WHEN THEATER WAS LIFE: THE WORLD OF SOPHOCLES

I

Greek theater emerged from the same explosive creativity that propelled the institutions and ways of knowing of ancient Athens, through two and a half millennia, into our own era. These ranged from the concept and practice of democracy, to an aggressive use of logic with few holds barred, to a philosophy singing not of gods and heroes but of what exists, where it came from, and why. Athenians distinguished history from myth, acutely observed the human form, and reconceived medicine from a set of beliefs and untheorized practices into a science.

Playwrights, whose work was presented to audiences of thousands, effectively took center stage as critics and interpreters of their own culture. Athenian drama had one major showing each year at the nine-day Festival of Dionysos. It was rigorously vetted. Eight dramatists (three tragedians, five comic playwrights), chosen in open competition, were “granted choruses,” a down-to-earth term meaning that the city financed production of their plays. For the Athenians theater was as central to civic life as the assembly, law courts, temples, and agora.

Historians summing up Athens’ cultural importance have tended to emphasize its glories, attending less to the brutal institutions and policies that underwrote the city’s wealth and dominance: its slaves, for instance, who worked the mines that enriched the communal treasury; or its policy of executing the men and enslaving the women and children of enemy cities that refused to surrender on demand. During its long war with Sparta, Athens’ raw and unbridled democracy became increasingly reckless, cruel, and eventually self-defeating. Outside the assembly’s daily debates on war, peace, and myriad other issues, Athenian citizens, most notably the indefatigable Socrates, waged ongoing critiques of the city’s actions and principles. Playwrights, whom the Athenians called didaskaloi (educators), were expected to enlighten audiences about themselves, both individually and collectively. As evidenced by the thirty-three plays that survive, these works presented a huge audience annually with conflicts and dilemmas of the most extreme sort.

To some extent all Sophocles’ plays engage personal, social, and political crises and confrontations—not just those preserved in heroic legend but those taking place in his immediate world. Other Athenian intellectuals, including Thucydides, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, and Aristophanes, were part of that open-ended discussion in which everything was subject to question, including the viability of the city and its democracy (which was twice voted temporarily out of existence).

II

To this day virtually every Athenian theatrical innovation—from paraphernalia such as scenery, costumes, and masks to the architecture of stage and seating and, not least, to the use of drama as a powerful means of cultural and political commentary—remains in use. We thus inherit from Athens the vital potential for drama to engage our realities and to support or critique prevailing orthodoxies.

The myths that engaged Sophocles’ audience originated in Homer’s epics of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Yet Homer’s world was tribal. That of the Greek tragedians was not, or only nominally so. With few exceptions (e.g., Aeschylus’ The Persians), those playwrights were writing through the Homeric world to address, and deal with, the polis world they themselves were living in. Sophocles was appropriating stories and situations from these epics, which were central to the mythos of Athenian culture, and re-visioning them into dramatic agons (contests) relevant to the tumultuous, often vicious politics of Greek life in the fifth century BCE. Today some of Sophocles’ concerns, and the way he approached them, correspond at their deepest levels to events and patterns of thought and conduct that trouble our own time. For example, “[Sophocles’] was an age when war was endemic. And Athens in the late fifth century BC appeared to have a heightened taste for conflict. One year of two in the Democratic Assembly, Athenian citizens voted in favor of military aggression” (Hughes, 138).

Each generation interprets and translates these plays in keeping with the style and idiom it believes best suited for tragedy. Inevitably even the most skilled at preserving the original’s essentials, while attuning its voice to the present, will eventually seem the relic of a bygone age. We have assumed that a contemporary translation should attempt to convey not only what the original seems to have been communicating, but how it communicated—not in its saying, only, but in its doing. It cannot be said too often: these plays were social and historical events witnessed by thousands in a context and setting infused with religious ritual and civic protocol. They were not transitory, one-off entertainments but were preserved, memorized, and invoked. Respecting this basic circumstance will not guarantee a successful translation, but it is a precondition for giving these works breathing room in which their strangeness, their rootedness in distinct historical moments, can flourish. As with life itself, they were not made of words alone.

