Sophocles: A Study of His Theater in Its Political and Social Context 9780691240404, 9780691172071

Citation preview

Sopho c l e s

Sophocles A S t u dy of H i s T h e at e r i n I t s P ol i t ic a l a n d So c i a l C on t e x t

Jacques Jouanna

Translated by Steven Rendall

Pr i nc e t on U n i v e r s i t y Pr e s s Pr i nc e t on a n d O x f or d

Sophocle by Jacques Jouanna World Copyright © Librairie Arthème Fayard 2008 Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket image: Marble head from a statue of the dramatist Sophocles, mounted on a modern herm. © The Trustees of the British Museum All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Jouanna, Jacques, author. | Rendall, Steven, translator. Title: Sophocles: a study of his theater in its political and social context/ Jacques Jouanna; translated by Steven Rendall. Other titles: Sophocle. English Description: Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017036423 | ISBN 9780691172071 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sophocles—­Criticism and interpretation. | Greek drama—­History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA4417.J6913 2018 | DDC 882/.01—­dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017036423 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

T o H e i n r ic h von S ta de n, i n m e mor y of Pr i nc e t on

Why am I concerned with Sophocles? Because there are new things that are very old and old things that are very new.

—­J e an Cocte au

C on t e n t s



PA R T I . S O P H O C L E S T H E AT H E N I A N    1

Prelude: A Snapshot of Sophocles Chapter I. The Young Sophocles Chapter II. Sophocles the Politician Chapter III. Sophocles the Religious Man Chapter IV. Sophocles and Dionysus: The Theatrical Career Chapter V. Happy Sophocles

3 5 14 60 76 94

PA R T I I . S O P H O C L E S T H E T R AG I C P O E T    109

Prelude: A Tragic Disaster Chapter VI. The Mythic Imagination Chapter VII. Space and Spectacle Chapter VIII. Time and Action Chapter IX. The Characters Chapter X. Humans and the Gods Chapter XI. Seeing, Hearing, and Understanding Deus ex Machina: Time and Nature Appendix I: Presentation of Sophocles’ Extant Tragedies Appendix II: Sophocles, Fragments: List and Presentation of the Plays Extant in the Form of Fragments Appendix III: The Identification of Sophocles as a Hellenotamias Appendix IV: Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 52: On Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; or, the Bow of Philoctetes Appendix V

111 113 178 241 293 365 406 455 471

Notes

627

Bibliographical Guide

781

List of Translations Used in the English Edition

823

General Index

825

Index Locorum

849

547 614 618 623

Prelude A S n a ps ho t of Sopho c l e s Finding the man behind the writer is a difficult, even impossible enterprise, especially when a man of the theater is concerned. This is even more true for an ancient author than for a modern one, because biographical information about the ancients seems questionable from the outset, especially if we don’t take the trouble to look into its origin and assess its relative value. However, Sophocles is in this regard an exception among ancient authors, because we have a contemporary witness’s report concerning him. It is a snapshot taken during a reception at which Sophocles, who had stopped off at the island of Chios, was the guest star. The report was composed by Ion of Chios, a writer born on the island who was younger than Sophocles, but like him a man of the theater. He had had the idea, which was very original at the time, of keeping a diary on the celebrities who passed through his homeland. Here is his account, as preserved in the work of a more recent author: I met the poet Sophocles on Chios when he was sailing to Lesbos as a strategos; he is a man who gets happy after having a few drinks and who is very astute. Hermesileos, his host and the Athenians’ proxenos, seated him at his table. The boy assigned to pour the wine stood near the fire; he was clearly [red]. Sophocles spoke to him: “Do you want me to drink under agreeable conditions?” The boy said he did. “Then move slowly as you give me my goblet and take it away from me.” When the boy blushed even more furiously, Sophocles said to his neighbor, who was lying on the same couch as he: “How beautiful it is, the verse composed by Phrynicus where he says: ‘The light of love shines in scarlet cheeks.’” To which his neighbor, who was a grammar teacher from Eretria, replied: “Sophocles, I have no doubt that you are an expert in poetry. However, Phrynicus did not express himself well when he described the handsome boy’s cheeks as ‘scarlet.’ For if a painter chose the color scarlet to represent this boy’s cheeks, he would lose his beauty.” When he heard these words spoken by the man from Eretria, Sophocles burst into laughter: “So, stranger, you are pleased by neither this verse of Simonides, which the Greeks nonetheless find so eloquent: ‘the young girl making her voice heard from scarlet lips,’ nor by the poet who speaks of Apollo with golden locks; for if a painter painted the god’s hair in gold and not in black, the picture would be mediocre; nor by the poet

4  pr e l u de t o pa r t I who says ‘Rosy-­fingered Dawn’; for if we took the color rose to paint her fingers, one would be representing a dyer’s fingers, and not those of a pretty woman.” This reply aroused laughter. And when the man from Eretria was stunned by this barrage, Sophocles resumed his conversation with the boy. As the boy tried to use his finger to remove a straw from the goblet, Sophocles asked whether he saw the straw clearly. The boy declared that he did. “Then blow it away, so as not to wet your finger.” And when the boy tried to do so, Sophocles brought the goblet close to his own mouth, so that his head was closer to the boy’s. And when he was very close to him, he seized him with his arm and gave him a kiss. Everyone present applauded, laughing and shouting to salute the cleverness with which Sophocles had taken the boy by surprise. “Gentlemen,” Sophocles declared, “I have been training myself in strategy since Pericles claimed that although I knew poetry, I was ignorant of strategy. But didn’t my stratagem succeed?” So there is one example among many others of the shrewdness of Sophocles’ words and his acts when he took part in banquets.1

Here we are in the middle of the fifth century BCE, or more precisely, in the year 441/440. Sophocles was already over fifty years old. He had long been famous as a tragic poet and was occupying for the first time the political office of strategos along with Pericles. In this lively narrative in which Sophocles is sketched by a talented witness, we will point out, for the moment, only the overall impression. It is a deliciously comic scene that shows two facets of Sophocles’ character: in his conversation with the grammar teacher, it is the cultivated and brilliant poet who ridicules his interlocutor’s professorial dogmatism and discreetly asserts the autonomy of poetry in contrast to painting: poetic technique must not be confused with pictorial technique! In the conversation between Sophocles and the young cupbearer, it is the strategist of love that we see at work. Here Sophocles, who was said to like boys, provides an example of his tactical skill by gradually drawing the victim into his trap. And there, he pretends to confuse military strategy and amorous strategy! In the end, what unites these two facets of Sophocles’ character is his power of seduction: by means of his great intelligence, full of irony and humor, he is able to win applause by mocking overly serious minds: that of the anonymous grammar teacher, but also that of Pericles, the master strategist. Sophocles, who was known for his ability to depict on the stage the misfortunes of the great, also knew how to make people smile in his private life, even when he was occupying a political office. This report invites us to discover the man in all the diversity of his activities, not only literary, but also political and religious, and to assess the work of such an astute mind in all the wealth of its dimensions, while avoiding any dogmatism.

