by Sophocles
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χαλκοσκελεῖς γὰρ [
ˉ ]ὲν ἐκπνέουσι πλευμόνων ἄπο·
φλέγει δὲ μυκτήρ, ὥσ[
καὶ τῶν πρὸς εἵλην ἰχθύων ὠπτημένων
πενία δὲ τοῖς ἔχουσιν οὐ σμικρὰ νόσος
ποδαπὸς ἦν τὴν φύσιν;
σιωπῆς οὐδὲν ἄμεινον
ἀπολοίμιον φανόν
ὀμμάτειος πόθος
ῥακτηρίοις κέντροισιν
τοῦ Προμηθέως ἀντέχεσθαι καὶ μὴ τῆς μεταμελείασ
Ἀανῖτισ()
ἀγήρω (masc.)
ἀκοσμεῖν
ἀναπολεῖ
ἀπόδρομον
αὑτόν
διακονούμενος
ἰδιῶτις
ἱπποβουκόλοι
μουνομήτορι
ξυμφορά
πέλλυτρα
χειρώνακτες
χρῆν (infin.)
The Biographies
The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, where Sophocles’ plays were first performed
A modern reconstruction of how the theatre may have appeared in Sophocles’ time
INTRODUCTION TO SOPHOCLES by F. Storr
SALAMIS, one of the decisive battles of the world, which saved not only Greece but western civilization, is a connecting link between the three great Attic tragedians. Aeschylus, then in his prime, fought himself and celebrated the victory in his Persae; Sophocles, a boy of fifteen, was chosen for his beauty and musical skill as leader of the youthful choir who danced and sang a paean round the trophy; and Euripides, according to tradition, was born on the very day of the battle.
In his art, no less than in his age, Sophocles stands half way between the primitive faith and large utterance of Aeschylus, the “superman,” and the lyric pathos, “the touch of all things human,” of Euripides the Rationalist.
Of his private life, if we neglect later myth and gossip, there is little to tell. As Phrynicus wrote shortly after his death, “Thus happily ended a life without one mishap.” He was born at Colonus (495 B.C.), that deme of Athens which he afterwards immortalized in what Cicero pronounced the sweetest of all lyrics, and his father Sophilus, a well-to-do Athenian (probably a master-cutler), gave him the best education of the day in music, dancing, and gymnastics. Endowed with every gift of nature, both physical and mental, from the very first, he carried all before him. When he began to dramatize we know not, but in 468 he won the first prize, probably with the Triptolemus, a lost play, and there is no reason to doubt the story that it was awarded to him by Cimon, the successful general to whom the Archon Eponymus of the year deferred the decision.
The year 410 B.C. was to Sophocles what A.D. 1850 was to Tennyson, the grand climacteric of his life. After, and partly at least in consequence of his Antigone, which took the town by storm, he was appointed one of the ten strategi sent with Pericles to reduce the aristocratic revolt in Samos. If the poet won no fresh laurels in the field he did not forfeit the esteem and admiration of his countrymen, who conferred on him various posts of distinction, just as the age of Queen Anne rewarded Addison and Prior with secretaryships, or as the United States sent us Lowell as ambassador. He was President of the ‘Ellenotamiai’ or Imperial Treasurers of the tribute. After the Sicilian disaster in 413 he was appointed a member of the ‘Probouloi’ or Committee of Public Safety. The pretty story told by Cicero in the De Senectute of his last appearance in public in extreme old age and his triumphant acquittal by the jury is too familiar to be repeated, and is probably a fiction, but it serves as evidence of his popularity to the very end. He had seen the rise of Athens and identified himself with her glory, and he was spared by a happy death from witnessing her final fall at the battle of Aegospotami (405 B.C.).
“His life was gentle.” Gentle is the word by which critics ancient and modern have agreed to characterize him. The epitaph is Shakespeare’s, and Ben Jonson applies it to Shakespeare himself, but it fits even more aptly the sweet singer of Colonus, in whom “the elements were so mixed” as to form what the Greeks expressed by ‘eukolos’. In the famous line of Aristophanes:
Sweet-tempered as on earth, so here below.
