Antigone / Oedipus the King / Electra Read online

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  ANTIGONE OEDIPUS THE KING ELECTRA

  WIDELY regarded in both ancient and modern times as the most sublime of the tragic poets, the life of Sophocles the Athenian (c. 495–405 BC) spanned the century of his city’s greatness as an imperial democracy and the leading state of the Greek-speaking world. He was a popular and prominent figure in the public affairs of Athens, acting as both treasurer and general in the late 440s, and as a magistrate in the civic crisis which resulted from the Athenians’ catastrophic invasion of Sicily in 413 BC. His first tragedy was produced in 468 BC, when he was in his late twenties, and he seems to have worked right up until his death, achieving a prodigious output of well over a hundred plays. Seven of his tragedies survive, of which only two, products of his old age, are firmly dated. Philoctetes was first produced in 409 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus was put on posthumously by Sophocles’ grandson in 402 or 401 BC. Ajax and Women of Trachis may be the earliest of his surviving works: the three contained in this volume, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Electra, were all probably composed after he had reached the age of 50. They have proved to be the most influential of his works and are generally regarded as his masterpieces.

  The debt owed by western drama to Sophocles is incalculable. He was believed by the ancients to have been the first tragic poet to use painted scenery and three actors, and Aristotle bestowed the highest praise on him in his treatise on tragic poetry, the Poetics, singling out the economy of his plot construction, the nobility of his characters, and his excellent handling of the chorus. But Sophocles’ name means ‘renowned for wisdom’, and few if any tragedies have ever rivalled his works in intellectual depth, luminosity of language, precision of imagery, and sheer emotional power.

  EDITH HALL is Lecturer in Classics and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford; her books include Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford, 1989). For Oxford World’s Classics she has introduced two volumes of Euripides’ plays.

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  SOPHOCLES

  Antigone Oedipus the King Electra

  Translated by

  H. D. F. KITTO

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  EDITH HALL

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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  English translation © Oxford University Press 1962

  Editorial material © Edith Hall 1994

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  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1994

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998

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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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  ISBN 0–19–283588–2

  7 9 10 8

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SEVERAL people have helped me in the preparation of this edition. John Betts, Nicholas Hammond, Christopher Robinson, Christopher Rowe, George Rowell, and Glynne Wickham all helped me to track down the history of the genesis and first performances of the translations. My students at Reading made it quite clear to me what they would wish to find in an edited translation of Sophocles. I would also like to record my heartfelt thanks to Linda Holt, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and especially Richard Poynder, for invaluable assistance of other kinds.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Texts

  Select Bibliography

  Chronology

  ANTIGONE

  OEDIPUS THE KING

  ELECTRA

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Time is a recurrent topic in Sophoclean tragedy. Of Oedipus, so recently so fortunate, the chorus sings, ‘Time sees all, and Time, in your despite, | Disclosed and punished your unnatural marriage’ (p. 91). Within the stark temporal economy of these tragedies, whose actions commence at dawn and are consummated within a single day, human fortunes are completely overturned. Antigone dies, Oedipus the king becomes a blinded outcast, and Electra is reunited with her long-lost brother Orestes, who slaughters the incumbents of the Mycenaean throne. Time is the only conceptual benchmark by which Sophocles’ mortals can fully understand their difference from divinity. Unlike the power held by Creon or Oedipus or Clytemnestra, the sovereignty of the gods is immune to time’s passing. The chorus of Antigone praises Zeus’ immortality: ‘Sleep . . . cannot overcome Thee, | Nor can the never-wearied | Years, but throughout | Time Thou art strong and ageless’ (p. 23).

  Sophoclean drama has proved to be as ‘strong and ageless’ as its immortal gods. These plays in this volume do not die; they are merely reinterpreted. The inventory of Sophocles’ admirers and imitators, in the English-speaking world alone, includes John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Percy Shelley (who translated Oedipus the King and drowned with a text of Sophocles in his pocket), Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and more recently Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison.1

  Sophocles’ influence extends beyond literature to philosophy and psychology. Hegel’s dialectic and view of tragic conflict are inseparable from his understanding of Antigone; 2 Sigmund Freud’s most famous theory is named after the protagonist of Oedipus the King.3 Nor, for over 400 years, has this poet been confined to the academy. The earliest-attested performance of a Greek tragedy in modern translation presented an audience of Italian humanists, in Vicenza, with a production of Oedipus the King on 3 March 1585.4 Although the performance of Sophoclean drama was, in nineteenth-century Britain, gener
ally proscribed on moral grounds by the Lord Chamberlain,5 this playwright has never enjoyed so many revivals as in the period since the Second World War. During 1992, as this edition was in preparation, every play in it was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the English stage.6

