Sophocles and the Athenian Democracy

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SOPHOCLES ANDTHE TRAGEDY OF

ATHENIAN

DEMOCRACY

JOSH BEER

PRAEGER


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Sophocles and the Tragedy

of Athenian Democracy


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SOPHOCLES AND THETRAGEDY OF

ATHENIAN

DEMOCRACY

JOSH BEER

Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 105

LIVES OF THE THEATRE

SIMON WILLIAMS and CHRISTOPHER INNES, Series Advisers


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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBeer, Josh

Sophocles and the tragedy of Athenian democracy / Josh Beer.

p. cm.—(Contributions in drama and theatre studies, ISSN 0163–3821 ; no. 105.

Lives of the theatre)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–313–28946–8 (alk. paper)

1. Sophocles—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Political plays, Greek—History and

criticism. 3. Sophocles—Homes and haunts—Greece—Athens. 4. Politics and

literature—Greece—Athens. 5. Sophocles—Political and social views. 6. Mythology,

Greek, in literature. 7. Theater—Greece—Athens. 8. Democracy in literature.

9. Tragedy. I. Title. II. Contributions in drama and theatre studies ; no. 105.

III. Contributions in drama and theatre studies. Lives of the theatre.

PA4417.B37 2004

882.01—dc28 2003060423

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2004 by Josh Beer

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be

reproduced, by any process or technique, without theexpress written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003060423

ISBN: 0–313–28946–8

ISSN: 0163–3821

First published in 2004

Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881

An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

www.praeger.comPrinted in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National

Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


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given time is set. Theatre itself can be seen to have a palpable effect on the

social world around it, because it reflects the life of its time and helps to

form that life by feeding it images, epitomes, and alternative versions of

itself. Hence, we hope that this series will also contribute to an under-standing of the broader social life of the period in which the theatre that is

the subject of each volume was a part.

Lives of the Theatre grew out of an idea that Josh Beer put to Christo-

pher Innes and Peter Arnott. Sadly, Peter Arnott did not live to see the inau-

guration of the series. Simon Williams kindly agreed to replace him as one

of the series editors and has played a full part in its preparation. In com-

memoration, the editors wish to acknowledge Peter’s own rich contributionto the life of the theatre.

Josh Beer

Christopher Innes

Simon Williams

viii Series Foreword


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Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Christopher Innes and Simon Williams, the coeditors

of the Lives of the Theatre, for their unflagging patience as well as their

suggestions for improving this manuscript. I have used the Greek text of

Sophocles’ Plays and Fragments, edited and translated by Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones in three volumes in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Sophocles

(Cambridge, Mass., 1994–96). Except for one passage of Thucydides in

chapter 8, where I have used the well-known translation of R. Crawley,

first published in 1876, the translations in the book are my own. They are

intended purely to be functional without any pretensions to literary merit.

In chapter 7, I have incorporated some material I originally used in an arti-

cle titled “The Riddle of the Sphinx and the Staging of Oedipus Rex,”

Essays in Theatre 8 (1990): 105–20. I should like to thank the editors for permission to use this material.

I have a number of other acknowledgments. Three friends—Victor

Valentine, Steve Kupfer, and Bill McGrahan—kindly read parts of the

manuscript and suggested improvements where they did not think my text

was easily comprehensible to the general reader. Mrs. Catherine Andreadis,

with great patience, helped to make the manuscript ready for the publisher.

I also owe acknowledgments to the Office of the Dean of Arts and SocialSciences and the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies at Carleton Uni-

versity, Ottawa, Canada, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada for subventions toward the research and pub-

lication of this book.

There is one other acknowledgment to be made of a different order.

Before his death in 1990, Peter Arnott and I discussed matters related

to Greek tragedy on many occasions. I still look at his marionette perfor-


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mance of Euripides’ Bacchae on video to remind myself that the characters

of Greek tragedies were masks, something admirably suggested by his

marionettes. There is much in this book that I know Peter would have dis-

agreed with, but it has been written in homage to someone who was a manof the theatre in every sense. Finally, I dedicate the book to Barnaby and

Carmel.

[James Barrett’s Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek

Tragedy, Berkeley, Calif. (2002), Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, eds., Greek

and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge (2002),

and Rush Rehm’s The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek

Tragedy, Princeton, N.J. (2002), reached me after this book had gone to press. In conformity with The Lives of the Theatre series, I have not bur-

dened the text with an overabundance of endnotes. My debts to many

scholars are too numerous to acknowledge personally. I hope that the bib-

liography serves as a token of my indebtedness.]

x Acknowledgments


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Introduction

Although there are dissenters, there has been an increasing consensus that

the Greek tragic theatre played an important role in the political life of

Athenian democracy in the fifth century. The way in which the theatre was

funded and its institutional context within the life of Athenian democracy point to its public importance. Soon after the democratic reforms of Cleis-

thenes at the end of the sixth century, the Athenians, at the beginning of the

fifth century, immediately gave recognition to the theatre by erecting a

large, permanent, public building for dramatic and choral performances on

the southeast slope of the Acropolis. This space provided a larger gather-

ing place for citizens to meet than did all other public places in Athens

except the agora, which was not a building. The theatre itself could hold

considerably more people than could the area on the hill called the Pnyxwhere the ecclesia, the main political assembly of the Athenians, met.

At first, only tragedies, satyr plays, and dithyrambs—which were orga-

nized around the new tribes of the polis created by Cleisthenes’democratic

reforms—were performed in this theatre. Comedy was introduced later, in

486. Because the satyr play became subsidiary to tragedy, tragedy pro-

vided the main dramatic fare. The emotional dangers inherent in tragedy

were soon realized, for in the late 490s, the playwright Phrynichus put onhis Capture of Miletus, which so upset the Athenians that he was heavily

fined and all future performances of the tragedy were banned. Tragedy as

a theatrical art form intended for a large audience of citizens survived that

crisis. It is difficult to imagine, however, that something as potentially sub-

versive as tragedy—in which there is created an imaginary space within a

public place, where different models of human behavior and conflict are

presented for a mass audience to witness—would have been allowed to


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Chronology

Date Sophocles Cultural Events Political Events

c. 650? Iliad and Odyssey

594 Solon’s Reforms

c. 546 Tyranny ofPisistratus begins

c. 534 Traditional date of

first performance of

tragedy by Thespis

527 Death of Pisistratus.

Rule of Hippias and

Hipparchus begins

525? Birth of Aeschylus

514 Conspiracy of

Harmodius and

Aristogiton.

Assassination of

Hipparchus

510 Expulsion of

Hippias and end of tyranny

508–507 Cleisthenes’

democratic reforms

507–506? Reorganization of

City Dionysia?


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c. 500 Construction of first

theatre of Dionysus

on southeast slope of

Acropolis. Aeschylus’dramatic career begins

c. 499 “Ionian” revolt

begins

c. 498 Burning of Sardis

c. 496 Birth of Sophocles

c. 495 Birth of Pericles

494 Persian capture of Miletus

c. 492? Production of Archonship of

Phrynichus’ Capture Themistocles

of Miletus

490 Eretria sacked.

Battle of Marathon

487–486 Comedies introduced Archons appointed at Dionysia by lot

485 Death of Darius.

Xerxes becomes

Persian king

484 First victory of

Aeschylus at Dionysia

480 Persian invasion.

Athens abandoned.

Battles of

Thermopylae and

Salamis

479 Battles of Plataea

and Mycale. “Ioni-

ans” revolt from

Persia478–477 Formation of Con-

federacy of Delos.

Rise of Cimon at

Athens

476 Phrynichus’ Phoenician

Women performed.

Themistocles choregus

xiv Chronology


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472 Aeschylus wins tragic

prize with Persians.

