Antigone / Oedipus the King / Electra Read online

  Tragedy was enacted before the collective body of Athenian citizens; it examined the religious and ethical problems to which the new socio-political order had given rise, albeit through the mediated symbolic language of archaic myth. The kings and queens whose crises it represents are confronted with problems directly related to those facing the Athenian democracy; the conflicts enacted crystallize tensions underlying Athenian life.40 Sophoclean tragedy repeatedly portrays the clash between the archaic family-centred order and the secular pragmatism of the new citizen. Creon can decree what ‘human’ edicts he will, but Antigone, who is obsessively aware of the nobility of her lineage and her special status as an aristocrat, is interested only in protecting her family’s interests and the antique canons of religion. Oedipus, however talented a human being, cannot elude his divinely ordained destiny. Orestes fulfils his archaic duty in murdering his father’s murderer, but the audience of the tragedy was well aware that in its own society aristocratic blood feuds were not immune to the jurisdiction of the state, and that Orestes would himself have been tried for murder by a democratically selected jury of ordinary citizens.

  The economic system underpinning the famous Athenian democracy was slavery; the producers of raw materials, of arms and artefacts, the labourers who sweated to create the Athenians’ wealth and build their buildings, were, for the most part, slaves. And in the mythical pasts of Thebes and Argos Sophocles assumes the existence of the uncrossable social boundary dividing slave and free. One ground on which Antigone defends burying Polyneices is that it was not some slave, but a brother, who had died (p. 19); Oedipus wants to know who his mother was, even if she was a third-generation slave (p. 85); Electra’s plight is that, although a princess, she is dressed, fed, and treated like a slave (p. 110).

  The expectations of women implied in these plays similarly reflect the dominant ideology of Sophoclean Athens, a city-state in which women were nearly silenced in public discourse, excluded from political institutions, and remained legally under the guardianship of a male, usually a father or husband, throughout their lives.41 Respectable women of the citizen class were married at an early age, and exemplary paragons of wifehood remained at home as inconspicuously as possible. Sophocles’ contemporary and friend, the Athenian statesman Pericles, is supposed to have said, ‘the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether in praise or in criticism’ (Thucydides 2. 46). Eurydice, Creon’s enigmatic wife in Antigone, nearly fits the template of the perfect wife. She is never mentioned, either in praise or in criticism, until her appearance nine-tenths of the way through the play. In the end she makes a single defiant gesture of self-assertion, in stabbing herself to death in her grief for her sons and her anger at her husband, but at no point has she disrupted the male world of city-state management in which women should not intervene. For her husband is present, and it is a generic convention with profound social significance that women in Greek tragedy rarely become vocally or actively transgressive except in the physical absence of their male guardians.

  The Greeks, moreover, believed that after puberty women were prone to both physical and psychic disorders, and could become social liabilities until, on marriage, their conduct came under the regulation of legitimate husbands. Antigone and Electra are both fatherless virgins of marriageable age, and their obstreperous conduct is not to be dissociated from this socio-sexual status. Antigone openly flouts the authority of her nearest surviving male relative, Creon. Electra, it is stressed, would not be wandering about outside the palace were Aegisthus, her stepfather, present to keep her in a woman’s rightful place: indoors, unseen, and unheard.42

  An aspect of the world portrayed in Sophoclean drama totally alien to the modern western mind, conditioned by monotheistic and messianic faiths, is its pluralist theology. This becomes much easier to approach if it is appreciated that there is always a specific reason why a particular deity is singled out for mention.43 Classical Greek polytheism attributed to its gods, for example, discrete topographical areas of influence. Dionysus is praised in the sixth choral ode of Antigone, and Ares the war god is prominent in Oedipus the King, because they were the recipients of important cults in the city-state of Thebes, where these two plays are set, just as Athena was central to Athenian religion. Similarly, the prologue to Electra draws attention to the nearby temple of Hera, who was from earliest times the tutelary deity of the city where the action takes place.

  The gods also had separate spheres of practical competence and responsibility which transcended the geographical boundaries of these local city-state cults. Hera was goddess of Argos, but also of marriage, an institution whose defilement by adultery and murder is the topic of Electra. Zeus, as the father of the gods and senior male Olympian, is everywhere ultimately responsible for the Unwritten Laws and the punishment of those who transgress them. Sitting on a tripod at Apollo’s panhellenic cult centre at Delphi, his priestess absorbed vapours and expressed them as oracles to visitors from all over the Greek world, and both Oedipus the King and Electra prove the veracity of her utterances. But Apollo was a god of healing as much as of prophecy, and it is to this aspect of his divine personality that the plague-ridden Thebans appeal in Oedipus the King (pp. 54–5).

