Aesthetics in Action: Sophocles' Conception of Tragic Plot and Character

The theoretical analysis of tragedy is generally thought to begin with Aristotle’s Poetics. In my dissertation I argue that a century before Aristotle, Sophocles offered a sophisticated, self-conscious theory of tragedy. I contend that he presented this theory in and through his dramaturgy. Through close readings of three Sophoclean dramas—Trachiniae, Ajax, and Philoctetes—I show that this playwright not only staged plot (mythos), character (êthos), and thought (dianoia) but, in doing so, offered his audience a nuanced meditation on these aspects of drama. In sum, Sophocles theorizes:1) Tragic plots (mythoi) as representations of the resistance of myth to delimitation. 2) Tragic characters (êthê) as representations which compel moral assessment from two mutually complicating temporal perspectives at once. 3) Tragic characters’ thoughts (dianoiai) as represented not only in speech but also in subtext, gestures, silences, and other semiotic means. These conceptions not only anticipate Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy in the Poetics but also oppose it. The alternative view of tragedy they offer enriches our understanding both of Attic drama in its fifth-century performative context and of ancient Greek aesthetic theory more broadly. Additionally, Sophocles’ theory of tragedy has distinctive philosophical implications. Tragic plot and characters, as he theorizes them, share an inscrutability with their analogues in the real world. That is, tragedy in the Sophoclean mould exposes the epistemological limitations of its audience for interpreting certain components of experience shared between theatre and life: how actions relate, who others are in moral terms, and what others are thinking. At the same time, Sophoclean theatre presents an ethic for dealing with such limitations. Both the characters on-stage and the audience in the theatre of Dionysus are challenged by the interpretive difficulty of Sophocles’ plots and characters. But various characters in the plays learn to confront this challenge by humbly tempering their judgments and embracing a disposition of compassion (οἶκτος). The recognition by such characters that οἶκτος is the best response to the opacity of their ‘world’ translates into an ethical lesson for the spectator as to how best to respond to the similar opacity of their own world.

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