Pericles choregus

471? Ostracism of Themistocles

469 Birth of Socrates

468 Sophocles’ first entry at

Dionysia? Defeats

Aeschylus

467 Aeschylus victorious

at Dionysia withTheban Trilogy, Laius,

Oedipus, Seven

against Thebes

464 Revolt of Spartan

helots

463 Aeschylus’ victory Cimon goes to aid

with Suppliants? Spartans

Sophocles winssecond prize

463–461 Ephialtes’ demo-

cratic reforms at

Athens. Areopagus

deprived of political

powers. Athens

allies herself with

Argos. Ephialtesassassinated. Cimon

ostracized. Influence

of Pericles begins

458 Aeschylus victorious

with Oresteia

456 Death of Aeschylus

455 Euripides competes atDionysia for the

first time

454 Treasury of Confed-

eracy of Delos

moved to Athens

451 Periclean citizenship

law at Athens

Chronology xv


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449–440? Production of Ajax and Prize introduced Peace made

of Trachiniae for lead tragic with Persia

(dates unknown) actors

447 Sophocles victorious Building of Parthenonat Dionysia begins

(plays unknown)

445 Birth of Aristophanes? Thirty Years’ Peace

between Athens and

Sparta

445–438? Production of Antigone

(date of 441 is dubious).

Wins first prize

443–442 Treasurer of Athena Ostracism of

Thucydides (not the

historian)

441–440 Strategos with Pericles? Euripides’ first tragic Revolt of Samos

victory (plays unknown)

438 Sophocles wins victory Alcestis, first extant

at Dionysia play of Euripides(plays unknown)

c. 435–425Oedipus Rex?

(Production date

unknown.) Second prize

431 Sophocles wins second Production of Beginning of

prize at Dionysia Euripides’ Medea Peloponnesian War

and Philoctetes.

Gains third prize.Victory of Euphorion,

son of Aeschylus

429? Birth of Plato

428 Euripides wins first Revolt of Mytilene

prize at Dionysia

with Hippolytus

427 Surrender of

Mytilene

425 Acharnians, first

extant comedy of

Aristophanes

421 Truce in Pelopon-

nesian War (Peace of

Nicias)

c. 420? Euripides’ Electra

xvi Chronology


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416 Destruction of

Melos

415 Trojan Women of Beginning of

Euripides (second Sicilian expedition. prize) Alcibiades deserts to

Sparta

413 Disaster of Atheni-

ans in Sicily

413–412 Sophocles as Proboulos Euripides’ Helen Athenian allies

revolt

411 Sophocles’ Electra? Establishment of Committee of 400.

Later overthrown

410 Democracy restored

409 Sophocles’ victory

with Philoctetes

408 Euripides’ Orestes

407 Alcibiades returns to

Athens

407–406 Death of Euripides

406 Death of Sophocles Battle of Arginusae

(either 406 or 405) (generals tried on

bloc)

405 Posthumous Battle of

production of Aegospotami

Euripides’ Bacchae?Aristophanes’ Frogs,

first prize at Lenaea

405–404 Blockade of Athens

404 Surrender of Athens

to Spartan Lysander.

Tyranny of Thirty

set up

403 Defeat of Thirty.

Restoration of

democracy

401 Posthumous victory

of Sophocles’ Oedipus

at Colonus

399 Trial and death of

Socrates

Chronology xvii


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Chapter 1

Tragedy, Athens, and the

Greek Cultural Mosaic

What is commonly known as Greek tragedy is sometimes more precisely

called Athenian or Attic tragedy, because tragedy as we usually understand

the term was an Athenian invention. The three major tragic playwrights

were all Athenians who composed their plays, with few exceptions, for production in Athens in the fifth century. The fifth century witnessed both

the flowering of Athenian democracy and the rise and fall of the Athenian

empire. However, even when their political power was at its height, the

Athenians did not achieve complete mastery over the Greek world,

because there were many poleis that never succumbed to their sway and

there was always the countervailing power of the Spartans and the Pelo-

ponnesian League. The Athenian empire—which was founded on, and

largely maintained by, the strength of the Athenian fleet—was acquired inthe years following the unsuccessful Persian invasion of Greece in 481–79.

This empire reached its peak in the middle decades of the century, but in

431, the Athenians became embroiled with the Spartans and their allies in

the long and exhausting Peloponnesian War that led finally to Athens’

defeat and the loss of her empire in 404.

The years between 479 and 404 are central to our study. All the surviv-

ing tragedies, with the possible exception of Rhesus —whose Euripideanauthorship is seriously debatable—fall within these years, as do the dra-

matic careers of Sophocles and Euripides. Although Aeschylus’ dramatic

career had begun earlier, in about 500, it seems more than simple chance

that all his extant works were composed in the decades following the

expulsion of the Persians. In fact, it could well be argued that the demo-

cratic reforms that had been instituted by Cleisthenes at Athens in 508 and

the major role that the Athenians had played in the liberation of Greece


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from the Persians served as the catalyst for the maturing of tragedy in the

hands of Aeschylus and Sophocles. At the very least, it is symbolically

significant that the plot of the earliest surviving tragedy, Aeschylus’ Per-

sians, produced in 472, is centered on the actual historical events of thePersian invasion and enacts the tragedy of oriental despotism against the

background of the Greeks’ struggle for freedom.

Even though the Athenians failed to gain complete military and politi-

cal dominance over the other Greeks in this period, their cultural superi-

ority nevertheless became unrivaled—to such an extent that on many

occasions, when we talk about the achievements of the Greeks in this era,

we are really talking about the achievements of the Athenians. If we may believe the historian Thucydides (2.41), Pericles, the main architect of

Athens’ imperial policy and her most successful statesman, claimed that

Athens was “the School of Greece.” In the visual and performing arts,

history, philosophy, and science, Athens provided a unique cultural

milieu. Even though not all of the most important writers, artists, and

thinkers of the era were Athenian, Athens provided the cultural center that

they frequented.

Most significant from our point of view is that by the middle of the fifthcentury, the City Dionysia, the main festival at which the tragedies and

comedies were performed in Athens, had become the major annual show-

case for the demonstration of Athenian cultural achievements as well as

Athenian wealth and power. Not only did it attract an Athenian audience in

the thousands, but also visitors and dignitaries from many quarters of the

Greek world. Although strictly speaking, unlike the Olympic games and a

few other festivals, the Dionysia was not a Panhellenic festival, it never-

theless assumed a Panhellenic significance. In the wake of its success, the-

atres were to spread throughout the Greek world and come to hold a

central place among the civic structures of many Greek poleis.

For all of Athens’ distinctiveness, culturally the Athenians shared much

in common with other Greeks. Tragedy provides a case in point. Although

it was essentially an Athenian creation, the Athenian tragedians were the

heirs of a larger Greek poetic tradition, in which no Athenian stands out

prominently, with the exception of Solon, a sixth-century Athenian states-man. The themes of Solon’s political poetry undoubtedly had an influence

on the moral discourse of tragedy, but it is archaic choral lyric, on the one

hand, and archaic narrative poetry (especially the epics of Homer) on the

other, that helped to shape the dramatic structure of tragedy as it came to

exist in fifth-century Athens. Homer—used as shorthand for the two epic

poems the Iliad and the Odyssey —was “the poet” whom no Greek polis

could claim as uniquely its own. Whatever the origins of the Homeric

2 Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy


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epics, such was their towering influence that, in no small measure, they

helped to forge the common cultural identity of the Greeks.

At the same time, the other great cultural cum political institution that

was essential in shaping the classical Greeks was the polis. Although anascent form of the polis is detectable in Homer, what is much more impor-

tant for the poems is the conception of the heroes as individuals. The Athe-

nian tragedians, especially Sophocles, were greatly influenced by the

Homeric heroes in creating their dramatis personae. In Sophocles, however,

unlike in Homer, the fate of these heroic figures has to be seen squarely

from the point of view of the value structure of the classical polis, even

when the polis does not form the immediate physical setting of the play.The larger background of tragedy, then, is the world of the Greek polis.

