Sophocles and the Greek Tragic Tradition. By SIMON GOLDHILL and EDITH HALL, 

eds. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 

336. Cloth, $99.00. ISBN 978–0–521–88785–4.



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CJ Online 2010.06.04





This Festschrift is a tribute to Pat Easterling’s contributions to the 

study of Greek tragedy and the history of its performance. The essays are 

divided into three parts. The first explores the relationship of actor and 

audience, and how this relationship reflects the political preoccupations 

(broadly conceived) of the Athenian polis. The second centers on the figure 

of Oedipus, while the third examines the development of the tragic genre in 

both ancient and modern contexts. The editors optimistically suggest some 

coherence to the offerings, especially in the dust jacket blurb. But the 

variety of topics is in fact a strength of the volume, not least because it 

is a fitting tribute to the range of Easterling’s interests.



In the first chapter (Sophocles: the state of play, pp. 1–24), Goldhill 

and Hall introduce the volume as a whole by assessing how scholarly 

interests have developed over the last century or so. Jebb and his 1900 

edition of Antigone serve as a watershed for contrasting what went before 

(Victorian idealism and obsession with the beauty of tragedy) with what 

followed (already in 1903 Hofmannsthal’s dark and violent interpretation 

of Electra). What makes this overview particularly valuable is the attempt 

to place individual oeuvres in their wider cultural and intellectual 

context – by tracing for example, the influences of anthropology, 

psychology, and new theories about dance and ritual on Hofmannsthal, and 

noting the challenge these interpretations presented to the privileged 

position of Greek culture as the intellectual ancestor of Western 

civilization. The chapter offers a provocative discussion of the 

intellectual pedigree and contributions of scholars such as Reinhardt, 

Kitto, Bowra, Knox, Winnington-Ingram, Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Segal, 

Zeitlin and Loraux, and briefly acknowledges the recent explosion in 

performance of Greek tragedy. It also makes broader observations about 

continuity and change in scholarly trends – the degree, for example, to 

whichcritics write against the backdrop of the previous generation’s 

work. The chapter then lays out four areas in which Sophoclean scholarship 

is currently engrossed (i) the political sphere (how political/how Athenian 

is tragedy?); (ii) performance studies, which have now moved from purely 

practical/dramaturgical considerations to cultural dimensions of 

performance, including other sites of “performance” in the city; (iii) 

the language of tragedy (especially its ambiguity); and (iv) the 

performance history of plays both in ancient and modern times. These four 

areas are the primary focus of the volume.



Part One: Between Audience and Actor



Goldhill (The audience on stage: rhetoric, emotion, and judgement in 

Sophoclean theatre, pp. 27–47) makes an ambitious attempt to develop a 

theory of the audience that can account for democracy’s belief in the 

collective deliberative ability of citizens . He examines how Sophocles 

dramatizes the process of being (in) an audience through the device of 

creating an on-stage audience [beyond the chorus, which serves continuously 

in this capacity, thus offering a helpful alternative model to the 

“chorus as sounding-board for the audience”]. For Goldhill, characters 

function as an on-stage audience when they serve as critical observers and 

respondents to what is occurring on stage, offering a model for the 

audience in the theatre, who are developing their own responses. The 

metadrama that other commentators see as an end in itself carries for 

Goldhill a political function: it encourages the audience to engage the 

critical faculties vital to deliberation. It is not always clear from 

Goldhill’s analysis what sets a particular character apart as an on-stage 

audience beyond his or her silence or function as focalizer, and his 

approach could be extended virtually ad infinitum given tragedy’s 

tendency to eschew sustained three-way conversation. Goldhill chooses 

instances that build suspense about how the character is responding to the 

situation and that highlight the multiplicity of possible responses to a 

scene. He provides a salutary reminder that the multiplicity of responses 

by the internal audience argues an equally wide range of response on the 

part of the external audience. The most fully developed case-study is 

Goldhill’s discussion of Electra, the most overtly theatrical of 

Sophocles’ plays, though he oddly omits the most prominent instance of an 

on-stage audience, Electra’s role as witness and mediator of the killing 

of Clytemnestra.



