IN his long life of ninety years (496–406 B.C.) Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays for the Athenian theatre. Of these only seven are extant, ranging in date from about his fiftieth year to the date of his death. As his earliest known victory, in the competitive dramatic festivals in which such plays were produced, was in the year 468 B.C., it may be presumed that the surviving plays form a representative sample of his best work and that that work was mainly the product of his middle and later life. It would be interesting if we could point with certainty to any example of his earliest essays in tragedy, or know at what age he first made any mark in the theatre. Only in the case of Aristophanes do we know that a man in his early twenties could obtain a hearing on the comic stage; the masters of tragedy seem to have served a longer apprenticeship.*
The plays translated in this volume (and placed in their probable chronological order) show some differences of style and treatment, but it is difficult – partly owing to the uncertainty of date in some cases – to trace any progressive development in one direction or another.
Its general shape and style place Ajax among the earlier works, and its position, in the oldest collections, at the head of the list, indicates a strong tradition of its having been the earliest of the extant plays. A preponderance of long speeches and soliloquies, and the comparatively rare appearance of more than two speakers together (other than the Chorus) are consistent with the early style of tragedy as established by Aeschylus. Even so, the play does not lack characteristically Sophoclean features. Its opening scene is as realistic in tone and dramatic in movement as that of any of his later plays; and the treatment of the Chorus, strongly characterized and closely concerned in the action of the play, is much more ‘advanced’ than, for instance, that of Women of Trachis and is very similar to that of Philoctetes, a work of much later date. If Ajax is in fact our earliest example of Sophoclean tragedy, it already shows strong indications of the new life which our author was to bring into the Athenian theatre.
One feature of the construction of the play may not be easily understood at first sight, but is of importance in relation to its central theme. Rising to a climax at the death of Ajax, the play seems to ‘peter out’ in a protracted and undignified squabble over the disposal of his remains. The fact is that the death of Ajax is not the true climax nor the central interest of the play. Greek tragedy does not as a rule take the Shakespearean shape of ‘The Life and Death of—’; in this case it starts with the death, or at any rate the downfall, of its hero, and its ultimate concern is with the judgement we are to make, through the minds of his friends or enemies, of the hero’s character. So that though admittedly (and, we must suppose, intentionally) the language of the play drops to a more prosaic level in the closing scenes, the keen debate over the burial of Ajax must have been to the Greek audience the most significant part of the play. I fancy that its effect may have been somewhat similar to that of the debate of the Knights, in Murder in the Cathedral, over the death of the Archbishop. In addition, of course, the religious importance of burial (as we see in Antigone) was a vital factor in the situation.
Typical of the Greek conception of tragedy is the theme of the great man fallen, the strange enigma of weakness and strength combined in one being. This problem Sophocles was to explore again, in Oedipus and in Heracles and doubtless other instances now lost to us; in Ajax he has presented it in a comparatively simple but highly concentrated form.
In Electra Sophocles handles one stage of the great story which Aeschylus had told in the three parts of his Orestean trilogy. As Euripides also used the theme in his Electra (whether before or after Sophocles is not known for certain) the approach of the three tragedians to the same subject can here be closely compared. Except for some minor details the basic story is the same, but differences in the treatment arise from the method and artistic aims of the three writers. For Aeschylus the story is only significant in its full development from the first sin of the ancestor to the final release of Orestes from the load of guilt; and in presenting the saga in the form of three consecutive plays his concern is primarily with the power and continuity of the divine forces which control the destinies of the doomed family – forces which cannot be questioned or resisted. The persons of the drama are less individuals than puppets symbolic of men and women entrapped in the predicaments to which humanity is condemned. Man is involved in such and such conflicts by the will of heaven, and only heaven can pronounce the verdict and unravel the knot.
Euripides took one chapter of the story – the return of Orestes and the punishment of the murderers – and presented it, in the main, on a human and naturalistic level, yet expressing in his way a judgement on the problem of the story – the judgement, in fact, of a rebel against the accepted interpretation: the deed of Orestes, by Euripides’ account, was both inevitable and sinful, and cannot have been the will of any good power. Orestes kills his mother, bitterly protesting against the horror of the deed to which he is driven, and the epilogue of the play foreshadows the torment which his soul is doomed to suffer, imprisoned in a maze of evil from which there is no escape.
