Only a minority of the extant plays of Sophocles can be firmly dated, which is tiresome. Ajax, with which we have opened, may well be, but is not certainly, the earliest; Antigone must have preceded 440 B.C. by a year or two. Trachiniae, though it cannot be placed in relation to either of those plays, probably belongs, more or less, to the same creative period; and there is a convenience in taking it next. It shares with Antigone an important Sophoclean interest, often neglected, upon which Trachiniae throws a light which helps the interpretation of the other play. It shares with Ajax the phenomenon of a formidable male hero. If Ajax stood alone in the theatre of Sophocles, one might hesitate to find such repellent aspects in him. If, however, he is – apart from Theseus – the greatest of heroes with Athenian connections, there was a pan-Hellenic hero who might seem the very paradigm of heroism; and if we find some degree of kinship between Ajax and Heracles – a similar combination of great and repellent qualities – it may serve to confirm the view which has been taken of Ajax in preceding chapters.

Throughout in Sophocles the heroes, their nature and their fates, stand in a problematic relationship to the gods, with whom Ajax put himself in the wrong from the start. If it is true that the gods love the ‘moderate’, they cannot love Ajax and he is bound to destroy himself by his excesses.

Of the seven extant plays two only have firm production-dates: Philoctetes was produced in 409, Oedipus Coloneus (posthumously) in 401. Antigone is said to have been responsible for Sophocles' election as general in 440, which, true or false, would not have been said unless the play was known to have been produced shortly before that date. The chronology of the four remaining plays is disputed. The following notes aim only to set out, without much argument, the assumptions made in the foregoing discussions. For fuller treatment of these complex matters the reader is referred to standard editions of the plays, to Lesky, TD, and to specialized monographs, some of which are mentioned below.

Ajax. This has often been assumed, on inconclusive grounds, to be the earliest extant play. There are, however, stylistic and technical reasons for placing it relatively early. I say relatively, since Sophocles first produced in 468, and there is no good ground for supposing that any of the extant plays belongs to the earliest period of his work.

Trachiniae. The dating is highly controversial, but recent opinion concurs in placing it early rather than late, cf. Kamerbeek 27–9; Lesky, TD 118–20; Johansen, Lustrum 257f.; Segal, YCS 103 n. 18. ‘Der Bau des Stückes schliesst eine Spätdatierung aus’ (Lesky); and one may observe the collocation of long speeches, with little or no dialogue, in the centre of this play (749–812, 899–946, 1046–1111) as of Ajax (646–92, 748–83, 815–65). Metrical evidence also seems to exclude a late dating dating.

The authenticity of P.V. has long been under suspicion. A careful and unprejudiced examination of this problem by Mark Griffith (The authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’, Cambridge 1977)–and particularly the metrical evidence which he adduces – has made it hard to believe any longer in its Aeschylean authorship. Whoever wrote it, it remains, however, an important document closely related to Aeschylean thought; and it contains a passage closely relevant to the themes discussed in chapter 7.

Prometheus, rebellious against Zeus, has said (103ff.) that he must bear his fated destiny (τὴν π∈πρωνην αἶσαν) as easily as he can, recognizing that the force of ananke is irresistible. At 511ff., in reply to the facile optimism of the friendly Chorus, he states that his release from bondage is not predestined until he has suffered a myriad torments.

A full analysis of all the trains of thought and emotion, of all the aesthetic relationships, in this subtle kommos would be lengthy and difficult. I wish only to pick out certain features, particularly those which seem to reflect the Aeschylean background.

The main theme of the first two stanzas (121–52) is Electra and her excessive lamentation, the Chorus' appeal to her to be moderate (which is to say not Electra, not heroic, not tragic).

After the death of Achilles his arms were awarded not to Ajax, who thought them his due, but to Odysseus. Ajax nursed his injured pride and then went out by night to avenge himself upon Odysseus and the Atridae and all the Greeks who had insulted him. But Athena, the patron of Odysseus, sent a mad delusion upon him so that he wreaked his vengeance upon flocks and herds, taking animals for men. Some he killed, but the ram he thought to be Odysseus was reserved for torture. When he came to his senses and realized what he had done, he saw nothing for it but to take his own life. The Atridae then forbade him to be buried. Despite the protests of his brother Teucer, this inhuman decree would have been carried out, if it had not been for the generosity of Odysseus who secured his burial.

