The monstrous river-god Achelous wooing a tender maiden and defeated amid the crash of fist and horn; the ‘beast-man’ killed in the river; the poisonous blood of the Centaur mingled with the venom of the Hydra; the tuft of wool flaring up and crumbling ominously in the sunlight; the hideous sufferings of the great hero Heracles as the venom, heated by the sacrificial fires and his own sweat as he slaughters bulls, seeps into his flesh – this is the mythical stuff of which Sophocles made his Trachiniae. These elements are not merely pieces of decorative vignettes or ‘sensational tableaux’. They are essential elements in one of the boldest and most powerful creations of Greek dramatic poetry. And yet the failure to take these mythical elements and the imagery which surrounds them at full seriousness has led to misunderstanding and undervaluation of this great play.

No other extant Sophoclean play makes use of such intractable mythical material and faces such a gulf between the characters as human beings and the characters as symbolic figures. This gulf creates much of the difficulty of modern response to the play. Sophocles draws Deianeira's domestic tragedy with the fullness and naturalism appropriate to the developed sensibilities of the civilized realm where she belongs, whereas Heracles never emerges entirely from the remote mythology and from the ancient powers of nature which he vanquishes.

This drama, severely criticized years ago by A. W. Schlegel, is, in spite of its apparently simple structure, one of the most problematic of the extant plays. There is a correspondingly large amount of secondary literature, and since there is such a thorough bibliographical survey of this secondary literature in the works by G. Zuntz and R. Guerrini mentioned below, a reference to them here will suffice. There are, however, two inquiries in particular which, we feel, serve, in their radically opposite positions, as the standard-bearers of the much debated issues. Both modified previously extant theses, but they did so in such an impressive way that anyone who wishes to approach the questions anew must begin with them.

One of these inquiries is the ‘Exkurse zu Euripides Herakliden’, which Wilamowitz wrote in his Greifswald period and which he adhered to in essence throughout his work. Long before him, G. Hermann assumed that the Heraclidae had been shortened by the loss of one episode, which he conjectured came at the end of the play. It was an important step when A. Kirchoff decided that this loss occurred inside the play after line 629. But while both scholars suspected an accidental lacuna, Wilamowitz showed that such a precisely circumscribed damage could not conceivably have come about by chance. He argued that the drama had been revised, and that in the revision an episode (following line 629) with the report of Makaria's death and a second strophe-pair were sacrificed.

Though the Ajax is thought to be the earliest of Sophocles' surviving plays, it is certain that the dramatist had already reached the height of his creative powers when it was written. It is equally certain that this play, in the course of its action, exhibits all the distinctive features of Sophocles' particular conception of the tragic world-order. We shall understand this conception best if we start from precisely that part of the play which is most controversial, the famous speech, often called the ‘deception speech’, which comprises the whole second episode (646–92). Its central position corresponds to its inner significance as the tragedy's heart. One of the most beautiful passages in all Greek tragedy (thanks to its poetic form and imagery), it is, at the same time, one of the most enigmatic. Since Welcker, in 1829, first recognized the problems it presents, an endless controversy, in which many eminent scholars have participated, has raged about it. However, a few years ago it was rightly said that no one has yet satisfactorily explained why Ajax makes this superb, but ambiguous speech. This is still true today. Interpretation has made little progress. A new approach may, therefore, be justified.

Ajax' honor is deeply wounded by the decision of the Greeks to award the arms of Achilles not to him, as the best of the heroes after Achilles, but to Odysseus.

In March 428 b.c., when Euripides' Hippolytus was played for the first time in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, the plague, or rather its first onset, was just coming to an end. Thucydides, one of the few who caught it and recovered, tells us what the scene in the city was like. We must remember that Athens had now for three years been fighting Sparta and her allies, and that the citizens had taken refuge within the walls. I quote from Jowett's translation (2. 52):

The recurrent problem of the Heracles is its apparent lack of unity. It is generally said to fall into either two or three parts, with the episode of Heracles' madness causing a decisive break in the action. While some critics hold that such a lack of cohesion is fatal to the dramatic structure of the play, others maintain that the ruptures constitute the tragedy's main interest. It is not only the play's structure that has been called into question; there is also puzzlement over the dominant theme. J. T. Sheppard looked to the closing lines, and proposed friendship, strength and wealth as motifs of the Heracles. H. H. O. Chalk declares: ‘Arete is the hub of the wheel … Youth, Age and the passage of Time, Tyranny and Wealth … [are] the spokes.’