Ismene Lada-Richard (‘The players will tell all’: the dramatist, the 

actors and the art of acting in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, pp. 48–68) also 

examines metadrama. She argues that Sophocles’ innovation in creating the 

role of Neoptolemus allows the playwright to explore the relationship 

between Neoptolemus’ part in the plot to dupe Philoctetes and his 

identity as player. It would be worth noting that a similar interest in the 

theatrical implications of disguise and role-playing may have formed part 

of Euripides’ Philoctetes, in which Odysseus approaches Philoctetes with 

appearance and voice changed by Athene and playing the part of one of his 

own victims. But in Sophocles’ play, it is the son of Achilles who is 

co-opted to play the deceiver, and the disjuncture between player 

(“self”) and part (“character”) is complicates considerably the 

issue of whether Neoptolemus’ responses to Philoctetes are genuine or 

simulated. Lada-Richards makes a convincing case for reading an interest in 

acting into the play, and offers a useful study of ancient responses to 

coherence and incoherence between an actor and his part. She argues that a 

high degree of expertise is required of the actor in order to pull off the 

part of the faltering apprentice-player in the internal plot, just as 

Philoctetes’ unremitting pathos requires considerable self-mastery on the 

part of the actor. Unlike in real life, Lada-Richards argues, authenticity 

in performance is judged by the degree to which a performance is 

compelling. She situates Neoptolemus the actor’s derailment of the plot 

of Odysseus the stage-director/playwright within the context of 

contemporary performance culture, in which the playwright’s control over 

performance was diminishing and actors were enjoying increasing prominence. 

Some dimensions of the analysis (e.g. the political influence and 

diplomatic roles of star actors) run the risk of anachronism, as 

Lada-Richards seems to appreciate (“Sophocles’ play was only a hair’s 

breadth away from that new chapter...,” p. 65), though in the absence of 

sufficient contemporary evidence this remains an argument ex silentio.



Edith Hall (Deianeira deliberates: precipitate decision-making and 

Trachiniae, pp. 69–96) considers the function of deliberation in 

Trachiniae, noting that the play conveys its importance by offering a 

series of examples of how not to deliberate. The essay ranges widely, 

drawing on a broad selection of sources to identify the key elements of 

good counsel (euboulia); this lays the groundwork for appreciating the 

degree to which deliberation in tragedies is usually presented as flawed or 

absent, and, in the case of Trachiniae, as compromised in virtually every 

conceivable way. Hall discusses the extent to which female tragic 

characters are capable of initiating and engaging in deliberation, 

concluding that in the case of Deianeira the evidence may say less about 

the deliberative capacities of women as a category than about the 

democratic polis; the precipitous decision-making and sudden mind-changing 

we see in the play are also characteristic of the Council and especially 

the Assembly. Hall’s suggestion that the hastiness of deliberation in 

tragedy may explain why the genre adopted the convention limiting its plot 

to the span of a single day must remain a conjecture. But tragedy certainly 

exploits the convention to highlight the dangers of hasty decision-making 

and, Hall argues, reflects the Athenian psyche’s essential optimism and 

self-sufficiency, since it raises the possibility that with better 

decision-making matters could have turned out differently.



Part Two: Oedipus and the Play of Meaning



Peter Burian (Inconclusive conclusion: the ending(s) of Oedipus Tyrannus, 

pp. 99–118) takes on the vexed question of the ending of Oedipus 

Tyrannus. Rejecting the arguments against authenticity, he seeks to make 

sense of the supposed inconsistencies, especially the fact that the 

expectation of Oedipus’ exile is suddenly overturned when Creon sends him 

into the palace in anticipation of further direction from Apollo. Indeed, 

the symmetry of ruler transformed into scapegoat is so compelling, Burian 

argues, that some scholars reject or even overlook the lack of exile at the 

play’s end. Oedipus’ departure into the palace brings the action full 

circle and forces him to return to the scene of his undoing. It thus bears 

a symmetry of its own, but this brings with it neither release nor the 

redemptive role of the pharmakos that we find in Oedipus at Colonus. 

Burian’s argument that the rejection of the pharmakos-ending is a 

rejection of polis-centered closure both fits and accounts for several of 

the more peculiar aspects of the play. The shift in focus from the polis to 

the fate and oikos of Oedipus, for example, is part and parcel of 

Oedipus’ fall from power: just as Oedipus the tyrant identified himself 

with the state he ruled, so now in his fall from power he can no longer 

serve any function within it. Burian provides a compelling characterization 

of the end of the play as providing formal rather than conceptual closure, 

and his analysis of the exchange between Oedipus and Creon points out its 

studied ambiguity. Thus the refusal of exile is a refusal of closure in 

which Sophocles masterfully exploits the openness of the mythical 

tradition.



