Becoming Female: The Male Body in Greek Tragedy 9781472539656, 9780715637128, 9781472521231

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Becoming Female

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BECOMING FEMALE The Male Body in Greek Tragedy

Katrina Cawthorn

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published in 2008 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. © Katrina Cawthorn 2008 Katrina Cawthorn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-7156-3712-8 ePUB: 978-1-4725-2124-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-2123-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Ray Davies

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration and translation

vii ix

Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body The cultured body The cultured body versus the material body Why study the ancient body? The ancient body – what does it comprise? The idealising tendency – Greece as origin The body theatricalised – the male becomes female The ‘corporeal style’ of tragedy

1 1 2 4 5 8 9 14

1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Part 1. The place of the body in tragedy Distinctions between pain and suffering, epic and tragedy Displaying the afflicted body Part 2. The power of logos and soma – the flesh of words The embodied voice The role of logos and soma in the enactment of suffering The body within and beyond logos

19 19 25 27 28 31 34 39

2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering Part 1. Woman’s intimate relation to ‘the body’ Part 2. The female body and suffering The susceptible female body Part 3. Mimesis, tragic dissonance, and the female body

44 44 50 54 56

3. The Precarious Male Body Part 1. The male relation to the body Part 2. Suffering and the male body Afflictions: the transmission of suffering from female to male Part 3. Dissonant heroes

59 59 68 71

v

72

Contents 4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female The ambiguities of Heracles The feminine within – Heracles’ hamartia

79 82 96

5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male?

98

6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions The effects of tragedy: the audience becomes female

112 124

Notes Bibliography Index

131 157 183

vi

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the tireless and generous support provided by Gerald Fitzgerald and Rachel Fensham. I enjoyed the privilege of Gerald’s teaching for many years, and this book has benefited immeasurably from his advice and expertise. A deeply original intellectual, his observations on Greek tragedy, the body in general, and the body classical in particular, inform this work. I am most grateful to Gerald for his continuing encouragement and friendship throughout the years. Monash Classical Studies Department in the 1990s was a vibrant and exciting place, a result of Gerald’s ability to draw together and foster a really talented group of individuals. I also wish to thank Rachel Fensham, formerly of the School of Literary, Visual, and Performance Studies at Monash University. I value her positive, personable approach and unfailing generosity with her time. Rachel’s expertise on modern theories of feminism, theatre and the body, and her impressive insight, both in a practical and creative sense, undoubtedly improved this book and facilitated its completion. Additionally I had the good fortune to work with Terry Threadgold, and her enthusiasm, support, and advice have left their mark on this work. I would also like to thank June Close, my teacher in secondary school, who fostered my interest in Classical Studies. In addition, I appreciate the financial support Monash University provided in the form of a Postgraduate award, followed by the Australian Postgraduate Award, which initially afforded me the time to allow my ideas to gestate in a less hurried fashion. David Konstan has been most helpful, encouraging, and supportive of this book being published, after I contacted him to thank him for his feedback as examiner of my doctoral dissertation. Jane Griffiths of Monash University Classics Department has also been so generous with advice, and I am grateful to her for suggesting I contact Duckworth. My editor at Duckworth, Deborah Blake, has been most obliging and helpful every step of the way. I have benefited from her guidance and thank her for making the process so agreeable. The assistance and interest of the following scholars confirmed my personal experience of the expansive generosity of academics in general – to Karen Bassi, Helen King, Kirk Ormand, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Victoria Wohl and Thomas van Nortwick I owe thanks for the provision of

vii

Acknowledgements unpublished papers or articles that were difficult to procure. This book also draws on the engaging and provocative works of other scholars who carved out new pathways in classics – for example, Froma Zeitlin, Charles Segal, Nicole Loraux, Page duBois, Anne Carson, Thomas Laqueur, Guilia Sissa, Jean-Pierre Vernant, David Halperin, Jack Winkler, Edith Hall, Maria Wyke and James Porter. My friends and family, especially my parents and sister, have always given me their support, interest, and love, and I thank them for this. My deepest gratitude to Nick for his unfailing support, patience, good humour and love, and for giving up any spare moments to care for our children so I could work on this book. To my sons Benjamin and Luca, whom I thank for speeding up this process by providing their own due dates, and for the gift of their pure love – may your engagements with the masculine and the feminine be far more positive than the experience of the Greek tragic hero.

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Note on Transliteration and Translation The transliteration of Greek names into English is a problem many scholars in this field encounter. I have chosen to adopt the more familiar form of Latin transliterations, but a sense of consistency is difficult to achieve. The translation of Heracles is a case in point – using the Greek system of transliteration renders this as Herakles, whilst the Latin system produces this as Hercules, but many commentators use the form of Heracles. I have chosen in this instance to proceed with the hybrid form of Heracles. I have adhered to the convention in classics of using s’, instead of s’s, for classical nomenclature when using the genitive form. I have elected to work with the standard university translations provided by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene for the University of Chicago Press in the hope that my work will be as accessible as possible to non-classicist readers. These are the translations in use throughout my book unless otherwise specified. I have also consulted other translations, in particular Loeb Classical Library editions, but have also used some valuable recent translations by feminist classicists. My preference for using the translations of others rather than relying on my own is also a reflection of the departments I have worked in – initially the Department of Classical Studies but ultimately the School of Visual, Literary, and Performance Studies at Monash University.

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When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge } Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all. It is better to let it last for long years; and even to anchor at the isle when you are old, rich with all that you have gained on the way, not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches. Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage Without her you would never have taken the road } C.P. Cavafy, Ithaca

Introduction Imagining the Classical Body The cultured body Greek tragedy was characterised by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy as a space where ‘the tattered rags of the classical tradition’ have repeatedly ‘been sewn together in their various combinations, and ripped apart again’.1 Nietzsche’s comment evokes a kind of critical ‘eternal return’ to the space of Greek tragedy, as each generation attempts to read the Greeks from a ‘new’ angle, indelibly shaped by the cultural milieu one works within. I write within yet another revision of this tradition, within the field of feminist classicists whose engagement with feminism has provided some challenging theoretical applications for the study of ancient Greek culture. The ‘new’ classicists have opened up the field of ancient sexuality and the study of ancient bodies.2 Their work, combined with the influence of Michel Foucault (whose main contribution to the field of classics is a methodological one), has led to a re-consideration of the ancient body.3 In recent poststructuralist readings, sexuality, gender, and the body have been established as discursive spaces, culturally inscribed and enacted, thus subject to societal constraints and moulding. In short, sexuality and the body have been perceived as historical constructs.4 So, as Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests in Mortals and Immortals, we should: } direct our inquiry to the body itself, no longer posited as a fact of nature, a constant and universal reality, but rather viewed as an entirely problematic idea, a historical category, steeped in the imagination (to use Le Goff’s expression), and one which must, in every case, be deciphered within a particular culture }.5

The role of culture in creating and shaping bodies, Vernant seems to believe, should be the starting point for any discussion of the body.6 Nietzsche also recognises this firm link between culture and the body. He emphasises: } one should inaugurate culture in the right place – not in the ‘soul’ } the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology: the rest follows } This is why the Greeks remain the supreme cultural event of history – they knew, they did what needed to be done }.7

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Becoming Female Culture is hopelessly embodied, and the body is hopelessly cultural, a product, a text, an artefact of culture.8 Indeed, culture is instated in the body, as Nietzsche writes. Nietzsche’s remark also stresses just how body-centred ancient Greek culture appears to have been. The male body has been the frequent focus, both historically and textually, of this body-centred nature of ancient Greek culture. Indeed, the male body is ubiquitous – enshrined in art (as the main topos), in medicine and dietetics (the body is the central concern), politics (as the key persuasive force in oratory, the locus of the expression of political and social power), the military (functioning as the critical instrument of warfare), poetry and drama (the body is the vehicle for performance), and finally, the body is entrenched in the symposia and discourses of what will become known as philosophy.9 The female body also appears to be prevalent in all but one of the above categories – warfare. (Yet even in the realm of war the female body is at times present – in the mythical aetiology of the Trojan War, Helen’s body starts the war in one version.) The female body, however, does not appear to be enshrined like the male body at the centre of culture, but instead operates at the margins, and is often expressed as the source and site of anxiety, tension, ambivalence, and mystery. The male body typically serves as the principal body in most genres, whilst the female body often works as his foil, the deviant body, the shadow of the male body. A complex distinction between the male body, which functions for the most part as the public expression of the body, and the female body, which is regularly cast as the private expression of the body, is perhaps in evidence here too. But, to qualify this, the female body is also ‘present’ in public representation, depicted in statuary and art, present in the religious sphere, and in a complex way, present but absent in theatre – real women are absent from the stage, yet the feminine is the condition of tragedy in a sense, and omnipresent. So, too, the male body certainly plays an important role in the Greek imagination of private space. The cultured body versus the material body The notion of the body as a ‘medium of culture’, as created and mediated by culture, is a useful platform on which to approach the body in Greek tragedy.10 The body in question is the body in representation, the textual body, rather than the material body. We have no unmediated access to the material bodies of ancient Greece at all – whether female or male, citizen or slave, the ancient material body is resoundingly absent. Every representation of the body is mediated and shaped by its culture in some way. Furthermore, all evidence from ancient Greece is textual, whether the evidence at hand derives from the genres of art, tragedy, or medicine. In order to explore the textual representations of the body, I will discuss some models evident in the literary remains, and consider how attention to

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body somatics might open up a different discourse on tragedy, so long centred on philology. (However, the nexus of soma, body, and logos, here meaning word, speech, discourse, is also considered, since logos is embodied in subtle ways in tragedy, as explored in Chapter 1.) The textuality of the body (and to a lesser extent, the performativity of the body) in tragedy is at issue here. In short, the ancient body can only be known as a cultural entity. The ancient body is not a given, rather it is a ‘category and the result of specific discursive practices’.11 The lived-in ancient body cannot be known, and the fragments of textual bodies are all that survive. The ancient body is ultimately ‘elusive’ and incomplete, represented in bits and pieces.12 As a result of this recent scholarship, the body has become endlessly troubled and troubling, an unstable and destabilising category.13 It resists the taxonomic urges of theorists, eluding any imposed boundaries, in a similar fashion to the notion of the feminine in male culture. On many levels the body per se remains an enigma, imaginary, unknowable and ephemeral, even ‘unrepresentable’ as Moira Gatens has suggested.14 The mystery of the body, to a great extent, seems intact. The body appears to function as the ultimate tabula rasa, inscribed with the desires of each culture. It may be called into service to become whatever culture demands in an expression of the endless becomings or multiple possibilities of the body. To illuminate this interplay of culture and the body, perhaps one of the clearest examples of this connection might be found in ancient Greek medicine. Helen King, Ann Hanson, Lesley Dean-Jones, Guilia Sissa, Thomas Laqueur, Heinrich von Staden and other theorists have revisited ancient medical discourse with an awareness of the culturally constructed nature of the body, and they have produced some spectacular results.15 Here the sexed body, alongside the gendered body, emerges (again) as an emphatically cultural phenomenon, embossed and created by culture. This scholarship makes it possible to push the boundaries marked out by early feminism where gender was revealed as a socially constructed phenomenon. Gender in this sense functions as a system of signs applied to or performed by the body to create meaning, place, and identity within a given culture. The body, including the sexed body, like gender, begins to emerge clearly as a product of cultural discourse.16 Thus, for example, a notion of the multiplicity of bodies begins to arise from a consideration of the ancient Greek sex/gender system (and this is perhaps especially true of classical Athens). And, the process of becoming male and female, a fluid scale, seems to lead to multiple sexed/gendered positionings. Furthermore, this recent work on the medical models of the body serves to fracture an enduring and dominant view of the body as universal and ahistorical, a view that still carries weight in the fields of psychoanalysis and contemporary medicine. If the science of bodies can be shown to be an historically shaped and culturally subjective field, in a discipline that has

3

Becoming Female always asserted its objectivity and claimed to pursue bodily ‘facts’ in an unbiased manner, then this observation may extend quite readily across other genres. So, in some sense, the body’s basic facts, its physiology and anatomy, can never be fully reached, since the ways scientists and doctors read, and indeed construct, the body are of course shaped by their cultural climate, although the scientific claim of objectivity has at times obscured this. In the ancient Greek medical models of the body the role of the imaginary is unmistakably stark, for it is a culture where anatomy is unknown, and dissection is not practised, and there is perhaps space for a fuller imagining of the body.17 Classical scholars have until quite recently assumed that when the Greeks spoke of the body that they were talking about an entity quite similar to our own construction. Yet the Greeks seem to have had entirely different bodies in mind. Why study the ancient body? From a feminist or postmodernist perspective, one might ask why study the ancient body, why keep recycling this canon, why not abandon it and study the modern body exclusively?18 These are valid questions, since the ancient Greek models, riddled with misogyny, are already entrenched in both subtle and explicit ways in modern models. (For example, the unstable female body is an enduring topos both then and now.)19 To consider the ancient Greek canon in some ways perpetuates its hold. But it is precisely for this reason that ancient bodies need to be re-read once more.20 The models of modern bodies bear the traces of ancient configurations of bodies and, as such, require analysis. Or, to put it a slightly different way, there are ancient bones in modern bodies, and therefore, to look at the modern body to the exclusion of these ancient archetypes obscures and limits the understanding of modern models of the body. For example, Maria Wyke, in her introduction to Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Bodies of Antiquity, writes: } the bodies and genders of antiquity still matter. Ancient bodies continue to be appropriated as sites on which to negotiate modern sexualities and genders }, and their analysis now occupies a prominent place in current academic debates about sexuality, gender, and the body.21

Wyke further emphasises this ancient architecture framing and underpinning the modern body. She argues that ancient fragments of bodies or ‘parchments of gender’, as she terms it, have been implemented to create the ‘genders, sexualities, politics, and ethnicities of later cultures and to construct the pleasures and the suffering of modern gendered bodies’.22 Therefore, it is because of the enduring influence of these models on western society that they need to be dismantled and critiqued. In order to

4

Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body diffuse the ancient power still inherent in current models, we need to return once more and examine these ancient configurations of the body. To leave the ancient body undisturbed means to leave its status as ‘classic’ or ‘classical’ (in this sense, meaning unchanging) in situ, when in fact the ancient body is characterised by its changing nature.23 Without the process of decoding these ancient vestiges of attitudes to sex, gender, and the body, it is difficult to imagine other alternatives, and the ancient body’s currency and valency, hidden in modern models, remains intact. This is perhaps in part why the French theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze so often rework ancient ideas and use the cachet of ancient figures as rhetorical tropes. Ancient bodies and ancient texts remain seductive. There is still a need to return, decode and disturb this material, and to use its rhetorical power to develop new projects, or new ways of thinking. The ancient body – what does it comprise? The important question of what the ancient body comprises still remains for this culture. Where does the body reside, does it include face and body, or just the body? The composition of the body differs depending upon era, locale, and genre, but, in keeping with this notion of the enigma of the body, classical texts are often vague, failing (or choosing not) to provide these details. The question of whose body is under consideration might also be raised – an Athenian male citizen seems to have been be configured differently to the other (for example, females, metics, and slaves). Thus, the body of the Athenian male citizen is ideally characterised by the quality of orthos (meaning upright), proud, strong and open, whilst the slave’s body is depicted in a hunched manner. In artistic representation, the female body is often exhibited leaning forward with a closed silhouette, especially when depicted nude/semi-nude – for example, the Esquiline Venus. This stooping pose provides a direct contrast to the positive male bodily expression of orthos and may link the female with the slave’s body in a negative fashion.24 Another important question needs to be considered – does the ancient Greek concept of body include or exclude the mind? To propose that just one model existed is, however, problematic. In all likelihood, there would have been variations and alternatives, but it seems fair to suggest that the body in pre-Platonic Greece generally appears to be inseparable from a concept of mind – the mind seems to be imagined as grounded in the body, to be conceived as a somatic function even in its very act of cerebration.25 Fairly consistently, the models of the body discernible in Attic tragedy also seem to conceive of the body and mind together, as a whole. The subject is usually cast as a body-mind or as a ‘body-self’, to use Bruce Wilshire’s term, developed in Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor, a term I will adopt, since it refuses the body-mind split of