Ch apter I

The Young Sophocles Sophocles of the Athenian Deme of Colonus Sophocles, whose life coincided with almost the whole of the fifth century BCE, was born in 497/496 or 495/494 in the city of Athens, where he died in 406/405. He was about a quarter of a century younger than Aeschylus, and about fifteen years older than Euripides. However, since he lived a long time, he died a year after Euripides.1 The city-­state of Athens included more than the urban area; it extended to all Attica. Athens had freed itself from tyranny only a few years before Sophocles’ birth. The new Athenian “civic space,” which was the foundation of Athenian democracy, had been defined by Clisthenes: the basic unit was the deme. This was an administrative territorial district where every free Athenian had to be registered upon reaching majority in order to receive his civil and political rights. Each Athenian citizen thus belonged to a deme; and Sophocles’ deme was Colonus, where he was born. In actuality, two demes bore the name “Colonus”: one was called Kolonos Agoraios, the other Kolonos Hippeios. These two demes originally owed their names to a geographical peculiarity. “Kolonos” meant “hill.” The first deme was in the city, near the public square or agora, as the adjective agoraios indicates. The second was outside the walls, northwest of the city, some distance from the ramparts of Athens and its acropolis. It was in this deme that Sophocles was born. It probably owed its qualifier “Hippeios” to a sanctuary of Poseidon Hippeios (“protector of horses”) or to the eponymous hero Kolonos, who was a horseman.2 Each deme had been a district belonging to one of the ten tribes since Clisthenes’ reform. The tribe to which Colonus belonged was the Aigeis tribe, which took its name from Aegeus, the former king of Athens. This tribe was second on the official list of the ten tribes.3

The Native Land: A Little Paradise For every citizen, the deme was not only an administrative district; it was also his little homeland. Even though it was part of the great city of Athens, the deme was a community of citizens that had its own life, its assemblies, its magistrates,

6  c h a p t e r i its cults; it was for everyone the native land, the place of childhood, the place whose memory was obscured by maturity’s activities and then reemerged with all the more power when old age came. It is symbolic that at the end of his long career Sophocles brought the deme of his childhood back to life in his last work, and even in its title: Oedipus at Colonus. All through the tragedy, Sophocles repeatedly mentions it. This attention is exceptional in his theater, because the tragic author does not usually appear behind his characters or his landscapes. Whether the deme is seen for the first time by foreign eyes, or presented by people familiar with it, we find the same awe before a luxuriant land blessed by the gods. Thus Antigone described the place where her blind old father has finally arrived after wandering in exile: Father, toil-­worn Oedipus, the towers that ring the city, to judge by sight, are far off; and this place is sacred, to judge from its appearance: laurel, olive, and vine grow thick-­set; and a feathered crowd of nightingales makes music within. So sit here on this unshaped stone; you have travelled a long way for an old man.4

These two first impressions—the sacred nature of the place and the richness of the land—are repeated and developed by the inhabitants of the deme. Here is how the first resident of Colonus met by Oedipus and Antigone presents his deme: This whole place is sacred; august Poseidon holds it, and in it lives the fire-­ bearing god, the Titan Prometheus. But as for the spot on which you tread, it is called the bronze threshold of this land, the support of Athens. And the neighboring fields claim Colonus, the horse-­rider, for their ancient ruler; and all the people bear his name in common as their own. Such, you see, stranger, are these haunts. They receive their honor not through story, but rather through our living with them.5

From this first mention, which explains the name of the deme by the existence of a founding hero, emerges the sacred nature of the place. But it is to the song of the old men of Colonus that we owe the most vibrant and poetic praise of this paradisiacal land where it is good to live, even if one is a god: Chorus: Stranger, in this land of fine horses you have come to earth’s fairest home, the shining Colonus. Here the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her clear note under the trees of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-­dark ivy and the god’s inviolate foliage, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by the wind of any storm. Here the reveller Dionysus ever walks the ground, companion of the nymphs that nursed him. And, fed on heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms day by day with its fair clusters; it is the ancient crown of the Great Goddesses. And the crocus blooms with a golden gleam.

t h e you ng s opho c l e s  7 Nor do the ever-­flowing springs diminish, from which the waters of Cephisus wander, and each day with pure current it moves over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, bringing fertility. Nor have the dancing Muses shunned this place, nor Aphrodite of the golden rein.

All these details help make this deme where the Cephisus flows a land of prosperity, made fertile by the pure water, protected from storms, rich in pasturelands in the valleys where horses graze, rich in flowers and fruits, and covered with forests where nightingales nest and gods and goddesses abide. To be sure, this enthusiastic description is that of old residents of the deme who are a little chauvinistic. The “imitating” poet necessarily distances himself from the characters he creates. But at the same time, the praise is sincere. It was not only to please his deme, as one ancient critic suggested, that Sophocles composed such a eulogy to Colonus.6 It was a way for the poet, who was approaching the end of his life, to immortalize his modest native land and probably to express his gratitude to it. Is it unimportant to see him noting that the choruses of the Muses do not despise this bit of earth? Perhaps as a child Sophocles saw his vocation as a poet born there, like Hesiod who met the Muses on Mount Helicon.

The Redoubtable Sanctuary of the Venerables This deme was not only inhabited by familiar gods. It also was the home of redoubtable powers, “the daughters of Earth and Darkness,”7 who were also called, by antiphrasis, the Eumenides (i.e., “the Benevolent,” to avert misfortune), or, using an ambiguous term, the Semnai, that is, both the Venerable and the Redoubtable. It was their sanctuary in Colonus that Sophocles represented in his Oedipus at Colonus. When the old men who form the chorus come to the sanctuary of these divinities, they express their fear of the invincible goddesses whose name they are afraid to utter, and the holy terror they feel in passing by this sanctuary they are forbidden to enter: “Their name we tremble to speak; we pass them by with eyes turned away, moving our lips, without sound or word, in still devotion.”8 We can imagine, without much risk of error, that even in his childhood Sophocles had felt that same sacred horror when he walked past the sanctuary of the Erinyes while holding his father’s hand.

