OUP (2025) p/b 146pp £6.99. ISBN 9780192897800
This book is a splendid addition to an impressive series. H. has somehow managed to distill a lifetime’s study of these masterpieces into a small compass without either cutting (many) corners or talking down to the ‘general reader’ at whom the book is aimed. Faced with the challenge of telling readers with no knowledge of Greek—or of ancient Greece—why and how they should read Sophocles, H. opts to keep things simple without eliding the complexities into banal generalisations. H. wears her heart on her academic sleeve to a degree which is unusual among scholars, and this shows in the palpable enthusiasm and personal engagement which she displays on every page of this highly charged and eminently readable book.
The first chapter looks briefly at the life and times of Sophocles, getting the reader into the world of the late 5th century BC, and also offering some information on Sophocles’ own career and his family life. Chapter 2 takes this further with a general survey of some features of Sophoclean tragedy—the drama competitions, gods, heroes, philosophy, the chorus—along with some areas which H. has written about before to good effect: suicide, the use of ‘deliberation’ as a theme, and the poetry itself. A judicious discussion of the relative roles of character and plot (pp.19-20) is seamlessly blended into the questions of truth, falsehood and fate. She makes a brave stab at discussing Greek metre to a Greekless readership—a discussion which really ought to have explained the metrical symbols she uses on p.23—and her quotation of a passage from the Ajax (646-9) in her own translation gives us a taste of Sophocles’ style. The musical side of drama—singing, dancing and the chorus—is well discussed and the chapter ends with a tantalisingly brief discussion of the role of philosophy in drama.
The following four chapters look at the eight plays in pairs, summarising the plots and explaining the key dramatic elements as she goes. Her reading of Oedipus the Tyrant soon hits the big issue. Was Oedipus ‘doomed before he was born’ (H.’s emphasis, p.33) and ‘under Apollo’s control all along’? Or were his actions the product of his character? Is Oedipus’ ‘I was framed’ argument yet another facet of his bull-headed character? A Leitmotif of this book is ‘deliberation’, which ‘consists of information … derived from experience, sensory perception or scientific proof’ (p.35). Here Oedipus makes some rash misjudgements—falsely accusing Creon and Tiresias for instance—and when he does get the deliberative bit between his teeth, he pushes his inquiries when even his own wife is begging him to stop (1060-1). If only he had been more measured in his assessments, H. implies, things could have turned out better, although she later concedes (p.50) that ‘this is a “bad luck” situation in which deliberation would have proved fruitless anyway’. The tragedy, as H. perceptively argues, is that his personality takes on challenges which both require him to take decisive action and then punish him when he does so.
Antigone is different. It is the most political of Sophocles’ plays: everything hinges on the political decisions of a headstrong man whose ‘errors are all caused by his own freely taken autonomous decisions’. The gods may have ‘singled [Oedipus] out for some strange destiny’ (41), but Creon has nobody but himself to blame. Deliberation-failure is evident again: Creon should have referred his edicts to magistrates or courts and should not have rushed to snap judgements (and even snapper u-turns). He fails to use either his own intelligence or the collective wisdom of his people and uses religion as a weapon rather than respecting the gods. The result ‘is simply a mess…caused by the wholly avoidable decisions made by a single fool’ (49).
Chapter four pairs the Ajax and Oedipus at Colonus together as ‘Athenian myth-making’, with a brief account of the links between tragedy and local cults. Ajax is ‘the most powerful suicide drama in the Athenian repertoire’ (57) and the hero’s suicide is explored for the effects it has on his family as well as for the psychological subtlety of its portrayal. H. well describes Ajax as ‘the loneliest figure in Greek tragedy’ (56) who dies alone on stage without even the chorus to witness. Oedipus at Colonus, written in 401 when Sophocles was extremely old and Athens had lost the Peloponnesian war, is his ‘eulogy to his homeland’ (63), a blend of religious and civic patriotism which is also one of the most gripping plots ever told on the Greek stage. H. also argues that the play shows ‘the true cost in emotional terms of family break-up’ (67), as well as being a dramatic envoi from the playwright and his character, as this blind Oedipus has attained the wisdom of the blind Tiresias he once spurned.
Chapter five links Electra and Philoctetes as exemplars of ‘retribution and rage’. Both plays show the effects of hatred, and how the desire for revenge can ‘distort whole lives’ (76). Those who think that Sophocles’ Electra is a safe and sanitised version of the myth—with a robotic Orestes carrying out his orders like a good soldier and restoring order—need to read H.’s explanation of the deeper unease with which the play ends. Philoctetes is also a political play. She well says of Odysseus that ‘disguise, lies and treachery are weapons in this politician’s armoury’ (84) but also discusses the issue of whether the urge to end the war justified the means employed. Sophocles’ unflinching depiction of Philoctetes’ suffering turns the stage into a ‘laboratory’ of pain, whose suffering hero is a wounded animal in ‘linguistic and social isolation’ (97).
Chapter six puts together Trachiniae and the satyric drama Trackers as both showing the wilder end of the dramatic spectrum. Trachiniae is located in a place which is ‘more primitive and less municipal’ (95) involving shape-shifting river gods and monsters—and a Heracles whose murder of Iphitus makes him arguably the biggest monster of all. H. shows how the play’s complex theology may end with Zeus but its ‘presiding deity’ is Aphrodite and it remains a study of ‘sacred mystery and human bewilderment’ (105). Trackers is the only satyr-play of Sophocles to have survived in sufficient quantity to reconstruct it and this makes an appropriately light-hearted piece on which to end her account of these tragedies. The final chapter looks at ‘Sophocles’ afterlives’: H. offers us a (selective) account of some of the most interesting adaptations of these plays since the Renaissance, and shows how the Greek plays can resonate in modern times in very different societies.
H. writes her own translations and does so with admirable clarity. There are very few errors: Aegisthus was not Electra’s father-in-law (p.19), and H. occasionally (e.g. p.27) refers to the non-existent play Oedipus when she means Oedipus the Tyrant (which she also calls Oedipus Tyrannus (21)). The book has ten monochrome images and ends with a glossary of Greek terms, a brief guide to further reading and a comprehensive index.
If you think you know these plays, read this book and you will be challenged to think afresh and inspired to read them all again. If you are new to Sophocles, this is an excellent place to start a lifetime’s journey around these iconic dramas. For the price of a cup of coffee, what are you waiting for?
John Godwin