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Becoming Female Platonic and post-Platonic discourse.26 The mind is very much a part of the body, swamped with somatic references, spoken of and constructed in terms normally applied to the body. The split between the mind and the body does not come until the apparently deeply somatophobic project of Plato, until philosophy’s attempts to escape the mortal constrictions of the body, and to extricate the body from the mind and establish the mind/soul/male as eternal, unchanging essence.27 I italicise the word ‘apparently’ since the body is omnipresent in Plato, immersed in notions of mind, as is the feminine, which is, of course, enmeshed in notions of the masculine, and vice versa. Plato’s relationship with the feminine is complicated, and the Platonic relationship with the body, when decoded, is no less complicated.28 Plato cannot control the significations and omnipotence of either, an effect of the cultural construction of these categories. The body and the feminine are both represented as fluid, uncontrollable, and unable to be contained. Furthermore, part of the problem the body poses is isolated here in Plato’s apparent desire to cast the mind/soul/male as unchanging – the body/female keeps changing, becoming something else. The mimetic potential, the histrionic, theatrical capabilities of the body and the feminine and their capacity for dissimulation appear problematic for Platonic discourse.29 In order to fine-tune this question of what the body is, I ask what is the classical body? What sorts of bodies come to mind when we think of the classical body now? Perhaps the body in art is the primary image that comes to mind – the beautiful restrained marble bodies, both male and female (which were in fact painted and thus would have looked quite different from the examples of classical art and sculpture we have received). When we think of the classical body in art, is it the image of a white marble nude male body in all its beauty that comes to mind? Or the partially nude, modestly draped female body giving the illusion of a closed body to the viewer?30 These bodies represented in the genre of art contribute greatly to the romanticisation of the notion of the classical body. But when we turn to classical Greek medicine, to the medical discourses on male and female bodies, the classical body begins to look very different. The strange bodies of medicine, subject to flux and flow (in particular the female body, with its shifting organs and porous flesh), emerge from the text in a surprising way. Once we begin to really pay attention to the classical body, preconceived notions are disrupted. Tragic bodies also look very different from our idea of the body in art once the existing theatrical conventions are read back into theatre (for example, where the male plays the female role). The tragic body is fundamentally a mimetic or metamorphic body, hard to pin down, difficult to compartmentalise as male or female. The notion of the unstable, changeable body is also implicated in this model of the feminised male body. The tragic (female and male) body is essentially in a state of transition, subject to becoming other.

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body Upon examining this classical body, the dissonant and contradictory nature of ancient attitudes towards the body also begin to emerge with more clarity. These inconsistencies are an important facet of the model of the classical body, if there is one to speak of in a generic sense. As James Porter writes in his introduction to Constructions of the Classical Body, ‘the body is a problem that can and should be faced, even if only by assessing its incoherency and especially the instability of its formulation by us’.31 These inconsistencies seem to be built into a fundamental concept of the ancient body and are part of an identifiably Greek way of thinking – that a concept contains its opposite. The apparent anomalies (to the contemporary observer) direct the critic to the heart of ancient thought in one sense and throw into relief the subsequent differences of the ancients to contemporary ways of thinking about minds and bodies in the postPlatonic era. The body thus emerges from a study of ancient Greece as historical, textual, culturally inscribed, proscribed, and enacted. The ancient model of the body (or sexed bodies) appears to be essentially unfinished, always subject to ongoing negotiations, revisions, improvements, and devolutions. The body is a site that is always changing, mutable, fluid, and incomplete. It is endlessly open to re-interpretation and modification, endlessly being rewritten. While the classical body by definition bears strong connotations of ‘changelessness’, the study of it paradoxically reveals the opposite, the perennially changing body.32 The body in tragedy is highly illustrative of this changing ancient body (because it is the theatrical body, with all the connotations of the theatrical becoming operative, as the theatrical body becomes an/other body). The tragic body works to distil the following observation offered by Porter on the classical body. He writes, ‘there is no singular body in the classical world but only a series of embodiments, hegemonic constructions, discriminations, and materialisations, which together produce the fantasy of “the (classical) body” ’.33 Perhaps more than in any other genre, the body in tragedy emerges as a ‘set of possibilities to be continually realised’.34 Tragedy confronts the problem of the body, of the feminine, of the masculine, of mimesis, particularly the mimesis of suffering and the mimesis of the feminine, and how this changes or affects the male heroic body (as I explore in Chapter 4). These issues are problematic because of the ambivalence and uncertainties they generate, and become especially troubling when the male body is the body in question. The body and the sex/gender system are, for example, reproduced in tragedy as uncertain, unruly, problematic, and above all, complicated. These unsettling images are to be found at times in other genres, but tragedy seems to really bring these complications out. It takes the implicit hints of such bodies in other genres (the medical body often exhibits such uncertainties, for instance), and pushes them to the extreme, destabilising the central image of its own culture. The body works as a most useful cause for concern in tragedy.

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Becoming Female The idealising tendency – Greece as origin Classical Greek culture has enjoyed an enduring idealisation and romanticisation in the academy and western culture in general, although this hold has been shaken in the last few decades.35 As the earlier quote from Nietzsche foreshadows, the Greeks have at times been profoundly idealised, and have enjoyed a privileged position as the fons et origo of western culture.36 From Nietzsche to Kitto and his contemporaries, the genre of classical Athenian tragedy in particular has been singled out for exaltation as an ‘“ideal” ground, a ground lifted high above the real paths of mortal men’.37 A claim characteristic of the period of classical theatre scholarship in which H.D.F. Kitto worked may be found in Richmond Lattimore: ‘By or during the career of Aeschylus, the features of Greek tragedy become fixed } Tragedy is heroic. The costumes are formal, physical action restrained and without violence; naturalism is neither achieved nor desired.’38 One faction of recent classical scholarship has invested in examining the kinds of areas completely sanitised by this golden age. For example, sexuality, the body, and to use Gayatri Spivak’s term, the ‘subaltern’ (in this sense meaning the socially inferior – women, barbarians, and slaves) have emerged as popular areas of interest.39 In short, a section of recent scholarship has concentrated on the other, the underbelly of the ancient Greek model developed in the 1950s and 1960s, a model which cast the Greeks as ‘like us’ – as white European gentleman, restrained and mannered.40 The Greeks’ otherness and the Greek male treatment of others has since been emphasised and explored by contemporary critics.41 The question of whether the classical world is currently being reidealised also remains open. The idea of the classical continues to exert a powerful influence, producing readings which idealise the Greeks in both overt and subtle ways.42 For example, in gay and lesbian studies, ancient Greek culture has at times become a promised land, functioning as a powerful place of origin. The position of the canon of classical texts as a master discourse, with all the imperatives this connotes, is often difficult to disturb and dislodge. When the plays are read within this methodology of disturbing the surface and reading against the grain of the text, the hero seems to be troubled. Heroism is put under pressure by the very processes of tragedy in many of the extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and, most emphatically, Euripides. The tragic hero seems rarely heroic in an uncomplicated, straightforward manner (and, therefore, it might be difficult to maintain Lattimore’s position of tragedy as heroic). Tragedy itself seems to be similarly fluid, unstable, and infused with violent suffering. The hero becomes undone in classical Athenian tragedy, becoming something other than a conventional hero. The genre of tragedy seems to involve a great challenge to the hero, one he barely survives. The tragic hero becomes a man-woman, virulently feminised in both body and identity.

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body Therefore, against this traditional interpretation of the male hero in tragedy as idealised and glorified, the male hero might instead be read as troubled and problematic. Tragedy seems to offer a persistent theme of the mutilation and humiliation of the male hero, at times appearing to provide little recourse for the resurrection of this hero. Indeed, tragedy is a genre that seems to critique the traditional male hero. Tragedy might seem to be less about how ordinary men should strive to be, and more concerned with what men should not be, about the horror and dilemma of the ‘unstrung hero’, and the potentially subversive pleasure to be taken in considering this taboo figure.43 The feminine and the female body play a dominant role in tragedy, used as a discursive space for thinking through the male body-self. The feminine and the female body are implemented to think through the fundamental underpinnings of this society, in a way that conforms to a general patriarchal tendency to cast the feminine as ‘good to think with’.44 The body theatricalised – the male becomes female If the body is written as a social discourse, embracing the multiplicity of gender and sexuality, the sorts of male bodies that emerge from tragedy are most intriguing. The female bodies-identities are the usual types of bodies we might recognise in this culture – sick, diseased, unstable, emotional, vindictive, polluting, sadistic, leaky, visceral.45 Elsewhere regularly barricaded off from such corporeality, the male body becomes feminised in similar ways. The normative Athenian male body – the ideal, glorious body against which all others are measured in Athens – becomes this other body, female, animal, mad, barbarian, on the tragic stage. For example, in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Heracles becomes female (as I will pursue in Chapters 4 and 5). Heracles is also bestialised in his fight with Achelous in the same play. Here the spectator cannot distinguish Heracles from Achelous – lines 505-22. And in Euripides’ Heracles, Heracles is cast as mad and female.46 Classical Athenian tragedy seems to demonstrate a deep interest in the topos of the male becoming female. The male body in tragedy becomes, to use Catherine Waldby’s terms for the female body in contemporary culture, ‘permeable’, ‘receptive’, and disturbingly open to ‘absorb } violence’.47 Therefore, in some ways, the tragic male body becomes a recognisably female body. One of the primary or iconic models of the body produced in tragedy is that of the fatally feminised, suffering male body, wounded, bleeding, altered in form from the pure masculine. The male body morphs into a feminised body via tragedy’s discourses and actions. In the construction of a normative male body-self, the female participates in this process of the male becoming male by virtue of its function as other, playing a huge role in defining the male by virtue of antithesis. But in the space of tragedy, the female plays a fundamental role in the undoing

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Becoming Female of andreia, in the male becoming female. The other (feminine, animal, and slave), so firmly shunned and denied in the Athenian male elsewhere in cultural discourse, becomes internalised in tragedy, frequently insinuating itself within the male hero, afflicting his body-self. The other now appears at the centre in tragedy. In some ways taboo bodies, those cast as miasmatic bodies (the female body, the effeminate male body or the dreaded kinaidos), become institutionalised not only within the tragic hero but also within the hallowed space of theatre, one of the central practices of this culture. These subversive bodies pervade the stage, and the normative male becomes marginalised, disenfranchised. And yet, this is not a direct exchange of positions, of sexed/gendered identities. In classical Athenian tragedy, masculine and feminine often intermingle (fatally) within the body-identity of one character. The theatre of Dionysus is a space of theatrical becomings, where the actor transforms into other subjects, other positionings. The prevalent anxiety about the feminine in this culture is now brought to the fore and its focus trained onto the male body in tragedy. Not only is the female dangerous, resistant, and challenging, but the female is no longer safely demarcated as the other (or as object). The feminine moves into the most valued topos of this patriarchy, the male subject. The male body mutates in a sense into the female body in tragedy – his body becomes leaky, uncontrollable, violated, bloodied. The male body becomes tragic via this passage through the feminine. A number of tragedies might be read as keeping the male body trapped in the feminine, unable to recover a male heroic identity, and therefore trapped in the genre of tragedy, unable to rise out of it. Plays such as Euripides’ Bacchae and Heracles, and Sophocles’ Trachiniae, might be read in this way. Tragedy could be interpreted as a kind of ‘reproduction of femininity’ and masculinity, via the parthenogenetic body-mind of the male, midwifed by the male poet, the male actor and the audience.48 (And here the ‘notional’ audience is male, regardless of whether women did indeed attend the Great City Dionysia.49) Tragedy might be understood as the reproduction of its culture in one sense, harnessing the perceived mimetic ability of the female body to reproduce male culture. However, the tragic reproduction of male culture is not a straight reproduction, it is a complicated and skewed representation. The genre of classical Athenian tragedy usually creates or requires the anti-hero as the condition of tragedy. The mask of the body, of the feminine, both in performance and text, thus becomes a potential site for the transgression of the traditional sex-gender system in this culture, as it is expressed outside tragedy. The sexed/gendered body in tragedy might also become a subversive space to rethink standard ideologies. Whether this was intentional or not is open to question, but I suggest it is an effect of tragedy’s performative practices. Tragic suffering also appears to further this conflation or disturbance of male and female, as I will explore. Suffering plays

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body a key role in both creating and skewing these masculine/feminine associations of the sexed body, and remakes the male body into something else. Suffering therefore plays a fundamental role in the male body becoming female, becoming other. The tragic conjunction of male and female is provocative and useful because of its performative potential and its disruption of the desire to classify/categorise – the taxonomic impulse. The dramatic male as female represents other possibilities – instead of male or female, a tragic subject may be male and female (although the viability and desirability of this is always open to question in tragedy). The tragic man can allow the feminine within, and the tragic woman can display the masculine within, yet both are typically represented as challenging aberrations, and both usually come to tragic ends. Tragic suffering seems to make, unmake, undo these bodies created on the stage, or through the text. This tragic tendency (Dionysian in essence) towards undoing, unmaking, seems to potentially mark a remaking of the tragic hero as a split subject, a feminised, dissolute, destabilised hero. The male body is marked as ruptured by this tragic process. The genre of Athenian tragedy appears at times to break apart the male body, the image of a whole, foreclosed, eminently superior male body we have received and constructed, and nowhere is this more obvious than in Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Euripides’ Bacchae. Thus, as I will discuss in later chapters, the tragic hero is reinvented and reassessed once more, but this time with attention to ancient ideas and practices of the body, and with a focus on the feminine and its associations with the body. I take my cue with regard to the body in theatre from the work of Froma Zeitlin, Nicole Loraux, and Karen Bassi, with reference to the ideas of theorists outside of classics, who open the way for further rethinking of tragedy. I focus on both sex and gender and their relation to the body as a process of unmaking and remaking, or becoming, in tragedy. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are perhaps the theorists most associated with a notion of becoming, and their notion of the fluidity of the body-becoming is useful.50 But Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of becoming seems more effective for my purposes here – her concept of becoming (evident in her statement ‘one is not born a woman but rather, becomes a woman’ for example) is directly related to gender, to the subject taking on a gendered positioning. De Beauvoir’s notion also seems to incorporate a concept of becoming in the performative sense.51 However, this notion of becoming is already evident in antiquity. It seems embedded deep within the ancient textual landscape, evident both within and without tragedy. This concept is perhaps most succinctly illustrated in Plato: ‘Nothing ever is, but is always becoming } All things are the offspring of flux and motion’ (Theataetus 152e). In ancient Greek thought, and especially classical Athenian thought, states of becoming other, all interrelated, appear to begin from the distinction of the female.