Sophocles, the Son of Sophillos The Athenian citizen drew his identity from his deme and, within the deme, from his family and especially his father. Sophocles, of the deme of Colonus, was the son of Sophillos (or Sophilos).9 The information given by the ancients regard-

8  c h a p t e r i ing Sophocles’ father diverges significantly. The Life of Sophocles mentions a discussion: Sophillos was not, as Aristoxenes says, a carpenter or blacksmith, nor, as Istros says, a dagger-­maker by trade, but he did possess slaves who were blacksmiths or carpenters. For it is not likely that a man born of such a modest father would have been deemed worthy of the office of strategos along with Pericles and Thucydides, the most prominent men in the city.10 And neither did he escape the barbs of the comic poets, who did not spare even Themistocles.11

To judge by this text, it is clear that the oldest evidence we have regarding Sophocles’ father’s trade presents him as a craftsman. The oldest source, Aristoxenes of Tarentum, one of Aristotle’s pupils (fourth century BCE), says that he was a carpenter or a blacksmith; a source a century later, Istros, representing the erudition of the time of the Library of Alexandria,12 attributes to him the trade of a dagger maker. These differences concerning Sophillos’s trade, whether carpenter, blacksmith, or armorer, are of little importance. In any event, he practiced a trade that, in the society of the time, was in no way noble. The modesty of Sophocles’ origins later shocked biographers and scholars. We can admire the cleverness of the author of the Life in the first century BCE in arguing that Sophocles’ father’s status could not have been so humble. But Sophocles’ later success cannot provide a basis for judging his origins. When modern writers present Sophocles as the son of a rich Athenian with slaves who were blacksmiths or carpenters, they are relying on the fallacious argument of a relatively recent biographer and not on the most ancient sources. This tendency to elevate Sophocles’ father’s status only increased in the course of antiquity. Pliny the Elder (first century CE) went so far as to claim that he was born into a prominent family.13 In Pliny, as in Sophocles’ biographer, though more implicitly, this high birth is related to the political role Sophocles played. Let us be clear. Sophocles did not belong to an aristocratic family, as was assuredly the case for Pericles, and probably also for Aeschylus; but neither did he come from a low-­class background, as Euripides did, if we believe the mockery of the comic poet Aristophanes, who claimed that Euripides’ mother sold aromatic or medicinal herbs at the market in Athens.14 He came from a class wealthy enough to qualify him to hold the office of strategos.15 And it is certain that his father had the means to give his son a good education.

A Talented, Well-­Trained Young Man We have hardly any information about Sophocles’ intellectual training and the way in which he acquired the immense culture that made him so brilliant at banquets.16 He is supposed to have learned the tragic art from Aeschylus.17 As

t h e you ng s opho c l e s  9 a youth, he distinguished himself in two domains that played a capital role in the education of young Greek men, gymnastics and music. In these two disciplines, he won a prize and was rewarded with a crown of laurels. It is true that he received a good education: he studied music with a famous teacher, Lampros, who taught him to play the lyre and dance. It was probably due to this instruction and his natural talents that at the age of fifteen or seventeen, at the height of his attractiveness, he made his first public appearance during an exceptional ceremony held in the city in 480.18

Sophocles’ Homeland in 480 At that time, the city of Athens and the Greek world in general witnessed, after the naval battle won at Salamis, the decline of the barbarian threat that had compromised its independence. As we have seen, shortly before Sophocles’ birth the Athenians had rid themselves of internal tyranny by driving out Hippias, the son and heir of the tyrant Pisistratos, and they had organized the administrative and political frameworks of their nascent democracy in such a way as to prevent the return of tyranny. But then they had been compelled to confront the threat of an external tyranny, that of the Persians. Moreover, the two dangers were partly linked, because as a result of the first Persian expedition sent by King Darius in 490 BCE, Hippias, who was advising the leaders of the expedition, Datis and Artaphernes, hoped to return to power in Athens. What was at stake in the battle of Marathon, where Athens repelled the twofold danger of external and internal tyranny, is clearly outlined in Herodotus by the man who played a crucial role at the beginning of the battle, the Athenian strategos Miltiades: Now the Athenians have come to their greatest danger since they first came into being, and, if we surrender, it is clear what we will suffer when handed over to Hippias. But if the city prevails, it will take first place among Hellenic cities.19

Sophocles was five or seven years old at the time of the victory won by the Athenians at Marathon with the help of the Plataeans—the triumph of the men who were later called the Marathonomachs (“the fighters at Marathon”) and who remained, in the Greek imagination, the courageous defenders of freedom and democracy against tyranny and barbarian imperialism. Aeschylus fought in the battle, and for the rest of his life he remained proud of having repelled the “long-­ haired Persian.”20 But ten years after this first Persian war, Xerxes, the son of Darius, personally led a powerful expedition by land and by sea that emerged from the whole of Asia with the intention of punishing Athens. It had already been the desire for vengeance that had moved Darius to launch the first expedition against Greece, and especially against the cities of Athens and Eretria in Euboea, which he

10  c h a p t e r i a­ ccused of having helped the Greek colonies in Ionia, who paid him tribute, to rebel against his control. This attempt had failed at Marathon. This time, his son Xerxes intended to complete the punitive expedition. But his real goal was more ambitious: he wanted to secure a universal empire by joining Europe to Asia. The young Sophocles, who was old enough, or almost, to enter his name on the registers of the deme of Colonus and thus to acquire the title of citizen, could not help strongly resenting the threat that once again weighed on Athens. The threat was in fact serious. While during the first Persian war the invaders had been defeated in northern Attica, at Marathon, and had not penetrated the city of Athens despite the barbarian fleet’s incursion into the Athenian port of Phalerus, during the second Persian war Athens experienced the most dramatic hours in its history. Xerxes broke through the gate constituted by the pass at Thermopylae, despite the heroic resistance of a battalion of three hundred Spartans commanded by their king Leonidas. He then pushed on into Attica, which he ravaged, and occupied Athens, which had been almost completely deserted by its residents, who had taken refuge on the island of Salamis, and seized the Acropolis, whose temple was pillaged and burned. To the Athenians, the situation appeared hopeless, but the Greek fleet that had fallen back on Salamis succeeded in defeating the Persian fleet, which was too numerous to maneuver in the narrow strait separating the island of Salamis from the Attic coast. The Greek fighters saw clearly what was at stake in the battle. At dawn, when the attack began, they sang a song whose words the poet Aeschylus, who fought at Salamis as well as at Marathon,21 reported in his tragedy The Persians produced eight years later: Now, sons of Hellas, now! Set Hellas free, set free your wives, your homes, Your gods’ high altars and your fathers’ tombs. Now all is on the stake!22

In this war of liberation, the Greeks’ naval victory was crushing. However, it was unhoped for, because the barbarians’ forces were significantly superior to those of the Greeks. They had four times as many ships. Thus we can imagine what the Athenians must have felt after the naval battle, during the religious ceremony that took place around the trophy, that is, around the monument formed by the bodies of the enemies near the place where their rout had begun: relief regarding the threat that had retreated at least temporarily, pride regarding the Greeks’ courage and wiliness, but above all gratitude to the gods to whom they spontaneously attributed this “divine surprise.” Sophocles must have shared such feelings with the rest of the Athenian community; but in his case, there was also the emotion and pride at having been

t h e you ng s opho c l e s  11 chosen to dance and sing in honor of the victory, accompanying himself on his lyre. Here, in any case, is what Athenaeus reports: After the battle of Salamis, at any rate, he danced to the accompaniment of his lyre round the trophy, naked and anointed with oil. Others say he danced with his cloak on.23

Was he one performer among others in the chorus of young people? Or did he play, as the author of the anonymous Life suggests, the role of exarch, that is, the head of the chorus, singing as a solo the paean in honor of the victory before the chorus as a whole echoed it? In any case, Sophocles’ grace and talent during this first performance before all the assembled Athenians are not in doubt. To confirm Sophocles’ gifts as a musician and dancer, in this same passage Athenaeus recalls that later on, when he had become an author of tragedies, Sophocles acted in his own plays on two occasions: when he brought out the Thamyris he played the lyre himself. He also played ball with great skill when he produced the Nausicaä.

