide shortly after
the halfway point of the play. To have the protagonist die so early has
sometimes been interpreted as a dramatic weakness. Criticism of Ajax’s
plot structure was even made in antiquity. However, we go wrong if we try
to read the play by imposing “Aristotelian” notions of unity of which
Sophocles was unaware. For Sophocles, what is important is the rupture in
the military cum political world of the Greeks created by the death of Ajax,
an aristocratic warrior of the “old school,” who cannot survive in a world
of changing values. In Ajax, the hero does, in fact, dominate the dramatic
action from beginning to end, but it is the fate of the hero in death as much
as in life that provides the central dramatic focus. As visual evidence of
this, Ajax not only commits suicide before the audience’s eyes—quite
exceptional for a Greek tragedy—but his corpse remains onstage until
the end of the play. In this tragedy, staging and political meaning are not
separable.
At the very heart of the action are a series of structural dichotomies. We
may illustrate this point by considering the two distinct places of the dra-
matic action. Ajax violates what has traditionally been known as one of the
“classical” unities: unity of place. In this respect, Ajax is not unique,
because Aeschylus’ Eumenides is also set in two distinct places, Delphi
and Athens. The first part of Ajax is set at Ajax’s tent in the Greek camp at
Troy and the second part is set in an isolated and somewhat nondescript
spot near a grove away from the camp. The contrast between the elaborate
setting of the scene at Ajax’s tent in the tragedy’s prologue and the topo-
graphical vagueness of the setting of Ajax’s suicide contributes an impor-
tant dimension to the play’s meaning: it not only serves to emphasize
Ajax’s isolation in death away from the world of heroic endeavor in which
he had won his renown, but also throws into relief a world devoid of hero-
ism, once he has died. Unlike Ajax, those characters who first appear after
the hero’s death and engage in petty wrangling over his burial do not act
against the backdrop of the Greek camp at Troy because they are lesser
men stripped of their heroic status. Only Odysseus, who appears in the
prologue at Ajax’s tent and again at the end of the tragedy, bridges the
divide between the two worlds.
As in Eumenides, the change of scene in Ajax is brought about not only
by the departure of the actors, but more especially by the departure of the
chorus who are commonly present throughout the whole of a tragedy after
their initial entrance. All that is needed, in the absence of actors and cho-
rus, to suggest a change of scene in Ajax is for the double doors of the
skene to be opened, suggesting an entrance into the grove. Whereas in the
first part of the play, the focus is squarely on the skene, in the second part,
the focus is on the orchestra.
In antiquity Sophocles was commonly regarded as the “most Homeric”
of the tragedians. Moreover, as Simon Goldhill has written:
The concern with right action and moral judgement in Sophocles’ drama is
developed through the interrelations of the tragic and Homeric texts. The
“unsettling questioning process” of this “intertextuality” . . . informs Sopho-
clean tragedy. Sophocles may be read for and/or against but never without
Homer [italics added for emphasis].2
Of the surviving tragedies of Sophocles, Ajax is the most heavily influ-

enced in its dramatic atmosphere by Homeric epic, particularly the Iliad.
Ajax is a character made in the mold of the Homeric Achilles. Even their
situations bear comparison. In the Iliad, Achilles’ honor is slighted when
he is deprived of his slave girl, Briseis, by Agamemnon, and he with-
draws from the fighting to his tent. In similar fashion, Ajax’s honor is
slighted when the arms of the dead Achilles are awarded to Odysseus
rather than himself. When we first encounter him, he, like Achilles, has
withdrawn to his tent. The heroic tone is struck in the first part of the
tragedy—while Ajax is still alive—by the language, which has an epic
tone that contrasts with the language of the other characters after his
death. This lowering of tone, like the change in setting discussed earlier,
serves to underscore the change in the world that is brought about with
Ajax’s passing. All these things help to set into relief Ajax’s heroic
stature in spite of his failings.
There is one scene in the tragedy, often remarked on, that is directly
modeled on a famous scene in the Iliad. The final meeting of the Trojan,
Hector, with his wife, Andromache, and his son, Astyanax, in the Sixth
Book of the Iliad, before he goes to his death, provided Sophocles with the
inspiration for the meeting between Ajax and his wife, Tecmessa, and son,
Eurysaces. However, the Sophoclean scene is no slavish imitation of the
Homeric scene. The pathos of the Homeric scene, notable for the gentle-
Ajax 53
ness of Hector as a husband and father, contrasts with the harshness of the
encounter of Ajax with his wife and son.
The Iliadic setting is established in the prologue of Ajax. According to
Homer (Iliad 11.5 ff.), the extremes of the camp of the Greek army at Troy,
traditionally viewed as the points of most danger, were occupied by the
tents of Achilles and Ajax. In contrast, Odysseus’ tent was located in the
middle. In Ajax, in the opening lines of the play, the audience is told by
the goddess Athena (3–4) that the play is set before the tent of Ajax, at one
end of the Greek camp. These opening lines allow the audience to estab-
lish the spatial dynamics of the first part of the tragedy. The central door of
the skene leads inside Ajax’s tent. One of the parodoi leads toward the cen-
ter of the camp, whereas the other leads outside the camp into a kind of no-
man’s-land.
The play opens with the entrance of two characters separately, Odysseus
and Athena. Odysseus enters the orchestra by the parodos from the Greek
camp. Like a tracker dog, he is following someone’s footprints, which lead
him toward the tent of Ajax. When he is close by, he is arrested in his
movements by the voice of Athena, whom he can hear but cannot see,
although she is visible to the audience. Athena probably enters from the
other parodos that leads out of the Greek camp.3 The goddess asks
Odysseus the purpose of his mission. Odysseus informs her that during the
night, the cattle of the Greek army have been slaughtered. Although he
cannot be certain, all the evidence points to Ajax as the culprit. Athena
informs Odysseus that Ajax is indeed responsible and that he had intended
to kill the leaders of the Greek army, but she had deluded his mind so that
he had mistakenly attacked the livestock of the army. Athena tells
Odysseus that Ajax is now inside his tent sitting amidst his animal victims.
When she proposes to call Ajax outside, Odysseus shrinks back in fear,
terrified by the thought of confronting his personal enemy in his madness.
Telling him not to be cowardly, Athena assures Odysseus that she will
darken Ajax’s eyes so that he will not see him. “Is it not the sweetest mock-
ery,” she asks, “to mock at one’s enemies?” (79).
Athena summons the mad Ajax and questions him about his handiwork
with the sword. Thinking that he has already slaughtered Menelaus and
Agamemnon and that he holds Odysseus bound within, since he wants to
torture him before flogging him to death, Ajax asks Athena always to stand
by him as an ally. He then retreats inside. With Ajax’s exit, Athena
addresses Odysseus: “Do you see, Odysseus, how strong is the power of
gods? Who was more prudent than this man or found better at doing what
was needed?” (118–20). Odysseus is filled with pity for his enemy, realiz-
ing that Ajax’s plight might have been his own. ”I see that we who have life
are nothing but wraiths or a frail shadow” (125–26). Athena warns

Odysseus not to offend the gods, because one day is enough to reverse the
lot of mortals. “The gods love the sober-minded and loathe the wicked”
(131–32).
This prologue scene is highly dramatic. Sophocles uses, to great effect,
his theatrical resources. He employs all three of his speaking actors, but we
note that only two converse at one time. Ajax and Odysseus never speak to
each other. There is an irreparable gap between them that can only be
bridged by the goddess who serves as the linchpin of the scene. As a god-
dess, Athena controls the action, but not from any superior vantage point,
because she is involved in the conflict. Rather, she fills the void between
Ajax and Odysseus, addressing them both separately from some point in
the orchestra, with Odysseus on the periphery and Ajax appearing in front
of the skene doors. When Athena converses with Ajax, Odysseus is
reduced to the position of a spectator. Although Ajax enters last, the audi-
ence’s imagination is directed, through the entrance movements of
Odysseus and his verbal exchange with Athena, toward what lies within
the central door of the skene. There is conjured up a vision of a veritable
abattoir, with a human butcher, sword in hand, presiding over the slaughter
of innocent animals.
How might members of the original Athenian audience have reacted to
this prologue scene? In the first place, the audience would have been
steeped in the Iliad and Odyssey and other epics that provided the basis of
much of their education. In spite of the atrocity Ajax has committed, his
heroic status is vouched for by the way that Sophocles has created the mise-
en-scène. Ajax, by the placement of his tent, had held a position in the
Greek camp second only to that of Achilles. Like Achilles in the Iliad who,
when his honor was slighted, had isolated himself from the rest of the army,
so does Ajax. Personal honor is the yardstick by which they measure their
worth. At the same time, for an Athenian audience, Ajax was not simply a
Homeric hero, he was also worshipped in Attica as a local hero. He was the
eponymous hero of one of the 10 tribes of Attica created by Cleisthenes.
According to Plutarch (Moralia 628b), the Athenians passed a decree that
in the competitions of tribal choruses, Ajax’s tribe should never be placed
last because he never bore defeat easily. Ajax’s legendary home was the
island of Salamis, which the Athenians had occupied in the sixth century;
and the people of Salamis were Athenian citizens. Salamis itself was visible
from the top of the Acropolis on whose southeastern slope the theatre of
Dionysus was located. Although, in the prologue, Sophocles does not fore-
ground this local connection of Ajax—rather, he brings into prominence
the Homeric setting—later in the play, the chorus is formed of Salamnian
Ajax 55
sailors. Moreover, the last part of the play, centered on the burial of Ajax,
leaves open the possibility of the establishment of a hero-cult of Ajax.4
If Ajax is created in the mold of Achilles, Odysseus is a much more pro-
tean character. Although he is one of the Greek warriors in the Iliad, it is
as the hero of the Odyssey that he is more famous. The moral ethos of the
two poems is, in many ways, very different, in part contrasted by the main
characters, Achilles and Odysseus, respectively. In Plato’s Hippias Minor
(365b), Achilles and Odysseus are clearly distinguished. Whereas Achilles
is “true and uncomplex,” Odysseus is “versatile and deceitful.” Bernard
Knox, who cites this passage in Plato, has well expressed the difference
between the two:
The aristocratic viewpoint in Greek literature . . . is Achillean, an ideal of

warlike generosity, of rigid standards of honor, of insistence on time, the
respect of the world—all this combined with the asceticism and physical
beauty of the athlete and his all-too-frequent intellectual limitations. The
democratic viewpoint (typically that of a seafaring and commercial com-
munity) is Odyssean—an ideal of versatility, adaptability, diplomatic skill,
and intellectual curiosity, insisting on success combined with glory rather
than sacrificed for it.5
The tragic playwrights were free to use either the more negative or the
more positive aspects of Odysseus’ protean nature as an effective dra-
matic foil. In Ajax, Odysseus may not have the heroic/tragic stature of an
Ajax, but his character is more attuned to the world in which Ajax finds
himself with the death of Achilles and in which he cannot survive. Mal-
leable and understanding, Odysseus expresses compassion for his enemy
in his madness.
If Ajax and Odysseus provide a dramatic contrast, what did Athena rep-
resent for the Athenian audience? In the Iliad, Athena is one of the
Olympians who supports the Greeks against the Trojans. We can assume,
therefore, that she is concerned for the safety of the Greek army. In the
Odyssey, she has a special relationship with Odysseus, pleading with the
other Olympians to help him in the face of the wrath of Poseidon and com-
ing to his aid in many difficult situations. Although these mythic associa-
tions would have been common knowledge, for the Athenians, Athena
meant something much more, because she was the patron deity of Athens
itself. Whether or not the Parthenon was already under construction when
Ajax was first performed, traditionally, Athena was the ultimate guardian
of the Acropolis. Although her cultic associations with the Acropolis
are not verbally brought into play in the tragedy, Sophocles interweaves
allusions to both Athens and Salamis, which serve to connect the world of
myth and the contemporary world of the audience.
In Aeschylus’ Eumenides, first performed presumably some years before
Ajax, Orestes had been sent by Delphic Apollo to seek protection from
Athena in her civic capacity as guardian of Athens. She had established a
law court to try him for matricide and had found a resolution to the com-
plex problem of dike in an issue of bloodletting that had lasted over three
generations. In contrast to Eumenides, in Ajax, Athena appears at the very
beginning of the play. Whereas in the former play she was a catalyst for the
resolution of the conflict, in the latter she is the catalyst of the conflict, dis-
playing a harshness of attitude toward Ajax that not even Odysseus
exhibits toward his personal enemy. In fact, in the prologue, more like Ajax
than Odysseus, she exhibits the traditional Greek attitude of “helping
friends and harming enemies,” which forms an ethical problem at the very
heart of the tragedy.6 The question that should be asked with regard to
Athena’s role is why Sophocles has chosen to characterize her in this harsh
way. That Sophocles uses the camp of the Greek army at Troy as the myth-
ical background of the tragedy should not make us forget that the play-
wright was producing the play in Athens before an Athenian audience. In
the later scenes of the play, it will become clear that the Greek army is con-
ceived as a divided polis, in which the moral questions of leadership and
right action are subject to severe scrutiny. Can it be, therefore, that Athena
is emblematic of a fractious polis?
One further point about the prologue: when Ajax enters, he is covered
with blood and almost undoubtedly holding his sword with which he has
slaughtered the cattle of the army and with which he will commit suicide.
Because Sophocles uses stage props sparingly, those that he does use
assume an added importance. The sword is visually part of Ajax’s costume,
the overt insignia of Ajax’s heroic stature, but its significance is ambiguous,
because it has been used for the nonheroic exploit of butchering the cattle
of the army under cover of darkness in his attempt to murder its leaders.
Athena recounts how Ajax is in his tent, “his head and sword-slaughtering
hands dripping with sweat” (9–10). Later, Odysseus describes how Ajax
had been seen leaping over the plain with his “fresh-reeking sword” (30),
and Athena asks Ajax whether he has “bathed [his] sword well in the blood
of the Greek army” (95). The compound epithets used to describe the
sword help to establish the heroic tone of the prologue, but the moral ambi-
guity of the sword’s significance remains.
At the end of the prologue, when the actors have left the stage, the
marching refrains of the chorus are heard as they enter the orchestra. The
chorus, as mentioned earlier, is composed of sailors from Salamis, loyal to
Ajax 57
Ajax. As a group of ordinary sailors, they present a stark contrast with the
dramatis personae of the prologue. Through their marching song, they
transpose the dramatic action into another mold. At the same time, their
opening words conjure up a vision not of heroic Troy but of the neighbor-
ing Athenian island of Salamis: “Son of Telamon, [i.e., Ajax], you whose
home is on the shore of sea-swept Salamis . . . ” (134–35). Thus, imagina-
tively, they forge a connection between the world of myth and the world of
the audience.
This Athenian connection will again be brought to the fore by Tecmessa,
Ajax’s spear-won bride, after she has entered a little later. She immediately
addresses the chorus in the following words: “Sailors who serve on the
ship of Ajax, descended from the sons of the earth-born Erechtheus”
(201–2). Erechtheus was a legendary founder-hero of the Athenians who
prided themselves on being autochthonous. If Sophocles had not wanted to
relate the dramatic action in some intimate way to Athens, he could have
elected for a different chorus. For example, he could have chosen a chorus
of Greek soldiers at Troy, unrelated in any personal way to Ajax. Although
the Greek army arrived at Troy by ship, in Homer, Ajax was more noted for
his exploits as a soldier than for any naval associations.
There is nothing detached about this chorus, then; they are totally parti-
san. They have heard the rumors about Ajax’s actions, spread by the insin-
uations of Odysseus. Invidious gossip, they say, always spreads about the
great, but such rumors, if spread about the rank and file, would command
no credence. The common man, however, without the great, would prove a
precarious bastion of defense. Therefore, they, without Ajax, have no
strength to ward off these slurs against his reputation. Should Ajax only
appear himself, these gossipmongers, like flocks of birds before a mighty
eagle, would cower speechless with fear. In the original Athenian audi-
ence, there would have been present both members of Ajax’s tribe, together
with their tribal general and, presumably, at least some sailors from
Salamis. How would they have reacted to this entrance song of the chorus?
Would the words of the chorus have struck a personal chord?
In the following scenes—first with Tecmessa and the chorus, and later
with Ajax after he has recovered his sanity and then also with his son,
Eurysaces—the impending fate of the disgraced hero and his loyal sup-
porters is poignantly dwelt on. Ajax compares himself with his father Tela-
mon, who had been part of a former expedition to Troy and had won great
honor. No less of a warrior than his father, he must now perish dishonored;
and yet, if it had been left to Achilles’ decision alone, no one but he would
have inherited Achilles’ arms. However, the Atreidae have contrived the
affair in favor of a villain, casting aside his own exploits. How would he be
able to face his father if he sailed home? Should he redeem himself, then,
by storming alone the bastions of Troy and dying? No, that would give
comfort to the Atreidae, his enemies. A man of noble birth should live or
die honorably. To the pleas of Tecmessa about the terrible fate that awaits
her and Eurysaces should he die, Ajax remains unmoved. He simply leaves
instructions to be given to Teucer to protect his family.
The beginning of the first stasimon of the chorus again forges a connec-
tion between the world of myth and the contemporary world as they eulo-
gize Salamis:
Oh famous Salamis, blessed sea-swept island, distinguished for ever in all

men’s eyes . . . (596–99)
words, no doubt, designed to recall the famous victory of the Greeks over
the Persians.7 The ode itself encapsulates lyrically several of the themes
that have been taken up earlier.
Suddenly, Ajax re-enters from the skene, followed by Tecmessa. This
sudden reappearance of Ajax may well have come as a surprise to the audi-
ence, who may have expected that Ajax had retreated earlier into his tent in
order to kill himself.8 If they were surprised, what follows is even more
surprising. The episode itself consists of a single dramatic monologue by
Ajax, in which he appears to have changed his mind about killing himself.
It is one of the great dramatic speeches in tragedy (646–92). Time can
change everything, so that no mortal should claim surely that something
will not be. His own resolve, which had been as hard as iron, has been soft-
ened out of pity for his wife and son. He will cleanse himself in a meadow
near the shore and bury his sword, the most hateful of weapons, where no
one can look upon it. For never since he received it as a gift from Trojan
Hector, the most grievous of his foes, has he experienced anything good at
the hands of the Greeks. An enemy’s gift is no gift. In the future, he will
learn to yield to the gods and respect the leaders of the army, for all things,
however terrible and strong, must yield to their appointed authority.
Although the speech has been much admired, it has caused endless crit-
ical controversy. It is known as the deception speech, because several crit-
ics believe that Ajax makes the speech to deceive the chorus and Tecmessa
of his intention to kill himself. On the other hand, other critics believe that
Ajax has a genuine change of heart. To use Gellie’s succinct formulation of
the problem, “Ajax cannot change and Ajax cannot lie. If Ajax cannot
change, he speaks to deceive; if Ajax cannot lie, he is recording an honest
change of heart.”9 Clearly, Tecmessa and the chorus are deceived, as we
learn from their reactions later, but there are sufficient double meanings in
Ajax 59
Ajax’s speech for the audience not to be deceived. Both lines of interpre-
tation suggested above are problematic, and the problem is not resolvable
if we approach it from the standpoint of modern representational theatre.
We have argued earlier that in Greek theatre, the mask—of which the
actor’s costume forms an integral part—defines the character. The pivotal
point of focus in this scene is Ajax’s sword, which—together with the blood
stains on his body—is the salient feature of his costume, emblematic of his
whole being as a “Homeric” hero. In fact, in an image in the opening of his
speech, Ajax comes as close as he can to identifying himself physically as
hard-tempered iron (650), but he now recognizes that the man of iron can be
no more. The sword that has defined his whole being has become the most
hated of weapons, because it has proved treacherous to himself. He will there-
fore go and wash himself clean of his stains and bury the sword in the earth
where none may find it save Hades. Without his sword, he will learn to yield
to the gods and respect the leaders of the army. Whether in this speech Ajax
intends to deceive or not is a red herring, because he is fixated on his sword.
Live or die, once he has washed himself clean of the blood and stripped him-
self of his sword, Ajax the hero will be no more, because the sword is his
heroic identity. As Christian Meier has written of fifth-century warriors:
We know that weapons at that time were regarded not simply as tools. Cer-
tain types of arms were associated with specific peoples and with segments
of society. They were seen as a man’s characteristic mark, indeed, as a part
of him. Helmet, shield, and spear were inseparable from the image of a
Greek warrior, as shown by innumerable monuments that depict naked men
with their weapons.10
Nor has Ajax had a change of heart; he has simply come to the recogni-
tion that the heroic Ajax is already a dead man. His speech, with its Her-
aclitan emphasis on change, is a powerful realization that there is nothing
permanent. In the new world in which he finds himself, where mass vot-
ing determines worth, rugged individualism has no place. With his depar-
ture via the parodos by which Athena originally entered from outside the
Greek camp, he leaves the world of heroic endeavor, visually symbolized
by the skene.
After the following stasimon, a messenger sent by Teucer—Ajax’s half-
brother and Telamon’s natural son—enters. He says that Calchas, the seer
of the Greek army, had taken Teucer aside and advised him to keep Ajax in
his tent that day, because if he can survive this day, Athena will forego her
wrath against him for once having spurned her help in battle and telling
her to take her stand by other Greeks. Ajax’s arrogant attitude had roused
the goddess’ bitter anger, because he revealed a total lack of sophrosyne

(moderation).11 For Athena, war is a cooperative enterprise, and an army—
which for the fifth-century Greeks was the polis under arms—required a
united effort. Here lay the root of Ajax’s downfall.
Alarmed by this news, Tecmessa arranges a search party, and the chorus
divides into two groups and leaves the orchestra by separate parodoi. At
this point, all the acting areas are left vacant and, as I mentioned earlier, the
double doors of the skene are opened to suggest that the scene has changed
to represent a deserted grove outside the Greek camp. As in Eumenides,
with which Ajax has much in common, when the scene changes from Del-
phi to Athens, there is a shift of dramatic focus from the skene to an open
space suitable for public debate.
Ajax enters, sword in hand, which he fixes in the ground. Totally iso-
lated, he speaks for the last time before falling on his sword. His speech
ends with the following words:
O light, o hallowed ground of my native Salamis, deep-rooted ancestral

hearth, and you, famous Athens and my companion race, and you, springs
and rivers here and plains of Troy, I salute you. Farewell, nurturers of my
life! This is the last word Ajax says to you. The rest I shall speak in Hades to
those below. (859–65)
We would do well to remember that the actor playing Ajax delivered this
speech alone, before an Athenian audience of some 15,000. In these
words, Ajax brings together the heroic world of Troy, on the one hand, and
Salamis and Athens, on the other. If Ajax belonged in traditional myth pri-
marily to Troy, in death, as a local tribal hero, he will belong mainly to
Athens. In the latter part of the play, the heroic world of Troy, the arena of
his life’s greatness, is replaced by a world more suggestive of contempo-
rary debate and mean politics.
After the dead body of Ajax is discovered by Tecmessa and the chorus,
Teucer enters. Scenically, it is an important moment. The swordsman has
been replaced by a bowman. Teucer sends Tecmessa to fetch Eurysaces so
that they may stand vigil over the corpse to prevent their enemies from
seizing it. Left alone with the chorus, Teucer uncovers the body and pon-
ders his own fate as the bastard son, wondering what kind of reception he
will receive from his father for failing to protect Ajax.
There ensue two debate scenes (agons). These scenes are separated by a
choral ode in which the Salamnian sailors curse warfare that denies them
the common pleasures of life, and life made more terrible by the death of
their protector, Ajax. In their misery, they long to see Cape Sounion that
Ajax 61
they might greet holy Athens. Thus, an implicit link is again imaginatively
forged between Troy and Athens.
“Courtroom drama” had been introduced to theatrical audiences earlier,
in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and in his Danaid trilogy. The growing impor-
tance of public debate, brought about by the various political and forensic
assemblies of the democracy, no doubt had a profound effect on Athenian
drama, and the drama itself—as the emphasis on the spoken increased—in
turn, fostered the Athenians’ love of debate. The courts, in particular, with
their large numbers of jurors drawn from the demos, provided an arena in
which the wealthy and the powerful could attack their personal enemies,
often viciously and mercilessly. Although the earliest forensic speeches
that survive come from a slightly later date, the agons of Ajax seem to
reflect the kind of popular mudslinging that we find in many a forensic
speech.
In the debate scenes, none of the participants show themselves made in
the heroic mold. They resort to petty and demeaning arguments. In the
first, Menelaus, in a speech full of cliché-ridden sentiments, attempts to
debase Ajax’s status by arguing that Ajax, in his criminal insubordination,
is a mere member of the demos. Neither the laws of a polis nor an army can
survive without fear and respect. In defense of Ajax, Teucer, although not
denying Ajax’s wrongdoings, questions Menelaus’ insinuations about
Ajax’s status. In so doing, he attacks Menelaus’ own character by claiming
that it is no wonder that people of mean birth can err when those of noble
birth can be so wrong. Ajax was no conscript of the Atreidae who came for
the sake of Menelaus’ wife. He was his own master. On what grounds does
Menelaus lay claim to being a strategos over Ajax and the Salamnians?
Menelaus came only as a ruler of Sparta. (Before an Athenian audience,
this remark about Menelaus’ Spartan origins is clearly intended as a slur.)
Neither Menelaus nor any other strategos will prevent Teucer from bury-
ing Ajax, who took no account of ciphers. Menelaus and Teucer then hurl
insults at one another. The whole episode is a bathetic comedown in com-
parison to the earlier scenes with the tragically heroic Ajax. Importantly,
however, terms such as polis, demos, and strategos give the debate a con-
temporary ring.
In the second debate scene, Agamemnon begins by denigrating Teucer’s
origins in that his mother was a mere slave woman. Had Teucer been nobly
born, Agamemnon could not imagine what presumptuous behavior he
would display, because now, as a mere nobody, he dares to protect Ajax’s
body, another nobody, and to claim that they, Agamemnon and Menelaus,
did not come as generals (strategoi) of the whole army, but rather that Ajax
came to Troy under his own command (1232–34). Surely it is vile to hear
such great insults from slaves? What feats did Ajax perform in battle that
were not matched by himself? Perhaps they should not have proclaimed a
contest for Achilles’ arms, if the decision of the judges was simply to be
denounced by the likes of Teucer. Such insolent behavior must be curbed
and he must be goaded into line if he cannot learn some sense. Teucer
should bring a free man to plead his cause because, when he himself
speaks, Agamemnon cannot understand him because of his barbarian
tongue.
In his reply to these insults, Teucer reminds Agamemnon how Ajax
alone had rescued the army when Hector had set fire to the Greek ships and
had also willingly leaped at the opportunity to encounter Hector face to
face in battle. Moreover he, Teucer, the slave and child of a barbarian
mother, was at Ajax’s side. Well, how much better were Agamemnon’s own
origins? His own grandfather, Pelops, was a barbaric Phrygian. Further-
more, his father had served up to his brother his own children as flesh to
eat. As for Agamemnon’s Cretan mother, she was caught, by her husband,
in flagrante delicto with some stranger. Can Agamemnon really censure
Teucer’s origins, whose father was Telamon and whose mother, although
she was a war prize, was a queen? If Agamemnon wants to cast the body
of Ajax out unburied, he had better know that he will have to cast out three
other bodies with him, because it would be better for him, Teucer, to die on
behalf of Ajax’s wife and son than to die by fighting on behalf of Agamem-
non’s wife or, should he say, his and his brother’s wife (i.e., Helen)?
Birth plays an important part in Ajax. Ajax’s own aristocratic pedigree,
unlike Agamemnon’s or Teucer’s, is never called into question. He is
eugenes (of noble birth). In spite of its democracy, birth was still an impor-
tant factor at Athens in the fifth century. Until the time of the Pelopon-
nesian War, Athens’ leaders emerged from aristocratic families. In the
earlier part of the century, it was not unknown for Athenian aristocrats to
have non-Athenian mothers, Cimon being a case in point. In 451, however,
a marriage law was passed that required both parents to be Athenian in
order for a son to become an Athenian polites. Thus, the question of the
legitimacy of someone’s origins may have been a cause of contemporary
concern reflected in the play.12
The violent altercation between Teucer and Agamemnon is interrupted
by the arrival of Odysseus. Thus, Odysseus’ two entrances provide the
framework in which Ajax’s tragedy is acted out. Although Odysseus had
been Ajax’s mortal enemy, he shows himself, as we saw in the prologue,
capable of displaying sophrosyne, which is denied to the other characters,
be it Ajax and Teucer on the one hand, or Menelaus and Agamemnon on
the other. Without such a quality, the warring factions—whether in a polis
Ajax 63
or an army—cannot be reconciled. It is left to Odysseus, well schooled in

the fragility of human life through his encounter with Athena, to bring an
uneasy truce to the disputing parties by persuading a reluctant Agamem-
non to grant Ajax a proper burial:
Never let violence so prevail upon you as to cause your hatred to stamp on
justice. For me, also, this man was the greatest of personal foes within the
army, ever since I became the possessor of Achilles’ arms. Yet, though he
was such to me, I would never so discredit him as to deny that I saw him as
the single greatest man of all the Greeks that came to Troy save Achilles.
Nor would you with justice so discredit him for, in so doing, it is not him but
the laws of the gods you would destroy. There is no justice in harming a
noble man, should he die, even if you chance to hate him. (1334–45)
Although Agamemnon yields to Odysseus’ entreaties, it is only out of his

friendship for him; for Ajax, his hatred remains implacable. His anger
unmollified, Agamemnon leaves.
Teucer is effusive in his thanks to Odysseus for his help. Whatever
enmity there was in the past, from now on they will be friends. However,
when Odysseus offers his help in burying Ajax, Teucer politely refuses
for fear of incurring the dead hero’s wrath. Odysseus departs, and now a
cortege forms of Tecmessa, Eurysaces, Teucer, and the chorus, who in
the manner of a Greek funeral procession, carry Ajax’s body out for
burial.
Many critics, these days, recognize that Ajax is an intensely political
tragedy.13 Although the play is set against the background of the Trojan
War, the factioning within the Greek army is used as a dramatic vehicle to
explore the kinds of tensions that can arise within a Greek polis, conceived
as a military formation, in which there is not established any clear-cut,
moral structure of command, but rather where there are the competing
claims of the leaders of rival tribal contingents. Through his clever use of
theatrical space and the interweaving of ethos, incident, and language,
Sophocles presents these problems as arising in a world of political change
in which old and new values collide and there is created a moral vacuum
in the matter of leadership. The old heroic code of rugged individualism—
moribund if not dead—as expressed in the values of Ajax and Achilles,
clashes with the new collective processes of democratic procedure, epito-
mized by the voting of the Greek army over the arms of Achilles. The old
heroic ways may have to give way, but the new democratic ways are not
idealized. The question is left open as to whether the voting of the Greek
army was rigged, manipulated by the Atreidae for their own political ends.
The Atreidae may claim to be the strategoi of the whole army, but they
scarcely display qualities that make them morally fit for leadership in this
changing world. Without the intervention of Odysseus, the play would end
in a moral quagmire. It is he, guided by the stern warnings of Athena, who
reaches for the new cooperative values required by democratic men. Nei-
ther arrogant nor self-aggrandizing, he recognizes the peerless qualities of
an old warrior like Ajax while, at the same time, he serves the better, col-
lective interests of the army in its present conformation. History must not
be rewritten, as Agamemnon would try to do, by desecrating the memory
of the fallen heroes of the past. In this sense, Odysseus is the rightful
inheritor of Achilles’ arms. However, the peace he establishes is, at best, an
uneasy one.
As for Ajax, the memory of this fallen warrior was preserved in the hero-
cult at his tomb. This tomb, as Sophocles perhaps suggests obliquely, should
serve as a reminder to the Athenians that only by preserving a memorial to
Ajax’s greatness can they ensure the continued protection rather than suffer
the anger of this valiant but dangerous hero of a bygone age.
APPENDIX: THE SUICIDE OF AJAX

Because Ajax commits suicide openly onstage, his death presents a
problem as to how the actor playing Ajax—given the three-actor rule—
gets offstage so that he can play other roles, and a substitute body can
replace him. It is commonly assumed that a dummy was used, and various
means have been proposed as to how the substitution was made, whether
by the use of the ekkuklema, by having Ajax fall on his sword through the
central door of the skene, or by the use of screens behind which the actor
would fall and from which he could make a hidden exit. None of these
solutions is convincing.14
I should like to suggest an alternative solution. After Ajax has fallen on
his sword near the skene, the members of the chorus, divided into separate
groups to search for him, enter by the two parodoi, not in orderly, but
rather in random, fashion. As they slowly come together, Tecmessa enters,
probably from the skene that now represents a grove (894), so that she is
unseen by the chorus. She immediately discovers the body, and her cries
alert the chorus’ attention (893). Tecmessa is accompanied by a mute
attendant—a slave wearing a cloak, possibly hooded. It would not be
exceptional for Tecmessa to be attended. In fact, for Tecmessa to wander
outside the Greek camp unescorted might seem more exceptional. This
mute attendant, earlier in the play, had brought in Eurysaces, Ajax’s son
Ajax 65
(544). Later, when Teucer sends Tecmessa to fetch Eurysaces to stand vigil
over Ajax’s body, we learn that Eurysaces had been left alone in the Greek
camp (985). As the chorus gathers around the body, obscuring it from
sight, Tecmessa says she will cover it with a large enfolding cloak to which
she points (916). It is usually assumed that she covers the corpse with her
own cloak, but I suggest it is the cloak of the mute attendant. As the extra
takes it off to put over Ajax, the actor playing Ajax unfastens his own outer
garment and slips it off. Then, the mute extra and Ajax change places. The
neutral qualities of the Greek mask allow for a relatively easy substitution
of the extra and actor. When Tecmessa leaves to fetch Eurysaces (989), she
and the actor who had played Ajax, but is now her attendant, exit together.
If this scenario is correct, the role of Teucer cannot be played by the same
actor as had originally played Ajax, as is often surmised.
NOTES
1. See A. F. Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax (Warminster, U.K., 1998), 6, note 20,
for references.
2. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), 161.
3. See however, Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax, 124, who gives references to other
discussions.
4. On the question of the hero-cult of Ajax, see Garvie, ibid., 230–31, with
references to other authors.
5. See B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy
(Berkeley, Calif., 1964), 121–22.
6. On this whole matter in Ajax and other Sophoclean tragedies, see M. W.
Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and
Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989).
7. Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax, 181, doubts this: “there is no need to suppose that
Sophocles is referring anachronistically to the defeat of the Persians at Salamis in
480 B.C.” But why not? Salamis was the Athenians’ greatest naval achievement
that assumed almost legendary significance. Surely Sophocles would not have
been unaware that this association would suggest itself to many of the Athenian
audience?
8. As is suggested by G. Gellie, Sophocles: A Reading (Melbourne, 1972), 13.
9. Ibid., 12, quoted with approval by Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax, 185, whom the
reader should consult for a useful summary of scholarly opinion and references to
other discussions.
10. C. Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age, trans. R. Kim-
ber and R. Kimber (London, 1999), 12.
11. For the importance of sophrosyne in the play with references to other dis-
cussions see Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax, 14–17.
12. F. Robert, “Sophocle, Périclès, Hérodote et la date d’Ajax,” Revue de

Philologie 38 (1964): 213–27, used this criterion to date the play, but his argu-
ments must be treated with caution.
13. For a brief summary of some of these political readings with references to
other scholars, see Garvie, Sophocles: Ajax, 16.
14. See A. F. Garvie, ibid., 203–4, with references to other scholars’ discus-
sions.
Chapter 5
Antigone
In 443–42, Sophocles served as treasurer of the Delian Confederacy. It

was an important political appointment, because he was charged with
overseeing a financial review of the contributions of Athens’ subject allies
to the League. In 441, Samos revolted from the Athenians and sometime
during the ensuing war, Sophocles was elected strategos. The Ancient Life
claimed that he was elected as a result of the production of Antigone. If this
were true, the first performance of Antigone would have been somewhere
close to 440. This dating, however, is controversial.1
The immediate conflict in Antigone arises from what funeral rites, if any,
should be given to Polyneices, Antigone’s brother, a traitor who has died in
combat while leading a foreign army against his native Thebes. The play
presents a political/religious crisis in which oikos values, as represented by
Antigone, clash with polis values, as proclaimed by Creon. Although the
burial of Polyneices forms the immediate point of conflict, the larger issue
of the tragedy revolves around the difficult question of what is the correct
attitude to be adopted toward the gods in a world in which the will of the
gods is not automatically understood, because the traditional religious
practices of the oikos conflict with the newer demands of the polis. Key
religious terms that recur through the play are sebas (respect), eusebeia
(reverence), asebeia (irreverence), and hosios (holy), together with cog-
nate terms and ideas, including time (honor).
The oikos predated the polis; but as the polis emerged from the mists of
history—being essentially a collection of oikoi—nomoi (originally unwrit-
ten customs, but later also laws that were written down) increased in the
wake of the development of the polis as a social organism. Traditionally,
funerals had been the private domain of individual oikoi. However, in the
sixth century at Athens, Solon (Plutarch Solon 21.5) had passed laws
restricting the more excessive aspects of funeral practices. Funerals of
members of aristocratic oikoi could be powerful emotional occasions
fraught with public danger through the threat of stasis. Female members of
an oikos played an important part in preparing the body for burial. There
also was a law, as described earlier in the case of Themistocles, that traitors
were denied burial within the borders of Attica. Furthermore, by c. 460, the
polis had taken over the burial of its war dead, giving them a mass and
therefore an individually anonymous, public funeral at which a distin-
guished public speaker was chosen to speak, lauding the traditions of
Athens.2 Such speeches, which presented Athens in an ideal light, provided
the opportunity for much myth making. These public funerals of the war
dead may be seen as evidence of the demos of Athens exercising its power
at the expense of private funerals of members of aristocratic oikoi, obliter-
ating the distinctions between ordinary members of the Athenian demos
and powerful aristoi. If true, then it would not be unreasonable to read
Sophocles’ Antigone against this background.3
Antigone is set in the city of Thebes, which provided a rich source of
mythological material. Although they are now lost, there were several
epics centered on Thebes and the family of Oedipus. The larger mythical
background of Antigone, therefore, was well known. Oedipus had cursed
his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, that they should divide their inher-
itance by the sword. After Oedipus’ death, Eteocles had ruled at Thebes,
but Polyneices had mustered a foreign army of Argives and led them
against his native city in order to claim his share of the inheritance. In the
ensuing conflict, the Argive army had been repulsed, but the twin brothers
had killed each other in the fray. Aeschylus treats this theme in his Seven
against Thebes, first produced in 467. At the very end of the tragedy, the
issue of Polyneices’ burial is raised and Antigone resolves to bury her
brother against the commands of the polis. Most scholars, however,
believe the ending of Seven against Thebes is spurious, being later added
to the play in the wake of the success of Sophocles’ Antigone. If this is true,
we have no firm evidence that any poet before Sophocles had treated the
theme of Antigone’s defiance in burying her brother. Thus, the possibility
presents itself that this part of the myth was Sophocles’ invention, although
we cannot be sure.
In Antigone, the skene represents the royal house of Thebes, the doom-
laden home of the dead Oedipus and his family. One of the parodoi leads
into the center of Thebes and the other leads out of Thebes to where the
two brothers fought and died. The oikos will be caught in the middle of a
conflict between the forces of two sides, the polis of Thebes itself, as rep-
Antigone 69
resented by its new ruler, Creon, and the site of the dead body of Poly-
neices, an outcast member of the polis, whose rights Antigone will cham-
pion. The opposition of the two sides to the conflict is given stage reality
by the places of entrance and exit of the dramatis personae.
The play begins with the opening of the central door of the skene. Two
young women—twin sisters—appear, Antigone and Ismene. Insofar as the
house represents their birthplace, it is only once they have fully emerged
from the oikos that the differences between these twins become apparent.
As is common in Sophoclean tragedy, the more aggressive character takes
the initiative and speaks first. Antigone informs Ismene that Creon has
issued a public edict proclaiming that Eteocles, who died defending
Thebes, is to be honored with the full customary rights of burial, whereas
Polyneices is to be dishonored by being refused burial, his body being left
as prey for dogs and birds. Death shall be the sentence for anyone dis-
obeying this edict. When Antigone first refers to Creon, she does not men-
tion him by name but rather by the term strategos (8). We should
remember that strategoi at Athens were the most powerful democratically
elected officials. Although Creon, as the tragedy unfolds, will take on the
characteristics of a stage tyrant as he finds his commands flouted, Sopho-
cles takes careful measures at the beginning of the play not to depict Creon
as a stereotypical tyrant. He is the legitimate ruler of Thebes, having inher-
ited the position through his relationship to Eteocles and Polyneices
(173–74)—he was their uncle. He is no simple usurper of power.
Antigone tries to persuade Ismene to join her in breaking Creon’s edict
by burying Polyneices, because Creon has no right to keep her from her
own. Ismene regards Antigone as insane. They shall die miserably if they
flout the law. They should remember that they are women, so as not to fight
against men (56–62). In rejecting Antigone’s proposal, Ismene adopts,
what would be considered in conventional Athenian terms, politically cor-
rect behavior. However, Antigone will hear none of it. She will not seek
any further help from Ismene, not even if she were to offer it. She will bury
her brother even if it means “committing a holy crime” (74). Let Ismene
hold in dishonor what the gods honor (77–78). In contrast to Antigone’s
harsh tone, Ismene’s is less harsh. “Go, if you must, but know that you are
foolhardy in your mission, but truly lovable to your loved ones” (98–99).
This prologue scene presents a number of contrasts that are typical of
Sophocles’ dramatic technique. The scene moves from unity to conflict.
The two sisters begin almost as one; however, by the end of the scene, the
close bond between them is irrevocably ruptured, even though Ismene will
attempt later to forge a reconciliation. Like their twin brothers who are
divided by Oedipus’ curse, so the sisters are divided by the edict of Creon.
As is commonly pointed out, Ismene serves as a dramatic foil to Antigone.

