Sophocles tends to get cast as the ‘good boy’ of classical Greek tragedy, by contrast with Aeschylus and Euripides. Characterizations (or caricatures) of the ‘great three’1 are already being set up in Aristophanes’ fantastical comedy Frogs, first put on in 405 bc,2 soon after the death of Euripides, and even sooner after that of Sophocles. Aeschylus is the rugged pioneer, heavy-handed, grandiloquent, advocating old-fashioned values; Euripides is clever, subversive, proletarian, undermining traditional norms; Sophocles is just a good chap, ‘genial up here above, and genial down there below’ (Frogs line 82). The infusion of this portrait into colouring the perception of his entire work is epitomized by Matthew Arnold in the mid-nineteenth century, when he thanks Sophocles and his ‘even-balanced soul’:
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage. . . .
Yet I, for one, do not find this view confirmed by the plays themselves. Far from it. A couple of choral odes affirming traditional religion and the Justice of Zeus do not make the tragedies serene or balanced or freighted with grave wisdom. Sophocles’ plays are deeply disturbing and unpredictable, unrelenting and open-ended, constantly refusing to stand firm on any consistent good-versus-bad situations or any redemptive justification of the ways of gods to men—or women. Arnold caught his vision of life far more perceptively when he wrote of Sophocles reflecting ‘the turbid ebb and flow of human misery’.3 At the same time it is undeniable that what we know of Sophocles the man consistently portrays him as a sociable, prosperous citizen, not at all the tortured soul we might expect (or even wish for?). But it is simplistic ideas about the relationship between creative artists and their work that should be adjusted.
What then, in the end, is particular about Sophocles’ kind of tragedy? Is there something distinctively Sophoclean in his world-view, his ‘philosophy’, his whole burden? Some of the ways which have been standardly claimed as uniquely Sophoclean do not really stand up to scrutiny. There seems, above all, to have been a desire for him to conform to some model of steadiness or solidity (as in the Matthew Arnold). But the plays themselves are constantly unbalancing this claim with leaps and twists, both of plot and of ethical weighting. The turbid suffering of the human world is—so far as I can see, at least—no more measured or just or explicable in Sophocles’ plays than in any other great tragic literature. Nor are his plays, as has often been claimed, distinctly conservative, or especially pious.4 There is rather more truth to the branding of Sophocles as a ‘pessimist’. Tragedy may not be the obvious resource to go for optimism in the first place! Nonetheless it may be true that Sophocles tends to offer less counterbalancing relief or consolation than most tragic drama. At the same time his plays do not lead towards unqualified despair or resignation: on the contrary they are in their own way strengthening.
What makes Sophocles special is not so much a ‘message’ or ‘philosophy’, but an intense vision of the human world amidst its pain. It is not a matter of world-view so much as of atmospheric clarity, like on one of those days when you can see every detail of far-distant hills. That is to say that Sophocles’ plays do what tragedy characteristically does, and with singularly stark focus. What I mean by ‘What tragedy characteristically does’ is this (to put it very simply and very briefly): to set up a complex and inextricable combination of strong emotion and challenging thought across a range of human experience in order to reach towards making some kind of sense out of human suffering. The fusion of emotion and cognitive engagement produce form, perceptible shape expressed in movement, poetry, and music.
The emotions aroused in Greek tragedy, and Sophocles in particular, go far beyond the cliché formulation of ‘pity and fear’—although pity is certainly central. Any full account would have to include grief, horror, indignation, disgust, affection, excitement, joy, elation, anguish, helplessness—all of them felt in anticipation and in the present and in retrospect.5
As for the range of issues on which Sophoclean tragedy provoked thought, an abbreviated list can do no more than to suggest their complexity and breadth. There are politics—in the sense of living in societies—power, persuasion, war, justice, revenge. There are the family, its bonds and conflicts, blood-kin, marriage, bereavement. There are the conflicts and interactions of male and female, public and interior, power and weakness, love and hate, hurtfulness and protectiveness. Emotions and their causes are thought about as well as felt—their rationality and irrationality, their justification and their harmfulness. Add to all that the workings of the mind, madness, how far motives are conscious, the benefits and dangers of rationality; responsibility, free will, determinism, the extent of choice, the attribution of blame. Tragedy further confronts the nature of truth, relativity, existence and seeming. And, not least, there are the gods—or the human sense of superhuman powers—whether the transcendent is malign or benign; whether the divine has any sense of justice; whether it can be understood, or is essentially incomprehensible. This amounts, all in all, to a panorama that takes in nothing less than the meaning or meaninglessness of life, of grief, of death.