Athenian playwrights relied on a settled progression of scene types: usually a prologue followed by conversations or exchanges in which situations and attitudes are introduced, then a series of confrontations that feature cut-and-thrust dialogue interrupted by messenger narratives, communal songs of exultation or grieving, and less emotionally saturated, or ‘objective,’ choral odes that respond to or glance off the action. Audiences expected chorus members to be capable of conveying the extraordinary range of expressive modes, from the pithy to the operatic, that Sophocles had at his disposal. To translate this we have needed the resources not only of idiomatic English but also of rhetorical gravitas and, on occasion, colloquial English. Which is why we have adopted, regarding vocabulary and ‘levels of speech,’ a wide and varied palette. When Philoktetes exclaims, “You said it, boy,” that saying corresponds in character to the colloquial Greek expression. On the other hand Aias’s “Long rolling waves of time . . .” is as elevated, without being pompous, as anything can be.

Unfortunately we’ve been taught, and have learned to live with, washed-out stereotypes of the life and art of ‘classical’ times—just as we have come to associate Greek sculpture with the color of its underlying material, usually white marble. The classical historian Bettany Hughes writes in The Hemlock Cup (81) that temples and monuments were painted or stained in “Technicolor” to be seen under the bright Attic sun. The statues’ eyes were not blanks gazing off into space. They had color: a look. To restore their flesh tones, their eye color, and the bright hues of their cloaks would seem a desecration. We should understand that this is so—even as we recognize that, for us, there is no going back. We’ve been conditioned to preserve not the reality of ancient Greek sculpture in its robust cultural ambience and physical setting, but our own fixed conception of it as colorless and sedate—a perception created, ironically, by the weathering and ravages of centuries. No one can change that. Still, as translators we have a responsibility not to reissue a stereotype of classical Greek culture but rather to recoup, to the extent possible, the vitality of its once living reality.

Regarding its highly inflected language, so different from our more context-driven modern English, we recognize that locutions sounding contorted, coy, recondite, or annoyingly roundabout were a feature of ordinary Greek and were intensified in theatrical discourse. Highly wrought, larger-than-life expressions, delivered without artificial amplification to an audience of thousands, did not jar when resonating in the vast Theater of Dionysos, but may to our own Anglophone ears when delivered from our more intimate stages and screens, or read in our books and electronic tablets. Accordingly, where appropriate, and especially in rapid exchanges, we have our characters speak more straightforwardly—as happens in Greek stichomythia, when characters argue back and forth in alternating lines (or ‘rows’) of verse, usually linked by a word they hold in common. Here, for example, is a snippet from Aias (1305–1309)¹ that pivots on “right,” “killer,” “dead” and “god(s)”:

TEUKROS A righteous cause is my courage.

MENELAOS What? It’s right to defend my killer?

TEUKROS Your killer!? You’re dead? And still alive?

MENELAOS A god saved me. But he wanted me dead.

TEUKROS If the gods saved you, why disrespect them?

There are no rules for determining when a more-literal or less-literal approach is appropriate. Historical and dramatic context have to be taken into account. The objective is not only to render the textual meaning (which is ordinarily more on the phrase-by-phrase than the word-by-word level) but also to communicate the feel and impact embedded in that meaning. Dictionaries are indispensable for translators, but they are not sufficient. The meanings of words are immeasurably more nuanced and wide-ranging in life than they can ever be in a lexicon. As in life, where most ‘sayings’ cannot be fully grasped apart from their timing and their place in both personal and social contexts, so in theater: dramatic context must take words up and finish them off. In Aias, Teukros, the out-of-wedlock half brother of Aias, and Menelaos, co-commander of the Greek forces, are trading insults. When Menelaos says, “The archer, far from blood dust, thinks he’s something,” Teukros quietly rejoins, “I’m very good at what I do” (1300–1301).