Her obedience to her male masters serves to throw into relief Antigone’s
rebellion. This division between the sisters also foreshadows the greater
conflict between male and female, between Creon and Antigone, a conflict
that will divide the Theban polis. The sisters, who as members of the same
oikos are naturally philoi (friends), are turned into echthroi (enemies) by
the intrusive influence of the polis on the oikos. Moreover, the schism
between the two is expressed theatrically through their stage movements.
At the beginning of the prologue, they both come out of the oikos, which,
in the sexually polarized world of the Athenian polis, is where women con-
ventionally belong. At the end of the prologue, however, Ismene goes back
into the oikos through the central door of the skene, refusing to violate the
boundaries that have been set for her. Antigone, on the other hand, exits via
the parodos that leads out of Thebes toward where the dead Polyneices lies
unburied. She thus commits an act of open transgression.
During their entrance song, the chorus of Theban elders arrives from the
opposite “city” parodos. They celebrate the victory of Thebes over the
invading Argive army. Their jubilant mood stands in ironic contrast to
the prologue, because they are unaware that Thebes is about to be shaken
by another conflict.
The first episode also stands in contrast to the prologue, because it is an
all-male scene. Creon enters, presumably from the battle scene. He
informs the Theban elders of his edict about the fate of the two brothers,
stating the principles on which he bases his rule:
It is impossible to understand the heart, the thought and the judgement of any
man until he shows himself tested in high office and the laws. In my opinion,
anyone who, when governing the whole city, does not cling to the best coun-
sels, but holds his tongue in silence out of some fear, has always seemed,
both now and in the past, the worst of men. And anyone who reckons some-
one more dear (philos) than his own country, I rate as nowhere. For I—may
Zeus who sees all know this—would never keep silent, when I see ruin com-
ing upon my citizens instead of safety, nor would I consider an enemy of my
country a friend (philos), since I know that she is the ship that gives us safety
and, only when we sail on her in an upright state, do we make true friends
(philoi). By such laws as these I shall magnify this polis. (175–91)
Unlike for Antigone, whose philoi are bound up with the oikos, for Creon,
the polis is the foundation for the making of all friends and enemies. With
regard to this conflict in values, there is merit in Souvrinou-Inwood’s state-
ment: “The polis values dictated that the citizens’ private interests had to
be subordinated to the public interests of the polis (cf. Thucydides ii.60).
Antigone 71
Kreon’s speech expressing these sentiments (175–90) was quoted with

approval by Demosthenes (xix. 247 cf. 246–8) as the epitome of demo-
cratic patriotism. Antigone privileged her own interests over those of the
polis and subverted the very articulation of the polis.”4 However, Creon’s
speech is full of sententiousness and we have to consider carefully its posi-
tioning within the dramatic context.
We have said that the prologue scene and first episode stand in ironic
contrast. Antigone, after entering from the skene/oikos, turns her back on
the polis and leaves it to bury her brother. For her, the polis is of no
account; for Creon, the place of Antigone’s exit is an area where the ene-
mies of the polis lie, a place of execration that has to be excluded from the
life of the polis. Creon makes his speech outwardly toward the Theban eld-
ers and the audience, but he also makes this speech with his back toward
the skene, seemingly oblivious of the oikos’ presence. The members of the
audience, however, are not oblivious to its presence—they have seen the
entrance of the two sisters from the oikos, the home of their doom-ridden
family, and their separate exits. The prologue of Antigone is a brilliant
manifestation of Sophocles’ use of skenographia. As a result of the pro-
logue scene, the audience knows that, even as Creon is making his speech
as ruler of the polis, his edict is being disobeyed by a member of his own
oikos.
A small question, but perhaps not an insignificant one, is why does
Sophocles have Creon repeat his proclamation, to a summoned gathering
of the Theban elders, when it has already been made public? The more nat-
ural order would be to have Creon make his proclamation in the prologue
and then have Antigone decide to disobey it in the next scene or episode.
In performance, an audience would probably not notice this apparently
needless duplication of the proclamation, but it is essential to Sophocles’
dramatic economy, because he needs it to balance the forces of the dra-
matic conflict by giving the initiative to Antigone, who is a woman and
overtly in the weaker position, rather than to Creon, who is in the position
of supreme authority. Antigone may ignore the polis in her own reckoning,
but she is still a member of the polis, and the oikos—whose interests she
defends and of which the dead form a vital part—provides the foundation
stone on which the polis as a community is built. In being oblivious, there-
fore, of the oikos in the background, Creon is already manifesting a blind-
ness that is as morally culpable as is Antigone’s wanton disregard of the
polis’ fiats.
Midway through the first episode, a sentry enters who has been part of a
guard placed by Creon to see that no one buries Polyneices. The colloquial
language and long-windedness of the sentry’s speech serve to undercut the
sententious seriousness of Creon’s preceding speech. Afraid of Creon’s

wrath, he tells how the first watchman on day duty had found that some
dust had been thrown over Polyneices’ body, as if by someone who had
tried to perform funeral rites. There was, however, no easy telltale evi-
dence of human handiwork.
The chorus wonders whether this might be a manifestation of a god at
work. Although it is only the chorus’ speculation, this is the first serious inti-
mation that Creon’s actions, in denying the burial, may be wrong. Creon
reacts angrily to this suggestion. For him, it is intolerable that the gods should
honor greatly, as if he were a benefactor, a man who came to set fire to their
shrines and to overthrow their land and laws. No, this is the work of malcon-
tents and men suborned by money that teaches every kind of villainy and
godless irreverence. Unless the guards produce the culprit into his hands,
death alone shall not suffice for them. Happy to escape, the sentry expresses
the following parting sentiment: “One thing is sure, you’ll never see me com-
ing here again” (329). Blind to the true culprit, Creon enters the oikos.
The chorus now sings what is probably the most famous ode in Greek
tragedy, the “Ode to Man,” celebrating Man’s ingenuity in creating civili-
zation. Man has mastered all things except Death. However, although
Mankind has a fertile imagination beyond all expectation, he ultimately
does not know whether what he does is for good or evil. While he reveres
the laws of the land and the sworn justice of the gods, he stands tall in the
polis, but there is no polis (apolis) for the man who harbors dishonorable
designs for the sake of reckless daring. May they never hold their hearths
and minds in common with such an adventurer.
It has sometimes been debated for whom these last words have a specific
relevance: Antigone or Creon. We might even consider Polyneices, who
became apolis and manifested reckless daring. The allusive quality of the
lyrics allows for any and all of these identifications. However, more impor-
tantly, the chorus’ words point, imaginatively and suggestively, in the
direction of the central, moral—one could equally say “political”—prob-
lem of the tragedy. Whose actions are upholding the sworn justice of the
gods and whose daring is endangering the polis?
The following episode begins with a surprise, because in walks the sen-
try who had claimed that he would never return. He is leading Antigone,
whose arrival the chorus regards as a divine portent. The prologue was an
all-female scene; the first episode was an all-male one. The second episode
presents the main clash between the male and female protagonists. The
guard informs Creon that Antigone was caught red-handed, performing
funeral rites. That Polyneices is given two burials has often troubled crit-
ics, and some—picking up the suggestion of the chorus earlier—have
Antigone 73
wondered whether the first burial rites were performed by the gods,
because Antigone would not perform funeral rites twice.5 However, this
duplication would probably not have been noticed in performance, and,
like Creon’s proclamation earlier, is probably best explained by the fact
that Sophocles wanted to create an ironic structure for the dramatic action.
When Creon cross-examines her, Antigone readily admits to flouting
Creon’s decree, but defiantly justifies her actions:
It was not Zeus who made this proclamation nor did Justice who dwells with
those below impose such laws (nomoi) among mankind. And I did not think
that your edicts had such power as to override the unwritten and unwavering
ordinances (nomima) of the gods. For these obtain not simply for today and
yesterday, but for all time, and no one knows when they did first appear.
Because of this I did not intend to suffer punishment among the gods
through fear of any man’s temper. I knew that I would die, of course, even
without your edict and, if I die before my time, I count that as a gain.
(450–62)
This speech of Antigone might be taken as a general appeal to some higher

moral law that transcends any human laws, but such an interpretation is
open to objections. There are numerous references in Athenian literature
of the fifth and fourth centuries to the unwritten laws that were clearly
older than written laws. These unwritten laws were commonly thought to
consist of honoring the gods, parents, and strangers.6 Although Antigone
claims that she is honoring the gods by her actions, do the unwritten laws
cover traitors and the burial of a brother? In her speech, Antigone does not
use the regular term for law (nomos), but a related one (nomima), which
might be translated as “customs” or “traditional observances.” In the con-
text, therefore, it is probably best to take Antigone’s words as a reference
to the fact that it was traditionally the oikos that had sole charge of bury-
ing its own members without interference from the polis.
Creon, outraged at Antigone’s brazen defiance, vows to punish her, even
if she is his sister’s child. If Antigone can perform such acts with impunity,
then she is the man and he the woman. Accusing the innocent Ismene of
complicity in Antigone’s actions, he threatens them both with death, and
orders Ismene to be brought outside.
The following dialogue centers on the thematic ideas of reverence and
honor: Antigone claims that it is no dishonor to reverence the dead Poly-
neices, whereas Creon claims that in reverencing Polyneices, she dishon-
ors Eteocles. When Creon asserts that an enemy is never a friend, even in
death, Antigone retorts: “I was not born with enemies, but with friends”
(523). As far as Creon is concerned, she can go down below and love these
friends there, because, while alive, he will not be ruled by a woman.
Ismene, now led from the house, tries to share Antigone’s guilt, but
Antigone will have none of it. Nevertheless, Ismene pleads for her sister’s
life, asking Creon whether he will kill his son’s intended bride. Creon tells
her curtly that there are other furrows for his son to plow. His words are an
allusion to the formula of an Athenian wedding ceremony—“for the plow-
ing of legitimate children”—words that foreshadow the grim wedding rites
Antigone will later celebrate.
After the following ode in which the chorus alludes to the royal family
as a model of transgressive behavior that meets with divine retribution,
Haemon, Creon’s son, enters. So far, Creon’s authority has been chal-
lenged from two directions: the parodos that leads out to Polyneices’ body,
and the oikos. In what follows, his authority is to be challenged from a
third, unexpected quarter, the city parodos, first by his son Haemon and
later, more ominously, by the prophet Teiresias. Although Haemon pro-
fesses that he will never put higher value on any marriage than the good
judgment of his father, his initial professions serve to emphasize the dis-
agreement between father and son later on. What complicates the dramatic
action of Antigone is that the problems of the family and the polis are inex-
tricably intertwined. A major irony of Creon’s fate is that the tragic down-
fall he suffers comes not through any punishment imposed by the polis,
but through the deaths of members of his own family.
The scene between Creon and Haemon takes the form of an agon (a pub-
lic debate). Both have a 40-line speech in which they state their respective
views before they resort to casting insults at each other. In his speech,
Creon tells Haemon that parents pray for obedient children so that they may
be a source of strength against their enemies. Nothing is worse than dis-
obedient children who give enemies a cause for laughter. Haemon should
never let the desire for a woman interfere with his good judgment, should
she prove a false friend. Instead he should spurn her as an enemy. Alone of
all the citizens of the polis, Antigone has shown herself defiant. Those who
are appointed to govern a polis must be obeyed in all matters, both good and
bad. The man who is guided by such rules will prove to be both a good sub-
ject and a good ruler. There is nothing worse than disobedience (672),
which destroys cities (poleis) and ruins families (oikoi) (673–74). In addi-
tion, one must certainly never prove oneself inferior to a woman.
It is easy, in the light of what we know about Creon’s treatment of the
guard and Antigone and Ismene earlier in the play, to read this speech as a
reflection of his autocratic attitude, even if this speech is also sententious.
However, we must not primarily read the speech as a manifestation of
Antigone 75
Creon’s character as if he were a fully constructed psychological being in

a modern sense. A Greek father would expect filial obedience from his son
in all matters. Marriage at Athens was arranged by the heads of the oikoi
and was not in any sense premised on love. If a marriage was not going to
promote the interests of an oikos, then it should not be countenanced. In
fact, Creon’s sententious remarks should be taken more as representing
those of a stereotypical father. In this sense, it is ironic that in the earlier
part of the tragedy, in promoting what he regards as the best interests of the
polis, he has been oblivious to his own oikos.
In reply, Haemon speaks not merely as a son to a father, but also as a cit-
izen. His speech makes clear for the audience how family and polis cannot
easily be separated as hermetically sealed entities. Haemon’s entrance ear-
lier as Creon’s son, from the “city” parodos, gives visual meaning to his
status. Creon can lock up Antigone and Ismene, as mere women, in the
oikos, but he cannot so easily control a male member of the oikos who is
also a citizen in the full sense of the word.
Haemon argues that there is always room for more than one opinion.
Because a common man (demotes) (690) dare not say openly what would
meet with Creon’s disapproval, Haemon must watch out for his father’s
interests by listening to what people say. Word has it that the polis mourns
for Antigone who, of all women, least deserves to die. Rather, she is wor-
thy of a golden honor. A wise man should not maintain a totally rigid posi-
tion. No man is likely to be knowledgeable in all matters; therefore, it is
sensible to learn from those who offer good advice.
Creon is in no mood to listen. Should he rule by someone else’s judg-
ment rather than his own? “The polis does not belong to one man alone,”
retorts Haemon. “You would make a good ruler of a desert” (737, 739). In
this heated exchange, notions of eusebeia (reverence) and sebas (respect)
are brought significantly into play. For Creon, there is no merit in showing
respect for those who create disorder (730). Haemon would never ask that
his father show reverence toward the wicked (731). Is he not to respect his
own office (744), Creon asks? He does not show respect, Haemon retorts,
if he tramples on the honor of the gods (745). In Creon’s view, Haemon is
merely a slave of a woman. As the taunts fly, Creon threatens to have
Antigone put to death before the eyes of her bridegroom. For Haemon, this
is intolerable and he departs in high dudgeon. Creon then resolves to bury
Antigone alive in a rocky cavern so that the polis may avoid pollution.
There she can revere Hades, because it is the affairs of his house she
wastes energy in revering.
After a brief ode on the power of Love, Antigone is led out of the house
on the way to her death and joins with the chorus in an antiphonal kommos
(a sung lament). Although there is nothing explicit in the text at this point,
it seems likely that Antigone is dressed in the manner of a bride, being
either veiled and/or garlanded. There are several references to marriage in
these lyric exchanges. When she first enters, the chorus sings, “I see
Antigone making her way to the bridal chamber where all find rest”
(804–5). Although Antigone bewails that she has not enjoyed the usual
rites of a wedding, she says, “I will be married to Acheron” (i.e., Hades)
(816). In fact, what this scene represents is a bleak parody of the rites of a
Greek marriage ceremony. For the Athenians, funeral and marriage rituals
shared much in common. As Tyrrell and Bennett wrote:
Underlying each celebration was the spirit of the other, because both mar-
riage and funeral effected an irreversible transition. Associations between
marriage and funeral in Athenian culture had deep roots in these transitions.
The dead entered Hades’ house, never to return. The bride left her father’s
house, never to return as the same person, to enter another man’s house
where she perished as a virgin. This contiguity between life and death was
concretized by common rituals for both the corpse and the bride. Marriage
and death mainly concerned women; they dressed and perfumed the corpse
and the bride, adorning both with special clothes and garlanding the heads;
they joined in the appropriate hymns and cries.7
The chorus offers little consolation to Antigone as she is about to go to her

death: “Proceeding to the limits of boldness, you fell against the high altar
of Justice (dike), my child. And you are paying for some ancestral woe”
(853–56). The idea that Antigone is cursed by the woes of her fathers def-
initely forms a leitmotif in the tragedy, but we should not overstress this
point. The family is doom ridden in a general way, but Antigone’s own vol-
untary actions have caused her death. The chorus claims that she suffers
the fate she does because she is autonomos—“making her own law” (821),
and later that “your self-willed temper has destroyed you” (875). At the
same time, the chorus cannot refrain from giving voice to the idea that
Antigone’s actions are full of reverence: “To offer respect is a form of rev-
erence, but power, to whom power is a concern, is not in any way to be
transgressed” (872–74).
When Creon orders his guards to lead Antigone away, she makes her final
speech, part of which has proved to be one of the most controversial pas-
sages in Greek literature (905–13). Some scholars have excised the pas-
sage,8 but it was known to Aristotle (Rhetoric 1417a 32–33), who quoted
two lines from it, and nowadays the passage has gained wider acceptance.
Antigone claims that had she been a mother of children and seen their bod-
Antigone 77
ies or her husband’s body lain rotting, she would never have undertaken the
burial, in defiance of the citizens (politai), because she might have found
another husband and had other children. However, because both her mother
and father are dead, she can never have another brother.
To those who harbor a “romantic” conception of Antigone’s character,
this passage may seem extraordinary and in contradiction to her appeal
earlier to the higher laws. It is made perfectly clear that Antigone has been
wedded figuratively to her oikos, her blood relatives, and the wedding cer-
emony she is undergoing is to join her with her dead family. In burying
Polyneices, she cares nothing for the laws of the polis but is autonomos.
Moreover, Antigone herself never expresses any love feelings for Haemon.
In Athens, a woman’s primary role in marriage was to serve as a vessel for
the birth of children—most importantly sons—to ensure the survival of
someone else’s oikos. She was introduced to this new oikos as a stranger,
because marriage, as we have seen, was a contract between the male heads
(kurioi) of two oikoi. Beyond the union of two oikoi, however, there was
also a political importance to marriage, because the polis required the var-
ious oikoi to provide male citizens (politai) to defend the polis. Although
they were vital to the polis’ survival, only in religion did women share in
its public life. What all this means is that Antigone expresses a view—
highly subversive to both marriage and the polis, if taken to extremes, as
she does—that a woman’s natural loyalties are to her philoi by birth, her
blood relations, and these are not replaceable by those philoi contracted
through marriage. As the product of an incestuous union—her mother was
also her father’s mother—Antigone herself was not the offspring of the
marriage of two oikoi. In this sense, the Theban polis suffers from
Antigone’s cursed background, which finds reflection in the extremity of
her views. Those who want to see Antigone as solely in the right in the play
have either to excise this speech or face up to its implications. Antigone
well expresses the paradox of her position: “I have acquired the charge of
irreverent disloyalty by being loyally reverent” (924).
After her departure to her death, little account is taken of Antigone’s
fate, as the focus shifts to Creon. This has caused some critics to think that
Creon, rather than Antigone, is the central character, a view that has been
vigorously denied by others. Both views are wrong. The tragedy drama-
tizes a polis in crisis about what constitutes correct religious values (i.e.,
eusebeia and cognate terms) in a changing world in which the polis is
becoming increasingly intrusive into the lives of families, and the inde-
pendence of the oikos traditions is seriously under threat. The real protag-
onist of Antigone is the polis, just as the main character of Aeschylus’
Oresteia was the oikos. If, in Aeschylus’ trilogy, dike (justice) had to be
taken out of the hands of the oikos, and the democratic polis created in a
judicial form to resolve the paradoxes of oikos justice, in Antigone, for the
polis to be truly just in its attitude to the gods—always an area of anxiety
and concern to the Athenians, given the inscrutability of the gods—the
polis must take into account that it is not a monolithic entity, but a collec-
tivity of families in which women form an indispensable part. Creon
ignores this to his cost. If Sophocles had ended the play with the death of
Antigone, the tragedy would have been no tragedy, because Antigone, as a
rebel against the dictates of the polis, would simply be seen as receiving
her just deserts. However, as we have said, the polis was not a monolithic
entity and the case against Creon as the authoritarian voice of the polis—
he is both strategos, the highest democratically elected official, and tyran-
nus—has yet to be fully articulated, even if his authoritarian attitude has
been assailed by his own son.
After a long and difficult ode,9 there enters from the city parodos a blind
man led by a boy. It is the prophet Teiresias. He informs Creon that when
he went to perform sacrifices, everything went awry, because the gods had
rejected his offerings out of anger that Polyneices’ corpse had been left as
carrion for dogs and birds. All men can make mistakes, but the wise can
learn to correct their errors. It is obstinacy that convicts men of folly.
Creon should yield and give the dead man his due.
Instead of listening to Teiresias’ sage advice, Creon accuses the seer of
acting out of mercenary motives. The whole breed of prophets is money
grabbing. No one shall bury Polyneices, because no human being has the
power to pollute the gods. After an angry exchange in which he answers
Creon’s charges against the money-loving motives of prophets by accusing
tyrants also of loving base gains, Teiresias delivers a prophecy that Creon
will soon pay with the life of one born of his own loins for his actions in
angering the nether gods. With this dire warning, Teiresias departs.
The chorus reminds Creon that never before has Teiresias spoken falsely
to the polis. Creon knows this too well, but it is a terrible thing to yield.
With a sudden volte-face, however, Creon accepts the chorus’ advice to
release Antigone and bury Polyneices. “I am afraid that it is best to com-
plete one’s life preserving the established laws” (1113–14). With these
words, he leaves to redress his wrongs, exiting along the same fatal paro-
dos that had been trod earlier by Antigone, a road that he had tried to
exclude from the life of the polis.
A short ode is followed by the arrival of a messenger. Creon, he says,
was once a man to be envied. He saved Thebes from its enemies and
became its ruler with a flourishing offspring, but once a man loses his joy
in life, he is no better than a living corpse. Haemon is dead. This shocking
Antigone 79
news heralds the entrance of a new character from the house. It is Eury-
dice, Creon’s wife, from whom we have not heard before. Almost in a
faint, she asks to hear the terrible story. The messenger relates how, after
Creon had first gone and buried Polyneices, he had hurried to where
Antigone had been imprisoned. There he heard the voice of his son
Haemon. As he entered the chamber, Creon saw the body of Antigone
hanging from a halter and the grief-stricken Haemon embracing the body.
When he saw his father, Haemon had rushed at him in anger but, when
Creon fled and Haemon had failed in his attack, in anger with himself,
Haemon had leaned on his sword and killed himself.
The pace of the dramatic action now quickens. Eurydice abruptly
departs into the house in an ominous silence. This alarms the chorus as
well as the messenger, who then follows her. Immediately, Creon enters
carrying the body of Haemon. Visually, he is no longer a ruler, but a father
of a dead child. In lyrics, he hymns his grief, acknowledging his folly and
accepting all responsibility. The messenger returns and announces that
Eurydice has killed herself. When the body of Eurydice is displayed, the
messenger informs Creon that she had struck herself in grief for her son
and had imprecated curses on Creon. In a final kommos, Creon prays for
death. As alone as Antigone was at the beginning, Creon is left with the
bodies of his own kin to bury.10 For him, death would be a release; instead
he is alive, without a family and his rule in tatters. In blindly exalting the
polis before everything, he ignored his own oikos, which was to be the
instrument of his own ruin.
In the tragedy’s closing words, the chorus intones: “Wisdom is by much
the main part of happiness. One must not be irreverent to the gods. The
great words of the over haughty are repaid with great wounds and teach
wisdom in old age” (1348–53).
In democratic Athens, religion became increasingly politicized as the
polis took greater control over the administration of religious matters, and
the courts pronounced, through their popular verdicts, on matters both sec-
ular and divine. We should remember that no less a person than Socrates
was tried and condemned for “not acknowledging” the gods of the polis. In
other words, he was condemned for impiety. That there was a political
motive behind his trial only shows how difficult it was at Athens to sepa-
rate religion and politics. Against the entreaties of his friends, Socrates
accepted the verdict of the polis and is even made to argue, in an important
passage of Plato’s Crito (51a-b), that one’s polis should command greater
honor than one’s parents. In establishing the nomoi (laws) that would guide
his rule of the polis, Creon would hardly have faulted the views of Socrates
expressed in this passage. He thought that he was showing reverence to the
gods. However, there were also other nomima (customary observances) of

great antiquity and sacred to aristocratic oikoi in particular—such as the
burial of a dead kinsman—that could be seen as an unwelcome religious
intrusion on the part of the democratic polis. Such nomima Antigone chose
to uphold. In the conflict that results, both Creon and Antigone are left by
the gods to their respective fates, because Sophocles does not moralize on
a solution to the problem; he simply dramatizes the crisis that can occur
when there is an irreconcilable conflict of beliefs in a changing world of
oikos and polis. As he wrote in a famous fragment: “You could not fathom
divine affairs (ta theia) if the gods conceal them, not even if you were to
go out and examine everything” (919).
NOTES
1. See S. Scullion, “Tragic Dates,” Classical Quarterly 52 (2002): 85–86.
2. The most famous of these is the funeral oration of Pericles as recorded by
Thucydides (2.35–46). On the relevance of funeral oratory to Antigone, see L. J.
Bennett and W. B. Tyrrell, “Sophocles’ Antigone and Funeral Oratory,” American
Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 441–56.
3. For further discussion see M. Griffith, ed., Sophocles: Antigone (Cam-
bridge, 1999), 47.
4. C. Souvrinou-Inwood, “Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Read-
ing Sophocles’ Antigone,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 139.
5. See, for example, S. M. Adams, Sophocles the Playwright (Toronto,
1957), 47–48.
6. On the problems, generally, of the unwritten laws and their relationship to
this passage, see V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954), 28–33; and
B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley,
Calif., 1964), 94–98.
7. W. B. Tyrrell and L. J. Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’Antigone (Lanham,
Md., 1998), 98. See the entire discussion of this scene in chapter 9, with copious
references to other scholarly sources.
8. See Griffith, Sophocles: Antigone, 277–79, for a discussion and references
to other discussions.
9. On the problems of interpreting the ode, see Griffith, Sophocles: Antigone,
283–85.
10. On the ending of the play, see C. P. Segal, “Lament and Closure in
Antigone,” in Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society, C. P. Segal
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 119–37.
Chapter 6
Trachiniae
If tragedy provides a register of society’s problems, marriage was a source

of deep anxiety for the Athenians. The most famous Greek tragedy that
presents an image of marital conflict is Euripides’ Medea, first performed
in 431. Medea—a barbaros (non-Greek) who had earlier saved the life of
her husband, Jason, and had had children by him—is abandoned by Jason
so that he may make a politically favorable marriage with a Greek
princess. Medea enacts a horrible revenge, not only murdering Jason’s new
bride and her father, but also murdering her own children by Jason in order
to crown her husband’s misery. One of Medea’s speeches has often been
cited as a rallying cry for the unfair lot of women:
Of all things that are endowed with life and have intelligence, we women are
the most wretched. First, at extravagant expense, we must buy a husband
and take a master over our bodies . . . and in this there is the greatest ordeal
whether we take a good or bad one, for there are no respectable divorces for
women nor is it possible to spurn taking a husband. Well, having come to
new ways and modes of behaviour, a woman must prove to be a seer, if she
has not learnt at home how best to deal with her bedfellow. If we manage all
this well and our husband lives with us without bearing the yoke reluctantly,
life is enviable. If not, it is better to die. A man, whenever he is tired of being
with those in his house, goes out and relieves his boredom . . . whereas we
must focus our eyes on a single human being. They say how we live a life
free from danger, while they do the fighting in battle. Simple-minded fools!
How I would prefer to stand in battle three times than bear a single child.
(Medea 230–251)
It has often been suggested that Euripides’ Medea should be interpreted

against the background of the Periclean citizenship law, introduced in Athens
in 451–50. This law was, in effect, a marriage law, because it debarred the
children of an Athenian father and a foreign mother from becoming Athenian
citizens.1 Before the passage of the law, it was only necessary to be the rec-
ognized son of an Athenian father to claim citizenship. This law was social
engineering of no small measure. Violation of the law could be punished
severely through atimia (the loss of civic rights). There has been much spec-
ulation about the reason for the law, but it could have been designed to pro-
tect Athenian women against the incursive influence of foreign women.
Medea’s famous speech finds resonance in a fragment of a lost play of
Sophocles, the Tereus. In this tragedy, Procne, the daughter of an Athenian
king who has been married to a Thracian king, Tereus, a barbaros, expresses
her views on a woman’s lot:
I have often looked at a woman’s nature in this way: that we are as nothing.
As young girls we live in our father’s house, I think, the most pleasant of
human lives. For foolish innocence is a delightful nurturer of children. But
when we reach maidenhood and are possessed of intelligence, we are thrust
outside and sold away from our family gods and parents, some of us to
strangers and others to barbarians, some to cheerless and others to acrimo-
nious homes. And this, once a single night has yoked us in marriage, we must
praise and regard as happiness. (Frag. 583)
Although we cannot be sure how Sophocles handled the plot, we do know

the myth from other sources. When Tereus raped Procne’s sister, Philomela,
and cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling about it, the truth never-
theless comes to light, and the two sisters avenge themselves on Tereus by
killing Tereus’ son by Procne. Thus, Procne, like Medea, commits infanti-
cide to punish her husband.2
Trachiniae of Sophocles, in which the problem of marriage is central,
approaches the subject from a somewhat different perspective. The hus-
band, Heracles, and the wife, Deianeira, cause each other’s death without
ever actually meeting onstage, because they live in divided worlds. Tra-
chiniae has probably aroused more disagreement about what should con-
stitute the central lines of interpretation than any of Sophocles’ extant
tragedies. In our discussion, we shall mainly focus on two themes: first,
sex and marriage, as some recent scholars have done;3 and second, free-
dom and slavery, although, at times, bondage may be a better term.
What makes the interpretation of Trachiniae more difficult is that not
only can we not date the play but also, apart from a few words that seem to
Trachiniae 83
show a verbal reminiscence of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, there is no obvi-

ous internal or external clue to give some general idea of the date. Whereas
some scholars have tried to date it late, most nowadays would place it
among Sophocles’ earlier works, mainly on stylistic grounds. However, we
cannot be sure that the somewhat stiff formality of its style is not due to its
subject matter.4
Trachiniae is set in Trachis in northern Greece against a background that
is very remote in time. Although Heracles has already completed his
famous labors in which he has rid the world of many of its monsters, the
tragedy still conjures up a vision of a world in which the divine, the mon-
strous, and the human intermingle and are not always separable. Some
scholars have noted that in the play, the classical polis is not in the fore-
ground.5 As Charles Segal has written, “The Sophoclean Trachis appears
as something of a frontier town, a place in which to envisage the break-
down of the most fundamental institution of society.”6 This, however, is to
put the cart before the horse. Rather, we should say that the tragedy pre-
sents a world in which the fundamental institutions of Greek society have
yet to be founded on a sure basis. This includes not only the polis, but also
the oikos. The tragedy seems to be set in a world of transition between that
of a society of hunters and marauders and that of an agricultural society,
which laid the foundations of the classical oikos. The members of Hera-
cles’ family are uprooted and do not have an oikos of their own. His off-
spring lie scattered throughout Greece and those children he has had by
Deianeira he sees only rarely. Heracles is like a farmer who owns a distant
plot of land that he only visits at sowing and harvest time. The rest of the
time, he lives a nomadic existence either as a bondsman to others or as a
freebooter who lives by rape and pillage.
According to Aristotle’s famous dictum: “Man is by nature a political
animal” (Politics 1.i.9)—that is, it is natural for man to live in a polis.
Although this view was widely accepted among the Greeks, the classical
polis was based on nomoi (customs/laws) that established strict conven-
tions about gender roles and rooted distinctions between slavery and free-
dom not in nature, but in what was politically expedient, because the polis
was the basis of the citizen’s freedom. For the Greeks themselves, to live
outside the polis was not to be a free man. One had either to be a god or to
live the life of an animal, among whom there was no dike (justice) (Hesiod
Works and Days 276–78). In Trachiniae, because Heracles lives in the
interstices between the worlds of animal, god, and man, his life is a con-
fused mixture of slavery and freedom and male and female gender roles.
In this confusion of identities, he sometimes seems like a superman; at
other times, like a subhuman monster; and at others, like a madman.
Two deities are prominent in the tragedy, both of whom are to be seen
not as civic gods, but as elemental powers. The first is Aphrodite/Eros. In
her unrestricted power as a sexual deity, conceived not as a goddess who
binds man and woman in formal marriage, but rather as the elemental
power of sex, she can even deceive Zeus himself. Her turbulent presence,
as much as anything, destroys the marriage of Heracles and Deianeira.
The second god is Zeus. Heracles himself is the offspring of a love union
between Zeus and a mortal woman. Zeus is the most powerful of the Greek
gods. Every polis recognized his importance, but no polis, outside of certain
Panhellenic cult centers like Olympia, could claim to have a special relation-
ship with him such as Athens could claim with Athena, or Sparta with Hera.
Whereas the power of other gods might be thought at times to be more local-
ized, Zeus, more than any other Olympian, transcended the polis. There is,
however, a certain ambiguity in the way in which the Greeks conceived of
Zeus. On the one hand, he is the upholder of dike, who governs the right rela-
tions between members of a polis and between those inside and outside of the
polis. As Walter Burkert has said: “Zeus has a special concern for the rela-
tions which bind strangers to one another: guests, suppliants and those bound
by oaths.”7 On the other hand, sometimes it is not so much Zeus as the god of
justice that seems to be in evidence as Zeus as a god of nature, whose raw
power is brought to the fore and who might be conceived in almost amoral
terms. How we should interpret the Zeus of Trachiniae is by no means easy
to decide, but his power is more directly felt to impact on the human world
than in any of the other surviving Sophoclean tragedies. It is largely as the
father of Heracles that the impact of Zeus’ power is most immediately felt.
In several ways, Heracles serves as an “earthly” counterpart to Zeus.
Unlike many heroes, Heracles cannot easily be localized. Although born in
Thebes, in some ways he is more associated with Tiryns because of his
famous labors, but essentially he is doomed to wander the earth. Although
sometimes he was regarded as simply human, he was also widely wor-
shipped as a hero and even as a god. In one sense, it would scarcely be an
exaggeration to say that as Zeus is to the gods, so Heracles is to the heroes
of the Greeks. He is the greatest of heroes, the Panhellenic hero par excel-
lence. If Zeus, in myth, had ensured the supremacy of the Olympian dis-
pensation by overthrowing the more savage orders of deity, so Heracles,
through his labors, had made the world safe for human beings by over-
coming the monsters of the world. The son of Zeus and a human mother,
Alcmene, Heracles is a hybrid who spends most of his life bridging sav-
agery and civilization and cannot be contained within any formalized
social structure, be it an oikos or other social organization. Full of contra-
dictions, he is both a “free man” who destroys cities to satisfy his own bod-
Trachiniae 85
ily lusts, and a slave who lives, much of the time, a life of bondage in the
service of human emancipation. The violator of women, he is also their
protector. He is thus destroyer and savior. From the viewpoint of the fifth-
century polis, his ambiguous nature is very problematic.
There is a further parallel that should be drawn here between Zeus and
Heracles. If both are ubiquitous, both are promiscuous. According to
mythographers, Zeus seduced no less than 115 women. Heracles him-
self—the offspring of one of Zeus’ sexual unions—had 72 sons by differ-
ent women. It is not insignificant that when Heracles is first mentioned in
Trachiniae, he is not identified by name, but through his parentage, “the
famous child of Zeus and Alcmene” (19). Heracles’ own sexual activities
provide the wellsprings of the tragedy and form the catalyst around which
the dramatic action is centered, even though he is only present onstage for
the last quarter of the play. Rather, the audience is made to experience the
effects of his sexual activities largely through the sufferings of his wife
Deianeira, who rarely sees him. When the play opens, she has neither seen
nor heard from him for some time (44–45). Moreover, as we learn later,
Heracles has not been sexually faithful, but has had many lovers, and his
sundry children live in different parts of Greece. Like Medea, Deianeira
does not have an oikos of her own, but she and some of the children are
residing at the moment in the house of a foreign friend in Trachis. This
absence of a stable oikos causes a problem in the gender roles of both hus-
band and wife. Although she is a faithful wife, Deianeira is not permitted,
by the absence of her husband and the uprootedness of the family, to live
the life of a normal wife. In the case of Heracles, it is one of the greatest
paradoxes that this quintessential male hero has to adopt so many of the
roles traditionally, in the Greek world, associated with women. As Burkert
has said: “The glorious hero is also a slave, a woman, and a madman.”8
This confusion of gender roles will be made explicit in much of the sexual
imagery of the tragedy.
The skene represents the oikos in which Deianeira and those of Hera-
cles’ children who are with her live. One parodos leads toward the agora of
Trachis and out of the town toward the Malian Gulf. This gulf separates the
mainland of Greece from the northern part of the island of Euboea, where
Heracles is located for much of the tragedy. The other parodos, which will
not be required until the very end of the play, leads inland toward Mount
Oeta. Thus, the majority of the tragedy presents a simple two-way traffic
between the oikos in Trachis and Heracles on Euboea. All communication
between husband and wife is conducted through intermediaries.
Deianeira comes out of the skene. She is accompanied by a female slave,
but there is no indication in the text of the slave’s presence until she sud-
denly addresses Deianeira at line 49. Trachiniae begins with a monologue,