  Another feature liable to estrange the modern reader is the prominence of the chorus, which can seem intrusive and irrelevant. Yet it was from a form of ritual choral song, in honour of Dionysus, that tragedy almost certainly first evolved (Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 6); to the ancient audience the choral songs were highlights of a tragedy. Although in the classical period the role of the chorus was beginning to diminish, in Sophocles it remains central to the intellectual, religious, ethical, and emotional impact of the plays.44 He was so admired for his skilful handling of the chorus that antiquity ascribed to him a (lost or apocryphal) prose treatise on the subject. The chorus, always an anonymous collective, is an intermediary between actors and audience; it is simultaneously a spectator of the action and deeply affected by it. Occasionally it even intervenes actively within it: in Antigone it is in consultation with the chorus of Theban elders that Creon decides (too late) to relent and release his niece (pp. 38—9). Aristotle commends such organic participation in the action by Sophocles’ choruses (Poetics, ch. 19).

  A dramatist made a crucial choice in the identity of his chorus. The political significance of the principals’ actions is emphasized in both Antigone and Oedipus the King by the selection of male Theban citizens, for the audience is invited to interpret the events from the perspective of the civic community; it is emotionally important, however, that Sophocles selected a chorus of older women to consort with Electra. Their tender parental attitude towards her, and her dependence on them, are comments on her psychological isolation and estrangement from her own natural mother.

  The chorus performed an important role in dramaturgical terms, providing the playwright with a means of filling in the necessary time while the three available actors changed costume, mask, and role behind the scenes, and describing or responding to unseen events taking place inside.45 Sometimes a chorus may sing a transparently hymn-like religious song, appropriate to the emotions of the moment, which has clear roots in one of the ritual genres of archaic choral performance. Examples are the first odes of both Antigone (a song of thanksgiving for military victory and salvation, pp. 6–8) and Oedipus the King (a prayer summoning the assistance of numerous gods in the face of plague and catastrophe, pp. 54–5).

  In Sophocles’ hands, however, the chorus transcended such formal restraints and conventions of the genre. It is in the choral odes that the finest poetry is often found and the most illuminating perspectives on the individuals’ activities expressed. The chorus complements the action and often guides the audience’s responses; it uses a lyric register and an elevated poetic idiom with a tendency towards the articulation of proverbial wisdom. In Antigone, for example, the chorus concludes the scene in which Haemon tries to save his betrothed by musing on the potentially destructive
power of sexual passion (p. 28). It can guess at the future or recount events prior to the action of the play, as the chorus of Electra predicts the murder of Clytemnestra and traces her death to the origins of the family curse (pp. 120–1). It illuminates experiences by drawing mythical parallels: when Antigone has been led from the stage to her death by entombment within a cave, the chorus adduces several examples of other heroic figures of myth who endured some form of incarceration (pp. 33–5). Often a choral song meditates in a generalizing manner on the scene which directly precedes it. At the climactic moment when the truth has been revealed in Oedipus the King, the chorus sings a great ode, ‘Alas! You generations of men’, reflecting on the mutability of human fortune and the transience of wealth and power (p. 91); indeed, in this play the chorus provides something approaching an abstract metaphysical commentary on the issues raised by the specific events they are witnessing.

  The least recoverable aspect of ancient tragedy is its performative dimension. This has been signally underestimated ever since Aristotle, who read tragedies as much as he watched them, and relegated music and spectacle to last place in his catalogue of the elements of tragedy (Poetics, ch. 6): the popular image of a sombre recitation of eternal verities by static sages from white-columned porticoes is a post-classical fantasy. The scenery and costumes were vibrant with forgotten colour; Sophocles is supposed to have been the first playwright to use painted scenery (Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 4), and contemporary vase-paintings can offer faint clues as to the appearance of the costumes and masks.46 The chorus danced in steps and postures of which we understand little; large portions of the plays were sung to music at which we can scarcely guess.47 Tragedy was not only a cerebral genre, but ‘an astounding aural and visual experience’ (Plutarch, de gloria Athenarum 348 BC). Our legacy, however, amounts to little more than the words on these printed pages. The reader must usually reconstruct in imagination the extra dramatic meanings and nuances which the visual and musical dimensions lent to a play, although it is occasionally apparent that Sophocles used props with devastating precision. In Electra, for example, they appropriately link its morbid main character firmly with the dead: they include the funeral urn in which she believes her brother’s ashes are incinerated, her own virginal girdle, which she dedicates to her dead father’s memory, his signet ring, and the funeral shroud veiling her murdered mother’s face.48

  The Translator

  The translations are the work of Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto (1897–1982), perhaps the last of the English romantic philhellenes; at his funeral no god was allowed to be mentioned except those of the classical pantheon, and the readings were taken from his own translations, reproduced here, of choral odes from Antigone. Kitto was one of the most idiosyncratic, yet influential, twentieth-century authorities on Greek tragedy. He was educated at the Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester, and, after rejection from military service (his eyesight was dreadful), at St John’s College, Cambridge. He taught at the University of Glasgow from 1921 to 1944, and was then appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, where he remained until his retirement in 1962, the year in which these translations were first published by Oxford University Press.49

  He is best known for his books on tragic drama—Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (London, 1939), Sophocles: Dramatist and Philosopher (London, 1958), Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and of Hamlet (London, 1956), and Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley, 1966). He also wrote an introductory study to ancient Hellas, The Greeks (London, 1951), which is still widely read. His romantic apprehension of Greece emerges from his account of a walking holiday he took there, published under the title In the Mountains of Greece (London, 1933). It conveys the inspiration he took from ancient sites (Sparta, Olympia, and the temple of Apollo at Bassae), and contains many allusions to ancient authors, especially his beloved Sophocles.

