418 Peter J. Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle There Is Much to Praise In

418 book reviews

Peter J. Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle Sophocles. The Theban Plays: Oedipus the Tyrant; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone. Agora editions. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2014. xvii + 195 pp. $12.95. ISBN 9780801478710 (pbk).

There is much to praise in this book. Inter alia, the authors have lifted the lid on what has often passed for translation in the past, but which was too often along the lines of W.B. Yeats’ encounter with Sophocles: Joseph Hone relates how in the winter of 1911-12, ‘Dr Rynd of the Norwich Cathedral Chapter, who was on a visit to Dublin, stood over him with the Greek text while he turned Jebb into speakable English with rough unrhymed verse for Chorus’.1 Students will be forever grateful for putting a ‘meticulously faithful rendition’ into English of Sophocles’ ‘very words, in all their pregnant ambiguities and astounding twists and turns’ (p. xvi). Or at least they will up to a point, for no translation is an adequate substitute for the Greek text itself, which is full of wordplay and allusion of a kind that does not easily lend itself to translation into another language. Nevertheless, Ahrensdorf and Pangle have striven to produce a text that will go a fair way towards assisting the interested Greekless student to reconstruct the ancient picture – which is the only one that matters. There are, however, points at which one would differ with Ahrensdorf and Pangle. In no way can Sophocles’ Theban plays be considered ‘timeless’, as the cover blurb would have it. Greek plays were essentially ‘occasional’, i.e. written with a view to performance on one occasion. They will thus inevitably have reflected recent events, with the characterization based on individuals who would be recognisable to the audience, if not always to us. I have explored this recently.2 At no stage were Greek plays great literature written for all time; rather, contemporary politics came before dramatic entertainment. In prin ciple, the tragedian will have taken a story from the mythical repertoire that seemed to reflect the historical situation and reworked it in order to fit a press ing political issue. Not least, this would account for the many discrepancies between one treatment of an ancient myth and another: the disparate versions of myths that we have will have been composed to meet different historical situations. Nor can Sophocles’ Theban plays be viewed as a ‘trilogy’ (p. ix), for they were performed decades apart; a trilogy consisted of three plays performed on a sin gle day. Arguments can be made for Antigone having been performed in 438,

1 J.M. Hone, W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939, 2nd ed. (London: MacMillan Press, 1962), p. 256. 2 In my Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Oedipus Tyrannus in 425, and Oedipus Coloneus in 407 BC. The topical points of reference are completely different from each other. Antigone amounts to a crit icism of Pericles’ notorious (in antiquity) cruelty towards captives taken after a triumphal campaign on Samos. After they had been exposed, in effect cruci fied, for ten days, these unfortunates were ‘knocked on the head with clubs and their bodies cast out without burial’. Sophocles had been a co-general, and clearly thought that such behavior was ‘not cricket’. The play is the tragedy of Cleon, who corresponds in many details to Pericles, from whom Sophocles clearly wanted to distance himself (and whose attributes may well have con tributed to Thucydides’ portrait). Antigone is based on Pericles’ wayward teen age ward Alcibiades, who bragged about having attended symposia dressed as a woman, and whose character was full of ‘many strange inconsistencies and contradictions’. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus as a warning about the direction the 27 year-old Alcibiades was taking. By 415 his conduct indeed caused many to fear that he was aiming at tyranny. Bernard Knox spoke of the ‘discovery of the past in the present action of the play’, but it was perhaps instead the ‘dis covery of the future in the present action of the play’ that Sophocles gave his original audience.3 In this way the inconsistencies that have so worried schol ars disappear. Alcibiades was accused by a contemporary of having been so debauched that ‘he lay with his mother, his sister and his daughter’. The choice of the Oedipus myth was appropriate in the circumstances. Cedric Whitman was right to observe ‘There may . . . be a touch of Aspasia about Jocasta’, and Fred Ahl has astutely noted how Creon in this play was endowed with the char acteristics of Cleon the demagogue who had several run-ins with Alcibiades in 425 (also parodied by Aristophanes in Knights). Creon is even addressed by Oedipus as ‘Cleon’ if we assume that, in addition to displaying other linguistic traits of Alcibiades, he pronounced ‘r’ as ‘l’. It was wisely written by Jebb that: ‘it is idle to look for the Creon of the Tyrannus in the Creon of the Coloneus: they are different men, and Sophocles has not cared to preserve even a semblance of identity . . . the Creon of this play is a heartless and hypocritical villain’. As indeed he is, for he is based on Alcibiades’ former friend but mortal enemy, Critias the tyrant-in-waiting, and the interplay between the Oedipus of the Coloneus and the Creon of this play well reflects the problematical relation ship between the exiled Alcibiades and Critias. The different characterizations of Cleon in the Theban plays thus reveal in microcosm the discrepancies that exist throughout the corpus of ancient

3 B. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 41.

polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 33 (2016) 399-420