which is not typical of Sophocles’ extant plays. Deianeira’s speech focuses
on her loneliness and suffering. Her life is a refutation of the old proverb
that you cannot tell whether someone has had a good or a bad life before
he dies, because hers has been utterly wretched. Even while a young
woman in her father’s house, her beauty was a cause of misery, because she
was wooed by a river god, Achelous, who appeared in different monstrous
shapes, so that she prayed for death rather than to have to share his mar-
riage bed. At the last moment, she was rescued by Heracles, who engaged
the river god in battle. However, marriage with Heracles brought one anx-
iety after another. He rarely came home except to have children, because
he was forced to lead a life of servitude as a bondsman in distant places.
Even after his labors were over, they did not find a settled home, because
Heracles had committed murder and been forced to flee. As a result, his
family has been uprooted and is living in Trachis with a foreign friend.
Deianeira has not heard from Heracles for 15 months. He must clearly be
in trouble, if she can judge from a note that he left for her before he went.
To help calm Deianeira, the slave offers advice: “If it is right for slaves to
advise the free with their opinions . . . why, you have so many sons, but you
do not send one of them to look for your husband” (52–55). The slave’s pres-
ence here is not merely functional to push the plot forward; she serves as a
dramatic foil to Deianeira. Given Deianeira’s life of suffering, the slave’s
intrusion is poignant because it begs the question of whose fate is the bet-
ter—the slave woman’s or the free woman’s? In the opening tableau, the free
woman is shadowed by the slave woman. However, it is the free woman who
is bound to a life of unrelieved suffering, whereas the slave woman is per-
mitted to speak freely, without any of the anxieties of the free woman. She
suggests that Deianeira’s son, Hyllus, be sent in search of his father.
When Hyllus enters, Deianeira compliments the slave on her advice:
“My son, my child, even the words of the lowly born may turn out well.
This woman is a slave, but she has spoken the words of someone who is
free” (61–63). Hyllus knows nothing of Deianeira’s anxiety but, when she
expresses her worry, he claims that he knows where his father is, if he can
believe in hearsay. Heracles has spent the previous year in bondage to a
Lydian woman, but is now set free and is attacking, or about to attack, the
city of Eurytus, on Euboea. Thus Hyllus’ response to his mother reveals
that Heracles’ life has been a mixture of slavery and wanton license.
Deianeira now tells him of the written prophecy that Heracles had left with
her—that, about this time, he would either die or would live on in happi-
ness. Deianeira asks Hyllus to go and help his father.
Trachiniae 87
Oliver Taplin includes Trachiniae in what he terms nostos plays9—that

is, plays in which a homecoming is awaited. The most famous nostos work
of Greek literature was the Odyssey. Hyllus’ search for his father intro-
duces an Odyssean motif. At the beginning of the Odyssey, Telemachus,
Odysseus’ son, is urged to go and seek news of his absent father. In one
sense, in his life of wandering, Odysseus bears comparison with Heracles.
He wanders for 10 years and encounters a world full of fabulous creatures
and monsters. A stock epithet of Odysseus is “sacker of cities.” However,
unlike Heracles, Odysseus is fundamentally a faithful husband. He yearns
to be reunited with his wife, Penelope, and his family. Deianeira also bears
comparison with Penelope, who is the archetype of the faithful wife and
who tries to maintain Odysseus’ oikos in his absence. However, unlike in
the Odyssey, where the oikos, although threatened, is deeply rooted, in Tra-
chiniae the oikos is, at it were, built on quicksand, and there will be no
happy reunion of husband and wife.
Trachiniae takes its name from the chorus, which consists of young
women. Like the slave woman in the prologue, the chorus serves as a dra-
matic foil to Deianeira, although in a different manner, because they are
marriageable virgins who have not been uprooted through exile. For them,
hope should never be abandoned, because Zeus has ordained that human
life is never free from pain, but joy and pain are cyclical. Deianeira attri-
butes these sentiments to the inexperience of youth. Only when one is
called a wife, rather than a virgin, can one know what terrors the night
brings concerning a husband or children. The ancient prophecy that Hera-
cles had written down for her about his fate, before leaving, only intensi-
fies her suffering.
With the arrival of a messenger, Deianeira’s mood changes abruptly. The
son of Alcmene is alive and on his way home in triumph. However, the
messenger’s news is secondhand, because he has only heard it from Hera-
cles’ herald, Lichas, who has been detained in a nearby meadow by a
crowd of inquirers. Nor does the messenger reveal all that he knows. In her
delight, Deianeira calls on Zeus, in thanksgiving, and invites all the
women, both those inside the house and those outside, to lift their voices
in joy at the unexpected good news. In response, the chorus sings a paean
to the gods. Although their opening words are subject to interpretation, it
is clear that they suggest that the house is about to celebrate a marriage.
But whose? The elusive quality of the lyrics makes the subject of the mar-
riage unclear, and its implications will only become clearer in the light of
subsequent events. As is not untypical of Sophocles, the chorus’ song
stands in ironic contrast with what follows.
Lichas does not arrive alone, but escorts a group of female captives.
How many slave women there are is unclear, but few Greek tragedies pro-
vide a spectacle of so many women onstage at one time. In the middle of
them stands Deianeira. As D. Seale expresses it:
Deianeira is surrounded by younger women; more specifically she is physi-

cally placed between two distinct representative groups, one imbued with
the joy and optimism of youth [i.e. the chorus], the other, equally young, but
already experienced in the extremity of grief. The circle of grief and joy just
formulated in the lyrics of the Chorus is here embodied in the stage group-
ings, and Deianeira’s position, between two large formations, suggests the
pressure of two opposing forces, the essential conflict of the scene.10
Just as importantly, Deianeira is placed between slave women and free

women, suggesting the ambiguity of her own position. Heracles has sent
these women ahead, as choice possessions for himself and the gods, after
capturing the citadel of Eurytus.
Lichas’ main speech is duplicitous. He claims that Heracles had been
rudely treated by Eurytus when he had visited him as a friend. In reprisal,
Heracles had murdered Eurytus’ son and, consequently, been forced by
Zeus, as a punishment, to spend a year as a slave to Omphale, a barbarian
woman. On regaining his freedom, Heracles had sacked Eurytus’ city.
According to later sources, while Heracles had been a slave to the Lydian
Omphale, he had been made to take on a woman’s role and Omphale had
worn Heracles’ lion’s skin and played the man’s part. Some consider that
this part of the Heracles/Omphale myth was a Hellenistic invention, but
there is some evidence that it was known in the fifth century.11 If this is
true, then the audience may have seen contained within the reference to
Omphale a first, indirect allusion to a change in Heracles’ gender role.
Deianeira’s reaction to Lichas’ speech is one of joy tempered by pity for
the captive women. As she says: “A terrible pity comes over me as I behold
these wretched women, wandering homeless and fatherless in a foreign
land. Perhaps, before, they were the daughters of free men, but now they
have a slave’s life” (298–302). One young woman, whose mask and cos-
tume must have been distinctive among the rest, captures Deianeira’s
attention. To Deianeira’s inquiries about her origins, Lichas feigns igno-
rance, claiming that, in her grief, the girl has not uttered a word. Deianeira
orders Lichas to lead the captive women inside, but is herself detained by
the messenger who had first brought her news of Heracles. He tells her that
the information Lichas had given her was different from what he had said
earlier in front of many witnesses. Lichas had said that the reason Heracles
Trachiniae 89
had sacked Eurytus’ citadel had nothing to do with the death of Eurytus’
son or his servitude under Omphale. Rather, it was Heracles’ passion for
the girl who has just gone inside the house. When Heracles had failed to
persuade her father to give him his daughter as a secret lover, he had sim-
ply trumped up a feeble pretext to sack the city. Heracles had now sent the
girl ahead intentionally, not so that she could be his slave, but because he
had been overcome with an insatiable desire for her. The girl’s name is
Iole, Eurytus’ own daughter.
It has often been noted that the entrance of Iole in Trachiniae bears a
resemblance to that of Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, whom the
king had brought home as his war prize from Troy. In the meeting between
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra on the king’s return, Cassandra maintains
a pregnant silence as does Iole in Trachiniae. However, Clytemnestra is no
Deianeira. Her preparations for her husband’s return are carefully made
and she dictates the manner in which Agamemnon and Cassandra will be
received into the oikos. Like a watchdog, Clytemnestra controls the move-
ments into the oikos. In comparison, Deianeira, although from her position
onstage she appears to be in control of the skene door, is not really in con-
trol. Rather, indirectly, Heracles is in control in spite of his absence. Unlike
Clytemnestra’s oikos, Deianeira’s oikos is a leaky vessel. Iole’s entrance
into the skene, therefore, without Deianeira knowing that she is not to be
simply a slave, is a threat to her own freedom as a wife. As in the prologue,
the specter of a slave in the background is to haunt Deianeira.
Lichas is forced to admit the truth. Heracles had sacked Eurytus’ citadel
because of Iole, who has been sent home to be his wife. Deianeira, far
from giving way to a Medea-like rage, recognizes that it is foolish to resist
the power of Eros, who rules even the gods, just as he rules her life. If Her-
acles is stricken with this madness, she herself would be insane if she
blamed Heracles or Iole, who meant her no harm. Heracles, she knows, has
slept with many women. As for Iole, her beauty has ruined her life and
caused the ruination and enslavement of her native land.
The following choral ode is central to the play’s meaning. Aphrodite’s
power is invincible. She had deceived even Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon, the
rulers of the world. The effect of citing her power over them is to empha-
size Aphrodite as an elemental force among the most powerful gods, even
before human creation. The chorus continues with an account of the battle
between Heracles and Achelous to win Deianeira and an evocation of
Deianeira as the beautiful bride helplessly awaiting the outcome of the bat-
tle between her suitors. Aphrodite is imagined both as a victorious athlete
and the umpire of the struggle. In its emphasis on Aphrodite, the ode dif-
fers remarkably from Deianeira’s account in the prologue, in which there
was no mention of the goddess, and Heracles was simply Deianeira’s lib-
erator. The ode thus serves to forge a connection between Deianeira and
Iole as beautiful young women who were both won by Heracles’ physical
strength, although lust was his motive. Iole therefore serves as a double for
Deianeira.
Deianeira confesses that Iole’s presence is deeply disturbing to her. It is
clear that Heracles has already had sex with Iole. She conjures up a vision
of her aging self having to compete for Heracles’ affection with a woman
whose youth is still blossoming. Such is her reward for having kept home
for him for so long. She is afraid that Heracles may be called her husband,
but the younger woman’s man.
She decides on a stratagem to win back Heracles’ love. When she had
left her father’s house as Heracles’ bride, she was offered transportation
across a river by the centaur Nessus. In midstream, Nessus had tried to
rape her. Hearing her cries, Heracles had shot the centaur with an arrow
that had been dipped in the poisonous gall of the Hydra, a many-headed
monster. Dying from the wound, Nessus had told Deianeira to preserve, in
secret, his blood which had been poisoned by the arrow. Should she ever
need it, this poison would act as a love charm on Heracles’ affections.
Deianeira decides that she will send this love salve, smeared on a cloak in
a casket, with Lichas to Heracles.
Sophocles, as we have seen, uses significant stage props sparingly.
Although Iole is not technically a stage prop, she is Heracles’ thankless
gift to Deianeira in return for her years of patient suffering of their mar-
riage. In return she sends him a gift of a robe—a typical marriage present
for a bride—in which is contained a secret love salve. In both cases, it is
the secret nature of the gifts exchanged that expresses the unspoken and,
ultimately, fatal divide between husband and wife, for contained within
both gifts are the seeds of their mutual destruction.
With Lichas’ departure, bearing the robe, the chorus sings a prayer for a
happy resolution through the victorious homecoming of the son of Zeus
and Alcmene. In their hopes for the end of Deianeira’s suffering, through
the gift of Peitho, the magical persuasion of the robe, this ode stands in
ironic contrast to the ultimate resolution of the tragedy. The chorus’ opti-
mism reveals the same virginal naïveté that they had shown earlier.
The re-entrance of Deianeira immediately sounds a note of alarm. The
wool with which she had smeared the salve on the robe had been totally
consumed, vanishing into nothing. How can that poison that had proved so
lethal in the past not now destroy Heracles also? Her fears are confirmed
by the arrival of Hyllus, who bitterly denounces his mother. He had wit-
nessed the effect of the poisonous robe on his father. When Heracles had
Trachiniae 91
put it on, the poison began to work its deadly effect. Heracles had turned
on Lichas, demanding to know through what scheme he had brought the
robe. Hearing that it was on Deianeira’s instructions alone, Heracles had
seized the innocent Lichas and dashed his brains out. He then denounced
the marriage he had made with Deianeira that had destroyed his life.
Catching sight of Hyllus, he instructed his son not to let him die where he
was but to move him out of that land. The stricken Heracles will soon
arrive. Hyllus concludes his speech by cursing his mother for having killed
the best man on earth. Without a word in reply, Deianeira withdraws omi-
nously, like Eurydice in Antigone, into the house.
The chorus now achieves an insight into the pattern of events that have
unfolded. The oracle that had been given to the son of Zeus—that he would
find freedom from the bondage of his labors—is to be fulfilled through his
death. As for Deianeira, she had not foreseen the calamity of the new mar-
riage (i.e., the marriage of Heracles and Iole) coming upon her home,
which had caused her to react in such a way that can only portend her own
ruin. In their pity for Heracles and Deianeira, the chorus sees the silent
work of Aphrodite as the doer of these deeds.
When the nurse announces Deianeira’s death, the chorus claims that
Iole, as the new bride without any marriage rites, has given birth to a
mighty Fury within the house. Deianeira had rushed into the marriage
chamber and, in tears, had said farewell to her marriage bed before unloos-
ening her robe and plunging a sword in her side, below the liver. In vivid
sexual imagery suggesting a bride unloosening her robe and revealing her
lower body, Deianeira had received, not her husband, but the thrust of a
sword. In committing suicide in a manner commonly associated in tragedy
with men, rather than through hanging herself in a manner more typical of
women, Deianeira had reversed the conventional gender roles. Unlike
Penelope and Odysseus, who had celebrated their reunion through the
secret of their marriage bed, Deianeira dies alone on the marriage bed. On
seeing his mother’s body, Hyllus realizes his mistake in falsely accusing
her. He, too, like others in the tragedy, his mother included, understands
the truth too late.
While the chorus sings the final ode, servants carry in the dying Hera-
cles on a bier, attended by an old man. The visual image of the bier forges
a connection between Heracles and the bed on which Deianeira had killed
herself. The cortege that enters here is in contrast to the procession earlier
in the tragedy, when Iole and the captive women had entered. At that time,
the chorus had predicted that the house was about to witness a marriage,
with Heracles’ triumphant homecoming. His actual homecoming is very
different. Instead of a female procession, there are male attendants. As the
tragedy focuses directly on Heracles himself, the female chorus, who had
largely served as a foil to Deianeira, has very little part to play until the
final exit of the dramatis personae.
Deianeira had suffered death in her marriage bed and had killed herself
in a manner befitting a male hero. The finale leads up to a funeral cortege
for Heracles. This exodos, in which Heracles is reduced to playing the part
of a woman, plays off a number of aspects of the Greek wedding ceremony.
Visually, the bed is emblematic of Heracles’ own confused dramatis per-
sona, a disastrous mixture of sexuality and death.
In plaintive lyrics, Heracles rebukes Zeus for the suffering he has caused
him in return for the sacrifices he has made for him. Yet Zeus, alone, is the
only doctor who can minister to his pain. Heracles also rails against the
Greeks, wondering from whom they, the most unjust of men, have
descended, because it was in their service that he has destroyed himself by
ridding the world of its monsters on land and sea.
As Heracles is carried in, he is still covered in the deadly robe that
Deianeira had given to him. In a verbal reminiscence of the net in which
Aeschylus had made Clytemnestra entangle Agamemnon before murdering
him, Heracles describes the robe as “a woven net of the Furies” (1051–52).
In Agamemnon, the net in which Agamemnon is murdered is variously
described as a net or a cloak. A similar ambiguity occurs with the robe in
the Trachiniae. Although it is sometimes called a chiton (a male cloak), it is
much more frequently called a peplos (the traditional woman’s dress). We
should not regard this as simple poetic license, but rather as a deliberate
ambiguity. At one point in the speech, Heracles describes himself as crying
out and weeping like a parthenos—a young woman of marriageable age
(1071), something he had never done before. Now, however, as a result of
what has happened, “I, wretch, am discovered to be a woman.”12 Then,
drawing attention to his disease-ridden body, he throws off the cloak, using
a term for it more suggestive of a bride’s veil as if the bride were revealing
herself for the first time to the members of her new oikos.
Heracles’ speech contains a bitter denunciation of Deianeira. Never
have the labors that were imposed on him caused him such pain as the
infernal net the deceitful Deianeira has put on him. He forbids Hyllus to
grace her further with the name of mother, but orders him to deliver her
into his hands so that he may see whether Hyllus is more upset by seeing
the mutilated body of his father or his mother’s body being justly tortured.
After recalling the greatness of his lineage as the child of the noblest
mother and of Zeus among the stars, he promises that, stricken though he
is, he will punish Deianeira, so that she may be taught to declare to the
world that, in death, as in life, Heracles punishes the wicked.
Trachiniae 93
Hyllus provides the major link between Deianeira and Heracles. Having
cursed his mother for killing the best of men, he now defends her to his
father, in spite of Heracles’ outrage at the very mention of her name. Hyl-
lus informs Heracles that Deianeira is dead by her own hand. Heracles’
only regret is that Deianeira did not live to die at his hands. When Hyllus
tells of the poisonous love philter of Nessus, by which Deianeira had
wanted to regain his love, Heracles also realizes, too late, the fulfillment of
another oracle given to him by Zeus, long ago, that he would die by the
hands of one who was already among the dead. He can now interpret both
oracles. The end of his labors did not mean a life of happiness, but rather
death, for the dead do not labor.
The end of the tragedy has caused considerable controversy.13 Is the end-
ing integral to the preceding dramatic action or is it rather to be seen as a
dramatic coda? Heracles makes Hyllus take a solemn oath to carry out two
commands, before telling him what they are. The first is that Hyllus should
build a pyre for him on Mount Oeta and burn his body on it while he is still
alive. The second is that Hyllus should marry Iole. Hyllus is outraged at
both of these commands and objects vehemently. In the case of the first,
Hyllus claims that Heracles is asking him to pollute himself by murdering
his own father. Heracles relents in this regard and says that if Hyllus builds
the pyre, he will get someone else to set fire to it.
Why does Heracles enforce on a reluctant Hyllus marriage with Iole? It
is already suggested earlier that Heracles has had sexual relations with her,
and Iole, even if she is not a willing accomplice, has been the major causal
factor in the death of Deianeira, Hyllus’ mother, as Hyllus recognizes all
too well. As he says: “It would be preferable, father, for me even to die than
to live with my worst enemy” (1236–37). In view of these factors, can it be
wondered at that some critics have found Heracles not so much superhu-
man as a subhuman monster, especially because Heracles gives no reasons
for imposing this marriage and will brook no flouting of his authority from
Hyllus?
The audience would have known that—according to a widely held
belief—the descendants of Heracles, through the marriage of Hyllus and
Iole, were the ancestors of the Dorian Greeks. Does this marriage, there-
fore, have any dramatic relevance or is Sophocles simply catering to a
larger mythological tradition? Marriage, as argued earlier, is central to Tra-
chiniae. Heracles is an absent and philandering husband, and much of the
tragedy’s focus is directed through the lens of the sufferings of his faithful
wife. Heracles’ marriages are no marriages in the classical sense, but rather
rapes and conquests resulting in a plethora of scattered children. Without
marriage as a formal institution, there can be no oikos, because the primary
purpose of marriage, for the Greeks, was the foundation of a stable oikos.
Without the oikos, there can be no polis. Whereas Deianeira, a victim of
male conquest, tries to lay the foundations of an oikos, her status as a wife
is never secure, and ultimately she fails. In this sense, we cannot underesti-
mate, theatrically, the power of the moment when Deianeira allows a crowd
of women, among whom Iole is conspicuous, to enter into the oikos/skene.
Potentially, they are all wives, just as, in fact, they are all slaves and a threat
to Deianeira’s position as a freeborn wife. At this vital, theatrical moment,
as the following ode will remind us, Aphrodite/Eros, who can beguile even
Zeus, is at her most insidious, as the destroyer of marriage. In being a slave
to his erotic lusts, Heracles is anti-Odyssean, for Odysseus, in spite of his
long absence, is a faithful upholder of the marital oikos. In making the insti-
tution of marriage, on which the oikos/polis structure was based, a formal
arrangement between males, the Athenians sought to temper the raw power
of Aphrodite, for only in this way could they create a structure of political
freedom, rather than become slaves to their sexual appetites.
In imposing marriage on Hyllus as his last act in the human world, Her-
acles tries to establish the future of his own oikos on a secure foundation.
However, in so doing, he is, in fact, negating the premises of his own
earthly life, which had been based on a combination of bondage and unbri-
dled sexual license. In his final act, Heracles behaves like Zeus with all his
imperious, mysterious, and patriarchal authority. In the marriage that Her-
acles imposes on Hyllus, Aphrodite is signally absent, unlike in the “mar-
riages” of Deianeira and Iole, earlier. This turbulent goddess, seen as the
enemy of stable family unions, has been banished. Hyllus, however, can
see nothing positive in a loveless, imposed marriage. As he says, “As you
lift him, comrades, offer consolation to me for these things and realise the
unfeelingness of the gods in these actions, gods who begat us and are
called our fathers but who oversee such miseries” (1264–69). At the very
end of the tragedy, the cortege forms to carry Heracles to Mount Oeta,
through the parodos that has not been used before. The use of this parodos
sets up a contrast between the earthly and the immortal Heracles. When he
is carried in earlier, he is on the point of leaving the world of his labors,
and all that awaits him is the cremation of his earthly remains. In empha-
sizing the cremation of Heracles, rather than simply making him, at his
death, go down to Hades, as the Hesiodic Catologue of Women earlier had
done, Sophocles suggests that, because Heracles partook of a world full of
lawless and savage beings, where rape and pillage were the norm, his
remains must be severed from earth before the necessary conditions of civ-
ilized society can obtain. He may have prepared the way for the “prom-
ised” land, but he can be no part of it.
Trachiniae 95
There are two further problems with regard to this exit: (1) who speaks
the last four lines of the play? and (2) who is being addressed by the word
parthenos (maiden) in line 1275? As to the speaker, the manuscripts are
divided, as are recent editors, between attributing the last lines to the cho-
rus or to Hyllus.14 It is probably best to give them to Hyllus, without being
certain, although whom, then, does he address as “maiden,” in line 1275?
Most editors would say that it refers to the chorus—specifically, the leader
of the chorus. This, however, would be both an unusual form of address
and rather tame. Some, therefore, have suggested Iole, something that
makes good theatrical sense; however, there is no indication that Iole is
onstage at this point. For her to be included, she must make a silent
entrance during the preceding dialogue between Hyllus and Heracles,
something that again would be highly unusual. However, if Iole were pres-
ent, the ending would suggest both a funeral and a wedding ceremony. As
Rehm writes:
The procession includes “foreign men” (964) from Euboea, the Old Man,
the Chorus of Trachinian women, Hyllus, and possibly even Iole. The act of
escorting Herakles out of the theatre integrates male and female worlds,
consolidating a community in the face of disaster. The co-operative nature
of the funeral rites and the promise of a new wedding give the play a sense
of ritual closure.15
In the very last line of the play, Hyllus (or possibly the chorus) says:
“There is nothing in these things that is not Zeus.” The main characters—
Deianeira, Hyllus, and Heracles—learn, too late, the meaning of what
happens to them. Zeus, alone, stands above the fog of human misunder-
standing. Yet what kind of god is Zeus? Is he a god of justice or simply an
elemental force who, like his son, imposes his will for no easily identifi-
able reasons? For Sophocles, the divine remains full of enigmas.
NOTES
1. See especially, R. Rehm, Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding
and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 97–98, and 197,
footnotes 4 and 5, with references to other scholars.
2. For a recent attempt to reconstruct the plot, see D. Fitzpatrick, “Sophocles’
Tereus,” Classical Quarterly 51 (2001): 90–101.
3. For example, see Rehm, Marriage to Death, 72–83; R. Seaford, “The Tragic
Wedding,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987): 106–30; C. P. Segal, “Time,
Oracles and Marriage in the Trachinian Women,” in Sophocles’ Tragic World:
Divinity, Nature, Society, C. Segal (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 69–94; V. Wohl,
Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

(Austin, Tex., 1998), 1–56; and K. Ormand, Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy:
Exchange and the Maiden (Austin, Tex., 1999), 36–59.
4. See P. E. Easterling, ed., Sophocles: Trachiniae (Cambridge, 1982), 19–23,
for a judicious summary of the dating problem and various views on the matter.
5. See Segal, Tragic World, 92; and C. P. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An
Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 62. Also see B. M. W.
Knox, “Sophocles and the Polis,” in Fondation Hardt, ed. J. de Romilly, vol. 29
(Geneva, 1983), 7. Knox describes the agora of Trachis as a “cow pasture.”
6. Segal, Tragic World, 92.
7. W. Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, trans. J. Raffan
(Oxford, 1985), 130.
8. Ibid., 210. See also N. Loraux, “Herakles: The Supermale and the Femi-
nine,” in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient
Greek World, ed. D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J., 1990),
21–52.
9. O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and
Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977), 125–26 and 302.
10. D. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (London, 1982), 190.
11. See Loraux, “Herakles,” 35.
12. See Easterling’s note on l.1075, Sophocles: Trachiniae, 208. Also see C.
Marshall, “Some Fifth-Century Masking Conventions,” Greece and Rome 46
(1999): 193–94, who suggests that through the pale mask of Heracles, “The
iconography of death and of the feminine here overlap and create a double effect.”
13. On the problems of the ending, see P. E. Easterling, “The End of the Tra-
chiniae,” Illinois Classical Studies 6 (1981): 56–74.
14. On this problem, see Easterling, Sophocles: Trachiniae, 231–32, who assigns
the lines to the chorus, but Lloyd-Jones gives them to Hyllus.
15. Rehm, Marriage to Death, 82–83, and the references in his note 42 on the
possibility of Iole’s presence. See also, Wohl, Intimate Commerce, 55, and note
58 with other references.
Chapter 7
Oedipus Rex
The second half of the fifth century witnessed what has been called an
“intellectual revolution.” This revolution affected Athens profoundly, but
the seeds of it are not to be found in Athens alone. Already in the sixth cen-
tury, early Greek philosophers had begun to attempt to explain the pro-
cesses of the world in naturalistic rather than supernatural terms.
Philosophical and scientific ideas expanded in the fifth century, so that
belief in the power of the gods, largely unchallenged in earlier times,
became subject to increasing scrutiny. What further challenged Greek
views of the world, as can be witnessed from Herodotus, was that, as they
learned more about other cultures, the Greeks discovered that values and
beliefs about the divine were not universally identical. These ideas helped
to introduce a notion of cultural relativism.
The spread of democracy in the fifth century created new needs in edu-
cation that could not be adequately met by the traditional training in
mousike and athletics. In Sicily, the foundations were laid for the system-
atic study of rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion. In Athenian democracy,
all citizens had the right to speak in the ecclesia; therefore, the art of pub-
lic speaking assumed a vital importance. Because of this dependency on
the spoken word, the ability to use language to serve one’s own political
ends or the interests of the polis as a whole was a major asset for the foun-
dation of a successful political career.
A new breed of teachers helped to fill this educational vacuum. Collec-
tively, they became known as “sophists,” although their individual views
were different and they did not constitute a formally organized school of
thought. In fact, they came from different backgrounds and often claimed
expertise in different areas of knowledge. However, they did share certain
things in common: they commanded large fees; they frequented Athens;

they all taught rhetoric; and were of a sceptical bent, questioning received
beliefs. The two most famous sophists were Protagoras of Abdera and Gor-
gias of Leontini in Sicily.
Protagoras, the oldest, tried to teach arete (excellence). What he meant
by this was how to make someone politically successful. He was the first
to claim that in any debate he could make the weaker argument appear the
stronger. Protagoras was sceptical about the existence of the gods. He is
famous for his statement: “Man is the measure of all things.” Whatever he
meant precisely by this, Protagoras’ statement can be used as a slogan for
the “intellectual revolution,” because it places man, not the gods, at the
center of understanding existence.
When Gorgias arrived in Athens in 427, he dazzled the Athenians with
the brilliance and ingenuity of his language. In a lost work entitled On
Nature or the Non Existent, Gorgias put forward three propositions:
(1) nothing exists; (2) even if anything does exist, it is unknowable; and
(3) even if anything is knowable, it cannot be communicated by language.
Whether Gorgias was being serious or tongue in cheek we do not know,
but he demonstrates how far language, as a tool for reasoning, had pro-
gressed from the time when truth was largely felt to be embodied in
archaic story telling.
Although tragedy continued to draw inspiration from myth, it too was
deeply affected by this intellectual revolution. Its effects can be seen most
clearly in the works of Euripides, whose tragedies often exploit the arti-
fices of rhetoric, question the morality of the gods, and submit many of the
traditional myths to a radical reexamination with a sophistic-like scrutiny.
Sophocles also was seriously influenced by the new intellectual Zeitgeist.
As A. A. Long states:
The use which he [Sophocles] made of Presocratic thought, particularly

Heraclitus, his medical knowledge and concern with politics, and the inter-
est which he shows in sophistic attitudes and arguments, all exemplify a
mind which was completely involved in the intellectual life of fifth-century
Athens.1
Although we cannot date Oedipus Rex precisely, it sits squarely in the

middle of this intellectual revolution.2 Its first production was most proba-
bly between c. 435 and c. 425 when, perhaps surprisingly, it only gained
second prize. Whether Sophocles is responding directly to Protagoras or
not, at the heart of Oedipus Rex is a deep questioning of the Protagorean
dictum: “Man is the measure of all things.” As exemplified in the fate of
Oedipus Rex 99
Oedipus, the tragedy explores the enigma that is Man. Sophocles, as many
have seen,3 structures the play around the twin themes of appearance and
reality, for which blindness and sight serve as dramatic metaphors. In
stripping away the layers of Oedipus’ identity, Sophocles makes problem-
atic two things on which theatre itself as a vehicle for understanding the
human condition is grounded: language (logos) and the mask.4 In the play,
a dialectical tension is developed between the two as the meaning of both
is subject to deep scrutiny.
Oedipus was a popular subject in myth, and several tragedies were
composed about him. It was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, however, that sub-
sequently became regarded as the canonical treatment. From our frag-
mentary information, it seems that two innovations, especially, set
Sophocles’ treatment apart from previous ones. The first is that he struc-
tured the plot around the mystery of Oedipus’ identity. As has often been
remarked upon, the plot of Oedipus unravels like a detective story, as
Oedipus—setting out to discover the murderer of the former king,
Laius—eventually discovers that not only was he himself the murderer,
but that the murdered man was his father and that he has married his own
mother, Jocasta. Unlike a typical modern whodunit, however, in which
the reader is left to figure out the culprit, the Athenian audience would
have been sufficiently familiar with the main details of Oedipus’ life to
have known that he was the culprit. As a result, the audience was put in
the position of ironic observers as they grasped the mistaken assump-
tions that Oedipus made in his search for the truth.
Sophocles’ second important innovation seems to have been to make the
riddle of the Sphinx an integral part of the mystery of Oedipus’ identity.
The riddle had been grafted onto the Oedipus story at least as early as the
sixth century. As such, it was part of the given of the myth, but Sophocles
gave the riddle greater significance by making it dramatically central to the
enigma of Oedipus’ existence, rather than treating Oedipus’ solution of the
riddle as a simple datum in the narrative of his life. As J-P. Vernant has
written: “It will be recognized that Oedipus Rex is not only centered on the
theme of the riddle but that in its presentation, development and resolution
the play is itself constructed as a riddle.”5
Although neither the Sphinx’s riddle nor its answer is explicitly men-
tioned in the text, there are several references to the riddle and, attached to
some of the manuscripts, there is a version of the riddle that might be
translated as follows:
There exists on earth a two-footed creature of a single voice, which also has
four and three feet. It alone of all animals that travel on land or through the
sky or under the sea changes its stature. But whenever it walks pressing
upon most feet, then is the speed of its limbs most feeble.6
The answer Oedipus gave to the riddle, that destroyed the Sphinx, was
“Man,” and so Oedipus became King of Thebes.
In Oedipus Rex, the skene represents the royal house of Thebes. One pa-
rodos leads out of Thebes in the direction toward three places: (1) Mount
Cithaeron, where Oedipus was left exposed as a child; (2) Corinth, where
Oedipus was brought up by Polybus and Merope, after being rescued, as if
he were their own child; and (3) the oracle at Delphi, which Oedipus, on
reaching manhood, had consulted before having made his way back to
Thebes, the city of his birth. On this fateful journey, unknown to himself, he
had killed his father at a place where three roads meet. These facts are
revealed strategically by Sophocles during the course of the dramatic action
as the plot’s narrative traces Oedipus’ life journey backward.7 Each of the
three main places in this journey is marked by a significant entry from this
parodos: Creon arriving from Delphi in the prologue; the messenger from
Corinth, announcing the death of Polybus; and the Theban herdsman from
Mount Cithaeron, who had originally been charged with exposing the
infant Oedipus. In terms of the dramatic action of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus’
life journey ends where his life had begun in the skene at Thebes.
The other parodos leads into the center of Thebes. If the parodos lead-
ing out of Thebes contains hidden clues about Oedipus’ identity, Oedipus
will mistakenly believe that the city parodos is the direction from which a
conspiracy has originated to depose him as king. Via this city parodos, the
prophet Teiresias and Creon will make important entrances, becoming the
focus for Oedipus’ suspicions of treachery. Until the end of the play, Oedi-
pus makes all his entrances and exits from the skene. Only two other char-
acters enter from the skene in the hidden recesses of which Oedipus’ life
journey began. They are Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife/mother, and the messenger
who describes how Oedipus had blinded himself on discovering Jocasta’s
hanging body. Although the plot hinges on a series of “messenger” scenes,
this messenger is the only stock messenger of the kind common in tragedy,
existing simply to report Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ blinding. In his
factual description of the blinding, this messenger speaks unambiguously
and reveals the true man behind Oedipus’ kingly mask, thus bringing
together appearance and reality.
A plague is raging at Thebes. In the prologue, a delegation of suppliants
enters from the city parodos and kneel at an altar before the royal palace.
They consist of an aged priest of Zeus and Theban young. Their heads are
probably wreathed. The skene doors open, and Oedipus comes out to
Oedipus Rex 101
address them. His opening words are: “Children, latest offspring of Cad-
mus of old” (1). Cadmus was the legendary founder of Thebes. Although
he does not know it, Oedipus himself is a direct descendant of Cadmus. He
inquires why the suppliants have come.
Here we note two things about Oedipus’ opening speech. First, he does
not address the suppliants as citizens or the like, but as children (1, 6).
Except when asking the old priest to speak on their behalf, Oedipus always
calls the delegation children (cf. 58, 142) as does the aged priest (32, 147).
Gellie wonders why Sophocles introduces “this collection of extras,”
rather than simply bringing on the chorus of Theban elders to serve as sup-
pliants.8 The answer lies in the different ages presented in the opening
tableau—the priest, bowed down with age; children; and Oedipus, the man
in the prime of life—which represent the three ages of man in the Sphinx’s
riddle. As the man who solved the riddle, Oedipus is “famous in all men’s
eyes” (8) and is the savior of his people (47–48).
The second point in his opening speech is that Oedipus claims that he
does not want to hear the suppliants’ pleas from messengers, but wants to
hear them in person. Messengers are quintessentially the purveyors of
words. Messages can be either true or false; before they are confirmed by
facts, they are mere words, rumors, or idle gossip. Even oracles are only
words, until they are proved true. As Oedipus investigates the mystery of
the murder of the former king, he has to strip away the differences between
fact and fiction, between reality and appearance. In the process, he shows
himself a prey to rumors. However, when he finally disentangles the truth,
his own mask as “greatest in all men’s eyes” is mercilessly exposed. Thus,
when Oedipus says that he has come not wishing to hear from messengers,
Sophocles is foreshadowing the importance of the reported word for
understanding Oedipus’ own destiny.
When the priest begs Oedipus to save them from the plague as he had
formerly saved them from the Sphinx, Oedipus replies that he has sent
Creon, his brother-in-law, to Delphi to inquire of Apollo how he might pro-
tect the city. His words are greeted by the priest with the news that Creon
is indeed arriving. Creon’s arrival from the out-of-city parodos is a matter
of some dramatic importance. It is the first of three entrances that he will
make in the play, at the end of which, as the new king, he will hold the
position that Oedipus currently occupies.9 The priest informs Oedipus that
it would seem that Creon brings good news or else he would not be wear-
ing a crown fully laden with laurel leaves. A laurel crown was worn by vic-
tors at the Pythian games, which were held at Delphi and were second in
prestige only to the Olympic games. Creon’s mask therefore endows him
with an aura of a victor. We should ask here why Sophocles has chosen to
have Creon report the message of the oracle from Delphi and not an
anonymous messenger. Creon’s entrance wearing a crown foreshadows his
eventual position as king. In some respects, Creon’s arrival at Thebes from
Delphi serves in miniature as a mirror to that of Oedipus’ arrival earlier in
his life. When Oedipus had first arrived in Thebes from Delphi, he had
encountered the Sphinx that had plagued the polis. After solving the
Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus was offered the crown of Thebes because of the
demise of the former king. When Creon arrives, his first encounter is with
Oedipus, the cause of the current plague. Creon provides the first clue to
the plague’s cause—namely, that it is due to the Thebans’ failure to dis-
cover and punish the murderer of the former king. After the riddle of Oedi-
pus’ birth has been discovered, Creon will become the new tyrannus
(king). None of this is explicit in the prologue, but Creon’s entrance and
his first exit foreshadow the threat that Creon poses to Oedipus’ position.
Unlike the suppliants, who are either bowed down with age or too young
to fly far, Creon is a man in the prime of life. He is not a suppliant and does
not need Oedipus’ help.
When Oedipus questions Creon as to what is the word from the god,
Creon’s answer is ambiguous, so that Oedipus does not know whether to
feel confident or afraid by Creon’s logos (90). Although the question,
“What is the word?” is repeated by Oedipus in the plainest of language,
Creon still fails to give a direct answer, but asks Oedipus whether he wants
to hear the answer in the presence of the suppliants or inside the skene. As
John Gould rightly points out:
Kreon, the envoy, enters but before he speaks the god’s words there is a politi-
cal [italics added for emphasis] issue to be determined: whether to speak pub-
licly, in earshot of the gathered Thebans, or in private council inside the palace.
Kreon implies a preference for privacy; Oedipus decides, unhesitatingly, for
public discourse.10
In the play, Creon serves as a dramatic foil to Oedipus. In his gesture