His tragedy entitled Thamyris (or Thamyras) is now lost, and the meager fragments still extant do not allow us to reconstruct the details of the action. But that does not prevent us from gauging the dexterity required to play the role of Thamyris, a cithara player from Thrace who belonged to the group of legendary musicians of whom Orpheus is the most illustrious. The best-­known episode of the legend of Thamyris is the battle he fought against the Muses, as Homer already reported: the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian and made an end of his singing, even as he was journeying from Oechalia, from the house of Eurytus the Oechalian: for he vaunted with boasting that he would conquer, were the Muses themselves to sing against him, the daughters of Zeus that beareth the aegis; but they in their wrath maimed him, and took from him his wondrous song, and made him forget his minstrelsy.24

When Sophocles represented in the theater this competition between Thamyris and the Muses—which ended tragically for the singer—he had once again to prove before the Athenian people his talent as a musician.25 And he showed off his talent as a dancer by playing ball in his play entitled Nausicaa or The Washerwomen (Plyntriai).26 This play, whether it is a tragedy or a satyr play, is also lost. Its subject was the mythical sequence in the Odyssey in which Nausicaa, the daughter of the king of the Phaeacians, and her servants, who have come to wash their laundry in the river at the seaside, play ball and dance while the laundry dries, while Odysseus, shipwrecked on the Phaeacians’ island, sleeps not far away, sheltered and hidden under a thick bed of leaves. Nausicaa leads the chorus of girls who sing and dance while throwing her the ball. One servant’s

12  c h a p t e r i clumsiness—provoked by the goddess Athena—causes the ball Nausicaa throws to fall into the river. The girls shriek. Odysseus wakes and sits up. The servants flee; only Nausicaa remains. This is their meeting.27 Although the extant fragments of this play are particularly few,28 by referring to the Odyssey we can very well reconstruct the scene in which Sophocles, playing the role of Nausicaa, sings and dances and throws the ball to the fifty servant girls who form the chorus, which also sings and dances, until one servant misses the ball, the chorus’s cry leads to Odysseus’s appearance, and the latter provokes the terrified flight of the servants running off to hide.

Sophocles’ Song at Salamis To conclude this significant episode in Sophocles’ youth in Salamis, we might mention that it inspired Victor Hugo to write a “Chanson de Sophocle à Salamine” (“Sophocles’ Song at Salamis”), which he inserted into La Légende des siècles: Here I am, a callow youth, My sixteen years bathed in azure; War, goddess of Erebus, Somber war with outraged cries, I come to you, the night is dark! Since Xerxes is the stronger, Take me for battle and for glory, And for the tomb; but first You, whom the sword obeys, And the lightning bolt follows, Choose me with your left hand A beautiful girl with soft eyes, Who knows nothing but how To laugh an innocent laugh, Who is divine, pink at the two points of her naked breast. Don’t be harder on the man Full of dark destiny Than is on profound Neptune The vivid morning star. Give her to me, that I might quickly Press her to my flaming heart; I’m willing to die, oh Goddess, But not before I’ve loved.

t h e you ng s opho c l e s  13 The poet, as we see, has taken great liberties with the ancient sources. He makes the young Sophocles a combatant, whereas at the time he was not yet old enough to fight. And he imagines him before the battle, and not afterward, at the time when the dark power of Xerxes is still threatening, when “the enormous blackness seeks to kill the star,” and not when bright light of victory has shone forth and “restored hope to the convict universe.”29 In Hugo’s work, the only light the young Sophocles hopes for before the battle, and perhaps before death, is that of love.

Ch apter II

Sophocles the Politician Unlike Aeschylus and Euripides, Sophocles was not solely a man of the theater. To be sure, his life was regularly punctuated by the writing of tragedies, but he also held important political offices at times in his life that were also symbolic moments of Athens’s most brilliant history, and then the most tragic. The fifth century BCE, which began so gloriously for Athens with its victory in the Persian Wars, and continued so splendidly with the years that have been called “the century of Pericles,” ended with the fratricidal conflict between the two cities that had overcome the Persians, Athens and Sparta, leading to the humiliating defeat of Athens in 404. Sophocles died, however, before he learned the outcome of his city’s tragedy.1

Sophocles the Hellenotamias Sophocles was already in his fifties when he held his first public office. It had a technical name: it was the office of the “hellenotamias,” or “Hellenic treasurer,” an office that had been created during the levy of the Athenian Empire.2 The formation of the Athenian Empire was an indirect consequence of the Persian Wars. The victory at Salamis, which the whole city had celebrated, had put a stop to the Persian invasion, because Xerxes, rending his garments at the sight of his fleet’s disaster, which he observed from a dominant point overlooking the bay of Salamis,3 had decided to retreat. But the stigmata left by the passage of the barbarians through Athens were painful: all the houses, with the exception of those that had been used by Persian dignitaries, had collapsed; the Acropolis had been burned, and all that remained of the defensive ramparts were a few sections of wall. Besides, the Persian menace had still not been entirely averted after Salamis: the following year (in 479), Xerxes’ brother-­in-­law, Mardonius, who had remained in Greece with a land army of three hundred thousand men, invaded Attica again. But Attica had been abandoned by its inhabitants, who once again took refuge on Salamis and on their boats; and faced with the Athenians’ refusal to negotiate, Mardonius burned Athens and razed every remainder of the walls, houses, and temples that were still standing. What put a definitive end to the Persian Wars was two defeats of the barbarians, which, according to the ancients, took place on the same day: on land, in continental Greece, at

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  15 Plataea, the contingent commanded by Mardonius was routed and massacred, after its leader’s death, by the combined army of the Greeks; and at sea, in Ionia, at Cape Mycale across from Samos, the Greek fleet blockaded the Persian fleet and burned it. This double battle corresponded to a double stake: the liberation of continental Greece and the liberation of the Greek islands. But the fear of a possible return of the barbarians after the Persian Wars guided Greek policy, and particularly that of the Athenians, and led to the formation of what became the Athenian Empire. The primary concern of the Athenians after the Persian retreat was to reconstruct their city ravaged by the double invasion: they rebuilt their houses and especially their ramparts. Despite the anxiety of the Lacedaemonians and their allies in the Peloponnese on seeing the growing power of a city that, confident in its fleet, had shown so much audacity against the barbarians, the Athenians fortified their city in a short time, notably at the instigation of Themistocles. Above all, they completed the construction of a new port, Piraeus, which a few years later they connected with the city by means of ramparts, after having fortified it as well. This was an affirmation of the maritime vocation of Athens’s power. This vocation took concrete form a little later in the hegemony that the Ionian allies and other peoples recently liberated from the Great King asked Athens to exercise. Sparta, immediately after the Persian Wars, had retained the command of the Greeks, even in the maritime domain: it is significant that the Greek fleets, sent to secure the barriers against the barbarians, Cyprus in the South and Byzantium in the North, were placed under the command of the regent of Sparta, Pausanias, even though the number of ships provided by the Athenians was greater than that provided by the Lacedaemonians. But the abuses of power committed by Pausanias, who behaved more like a tyrant than an ally, displeased the recently liberated partners: they asked for a change of hegemony. The Athenians found in this a pretext for obtaining command of the fleet that they had already wanted during the Persian Wars. It was during this change in hegemony that the office of the hellenotamiae was instituted, as Thucydides explains: The Athenians having thus succeeded to the supremacy by the voluntary act of the allies through their hatred of Pausanias, fixed which cities were to contribute money against the barbarian, which ships; their professed object being to retaliate for their sufferings by ravaging the king’s country. Now was the time that the office of “Treasurers for Hellas” was first instituted by the Athenians. These officers received the tribute, as the money contributed was called. The tribute was first fixed at four hundred and sixty talents. The common treasury was at Delos, and the congresses were held in the temple.4