Understanding the exchange between the two men requires that the reader or audience recognize the ‘class’ implications of archery. Socially and militarily, archers rank low in the pecking order. They stand to the rear of the battle formation. Archers are archers usually because they can’t afford the armor one needs to be a hoplite, a frontline fighter. The point is that Teukros refuses to accept ‘his place’ in the social and military order. For a Greek audience, the sheer fact of standing his ground against a commander had to have been audacious. But that is not how it automatically registers in most modern word-by-word translations, which tend to make Teukros sound defensive (a trait wholly out of his character in this play). Examples: (a) “Even so, ’tis no sordid craft that I possess,” (b) “I’m not the master of a menial skill,” (c) “My archery is no contemptible science,” (d) “The art I practice is no mean one.” These translations are technically accurate. They’re scrupulous in reproducing the Greek construction whereby, in an idiomatic context, a negative may register as an assertion—or even, framed as a negative future question, become a command. But tonally, in modern English idiom, Teukros’ negation undercuts his assertion (the ‘I’m not . . . but even so’ formula). To our ears it admits weakness or defensiveness. “I’m very good at what I do,” however, is a barely veiled threat. The dramatic arc of the encounter, which confirms that Teukros will not back down for anything or anyone, not even a commander of the Greek army, substantiates that Sophocles meant it to be heard as such.

Hearing the line in context we realize instantly not only what the words are saying but, more pointedly and feelingly, what they’re doing. His words are not just ‘about’ something. They are an act in themselves—not, as in the more literal translations, a duress-driven apologia. Translation must thus respond to an individual character’s ever-changing demeanor and circumstance. The speaker’s state of mind should show through his or her words, just as in life. Idiomatic or colloquial expressions fit many situations better—especially those that have a more finely tuned emotional economy––than phrases that, if uninhabited, hollowed out, or just plain buttoned-up, sound evasive or euphemistic. Many of the speeches Sophocles gives his characters are as abrupt and common as he might himself have spoken to his fellow Athenians in the assembly, in the agora, to his troops, his actors, or his family.

At times we have chosen a more literal translation in passages where scholars have opted for a seemingly more accessible modern phrase. At the climactic moment in Oedipus the King, when Oedipus realizes he has killed his father and fathered children with his mother, he says in a modern prose version by Hugh Lloyd-Jones: “Oh, oh! All is now clear. O light, may I now look on you for the last time, I who am revealed as cursed in my birth, cursed in my marriage, cursed in my killing!” (Greek 1182–1885). When Lloyd-Jones uses and repeats the word “cursed,” he is compressing a longer Greek phrase meaning “being shown to have done what must not be done.” This compression shifts the emphasis from his unsuspecting human actions toward the realm of the god who acted to “curse” him. The following lines keep the original grammatical construction:

All! All! It has all happened!

It was all true. O light! Let this

be the last time I look on you.

You see now who I am—

the child who must not be born!

I loved where I must not love!

I killed where I must not kill! (1336–1342)

Here Oedipus names the three acts of interfamilial transgression that it was both his good and his ill fortune to have survived, inflicted, and participated in—birth, sexual love, and murder in self-defense—focusing not only on the curse each act has become but now realizing the full and horrific consequence of each action that was, as it happened, unknowable. Registering the shudder rushing through him, Oedipus’s exclamations convey the shock of his realization: I did these things without feeling their horror as I do now.

Finally, translations tend to be more or less effective depending on their ability to convey the emotional and physiological reactions that will give a reader or an audience a kinesthetic relationship to the dramatic moment, whether realized as text or performance. This is a precondition for maintaining the tactility that characterizes any living language. Dante wrote that the spirit of poetry abounds “in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations” of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. We have not attempted that—these are translations, not new works—but we have striven for a language that is spontaneous and generative as opposed to one that is studied and bodiless. We have also worked to preserve the root meaning of Sophocles’ Greek, especially his always illuminating metaphors.