The best proof of these large claims—the eating of the pudding, so to speak—lies not in my lumbering formulations, but in the huge variety of inspirations and provocations that have been brought to fruition by later ages in response to Sophocles’ seven surviving plays. Since there is no way of doing justice to any particular instances in this context, the point may be made by scattering a spread of names from the last few generations, without specifying their very varied, and even contradictory, responses. Think of G. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler; think of Friedrich Hölderlin, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson; Thomas Hardy, Hugo von Hofmannstal, Jean Anouilh, Bert Brecht, Athol Fugard, Heiner Müller, Rita Dove; bear in mind Felix Mendelssohn, Max Reinhardt, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Alfaro. . . . The point is that Sophocles has meant so much and so many different things to such different creative artists and thinkers, and in so many art-forms. He has offered them handles, threads, shapes to hold on to.
If I have, then, to try to pick out two characteristics of Sophocles that have imparted to his plays such staying power and such adaptability, it would be these. First, there is the brave, unflinching facing up to suffering, the engagement with ‘the human condition’ in all its darker and more heart-rending aspects. No blinking, no evasion, no palliative. The creative form emerges with such focus because there is no blurring or sideways glancing or postponement.
Secondly, in the face of this sombre fixity, Sophocles’ plays are, nonetheless, never reduced to inarticulacy or chaos or despair. They remain strong and engaged even amid the turbid ebb and flow; they find poetry and lyric and heat and light even in the most arctic and tempestuous conditions of human life. The most terrible possibilities are exposed and faced, and yet the response becomes crafted words and movements and song. The tragedies ‘face the music’, and they do that by turning it into poetry and music. The sorrows are thus transmuted into a kind of benefit, and even beauty. Out of apparently meaningless suffering comes meaning and form. And so the spectator or reader is strengthened and extended for pressing on through the experience of life.
It so happens that Sophocles’ long life coincided almost exactly with the years of the great ‘golden’ age of Greek tragic theatre; and that very nearly synchronizes with the period that our calendar calibrates as the ‘fifth century bc’. Aeschylus is said to have put on his first production in 499, and it is clear that he and his contemporaries were already producing fully fledged and serious tragedies in the 490s, the decade during which Sophocles was born. It is a plausible view that tragedy had suddenly burst on the cultural and poetic scene at Athens not long before then; and, if so, this would mean that the whole enterprise of Theatre and of Tragedy was born only some ten or twenty years before Sophocles himself.6
Sophocles first put on tragedies in 468 (and won first prize at first attempt, it is said). For the first dozen years of his career he was competing with the great Aeschylus at the height of his powers; for the next fifty years after that his chief rival was Euripides, who was some fifteen years younger. It would be a condescending mistake to suppose that all the other playwrights of the time were inferior second-raters, but, as Frogs shows, these two were recognized in their own day as the greatest creative poets and dramatists of the age.
