Hannah Brandenburg has published the first book-length study dedicated to the earliest reception of Sophocles, beginning with his contemporaries through the late third century BCE. Brandenburg shows “the fact that, and the process by which, Sophocles already early on became a member of the canon and a classic” (p. 11). Given how much scholarly attention has gone into Greek tragedy in general and Sophocles in particular, it is remarkable that this niche remained to be filled and we are fortunate that Brandenburg was the one to do so.
Many readers—especially those who may find more than 360 pages of academic German prose daunting—may find that the best way to begin this book is to skip to the appendices. Even a cursory scan of these appendices will give readers a sense of which later works engage with which passages in Sophocles. For many, such a quick scan will be useful on its own terms. For those who wish to dig through some or all of Brandenburg’s detailed discussions, scanning the appendices will give them a quick overview of early Sophoclean reception and prepare them for close analysis of individual passages.
Appendix 1a (pp. 369-391) lists every passage in every Sophoclean play, including the seven canonical plays and those that survive as fragments. A quick scan reveals the number of passages that authors in Brandenburg’s period of focus cited in each surviving play: Ajax (15), Antigone (49), Electra (25), Oedipus Rex (22), Oedipus at Colonus (10), Philoctetes (9), Trachiniae (17). By looking up a subset of the passages from Sophocles and the works that quote or comment on them, readers will quickly get a sense of this early reception from the sources themselves. Anyone reading a particular play of Sophocles can concentrate on the sources of reception and on Brandenburg’s discussion. Appendix 1a usually includes a citation to the passage in Brandenburg’s book that discusses the particular case. Appendix 1b (392-409) leads from authors back to Sophocles. Brandenburg lists fifteen passages from Plato and c. 100 passages from the surviving plays and fragments of Euripides that probably engage with Sophocles. Readers who wish to see Brandenburg’s thoughts will have to look up the Sophocles passages in Appendix 1a to find what she says about any given passage.
Euripides plays a much more visible role in Aristophanes than does Sophocles (who is also gently dismissed from the Frogs at v. 82 on the grounds that he was too good tempered for a bitter fight). As a result, this contribution is valuable for at least two reasons. First, Brandenburg systematically points out that Aristophanes makes much wider use of Sophocles than many readers will have realized (e.g., the Antigone in Aristophanes: pp. 61-74; the Peleus: pp. 146-151; Sophocles as a whole: pp. 251-255). Second, she reminds us that fragments from other comic playwrights suggest that Sophocles may have been more prominent in their work than in Aristophanes.
Of course, not every apparent echo of Sophocles’ language necessarily recalls a particular passage in a particular play. Brandenburg discusses how Sophocles helped expand the tragic koinê (pp. 76-92).
Anyone who sees how often the surviving plays of Sophocles generated comment through the 3rd century BCE will understand why Brandenburg makes her analysis of the Antigone and its reception the 120-page core of her study. She devotes 100 pages (pp. 25-126) to discuss each work that plausibly responds to the Antigone. Euripides, not surprisingly, is the first and the most prominent author, with discussions of the Alcestis, the Suppliant Women, (Euripides’ own) Antigone, and the Phoenissian Women. Those who wish to see Brandenburg at her best can see the 14-page exploration of how the Alcestis echoes the Antigone (pp. 26-39). She begins with a substantial comparison of Antigone 905-912 (where Antigone famously argues that she would not give her life for a son or husband but only for an irreplaceable brother) with Alcestis 282-294 (where Alcestis talks about why she, but not his parents, was willing to die for her husband Admetus). She then moves on to smaller (but linguistically more striking) comparisons of Antigone 547 with Alcestis 383, Antigone 746, 677-680 with Alcestis 696-698, Antigone 450-455 with Alcestis 683-684, and Antigone 71-75 with Alcestis 691-693. Readers who are not comfortable with German can infer much of Brandenburg’s most important arguments by looking for citations to the primary sources being compared (such as Antigone and Alcestis). Most readers who then dug in and found a way to follow Brandenburg’s argument would probably find that they had already inferred many, but by no means all, of her key points and would appreciate even more her judicious consideration of uncertain points. Brandenburg’s comparison of the Euripidean Antigone (pp. 41-43) is only the first of numerous instances where Brandenburg shows both imagination and restraint in using fragments to compare a surviving with a lost work.
The most useful chapter for many readers may well be the one in which Brandenburg discusses (pp. 92-104) how Demosthenes (Against Timarchus 246-250) uses a long quote from Creon’s initial (and idealistic) speech at Antigone 175-190. This speech provides us with invaluable information about how conscious people in the fourth century were about which plays had found a place in the living repertoire (like the Antigone) and which had not (like the Phoenissae), about how third actors (like Aeschines) typically performed the roles of scepter-holding tyrants, and how Aeschines himself (according to Demosthenes) had played the role of Creon multiple times. According to Demosthenes, Aeschines had failed to quote and to embody the values of Ant. 175-190, where Creon places city over family ties and personal well-being. There are various ways to interpret the figure of Creon (as Brandenburg points out on p. 96) but Demosthenes’ use of this quotation shows that many (if not all) fourth-century Athenians did indeed view Creon’s opening speech with admiration. I will certainly build on the exposition of Brandenburg the next time I teach this passage.