III

Sophocles reveals several recurrent attitudes in his plays—sympathy for fate’s victims, hostility toward leaders who abuse their power, skepticism toward self-indulgent ‘heroes,’ disillusionment with war and revenge—that are both personal and politically significant. All his plays to a greater or lesser degree focus on outcasts from their communities. Historically, those who transgress a community’s values have either been physically exiled or stigmatized by sanctions and/or shunning. To keep a polity from breaking apart, everyone, regardless of social standing, must abide by certain enforceable communal expectations. Athens in the fifth century BCE practiced political ostracism, a procedure incorporated in its laws. By voting to ostracize a citizen, Athens withdrew its protection and civic benefits—sometimes to punish an offender, but also as a kind of referee’s move, expelling a divisive public figure from the city (and from his antagonists) so as to promote a ten-year period of relative peace.

In earlier eras Greek cities also cast out those who committed sacrilege. Murderers of kin, for instance, or blasphemers of a god—in myth and in real life—were banished from Greek cities until the ‘unclean’ individual ‘purged’ his crime according to current religious custom. The imperative to banish a kin violator runs so deep that Oedipus, after discovering he has committed patricide and incest, passes judgment on himself and demands to live in exile. In Oedipus at Kolonos, he and Antigone have been exiled from Thebes against their will. In the non-Oedipus plays Philoktetes, Elektra, and Aias, as well as Herakles in Women of Trakhis, are not outcasts in the traditional sense, though all have actively or involuntarily offended their social units in some way. They may or may not be typical tragic characters; nonetheless none ‘fit’ the world they’re given to live in. In these translations we’ve incorporated awareness of social dimensions in the original texts, which, as they involve exercises of power, are no less political than social.

In each of the four non-Oedipus plays, a lethal confrontation or conflict ‘crazes’ the surface coherence of a society (presumed to be Athenian society, either in itself or as mediated through a military context), thus revealing and heightening its internal contradictions.

In Women of Trakhis the revered hero Herakles, when he tries to impose a young concubine on his wife Deianeira, provokes her to desperate measures that unwittingly cause him horrific pain, whereupon he exposes his savage and egomaniacal nature, lashing out at everyone around him, exercising a hero’s prerogatives so savagely that he darkens his own reputation and drives his wife to suicide and his son to bitter resentment.

Elektra exposes the dehumanizing cost of taking revenge, by revealing the neurotic, materialistic, and cold-blooded character of the avengers. In Aias, when the Greek Army’s most powerful soldier tries to assassinate his commanders, whose authority rests on dubious grounds, he exposes not only them but his own growing obsolescence in a prolonged war that has more need of strategic acumen, as exemplified by Odysseus, than brute force. In Philoktetes the title character, abandoned on a deserted island because of a stinking wound his fellow warriors can’t live with, is recalled to active service with the promise of a cure and rehabilitation. The army needs him and his bow to win the war. It is a call he resists, until the god Herakles negotiates a resolution--not in the name of justice, but because Philoktetes’ compliance is culturally mandated. As in Aias, the object is to maintain the integrity and thus the survival of the society itself. The greatest threat is not an individual’s death, which here is not the preeminent concern, but the disintegration of a society.

In our own time aspects of Aias and Philoktetes have been used for purposes that Sophocles, who was the sponsor in Athens of a healing cult, might have appreciated. Both heroes, but especially Aias, have been appropriated as exemplars of post-traumatic stress disorder, in particular as suffered by soldiers in and out of a war zone. Excerpts from these two plays have been performed around the United States for veterans, soldiers on active duty, their families, and concerned others. Ultimately, however, Sophocles is intent on engaging and resolving internal contradictions that threaten the historical continuity, the very future, of the Athenian city-state. He invokes the class contradictions Athens was experiencing by applying them to the mythical/historical eras from which he draws his plots.

