So many thousands of scholars have written so many millions of words on Sophocles that one might be forgiven for concluding that there is little prospect of anything valuably new being said. But in fact during the last thirty years our appreciation of this dramatist has been considerably deepened and enriched. It is not that there has been (as with, say, Menander) a great increase in the quantity of material available: nothing of comparable length has turned up since the fragmentary Ichneutae discovered near the beginning of this century, so that as ever we must fall back on the seven fully extant tragedies. Yet, as will be evident from the chapters which follow, scholars have been engaged in a genuinely fruitful debate about the issues at stake in the plays.

Although the career of Sophocles overlapped in its earlier years with that of Aeschylus and later on with that of Euripides, it is very hard to avoid over-simplifying the development of fifth-century tragedy into a progression from Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripides. The same simplification is found amongst ancient critics, for whom Sophocles is ‘the middle one’ in ways which go beyond mere chronology. Thus Dio Chrysostom (first/early-second century A.D.) in his comparison of the three tragedians’ versions of the Philoctetes story says of Sophocles that ‘he seems to stand midway between the two others, since he has neither the ruggedness and simplicity of Aeschylus nor the precision and shrewdness and urbanity of Euripides, yet he produces a poetry that is august and majestic (σϵμνήν δέ τινα καί μϵγαλοπρϵπἢ ποίησιν), highly tragic and euphonious in its phrasing, so that there is the fullest pleasure coupled with sublimity and Stateliness (μϵτἁ ὕψους καί σϵμνότητος)’ Approximately a century earlier the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus also found a ‘middle’ quality in Sophocles’ style: between the ‘austere’ (Pindar, Aeschylus, Thucydides, etc.) and the ‘smooth’ (Sappho, Euripides, Isocrates, etc.) he located the intermediate, ‘well-blended’ (ϵὔκρατος) mode of composition, including Sophocles as well as Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and others. Of this intermediate style Dionysius says he is at a loss to decide ‘whether it is produced by excluding the extremes or by blending them’; but it is at any rate clear that it is defined principally by reference to what it is not.

The idea that what happens on stage in a Sophoclean play should be interpreted above all in the light of the motives and intentions of the individual characters has had and continues to have widespread support. In the words of one critic who adopted such a character-oriented approach, ‘Sophocles differs from the other two tragedians in directing his whole technique to the presentation of one or at most two great figures’. But in recent years the notion of ‘character’ has come under increasingly critical scrutiny. In this chapter we shall examine some of the issues involved.

When we describe a work as ‘tragic’, one of the things we may imply is that in it human conduct is presented in counterpoint with forces beyond mankind’s control. In Greek tragedy this metaphysical dimension is supplied not by fate (a concept pretty well irrelevant to Greek tragedy) but by the purposes and actions of the gods. To a greater or lesser extent all Sophocles’ plays incorporate these purposes and actions as part of the drama. However, although there is general agreement that divine-human relations constitute an area crucial for our understanding of Sophocles, critics differ widely over how to interpret those relations.

Though lacking the pre-eminence which it apparently had earlier in the development of tragic drama, the chorus remained a central element in the plays of Sophocles. We find in his works, as in those of Aeschylus and Euripides, that counterpoint between heroes and chorus which is a major aspect of the doubleness of Greek tragedy. The fates of Oedipus, Ajax, Heracles, and the rest are not private or claustrophobic (contrast Seneca); on the contrary, they are played out in public, before groups of ordinary people. These groups, again as in the other tragedians, are socially or politically marginal: women (Elec., Trach.), old men (Ant., Oed. Col., Oed. Tyr.), subordinates (Ajax, Phil.). The identity of the groups, far from being a matter of indifference, may materially affect the way in which the plot of the drama is inflected. We know from Dio Chrysostom (Or. 52.15) that, whereas Sophocles’ chorus comprised sailors who had come along with Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Aeschylus and Euripides brought on a chorus of inhabitants of Lemnos. It can hardly be doubted that in choosing as he did Sophocles intended to emphasize Philoctetes’ utter isolation.

In what follows I shall look either at competing interpretations of an entire play, or at a more specific issue or issues – whichever seems the more useful in a given case. The works are ordered alphabetically.

Ajax

Sometimes a problem arouses so much interest that the criticism relating to it becomes self-perpetuating. This has happened with the ‘deception speech’ (646-92), now the object of a minor industry. But in spite of the conflicting advice one can make some progress.