III. Language and Stage Action

Abstract

Although the career of Sophocles overlapped in its earlier years with that of Aeschylus and later on with that of Euripides, it is very hard to avoid over-simplifying the development of fifth-century tragedy into a progression from Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripides. The same simplification is found amongst ancient critics, for whom Sophocles is ‘the middle one’ in ways which go beyond mere chronology. Thus Dio Chrysostom (first/early-second century A.D.) in his comparison of the three tragedians’ versions of the Philoctetes story says of Sophocles that ‘he seems to stand midway between the two others, since he has neither the ruggedness and simplicity of Aeschylus nor the precision and shrewdness and urbanity of Euripides, yet he produces a poetry that is august and majestic (σϵμνήν δέ τινα καί μϵγαλοπρϵπἢ ποίησιν), highly tragic and euphonious in its phrasing, so that there is the fullest pleasure coupled with sublimity and Stateliness (μϵτἁ ὕψους καί σϵμνότητος)’ Approximately a century earlier the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus also found a ‘middle’ quality in Sophocles’ style: between the ‘austere’ (Pindar, Aeschylus, Thucydides, etc.) and the ‘smooth’ (Sappho, Euripides, Isocrates, etc.) he located the intermediate, ‘well-blended’ (ϵὔκρατος) mode of composition, including Sophocles as well as Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and others. Of this intermediate style Dionysius says he is at a loss to decide ‘whether it is produced by excluding the extremes or by blending them’; but it is at any rate clear that it is defined principally by reference to what it is not.