Chris Carey (The third stasimon of Oedipus at Colonus, pp. 119-33) offers a 

study of the third stasimon of Oedipus at Colonus. His opening remarks 

proposing that OC functions as a cornerstone for the “Theban cycle”, 

which he characterizes as the nearest thing to a Sophoclean trilogy, set 

off alarm bells, given the many years and plays separating Antigone from 

OC. But Carey’s analysis does not, for the most part, insist on direct 

verbal echoes. Rather, it offers a thoughtful exploration of this ode and 

its reflections on old age and mortality, teasing out the resonances of its 

words and motifs, especially the points of intersection with the lives of 

Oedipus and his family: time is focalized through the long-standing 

sufferer Oedipus; death described as anumenaios suggests his own unclean 

marriage; the description of old age as akratesintersects provocatively 

with his situation as at once powerless and strangely powerful. Carey’s 

greatest insight may come at the end, where he links the chorus’ 

comparison of Oedipus to a headland to the interest in topography that 

permeates the play. Oedipus’ connection to the landscape goes far beyond 

the apostrophizing seen in other plays, Carey argues: Oedipus not only 

resembles but becomes the rugged landscape into which he will be absorbed.



Michael Silk’s contribution (The logic of the unexpected: semantic 

diversion in Sophocles, Yeats (and Virgil), pp. 134–57) examines a 

specific feature of Sophoclean use of language: what Silk calls a 

“semantic diversion”, usually found at the end of a syntactic unit, 

which substitutes a different word for what the listener expects . Silk 

claims that this practice is unique to Sophocles among Greek tragedians [I 

am not so sure] and draws on instances from Yeats and Virgil to elucidate 

it; he compares it to the para prosdokian of comedy, though it lacks the 

tendency towards climax of the latter. Indeed, Silk is insistent on 

avoiding thinking of semantic diversions as a device at all, perhaps 

because this suggests a degree of standardization; the claim that these 

diversions have nothing to do with defamiliarization needs more argument. 

Silk exposes the facile tendency of commentators to explain these word uses 

as metonym or to posit alternate meanings and points out the challenge they 

represent to textual critics used to operating according to probability. 

Sophocles’ “magisterial elusiveness” causes a wide range of 

associations to spill out, including the residual presence of the expected 

but supplanted reference, and may reflect the playwright’s Weltanschauung 

in constituting completeness and open-endedness at once.



Fiona Macintosh (The French Oedipus of the inter-war period, pp. 158–76) 

considers reworkings of Oedipus Tyrannus in France during the 1920s and 

1930s. Her analysis sets the approaches taken by Mounet-Sully, Bouhélier, 

Stravinsky, Cocteau and others in the context of cultural and intellectual 

history. Rejection of the classical heritage as presented by Parnassiens 

such as Leconte de Lisle resulted in the Modernist predilection for 

dissonance and incongruity. When Modernism became associated with German 

cultural imperialism, a classicism emerged that sought the wellsprings of 

French culture in a democratic classicism, and reworkings of the Oedipus 

myth presented new popularist tendencies and preferred a sequential, 

diachronic plot order. Macintosh considers inter alia educational policy, 

aesthetic currents, staging choices and biographical information to explain 

the peculiar dynamics of the resurgent classical performance tradition in 

France two decades after the country seemed to have turned its back on 

classicism as a vestige of the ancien régime.



Part Three: Constructing Tragic Traditions



In a dense and often elusive piece (Theoretical views of Athenian tragedy 

in the fifth century BC, pp. 179–207), Kostas Valakas attempts to 

recreate fifth-century theories of tragedy on the basis of evidence from 

the tragedies themselves. He draws attention to affinities with Presocratic 

ideas and rhetorical theory, noting for example a growing interest in a 

theatrical “reality” seen as distinct from both what it represents and 

the world of the audience, and observing that this parallels a shift in the 

conception of the relation between artefact and reality in statuary 

inscriptions: whereas early inscriptions assume that statue and model are 

one and the same, Athenian inscriptions of the fifth century acknowledge 

that the statue is a representation rather than the thing itself. 

Valakas’ suggestion that the terminology of representation in Plato and 

Aristotle (eikōn, mimēsis etc.) was likely already used by fifth-century 

intellectuals to discuss the dynamics and interests of tragedy, especially 

tragedy’s interest in the capacity and limits of human knowledge and its 

treatment of themes of appearance and reality, deception and discovery, 

seems reasonable. Whether this interest amounts to an espousal of 

Protagorean relativism, as Valakas suggests, and whether one can separate 

tragedy’s “moral education” from its “political role” is less 

certain.



