Everyone who reads Aeschylus sympathetically does so, I should guess, with at least an implicit understanding of the point I shall be attempting to make in this paper;1 my reason for elaborating it at such length is that it is barely acknowledged in some of the recent scholarly literature, and the new orthodoxy on characterization is in danger of becoming no more helpful than the old.

Oliver Taplin1 has recently taken a fresh and challenging look at what we can learn from vase paintings about responses to the theatre in the Greek cities of South Italy and Sicily from the fifth to the third centuries b.c. It is not a new idea, of course, that other cities were powerfully attracted by the drama, as by the visual art, of Athens, but what needs to be stressed, as Taplin rightly claims, is the fact that the process begins so early, spreads so widely and involves both tragedy and comedy.

My concern in this paper is with the spread of tragedy outside Athens – not only in the West – in the fifth century.

It has become a commonplace among classical scholars that the Greeks were indifferent to close repetition of the same word; and there is no doubt that their poetry abounds in instances which a modern translator feels constrained to avoid (e.g. βέλος at the end of two consecutive lines, S. Ph. 1299–1300). Campbell, in his essay On the Language of Sophocles, describes the phenomenon in these terms.

This chapter challenges the traditional view of Roman elite women as passive holders of wealth by highlighting their active roles as property owners and managers in the Late Republican economy. While jewels and adornments symbolized status, elite women also exercised economic agency beyond mere conspicuous consumption. Beginning with the famous speech by Hortensia reported by Appian (App. B Civ. 4.32–34) and primarily drawing on Varro, as well as Cicero’s speeches and letters, the chapter explores how women owned, managed and profited from land, urban real estate and financial assets. Despite legal restrictions, women navigated economic structures to control, preserve and enhance their wealth more actively than is often assumed, with their economic engagement having significant socio-political implications. Ultimately, gendered assumptions about wealth and power in the Roman Republic will be discussed.

The Greek Play has been a Cambridge institution since 1882; its history is well documented, but not much of the relevant material is easily available in published form. So it makes sense to begin with a note on the archive and other sources, before attempting an outline sketch of the period between 1882 and 1912 (the date of the last production before the First World War). This is the earliest of the three1 phases into which the story so far seems to fall.

The main collection of material is the records of the Greek Play Committee, which are housed in the University Library under the care of John Hall, the Committee’s Hon. Librarian.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 celebrated the centennial of Tennessee’s admission to the United States. This chapter argues that the use of Greek and Grecian architecture at Nashville was connected to Nashville’s reputation as a city of learning and culture. During the nineteenth century, Nashville was known as the Athens of the South and of the West. A life-sized replica of the Parthenon was the fair’s premier building. Archaeological accuracy and color were also essential to creating the fair’s Parthenon. Other buildings incorporated classical motifs from different periods, demonstrating the flexibility and fluidity of ancient architecture and embodying the neo-antique. This classical architecture embodied Nashville’s arrival as a city, but it also celebrated the New South and reflected the codification of the racist Jim Crow laws. Thus, the appropriation of classical architecture to justify institutional racism is examined. Egyptian architecture played a prominent role here. Shelby County erected a pyramid for its pavilion, which was an exceptional use of Egyptian architecture at United States fairs. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the enduring importance of the rebuilt Nashville Parthenon (and its Athena statue) as a symbol of culture and democracy for the city.

Writing a commentary on Oedipus at Colonus has made me think about how to do justice to the extraordinary poise and power of Sophoclean language, despite its seeming simplicity in this late play. Hence the ‘plain words’ of my title, but plain in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Lear.

If asked why I chose this topic I should have to admit that it was partly for my own pleasure, for the privilege of talking about a great play set in Athens in the city of its origin. I was also influenced by the fact that the πόλις has been attracting a good deal of attention recently, and this has raised methodological questions which relate interestingly to Oedipus at Colonus. Here after all is a play set in Attica, with Theseus as a major character fulfilling the traditional Athenian role of receiver of suppliants: we can safely assume that it had something relevant to say about the πόλις to the πολῖται who watched the first performance.1 My main concern, though, is with the ways in which Sophocles causes contemporary meaning to be apprehended, rather than with exactly what that meaning (or those meanings) may have been.

The question of whether tragedy was performed in late antiquity and, if so, in what form, has provoked considerable scholarly debate. Much of this work has been influenced by the Gibbonesque model of decline and fall. Culture as an articulation of society mirrors the political decline of the Empire. Even scholars who attempt to distance themselves from such a model find it hard not to portray theatre in the middle and late Empire as a pale reflection of the dramatic glories of the past.1 Tragedy becomes a stagnant elite literary exercise which even the educated classes approached in a half-hearted manner, whilst the rest of the populace indulged in the intellectually vacuous pleasures of the pantomime and mime.2 Scholarship has made a careful distinction between the activities of the tragic pantomimes and tragedy, between late antiquity and the ‘Classical world’, and ultimately between text and performance.

Long ago, when I first began research, I was set to work by Denys Page on manuscripts of Sophocles. A big question of the time was Alexander Turyn’s claim, on the basis of a large-scale study of the surviving manuscripts of the triad – Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus – to have identified recensions of the text by Manuel Moschopoulos and Thomas Magistros as well as by Demetrios Triklinios, who already had a secure place in scholarly history.1 Stemmatics was more popular then than it is now, and intense arguments revolved around the relationships between manuscripts, and particularly the evidence for conjecture, in the large numbers of recentiores copied around or after the time of the Palaeologan Renaissance. There was relatively little interest in the Byzantine commentaries and their content, except insofar as they helped to link particular manuscripts with particular scholars.