  Their enduring popularity makes it hard to remember that they were first performed 2,500 years ago, by exclusively male actors, in the quite different context of a day-lit theatre in Athens. Dramas were produced at sacred festivals in honour of Dionysus, god of wine, dancing, and illusion. Every year three tragedians competed against each other with a group of four plays, three tragedies and a satyr play (a hybrid dramatic form mixing tragic and comic elements), with the aim of persuading a democratically selected jury to award their group of works the first prize; with it came vast prestige and fame around the whole Greek-speaking world.7

  The decision to present these particular three of the seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles together in a single volume, although unusual, has great advantages. By detaching Oedipus the King and Antigone from Oedipus at Colonus, which is not included, the misleading latter-day myth of a Theban ‘trilogy’ or ‘cycle’ is exploded. For the three surviving plays by Sophocles set at Thebes and focusing on the family of Oedipus were not designed to be performed together sequentially. They were independently conceived, composed over a period of perhaps nearly forty years, and were first produced separately, each in a group with other, unknown, tragedies. Antigone and Oedipus the King, are, however, at least consistent with each other, whereas Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus contain one important factual difference. Antigone assumes that Oedipus died ingloriously at Thebes, whereas Oedipus at Colonus brings him to a beatific death at Athens.

  The selection has other merits, however. A distinctive feature of Sophoclean tragedy is a titanic central heroic figure defiantly refusing to compromise and bend to other people’s different perceptions of reality.8 These characters’ intransigent stances, while ennobling them, bring them into collision with, at best, misery (Electra) and, at worst, catastrophe (Oedipus): this volume brings together the two surviving Sophoclean tragedies, Antigone and Electra, in which the dominant heroic figure is a woman.

  Another significant link connecting the three is the similarity of their perspective on familial relationships. Discord abounds between husbands and wives. Creon drives his wife to suicide; Oedipus wants to kill his mother/wife; Clytemnestra murdered her husband. Siblings of the same sex are vulnerable to dissension; in Antigone two brothers have killed each other; in both Antigone and Electra pairs of sisters are in powerful disagreement. Oedipus killed his father, and mother–child enmity leads to matricide in Electra. All three plays, however, privilege, indeed idealize, two particular bonds—between daughter and father and between sister and brother: in the case of Antigone and Oedipus the bond is famously and bizarrely identical. Antigone, torn as a child from her father’s arms at the end of Oedipus the King, later brings death upon herself out of loyalty to her dead brother Polyneices; Electra awaits the return of her adored younger brother Orestes to avenge the death of a father to whose memory she is quite obsessively attached. Sophoclean women are only defined, and can only achieve heroic status, in the contexts of their relationships with men.

  Sophocles

  Sophocles was enormously popular within his own lifetime, and had his place in the gallery of the greatest poets of all time canonized by the generations immediately succeeding him. Even Plato, who was to banish dramatists from his ideal Republic, was gentle in his assessment of Sophocles (Republic 1. 329 b–c), and in his Poetics Aristotle expressed the view that Sophoclean drama brought the genre of tragedy to its consummate achievements, especially in Oedipus the King. The general consensus of Sophocles’ contemporaries and successors was that he was a man blessed with a virtuous disposition and, unlike his characters, a remarkably trouble-free life. A charming epitaph occurred in a fragmentary comedy entitled The Muses, by Phrynichus: ‘fortunate Sophocles lived a long life, made many beautiful tragedies, and, in the end, died without suffering any evil’.9

  The facts of Sophocles’ life must, however, be pieced together from diverse sources of varying reliability.10 Inscriptions can usually be trusted; ancient librarians and scholars had access to sources of information now lost to us, but many allusions in ancient authors have little claim to veracity. The ‘Chronology’ in this edition therefore confines itself to those few dates which are almost certainly trustworthy.