This new Athenian magistracy, created in 478/477, only two years after the Battle of Salamis, was collegial. A college of ten treasurers was made responsible for administering the product of the final revenues paid by the allies who did not want to participate directly in the struggle against the barbarians by sending

16  c h a p t e r i i ships. These treasurers were elected for a year by the popular assembly in Athens; they took office at the time of the Panathenaic Games, in July. It is in the list of the tributes for 443/442, provided by an inscription, that “Sophocles of the deme of Colonus” appears as a hellenotamias.5 Therefore it is not a literary testimony, but a testimony preserved on stone that is the source of our information, though what it tells us is nonetheless not as obvious as one might think.

An Epigraphic Puzzle We have to imagine things very concretely, and restore a historical perspective to the discovery and reading of the inscription in order to grasp what is at stake in the problems concerning the identification of Sophocles. The inscription is in fact incomplete. Is the hellenotamias referred to by the inscription really Sophocles, and is this Sophocles really the tragic poet? Let us go to the epigraphic museum in Athens, where we can see a large, quadrangular stele in Pentelic marble, more than 3.5 meters high, 1.1 meters wide, and almost 40 centimeters thick. This stele bears, inscribed on its four sides, the first fifteen lists, year by year, of the allies of Athens who paid tribute, starting in the year 454/453. Unfortunately, the stele has not been preserved whole; it is constituted of 180 fragments that do not all fit together and leave major lacunae. These fragments were found alongside the monumental gateway during excavations of the Acropolis carried out after Greece won independence in 1834.6 The stele as we see it today was put back together in 1927. Several generations of epigraphists have gradually reconstituted the puzzle, starting from the discovery of the fragments in the early nineteenth century. The learned publication (which is authoritative) in 1939 by scholars from the American school—a century after the discovery!—presents as follows the twelfth list, the one that concerns us, and that was constituted by assembling several fragments some of which were lost during the reconstitution of the stele in 1927. It represents the year 443/442.7 The list properly so called of the allies paying tribute is divided into five columns, each comprising thirty-­five lines: each line indicates the residents of a city preceded by the amount of the tribute they paid. The cities, which number 162, are grouped according to the five great geographical and administrative districts for collecting the tribute.8 This list—which gives an idea of the magnitude of the task faced by the hellenotamiae responsible for collecting each of these tributes—is itself framed by two lines, one above, the other below the five columns, providing information regarding the year and the names of the secretary, the assistant secretary, and a hellenotamias. On the list for 443/442, the top line reads as follows: “During the twelfth years of the empire, Sophias, of the deme of Eleusis, was secretary.” The bottom line, which is in fact a continuation of the top line, gives at the beginning, on a fragment now lost, the name of the assistant secretary (“Satyros of the deme Leuconone was

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  17 assistant secretary”); then at the end, on an extant fragment, the name of the hellenotamias with his deme of origin. But this last part is unfortunately incomplete!9 The name of the hellenotamias as well as that of his deme are found, in fact, on a damaged part of the inscription. The American editors followed others in reading as the name of the hellenotamias the last seven letters OPHOKLES (the “PH” being a single Greek letter phi), which makes it possible to find, after restoring an initial “S,” the name SOPHOKLES. As for the following name of the deme, the first four letters KOLO can be read without difficulty; but there the fragment breaks off. Like other editors, the Americans restored KOLO[NETHEN], “from the deme of Colonus.” Who could this “Sophocles of the deme of Colonus” be, except Sophocles the great tragic poet? Let us recall that the Byzantine dictionary known as the Suda presented the latter this way: “Sophocles, son of Sophilos, of the deme of Colonus (KOLONETHEN).” This identification, which had not immediately established itself when the stone was first deciphered, now seems very likely, and the great majority of scholars consider it certain.10 The inscription on stone remains lapidary in every sense. It reports the raw fact, without indicating why the popular assembly chose Sophocles. Nonetheless, since Sophocles’ name appears as representing the college of the ten hellenotamiae we can infer that he was its chairman.11

The Transfer of the Treasury Managed by the Hellenotamiae from Delos to Athens There is one detail on the stone that is revealing concerning the period in which Sophocles held this office of hellenotamias. The annual list of the tributes that the hellenotamiae managed is presented in the form of two series. Sophocles’ name appears in the twelfth year of the second series. Between the two series a major event occurred concerning the location of the treasury that the hellenotamiae managed. This event reflects the transformation of the Delian League into the Athenian Empire, a transformation of which the historian Thucydides offers a remarkable analysis. As we have seen, when the league was created in 478/477 the allies had willingly granted the Athenians hegemony. Although it was directed by the Athenians, the league’s center was on the island of Delos. The sanctuary of Apollo on Delos, which was the Ionians’ sanctuary, was the site of the league’s meetings and especially that of the federal treasury constituted by the tribute paid by the allies. Thus the hellenotamiae, who were Athenian magistrates, had to manage a treasury that was on Delos. This somewhat paradoxical situation lasted a quarter of a century, until the treasury was transferred from Delos to Athens in 454/453, the most tangible sign of a transformation of the Delian League into an Athenian empire. In a way, it made the new era official. The numbering of the series of different colleges of hellenotamiae that followed was begun over starting with the transfer of the treasury to the temple of Athena in Athens. Sophocles’

18  c h a p t e r i i name appears in the second series, which extends from 454/453 to 405/404. This change of place was not merely symbolic. It led to changes in habits. Beginning in 454, the allies had to bring their tribute to Athens each year, where it was presented officially during the Dionysia, the great festival of Dionysus, on the dance floor of the theater, when all the tiers of seats were filled. The hellenotamiae now received each city’s tribute in Athens and levied a sixtieth of it for the goddess Athena, and no longer for the Delian Apollo. When Sophocles, acting as a hellenotamias, received officially the tribute paid by the representatives of the 162 cities who came to parade in the theater during the Dionysian Festival of 442, he was on familiar territory. In fact, he had been famous there as an author of tragedies for more than twenty years.12

