The Tragic Homer

It was a cliché of ancient literary criticism that Sophocles was ‘most Homeric’: Polemo put the idea epigrammatically when he said Homer was the epic Sophocles and Sophocles the tragic Homer. 1 Modern scholarship has tended to endorse this view without paying very close attention to the particular ways in which Sophocles uses his epic models or to the new kinds of perception and sensibility he brings to bear on them. 2 Of course there are important similarities: Sophocles seems more interested than either of his great rivals in heroic behaviour and (in the extant plays at any rate) characteristically chooses models of human experience that are very like those of the epic, as when he shows a great individual pitting his moral strength against the rest of the world in a sort of test of man’s endurance.