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Becoming Female So, too, in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming, becoming-woman serves as ‘the privileged site of all becomings’, the place from which all other becomings flow,52 which seems reminiscent and suggestive of the Greek model. And yet, in antiquity, a tacit distinction between states of otherness appears to be in operation, in the form of a scale of undesirable states for a male to fall into. It would seem fair to assume that becoming female would appear to be the most unfavourable becoming for a male, given the images of endemic misogyny evident in Greek texts, from Hesiod to Aristotle.53 With this in mind, the ancient notion of becoming might be implemented to rethink the tragic hero once more, with an accent on the male becoming female, and an awareness of the complications such a becoming holds. Furthermore, the ancient concept of tragic mimesis does not appear to rest upon a straightforward process of imitation or substitution, but rather, emerges as a complex process of becoming, so that the subject or character, instead of imitating another, becomes an/other. The Greek model of becoming is diffuse and nebulous, however, just like the Greek model of the feminine and of the body, and such qualities make the notions of becoming, the feminine, and the body most useful for tragedy. * Starting from the Foucauldian point of the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’,54 the body can be seen to function as the site of both domination and resistance in both tragedy and culture at large. To quote Maria Wyke, the ‘surface of the body is a crucial site for the display of difference (including gender difference)’.55 The theatrical body acts as a site for the display and disguise of difference, as well as holding the potential for the reformulation of difference. The theatrical body can be manipulated by the actor from male to female, slave to king and so forth via the exploitation and inscription of the signifiers of gender, class, and ethnicity on the surfaces of the body. The theatrical body can therefore be employed to produce endless states of becoming. These states of becoming do not seem to be restricted to the surfaces of the body. The theatrical body also attends to depth, to the insides of the body or ‘innards’, and casts these too as gendered or sexed.56 In this sense the male body has a female body within, via the designation of the insides of the body as feminine. Furthermore, the theatrical body often acts as a site for the dissolution of difference, and this is perhaps particularly striking when the male body is subjected to the processes of Dionysian dissolution (since the male body is so often expressed as different from the female/the other). The performative aspects of the body – sex/gender/otherness – appear to be undeniable in tragedy and evident within this process of theatrical becoming. In the space of the theatre it is possible to construct, pervert,

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body and disturb the signs that mark the body as known, navigable, and safely categorised as male or female in classical Athenian society. Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as developed in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and in her article ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’ is useful here – via the combined effects of speech and behaviour, a subject is both constructed and constrained by the social order of accepted norms. Or performativity might be cast as the repetition of the types of behaviour considered acceptable and ‘normal’.57 The body emerges as an important site for the creation, manifestation, exhibition, control, and potential contestation of gender/sex identity in particular.58 The study of the theatrical body focuses on the performative, textual applications of sex and gender that are mapped onto the body, how tragedy disturbs the systems of signification that this society elsewhere appears to rest upon. Tragedy seems to give meaning to the body, in particular as male and female, ratified on the stage by the gaze of the spectator in a sense, and then often turns to erode or disrupt this meaning. I briefly referred to the primary models of the body in tragedy above.59 To pursue the issue further, if the body is a ‘social text’, as Hwa Yol Jung suggests in ‘Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics’,60 what kinds of social texts are to be found in the male and female bodies that emerge in tragedy? In the world of tragedy, the body (male and female) appears to be inscribed with the feminine. The tragedy of tragedy is that the male body, elsewhere sublime, contained, sealed, masked by muscle, is after all a (female) body. The ‘somatography’ of the feminine is a persistent theme in Athenian tragedy.61 Tragedy’s body, male and female, is written and performed as feminine (yet created and played by the masculine). The masculine is fundamentally destabilised in tragedy, unmade and remade, by being inscribed with the feminine. But this is not the whole story. Tragedy is both essentialist and anti-essentialist with regard to the masculine and the feminine, to male and female bodies through the performance and construction, indeed, re-construction of the theatrical body.62 It destabilises the fundamental distinctions between male and female, and constructs sex and gender as performative, as just another state of becoming, regardless of authorial intention. The male body, thought to be so different from the female body in certain genres (for instance, the medical and literary models of the body typically offer a model of sexual difference), becomes its shadow, the female, in a vivid expression of tragic dissonance.63 Tragic dissonance might be described on one level as the incongruence of the outer and inner of a body-identity in tragedy. The body becomes a force with fatal communication between that which is without (the other, the divine) and that which is within (innards, psyche). Inner and outer often merge tragically in a character’s body. Furthermore, the model of the masculine bears a strange and resounding femininity. The male body, supposedly impenetra-

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Becoming Female ble and harmonious by nature, is perforated and penetrated by the female, and is subjected to the kinds of dissonance thought to characterise the feminine in the tragic world. By the late fifth century, the old aristocratic ethos that a high born man is a good man (kalokagathia), a sentiment thought to be expressed through his body, the outside a mirror of his inner, becomes deeply complicated in tragedy, especially in Euripidean tragedy, as I will explore in Chapter 3. The fundamental ambivalence of Greek attitudes towards the female body is now trained onto the male body, as the great hero becomes stained with the feminine, with dissonance. The male body, when feminised in tragedy, becomes tragic, whereas the female body, when feminised, is perhaps produced as mundane, untragic. When the male practises ‘femininity’, the feminine becomes tragic.64 Although it might be argued that Deianira, Phaedra, Medea and Andromache, for example, are truly ‘tragic’ figures, I mean to suggest that the female is perhaps untragic because the feminine is thought to be the condition of woman, and therefore perhaps not considered to be tragic in the same way as the fall from the masculine for the male appears to be. The female body is cast as ‘the body out of place’ in male culture (yet simultaneously central to that culture, as the maternal body, the guarantor of Athenian citizenry along with the paternal body, and the model for the theatrical body, for example).65 Tragedy inscribes such dissonance onto and into the male body via the nexus of mimesis, the feminine and suffering, and the male body begins to mime this position of the dislocated female body. The idea of the secure, stable, bound male body comes apart. Such a mask is stripped away and what is known as the feminine in this culture is revealed as the very condition of the tragic male. Instead of a clear-cut heroised male body, the integrity of the male body in tragedy is defiled. The ‘corporeal style’ of tragedy The work of Butler may be used to further rethink the classical Athenian theatrical body, or the discursive (re)production of bodies in theatre. By applying her work on the process of ‘repetitive acts’ and their role in constituting bodies, the implications of the tragic body might be considered further. Butler (also working from de Beauvoir’s position on gender as a state of becoming) writes: ‘gender is in no way a stable identity’.66 Gender identity is open to change and renegotiation, an identity constituted through ‘a stylised repetition of acts’.67 Gender is created via ‘the stylisation of the body’, as ‘gestures, movements and enactments’ invent this ‘gendered self’; therefore, in Butler’s analysis, gender becomes a ‘corporeal style’.68 Tragedy seems to disrupt these enactments of the male body as an entity that is completely alien from the feminine, or to deconstruct the engendering of the male as masculine, using different enact-

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body ments to create different possibilities (whether this was the intention or not). Tragedy utilises the tools of dress, costume, gesture, manner, and possibly the voice to disguise, dissimulate and manipulate gender, to stylise the body into different gendered positionings. The repetitive act of staging the wounded, feminised hero, might materialise another kind of male body-identity. This tautology of the hero’s body may produce a resistant body to the norm, to the discourse of the male body recirculated outside of tragedy. The tragic male hero therefore might avoid in some way the constraints of conventional masculinity, of the exercise and expression (or repression) of the masculine body and identity, outside of tragedy. As discussed, a dominant ‘corporeal style’ of the body in tragedy is marked by instability, dissonance, and the feminine. In this context of Butler’s discussion of gender as performance, it might be remarked that the corporeal style of the body is fundamentally that of mimesis. The body changes and metamorphoses in this genre. Gender, the ‘construction that regularly conceals its genesis’,69 is revealed as performative via the dramatic essentials of this genre. Euripides’ Bacchae is a useful example here – Pentheus manipulates both dress and his body via mannerisms to create a new identity, that of a ‘woman’. The male body-identity becomes like the female body-identity and vice versa in tragedy. The performative nature of gendered bodies is revealed. The corporeal styles of male and female are conflated in tragedy as theatre disturbs known expressions of the body. Virile ‘women’ and feminine men take their places on the stage. Tragedy revels in the faultlines of sexed bodies-identities, putting pressure on them so that the hitherto closely guarded practices of male and female bodies merge and conflate tragically. There is much emphasis in tragedy on a masculine selfhood, on male identity. But it is a masculine selfhood that is constantly being revised by its negotiations with the feminine and indeed the masculine. Perhaps part of the problem of tragedy, and the challenge of Greek notions of masculinity, lies in this accent on masculinity as an ongoing negotiation, a continual process of ‘constituting acts’,70 a process of becoming. Masculinity is a process under eternal revision, and a man must constantly prove his worthiness of the great appellation of aner. In the Greek system it appears that masculinity must be constantly proven, from the literary characterisations of Odysseus to the male characters of the tragic stage who fare so badly. Masculinity does not seem to be presented as a permanent, unassailable state a man achieves. He must, even Heracles must, constantly prove this quality of andreia. The genre of tragedy seems to elaborate upon this process of the endless and restless negotiation of male identity. So the masculine is fundamentally challenged in tragedy. The feminine in tragedy, on the other hand, is still theorised within ‘masculine parameters’.71 The feminine appears to continue to be re-circulated in the usual way. The kinds of female bodies produced in tragedy are often familiar to

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Becoming Female us from the models evident in other genres, as I have already suggested – the female body as sick, miasmatic, catastrophic for the male, wet, boundless, uncontainable, dissonant, mimetic, resistant, and elusive.72 The women of tragedy – the dominatrix (Medea, Clytaemnestra, and Antigone), and the femme fatale (Helen) – are cast as resistant and destructive to patriarchy (as are most women in tragedy).73 But they are of course read and constructed through a male lens – even the resisting woman is still cast within a masculine universe.74 However, the feminine is not effectively contained by masculine discourse. The feminine functions as the sign for everything or, more specifically, the sign for everything that is other. It therefore exceeds representation, and disrupts the male act of trying to know, contain, and control the feminine through representation. What is perhaps radical in tragedy is that the masculine is challenged in its traditional representations. The masculine, typically enjoying the expression of singularity and unity in discourse, becomes pluralised in tragedy, marrying the feminine and embodying the feminine, fatally. The masculine body cannot flow with the fluids of the feminine, with the fluids of emotion in tragedy, it is overwhelmed, drowned. The feminine, an excess of body (in the form of suffering – with an emphasis on wounds, oozing, crying, and bleeding), destroys pristine male form. The male body is often reduced to the visceral, to innards, to matter, and is denied form, perhaps the defining characteristic of the male body.75 The erect, hard, bloodless, virile, and invulnerable body of the male that appears at times in genres outside of tragedy gives way to the body in pain, the vulnerable body, the wounded, liquid, amorphous body, the body bloodied – a body normally interpreted as feminine in this culture.76 These appear to be the favoured states of embodiment in the genre of tragedy. The beautiful male body, the topos of art, of funeral oration (in the form of the beautiful death), becomes viscerally ugly, its aesthetics and heroism challenged in its incarnation in tragedy. The male appears on the tragic stage, wearing a mask that would appear to display eyes gouged out, sockets dripping with blood (Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1275-1306). Pain, horror, and mutilation reign over the male body in tragedy. This threat is omnipresent in epic, yet the male overcomes it, for example, in the ‘beautiful death’ (kalos thanatos). In the topos of the beautiful death, a heroic male gives up his life and loses his body in glorious servitude to the state.77 And yet, once we reach tragedy, as Vernant writes, the tragic hero is ‘no longer put forward as a model, as he used to be in epic and lyric poetry. Now he has become a problem’.78 The issue could be pushed even further, to suggest that heroes finish as heroes in epic, whereas heroes often finish as ‘women’ in tragedy. In the genre of tragedy the hero often cannot re-emerge from his time spent in the chrysalis or engulfing sheath of the feminine. The mastery of Proteus, the ability of the male to become the other and to control form, does not appear to be in evidence once we reach Euripidean tragedy in particular

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Introduction: Imagining the Classical Body (and the Bacchae is the best example of this). Control of the body, the feminine, ultimately of the tragic, is not allowed within some of the plays. Technically the male actor might be interpreted as exerting such mastery, given that the male actor underneath the costume controls form, casts off the feminine and returns to his original shape after his theatrical becomings. This might serve as an underlying safety valve in a sense. But I argue that the feminine is not safely circumscribed in tragedy. The challenge of the feminine to the masculine is so great and the endings are so inconclusive at times that this return to masculinity is cast as tenuous and undermined by the horror of what has taken place earlier on the stage. The very construction of the feminine as uncontainable creates the condition for the feminine to remain at large in tragic space, long after the play has finished. The repetitive acts of risk that elsewhere fundamentally constitute the masculine through a process, a becoming, negotiated time and time again successfully in other literary genres, might appear to finish the hero off in some ways in tragedy. Whilst it might be argued the male body-self is repositioned at the centre of tragedy by virtue of this focus on the tragic hero once more, the male hero is actually decentred in this discussion, as the feminine emerges at the centre of tragedy, indeed, at the core of the male subject. The return to the male hero, with this accent on the body and becoming female, reveals the male subject as deeply unstable. The classical Athenian tragic texts open up once more, this time presenting male identity, indeed, the male body itself, in the process of coming undone. In this reading tragedy is inconclusive, endlessly open, and far from settled in its articulation and engagement with the masculine and its utilisation of the feminine.79 Nancy Rabinowitz (in, for example, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women), Froma Zeitlin (in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature) and Victoria Wohl (in Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy) all appear to argue, to varying degrees, that in the end, the male principle is reinstituted, resurrected, and confirmed in classical Athenian tragedy.80 To some extent Athenian tragedy as a genre can be read as ultimately failing to settle on a note of safety, as failing to leave male culture intact. The male body does not appear to be categorically reaffirmed by this process of revisiting the feminine and safely exploring the feminine within the masculine. Rather, the spectre of the destabilising feminine is frequently left alive in tragedy. The tragic hero often remains feminised, and this effect is further reinforced by many of the plays finishing on a note that is unsettling, and, disturbingly for male culture, open-ended. The tragic hero seems destined at times endlessly to become female. Masculinity does not always encircle and seal the feminine securely by the close of the play. Indeed, by the time we reach the work of Euripides, an argument could be made that there are no heroes left onstage. The hero

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Becoming Female seems virtually obliterated, at times reduced to a flawed, husk of a male, which prompts the question, do only female characters act like men, particularly once we reach Euripidean tragedy?81 The hero is dealt the final deathblow; his plea for supplication in tragedy, for respite from suffering and the relentless march of the feminine/the tragic over his body-identity or experience is often ultimately ignored. This male body continues to bleed – ‘for still the warm conduits spout forth his life’s dark force’ (Sophocles, Ajax 1413-14). In the Bacchae, perhaps Euripides’ last play, the audience experiences an extraordinarily complete destruction of the male body and the masculine principle. (Indeed, in the Bacchae at one stage all characters, male and female, are dressed as women, in a remarkable dramatisation of tragedy’s feminising practices.) Here, the female (in the form of Pentheus’ mother, aunts, and various kinswomen) subjects the male body to a horrifying vivisection – Pentheus is dismembered and reduced to bits and pieces (this topos of becoming is extended to its limit in a sense, so that the male body becomes other than body). In this sense, the Bacchae can be read as the ultimate undoing or unmaking of the masculine, obliterated by the feminine/maternal. The Bacchae, in a skewed manner, reaffirms the body as the end of writing/representation. If the ‘final goal of writing’ is ‘to articulate the body’, as Chantal Chawaf writes,82 the Bacchae disarticulates the male body. The dismemberment of the male is so thorough that when Pentheus’ mother/murderer Agave realises what she has done, she tries to reassemble her son’s body, but fails.83 The male hero’s body is mutilated almost beyond recognition in this startling play, reduced to gruesome body parts, to scraps of flesh, the sport of ‘women’, the sport of tragedy. The regulation of the male body, such an important theme in other genres (it is both implicit and explicit in medicine, oratory, and philosophy, for instance) is utterly undone. The character of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae is the consummate example of the deregulation and dissolution of the hero’s body in tragedy, and dissolution could perhaps be interpreted as the outer reach of becoming. Perhaps all that remains of the character Pentheus are the rumpled parts of the dramatic tools of the trade – body parts, male and female costumes, and mask, for example – the signifiers that, when put together, construct a gendered positioning of the body-self. Butler’s analysis of the performativity of gender comes to mind here: ‘Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself.’84 The performative body is the end of the story here in the Bacchae.

