‘The road of excess’

This chapter addresses E.R. Dodds’s papers on Greek tragedy. Despite everything that can be said in criticism of Dodds’s Bacchae, the book is a compelling masterpiece of classical scholarship. Its shortcomings all have to do with his approach to ‘the Dionysiac’. However, Dodds’s vision is fundamental to the reception of his work: its impact on readers, within and beyond the academy, is a cultural fact independent of the validity of his treatment of any particular work, phenomenon, or body of evidence. The chapter then considers Dodds’s 1960 article on the Oresteia and another article on Oedipus Rex. By both ancient and modern reckoning, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is among the greatest of Greek tragedies, and what would perhaps be generally acknowledged as the most satisfying interpretation of it was given by Dodds in his 1966 article ‘On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex’, his final contribution to the study of Greek tragedy.