Modern-day relevancies implicit in Sophocles’ plays will come sharply into focus or recede from view depending on time and circumstance. The constant factors in these plays will always be their consummate poetry, dramatic propulsion, and the intensity with which they illuminate human motivation and morality. Scholars have also identified allusions in his plays to events in Athenian history. The plague in Oedipus the King is described in detail so vivid it dovetails in many respects with Thucydides’ more clinical account of the plague that killed one-third to one-half of Athens’ population beginning in 429 BCE. Kreon, Antigone’s antagonist, displays the imperviousness to rational advice and lack of foresight exhibited by the politicians of Sophocles’ era, whose follies Thucydides narrates, and which Sophocles himself was called in to help repair—specifically by taking a democracy that in a fit of imperial overreach suffered, in 413, a catastrophic defeat on the shores of Sicily, and replacing it with a revanchist oligarchy. When Pisander, one of the newly empowered oligarchs, asked Sophocles if he was one of the councilors who had approved the replacement of the democratic assembly by what was, in effect, a junta of four hundred, Sophocles admitted that he had. “Why?” asked Pisander. “Did you not think this a terrible decision?” Sophocles agreed it was. “So weren’t you doing something terrible?” “That’s right. There was no better alternative.” (Aristotle, Rh. 1419a). The lesson? When life, more brutally than drama, delivers its irreversible calamities and judgments, it forces a polity, most movingly, to an utterly unanticipated, wholly ‘other’ moral and spiritual level.

In Oedipus at Kolonos Sophocles alludes to his city’s decline when he celebrates a self-confident Athens that no longer existed when Sophocles wrote that play. He gives us Theseus, a throwback to the type of thoughtful, decisive, all-around leader Athens lacked as it pursued policies that left it impoverished and defenseless—this under the delusion that its only enemies were Spartans and Sparta’s allies.

IV

Archaeologists have identified scores of local theaters all over the Greek world—stone semicircles, some in cities and at religious destinations, others in rural villages. Within many of these structures both ancient and modern plays are still staged. Hillsides whose slopes were wide and gentle enough to seat a crowd made perfect settings for dramatic encounters and were the earliest theaters. Ancient roads that widened below a gentle hillside, or level ground at a hill’s base, provided suitable performance spaces. Such sites, along with every city’s agora and a temple dedicated to Dionysos or another god, were the main arenas of community activity. Stone tablets along roads leading to theaters commemorated local victors: athletes, actors, playwrights, singers, and the winning plays’ producers. Theaters, in every sense, were open to all the crosscurrents of civic and domestic life.

The components of the earliest theaters reflect their rural origins and were later incorporated into urban settings. Theatron, the root of our word “theater,” translates as “viewing place” and designated the curved and banked seating area. Orchestra was literally “the place for dancing.” The costumed actors emerged from and retired to the skenê, a word that originally meant, and literally was in the rural theaters, a tent. As theaters evolved to become more permanent structures, the skenê developed as well into a “stage building” whose painted facade changed, like a mask, with the characters’ various habitats. Depending on the drama, the skenê could assume the appearance of a king’s grand palace, the Kyklops’ cave, a temple to a god, or (reverting to its original material form) an army commander’s tent.

Greek drama itself originated in two earlier traditions, one rural, one civic. Choral singing of hymns to honor Dionysos or other gods and heroes, which had begun in the countryside, evolved into the structured choral ode. The costumes and the dancing of choral singers, often accompanied by a reed instrument, are depicted on sixth-century vases that predate the plays staged in the Athenian theater. The highly confrontational nature of every play suggests how early choral odes and dialogues came into being in concert with a fundamental aspect of democratic governance: public and spirited debate. Two or more characters facing off in front of an audience was a situation at the heart of both drama and democratic politics.

Debate, the democratic Athenian art practiced and perfected by politicians, litigators, and thespians—relished and judged by voters, juries, and audiences—flourished in theatrical venues and permeated daily Athenian life. Thucydides used it to narrate his history of the war between Athens and Sparta. He recalled scores of lengthy debates that laid out the motives of politicians, generals, and diplomats as each argued his case for a particular policy or a strategy. Plato, recognizing the open-ended, exploratory power of spirited dialogue, wrote his philosophy entirely in dramatic form.