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1

The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma This is a terrible sight for men to see! Never have I found a worse! Poor wretch, what madness came upon you! } Indeed I pity you, but I cannot look at you, though there’s much I want to ask and much to learn and much to see. I shudder at the sight of you. Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1298-1306 Your words are wounds }

Euripides, Hippolytus l.342

Part 1. The place of the body in tragedy The body is tragedy’s currency. Classical Athenian tragedy focuses audience attention on the body, both in the form of the actor’s body through character (this, however, is not a straightforward activity), and the textual body (the body described and produced by logos, the body within the text). The audience’s attention is centred on the body in at least two ways – via sight (watching the body of the actor in character) and sound (tragic logoi focussing on the character’s body). The actor’s body is a central icon in tragedy, and the character’s body is a locus of language. The actor’s body undergoes theatrical becomings or metamorphoses (usually, but not always, reported or offstage, owing to the conventions of Athenian tragedy) – changing from human body to animal body, from male body to female body, from mortal body to immortal body, from live body to dead body. (Euripides’ Bacchae, for example, foregrounds these processes on stage, when Pentheus dresses as the female, changing from male to female, from live body to dead body, from whole body to fragmented body.) Athenian tragedy also displays a deep concern with the boundaries of the body. This theme appears to be a feature of the genre, and reflects Dionysus’ role as confounder of boundaries. Such an interest is evident in the plays attributed to Aeschylus and Sophocles, but really emerges as a particular concern in Euripides’ work. The boundaries between male and female, human and animal, Greek and barbarian, noble and poor, appear, for example, to be explored, questioned, and destabilised on the tragic stage. (Euripides’ Medea is a prime example of this.) Whether sexual/gender boundaries are restored at the end of the plays in general is a question for Chapters 5 and 6. The actor uses his body to signify sex, character, nationality, and class by way of gait, stylised gesture, formalised dance movements, costume,

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Becoming Female masks, and presumably the voice.1 In the theatre of Dionysus, the god of concealing and revealing, the body is variously concealed, disguised, and revealed. These processes may occur on multiple levels – the male actor plays both male and female parts in a performance, for example, although this is not necessarily shown to the audience.2 The actor’s body is apparently not revealed onstage. However, the actor’s body appears to have been revealed in part by the rituals that occur before the plays commence. The actor might even have paraded nude in the Proagon, as Bassi suggests in Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece, thus displaying his masculinity prior to revelling in the feminine.3 Being seen in a naked state perhaps serves to ostensibly strip the performer’s body of the capacity for deception (and the feminine); symbolically divesting the actor of the deceptive, mimetic nature of the body that is a feature of tragedy. The nude male body might masquerade as the ‘truthful’ body. However, once on stage, the actor’s body becomes embroiled in the uncertainties of mimesis, and the potentially feminising effects of disguise on the male subject. The actor’s body is now disguised by a costume, the face of the actor obscured by a mask. So, whilst the body appears to be an important focus of tragedy, the theatrical body is in many ways unstable. The perceived instability or unreliability of the body and voice complicates matters further. Thus Helen King may write in Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece: ‘In the ancient world, reading the body was never considered to be a straightforward activity.’4 The capacity of the body to lie, to dissimulate, is expressed most often by female characters in this culture. A notion of the female body as deceptive, concealing, is evident in the ‘first’ female body of all, Pandora, and continued in the myths surrounding Helen, for example, as I will discuss in Chapter 2.5 The act of disguise has a long association with the feminine in this culture, a fact which further complicates this theatrical expression and implementation of the actor’s body, a body that is male. The mimetic nature of the body, with its inherent capacity for disguise, is also related to this long-standing topos of the deceptiveness of the body, and the female is seen as particularly talented in this arena.6 As soon as the male disguises himself he careens onto dangerous ontological ground, risking feminisation, risking becoming female. This implementation of disguise in Athenian tragedy also implies that the actor’s body is both absent and present in tragedy, a dilemma that extends to the body in general in a profoundly complicated way. This conundrum of presence and absence is also echoed in the position of the feminine. On a concrete, material level, the male body is theatre’s main vehicle of expression and performance, the locus of signification. The female body is in this sense written out in tragedy, thus becoming entirely absent on a literal level. Yet the female body is absolutely central to the practice of tragedy on many levels. As trope, signifier, and medium for the processes of acting, the female body emerges as the driving force of

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma tragedy.7 Attic tragedy therefore exhibits a simultaneous action of disembodying and re-embodying the feminine. Given this sexed interplay of absence and presence, tragedy focuses on the body in a complex way. My particular concern in this chapter is the suffering body, which is, in some senses, the crux of tragedy. Tragedy is driven by powerful depictions of the intense suffering of the body-self in all its permutations.8 Dramatists trade on the suffering of tragic bodies, on both recognisable and unrecognisable somatic experiences for the (notionally male) audience (incest and matricide are presumably not the ordinary experiences of the average Athenian audience member). Tragedy functions in this sense as a place or space of both otherness and familiarity.9 As Aristotle contends in Poetics 1452b, the suffering body is the customary subject of tragedy.10 This point is amplified in his consideration of pathos, which he identifies as a key aspect of the tragic plot. Pathos is described as ‘an action of a destructive or painful description, such as the deaths that take place out in the open }, agonies of pain, wounds, and so on’ (Poetics 1452b).11 The term ‘Greek tragedy’ has become shorthand in modern vernacular for a histrionic display of warped human relations, where the most intimate bonds are broken or perverted, where bodies-selves are frequently tortured, where the unimaginable happens with regularity. Greek tragedy displays an excessive quality that perhaps at times seems to set it apart from the types of tragedy to be found in other eras and cultures. So, for instance, Zeitlin reminds the reader that theatre has been characterised as the ‘adventure of the human body’, but, she adds, it would be more apt to call classical Athenian tragedy ‘the misadventure of the human body’.12 The body in tragedy is most often presented in an extreme condition of suffering, and in this condition, as Zeitlin remarks, the body is most removed from the model of ‘strength and integrity’.13 The dramatisation of the suffering body seems to have had a deep impact on audiences. The experience of ‘pathos’ might be intensified when it is the male body reduced to this state, since the male body is the principal object of cultural concern. Thus, it is not so much the body, but the male body at issue here. The body in a state of vulnerability and openness is least like the male body-self, but perhaps more importantly, most like the female body-self. The male body in the condition of suffering would seem to deviate from the perceived ‘nature’ of the male body as one characterised by vigour and wholeness. The male body is cast in this way in general when all is functioning well. This appears to be the frequent model of the male body presented, for example, in the medical writings of the Hippocratics and the scientific writings of Aristotle. Medicine is concerned with the malfunctioning of the body and the prevention of pathology, and whilst the male body might not appear quite so sound in this genre, the models of male and female bodies seem to dictate that, in general, the male body is perceived as malfunction-

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Becoming Female ing less often, or is less complicated, than its female counterpart.14 The female body, by contrast, seems regularly construed as prone to suffering, lacking in ‘strength’ and ‘integrity’ – endlessly open and penetrable. Indeed, the female body in a state of suffering seems to be the usual condition of womanhood (as I discuss in Chapter 2). The male body suffering (like a woman) becomes in turn the condition of tragedy in a sense. Suffering is the ‘normal’ and hence mundane condition of the female body, but when the male body behaves in this way it becomes a ‘tragic’ condition. The audience is affected by the suffering of protagonists via the characterisation of acts of violence committed against bodies. Acts of violence force the fluids and innards that should stay inside bodies to come out, and bodies change from their original form into something else. This is perhaps particularly a concern when it is the male body that is subject to violation. (How this might have been enacted is unknown, but even if it is ‘reported’ in speech, the body is most important in this process, both as metaphor and the body’s involvement in the act of speaking, as I argue below.) The suffering body appears on some levels to be an abject body in classical Athens, since it violates the desired integrity of the body. The tragic male body (which should be a closed whole), leaks, bleeds, and suffers like the female body, conceived as open, bloody, and incontinent.15 The female body, by virtue of the model of the female body’s amorphousness and natural proclivity for leaking and bleeding, is perhaps cast as less affected by tragic violence in this sense. Yet tragedy does show an interest in the female body affected by violence, and in female characters affected by tragic acts, in part indicated by the pervasiveness of ‘women’ suffering on the tragic stage. Examples of female characters affected by tragic acts are numerous – Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women and Hecuba, Deianira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, for example. Tragedy also betrays an interest in violent acts committed against the parthenos’ body. The sacrifices of Polyxena and Iphigenia are described with somatic force.16 But whilst the suffering of female characters is important to tragedy, on a literal level these characters are played by men, a fact which seems to transform the focus of this concern. Tragedy displays a concern then with acts of violence which change the male body into something like the female body. Wounds function as the marks, the evidence or inscriptions, of violence, regardless of whether these wounds are textual, reported, or enacted. (For example, see Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1479-80, and Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which centres on Philoctetes’ suffering, wrought by a suppurating, offensive wound – 3-4, 169-75.) Violence, like eros (desire), and thanatos (death), serves to unstring the body in the Greek tradition, loosening the limbs, and thus in a sense dissolving the recognisable form of the body.17 The state of suffering itself is frequently perceived as more distressing

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma than dying or death. Hippolytus laments, ‘a quick death is the easiest of ends’, and pleads, ‘O the pain, the pain that comes upon me } May death the healer come for me at last! You kill me ten times over with this pain’ (Euripides, Hippolytus 1046-7, 1371). Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae also desires death, an escape from the suffering that racks his body: O Zeus! Torture, torture is all you give me! I wish I had never seen you with these poor eyes that must now face this inexorable flowering of madness } Oh! Let me be. Let me sleep in my misery, let me sleep my last sleep. Where are you touching me? Where are you laying me? You are killing me, killing me. You have prodded awake what slumbered. It has caught me. Oh! It comes on again } Now when I am sick, will no one turn the beneficial fire, the sword on me? Oh! Why will no one come and cut away my head from my abominable body? Sophocles, Trachiniae 996-1017

In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound 745-8, Io sings with a similar sentiment: ‘Why should I go on living? Why not hurl myself at once down from this rocky cliff, be dashed in pieces, and find relief from all my pain? Better to die once, than suffer torment all my living days.’ In these examples, tragic suffering is so acute that subjects desire death as an escape from ponos, as a welcome relief from the pressures of suffering. Aeschylus’ Oresteia is particularly ‘vocal’ on the question of suffering. This trilogy’s power turns on visceral descriptions of acts of violence committed against the bodies of relatives.18 The house of the Atreidai is a place where the bodies of family members are butchered and their flesh is roasted, bodies which should, according to Greek custom, be sacred to one another. The impact of the bleeding body is also explicit in Cassandra’s cries: } a house that god hates, guilty within of kindred blood shed, torture of its own, the shambles for men’s butcher, the dripping floor } Behold there the witnesses to my faith. The small children wail for their own death and the flesh roasted that their father fed upon } Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1090-7

Clytaemnestra describes the famous curse of the Atreidai as an ‘old wound’ which, before it ‘dries, it bleeds again’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1479-80). She is cast as bloodthirsty, taking pleasure in the act of being spattered with the blood of her victim, Agamemnon. This passage also derives power from Clytaemnestra’s disturbing descriptions of the painfully vulnerable male body, victimised and hunted: I stand now where I struck him down } That he might not escape nor beat aside his death, } I spread deadly abundance of rich robes, and caught him fast. I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony he buckled at the knees and fell. When he was down I struck him the third blow, in thanks and reverence to Zeus the lord of dead men underneath the ground. Thus he went down, and the life struggled out of him; and as he died he spattered me with

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Becoming Female the dark red and violent driven rain of bitter savored blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1379-92

The character of Aegisthus is given similarly gruesome words to describe the suffering of the Atreidai. Aegisthus’ words also draw their power from the topos of the vulnerable body: Atreus } then served my father his own children’s flesh to feed on. For he carved away the extremities, hands, feet, and cut the flesh apart, and covered them served in a dish to my father at his table apart, who } ate that ghastly food whose curse now works before your eyes. But when he knew the terrible thing that he had done, he spat the dead meat from him with a cry } Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1590-1600

These images from the Oresteia acquire much of their force from the depiction of the violation and severance of familial bonds, and from the visceral nature of the suffering body, open to violence and deformation. This notion of the body – afflicted, wounded, mutilated, tortured, even dismembered – is clearly a favoured subject of classical Athenian tragedy. The visceral nature of the body is one of tragedy’s most striking features. Tragedy revels in this excess of body, of the suffering body. Sophocles’ Philoctetes makes the suffering of Philoctetes its focus. But Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is so excessive in its dramatisation of suffering that it almost seems like a satire of one of tragedy’s preferred subjects. The god Hephaestus tells Prometheus: } I now shall fasten you in bands of bronze immovable to this desolate peak, where you will hear no voice, nor see a human form; but scorched with the sun’s flaming rays your skin will lose its bloom of freshness } Each changing hour will bring successive pain to rack your body; and no man yet born shall set you free } you shall keep watch upon this bitter rock, standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest. And many groans and cries of pain shall come from you } Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 18-33

And from Prometheus: See with what outrage racked and tortured I am to agonize for a thousand years! See this shameful prison invented for me } I groan in anguish for pain present and pain to come } Under such suffering, speech and silence are alike beyond me. For bestowing gifts upon mankind I am harnessed in this torturing clamp } I now pay the full price, bared to the winds of heaven, bound and crucified. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 90-112

This example could be read as metaphorically referring to the body. The line ‘this shameful prison } pain present and pain to come’ may be interpreted as invoking the body as carapace, as an ongoing source of pain.