The one aspersion on his character is that in his younger days he was a passionate lover, but the charge rests on a passage in the opening scene of the Republic of Plato which will bear a milder interpretation. When Sophocles, as there reported, expressed his satisfaction at escaping from a savage and tyrannous monster, he surely did not mean that he had been a libertine, but that old age had removed him from temptations to which he may never have succumbed. In all antiquity there is not a purer-minded poet, and (as in the case of Virgil and Shakespeare) we may discredit and ignore the unsavoury gossip of Athenaeus and the scandal-mongers of a later age.
Since his death the fame of Sophocles has grown and never suffered eclipse. To Aristotle no less than to Aristop
hanes he is the greatest of dramatists, and in the Poetics the Oedipus Rex is held up as the model of a tragedy. To Virgil who freely imitated him “the buskin of Sophocles” is a synonym for dramatic perfection. Racine and Lessing prized him no less highly, and Sophocles was the volume that Shelley carried with him to his watery grave.
The Merope of Matthew Arnold is a far-off echo of the Electra of Sophocles, and no finer or truer tribute has been paid to a poet than the sonnet in which Arnold renders his special thanks to him
“Whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus and its child.”
For a discussion of the genius of Sophocles as a dramatist and a poet, his relation to his older and younger contemporary, his religious and political creed, we must be content to refer our readers to the Bibliography, but a few words may be permitted on his language as it affects the translator. Dr. Warren has pronounced Sophocles “the least translatable and the least imitable of the Greeks,” and it is in the second epithet that the translator may find his best excuse for attempting the impossible. Greek critics assigned to Sophocles in his maturity “the common or middle diction,” that is, a diction half way between the pomp of Aeschylus and the language of everyday prose, and Wordsworth might have taken him to illustrate the canon laid down in his Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” Coleridge might no less have chosen Sophocles to refute that canon. The words themselves are familiar in men’s ears, but in Sophocles they have gained a new significance, sometimes simply from their collocation, sometimes by a reversion to their first meanings, oftener because (as in Virgil) they denote one thing and connote others. It is no paradox to say that the ease, the simplicity, the seeming transparency of the language, constitute the translator’s main difficulty. In the present instance he is painfully conscious of his failure to preserve this simplicity and transfer these latent meanings, but he has sought to be faithful and the prospect of the text facing him has been a righteous terror. At the same time he has held as a first principle that, whatever else it is, a translation must be English, that is to say, it must be intelligible and enjoyable without a knowledge of the original.
One or two instances may be given from the Oedipus Rex. Line 67 is literally rendered by Jebb, “I have gone many ways in the wanderings of thought,” but to a Greek scholar it is no less sublime than, in another style, Milton’s “thoughts that wander through eternity.” To convey this sublimity in another tongue is as hard as it would be to render in French “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” Lines 736-7 are the turning point, the climax, as it were, of the play, but in language they hardly differ from prose:— “As I heard you speak just now, lady, what wandering of the soul what upheaval of the mind, have come upon me!” The second point may be illustrated from a recent version of the play by an eminent Professor. He begins,
“Fresh brood of bygone Cadmus, children dear,
What is this posture of your sessions here —
Betufted on your supplicating rods?”
We defy any Englishman without a knowledge of the Greek to make any sense of the third line. So with the Choruses. To preserve in rhyme the correspondence of Strophe and Antistrophe (Turn and Counterturn they are here called), is at best an exhibition of tight-rope dancing.
These seven plays are all that are left to us of some 120, except in fragments and a considerable portion of a Satyric Drama, the’Ixneutai’ or Trackers. The order in which they were composed and produced is largely a matter of conjecture. All we know for certain is that the Antigone was the first (some, however, put the Ajax before it), and the Oedipus Coloneus, produced by the poet’s grandson, three years after the death of Sophocles, was the last of the seven. The following may be taken as an approximation: — Antigone, Electra, Ajax, Oedipus Rex, Trachiniae, Philoctetes, Oedipus Coloneus.
The Greek text is based on Dindorf (latest edition), but this has been carefully collated with Jebb’s edition and in most cases the English has been preferred to the German editor.
It remains to express my deep obligations not only to the text but to the commentary and prose translation of the great scholar who for more than forty years honoured me with his friendship. I have not consciously borrowed from his rendering, but there is hardly a line in which I am not indebted to him for a fuller appreciation of the meaning and significance.
To three other life-long friends, all three rival translators of Sophocles in whole or in part, I am indebted for generous help and counsel. Sir George Young, Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, and Professor Gilbert Murray read and freely criticized my first essay which has been kept for more than the statutory nine years of Horace, and it was their encouragement that made me persevere in what has proved the pleasantest of all holiday tasks.
