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Updated Review: I deleted the blog where my reviews were originally posted, but I'm doing a project where I'm discussing each of the surviving Greek plays in a Youtube video (at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheatreofPhil). I'll be rereading these plays as I move through making the videos, and I'll write new reviews here.
You can watch my overview video about Sophocles here: https://youtu.be/9gR36rauWkA
Ajax: For me, there are two main ways to read Ajax. The first, more traditional way, is as a tale of hubris punished. Ajax is proud, especially dismissing the help of Athena in fighting the Trojans, and so when he determines to murder the Greek generals out of anger at not being given Achilles' armor, Athena confuses him so that he attacks a herd of livestock. In this sense, Athena humbles Ajax by making him look so ridiculous that he eventually kills himself.
On the other hand, there is a more modern reading that has become pretty common since the beginning of the Iraq War (and to a lesser extent the Afghanistan War), which sees this as a story about PTSD. Much of Ajax's behavior--including the confusion, the violence, his uncontrollable weeping and shaking, and even his suicide--is consistent with the symptoms of PTSD experience by soldiers returning from combat. Many people (including Theatre of War's Bryan Doerries, who wrote a book on using Greek tragedy to help traumatized soldiers process their experience) today are reading Ajax as a story about the damaging psychological effect of war. That reading is especially timely considering that since 2003 or so there has been a whole new generation of US (and coalition) soldiers dealing with PTSD. As in the post-Vietnam War years, it is a massive problem, especially given underfunding of veteran's services and the difficulty of access to healthcare in the US.
https://youtu.be/HeAggm42DFs
Electra: This play is an interesting version of the Electra story, which Aeschylus also presented in The Libation Bearers (the middle play of the Oresteia trilogy) and Euripides presented in his Electra. What strikes me about Sophocles' Electra is that the characters are more bloodthirsty and inflexible than in many of the other versions. There's a very clear agonistic structure, and it definitely reveals one of the key points that the theorist Rene Girard makes about tragedy--that the agon pits two flawed characters against one another, using comparable types of violence in an escalating cycle of conflict. This is not a good-bad axis because each side is equally violent. Sophocles makes this especially clear, with Electra and orestes making a lot of (ironic) references to justice and the penalty for violence regarding Clytemnestra's killing of Agamemnon. They put forward these arguments to justify their own planned murder of her and Aegisthus. But taking these arguments about justice and not using violence seriously would require them to acknowledge that 1) Agamemnon did in fact kill Iphigenia and deserved punishment for that, and 2) their plans to murder Clytemnestra are essentially a mirror of her murdering Agamemnon. And in fact, at the end of the play the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus eerily resemble the murder of Agamemnon from Aeschylus' Oresteia--Clytemnestra cries out from in the house, and Orestes actually drives Aegisthus into the palace to kill him where Agamemnon was killed. Basically, Sophocles highlights how Electra and Orestes are as guilty of murder as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
https://youtu.be/5eWP9eVNiS4
Philoctetes: I'm not much of a fan of Philoctetes, in part because of the ending, which seems largely to negate everything that comes before. Basically, Philoctetes was marooned on an island by the Greeks at the beginning of the Trojan War because he had a wounded and infected foot that stunk. Later, the Greeks found out through a Trojan prophet that they needed Philoctetes and the magic bow of Heracles in order to take Troy. The problem being that he was still on the island, and pretty much hated all the Greek commanders who left him there, especially Odysseus. In order to get him, Odysseus and Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) sail to the island, where Odysseus instructs the younger man to trick Philoctetes into giving up the bow so they can steal it and go back to Troy. Against his conscience, Neoptolemus does this, but he also feels tremendous sympathy with Philoctetes' sufferings. When Philoctetes is in despair, deprived of the bow that was his only way to get food on the island, Neoptolemus comes back in defiance of Odysseus and returns the bow to the wounded man. Neoptolemus then tries to persuade Philoctetes to go to Troy, but fails to convince him. It's only when Heracles--formerly Philoctetes' friend and now a god--comes and commands Philoctetes to go to Troy that the man agrees. For my money, this deus ex machine (literally, since Heracles almost certainly would have been swung in on the mekhane, a kind of crane used to show gods and from which we get the Latin term deus ex machine) basically undermines everything else that happens in the play because it gives the Greeks what they want without them actually having to achieve it through persuasion, coercion, or trickery.