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Thus the body demands attention in tragedy when it is afflicted, when it is vulnerable.19 This can take its form from the following registers of bodily states – the body becomes tragic when it falls, to paraphrase Zeitlin, into a powerless or quiescent state; when the body-self is sick or becomes mad; when it vacillates between spasms of pain and periods of calm.20 The staging of the body undergoing these extreme states would seem to heighten audience reaction, whose bodies-selves appear to have been constructed as possibly answering these theatrical shudderings (in Aristotle’s Poetics, for example). The actor’s body shudders with tragic pain, tragic emotion, and the audience’s bodies might mime this shudder, experiencing a katharsis of emotion.21 In this context, Julia Kristeva’s reading of Greek tragedy is useful. In Powers of Horror Kristeva writes that tragedy stages the ‘mind’s other’ – ‘the passionate, corporeal, sexual body’.22 Tragedy’s ‘rhythm and song’ are viewed by Kristeva as arousing and harmonising this body.23 Or, in Diamond’s interpretation of Kristeva, tragedy’s processes might be seen to calm the shuddering body.24 However, Kristeva’s designation of the body as the mind’s other seems misplaced, since this is not a formula that fits Greek notions of embodiment at this time. Body and mind appear connected, particularly in the space of tragedy. Moreover, whilst the ‘passionate, corporeal, sexual body’ is very much a tragic topos; it does not seem to be always harmonised in tragedy. This kind of body often remains a problem, left at large or on the margins as an important creator of discord. Typically the only way this ‘corporeal, sexual body’ (particularly if it is the female body) is accommodated is when it is dead. Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus is an example of this, but even then the dead Phaedra generates unease and continues to provoke and destroy the patriarchy (here by the female’s clever manipulation of graphein, writing, signs). The dead body in general might remain discomforting, disquieting, even whilst the appropriate rituals required for burying/cremating the dead seem designed to appease these feelings. The shudder of the body, emotion, and desire do not appear to be satiated or eliminated (even though Aristotle’s notion of katharsis perhaps suggests that tragedy might be understood as an attempt to rid the audience of the ‘body’s shudder’,25 exorcising the pull of emotion, passion, carnality). Tragedy stages an eternal return to the body, and all the body entails. The problem of the body remains. Distinctions between pain and suffering, epic and tragedy This vigorous focus on the suffering of the body in tragedy seems to be fairly particular to this genre. While other genres such as epic, lyric poetry, comedy, historiography, medicine, and philosophy also deal with the suffering of mortals, it seems fair to say that tragedy at this stage in

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Becoming Female classical Athenian society appears to be one of the genres concerned with the suffering of the body-self.26 In this sense, tragedy represents the inability, impossibility, and even undesirability of eradicating the body and the irrational. It is a genre frequently concerned with the disruptive power of the body, emerging and erupting from a repressed or sublimated position in some Athenian ideological discourses, reasserting itself in drama. A discussion of the different ways epic and tragedy engage with this body in pain may be beneficial for developing the issue of tragic suffering further. There appears to be a modern distinction between suffering and pain in operation – in the modern definition, pain might be the condition felt at the point of wounding, and suffering might often be understood as the subsequent state. Epic and tragedy appear to offer slightly different registers of bodily pain and suffering, and this is not at all surprising given the differences of era, locale, and genre between them.27 Notwithstanding these qualifications, it does initially appear that, according to the modern distinction between pain and suffering, archaic epic is concerned primarily with the pain, vulnerability, and heroism of the male body. The end result in epic for this male body in pain is often the achievement of kleos, glory. Tragedy, by contrast, might seem to be concerned with suffering, and the vulnerability of the body, with the end result usually leading to a humiliating experience for the male hero. The loss of kleos, a defining feature for the male in this culture, appears to lead to a subsequent loss of masculinity. Heroes typically end as heroes in epic, whereas heroes end, in a sense, as ‘women’ in tragedy. Epic displays a tendency towards constructing a positive purpose and result for epic pain, whilst tragedy might appear to favour a negative effect of tragic suffering, often keeping subjects in a state of unremitting suffering. However, it would be unwise to assume the modern distinction of pain and suffering might have a Greek antecedent, given the very different ideas of the Greeks concerning embodiment in evidence so far. A preliminary consideration of this question suggests that this does not appear to be an ancient distinction. The definition of pain (ponos) offered by Liddell and Scott in A Greek-English Lexicon includes ‘pain of body or mind, suffering, grief: in plural, pains, distress’.28 While Liddell and Scott separate pain of the body and the mind, extant tragedy does not appear to make such a distinction. The body and the mind are enmeshed in the experience of tragic pain, tragic suffering, as explored below. Tragedy is concerned with both pain and suffering, or, to put it a slightly different way, suffering is pain and pain is suffering in tragedy. Given the brevity of tragedy when compared with the length of epic, tragedy does appear to focus on ponos to a greater degree than epic.29 The focus of tragedy on ponos is unrelenting. In this respect tragedy might seem at odds with other Attic genres, and most pointedly with classical funeral oration, a genre more inclined to suppress the suffering of male

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma bodies.30 This ideological tendency may even go so far as to deny (in a sense) that men have ‘bodies’.31 ‘In the concept of kalos thanatos, ‘the beautiful death’, a man is elevated above the corporeal, when he gives and loses his body and life gloriously in service to his state.32 Tragedy would seem to engage in an apparent reversal of other genres, realigning the male with the body (via an association with and a mimesis of the female body and suffering), and concentrating on a portrayal of male and female bodies vulnerable to unimaginable sufferings. Conventionally in Greek culture women carry the sign or cross of the body, but in tragedy men are also forced to bear the body. And yet, this realignment of the male with the body is always a mimetic one, hence it remains unstable, unpredictable. Displaying the afflicted body The genre of tragedy is most interested in displaying this afflicted body, a fact, as Zeitlin remarks, that is illustrated by tragedy’s frequent practice of displaying bodies killed offstage, a practice which then demands a ‘public view[ing]’.33 Some characters call upon the chorus/audience to observe ‘the spectacle of their suffering’ and ‘pity them’.34 The character of Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae is an example of this (1076-80). Other characters desire to hide their suffering, to be hidden from spectators by way of clothing or to take refuge inside the house, or simply to disappear.35 Oedipus wishes to disappear from ‘men’s sight’ (Sophocles, Oedipus the King 833-4). Instead of escaping from the eyes of others, he puts out his own graphically with his mother’s brooches which were supposed to keep a woman’s clothing and therefore implicitly her body closed. Oedipus and Heracles represent two poles in the tragic character’s response to suffering, expressing the dilemma faced by the tragic character of whether to conceal or reveal their bodies-selves. Part of this twofold movement between concealment and revelation is played out in the expression of corporeal suffering in places that might already be encoded by gender. Tragedy stages the public witnessing of pains and suffering that would normally remain hidden within the house, the space of the female. The house in Greek tragedy is a far more hazardous place for the male hero than the battlefield or the political arena (indeed, it is the most dangerous space for the male).36 A male hero who is led inside the house in tragedy rarely returns. When female characters in tragedy act according to ideological convention, they hide themselves within the house. Thus, Phaedra wishes to hide her suffering from view, Deianira heads for the innermost chamber of the house to kill herself, and Jocasta hangs herself inside the house.37 With this in mind, the question of how to interpret the male characters’ decisions to hide or reveal their suffering becomes more complicated. Whether they act as ‘women’ or ‘men’ here is hard to answer, given the complex mores surrounding these issues. Heracles in Euripides’ Heracles

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Becoming Female wishes to hide his suffering from Theseus, in part so as not to pollute Theseus, but also to save himself the shame and ignominy of being seen in this humiliating state of weakness and vulnerability (Euripides, Heracles 1157-62). To be seen in this open, penetrated, and vulnerable state seems on one level to shame and feminise a male subject. There appears to have been a certain reluctance to view the suffering or dead body; it should be hidden from sight, and this might have served to protect the suffering or dead body from the gaze, from being further penetrated (in this instance, visually) by another. The gaze is often cast as a penetrating force in this culture, certainly with regard to the female body. The violation of female bodies by the penetrating gazes of others seems to have been a concern in ancient Athens.38 The invitation of the Sophoclean Heracles to his son Hyllus, the chorus (the internal audience), and implicitly the wider audience, to look at his body in its suffering, hideous state is, in this context, striking (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1076-80, 1103). The suffering, mutilated, and feminised body now takes the place of his beautiful heroic body, and he asks for this to be witnessed. However, this dictum that a man should not be seen undergoing the experience of suffering is perhaps open to question. It is possible that there is an alternative attitude towards male suffering – a man might become more masculine via the endurance of suffering, and others watching his suffering might reify this state of heightened manliness.39 This line of thought seems to fit in with a more traditional interpretation of tragedy, whereby the tragic hero is ultimately glorified by his experience of suffering.40 It is also important to note in this context that tragedy, according to Aristotle (Poetics 1452b, 1453a, 1453b), depends upon the audience pitying the protagonists, and this pity might in turn depend upon witnessing such sufferings in a sense. What appears to be at issue here is the acceptability or suitability of certain kinds of bodies held up for the audience’s view (a position which might be flexible). So, too, regardless of the stated desire to not be seen whilst suffering, ‘the human body invite[s] the attention of a spectator’.41 Characters might paradoxically draw the audience’s attention to themselves by declaring they wish to hide from view. Part 2. The power of logos and soma – the flesh of words In the above discussion, various issues surrounding the place of the body in tragedy have been considered. Now I turn to the argument of Sheila Murnaghan in her article, ‘Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy’, on the displacement of the suffering body by speech. I offer a lengthy engagement with the thought-provoking work of Murnaghan as it serves as a useful platform from which to bring to the fore some important considerations with regard to the place of soma (the body) and logos (here used to denote

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma language, words, speech) in tragedy.42 The Greeks’ different ideas about embodiment will also become more apparent. Words and bodies appear to be poetically enmeshed, interdependent upon one another. Tragic logos draws its power to affect the audience from the body, and the body relies upon logos to accentuate its affect. While tragic images acquire their power via the perversion of familial bonds, through the representation of violence committed against bodies, the impact of the body here also deeply depends on logoi. Literal acts of violence are typically, though not exclusively, dramatised in language. In a sense, language is constructed as having the capacity to literally violate a tragic subject’s body-self. The physical and visceral nature of logoi leads to an emerging picture of logoi deriving their power from soma, which, in my reading, does not appear to diminish or replace the body. In short, a mutually profitable relationship between logos and soma is evident in an expression of the combined power of the body and language. The protagonist experiences a combined suffering of body and mind; the emotional and physical seem inextricably entwined. Suffering does not appear to be restricted to the body or the mind – the mind-body is emphatically linked in this ‘culture of pain’, just as the effect of tragedy does not seem to be restricted to logos or soma.43 Murnaghan provocatively suggests: } people don’t think about their bodies when they don’t hurt; and consequently that awareness of the body entails an unwelcome recognition of vulnerability and mortality (so that, correspondingly, not thinking about the body becomes a way of denying mortality).44

The profound cultural component in the perception and construction of the body is overlooked in this suggestion that the ancient Greeks thought of the body only when experiencing pain.45 Iliadic heroes and the male warriors of the classical period do not appear cast as completely disengaged from the body until it is wounded, in pain. The body is the Iliadic hero’s and the classical warrior’s greatest instrument, and the epic hero is often represented as taking pleasure in the power, glory, and beauty of his body in battle.46 Ancient Greek culture focuses on the body, giving it an important and visible place in ordering and experiencing the world. Hence, the male body is foregrounded in a positive way in the symposium, the gymnasium and in art, for example.47 The female body also seems to have been constructed in a positive light in male cultural discourse – in the form of the hetaira’s body and the parthenos’ body, for instance, although examples of the female body cast in a negative fashion are far more prevalent.48 Whilst we do not have any extant literary works authored by women in the classical period, the archaic poet Sappho appears to revel in the female body. Awareness of bodies surely occurs in pleasure too, although this is perhaps

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Becoming Female a false assumption – there is no way of knowing how the ancients felt about their bodies, all that remain are ‘representational’ bodies, textual bodies. However, Sappho and other lyric poets do appear to depict the erotic as a keen experience of the body, as a fracturing distillation of the body, a rotation of awareness through the body’s parts.49 Whilst this genre predates tragedy and cannot be used to suggest anything about classical Athens, at least it might caution against making the assumption that the Greeks thought about their bodies in the same way as modern western prescriptions at times encourage ‘us’ to. The Greeks thought about their bodies differently. That can be no surprise. Froma Zeitlin has interpreted the Euripidean characterisations of Pentheus and Hippolytus in a similar way to Murnaghan’s proposition of the experience of pain leading to an awareness of the body. I do, however, agree with Zeitlin’s reading that these young male characters, perhaps ephebes, are represented in Euripides’ Bacchae and Hippolytus as coming to an enhanced awareness of their bodies (as ‘feminine’ bodies in this culture’s sense) via the interplay of ponos and the feminine.50 This awareness seems to reverse the cultural imperative of turning boys into men, perhaps confounding the ephebic attempt to separate from the feminine.51 In which case, the awareness of the body appears to be intricately linked with the feminine, the tragic. Nevertheless, as I suggested above, the male is not always represented as thoroughly alienated from his body, as Murnaghan has suggested. This point might appear to undermine my argument regarding the apparent theme in tragedy of giving back or forcing the body on to the male. Perhaps the difference between these positions lies in the fact that whilst the male is typically cast as experiencing his body as male, in tragedy I am suggesting that he experiences his body in the feminine, that is, in the tragic modality. Murnaghan’s analysis does, however, offer a valuable acknowledgment of the complexities of tragedy’s relation to the body, and furthermore, literature’s equivocal relationship with the body. To Murnaghan, tragedy displays: } a tension between its characteristic subject matter, the representation of bodily suffering, and its status as a literary artefact, which implicates it in culture’s constant project of protecting, covering, disguising, concealing, and ignoring the body – and, especially, replacing the body’s adventures with forms of speech.52

Murnaghan identifies an important and defining paradox in tragedy of showing and ‘concealing’ the body, of representing yet ‘replacing the body with speech’.53 The body in theatre is part of a perplexing conundrum of absence and presence, disguise and revelation. This is certainly applicable to both the male and, more particularly, the female body. The male body

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma is emphatically present on the stage, in the form of the actor’s body, but as such is also disguised in the process of role-playing, and therefore in a complicated way rendered absent by tragedy’s processes. Yet, as I have suggested in my Introduction, the female body is literally, or physically, absent from the stage, and functions as a crucial and prevalent concern in tragedy. The embodied voice Murnaghan’s suggestion that the body’s acts are replaced by speech in tragedy is, however, problematic for another reason. In this reading, tragedy’s relationship with the body would be similar to that of epic, where the ‘body’s adventures’ are narrated via logos. In her article, she suggests that tragedy as a genre replaces and implicitly contains the body via the spoken word. I interpret this to mean that both the actor’s body and the textual body (in this sense the bodies produced by the texts of tragedy) are contained by logos. The importance of the performing body in this statement seems underestimated (although elsewhere Murnaghan confirms the significance of the performing body).54 An unrelated observation of Zeitlin serves as a useful counterpoint, conveying just how body-saturated the genre of tragedy is in a general sense and how embodied the process of acting appears to be within Attic tragedy: The emphasis in theatre must inevitably fall upon the body – the performing body of the actor as it embodies its role, figures its actions, and is shown to us in stylised poses, gestures, and attitudes. We see this body before us in the theatron, ‘the viewing place,’ in rest and movement. } This performing body engages at every moment its sensory faculties: it hears, sees, touches, and moves. Above all, it is the actor as body or body as actor who projects the human voice in all its inflections.55

