V.N. offers this slim volume on the last three plays of Sophocles in the hope that it will prove an aid to students, non-specialists, general readers and theatre practitioners, citing both his experience as a professor of long standing and his work as a consultant on the production of various Greek plays. He also expresses a desire that specialists in Sophocles may find some merit in the work; in the latter hope he may expect disappointment. The work offers little of value to Sophoclean scholars, and in all likelihood only students will find it particularly helpful. That said, the work displays some genuine merit.
V.N. begins with a promising chapter that emphasises the continuity of Sophocles' late works with his earlier plays, and gives a good discussion of the temperament and ideals that infused epic as well as tragic heroism. He rightly emphasises the distance maintained between the protagonists of the late plays and the characters and mythology around them, even while those protagonists experience a restoration into society from which they were outcast. V.N. also makes solid if familiar points on Sophocles' questioning of the utility of the old myths and his use of metatheatre.
As he moves on to the specific plays, V.N. fares worse. He attempts to limit Electra to a passive observer in the presence of whom, rather than through or with the assistance of whom, the plot is executed. He locates her on the now conventional polarity of male/female, active/passive, in contrast to the almost hyperactive Orestes. But as L. MacLeod has observed (Dolos and Dike in Sophokles' Elektra [2001], p. 22 et passim), such a static reading hardly does justice to the tragic heroine. If one wishes to see impotent femininity, Chrysothemis affords a better exemplar. V.N. seems very peculiarly to privilege the role of the Paedagogue as though he were the designer of the plan that Orestes will carry out. In fact, Apollo designed the plan, and the Paedagogus does nothing more than attempt to keep the young man on track. V.N. pursues this line of inquiry in order to set up some rough correspondence between the Paedagogus and Odysseus in Philoctetes, and a consequent correspondence between their young charges, Orestes and Neoptolemus.
On the use of craft, as ordained by Apollo, in order to accomplish the demise of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, much ink has been spilled to no purpose, by V.N. and others. Sophocles, by clearly defining and elaborating the element of trickery already present in Aeschylus' Choephoroi, merely allows Orestes to become what he will, the man whose most (in)famous triumph comes when he arranges the murder of Neoptolemus, his rival for the hand of Hermione, in a story doubtless well known to Athenian audiences from Euripides' Andromache (1085–165). A better line to explore might have been how Apollo, directly in the Electra and the Oedipus at Colonus and indirectly through Helenus in the Philoctetes, allows characters to create the destiny that makes them what they are.
In the Electra, the most controversial part will be the faint suggestion that Electra ends as a character we might almost mock, a position V.N. derives from a comparison with Ajax, since both characters are duped and other characters (Athena in Ajax and the Paedagogus in Electra) might be said to be winking at the tragic heroes for falling into their trap. I doubt that anyone will find Electra's position comical, nor view Orestes as a type of comic hero (pp. 38–40).
In his chapter on Philoctetes, V.N. spends a great deal of time on the possible corruption of Neoptolemus, the honourable son of a honourable father. One wonders if anyone has actually read the Iliad, where the ‘honourable father’ wishes for his own troops to be destroyed because of his dispute with Agamemnon (1.408–12); would prefer that all the Greeks die, including his Myrmidons, so that he and Patroclus could savour the fall of Troy unencumbered (16.97–100); wishes that Briseis, the deluded maiden who thought she might marry Achilles, had died rather than Patroclus (19.59–60); and threatens a suppliant Priam with death (with the assistance of the Homeric narrator) twice in less than 20 lines (24.569–70, 585–6). Moreover, for all that he hates like hell that man who says one thing and means another, Achilles, after obnoxiously rejecting prizes as a motive for behaviour in Book 9, worries that prizes might be taken from him in Book 16 if Patroclus succeeds in taking Troy without him (16.83–6). Finally, if we regard ambush as a type of deceit, Achilles implicitly, at least, endorses it when he criticises Agamemnon for being unwilling to join in one (1.227). A proper criticism of this play must take into account not the ‘honourable’ nature of the father, but the fact that the apple does not fall far from the tree.
For one claiming that this work might be useful for theatre practitioners, V.N. undersells the component of metatheatre here. The actor who plays Odysseus plays the False Merchant – might the audience, and even the sometimes clueless Neoptolemus, suspect that Odysseus has returned in disguise, and pick up that the sense of mockery that V.N. suspects (wrongly, I believe) is present in Electra might actually be present here? And for that matter, did Sophocles play the same trick in the final appearance by Heracles, also played by the same actor? Such a reading might suggest sacrilege, but does offer an interesting dramatic possibility. On this reading, Sophocles calls into question the entire epic tradition – it is not the Boule Dios, the will of Zeus, traditionally the plot of epic, but rather the intervention of Heracles, archetype of tragic suffering to an extent far greater than Oedipus, that puts the epic on track – epic, in short, made subservient to tragedy, all engineered by the trickery of Odysseus, who saw his epic reputation plummet at the hands of tragedians in fifth-century Athens. V.N. makes a fairly tortured and extravagant claim for the bow of Philoctetes, arguing that it is the same bow that Apollo used to kill the Pytho and inflict plague on the Greek troops at the outset of the Iliad, a proposition wholly unsupported by the text of the play (p. 57). Can we imagine a scenario in which Apollo dropped by Lemnos in the tenth year of the war, asked Philoctetes for his bow back, and then took aim at the Greek troops? And then returned it?
In his chapter on the Oedipus at Colonus, V.N. makes an argument based on D. Wiles' book (Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning [1997], pp. 146–7) regarding the staging of the play. He claims that the audience would have looked for Thebes on Stage Left, Athens Stage Right, but given the setting of the actual theatre, with the audience facing south, geography would suggest the opposite. I doubt the Athenian audience would not have known that. On the whole, however, V.N. does better with this chapter, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he has already written extensively on the play. He makes a very solid point in comparing Oedipus' meditation on time to Ajax's speech prior to his suicide (Aj. 646–77). His observations on Oedipus' sometimes inconsistent efforts to defend himself from charges of murder and incest are spot on, as is his discussion of the metatheatrical elements of Polyneices' appeal to his father near the end of the play.
Two of the more familiar areas of controversy in the final plays are nearly overlooked. On the matter of whether the bow, Philoctetes himself, or both, are required for taking Troy, V.N. gives an answer in passing that smacks of afterthought (p. 79). He ignores completely the question of Musgrave's emendation at 637 of empalin to empolin in the O.C.; does Theseus offer citizenship to Oedipus in Athens, or merely permit him to stay. One would like to know V.N.'s position.
In a final chapter, V.N. takes some effort to feminise Oedipus and Philoctetes, unconvincingly. He previously suggested that Philoctetes recalled for the audience Polyphemus – one can hardly have it both ways. Oedipus' evident immobility, the fact that characters come to him rather than he to them, is an accusation that could be levelled just as convincingly at the Oedipus of the Oedipus the King, who can hardly be considered passive or feminine.
The book, while good in spots, ultimately disappoints.