The Greeks were addicted to contests and turned virtually every chance for determining a winner into a formal competition. The Great Dionysia for playwrights and choral singers, and the Olympics for athletes, are only the most famous and familiar. The verbal agon remains to this day a powerful medium for testing and judging issues. And character, as in the debate between Teukros and Menelaos, may be laid bare. But there is no guarantee. Persuasiveness can be, and frequently is, manipulative (e.g., many of the sophists evolved into hired rhetorical guns, as distinguished from the truth-seeking, pre-Socratic philosophers). Sophocles may well have had the sophists’ amorality in mind when he had Odysseus persuade Neoptomolos that betraying Philoktetes would be a patriotic act and bring the young man fame.

Though they were part of a high-stakes competition, the plays performed at the Dionysia were part of a religious ceremony whose chief purpose was to honor theater’s patron god, Dionysos. The god’s worshippers believed that Dionysos’ powers and rituals transformed the ways in which they experienced and dealt with their world—from their enthralled response to theatrical illusion and disguise to the exhilaration, liberation, and violence induced by wine. Yet the festival also aired, or licensed, civic issues that might otherwise have had no truly public, polis-wide expression. The playwrights wrote as politai, civic poets, as distinguished from those who focused on personal lyrics and shorter choral works. Though Aias and Philoktetes are set in a military milieu, the issues they engage are essentially civil and political. Neither Aias nor Philoktetes is concerned with the ‘enemy of record,’ Troy, but rather with Greek-on-Greek conflict. With civil disruption, and worse. In fact one need look no further than the play venue itself for confirmation of the interpenetration of the civic with the military—a concern bordering on preoccupation—when, every year, the orphans of warriors killed in battle were given new hoplite armor and a place of honor at the Festival of Dionysos.

Communal cohesiveness and the historical continuity of the polity are most tellingly threatened from within: in Aias by the individualistic imbalance and arrogance of Aias, whose warrior qualities and strengths are also his weakness—they lead him to destroy the war spoil that is the common property of the entire Greek army—and in Philoktetes by the understandable and just, yet inordinately unyielding, self-preoccupation of Philoktetes himself. In both cases the fundamental, encompassing question is this: With what understandings, what basic values, is the commonality of the polis to be recovered and rededicated in an era in which civic cohesiveness is under the extreme pressure of a war Athens is losing (especially at the time Philoktetes was produced) and, further, the simmering stasis of unresolved class or caste interests? In sharply different ways, all three plays of the Oedipus cycle, as well as Aias and Elektra, cast doubt on the legitimacy of usurped, authoritarian, or publicly disapproved leadership.

Given the historical and political dynamism of these great, instructive works, we’ve aimed to translate and communicate their challenge to Athenian values for a contemporary audience whose own values are no less under duress.

V

The Great Dionysia was the central and most widely attended event of the political year, scheduled after winter storms had abated so that foreign visitors could come and bear witness to Athens’ wealth, civic pride, imperial power, and artistic imagination. For eight or nine days each spring, during the heyday of Greek theater in the fifth century BCE, Athenians flocked to the temple grounds sacred to Dionysos on the southern slope of the Acropolis. After dark on the first day, a parade of young men hefted a giant phallic icon of the god from the temple and into the nearby theater. As the icon had been festooned with garlands of ivy and a mask of the god’s leering face, their raucous procession initiated a dramatic festival called the City Dionysia, a name that differentiated it from the festival’s ancient rural origins in Dionysian myth and cult celebrations of the god. As the festival gained importance in the sixth century BCE, most likely through the policies of Pisistratus, it was also known as the Great Dionysia.

Pisistratus, an Athenian tyrant in power off and on beginning in 561 BCE and continuously from 546 to 527, had good reason for adapting the Rural Dionysia as Athens’ Great Dionysia: “Dionysos was a god for the ‘whole’ of democratic Athens” (Hughes, 213). Everyone, regardless of political faction or social standing, could relate to the boisterous communal activities of the festival honoring Dionysos: feasting, wine drinking, dancing, singing, romping through the countryside, and performing or witnessing dithyrambs and more elaborate dramatic works. The Great Dionysia thus served to keep in check, if not transcend, internal factionalizing by giving all citizens a ‘natural’ stake in Athens—Athens not simply as a place but as a venerable polity with ancient cultural roots. To this end Pisistratus had imported from Eleutherai an ancient phallic representation of Dionysos, one that took several men to carry.

