Professor Bernard Knox, in The heroic temper, has studied Sophoclean heroes with great skill and, largely by a careful examination of the language which they use and which is used of them, has brought out a number of characteristics which they tend to share in common. ‘Such’, he writes (op. cit. 44), ‘is the strange and awesome character who, in six of the Sophoclean tragedies, commands the stage. Immovable once his decision is taken, deaf to appeals and persuasion, to reproof and threat, unterrified by physical violence, even by the ultimate violence of death itself, more stubborn as his isolation increases until he has no one to speak to but the unfeeling landscape, bitter at the disrespect and mockery the world levels at what it regards as failure, the hero prays for vengeance and curses his enemies as he welcomes the death that is the predictable end of his intransigence.’ These characteristics are displayed in a situation and in relation to other people; and therefore what the heroes do and suffer throws light not only upon them but upon a world – their world and perhaps the world. If the world, governed by the gods, is one and the same, their worlds – their circumstances and companions – differ so widely that, similar as their reactions may be in some fundamental respects, generalization becomes hazardous. Sophocles was, after all, writing individual plays on specific subjects, not a series of exemplifications of heroic character, though his handling of heroic character was partly determined by a certain – and, it seems, a remarkably stable – view of the world.