toward the secrecy of the house, Creon poses an unspoken threat to Oedi-
pus’ command of the skene.
Creon says that Apollo has ordered the Thebans to find the murderer of
the former king, Laius, and avenge his murder. Laius and his escort had
been attacked while traveling to Delphi, but his murderers reside in
Thebes. When Oedipus says: “I know of him only by hearsay, for I never
set eyes upon him” (105), the dramatic irony is palpable. To Oedipus’
question as to whether there was a “messenger” of the attack, Creon
replies that everyone had been killed except for one who could say nothing
Oedipus Rex 103
clearly, save that they had been attacked by brigands. Oedipus responds
that no one would have dared to attack the king unless he had been paid by
someone in Thebes. He asks Creon: “What trouble was in your way (more
literally “at foot”) that it prevented you from making a full investigation of
this matter, after the monarchy (tyrannis) had so fallen?” “The riddling
Sphinx caused us to dismiss what was obscure and to look to what was at
our feet,” is Creon’s response (130–31).
There are important details in this exchange. First, there is a play on the
word for feet that seems to allude to the Sphinx’s riddle. Oedipus’ own name
can be construed as a pun on the word for feet. Although it more literally
means “swollen footed,” referring to the piercing of his ankles when he was
exposed as a child, it could also mean “know foot,” because the “Oed” part
of his name is ambiguous.11 Second, the exchange juxtaposes the riddle of
the Sphinx with the murder of Laius. Having solved the riddle of the Sphinx,
Oedipus will now attempt to solve the mystery of Laius’ death and rid
Thebes of a second plague. Third, the notion of “tyranny” with regard to
Laius’ rule is introduced. Tyranny is a recurrent theme in the tragedy. Is
Oedipus meant to be represented as a tyrant in a historical sense or are
tyrannus/tyrannis and related expressions simply used as general terms for
king/kingship?12 Here, only a few things will be said on this matter. The term
is first introduced in connection with Laius, who was a legitimate monarch.
However, because Oedipus suspects that those who plotted Laius’ murder
might also plot against him, he shows a suspicious ethos common to tyrants.
Also, the term is first introduced in an exchange between Oedipus and
Creon, whom later Oedipus will accuse of plotting against his throne. In
fact, Creon will later take Oedipus’ place as king. The mask of Creon and his
movements in the prologue scene suggest that Creon is a threat to Oedipus’
absolute position as monarch. This threat is foreshadowed in the introduc-
tion of the term tyrannis in the verbal exchange between Oedipus and Creon.
Oedipus promises to reinvestigate the murder and orders the suppliants
to stand up. Taking his cue from Oedipus, the aged priest says; “Children,
let us stand up, for this man announces [playing on the verb that means “to
report a message”] those things for the sake of which we came” (147–48).
Oedipus, the man on two feet, has given hope and strength to the old and
young. The members of the delegation leave by the city parodos, but they
are not alone, for Creon goes with them. As a man wearing a laurel crown,
does Creon appear as the natural leader of these wreathed suppliants who
are weak and infirm? As they exit through the parodos, their procession
again presents the three generations of man in the Sphinx’s riddle.
The suppliants are replaced by a chorus of Theban elders who, while
invoking the gods for help, wonder what is this sweet-sounding Word that
has come from Delphi. Oedipus addresses them, saying that he speaks as
one who was a stranger to the story (logos) of Laius’ death as he was a
stranger to the deed. Those complicit in the murder who do not come for-
ward he bans from the social and religious life of the city, invoking a curse
on the culprit and promising to search out Laius’ murderer as if Laius were
his own father.
The chorus advises Oedipus to send for the blind prophet Teiresias,
whose vision of things is most like that of Apollo. Oedipus replies that at
the instigation of Creon, he has already sent for the blind prophet. With the
arrival of Teiresias, the mood of Oedipus will change from that of a caring
ruler to that of a suspicious monarch.
As with Creon’s earlier arrival, we should pay attention to the visual
tableau presented by the entrance of Teiresias. Teiresias is a blind old man.
A young boy escorts him to serve as his guide. At the same time, they are
accompanied by two mute attendants of Oedipus. The tableau therefore
again presents the three generations of man. Teiresias and his child escort
come before Oedipus.
Like the suppliants in the prologue, Oedipus kneels before Teiresias and
begs him to help save the polis. Teiresias is reluctant to speak, but simply
wishes to go home. Provoked by the prophet’s refusal to help, Oedipus
becomes so enraged as to claim that Teiresias must have been in the plot to
kill Laius. Angered, in turn, Teiresias accuses Oedipus of being the mur-
derer whom he seeks. Taunted by what he thinks are baseless allegations,
Oedipus accuses Creon of plotting against his throne (tyrannis, 380) and
bribing Teiresias to accuse himself of being Laius’ killer. He then attacks
Teiresias’ reputation as a prophet:
Come now, tell me, where have you been a reliable seer? When the riddling
dog [i.e., the Sphinx] was here, why did you not say anything to free your
citizens? And yet the riddle was not a matter for a chance by-comer to solve
but had need of a prophet’s skill—something you were shown not to have
whether from the help of birds or knowledge from the gods. But I came,
Oedipus, who knew nothing, and put a stop to her, hitting the mark by my
own wit and untaught by birds. (390–98)
In this passage, Oedipus juxtaposes his own power to solve riddles with
Teiresias’ oracular powers as a prophet. To Greeks, riddles and prophecies
were both conundrums. As Rebecca Bushnell expresses it: “oracles reflect
the temporality of riddles in which the natural laws of time are overthrown.
The Sphinx’s riddle, for example, compresses the three ages of man into a
monster of simultaneity, a two-footed, three-footed, and four-footed beast.”13
Oedipus Rex 105
Stung by Oedipus’ insinuations that he is Creon’s lackey and the taunt of

his blindness, Teiresias shows his full powers of clairvoyance, revealing
Oedipus’ own blindness about his family origins and warning of the future
fate that will ruin him. In Oedipus’ eyes, Teiresias talks in riddles. Enig-
matic though his words are to Oedipus, Teiresias makes a final speech,
exposing the sham of the mask that belies Oedipus’ true identity:
I shall depart after I have said why I came, undaunted by your face (proso-
pon), for you cannot destroy me. But I say this to you: this man, whom you
have long been seeking by uttering threats and proclamations about the
murder of Laius—this man is here, an alien resident by report, but in fact he
will be shown a native-born Theban. Nor will he rejoice in his fortune, for
blind instead of seeing, a beggar in place of wealth, he will journey to a for-
eign land, groping his way on a stick. He will be shown as the father and
brother of the children with whom he lives, the son and husband of the
woman from whom he was born, and the heir to the bed of the father whom
he killed. So go inside and reckon that out and, if you find I have lied, then
say I have no skill in prophecy. (448–62)
It weakens the metatheatrical significance of the text if we fail to bring out

in translation the force of the word prosopon in line 449. Teiresias, the
blind mask, sees with an astounding clarity of vision—unfettered by the
temporal limitations of eyesight—the whole man that is Oedipus from
birth to old age. The appearance of Teiresias, as he gropes his way out sup-
ported by his child guide, says visually—if he could but understand—what
Oedipus needs to know about the ages of his own life.
In the first stasimon, the chorus addresses the troubling nature of the
prophet’s words, as they wonder what cause can lie behind the insinuation
of the quarrel between Oedipus and the royal house of Thebes. The gods
are truly wise and understand the affairs of men, but is one prophet really
better than another? Until there is clear proof, they will never lose trust in
Oedipus who, when the winged Sphinx had come upon him, had proved
himself wise and dear to the polis.
The political motif is intensified with the second entrance of Creon. He
has heard the terrible accusations that the monarch (tyrannus), Oedipus,
has leveled against him. Earlier, we noted the distinctive quality of Creon’s
mask with its laurel crown. It is a matter of some importance whether
Creon’s mask is different in any way on his second appearance. It would be
unusual if his costume were changed at all without some clue in the text.
In fact, the text does draw special attention to Creon’s mask. As soon as
Oedipus sets eyes on Creon, he immediately makes a pointed reference to
Creon’s mask: “Have you such a face (prosopon) of effrontery that you
have come to my house, when you are palpably my murderer and openly
the robber of my kingship (tyrannis)?” (533–35; cf. 541). It is a reminder
for the audience of the tacit threat that Creon poses to Oedipus.
At this particular point in time, the audience does not know how Sopho-
cles is going to work out the details of Oedipus’ fate, but the emphasis
placed on the “tyranny” motif, centered around Oedipus and Creon, and
the visual threat to Oedipus posed by Creon’s mask, may well make the
audience not entirely confident that Oedipus’ suspicions about Creon’s
plotting against him are groundless. Seen from Oedipus’ point of view, he
has only Creon’s word about the message from Delphi. A common charge
against prophets in tragedy is that they are venal, and Oedipus has made it
clear that he believes that Teiresias has been bribed by Creon. In the fol-
lowing angry scene between Oedipus and Creon, Creon’s arguments in his
own defense have the specious air of a political sophist. As Oedipus says
to Creon: “You are a clever speaker” (545), using the commonplace idiom
to describe a sophist’s or politician’s clever verbal powers. The sophistic
nature of Creon’s argument is evidenced in the dialogue between Oedipus
and Creon, which leads up to Creon’s forensic-like speech of self-defense:
CREON: . . . I deem it fair to learn from you just as you deem it fair to learn
from me.
OEDIPUS: Learn all you like: I shall not be exposed as the murderer.
CREON: Well then, are you married to my sister?
OEDIPUS: There can be no denial of the fact.
CREON: Do you rule this land, giving her an equal part?
OEDIPUS: All that she desires she gains from me.
CREON: And am I equal to you both as a third partner?
OEDIPUS: It is in this very thing you prove a villainous friend.
CREON: Not if you reason the matter as I do. Think first on this, whether
you believe that someone would prefer to rule in dread rather than to rule
sleeping fearlessly, if the privileges be the same. Look, it is not in my
own nature to desire to be a ruler (tyrannus) rather than enjoy royal
perquisites (tyranna). (574–88)
Creon does not deny that he likes the benefits of power; he simply does
not want the aggravations of monarchy, a point he will reemphasize in
lines 592–93, where he uses the term tyrannis. Creon’s arguments are
sophistic in that he wants to have his cake and eat it at the same time. It is
not surprising that to Oedipus, Creon’s speech seems duplicitous and does
not allay his suspicions. Thinking that if he does not react quickly he will
Oedipus Rex 107
be overthrown, Oedipus demands Creon’s death as a traitor. In the final

lines of their exchange, to increase the tension, Sophocles gives antilabai
(half lines) to each character. To Oedipus’ claim, “I must rule,” Creon
retorts, “Not if you rule badly.” Oedipus simply cries, “Oh polis, polis!”
(628–29).
Jocasta enters from the house. It is a brilliant coup de théâtre. Behaving
at once like a mother and an older sister, she treats Oedipus and Creon as
if they are two squabbling children. She reminds them that the polis is suf-
fering from the plague, something far more important than their personal
tiff. Reluctantly, Oedipus allows Creon to go home.
With Oedipus and Jocasta alone onstage, there is a radical shift in the
direction of the plot. The “tyranny” motif that had dominated Oedipus’
attention in the scenes with Teiresias and Creon is put aside for the time
being. What Oedipus does not realize is that the character he is now alone
with face to face, the most intimate member of his own oikos, presents a
far greater threat to him than either Creon or Teiresias.
When Oedipus explains the cause of his quarrel with Creon, Jocasta
tries to relieve him of his fears about seers and prophecy. She says that an
oracle once came to Laius—she will not say from Apollo himself, but from
his servants, at least—that he would die at the hands of a son born to him
and Jocasta. However, as the story has it, Laius was killed by robbers at a
place where three roads meet. The child itself had been left to die on a
pathless mountain when it was only three days old. Thus, the prophecy was
not fulfilled, and one should pay them no heed.
Instead of comforting Oedipus, Jocasta’s words trouble him. He asks
Jocasta to give him more details about Laius: the exact place and the date
of his death, his physical appearance and whether he was traveling alone or
with retainers. On being told that a single slave survived, who had begged
to be allowed to work outside of the polis in the countryside, Oedipus
requests that the slave be sent for at once. Perplexed, Jocasta asks the cause
of his concern.
Oedipus now gives an account of what he knows of his own life. His par-
ents were Polybus and Merope, the king and queen of Corinth. When he
was a young man, a drunk had accused him of not being Polybus’ son.
Although his parents tried to allay his fears, he was not satisfied and
decided to consult the Delphic oracle about the matter. Apollo had simply
said that he would beget children by his mother and murder his father. He
decided therefore never to return to Corinth so as to avoid the fearful
prophecies coming true. He then describes his encounter at a crossroads
with a man and his retainers, such as Jocasta had described. The man in the
car and his herald had tried to thrust him from the road with their staves. In
his anger, Oedipus had retaliated and killed them all. If Laius was the man
in the chariot, Oedipus is the criminal. There is one hope alone to which he
clings; the slave who had escaped had said that Laius had been killed by
several robbers. If that is true, then Oedipus himself cannot be the killer.
Oedipus’ hopes now rest on the spoken message of one man. All Jocasta’s
attempts to comfort him fail.
The following stasimon of the chorus is one of the most difficult in
Sophocles and has caused considerable scholarly controversy to which we
cannot do justice here. However, some of their sentiments call into ques-
tion, in striking manner, the roots of religious belief. The members of the
chorus begin by praying that their lot may prove themselves to be pure in all
words and deeds, as laid down by the laws on high that were generated not
by mortals but by Olympus, who was their only begetter. These laws cannot
be lulled into forgetfulness, for god is great in them and does not age.
If the manuscripts are right, the second stanza begins with the words
“Hubris begets the tyrant” (873) and there follows a lyric disquisition on
the dangers of hubris for the man who does not fear dike (justice) nor rev-
erences the abodes of the gods. However, if the deeds of such a man win
respect, the chorus wonders why they should honor the gods with dances.
This sentiment, like the references to Oedipus’ and Creon’s masks earlier,
seems to be a clear metatheatrical allusion, invoking not the chorus’ role as
Theban elders but their very status as dancing actors in the theatre
involved in a religious performance. If wickedness prevails, they see no
point in visiting the oracles of the gods. To relieve their doubts, they call
on Zeus’ help to prove that their fears are not true, because belief in the
efficacy of Apollo’s power is fading.
When Jocasta appears with offerings to Apollo to soothe their fears,
because Oedipus has become a prey to anyone spreading rumors, a mes-
senger—an old man—arrives from Corinth seeking the house of the king
(tyrannus), Oedipus. The Corinthians will have Oedipus as their king
(tyrannus), for Polybus is dead. When Oedipus hears that Polybus died of
old age, he joyfully echoes Jocasta’s sentiments about the unreliability of
oracles, but still expresses fears about having intercourse with his mother.
The curiosity of the Corinthian messenger is piqued, so Oedipus tells him
of the fearful prophecy about his mother and his father. “My child, you
clearly do not know what you are doing,” says the messenger. “How come,
old man? In gods’ name tell me!” replies Oedipus (1008–9). In contrast to
earlier, when the messenger had referred to Oedipus as tyrannus, in the
present exchange, the messenger addresses Oedipus as “child” (1008,
1030). The tyrannus is being stripped of his identity, as the old man from
Corinth provides Oedipus with the first major clue to his identity as a child.
Oedipus Rex 109
He reveals that Polybus was not Oedipus’ father, but had received the infant
Oedipus as a gift from the messenger’s own hand and had brought him up
as his own son. The messenger himself had received Oedipus from a neigh-
boring shepherd on Mount Cithaeron who was said to work for Laius.
Jocasta now realizes the truth. In her despair, she begs Oedipus not to
investigate further, but Oedipus wants to know the truth about his birth.
When he remains immune to Jocasta’s pleas, she abruptly departs into the
house, addressing her son for the last time: “Oh, oh, you unhappy man!
That alone I can say to you, and never anything more.” The revelation of
Oedipus’ identity will condemn her to perpetual silence. Her last words are
to protect her son from knowing the dreadful truth about himself. How-
ever, Oedipus will not be deterred from knowing.
After the following ode in which the chorus speculates about the origins
of the infant Oedipus, the old Theban shepherd is escorted in by some of
Oedipus’ attendants. The previous episode and ode had concentrated on
the identity of the child Oedipus. In Oedipus’ ultimate discovery of his
birth, he will be surrounded by old men. Apart from the mute attendants,
the acting areas are filled by the chorus of elders and the two aged shep-
herds. Reluctant at first, like Teiresias earlier, to speak out, the Theban
shepherd, under threat of torture, provides the ultimate testimony of the
truth about Oedipus’ birth. The attempted silences of these two physically
feeble, old men had contained more truth than all the pronouncements of
Oedipus—tyrannus extraordinary, but hollow savior of his citizens.
In their final stasimon, the chorus encapsulates the fragility of humanity,
using Oedipus as their paradigm. Human beings are as nothing; no man
wins more than an appearance of happiness. Having destroyed the Sphinx
by solving her riddle, Oedipus became king and won the greatest honor,
but now no man is more pitiable. Time has found him out in all the horror
of his marriage and offspring. The reference to the Sphinx is central to the
meaning of the ode. Oedipus’ destruction of the Sphinx gave him the illu-
sion of happiness and endowed him with the mask of a great man but, in
truth, what he did not realize was that as a man, the riddle referred to him-
self, an ignorant, pathetic human being.
The graphic description of the messenger, describing the suicide of
Jocasta and Oedipus’ blinding of himself with the pins of her dress, fol-
lows. The blood from his eyes has drenched his cheeks with a continuous
shower of blood. Now he is demanding that the doors be opened so that the
Thebans may behold this defiler of both father and mother. The chorus is
about to witness a sight that would evoke pity even in an enemy.
There can be no doubt that, when Oedipus makes his final entry, his
mask has been altered significantly. He is probably wearing a new
mask, representing his changed status from grand tyrannus to blind

cripple. Whether he is also supported by a stick, as Teiresias had earlier
foretold, is not explicitly stated in the text, but it would make theatrical
sense.
At this point, the play is far from over, because there are still some 200
lines to go. There is an exchange between Oedipus and the chorus, first in
song and then in spoken words, in which the pathos of his life is given
emotive expression. Oedipus recognizes the role of Apollo in his blinding,
but he says that the act was the work of his own hand. Although he realizes
that it would have been better for him to have died as a child, he justifies
his own blinding by saying that, in view of what he has done, he could not
look upon his parents in Hades nor bear to see his own children, the city,
or the shrines of the gods. He simply wants to be hidden out of the way or
granted death.
Creon now makes his third and final entry. He is escorted by attendants
to do his bidding as attendants had done Oedipus’ bidding before in fetch-
ing Teiresias and the Theban shepherd. All the visual trappings of Creon’s
regal power are now complete. Oedipus wonders what he can say to Creon
in view of the wrong he has done him, but Creon assures him he has not
come to mock him. He insists, however, that shame demands that Oedipus
should not expose his polluted sight in public. He commands the atten-
dants to take Oedipus inside the oikos, as reverence demands.
The dialogue that follows between Oedipus and Creon raises several
important issues. When Creon orders Oedipus to be taken inside, Oedipus
asks to be cast out of the land, but Creon objects, saying that he must seek
Apollo’s advice. Oedipus, speaking with assurance, claims that Apollo’s
word is already clear. Failing to persuade Creon, Oedipus takes thought of
his family and begs Creon to let him touch his daughters, Antigone and
Ismene. Creon has anticipated his request as Oedipus realizes from hear-
ing their cries. We have here a mirror of the prologue scene. Creon, the
new ruler, out of compassion for his suppliant, has anticipated his request
and, like Oedipus earlier, has sent a messenger to Delphi to seek advice.
Furthermore, with the entry of Antigone and Ismene, the stage tableau
again presents the three generations of man in the Sphinx’s riddle.
Finally, Creon, firmly but gently, calls for a halt to Oedipus’ lamentation
and orders him into the house. When Oedipus repeats his pleas for exile,
Creon insists that the god alone can grant his request. Creon has the final
say: “Do not wish to have power in all matters, for the power you wielded
has not stayed with you throughout your life” (1522–23). As the king, the
blind cripple, and the children disappear into the skene, the chorus, if our
manuscripts are to be trusted, sums up Oedipus’ fate:
Oedipus Rex 111
Inhabitants of our native Thebes, look upon Oedipus here, who knew the
famous riddle and was a man most powerful. What citizen did not look with
envy on his fortune? Into what a storm of trouble he has come! Therefore,
until you have seen his final day, count no man happy before he has crossed
the boundary of life without pain. (1524–30)
Oedipus Rex questions the very foundations of human power and knowl-
edge. As represented by Oedipus, human greatness is seen simply as a
mask that thinly disguises the reality of weakness by the appearance of
strength, and which can be stripped away by a single word of truth. How-
ever, words, like masks, can be deceptive as well as veridical. When Oedi-
pus uttered the single word “Man” in answer to the Sphinx’s riddle that
provided the foundations of his political power as a tyrannus, he no more
saw the implications of what it meant for himself than an ignorant simple-
ton. In the way that Sophocles has structured his plot, the audience is given
the means to unravel, from the first appearance of Creon in the prologue
onward, the hollowness behind Oedipus’ mask.
But what of Creon, the mask of power in waiting? The last scene pre-
sents him as the new Oedipus, yet how secure is his kingly mask? As the
new ruler, he has the final say over the actions of Oedipus and his children.
In bringing Antigone and Ismene onstage, Sophocles seems to be making,
by use of an intertextual allusion to his earlier tragedy Antigone, an impor-
tant political point. He reminds the audience, through the presence of the
children, of the troubles that Creon, as the new tyrannus in the royal house
of Thebes, will inherit from Oedipus’ accursed family.
Kenneth Minogue has written: “As a theatre of illusion, politics does not
reveal its meanings to the careless eye. Reality and illusion are central cat-
egories of political study.”14 Theatre allows the audience to see the reality
behind the illusion. As the Athenians looked down on Oedipus from their
seats above, they could observe his fate with a clarity of vision that in real
life can only be credited to the gods. When, however, they left the theatre,
a world created from illusion, who is to say that the Athenians were not as
blind as Oedipus to the dreadful events that were to overtake their polis not
so many years later?
APPENDIX: BLIND AND KINGLY MASKS

In Oedipus Rex, the blind and the kingly masks work in dialectical oppo-
sition. In tragedy, the mask defines the character. For Sophocles, the blind
mask held a special fascination, serving with divine insight to undermine
the illusionary pretenses of those with sight. He uses the blind mask in
three of the seven extant tragedies, as well as in at least two other lost
plays. Did Sophocles train a special actor to use the blind mask? If he did,
it is conceivable that in the last part of the play, the actor who had played
Teiresias earlier plays Oedipus in the last scene, and that Creon, the new
king, is played by the actor who before had played Oedipus. Because
Greek tragedy only used three speaking actors, actors were often required
to take more than one speaking role. For the three-actor rule to work in
Oedipus at Colonus, the role of Theseus, for example, has to be shared by
different actors. Let us consider the possibility, therefore, that the same
actor played both Teiresias and the blind Oedipus and another played both
Oedipus as king and Creon as king. Gould makes a particularly telling
point about Creon’s final entrance. He writes:
Kreon’s entry . . . ironically echoes his first entry in the play: once more there
is a political decision to be made, and once more the god’s judgement [i.e.
Apollo at Delphi] to be sought, but now the decision is Kreon’s and like
Oedipus’ then, he will await the god’s word and then act on it. This Kreon
indeed possesses the same calm and reasonable assurance that was the mark
of Oedipus in the opening scene, and like that Oedipus he has foreseen what
must be done and has already sent for Oedipus’ daughters for a last greeting
and farewell. It is as if Oedipus, himself transformed into another Teiresias,
is reborn in this new cool but humane Oedipus.15
If Creon behaves like Oedipus when he was at the height of his power in
the prologue, Oedipus himself, as Gould rightly suggests, is transformed
into another Teiresias. Once he reappears with his blind mask, unhindered
by sight, he speaks with a voice that, to use Calame’s words, “sounds
strangely like that of Teiresias.”16 Earlier, Teiresias had said to Oedipus, “It
is not your lot to fall through me, since Apollo, whose concern it is to ful-
fil these things, is adequate” (377). Once blind, Oedipus, like Teiresias, has
gained full insight into the workings of Apollo. To the chorus’ questions
“How did you dare to put out your own eyes? Which of the gods made you
act?” Oedipus replies, “It was Apollo, Apollo, friends, who brought to ful-
filment these terrible sufferings of mine” (1328–30). After he has begged
Creon to cast him out of Thebes, Creon says that he has to wait for Apollo’s
advice, to which Oedipus replies, “His utterance is utterly plain” (1440).
The word he uses for “utterance” (phatis) is the same word the chorus used
in their entrance song of Apollo’s oracular pronouncement. Given the con-
ditions of masked theatre and the special significance of the blind mask,
therefore, it would not be dramatically ineffective for the actors to change
roles, giving continuity to the types of parts they had played earlier.
Oedipus Rex 113
NOTES
1. A. A. Long, Language and Thought in Sophocles (London, 1968), 167.
2. On the intellectual background of the play in general, see B. M. W. Knox,
Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven, Conn., 1957).
3. See, for example, K. Reinhardt, Sophocles, 4th ed., trans. H. Harvey and
D. Harvey (Oxford, 1979), 94–134.
4. For some helpful comments on language in the play, see J. Gould, “The
Language of Oedipus,” in Sophocles: Modern Critical Views, ed. H. Bloom (New
York, 1990), 207–22.
5. J-P. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of
Oedipus Rex,” in J-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient
Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York, 1988), 120.
6. I have translated the text as printed in Sir Richard Jebb’s third edition of
Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments. Part 1. The Oedipus Tyrannus (Cambridge,
1914), 6.
7. See O. Taplin, “Sophocles in his Theatre,” in Sophocle, Fondation Hardt,
ed. J. de Romilly, vol. 29 (Geneva, 1983), 168.
8. G. Gellie, Sophocles: A Reading (Melbourne, 1972), 79.
9. On the importance of Creon, see D. G. Beer, “The Riddle of the Sphinx
and the Staging of Oedipus Rex,” Essays in Theatre 8 (1990), 108–20, and espe-
cially 115.
10. Gould, “Language of Oedipus,” 211.
11. On Oedipus’ name, see Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, 182–84.
12. See B. M. W. Knox “Why is Oedipus Called Tyrannos?” in Word and
Action: Essays on the Ancient Theatre, ed. B. M. W. Knox (Baltimore, Md., 1979),
87–95.
13. R. Bushnell, Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban
Plays (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 17.
14. K. Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 1995), 6.
15. See Gould, “Language of Oedipus,” 220.
16. C. Calame, “Vision, Blindness and Mask: The Radicalization of the Emo-
tions in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. Silk (Oxford,
1996), 24; see also 23 and 28–29.
Chapter 8
Electra
The years when Pericles directed Athenian imperial policy were ones of
expansion and achievement. However, the aggressiveness of the Athenians
was regarded with hostility in many quarters. The Thirty Years’ Truce,
signed in 445 between the Athenians and the Spartans, was doomed not to
last and war broke out in 431. This war engulfed much of the Greek world.
It was unprecedented in its duration and unrivaled in its savagery. At
Athens, Pericles himself died in 429 of a plague that seriously affected the
confidence with which the Athenians had entered the war. Deprived of the
stability of his leadership, a new class of politicians arose, pejoratively
called demagogues, who largely broke the mold of the Athenians electing
their leaders from the aristocracy.
It is mainly through the writings of Thucydides that we can witness the
profound changes that took place in the Greek world. In the third book of
his Histories, Thucydides encapsulates what these changes were:
Every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the
troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was
laughed down and disappeared: and society became divided into camps in
which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither
promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all
parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a per-
manent state of things were more intent upon self-defence than capable of
confidence. (3.83. trans. Crawley)
According to Thucydides, words acquired new meanings. Irrational audacity

was looked upon as loyal bravery, prudent circumspection as conspicuous
cowardice, and moderation as a veil for pusillanimity. In many poleis, fam-

ilies became bitterly divided as factional loyalties took precedence. Mon-
strous acts of unprovoked brutality often took place, as factions preferred
to strike beforehand rather than having to wait to retaliate. In turn, revenge
was regarded as more important than self-preservation and acts of deceit
rather than open fair fight were more applauded.
Although these changes did not take place everywhere at once, the pro-
gressive deterioration of humane values at Athens itself can be registered
through two incidents that took place at different stages of the war. In the
first, in 428, the island of Lesbos revolted against the Athenians who laid
siege to its largest town of Mytilene. When it surrendered, the Athenians
debated the fate of its inhabitants. Cleon, the main advocate of an aggres-
sive war policy, argued that Mytilene should be made an example to
Athens’ other subject allies who might wish to revolt. He proposed that all
the adult males be put to death and the women and children sold into slav-
ery. Cleon’s proposal won the day, and a ship was dispatched with instruc-
tions to the Athenian commanders to carry out the order. The next day,
however, the Athenians had a change of heart and so another ship was sent
to overtake the previous one and countermand the order. Thus, the people
of Mytilene were saved from a dreadful fate.
No such mercy was shown later to the people of Melos, another island in
the Aegean Sea. The Melians were not subject allies and in the war they
tried to remain neutral. In 416, without serious provocation, the Athenians
decided to coerce the Melians into subjection. When the Melians refused
to obey, the Athenians laid siege to them for six months, captured the polis,
killed all the men, and sold the women and children into slavery. The
debate that took place between the Athenian commanders and the Melian
leaders before the siege, as graphically presented by Thucydides
(5.85–116), in which the Athenians advocate the basic expediency that
might is right, makes for chilling reading.
It was against the background of the Melian massacre that Euripides in
415 produced his great antiwar play, Trojan Women, in which he not only
shows the brutalization of victors in war and the pitiable sufferings of the
vanquished, but also suggests that doom, in turn, awaits the victors as well
as the vanquished. War is a recurrent theme, not only in Euripides’ surviv-
ing tragedies, but in several extant comedies of Aristophanes, which pro-
vide testimony of how divided the Athenians were about the war.
Euripides’ Trojan Women did not deter the Athenians, in the same year,
from embarking on what turned out to be a foolhardy, imperialistic adven-
ture in Sicily against the powerful city of Syracuse. Although in the early
years of the war, the fortunes of the two sides had fluctuated, the Atheni-
Electra 117
ans’ Sicilian expedition was to prove the beginning of their downfall. The
expeditionary force was totally destroyed in 413. Although the Athenians
managed to make a modest recovery and even enjoyed some successes,
with the Sicilian expedition they had ruinously overreached themselves.
The shock of the disaster caused a political crisis at Athens and led to 10
advisers (probouloi) of men over 40 years of age being appointed to take
charge of the affairs of the boule. Sophocles was one of these probouloi,
himself being over 80. In the wake of the disaster, antidemocratic senti-
ment at Athens became more virulent and, in 411, under pressure from an
oligarchic-minded faction, the Athenians briefly abandoned the democ-
racy and replaced it with a committee of 400 whose task was to draw up a
constitution restricting the franchise to 5,000 citizens. When the extreme
members of this oligarchic faction began to intrigue with the Spartans and
showed reluctance at handing over power to the 5,000, the more moderate
among the 400 seceded and led a fight against the extremists, who were
eventually routed. Thus, an attempt at an oligarchic coup had failed and the
democracy was restored.
While these events were taking place in Athens, many of the demos were
absent at Samos, serving in the Athenian fleet. Whether exaggerated or
not, reports were brought to them that there was a reign of terror taking
place in Athens: flogging was widespread, open criticism of the govern-
ment was impossible, and outrages had been committed against wives and
children (Thucydides 8.74). As one of the probouloi appointed after the
Sicilian disaster, Sophocles must have helped in forming proposals that led
to the creation of the committee of 400. What part he played in what fol-
lowed is not recorded, but he was at least minimally responsible. Accord-
ing to Aristotle (Rhetoric 3.18 1419a), when asked later whether what he
had done was wrong, he admitted that it was, but said that there had
seemed no better alternative at the time.
Although the date of the original production of Electra is unknown, on
stylistic grounds the evidence is strong in suggesting that it is a late work,
and a number of scholars have argued for a date close to the events of 411.
This late date finds some support from Euripides’ Orestes, produced in
408, which seems in part to have been written as a response to Sophocles’
Electra.1
Critics of Electra have tended to fall into opposing camps. The crux of
the dispute has centered on the issue of matricide. The traditional view is
that the revenge that Orestes and Electra exact for the death of their father,
Agamemnon, in murdering their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover,
Aegisthus, does not raise difficult moral issues. Thus, as one scholar has
expressed the matter, “The Sophoclean Electra ends in success, a fact
distressing to those who think that revenge tragedy must always condemn
its own violence.”2 Increasingly, however, the more common view has
been to regard the deeds of Orestes and Electra as a dark act of vengeance
whose justice is seriously questionable.3 Importantly, some recent critics
have stressed the metatheatrical aspects of the tragedy.4
In the Odyssey, the story of Orestes’ revenge of the death of his father,
Agamemnon, forms a leitmotif, used as a model of loyal filial behavior for
Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. Orestes had killed Aegisthus, who had
murdered Agamemnon on his return from Troy after seducing Clytemnestra
during the king’s absence. Although Clytemnestra is presented as an unfaith-
ful wife, Homer does not mention Orestes’ murder of his mother. Thus, the
moral issue of matricide is avoided. Between the time of Homer and the
tragedians, however, the matricide became central to the tradition. All three
tragedians composed plays based on the myth. Aeschylus made the moral
issue of the matricide the crux of his Oresteia. The matricide forms part of a
chain of murders that had originated in a curse on the family. In the first play,
Agamemnon, Clytemnestra was the main agent in murdering her husband,
punishing him for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, before
sailing for Troy. In Libation Bearers, the second play, Orestes is commanded
by Apollo to avenge the death of his father under threat of being attacked by
his Furies. Orestes is caught in a catch 22, because he will also be attacked
by Clytemnestra’s Furies should he murder her. Thus, Aeschylus dramatizes
poignantly the problem of dike as revenge justice. In the last play,
Eumenides, he presents a resolution, without minimizing the difficulties of
the moral issues, by having the Olympian gods have Orestes tried for matri-
cide in Athens and narrowly acquitted. In so doing, dike, as trial by jury,
replaces dike as an unending spiral of punishment and counterpunishment.
The establishment of a law court in Athens to try Orestes for matricide can
be regarded as providing a founding myth for Athenian democracy.
Aeschylus presented his Oresteia in 458, when Athens had put in place
the final reforms in the creation of a radical democracy. Whatever Aeschy-
lus’ own views were of these democratic reforms, Oresteia does suggest
that solutions—not necessarily ideal, but solutions nevertheless—can be
found to seemingly the most intractable of problems. If Oresteia presented
grounds for optimism, both Sophocles and Euripides composed their plays
against the background of the Peloponnesian War, in which atrocities of
extreme brutality had become commonplace and the moral motivations of
acts of revenge seemed to demand reexamination.
If the original production of Euripides’ Electra preceded that of Sopho-
cles’ (the issue of precedence is much disputed), Euripides was probably
responsible for first enlarging the role of Electra in the revenge. In Aeschy-
Electra 119
lus’ play, Electra had only been a secondary character who, reduced to vir-
tual slavery through no fault of her own, had mainly been used to evoke
sympathy for the dreadful deed Orestes is to perform, without actively par-
ticipating in the matricide. Deliberately undercutting the tragic grandeur
of Aeschylus, Euripides has Electra married off to a peasant, against
whose hut the play is set. Electra is as much motivated in her revenge by
jealousy of her mother as she is by the murder of her father. She resents the
loss of her status as a princess and plays on her story as one of “riches to
rags.” It is Electra who sets the trap by which Clytemnestra is ensnared, so
that Orestes can kill his mother. Although Euripides has greatly enlarged
the part of Electra, the tragedy focuses equally on the actions of Electra
and Orestes. The murders of both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are treated
as sordid affairs, and it is suggested at the end that if the oracle of Apollo
ordered the matricide, the god may be wise, but his oracles are not.
Both Aeschylus and Euripides frame their “Electra” plays around
Orestes’ return from exile and return into exile. Superficially, at least,
Sophocles’ version seems more Homeric, because Orestes simply returns
from exile and avenges the death of his father without any suggestion that
he is to face another period of exile. Moreover, Sophocles adds many
Homeric touches, including the setting of the tragedy in Mycenae in con-
trast with the other two playwrights’ versions, in which the setting is
Argos. The several Homeric touches are dramatically functional insofar as
they help to recall the heroic world of Agamemnon as general of the Greek
army at Troy, which stands in contrast to the dark world of the family oikos
in which his murder is avenged.5 In his treatment, Sophocles has made
Electra the central focus of the tragedy. Through Electra’s sufferings and
her reactions, the audience experiences the miseries of the oikos.
The tragedy opens with three men entering from a parodos. Orestes’ old
slave, his tutor, leads the way. He had rescued the infant Orestes from the
house at the time of Agamemnon’s murder and brought him up in exile to
be his father’s avenger. Orestes follows the slave and, in turn, is shadowed
by his silent friend, Pylades. As leader, the slave speaks first. Almost as if
he were a military officer, he gives Orestes a lesson in topography by
pointing out the lie of the land. He describes the skene/oikos as “this mur-
derous house of the sons of Pelops” (10). Pelops is the ancestral founder of
Orestes’ oikos about whom we shall hear more. The tutor calls on Orestes
to prepare a campaign of action.
The opening of the tutor’s speech is in such grandiloquent language that
it is impossible to capture its full effect in English: “Son of Agamemnon,
once grand marshall of all the generals at Troy, now, boy, it is possible to
survey . . . ” The words have an heroic gloss, being full of high-sounding
polysyllabic words and phrases. However, they are also bathetic, contrast-
ing the monosyllabic word “boy” in the here and now to the glorious father
of the past. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the tomb of Agamemnon was
physically depicted onstage and provided the main focus for the first half
of the tragedy. In Sophocles’ play, the tomb is offstage, but no less than in
Libation Bearers, the influence of the dead Agamemnon invoked in these
opening words is constantly felt. However, unlike in Aeschylus’ play, in
which his children are united early on in a common purpose, in Sophocles’
play, the image of the fallen king is more complex and represents different
things to different characters. Orestes’ image of his father has been fed to
him by a slave who presents Agamemnon as the great war hero. Orestes,
however, is not destined to win fame on the battlefield, but rather by a
stealthy act of revenge in the murderous house of Pelops. In this, he uses a
slave as a decoy whom he glorifies with noble sentiments. The contrast
between father and son is brought out in the response of the Delphic ora-
cle to Orestes’ question of how he might win revenge from his father’s
murderers. The oracle had replied that he should steal a due revenge by
cunning without resorting to force of arms or an army.
Unlike Electra, Orestes never expresses any sense of outrage at his
father’s death. He is primarily interested in fame and glory at any cost. He
instructs the tutor to tell a lying tale to the rulers of the house that he has
come from one of their allies to report that Orestes has been killed in a
chariot race at the Pythian games. The chariot race at the Pythian games
was the most prestigious event. Thus, the tutor is to present an image of a
fictitious Orestes enjoying a heroic death. Meanwhile, the real Orestes,
after pouring libations at Agamemnon’s grave, will spend most of the play
in hiding before bringing in an urn, supposedly containing his own ashes,
as evidence of his own death. As he says:
For why should this distress me, if I die in word but in fact I am preserved
and win glory? To my mind, no word spoken for profit is evil. (59–61)
The morality of winning fame by lying is highly questionable, more sug-

gestive of a wily Odysseus than of Agamemnon. Electra is built around a
“dialectical design” of words and actions.6 For Orestes, words, even in the
form of lies, are simply instruments for successful action. Orestes’ lying
words will find their counterpart in the urn containing his fictitious ashes,
the most important visual image of the play, in which the inversions of life
in death and death in life will reach a climax.
Orestes, with the help of the tutor, has orchestrated a plot against those
within the house. This plot frames the world of those within, with the result
Electra 121
that the audience knows that those inside live in a world of illusory truth
about what is really happening outside. Thus, there is a play within a play.
Although the metatheatrical frame has a superficially gilded gloss, the pic-
ture it contains is of a dark political tragedy that calls into question the
very possibility of heroic action.
The prologue of Electra falls into two distinct halves, the second of
which is foreshadowed by the screams of Electra from within the house
that momentarily interrupt the planning of Orestes and the tutor. Electra
enters alone. The contrast between brother and sister is stark. She has no
slave to help her, no faithful friend behind her. She is dressed in filthy rags
as if she herself were a downtrodden slave. She has no plans. She does not
speak, and can only sing a grief-stricken monody of outrage and despair.
The contrast between Orestes’ action-oriented words and Electra’s lonely
pathetic song underlines the difference between the acrimonious, claustro-
phobic world of her life as a woman within and Orestes’ male dreams of
glory.
For Electra, the day is a time of darkness, when she beats her bruised
breasts in grief-stricken lament. She dwells upon the death of her father
who did not die a warrior’s death in a foreign land, but was dishonorably
axed to death by her mother and her mother’s adulterous lover. Through
constant lamentation, she preserves the memory of Agamemnon. Unlike
for Orestes, Agamemnon is not simply a military icon but a dear father
foully murdered. She longs for her brother’s return. While Electra gives
vent to her grief, the chorus of noble Mycenaean women enter from the
city parodos. They join with her in an antiphonal lament. In not giving the
chorus an independent entrance song, Sophocles has made the chorus sub-
ordinate to Electra for whom they largely serve as a sounding board.
Electra justifies her extreme behavior by the outrages that have taken
place. Aegisthus has not only usurped Agamemnon’s throne, but has taken
on all the trappings of royalty. To crown insult with insult, Aegisthus sleeps
in her father’s bed with her wretched mother who scarcely deserves the
name. As for her mother, she revels in Agamemnon’s murder, celebrating
his death with monthly sacrifices. Electra is constantly at war with her
mother over Agamemnon, but what provokes Clytemnestra’s wrath more
than anything is if Orestes’ name is mentioned. Then Clytemnestra flies
into a rage and blames Electra for having stolen him away from the house.
Electra only wishes that Orestes would come and put an end to her mis-
eries. He keeps sending promises to come, but never actually appears.
The mention of Orestes might seem a preparation for the reentrance of
the tutor with the false news of his death. Sophocles however springs a sur-
prise, for it is not the tutor who enters, but a new character from the house.
It is Chrysothemis, Electra’s sister. Unlike the other children of Agamem-

non, Chrysothemis is a less prominent character who does not appear in
other dramatic versions of the myth. Sophocles introduces a sister for
Electra to give greater complexity and depth to the plot. Chrysothemis is
probably escorted by a slave carrying a libation vessel. In this way, Sopho-
cles not only plays off Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, where Electra had
entered with slave libation bearers, but visually emphasizes the difference
in status between Chrysothemis and the slave-like Electra.
Chrysothemis serves as a political foil to her sister. She is somewhat of
a trimmer. Although she recognizes the justice of Electra’s moral stance,
for her, personal freedom and a comfortable life are preferable to a life of
suffering brought about by opposing those in power. This life of compro-
mise brings a stinging rebuke from Electra. Not only does she accuse
Chrysothemis of cowardice, but she also accuses her of treachery to her
father and loved ones:
Gorge yourself at a full table and wallow in the pleasures of a rich life. For
me it is sustenance enough not to cause myself pain. I have no yearning to
win your privileges. Nor would you, if you were decent-minded. But, as it
is, when you could be called the daughter of the noblest of fathers, be called
your mother’s child, for so you will seem base to most people and a traitor
to your father and your loved ones. (361–68)
Chrysothemis warns Electra that, unless she changes her behavior,

