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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
Sophocles was an outstandingly successful playwright in his lifetime, with a most impressive number of victories (pp. 5–6 above); he was even Socrates’ favourite tragedian. Shortly after his death he received praise in Aristophanes’ Frogs of 405, and in Phrynichus’ Muses of the same year, in which a character refers to his ‘many beautiful tragedies’. In particular, the sweetness of his poetry was remarked on while he was still alive, and would become a frequent image in later criticism, paradoxical though that may seem given the dark tones of so many of his plays. For the rest of antiquity he retained his popularity, though from now on he would always be overshadowed by a playwright who during his lifetime had only rarely beaten him. The greater favour enjoyed by Euripides is visible as early as the fourth century, when his plays seem to have been reperformed more often than those of Sophocles, and then in later times is reflected by the considerably larger numbers of papyri, as well as quotations from his plays in other authors. Aeschylus, on the other hand, was far less popular than either Sophocles or Euripides, as measured by the same criteria. The reason for these relative standings, which were to remain consistent, will lie partly in the relative difficulty of the Greek used by each playwright. Aeschylus’ lexicon is the furthest removed from everyday language; Sophocles’ vocabulary may be easier to grapple with, but his syntax is still difficult, certainly more difficult than that of Euripides. Aeschylean tragedy was also less suited to displaying the bravura abilities of individual actors who played such a part in the transmission of tragic texts; in addition, his fondness for connected trilogies may have proved challenging in dramatic contexts unsuited to that elaborate form.
Essential works on this topic include Easterling 2006; Wright 2012; Magnelli 2017.
2 Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.4.3 (test. 146).
3 Phrynichus fr. 32 PCG (test. 105); see Stama 2014: 197–206. For Sophocles in comedy see further Nervegna 2016.
4 Ar. fr. 598 PCG (test. 108); see Mauduit 2001; Sommerstein 2012b: 17, and, for ‘sweet’ in literary criticism more generally, Hunter 2015.
5 Demosthenes 18.180 (test. 45).
6 Demosthenes 19.246 (test. 44); Demont 2017.
7 Plutarch, Quaestiones Convivales 737ab; Finglass 2017a: 479.
8 Athenaeus 13.584d (fr. 185).
9 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 6.5 (test. 46); Easterling 2002: 335–6; Holford-Strevens 2005; Finglass 2017a: 479.
10 Epictetus, Dissertations fr. 11 Schenkl (test. 47).
11 Σ Ajax 864a (test. 48).
12 Finglass 2015b.
13 Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 15, [Plutarch], Lives of the Ten Orators 841F (test. 156); Hanink 2014.
14 Finglass 2015a: 219–21, 2017a: 493–4, 2018e: 83–5. These three are all from the seven that survived complete, but we cannot thereby conclude that the seven, or some fraction of them, were more popular than the others in this region at this time, since it is so much harder to recognize the influence of a lost play on a particular vase.
15 Plutarch, Alexander 8.3, On the Fortune of Alexander 328d (test. 169–70). For Alexander and tragedy see Fountoulakis 2017: 77–82.
16 Alexander of Aetolus test. 7 Magnelli (S. test. 158). See Markantonatos 2012c on Sophoclean scholarship.
17 Galen, Commentary on the Epidemics of Hippocrates 2.4 (test. 157).
18 Finglass 2012c: 12–13; Antonopoulos 2013b; N. Wilson 1983: 44.
19 Test. 179; my translation, from Finglass 2017a: 480, is influenced by HE ii.254–5.
20 Test. 181; translation from HE.
21 Holford-Strevens 1999; Nervegna 2014: 178.
22 Panoussi 2002, 2013; Wright 2012: 593.
23 Cicero, Letters to his brother Quintus 2.16.3 (TrGF IV p. 425).
24 Finglass 2017a: 483–5, in press 3.
25 That number includes only papyri of the plays themselves; it does not include papyri of other authors who cite Sophocles, or paraliterary papyri such as prose hypotheses. When a papyrus was split into two parts which were published separately and later recognized as coming from the same document, that counts as one papyrus.
26 Iovine 2016: 318.
27 Hunt 1927a: 30.
28 See, however, Finglass 2018e: 89 on two second-century papyri of Oedipus the King whose provenance from a particularly rich library at Oxyrhynchus can be identified.