Lodged as it was in a temple on the outskirts of Athens, this bigger-than-life icon gave the relatively new, citified cult the sanctified air of hoary antiquity (Csapo and Slater, 103–104). Thus validated culturally, the Great Dionysia was secured as a host to reassert, and annually rededicate, Athens as a democratic polity. As Bettany Hughes notes in The Hemlock Cup, “to call Greek drama an ‘art-form’ is somewhat anachronistic. The Greeks (unlike many modern-day bureaucrats) didn’t distinguish drama as ‘art’—something separate from ‘society,’ ‘politics,’ [or] ‘life.’ Theater was fundamental to democratic Athenian business. . . . [In] the fifth century this was the place where Athenian democrats came to understand the very world they lived in” (Hughes, 213).

The occasion offered Athens the chance to display treasure exacted from subjugated ‘allies’ (or tributes others willingly brought to the stage) and to award gold crowns to citizens whose achievements Athens’ leaders wished to honor. Theater attendance itself was closely linked to citizenship; local town councils issued free festival passes to citizens in good standing. The ten generals elected yearly to conduct Athens’ military campaigns poured libations to Dionysos. The theater’s bowl seethed with a heady, sometimes unruly brew of military, political, and religious energy.

Performances began at dawn and lasted well into the afternoon. The 14,000 or more Athenians present watched in god knows what state of anticipation or anxiety. Whatever else it did to entertain, move, and awe, Athenian tragedy consistently exposed human vulnerability to the gods’ malice and favoritism. Because the gods were potent realities to Athenian audiences, they craved and expected an overwhelming emotional, physically distressing experience. That expectation distinguishes the greater intensity with which Athenians responded to plays from our own less challenging, more routine and frequent encounters with drama. Athenians wept while watching deities punish the innocent or unlucky, a reaction that distressed Plato. In his Republic, rather than question the motives or morality of the all-powerful Olympian gods for causing mortals grief, he blamed the poets and playwrights for their unwarranted wringing of the audience’s emotions. He held that the gods had no responsibility for human suffering. True to form, Plato banned both poets and playwrights from his ideal city.

Modern audiences would be thoroughly at home with other, more cinematic stage effects. The sights and sounds tragedy delivered in the Theater of Dionysos were often spectacular. Aristotle, who witnessed a lifetime of productions in the fourth century—well after Sophocles’ own lifetime, when the plays were performed in the heat of their historical moment—identified “spectacle,” or opsis, as one of the basic (though to him suspect) elements of tragic theater. Under the influence of Aristotle, who preferred the study to the stage, and who therefore emphasized the poetry rather than the production of works, ancient commentators tended to consider “the visual aspects of drama [as] both vulgar and archaic” (Csapo and Slater, 257). Nonetheless, visual and aural aspects there were: oboe music; dancing and the singing of set-piece odes by a chorus; masks that transformed the same male actor, for instance, into a swarthy-faced young hero, a dignified matron, Argos with a hundred eyes, or the Kyklops with only one. The theater featured painted scenery and large-scale constructions engineered with sliding platforms and towering cranes. It’s hardly surprising that Greek tragedy has been considered a forerunner of Italian opera.

Judges awarding prizes at the Great Dionysia were chosen by lot from a list supplied by the council—one judge from each of Athens’ ten tribes. Critical acumen was not required to get one’s name on the list, but the choregoi (the producers and financial sponsors of the plays) were present when the jury was assembled and probably had a hand in its selection. At the conclusion of the festival the ten selected judges, each having sworn that he hadn’t been bribed or unduly influenced, would inscribe on a tablet the names of the three competing playwrights in descending order of merit. The rest of the process depended on chance. The ten judges placed their ballots in a large urn. The presiding official drew five at random, counted up the weighted vote totals, and declared the winner.