Aegisthus intends to lock her away in an underground chamber. When
Electra pours scorn on this warning, Chrysothemis wants to go on her way,
which prompts Electra to ask where she is going with funeral offerings.
There is a political edge to the argument between Electra and
Chrysothemis, because it raises the serious moral issue of how one should
behave in the face of despotic power. Does one live a life of seemingly
futile resistance or does one learn to compromise? The serious curtailment
of Electra’s freedom and her life of humiliation come from her own choice
of open defiance against those in power. The issue of power also lies cen-
tral to the dream that has caused Clytemnestra to send Chrysothemis with
offerings to Agamemnon’s tomb, for she dreams that Agamemnon comes
back to life, seizes his scepter (which Aegisthus now carries), and plants it
in the ground. From this scepter, a huge tree grows and overshadows the
whole of Mycenae. Unlike in the Aeschylean version, in which Clytemnes-
tra is herself central to the dream’s meaning, in Sophocles’ version,
Aegisthus assumes prominence. Thus, the dream alludes to the usurpation
of political power and counterusurpation.7
Electra 123
On hearing about the dream, Electra persuades Chrysothemis not to take

the offerings to Agamemnon’s tomb on behalf of their unholy mother, but
to give offerings at the tomb on behalf of themselves and to pray for the
victorious return of Orestes. Chrysothemis accedes to her request, think-
ing it not right for the two of them to argue about what is just, although she
begs Electra not to divulge what she will do.
In the first stasimon, the chorus sees the dream as a harbinger of dike
coming from Agamemnon in the form of a brazen-footed Fury. They then
relate the troubles that have come upon the land back to the original crime
of Pelops, the founder of the race, who had won his bride by treachery in a
chariot race. The image of Pelops combines both an association of a field
of heroic endeavor in the chariot race and a notion of treacherous behavior.
This imagery might appear preparatory for the entrance of the tutor, who
is supposed to tell the lying story of Orestes dying in a chariot race. How-
ever, Sophocles springs another surprise by having another woman enter
from the skene. It is Clytemnestra.
The agon scene between Clytemnestra and Electra is centered on the
notion dike and what constitutes shameful behavior. Clytemnestra chas-
tises Electra for always publicly shaming the family. She argues that dike
was responsible for Agamemnon’s death, because Agamemnon alone of all
the Greeks had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, her child, when he had no
right.
In her response, Electra claims that the true reason why Clytemnesta had
murdered Agamemnon was the lustful persuasion of Aegisthus. Agamem-
non had had no choice but to sacrifice Iphigenia, because he had inadver-
tently offended Artemis. As a result, the goddess had stalled the Greek
fleet at Aulis, and it was not possible for the army to sail home or to Troy
without the sacrifice, in spite of Agamemnon’s reluctance. If Clytemnestra
had murdered Agamemnon for the death of Iphigenia, then by the same
law, Clytemnestra should also die for the murder of Agamemnon, if justice
is to be done. Clytemnestra’s behavior is doubly disgraceful in that she has
now had children by Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s enemy, while casting out
her earlier, legitimate children. Clytemnestra is a tyrant rather than a
mother, because she and Aegisthus subject her to a life of constant pain
and Orestes has to live an unhappy life of exile. If she herself is conversant
with such base and shameful behavior, she only proves herself a child not
unworthy of her mother.
At the end of their altercation, Clytemnestra makes sacrifices at the altar
of Apollo in front of the house. Praying in secret to the god, she asks that
the dreams she has had may be propitious to her and her friends and inaus-
picious to her enemies. As if in answer to her prayers, the tutor enters.
The terse announcement of the tutor that Orestes is dead causes Electra
to cry out in pain. Her life has been destroyed. His actual speech about how
Orestes died has all the hallmarks of a messenger speech, but is not,
because it is a lie from beginning to end. The speech comes at the very
center of the tragedy. In contrast to the preceding episodes, which have
been filled with acrimonious wrangling among the women of the oikos, the
tutor’s vivid narrative transposes the minds of the audience into a splendid
world of aristocratic male achievement. Orestes, having enlisted in all the
events of the Pythian games, had covered himself with glory, winning all
the prizes until the fatal chariot race. Such was his success that he was her-
alded as “an Argive, Orestes by name, the son of Agamemnon who had
once mustered the famous army of the Greeks” (693–95).
The tutor’s speech is a piece of metadrama, a one-actor play within a
play, in which the slave has been secretly directed by Orestes. However, in
his overblown magniloquence, the tutor enlarges his own role as messen-
ger by elaborating on the glorious actions of Orestes. To use Orestes’ own
words from the prologue, “no word is base, when spoken for gain.” In the
tutor’s speech, Orestes is a genuine heroic son of a heroic father.
Although the tutor’s speech is mainly directed toward Clytemnestra to pre-
pare the way for Orestes to get into the house to perform his act of revenge,
this piece of metadrama has the unintended effect of shattering Electra’s
hopes. For Electra, swept away by its powerful effect, the speech creates an
illusion of a personal tragedy. Until Orestes breaks its spell on her by reveal-
ing his true self, Electra will mistake illusion for reality. In response to the
speech’s effect, Electra will display a traditional aristocratic male heroism
before she is sucked into the cunning ways of her brother. Bereft of both
father and brother, Electra confronts the prospect of a life of slavery.
The tutor’s speech throws into relief the confusion between appearance
and reality. This effect is deepened in the following episodes. Everything
has been prepared for the arrival of Orestes, so long delayed. Sophocles
however still has other surprises in store for the audience, because the
character who arrives from the parodos leading to Agamemnon’s tomb is
not Orestes but Chrysothemis. Ignorant of the false news of Orestes’
death, Chrysothemis enters, overcome with joy. She has discovered offer-
ings at Agamemnon’s tomb that she rightly believes could only have come
from Orestes. The reaction she receives from Electra is not one she could
have anticipated, because Electra treats her as if she is suffering from delu-
sions. Shattered by what Electra says about the news of Orestes’ death,
Chrysothemis is harshly brought into the illusory world of Electra.
After convincing Chrysothemis that Orestes is dead, Electra tries to per-
suade her sister to help her in killing Aegisthus. It is significant that here
Electra 125
Electra contemplates murdering only Aegisthus and not Clytemnestra. Her

speech is remarkable for the values it espouses. Warning Chrysothemis
that, with Orestes’ death, she cannot expect that Aegisthus will allow her
to enjoy their father’s wealth, but that she can only look forward to a mar-
riageless and childless old age, Electra tells Chrysothemis of the freedom
and honor that they will win if she will help her in carrying out a plan she
has decided on:
First, you will win the praise of reverence from our dead father and also
from our brother: next, in the future, you will be hailed as a free woman, as
you were born, and will meet with a worthy marriage, for every one is wont
to have regard for what is honorable. And, indeed, do you not see how wide-
spread will be the fame you will bring to you and me, if you listen to me?
What citizen or stranger will not welcome us with words of praise: “Behold
these two sisters, friends, who rescued their father’s oikos and, unsparing of
their own lives, stood proud as avengers against their well-placed enemies.
Everyone should cherish and revere them; everyone should honor them at
feasts and among the assembled polis on account of their manliness.” Such
things all men will say of us so that glory will never fail us in life and death.
But, be persuaded, dear heart, help your father, succor your brother, deliver
me from evil, deliver yourself, knowing that it is disgraceful for those who
are nobly born to live disgraceful lives. (968–89)
Although spoken by a woman, there is nothing in the basic values of this

speech with which an Achilles or an Ajax could not identify. Electra’s
words encapsulate the traditional male aristocratic ethic: a noble death if
necessary, rather than a base life, in return for winning everlasting fame.
The praise that she imagines would attach to Chrysothemis and herself in
feasts and among the assembled polis befits the kind of honors that were
bestowed at Athens upon Harmodius and Aristogiton, who were honored
as tyrant slayers.
The last two lines of Electra’s speech juxtapose key concepts that are at
issue in the tragedy, to kalon and to aischron. Although kalos and aischros
can mean “beautiful” and “ugly,” respectively, they were also used in
Greek in a moral sense of “good” or “honorable” and “base” or “shame-
ful.” Electra is overtly the “ugly” woman—she is emblematically dressed
in filthy rags—but the code of behavior she espouses in this speech reveals
her as “good and honorable.” Her mask therefore belies her noble ethos,
but this contradiction in her mask between appearance and reality will
only last as long as she lives immune from the baleful influence of her
brother. Although he may have all the appearance of being kalos, his
actions suggest that he is aischros.
As a political trimmer, Chrysothemis rejects Electra’s plea and, in turn,

begs Electra to give up her foolish plan lest she destroy the whole family.
Electra accuses Chrysothemis of cowardice and bids her—it is a signifi-
cant point—to proclaim her plan to her mother. Defiant, forthright, and
honest, Electra stands heroic in the very openness of her intentions. At
the end of the scene, the sisters are as bitterly divided as they had begun,
in spite of a brief rapport. In what follows, Chrysothemis will have no
role, for the battlelines will be drawn up firmly between two opposing
sides.
The following ode recalls some of the underlying themes of the tragedy.
The chorus calls out for a message to be sent to the Atreidae below, telling
how their house is plagued with strife and that Electra, forlorn in her grief,
is ready to die through a noble death. They pray that Electra may yet rise
up over her enemies by winning the greatest prize of honor through her
reverence to Zeus.
Finally, Orestes enters accompanied by his friend Pylades and at least
one attendant. The recognition scene is a piece of magnificent dramaturgy,
in which the inversions of life and death imagery reach a climax before the
recognition of brother and sister. Orestes comes as a stranger bringing the
urn with his own ashes. Electra pleads with him to let her hold the urn over
which she delivers a long funeral eulogy as if she is holding Orestes’ head.8
Electra’s lament, however, is undercut by the visual reality of the scene.
While she is pouring out her grief over an empty urn as if it were her
brother, Orestes—alive and well—is standing close by.
To understand the recognition scene, we must consider the masks to
which there will be some explicit references later, after the actual recogni-
tion has taken place, for there will be a tussle between the upfront, defiant,
and heroic Electra and an Orestes who works by deception. Ultimately, the
heroic Electra will be destroyed as she is drawn into the deceptive world of
her brother.
Let us look at the dynamics of the scene. Orestes arrives in the guise of
a stranger, supposedly bringing his own ashes in an urn that an attendant is
carrying. He therefore has two masks, a fictitious one, the urn, and a dis-
guised one, the stranger. Electra has the mask of a slave, so at first neither
recognizes the other. Brother and sister have lived in different worlds.
Orestes is intent on getting into the skene without being discovered for
who he really is. Electra bars his passage by pleading to hold the urn,
which Orestes—because of her importunate behavior—allows her to do,
recognizing, at least, that she is no enemy. When Electra takes the urn in
her hands and pours out her lament over it, she has made physical contact
with her lying and double-faced brother. Given the presentational nature of
Electra 127
the theatre, by this act she is, unknowingly, sowing the seeds of the
destruction of her heroic self.
When it dawns on Orestes that the woman holding the urn is Electra,
shocked to learn of her wretched existence, he tries to relieve his sister of
the urn that she is so dearly clutching. When she resists, Orestes slowly
brings Electra to the point when he divulges that the urn is not himself, but
a pretence. The excitement of the actual moment of recognition is con-
veyed by antilabai (half lines) that replace the more formal stichomythia.
At last, Orestes reveals his true identity and, as proof, shows Electra their
father’s seal. This is the ultimate bond that finally unites them. It is almost
as if the ghost of Agamemnon were with them. As Electra later declares,
the effect of Orestes’ presence is such that were their father to return alive,
she would not regard it as a miracle.
In the following dialogue, Electra, at first, is so transported that she
breaks into song that contrasts with the more measured words of Orestes.
He cautions her to keep quiet lest they be overheard. However, Electra
throws caution to the wind, declaring that she would never be afraid of
women in the house, whereas the circumspect Orestes expresses his con-
cerns about women’s powers to fight. Electra begs Orestes not to let her
forego the joy of his face. The language she uses, however, draws attention
to the double aspect of Orestes’ mask, because she uses the plural form of
prosopon (1278).
When Orestes warns Electra to beware that, when they go inside,
Clytemnestra does not realize the true situation by Electra’s radiant face,
he makes a pointed reference to her mask, prosopon (1297). The way in
which the actor playing Electra in this scene uses the mask would be cru-
cial. In the lament over the urn, the mask would be face down. After the
recognition, the mask would be held face upward, giving the appearance of
joy. Electra tells Orestes that her mother will never see through her radiant
and smiling face, because Electra is so full of happiness at seeing Orestes
that she will not stop crying. Because Orestes has come, he may direct
Electra as he wishes. In other words, she will adopt a mask of deception.
As if to underline the change in her, she says “If I had been alone, I would
have accomplished one of two things: either I would have saved myself
honorably (kalos) or I would have died honorably (kalos)” (1320–21).
These words recall the Electra of the previous episode, when she had stood
alone and declared openly that she would try to kill Aegisthus. However,
now she is not alone, and she will not act openly but will subserve the
deceptive plans of Orestes, which will include matricide as well as tyran-
nicide. The “heroic” Electra, splendidly defiant in her wretched isolation,
is being destroyed. When Electra has adopted her mask of pretence, she
bids the “strangers” to proceed inside the house, but she is interrupted by
a surprise entrance from the skene. It is the tutor. He chastises Orestes and
Electra, declaring that if he had not stood watch, the news of their plans
would have been inside the house before themselves. They must act now
without delay and put an end to the matter. However, Electra again delays
matters when she learns that the tutor is the very man to whom she had
entrusted Orestes as a child. In a further outpouring of joy, she greets the
tutor as if he were the incarnation of her father. The tutor firmly calls them
to the task at hand. It is the slave, not Orestes, who has to take control. Like
Hermes, the god of cunning and the explorer of boundaries, who is men-
tioned in the following ode, the tutor has penetrated the dark threshold that
Orestes must cross. Without his lead, Orestes seems inadequate for the task
at hand. At last, Orestes, Pylades, and the tutor enter the house.
Electra is left outside with the chorus. Suddenly she too enters the
house. It is a significant moment, because it is the first time that she has not
been onstage since her entry in the prologue and the only time the chorus
has been completely alone. The pace of the dramatic action now quickens.
The chorus sings a very brief ode of how the War-God is advancing; they
describe the conspirators in terms of hounds of vengeance with the dark-
plotting Hermes leading the way.
Just as suddenly, Electra reappears. Why does Sophocles make her go
into the house only to reappear so quickly? Has her mask been altered in
any way? What is clear is that it is a different Electra who comes outside.
No longer is she the up-front Electra of noble resistance, but a front for the
conspirators. She has come to stand guard at the door, lest Aegisthus should
return home without warning. As she stands between the doors of the skene,
it is through her reactions that the audience experiences the matricide.
When Clytemnestra’s cries are heard from within for Orestes to pity his
mother, Electra shouts in response that Clytemnestra showed no pity to
Agamemnon. After Orestes strikes the first blow, Electra bids him strike
again if he has the strength. Electra has become a Fury of vengeance.
After the matricide, Orestes and Pylades reenter. To Electra’s question
“how fares it with you, Orestes?” Orestes replies: “All is well (kalos)
within the house, if Apollo prophesied well (kalos)” (1424–25). Neither he
nor Electra expresses any remorse at the death of their mother.
Almost at once, Aegisthus is seen approaching down a parodos, so
Orestes and Pylades retreat into the cover of the house. The trap used to
ensnare Aegisthus works in the reverse direction from that in which
Clytemnestra was caught. Whereas the plot previously had been worked
from outside to within, the plot now works from within to outside. In the
earlier instance, the tutor had been used as a decoy for Orestes to get into
Electra 129
the house; it is now Electra who sets the bait for the unsuspecting
Aegisthus. When Aegisthus asks where the strangers are who have brought
news of Orestes’ death, Electra tells him that they have not only brought
news, but visible proof. Aegisthus demands that the doors of the skene be
opened, and, as the doors open, Orestes and Pylades are seen, possibly on
the ekkuklema, standing beside a covered bier.
Once more, there is an ironic interplay between appearance and reality
with the inversion of life and death. When Orestes, whose body the bier is
supposed to hold, is told by Aegisthus to uncover the veil, Orestes bids him
do it, because “It is not mine, but yours to look upon and address affec-
tionately” (1470–71). Aegisthus asks that Clytemnestra be called. Orestes
replies “She is here at hand; do not look elsewhere.” As Aegisthus lifts the
veil, he grasps the trap that Orestes has set for him. He pleads for his life,
but Electra tells Orestes to kill him immediately and to cast out his body.
However, Aegisthus has his say, and the brief dialogue between him and
Orestes suggest that there are serious questions to be answered about the
glorious nature of Orestes’ actions. When Orestes orders Aegisthus into
the house, Aegisthus sarcastically asks, if what Orestes is doing is fair
(kalon), why does he need darkness, and not do it there and then
(1493–94)? Orestes’ reply that Aegisthus must die in the same place he
killed his father may accord with his notion of vengeance, but begs for
other answers. Aegisthus’ next question reveals a deeper realization of the
significance of Orestes’ actions. “Must this house be the witness of the
present and the future ills of the family of Pelops?” (1496–97). “Yours at
least,” retorts Orestes. “In this regard I am an excellent prophet.” There is
an ambiguity in Aegisthus’ response: “The expertise (techne) you boast of
was not your father’s.” The overt meaning is that Agamemnon was no
prophet in that he was blind to the death that awaited him in the murderous
house of Pelops, but the words might also allude to the idea that, unlike
Agamemnon, Orestes is no field marshal. Orestes does not pick up the
innuendo, but simply orders Aegisthus into the house. When Aegisthus
proposes that Orestes lead the way, Orestes makes him go first. Thus, in the
final exit, Orestes goes second with the silent, faithful Pylades in the rear.
When does Electra make her final exit? It is likely that she waits onstage
until after the chorus has sung the final words of the tragedy: “Seed of
Atreus, after much suffering, you have at last gained your freedom, made
whole by this day’s onslaught” (1508–10). If these words are meant pri-
marily to refer to Electra, they seem highly ambiguous, because the invo-
cation of her as “the seed of Atreus” links her with one who was the worst
criminal among the whole line of her murderous ancestors. Electra may
have won her political freedom, but at what cost? To answer this question,
we have to consider where the moral center is of this most ambiguous of

tragedies.
Electra is a play full of melodramatic effects with constant surprises and
reversals in which Sophocles demonstrates brilliantly his mastery of the
art of theatre. It is also, however, a serious tragedy of political revenge,
centered on the moral question of dike. As such, it does not invite simple
answers. There are those for whom the revenge does not raise any difficult
questions. It is, however, hard to imagine how after Aeschylus’ Oresteia,
Sophocles could have deliberately avoided raising the serious moral issues
of the revenge without risking that his tragedy would be a failure. Yet,
overtly at least, there seems to be a case to be made that Sophocles has
evaded the moral complexities. Neither Orestes nor Electra even mention,
let alone discuss, whether it is right to commit matricide and, as if to play
down the whole moral problem, Sophocles has Clytemnestra murdered
before Aegisthus so that the matricide does not form the climax of the
tragedy. Nor is there any suggestion that the matricides will suffer any
punishment from their mother’s Furies. Not even Euripides, who often
dared to challenge the sympathies of his audiences, took such risks in his
Electra. What, therefore, is Sophocles doing?
In Electra, the oikos stands as a microcosm of a polis, torn apart by bit-
ter conflict, as Athens must have been during the crisis of 411. After the
murder of Agamemnon, during the harsh rule of Aegisthus and Clytemnes-
tra, their male opponents are stuck in exile until the opportunity presents
itself for them to strike. Without the presence of male opposition, the only
internal resistance to the tyrannical usurpers can come from women. Such
resistance divides the daughters of the family, as each one must choose to
what extent she will find or resist an accommodation with the powers that
be. Electra chooses the part of heroic defiance, loyal to the memory of her
father, whereas Chrysothemis chooses a more comfortable accommoda-
tion. However, defiance has severe costs. Unmarried and childless, Elec-
tra’s freedom is severely curtailed and she has been reduced to being little
better than a slave. Her years of verbal war have made her full of hate that
has destroyed her better self, but not her noble nature. She is both aischros
and kalos. At the end of the play, she may have won her freedom, but she
has lost her raison d’être, because she has nothing more to resist by an
open and noble defiance. In yielding to her brother and helping him in his
guileful deeds, the moral Electra is not so much rescued by him as
destroyed.
Orestes lives in a male world and is intent on fame at any price. Unlike
Electra, he expresses no personal feelings toward either his father or his
mother. He has been educated by a slave who has fed him images of his
Electra 131
father as a famous warrior. Intent on achieving fame, Orestes fails to rec-

ognize that to be really great like his father, the means are as important as
the ends. He therefore thinks that by seizing power by underhand means,
he will achieve the same kind of glory as his father did on the battlefield.
Orestes’ values are shallow, because he has been raised in a world in which
traditional male heroic endeavor is no longer open. He is as ignorant of the
moral issues of matricide as he was to the plight of his wretched sister and
her noble defiance.
If this reading is correct, perhaps the Electra is a darker tragedy than
even imagined by those critics who have felt that the revenge raises more
questions than it answers. It presents a world in which hatred is so deeply
ingrained and traditional moral values so debased that no one even stops to
ask the moral consequences of their actions. The darkness of their deeds,
however, is simply suggested by their final exits into the murderous ances-
tral house.
APPENDIX: THE DATING OF ELECTRA

The dating of both Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra has been much
debated. Some factors incline me to think that Sophocles’ was the later play,
produced probably not long before Euripides’ Orestes of 408. At the end of
both Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Euripides’ Electra, Orestes is driven
into exile after the matricide. In Sophocles’ Electra, Orestes simply enters
the house without any suggestion of exile. In the last scene, a bier is brought
onstage with the covered corpse of Clytemnestra, and it seems quite possi-
ble that, apart from the chorus, Electra is alone onstage with the covered
bier at the very end. Euripides’ Orestes begins with Electra alone onstage
with a covered bier. It is set six days after the matricide, without Orestes
having gone into exile. It is only at l.35 of Electra’s opening monologue that
we learn that the body on the bed is the sleeping Orestes. Before that, might
the audience have wondered whether the body on the bier was Clytemnes-
tra’s? In 414, in his Iphigenia in Tauris, Euripides had written a novel end-
ing to the Orestes’ myth, after his exile, without seriously violating the
ending to his own Electra. Did Sophocles’ Electra provide him with the
inspiration to write yet another ending before Orestes goes into exile?
Let us consider the mythic topos of the libations sent by Clytemnestra to
Agamemnon’s tomb. In Libation Bearers, Aeschylus follows the lyric poet
Stesichorus in having Electra take offerings as a result of a dream
Clytemnestra has had. Both Euripides and Sophocles make changes in their
Electras. Euripides dispenses both with the dream and the libations, but he
does follow Aeschylus in having Electra enter from the house with a vessel
on her head, only it is not a libation vessel but a simple water pitcher, as if
to undermine the tragic seriousness. Sophocles makes Chrysothemis, Elec-
tra’s sister, enter from the house with offerings for the tomb, as a result of
Clytemnestra’s dream. Before Sophocles, Chrysothemis was little more
than a name in the mythic tradition. In all three tragedies, then, we have a
daughter entering from the skene with some kind of vessel, but Sophocles
changes the daughter by introducing Chrysothemis, whereas Aeschylus and
Euripides ignore her existence.
This is not the case however in Euripides’ Orestes. In her opening
monologue, Electra names Agamemnon’s three daughters as Iphigenia,
Chrysothemis, and herself. Is Euripides simply paying lip service to Sopho-
cles by mentioning Chrysothemis? Perhaps, but perhaps not entirely—it
could be that he wants to set up an intertextual joke, based on women and
libation vessels, which has been suggested to him by the Sophoclean
Chrysothemis. Electra informs us that she is not the only woman in the
house, apart from, we may assume, Chrysothemis. Helen, Clytemnestra’s
sister, has arrived there the night before. Moreover, while Helen was at
Troy, Hermione, Helen’s daughter, had been brought up in the house. Thus,
as in Sophocles’ Electra, the house is full of women of the family.
In Euripides’ Orestes, at the end of Electra’s monologue, suddenly the
doors of the skene open, and there is an unannounced entrance of a woman
from the house, carrying a libation vessel. Is it Chrysothemis? No, it isn’t.
If Sophocles can innovate on the visual topos by taking away the libation
vessel from Electra and giving it to Chrysothemis, so Euripides can make
his own innovations. He will give the vessel to Helen who wants to offer
libations at her sister’s tomb. However, she does not want to perform the
task herself; instead, she wants Electra to do it for her. After all, that was
Electra’s traditional role before Sophocles gave it to Chrysothemis. Electra,
however, gives Helen short shrift and replies almost as if she were saying:
“This play is not called Electra and so it’s not my task. If a mother wants to
send offerings to a tomb, that’s the task for her own daughter. You’ve got a
daughter of your own—Hermione. It’s her job; get her to do it.”
Much of Euripides’ Orestes is full of intertextual allusions to previous ver-
sions of the myth, but I suggest that in this opening prologue scene, in the
matter of the covered bier and the carrying of the libations, Sophocles’ Elec-
tra provides the immediate point of reference. Stylistically, it seems clear
that Sophocles’ Electra is a late play. Dramatically, it has a number of points
in common with his Philoctetes of 409. Although Euripides’ parodies do not
provide conclusive evidence that Sophocles’ Electra is to be dated close to
Euripides’ Orestes, they certainly seem to point in that direction.
Electra 133
NOTES
1. See J. March, ed. Sophocles: Electra (Warminster, U.K., 2001), 20–22, with
references there to other discussions. See also the appendix at the end of this chapter.
2. A. P. Burnett, Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy (Berkeley, Calif., 1998),
138.
3. See, for example, C. P. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of
Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 249–91; and R. P. Winnington-Ingram,
Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), 217–47. After I had written this
chapter, L. MacLeod’s book, Dolos and Dike in Sophokles’ Elektra (Leiden, Hol-
land, 2001), came to my attention. Readers should consult pp. 4–20 for a judicious
summary of views on Electra.
4. M. Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role Playing in
Sophocles (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 127–212; A. G. Batchelder, The Seal of
Orestes: Self-Reference and Authority in Sophocles’Electra (Lanham, Md., 1995),
passim.
5. On the relationship between Homer and Electra in general, see J. Davidson,
“Homer and Sophocles’ Electra,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 35
(1988): 45–72.
6. On this topic in general, see T. M. Woodard, “Electra by Sophocles: The
dialectical design (1),” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 68 (1964):
163–205; and the second part of the article in the same journal, 70 (1965):
195–233. I do not agree with all of Woodard’s conclusions.
7. On the dream, see L. Bowman, “Klytaimnestra’s Dream: Prophecy in
Sophokles’ Elektra,” Phoenix 1997 (51): 131–51.
8. See J. Davidson, “O Brotherly Head: Sophocles, Electra 1164 and Related
Matters,” Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 38 (1991): 87–93.
Chapter 9
Philoctetes
Philoctetes won the first prize in 409. Because its date is known, there have
been attempts to relate the play to certain political figures of the time,
notably Alcibiades, a brilliant but fickle Athenian, who caused the Atheni-
ans many problems during the war.1 Although certainty is impossible in
this regard, it is of interest that Philoctetes is set on an island in the north-
east part of the Aegean Sea, which, at the time, had become the main the-
atre of naval operations of the Peloponnesian War.
The myth of Philoctetes was well known. He had been abandoned on
Lemnos by the Greek army on their way to Troy because of a snakebite he
had received on his foot. He had in his possession the invincible bow of
Heracles that the latter had given him for agreeing to set light to his funeral
pyre. When the Trojan prophet Helenus was captured, he told the Greeks
that they would only capture Troy if Philoctetes was brought to the city,
where his wound would be healed. After Philoctetes had been sent for, he
killed Paris and played a vital role in the sack of Troy.
Both Aeschylus and Euripides had written tragedies on Philoctetes before
Sophocles. The date of Aeschylus’ version is unknown, but Euripides had
produced his tragedy in 431. Although neither work has survived, Dio
Chrysostomus (c. 40–post 111 C.E.) wrote his impressions of all three tragic
versions and wrote a paraphrase of the prologue of Euripides’ tragedy. In the
Aeschylean version, Odysseus goes alone to capture Philoctetes and his
bow. In Euripides’ version, Odysseus is accompanied by Diomedes. In both
versions, how Heracles’ bow was captured and Philoctetes was brought to
Troy is not fully clear. The chorus of both plays consisted of Lemnians.
In his tragedy on Philoctetes, Sophocles introduced his own variations.
The most important is that Neoptolemus—the son of Achilles, who had
been brought to Troy after his father’s death—accompanies Odysseus on

his mission to fetch Philoctetes and the bow. He and Philoctetes together are
destined to capture Troy. Also, Sophocles makes Lemnos a deserted island,
enhancing the loneliness of Philoctetes, who is the most isolated of all
Sophoclean protagonists, having lived alone for nine years. Through his
savage appearance and the howls of agony he lets out when afflicted by his
wound, Philoctetes blends in with the wild physical landscape of the island.
In some ways, the fate of Philoctetes forms an analogue to that of
Achilles in the Iliad. Such is the way in which this epic is structured that
Achilles is removed from the fighting for most of the poem, having with-
drawn from the war because of the insult done to him by Agamemnon.
Achilles only enters the fray toward the end. However, his intervention is
vital, because he kills Hector, on whose military prowess the survival of
Troy depends. In the Iliad, Achilles’ anger is a result of the plan of Zeus.
Although Achilles does not die in the poem, in several passages it is made
explicit that he is destined to meet an early death at Troy. His death, in fact,
came from an arrow wound in his heel. In the Iliad, it was the death of
Patroclos—Achilles’ closest friend—at the hands of Hector that persuaded
the hero to return to the fighting. Before that, Achilles had remained
implacable in his anger, even though, when the Greeks were desperate,
Agamemnon had sent an embassy to him, offering abundant compensation
for the wrong done to him, if he should return to the fighting.
Like Achilles in the Iliad, Philoctetes sits out of most of the fighting at
Troy, only joining the war for the final onslaught on the city. Also, in Sopho-
cles’ play, Philoctetes’ absence is part of a divine plan that he should not
take part in the fighting until the final year. Like Achilles, Philoctetes feels
an implacable anger toward Agamemnon and the other Greek leaders,
notably Odysseus, for the wrong they have done to him by abandoning him
on Lemnos. Although the mission to fetch Philoctetes to Troy is different
from the embassy to Achilles,2 Philoctetes remains as immune to persua-
sion as did Achilles, even though it is promised that his wound will be
healed and he will have the glory of military victory. Finally, like Achilles,
it is only through the agency of a dead friend—in this case the hero Hera-
cles, who has been deified—that Philoctetes is ultimately persuaded to join
the fighting. Here, the analogue ends and the fates of Achilles and
Philoctetes work in reverse. Achilles was to be killed by an arrow wound in
his foot that prevented him from being part of the final onslaught on Troy.
In contrast, it is only after having the wound in his foot healed that
Philoctetes, with his bow, will take part in the actual capture of Troy.
Although Achilles is dead by the time the Greeks go to fetch Philoctetes,
in the play the audience is constantly reminded of what he represents.
Philoctetes 137
Philoctetes, like other Sophoclean tragic heroes, is modeled, in several of

his salient characteristics, on Achilles. There is also Neoptolemus, the son
of the dead hero, who, as a young man—like Telemachus, the son of
Odysseus in the Odyssey—has yet to prove himself worthy of his father.3
In fact, in Philoctetes, initially at least, it is Odysseus who provides Neop-
tolemus with an education. The ethical contrast between the two character
types—the Achillean and the Odyssean—is as pronounced as in any extant
tragedy. Whereas the Achillean model represents the traditional aristo-
cratic ideal in which success is to be won by honorable means and deceit
has no place, for Odysseus, success is an end to be achieved by whatever
means are available. In Philoctetes, the Achillean ideal is seen as almost
moribund. Its only representative is a lonely outcast who has been aban-
doned on a deserted island and lives in a time warp as a savage but noble
embodiment of a largely forgotten past. Although the Achillean and
Odyssean standpoints represent opposing poles that form the moral foun-
dations of the tragedy, “Philoctetes is,” as Mary Whitlock Blundell has
said, “the most ethically complex of all Sophocles’ plays.”4
There is much that is distinctive about Philoctetes that sets it apart from
the early tragedies. Some of these aspects are foreshadowed in Electra.
However, whereas Electra, in spite of its melodramatic and metadramatic
qualities, is recognizable in terms of a more traditional notion of tragedy,
Philoctetes breaks the tragic mold. It is almost as if the notion of tragedy
as embodied in an act of violence—be it suicide, murder, blinding, or
whatever—that helps to give a tragedy its definition qua tragedy is too
clear-cut to embrace the moral quagmire that we find in Philoctetes, in
which there can be no such definitive resolution. Although acts of extreme
violence are threatened, none actually takes place. In fact, Philoctetes has
sometimes been seen as melodrama.5 Although the play defies any easy
classification, it does challenge the notion of genre.6 In Philoctetes, there
are no female dramatis personae. The moral problems arise from the world
of men. It is a political drama in which the fortunes of the polis, conceived
militarily as the Greek army at Troy, is a matter of the utmost importance.
Ironically, the setting of the play does not immediately seem to conform
to the notion of a political drama or “high” tragedy. The setting on a desert
island, with the skene representing a cave, is more in keeping with a satyr
play than a tragedy.7 This cave is the lowly habitat of Philoctetes. The cave
has two entrances, the second of which is offstage, but, because the skene
doors are open throughout the play, a dim shaft of light penetrates from the
back of the skene, indicating the second entrance. Thus, the skene does not
represent a cul-de-sac. When the play opens, Philoctetes is not in his cave,
but he later enters it from the hidden entrance, and he is seen as a shadowy
form before appearing fully visible to the audience. Only one parodos is
used. We should imagine that this leads down to the seashore, and the
other, the unused one, leads into the uninhabited hinterland of the island.
Three men enter from the seaward parodos: Odysseus, Neoptolemus,
and a silent extra—a sailor. The older man, Odysseus, hangs back, telling
the younger, Neoptolemus, to look for a cave. Odysseus identifies Neop-
tolemus through his legendary father. “Offspring of the greatest father of
the Greeks, son of Achilles, Neoptolemus” (3–4). That Achilles is the first
person explicitly mentioned is significant. It not only establishes Achilles’
importance in the ensuing action, but also foreshadows the significance of
patronyms in the tragedy.8 Heredity is a major motif. Odysseus tells Neop-
tolemus how Philoctetes had been left on the island because of his dis-
eased foot that caused him to cry out so much that the army could not
perform any rites to the gods. Odysseus identifies Philoctetes through his
patronym, “son of Poeas” (5).
When Neoptolemus discovers the cave empty, Odysseus instructs him in
what he must do. As in Electra, lying and deceit are to form the basis of
action. Neoptolemus must tell a false tale to Philoctetes in order to capture
his bow. He need not lie that he is the son of Achilles, but should say that,
when he came to Troy after his father’s death, he had asked for the arms of
Achilles, as was his right. The army had refused his request, saying that the
arms had been awarded to Odysseus. Full of hate against the army because
of this insult, Neoptolemus must say that he has abandoned the army and
is sailing home to Scyros. Achilles had withdrawn from the fighting
because of an insult done to his honor. It is not unironic that the lying tale
that Odysseus asks Neoptolemus to tell is also an insult done to his honor.
Odysseus says that he himself cannot confront Philoctetes because he
would immediately kill him with his unerring bow. Although it is contrary
to Neoptolemus’ nature to use trickery, Odysseus tells him that, for the
pleasure of gaining victory, Neoptolemus should give himself over to him
for a brief part of a day in shameless behavior and then be known as the
most upright of men for all time thereafter.
Neoptolemus baulks at telling lies. Such a thing is as contrary to his own
nature as it was to his father, Achilles. He is ready to capture Philoctetes by
force and not by cunning. Odysseus’ reply sets up an antithesis between his
own value structure and that of a young, noble warrior, the greatest exem-
plar of whom was Achilles.
Son of a noble father, I also, when I was young, kept my tongue idle and my
hand active. But, now, when I put it to the test, I see that for men it is the
tongue, and not actions, that prevails in all matters. (96–99)
Philoctetes 139
After Neoptolemus suggests that he use persuasion rather than deception,

