‘Perhaps the most astonishing paragraph in the poem’ is Bailey's often quoted comment on 5.1308-49, the account of how men of the past tried to use wild beasts in war. ‘Fantastic’, ‘strange’, ‘bizarre’, ‘astonishing’, the product of ‘an intelligence fevered, perverted and cancerous’, a display of ‘obsessive exaltation’—such are the puzzled reactions of scholars to these disturbing lines.

The most recent commentator finds it full of ‘macabre and gory detail’ and ‘not integrated properly into its context’. And his reviewer's approval threatens to undo forty years' work on the patterns of thought, symbol and image in Lucretius: Bailey's biographical explanation, the poet's subjection to hallucination and even mental derangement, it is observed, ‘has never been satisfactorily refuted’. Even scholars who have sought to explain the passage rather than delete it as an interpolation or an aberration wonder whether the poet ‘has triumphed over the philosopher’ and therefore is called back to a more sober reality by the ‘recantation’ of 1341-49 (such things probably did not happen but might have, given the infinity of possible worlds).

When Oedipus rushes into the palace at line 1185 of the Oedipus Tyrannus we have a sense of dramatic fulfilment which, most people would say, is about as much as one play can offer. The process of getting us to this moment of climax has been so satisfyingly managed and our emotions kept at such tension before the instant of release that it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when the resolution of so much theatrical energy takes effect. We are tempted to ask no more of the dramatist: he can do what he likes with us, provided that he does it gently and recognises that our resources of pity and fear have been drained by what we have been through.

So it has been customary to regard the part of the play that follows 1185 as a leisurely declension from the high point of the discovery to the flat land of acquiescence: no new material but an absorption of the old, a gradual accommodation to the horror of the revelation. In keeping with this view the critical literature has often found very little to say about this closing scene. Yet there is evidence enough that the scene is something more than a winding-down. Its very dimensions should set us wondering. That Sophocles should use almost a quarter of his playing-time, not to clinch something in his final scene, but to offer unproductive and undemanding comment on a now played-out play, looks like dramatic and poetic waste. In fact the material of the scene takes us not down but up. There is a design at work that lets the play grow again. Oedipus finds his way back into the world and it is not hard to chart his progress through a number of stages that are separable and display a distinct identity, each of them contributing a little more to the cumulative effect. The play is really doing another kind of building towards another kind of climax. Immediately after the discovery there is a flatness of exhaustion, but from that low point the dramatist works to generate new tensions and excitements around the figure of Oedipus. When he and his daughters meet the play is back on high ground. To change the image, the progress of Oedipus could be compared with the return of a deep-sea diver from the ocean bed; he pauses at one pressure-level after another, getting used to the new conditions, and then proceeds to the next holding-station on the way to the surface.

It is an unfortunate weakness of most of the standard textbooks on Greek tragedy that they fail to communicate the immediacy of pressure that is of its essence. This particular inadequacy has hardly been corrected by the recent spate of books on either staging or the visual presentation of plays, which suggest themselves now as the standard adjustment to existing handbooks for students with or without the language.

One of the few certainties we have, in beginning the argument, is that tragedy is, if anything, about decisions and their consequences. This much is implied in Aristotle's intuition about hamartia, which if it means ‘mistake’ can be taken to direct attention to the circumstances which dictate a decision. Indeed, decisions are far more prominent in Attic tragedy than mistakes as such: to take two examples from the Oresteia, which as an Aeschylean trilogy should not seem so exceptional as people are inclined to make it, both Agamemnon and Orestes take decisions of terrifying consequence that can hardly be classed as ‘mistakes’ (namely to kill a daughter and to kill a mother, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon and Libation Bearers respectively). In this respect, Aristotle might be taken as considering more closely the sentimental drama that flourished in his day, and in this, if we judge by his perceptions, it may well be that Oedipus the King of Sophocles in fact marks a turning-point—in the desperate futility of Oedipus' errors—which is more readily, and perhaps with less justice, ascribed to Euripides.

Book 3 of De Rerum Natura ends with a series of dramatic voices unparallelled anywhere in Lucretius (lines 894-1094). Mourners, the elderly, Nature and Memmius raise their voices to debate the issue of mortality. From Epicurean tenets Lucretius dramatises and creates images for the follies of superstitious fears, passions, ambitions, attachment to nature, guilty fears of retribution for sins, and the blinding desire to live. But this section has been seen to have failed both as effective persuasion of Epicurean ideals and as an artistically polished conclusion to the book. The tone, the arrangement and the ideas of the drama's conclusion have been criticised by commentators from Hadzsits (1935) to Kenney (1971); the most comprehensive and often-cited commentator, Bailey (1947), calls the section a ‘culminating triumph-song over the mortality of the soul’ but finds Lucretius’ response to the mourners ‘not altogether satisfactory’, his ‘consolation…inadequate’, and flatly judges the last eighteen lines ‘unsatisfactory as a conclusion’. Bailey, as well as the others, has stressed the departure from Epicurean doctrine in both tone and imagery.

Dr Shelton's article, ‘Human Knowledge and Self-Deception’ (Ramus 13 [1984], 102-23), has two main theses which are related. The first, as she duly acknowledges, has already been put forward by a small number of other scholars; it is that Creon is the sole main character of the Antigone. The second is, I think, original, or at least has nowhere else been stated with such force; it is not merely that Antigone is a minor character (which is simply the converse of the first thesis) but that she is a dispensable one (‘Ultimately Antigone is not necessary for the story’). ‘The gods would punish Creon even if Antigone had never existed’; should they be remiss, other mortals could do the job (‘since everyone in the play seems to disagree with Creon, and Antigone is therefore not his only opponent, what exactly is her function in the play, and how does it differ from that of Haemon and Teiresias?’). I think that the emphasis of her article is seriously misleading; so I would like to deal with her theses as briefly as possible, without reopening the endlessly debated question of the exact rights and wrongs of the positions of Antigone and Creon.