Although the setting of most tragedies is mythical, because the plays are set

in a legendary past, the concerns of tragedy arose from the moral, political,

and religious issues of the contemporary polis. Myth was not simply a vehi-

cle for preserving the memory of a legendary past, even if the memory of

that past had helped to form the consciousness of the Greeks. Rather, the

myths were constantly subject to change and were a dynamic means whereby

current concerns could be explored by the playwright and presented to theaudience for their scrutiny and examination or re-examination. Thus, it was

open to a Sophocles or a Euripides to dramatize a myth that an Aeschylus

had already dramatized and to re-present it from a radically different moral

or political point of view. Myths did not admit of closure. Although the

main narrative outlines of a particular myth may have been formed in the

preceding archaic age, there was always the possibility of introducing

important variations. Therefore, in spite of Sophocles’Oedipus Rex, Euripi-

des, in his Phoenician Women, chose not to have Jocasta commit suicide on

learning of her incestuous marriage with her son, but to have her live on. In

Euripides’ lost Antigone, unlike Sophocles’ Antigone, it seems that Creon

handed Antigone over to Haemon to kill, but he fell in love with her and

they had a child together. There could even be important extensions to the

more commonly known versions to emphasize a specifically Athenian

dimension such as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus at

Colonus. In some cases, such as Euripides’ Orestes or Iphigenia in Tauris,the plot seems to have been almost completely invented.

What helped to give the treatment of the myths in tragedy a “political”

dimension was the presence of the chorus. In Greek tragedy, the fate of the

mythical characters was acted out against the sounding board of a chorus

who both sang and danced. The chorus commonly comprised an individu-

ally anonymous group that was representative of some part of the commu-

nity, whether they were elders, sailors, women, or slaves. The distinction

Tragedy, Athens, and the Greek Cultural Mosaic 3


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between the actors proper, who portrayed the mythological characters, and

the members of the chorus became clearly differentiated in the fifth century.

Whereas the actors became professionals, the chorus was always formed of

ordinary citizens, even if their training was rigorous and extensive. In a realsense, the chorus could be said to represent the polis “onstage.”1

Because the individual poleis constituted the main foundation on which

the political culture of classical Greece was built, Greece did not constitute

a nation-state in a modern sense of the term, because there were more than

a thousand individual poleis. Although the Greeks collectively called

themselves Hellenes, each polis aspired to be politically autonomous and

economically self-sufficient. Thus, a Greek citizen was an Athenian or aCorinthian first and foremost and only secondly a Hellene.

By the standards of modern nation-states, the size of these poleis was

tiny, consisting of no more than a few hundred or so people at one end of

the spectrum, to a few very large ones like Athens, which consisted of a

few hundred thousand people. Although the figures are conjectural, the

Athenian population in about 431 was probably somewhere between

250,000 and 350,000 people. Even though Athens was a democracy, only

about 15 percent of that number were citizens in the full sense of the word, because possibly as many as one-third of the population was slaves and

there was a large number of resident aliens (metics) who—whether born

elsewhere or born in Athens of metic parents—were not entitled to citi-

zenship. In addition, women were always legally minors, subject to a male

kurios (master), and had no direct access to political power. In fact, Athe-

nian democracy has sometimes been described as a “men’s club.” There-

fore, the size of the actual citizen population, even of a very large polis that

had a democracy, was relatively small; however, size was of the essence of

the polis. Indeed, Aristotle was so preoccupied with the size of an ideal

polis that, when discussing its constitution, he claimed: “In deciding ques-

tions of justice and the allocation of offices by merit, citizens must know

each other’s characters, since where this condition is not met, the election

of political officials and judicial proceedings will go awry” ( Politics 7.4).

For him, if a community consisted of too few people, it did not meet the

requirements of a polis in being self-sufficient. However, if, like a nation,it consisted of too many people, although it might be self-sufficient, it

would not be a polis, because its size would make it incapable of having a

constitutional government.

Reduced to its bare essence, a polis was a small, close-knit community

of citizens ( politai, free adult males), even if they were dependent on oth-

ers (e.g., women and slaves, etc.) for their existence and survival. More-

over, although each polis occupied a certain territory (which is discussed



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below), this was, in a sense, secondary. As Thucydides has the Athenian

general, Nicias, say: “Men make a polis and not walls or ships” (7.77). If

the polis in essence was a community of citizens, these citizens were

bound together by a complex of social, political, religious, and militaryties that were forged, in part, by local conditions and traditions. Potentially,

there was no worse political evil for members of a polis than stasis (polit-

ical strife), because there was no secure protection from death or slavery

beyond the polis. To be apolis (without a polis) was a terrible fate. Stasis

and exile are recurrent themes in tragedy. Therefore, it was in the interests

of citizens to defend their polis at all costs and to be ready to die for it.

Thus, citizen armies were the norm and the army—whether mustered onland or sea—was essentially nothing more than the polis under arms.

Each polis was built at root on a collection of oikoi. The word oikos

may be variously translated as “house,” “family,” or “household.” The

oikos was not simply a “nuclear family,” but was also the primary eco-

nomic unit on which the polis was built. It consisted of house and prop-

erty, including slaves and domestic animals. The head of the oikos was the

male kurios to whom everyone else was subordinate, and his prime

responsibility was to preserve the economic and social interests of theoikos. Marriages were arranged between the male heads of different

oikoi, without there being any “romantic” involvement between the bride

and groom, primarily so that marriage might provide for the continuation

of the husband’s oikos through the begetting of children. The oikos was a

cooperative enterprise in which the interests of each individual were sub-

ordinate to those of the larger whole, although the master had overriding

authority. Wives were usually considerably younger than their husbands

for, as Cynthia Patterson says, “The key determining factor in the struc-

ture of the ancient Greek family—or, more properly, the ancient Greek

household—is clearly life expectancy.”2 How women may have regarded

these marital arrangements is a moot point, but in tragedy, marriage was

often an arena of violent conflict.

Because many aristocratic oikoi had their own traditions that predated

the emergence of the democratic polis, there was always the potential for

tension between the interests of members of an oikos and the polis, partic-ularly when the polis began to encroach upon things that had traditionally

been the preserve of the oikos. In this world, what constituted dike (com-

monly translated as “justice,” although the Greek word has an extensive

range of meanings) was a matter of ongoing debate and forms a central

issue of many tragedies.

If the first duty of members of the oikos was to ensure its collective sur-

vival, the oikoi collectively needed the polis for defense against hostile



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intrusion. Thus, it was incumbent on the various oikoi to provide the polis

with able-bodied soldiers. Even when a polis, like Athens, became a

democracy and gave all its politai the freedom to have an equal share in the

day-to-day government of the polis (as much as was reasonably possible),that freedom was premised on an active participation in what the polis

required. The idea that an individual could simply opt out and do his own

thing, without performing the minimum requirements of his duty as a cit-

izen, was scarcely countenanced. Even Socrates fought in the Athenian

army and served on the boule (the Council).

This “communitarian” notion of a person finding fulfilment in his duties

to a larger entity, whether it be to the oikos or the polis, contrasts with thenotion of the individual we gain from Achilles, in the Iliad, who fought at

Troy for his own personal glory and who, for later Greeks, became the par-

adigm of aristocratic manhood. The contrast between the two conceptions

of the individual—the Achillean and the communitarian—is one that helps

to provide Sophoclean tragedy with many a fruitful tension. More gener-

ally speaking, it is built into the structure of the tragedies with their indi-

vidual protagonists and the collectivity of their chorus members.

Let us briefly consider the polis as a territorial unit. Basically, the polisconsisted of an urban center with an agora, where trade could take place

and political concerns could be discussed and resolved, and rural envi-

rons, that were cultivated as much as possible because good, arable land

was at a premium. Although the territories of the Athenians and the Spar-

tans were large by Greek standards, the territories of most poleis were

restricted, whether because of the sea or nearby mountains or the territory

of a neighboring polis. War was a common occurrence among neighbor-

ing poleis and warfare was accepted as a fact of life. In the fifth century,

Athens was at war on average every one year in two. The constant threat

of war meant, of course, that although poleis valued their political inde-

pendence, not all could survive alone without help; thus, many were

joined together in alliances over which they might exercise a greater or

lesser degree of control.