That, in broad outline, is the story told in the Ajax of Sophocles. It has its revolting aspects and the main character is, on the bare facts as stated, neither attractive nor laudable. If the grimness is offset by the pathos of Tecmessa, by the loyalty of Teucer perhaps, and certainly by the generosity of Odysseus, Ajax, on the other hand, seems to earn his disastrous fate by his own conduct. Towards the gods he is arrogant; towards men he is treacherous and cruel, going out by night to attack and kill the Greeks, torturing a ram in the belief that it was Odysseus. Yet the interpretation of the play and of its central figure is vexed.

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.

There is no mention of an Erinys or Erinyes in Oedipus Tyrannus. Should we find this surprising? True that the curse of Oedipus upon his sons which evoked an Erinys in Septem does not enter, even by hint or inference, into this play. Yet Oedipus was a doomed man under threat in consequence of a breach, if an unwitting breach, of the law governing the relationship between parents and children. He had killed his father; and, apart from matricide, it is hard to imagine an act more likely to evoke an Erinys than parricide. But Apollo is the only specific divine power that seems to be concerned with the pursuit of Oedipus. For this absence of Erinyes there could be a reason not unconnected with the way in which the concept of moira is introduced into the play. We have already made the acquaintance of Erinyes as punitive agencies closely associated with moira and the Moirai. This was one way – and an Aeschylean way – of regarding moira. In the Tyrannus, however, Sophocles wished to concentrate upon the individual destiny of the hero, upon his unaccountable fate, rather than upon an ineluctable chain of consequences through which, from generation to generation, Erinyes punish breaches of the divine order. It is for this reason that he is unemphatic, if not ambiguous, about the responsibility of Laius; that he ends his play with Oedipus still in Thebes, his exile still undetermined, and with virtually no mention of the sons who will wrong him and be cursed.

Having heard Neoptolemus' narrative of his supposed wrongs, Philoctetes is led to enquire after a number of eminent Greeks. It emerges that the ‘good’ are dead (or powerless), only the ‘bad’ survive. Great significance has been attached to this passage by some interpreters, who use it to explain, in part, the refusal of Philoctetes to go to Troy. The true heroes, they say, have departed leaving a corrupt world with which a Philoctetes cannot bear to be associated. Cf. 1348ff. (on which see pp. 296f. above). But can the episode really carry this weight of interpretation? It is worth considering who, precisely, are the living and the dead in question.

First, then, for the living bad. They are Odysseus: and who else? The sequence of names is as follows: Diomede and Odysseus (416f.), Odysseus (429f), Odysseus (441) – but no, it is Thersites (442)! Diomede, who is on the whole an attractive character in the Iliad, is introduced, very briefly, as known to have been associated with Odysseus in more than one crafty action (and possibly with a cross-reference to the Philoctetes of Euripides). The function of Thersites is simply and solely to provide the crowning insult. The Aithiopis story is beside the point: what an educated man in the audience would remember was Iliad 2 (Jebb refers to 212, 222) and how Thersites for speaking out of place was soundly thrashed by Odysseus!

By contrast, the good are dead, or, in the case of Nestor, powerless. Philoctetes selects for enquiry those who might have been expected to protect Neoptolemus against his (non-existent) injury.

In Trachiniae, at a critical point in the action, Sophocles has placed an ode (497ff.) which celebrates the invincible power of love, or lust. It is prompted by Lichas' revelation (488f.) that Heracles, champion in all else by the might of his hands, has been utterly worsted by his love for Iole. It is also prepared by the words of Deianira, that it is ill fighting against the gods (492), which is what in effect, with a fatal weapon, she will try to do. in the event both she and Heracles are defeated and destroyed, leaving Kypris sole victor on the field. There is a more famous ode upon this subject in another play. If Deianira uses the verb dusmachein, the Chorus of Antigone calls Aphrodite amachos; if the women of Trachis sing that Kypris ever wins the victory, the Theban elders address Eros as unconquered, or unconquerable, in battle.