At pp. 104-122, Brandenburg turns to the importance of the Antigone for Aristotle. “Aristotle cites and paraphrases verses from Sophocles’ Antigone in four passages from the first and third books of the Rhetoric. In three passages from the third book of the Rhetoric and in the Poetics, he goes over the character of Haemon in Antigone. Overall, the Antigone is, along with the Oedipus Tyrannos, the piece by Sophocles that Aristotle most frequently cites, discusses or mentions in his surviving work.” (p. 104)
Where Brandenburg focuses on Antigone from among the surviving plays, she chooses sparse fragments of the Peleus and the even sparser fragments of the Women of Phthia (pp. 141-172). The theme of men such as Peleus who had been powerful during their prime but declined in old age features prominently in both places, and each provides a backdrop for plays such as Aristophanes’ Knights (which echoes the language of Sophocles to invite the audience to compare the aged Demos with the Sophoclean models).
Brandenburg constantly faces a very general problem when examining later works that resemble particular passages in Sophocles. To take just one example, she points out that Aristoxenus in his Pythagorean Sayings (fr. 2 Hoffman) remarks that “there exists no evil worse than lack of rule” (μηδὲν εἶναι μεῖζον κακὸν ἀναρχίας) and points out that this statement closely resembles Antigone 672: “there is no evil greater than lack of rule” (ἀναρχίας δὲ μεῖζον οὐκ ἔστιν κακόν). Is Aristoxenus echoing Creon in the Antigone? or are both echoing a topos that was common in classical Greek? Those who (like me) focus on how small a subset of Greek poetry survives may lean towards Creon echoing traditional language. But Aristoxenus certainly could have had that line of Sophocles in mind. Anyone studying reception should include every possible case and let the readers decide based on the evidence before them.
Every page discussing particular passages from Sophocles touches on passages where we have to make our best judgment as to whether the later source echoes Sophocles, the tradition or Sophocles commenting on a known older tradition. When (p. 59) Archilochus fr. 122 IEG, Antigone 388 and Eupolis Poleis fr. 234 Kassel/Austin make similar use of the adjective apômoton (essentially: “don’t bet against mortals/the Athenians”), I tend to believe that all three are drawing on a common topos, rather than (as Brandenburg thinks) that Sophocles is echoing Archilochus and Eupolis is alluding to Sophocles. There is no way, however, to resolve that question and readers simply must use their best judgment while remaining conscious of uncertainty. We are now in a position to begin applying corpus-driven statistical measures in the hopes of developing models that transparently quantify our (un)certainty.
I will conclude with a suggestion for future work on Sophocles in particular and Greek drama more generally for which Brandenburg’s monograph is a first step and a qualification. This monograph—like many other traditional scholarly monographs on tragedy—is accessible to a very small and specialized audience. To her great credit, Brandenburg methodically translates all Greek passages. She writes with clarity and when she does make use of literary theory (as she does in the introduction, pp. 18-21, when she discusses what reception means and how it happens), she does so in a way to clarify what she is trying to say. The factors that limit the impact of this work reflect the genre of the scholarly monograph rather than the decisions of Brandenburg. The monograph is not open access and this simple PDF costs (in the US) $115 but even if it were freely available for download (and even if every reader were comfortable with German), it would still be a heavy lift. The monograph assumes, for example, that readers who wish to learn more about the context of fragments have ready access to specialist publications such as the elaborate 20th-century editions for the fragments of Sophocles and the Comic Playwrights. Even if those books are available, few readers can work with the untranslated Greek and fewer still have access to a library in which they can look up the hundreds of sources from which these editions of fragmentary sources quote multiple times on each page. A work based on how one text quotes, paraphrases and cites other texts, if developed for a digital age, should be designed from the start as a hypertext.
If we believe that Sophocles in particular and Greek drama in general deserve to play a major role in the intellectual life of humanity, we can—and should—exploit digital media to open up not only the plays and fragments of Sophocles but also the texts which discuss them to an audience from beyond Europe and the English-speaking world. We need a new digital infrastructure, based on new scholarship that uses the design of traditional reference works as a starting point rather than as a limiting model.
Unlike nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom, Germany supports long term research projects that can take decades (or, in the case of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, more than a century). The time has come for a new born-digital, openly licensed edition of Sophocles and the Greek dramatists. This monograph demonstrates that Brandenburg is a scholar with the traditional philological skills that are the starting point for the next generation digital infrastructure that Greek drama will need if it is to flourish in a global intellectual world that extends beyond the languages and cultures of Europe and North America.
Works cited
Huffman, Carl A. Aristoxenus of Tarentum: The Pythagorean Precepts (How to Live a Pythagorean Life): An Edition of and Commentary on the Fragments with an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593168.
Kassel, Rudolf, Colin Austin, and Stephan Schröder. Poetae Comici Graeci. Berlin / New York / Boston: De Gruyter, 1983.
Radt, Stefan. Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. IV: Sophocles. Editio correction et addendis aucta. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999.