Antigone / Oedipus the King / Electra by Sophocles
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1 See further Stuart Gillespie, The Poets on the Classics: An Anthology (London/New York, 1988), 202–6.
2 See esp. Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton, NJ, 1988).
3 For a critique of Freud’s (ab)use of Sophocles, especially with regard to Oedipus the King, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Oedipus Without the Complex’, in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Eng. trans. New York, 1988), 85–111.
4 Hellmut Flashar, Inszenierung der Antike: Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit 1585–1990 (Munich, 1991), 27–9.
5 See F. Macintosh, ‘Tragedy in Performance’, in P. Easterling, The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1995).
6 Oedipus the King and Antigone were performed together with Oedipus at Colonus under the title The Thebans. The director was Adrian Noble. Electra was directed by Deborah Warner. (Kitto’s translations were not the versions used for these productions.)
7 See A. W. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, reissue, with new supplement, of the second edition, revised by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford, 1988).
8 For a discussion of this aspect of Sophoclean drama see the definitive, but controversial, study by B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1964).
9 Phrynichus, fr. 32, in R. Kassel and C. Austin (eds.), Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. vii (Berlin, 1989).
10 All the evidence is compiled in S. Radt, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta iv (Berlin, 1977), 29–95.
11 The ancient Life of Sophocles is reproduced in English translation and well discussed by Mary R. Lefkowitz in The Lives of the Greek Poets (London, 1981), 74–87 and 160–3. See also J. Fairweather, ‘Fiction in the biographies of ancient writers’, Ancient Society v (1974), 231–75.
12 An admirably clear account of fifth-century Athenian history is to be found in J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Glasgow, second edition, 1993).
13 See D. F. Sutton, The Lost Sophocles (Lanham, 1984), and A. Kiso, The Lost Sophocles (New York, 1984).
14 Recently incorporated by Tony Harrison into his drama The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (2nd edn., London, 1991). The fragment, which is of considerable length and interest, was edited by Richard Walker (The Ichneutae of Sophocles, London, 1919); a prosaic, but faithful, translation may be found in D. L. Page (ed.), Select Papyri, vol. iii (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1941), 27–53.
15 Plutarch, Life of Cimon 8. 8.
16 ‘Hypothesis’ (ancient scholarly note of introduction) to Philoctetes.
17 Second ‘hypothesis’ to Oedipus at Colonus.
18 See below and n. 27.
19 Bernard Knox (‘The date of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles’, in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater, Baltimore/London, 1979, 112–24), argues for a production in 425 BC. He compares the plague blighting Thebes in the play with the outbreaks of plague which had beset Athens from 430 to 426 BC. This seems persuasive, until it is remembered that the earliest and greatest work of Greek literature, the Iliad, likewise opens with a plague sent by Apollo.
20 See e.g. A. M. Dale (ed.), Euripides’ Helen (Oxford, 1967), xxiv–v.
21 For a succinct and sensibly agnostic discussion of Sophoclean chronology see R. G. A. Buxton, Sophocles (Greece & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics, xvi, Oxford, 1984), 3–5.
22 Inscriptiones Graecae ii2. 1252.4.
23 See e.g. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), 193.
24 On the ‘Unwritten Laws’ see V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954), 22–50 and 167–72.
25 For an attempted reconstruction of Sophocles’ political career see Ehrenberg (n. 24 above).
26 Inscriptiones Graecae i3. 269.36; first ‘hypothesis’ to Antigone; Androtion 324, fr. 38, in F. Jacoby (ed.), Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. IIIb (Leiden, 1950), 69; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1419a25.
27 Recorded in the first ‘hypothesis’ to Antigone. L. Woodbury argued that the tradition was credible (‘Sophocles among the Generals’, Phoenix xxiv, 1970, 209–24); for a more sceptical view see Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles (Eng. trans. Oxford, 1979), 240.
28 On the ‘afterlife’ of Antigone see the illuminating discussion by George Steiner in Antigones (Oxford, 1984).
29 See Froma Zeitlin, ‘Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in J. Peter Euben (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1986), 101–41.
30 See e.g. W. M. Calder, ‘Sophocles’ political tragedy, Antigone’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies ix (1968), 389–407.
31 See G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, 1981), 149–50.
32 For a discussion of this and other film versions of Sophoclean tragedy see Kenneth MacKinnon, Greek Tragedy into Film (London/Sydney, 1986), esp. 126–46.
33 See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Oedipus in Vicenza and in Paris: Two Turning Points in the History of Oedipus’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (n. 3 above), 361–80.
34 e.g. John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London, 1962); P. E. Easterling, ‘Character in Sophocles’, Greece & Rome xxiv (1977), 121–9; J. Gould, ‘Dramatic character and “human intelligibility” in Greek tragedy’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society cciv (1978), 43–67.
35 See P. E. Easterling, ‘Electra’s Story’, in Derrick Puffett (ed.), Richard Strauss: Elektra (Cambridge, 1989), 10–16.
36 Quoted in Richard Reid (ed.), Elektra: A Play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming (Princeton, NJ, 1989), p. xiii.
37 Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Tragic Subject: Historicity and Transhistoricity’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (n. 3 above), 237–47.
38 An approach exemplified by the essays in John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton, NJ, 1990).
39 Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, trans. P. Thody (Harmondsworth, 1970), 199.
40 See Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (n. 3 above), 23–8.
41 See in general R. Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London, 1989).
42 Sophoclean women are discussed by R. P. Winnington-Ingram, ‘Sophocles and women’, in Sofocle, Entretiens sur Vantiquité classique, vol. xix (Fondation Hardt, Geneva, 1983), 233–49, and S. Wiersma, ‘Women in Sophocles’, Mnemosyne xxxvii (1984) 25–55. On the relation between the portrayal of women in tragedy and the realities of life for women in classical Athens see John Gould, ‘Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens’, Journal of Hellenic Studies c (1980), 39–59, and H. P. Foley, ‘The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama’, in H. P. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), 127?
43 See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Oxford, 1985), especially ch. 3, and Jon D. Mikalson, Honor thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (North Carolina, 1992).
44 For detailed studies of Sophocles’ use of the chorus see R. W. B. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies (Oxford, 1980), and C. P. Gardiner, The Sophoclean Chorus: A Study of Character and Function (Iowa City, 1987).
45 On Sophoclean stagecraft see O. Taplin, ‘Sophocles in his Theatre’, in Sofocle (n. 42 above), 155–74.
46 Pickard-Cambridge (n. 7 above), 190–204.
47 See Pickard-Cambridge (n. 7 above), 257–62; M. L. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), especially 350–5.
48 D. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (London, 1982), discusses the visual dimension of Sophoclean tragedy.
49 For an appreciation of Kitto’s life and work see N. G. L. Hammond’s memoir in Proceedings of the British Academy, lxi (1982), 585–90.
50 See A. M. Dale, The Lyric Metres of Greek Drama2 (Cambridge, 1968).
51 Sophocles: Three Tragedies (Oxford, 1962), 154.
1 See L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford, 1968), 129–32.
2 For a discussion see Alexander Turyn, Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Sophocles (Urbana, Ill., 1952).
1 Verse lines are numbered according to the Greek text (see Introduction, p. xxxv).
1 Verse lines are numbered according to the Greek text (see Introduction, p. xxxv).
1 Verse lines are numbered according to the Greek text (see Introduction, p. xxxv).
Sophocles, Antigone / Oedipus the King / Electra
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