https://youtu.be/yub_GeR0An4
The Women of Trachis: This is a play structured on reversals. Right from the very beginning we get a hint to expect the unexpected and that things would change in unpredictable ways. The play opens with Heracles' long-suffering wife Deianeira metatheatrically pointing to the folk wisdom that one should never count a person's life as lucky or unlucky until they're dead (this is metatheatrical because the saying shows up repeatedly in Greek tragedy), but that she knows her life has been blighted. Heracles is off doing labors/sacking cities, and he's left her a prophecy that on this date he'll either return triumphant or die, so Deianeira is understandably worried. Then Lichas, Heracles' herald, shows up to announce that Heracles has sacked a city and will be home shortly. Lichas brings a bunch of captives, including a beautiful young girl whom he claims to know nothing about. But then a messenger reveals that Lichas knows exactly who she is, that she's Heracles' concubine, and that far from the noble motives Lichas had told Deianeira, Heracles sacked the city to take her prisoner (this is a the first major reversal). Deianeira realizes that her marriage is in jeopardy, so she uses a potion that the centaur Nessus had given her, promising that it would ensure Heracles never fell in love with another woman. However, what she didn't consider (and this seems like a huge oversight) is that the potion was Nessus' blood as he was dying from an arrow Heracles shot into him, so Nessus didn't exactly have the purest motives to help Heracles and Deianeira. Deianeira is alerted to the deadly nature of the centaur's blood when a piece of wool she used to smear it on a robe for Heracles dissolves, and her suspicion is confirmed when their son returns with news that the robe is painfully killing Heracles (the second reversal). The son, Hyllus, accuses Deianeira of murdering his father, but when she kills herself he finds out from the servants that she did not mean to hurt Heracles but was trying to save her marriage, so Hyllus feels like an ass (a third reversal). Then Heracles is brought on and basically spends the last quarter of the play bragging about his accomplishments, whining about the pain, threatening to kill Deianeira (until Hyllus tells him about her suicide, to which Heracles basically responds by wishing he'd gotten to murder her), and finally gets Hyllus to promise to take him to a sacred mountain and burn his still living body and then come back and marry the (ex-)princess that Heracles had already gotten pregnant.
https://youtu.be/ZAawo4aRSnQ
Oedipus the King: There's a massive amount to be said about Oedipus the King, which is one of the most studied plays in world history. There are deep themes of fate and free will, blindness (both physical and symbolic) and insight, strength and flexibility, truth and expedience, etc.
https://youtu.be/0_dp9n1qc6M
Oedipus at Colonus: This is perhaps Sophocles' last play, and it's got the same kind of themes of maturity, seeking rest, and tragic fate that we see in a play like King Lear. perhaps one of the most interesting questions/issues with Oedipus at Colonus is the question of Oedipus' transformation from Oedipus the King. Paul Roche, in his introduction to this translation, seems to think Oedipus has almost completely changed. Certainly he's become an object of veneration--which he isn't shy about telling anyone and everyone--and he says he has moderated the uncompromising nature that had him self-exiled from Thebes at the end of Oedipus the King. But I'm not sure I see these changes in Oedipus at Colonus. I mean, he's certainly an object of veneration by the end of the play, but he starts out an object of disgust. The elders of Colonus try to throw him out when they find out who he is, and it's only when they learn that his presence will bring blessings to whomever has him that they change their tune. This is a change from Oedipus the King, but it's a reversal rather than a change of kind--in the earlier play Oedipus goes from honored to rejected, now he goes from rejected to honored.
Similarly, I'm unconvinced by Oedipus' claims that he has moderated his hubristic pride, just changed the focus of it. In this play Oedipus is stridently dedicated to taking revenge on those in Thebes he feels had wronged him--Creon and Oedipus' sons Polynieces and Etocles--by refusing to let him return to Thebes. I have a few problems with this. One is that Oedipus ends Oedipus the King vowing that he will be exiled from Thebes for the rest of his life, then he just changes his mind and expects everyone to go along with it. And when people refuse to accept that he's changed his mind and wants to come back to Thebes, he curses them, even though he knows that it's his destiny not to go back to Thebes. Which brings up another issue with Oedipus in this play: he plays the "I was fated to kill my father and marry my mother, so none of that is really my fault" card, but refuses to accept that if his fate is also to die at Colonus then neither Creon nor his sons could/should have accepted him back into Thebes. It's almost like Oedipus is the only one who gets a pass for being fated to do things, even if those things are pretty well worse than what other people are doing.