Although the Greeks were not politically united, there were certain

important things shared in common that distinguished them in their ownminds from other peoples. In his Histories (8.144), Herodotus has some

Athenian envoys state succinctly what these things are: their religion, their

racial kinship, their language, and their common way of life. Religion is a

large topic that we shall have to treat separately and, for our purpose, what

we have said about the polis can suffice for the moment about the Greek

“common way of life.” However, we should briefly state something about

the Greeks’ “racial kinship” and “language.”



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The two topics are not wholly separable. Race, as we all know, is a

loaded term. Although the Greeks regarded themselves as racially akin,

Greek-speaking peoples had not all migrated into the central and southern

parts of the Greek peninsula at the same time, but had settled there throughdifferent waves of migration between c. 2000 and c. 1000. Then, through

pressures of one sort or another, many migrated overseas, inhabiting the

littoral of a considerable part of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. As

a result, even though the Greeks spoke a mutually intelligible language,

there were distinct tribal groupings among them. These tribal groupings

were underscored by different dialects that can be clearly witnessed in dif-

ferent types of poetry. We mentioned earlier that tragedy was heavilyindebted to archaic choral lyric, much of which was composed in Doric

Greek, the dialect of the Spartans and Corinthians among others. Thus,

Doric forms of Greek are found extensively in the choral parts of tragedy,

even though the main tragic playwrights were Athenian whose local dia-

lect was Attic, the dialect that predominates in the spoken parts of tragedy.

The language of tragedy, therefore, was eclectic.

A common language, in spite of dialectic variations, was an important

factor in helping the Greeks to feel a sense of common ethnic identity and in separating Greeks from non-Greeks. In fact the Greek word that comes

closest to expressing the modern notion of foreigner is the word bar-

baros(oi), a word that may have originally suggested for the Greeks some-

one who did not speak Greek. After the Persian Wars, however, the word

took on largely pejorative overtones with the implication that to be non-

Greek was to be culturally inferior. Thus, the Persians were often collec-

tively termed barbaroi. In this regard, tragedy not only reflected but no

doubt helped to foster the cultural chauvinism of the Greeks. The term

barbaros(oi) is found in Aeschylus’ Persians and is pervasive throughout

the tragic corpus. Myth was harnessed in the interests of Greek or, more

particularly, Athenian ideology. Thus, in the Homeric epics, we gain no

sense that the Trojans are barbarians but—because, by the time of the Per-

sian Wars, the area around Troy had become part of the Persian Empire—

we frequently find famous Trojans called barbarians.3

Thus far, we have considered the polis almost wholly from a secular point of view, but the citizens shared the polis with their gods, whose altars

and shrines were visible everywhere. The Greek temple that, together with

the oikos, forms the most frequent backdrop of the tragedies was the house

of a god. It was not used, however, as a place of communal worship, like a

Christian church; instead, it housed a statue of the god that served to

acknowledge his or her presence. Much of the life of the polis was devoted

to religious rites and festivals. At Athens, more than a hundred days of the



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year were given up to religious festivals of one sort or another. Both the

tragedies and comedies were performed at religious festivals in honor of

Dionysus, who was honored at other festivals as well.

Greek religion was polytheistic. The most well-known of these gods werethe twelve Olympians (Zeus, Apollo, etc.). In Homer, the presence of these

anthropomorphic deities exerts a powerful influence on the actions of the

heroes. According to Herodotus, it was the poets Homer and Hesiod who

first “created theogonies for the Greeks by giving the gods their names and

defining their honors, powers and forms” (2.53). The poets, then, through

their genealogies and stories of the gods, helped to forge for the Greeks a

shared religious identity because—in the absence of an overriding religiousauthority, like the Christian Church, or a canonical religious text, like the

Koran—the poets were often thought to provide insights into the ways of

the gods. However, even if their poetry could be conceived as being

divinely inspired, the poets did not constitute a group of religious authori-

ties in any formal sense. In fact, if we used the poets as our only source for

understanding Greek religion, we would gain a distorted view of it, because

the poets—although they drew heavily, at times, on a common store of reli-

gious experience—used the gods either for their own artistic purposes or asa means of presenting their own vision of human life and its problems. It is

a contentious issue, for instance, to what extent we can use tragedy as evi-

dence for understanding Greek religion as it was experienced in the daily

life of the Greeks.4 All we can say positively is that, insofar as the tragedies

present a Weltanshauung in which the human and the divine are inextrica-

bly interrelated, they reflect—albeit in a refracted manner—a Greek view

of the world. When we examine the life of the Greek polis, therefore, there

is often no easy disjunction to be made between the secular and the divine

or between politics and religion.

Except at certain religious centers such as Delphi, where the priests of

Apollo presided over the administration of the oracle, there was no for-

mally constituted class of priests who told the Greeks how to lead their

lives. The function of a priest, as the occasion demanded, could be fulfilled

by the head of an oikos, the general of the army, or the civic official who

was in charge of the rites of a particular religious cult. For example, it wasthe 10 generals who, at the City Dionysia, poured libations to the god on

behalf of the citizens. True, there were such people as soothsayers and ora-

cle mongers who might read divine signs as manifested in sacrifices or in

the sky, but these commanded no more authority than was credited to them

by individuals or groups of individuals.

In essence, Greek religion was not expressed by any overriding religious

credo, but through a variety of religious observances (e.g., a sacrifice or a



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prayer, the construction of an altar or temple, or the holding of a festival)

through which the power of a god was recognized. Because Greek religion

did not constitute a closed system of belief, it was always possible to accept

a new god. Thus, the Olympians were not the only gods; there were a hostof other deities, many of whom may have only been felt as vague presences

and not conceived as anthropomorphic beings. In fact, the common Greek

terms for a god (theos and daemon) often imply simply some kind of power

immanent in human life, without the corollary that monotheistic religions

commonly assume—that god is transcendent. Therefore, what we might

regard as abstract ideas could be personified as gods: Poverty, Wealth, and

Persuasion, for example. Thus, although Peitho (Persuasion) was some-times associated with Aphrodite, she had her own cultic status at Athens

and could be worshipped either for her sexual power or, as we might expect

in a democracy heavily dependent on the spoken word, as a political deity.5

Because the day-to-day religion of the Greeks was mainly polis based,

each polis had its own calendar, built around its own religious festivals and

cults. Several of these cults and festivals were agricultural in origin, because

the economy of the Greeks was largely based on agriculture. Related to this,

there were gods specifically connected with the earth, known as chthonicdeities. These gods could also be connected with the Underworld and the

kingdom of Hades, whose name means “unseen,” so that their power could

be conceived as potentially sinister as well as beneficent.

In each polis, the rites and festivals of the gods might take their own par-

ticular form and, in every polis, some gods could assume a greater promi-

nence than others. If, for example, Athena held a special place at Athens as

Polias, guardian of the community, Hera assumed a similar position in

Argos and Poseidon in Corinth. In the final analysis, it was the polis that

determined how and what gods should be worshipped. Thus, the polis

became the ultimate arbiter of what constituted eusebeia and asebeia

(what was correct or incorrect behavior toward the gods), words usually

translated as “piety” or “reverence” and “impiety” or “irreverence,”

respectively. Even if the evidence, in some instances, is unreliable, there

are several cases recorded of people who were put on trial at Athens for

asebeia. Socrates, who was accused of “corrupting the young and notacknowledging the gods,” is the most famous.

In addition, there were, of course, some festivals and religious centers

that were Panhellenic, such as the festival at Olympia, where the famous

games were held every four years, or the Oracle at Delphi. Because

prophecies and oracles loom large in Greek tragedy—Sophoclean tragedy

being a special case in point—we should briefly say a few things on the

subject, without going into the complex issue of how and why oracles



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(Delphi in particular) came to occupy such an important place in the Greek

world.