Sophocles pronounces no judgement. He neither approves nor condemns. Here, he says to us, is the story – an immortal story, but a story of mortal beings; such was their predicament; such were the pleas advanced on this side and on that; such was the bearing of the persons implicated in the event. And within the limits assigned to the play, what is done is complete and final. If there was a sequel, we are not concerned with it, except in so far as we supply one for ourselves in our reflexions after the fall of the curtain. More objective than either Aeschylus or Euripides, Sophocles imitates neither the symbolism and poetic sublimity of the elder writer nor the fierce partisanship of the younger. Yet we cannot think that he ignored or belittled the controversial implications of the legend. Rather his feeling seems to have been that it was enough to show the picture, without writing a moral underneath it.
Women of Trachis, the only one of the seven known plays to bear a title denoting the persons of the Chorus, is, oddly enough, the one in which the Chorus is least important; the ‘Trachinian women’ make no contribution to the plot, their presence at the scene of action has little probability, and their lyric interludes are uninspired. Should the play have been called Deianeira, or Heracles? That it was not so labelled may be a hint that the author himself was in two minds as to the real subject of the play. It is on this score, at any rate, that its construction has been criticized. If its theme is the love and tragic error of Deianeira, her abrupt death comes too soon, to be followed by an irrelevant postscript in the protracted agony of Heracles. If Heracles is the subject, his appearance is too long delayed and Deianeira’s part over-written.
One answer to such criticism is the view that the sense of Deianeira’s presence remains with us throughout the closing stages of the tragedy, both in the consequences of her action and in the words spoken of her by Hyllus and Heracles. But since her husband’s only thought of her at this point is one of revenge and baffled rage, and no resolution of the conflict is achieved, this view of the matter hardly helps to justify and define the structure of the play. The centre and focus of its theme is surely Heracles – Heracles as seen through the eyes of his wife. In Deianeira Sophocles has drawn one of his most complete and convincing characters, and yet all we know of her is her single-minded devotion to her husband. Through three-quarters of the play Heracles, though absent in person, is kept continually present to our minds – the very fact of his absence being indeed the mainspring of the action – so that his eventual appearance, prepared for by the ‘build-up’ of the preceding scenes (perhaps the most remarkable example of ‘build-up’ in all dramatic literature!), far from being an anti-climax, is the true climax of the play. That the husband and wife never meet, but speak of each other across a gulf of terrible misunderstanding, and die apart, gives a last twist of pathos, and a grim dramatic justice, to the conjugal tragedy.
The character given to Heracles in this play does not, by any human standards, endear him to the modern reader. How the ancient audience would feel about the moral problem of the play, it is hard to say. Is Sophocles thinking in terms of human life and contemporary morality? Partly, but not, by the nature and limitations of the story, wholly. Heracles had a clearly defined place in mythology as the symbol of masculine physical strength committed to endless warfare against the powers of evil. That was the justification, and the burden, of his existence, overriding all other loyalties or moral obligations. And if the physical burden was his, on his wife fell the burden of anxiety, loneliness, and neglect. Deianeira knows this. ‘Any woman’, she says, ‘who has known this, will know what kind of thing I suffer.’ If Heracles is too much of a superman to interest us as a man, Deianeira is never more than a woman, in her much-tried patience, her bravely subdued pride, and her desperate bid for victory. Heracles moves in a far-off world of monsters and miracles, but Deianeira lives in any street in Athens. With all its defects, some of them due to the intractability of the material which Sophocles chose for the experiment, the play is worthy of its place in the canon, if only as an example of his ‘Euripidean’ manner, and of the human verisimilitude which he could impart to an unprepossessing, almost repulsive, piece of mythology.
Among the plays nominally classed as tragedies in the Greek theatre, a few (such as the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripides) break out of the usual pattern of conflict mounting to a climax in violent action. The conflict and the passion (in the sense of suffering) are in the background or antecedents of the story and the play depicts an aftermath issuing in escape or release from tension. Of such a kind is Philoctetes.
This play, produced in 409 B.C. (the author’s eighty-seventh year) is remarkable both for its atmosphere and for its plot, and shows us our author still experimenting in the theatre and still finding new ways of broadening and varying its interest. The scene of the play is of a new kind, a lonely island in the Aegean, and great skill has gone to the creation, in dialogue, narration, and lyrics, of an appropriate and convincing setting. In what literal sense Sophocles was ‘the inventor of scene-painting’ we cannot now be sure; but in this play at least it is clear that he did not need to rely on paint and canvas to take the place of verbal scene-painting. The sound of the sea and the birds, the scud of winds and rain, the heat and cold, summers and winters, are with us on every page of the play.