This was the very period which saw Athens pass through its greatest cultural and economic flowering. The city then went on to confront the toils of disease and war, although since both Euripides and Sophocles died within a few months of each other in 407–6, they did not live to see the war end with the humiliating defeat of Athens by Sparta and her allies in 404.7 The years of Sophocles’ maturity, say between about 460 and 432, were the heady, and relatively peaceful, years when Athens produced one of the most creative cultures ever known in human history. With an allowance of simplification, one might say that History and Philosophy were both invented in this very time and place; the Parthenon was built; many of the finest artworks of ancient Greece radiated from this cultural hub. This one city—the largest in the Greek world at the time, with a population of male citizens of about 30,000—housed, among others, Socrates, Phidias, Protagoras, Pericles, and Herodotus (a personal friend of Sophocles). And the next generation, that growing up in Sophocles’ later years, included Plato, Thucydides, and Aristophanes.
Within this prolific era Sophocles emerges as a central and congenial figure—rich, attractive, sociable—and a great poet. Anecdotes clustered around his exploits, especially his love-life and his table-talk, but he did also participate in the public life of the city. One year he was an official Treasurer; in another (possibly more than once) he was one of the ten elected military Commanders; and late in life in 413 he was one of the ten ‘Councilors’ convened after Athens had suffered military disaster in Sicily. A genial spirit, then, a famous lover (of both sexes), a good citizen, a model public figure. All this might not fit our preconceptions of the kind of person who should produce disconcerting, soul-scouring tragedies. But, just as it took Athens at the crest of its strength and prosperity to create the whole genre of tragedy, it arguably took a person of confidence and security to drive its portrayal of life so far into the dark terrains of the human condition without flinching. It is as though he takes his audience to the verge of the abyss, and then keeps his feet so firmly planted in the stuff of human resilience that he can then hold them back from falling into the black hole, returning them unharmed, and even strengthened, to everyday life.
Such fierce material needed a kind of heat-proof crucible to contain it. It could only dare to become so harrowing and challenging once the surrounding society in Athens had set up an occasion to hold it without danger of corrosion. Whether the genesis of tragedy was long and gradual or a sudden invention (as I believe), its stature as a major art-form was undoubtedly indivisible from the inauguration of a major festival as the occasion for performances. And it is surely no coincidence that this was founded, or at least became centrally important, at just the same time as the first establishment of a democratic constitution in 508, a revolution which, to an unprecedented extent, handed over power to the whole people (demos). This festival, the Great Dionysia (also known as the City Dionysia) was open for all citizens to attend; it was held every spring in a sloping area sacred to the god Dionysus beneath the Acropolis. There was room here for several thousands of spectators to gather and witness the pre-rehearsed actors and chorus. It was probably the first festival in ancient Greece to be devoted exclusively to poetry, without any admixture of athletics and other such events. There were also smaller Dionysia held in villages throughout Attica; and serious theatrical performances, far from rudimentary or rustic, were put on at these as well.
All of Sophocles’ plays were, so far as we know, created for first performance at the Great Dionysia. Right from the beginning it seems that they were organized according to much the same programme as they continued to have during Sophocles’ time.8 A first day was given over to dithyrambs, a pre-dramatic form of choral poetry; and then three days were devoted to tragedy, with one tragedian putting on his work each day. This took the form of three tragedies followed by a satyr-play, all performed by the same team of actors and chorus.9 These were, as with so many occasions in ancient Greece, mounted as a competition. Quite highly organized conventions controlled the recruitment, financing, and status of the fifteen members of the chorus, who had to be Athenian citizens (they may have been twelve in early days). In Sophocles’ time there were three male actors (not necessarily Athenian), but in earlier times there had been only two. These took on all the individual roles between them, changing mask and costume as needed. The playwright himself was known as the didaskalos, the teacher, presumably because of his role in the development and rehearsal of the production.
The evidence seems firm that Sophocles composed between 120 and 130 plays over his long career. Supposing that these were all in sets of four for the Great Dionysia, he will have put on plays for some thirty-one annual festivals, in other words for about half of all those held over the course of his adult life. It is recorded that he won first prize on well over half of these occasions. Yet, of these many plays only seven tragedies have come down to us, and no complete satyr-plays.10 Most of his works evidently survived intact until about ad 200 or 300, but after that only the seven which we have continued to be much copied. They were selected for primarily educational purposes. Oedipus the King and Antigone were always his most famous plays; and they presumably account for the selection of Oedipus at Colonus as a kind of companion piece. It should be emphasized, though, that these three plays were not originally conceived of as a trilogy, nor performed as one. Aias and Electra were also widely read and performed from early days. We cannot really say, however, why the other two, Deianeira11 and Philoctetes were selected.