Sophocles the Strategos: The First Mission (441/440) It was also in the context of this transformation of the Delian League into an Athenian empire that Sophocles held his second public office. Only one year after the end of his first term as hellenotamias, in 441/440, he took part, as a strategos, in Athens’s expedition against the island of Samos, which had revolted. The transition from hegemony to empire was marked, in fact, not only by the concentration of financial means in Athens, but also, more profoundly, by the evolution of the relationships between the Athenians and their allies, which Thucydides points out immediately following his discussion of the establishment of the hegemony: Their supremacy commenced with independent allies who acted on the resolutions of a common congress. It was marked by the following undertakings in war and in administration during the interval between the Median and the present war, against the barbarian, against their own rebel allies, and against the Peloponnesian powers which would come in contact with them on various occasions.13

Thucydides goes on to analyze the general causes that led the Athenians to oppose their allies and to transform hegemony into empire: the allies’ failure to deliver the right amount of tribute in money or ships, and in some cases their revolt. Once these revolts had been put down, the former allies were subjugated. The first revolt the Athenians had to cope with was that of the island of Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades, around 470.14 Naxos was the first to move from the status of an ally to that of a subject. Four years later, it was the turn of the island of Thasos, following a dispute over the trading posts and gold mines that the Thasians were operating on the Thracian coast across from the island. It took a siege lasting more than two years to force the Thasians to surrender to the Athenians, accepting very harsh conditions: their ramparts had to be de-

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  19 stroyed, their fleet handed over, and tribute paid. Starting from the time when Pericles dominated Athenian policy, two other revolts took place before the Peloponnesian War, one on the island of Euboea in 446, and the other on the island of Samos five years later. Each time, Pericles intervened in person. In Euboea, he subjected the whole island and expelled all the residents of the city of Histiaea, where he established cleruchs (that is, Athenian military settlers). In this way he took revenge on the inhabitants of Histiaea, who, after capturing an Athenian ship, had massacred its crew.15 The harshness of the repression marked people’s memories: more than twenty years afterward, the comic dramatist Aristophanes still alluded to it in his plays.16 It was during the other expedition, the one conducted against Samos, that Sophocles served as strategos alongside Pericles. This expedition took place in 441/440.

Pericles and the Revolt of Samos For the Athenians, the revolt of Samos had a very special significance. While they acted rather despotically with regard to their allies in general, they had treated the three islands of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos more gently. As Aristotle says in his Constitution of Athens, they saw the inhabitants of these three islands as the guardians of their empire. The Athenians had therefore allowed them to retain their own constitution and the government of their possessions.17 However, taking advantage of a war between Samos and the inhabitants of Miletus over the possession of Priene, in 441/440 (during the archontate of Timocles) the Athenians, under the command of Pericles, overthrew the established regime to establish democracy, took children as hostages whom they entrusted to the inhabitants of Lemnos, and set up a garrison. But the adversaries of democracy, supported by the satrap of Sardis, Pissosuthenes, reestablished the former regime, surreptitiously recovered the hostages, and broke with the Athenians after handing the Athenian garrison over to the barbarians.18 Thus one of the three pillars of the empire was collapsing. Given Samos’s naval power, it was control of the seas that was at stake;19 the Athenians had to react. They did so rapidly, using exceptional means. Here is what Thucydides says about the beginning of their response: As soon as the Athenians heard the news, they sailed with sixty ships against Samos. Sixteen of these went to Caria to look out for the Phoenician fleet, and to Chios and Lesbos carrying round orders for reinforcements, and so never engaged; but forty-­four ships under the command of Pericles with nine colleagues gave battle, off the island of Tragia, to seventy Samian vessels, of which twenty were transports, as they were sailing from Miletus. Victory remained with the Athenians.20

What shows the magnitude of the means employed is first of all the number of ships engaged: the fleet of sixty ships initially sent was twice reinforced, first

20  c h a p t e r i i by twenty-­five ships coming from two of the most important other allies, Chios and Lesbos, and forty from Athens; then, the following year, sixty ships from Athens and thirty from Chios and Lesbos, which increased to 215 ships the total size of the allied fleet that besieged Samos.21 But the most exceptional measure was the number of generals sent. We know that since Clisthenes’ reform the strategoi formed in Athens a college of ten magistrates (one for each of the ten tribes) elected annually among the wealthiest citizens; they could be reelected indefinitely.22 As their name indicates (strategos means “he who leads the army”), they first had military functions, and it was not unusual for them to assume in turn the command of military expeditions by land or by sea. But they also played a political role. That was the case especially when a strategos was reelected repeatedly. At the time of the expedition to Samos, Pericles had already been a strategos several times. Having become the leader of the popular party after the death of Ephialtes (shortly after 461), he had first been elected strategos some fifteen years earlier (in 454/453)23 and had been regularly reelected to that office for the past five years. Having eliminated not long before, by ostracism, his political adversary, Thucydides24—not the historian, but the head of the oligarchic party, Melesias’s son—Pericles then reigned supreme in the city: “So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen,” the historian Thucydides says.25 Thus it is natural that the historian, when he speaks of the generals sent to put down the Samians’ revolt, mentions Pericles first and does not think it necessary to give the names of the other strategoi who accompanied him. But he does say how many of them there were, saying that Pericles was the tenth, which means that Pericles was accompanied by his nine colleagues.

Sophocles as Pericles’ Colleague on the Samos Expedition Sophocles was one of these nine colleagues. His presence is mentioned by the geographer Strabo: “The Athenians,” he says, “formerly sent Pericles their general, and with him Sophocles the poet.”26 But it is to a fourth-­century BCE historian of Attica, Androtion, that we owe the names of all the strategoi of the year 441/440. This Androtion, who studied under Isocrates, is better known as an orator and politician than as a historian. He has come down to posterity mainly for the political plea Demosthenes wrote against him, Against Androtion. But his local history of Attica was highly regarded in his own time. It served Aristotle as his principal source for everything in The Constitution of Athens that touches on the history of Athens. The list of strategoi given by Androtion felicitously supplements Thucydides’ testimony. Here it is: Socrates of the deme Anagyronte, Sophocles of the deme Colonus, the poet, Andocides of the deme Cydathenaion, Creon of the deme Scambonides, Pericles of the deme Cholarges, Glaucon of the deme Kerameies, Callistros of the

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  21 deme Acharnes, Xenophon of the deme Melite, Lampides of the deme Piraeus (Hippothontis), Glauketes [Athenian], Clitophon of the deme Thorai.27