Aphrodite, or Kypris, as a goddess fit for tragedy we know well from Euripides' Hippolytus; Sophocles' Phaedra which preceded it was a famous play. Curiously enough, however, in general discussions of the divine world of Sophocles and its impact upon his heroes, we read little about this goddess. Consult the indexes of standard works, and you will find few entries under Aphrodite, Kypris, Eros, love, lust, or sex. It may be that this theme did not fit some preconceived notion of what ought to have interested Sophocles.

A play of extraordinary brilliance and power, Philoctetes is here taken outside the chronological order, in which it lies between Electra and the Coloneus. There were special reasons for taking those two plays together. Are there features which, as some feel, separate Philoctetes from other extant plays of Sophocles? After all, if (unlike Electra and the Coloneus) the play has no Erinyes, yet the lasting effects of a cruel act are displayed. There is a hero who shares many characteristics with other Sophoclean heroes; the pathos – and the rhetoric – are unsurpassed; there is human pity, and irony, and other Sophoclean themes in plenty. If the ending is ‘happy’, so in some strange sense are the endings of Electra and the Coloneus, though it may be remarked that here the final solution is not marred by an ambivalent matricide or a parental curse. The absence of death and disaster from the outcome do not necessarily deprive the play of tragic quality, though they affect its tone.

Odysseus, and with him the young Neoptolemus, have been sent to bring Philoctetes to Troy. Philoctetes, inheritor of Heracles' infallible bow, had been jettisoned by the Greeks ten years before upon the desert island of Lemnos, but a prophetic utterance has now revealed that his presence is necessary if Troy is to be captured. How is he to be brought? By force? By persuasion? By craft? Odysseus, for good reasons, opts for craft and enlists the services of Neoptolemus. But is it Philoctetes who is needed or merely the bow? What did the prophet say? While Philoctetes holds the bow, the question is academic, since the bow cannot come without its owner.

Words of locality are frequent in the opening scene. The matter is first raised in if., with the twofold enquiry of Oedipus: what places (χώρoνσ), what city of men? This is answered, in reverse order, by Antigone at 14ff.: the city afar, which she knows to be Athens (24), and the χῶρoς (16, 24) which she only knows to be holy.

With the suicide of Ajax something has reached completion, not only an action but the revelation of a mind which accounts for that action. The play begins again, with a new Parodos. The Chorus re-enters in two groups, searching; and the scene has justly been compared with the searchings of Odysseus at the beginning of the play. What was Odysseus looking for, and what did he find? He was looking, as ever – so Athena says – for some way to get at his enemies: what he found was an object-lesson in the frailty of human fortunes, he found Ajax in an aspect with which he had not reckoned. With the suicide this lesson is complete. The Chorus and Tecmessa lament. Something is over, but something is about to begin. Enter Teucer: a new character, a new tracker (997), brought by a new phatis (978), a new baxis (998); and his entry leads into a new issue. Ajax must be buried; and upon the burial of Ajax the whole of the remainder of the play turns.

It is an old problem. Does, or does not, interest go out of the play with the death of Ajax? Not, perhaps, if we use our eyes and see the corpse, with a child and a woman in attendance; not, perhaps, if we use our imaginations to enter into a Greek preoccupation (which we are, oddly, supposed not to share) with the disposal of a dead body. Sophocles was fully competent to maintain the interest and wrote scenes which are effective even upon the modern stage.

The main function of criticism is the interpretation of individual works of art; and it is a primary concern of this book, by detailed study, to interpret the seven extant tragedies of Sophocles, each in its own unique form, quality and theme. Amid their variety, however, resides an elusive unity. Sophocles being a dramatist whose mind and vision are characteristic and, throughout a long career, remarkably consistent. ‘Sophoclean’ is not an empty term, hard as it may be to define, controversial as the tragic vision of this tragedian may be. It is, therefore, my further aim to inject some (more or less) new ideas or emphases into the general criticism of the author. This double aim has determined the form, in some ways unusual, of the book.