Odysseus asserts that neither persuasion nor force will work. Deceit is the
only means. Despite Neoptolemus’ protestations, Odysseus says that if
Philoctetes’ bow is not captured, Neoptolemus will never take Troy. At this
point, it is left ambiguous whether it is Philoctetes himself or the bow that
is more important for the capture of Troy. This ambiguity is deliberate on
Sophocles’ part, because he wants Odysseus to play on Neoptolemus’
desire for glory, in order to convince him of the necessity of carrying out
his devious scheme.9 Finally, Neoptolemus submits and casts aside his
shame.
Before he goes, Odysseus tells Neoptolemus that if he finds Neoptole-
mus taking too long in his mission, he will send back the sailor they have
brought with them, disguised as a merchant, to help Neoptolemus out. The
audience is now forewarned of the function of the silent extra. Like the
device of Orestes’ urn in Electra, the sailor will serve as a deceptive mask
for Odysseus. As he leaves, Odysseus invokes the help of three divinities;
“Hermes, the guileful escort who leads us, Victory, and Athena Polias
(Guardian of the Polis), who always protects me” (133–34). This triad of
divinities helps to characterize Odysseus. His goal is victory, achieved by
deceitful means, in the service of the polis. At the same time, the refer-
ences to Victory and Athena Polias are scarcely veiled references to mon-
uments on the top of the Athenian Acropolis above the theatre.
Let us review some aspects of the prologue. Although Neoptolemus is
the son of Achilles, it is not the moral example of his dead father by which
he is instructed, but rather that of the deceitful Odysseus, who “sets up an
alternative criterion of behavior, irrespective of morality.”10 Odysseus dis-
plays the characteristics of a sophist, something indicated by the language
of the text. When he first refers to the trick by which Philoctetes is to be
ensnared, Odysseus calls it a sophisma (14), the verbal form of which he
uses again in line 78. When Neoptolemus asks what prizes he will win if
he follows Odysseus’ instructions, Odysseus claims that Neoptolemus will
win two prizes: “you would be called both clever (sophos) and brave at the
same time” (119).11
As in Electra, a plot is devised so that there will be a play within a play.
In Philoctetes, however, unlike Electra, a younger man will serve as the
actor, taking his directions from an older man. This young man, unlike the
old tutor in Electra, will reach a state of utter moral turmoil as he finds
the ethics of the role he is required to play seriously in conflict with his
own inherent morality. In Philoctetes, Sophocles almost seems to question
the ethical foundations of drama itself insofar as the tragedy openly chal-
lenges the morality of role-playing. Role-playing requires the actor to be
untrue to his true self. This is one of the very reasons why, later, Plato
would ban tragedy from his ideal state. For Plato, tragedy, like rhetoric, is
sophistic chicanery. Perhaps the more important point, however, is that the
play questions the morality of political expediency and the unscrupulous
nature of politicians as dissembling actors.
The question of political morality also affects the chorus, who enter as
sailors, under the command of Neoptolemus. Although they will express
sympathy for Philoctetes, their loyalty is to their young master, who tells
them to serve him as the situation requires. Thus, the chorus is morally
compromised from the beginning. As M. Ringer says: “no other tragic
chorus practices such a long, sustained deception. In no other play is the
chorus’s attitude so ambiguous and disconcerting.”12
Philoctetes’ arrival is heard before he is seen. His delayed entrance has
been well prepared for and there is suspense to see both what this man
looks like and what sounds he will make. He enters from the skene. For a
second, it seems that he will let out a howl of pain, but instead it is a cry of
greeting as he addresses the strangers (xenoi) (220). Again, as in Electra,
the main character is dressed in squalid rags, belying his tragic dignity, but
he is also carrying the famous bow as part of his costume. On learning that
Neoptolemus is the son of Achilles, he addresses him as the son of the
dearest of fathers. Neoptolemus informs him that he is sailing home to
Scyros from Troy.
The mention of Achilles prompts Philoctetes to say that Neoptolemus
must have heard about him. He recounts his misfortunes and prays that the
gods may grant the Atreidae and Odysseus similar misfortunes. Neoptole-
mus agrees that they are evil men. When he mentions the death of Achilles,
Philoctetes at once expresses his distress at the death of such a noble man.
After recounting his fictitious story of the insult done to him over
Achilles’ weapons, he ends, like Philoctetes before him, with an impreca-
tion against the Atreidae and Odysseus. Philoctetes readily believes his
tale, because the leaders’ base actions jell so closely with his own experi-
ence. There is an ironic ring to Philoctetes’ words, when he says of
Odysseus: “I know that his tongue resorts to every base argument and vil-
lainy to accomplish his wicked ends” (407–9), because Neoptolemus is
Odysseus’ lying mouthpiece.
Philoctetes wonders why so many honorable men in the army—such as
Ajax, Patroclos, and Nestor—were willing to allow Neoptolemus to be so
abused by the Atreidae and Odysseus. Neoptolemus informs him that they
are either dead or broken men. “War,” he says, “never willingly kills the
wicked man but always the good” (436–37). We should note that, in their
dialogue, Philoctetes casts aspersions on Odysseus’ paternity, claiming
Philoctetes 141
that he was not really the true son of Laertes but the bastard son of Sisy-
phus, conventionally one of the most cunning and wicked characters in
Greek mythology.
Philoctetes asks about another unworthy character who is skilled with his
tongue, Thersites. There seems to be a political point here. In the Iliad,
Thersites is the only common man given a voice. He is described as a repul-
sive man who dares to question the wisdom of Agamemnon. According to
later sources, Thersites was killed by Achilles for mocking him in his dis-
tress over the death of an Amazon queen. Therefore, when Neoptolemus
says that he has heard that Thersites is still alive, Sophocles goes against the
received tradition. The implication is that all the war has left from the past
are unscrupulous leaders and the dregs of the army. That Thersites is still
alive prompts the following bitter reflection from Philoctetes:
He would be! Nothing evil has ever yet been destroyed, but the gods protect
it well and somehow rejoice in saving rogues and villains from Death. Yet
the just and honorable they always despatch. How am I to reckon this and to
approve when, in my evaluation of matters divine, I find the gods evil?
(446–52)
These pessimistic words were spoken before an Athenian audience that

had witnessed the loss of the cream of their army in Sicily and the revo-
lution of the 400 in 411; and who were, no doubt, anticipating the return to
Athens of the brilliant, but scheming, Alcibiades. Neoptolemus agrees
with Philoctetes’ sentiments, alleging that that is why he is withdrawing
from the army: “Where the base have more power than the worthy, where
what is honorable is in decline and the vile prevail—such men I shall never
endure” (456–59). In that he is being duplicitous, Neoptolemus is part of
the world he denounces.
When Neoptolemus starts to leave, Philoctetes supplicates him to take
him with him. The chorus also entreat Neoptolemus to show pity to
Philoctetes. With feigned reluctance, Neoptolemus consents, causing an
outpouring of gratitude from the stricken man. It would appear that the
ruse has worked and the mission will be successfully accomplished, even
though the play has only been running for about half an hour. It is but the
first of several false endings that Sophocles teases the audience with in a
play full of surprises.13 Before they leave, however, two men enter: one a
member of Neoptolemus’ crew—a silent extra—and the other, a stranger.
It is the false merchant that Odysseus said he would send.
Instead of facilitating the mission, the merchant, played by the same
actor as had played Odysseus earlier, interrupts it through his untimely
intervention. What the merchant scene helps to illustrate is that once deceit
is adopted as a mode of behavior, events can so take over that one is locked
into the deceit beyond the time that it has served its particular purpose. If
Neoptolemus is not to blow his cover, he has no choice but to go along
with the merchant’s story, even though it hinders his immediate aim. It is
not as simple as Odysseus had claimed earlier, when he had said, “give
yourself over to me for a brief part of a day in shameless behavior and then
be called the most upright of men for all time thereafter” (83–85). Neop-
tolemus has made himself Odysseus’ pawn with no easy way out.
The merchant says that after anchoring nearby and learning that Neop-
tolemus was on Lemnos he wanted to inform him that the Greeks were
sending Phoenix and the sons of Theseus to take him back to Troy. Like the
mention of Athena Polias earlier, the mention of the sons of Theseus—the
most famous legendary king of Athens—helps to forge an Athenian con-
nection. When Neoptolemus asks why Odysseus is not part of the mission
to fetch him, the merchant tells him that Odysseus, with Diomedes, is on
his way to Lemnos, having promised to bring Philoctetes to Troy either by
persuasion or by force. In the prologue, Odysseus had rejected persuasion
and force as a means of taking Philoctetes. The mention of them now is
ironic because they stand in contrast to the trickery actually being used. At
the same time, do the merchant’s words covertly suggest that trickery is not
the means by which Philoctetes is to be taken to Troy? When the merchant
relates the prophecy of Helenus, significantly he says that Helenus had
said that Philoctetes was to be persuaded to come to Troy, but that
Odysseus had said that if he failed to persuade Philoctetes, he would take
him against his will. Although there can be no mention of trickery as a
means of capturing Philoctetes, because this would arouse his suspicions,
the ambiguous emphasis placed on the question of means, which had
seemed so clear-cut in the prologue, is perhaps designed both to suggest
that trickery will not work and, at the same time, to undercut the role that
Neoptolemus is playing as Odysseus’ decoy, by suggesting that he, like
Philoctetes, is also Odysseus’ dupe.14
Philoctetes is anxious to leave for Greece at once, after he has collected
some arrows from his cave. Now the bow is brought into the foreground as
Neoptolemus asks if he may hold it and embrace it, as if it were a god.
Philoctetes promises him that he will be given the opportunity because of
his nobility and kindness, as these were the reasons why he himself had
originally been given it. In reply, Neoptolemus says, “I am pleased to have
seen you and taken you as a friend, for whoever knows how to exchange a
kindness for a kindness would prove to be a friend more dear than any pos-
session” (671–73).
Philoctetes 143
Neoptolemus’ words imply that the two strangers have formed an

implicit bond of friendship by their promising to exchange acts of kind-
ness. In Greek, the word for stranger, xenos, has the extended meanings of
“host” and “guest,” derived from the fact that, from at least as early as
Homer, a traveler, during his journey, would frequently seek refuge in a
stranger’s house. Much of the Odyssey is structured around host/guest rela-
tionships. To cement the friendship between the two strangers, gifts were
commonly exchanged and there was considered to arise a reciprocal obli-
gation to repay a favor with a favor. Violation of the host/guest relationship
was a crime against Zeus.
Philoctetes invites Neoptolemus into his cave dwelling, because he
requires his help. There is no obvious dramatic reason why Sophocles
should want Neoptolemus offstage during the following choral ode, except
perhaps to suggest that by going into Philoctetes’ home, he is tacitly
accepting his role as a guest. If he continues to deceive Philoctetes, there-
after he will be in danger of offending Zeus.15
This interpretation finds some support in the choral ode, the only formal
stasimon of the entire tragedy. The chorus compares the fate of Philoctetes
to that of Ixion. Like Sisyphus, mentioned earlier, Ixion was one of the
most infamous criminals in Greek myth. He had been condemned to ever-
lasting torture, on a wheel in Hades, for trying to seduce Zeus’ wife, Hera,
after being invited to Olympus. Ixion violated the host/guest relationship.
Unlike Ixion, Philoctetes—who has committed no crime—has been con-
demned to a life of undeserved suffering. The chorus thus evokes sympa-
thy for him. Can it be that the example of Ixion, extreme though it may be,
serves as an indirect warning to Neoptolemus, who is on the point of vio-
lating the host/guest relationship, under the Sisyphean influence of
Odysseus?
The last stanza of the ode has puzzled critics. The chorus tells how
Philoctetes has now met with the offspring of noble men and will find hap-
piness, because Neoptolemus will take him home. Because Philoctetes is
not onstage, why does the chorus maintain the fiction that Neoptolemus is
about to take Philoctetes home rather than to Troy?16 An important point
here is that the doors of the skene are open and, because a shaft of light
emanates through the skene from the second hidden entrance of the cave,
the shadows of both Philoctetes and Neoptolemus could almost surely be
seen through the main entrance. The chorus’ words might therefore be
overheard. However, the really important point is that although Philoctetes
is the explicit subject of the ode, it is also indirectly about Neoptolemus.
Neoptolemus may be the descendant of noble men, but he seems to be about
to commit an unholy crime. The tableau of the skene with the shadows of the
two men inside conjures up a vision of Hades, where Ixion suffered his
everlasting torment. In Sophoclean tragedy, the skene commonly evokes
Death.
With the reentry of Philoctetes and Neoptolemus, all seems set for the
much-heralded departure. Suddenly, Philoctetes lets out a cry of agony as
he is afflicted by his wound. He begs Neoptolemus to take his bow—a cru-
cial moment—and keep it safe for him. He is now a suppliant before
Neoptolemus and makes him pledge that he will not leave without him. He
then passes out on the ground. The departure has again been thwarted.
Neoptolemus is now in possession of the bow, and Philoctetes is help-
less before him. Philoctetes has fulfilled his half of the gift exchange by
handing Heracles’ bow over to Neoptolemus, cementing the bonds of
friendship. If Neoptolemus fails to take Philoctetes home, he will violate
the laws of xenia. At the same time, should he take Philoctetes home, he
will be betraying his obligations to the army that require him to take
Philoctetes and the bow to Troy, something that also seems required by the
gods. It is arguably the most complex moment of dilemma in the ethical
theme that runs through so much Sophoclean tragedy: helping friends and
harming enemies.
While Philoctetes is utterly defenseless at his feet, Neoptolemus is in a
position of physical invincibility, having become the master of Heracles’ bow.
Not since Priam had groveled at the feet of Achilles in the Iliad, in order to
ransom the dead body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles had pitilessly slain,
do we find such a pathetic contrast between overwhelming physical strength
and total human feebleness depicted among men. In that sublime moment in
the Iliad, Priam, for all his physical weakness, had prevailed over the stronger
man by evoking pity in the ruthless Achilles. Will Neoptolemus succumb to
pity in the same way as his father? The chorus wonders why Neoptolemus
delays. The critical moment for success has come (837), they say, recalling
the sentiments of Odysseus in the prologue (111).
Neoptolemus’ response is amazing. Only if Neoptolemus had changed his
mask before the audience’s eyes could Sophocles have produced a more
remarkable effect. Neoptolemus breaks into dactylic hexameters, the meter
of both heroic epic and oracular prophecy. Not even Teiresias, at his clair-
voyant best, had used this meter. Neoptolemus’ words reveal not only a
reawakening of his noble lineage, but also an insight into the workings of the
gods.17 Up until now, he had been more interested in capturing the bow as an
instrument for his own success, than seriously thinking about Philoctetes:
I realise that we have hunted down this bow in vain if we sail without him.
He is to gain the crown; It is he the gods have enjoined us to bring. It is
Philoctetes 145
utterly shameful to boast of incomplete deeds accomplished by lies.

(839–42)
Although Neoptolemus has recognized the shame of winning victory by

lies, he still has not solved the moral dilemma of what he should do.
What causes the change in Neoptolemus? Quite simply, he is in posses-
sion of the bow, a divine force and the defining aspect of Philoctetes’
heroic being. However Neoptolemus will act, he must abandon the decep-
tive mask he had adopted under the guileful influence of Odysseus. From
now on, his pity for Philoctetes will be genuine, as was his father’s for
Priam, and his words, like Heracles’ arrows, will be delivered with an
unerring force and honesty.
On waking, Philoctetes can scarcely believe that Neoptolemus has
shown such pity as to wait for him through his sufferings. Philoctetes is
ready to sail. Suddenly, Neoptolemus lets out a cry, mirroring Philoctetes’
cry earlier, but it is not a cry of pain but of anguish, because he is wonder-
ing what to do next. The departure is about to be put off again. Discon-
certed, Philoctetes asks whether his malady has made Neoptolemus think
again about taking him on board ship. Neoptolemus calls on Zeus for help
in his dilemma. He drops his pretence and informs Philoctetes that he must
sail to Troy. Overcome at being betrayed, Philoctetes demands his bow
back. Neoptolemus refuses, claiming that duty makes him obedient to his
commanders.
Philoctetes denounces Neoptolemus as a monster of wickedness who
has betrayed him, after promising to take him home. He makes a most bit-
ter and anguished speech, reviling Neoptolemus’ villainy. He supplicates
Neoptolemus to give the bow back. Neoptolemus concedes that he has
long felt a terrible pity for him and wishes that he himself had never left
his home. Philoctetes says that Neoptolemus is not base, but has only
learned disgraceful behavior from wicked men. Let him only give the bow
back and leave.
As Neoptolemus hesitates, Odysseus suddenly enters with two sailors.
He has overheard the preceding dialogue. Calling Neoptolemus a rogue, he
demands that he be given the bow. Philoctetes recognizes Odysseus and
realizes that the stratagem to trick him was Odysseus’ doing. Neoptolemus
remains silent; his loyalties are divided. Odysseus says that Philoctetes can
either come willingly or be dragged by force, because he is simply execut-
ing the will of Zeus. In Philoctetes’ eyes, to claim the gods as the author-
ity behind the deceit perpetrated on him is to turn the gods into liars. When
Philoctetes adamantly refuses to go and threatens to cast himself off a
sheer rock, Odysseus orders his men to seize him. Defenseless without his
bow, Philoctetes denounces Odysseus for using an innocent boy, who

knew nothing but to follow orders, as a pawn to trap him. It was Odysseus’
ugly soul that schooled Neoptolemus to be a cunning practitioner of evil.
He invokes the gods to bring destruction on the Greeks.
In answer, Odysseus expresses the essence of his philosophy. When a
situation demands devious men, such he will prove to be. When, however,
there is a need for righteous and noble men, no one will be found more
honorable. However, it is his nature to desire always to be victorious. Then,
unexpectedly, Odysseus adds the words “except over you. Now for you
I shall willingly stand aside” (1053). He then orders his men to let
Philoctetes go, for he claims that, having got the bow, they have no need of
Philoctetes. Is this a further bluff on Odysseus’ part? We cannot be sure,
because Odysseus’ motives in releasing Philoctetes are not clear. Odysseus
orders Neoptolemus to come with him. Neoptolemus tempts Odysseus’
disapproval by agreeing to let the chorus stay while the sailors on board
ship make her ready. In the meantime, perhaps Philoctetes will think bet-
ter about his refusal to come with them.
Philoctetes foresees a miserable lot awaiting him on the island, as a
result of Odysseus’ cunning. The chorus object, asserting that Philoctetes’
fate is the work of the gods and that is why they lent their hand in the plot
against him. They extend an offer of friendship, but Philoctetes can only
dwell on the wrongs that have been done to him and rejects the chorus’
pleas that he come to Troy. They could at least hand him a weapon of some
sort so that he could kill himself. After addressing his native land, which
he left to help the Greeks, his enemies, and claiming his life over,
Philoctetes withdraws into the skene. As Taplin suggests, there is a pause
here, allowing the audience to explore “a pessimistic ending which is then
rejected.”18
Neoptolemus rushes in, pursued by Odysseus. He intends to right the
wrong he has done. He had tricked Philoctetes and acquired the bow in a
shameful and unjust way. Odysseus threatens him with the anger of the
whole army. Neoptolemus declares: “sophos as you are, what you say is
not sophos,” to which Odysseus replies: “Neither what you say nor what
you intend is sophos.” Neoptolemus retorts: “If I act justly, then this is
superior to being sophos” (1244–46). Neoptolemus insists that what he did
was disgraceful and must be rectified. He is not afraid. Frustrated,
Odysseus starts to draw his sword, but when Neoptolemus reciprocates the
gesture, Odysseus withdraws.
Neoptolemus calls Philoctetes from his cave and asks whether he is will-
ing to sail. Philoctetes remains resolute, denouncing Neoptolemus and the
Greek leaders. When Neoptolemus suddenly offers to give the bow back,
Philoctetes 147
Philoctetes wonders whether this is another trick. Swearing that it is not,

Neoptolemus is in the act of handing the bow back when Odysseus rushes
in again, forbidding what Neoptolemus is doing. Philoctetes immediately
tries to shoot him, but is prevented by Neoptolemus grabbing his hand.
Odysseus, however, is forced to withdraw. His brief, final appearance and
ignominious exit scarcely accord with the dignity commonly associated
with tragedy, and he is treated almost as a rascal, more in keeping with a
character from comedy, who is given short shrift and quickly driven from
the stage.
The way has been cleared for the establishment of an honorable friend-
ship between Philoctetes and Neoptolemus. Neoptolemus has, however,
made himself a potential enemy of the army, although in the eyes of
Philoctetes, Neoptolemus has redeemed his aristocratic inheritance: “You
have revealed, my son, your true origins; Sisyphus was not your father, but
Achilles, who, while among the living, had the greatest fame, as he now
has among the dead” (1310–14).
Neoptolemus has come to realize that deceit, as a means of capturing
Philoctetes, is morally abhorrent. He has also rejected force, if based on a
dishonorable advantage. Although persuasion has also not worked, it is the
only honorable means still available to him, now that he is in a position of
genuine trust. It was the gods, he says, who caused Philoctetes to suffer the
dreadful snakebite, but he will never find relief from it until he comes to
Troy and is cured by the sons of Asclepius, the god of healing. Together,
the two of them will capture Troy. The prophet, Helenus, was willing to
sacrifice his own life, if his prophecy was false. If only Philoctetes con-
sents to go, he will be counted the greatest of the Greeks and will win the
highest renown.
Although Philoctetes recognizes the power of Neoptolemus’ words, he
cannot yield. Once men’s minds have become corrupted, they cannot
change. Neoptolemus himself should not go to Troy, because these men
have robbed him of his father’s arms. However, he should fulfill his prom-
ise and take Philoctetes home. By not helping men who are evil, Neop-
tolemus will not seem to be like them.
When all his attempts fail to persuade the recalcitrant Philoctetes, Neop-
tolemus agrees to take him home, although he voices his fears about what
the Greeks may do to him. Philoctetes promises to protect him with Hera-
cles’ bow. Neoptolemus is thus about to fulfill his obligation under the laws
of xenia by reciprocating the favor that Philoctetes had granted him in let-
ting him hold the bow. In so doing, Neoptolemus has placed the traditional
aristocratic bonds of friendship above his duty to the polis. He is, para-
doxically, at once honorable and guilty of treachery. The two men start to
leave. Surely, this is the last ending in a series of false endings—but how
can it be, when it is manifestly contrary to the will of the gods? Is Sopho-
cles going to rewrite the ending of the myth? No, he has one more momen-
tous surprise in store.
Suddenly, the deified Heracles appears above the skene and stops them
in their tracks. Although the use of the deus ex machina is commonplace
at the end of Euripidean tragedy, its use in Sophocles is exceptional. As
such, this deus ex machina is as dramatic as any in tragedy. Heracles
informs them that he speaks with the authority of Zeus. He addresses both
of them by their patronyms. Like himself, Philoctetes will be rewarded for
his arete (virtue). After going to Troy and being healed by the god Ascle-
pius, he will kill Paris, the cause of the war, and capture Troy. From there,
Philoctetes will return home to his father, Poeas, and place his spoils from
Troy on Heracles’ pyre as a remembrance of his bow. As for Neoptolemus,
he will not be able to take Troy without Philoctetes, nor will Philoctetes be
able to take Troy without him. Philoctetes and Neoptolemus must protect
each other like lions. Let them only respect the gods on which Zeus, Her-
acles’ own father, places the highest store.
How are we to understand this ending with its Heraclean deus ex
machina? Is it simply an addition tacked on to make the play conform to
the traditional myth, or is it integral to the play’s meaning? Does the decree
of Zeus provide a morally satisfactory resolution to the human drama, or is
it flagrantly at odds with it? Critics have been seriously divided. Moreover,
it may be doubted whether the members of the original Athenian audience,
deeply divided as they had been recently by the coup of 411, would have
agreed about the moral significance of the ending. Nor, one may hazard a
guess, would Sophocles have been forthcoming as to his intentions,
because surely he intended the ending to be ambiguous. Although the play
does not allow for anything approaching definitive answers, we can at least
try to put into perspective some of the important problems that the play
raises.
Seen from the viewpoint of Sophocles’ early tragedies, Philoctetes
raises important questions about tragedy as a genre. Electra, with its sur-
prises and reversals, in this respect paves the way for Philoctetes. Oedipus
at Colonus, in turn, will raise some further questions. All three plays have,
as their central dramatis personae, characters dressed, emblematically, in
“beggar-like” rags. In the last two plays—and one could argue for an anal-
ogous case with Electra—we have a tragic hero, who has become an out-
cast from his polis, reintegrated into society. The movement from outside
to inside, with what seems—overtly at least—a happy ending, may appear
more in keeping with comedy than with tragedy. However, all three plays
Philoctetes 149
have an overall seriousness that does not allow them to be simply classi-
fied. Rather, the changes in the tragic tone serve to emphasize in Electra
and Philoctetes the moral ambiguities of the tragic context. As far as the
protagonists are concerned, the plays do not have the same sense of inex-
orability that is commonly associated with the destinies of the central
characters of the earlier tragedies. The Oedipus of Oedipus Rex is doomed
to suffer when he discovers the truth of what he has done. Antigone is
doomed to be punished for defying Creon’s decree. In the case of Electra,
critics are divided as to whether she has been really saved or morally
destroyed.
In Philoctetes, the gods impose a future on Philoctetes that is at odds
with his own wishes, by reintegrating him into the society of his enemies.
In spite of the glory promised him by Heracles, will he be happy or miser-
able? Just as it is ambiguous whether the moral fiber of Electra is destroyed
by her participation in the plot of her morally shallow brother, so it is pos-
sible to read Philoctetes’ moral fiber as being destroyed by his submitting
readily to the persuasion of Heracles, which will require him to do what he
has steadfastly refused to do. In having rigidly adhered to a heroic value
system of the past, based on truthfulness and honest dealing, Philoctetes’
life has served as a yardstick by which to measure the decadent values of a
world irreversibly changed under the impact of a long and bitter war. In
spite of the glory promised him, will Philoctetes find himself comfortable
in this degenerate world? What price will he pay for reverencing the will
of the gods? On the other hand, perhaps this son of Poeas, assisted by the
son of Achilles and the bow of Heracles, will restore the old heroic values.
Perhaps it is true that the war cannot be won without him. There are so
many unanswered and ultimately unanswerable questions.
Nor do the questions confine themselves to Philoctetes alone. What of
Neoptolemus and Odysseus? Having once been corrupted, the son of
Achilles may have redeemed himself, but can he be trusted not to go
wrong again in his desire to win? Does Heracles covertly allude to this
possibility when he reminds Philoctetes and Neoptolemus that when sack-
ing Troy, they must show reverence to the gods? We know from other
mythological sources that in the sack of Troy, Neoptolemus brutally slayed
the helpless Priam at an altar of the gods. Should we forget that his father,
Achilles, had shown pity to the same Priam to whom Neoptolemus will
show no mercy, or is this outside the limits of the play?
Odysseus has no overt place in the ending of Philoctetes. Perhaps, how-
ever, we should not forget that the same actor who plays Odysseus also
appears as Heracles. Machiavellian to a “T,” Odysseus justifies adopting
any kind of behavior—moral or immoral—in the interests of the polis.
When Odysseus had claimed that he is only carrying out the will of Zeus,
of whom he is a servant, Philoctetes had answered that by using the gods
as a pretext, Odysseus makes the gods liars (990–92). In fact, however,
Odysseus is speaking the truth. This political manipulator is the instru-
ment of Zeus’ will.
Philoctetes is a serious drama in which the morality of political actions
is seriously examined. Can the ends justify the means, if the means are
dishonorable? Among the aspiring politicians in the theatre that day there
was, almost undoubtedly, the 20-year-old Plato who, like Neoptolemus,
had recently done service as an ephebe (a raw recruit). Did Philoctetes
help to sow doubts in him that were later to bear fruition, after the death
of Socrates, about the nature of politics as practiced in contemporary
Athens? Did the image of Philoctetes’ cave later inspire him in the cre-
ation of his own “allegory of the cave,” in which he presents a damning
indictment of the human condition? Did the play make him wrestle with
the moral problem of lying? Namely, is lying always to be condemned or
can a “noble lie” be justified? We do not know. What we can say is that
Plato himself both felt the immense power of the theatre to present an illu-
sion of reality and feared it. Moreover, in his literary portrait of Socrates,
he drew heavily on the salient characteristics of the Sophoclean hero.
Like Philoctetes and the blind Oedipus, Socrates, an almost beggar-like
figure, is immune to persuasion as he steadfastly pursues, even until
death, what he believes to be morally right. In Plato’s Apology (28c–d),
Socrates uses Achilles as a model of a noble individual who spurns dan-
ger and death in the pursuit of what he thinks is his duty. At the end of the
speech, however, after invoking Ajax as someone who, like himself, had
suffered from an unjust verdict, Socrates contemplates whom, if there is a
life after death, he might cross-examine in the Underworld. Like the
Sophoclean Philoctetes, he couples Odysseus with the infamous Sisyphus
(Apology 41b–c).19
NOTES
1. See A. M. Bowie, “Tragic Filtres for History,” in Greek Tragedy and the
Historian, ed. C. Pelling (Oxford, 1997), 56–62; and M. Hose, Drama und
Gesellschaft: Studien zur Dramatischen Produktion in Athens am Ende des 5
Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, Germany, 1995), 171–97. Both of these works contain
references to earlier studies of this kind.
2. On the embassy in general, see C. R. Beye, “Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the
Homeric Embassy,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological
Association 101 (1970): 63–75. On Homeric influences in general, see J. David-
son, “Homer and Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient
Philoctetes 151
Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies,

Supp. 66 (1995): 25–35.
3. On Telemachus as a model for Neoptolemus, see especially C. Fuqua,
“Studies in the Use of Myth in Sophocles’ ‘Philoctetes’ and the ‘Orestes’ of
Euripides,” Traditio 32 (1976): 29–95, especially 32–62.
4. M. W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in
Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989), 184.
5. E. M. Craik, “Philoktetes: Sophoklean Melodrama,” L’Antiquité Classique
48 (1979): 15–29.
6. See especially C. Greengard, Theatre in Crisis: Sophocles’ Reconstruction
of Genre and Politics in Philoctetes (Amsterdam, 1987).
7. See Bowie, “Tragic Filtres for History,” 60–61, for intertextual allusions to
Euripides’ satyr play, Cyclops.
8. Bowie, ibid., 60, writes, “He is called Neoptolemus only twice (4, 241) but
addressed or mentioned twelve times with circumlocutions involving Achilles.”
9. On this topic, see M. Clarke Hoppin, “What happens in Philoctetes?” Tra-
ditio 37 (1981): 1–30, where it is argued that the audience would have known from
the mythic tradition that both Philoctetes himself and the bow is required.
10. Blundell, Sophocles and Greek Ethics, 187.
11. The influence of the sophists on Philoctetes has been considered from var-
ious points of view. See, for example, P. W. Rose, “Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the
teachings of the Sophists,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 80 (1976):
49–105; and E. Craik, “Sophocles and the Sophists,” L’Antiquité Classique 49
(1980): 247–53.
Sophocles (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 111.
13. See especially D. Seale, “The Element of Surprise in Sophocles’
Philoctetes,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 19 (1972): 94–102.
14. See R. G. Ussher, Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Warminster, U.K., 1990), 14
n.11, with references to other discussions.
15. On the significance of xenia for the play, see E. S. Belfiore, Murder among
Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 2000), 63–80.
16. On the problem of the ode, see R. J. Tarrant, “Sophocles, Philoctetes
676–729: Directions and Indirections,” in Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays
Presented to D. J. Conacher, ed. M. Cropp, E. Fantham, and S. Scully (Calgary,
1986), 121–34.
17. See Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn, 116–17, with references in n.28
and 29 to other critics. Also see C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford, 1944),
281, on the oracular aspect of the language.
18. O. Taplin, “Significant Actions in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Greek, Roman,
and Byzantine Studies 12 (1971): 39.
19. On the relationship of the Platonic Socrates to Sophocles and Achilles, see
H. E. Moritz, “Heroic Temper in Context: Achilles, Oedipus, Socrates,” in Daida-
likon: Studies in Memory of Raymond V. Schoder, S. J.. ed. R. K. Sutton, Jr. (Wau-
cunda, Ill., 1989), 263–71.
Chapter 10
Oedipus at Colonus
The final decade of the century witnessed much political upheaval in Athens.
Orestes of Euripides, produced in 408, presents a vision of a nightmarish
world in which society seems almost to be reduced to an absurd mixture of
comedy and terror. In 407, the Athenians won a naval victory at Arginusae
against the Spartans, in which they lost many ships. When the generals in
command failed to rescue the dead crews because of a storm, six of them
were tried en bloc by the assembly, despite the objections of Socrates, and
were all executed. In the same year, Euripides died. His last tragedies,
including his Bacchae, were produced posthumously. Within about a year,
Sophocles was also dead, and the era of the classical tragedians was over.
Aristophanes’ comedy, Frogs, produced in 405, for all its humor, can be read
in some ways as a sad tribute to the death of the great tragedians.
From several passages in Frogs, it is clear that Athens was in a state of
political crisis. This crisis came to a head in the summer of 405, when the
Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami by the Spartan, Lysander.
Athens was besieged by land and sea and surrendered in the spring of 404.
Whether death or slavery awaited her citizens and whether the city would
be razed to the ground was unknown. Recognizing Athens’ great contribu-
tion to the defeat of the Persians earlier in the century, however, Lysander
spared the Athenians the worst of fates, and instead made them subject
allies. However, Lysander also supported the setting up of a regime of
Thirty Tyrants. Those democratic leaders who escaped the purges fled into
exile. The tyrants massacred their enemies and appropriated their property.
However, the Thirty Tyrants did not rule for long, because they soon
became widely loathed. The exiles banded together and drove them out in
403. Thus, the democracy was restored.
Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously in 401. It

won first prize. The tragedy seems to raise some important political issues,
and Lowell Edmunds1 has argued that the play should be read against the
background of the political events of 411, when the 400 held an assembly
at Colonus. Given the paucity of our sources and the uncertainty of much
of the historical data, Oedipus at Colonus raises more questions than easy
answers in this regard. Nevertheless, it is politically relevant that in this
play, unlike in Sophocles’ other extant tragedies, the world of Athens
forms the larger backdrop of the action. The tragedy is also heavily preoc-
cupied with old age. As such, it is as reasonable to read Oedipus at
Colonus as Sophocles’ final statement about theatre as it is about politics.
As is common in Sophocles’ works, the politics are encoded in the theatri-
cal vision and not easily separable.
In Euripides’ Bacchae, composed at the end of his life, the playwright
holds up to scrutiny the very foundations of theatre as a Dionysiac perfor-
mance. Bacchae presents an in-depth examination of the paradoxical
nature of Dionysus as the god of the Mask. In his failure to recognize
Dionysus, the young king, Pentheus, both acts as a deluded hunter and suf-
fers as a hunted prey; he becomes, literally, both a theates (spectator) of
others’ actions and himself a spectacle of suffering, physically torn apart
by those whose actions he has come to observe. For the actual spectators
in the theatre of Dionysus, Pentheus becomes seen as a severed head, rep-
resented by a simple mask. No other Greek tragedy lays bare more starkly
the most essential physical property that serves to create illusion in the
tragic theatre.
At the same time, Euripides seems to be almost playfully mocking
two aspects of the theatre that are quintessentially Sophoclean: the blind
mask and the skene. In Bacchae, he introduces a blind Teiresias as a self-
interested broker of the truth and makes him rather ludicrous. He also has
Dionysus, the patron god of the theatre, break out of the skene and—figu-
ratively at least—“blow it up,” just as in Euripides’ Orestes the skene is put
under threat of being burnt down.
At the climax of Bacchae, Euripides had reduced theatre to the essen-
tials of a disembodied mask. Although Sophocles did not know of Euripi-
des’ Bacchae, because he died before seeing it, almost presciently in
answer to Euripides, Sophocles, in his Oedipus at Colonus, uses the mask
and the skene to more remarkable effect than ever before. He makes the
blind mask central to his last tragedy, thus ironically underscoring the fact
that all masks are blind.2 The contrast of blindness and sight—whether
conceived as dramatic metaphors or actually presented in the physical
appearance of the stage characters—had always been central to Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus 155
tragic vision, but in no other extant tragedy is a physically blind dramatis

persona presented from the beginning of the play as the main character.
This use of a blind character as the protagonist around whom all the action
is focused has profound implications for the drama, because it stands on its
head the traditional metaphysics of tragedy. The Greek word for theatre,
we should remember, means a “viewing place.” In Oedipus at Colonus, it
is the blind man who sees the deeper significance of this viewing place and
who comes to determine the actions and destinies of the characters who
have sight, until he orchestrates his own disappearance. In his initial move-
ments, at least, Oedipus seems to be in danger of violating the sanctity of
the gods by entering a sacred grove exclusively reserved for them. The
blind Oedipus sees, however, what others do not, because he has learned
from Apollo that this sacred grove is to be his final resting place.
The grove is represented by the skene. We have seen in his earlier tragedies
that Sophocles uses the skene, through his invention of skenographia in the
sense of “setting the scene,” to brilliant effect. In the early plays before
Philoctetes, the skene had represented a black hole in which acts of horror
had been committed. Philoctetes shows that Sophocles was still using the
skene in an innovative fashion. Instead of making it a dark cul-de-sac, he gave
it an unseen second entrance by which means shadowy figures could be seen
inside. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles makes the skene a place reserved
for the gods. Oedipus crosses that sacred boundary. Instead of incurring
divine punishment, he meets with the most extraordinary death in all Greek
tragedy—a death that is not only desired by Oedipus, but a death that seems
at odds with everything that death has conventionally been represented to
mean in tragedy. There is no violence; Oedipus is not cut down in the prime
of life, but rather dies of old age. As one critic has expressed it: “This last
Sophoclean tragedy serves as a kind of ‘antitragedy,’ a work that self-
consciously reverses the tragic pattern of earlier plays.”3
At the beginning of the play, the blind Oedipus is led in through a paro-
dos by his daughter Antigone. They are beggars. Years of suffering have
taught Oedipus to be content with his lot. Antigone tells her father that the
place is clearly sacred, as is evidenced from its great natural beauty. The
walls of the city in the distance are those of Athens, but she does not know
this place. She then sits Oedipus down on a rough rock near the door of the
skene.
A villager enters from the second parodos. At once, he orders Oedipus
to leave his seat because he is sitting on ground that is unholy to tread
upon. It is the abode of the Fearful Goddesses, the Daughters of Earth and
Darkness. The local people call them Eumenides, but they have different
names in different places. In other words, these goddesses are the Erinyes
(Furies) who in Athens itself were worshipped under the cult title Semnae,
the Dread Goddesses.4 Oedipus prays that they may receive him propi-
tiously as their suppliant; he will never leave their abode because they are
a sign of his destiny. He asks the villager the name of the place and is told:
The place on which you tread is named the Brazen-footed Threshold of this
land, the safeguard of Athens, and the nearby fields claim that the horseman
Colonus here [he points to a statue] is their founder. The whole locality
shares his name. These things are not so much given a place of honor in
story, stranger, but rather in the hearts of its residents. (56–63)
Before Sophocles, Colonus was not particularly famed in myth,5 and

