Sophocles and the Sacred Hero

Ancient Greek heroes were completely different from their modern counterparts. Rather than being distinguished by his virtue and willingness to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, the hêrôs of the fifth century B.C.E. was distinguished solely by his power. He was feared. He was held in awe. He was worshipped. In short, he was sacred.

Oedipus, Ajax, Heracles, and other figures who appear in the tragedies of Sophocles were hêrôes of this sort. If we want to understand what Sophocles was saying about them, we have to view them just as an ancient audience would have viewed them, stripping away the many layers of modern interpretation that tend to distort our interpretation of these characters. Only when we see the sacred heroes of Sophoclean tragedy as the playwright himself saw them, can we then proceed to ask: Do these tragedies still speak to us and, if so, how and why?

In this exploration of all seven of Sophocles’s extant tragedies, Jeffrey L. Buller begins by exploring what we know about the cult of the hero in the second half of the fifth-century B.C.E. and how those ideas may have been affected by the rise of philosophy and rhetoric. Buller then looks at each tragedy individually before turning to modern works of literature and film in the last chapter, seeking contemporary parallels for the protagonists of Sophocles.

Jeffrey L. Buller received his undergraduate degree in modern and classical languages from the University of Notre Dame and his master’s and doctorate degrees in classics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then served as a faculty member and administrator at Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University. In 1996, he received an ovatio from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, and from 2004-2005 he served as president of that organization. He is the author of more than thirty books and over two hundred articles, essays, and reviews.