Sophocles and the Byzantine Student

Sophocles belongs to that small group of authors whose works – or some fraction of them – have always been classics. 1 Even Euripides, who was ultimately more influential – more widely performed after his death, more often quoted and studied – than Sophocles, was not as popular for a start, whereas Sophocles, like Homer as represented by the Iliad and Odyssey , or Virgil, or Horace, did not have to wait to achieve canonical status. A high proportion of his plays were outstandingly successful when first put on in the drama competitions of his lifetime; some of the most admired of these became part of the theatrical repertoire after his death and stayed there as long as plays were performed; at least a handful were intensively studied by the students and scholars of later antiquity, survived as classics in the Christian educational system of the Byzantine period and safely reached print in Venice in 1502.