Sophocles, with his emphasis on this unknown place of great natural
beauty, helps to build suspense as to where exactly the play is set. It may
well have come as a surprise to some of the audience when Colonus is at
last mentioned. Colonus was one of the demes (villages) of Attica, situated
about a mile northwest of Athens. Not only did the 400 hold a meeting of
the Athenian assembly there in 411, but in either 410 or 407, there had
been a skirmish at Colonus between the Athenians and Thebans, which
Sophocles may have had in mind when writing the play. Most significantly,
however, Colonus was Sophocles’ own birthplace.
Oedipus asks whether the people have a ruler or whether they them-
selves have power. The villager informs him that the people are ruled by
the king, Theseus, in Athens. Oedipus asks that Theseus be brought to
Colonus so that by a small service he might win a great gain. The villager
tells Oedipus not to move while he informs the members of his deme, who
will decide whether Oedipus can stay or must leave.
Oedipus now prays to the Eumenides to forgive Apollo and himself,
because Apollo had foretold that he would find his final resting place with
them. There would be some divine sign from Zeus. Therefore, let them
grant fulfillment of Apollo’s words. Oedipus then invokes Athens, the most
honored city of Athena, to take pity on him.
When Antigone tells her father that old men are approaching, Oedipus
bids her hide him in the grove. Thus, Oedipus retreats into the skene, whose
central doors—as in Philoctetes—are open. Disobedient to the orders of the
villager, is Oedipus tempting the anger of the goddesses? Oedipus has
come as a stranger among strangers. He is a guest in a foreign land. He is
also a suppliant who prays to the Eumenides to receive him propitiously.
Both as a stranger and a suppliant, Oedipus falls under the protection of
Zeus. At the same time, by his stage movements, Oedipus seems at risk of
forfeiting the protection he might claim as a suppliant. Central to this is his
entrance into the skene/grove, an inviolable place where no mortal may

tread. Almost amazingly, this skene/grove—whose entrance represents a
liminal space between the sacred and the profane—is located in Sophocles’
own birthplace, and that skene is Sophocles’ greatest creation. The drama-
tis persona and the playwright are to be irrevocably linked. If Oedipus is to
break some of the most sacred of taboos, Sophocles is his instigator.
Oedipus’ audacity is stressed by the chorus’ entrance song. They have
come looking for this wanderer who has shown no reverence to the Dread
Goddesses. Like Sophocles, the members of the chorus are old men native
to the deme of Colonus. This chorus is thus comprised both literally and
dramatically of Athenian citizens, a rare phenomenon challenging the dis-
tancing effect of myth.
Oedipus, having hidden just inside the skene, reenters, stating that he
sees with his voice. His entrance is reminiscent of his entrance in Oedipus
Rex after he has been blinded. As the chorus says, recalling the chorus’
reactions of the earlier play: “Ah, ah! He is dreadful to behold and dread-
ful to hear” (140). They wonder who Oedipus is. Was he blind from birth?
Clearly, his life has been wretched, but he goes too far. He must remove
himself from the inviolate ground. Urged by Antigone to respect the con-
cerns of these citizens who promise not to send him away against his will,
Oedipus is led by his daughter to the ledge of another rock where he sits.
In theatrical terms, Oedipus’ entrance here from the skene is a great
moment. Not only do the chorus’ reactions draw special attention to Oedi-
pus’ blind mask in a way that has not been emphasized before, but he also
enters from the grove of the Eumenides, whom the chorus is afraid to look
upon. Thus, visually, Oedipus’ entrance by association makes him closely
identifiable with these Eumenides, whose dual aspect as both malignant
and beneficent divinities Oedipus will increasingly assume in the ensuing
action. His exit into the grove has endowed Oedipus with the mana of these
dread goddesses. It may well be that when Oedipus reenters from the grove
at this point, the audience is given the first fully frontal view of Oedipus’
blind mask. Surely Oedipus’ mask has a Fury-like quality.
When Oedipus is forced to reveal his identity, alarmed, the chorus at
once asks him to leave their land. Oedipus challenges them in the name of
Athens’ reputation as a most god-fearing polis and a haven of refuge for
strangers in distress. The chorus cannot fear him for his person or his
actions. If the truth must be told about his mother and father that gives rise
to their fears, he was an innocent victim rather than a culprit. He beseeches
them to honor the gods and not besmirch Athens’ fair reputation with
unholy deeds. He is their suppliant who should not be spurned because of
his repellant looks. He comes as one bringing benefits to their citizens.
The chorus agrees to let Theseus decide on Oedipus’ fate. Oedipus prays
that their ruler’s coming may be a blessing both to Athens and himself.
This dialogue might seem preparatory for the arrival of Theseus, but, as is
not uncommon in Sophocles’ works, there is an unexpected arrival from
the parodos by which Antigone and Oedipus had originally entered.
It is Ismene, accompanied by an attendant. She is mounted on a horse
and her face (prosopon) is covered by a Thessalian hat to protect her from
the sun. To have a woman enter on a horse is a highly unusual entrance,
and there is obviously a pointed reference to the distinctive quality of her
mask. She is meant to have all the signs of a noble man on his travels.
When she dismounts, Ismene clasps Oedipus and Antigone affectionately.
This embrace mirrors and inverts the farewell meeting of Oedipus and his
daughters in Oedipus Rex. Having been separated in the earlier tragedy,
against Oedipus’ wishes, they are now reunited.
Ismene has come with news for Oedipus. Oedipus asks why her broth-
ers have not come. When Ismene alludes to the quarrel between Eteocles
and Polyneices, Oedipus denounces his sons, who behave like Egyptians,
among whom the men sit at home weaving while the women work outside,
providing life’s necessities. In his own family, the women have undertaken
the men’s task of maintaining him in his old age. Among Athenians, tradi-
tionally sons, not daughters, provided for their parents in old age in return
for their upbringing. With Ismene’s arrival, then, a new theme is intro-
duced—that of nature and nurture—whereas before, the main focus had
been the twin themes of suppliants and strangers.
Ismene relates how Polyneices and Eteocles have quarreled over the royal
power at Thebes, and Eteocles has driven Polyneices into exile. The latter
has gone to Argos and made new allies through marriage. Polyneices
intends either to reoccupy Thebes with honor or die in the attempt. New
oracles have come to the Thebans that their safety lies with Oedipus, in
whose power resides the outcome of the quarrel. In view of this, Creon will
arrive shortly from Thebes to make Oedipus take up residence near the bor-
ders of the land. When Oedipus demands to know why the Thebans want
him outside rather than within the land, Ismene says it is in order that Oedi-
pus might not be in full control. Oedipus wants to know whether he will at
least be given a burial in Thebes. This, however, will not be possible in view
of Oedipus’ shedding of his parent’s blood. Oedipus swears they will never
gain power over him. When Oedipus learns that both sons know of this
prophecy, he is outraged: “And then, after hearing this, did the miscreants
place their ambitions for the throne (tyrannis) before their yearning for
me?” (419). He prays that neither Eteocles remain in power nor Polyneices
return from exile. His polis has done nothing to help him, and they shall
have nothing from him. Therefore, let Creon or anyone else in Thebes come
for him; their quest will be in vain, for if the men of Colonus, with the help
of the Dread Goddesses, protect him, the Athenians will acquire a great sav-
ior for their polis and a source of hardship for his enemies.
Because Oedipus offers himself as a protector of their land, the chorus
wants to offer him helpful advice. He should perform purificatory rites to
the goddesses on whose ground he has trod. As Oedipus is physically inca-
pable, Ismene offers to perform the rites for him. She therefore departs.
The chorus now questions Oedipus in detail about the dreadful deeds he
has done. Reluctantly, he admits that he killed his father and married his
mother, but according to the law he is pure, because he acted in all igno-
rance. This whole section is an intertextual mediation on his earlier
tragedy, Oedipus Rex. The guilt-ridden Oedipus of Oedipus Rex is pro-
claimed innocent.
Theseus now enters from the Athens parodos. Theseus is not a nameless
demesman, but the king of Athens. With his appearance, the chorus’ reser-
vations about receiving the polluted Oedipus give way to the positive atti-
tude of Theseus, an ideal king, who embodies the best traditions of Athens
in its reception of foreigners.6 Theseus immediately recognizes Oedipus
from his beggar’s garb and disfigured face. He wishes to know what Oedi-
pus desires to receive from Athens and is not fazed by the appearance of
this wretched outcast. His own humanity has taught him never to reject an
outcast.
Oedipus acknowledges Theseus’ nobility. He informs the king that he
will bestow great benefits upon him, when he is dead and Theseus has
given him a burial, but that it may involve Theseus in no small conflict
with Oedipus’ sons, because oracles will force them to try to make Oedi-
pus return to Thebes against his will. Theseus wonders how this will dis-
tress him. In reply, Oedipus stresses the mutability of fortune. Time
changes all. The power of countries, like that of humans, declines; old loy-
alties between cities and friends can turn sour. Athens may be on good
terms with Thebes now, but for a trifling reason the current harmony will
be shattered by war. He, Oedipus, in death, will be a scourge to the The-
bans. Let Theseus only abide by his pledge and he will never say that he
has received Oedipus as a worthless resident.
Accepting him as a suppliant and with his promise of benefits, Theseus
welcomes Oedipus as an inhabitant and offers him the choice of either
going with him to Athens or remaining in Colonus. Oedipus chooses to
remain in Colonus, but fears that the Thebans will attempt to seize him.
Theseus promises him that he should have no fear and gently rebukes
Oedipus for thinking that he is not taking adequate precautions.
The following ode is one of the most beautiful in Greek tragedy. It is a

paean to the haunting beauty of Colonus, endowed by nature with luxu-
riant flora and rich vegetation, where the nightingales sing, the horses
graze, and the streams of the Cephisus flow in life-supporting wonder. It
is the joyous haunt of the Muses and the gods. In their praise, the chorus
singles out two aspects: the unrivalled Attic olive, sustained by Zeus and
Athena; and the god Poseidon, who has bestowed on their polis two great
glories—the power of the horse and the might of the sea. As they weave
a delicate thread of place and association, the chorus extends their
description of the beauties of Colonus into a eulogy of Athenian power
and glory. The ode is addressed to the stranger, Oedipus. The transfor-
mation of this squalid, blind beggar into a local hero gains much of its
wonder from the very beauty of the sacred haunt in which he is to find
his final resting place.
Creon enters from the Theban parodos, escorted by an armed guard. He
has come with the backing of the citizenry simply to persuade Oedipus to
return to Thebes. He feigns sorrow for the miserable plight of Oedipus and
Antigone. Antigone’s wretchedness is a reproach to Oedipus and their
whole family. Oedipus accuses Creon of using a fair pretext to mask a
scheme of low cunning. He had shown no consideration for his wishes in
the past. Now, because the people want him, Creon comes with blandish-
ing words, but he will prove the baseness of Creon’s actions. He has not
come to take him home, but to settle him nearby so that Thebes can avoid
the danger from Oedipus’ presence in Attica. However, he will not be suc-
cessful, because Oedipus’ vengeful spirit will stay where it is. Thanks to
Apollo and Zeus, he knows better than does Creon the affairs at Thebes.
Creon’s lies will cause more harm than safety.
When Creon fails to persuade the angry Oedipus, he reveals the threat-
ening means by which he will capture him. He has seized Ismene and he
will now take Antigone by force. Oedipus’ pleas to the chorus are of no
avail, because they are powerless in the face of Creon’s henchmen who
carry Antigone off. Oedipus invokes the Eumenides as he curses Creon
that he may suffer an old age like his own. A confrontation between Creon
and the chorus is interrupted by the arrival of Theseus who has heard the
chorus’ cries for help. Like Creon earlier, Theseus is attended by an escort.
Theseus enters at line 887 and, given the three-actor rule, is played by
the same actor who had earlier played Antigone before her abduction at
line 847, whereas previously he had been played by the actor who had
played the Stranger and Ismene. This is instructive in a theatrical sense,
because it illustrates clearly the presentational nature of Greek theatre; it is
the mask, not the actor, that identifies the dramatis persona.7
Seen in stage terms, the scene that follows is an agon in the sense of a
debate with the threat of an agon as a physical battle. Both Theseus and
Creon have entered from opposite parodoi, with guards, to contest the fate
of Oedipus, who is caught in the middle. Creon has dissipated his power by
making his guards take Antigone. Theseus, in the actual battle that will
take place later, will be able to command both his infantry and his cavalry.
The scene also presents two conflicting images of leaders. Creon has char-
acterized himself as a tyrannus (851) and cognate terms were used earlier
in connection with the dispute between Eteocles and Polyneices over the
throne of Thebes (374, 449). Thebes is a place of ambitious politicians
who use violence to achieve their ends. Theseus, on the other hand, is a
noble man and a king (67).
When Theseus learns that Creon has seized Oedipus’ daughters, he
threatens that Creon will never leave Attica until they are returned and
accuses him of disdaining the Athenian polis that is steadfast in the prac-
tice of justice and maintenance of law. Did Creon think that Theseus’ polis
was devoid of men? The Thebans themselves did not teach Creon such
behavior. Theseus would never behave in this way in Creon’s land, even if
he had the most just of reasons.
Creon’s response to these accusations is shallow. He did not think the
Athenians would want to keep his kinsmen or welcome one who was
guilty of parricide and incest. In an allusion to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Creon
refers to the court of the Areopagus, in which Orestes had been tried for
matricide, a court that forbade such condemned outcasts to dwell in the
polis. This is why he had acted as he did. Nor would he have done so if
Oedipus had not cursed him and his family.
In a scathing retort to Creon’s effrontery, Oedipus defends the innocence
of his own actions, because the oracle had prophesied that he would do
what he would do even before he was conceived. His speech is constructed
almost as if it were a legal defence.8 He had killed his father unwittingly.
As for his mother, is not Creon ashamed to make him talk of his marriage
to her, Creon’s own sister? Because Creon is so impious as to do so, he will
admit that, in her ignorance, she bore him and had children by him, to his
shame. Her acts and his own, however, were unwilled, but Creon’s
reproaches are deliberately abusive; Creon, however, will never prove him
evil. If someone were to try to kill Creon, would he stop and ask whether
his assailant was his father or would he simply retaliate? He would surely
retaliate without considering the justice of the matter! However, Oedipus’
actions were divinely induced so that not even his dead father could refute
him. As for Creon’s flattery of Theseus and the Athenians, he overlooks
how the Athenians honor the gods more than any people. Oedipus then
invokes the help of the Eumenides to prove to Creon the manner of the
men who protect Athens.
Theseus commands Creon to take him to where Oedipus’ daughters are.
He assures Oedipus that he will not return until he has delivered his chil-
dren to him. Oedipus blesses Theseus for his nobility.
After the ensuing ode, Antigone and Ismene enter, followed by Theseus.
There is a happy reunion of father and daughters in which Antigone gives
credit to Theseus for their return. Because there are four dramatis personae
present, Ismene does not speak—her part is played by a silent extra. In
response to Oedipus’ blessings upon him, Theseus is modest about his
actions.
It might seem that the threat to Oedipus from Thebes has been averted
but, with an unexpected twist, Theseus raises a new issue. While he was
offering sacrifices nearby, he had been told that a suppliant—not a Theban
resident, but a relation of Oedipus—was crouching at the altar of Posei-
don. This man wishes to speak to Oedipus. Theseus asks whether he has a
relative in Argos. Oedipus realizes it is his exiled son Polyneices. He wants
nothing to do with him. Theseus reminds Oedipus that to turn away the
suppliant would be to neglect the respect that is owed to the god. Antigone
also pleads on her brother’s behalf. Reluctantly, Oedipus yields, but warns
Theseus not to let anyone get power over his life. Theseus reproves him,
saying he does not need to be told such things twice, and departs.
Throughout the tragedy, there has been a strong emphasis on old age.
Both Oedipus and Creon draw attention to their own advanced years. Now
the chorus of Elders sings an ode bewailing the miseries of too long a life.
Best is not to be born. If not, it is better to die young, while full of carefree
ignorance, because murder and discord lie near at hand and old age is
attended by the afflictions of impotence and the absence of friendship.
Thus, Oedipus is battered and beaten by the breakers of misfortune on all
sides.
Polyneices enters. He is unattended, emphasizing his isolation. In his
supplication, he will find Oedipus no benevolent Theseus. Distressed at the
wasted state of his blind father, Polyneices recognizes that he has behaved
very badly in the nurture of his aged father and begs forgiveness. Oedipus
remains silent and unyielding, making Polyneices despair. Antigone tells
him to say what he requires of his father, because only words might break
Oedipus’ silence. Polyneices recounts how he was driven into exile by his
brother Eteocles. He attributes the cause of this to his father’s Fury
(Erinys). He is willing either to die fighting for justice or expel those
responsible for his fate. In an allusion to Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes,
Polyneices names the champions of his army on whose behalf, and his
own, he has come as a suppliant to his father. He pleads with Oedipus by

appealing to their common lot as exiles. If Oedipus will only support him,
Polyneices will overthrow his brother and reestablish Oedipus in his own
house. Such is his boast, but without Oedipus, he has no safety.
In answer, he receives a damning indictment of his behavior, together
with a violent curse for his destruction. To Oedipus, Polyneices is a foul
abomination who, when he had power, drove him into exile and made him
apolis with only rags to wear. He is his father’s murderer. It is Oedipus’ two
daughters who are men, because they nurse and toil for him. His sons are
not his sons, but the offspring of some other man. If Polyneices leads his
brigades against Thebes, he will die polluted, like his brother, from mutual
slaughter. Oedipus calls upon the Curses as his allies, that his sons may
learn to respect their parents. If Justice (dike) is enthroned beside Zeus
according to the laws of old, Oedipus’ Curses shall prove stronger than
Polyneices’ supplication and desire for power. “Go,” he commands, “and
announce to all the Thebans and your loyal allies that such is the reward
that Oedipus has conferred on his sons” (1393–96).
Doomed, Polyneices prepares to depart. He cannot tell his allies of Oedi-
pus’ dire words nor can he turn back, but must meet his fate in silence. He
begs his sisters not to dishonor him, but grant him a proper burial. By
doing so, they will receive as much praise as they now have for the ten-
dance of their father. Antigone pleads with Polyneices to turn back and not
destroy Thebes, but he refuses, for in the face of such cowardice he could
not lead an army again. He accepts the destiny that his father’s Erinyes will
impose upon him. The Polyneices scene induces a sense of terror. It is the
culmination of the progressive manifestation of Oedipus’ daemonic mask
as an Erinys-like being. We go wrong if we try to read the Polyneices
episode in terms of human character analysis, as P. Easterling does in an
influential article.9 The blind mask in Sophocles never represents a human
being in the normal sense. Teiresias’ mask, for instance, always has con-
tained within it the voice of Apollo. If Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes
provides any clue, the scene is a response to the older playwright’s lost
Oedipus, in which Oedipus had cursed his sons, for Sophocles’ play is full
of Aeschylean echoes. As for Polyneices, he is simply doomed under the
weight of his father’s Curse.
With the exit of Polyneices, Oedipus has severed his ties with the city of
Thebes, and the play moves inexorably to the climax of his death. A loud
thunderclap is heard. Oedipus recognizes it as the sign from Zeus that his
death is approaching. He asks that Theseus be summoned. The emotion of
the scene is given intensity by the fearful cries of the chorus members who
sing in response to the peels of the thunder.
When Theseus arrives, Oedipus informs him that his life is in the bal-
ance, but before dying he wishes not to be false to his promises to him. He
will lead the way and when they have come to the place where he must die,
he will reveal what things are in store for Athens. Theseus must never
divulge where his tomb is, because its hidden proximity will provide a
security from external enemies. Theseus must guard his secrets to his
dying day and they must only be passed on to his successors in like fash-
ion. In this way, the Athenian polis will never be pillaged by the Thebans.
Innumerable are the poleis that have become hubristic, when divine mat-
ters (ta theia) (1537) have been neglected. Let Theseus never wish to suf-
fer from this affliction.
Oedipus orders Antigone and Ismene to follow. He must be their guide
as before they were his. In his blindness, the light of the sun that once was
his to see, but which he can now only feel with his body, he is leaving for
the last time. Thus, Oedipus—accompanied by Antigone, Ismene, The-
seus, and his attendants who form a religious procession—departs into the
darkness of the skene, which represents the inviolable grove of the gods
where no one is permitted to enter except under divine dispensation. Now
the full theatrical significance of the skene, which has not been used since
the prologue, is at last brought into prominence. It is almost as if Sopho-
cles himself, through his most famous stage character, is making his own
exit from the stage by making Oedipus go to his death through the entrance
to what has been his own greatest scenic invention. Oedipus will lie as a
hero in the very skene by which Sophocles himself achieved immortal
fame. Is it to be wondered that, in view of Oedipus’ heroization, the belief,
whether true or not, later gained currency that Sophocles himself had been
heroized under the cult epithet of “Receiver”?10
It might be felt that Oedipus’ exit into the skene would provide a fitting
conclusion to the tragedy. Instead, the chorus launches into a full, albeit
brief, ode. It takes the form of what we might call a funeral hymn, in which
they pray to the gods of the Underworld that Oedipus, after all his suffer-
ings, may find untroubled rest. This ode is followed by the arrival of a mes-
senger, an attendant of Theseus, who had formed part of the procession
into the skene.
It is characteristic of Sophocles that when messengers enter from the
darkness of the skene, as in Antigone or Oedipus Rex, they announce some
terrible act of violence that has been self-inflicted by one of the dramatis
personae; for example, the blinding in the case of Oedipus or the suicide in
the case of Eurydice and Jocasta. Typical of this unusual play, Oedipus at
Colonus does something different in keeping with Sophocles’ exceptional
use of the skene as an inviolable grove of the gods. The messenger brings
no cause for alarm or terror, but instead brings cause for divine wonder. He
describes how the blind Oedipus served as the guide for all present. When
he came to the threshold of the Underworld, he divested his squalid cloth-
ing and, with his daughters’ help, had performed lustrations. Then Zeus
sent loud thunder from the ground and, as his children wept and beat their
breasts, Oedipus addressed them tenderly, saying that his life was over.
Suddenly, a god summoned Oedipus not to delay. Oedipus bade his daugh-
ters leave, because they must not see or hear what was about to transpire.
Theseus’ attendants had led the children away but when, after a while, they
looked back, Oedipus had disappeared, and Theseus was holding his hands
to his face, as if to protect himself from some fearful spectacle unbearable
to behold. Theseus then made a salutation to the earth and the Olympians.
How Oedipus actually died no one can say except Theseus but, if any
man’s passing was miraculous, it was that of Oedipus.
Antigone and Ismene enter and, led by Antigone, join with the chorus in
a kommos (lament) for their father. When Theseus enters, Antigone pleads
with him to let them see their father’s tomb, but Theseus politely refuses,
saying that Oedipus had forbidden him to visit it or to speak of the tomb to
others, for in this way he would keep his country free from harm. He there-
fore will not break his promise. Antigone then asks Theseus to let them go
to Thebes to prevent the butchery of their brothers. To this, Theseus acqui-
esces. Loyal to the last to her family philoi, Antigone thus prepares to go
meet her doom in her own eponymous tragedy. With a few closing words
of the chorus, they make their final exit.
His other tragedies notwithstanding, Oedipus at Colonus has an ele-
mental power that transcends anything Sophocles had written before. Not
even Heracles of Trachiniae, traditionally the greatest of Greek heroes, can
bear comparison with the blind Oedipus of Colonus. Yet the play is fraught
with problems of understanding. Sophocles had competed at the Dionysia
in 406 only months before his death. Yet Oedipus at Colonus was not one
of the tragedies he had presented. Why? Did he compose it in the final
months of his life or had he composed it earlier and deliberately kept it
back? Did he want it performed in his own lifetime, or was he perhaps
afraid that, because Athens was in the throes of a humiliating defeat that
came all too soon after his death, the subject matter was potentially too
explosive? These and similar questions beg for answers. However, there
are no easy answers.
In spite of its elemental power, Oedipus at Colonus has an episodic qual-
ity remarkable in comparison with the other plays. Part of this can be
explained by the fact that Sophocles touched on so many ethical problems
that had helped to form the very stuff of other tragedies. In this tragedy, for
instance, “helping friends and harming enemies” does not present the
same moral ambiguities as it does elsewhere. Oedipus cuts, almost as if it
were a Gordian knot, the ties with his native Thebes. Such is the power of
his malignant hate. His benevolence is reserved for Athens. Oedipus is
also a stranger and suppliant, driven into exile from his own polis where he
has been dishonored. However, he is not simply a hapless exile supplicat-
ing help; he also comes promising great benefits to Theseus and Athens,
and all his words have sight. The accursed parricide who had brought a
plague on his ancestral polis is now to become the savior of Athens, thus
reversing the pattern of Oedipus Rex. Finally, he is to be heroized in
Sophocles’ own birthplace.
So much is clear. When, however, we try to fit Oedipus at Colonus into
the historical, religious/political landscape of the time, we are confronted
with enormous difficulties. Did Sophocles invent both the death and hero
cult of Oedipus at Colonus? Was there a cult of the Eumenides at Colonus
or did Sophocles invent this? In the case of the cult of the Eumenides,
there is no evidence of its existence outside of Sophocles. In the case of a
hero cult of Oedipus himself, the evidence is ambiguous and subject to
interpretation.
Before we can suggest some tentative answers to these problems, we
have to mention two other pieces of historical data. First, whether or not
there was a preexisting cult of the Eumenides at Colonus, there was one in
the city proper of Athens on the Areopagus, where the Eumenides were
worshipped under the name of Semnae. Second, we hear from much later
sources that close by the cult site of the Eumenides in Athens there was
also a hero shrine of Oedipus. How far back this shrine of Oedipus dated
we cannot tell. However, as Kearns11 has remarked, to have two tombs of a
dead hero in one polis is unprecedented, even though it was not uncommon
for different poleis to claim to have a hero’s tomb. Assuming that the tomb
of Oedipus on the Areopagus was ancient, it may have been politically
very dangerous for Sophocles to want to invent a countertradition by mov-
ing the cult sites of both the Eumenides and Oedipus from the Areopagus
to Colonus. If that were the case, what could have been his reasons for
doing so?
Aeschylus may provide a clue, because much of Oedipus at Colonus has
several Aeschylean echoes. In his Theban trilogy, of which only the last
play—Seven against Thebes—survives, the house of Laius is under a
curse, destined to be obliterated. In the second play, Oedipus, Oedipus had
cursed his sons, who are destroyed in the final play. In Seven against
Thebes, the immediate agent of Polyneices’ and Eteocles’ mutual slaugh-
ter had been Oedipus’ Erinys, as is also suggested in Oedipus at Colonus.
Thus, the family curse caused by Laius is worked out implacably. In

Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the house of Atreus is also under a curse, but in the
last play, Eumenides, Orestes flees the Furies of his mother whom he has
murdered to avenge the death of his father and seeks refuge at Athens.
There, he is tried in the court of the Areopagus, presided over by Athena,
who represents her father Zeus. Apollo defends Orestes and the Furies
prosecute him. Orestes is narrowly acquitted. Thus, the curse on the fam-
ily is broken. In the process, dike—seen originally as an inexorable law of
retribution, is superseded by dike in the form of a law trial. Defeated, the
Furies however are not easily pacified, until Athena persuades them to take
up residence in Athens on the Areopagus under the cult title of Semnae.
Whereas Oresteia had provided grounds for hope, Aeschylus’ Theban tril-
ogy had shown no way out of the curse. Is Oedipus at Colonus closer in
spirit to Aeschylus’ Oresteia or the Theban trilogy?
Let us look at some of the parallels and differences between the plays by
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus was written, like Aeschy-
lus’ Oresteia, at the end of Sophocles’ dramatic career, but at that time,
Athens, unlike when Oresteia was performed in 458, provided no grounds
for optimism. Rather, the polis and its democracy seemed in danger of
being destroyed. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles removes the cult site of
the Semnae/Eumenides from fractious Athens to idyllic Colonus. He may
have also transferred the tomb of Oedipus at the same time. In Eumenides,
Apollo (the god of Delphi) and the Furies (chthonic deities) are bitter ene-
mies. In Oedipus at Colonus, the Olympian Apollo—who speaks for
Zeus—and the Eumenides act in conjunction, and earth gods and
Olympians are united. The messenger who reports Oedipus’ disappearance
from life tells how “chthonic Zeus had thundered” (1606) and later how
Theseus, at Oedipus’ disappearance, had saluted both the earth and the
Olympian home of the gods at the same time. Through his prophetic state-
ments in the play, the blind Oedipus, like Teiresias before, had been
Apollo’s mouthpiece; through his curses he had assumed the characteris-
tics of an implacable Fury. Curse and prophecy are united.
In the tragedy, Colonus is described as the threshold of Athens, which,
of course, it was not; however, it becomes a liminal place in which the con-
flict between doomed Thebes and glorious Athens is negotiated. Oedipus
bridges both cities. What, however, are the deeper images that we gain of
these two poleis? If Oedipus has forsaken Thebes forever, he equally
refuses to go into Athens proper. Athens itself is represented by Theseus,
an ideal king. There is no hint however that Theseus is a democratic leader;
nor, as in Eumenides, does the action of the play fall under the auspices of
Athena, the patron deity of Athens. Rather, the tutelary deity of Colonus is
Poseidon, who had lost out to Athena in a contest as to who should be

Athens’ patron deity,12 and whom Theseus conspicuously honors with sac-
rifices. Poseidon was an aristocratic god, just as Theseus is an aristocratic
leader. Apart from the sea, he is most closely associated with the horse, a
noble creature. Colonus itself is physically represented by the statue of a
horseman, its eponymous hero. Can it be that Athena had become too
closely associated with an image of a democratic Athens, and that Sopho-
cles, through Theseus and Poseidon, is trying to present a more noble
image of Athens’ best traditions before foolish politicians had brought it to
the point of destruction? We should remember Oedipus’ warning earlier to
Theseus and his successors never to divulge his secrets if Athens is to be
protected from Thebes, because too many well-governed cities have easily
become hubristic (1530–35). Unlike in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes,
in which the city can be saved at the expense of the destruction of the fam-
ily, in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Thebes stands for the image of an
acrimonious polis (a warning to the Athenians perhaps?), torn apart by
self-serving politicians and would-be tyrants from Creon to Eteocles and
Polyneices who, in their desire for power, bring curses on themselves by
their treatment of the former ruler. Will Athens, therefore, be more blessed
than Thebes? Yes, but it is only a very provisional yes. If Athens is to have
faith in a future, it should not put its faith in democratic institutions as is
suggested in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, but it must be led by a noble aristocrat
like Theseus, blessed by the help of a beneficent hero like Oedipus who,
hidden away from the insane rivalries of the city in a secret grave at
Colonus, can dispense harm to Athens’ enemies and blessing to her
friends. In Sophocles’ earlier Theban plays, the kingly and the blind masks
had functioned dramatically as antagonists. In Oedipus at Colonus, the
two masks work in harmonious unity. In the end, hope seems to reside in
an all-seeing blind mask that serves as leader to the kingly mask. Is this the
last will and testament that Sophocles intended to be delivered to the Athe-
nians from his own grave? If so, it seems a bleak hope arising from despair.
NOTES
1. L. Edmunds, Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus
at Colonus (Lanham, Md., 1996), 87–148. See also J. Wilson, The Hero and the
City: An Interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Anne Arbor, Mich.,
1997), which is a full-length analysis of the play that suggests that Sophocles pro-
vides warnings about the weaknesses of contemporary democratic Athens—a
view that I share, although my argument is different.
2. Generally on masks, see Edmunds, ibid., 33–34. E. Bernidaki-Aldous, in her
book, Blindness in a Culture of Light: Especially the Case of Oedipus at Colonus
of Sophocles (New York, 1990), rightly stresses the importance of blindness for
understanding Oedipus at Colonus, but does not give enough weight to the impor-
tance of the mask.
Sophocles (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 95.
4. On the question of the different names for the Furies and their use in the
play, see Edmunds, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, 138–42.
5. The evidence is not entirely clear whether Sophocles invented the myth of
Oedipus dying at Colonus. Wilson, Hero and the City, 10, states that “Sophocles
may have invented the story,” but Edmunds, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus,
95–100, after a judicious review of the evidence with regard to Oedipus’ place(s)
of death in the mythical tradition thinks it unlikely that Sophocles invented the
story, but rather that Sophocles radically transformed its significance with regard
to Athens. We can also be sure that nearly all the incidents in the actual plot are
Sophocles’ creation.
6. On Theseus in tragedy in general, see S. Mills, Theseus, Tragedy and the
Athenian Empire (Oxford, 1997), passim, and, more specifically, on his depiction
in Oedipus at Colonus as representing the ideal spirit of Athens, see 160–85.
7. On the whole question of the distribution of parts in the play, see A. W.
Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1968),
142–44.
8. See Edmunds, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, 134–38, for an examina-
tion of its structure.
9. P. E. Easterling, “Oedipus and Polyneices,” Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society 13 (1967), 1–13.
10. For the evidence of Sophocles as a hero, see E. Kearns, The Heroes of
Attica Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supp. 57 (London, 1989), 154.
M. Lefkowitz, Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore, Md., 1981), 84, however is
probably right in doubting the truth of the tradition.
11. E. Kearns, Heroes of Attica, 50–52 and 208–9.
12. On the possible relevance of the contest to the play, see W. M. Calder III,
“The Political and Literary Sources of Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus,” in Hypa-
tia: Essays in Classics, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy Presented to
Hazel E. Barnes on Her Seventieth Birthday, eds. W. M. Calder III, U. K. Gold-
smith, and P. B. Kenevan (Bolder, Colo., 1985), 8.
Conclusion
Whatever the Ur-form of Greek tragedy was like, it was Athenian democ-
racy of the fifth century that created the conditions under which the theatre
of the great tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—flourished.
In return, these playwrights and their contemporaries, together with all those
who helped make the theatre of the time a success—from the choregoi to the
actors—rewarded the democracy with its greatest cultural achievement. The
tragic theatre, aided and abetted by its junior partner, comedy, presented
the democracy with images, epitomes, and alternative versions of itself by
which its citizens’ imaginations were empowered and greatly enriched.
The democracy both created, and was obliged to respond to, a multitude
of problems that could scarcely have been envisaged in a more restricted
polity. In its many law courts and political assemblies, the democracy was
presented with conflicts and policy decisions that had to be resolved on an
almost-daily basis. Juries at Athens could consist of several hundred peo-
ple and, at times, of more than a thousand. The meeting place of the eccle-
sia, the sovereign assembly of the people, which met regularly four days a
month and more often in times of crisis, could hold up to 6,000 people.
Although the theatre of Dionysus—which held 15,000 spectators—was not
the main assembly in which to negotiate conflict resolutions and policy
decisions, it was organized on a competitive basis and the plays raised seri-
ous ethical, social, religious, and political problems that provided a major
part of all Athenians’ education. At times, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a solu-
tion to the vexed problem of justice might be suggested; but the main func-
tion of the tragedies was not so much to suggest solutions as to broaden and
enlarge the citizens’ minds by dramatizing difficult issues to which there
are no easy answers. The fact that it was such a potent democratic force was
172 Conclusion
no small part of the reason why Plato would exclude tragedy from his ideal
state.
We cannot write a history of Athenian culture of the fifth century through
tragedy, but it does provide a rich register of the kinds of concerns that
engaged the Athenian body politic. In the creation of tragedy as a political
art form, Aeschylus bestrides the stage like a colossus, and it may well be
that Phrynichus, whose works are wholly lost, deserves much more than a
passing mention. However, it was Sophocles—rather than his younger con-
temporary, Euripides—who became, for the Athenians in the second half of
the fifth century, “the tragedian,” just as Homer was “the poet” for all the
Greeks. Even if it is not totally misguided, no book on Sophocles can aspire
to capture more than a fragmentary understanding of this richly allusive
and, ultimately, enigmatic dramatist. He was, and perhaps still is, the least
superficial of playwrights. It was Sophocles who was the first to make pal-
pable for Western culture two important corollary ideas: (1) that “all the
world’s a stage,” and (2) that the stage is a world of illusion. In so doing, he
fed complex images of life to thinkers as diverse as Plato and Freud, both of
whom sought to discover “the real” behind surface reality.
Central to this tragic vision of Sophocles was the creation of two pieces
of stage property. The first was the invention of the skene in the sense of
skenographia—that is, the use of the skene to represent an imaginative
backdrop that gave concrete definition to a notion not of space but of
place. What could not be seen inside the skene was as important to the
dramatic action as what could actually be seen outside of it onstage, if not
more so. The unseen could belie the appearance of the seen. The second
was the creation of the blind mask. Sophocles did not invent the use of
masks themselves. However, he saw more deeply than either Aeschylus or
Euripides, in spite of the latter’s Bacchae, that all masks are blind, because
they are simply inert matter, and it is only the actors behind the masks that
give them the appearance of life. In this consists the main dramatic illusion
of Greek tragic theatre. In contrast, the blind mask concentrates the atten-
tion of the audience on itself as an unseeing artifact, thus exposing the illu-
sion of the other masks and pointing to a more profound reality. In this
sense, the blind mask and skenographia are but two aspects of a single
tragic vision. We, of course, simplify the richness of Sophoclean theatre if
we limit our understanding of him to these two important properties. At the
same time, without appreciating them, we can scarcely do justice to his
genius. Their implications are vast and may at times make us all feel
uneasy. However, they go a long way toward explaining why the whole of
European civilization and whatever cultures that have been deeply touched
by it stand profoundly in his debt.
Glossary of Terms
agon Athletic or military contest; debate or argument

agora Meeting or marketplace in the center of the polis
aischros Ugly, base, shameful
antidosis Exchange of property
antilabai Half lines of verse spoken by an actor
antistrophe Lines of verse sung by the chorus in exact metrical response
to a strophe; part of a choral ode
apolis Exiled; having no polis
archons Civic officials; eponymous archon organized the Dionysia
Areopagus Traditional aristocratic council at Athens
arete Excellence: physical or moral, virtue
aristoi Aristocrats; nobility
asebeia Impiety or lack of reverence
atimia Loss of one’s rights as a citizen
aulos Musical instrument with twin reeds
barbaros(oi) Non-Greek(s)
boule Executive council of the Athenians
choregia Office of choregus(oi)
choregus(oi) Rich citizen(s) required to fund dramatic and dithyrambic
contests at the Dionysia
daemon Supernatural power; deity
174 Glossary of Terms
deme Village or administrative district of Attica

demos Non-elite citizens
demotes A member of the demos
deus ex machina “God out of a machine”; an appearance of a god from
a crane
didaskalos The playwright as theatrical director
dike Justice; revenge; law case
Dionysia (City) The main Athenian festival at which plays were per-
formed
dithyramb Cult hymn to Dionysus, patron god of the theatre
ecclesia Sovereign assembly of the Athenian people
echthros(oi) Personal enemy(ies), opposite of philos(oi)
eisodos(oi) Side entrance road(s) into orchestra. See parodos(oi)
ekkuklema A wheeled platform used to reveal scenes inside the skene
eleutheria Political freedom
ephebe(s) Young man (men) of military age
epode Final verses of a choral ode
eugenes Of noble birth
eusebeia Reverence
hetairai Non-Athenian women; female companions
hypokrites Stage actor
hypothesis(es) Ancient scholar’s(s’) foreword(s) to a tragedy
iambic trimeter Main meter used in spoken parts of tragedy
kalos Beautiful, morally good
kommos A sung lament
komos Feast or revel
kurios Head of a Greek oikos or household
Lenaea A winter dramatic festival
liturgy Public service performed by the wealthy, e.g., choregia
logos Word, reasoning, story
mechane Crane-like machine used to fly gods onto the “stage”
metic(s) Foreign resident(s) at Athens
mousike Music, song, and dance
muthos Myth, story, plot of a play
Glossary of Terms 175
nomima Customs, traditional observances

nomos(oi) Law(s) either written or unwritten; custom(s)
oikos(oi) House(s), household(s), family(ies)
orchestra Dancing area of the chorus, probably circular
parodos(oi) Entrance song(s) of the chorus; side road(s) leading into the
orchestra
parthenos Girl of marriageable age
peitho Persuasion, inducement
phalloi Artificial erect penises carried in honor of Dionysus
philos(oi) Blood relation(s), friend(s), loved one(s)
Pnyx Hill on which the Athenian ecclesia met
poleis Plural of polis, the Greek city-state
polites(ai) Citizen(s)
proagon Ceremony held before the plays at which the dramatists
announced the subject of their plays
proboulos(oi) A commissioner(s)
prosopon(a) Face(s), mask(s), dramatis persona(ae)
protagonist Leading actor, main character
rhapsode(s) Trained reciter(s) of Homer
rhesis(eis) Formal, set-speech(es), e.g., messenger speech(es)
satyr play Play performed after the tragedies with a chorus of satyrs,
part-human, part-animal creatures
sebas Respect, reverence
skene Stage-building at the back of the orchestra
skenographia Stage or scenic description
sophia Wisdom
sophisma A clever device, trick, stratagem
sophos Clever, wise
sophrosyne Moderation, temperance, prudence, discretion
stasimon(a) Choral song(s)
stasis Civil strife; political feuding
stichomythia Line-by-line or two-line dialogue between actors
strategia Office of general; highest elected office at Athens
strategos(oi) General(s); military and naval leader(s)
176 Glossary of Terms
strophe A set of verses or a stanza sung by the chorus

ta theia Things pertaining to the gods; loosely “religion”
theates A spectator at the Dionysia
theorikon A fund for citizens to pay for admission to the theatre
theos(oi) God(s); supernatural power(s)
time Honor, worth—often denoting one’s standing as a citizen
tragoididaskalos Tragic playwright or director
tragoidos(oi) Performer(s) in a tragedy
trittys(yes) Third(s); divisions of Attic tribes
tyranna Matters pertaining to a tyrannus
tyrannis Monarchical power, tyranny, kingship
tyrannus Monarch, tyrant, king
xenia The “religious” etiquette governing the relationship between hosts
and guests or strangers
xenos(oi) Stranger(s), host(s), guest(s)
Select Bibliography
This bibliography, which consists mainly of books, is intended to be a

guide to some further reading on the many critical approaches to Sopho-
cles and the Greek tragic theatre. It also includes a few general books on
the political and cultural background. Those books marked with an aster-
isk (*) contain useful bibliographies of more specialized articles.
Adams, S. M. Sophocles the Playwright. Toronto, 1957.

