exotic.
Sophocles lived from about 496 to 406 B.C., that is, nearly all the years of the fifth century. At the age of about
twenty-eight he won a festival competition against Aeschylus, in 468. In the year of his own death he paraded his
chorus in mourning for the death of Euripides. He was comparatively rich and several times took part in public
life. He treated the gods with respect, and several kinds of pain, affliction, and horror with extraordinary
directness. It is therefore all the more interesting that in real life he played an important part in the introduction of
Asclepius to Athens, which effectively means the founding of the first public hospital. In the theatre he was
particularly interested in consequences, and in the fulfilment of prophecy. The common ending of Athenian
children's stories or folk-tales was apparently 'and so the story came true.' With his vigorous and memorable poetry
one must beware of identifying what the chorus chants or what is spoken in passionate irony or grief with the
wisdom of the poet himself.
The momentum of any tragedy leads to the end of the action. In Sophocles' Women of Trachis this is five minutes
after the end of the play, when Heracles will be consumed by fire and rise out of it unconsumed to be a god. In the
Philoctetes the end of the action is rather far in the future and involves the fall of Troy. Reconciliation is to come;
the audience need not think much about it; the pain of the hero's wound is an unforgettable impression. In the Ajax
the suicide of the hero is in a sense the end of the action, and it comes early, but the force of the play is in the
consequences and in his burial. The Electra of Sophocles, which corresponds to the second play of the Oresteia, is
like a frame with action at the start and finish, but its centre and substance is a play about women to which the
thought of action gives great tension. The greatest set-piece in it is a long, thrilling story about a death, which the
audience knows is a lie, a deceiving fabrication.
Look, here Orestes is, who by device
was dead, and by device was saved alive.What all these varied structures have in common is their restrained clarity of line; the clarity in turn permits a
quantity of formal embroidery in speech. In the Antigone:
She howls in the sharp
tongue of that bitter bird which sees the void
bed of its marriage emptied of all young.And again in the same play:
we were two sisters of two brothers robbed
killed on one day each by the other's hand.There is a certain strength in these verses that flows into them from the very marrow of tragic form, the marrow of
folk-tales. Their likeness to Elizabethan verse, which I do not think I have exaggerated in translation, is striking
and may derive from the same cause. Sophocles is also capable of great and moving simplicity, yet again for a
similar reason. Here, for instance, in a prayer, a lyric chant from the Electra:
O Furies, dreadful children of the gods,
who see all murders of the unjustly dead
and see all beds of marriage that are robbed,