In this list, where the strategoi are designated by their names and their demes of origin, we see that Pericles does not appear first, detached from his colleagues, as he does in Thucydides. His name appears in the fifth position, after that of Sophocles, which is in the second position. The reason for this is that we are dealing with a list proceeding from an official document, in which the names of the generals are not arranged in a preferential order, but in the official sequence of the ten Athenian tribes, the ten strategoi having been elected at the rate of one per tribe. These ten tribes drew their names from ten Athenian “heroes” who are “eponymous” (literally, give their names), and whose statues were lined up on a long base in the middle of the central square in Athens, the agora.28 Pericles appears in the fifth position because his tribe, the Acamantis, which owed its name to Acamas, one of Theseus’s two sons, came fifth in the official order. Coming second, Sophocles was thus born in a deme that belonged to the Aigeis tribe, owing its name to Aegeus, king of Athens and father of Theseus.29 Reading this list, we understand that Sophocles incontestably belonged to the Athenian elite. In addition to the name of Pericles, we should note also that of Andocides. He was the grandfather of the orator Andocides, whom we know to have belonged to a noble line, the ancient family of the Kerykes. This grandfather had already played an important political role five years earlier: he had been one of the ten Athenians who had been chosen to negotiate, in 446, the thirty-­ year truce with the Lacedaemonians.30 Under these conditions, we can see why the biographer of Sophocles revolted against the idea that the poet had a very modest origin, declaring: “For it is not likely that a man born of such a modest father would have been deemed worthy of the office of strategos along with Pericles and Thucydides, the most prominent men in the city.”31

Why Was Sophocles Elected Strategos, and What Was His Role? Regarding the reason for Sophocles’ election as a strategos, one explanation was current as early as the Hellenistic period in the great scholarly center represented by the Library of Alexandria. At the beginning of the manuscripts of Sophocles’ Antigone a presentation of the tragedy has been preserved that was written by one of the directors of that library, Aristophanes of Byzantium (third to second centuries BCE). It ends this way: “It is said that Sophocles was deemed worthy of his office as strategos at Samos because he had acquired fame as a result of the performance of his Antigone.” Thus it is supposed to be Sophocles’ literary success that justified his playing a political and military role.32 What was the role of the strategos Sophocles in this expedition against Samos? At first glance, it seems difficult to say, because our main sources on that expedition say nothing about this. Thucydides, as usual, goes right to the heart of the

22  c h a p t e r i i matter, without mentioning names. He distinguishes several stages in the campaign: first, the Athenians’ initial naval victory off the coast of Samos, near the little island of Tragia located south of Samos; then the landing after the arrival of reinforcements and, following a victory on land, the siege of the city with its triple fortification; then the reversal of the situation: taking advantage of Pericles’ departure at the head of a large part of the fleet, the Samians broke out toward the sea, making a sudden sortie that allowed them to destroy part of the besieging fleet and to gain access to the sea for a fortnight; then Pericles, having returned, closed off their access to the sea and renewed the siege; and finally, further reinforcements having arrived, the Samians surrendered after an eight-­ month siege and were forced to accept draconian terms: the destruction of the fortifications—which had been heavily damaged by siege machines—the surrender of the fleet, the provision of hostages, and war indemnities.33 In Thucydides, the protagonists of history are peoples and not individuals: the Athenians on one side, the Samians on the other. Only one individual emerges on the Athenian side: Pericles. In Diodorus Siculus, the second historian to report the facts, Pericles is also the only strategos mentioned.34 Even in Plutarch, where history is more personalized—it is he who reports the role played by Pericles’ companion Aspasia, a native of Miletus, in Pericles’ decision to intervene on behalf of Miletus against Samos—the name of Sophocles does not appear.35 But Plutarch nonetheless preserves clues, apropos of this crisis between Athens and Samos, one of which sheds light on the role of men of letters in the politics of the cities, and the other more precisely on the relationships between Pericles and Sophocles while they were both serving as strategoi.

The Poet Sophocles of Athens versus the Philosopher Melissus of Samos Whereas Thucydides and Diodorus Siculus say nothing about the Samian leaders, Plutarch mentions the great man of the Samian resistance, a certain Melissus, whom historians of Greek philosophy know well as a student of Parmenides’ and the last important member of the Eleatic school. Here is the passage from the “Life of Pericles” in which Plutarch discusses the role of the philosopher Melissus in the resistance, at the time when Pericles left to meet the Phoenician squadron: No sooner had he sailed off than Melissus, the son of Ithagenes, a philosopher who was then acting as general at Samos, despising either the small number of ships that were left, or the inexperience of the generals in charge of them, persuaded his fellow-­citizens to make an attack upon the Athenians. In the battle that ensued the Samians were victorious, taking many of their enemy captive, and destroying many of their ships, so that they commanded the sea and laid in large store of such necessaries for the war as they did not have before. And

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  23 Aristotle says that Pericles was himself also defeated by Melissus in the sea-­fight which preceded this. . . . When Pericles learned of the disaster which had befallen his fleet, he came speedily to its aid. And though Melissus arrayed his forces against him, he conquered and routed the enemy and at once walled their city in.36

In the two opposing camps, the strategoi were both men well known through their literary works, on the side of the Samians the philosopher Melissus, the author of a treatise on Being, and on the Athenian side the man of the theater Sophocles, who had just successfully staged his Antigone. No doubt Melissus’s austere analyses of Being, both eternal and infinite, were, even in antiquity less well known than Sophocles’ tragedies. But his work represents an indispensable chapter of the history of philosophy before Plato, and more exactly of the history of the monism called “Eleatic,” in the heritage of Parmenides, who came from Elea, in southern Italy.37 Here is how the historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius (second century CE) presents the life and work of Melissus of Samos: Melissus, the son of Ithagenes, was a native of Samos. He was a pupil of Parmenides. Moreover he came into relations with Heraclitus, on which occasion the latter was introduced by him to the Ephesians, who did not know him, as Democritus was to the citizens of Abdera by Hippocrates. He took part also in politics and won the approval of his countrymen, and for this reason he was elected admiral and won more admiration than ever through his own merit. In his view the universe was unlimited, unchangeable and immovable, and was one, uniform and full of matter. There was no real, but only apparent, motion. Moreover he said that we ought not to make any statements about the gods, for it was impossible to have knowledge of them. According to Apollodorus, he flourished in the 84th Olympiad. [= 444–41].38

It is significant that Diogenes Laertius’s chapter on Melissus, which appears between those on Parmenides of Elea and Zeno of Elea, also mentions in very laudatory terms the political and military role played by Melissus at Samos, particularly during the revolt of Samos in 441/440. It is probably not accidental that authors of chronographies make the philosopher’s apogee coincide with the Olympiad that corresponds precisely to the most important event in his political career. To judge by all the testimonies that speak of his military and political role, during the revolt of Samos Melissus played, as a strategos, a role comparable to that of Pericles on the Athenian side, and not to that of Sophocles, which was undoubtedly much more modest. It is in fact the political and military opposition between Pericles and Melissus that is generally emphasized. “It was Pericles . . . whom Melissus opposed at the siege of Samos,”39 says Plutarch. “As a politician, Melissus was opposed to Pericles,” says the Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda,40 thus recalling the political dimension of the conflict between Athens and Samos. Whereas Pericles’ first act was to establish a democratic regime in

24  c h a p t e r i i Samos, Melissus, the man of the resistance, belonged to the aristocratic party. Nonetheless, the Suda, after mentioning the political contrast between Melissus and Pericles, goes on: “And Melissus, who was a general on the Samian side, fought a naval battle against Sophocles the tragic poet during the eighty-­fourth Olympiad [= 444/441].”41 That is the sole testimony to a naval battle in the war between Athens and Samos in which the two men of letters directly opposed each other during their tenure as strategoi. The only occasion that really seems possible for such a naval battle is the one on which Melissus, taking advantage of the absence of Pericles when he went to meet the Phoenician squadron, made a sudden sortie during which he destroyed, as we have seen, part of the besieging fleet. It was then that he must have gone up against Sophocles (as well as the other strategoi who had remained). And since Melissus had convinced the Samians to make this sortie by emphasizing not only the small number of ships that were still there, but also the “inexperience of the strategoi”42 who had remained, we can conclude that Melissus did not have a high opinion of the poet Sophocles’ military talents. If in fact it is with this naval battle that the confrontation between Melissus and Sophocles should be connected, we have to recognize that it ended with a cruel defeat for the Athenians, who had, it is true, many fewer ships.