In real life, oracles such as Delphi seem to have largely confined them-

selves to giving advice or offering explanations in the face of disasters or what seemed inexplicable. As the spokesman of his father Zeus, Apollo,

the chief god of Delphi, was felt to know the hidden meaning of events and

causes of things that were obscure to human beings. However, the gods

were not believed to offer up their knowledge easily and thus oracular pro-

nouncements often took the form of riddling statements and were open to

different interpretations. Therefore, if an oracle seemed to be proved

wrong, that did not mean (for the believer in oracles) that Apollo was afalse prophet, but rather a wrong interpretation could well have been put

on the oracular pronouncement. The Greeks were also aware that even if

Apollo spoke the truth, this did not mean that the priests at Delphi, who

produced a written form of the oracle based on the utterances of an illiter-

ate prophetess in a trance-like state, were infallible or could not be influ-

enced. A not-uncommon charge against prophets and oracles was that they

could be bribed. Confronted with an oracle, therefore, one always had to

exercise caution. Moreover, there is no doubt that, although Delphi stillcommanded great influence in the fifth century and many still believed in

oracles, in the wake of the “intellectual revolution” of the second half of

the century, there was a growing scepticism about the truth of oracles.

When we turn to tragedy, we see that oracles and the prophets of the

gods do not confine themselves to offering advice and explanations, but

frequently predict the future. The classic example is Sophocles’ Oedipus

Rex, in which the oracular pronouncements of Apollo at Delphi are central

to the tragedy and prove all too true. Because of the truth of these oracles

and their importance in the tragedy, it is not uncommon for it to be

assumed that Sophocles was an upholder of the belief in oracles. However,

it is also possible that Sophocles used oracles and prophecies in his

tragedies primarily as an artistic device to serve the dramatic needs of his

plot. We do not have to think that Shakespeare believed in witchcraft

because he used the three witches to predict Macbeth’s future.

There are three other aspects of Greek religion that should be mentioned because they are relevant to understanding some aspects of Sophocles:

hero-cults, the concept of “pollution,” and the unwritten laws that gov-

erned the relationship between strangers. Unlike the gods, who were

immortal, heroes were the famous dead, whether real or mythical. The

Greeks did not really distinguish between the two, because the heroes of

myth were regarded as the legendary dead. The bones of a dead hero were

thought to be endowed with special powers and a cult could grow up



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around his supposed grave. I say “supposed” purposely, because, in most

instances, these graves were fictitious, but the shrines at which the heroes

were worshipped were commonly treated as their actual tombs. Thus, it

was quite possible for a hero to have a “tomb” in more than one place. Itwas thought that these heroes could be the workers of great benefit to a

community but, if they were offended in some way or neglected, could also

work harm. The exceptional power that heroes had manifested when they

were alive was believed to continue after their death and that power was

commonly believed to reside in the place where they were buried. The pos-

session of a hero’s bones, therefore, was regarded as a matter of great

importance.Two historical examples must suffice to illustrate this point. Once, when

the Spartans were at odds with the Tegeans and were faring badly, they

were informed by the Delphic oracle that they would only be successful in

their struggle if they recovered the lost bones of Orestes (Herodotus

1.67–68). Although the wording of the oracle was cryptic as to where these

bones were to be found, eventually some bones were found that seemed to

fit the oracle’s description, and Sparta became victorious. If Sparta had

been unsuccessful, the oracle might have replied that the captured boneswere not those of Orestes. Similarly, the Athenians were told by an oracle

to recover the bones of their legendary king, Theseus, from the island of

Scyros (Plutarch Cimon 8). When the Athenian general Cimon went to

Scyros, he reputedly discovered where the bones of Theseus were buried

and brought them back to Athens, where he was received with great honor.

There was probably a personal political motive behind Cimon’s actions,

but the important point is that this is no legendary event; it happened in the

fifth century, within Sophocles’ own lifetime. Two of Sophocles’ tragedies,

Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus, seem to foreshadow the heroization of the

protagonist. Moreover, both Ajax and Oedipus came to be worshipped as

heroes at Athens.

Let us now turn to pollution, what the Greeks called miasma. The seri-

ousness of a miasma varied, depending on the type of event that was felt to

induce it. Thus, contact with childbirth and death could be construed as

causing pollution in those directly involved. This pollution could becleansed through the observance of appropriate rituals. Much more seri-

ous, however, was the type of pollution associated with such things as mur-

der and acts of sacrilege. In these cases, the perpetrators, and even those

who were associated with them, could be felt to have a moral stain that

made them religiously impure and with whom contact of any kind could be

extremely dangerous, affecting the whole family or community. Thus,

the person(s) involved were, in a sense, “cursed.” In myth, Oedipus, the



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subject of two of Sophocles’ surviving seven tragedies, is the most famous

example.

Lastly, we should mention the unwritten laws that governed the relation-

ship between strangers. There are a number of references in Greek litera-ture to unwritten laws and there is some dispute as to what constituted

them, but the unwritten law governing the relationship between strangers

was clearly one of them. In Greek, the word for a stranger (xenos) was the

same word as for a “host” or a “guest,” because from earliest times—there

are many examples in Homer—a traveler could be put up as a guest in a

stranger’s home. Any violation of the code of correct behavior between

host and guest was believed to be punishable by Zeus. Closely related isthe idea of Zeus as the god of suppliants. A suppliant could throw himself

on the mercy of a stranger, an enemy, or a god and ask for his protection.

Because the suppliant was helpless and entrusted his life to the supplicated

person, it was a crime against Zeus to harm him. Several tragedies are built

around the theme of suppliants and strangers.

Fifth-century tragedy, then, drew inspiration widely from the common

traditions of Greek culture, whether it was from language, poetry, myth,

religion, or politics. Whatever the precise origins of tragedy, however, itwould not have blossomed and flourished in the way that it did without

what transpired politically and culturally in Athens. It is in this sense that

tragedy is a uniquely Athenian creation, so much so that it became an inte-

gral part of the public life of Athenian democracy.

The main structural framework of Athenian democracy was established

by Cleisthenes in c. 508. Outside of his political reforms and the general

background to them, little is known about Cleisthenes except that he came

from a famous aristocratic Athenian family, the Alcmaeonids, who had had

a curse put on them in the late seventh century and had, during the sixth

century, suffered periods of exile. Toward the end of this period, they had

bribed the Delphic oracle to persuade the Spartans to intervene in Athe-

nian affairs and drive out the Pisistratids, tyrants who had ruled Athens for

more than 30 years.

During the sixth century, Athens had suffered times of great stasis.

Although in the early part of the century, Solon—the poet statesman—had been appointed as a mediator to solve the severe economic problems of the

poor and had instituted a number of important reforms, he had failed to put

an end to the unrest. As a result, factions had re-emerged among aristo-

cratic leaders until in c. 546, one Pisistratus finally established himself as

tyrant at Athens.

Tyranny was not an uncommon phenomenon among the Greeks. In fact,

it was one of the three most common forms of government, the other two



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being oligarchy and democracy. Nor was tyranny always regarded in the

same negative fashion as it is now considered. Originally, a tyrant was

simply someone who had seized power unconstitutionally. Although the

Spartans were generally opposed to tyrants, and tyranny became a pejora-tive term at Athens once the democracy had taken firm root, tyrants had

quite often overthrown oppressive regimes. Thus, tyrants could command

wide popular support, and their policies were, at times, enlightened.

Pisistratus is a case in point. The evidence suggests that his rule was

moderate and popular. As much as possible, Pisistratus sought to preserve

the political system that Solon had introduced. He took measures to pro-

tect the livelihood of the poor; he expanded Athens’ economic base bydeveloping foreign trade; he introduced a vigorous building program and

tried to create a greater sense of unity among the people of Attica, by

introducing new religious cults or expanding pre-existing ones—the

Dionysia and the Panathenaia, the main festival in honor of Athena, being

two signal examples. Before the time of the Pisistratids, Athens had been

something of a cultural backwater. All this changed under their rule: poets

and artists were invited to Athens; Athenian sculpture gained greater dis-

tinction; Attic black-figure vase-painting began to rival the more famousware of Corinth; and the poems of Homer were written down (the first

written version of them that we know of), and provision was made for their

recitation at the Panathenaia by rhapsodes, whose highly histrionic perfor-

mances must have had an important influence on the art of acting. Finally,

Thespis produced his one-actor tragedies. In short, the Pisistratids did

much to lay the foundation of later Athenian success.