The circular shape of the theatre naturally highlights the body of the actors and chorus. (Even though the body of the actor might appear to be small to the audience in the back of the amphitheatre, as Ruth Padel notes in her book, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self,56 and therefore its impact ostensibly diminished, the most ‘important’ section of the audience consists of those up front. For all its professions of democracy, classical Athenian culture still favoured the elite.) Given the lack of other major distractions in Attic tragedy, the body is magnetic, drawing the eyes of the audience. The tragic focus falls on the body. The performing body is a critical facet of classical Athenian tragedy, however complicated the manifestation or expression of this body might be. The problem of the privileging of logos over soma partly lies in the fact that most critics follow the tradition of the written text – reading the texts rather than watching performances. The recent interest in and sub-

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Becoming Female sequent emphasis on the body could be interpreted as a resistance to this tradition, or perhaps a recognition that the body was overlooked in favour of the word in past scholarship. (I do not mean to imply that the philological approach completely misses the body, since the body is in fact in the word in this tradition.) In this sense then, Murnaghan’s reading of speech replacing the body in Attic tragedy might unwittingly continue to follow the ‘traditional philological emphasis on the word’ in the discipline of classics.57 If Murnaghan is right, the logocentric approach to tragedy, the long term privileging of logos over soma in the theatrical tradition of scholarship, is inadvertently legitimised.58 (However, Murnaghan later comes to the conclusion that this act of speech replacing the body is not always successful, and this issue is explored below.) To comprehend the affects of tragedy, it is worth trying to imagine the body in performance, to try and look past this conventional focus on the word, to imagine the bodies within and beyond logos. This is not to say that this performing body can actually be recovered or resurrected (or to suggest that bodies beyond logos are readily accessible, for that matter). The performing body, however, is not just restricted to speech, but has a fuller register of emotion at its disposal. The performing body calls upon voice, dance, movement, and gesture to convey and create meaning.59 The importance of the body in general and the performing body in particular is implicit in the following remark of Herbert Golder. In his article ‘Visual Meaning in Greek Drama: Sophocles’ Ajax and the Art of Dying’ he writes: The poetics of tragedy is a poetics of enactment } [this is expressed, for example, in] the genius of the medium, the revealed tableau – the trundling out of Agamemnon and Cassandra, butchered in their bath, the dreaded entrance of Agave holding the head of Pentheus }.60

The actor enacts tragic logoi in innumerable and unrecoverable ways, utilising the full spectrum of the body. As part of this embodiment, voice plays an important role. In the above quote from the work of Zeitlin, she also draws attention to ‘the body as actor who projects the human voice’.61 This raises my next point of emphasis in this consideration of the place of soma and logos in tragedy – the actor’s voice, the medium of logos, is embodied. The voice has perhaps become disembodied in Murnaghan’s analysis, and this tendency is widespread in other circles of discourse – as David Morris remarks in The Culture of Pain, ‘voice and body’ are ‘understood as paired opposites’.62 According to this assumption, the voice somehow enigmatically emanates from the body but is disengaged from it, removed from it, deflecting attention from the body of the speaker. But the voice acts as an overt connection between soma and logos and once the mind/soul and body is split in Plato’s dialogues, it serves as a copula between mind and body.

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Nancy Jones and Lesley Dunn’s suggestion that the voice acts as a ‘material link between body and culture, self and other’ seems relevant here.63 In classical Athens, or more specifically, in Athenian tragedy, the voice seems, in the process of transmitting and delivering logoi, to have been thought of as embodied, embodying logoi. The body is cast as central to the activity of speech. In a more general sense, speakers are cast as embodied in ancient Greece – orators rely upon their bodies to deliver their words and persuade audiences. As King writes, the voice is an important part of the citizen’s body, ‘} central to the oral culture of the polis’.64 The act of speaking (relaying rather than enacting the body’s events) does not delete the body. For example, law court speakers appear to be actors in a sense. Furthermore, the voice firmly draws attention to the body of the speaker. The seductive possibilities of the speaking body lead the polis to adopt the measures of the beautiful Alcibiades in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (6.15-20), for example. Alcibiades’ logoi do not work on their own – the embodiment of Alcibiades, the whole ‘package’, persuades his audience. In her discussion of speech replacing the body in tragedy, Murnaghan argues that Aeschylus’ Oresteia moves from soma to logos, and such a move relies on a distinction between speech and the body. She believes this trilogy progressively contains the body via legal discourse, thus ending the cycle of revenge meted out by the law of the body, a law which dictates that blood should be exacted for blood.65 Murnaghan maintains that the law court creates people as ‘speakers’ rather than ‘actors’, thus ‘deflect[ing] attention from the body’.66 However, in my view, the place or enactment of the body in Attic oratory, including legal discourse, challenges this argument. Speech, logos, relies heavily on the male body for delivery, expression, and persuasion. The classical Athenian practice of rhetoric is very much an embodied activity. Classical Athens as a society reads qualities about a man from the presentation and exercise of his body. The performance of this male body-self is crucial in building a persuasive image which encourages the audience to believe the speaker’s claims to truth. (And this is one reason why the theatrical body becomes problematic – the disguised male body presents an ontological dilemma for its audience.67) The aristocratic ethos, with all its corporeal implications, continues to linger in classical Athens.68 The extant literature (albeit typically produced by the elite), continues, at times, to adhere to the notion of kalokagathia, where good bodily presentation and noble birth indicate a good person in an expression of the congruity of outer and inner. The presentation and interpretation of the male body remains a concern during this period.69 This physical nature of declamation in antiquity is brought out further in the work of Aline Rouselle:

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Becoming Female } we have failed to see } how far the learning of poetry was a physical process involving breathing and attention to voice quality – all aspects which we have come to ignore. A spoken text – and in antiquity texts were always spoken – is a form of conscious physical expression.70

The role of logos and soma in the enactment of suffering Murnaghan builds her argument regarding the replacement of the body by logos on the tradition that acts of ‘physical violence, physical pain and death’ are markedly absent from the tragic Athenian stage, and typically occur off stage.71 Whilst most acts of physical violence and death do seem to occur offstage, the proposition that representations involving bodies undergoing physical pain are reported and occur ‘offstage’ is contentious.72 As I have suggested, physical pain, which is staged as inseparable from mental pain, is repeatedly enacted in Attic tragedy. The model of the intrinsic mind/body connection at the time of Athenian tragedy suggests that mental and physical pain are also inseparable. Intriguingly, Sigmund Freud writes that Greek tragedy ‘restricts’ itself to the representation of ‘mental suffering’, since ‘no one wants [to watch] physical suffering’.73 However, suffering is experienced as physical pain in tragedy. Emotional and physical suffering, the outpouring of tragedy, is typically played out on the body in some way. For example, the gestures of supplication (where the supplicant touches the knees or the feet of another person in an attempt to elicit mercy) and mourning (which is ritually embodied, for instance, in the tragic act of self-mutilation) both demonstrate this. Signs of tragic grief are expressed via the body – the ritualistic keening of mourning and the tearing of hair, skin, and clothes.74 The representation of the suffering of mourning mothers, founded on the expression of intense bodily intimacy and love, is projected as a combined sensation of physical and emotional pain in a holistic experience of suffering where the mind and body are intricately involved.75 Murnaghan then proceeds to concur with the orthodox position that tragedy ‘} by and large keeps bodies in states of extreme suffering hidden from view’.76 Whilst it is not known how the performing body might have been used to express tragic suffering, the suffering constructed in speech could have been played out on the actor’s body. The texts of tragedy often seem to allow room for this, although this is speculative given that we do not have direct access to the ancient performances of these plays. In this context, I would also point to the memorable episodes of suffering and death that we do see represented on stage. Alcestis, Hippolytus, Evadne, and Ajax all ‘die’ onstage, and the ‘extreme suffering’ of these characters is foregrounded (Euripides, Alcestis 392, Hippolytus 1458, Suppliant Women 1071, and Sophocles, Ajax 865). Indeed, many of tragedy’s characters do suffer in an extreme manner on stage, and those who die offstage are regularly presented to the audience via the ekkuklema. As

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Charles Segal suggests, the ekkuklema serves to show the audience ‘results of the violent acts of which they have heard’, since characters display these violated bodies, bodies that are rolled out on the ekkuklema.77 The following characterisations might also be enlisted to pursue this possibility of the body enacting logos in a dramatic way. The character of Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus suffers terribly onstage, in a way that appears to leave room for an embodied and ‘extreme’ representation of suffering. She seems to be characterised as writhing in the throes of eros as if in a fever. The nurse castigates Phaedra: ‘Quiet, child, quiet! Do not so restlessly keep tossing to and fro!’ (Euripides, Hippolytus 203-4, and there is also room to perceive Phaedra moving around in lines 141, 179-80, 197-202). Heracles appears to contort in agony on stage in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. It is hard to imagine that the actor delivers these lines in a static fashion: It lunges, lunges again, the vile thing is destroying me – savage, unapproachable sickness. O Pallas! It is torturing me again. O my son, pity me who begot you, draw the sword – no one will blame you – strike me in the breast, heal the pain with which your godless mother has made me rage. Sophocles, Trachiniae 1026-39

Shortly after we hear the following lines which might also suggest an animated, embodied delivery: ‘Oh, oh, the pain! That malignant tearing scorches me again, it shoots through my sides, it will have me struggle, it will not let me be – miserable, devouring sickness’ (lines 1081-4; see also 1089-91 in this light). Philoctetes in Sophocles’ Philoctetes is given similar words to Heracles, words again suggesting an embodied performance: ‘Oh! Oh! It goes right through me, right through me! Miserable! Miserable! I am lost, boy. I am being eaten up. Oh! By god, if you have a sword, ready to hand, use it! Strike the end of my foot. Strike it off, I tell you, now. Do not spare my life. Quick boy, quick } Terrible it is, beyond words’ reach’ (Sophocles, Philoctetes 742-56). Indeed, his suffering has been so insistent and graphic that the Argives left him long ago on this small island (lines 1-10). Surely the chorus playing mourning women in Euripides’ Trojan Women use embodied gestures of mourning to express their emotions. (For example, lines 279-80 perhaps could be performed with gestures of mourning striking at the face.) In Euripides’ Heracles (157-62), Heracles suffers onstage enormously when he realises that he has killed his children in a manner that leaves room for an embodiment or enactment of this suffering. Agave’s suffering when she realises that she has dismembered and decapitated her own son is conceivably performed powerfully onstage in Euripides’ Bacchae (1282-1325, including the lacuna which has been speculatively reconstructed). Polymestor comes onstage in Euripides’ Hecuba (1055-84), wearing a mask which gruesomely depicts his eyes bleeding after Hecuba stabs them, in an expression of ‘extreme’ onstage

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Becoming Female suffering. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King represents Oedipus blinding himself offstage, but his suffering is expressed onstage (1298-1346). Prometheus also suffers physically onstage in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, a play in which ‘on every side is suffering’ (198). Io seems to twist and turn in this play, and it is hard to imagine that these lines were performed in an immobile fashion: The stroke of madness burns me again, my brain is convulsed, the gadfly stings me with his immortal arrow. My heart beats wildly in my body; my eyeballs roll and turn; insanity falls on me like a raging storm and drives me off course; I can’t govern my tongue; words rush out at random } Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 876-84

If these directions in the text were not acted out, it would have been an interesting exercise in tragic dissonance – the body would be at odds with logos here. It therefore seems likely that tragedy does in fact represent ‘bodies in states of extreme suffering’ onstage, and with regularity. After examining the staging of suffering and deaths in the extant tragedies, it seems on balance that the enactment of suffering often occurs onstage, contrary to Murnaghan’s opinion, whilst the enactment of death is usually offstage, as Murnaghan remarks. As for the absence of staged literal acts of violence, Segal believes they serve to accentuate ‘what is not seen’.78 The events that occur offstage thus carry an intense element of ‘mystery, horror, and fascination by the very fact of taking place behind the scene’.79 Relegating literal acts of violence to unseen space perhaps therefore increases levels of anxiety. This offstage space, usually the hidden interior of the house or palace, functions as a place where women take men to kill them (for example, Clytaemnestra, or where they store their weapons – for example, Deianira keeps the Centaur’s lethal blood inside the house). In light of the inseparable nexus of physical and emotional/mental suffering in tragedy, the distinction Murnaghan makes between these two types of suffering in modernity does not appear to be applicable to classical Athenian culture and to this performative genre. (Murnaghan makes this distinction implicitly by stating that bodies experiencing extreme suffering are not represented onstage.80) Even if this is a tenable distinction, it may be noted that reportage rather than enactment does not necessarily diminish the power of the body and its sufferings. The imagination may construct images which are often more disturbing than any we can view. Consider Loraux: ‘Death by report lends itself to conjecture vastly more than does violence exposed to the public view’.81 Thus, in Sophocles’ Trachiniae (778-82) the death of Lichas is reported in the following way: Heracles ‘caught Lichas by the foot where the ankle turns and threw him against a wave-beaten rock that juts from the sea. It pressed the pale

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma brains through his hair, and, split full on, skull and blood mixed and spread.’ The horror of description perhaps transcends enactment. In Euripides’ Bacchae (1109-37), the Messenger offers a description which demonstrates a powerful convergence of logos and soma: With that, thousands of hands tore the fir tree from the earth, and down, down from his high perch fell Pentheus, tumbling to the ground, sobbing and screaming as he fell, for he knew his end was near. His own mother, like a priestess with her victim, fell upon him first. But snatching off his wig and snood so she would recognize his face, he touched her cheeks, screaming, ‘No, no, mother! I am Pentheus, your own son, the child you bore to Echion! Pity me, spare me, Mother! I have done a wrong, but do not kill your own son for my offense.’ But she was foaming at the mouth, and her crazed eyes rolling with frenzy. She was mad, stark mad, possessed by Bacchus. Ignoring his cries of pity, she seized his left arm at the wrist; then, planting her foot upon his chest, she pulled, wrenching away the arm at the shoulder – not by her own strength, for the god had put inhuman power in her hands. Ino, meanwhile, on the other side, was scratching off his flesh. Then Autonoe and the whole horde of Bacchae swarmed upon him. Shouts everywhere, he screaming with what little breath was left, they shrieking in triumph. One tore off an arm, another a foot still warm in its shoe. His ribs were clawed clean of flesh and every hand was smeared with blood as they played ball with scraps of Pentheus’ body. 82

This shocking scene is created in the imagination of the spectator. The Greeks appear to have this model of the power of logos (and sight) to wound the bodies-selves of listeners.83 This society is a powerfully visual one, judging from male discourse.84 (However, the ancient notion of the gaze is not unproblematic. Zeitlin writes of sight as both a ‘privileged source of knowledge’ and ‘the delusive basis of appearance’.85) In classical Athenian tragedy, watching and listening both appear to be equally important activities. There does seem to be a certain Greek tradition of privileging sight, but this sense is one of a few relied upon for the reception and construction of meaning by the spectator.86 It seems as if most of the senses are required for the power of tragedy to take hold. These descriptions would have little affective power without the rhetoric of the body, particularly the disturbing vulnerability of the body. Tragic words would appear to have most effect on the audience when they viscerally evoke the body, indeed, tragic language derives its power from the body – logos would lack resonance if it did not trade on the formidable referent of the body’s experience. Thus, the suffering of the body does not appear to be displaced by logos; the body seems in no way to be ‘replaced’ by speech. Logos and soma appear to work together in tragedy to profoundly affect the bodiesselves of listeners. Both logos and soma draw their power from each other, and the suffering of bodies is enshrined onstage via logos. Furthermore, logos also works with the body in tragedy, in yet another

