THE ORIGINS OF TRAGEDY

The documented history of Greek tragedy begins in 472 B.C. with Aeschylus' Persae. Of his earlier career we know little; we know something but not much about one or two of his contemporaries; we have a date (536/533) for the institution of a competition in tragedy at the Great Dionysia. The origins of tragedy lie in the sixth century. So complex, however, and so obscure is the evidence, so various are the theories advanced, that the hardened scholar approaches this subject with dismay.

The surviving plays of Aeschylus tell us what needs to be explained. There is a chorus, dramatized as the play demands. Their songs are elaborate and bulk large and, in pre-Aeschylean tragedy, may have bulked larger, since Aristotle informs us that Aeschylus reduced the choral element and ‘gave the leading role to the spoken word’. For the earlier plays two actors are required (either of whom could, with a change of mask and costume, take more than one part). Aeschylus is said himself to have added the second actor and either he or Sophocles the third, and Aeschylus uses three in his later plays. The actors deliver speeches, often of considerable length and formality, but also enter into dialogue with the coryphaeus (chorus-leader) or with the other actor. Particularly characteristic are passages of line-by-line interchange (stichomythia) which, like the narrative speech, remains a formal convention of tragedy as long as we know it and may well go back to its earliest beginnings. The plays (except Agamemnon) are of moderate length, rather over 1,000 lines. In what kind of performances did plays like these originate?

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.

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.