by Sophocles
We also have chosen a more literal translation in passages where scholars have opted for a seemingly more accessible modern phrase. For instance, 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 to the realm of the god who acted to “curse” him. To keep the immediacy of the original, we get:
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 terrifying consequence of each action that was unknowable as it happened. Registering the shock running 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 text or its performance. This is a precondition for maintaining the fluidity 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.
II
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. It is also significant that all his plays to a greater or less 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, self-imposes this judgment and demands to live in exile. When he reappears in Oedipus at Kolonos, he and Antigone have been exiled in a more or less traditional sense.
Philoktetes, Elektra, Aias, and Herakles (in Women of Trakhis) are not all outcasts in the conventional sense, though all have offended their social units in one way or another. They may or may not be ‘tragic characters,’ but each is punished for a physical condition, a violent obsession, or murder. The personalities at the center of the non-Oedipus plays offend against their social worlds. In these translations we attend to their social worlds as Sophocles presents them.
We have not attempted to fit the action and import of each play into a theory of tragedy—for instance, to conceive it ultimately as a tragedy of character. Rather, we widen the purview to include the breadth and specificity of Sophocles’ obvious, fundamental social and historical concerns. In each of the four non-Theban plays, a lethal confrontation or conflict ‘crazes’ the surface social 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 a revered hero overreaches, destroying his reputation, his marriage, and ultimately himself. Elektra exposes the dehumanizing cost of taking revenge. In Aias a heroic soldier’s rebellion against his corrupt commanding officers exposes the tyranny of an aristo-military hierarchy. In Philoktetes the title character is treated as an inconvenient military asset and shelved, but when recalled to active service he resists the rehabilitation offered by his former betrayers until a god negotiates a culturally mandated resolution.
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. Recently, excerpts from these two plays have been performed around the United States for audiences of American service members, their families, and concerned others. Ultimately, however, Sophocles is intent on engaging and resolving internal contradictions that threaten the integrity and historical continuity, the very future, of the Athenian state. He invokes the class conflicts Athens was experiencing by applying them to the mythical/historical eras from which he draws his plots.
Modern-day relevancies implicit in Sophocles’ plays come sharply into focus or recede from view depending on time and circumstance. The constant factors in his masterpieces will always be their consummate poetry, dramatic propulsion, and illumination of human motivation and morality. But scholars have recognized and documented events in his plays that allude to events in Athenian history. For instance, the plague in Oedipus the King is described in such vivid detail that 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, exhibits the imperviousness to rational advice and lack of foresight present in the politicians of Sophocles’ era, whose follies Thucydides narrates, and which Sophocles himself was called in to help repair. Most movingly, Oedipus at Kolonos explicitly celebrates an Athens that no longer existed when Sophocles wrote that play. In it he gives us Theseus, the kind of all-around leader Athens lacked as it drove itself to destruction—this under the delusion that its only enemies were Spartans and Sparta’s allies.
Every drama, almost every speech and character, demands we grasp its import both within and beyond the play. That the Athenians revered the wisdom of their playwrights is clear from the name by which they were known—didaskaloi (educators, teachers)—and by the massive, expensive, and technologically impressive structures they created in which to stage, watch, and honor their works.
III
Archaeologists have identified hundreds 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 the hills, or level ground at the hill’s base, provided a suitable performance space.
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 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.
The origins of Greek drama itself have roots in two earlier traditions, one rural, one civic. Choral singing of hymns to honor Dionysos or other gods and heroes began in the countryside and evolved to become the structured choral ode. The costumes and the dancing of these choral singers, often accompanied by a reed instrument, are depicted on sixth-century vases that predate the plays staged in the Athenian theater.
It’s not coincidental that the highly confrontational nature of every play suggests how early choral odes and dialogues became fused with a fundamental aspect of democratic governance: public and spirited debate. Two or more characters facing off in front of an audience was a familiar situation, one central to both drama and democratic politics.
Debate, the democratic Athenian art practiced and perfected by politicians, litigators, and thespians—and 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 the verbal agon, 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 across the spectrum of civilized life. It is at least possible that superior arguments will emerge from debate and dialogue. And character, as in the debate between Teukros and Menelaos, may be laid bare. But there is no guarantee. Bad or harmful conclusions may prevail when a debater is both eloquent and wrong-headed. Persuasiveness can be, and frequently is, manipulative (e.g., the sophists evolved into hired rhetorical guns, as distinguished from the truth-seeking, pre-Socratic philosophers).
For instance, Odysseus’s comment to Neoptolemos in Philoktetes—“At your age, just like you, my hand / was quicker than my tongue. / But now I’ve learned it’s words / that move people, not deeds” (108–111)—was considered by one ancient critic to be a slander against Athenian politicians. One famous example of a civic speech crafted to have a dramatic effect, and achieve a political purpose, is Perikles’ funeral oration as Thucydides presents it. The speech is not, Paul Cartledge (62) argues, “a simple hymn to democracy”; rather, it is “ideologically slanted . . . to persuade his fellow citizens that wars were good for Athens.” Perikles was, however, stating a fact when he said, “Athens was called a demokratia because governance was effected in the interests of the many [citizens] rather than the few.”
The works of the Greek tragic poets were commissioned and funded via a type of wealth tax on rich citizens who were assigned the role of financing a particular production by the polis (i.e., Athens), and staged under the auspices of a civic festival. The playwrights wrote as politai, civic poets, as distinguished from those who focused on personal lyrics and shorter choral works.
Plays performed at the Dionysia honored its 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 ecstatic 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. As we see in Aias and Philoktetes, a play could even serve a particular civic purpose—either by reconfirming (via Philoktetes), or by revising or redefining (via Aias), the link between military and civic responsibility. This link was on public view when the orphans of warriors who had been killed in battle were given a place of honor at the Festival of Dionysos. The bottom line, however, is that even as 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.
Communal cohesiveness and the historical continuity of the polis are threatened from within: in Aias by the individualistic imbalance and arrogance of Aias, whose warrior qualities and strengths are also his weakness, and in Philoktetes by the understandable and just yet inordinately unyielding self-preoccupation of Philoktetes himself. In both cases the fundamental, encompassing question is: with what understandings, what basic values, is the commonality of the polis to be recovered and rededicated in an era in which its 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 antagonism? In sharply different ways, all three Oedipus plays and Elektra cast doubt on the legitimacy of usurped, authoritarian, or publicly disapproved leadership.
Given this sense of their historical sources, we’ve considered it our job not simply to translate the plays as texts but to communicate their relevance and their urgencies to an audience of our own time.
IV
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, by some accountings, 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. The introduction of this huge wooden shaft, festooned with garlands of ivy and a mask of the god’s leering face, 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 rather 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 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).
Regardless of its political agenda, the festival retained much of the spirit and tradition of its rural roots. The morning after the parade of young men brought Dionysos’ icon from the temple to the theater grounds, a much larger procession arrived. A cross section of Athenian society, some bearing other phallic images of the god, brought provisions for a sacrifice and feast. Young virgins of aristocratic family carried golden baskets of fruit; male citizens lugged wineskins and enormous loaves of bread; resident aliens, called metics, contributed honeycombs and cakes while their daughters hauled in jugs of water. At the massive altar before the temple, priests of Dionysos butchered (in sacrifice) several hundred bulls that young men of military age had herded into the pageant; the animals’ joints and haunches were then wrapped in fat, seared on the altar, and distributed to the vast crowd, who finished roasting the meat on portable braziers. Five days of theatrical competition ensued: day one featured ten fifty-member male choruses singing and dancing in homage to Dionysos; day two offered comedies; and the last three days were devoted to tragic drama.
