Ajax, Electra, The Women of Trachis and Philoctetes

Summary

These are the four surviving tragedies of Sophocles that stand outside the Theban cycle of Oedipus and Antigone. Their dates are mostly uncertain; only Philoctetes is securely dated, to 409 BC, when it won first prize, and Ajax and The Women of Trachis are usually thought earlier than Electra. Lewis Campbell's verse translation, attached here, calls the hero Aias and the wife of Heracles Dêanira. In Ajax the Greek army has awarded the dead Achilles' armour to Odysseus rather than to Ajax, its greatest remaining fighter. Ajax sets out by night to kill the generals, but Athena clouds his mind and he butchers the army's captured cattle instead, believing them his enemies. In the prologue the goddess displays the deluded man to Odysseus, who answers with pity. Restored to sanity and overwhelmed by shame, Ajax takes leave of his concubine Tecmessa and their small son, deceives his friends with a speech about time and change, and falls on the sword Hector once gave him, in one of the very few deaths a Greek tragedy shows on stage. The last third of the play is a quarrel over his corpse, which Menelaus and Agamemnon would leave unburied until Odysseus, his enemy, persuades them to allow the rites. In Electra, Orestes returns secretly to Mycenae to avenge Agamemnon, murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. His tutor brings a false report that Orestes has died in a chariot race at the Pythian games, and Electra, who has kept faith with her father's memory through years of humiliation, is handed an urn she believes holds her brother's ashes. Her lament over it is the play's emotional height, and recognition and the killings of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus follow swiftly, with none of the Furies that pursue Orestes in Aeschylus. In The Women of Trachis, Deianira learns that Heracles, long absent, is bringing home the captive princess Iole as a second wife. Hoping to win back his love, she sends him a robe smeared with blood the dying centaur Nessus told her was a love charm. It is poison; Heracles is consumed in agony, Deianira kills herself, and Heracles, recognising an old oracle fulfilled, orders his son Hyllus to burn him on Mount Oeta. In Philoctetes, Odysseus brings Achilles' young son Neoptolemus to Lemnos, where the Greeks marooned Philoctetes ten years earlier because of his festering snake-bite, to win by lies the bow without which Troy cannot fall. Neoptolemus's growing pity for the suffering man and his inborn honesty break the plan, and only the appearance of the deified Heracles sends Philoctetes to Troy and to healing. Across all four plays Sophocles sets inflexible heroes against changing circumstance and asks what nobility, friendship and reverence for the gods require.

Top Lessons

• Pity for a ruined enemy

  Ajax opens and closes with Odysseus. In the prologue he refuses Athena's invitation to mock the maddened Ajax, because he sees in him the frailty of every mortal; at the end he persuades Agamemnon to allow the burial of a man who had tried to kill them both. The play makes magnanimity toward a fallen enemy the mark of true wisdom, set against the vindictiveness of the Atreidae and the hero's own unbending pride.

• Ajax's speech on time

  After resolving to die, Ajax speaks of how time brings all things to light and bends even iron wills, of winter yielding to summer and night to day, and his friends believe he has decided to live. Readers still argue whether he meant to deceive, spoke ironically, or briefly glimpsed a way of yielding he could not take. The speech is a test of close reading: its images say one thing, its context another.

• Lying for the common good

  Philoctetes poses a direct moral question: may a young man lie at his commander's order if the war's success depends on it? Odysseus argues that words, not deeds, rule men and that one short shame earns lasting honour. Neoptolemus first consents, then finds that pity for Philoctetes and his own nature will not let him complete the fraud. Sophocles lets each side speak forcefully before honesty proves the harder and nobler course.

• A good intention and a fatal trust

  Deianira means only to keep her husband's love; she feels no hatred for Iole and blames love itself rather than the girl. Yet she trusts the counsel of an enemy, the dying Nessus, and applies the charm before testing it. Her discovery comes too late. The play asks how far good intentions excuse a deed, and what prudence would have required of her.

• Grief that will not be consoled

  Electra keeps mourning when everyone around her counsels moderation, and her loyalty to her murdered father becomes the measure of her life. Her lament over the urn, holding what she believes is her brother's dust, shows love and hope collapsing into nothing. The play honours her constancy while letting students ask whether a life built on vengeance can be whole, and why Sophocles ends the matricide without the Furies.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Three of the four plays put bodily or mental affliction at their centre. Ajax's madness is presented as sent by Athena, a divine delusion lasting one night, followed by lucid shame; the play describes his raving, his recovery and his deliberate suicide, and Tecmessa's account of his waking is an unusually close description of a disordered mind returning to itself. Modern readings that compare Ajax to combat trauma are interpretive; the play itself frames his state as a god's punishment for pride. The Women of Trachis turns on a poison mistaken for a love charm and describes its action on Heracles' body in graphic detail, with paroxysms of pain separated by exhausted respite. Philoctetes is among the most sustained portrayals of chronic pain and of the social isolation of an offensive wound in ancient literature: the festering foot, the sudden attacks, the sleep that follows, the herb he uses to ease it, and the promise that Asclepius will heal him at Troy. Electra's unconsoled mourning is presented as fidelity, not illness. Sophocles' own priestly service to Asclepius is reported by later ancient sources.

• Ajax, prologue

  Athena displays the deluded Ajax, who believes he has captured and is torturing Odysseus and the generals, when he has slaughtered cattle.

• Ajax, first episode (Tecmessa's narrative)

  Tecmessa describes Ajax's night of slaughter, his return to his senses among the carcasses, and his silent, motionless grief.

• Ajax, suicide speech

  Alone on the shore, Ajax fixes Hector's sword in the ground, prays to Zeus, Hermes and the Furies, and falls on it.

• The Women of Trachis, Hyllus's report and exodos

  The robe clings to Heracles' flesh and devours it; his spasms, cries and alternating collapse are described and then enacted when he is carried on stage.

• The Women of Trachis, Deianira's death

  The nurse reports Deianira's silent suicide inside the house after Hyllus's curse.

• Philoctetes, the attack of pain

  Philoctetes is seized by agony from his wounded foot, begs Neoptolemus to cut it off, gives him the bow and sinks into sleep.

• Philoctetes, exodos

  Heracles promises that Asclepius will be sent to Troy to heal the wound.