8

HISTORY AND TRAGEDY IN THE FIFTH CENTURY

Herodotus   and the Invention   of  History

Books   and Readers

Sophocles

Other   Persons:        Women   and Athenian    Democracy

Chapter 8 concerns itself with two important fifth-century literary figures who lived and worked in
Athens, the historian Herodotus and the tragic poet Sophocles, and closes with a consideration of the
position of women on the tragic stage and in Athenian society. Herodotus composed the first serious work
of historical investigation, his extended account of the Persian Wars. Herodotus is not merely concerned
to record the events of the wars, but to understand the causes that underlie these events and, in general, to
attempt to understand what causes wars to occur and what causes states to increase and decrease in
power. In this regard, Herodotus reflects the influence of the Ionian philosophers, in whose milieu he
spent his formative years and who were likewise concerned to understand underlying causes. Prose
literature, like that of Herodotus, depends upon relatively widespread literacy, and Greece in the time of
Herodotus and his contemporary Sophocles was undergoing a transition from a largely oral to an
increasingly literate society. The characters in Sophocles’ dramas, however, seem to be drawn from an
earlier, heroic age, like that depicted in the (orally composed) epics from which the Homeric poems
arose. Indeed, many of Sophocles’ main characters share the unyielding, heroic nature of Homer’s
Achilles, whose refusal to compromise is both admirable and disastrous. Even the female characters
around whom some of Sophocles’ tragedies revolve, like Antigone and Electra, are presented in strong,
heroic terms. The chapter closes with a discussion of the way in which powerful female characters like
those in Sophocles are reflective not of the realities of democratic Athenian life but of the need for male
poets and their overwhelmingly male audiences to come to terms with the limited roles women were
permitted to play in contemporary society.

The spectacle   that    opened  the annual  festival    of  the Dionysia    at  Athens, including   the

procession and the conspicuous display of the financial contributions by Athens’ allies (see p. 140), was
intended not only for the benefit of the Athenians in the audience, but for the purpose of impressing
visitors to Athens from other Greek poleis as well. For, by the middle of the fifth century BC, Athens had
begun to attract substantial numbers of Greeks who came either to visit briefly or to take up residence in a
city that was flourishing both economically and culturally. Representatives of the allied cities came of
necessity, to pay their contributions into the treasury of the alliance, but many came voluntarily, either to
take advantage of the financial opportunities that were now available or to participate in the vibrant
intellectual life of democratic Athens. In this chapter, we will examine the intellectual contribution made
by one of those visitors, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, whose history of the Persian Wars has justifiably
conferred on him the title “Father of History.” We will also discuss the work of an Athenian contemporary
who was said to have been a friend of Herodotus, the tragic poet Sophocles.