https://youtu.be/Hi2QrLVVcTw
Antigone: I'm actually not a big fan of Antigone, in part because I think so many people get the play wrong by underestimating the complexity of Antigone and Creon, and by seeing in it what they want to see (which is often a radical anti-authoritarian politics). However, I don't think Antigone really does stand for the rights of the individual against the autocratic state. I see this argument, but I think it misses the specificity of her experience. Antigone does not necessarily stand up for the rights of anyone else to defy the state, even acknowledging that she would not do so for a husband or a child, only the specific circumstance of a brother who cannot be replaced because their parents are dead (suggesting that if Oedipus and Jocasta were still alive and could have another son, Antigone might not even bother burying Polynieces). Additionally, when she explains the plan to Ismene at the beginning of the play, Antigone's focus seems to be on her own impending execution for breaking Creon's edict. While she definitely does assert the ethics of burying her brother, she also says "How beautiful to die in such pursuit!" and refuses Ismene's request to bury him in secret without letting anyone know. If the goal is merely to bury Polynieces to honor the dead and the gods, then why not do it in secret? Antigone asserts that she will bury her brother and essentially demands to be killed for it--which doesn't necessarily jive with the idea that she's a champion of individual rights (though it does fit with another common reading, which is that she's morbidly in love with death as such).
And while Creon is often identified as the ruthless and unyielding tyrant, in many ways he's actually more flexible and open to persuasion than Antigone (or Oedipus in both Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus). For instance, initially Creon determines to execute Ismene along with her sister, but when the Chorus mentions this Creon changes his mind with virtually no pressure put on him. Similarly, after Tiresias gives his warning, Creon pretty much immediately yields to the force of prophecy (though he doubts and insults Tiresias while the seer is on stage) and goes to bury Polyneices and free Antigone. For being the unbending tyrant, he actually bends a lot, which again doesn't necessarily fulfill the individual-rights-against-authoritarianism narrative.
https://youtu.be/Hp6Oo-ZJENs
Theban Trilogy Video: https://youtu.be/AWr9feYIYtc
Original Review: I don't think most people ever read anything by Sophocles except the Oedipus cycle, or Oedipus Rex and Antigone without Oedipus at Collunus. But I really like these translations of Sophocles' plays, though I'm not sure how true to the original they are some of the words seem a bit to slangy for me to really believe its an authentic translation from ancient Greek.
You can watch my overview video about Sophocles here: https://youtu.be/9gR36rauWkA
Ajax: For me, there are two main ways to read Ajax. The first, more traditional way, is as a tale of hubris punished. Ajax is proud, especially dismissing the help of Athena in fighting the Trojans, and so when he determines to murder the Greek generals out of anger at not being given Achilles' armor, Athena confuses him so that he attacks a herd of livestock. In this sense, Athena humbles Ajax by making him look so ridiculous that he eventually kills himself.
On the other hand, there is a more modern reading that has become pretty common since the beginning of the Iraq War (and to a lesser extent the Afghanistan War), which sees this as a story about PTSD. Much of Ajax's behavior--including the confusion, the violence, his uncontrollable weeping and shaking, and even his suicide--is consistent with the symptoms of PTSD experience by soldiers returning from combat. Many people (including Theatre of War's Bryan Doerries, who wrote a book on using Greek tragedy to help traumatized soldiers process their experience) today are reading Ajax as a story about the damaging psychological effect of war. That reading is especially timely considering that since 2003 or so there has been a whole new generation of US (and coalition) soldiers dealing with PTSD. As in the post-Vietnam War years, it is a massive problem, especially given underfunding of veteran's services and the difficulty of access to healthcare in the US.
