Sophocles and Symbolism
The Life and Work of Sophocles. By F. J. H. Letters. (Sheed & Ward. 18s.) "SOPHOCLES' Athens," announces Mr. Letters on his first page, "was a slum." Seldom can such a resounding truism have been uttered with firmer conviction of originality. The rest of this chapter—a brief sketch of the moral and social climate of the Peri- clean Age—flogs a dead horse on which Sir Alfred Zimmern cantered past • the post over half-a-century ago. A good deal of space is taken up with assurances that Athenians were cheerfully homo- sexual : mainly, it appears, to refute Professor Murray's views on the subject as expressed in The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907). The style betrays its antecedents in the lecture-room ; but Mr. Letters, despite his position as a senior classics lecturer in Australia, refers to no editions apart from Jebb's, and no critics except Jebb, Bowra and Kitto. The only foreign citation is a single allusion to Volkelt's Aesthetik des Tragischen, and the general documentation is sketchy in the extreme.
This, then, is clearly a book for the Greekless reader, a potential Companion to Mr. Watling's admirable Penguin translations. Its arrangement confirms such a supposition. It consists of an essay on each of the seven extant plays, prefaced by the chapter on back- ground referred to above, and sections on Sophocles "The Man," "The Poet," "The Dramatist"; and at first sight it raises the inevitable question: Why yet another book on Sophocles? k is a pleasure to record that Mr. Letters both analyses the questid and provides a wholly sufficient answer; and the truth is rather startling.
Owing to the fact that classical scholarship for so long largely occupied itself with predominantly textual problems, and that Greek religion (an integral part of Greek drama) has only in this century been studied with any real degree of understanding, effective literary criticism of ancient tragedy is still virtually in its infancy. Further, not only is the ground virgin, but cluttered up with the weeds set there by those who considered that technical proficiency was a passport to literary insight. If Mr. Letters's scholarship is in the second flight, he more than makes up for it by his deep and sensitive understanding of more universal problems.
His most valuable achievements in this book are first, his perception of the strength of religious feeling which makes several of the plays, such as the Ajax or the Antigone, difficult for a modern mind to grasp; secondly, his acute analysis of Sophocles' poetic symbolism—a subject hitherto obscured by the conviction of classical critics that a phrase can mean either one thing or another, but never both at once. Particularly valuable is his emphasis on the importance attached by the Greeks—overriding any more personal considerations—to the correct burial of the dead; and in the field of symbolism his analysis of Trachiniae vv.831-40 exposes ruthlessly those editors who would emend what they cannot understand.
The section on dramatic technique, though useful, contains little that is new; though it rightly emphasises that Aristotle's Poetics is largely a study of Sophocles. Sophocles the man emerges a some- what vague figure. In the absence of evidence perhaps we should not complain, and Mr. Letters is to be thanked for quoting the famous Athenaeus fragment in full. He gives us the surface dichotomy of character: on the one hand the tragedian, working out the conflict of human, and divine laws, the advocate of moderation, the technical innovator, the master and pupil' of Euripides; on the other the wit, the bon vivant, the writer of Rabelaisian satyric comedy, the insatiable pursuer of young boys. But something is missing; the character is obstinately two-dimensional. Can it be that the fault is in Sophocles himself? Mr. Letters observes, without drawing any conclusion from it, that about 441 B.C. Sophocles wrote the Antigone, the supreme play of the individual will in revolt against mere man-made decrees that cross the will of God, and that a year later, "as a reward," he was one of the generals who sailed with Pericles to reduce the revolt from the Athenian Empire of the free and kindred island of Samos. That these two activities were com- patible in Sophocles' mind is not only his personal tragedy, but that of Periclean Athens as a whole. I hope Mr. Letters will not class me, as a result of this, with those of whom he rightly disapproves for applying modern standards to their consideration of the ancient world.
PETER GREEN
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