SOPHOCLES by T. W. Lumb
In Aeschylus’ dramas the will of the gods tended to override human responsibility. An improvement could be effected by making the personages real captains of their souls; drama needed bringing down from heaven to earth. This process was effected by Sophocles. He was born at Colonus, near Athens, in 495, mixed with the best society in Periclean times, was a member of the important board of administrators who controlled the Delian League, the nucleus of the Athenian Empire, and composed over one hundred tragedies. In 468 he defeated Aeschylus, won the first prize twenty-two times and later had to face the more formidable opposition of the new and restless spirit whose chief spokesman was Euripides. For nearly forty years he was taken to be the typical dramatist of Athens, being nicknamed “the Bee”; his dramatic powers showed no abatement of vigour in old age, of which the Oedipus Coloneus was the triumphant issue. He died in 405, full of years and honours.
Providence has ordained it that his art, like his country’s tutelary goddess Athena, should step perfect and fully armed from the brain of its creator. The Antigone, produced in 440, discusses one of the deepest problems of civilised life. On the morning after the defeat of the Seven who assaulted Thebes Polyneices’ body lay dishonoured and unburied, a prey to carrion birds before the gates of the city which had been his home. His two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, discuss the edict which forbids his burial. Ismene, the more timid of the two, intends to obey it, but Antigone’s stronger character rises in rebellion.
Loss of burial was the most awful fate which could overtake a Greek — before he died Sophocles was to see his country condemn ten generals to death for neglect of burial rites, though they had been brilliantly successful in a naval engagement. Rather than obey Antigone would die.
“Bury him I will; I will lie in death with the brother I love,
sinning in a righteous cause. Far longer is the time in which I
must please the dead than men on earth, for among the former I
shall dwell for ever. Do thou, if it please thee, hold in dishonour
what is honoured by Heaven.”
Here is the source of the tragedy, the will of the individual in conflict with established authority.
A chorus of Theban elders enters, singing an ode of deliverance and joy; they have been summoned by Creon, the new King, uncle of Oedipus’ children. Full of the sense of his own importance Creon states the official view. Polyneices is to remain unburied.
“Any man who considers private friendship to be more important than
the State is a man of naught. In the name of all-seeing Zeus I would
not hold my tongue if I saw ruin coming to the citizens instead of
safety, nor would I make a friend of my country’s enemy. Sure am I
that it is the State that saves us; she is the ship that carries us;
we make our friendships without overturning her.”
The elders promise obedience, but grave news is reported by a guard who has been set to watch the corpse. Someone had scattered
dust lightly over the dead and departed without leaving any trace; neither he nor his companions had done the deed.
When the Chorus suggest that it is the work of some deity, Creon answers in great impatience:
“Cease, lest thou be proved a fool as well as old. Thy words are
intolerable when thou sayest that the gods can have a care of this
corpse. What, have they buried him in honour for his services to them?
Did he not come to burn their pillared temples and offerings and
precincts and shatter our laws?”
He angrily thrusts the watchman forth, threatening to hang him and his companions alive unless they find the culprit.
“There are many marvels, but none greater than Man. He crosses the
wintry sea, he wears away the hard earth with his plough, ensnareth
the light-hearted race of birds, catcheth the wild beasts, trappeth
the things of the deep, yoketh the horse and the unwearying ox. He
hath taught himself speech and thought swift as the wind, hath learnt
the moods of a city life and can avoid the shafts of the frost; he
hath a device for every problem save Death — though disease he can
escape. Sometimes he moveth to ill, again to good; his cities rear
their heads when they reverence the laws and the gods; he wrecketh
his city when he boldly forsakes the good. May an evil-doer never
share my hearth or heart.”
Such is the ordinary man’s view of the action of Polyneices, for in Sophocles the Chorus certainly represents average public opinion. It is quickly challenged by the entry of Antigone with the Watchman, whose story Creon hastens out to hear. With no little self-satisfaction the Watchman tells how they caught the girl in the very act of replacing the dust they had removed and pouring libations over the dead. Antigone admits the deed. When asked how she dare defy the official ordinance, she replies —
“It came neither from Zeus nor from Justice, nor did I deem that thy
decrees had such power that a mortal could override the unwritten