  Kitto was fanatically committed to theatre, and was partially responsible for the establishment of the important Chair of Drama at the University of Bristol in 1947. The Classics and Drama departments there used annually to collaborate in productions of Greek plays; oral tradition records his own memorable performance, suspended from a basket, in the role of the eccentric philosopher Socrates in a production in 1962 of Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds. It is touching to note that his outstanding translations of Antigone and Electra were written for these modest amateur performances. Kitto attended rehearsals, revising the English as he heard it delivered, which helps to account for the satisfying fluency and sheer performability of his translations; with his wife he composed the original musical scores. The Library at Bristol University retains a photograph of the first production of Kitto’s version of Antigone in May 1951; the Electra followed it in 1955. Oedipus the King was translated for performance by the local Classical Association in the late 1950s.

  The Translations

  The ancient critic Dio Chrysostom described Sophocles’ verse as ‘dignified and grand, tragic and euphonius to the highest degree, combining great charm with sublimity and dignity’ (Oration 52). It is also remarkable for its lapidary precision and its imagery, which is simultaneously muscular, subtle, and economical. Conveying such qualities in another language represents an astonishing challenge. Unusually for an academic, Kitto was a fine poet, and his translations are notable for their lucidity, accuracy, and vigour. His lifelong passion for Shakespearean drama bears rich fruit in his rendering of Sophocles’ standard Attic iambics of the speeches and dialogue into the graceful iambic pentameters of English blank verse.

  But Greek tragedy was an inclusive genre, alternating spoken iambic sections with dance and song, accompanied by pipe music, in numerous complicated metres.50 Kitto’s translation succeeds in the ambitious project of reproducing in lyrics some of the effects of the elaborate shifts and changes in the original metres of the musical sections. They comprise both choral song and passages in which individual characters sing either on their own or antiphonally in response to the chorus. This important aspect of tragedy, far from being a matter simply of technical formality, has been disastrously neglected in most modern translations. For a poet’s choice of song or speech for a particular section can, especially in performance, radically affect its impact. Song is a mark of social status: besides the chorus, only royal individuals (as opposed to guards, messengers, and servants) are awarded the privilege. But when characters sing, it also signifies drastically heightened emotion. Antigone sings her own funeral lament (pp. 29—31); when Oedipus emerges blinded from his palace, he expresses his agony in song (pp. 94—6); the actor who played Electra needed to be vocally gifted, for she frequently resorts to the musical medium to articulate her fluctuating feelings.

  Metrical authenticity is ultimately unattainable in translation from ancient Greek, not least because its metres were shaped by vowel length and, not, as in English verse, by accentual stress. This edition therefore simply marks those sections of the tragedies which are thought to have been either sung or chanted (depending on the nature of the metre) rather than spoken. Speech is the correct medium unless otherwise indicated.

  The basic rhythmic unit of sung sections, whether delivered by the chorus alone, or by a character or characters, or antiphonally by both chorus and characters, often comprises a pair of stanzas metrically (and originally no doubt melodically) corresponding with each other (AA). Sometimes more than one pair of such corresponding stanzas is accumulated sequentially, producing an overall metrical pattern AABB, or even AABBCC. The tragic chorus danced as it sang, and is believed to have marked the end of each stanza by some kind of physical turn, perhaps to face the opposite side of the circular dancing area (orchestra). The two parts of each pair thus came to be known traditionally by the Greek terms strophē (‘turn’), and antistrophē (‘counter-turn’), respectively. Some antistrophic sung sections conclude with the addition of a metrically independent epōdē (‘after-song’), which gives a pattern, for example in the second choral section of Electra, of AA
B (pp. 120–1). This feature of the original Greek lyric verse, important in performance, has been conveyed particularly well by Kitto’s translation, and so the present edition has retained the labels in the sung sections marking each stanza as a ‘strophe’, ‘antistrophe’, or ‘epode’.

  Kitto’s renderings compress the plays into fewer metrical lines than are contained in the Greek texts of Sophocles now in use; they all adopt the same standard system of numeration. The line numbering in this edition therefore marks not the lines of the translation itself, but those of the standard Greek texts. This is intended to enable the user to compare the translation with others, or with the original Greek, or quickly to locate passages discussed in secondary criticism. When an article or book cites, for example, ‘Electra, lines 820–2’, it will certainly be using the same orthodox numerical system as this volume.