There seems little doubt that the play falls into three parts, but whether this division bespeaks a lack of unity is another matter.

Moreover, while the aforementioned themes are touched on at various points in the play, none of them is adequate to explain the whole. They are not themes particularly germane to the character of Heracles: references to philia, the futility of wealth, the passage of time turn up in almost any Greek tragedy one cares to examine.

If one hopes to defend the structural and thematic unity of the Heracles it would be helpful to be able to point to some motif that spans all the episodes: a motif, moreover, that is particularly linked to the story of Heracles and that can help to account for the various modifications Euripides has made to the received myth.

Among the many human problems that refuse to disappear the problem of the authorship of the Rhesus is by no means the most important though it may be among the most tiresome. The latest investigation, and probably the most thorough, is Professor W. Ritchie's The Authenticity of the Rhesus of Euripides (C.U.P. 1964). Ritchie discusses the documentary evidence that has come down to us, submits the text to a sustained and careful stylistic examination – vocabulary, syntax, and style in its many manifestations: metre, structure of the lyrics, dramatic technique. He compares the play point by point with normal Euripidean usage and arrives at the fairly confident conclusion that the play was written by Euripides, rather early in his career, somewhere between 455 and 440 b.c.

Some years earlier D. W. Lucas, reviewing another book on the Rhesus, wrote: ‘There is a strong presumption that the play is an early work of Euripides’; but having said that, he added what oft is thought but not often so pungently expressed: ‘But in spite of all, many will remain disinclined to believe that Euripides could have written a work so intellectually null, so completely devoid of the clash of argument, of ideas, and of verbal nicety and precision.’ True; there are many such.

It is usually said, either with admiration or with regret, that in Trojan Women nothing happens. Desmond Conacher gives this opinion an elegant expression when he speaks of the ‘long passion of the Queen and her women’ which is saved from being a ‘mere sequence of disaster’ by a faint, rhythmic pattern of hope revived and then betrayed again. Others have mentioned with less sympathy the play's ‘unrelieved despair’, and Wilamowitz even proposed the deletion of some of Cassandra's lines because he felt they were in opposition to this overriding mood. The play is described as a piece without event; it is said to have but a single tone, and to display little or no structure, a fact which Conacher would relate to its being the last drama in a trilogy.

Now certainly Trojan Women is different from tragedies like Medea or The Bacchae. It does not engineer a single great overturn of fortune, because the downfall of its principals has occurred before the tragedy begins (106–7; 614–15) and all that remains now is for the women to embrace their disasters and savor them as their own. The action of the play thus has a formal likeness to that of Prometheus Vinctus, except that here the single figure of the vanquished giant has been splintered to become three female mortals, to whom a chorus of other women adhere.

The title of my paper is intended to emphasize two things. By ‘extra-dramatic’, I want to indicate that the scenes to be considered do not participate in the dramatic action proper of the tragedy in which they appear, and so in some sense can be said to move outside the plot; but, at the same time, I also want to suggest that the dramatic structure of the plays can in each case provide a useful point of reference for a methodical comprehension of the phenomenon I have in mind.

I have chosen the term ‘communication’ because it can signify a close human relationship that finds expression through exchange of words, as for example in dramatic dialogue. ‘Communication’ does not entail any restriction regarding the kind of persons who communicate. In the Euripidean passages the persons involved frequently address each other as philoi, but the common English translation, which is ‘friend’, would unduly limit my reader's expectations. For the observations which follow are in no way tied to a particular word or a particular bond between human beings. Even philos and philia (which, unlike our ‘friendship’, can indicate not only the ties between friends, but the familial relationships of father and son or brother and sister as well) are too narrow terms. With regard to my special subject, I should therefore not use ‘friendship’, or, if at all, in an extended sense, meaning any close human relationship.