The plot presents a new kind of conflict and a new kind of dénouement. There is no violent death, no vengeance or retribution. The tragedies, individual and general, of the Trojan War, are in the background of the story and are kept continually in mind, but the foreground is occupied by a conflict which can be formalized as: physical weakness plus moral strength versus physical superiority plus moral weakness. Philoctetes is physically at the mercy of his opponents, Neoptolemus and Odysseus, who could easily force their will upon him, and almost do so; but, as Neoptolemus well knows, might is not right, and without right (here symbolized by the bow in the hands of its rightful owner) might cannot prosper. The conflict is not in itself exceptional – we are reminded of the situation between Creon and Antigone – but in the present play a new dramatic interest is developed in the situation and character of Neoptolemus, for it is he who finds himself placed on both sides of the battle, first as the accomplice, not altogether unwilling, of the unscrupulous Odysseus, and then, true to his better nature, standing out for justice. He has his reward in a solution, under the guidance of Heracles, which both satisfies his conscience and achieves the object of his mission. The sympathetic and sensitive picture of Neoptolemus gives the play an unusual charm and is one of Sophocles’ highest achievements in character-drawing.
The significance of Sophoclean drama, in relation to the religious and ethical climate of his time, has been explored in books of greater scope and authority than this. In my series of translations, with the briefest of incidental comment, I have tried to set before the English play-reader an impression of the work of the dramatist who, if he did not actually lay its foundations, was the first to give to theatrical art in ancient Greece a shape and structure recognizably akin to its modern descendant. And it is to his achievement as a dramatic artist that I should like finally to direct the reader’s attention.
Sophocles was a master of dramatic technique – its inventor, to all intents and purposes. And it is to one seemingly small and, like many other momentous discoveries, simple innovation that we owe the astonishing leap which he made from a comparatively primitive and restricted art-form to the complete ‘roundness’ of dramatic presentation. The elder master, Aeschylus, had shown what could be done with poetry spoken in character, and had made the first step from declamatory or narrative monologue to the exhibition of dramatic conflict in dialogue between two characters. The step was an important one, yet did not constitute an essentially significant advance from the territory of epic poetry, where speech can follow speech in debate or conflict of wills. Sophocles, as Aristotle laconically informs us, ‘increased the number of actors to three’.
The mere mechanical advantage of this innovation was a considerable gain; with the triangular scene it became possible to depict a new variety of dramatic situations: a transaction between two persons being hastened, obstructed, or deflected, by the intervention of a third (Orestes, Aegisthus, Electra; Philoctetes, Neoptolemus, Odysseus) – information brought by one person evoking different reactions in each of two others (Clytaemnestra, Electra, Tutor; Oedipus, Messenger, Jocasta) – an attempted deception unmasked (Deianeira, Lichas, Messenger). Aeschylus, in his latest plays, made occasional use of the third actor; but it must be remembered that Sophocles won his first success in the theatre ten years before the production of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. So that there is, on the face of it, no reason to doubt the truth of Aristotle’s dictum. Sophocles invented the three-actor scene.
But the matter goes deeper than a mere improvement in scene-construction. The essence of the three-actor scene is that the turn of events will depend on whether A will side with B or with C; whether the combined efforts of B and C will change A’s purpose; and so on. A choice is to be made, and the choice will be determined by the nature, as well as the situation, of the person making it; character, not predestined event, is now the focus of the drama. Thus, in the hands of Sophocles, drama became not only triangular but three-dimensional; to the length and breadth of mythical narrative he added the depth of human character as he observed it in his fellow mortals. What had hitherto been a frieze of more or less static figures confronting one another in profile became a perspective of living human beings reacting on one another and shaping their own destinies by the interplay of their contrasted characters. ‘The purpose of Aeschylus is not, like that of other dramatists, to analyse the complex machinery of the human mind, but to reveal the relation in which men stand to the universal order of things’ (Haigh, Tragic Drama). In other words, the typical Aeschylean play is essentially a narrative rather than a drama – a statement of what happened, rather than the presentation of a thing happening here and now to certain people who are what they are, and happening because they speak and act as their natures prompt them. So far as our evidence goes, Sophocles was the first to create that ever-exciting paradox of the theatre, in which, knowing perfectly well what will happen, we are yet absorbed in the contemplation of how and why it happens, and can watch it happening time and again as if new and unforeseen. If this is the secret of drama, its condition is that the persons of the drama should be free-willed creatures, not pawns in the hands of an omnipotent force or ‘fate’. Sophoclean drama is the drama of living persons choosing their own paths to happiness or disillusion, to success, failure, or extinction.
June 1952 E. F. W.