https://youtu.be/HeAggm42DFs
Electra: This play is an interesting version of the Electra story, which Aeschylus also presented in The Libation Bearers (the middle play of the Oresteia trilogy) and Euripides presented in his Electra. What strikes me about Sophocles' Electra is that the characters are more bloodthirsty and inflexible than in many of the other versions. There's a very clear agonistic structure, and it definitely reveals one of the key points that the theorist Rene Girard makes about tragedy--that the agon pits two flawed characters against one another, using comparable types of violence in an escalating cycle of conflict. This is not a good-bad axis because each side is equally violent. Sophocles makes this especially clear, with Electra and orestes making a lot of (ironic) references to justice and the penalty for violence regarding Clytemnestra's killing of Agamemnon. They put forward these arguments to justify their own planned murder of her and Aegisthus. But taking these arguments about justice and not using violence seriously would require them to acknowledge that 1) Agamemnon did in fact kill Iphigenia and deserved punishment for that, and 2) their plans to murder Clytemnestra are essentially a mirror of her murdering Agamemnon. And in fact, at the end of the play the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus eerily resemble the murder of Agamemnon from Aeschylus' Oresteia--Clytemnestra cries out from in the house, and Orestes actually drives Aegisthus into the palace to kill him where Agamemnon was killed. Basically, Sophocles highlights how Electra and Orestes are as guilty of murder as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
https://youtu.be/5eWP9eVNiS4
Philoctetes: I'm not much of a fan of Philoctetes, in part because of the ending, which seems largely to negate everything that comes before. Basically, Philoctetes was marooned on an island by the Greeks at the beginning of the Trojan War because he had a wounded and infected foot that stunk. Later, the Greeks found out through a Trojan prophet that they needed Philoctetes and the magic bow of Heracles in order to take Troy. The problem being that he was still on the island, and pretty much hated all the Greek commanders who left him there, especially Odysseus. In order to get him, Odysseus and Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) sail to the island, where Odysseus instructs the younger man to trick Philoctetes into giving up the bow so they can steal it and go back to Troy. Against his conscience, Neoptolemus does this, but he also feels tremendous sympathy with Philoctetes' sufferings. When Philoctetes is in despair, deprived of the bow that was his only way to get food on the island, Neoptolemus comes back in defiance of Odysseus and returns the bow to the wounded man. Neoptolemus then tries to persuade Philoctetes to go to Troy, but fails to convince him. It's only when Heracles--formerly Philoctetes' friend and now a god--comes and commands Philoctetes to go to Troy that the man agrees. For my money, this deus ex machine (literally, since Heracles almost certainly would have been swung in on the mekhane, a kind of crane used to show gods and from which we get the Latin term deus ex machine) basically undermines everything else that happens in the play because it gives the Greeks what they want without them actually having to achieve it through persuasion, coercion, or trickery.
https://youtu.be/yub_GeR0An4
The Women of Trachis: This is a play structured on reversals. Right from the very beginning we get a hint to expect the unexpected and that things would change in unpredictable ways. The play opens with Heracles' long-suffering wife Deianeira metatheatrically pointing to the folk wisdom that one should never count a person's life as lucky or unlucky until they're dead (this is metatheatrical because the saying shows up repeatedly in Greek tragedy), but that she knows her life has been blighted. Heracles is off doing labors/sacking cities, and he's left her a prophecy that on this date he'll either return triumphant or die, so Deianeira is understandably worried. Then Lichas, Heracles' herald, shows up to announce that Heracles has sacked a city and will be home shortly. Lichas brings a bunch of captives, including a beautiful young girl whom he claims to know nothing about. But then a messenger reveals that Lichas knows exactly who she is, that she's Heracles' concubine, and that far from the noble motives Lichas had told Deianeira, Heracles sacked the city to take her prisoner (this is a the first major reversal). Deianeira realizes that her marriage is in jeopardy, so she uses a potion that the centaur Nessus had given her, promising that it would ensure Heracles never fell in love with another woman. However, what she didn't consider (and this seems like a huge oversight) is that the potion was Nessus' blood as he was dying from an arrow Heracles shot into him, so Nessus didn't exactly have the purest motives to help Heracles and Deianeira. Deianeira is alerted to the deadly nature of the centaur's blood when a piece of wool she used to smear it on a robe for Heracles dissolves, and her suspicion is confirmed when their son returns with news that the robe is painfully killing Heracles (the second reversal). The son, Hyllus, accuses Deianeira of murdering his father, but when she kills herself he finds out from the servants that she did not mean to hurt Heracles but was trying to save her marriage, so Hyllus feels like an ass (a third reversal). Then Heracles is brought on and basically spends the last quarter of the play bragging about his accomplishments, whining about the pain, threatening to kill Deianeira (until Hyllus tells him about her suicide, to which Heracles basically responds by wishing he'd gotten to murder her), and finally gets Hyllus to promise to take him to a sacred mountain and burn his still living body and then come back and marry the (ex-)princess that Heracles had already gotten pregnant.
https://youtu.be/ZAawo4aRSnQ
Oedipus the King: There's a massive amount to be said about Oedipus the King, which is one of the most studied plays in world history. There are deep themes of fate and free will, blindness (both physical and symbolic) and insight, strength and flexibility, truth and expedience, etc.