Pisistratus died in 527, but his policies were continued by his sons, Hip-

pias and Hipparchus. When, however, Hipparchus was assassinated in 514

by Harmodius and Aristogiton—probably because of a homosexual lovers’

quarrel—the rule of his brother turned oppressive and the popularity of the

tyranny waned. Later, Hipparchus’ two assassins were made “heroes” as

the liberators of the Athenians. Such are the myths of history.

In 510, Hippias was driven out of Athens with the help of the Spartans. In

the power struggle that ensued, ultimately Cleisthenes, the Alcmaeonid,

emerged victorious. However, in order to win, Cleisthenes had to enlist thehelp of the Athenian demos, the common people, who, until this time, had

had little say in governing the polis. Traditionally, Athenian society was

divided between aristoi (members of aristocratic oikoi), and the demos. The

main political power had resided with the Areopagus, which had originally

been a wholly aristocratic council, but whose membership had been opened

up to the very wealthy by Solon. The Athenians were also divided into four

tribes, in which the influence of the aristoi would have been paramount.



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We cannot be sure what Cleisthenes’ultimate intentions were in institut-

ing his reforms, but these reforms completely redrew the political map of

Attica and laid the basis for Athenian democracy, although Athens was not

to become a radical democracy for about another half century. Cleisthenesdid not abolish the Areopagus that still commanded extensive power, and

the aristoi still provided leadership, because one still needed wealth—

most of which was based on inherited land—to hold certain high offices

for which there was no financial remuneration. In order to break the stran-

glehold of the old tribal divisions, Cleisthenes created 10 new tribes, based

on artificial divisions. For this purpose, Attica was divided into three geo-

graphical areas: urban, coastal, and nonurban inland. Each of these threeareas was further divided into 10 subdivisions, making 30 in all. In the

future, each new tribe was to be composed of three trittyes (thirds), one

drawn from an urban, another from a coastal, and another from an inland

area. He also created a new council for the 10 tribes. This boule had 500

members, 50 appointed by lot from each of the 10 new tribes. Every mem-

ber served on the boule for a year, and no citizen could serve on it more

than twice in a lifetime. The main function of the boule was to draft

motions and to prepare the agenda for the ecclesia, which was the assembly of all the citizens, whose will was to be sovereign and who had the

responsibility for passing laws and making all major political decisions.

The main executive officers of the polis, however, were the nine archons

(leaders or rulers), who were in charge of religious, legal, and military

affairs. In order to become one, a property qualification had to be fulfilled.

Under Cleisthenes, these officials were elected for a year and, on comple-

tion of their term of office, became members of the Areopagus, the tradi-

tional aristocratic council. However, in 487, appointment by lot replaced

election as the means of choosing these archons and thus their political

power was seriously diminished. From that time on, the strategia became

the most powerful political office. Each of the new tribes elected, annually,

a strategos (a general), creating a board of 10. Warfare was one area in

which the Athenians could not rely on mere chance.

Cleisthenes’ reforms were far reaching. Because the boule consisted of

500 annually appointed members who could only serve twice in a lifetime,given the small size of the citizen population, this meant that, within a rel-

atively short time, a significant percentage of the citizenry would have held

an important executive position within the polis. Furthermore, since the

ecclesia (the sovereign assembly of the Athenians) was open to all citizens

to vote on whatever motion was brought before it, Athens became a direct,

rather than a representative, democracy, and thus there was no true dis-

tinction between rulers and the ruled. The citizens were the government.



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The Athenians were the polis. Finally, in breaking the old aristocratic tribal

divisions, Cleisthenes joined together people of different regional, eco-

nomic, and political interests. Because the organization of space helps in

profound ways to shape people’s perception of reality, Cleisthenes’redrawing of the spatial divisions of the Athenians radically affected the

way in which they came to view their polis.

Cleisthenes’ reforms were also to have a significant influence on the

organization of the Athenian theatre, because—however it had been orga-

nized before, whether on a rural or urban basis—the Dionysia, the festival

at which the tragedies were performed, was at least partially reorganized,

taking into account Cleisthenes’ new tribal divisions. All 10 new tribeswere required to submit, every year, two dithyrambic choruses, one adult

male and one boys’, each consisting of 50 members, for competition at the

Dionysia. If we can believe Aristotle ( Poetics 49a), the dithyramb was

important in the origins of tragedy. Be that as it may, what is of interest is

its cultural significance in the new democratic polis. In the archaic era,

choral performances tended to be of aristocratic provenance. The dithy-

rambs at Athens, however, were choral performances in honor of Dionysus

(a popular god), that were designed to cement the new divisions of thedemocratic polis. The training of these dithyrambic choruses lasted the

better part of a year and, during the period of their training, the adult males

were released from military service. Because there were a thousand per-

formers, altogether, in these dithyrambs—500 adult males and 500 boys—

this meant that most likely, as in the case of service on the boule, a large

percentage of the citizens at the theatre had also acted as performers at one

time or another. Athletics and mousike (not simply music, but song, dance,

and poetry) formed the basis of traditional Athenian education. Given the

rigorous training that the performers underwent, participation in a dithy-

rambic chorus was not simply a musical experience but also hard physical

training. Among other things, it trained the members of the chorus how to

function as a coordinated group. As such, it must have been an excellent

preparation, in the case of the boys’ choruses, for military service, not the

least because at Athens, in the army, the citizens served in tribal divisions.

As Athenaeus reports Socrates to have written: “Those who honor the gods best in choruses are the finest in war” (14.628). Did the Athenians march

into battle with musical accompaniment? It is possible, but we do not

know. In any case, the dithyrambic choruses based on Cleisthenes’ new

tribes served as an important form of training and education in Athens’

new democracy.

One final point should be made. The performances of the dithyrambs

took the form of a competition, with prizes for the winning choruses. The



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competitive aspect no doubt helped to cement loyalty to the new tribes.

Because the theatre held some 15,000 spectators, the atmosphere at times

must have been more like that of a major sporting event than that of a mod-

ern theatre. Competition was a vital part of the Greek way of life, becauseso many aspects of it took the form of an agon (contest): war was an agon,

the Olympic games were agons, law cases were agons, several of the reli-

gious festivals contained agons. The life of a democratic polis like Athens

was both a cooperative and a competitive enterprise. When the playwrights

presented their tragedies and comedies, they, too, were engaged in an agon

for a prize with their fellow tragedians and comedians, respectively. The

winners took all, the losers received nothing. Greek culture has been vari-ously called a “song culture” and a “performance culture”; it was also, in

large measure, a “competition culture.”6 This competitive spirit was instru-

mental in the Greek invention of politics. The fifth-century theatre that

came to hold such a central place in the life of Athenian democracy was

one manifestation of their zest for the political life.

In summary, tragedy was both a Greek and an Athenian creation.

Although it drew much of its lifeblood from the rich wellsprings of Greek

culture, only after it had taken firm root in Athenian soil did it fully mature.Through the use of muthos (word as story), it fed the Athenians with

images of alternative versions of life and its problems and thus made a

vital contribution to the logos (word as discourse) of the democratic polis.

NOTES

1. On this point, see especially S. Goldhill’s reply, “Collectivity and Other-

ness—The Authority of the Tragic Chorus,” 244–256, to J. Gould’s “Tragedy and Collective Experience,” in Tragedy and the Tragic, ed. M. Silk (Oxford, 1996),

217–43.

2. C. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 43.

3. See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through

Tragedy (Oxford, 1989). As she writes: “To an archaic Greek Priam was a king,

Hector a hero, Memnon the son of Dawn, and Medea a sorceress; to the fifth cen-

tury theatre-goer, an essential aspect of such figures’ identities was that they were

barbarians” (54).4. On this question, see C. Souvrinou-Inwood, “Tragedy and Religion: Con-

structs and Readings,” in Greek Tragedy and the Historian, ed. C. Pelling (Oxford,

1997), 161–86.

5. On Peitho and a discussion of persuasion in Greek tragedy, see R. G. A.

Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1982).