  Ancient poets attracted anecdotes and sayings which were compiled in later antiquity into ‘biographies’. The Life of Sophocles contains numerous pieces of information which it would be delightful to be able to believe. He is alleged to have led with his lyre the Athenian chorus which celebrated the victory over the Persians at the battle of Salamis, to have acted leading roles in his own plays, and to have died either while reciting a long sentence from Antigone without pause for breath, or by choking on a grape (the fruit of Dionysus, the tutelary deity of drama). Unfortunately such anecdotes reveal more about the biographers’ imaginations than about the poet himself.11

  Sophocles son of Sophilus was born at the Colonus of his Oedipus at Colonus, a district of the Athenian city-state, in the middle of the first decade of the fifth century BC. He is said to have married one Nicostrate, and both a son (Iophon) and a grandson (also named Sophocles) followed him by becoming tragic poets. He lived until about 405 BC, just before the Athenians’ defeat in the disastrous Peloponnesian War, which had thrown the Greek-speaking world into divisive chaos for nearly three decades. His life thus began and ended commensurately with the century of Athens’ greatness as an imperial democracy and the leading city-state of the Hellenic world.12

  He composed at least 120 dramas, of which only seven tragedies survive; a certain amount is known, however, about many of his other productions.13 In the three plays translated here mythical parallels are often drawn from other stories we know he was sufficiently interested in to dramatize. He wrote, for example, a Niobe, about a tragically bereaved mother, with whose misery both Antigone and Electra emotionally identify (see pp. 29 and 109 with explanatory notes). He was victorious in the dramatic competitions about twenty times, and apparently never came last; he is thought to have won in the year he produced Antigone, but the group of plays which included Oedipus the King was astonishingly awarded only second place. Whether or not Electra and its companion dramas won the first prize is not even known. A portion of Trackers, a satyr play, has been discovered on papyrus: its pastoral content—an enormous newborn Hermes, greedy satyrs, an indignant nymph, and cattle dung—has granted the twentieth century a precious glimpse into this sombre tragedian’s sense of humour.14

  Sophoclean scholarship is hampered by the lack of evidence concerning the dates of his works. He won his first victory in 468 BC, defeating the great Aeschylus, when he was approaching the age of thirty;15 the victorious plays may have included his (lost) Triptolemus. Philoctetes was awarded first place in 409,16 and Oedipus at Colonus was produced posthumously in 402/1.17 But of the other five extant tragedies, namely Ajax, Women of Trachis, and those published here, not one is firmly dated. The dramatic technique and style of Ajax and Women of Trachis may suggest that they are fairly early, but this assumes that a writer’s works must evolve in a smooth linear progression. An ancient, but unreliable, tradition implies that Antigone may have been produced in the late 440s.18 Scholars have tried hard to place Oedipus the King in the mid-420s19 and Electra about a decade later,20 but such conjectural dating should not be treated with anything but rampant scepticism.21

  It is fairly certain that Sophocles dedicated a cult of the healing hero Asclepius in his own home,22 but the biographical tradition makes extravagant claims about the poet’s personal piety. He is supposed to have been loved more than others by the gods, to have been a favourite of Heracles, and to have held a priesthood himself. Such dubious testimony has resulted in scholarly quests for evidence of religious conviction in his plays.23
But the only generalization that can safely be made applies equally to all Greek tragedy: divine will is always eventually done.

  Antigone affirms that the laws of heaven are ‘Unwritten and unchanging. Not of today | Or yesterday is their authority; | They are eternal’ (p. 17). These ‘Unwritten Laws’ encoded archaic taboos and imperatives regulating familial and social relations; they proscribed murder within the family, the breaking of oaths, incest, and disrespect towards the dead—for example, the failure to bury them.24 Mortals who in tragedy transgress these immortal edicts must come to see the error of their ways. Creon may have justification in Antigone for the measures by which he attempts to deter possible traitors to his city, but the play reveals that human reasoning faculties are not sufficient means by which to apprehend an inexplicable universe. Iocasta derides oracles as hocus-pocus, but they all come true in the end. Oedipus attempts to save his city from its disastrous plight by means of his intellect, but his detective trail leads him to the discovery that the gods had ordained that he break, by parricide and incest, two of the ‘Unwritten Laws’. In Electra Clytemnestra may have had a perfectly understandable motive for killing her husband, Agamemnon—he was responsible for the death of their daughter Iphigeneia—but divine law dictates that as a murderer within the family, she must give her life in return.

  The only other pertinent biographical information, which in this case is reasonably reliable, concerns Sophocles’ public life.25 He served as an ambassador, held office under the Athenian democracy as a treasurer in 443-2 BC, as a general (not a narrowly military office) in 441-0, and as a magistrate in 413 after the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily.26 Such practical experiences are not inconsistent with the continuous investigation running through all three plays of the ease with which political authority can turn into tyranny, and with the artistic exploration, through the dilemmas facing Creon and Oedipus, of the anxieties inherent in the possession of political power.