Martin Litchfield West OM
December 31, 2013
Humble and hearty congratulations to Martin West on his appointment as a member of the Order of Merit. He is the seventh classical scholar to receive this exclusive honour in the 111 years of the Order’s history, following Sir Richard Jebb (1905), Henry Jackson (1908), Sir James Frazer (1925), J.W. Mackail (1935), Gilbert Murray (1941), …
Triptolemus’ Trips, or Around the World by Snake Power (part 2)
December 12, 2013
As I explained last week, the greater part of what we know about Sophocles’ early play Triptolemus relates to the instructions given by the goddess Demeter to Triptolemus of Eleusis for his journey or journeys to various parts of the world spreading the knowledge of grain cultivation and probably also of the Eleusinian mystery-cult. What …
Triptolemus’ Trips, or Around the World by Snake Power (part 1)
December 2, 2013
In 468 BC the tragic dramatist Sophocles won the City Dionysia for the first time. He was about twenty-eight years old, which was good going; Aeschylus gained his first victory when he was forty, Euripides when he was thirty-eight or so, and each of them had been competing at the festival, on and off, for …
Parallel but presumably unconnected
September 27, 2013
In 2007 Christoph Muelke published a small papyrus fragment (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 4807) containing about a dozen lines of verse, which happened to include six words that had been quoted by an ancient commentator on Aristophanes who attributed them to Sophocles. The context of those six words had not been known, but the new fragment surprisingly …
Sophocles the politician
July 5, 2013
Sophocles was arguably the greatest, and certainly in his own time the most popular, of Greek tragic dramatists. He was also, in his later years, a prominent figure in Athenian public life, and one whose relationship to Athens’ democratic political system was curiously equivocal. He was more than once chosen by popular vote for the …
Thoughts of a serial translator
April 10, 2013
Here … is the text of the plenary lecture I gave at the annual conference of the Classical Association at Reading last Wednesday. Next year’s conference is in Nottingham. It will be a bit later in April, and we hope the weather will be better! Alan Sommerstein
Multiple champion “killed” in racing tragedy
January 31, 2013
As this is National Storytelling Week, I thought I’d put up my favourite piece of storytelling from ancient drama – an early classic of sports reporting, from Sophocles’ Electra. The old slave-tutor of Prince Orestes of Argos has come to bring some very sad news to his master’s mother. “He went to the famous competitive …
A new guide to Sophocles
October 25, 2012
Nottingham classicists have contributed three chapters to the new Brill’s Companion to Sophocles edited by Andreas Markantonatos – more than any other institution in the world. In this volume, which covers all aspects of Sophocles’ dramas and their reception, Patrick Finglass writes on Sophocles’ Ajax (which he edited for Cambridge University Press last year), Alan Sommerstein on …
