According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

Around 514 BC a Spartiate Herakleid of the royal house by the name of Dorieus asked the state for a group of colonists to take with him to Africa, where he established a colony on the estuary of the Kinyps. Two years later the colony was driven off by a coalition of Libyan tribes (the Makai and others) and Carthage. Dorieus returned home and departed again to colonize Eryx in western Sicily. Again he failed, this time dying in combat with Elymians and Phoenicians. The Herakleid charter myth for the land of Eryx is as explicit as one may expect in the world of Greek colonization, and it is particularly Spartan in that it employs the motif of the Return of the Herakleidai for the benefit of a Spartan Herakleid of the royal house. It also demonstrates the viability of the challenge theory of Spartan territorial charter myths. Kinyps was the last site in North Africa free of either Carthaginian or Greek colonization, and western Sicily was the last corner of the island not colonized by Greeks. Late sixth-century Sparta was a latecomer; the fewer the lands available for the taking, the more ambition burned and the more explicit the charter myths.

Fictive Spartan colonies were so numerous in antiquity that modern scholars rarely want to have anything to do with the question of their historicity. This approach may be safe but is not always wise. Whereas obvious inventions of Spartan kinship should be excluded, questions about the possibility of Spartan colonization are legitimate, at least for the Archaic and Classical periods. The fact, for example, that in the Hellenistic period the Jews claimed kinship with the Spartans or that cities in Asia Minor such as Selge, Alabanda, and Synnada considered themselves Spartan colonies, is an excellent topic for the study of late attitudes, but such patently fictive Spartan kinships teach us very little about the Archaic and Classical reputation of Sparta as the mother city of cities such as Melos or Thera. With the latter it is at least legitimate to examine the possible factual basis of this reputation. Whether such cities were once in fact Spartan colonies is irrelevant to the study of attitudes to Spartan colonization in the Archaic and Classical periods. If, however, there were a kernel of truth in a claim such as that of Melos that Sparta was its mother city, it might clarify how that claim came into being and especially how it was sustained.

The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.

The Poet’s Voice is an intervention in the field of classics and is committed to the slow, close reading of Greek texts. The testing of how critical activity could be transformed by theoretical reflection is to be found in how the texts of antiquity were opened to a transformative exploration of their meaning. The practice of the discipline – how texts are read and understood, what questions are authorized, what sorts of answers countenanced – is what is at stake in such an enterprise. The Poet’s Voice is written from within the discipline of classics, to transform it from within, and hence its focus is on critically reading the texts of the discipline, both the ancient literature and its modern critics. That is how its theoretical commitment is embodied and enacted.

In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

What is surprising about a return to a book I wrote thirty years ago is how fresh it feels in my mind, as if I have kept writing it ever since. In my later studies, I have explored many of the same themes that I first discussed in this book, such as ethnicity, networks, and the ’small world’ effect on the rise of Greek civilization, some Mediterranean issues, the impact of myth and quasi-historical accounts on history, the validation and legitimization of conquest and settlement, the evidence of nomima and their usefulness for the ancient historian, the historical and archaeological evidence of settlement, and even the role of drawing lots in ancient Greece.

The founding of Sparta, Pindar’s ’colony of the Dorians’, and especially the legitimation of its presence in the Peloponnese are topics rich in mythological articulations. Sparta was believed to have been founded by Dorians who had no previous connection at all in the Peloponnese. Such a connection was articulated for them in terms of a historicizing genealogy of their leaders, the Herakleidai (descendants of Herakles). In marked contrast to the perception of the newly arrived Dorians, the arrival of these Herakleidai came to be viewed as a kathodos (a word signifying both ‘descent’ and ‘return from exile’). The Return of the Herakleidai – a return to a land which had once been theirs – implied a right of possession vindicated by the foundation of the Dorian cities of the Peloponnese under their leadership.

Antigone is the only character in Sophocles who explicitly purports to value philia above hatred. She does so in the course of a short dialogue, central to the play, which turns on the nature of philia and enmity.

The twin principles Help Friends and Harm Enemies are fundamental to the structure of Oedipus at Colonus. At the outset Oedipus reveals Apollo’s prophecy which he wishes to fulfil, and whose fulfilment will constitute the action of the play. He is to find rest at Athens, ‘bringing profit by dwelling here to those who welcomed me, but doom to those who sent me away, driving me out’). The dual theme is restated more explicitly when he tells the chorus that if they help him they will gain ‘a great saviour for this city, and troubles for my enemies’. For the first 700 lines of the play, until Creon arrives, Oedipus’ two-edged hopes and emerging power to implement them are constantly stressed. He shows his benign aspect to the Athenians, to whom he promises soteria and benefits if they help him. The arrival of Ismene shows his love for his daughters, and through her message his power over Thebes is revealed. It gradually emerges how he intends to use that power, and the scene culminates in a curse on his sons and a prayer that he may indeed have the control over their fate which the oracle has promised him. Later, in his long speech to Theseus, it is made clear that the same event will simultaneously bring help to his friends and harm to his foes, and Theseus’ response shows a full understanding of this.

Territorial myths may ’open up’ the territory, articulating rights or telling how it became possible to inhabit it, or they may ’close’ it, delimiting it and explaining why it is ’full’. Opening myths function either through an expressly articulated charter or through the identification of certain mythic scenes and events with particular places. Such localizations, involving the concretization and remapping of mythic geography, are rather flexible and seem to have evolved as the Greek colonies expanded. ’Closing myths’, on the other hand, express the end of expansion by defining (and justifying) territorial limits. Both these types are classified as historical myths – myths that function in history, have a dynamic relation with it, and are subject to changes because of it.

The opening lines of Ajax are spoken by the goddess Athena, who addresses her favourite, Odysseus, as an adherent of Harm Enemies: he is tracking down an enemy as usual, in a manner worthy of his traditionally tricky persona. She is the dearest of gods to him, and they enjoy a solidarity inherited from the Odyssey. He places himself in her hands, as he has always done in the past. But despite the bond between them, a conflict of values emerges. When Odysseus is reluctant to view the mad Ajax Athena scolds him as a coward. She implies that any kind of fear or ’reluctance’ constitutes cowardice.