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Becoming Female expression of the interdependence of discourse and the body. Perhaps Golder says it best when he describes how logos paves the way for the theatrical representation of wounded bodies to achieve their full tragic effects. He characterises the messenger’s speech, a conventional feature of tragedy, in the following way: Presaging the revelation of some tragic spectacle, its heightened rhetoric, graphic descriptions, and sonorous devices are literally sounds with which to conjure sight. The messenger speech in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus is a case in point. It exemplifies the tragic optics which the messenger speech in general epitomizes, since the speech is itself about seeing and prepares, point for point, for the following spectacle of Oedipus blind but newly sighted.87

So here the powerfully somatic description of Oedipus putting out his eyes prepares the audience for the sight of the mutilated face (mask) of Oedipus, who is represented as denying himself of vision, the sense which seems so important to the exercise of masculinity in this culture. Murnaghan writes that Oedipus is ‘deprived of vision, which we tend to think of as the most cerebral of the senses }’.88 However, vision is also highly somatic in the Greek tradition, and the gaze is predicated upon the body, its central fascination.89 Nicole Loraux’s words on the interrelationship of sight and logos are apt. In Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman she observes: ‘} seeing is born from words and is closely bound up with them’.90 Whilst Silvia Montiglio in Silence in the Land of Logos points to ancient Greece in general as a ‘culture of the spoken word’, she also fully addresses the rich visual capabilities of logos. Montiglio writes: ‘As opposed to silence, words disclose, reveal, show themselves: in the theatron, a place where one sees, speaking brings light. Tragedy is rich in synaesthesias, sounds perceived by the eyes.’91 This notion of a sensation experienced in one part of the body when stimulated by another seems applicable to the visual nature of tragic language. Montiglio’s concept of tragic synaesthesia might also cover this interrelationship of logos and soma under discussion – one invokes the other, one incites the other. Without the body, logos would be barren, and without logos, the body’s power would be curtailed. * The visceral nature of tragic logos derives directly from (imagined) violence against soma, the body. Logoi frequently perform a startling vivisection of the body in tragedy, violating the inside and outside of protagonists’ bodies, targeting both the emotional and physical. Speech and words are thought to have a definite impact on bodies in ancient thought, and this affect is not restricted to the listener, the audience member. The words of one protagonist can literally wound another’s body in tragedy. Logos

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma commits violent acts against the body onstage, and concomitantly affects the bodies of the audience members. Once again the intensely somatic nature of Greek thought in general, but here with regard to the senses (especially sight and hearing) is important to keep in mind. So, too, emotion, passion, even madness are constructed, as Padel remarks in Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek Madness, as ‘physical and concrete’, having ‘the body as its base, and carry[ing] resonances of other bodily conditions like pollution and disease’.92 In the tragic genre these emotions are mental/physical states expressed by logoi and the performing body. The ancient nexus of logos and soma is further demonstrated by the notion that words are imbued by the classical Athenian tradition with the power to cause much suffering to the body. Language seems to have been thought to exert a strong hold over the body-self in ancient Greece. Padel writes expressively on this power of tragic logoi: Pain enters, excites, wounds innards through words } Sirens embody the Greek sense that what comes in through the ears – poetry, words, music – is both supremely desirable, or treasurable, and lethal } Innards can be damaged by what comes in through sight and hearing, wounded by emotion }93

Images are thus accounted for – images have bodily affects, wounding the body enormously (and it seems this is an important objective in tragedy). ‘Your words are wounds’, the nurse tells Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus (342). Sight and hearing emerge as two important avenues for wounding the body. The female, so often bent on inflicting suffering, is, for instance, cast as exploiting the route of hearing. The Sirens, mythical female monsters, are the most flagrant example, capable of unforming, deforming, and even decomposing men’s bodies with the magical power of their words (Homer, Odyssey 12.39ff.). Indeed, words appear to be so powerful at inflicting suffering, one could be prompted to ask if there is a difference between a word and a sword when it comes to wounding another in tragedy? Perhaps such a distinction is irrelevant, when it comes to the end result of damaging others, of the representation of suffering. Whilst the fact that words wound the body onstage instead of bodies wounding bodies might initially appear to confirm Murnaghan’s contention that speech replaces the body, the body instead has emerged as an integral part of logos. The voice is embodied, and words remain within the province of the performing body. The body within and beyond logos The body is in the word in ancient Greek thought, so much so that in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, words are endowed with ‘bodies’. In his rhetorical treatise, Gorgias seems to attempt to give logos, his logoi,

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Becoming Female dominance over soma and the feminine via his apparent power over the figure of Helen.94 Gorgias tries to commandeer the perceived feminine power over language, as seen in the above example of the Sirens. The female in the Greek literary tradition is given ‘a metis-like power over the utterance of both truth and imitation, a power that every male from Zeus to Gorgias himself must make his own’, as Anne Bergren writes.95 Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, a panegyric to the power of language (and implicitly his mastery over logos), discusses the affect of logoi on the bodies of listeners and suggests logos has a body.96 Gorgias casts speech in a corporeal way, utilising the body as a blueprint for his discourse on logos, to produce metaphors, to produce logos.97 Gorgias’ entwining of logos and soma is reminiscent of tragedy, where tragic logoi affect bodies in a physical manner. In Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen not only does speech have a body, but speech impacts on the listener’s soul via, in the words of Nancy Worman, ‘the body’s senses, in a manner increasingly likened to physical impact’.98 In a further confirmation of the violating power of words, Gorgias describes the audience’s embodied reaction to poetry as a penetration of the listener’s body, which in turn produces an embodied reaction. Gorgias imagines: ‘Into those who hear poetry there enters a shuddering surrounded by fear, and also pity with abundant weeping, and longing that loves mourning’ (Encomium of Helen 9).99 This is reminiscent of Aristotle’s description of the tragic audience’s cathartic shudder (phrittein, Poetics 1453b5-7).100 Segal points to the similarities between Gorgias’ descriptions of the audience’s reaction to poetry in general and Aristotle’s ideas on the audience’s experience of watching Greek tragedy. Segal describes tragedy as eliciting these extreme physical reactions from its audience: ‘shuddering, trembling, hair standing on end, aphasia, dizziness, pounding or leaping heart, cold chills in the belly, and a tension in the whole body’.101 He locates these ‘physiological’ and ‘emotional’ responses to tragedy in both subsequent discourse and extant tragedy.102 In this context, a suggestion of Ruth Padel’s seems relevant – she points to evidence of actors using ‘specific visual and oral techniques’ designed to produce emotional reactions.103 Thus, as mentioned above, the Greek tradition often appears to emphasise and expect embodied responses from its audience members, to design techniques calculated to extract such responses, and to allow for the audience’s bodies to act as histrionically as the actors’ bodies in some ways. Words have a deep effect on the body in this facet of the Greek tradition, and the act of watching is cast as a deeply physical activity, an embodied (inter)action, rather than purely a cerebral function.104 Yet some bodily experiences are depicted as beyond the reach of logos – the intensities of mourning, the pain of childbirth, and the experience of pleasure. Sometimes ‘words can fail’.105 Euripidean tragedy at times tries to gesture at these experiences that are beyond words. For example, the pains and tormenting ramifications of eros are an important theme in

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Euripides’ Hippolytus and Sophocles’ Trachiniae. The embodied language of mourning women in the literary remains might best express the ability of the body to reach emotions beyond the scope of language, as illustrated by the keening and accompanying gestures of the women who have lost husbands, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and city in Euripides’ Trojan Women (see 98-21, 278-80, 1218-37). Images, noises, and gestures of the body might express or ‘flesh’ out emotions that words cannot convey. The words of the afflicted and anguished Philoctetes in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (756) depict tragic pain and suffering as beyond linguistic representation: ‘Terrible it is, beyond words’ reach.’ Morris suggests this Sophoclean representation reveals ‘the silence implicit in pain – a shutting off of communication } .’106 Whilst Morris reads this play as ‘a play composed of silences’,107 it seems that Sophocles’ Philoctetes is also full of anguished cries, saturated with the noises of the male body experiencing suffering. Consider, for example, the well-known Sophoclean onomatopoeia: pappapappapai (Philoctetes 752).108 The genre of tragedy seems to display an extensive repertoire of the noises of pain, suffering, and mourning. In Greek Tragedy and the Emotions, William Bedell Stanford reports that the ancient Greek language ‘had an extraordinarily wide range of exclamatory semi-animalistic cries (“interjections”) that are far more visceral than our “alas” ’.109 Primal sounds might perform the task of conveying suffering more effectively than words here. So, too, gestures played out on the body might be able to convey emotions beyond the sweep of language. Tragic language is not restricted to words, but also extends to sounds and gestures. These sounds and gestures are a profoundly important part of tragedy’s tableau and might also obscure their basis or reliance on the body less than words (since language/speech is often seen as curiously disembodied). Sometimes, logos, man’s shining accomplishment, fails and the body triumphs.110 It would, however, be unwise to diminish the importance of logos in tragedy, to reverse this prejudice by privileging the body, by asserting it is ‘more’ important than speech in tragedy. Speech is unquestionably intrinsic and integral to tragedy’s power, to the articulation and expression of the body. The plays affect the reader because of tragic language, but this tragic language remains grounded in the visceral body, relying on the body for its impact. In another sense, these images, noises, and gestures of the body might also be interpreted as another form of language. Gestures are, for instance, part of another language, body language. The noises of the suffering body are part of a primal language. Or, to use Simon Richter’s words, ‘pain breaks down cultured language and returns the human to language’s origin’.111 At the very least, pain has an interesting effect on language, or on the speaking body, and exposes the intricate segue between logos and soma. This failure of speech to displace the body in tragedy is eventually addressed by Murnaghan, at least with regard to Sophocles and Euripides.

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Becoming Female She suggests: ‘the works of } [these] two tragedians register a similar tension between exposing the body and escaping from the body into speech with a less certain resolution in favour of speech } In a number of plays } the body asserts itself }’112 However, whether this apparent desire to ‘escape from the body into speech’ is in fact a tragic imperative is open to question. The traditional stance of the primacy of logos in tragedy may be constructed from the Platonic tradition of the hatred of the body. The desire to ‘escape from the body into speech’ emerges at times in the Platonic dialogues, rather than tragedy. Perhaps Murnaghan arrives at her position of tragedy’s desire to ‘escape from the body into speech’ by way of Aristotle. As Jennifer Wise suggests in Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece, Aristotle apparently theorises a progressive movement away from the body in the genres of epic and tragedy towards the discursive practice of the ‘bare prose’ of the ancient novel.113 Although elsewhere Aristotle (in Poetics 1449b) argues that tragedy is a performative imitation of action, rather than a narrative imitation of action.114 The assumption that a move from epic to drama is a move away from the body remains questionable.115 In tragedy, actors enact the dramatis personae on the stage, an emphatically embodied process, whereas the bard sings the epic poem to the audience. Drama appears to be far more ‘embodied’ than epic. The apparent order that Murnaghan sees Aeschylus achieve in the Oresteia over the ‘unruliness that is thought to reside in the body’ is overthrown in several plays by the latter two tragedians in her reading. ‘In a number of [Sophocles’ and Euripides’] plays’, according to Murnaghan, ‘the body asserts itself, and, as a consequence, wounded and suffering bodies make their way into theatrical space.’116 She, along with other scholars, sees a connection between this ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘greater prominence of female figures in tragedy than in any other public activity in classical Athens aside from ritual’.117 The logic appears to be – more women, more suffering, more wounded bodies-selves. This points to an implicit connection between the female and suffering bodies, the focus of my next chapter. As we might expect, ‘many of the most insistent examples of the body asserting itself in tragedy come from Euripides’.118 Whilst the body might be asserted in tragedy, it is the kinds of bodily qualities regularly associated with the feminine that result in the body’s refusal to be obliterated. In this sense, therefore, the female body reasserts itself. So, for example, Murnaghan reads Euripides’ Hippolytus as a failed endeavour to contain the (female) body via speech. Logos is unable to suppress and avert the infection of suffering that travels from the body of Phaedra to the body of Hippolytus.119 Euripides’ Electra might also be read as an unsuccessful attempt by speech to supplant the body. Here, according to Murnaghan, Orestes’ failure to move past his act of matricide is demonstrated in the way her body overruns his logoi, riddled with ‘graphic, somatic images of his crime’.120 The maternal body haunts this play, refusing to be contained, deleted.

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1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma Yet it is Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the ‘last’ play from the opus of classical Athenian tragedy, which Murnaghan believes serves, perhaps more than any other play, to highlight the body, by ‘resisting the body’s subordination to speech without turning its action into the exposure of bodily pain’.121 Whilst she suggests that several Sophoclean plays express the dilemma posed by the abject body to culture, or, as she terms it, ‘a disturbingly obtrusive body’, Oedipus at Colonus concentrates instead ‘on a living body that is not in pain’.122 It might therefore be remarked that, in this instance, the male body is no longer tragic. However, Oedipus’ body perhaps remains one of the most problematic bodies, impossible to accommodate in the polis. Oedipus’ body, and by extension his polis, is polluted by his act of patricide, his incestuous marriage, and the production of children with his mother. Perhaps the only way to accommodate such an abject body is to make it disappear, as Sophocles arranges at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. Tragedy stages the kinds of concerns that other genres and discourses tend to repress, sublimate, and vilify, revelling instead in the abject corporeality of bodies. Disease, madness, eros, and suffering are its ‘natural’ terrain. As Wise suggests, ‘} drama is a genre in which real grotesque bodies are always given the last word’.123 Whilst it might be argued that logos is also involved here, having the last word even when describing the body, the body is not securely contained via logos – its effects exceed the frame and control of language, just as the feminine does. And if the body triumphs, I would emphasise that it is the ‘female’ body that triumphs, in the sense that the carnal, finite qualities of the body, along with the tragic sufferings of the body-self, are regularly thought of as feminine and feminising.