Scholars have not got very far with placing the seven surviving plays chronologically within Athenian history and Sophocles’ career. The only two with firm dates are from near the end: Philoctetes was first put on in 409, and Oedipus at Colonus only after his death. There are anecdotes which date Antigone to 442, but, while that date is not in itself implausible, the stories are probably fictional. Otherwise, internal evidence of style and technique offer little help, except to indicate that Electra was relatively late, probably after 420. It is quite likely that Deianeira, Antigone, and Aias were all first produced somewhere between 455 and 435, but this is far from sure; and scholarly studies suggest, though not firmly, that Oedipus the King was later than these other three plays, most likely dating from the 430s or 420s.
Biographers like to detect a progression in an artist’s oeuvre, and tend to order works in a sequence from juvenilia to high maturity to ‘last things’. But, apart from the two late works, which would have been probably dateable even without the external evidence, Sophocles generally denies us such progressions, whether naïve or sophisticated. So the three plays in this volume are not related by chronology or mind-set: in fact the main feature which they have in common is a central female character. In Deianeira and Antigone she is alive for only the first two-thirds of the play, but in both is clearly the most interesting character. Both Deianeira and Electra have the support of a sympathetic female chorus, but Antigone is more isolated with a chorus of Thebes elders. This division of Sophocles’ seven surviving plays between the two volumes is thus entirely editorial; but it does, at least, have more of a significant connection through gender than the standard gathering of so-called ‘Theban plays’.
One notion that sustains the fallacious image of Sophocles as some kind of rock-like monument (however ‘mellow’) is that his plots are driven by the inexorable will of the gods or by Fate. The audience knows the story already, this account goes, and helplessly watches them enact their predetermined doom, however much they may struggle against it. As the Prologue of Cocteau’s Oedipus play puts it, ‘Before you is a fully wound machine. Slowly its spring will unwind the entire span of a human life. It is one of the most perfect machines devised by the infernal gods for the mathematical annihilation of a mortal.’12 But on the human level Sophocles’ characters clearly determine their own fate; they are in no way mere pawns or puppets. And, in any case, the audience did not know the whole story already. This becomes clear if one takes a step back and looks at Tragedy as story-telling.
The fundamental revolution brought about by the invention of theatre in Athens was that the stories were told through enactment and embodiment without any narrative framing. The scene before the spectators became the world of the story, the actors became the agents, the chorus became participants integrated into that world. We take it for granted that the stories told in Greek tragedies were set back in the great ‘heroic’ age, the world that had already supplied epic poems for hundreds of years before. But when the Athenians first developed their new dramatic art-form, that would not have been the only possibility; they might, for example, have told stories of gods, or narratives drawn from more recent historical times.13 Yet, from its earliest stages tragedy settled on the old myths.
This seems to have been, in effect, a master-stroke of prescience, a kind of intuition that these would hold almost limitless potential for future development. This capacity is partly thanks to their combination of the immediate and the remote, so that the plots contain dynamic combinations of high nobility with family strife, of distance in social and political terms, yet topicality of places, cults, and institutions. But another important factor was surely that, if the new art-form was to set itself up as a serious rival to the traditional genres of epic and large-scale choral poetry, it was going to have to challenge them on their own ground. Tragedy’s claim was to provide everything that they could offer plus the whole new and unmatchably vivid dimension of direct enactment. It even followed and capped epic poetry by taking on its two core story-clusters, namely the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath, and the dynastic struggles at Thebes.14
The tragic versions of these mythical narratives had another enormous advantage over epic and lyric versions, one that undoubtedly helped to eclipse them: the potential for change and innovation. The epic poems, especially the Iliad and Odyssey, were frequently performed in the fifth century, but the words (‘text’ is a rather anachronistic term) were more or less fixed. Indeed an agreed wording might have been indispensable for the coordination of competitions held between the performers of epic, the rhapsodes. But Tragedy did not have any call to stick closely to previous versions: on the contrary, part of the excitement of the competition lay in finding new ways of manipulating the old stories. Variations, changes, and innovations were positively welcome, provided that they were persuasive and purposeful.