Military Strategy and Erotic Strategy We have other echoes of the strategos Sophocles’ conduct during this Athenian expedition to Samos that refer to his erotic strategy, an area in which he seems to have been expert. One of the rare witticisms uttered by Pericles, who was usually better known for his austerity than for his sense of humor, deals precisely with Sophocles’ attraction to young men when he was his colleague as a strategos. In the Greek tradition, there is a story reported by Plutarch: Once also when Sophocles, who was general with him on a certain naval expedition, praised a lovely boy, he said: “It is not his hands only, Sophocles, that a general must keep clean, but his eyes as well.”43

Pericles meant by that that a general must not allow himself to be corrupted by either money or love.44 This anecdote also appears in the Latin tradition, but in a more explicitly moralizing context. Here is how Cicero presents it in his treatise On Duties: it is unbecoming and highly censurable, when upon a serious theme, to introduce such jests as are proper at a dinner, or any sort of loose talk. When Pericles was associated with the poet Sophocles as his colleague in command and they had met to confer about official business that concerned them both, a handsome boy chanced to pass and Sophocles said: “Look, Pericles; what a pretty boy!” How pertinent was Pericles’s reply: “Hush, Sophocles, a general should keep not only his hands but his eyes under control.” And yet, if Sophocles had

s opho c l e s t h e p ol i t ic i a n  25 made this same remark at a trial of athletes, he would have incurred no just reprimand. So great is the significance of both place and circumstance.45

Thus Cicero clearly sides with Pericles against Sophocles. Many modern scholars are instinctively skeptical regarding the historical foundation of such anecdotes. However, we have an authentic testimony concerning the relations between Pericles and Sophocles that more or less confirms this one. I refer to the words reported by Ion of Chios in his account of the banquet he attended when Sophocles, during his tenure as strategos, stopped off at Chios while he was sailing toward Lesbos. I have given this testimony in toto in the prelude to this part.46 We recall that Sophocles ended his little scene of seducing the young cupbearer with these words: “I have been training myself in strategy since Pericles claimed that although I knew poetry, I was ignorant of strategy.” With humor, Sophocles hints at his conflicts with Pericles, who seems not to have had a high opinion of the poet’s competence in military matters. And his humor becomes still more piquant if we know that Pericles had earlier denounced one of his witty remarks about a young man’s beauty. He was persisting in his mistake!

Sophocles’ Visit to Chios: What Was He Doing There? From the account given by Ion of Chios there emerges apparently surprising information regarding Sophocles’ activity during his tenure as strategos. Ion says that he met Sophocles on Chios “when he was sailing as strategos toward Lesbos.” One would expect instead: toward Samos, if the reference is in fact to the Athenian expedition against Samos in 441/440. Thus some scholars have tried to connect Sophocles’ stopover with another mission that they invent for the purpose at hand. But if we compare this clue given by Ion with the account of the Athenian expedition to Samos given by Thucydides, we see that when Pericles won an initial battle against the Samians, he was without part of the fleet (sixteen ships, to be exact). Some of the ships sailed south, toward the Asian coast of Caria, to watch for the possible arrival of the Phoenician fleet, while the others sailed north, toward Chios and Lesbos, to demand reinforcements from those two members of the Athenian league. We need only look at a map to understand that the ships that went north passed by Chios before reaching Lesbos. Sophocles was therefore the strategos (or one of the strategoi) commanding this contingent of ships that went to seek reinforcements. It was when Sophocles landed on Chios, before reaching Lesbos, that the famous banquet described by Ion took place. The mission entrusted to Sophocles was not in any way dangerous. In this context, we can understand all Sophocles’ humor during the banquet, when he reported Pericles’ disabused judgment concerning his inexperience as a strategos. Pericles had probably not wanted to entrust to Sophocles the more delicate command of the detachment that had sailed south toward a possible encounter with the Phoenician fleet.47 However that may be, Sophocles’ mission produced re-

26  c h a p t e r i i sults, since a reinforcement of twenty-­five ships provided by Chios and Lesbos arrived to strengthen the Athenian fleet and facilitate the siege.48 Sophocles returned to Samos after the first naval battle had been fought by Pericles near the little island of Tragia, but before Pericles left to reinforce personally the detachment sent south to ward off the Phoenician fleet. And it was after Pericles’ departure in command of sixty ships that Melissus of Samos, taking advantage especially of the inexperience of the remaining generals, made, as we have seen, a successful sortie, and that was when the confrontation between Melissus and Sophocles took place. Thus the account of the banquet on Chios, although apparently a rather trivial subject, allows us to define more clearly the role of Sophocles the strategos during the earlier phase of the expedition, and to note how little confidence Pericles must have had in him in the domain of generalship, despite his admiration of his work as a writer. The relations between Sophocles and Pericles must not have been as idyllic as one might think. They differed, at least, in temperament. But Sophocles’ feigned modesty should not deceive us regarding his prestige in the high society of the allies. To gauge this prestige, it may be useful to present the personality of the author of the account, who was present at the banquet where Sophocles was the star.

Who Was Ion of Chios? This witness is not unimportant, because according to the geographer Strabo, Ion was a very prominent figure on the island of Chios.49 His presence at this banquet given by his compatriot Hermesileos to Sophocles is in no way surprising. First of all, he belonged to an aristocratic family on Chios, and as a youth he had rubbed shoulders with eminent people from Athens. In particular, when he was very young he had attended, during a trip to Athens, a banquet at which the strategos Cimon, whom he still greatly admired, was present. He also knew Pericles but did not like his haughty character.50 In addition, Ion of Chios was, like Sophocles, an author of tragedies. About fifteen years younger than Sophocles, he began his theatrical career in Athens about twenty years later.51 Of course, Ion’s dramatic production is not comparable to Sophocles’ in magnitude.52 But although he was a minor tragic poet, Ion of Chios was not negligible. He won a first prize and was so pleased by the honor that he sent free wine from Chios to the Athenians.53 He was sufficiently well known to the Athenian audience for Aristophanes to have mentioned him by name in one of his comedies.54 And as late as the period of the treatise on the Sublime, his tragedies were still compared with those of Sophocles, as Bacchylides was compared with Pindar, even if the faultless talent of Ion of Chios and Bacchylides did not achieve th