Angus Bowie (Athens and Delphi in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, pp. 208–31) 

explores the function of prophecy in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, arguing that it 

is an early indication of a shift toward a greater sense of human agency in 

understanding causation and interpreting events. Much of the piece is 

devoted to close analysis of passages in the Oresteia, elucidating the 

degree to which prophecy, and Delphic prophecy in particular, looms as an 

interest in the plays. Bowie argues that other forms of sign-interpretation 

(e.g. the beacon) are described in oracular terms, and that Cassandra is 

described in language reminiscent of the Delphic Pythia. Bowie even 

suggests that the description of Agamemnon’s robe as a net alludes to the 

Delphic omphalos and its knotted covering. Be that as it may, he 

successfully demonstrates that in the Oresteia prophecies are repeatedly 

problematized as ambiguous, open-ended, and associated with violent 

revenge, and that the plot privileges Athens over Delphi as the locus for 

resolving legal and political problems. In an intriguing side-note, Bowie 

suggests that psephomancy (divination through the use of pebbles) may have 

been the usual form of divination at Delphi, and argues that this might 

offer an additional dimension to the contrast between divination’s 

failure at Delphi and the successful use of (voting) pebbles in the 

Areopagus court at Athens.



Richard Buxton (Feminized males in Bacchae: the importance of 

discrimination, pp. 232–50) offers a welcome cautionary rejoinder to the 

tendency to see gender-crossing everywhere in the Bacchae. Analyzing 

characterizations singulatim, he argues that the play creates as much 

meaning by setting up distinctions as by collapsing them. Tiresias and 

Cadmus, for example, take up the paraphernalia of bacchants but do not 

participate in transvestism, in contrast to Pentheus. In their case, what 

matters is whether their behavior is age-appropriate rather than 

gender-appropriate. Buxton also cautions that Dionysus’ femininity is not 

as ubiquitous a motif as some suppose, since it belongs to the early stages 

of the play; later on, his wildness is at issue. So too Pentheus’ 

feminization is a concern early in the play, whereas later his 

identification by Agaue as a wild beast dominates. Zeus is presented as 

parent, and specifically as mother; he is feminized in function but not in 

appearance.



Oliver Taplin (Hector’s helmet glinting in a fourth-century tragedy, pp. 

251–63) sets out to shine the spotlight on fourth century tragedy. He 

convincingly identifies an Apulian vase in the Antikenmuseum in Berlin as 

representing scenes from Astydamas’ Hector, though he probably overstates 

his case in reading the inclusion of an attendant to receive Hector’s 

helmet as an example of a bold aemulatio of Homer, given the ubiquity of 

supernumerary characters in both tragedy and vase-painting. Taplin closes 

with a thought-provoking analysis of a fragmentary passage (adesp. tr. fr. 

649) in which Cassandra is allotted (by Astydamas, Taplin argues) a highly 

unusual televisionary “messenger speech” in which she describes 

Hector’s death from afar.



Christopher Pelling (Seeing a Roman tragedy through Greek eyes: 

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, pp. 26–88) closes the volume with a 

delightful look at Shakespeare’s use of ancient source material. After 

briefly discussing evidence for the direct influence of Greek tragedy, he 

settles into an extended treatment of the ways Shakespeare engaged with 

Plutarch. Although his access to Plutarch’s Lives was at two removes 

(through North’s 1579 translation of Amyot’s 1559 French translation), 

close examination reveals that Shakespeare was often truer in spirit and in 

sense to Plutarch than either Amyot or North. Plot devices such as mirror 

scenes, motifs including the language of sacrifice to describe Caesar’s 

murder, reintroduction of “pagan” elements such as the daimon linking 

Brutus and Caesar all show a close affinity to Plutarch’s sensibilities 

and especially his vision of the tragic.



This volume was written by scholars for scholars. Much of the Greek is left 

untranslated, and footnotes generally do not attempt to provide the 

overview of the scholarly terrain an undergraduate would need. Although 

there is little here that is radically pioneering, this volume gathers a 

collection of well conceived and written essays that will likely spawn 

further discussion and frequent citation, and the reader comes away with an 

appreciation for the wide variety of approaches to the study of Greek 

tragedy that exists in the early twenty-first century.



Eric Dugdale 

Gustavus Adolphus College 

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