6. See J. Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic

Tradition (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), 3–5, on song culture; and R. Rehm, Greek



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Tragic Theatre (London, 1992), 3–11, on performance culture. Jacob Burckhardt

was the first to emphasize the importance of competition for Greek culture. See,

for example, his History of Greek Culture, trans. P. Hilty (New York, 1963), 133;

see also, A. W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York, 1965), 41–77.



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Chapter 2

Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings

Sophocles was born c. 496 into the world of the emerging Athenian

democracy. He died in 406–405, shortly before the Athenians were finally

defeated in the Peloponnesian War that brought about the end of their

empire in 404. His life thus spanned most of the century that witnessed Athens’ greatest achievements. Although the biographical information on

Sophocles is scanty and largely unreliable,1 we can nevertheless set his life

against the political and cultural background of the time. What reliable

evidence we have indicates that Sophocles, unlike Aeschylus and Euripi-

des, had a political as well as a dramatic career.

Sophocles, the son of Sophillus, was born at Colonus, an Attic deme

about a mile and a quarter northwest of Athens. A number of anecdotes

speak of his musical and athletic achievements in his youth. Whether trueor not, Sophocles must have enjoyed the traditional fare of Athenian edu-

cation of the time, which, as previously described, was comprised of

mousike and physical training. At the time, Athens was no bookish culture.

Poetry was taught orally and committed to memory.

Sophocles’ early years were scarcely a time of political stability. We

should not assume that, with Cleisthenes’ reforms, Athens made a simple

and smooth transition from tyranny to democracy. The possibility ofHippias’ restoration, through the intervention of outside forces, was

always a threat and only receded once the Persians had been soundly

defeated. Moreover, various aristocratic leaders must have vied for power,

not necessarily with any democratic ends in mind. In the 480s, there were

a number of ostracisms, a peculiarly Athenian practice whereby a promi-

nent politician could be banished from Athens for 10 years through a pub-

lic vote in the assembly. Whether this institution was established by


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Cleisthenes himself or was introduced a little later, it was instituted as a

safeguard against tyranny and as a means of avoiding stasis among polit-

ical leaders.

What must have lent charge to the air of instability was the growingmenace of Persia. In 499, the Athenians had embarked on a risky foreign

venture that was to have grave consequences. In that year, some of the

Greeks of Asia Minor who, in the sixth century, had become subject to

Persian domination, revolted and appealed to other Greeks for help. Only

Athens and Eretria responded by sending an expeditionary force of ships.

Although this force soon withdrew, in the meantime it burnt the Persian

city of Sardis. The “Ionian revolt” continued to 494, before it was finallyquelled by the Persians. However, Darius, the Persian king, had not taken

kindly to the Athenian and Eretrian intervention and launched a punitive

expedition against them in 490.

At the time, the Persian Empire was vast and expansionist in its designs,

something to be feared by mainland and Aegean island Greeks, who

resided in all too close a proximity. The Athenians, in view of their actions,

had special reason to fear the Persians, and the measure of their fear may

well be gauged by the reception of a tragedy by Phrynichus, an early Athe-nian tragic playwright whose works have not survived. The collapse of the

Ionian revolt came when the Persians sacked the city of Miletus, on the

island of Lesbos, in 494. Sometime shortly afterward—possibly 492—

Phrynichus produced his tragedy centered on the sacking of Miletus.

According to Herodotus (6.21), the Athenian audience was so affected by

it that they burst into tears. Phrynichus was fined a thousand drachmas,

and a ban was put on any further production of the tragedy. Although

Sophocles himself would probably have been too young to have seen

Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus, this play may possibly, as we shall con-

sider below, have had an important influence on the direction of tragedy

and thus on Sophocles himself.

Athens survived the Persian assault when it came, although Eretria was

not so lucky. When a Persian force landed on the plain of Marathon on the

east coast of Attica, the Athenians drove them back to their ships. The

Athenians then had to beat a hasty retreat the 30 miles back overland toAthens to prevent the Persians from anticipating their arrival by sailing

around the south coast of Attica and taking Athens in their absence. When

the Persian fleet arrived and found the Athenians waiting for them, they

sailed home. Apart from a small contingent of troops who had come to

help from the neighboring polis of Plataea, the Athenians had stood alone

against the might of Persia and had won. Later, these Marathon veterans—

among them, Aeschylus—became the stuff of legend.



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The Persian threat, however, was by no means over. In the following

decade, the Persians planned a full-scale conquest of Greece. If the Greeks

were to have any chance of resisting the Persian menace, it was imperative

that they overcome their customary differences and unite in some kind of concerted military effort. Some Greeks, such as the Thebans, sensing the

futility of resistance, submitted to the Persian invaders without a fight, but

those who decided to resist combined under the leadership of Sparta, the

strongest military power in Greece, to oppose the Persians. For the sake of

unity, the Athenians acquiesced in the Spartans taking overall command.

Nevertheless, the Athenians provided by far the largest number of ships.

Thanks to the strategy and leadership of their general, Themistocles, whoearlier had persuaded them to invest their resources in building a fleet, the

Athenians were to play a crucial role in helping to defeat the invaders.

When the Persians actually invaded in 481, it was a combined land and

sea operation. After some initial encounters, notably at Thermopylae and

Artemisium, the Greek fleet met the Persians in the narrows of the Saronic

Gulf between the island of Salamis and the mainland, in 480. Although the

Athenians played the decisive role in the naval victory of Salamis, victory

did not come without serious cost, because the Athenians, after transport-ing their women and children to safety, abandoned their city to the Per-

sians. After the defeat, Xerxes—who had succeeded his father, Darius, to

the Persian throne—fled back to Persia, but left a large land army under his

general, Mardonius, to continue the war. Mardonius retreated north for the

winter before advancing south again in the following year. Once more the

Athenians were forced to abandon their city; but Mardonius was no more

successful than the Persian fleet had been. In 479, the Greek and Persian

land forces met near Plataea, and the Persians were resoundingly defeated,

thanks in large measure to the Spartans, although the Athenians acquitted

themselves with honor. Mardonius himself was killed. Meanwhile, the

Greek fleet had crossed the Aegean sea, landed at Mycale, and burnt the

remnants of the Persian fleet, thus paving the way for the liberation of

the Greeks under Persian control.

If these Greeks were to gain and maintain their freedom, they needed

leadership. When the Spartans proved unsuited for the task, they turnedto the Athenians who, in spite of the destruction of their city, willingly

accepted the offer. Thus, in 478, the Delian Confederacy was formed. Each

member contributed ships or made a monetary contribution assessed

according to its size and power. From then on, Athens was to become the

most dynamic power in the Greek world. Here lay the origins of her empire.

The psychological and cultural effects of the Persian Wars on the Athe-

nians and other Greeks were enormous. Nothing less than the Greek way

Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings 21


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of life had been at stake. We have to gain an insight into these psychologi-

cal and cultural effects largely from the art and literature of the subsequent

era, because the main historical sources are tantalizingly sparse. Hero-

dotus ends his history with the repulse of the Persians and Thucydides onlygives a brief sketch of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian

wars. However, there can be no doubt that the Persian Wars provided a

major watershed in Greek culture. Conventionally, art historians use the

term “Archaic” to describe the period before the Persian Wars, and “Clas-

sical” to describe the one that came after. Although such a demarcation is,

to some extent, more one of convenience than of absolute precision, there

was a beginning of a new era in sculpture, architecture, and vase painting.As J. J. Pollitt expressed it:

Archaic Greek art had never lost touch with the artistic traditions of the

ancient Near East from which it had borrowed certain schemes of composi-

tion and a good many decorative details. . . . After 480/79 B.C. the Orient was

increasingly viewed as barbarous and contemptible; and Archaic art, which

had been fostered in many cases by Greek tyrants who had been on good

terms with the oriental monarchs and had set themselves up in power some-what on the oriental model, was tainted by these associations.2

The fact that tragedy was affected by the new Zeitgeist can scarcely be

doubted, but quite how it was affected is not easy to determine because

evidence of what tragedy was like between the first performance of a one-

actor tragedy by Thespis in c. 534 and Aeschylus’ Persians in 472 (the ear-

liest surviving play) is confusing and meager. There are three types of

information, however, that we can look at in slightly more detail: what

Aristotle says in the Poetics; what we know of Phrynichus’ tragedies; and,

lastly, the fragments of the lost plays of Aeschylus that can, in part, be sup-

plemented by his post-Persian Wars, extant tragedies.