So tragedy was constantly making use of earlier versions, but in order to depart from them as much as to follow them. Both Aeschylus and Euripides had, for example, previously dramatized the fetching of Philoctetes to Troy from Lemnos, but, while both had employed several more characters than Sophocles, neither of them introduced Neoptolemus. This is Sophocles’ innovation and it radically changes the whole dynamic of the play. The most extreme example of innovation in surviving Sophocles is Antigone. While he may not have actually invented Antigone herself, it is very probable that the whole story of her going to her death in order to bury her brother was his own creation (see further p. 3). Jean Anouilh15 has his Prologue-figure say that, much as this young woman would have liked to live, ‘there’s nothing to be done. Her name is Antigone, and she must play her part through to the end’. But the real reason why Antigone must play her part is because Sophocles created that part.
So it was integral to the whole strength of tragedy that each play was not predictable, neither in its dramatic structure nor in detail of plot. The genre encouraged novelty, though nearly always deployed within the basic conventions of the art-form. So the familiar dogma that ‘they all knew the story already’ is quite simply false: they never know what unforeseeable turns the dramatization was going to take. In keeping with this, the myths, while traditional in many ways, did not incorporate any sort of inexorability or ‘Fate’ intrinsically built into them. Sophocles was no less inventive in both narrative and in dramatic technique than Euripides and his other rivals.
When we talk about the birth or invention of Tragedy—which means in effect the invention of Theatre—we tend to think above all about myths, themes, issues, world-views. But there had to be a crucial physical and performative dimension to all this as well. There had to be the ‘personnel’ in the first place: the actors, chorus, playwright, musician, stage managers, financiers, etc., who all collaborated in advance to prepare and rehearse the works. And there had to be a coordinated audience who knew both the time (the festival of Dionysus) and the place where they should gather in a theatron—which means ‘viewing-place’—in order to see the work performed. Until all that had been set up there was no theatre in any relevant sense, and so no Tragedy.
Ancient Greek theatres were invariably huge open-air viewing-places with room for thousands, rather than hundreds, of spectators. The actual performance-space was a large, flat area at the foot of a slope and/or raked seating (‘bleachers’ is the useful American term). All of Sophocles’ plays were, so far as we know, composed for the theatron in the area sacred to Dionysus at Athens, which made use of the slope beneath the south-east segment of the Acropolis.
It used to be regarded as beyond question that the performance space, the orchestra (literally ‘dance-place’) was circular; and that did, indeed, become the standard form for theatres in the fourth century, such as the most famous example at Epidaurus. Many scholars now believe, however, that back in the fifth century the orchestra was rectangular, on the grounds that the stone seating at the front was built in an arc of straight segments. But since most of the seating in Sophocles’ day was constructed in wood, it is not unexpected that the stone seating should be in similarly straight stretches. That is, in fact, still compatible with a circular orchestra; and I am personally inclined to favour the circle as providing both a more unified viewing-focus and a better dance-space. It also used to be generally accepted that the audience-slope in Sophocles’ day was large enough to seat some 12,000–15,000, a figure reached (again) by extrapolating from fourth-century auditoria. It now transpires that in the fifth century there were some houses half way up the slope, which might indicate an audience of ‘only’ about 6,000 (still a huge number of people!). It is, however, not out of the question that some of the audience sat around and above the house-plots.