VI

When Sophocles was a boy, masters trained him to excel in music, dance, and wrestling. He won crowns competing against his age-mates in all three disciplines. Tradition has it that he first appeared in Athenian national life at age fifteen, dancing naked (according to one source) and leading other boy dancers in a hymn of gratitude to celebrate Athens’ defeat of the Persian fleet in the straits of Salamis.

Sophocles’ father, Sophroniscus, manufactured weapons and armor (probably in a factory operated by slaves), and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife. The family lived in Kolonos, a rural suburb just north of Athens. Although his parents were not aristocrats, as most other playwrights’ were, they surely had money and owned property; thus their status did not hamper their son’s career prospects. Sophocles’ talents as a dramatist, so formidable and so precociously developed, won him early fame. As an actor he triumphed in his own now-lost play, Nausicaä, in the role of the eponymous young princess who discovers the nearly naked Odysseus washed up on the beach while playing ball with her girlfriends.

During Sophocles’ sixty-five-year career as a didaskalos he wrote and directed more than 120 plays and was awarded first prize at least eighteen times. No record exists of his placing lower than second. Of the seven entire works of his that survive, along with a substantial fragment of a satyr play, The Trackers, only two very late plays can be given exact production dates: Philoktetes in 409 and Oedipus at Kolonos, staged posthumously in 401. Some evidence suggests that Antigone was produced around 442–441 and Oedipus the King in the 420s. Aias, Elektra, and Women of Trakhis have been conjecturally, but never conclusively, dated through stylistic analysis. Aristotle, who had access we forever lack to the hundreds of fifth-century plays produced at the Dionysia, preferred Sophocles to his rivals Aeschylus and Euripides. He considered Oedipus the King the perfect example of tragic form, and developed his theory of tragedy from his analysis of it.

Sophocles’ fellow citizens respected him sufficiently to vote him into high city office on at least three occasions. He served for a year as chief tribute-collector for Athens’ overseas empire. A controversial claim by Aristophanes of Byzantium, in the third century, implies that Sophocles’ tribe was so impressed by a production of Antigone that they voted him in as one of ten military generals (strategoi) in 441–440. Later in life Sophocles was respected as a participant in democratic governance at the highest level. In 411 he was elected to a ten-man commission charged with replacing Athens’ discredited democratic governance with an oligarchy, a development that followed the military’s catastrophic defeat in Sicily in 413.

Most ancient biographical sources attest to Sophocles’ good looks, his easygoing manner, and his enjoyment of life. Athanaeus’ multivolume Deipnosophistai, a compendium of gossip and dinner chat about and among ancient worthies, includes several vivid passages that reveal Sophocles as both a commanding presence and an impish prankster, ready one moment to put down a schoolmaster’s boorish literary criticism and the next to flirt with the wine boy.

Sophocles is also convincingly described as universally respected, with amorous inclinations and intensely religious qualities that, to his contemporaries, did not seem incompatible. Religious piety meant something quite different to an Athenian than the humility, sobriety, and aversion to sensual pleasure it might suggest to us—officially, if not actually. His involvement in various cults, including one dedicated to a god of health and another to the hero Herakles, contributed to his reputation as “loved by the gods” and “the most religious of men.” He was celebrated—and worshipped after his death as a hero—for bringing a healing cult (related to Aesculapius and involving a snake) to Athens. It is possible he founded an early version of a hospital. He never flinched from portraying the Greek gods as often wantonly cruel, destroying innocent people, for instance, as punishment for their ancestors’ crimes. But the gods in Antigone, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Philoktetes mete out justice with a more even hand.

One remarkable absence in Sophocles’ own life was documented suffering of any kind. His luck continued to the moment his body was placed in its tomb. As he lay dying, a Spartan army had once again invaded the Athenian countryside, blocking access to Sophocles’ burial site beyond Athens’ walls. But after Sophocles’ peaceful death the Spartan general allowed the poet’s burial party to pass through his lines, apparently out of respect for the god Dionysos.

Robert Bagg
James Scully

NOTE

1. Unless otherwise indicated, the line numbers and note numbers for translations of Sophocles’ dramas other than Women of Trakhis refer to those in the Harper Perennial Complete Sophocles series.