In an elusive passage of the Poetics (49a 9–21), Aristotle summarizes

the evolution of tragedy. He informs us that tragedy arose as a form of

improvisation on the part of the leaders of the dithyramb and only gradu-

ally grew as improvements were made, but in the process it underwent sev-eral changes until it found its natural form. Aeschylus added a second

actor, reduced the choral component, and made the spoken part the most

important. Sophocles added a third actor and skenographia. Moreover, it

was only at a late date that tragedy became serious, after abandoning short

plots and ridiculous language through changing from the “satyr-like.”

Although I will not go into tragedy’s possible relationship with the

dithyramb, if Aristotle is reliable, tragedy began as a form of improvisation



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and did not become serious until quite late. It is an interesting point that, at

least by some time in Aeschylus’ dramatic career, each tragic playwright at

the City Dionysia was required to produce four plays for performance on a

single day: three tragedies and a satyr play. When this number became fixed cannot be ascertained but, presumably, it was not fixed when Thespis first

began producing tragedies. If, as Aristotle suggests, the plots of the tragedies

were slight and the language ridiculous, then we have to assume that the ear-

liest tragedians produced a series of lighthearted, rather sketch-like perfor-

mances with a single actor and chorus. At some later point, perhaps when

tragedy became more serious, four became the established number of plays

for a tragedian to produce—three tragedies and a satyr play as an afterpiece,which may have preserved the spirit of the original performances.

When did the change take place in the tone of tragedy from nonserious

to serious? Virtually nothing is known about the tone of the tragedies of

Thespis and his immediate successors until Phrynichus—and what is

known about Phrynichus is very limited. Aristophanes attests to the para-

mount importance of the choral element in his plays, something we would

naturally suspect, because he only used one actor. He is also said to have

been the first to introduce female characters. However, it is only when wecome to his Capture of Miletus in c. 492 that we have the first evidence of

a tragedy that treated a serious subject in a serious manner. Phrynichus’

tragedy created a storm of protest, and his play was banned in perpetuity,

its subject matter being too close to home. The Capture of Miletus, how-

ever, may have been the first attempt to have a tragedy make a politically

meaningful statement. Was it Phrynichus who was instrumental in chang-

ing the tone of tragedy from less to more serious and was his Capture of

Miletus a harbinger of later developments, once the Athenians had weath-

ered the Persian threat and were buoyed up by a new spirit of confidence?

We do not know, but it remains a tantalizing possibility. What we do know

is that Phrynichus did not abandon historical subjects, because he pro-

duced his Phoenician Women in 476 with the backing of no less a person

than Themistocles, who served as choregus. This tragedy, like Aeschylus’

Persians later in 472, dealt with the defeat of the Persians. Furthermore, it

is quite possible that Themistocles was the archon who had given Phryn-ichus permission to produce his Capture of Miletus.3 Although we know

that Phrynichus also produced tragedies on mythological themes, we do

not know how he treated these myths.

If we wish to speculate about what tragedy was like in the early part of

the fifth century, we have to turn to the fragments of the lost plays of

Aeschylus, a rather unsatisfactory source, admittedly. Aeschylus was born

in 525 under the Athens of the tyrants. He began his dramatic career c. 500

Sophocles: Dramatic Beginnings 23


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after the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes, but he had to wait about 15

years before he won his first victory at the City Dionysia in 484. From then

on, however, he was victorious on 13 occasions and, after his death in 456,

he was granted the signal honor of having anyone who wanted to, restagehis plays. Although we commonly associate tragedy with the heroic figures

of legendary places like Argos, Troy, and Thebes—places that do indeed

form the backdrop of some of his late plays that survive—the extant frag-

ments reveal a rather different view of his dramatic imagination. As J. Her-

ington once expressed it:

Such now familiar heroic themes occupied scarcely a quarter of Aeschylus’dramatic output as it originally stood. The titles and fragments of the

remaining three-quarters open up a wild mythological landscape that seems

to be bounded by no horizons of space, time, or credibility—a very ancient

landscape, which few later European dramatists, or even Attic dramatists,

were ever to explore again on the stage.4

Although none survive, in later times, Aeschylus was recognized as the

greatest writer of satyr plays. Even in his late surviving tragedies there can be seen clear evidence of a world of archaic imagination both in his lan-

guage and in the grotesque appearance of some of his stage characters. In

Eumenides, the last play of his famous Oresteia trilogy, side by side with

Orestes, a figure from heroic myth, and the Olympian gods Apollo and

Athena, stands the chorus of Furies. So appalling is their appearance that

the priestess of Apollo, on seeing them, is reduced to crawling on all fours

out of terror. The Furies are described as having snakes in their hair, snort-

ing with foul breath, and letting flow a dreadful ooze from their mouths.

First compared with Gorgons and then with Harpies, they feed on human

blood and are the ghoulish daughters of Night. Only when we turn to

Sophocles’ surviving tragedies do the protagonists of heroic myth come

more firmly into their own.

Sophocles is said to have learned his tragic art from Aeschylus ( Life 4).

According to Plutarch (de Profectu in Virtute 7), he divided his own works

into three stylistic periods, in the first of which he adopted the high-flownstyle of Aeschylus. Although we have no way of proving this claim, we can

detect Aeschylean echoes in much of his work.5 However, the younger

playwright may equally well have had an important influence on the older

one, because all of Aeschylus’ datable, surviving tragedies except the Per-

sians were first produced after Sophocles’ dramatic career had begun.

Unlike Aeschylus’ dramatic career, Sophocles’ was highly successful

from the beginning and was to remain so throughout his life. Out of the



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123 plays that he most likely composed—there are some variations in the

figures in our sources—he was the victor in the tragic competition at least

18 times and possibly as many as 24. This success was unprecedented.

Moreover, he never placed lower than second. According to Plutarch(Cimon 8), Sophocles was the victor with his first productions at the City

Dionysia in 468, defeating Aeschylus. Although this, in fact, may not have

been his first appearance at the festival,6 the rivalry between the supporters

of the two playwrights on this occasion was so great that the 10 generals

had to be called in to serve as the 10 judges. The following year, however,

Aeschylus came back and was victorious with his Theban trilogy, of which

there survives the last tragedy, Seven against Thebes. Moreover, we knowthat Aeschylus defeated Sophocles with his Danaid trilogy, of which Sup-

pliants is extant.

These last two mentioned tragedies of Aeschylus, together with the Per-

sians of 472, only require two actors, whereas Aeschylus’ last trilogy,

Oresteia, first produced in 458, and Prometheus Bound —if indeed it is by

Aeschylus, because its Aeschylean authorship is disputed 7 —require three

actors. Furthermore, the two-actor tragedies do not seem to require a clearly

defined skene (backdrop), because their action takes place in a rather gen-eralized dramatic space, whereas in Oresteia, there is a clearly defined

skene, which in the first two parts of the trilogy represents the accursed

House of Atreus. As we have seen earlier, Aristotle ( Poetics 49a 9–21)

claimed that the two innovations that Sophocles brought to tragedy—the

introduction of the third actor and skenographia —carried tragedy to a more

fully evolved form. If Aristotle’s testimony is reliable, it is possible that

Sophocles introduced both of these innovations sometime toward the end of

Aeschylus’ dramatic career, before the first production of Oresteia in 458.

Let us first look at the three-actor rule. Greek tragedy never used more

than three actors, who divided up all the speaking roles between them-

selves, even if this meant—as in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus at

Colonus at least—a particular role had to be shared by more than one

actor. This doubling of parts was facilitated by the use of masks, which is

discussed in the next chapter. Even though Aeschylus adopted the third

actor in his last plays, the manner in which he used his actors is, in manyways, different from that of Sophocles. To talk about character interaction

at all in much Aeschylean tragedy is misleading, because dramatic mood�

Sophocles and the Athenian Democracy

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