Agōn and Authority

This chapter focuses on the agōn sophias. The term is used to describe a group of scenes that, despite differences in formal constitution, stage an opposition between two understandings of sophia and debate what it is to be sophos. These scenes are bound together not so much by their verbal or scenic form (insofar as it can be reconstructed) as by the agonistic setting and the central concern of sophia, which both figures seek to define and claim for themselves through debate. There is ample evidence that such debates were a Euripidean specialty, reflecting on novel intellectual currents and interrogating the role of the intellectual in society. All of these agōnes pose the question of the value of sophia to the wider community, and are thus emphatically political. But the form as a whole, the chapter argues, demonstrates the need for a broader understanding of tragic politics and ideology.