We shall all die, at a moment unknown and in circumstances no one can foresee: this is the ultimate dispensation. The Greeks, at some early stage in their thinking about the world, came to conceive of powers which they called Moirai. If these were spirits who presided over birth as well as determining death, it is not hard to see why. The individual comes to birth with an apportionment (a moira) of life, and nothing is more striking in the lot of human beings than the difference in their life-spans and the unpredictability of their deaths. There must be some power or powers which determine these things: not only birth and death but the events of life, particularly perhaps those which are dramatic and disastrous and lead towards death. The history of such beliefs and feelings is notoriously complex and debated. There is much evidence in Homer and Hesiod, but behind the poets a long tradition will have led back into the early history of the race and related races. When did cults of the Moirai originate? When did the singular moira acquire a degree of personification and approach the notion of a generalized power of destiny? These and many other questions are not very important for our study, since it is clear that the dramatists had inherited a whole cluster of conceptions which were available to their use, including the plural Moirai, a singular Moira with personification and an unpersonified moira (a fate). What they have in common is the suggestion of something inevitable, something that ‘has to be’, that is ‘bound to happen’.

The Second Stasimon holds a central position in Oedipus Tyrannus. It follows the elaborate preparatory scenes and immediately precedes the rapid march of the action towards its catastrophe. The ode is difficult to understand and has been variously interpreted.

We expect a Sophoclean Chorus to react to the preceding episode; and the themes of this ode are indeed related to the long scene that has just been played. Interpreters are not agreed, however, on the precise character of this relationship, except in one particular. It is abundantly clear that the fourth stanza (898–910) relates to the scepticism on the subject of oracles and prophecy which was expressed by Jocasta at the end of the preceding scene. The concern of the Chorus arises, however, not so much from the fact that she expresses a sceptical view which might be thought shocking as from the grounds on which her view was based. On the face of it, and on the facts as stated, an oracle given by Loxias at Delphi has failed, once and for all, to be fulfilled. They feel that, unless facts and prophecy are shown to be in full agreement, this will be the end of oracular authority and the end of religion (if that is how we should translate τὰ θ∈ῖα); and they pray to Zeus the supreme king to give the matter his attention. It is the facts – the apparent facts – that cause their concern. But, when in the first stanza they sing about reverent purity of word as well as of deed, it is commonly – and I think rightly – held that they have in mind, among other things, the impious words of Jocasta.

The Electra of Sophocles might be thought to prove the impossibility of objective literary criticism: so diverse are the interpretations to which it has given rise. The greatest divergence of opinion concerns the poet's attitude towards the matricidal vengeance. At one extreme we have a robust ‘Homeric’ Sophocles, untroubled by the moral squeamishness of an Aeschylus, and at the other an Aeschylean sensitiveness to the moral implications of the vengeance and a presumption that the Furies are only waiting for the play to end to initiate their traditional pursuit of Orestes. Critics are also divided between those who regard the moral and religious issue as central to the play and those for whom it is either absent or peripheral – incidental, one might say, to an essentially psychological drama. But even here, there is no agreement: for one critic Electra goes mad, for another she reaches the height of human arete.

I start from a fact which will hardly be contested: that Electra is full of reminiscences of the Choephori, which must mean that Sophocles wrote his play with the Oresteia constantly in mind. Now it is of course a substantial point of difference between Sophocles, on the one hand, and on the other Aeschylus (and Euripides and the tradition as a whole), that there is nothing in Sophocles about a pursuit of Orestes by the Erinyes of his mother. He is accordingly said to have ‘omitted the Furies’. This is not literally true. The word Erinys occurs four times in the play.