Whatever the truth of these disputed issues, the basic lay-out of the performance space, as it is incorporated into the fabric of the plays, is pretty clear and relatively uncontroversial. On the far side of the orchestra was the stage-building, the skene, with a wide central door.16 This most often represented some kind of house or palace. In both Antigone and Electra this is the ancestral royal palace, the seat of power, however contested; in Deianeira it is the house where the family of Heracles has settled in Trachis. Both actors and chorus shared the orchestra-space without special differentiation. It may well be, however, that the actors tended to perform in the section further away from the audience. It is possible there was a low stage-platform in front of the skene at Athens, but there is no clear indication of this in any of our plays.17
Scene-painting was being developed in the time of Sophocles, and was especially associated with techniques for representing perspective. It is not known, however, whether the same panels of scene-painting remained in place throughout each year’s festival, or whether they were changed for each playwright, or, indeed, for each play. The variety of settings that we find in the plays could obviously make use of specific scene-painting that changed for each one, if it was available. But, even without any play-specific painting, the signification of the location and background are clearly established within each play.
There were also two pieces of theatrical machinery, which, to judge from allusions in contemporary comedy, were particularly associated with tragic theatre. One, the ekkyklema (the ‘roll-out’), was a wheeled platform which could be extruded from the central door: its core function was to make internal scenes visible on stage. Within the three plays in this volume, it is possible that it was employed to reveal the body of Eurydice in Antigone (see note on 1293); and it was undoubtedly used in Electra to reveal the tableau of the body of Clytemnestra with Orestes and Pylades standing by (see note on 1463). The other, the mechane (the ‘device’), was some kind of crane used to carry actors through the air, especially those playing gods, so that they are to be imagined as flying. This is especially associated with divine epiphanies at the end of Euripides’ tragedies; these are the so-called theos apo mechanes or deus ex machina.
To either side of the acting-area were entrance-ways, in effect roads that were visible to the audience for at least several metres (known as eisodoi or parodoi). These did not have a rigidly fixed signification; but a clear sense of ‘topography’ is still established internally within each play. Often these two directions were dramatically important, usually in opposition to each other; and Sophocles paid particular attention to this spatial dimension. The significance of the two directions in the three tragedies in this volume are set out in the notice at the beginning of each play.
It is questionable whether there were any fixed structures within the orchestra. It is conventionally supposed that there was an altar of Dionysus, but this is far from certain. What is certain is that some plays, for example the opening scenes of Oedipus the King, call for a stage altar; but that was more probably a portable painted prop; it also looks likely that in Electra there was a stage-statue of Apollo in front of the palace. Portable furniture such as thrones, couches, etc., were available when called for, and, like all the props and masks, these were the responsibility of the skeuopoios, the ‘equipment-maker’.
The actors and chorus in the Greek theatre always and invariably wore masks, and these indicated gender, age, and social status. So to some extent did the costumes, which were generally rather ornate. The skeuopoios will have also met special requirements such as the coverings of the suffering Heracles in Deianeira and the rags and bandages of Philoctetes. There were some conventional portable props, for example kings carried a staff of authority, military men had swords, and so forth. But otherwise stage-props were employed only sparingly, and this would make them all the more imbued with potential significance. Sophocles made something of a speciality of significant stage-objects that carried power as symbols or tokens within the dramatic fabric. Two examples from these three plays are the metal case in which Deianeira packs the robe that she sends to Heracles in Deianeira, and the bronze urn which is supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes in Electra.