https://youtu.be/0_dp9n1qc6M
Oedipus at Colonus: This is perhaps Sophocles' last play, and it's got the same kind of themes of maturity, seeking rest, and tragic fate that we see in a play like King Lear. perhaps one of the most interesting questions/issues with Oedipus at Colonus is the question of Oedipus' transformation from Oedipus the King. Paul Roche, in his introduction to this translation, seems to think Oedipus has almost completely changed. Certainly he's become an object of veneration--which he isn't shy about telling anyone and everyone--and he says he has moderated the uncompromising nature that had him self-exiled from Thebes at the end of Oedipus the King. But I'm not sure I see these changes in Oedipus at Colonus. I mean, he's certainly an object of veneration by the end of the play, but he starts out an object of disgust. The elders of Colonus try to throw him out when they find out who he is, and it's only when they learn that his presence will bring blessings to whomever has him that they change their tune. This is a change from Oedipus the King, but it's a reversal rather than a change of kind--in the earlier play Oedipus goes from honored to rejected, now he goes from rejected to honored.
Similarly, I'm unconvinced by Oedipus' claims that he has moderated his hubristic pride, just changed the focus of it. In this play Oedipus is stridently dedicated to taking revenge on those in Thebes he feels had wronged him--Creon and Oedipus' sons Polynieces and Etocles--by refusing to let him return to Thebes. I have a few problems with this. One is that Oedipus ends Oedipus the King vowing that he will be exiled from Thebes for the rest of his life, then he just changes his mind and expects everyone to go along with it. And when people refuse to accept that he's changed his mind and wants to come back to Thebes, he curses them, even though he knows that it's his destiny not to go back to Thebes. Which brings up another issue with Oedipus in this play: he plays the "I was fated to kill my father and marry my mother, so none of that is really my fault" card, but refuses to accept that if his fate is also to die at Colonus then neither Creon nor his sons could/should have accepted him back into Thebes. It's almost like Oedipus is the only one who gets a pass for being fated to do things, even if those things are pretty well worse than what other people are doing.
https://youtu.be/Hi2QrLVVcTw
Antigone: I'm actually not a big fan of Antigone, in part because I think so many people get the play wrong by underestimating the complexity of Antigone and Creon, and by seeing in it what they want to see (which is often a radical anti-authoritarian politics). However, I don't think Antigone really does stand for the rights of the individual against the autocratic state. I see this argument, but I think it misses the specificity of her experience. Antigone does not necessarily stand up for the rights of anyone else to defy the state, even acknowledging that she would not do so for a husband or a child, only the specific circumstance of a brother who cannot be replaced because their parents are dead (suggesting that if Oedipus and Jocasta were still alive and could have another son, Antigone might not even bother burying Polynieces). Additionally, when she explains the plan to Ismene at the beginning of the play, Antigone's focus seems to be on her own impending execution for breaking Creon's edict. While she definitely does assert the ethics of burying her brother, she also says "How beautiful to die in such pursuit!" and refuses Ismene's request to bury him in secret without letting anyone know. If the goal is merely to bury Polynieces to honor the dead and the gods, then why not do it in secret? Antigone asserts that she will bury her brother and essentially demands to be killed for it--which doesn't necessarily jive with the idea that she's a champion of individual rights (though it does fit with another common reading, which is that she's morbidly in love with death as such).
And while Creon is often identified as the ruthless and unyielding tyrant, in many ways he's actually more flexible and open to persuasion than Antigone (or Oedipus in both Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus). For instance, initially Creon determines to execute Ismene along with her sister, but when the Chorus mentions this Creon changes his mind with virtually no pressure put on him. Similarly, after Tiresias gives his warning, Creon pretty much immediately yields to the force of prophecy (though he doubts and insults Tiresias while the seer is on stage) and goes to bury Polyneices and free Antigone. For being the unbending tyrant, he actually bends a lot, which again doesn't necessarily fulfill the individual-rights-against-authoritarianism narrative.
https://youtu.be/Hp6Oo-ZJENs
Theban Trilogy Video: https://youtu.be/AWr9feYIYtc
Original Review: I don't think most people ever read anything by Sophocles except the Oedipus cycle, or Oedipus Rex and Antigone without Oedipus at Collunus. But I really like these translations of Sophocles' plays, though I'm not sure how true to the original they are some of the words seem a bit to slangy for me to really believe its an authentic translation from ancient Greek.