It is addressed, primarily, to those who are already familiar with the plays, but this does not mean classical scholars only. Except for footnotes, virtually all Greek is translated or paraphrased or, in the case of some words having thematic importance, transliterated. The classical scholar will demand, rightly, that the problems of a difficult text be faced: they are generally discussed in the footnotes which proliferate, and which the non-specialist will, rightly, disregard. The detailed arguments in the main body of the work will need no apology for those who agree that interpretation must be closely based upon the actual words of the poet.

I have read fairly widely in the modern critical literature of this author, but cannot claim to have covered its vast range. I cite liberally in footnotes works where some point of view receives cogent expression, but there may be many unacknowledged debts.

Interest in Sophocles is unabating. If it was marked in the periods which followed the two world wars, yet now, when the second war has been over for more than thirty years, books and articles on Sophocles still flow from the presses. There is clearly a fascination here – a sense of relevance, if one may use a modish word. From all this scholarly and critical activity – and much of it has been of quality – one ought not to expect or even desire that a consensus should emerge any more than from the critical study of Shakespeare. The range of opinion, however, has been and still is fantastically wide. There are orthodoxies and dogmas, but they conflict. There is conflict over the interpretation of individual tragedies and over the tragic thought of Sophocles in general.

A complete survey would be tedious. We have been asked to look at Sophocles in many different guises: the virtuoso playwright, unconcerned with ideas or consistency or character; the portraitist; a Homeric, or aristocratic, or conservative, Sophocles turning his back on the contemporary world or confronting it with paradigms of a lost heroism; a pious Sophocles, the outcome of whose plays must always reflect well upon the gods; an acceptant Sophocles, but also, by contrast, one whose heroes rightly arraign the gods. On the critical stage they have had their entrances and their exits and their reappearances with a change of mask and costume; and we seem to look in vain for the face behind the mask.

To take the eros-theme, as we have done, and examine it more or less in isolation from the rest of Antigone, gives a distorted impression of the play as a whole. It is only one figure in the pattern, though perhaps a more important one than has generally been recognized. But where does its importance lie? Haemon was in love and acted tragically under the influence of Aphrodite's power, but he is a minor character; if Antigone was in love, her tragic action was otherwise determined. I have argued above that the theme bears most significantly upon a Creon who set himself to fight against that unconquerable force who is amachos. And the persistence of this theme in the second half of the play might lead us to regard Creon as the central character. Creon or Antigone? This is one of the issues upon which interpreters have been divided.

Antigone is a singularly difficult play to understand. Which is strange, since it makes a universal appeal and has probably been acted in modern times more frequently and more successfully than any other Greek tragedy. Some might say that we make the difficulties for ourselves by seeking more in the play than Sophocles was minded to put into it, though I doubt if this is true. Certainly the divergence of critical opinion has been extreme, with the currents surging this way and that. There is of course an easy way of interpreting Antigone, as there is of interpreting Ajax. We can interpret them both as essentially Aeschylean tragedies of the punishment of hubris – in Antigone the hubris of Creon.

There are features in Lichas' narrative which are extremely obscure; and it is not enough to say that we ought not to demand complete clarity from an embarrassed liar. It has long been recognized that what is impossibly obscure to us may have been relatively clear to the original audience or to a large section of it. What sources of information could Sophocles count on their knowing? The epic Oἰχαλíας ἅλωσις, no doubt. Panyassis' epic on Heracles? Sophocles himself may well have known this, if only through Herodotus, but one cannot assume that it was widely known in Athens. The notion that a recent stage treatment, e.g. the Eurytidae of Ion, lies behind the passage is attractive (cf. T. B. L. Webster, Hermes 71 (1936) 267), but neither Ion's tragedy nor his satyric Omphale can be dated. Since none of these sources is available to us, it is perhaps hardly worth speculating.

The basic lie of Lichas is about motives, not about facts. Heracles was thrown out when drunk (Lichas would never have invented so discreditable a story); he did kill Iphitus and was in servitude to Omphale – both traditional features. But (351ff.) it was not his servitude to Omphale in Lydia, i.e. his resentment of it, nor the death of Iphitus which led to it, that motivated his attack upon Oechalia, but his passion for Iole. When was that passion conceived?

The Messenger tells us, i.e. Lichas had said, that Heracles asked for Iole as a concubine (359f.), unsuccessfully. When? Hardly subsequent to the events of 262ff., including the slaying of Iphitus.