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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
The character delivering this speech was not attempting a dispassionate assessment of the relative merits of two genres; rather, as often, a comic poet was asserting his rivalry with practitioners of an art form at once closely related and quite distinct. Nevertheless, the sentiments voiced here probably occur to anyone aware of how serious Greek literature generally confined itself to well-known myths. Can a literature based on such restricted subject matter really deserve its place among the world's classics? More specifically, to what extent can Sophocles be reckoned an original artist, when so many of his plays are based on myths already treated by an earlier tragic virtuoso, namely Aeschylus?
1 Text and translation from Olson 2006–12; see further Olson 2007: 172–5.
2 For the relationship between fifth-century tragedy and comedy see Taplin 1986.
3 Fr. 541 TrGF with Finglass 2017b: 9–13.
4 For that originality see Finglass 2018e: 13–40.
5 Antigone 2–3, 582/3–603, 856–68.
6 For justice and theodicy in Oedipus the King see Kovacs 2009b, 2019; Cairns 2013a; Finglass 2018e: 70–7.
7 Oedipus the King 100–1, 236–43, 455–6, 823–5, 1290–1, 1340/1–1346, 1410–11, 1436–7, 1518.
8 Finglass 2017e, 2018e: 41–51, 2018g.
9 On this speech see Finglass 2018f.
10 Philoctetes 1321–3. For the wildness of Philoctetes see Davies 2003; Finglass 2006.
11 Finglass 2011b: 26–41, 2011c.
12 Finglass 2007b: 34–47 (on Pindar's version), 2007d: 4–8, 2018j (on Stesichorus’ Oresteia).
13 For Stesichorus see Davies and Finglass 2014: 489; Xanthus fr. 700 PMG.
14 See Sommerstein 2015: 471–2 for the argument in this paragraph.
15 Slenders 2012: 162–3, to whom much of this paragraph is indebted.
16 Hahnemann 2012: 172.
17 Larson 2017: 107.
18 Whitman 1951: 122.
19 Dio Chrysostom 52.15 (test. 123).
20 Sommerstein 2012b. Cf. Wright 2012: 598–9: ‘The oddly uncritical admiration of ancient readers has encouraged many modern scholars to understate or oversimplify the complexity of Sophocles’ plays, or to base their opinions on an artificially schematic view of the genre, in which Sophocles somehow comes to represent an ideal or normative type of tragedy. This sort of criticism tends to make Sophocles seem too easy, even rather bland (while Euripides by contrast is made to seem unorthodox or aberrant).’