Athenian tragic poets were careful to separate the ‘heroic’ world from the world of their ffth-century audience, and they did so by deploying the twin dynamic of ‘distance and diference’. This dynamic encoded cultural lessons and allowed the audience to sympathise with the dilemmas facing the characters on stage, and thus to evaluate and understand the way they went about dealing with those dilemmas. The Aias of Sophocles is used to make the point, demonstrating that the playwright attempted ...