In such a large theatre the actors (three for each playwright) must have been skilled at making large, clear, and role-appropriate movements; and the chorus were highly rehearsed for their dancing. But there was also a great emphasis on the quality of sound. Actors were especially famed for their voices, which would have to vary from role to role; and the chorus were highly trained in singing as well as dancing. These performative skills were essential to the formal structure and aural textures of the whole genre. Throughout the fifth century there were within tragedies three main modes of vocal delivery: spoken iambics, sung choral lyric, and lyrics shared between chorus and actors.18
The plot, in the sense of the action and argumentation of the story, was predominantly carried by the three actors, though with usually only two directly contributing at any one time. Their parts were nearly all delivered in the spoken metre, the iambic trimeter, a line of usually twelve syllables. This was used both for dialogues and for speeches of widely varying length, sometimes running to forty lines or more. The chorus also contributes occasionally to these spoken scenes, but was always limited to a few lines; and for these spoken parts they were very probably represented collectively by the single voice of their leader. This is in keeping with the way that the reasoned, argumentative matter of the drama is the territory of the individual characters, not of the chorus. In Sophocles the spoken iambic sections tend to take up about three-quarters of the entire play, as reckoned by the (rather crude) measure of the number of lines.
Every play incorporated a chorus, a feature which was of the very essence of the art-form. This group of singer-dancers belonged within the created world of the play, and while it was common for them to be local inhabitants, their identity was a matter of choice for the playwright. The contribution of the chorus is developed through their role as involved witnesses; it is, in effect, to articulate a group response to the unfolding drama.19 They are not tied down by the specific individuality and rationality that are intrinsic to the roles of the speaking actors. In a nutshell, the chorus always attempts, by means of its poetic and musical resources, to face what has happened, or may be about to happen. They do their best to make some sense of the events unfolding before their eyes. They are never silenced or reduced to inarticulacy: on the contrary they order their responses and thoughts into poetry, song, and dance. This highly crafted re-visioning of the events of the play adds a whole extra dimension to the texture of the dramatic matter, a layering that cannot be reached through the speech or person of a single character.
The primary vocal contribution of the chorus as a group took the form of dance-poems sung in lyric metres, and accompanied by a double-pipe wind instrument, the aulos. These songs (or ‘odes’) are interspliced with the sections of the play spoken by the actors. They are mostly arranged in stanza-pairs of some ten to fifteen lines, although there are also some stand-alone stanzas. They were all set in complex metres, every stanza-pair unique.20
In addition to the spoken acts and the choral songs, there is a third distinct mode of expression, which may be covered by the loose term ‘lyric dialogue’. There are one or two (occasionally more) of these lyric dialogues in every tragedy: they involve the chorus and one (rarely two) of the actors singing in lyric stanzas, but contributing in widely varying proportions. Crucially, they are not as a rule positioned in between the spoken acts, as the odes are, but are an integrated part of the action of the play. So they do not stand apart like the purely choral songs, but are caught up in the main current of events. While they occur in a variety of circumstances, they all come at junctures of heightened emotional intensity, often but not invariably of distress. It is as though they break through the constraints of the measured and rational iambic speech (and they do sometimes include some iambic lines within the lyric structure).
Finally, and less distinctively than these three modes, there are occasional passages of ‘recitative’ metres (anapaests and trochaics) which are pitched somewhere in between iambic and lyric. These are usually delivered by the chorus-leader, and often accompany arrivals and departures. These intermediate types of delivery are also particularly used to signal a quickening pace as the final movement of the play approaches.
In conclusion, we encounter a huge theatrical space, where both the sight and the sound of the tragedies played were presented in all their measure and beauty. Fine costumes and handsome masks, skilled dancing, mellifluous voices, gripping rhetoric, highly crafted poetry, both spoken and lyric, combine in a Gesamtkunstwerk (an ‘all-in work of art’). Yet at the same time, the events and issues of the plays, with their deceptions, feuds, disappointments, cruelties, untimely deaths—all these are far from beautiful and far from comforting. Pain, anguish, conflict, mortality, the turbid ebb and flow. . . . Antigone’s obsession with the dead, Creon’s crushing inflexibility, Deianeira’s jealous desperation, the injustice of the gods witnessed by Hyllus, Electra’s obsessive vindictiveness, the threatening of insoluble dynastic contamination. . . . Such are the pains and distortions and instabilities of Sophoclean tragedy. And yet they do not deteriorate into cacophony or disgust or incoherence or silence: they face the music, and through that the suffering is itself turned into the coherence of song and poetry.