Arnott, P. D. Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre. London, 1989.
Ashby, C. Classical Greek Theatre: New Views of an Old Subject. Iowa City, Iowa,
1999.
Batchelder, A. G. The Seal of Orestes: Self-Reference and Authority in Sophocles’
Electra. Lanham, Md., 1995.*
Belfiore, E. S. Murder among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy.
Oxford, 2000.*
Bernidaki-Aldous, E. Blindness in a Culture of Light: Especially the Case of
Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles. New York, 1990.*
Bloom, H., ed. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. New York, 1988.
Blundell, M. W. Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles
and Greek Ethics. Cambridge, 1989.*
Bowra, C. M. Sophoclean Tragedy. Oxford, 1944.
Burton, R. W. B. The Chorus in Sophocles’Tragedies. Oxford, 1980.
Bushnell, R. Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays.
Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.
Buxton, R. G. A. “Blindness and Limits: Sophocles and the Logic of Myth.” Jour-
nal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 22–37.
———. Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho. Cambridge, 1982.
———. Sophocles (Greece and Rome New Surveys). Oxford, 1984.
178 Select Bibliography
Calame, C. “Facing Otherness: The Tragic Mask in Ancient Greece.” History of

Religions 26 (1986): 125–42.
Cameron, A. The Identity of Oedipus the King. New York, 1968.
Csapo, E., and Slater, W. J. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1995.
Davies, J. K. Democracy and Classical Greece, 2d ed. London, 1993.
de Romilly, J., ed. Sophocle. Entretiens Hardt. Vol. 29. Geneva, 1983.
des Bouvrie, S. Women in Greek Tragedy: An Anthropological Approach. Oslo,
Norway, 1990.
Easterling, P. E., ed. Sophocles: Trachiniae. Cambridge, 1982.
———. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, 1997.*
Easterling, P. E., and Muir, J. V., eds. Greek Religion and Society. Cambridge,
1985.
Edmunds, L. Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at
Colonus. Lanham, Md., 1996.*
Ehrenberg, V. Sophocles and Pericles. Oxford, 1954.
Euben, J. P., ed. Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Los Angeles, Calif., 1986.
———. The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken. Princeton, N.J.,
1990.
Foley, H. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, N.J., 2001.*
Gardiner, C. P. The Sophoclean Chorus: A Study of Character and Function. Iowa
City, 1987.
Garner, R. Law and Society in Classical Athens. London, 1987.
Garvie, A. F., ed. Sophocles: Ajax. Warminster, U.K., 1998.*
Gellie, G. Sophocles: A Reading. Melbourne, 1972.
Goff, B., ed. History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama. Austin,
Tex., 1995.
Golder, H., and Scully, S., eds. The Chorus in Greek Tragedy and Culture. Arion,
3d ser., vols. 3 and 4. Boston, 1995–96.
Goldhill, S. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge, 1986.*
Gould, J. Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and
Culture. Oxford, 2001.
Gouldner, A. W. Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory.
New York, 1965.
Green, J. R. Theatre in Ancient Greek Society. London, 1994.
Greengard, C. Theatre in Crisis: Sophocles’ Reconstruction of Genre and Politics
in Philoctetes. Amsterdam, 1987.
Griffin, J., ed. Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones.
Oxford, 1999.
Griffith, M., ed. Sophocles: Antigone. Cambridge, 1999.*
Griffith, R. D. The Theatre of Apollo: Divine Justice and Sophocles’ Oedipus the
King. Montreal, 1996.
Guthrie, W. K. C. The Sophists. Cambridge, 1971.
Hall, E. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford,

1989.
Heath, M. The Poetics of Greek Tragedy. London, 1987.
Heiden, B. Tragic Rhetoric: An Interpretation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae. New
York, 1989.
Herington, J. Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition.
Berkeley, Calif., 1985.
Jebb, R. C., ed. Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments. 7 vols. Cambridge,
1883–1914.
Johnson, M. “Reflections of Inner Life: Masks and Masked Acting in Ancient Greek
Tragedy and Japanese Noh Drama,” Modern Drama 35 (1992): 20–34.
Jones, J. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. London, 1962.
Just, R. Women in Athenian Law and Life. London, 1989.
Kirkwood, G. M. A Study of Sophoclean Drama. Ithaca, N.Y., 1958.
Kitto, H. D. F. Form and Meaning in Drama. London, 1956.
———. Greek Tragedy. 3d ed. London, 1961.
Knox, B. M. W. Oedipus at Thebes. New Haven, Conn., 1957.
———. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley, Calif.,
1964.
———. Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theatre. Baltimore, Md., 1979.
Lesky, A. Greek Tragic Poetry. 3d ed. Translated by M. Dillon. New Haven, Conn.,
1983.
Ley, G., and Ewans, M. “The Orchestra as Acting Area in Greek Tragedy,” Ramus
14 (1985): 75–84.
Loraux, N. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City.
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Index
Acropolis, of Athens, 36, 38, 54, 55, Seven against Thebes, 25, 68, 162,
139 163, 166, 168; Suppliants, 25, 29
Actors: financing of and prizes for n.6; Tereus, 82
actors, 32, 36; as hypokrites, 41; Aeschylus trilogies: Danaid, 25, 61;
introduction of third actor, 22, Fragments, 23, 24; Oresteia, 24,
25–26, 29; mask acting, 41–44; 25, 26, 29, 38, 77, 118, 130, 161,
professional actors, 4, 33, 34; 167, 168, 171; Theban, 167
protagonist (lead actor), 32–33; Agathon, tragic playwright, 33
relationship to chorus, 45; three- Agons, types of, 16; in Ajax, 60–62;
actor rule, 64, 160; as tragoidos, in Antigone, 74–75; as debates in
34 tragedy, 44; in Electra, 123
Adams, S. M., 80 n.5 Agora, 6; in Trachiniae, 96 n.5
Aegospotami, battle of, 153 Aischros, as motif in Electra, 125,
Aelian, 36 130
Aeschylus, general references to, 1, 2, Alcibiades, 33, 135, 141
3, 7, 20, 24, 46, 118, 119, 120, 122, Alcmaeonids, 12
130, 131, 135, 172; dramatic Alexandrine hypotheses, 27, 42
career, 23–24 Antidosis, 33
Aeschylus tragedies: Agamemnon, 26, Antilabai, 43, 107, 127
28, 29, 83, 89, 92; Eumenides, 3, Antistrophe, 46
24, 26, 50, 51, 52, 56, 60, 61; Aphrodite, as god in Trachiniae, 84,
Libation Bearers, 118, 120, 122, 89, 94
131; Oedipus, 163, 166; Persians, Apolis, 5, 72, 163
2, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26; Philoctetes, Apollo: as god in Oedipus at
135; Prometheus Bound, 25; Colonus, 160, 163, 167; as god in
184 Index
Oedipus Rex, 101, 102, 107, 108, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 44

110, 112; as god of Delphi, 10, 56, Barbarians, barbaros(oi), 7, 81, 88.
118; as an Olympian god, 8. See See also Persians
also Delphi Batchelder, Ann, 133 n.4
Archaic age, 3, 22 Beer, David, 113 n.9
Archaic choral lyric, 2, 7, 44 Belfiore, Elizabeth, 151 n.15
Archons, 14, 23, 32, 36 Bennett, Larry J. See Tyrrell, Wm.
Areopagus, 14, 49, 166 Blake
Arete, 98, 148 Bernidaki-Aldous, Eleftheria, 168 n.2
Arginusae, battle of, 153 Beye, Charles Rowan, 150 n.2
Argos, 9, 24, 50 Blindness. See Masks
Aristogiton. See Harmodius and Aris- Blundell, Mary W., 65 n.6, 137, 151
togiton nn.4, 10
Aristoi, 13, 14, 68 Boule, 6, 14, 15, 117
Aristophanes, general references to, Bowie, Angus M., 150 n.1,
33, 41, 116 151 nn.7, 8
Aristophanes plays: Clouds, 36; Bowman, Laurel, 133 n.7
Ecclesiazusae, 36; Frogs, 153 Bowra, Sir Cecil M., 151 n.17
Aristotle, general references to, 23, Burckhardt, Jacob, 17 n.6
28, 31, 42, 46 Burkert, Walter, 84, 85, 96 nn.7, 8
Aristotle works: Poetics, 15, 22, 27; Burnett, Anne P., 133 n.2
Politics, 83; Rhetoric, 76, 117 Bushnell, Rebecca, 104, 113 n.13
Arnott, Peter, 48 nn.18, 21 Buxton, Richard G., 16 n.5
Artemisium, battle of, 21
Asebeia, 9; as motif in Antigone, 67 Calame, Claude, 112, 113 n.16
Ashby, Clifford, 37, 47 nn.8, 11, 14 Calder, William M., III, 169 n.12
Asia Minor, Greeks of, 20 Character. See Homer, general refer-
Athena: as god in Ajax, 53, 54, 55, ences to; Masks
59, 139, 142, 160, 167, 168; as god Choregia, 33, 47 n.6
in Oedipus at Colonus, 160, 167, Choregus(oi), 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 171
168; as Polias, guardian of Athens, Chorus: composition of tragic, 3–4,
9, 84, 139, 142 45–46; formation of, 45–46; rela-
Athenaeus, 15 tionship to actors, 45; training of,
Athens: citizenship, 4; culture, 3, 15, 32. See also Dithyramb
97–98, 172–73; empire, 1, 21; polit- Cimon, 33, 49–50
ical developments, 12–16, 19–21, Citizens, polites(ai), definition of, 4
49–50, 67, 111, 115–17, 135, 153; Citizenship law. See Pericles
population, 4; war, 6. See also Classical unities, 51
Democracy; Peloponnesian War; Cleisthenes, 1, 12, 13, 15, 19, 31, 33,
Pericles, Citizenship law; Persians 54; democratic reforms, 14
Atimia, 82 Cleon, 116
Audience, at Dionysia, 39–40, 45, 60, Colonus: as birthplace of Sophocles,
111 19, 156; as setting of Oedipus at
Aulos, 32, 40, 41, 47 n.5 Colonus, 156
Index 185
Comedy, 32, 33, 41, 147, 148, 171. Easterling, Patricia E., 96 nn.4, 12,
See also Aristophanes 13, 14, 163, 169 n.9
Connor, W. R., 47 n.2 Ecclesia (assembly), 14, 39, 97, 171.
Corinth, 9, 100, 107, 108 See also Pnyx
Costume, 41–42; in Ajax, 56, 59; in Echthroi (enemies), as motif in
Antigone, 42, 76; in Electra, 121; Antigone, 70, 73
in Oedipus Rex, 110; in Edmunds, Lowell, 154, 168 nn.1, 2,
Philoctetes, 140, 148; in 169 nn.4, 5, 8
Trachiniae, 88, 92. See also Education, 15, 19, 34
Masks Egypt: Egyptian customs, 158; setting
Craik, Elizabeth M., 151 nn.5, 11 of Euripides’ Helen, 42
Csapo, Eric, and Slater, William J., 47 Ehrenberg, Victor, 80 n.6
nn.1, 9, 12 Eisodos. See Parodos
Ekkuklema, 38, 46, 64, 129
Dactylic hexameter, 144 Eleutheria, 32
d’Angour, Armand, 47 n.13 Ephebe(s), 40, 150
Darius, 20, 21 Ephialtes, 49–50
Davidson, J. F., 133 nn.5, 8, 150 n.2 Epidauros, 44
Delian Confederacy, 21, 49, 67 Epode, 46
Delphi, 8, 9, 10, 51, 56, 60, 100, 101, Eretria, 20
102, 106, 110, 120, 167 Erinyes. See Furies
Demagogues, 115 Eugenes, 62. See also Aristoi
Democracy, 1, 5, 6, 12, 14–16, 19, 47 Eumenides. See Furies
n.2, 49–50, 55, 62, 97, 117, 118, Euripides, general references to, 1, 3,
153, 168, 171–72 32, 34, 35, 38, 44, 98, 116, 118,
Demos, 61; demesman, 159; demotes, 119, 131, 135, 171, 172
75 Euripides, satyr play: Cyclops, 151
Demosthenes, 35, 71 n.7.
Deus ex machina, 37–38, 148 Euripides, tragedies: Antigone, 3;
Didaskalos, 34 Bacchae, 153, 154, 172; Electra,
Dike, 5, 76, 77, 83, 84, 108, 118, 123, 118–19, 131; Helen, 42; Iphigenia
130, 163, 167 in Taurus, 131; Medea, 81; Orestes,
Dingel, Joachim, 48 n.27 3, 131, 132, 133, 153, 154;
Dio Chrysostomus, 135 Philoctetes, 135; Phoenician
Dionysia, City or Great, 2, 8, 13, 15, Women, 3, 37; Rhesus, 1; Trojan
23, 24, 29 n.6, 31, 32, 33, 47 n.2, Women, 116
165; organization of festival, Eusebeia, 9; as motif in Antigone, 67,
31–36 75
Dionysus, 31, 32, 40, 154; theatre of,
37–39, 171 Fitzpatrick, David, 95 n.2
Dithyramb, 22, 31, 33, 39, 47 n.13; 400, Committee of, 117, 141, 146
number in chorus, 15 Freedom: Greek name for, 32; as
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 44 motif in Trachiniae, 83, 86, 88, 89
Dramatis Personae. See Masks Freud, Sigmund, 172
186 Index
Funerals: at Athens, 67–68; relation- Herodotus, 6, 8, 11, 20, 22, 49, 97

ship to marriage, 76 Hesiod, 8
Funeral speeches, 68, 80 n.2 Hesiod works: Catalogue of Women,
Fuqua, Charles, 151 n.3 94; Works and Days, 83
Furies, 24, 118, 155–56, 169 n.4; Hetairai, 40
Erinyes, 155, Erinys, 166; Hipparchus. See Hippias
Eumenides, 155, 157, 160, 166, Hippias and Hipparchus, 13, 19
167; grove of Eumenides as skene Homer, general references to, 2, 3, 8,
of Oedipus at Colonus, 155–56; 12, 13, 34, 49, 119, 172
relationship between Erinyes, Homer works: contrast of Achillean
Eumenides and Semnae, 155–56, and Odyssean characters, 55,
169 n.4; Semnae, 155–56, 167 136–37; Iliad, 2, 6, 51, 52, 54, 55,
136, 141, 144; Odyssey, 2, 50, 54,
Gardiner, Cynthia P., 48 n.26 55, 87, 118, 137, 143
Garvie, A. F., 65 nn.1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, Hoppin, M. Clarke, 151 n.9
13, 14 Hose, M., 150 n.1
Gellie, George, 58, 65 nn.8, 9, 113 n.8 Hubris, 108
Generals. See Strategos Hunningher, B., 48 n.22
Goldhill, Simon, 16 n.1, 47 nn.7, 15, Hypokrites. See Actors
52, 65 n.2
Gorgias, of Leontini, 98. See also Iambic trimeter, 43
Sophists Intertextuality, 52, 111, 132, 158,
Gould, John, 16 n.1, 113 nn.4, 10, 15 162, 163, 165, 166–68
Gouldner, Alvin W., 17 n.6 Ionian revolt, 20
Greek religion, general description of, Isocrates, 27
6–12
Greeks: dialects of, 7; identity of, 6 Jebb, Sir Richard, 113 n.6
Greengard, Carola, 151 n.6 Johnson, Martha, 41, 48 n.17
Griffith, Mark, 29 n.7, 80 nn.3, 8, 9 Jones, John, 48 n.20
Jouan, Francois, 48 n.19
Hades, 9, 59, 75, 76, 89, 143, 144 Judging, at Dionysia, 36
Hall, Edith, 16 n.3
Harmodius and Aristogiton, 13, 125 Kalos, as motif in Electra, 125, 127,
Heinrichs, Albert, 32, 47 n.4, 48 n.24 128, 130
Hellenistic theatres, 26, 38 Kearns, Emily, 166, 169 nn.10, 11
Henderson, Jeffrey, 47 n.15 Knox, Bernard, 30 n.9, 55, 65 n.5, 80
Hera, 143; as tutelary god, 9, 84 n.6, 113 nn.2, 11, 12
Heraclitus, 59, 98 Kommos, 75, 79, 165
Herington, John, 16 n.6, 24, 29 n.4, Komos, 35
45 Kurios, 5, 39–40, 77
Hermes, 128, 139
Hero-cults, 10–11; in Ajax, 64, 65 Law courts, 35, 44, 61, 171. See also
n.4; in Oedipus at Colonus, 164, Agons
166, 168, 169 nn.10, 11 Lefkowitz, Mary, 29 n.1, 169 n.10
Index 187
Lemnos, island of, setting of Meter, varieties of in tragedy, 45. See

Philoctetes, 135 also Dactylic hexameter; Iambic
Lenaea, festival of, 31, 47 n.1 trimeter
Lesbos. See Mytilene Metic(s), 4, 35, 39
Liturgies, 33 Miasma (pollution), 10, 11–12
Lloyd-Jones, Sir Hugh, 96 n.14 Michelini, Ann, 30 n.8
Logos, 16, 99, 102, 104 Miletus. See Phrynichus
Long, A. A., 98, 113 n.1 Mills, Sophie, 169 n.6
Loraux, Nicole, 96 nn.8, 11 Miltiades, 49
Lysander, Spartan general, 153 Minogue, Kenneth, 111, 113 n.14
Monody, 34, 121
MacLeod, Leona, 133 n.3 Moritz, Helen E., 151 n.19
Marathon, 49; battle of, 20 Morris, Pam, 48 n.23
March, Jenny, 133 n.1 Mousike, 15, 19
Mardonius, Persian general, 21 Murray, Gilbert, 30 n.9
Marriage: at Athens, 5; as motif in Muthos, 16
Antigone, 74, 76, 77; as theme in Mycale, battle of, 21
Trachiniae, 81–94, 95–96 n.3. See Myth, function of, 3, 7
also Pericles, Citizenship law Myth as general background of: Ajax,
Marshall, Christopher W., 47 n.16, 96 50–51; Antigone, 68; Electra,
n.12 118–19; Oedipus at Colonus,
Masks: in Ajax, 59, 65; blind and 156–57; Oedipus Rex, 99–100;
kingly masks, 111–12, 168; blind Philoctetes, 135–37
masks, 105, 110, 112, 154, 155, Mytilene, 20, 116
157, 163, 172; Dionysus, as god
of masks, 32, 154; as dramatis Nicias, 5, 33
personae, 42, 155; in Electra, 125, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32, 47 n.4;
126, 127, 128; Greek name for, work, The Birth of Tragedy out of
42; in Oedipus at Colonus, 154, the Spirit of Music, 32
155, 157, 158, 163, 168; in Oedi- Nomos(oi), nomima, 73, 79, 80, 83.
pus Rex, 99, 101–2, 105, 106, See also Unwritten laws
109–10, 111; in Philoctetes, 139,
144, 145; theatrical function, Odeon, 35. See also Proagon
40–44, 47n.16, 48 n.17; in Tra- Oikos: definition of Greek word,
chiniae, 88, 96 n.12 5–6; as theme in Antigone, 67,
Mechane, crane-like device, 37 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77,
Meier, Christian, 59, 66 n.10 78, 79
Melodrama, 130, 137, 151 n.5 Oikos, skene in: Antigone, 68; Elec-
Melos, island of, 116 tra, 119; Oedipus Rex, 100; as
Menander, 34 problem in Trachiniae, 83, 85, 87,
Messenger speeches, 44; as motif in 89, 93–94; Trachiniae, 85
Oedipus Rex, 101 Oligarchs, 13, 117
Metadrama, 124, 137 Olympian gods, 8, 84, 118, 165. See
Metatheatre, 105, 108, 121 also Aphrodite; Apollo; Athena;
188 Index
Hera; Hermes; Poseidon; Religion; Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur W.,

Zeus 169 n.7
Olympic Games, 2, 9, 16, 101 Pisistratids, 12; family of Pisistratus,
Oracles and Prophecy: in Electra, 13. See also Hippias
120, 130; in the Greek world, 9–10; Plague, at Athens, 115; in Oedipus
in Philoctetes, 135, 142; in Tra- Rex, 100
chiniae, 87, 93. See also Delphi Plataea, battle of, 20
Oracles and Prophecy as motif in: Plato, 140, 171–72
Oedipus at Colonus, 156, 158, 159, Plato works: Apology, 150; Crito, 79;
161, 163, 164; Oedipus Rex, 100, Hippias Minor, 55; Laws, 36, 46;
101, 102, 104, 105, 107; prophecy Phaedrus, 27; Republic, indirect
of Teiresias in Antigone, 78. See references to, 150, 172; Sympo-
also Delphi sium, 33
Orchestra, shape of, 38–39. See also Plutarch works: Aratus, 27; Cimon,
skene 11, 25; Moralia, 54; Nicias, 33; de
Ormand, Kirk, 96 n.3 Profectu in Virtute, 24; Solon, 68
Ostracism, 19, 49, 50 Pnyx, meeting-place of Athenian
ecclesia, 39
Padel, Ruth, 30 n.10 Podlecki, Anthony, J., 29 n.3, 47 n.15
Panathenaia, 13 Poe, Joe P., 47 n.14
Parodos: as entrance song of chorus, Polis: in Ajax, 56, 61; as motif in
45–46; as side road leading into Antigone, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73,
orchestra, sometimes called eiso- 74, 75, 78, 79, 80; nature of, 4–6;
dos, 39 as problem in Trachiniae, 83, 85;
Parthenon, 55 relationship to oikos in Electra,
Parthenos, 92, 95 130; territory of, 6
Patterson, Cynthia, 5, 16 n.2 Polites(ai). See Citizens
Peitho. See Persuasion Pollitt, J. J., 22, 29 n.2
Peloponnesian War, 1, 22, 33, 62, 115, Poseidon, 9, 89, 160, 168
135; effect on playwrights, 116 Praxis, 42
Pericles, 2, 33, 40, 80 n.2, 115; citi- Presentational theatre, 41, 48 n.18,
zenship law, 62, 82 126, 160
Persians: as barbaroi, 7, 16 n.3; Per- Proagon, 35
sian empire, 20; Persian Wars, 1–2, Proboulos(oi), 117. See also Sopho-
7, 20–22, 29; psychological effects cles, biographical data
of wars, 21–22 Prophecy. See Oracles
Persuasion, translation of Greek term Prosopon(a). See Masks
peitho, 9; in Electra, 123; in Protagonist. See Actors
Philoctetes, 139, 142, 147; in Tra- Protagoras, of Abdera, 98. See also
chiniae, 90 Sophists
Philoi (friends), 165; as motif in
Antigone, 70, 73, 77 Rehm, Rush, 16 n.6, 95 nn.1, 3, 96 n.15
Phrynichus, 22, 172 Reinhardt, Karl, 113 n.3
Phrynichus works: Capture of Miletus, Religion: chthonic gods, 9; polis
20, 23; Phoenician Women, 23 based, 9, 74; polytheism, 8; terms
Index 189
describing gods, 9, 80, 164. See Sophoclean invention, 22, 25–29,

also Delphi; Hades; Olympian 172
gods; Oracles Slater, William J. See Csapo, Eric
Representational theatre, 41, 48 n.18, Slavery, Athenian, 4, 5, 116; as theme
59 in Trachiniae, 83, 86, 89, 94
Rhapsode, 13 Smethurst, Mae J., 30 n.8
Rheseis, 44 Socrates, 6, 9, 15, 33, 79, 150, 153
Rhetoric, 97, 140 Solon, 2, 13, 68
Riddles. See Sphinx Sophists, 97, 98, 139, 151 n.11
Ringer, Mark, 133 n.4, 140, 151 Sophocles: Ancient Life of, 67; bio-
nn.12, 17, 169 n.3 graphical data, 19, 67, 117; dra-
Robert, F., 66 n.12 matic career, 22, 23; general
Rose, Peter W., 151 n.11 references to, 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12,
20, 24, 32, 35, 36, 37, 44, 171, 172;
Salamis, 49, 60; battle of, 21; in Ajax, theatrical innovations, 25–29
54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60 Sophocles fragments, 80, 82
Samos, revolt of island of, 67 Sophocles tragedies: Ajax, 11, 38, 39,
Sardis, 20 49–66, Antigone, 43, 67–80, 91,
Satyr play, 23, 24, 36, 51 n.7, 137 111, 164; dating of, 117, 131–33,
Scullion, Scott, 29 n.6, 80 n.1 133 n.1; Electra, 34, 115–33, 137,
Scyros, island of, 11 138, 139, 140, 148, Oedipus at
Seaford, Richard, 47 n.3, 95 n.3 Colonus, 3, 11, 25, 46, 112, 148,
Seale, David, 88, 96 n.10, 151 n.13 153–69; Oedipus Rex, 3, 10, 26,
Sebas, 9, 67, 75. See also Asebeia; 28, 29, 43, 45, 97–113, 149, 158,
Eusebeia 159, 164; Philoctetes, 28, 38, 132,
Segal, Charles, 48 n.27, 80 n.10, 83, 135–51, 156; staging of suicide,
95 n.3, 96 nn.5, 6, 133 n.3 64–66; Tereus, 82; Trachiniae,
Semnae. See Furies 81–96, 165
Shakespeare, William, 42; work, Sophos, sophisma, as motif in
Macbeth, 10 Philoctetes, 139–40, 146
Sicily, 97, 98; Sicilian expedition, Sophrosyne, as motif in Ajax, 60, 62
116–17 Souvrinou-Inwood, Christiane, 16
Skene, function of and relationship to: n.4, 70, 80 n.4
audience, 39–40; orchestra, 37–39; Sparta, 12, 21, 49, 50, 115, 117, 153
physical description of, 26, 37–38; Spectacle, 46
skenographia, 26–29 Sphinx and riddle of, 28, 99, 100,
Skene as backdrop of: Ajax, 51–53, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111
60; Antigone, 68–69; Electra, 119; Stage props, 46, 48 n.27; in Ajax, 56;
Oedipus at Colonus, 155, 164; Electra, 120, 126–27, 129, 131,
Oedipus Rex, 100; Philoctetes, 132; Oedipus at Colonus, 156, 158;
137–38; Trachiniae, 85 Oedipus Rex, 110; Philoctetes,
Skenographia, definition of, 26–29; as 142, 144; Trachiniae, 90, 91–92
term of Aristotle, 22, 25, 26 Stasimon(a), defined, 45–46
Skenographia as used in: Antigone, Stasis, 5, 68
71; Oedipus at Colonus, 155; as Stichomythia, defined, 43
190 Index
Strabo, 27 Tragoidos. See Actors

Strategia, office of general. See Strat- Trittyes, divisions of Attica, 14
egos Tyrannus, tyrannis, tyranna. See
Strategos(oi), 8, 14, 35, 49; in Ajax, Tyranny
57, 61, 64; Antigone, 69; in Elec- Tyranny and tyrants, 12–13, 19, 22,
tra, 119, 129; Sophocles as, 67 23, 153; in Antigone, 78; in Oedi-
Strophe, 46 pus at Colonus, 158, 161; as theme
Surprise, in: Ajax, 58; Antigone, 72; in Oedipus Rex, 102, 103, 104,
Electra, 121–22, 123, 124, 128, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111
130; Oedipus at Colonus, 156, 158; Tyrrell, Wm. Blake, and Bennett,
Philoctetes, 141, 148, 151 n.13 Larry J., 76, 80 nn.2, 7
Syracuse, 116
Unwritten laws, 12; in Antigone, 73,
Taplin, Oliver, 30 n.11, 87, 96 n.9, 80 n.6
113 n.7, 151 n.18 Ussher, Robert G., 151 n.14
Tarrant, R. J., 151 n.16
Ta theia. See Religion Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 99, 113 n.5
Techne, 129
Tegeans, 11 Walcot, Peter, 37, 47 nn.8, 10
Theates, 154 War, as part of Greek way of life, 6.
Theatre: at Athens, 15, 16, 26, 29, 31, See also Peloponnesian War;
47; in Greek world, 2. See also Persians
Dionysia, City; Dionysus, theatre Wedding. See Marriage
of; Hellenistic theatres Wilson, Joseph P., 168, n.1, 169 n.5
Theatre audience, 39–40, 45 Wilson, Peter, 47 nn.5, 6
Thebes, 21, 24, 27, 156; as setting of Winnington-Ingram, R. P., 29 n.5, 133
Antigone, 68; Oedipus Rex, 100 n.3
Themistocles, 21, 33, 49, 68 Wohl, Victoria, 95 n.3, 96 n.15
Theorikon, 40 Women: Athenian, 4; attendance at
Thermopylae, battle of, 21 theatre, 39. See also Hetairai; Mar-
Thespis, 22, 23, 31 riage; Parthenos
Thirty Tyrants, 153 Woodard, Thomas M., 133 n.6
Thucydides, historian, 2, 5, 22, 70, 80
n.2, 115, 117; opponent of Pericles, Xenos(oi), xenia, 12; as motif in
5, 50 Philoctetes, 140, 143, 144, 147
Time, 55, 67 Xerxes, king of Persia, 21
Tragedy, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
16, 20, 22, 23–24, 25, 26, 27, 28, Zeus, 8, 10, 12, 73, 89, 94, 143,
29, 31–48. See also Aeschylus; 145, 148, 160, 163, 165; impor-
Agathon; Euripides; Phrynichus; tance as father of Heracles in Tra-
Sophocles chiniae, 84–85. See also Olympian
Tragoididaskalos, meaning of, 34 gods
About the Author
JOSH BEER is an Associate Professor of Classics in the College of

Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He represented Carleton
University on the Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans (CAFAD) from
1983-1989, serving as Secretary Treasurer from 1987–1989.
Recent Titles in
Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies
Actor as Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Devil, and the Boy Rosalind
Lesley Wade Soule
Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem
Diana Price
The Glamour of Grammar: Orality and Politics and the Emergence of Sean
O’Casey
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North of Ireland, 1969–1994
Bernard McKenna

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SOPHOCLES AND

Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 105

The paper used in this book complies with the

Series Foreword vii

Lives of the Theatre is designed to provide scholarly introductions to

mance of Euripides’ Bacchae on video to remind myself that the characters

continue to ﬂourish under tyrants or oligarchs in the same way as it did

Date Sophocles Cultural Events Political Events

c. 500 Construction of ﬁrst

472 Aeschylus wins tragic

449–440? Production of Ajax and Prize introduced Peace made

Tragedy, Athens, and the

What is commonly known as Greek tragedy is sometimes more precisely

below), this was, in a sense, secondary. As Thucydides has the Athenian

prayer, the construction of an altar or temple, or the holding of a festival)

(Delphi in particular) came to occupy such an important place in the Greek

around his supposed grave. I say “supposed” purposely, because, in most

subject of two of Sophocles’ surviving seven tragedies, is the most famous

We cannot be sure what Cleisthenes’ ultimate intentions were in institut-

competitive aspect no doubt helped to cement loyalty to the new tribes.

Tragic Theatre (London, 1992), 3–11, on performance culture. Jacob Burckhardt

Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings

Cleisthenes himself or was introduced a little later, it was instituted as a

The Persian threat, however, was by no means over. In the following

after the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes, but he had to wait about 15

Such now familiar heroic themes occupied scarcely a quarter of Aeschylus’

Although none survive, in later times, Aeschylus was recognized as the

sometimes there could be a change of dramatic location during the action

8. On the dramatic technique of the Persians, see A. Michelini, Tradition and

At Athens, the dramatic festivals were held in honor of Dionysus.

dithyrambic, tragic, or comic—should be seen as a part of a showcase pre-

important performative aspects. As in so much else we have been consider-

in airborne, hence the Latin expression deus ex machina. On the surviving

constructed with the dithyrambs in mind, a fully circular orchestra would

Although the mask precluded what is an essential part of the modern

Furthermore, unlike in modern representational theatre, there was not the

In the relationship between individual and group, the individual stands

17. M. Johnson, “Reﬂections of Inner Life: Masks and Masked Acting in

summarily dismissed the Athenian expeditionary force. In the ensuing

Of the surviving tragedies of Sophocles, Ajax is the most heavily influ-

are nothing but wraiths or a frail shadow” (125–26). Athena warns

The aristocratic viewpoint in Greek literature . . . is Achillean, an ideal of

Oh famous Salamis, blessed sea-swept island, distinguished for ever in all

the goddess’ bitter anger, because he revealed a total lack of sophrosyne

O light, o hallowed ground of my native Salamis, deep-rooted ancestral

or an army—cannot be reconciled. It is left to Odysseus, well schooled in

Although Agamemnon yields to Odysseus’ entreaties, it is only out of his

APPENDIX: THE SUICIDE OF AJAX

12. F. Robert, “Sophocle, Périclès, Hérodote et la date d’Ajax,” Revue de

In 443–42, Sophocles served as treasurer of the Delian Confederacy. It

As is commonly pointed out, Ismene serves as a dramatic foil to Antigone.

Kreon’s speech expressing these sentiments (175–90) was quoted with

sententious seriousness of Creon’s preceding speech. Afraid of Creon’s

This speech of Antigone might be taken as a general appeal to some higher

Creon’s character as if he were a fully constructed psychological being in

The chorus offers little consolation to Antigone as she is about to go to her

gods. However, there were also other nomima (customary observances) of

If tragedy provides a register of society’s problems, marriage was a source

It has often been suggested that Euripides’ Medea should be interpreted

Although we cannot be sure how Sophocles handled the plot, we do know

show a verbal reminiscence of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, there is no obvi-

denly addresses Deianeira at line 49. Trachiniae begins with a monologue,

Oliver Taplin includes Trachiniae in what he terms nostos plays9—that