Re-Reading Reading Greek Tragedy

Summary

I have a copy of the Oxford Classical Text of Sophocles where one spread of pages is permanently discoloured into a dull yellow because it was left open for many days in the sun. I was working intently on the so-called deception speech in the Ajax and the book sat for hours open on my desk by the large windows of my college apartment through the summer. To see these pages now reminds me of the famous, grim lines of Macbeth, ‘My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf …’ There is inevitably for me a certain melancholic sense of the passing of time to reflect back to that summer more than thirty-five years ago, when I was writing Reading Greek Tragedy, still in my untenured twenties; but, unlike Macbeth, I can at least look back without a crippling sense of horror, and forward still with hope, not least thanks to the intellectual community of scholars in Cambridge and across the world with whom I have had the privilege of continuing to discuss Greek tragedy over the intervening decades.