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2

The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering [Woman] is loved only when absent or abused, a phantom or a fascinating abyss. Outside and also beside herself. That is why I stopped going to the theatre; it was like going to my own funeral, and it does not produce a living woman or (and this is no accident) her body or even her unconscious. Hélène Cixous1 Product of nothing but his jealously protected creativity, speaking no words other than his, she represents that sexless, indifferent } incarnation of his own image. Elizabeth Grosz2

Part 1. Woman’s intimate relation to ‘the body’ Many feminist scholars have commented upon the equation of the female with the body in ancient Greece. It must be said at the outset of this discussion, however, that my remarks serve as a brief overview of a vast subject. This is not an exhaustive study of the configuration of the female as body and the well-established connection of the female with the body in ancient Greek myth, drama, and philosophy.3 The female seems to be perennially implicated when the body is at issue. Corporeality is the ‘defining’ condition of the female in a culture which regularly aligns the physiological passages of both birth and death with the female and highlights any bodily elements of female experience.4 The feminine is typically ascribed to the material, the body, and is often cast as powerless against the ‘constraints’ of the body.5 (Interestingly, when the tragic male hero starts miming the female, the male also becomes powerless against the constraints of the body.) Women in ancient Greece, Froma Zeitlin reminds the reader, are regularly cast as responsible for looking after ‘the bodies of others’ – for example, feeding, clothing, and mourning family members’ bodies.6 This comment is echoed by Page duBois who remarks in Sappho is Burning, ‘women are hopelessly tied up with the body in ancient Greek culture. They give birth, they nurse the young } [and] the sick, tend the dying, and bury the dead’.7 The body begins to emerge as an essential force in ordering the female experience, domain and ‘psyche’.8 Euripides’ Hecuba serves as an illustration of this perception of the body shaping female experience,9 and also of the long and complicated association of

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering the maternal and the body in ancient Greece. The Euripidean Hecuba, the archetypal mother figure, the ‘mater dolorosa of the ancient world’, is, as Zeitlin remarks, intimately tied to the ‘syntax’ of the body.10 Hecuba is depicted as experiencing a deep connection with her family and an easy comprehension of the body’s ability to use ‘gesture’ to signify the power of emotion. This is, for example, powerfully demonstrated in the embodied acts of mourning and supplication.11 Her affinity with the body is related not only to her sex, but in particular to her identity as a mother. This connection of the female with the body frequently extends to a close, at times even synchronous, experience with the bodies of her children. Hecuba and Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba are excellent examples of such a symbiotic relationship.12 Andromache, in Euripides’ Trojan Women, is also cast as having a painfully sweet connection to her son Astyanax’s body (see lines 757-64). A further aspect of this notion of the body principle ruling the female is raised in the characterisation of Euripides’ Hecuba. Here, and elsewhere in tragedy, as Zeitlin suggests, women are often cast as fighting back against violence committed against their children’s bodies and their own, by striking forcefully at the bodies of the perpetrators, as if they are bound by a primeval body-logic.13 Euripides’ Medea offers an interesting counterpoint here. She is a powerful example of a woman who goes against this perceived ‘natural’ ability of a mother to love her children. She fights back at Jason through her children’s bodies, perverting this topos of the mother who retaliates against violent acts committed against her children’s bodies.14 The connection of the mother to the child is, however, regardless of motive, considered to be ‘normal’ in this culture (and it is this sacrosanct bond that Medea violates). A resonating theme of the somatics of motherhood emerges. Even Aeschylus (the tragedian who seems to depict Clytaemnestra in the most negative way) presents Clytaemnestra’s wrath at the sacrifice of her daughter and her motivation to kill her husband as partly deriving from a desire to avenge her daughter’s death. The Chorus’s speech in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (154-5) might be interpreted in such a way: ‘For the terror returns like a sickness to lurk in the house; the secret anger remembers the child that shall be avenged.’ The character of Clytaemnestra follows this line: ‘Yet look upon this dead man; } with no more thought than as if a beast had died, } he slaughtered like a victim his own child, my pain grown into love, to charm away the winds of Thrace’ (1414-18). In an attempt to exonerate herself she sings: No shame, I think, in the death given this man. And did he not first of all in this house wreak death by treachery? The flower of this man’s love and mine, Iphigenia of the tears he dealt with even as he has suffered }With the sword he struck, with the sword he paid for his own act. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1521-9

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Becoming Female This representation of Clytaemnestra can be read as straight or skewed, sincere or deceptive, but either way it trades on the tradition of the mother’s ‘natural’ love for her child. Whilst the characterisation of Clytaemnestra (and indeed most characters in Athenian tragedy) is deeply complicated and always open to interpretation, in Euripides’ Electra this theme of the mother as more attached to the child than the father emerges again. Clytaemnestra’s words perhaps point to a perception of the man as more able to separate from the child than a mother might. In response to her daughter Electra’s charges of neglect the Euripidean Clytaemnestra sings: And dark and lonely were your father’s plots against those he should most have loved and least conspired to kill } My father gave me to your father’s care, not to kill me, not to kill what I bore and loved. And yet he tempted my daughter, slyly whispering of marriage with Achilles, took her from home to Aulis where the ships were stuck, stretched her high above the fire and, like the pale field grass, slashed Iphigenia’s throat. Euripides, Electra 1011-23

Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis also represents this deep maternal bond to the child’s body. Upon hearing Clytaemnestra’s reaction to the proposed sacrifice of her daughter the Chorus declare: ‘Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing a potent spell. All women alike fight fiercely for a child’ (917-19) This serves as a further example of the theme of the deeper female ‘attachment’ to the body and subsequent inclination to preserve it. The female appears to be frequently essentialised as body in this culture. Although Zeitlin hesitates to extend this association of the female and body to an essentialist reduction of the female to body,15 this often seems to be the case. The female is perennially cast as rooted in the body by virtue of her perceived physiology. But this association also extends beyond physiology. The female must bear the sign of the body in ancient Greece, with its connotations of sickness, infirmity, inscrutability, and deception. In a further complication, these qualities are often configured as rooted in the female’s physiology. Indeed, women are so aligned with the body in this culture that in one Platonic representation men who indulge in the vulgar form of love – love of the body – are attracted to women rather than men. Men who are drawn to men, on the other hand, act as representatives of a more ‘heavenly’ kind of love, love of the soul (Plato, Symposium 208c ff.). Here in the Symposium men seem to be constructed as less bodily than women. The ideal form of love is the love between men’s souls, a love which produces ideas or wisdom, as opposed to the ‘earthy’ kind of love of the male/female coupling which produces children. This seems indicative of the prevalent equation of the female with the body in the Platonic corpus, or, as Elizabeth Spelman observes in her article ‘Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views’, Plato represents the female as ‘quintessentially body-directed’.16

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering In this discussion of the female body, the paradoxical status of the female body as both central and marginal in classical Athenian culture needs to be observed, and this complicates the signification of woman as body. The female body is considered to be foundational to nomos (culture) by virtue of the production of sons and daughters who are important for the continuation of the polis. And yet, whilst the female body (in conjunction with the male body) plays an important part in conferring citizenship, the female is not an active citizen in the democratic process that defines the citizen. The female body is depicted as outside of culture, holding a marginal place in society. This status is reflected in the conception of the female as unruly, wild, closer to ‘nature,’ changeable, fluid, boundless, and as such her body poses a challenge to the male to control and contain her. (For example, the female and her body are tamed in marriage and the dysfunctional female body with its unruly parts – the wandering womb, for instance – is tamed in medicine by male iatroi, healers.17) Woman is cast by this logic onto the margins of culture as the other of man, who is central to culture. This positioning of the female body as both a central and peripheral force in male culture is also echoed in Athenian drama. Here the female and her body are central to the mimetic process, and literally feminise mimesis, and yet the female is marginalised by the fact that actual women are absent from the stage due to the tradition of male actors playing female parts.18 As the opening quote from Cixous at the start of this chapter suggests, ‘the theatre }. does not produce a living woman or } her body’.19 The female in this sense becomes a trace, marked by absence. Tragedy presents a simultaneous (textual) embodiment and disembodiment of the female body – an enactment of the female as approximating body, but, the male disembodies ‘her’ via the processes of mimesis, by taking the female part. In another sense, the female is re-embodied as a male playing a female. However, this dialectic of absence and presence extends to the position of the body in general in tragedy. The body is both absent and present in the mimetic process in complicated ways. The male body in tragedy will also become marked by this theme of absence and presence. Outside tragedy, this is a body that glorifies in and parades its masculinity, but in the genre of tragedy it is obscured and disguised, and thus on some level figuratively absent in performance. The disguised male body is deeply at risk of feminisation, as Bassi observes, given the cultural associations of disguise and the female body.20 The equation of the female with the body becomes further complicated by the use of the feminine to signify the abstract. Classical Athenian tragedy implements the feminine to talk about the body, but also the mind (nous) and the soul (psukhe). Indeed, a picture emerges of tragedy favouring a female model of both mind and body. Padel suggests this genre favours ‘a female model of mind’. The mind is seen as an innard, a passive

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Becoming Female receptacle, in some images, and both innards and receptacles are typically marked as feminine. This picture fits in with the common Greek tendency to designate the ‘personifications’ of abstract concepts as feminine in gender.21 In the tragic context, ‘ideas of female interiority’ are often summoned to think through ‘the mental and emotional experience, of everyone, and most importantly } of men’.22 It might be added that the feminine is also employed to think through the corporeal experience of men. The feminine is regularly used as a general tool to comprehend and critique male culture, to conceptualise both the abstract and the corporeal, and this appears to be a general feature of patriarchal cultures.23 The operation of the female as sign leads to these apparent inconsistencies with regard to the female signifying body, mind, and soul in ancient Greece. The feminine is always a sign for something else and is consistently utilised as such. (This suggests in itself that the female is always somehow absent in male discourse.) The feminine has an ephemeral presence, and, as such, functions as a potent and limitless signifier, crucial to the activity of male representation. Luce Irigaray writes: Femininity – an indispensable intermediary for the father in making his law prevail. The simulacrum which introduces the false into the true, effaces their difference, substituting for this difference an interval of pretense: the neutrality of femininity } With the patriarchal order, femininity forms a system. Dissimulation of woman in the thought of the father. Where she is created fully-clothed and armed. Veiled, her beauty concealed. Nothing visible except her face. Therefore, not woman }24

The woman, by virtue of the polyvalence of the feminine, seems to become divested of womanhood, and of the feminine. Athena appears to be the figure Irigaray is thinking of here, but her comments are also suggestive of the ways both Helen and Pandora are used in this culture. Helen, for example, certainly seems to function as a figure who effaces difference. The figure of Helen operates as the sign or site of and for desire, all desire, and, as such, Helen seems to elide distinctions and confound difference.25 Helen is also cast as a simulacrum, veiled and representative of whatever the author desires, a veil in and of herself. Euripides’ Helen might be read as coalescing these qualities in the form of the eidolon (shade, or double) of Helen.26 Pandora is another veiled dissimulator, the original imitation who confounds any distinction between ‘the true and the false’, another speculum.27 However, Pandora could also be interpreted as introducing difference into the harmonious world of men in Hesiod’s Works and Days (92-4). Pandora, or gune, ‘the woman’, as she is called in Works and Days, also functions as the representative of sexual difference. Furthermore, the female in tragedy in general is often cast as a confounder of difference. The figure of Helen also raises the notion that the female is reduced to

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering the body and occasionally cast as almost bodiless in tragedy. Helen, the most embodied body, is almost rendered without a body – her body is often described loosely in outline, mysterious, elusive.28 This serves as a further demonstration that the female is all things and nothing; the female body is always elsewhere. Vernant’s description of psukhe (soul) gestures towards this indeterminate quality of the feminine (and invokes Irigaray’s reference to the feminine as a simulacrum). Vernant observes: } the psukhe is like a body } it is the double of the living body, a replica that can be taken for the body itself that has the same appearance, clothing, gestures, and voice. But this absolute likeness is also a total insubstantiality. The psukhe is a nothing, an empty thing } a shade }.29

The psukhe, as discussed above, is regularly cast in the feminine, and the description of psukhe as mimetic, an insubstantial double, could be used to characterise the feminine in general in tragedy, in particular, the figure of Helen in Euripides’ Helen. Vernant’s words also bring to mind the figure of Alcestis in Euripides’ Alcestis – she comes back from the dead, enigmatic, hard to read, almost ‘an empty thing, a shade’.30 Wohl describes Alcestis at the end of the play as ‘a copy of herself, the essence of tragic mimesis’, and in this context Zeitlin’s remark on the ‘generic category’ of woman also functioning as an ‘enigmatic sign’ serves to fill out this characterisation of the feminine, the female body.31 The female, so thoroughly embodied in this tradition, is also depicted as unknowable, uncertain in her embodiment. Thus the feminine appears to function as the sign par excellence in patriarchal culture. The feminine provides ‘the male imaginary’, in David Halperin’s words in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, with a ‘specular poetics of male identity and self-definition’.32 Male culture seems to constantly pass through or engage with the feminine in order to reproduce itself. Here, the feminine engenders male culture. This shift is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in classical Athenian tragedy – the feminine engenders the male hero’s body-self in tragedy. This notion of the female body as sign is certainly a pervasive concern in the self-conscious tragedy that emerges from classical Athens (and again, this is especially evident in Euripides’ Helen). In a sense, by functioning as a sign, the female is necessarily ambivalent and enigmatic, and the ideal trope for thinking through notions of the body, the mind, the spirit, the abstract, and the masculine. But perhaps more interestingly, the feminine in its role as the ultimate signifier inverts or envelops the logic of culture, as the gendering of culture shifts from masculine to feminine. Here the feminine emerges as the condition for and of cultural signification, not just a mutable sign.33

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Becoming Female Part 2. The female body and suffering A complicated connection between the female and the body has emerged in the discussion so far. A further aspect of this equation of the female and the body might be found in the association of the female body with pain. The following works may be read as exploring this nexus of the female body, suffering, and pain in one way or another – the figure of Helen in the Iliad and Odyssey, Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Hippocratic writings, especially the ‘gynaecological’ writings, Euripides’ Helen and Hippolytus, and Sophocles’ Trachiniae.34 Loraux, Padel, Murnaghan, and Zeitlin establish the ancient Greece identification of women with both the concept of the body (as discussed above) and the notion of ponos (pain and suffering).35 This association of women with pain might be a logical extension of the prevalent association of the female with body. In this equation the female is assimilated to the body, and the body is, certainly in tragedy, defined by pain and suffering, experiences which are typically encoded female. As a further thread in this equation, the female body is thought to be especially prone to pain. Or to put it a slightly different way, the body, the feminine and pain all seem to be inter-linked in a kind of flexible continuum in the ancient imagination. The genre of classical Athenian tragedy persistently associates the female body with pain and suffering. This model of the female body as one prone to ponos extends to epic, lyric poetry, and the medical writings. The medical corpus, for example, seems to display a proclivity for viewing the woman’s body, in its transition from parthenos to gune, as one prone to pain by virtue of the female’s anatomy and physiology. (For example, to experience menstruation without pain in the medical model, as King writes, ‘the body must be completely female, in that it must be “broken down” } this breakdown can only occur through childbirth }’. The female body needs the male body to facilitate this process, via insemination.36 This might be worthwhile recalling when trying to unravel the tragic association of the woman’s body and pain. Whilst I do not intend to imply that the models of the female body in medicine are commensurate with the models of the female body in tragedy, I might, however, call attention to a tragic dramatisation that seems to play with the kinds of notions evident in the medical model of this transition. There will of course be differences between the ways the genres of medicine and tragedy image and interpret the body, producing different models of bodies. Here I draw attention to a similarity. However, the differences between the two genres are vast – they have different imperatives and emerge from different locales.37 In Aeschylus’ characterisation of Io, the pain of Io’s existence seems to be a pain whose genesis is directly linked to this crossing from the girl’s body to the woman’s body. (This notion of a transitional state as hazardous is found across Greek literature and medical writings – see, for example, the depictions of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae and Hippolytus in

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering Euripides’ Hippolytus, both of whom appear to be of ephebic age.38) Or, to take this idea further, it appears Io’s pain is closely tied up with the experience of the gune’s body. This transition is accomplished only after the passage of childbirth and the flow of lochia, at least in the medical writers.39 So here pain and suffering are cast as a defining condition of the ‘true’ female body (as Euripides’ Phaedra will also demonstrate). Interestingly, in Aeschylus’ Suppliants the suffering of Io is relieved by the male body: Who was it who charmed poor much-wandering Io who was stung by the gadfly? It was he who rules through an unending lifetime, and by his force of painless power, and by his divine breath, her wanderings and sufferings were ended. Then she, with her tears, washed away her sorrowful aidos, her virginal shame. And } she bore a blameless child. Aeschylus, Suppliants 571-8140

The male body seems to be bestowed with beneficent, healing powers in this image, and this is reminiscent of the anodynous and therapeutic qualities of the male body for healing the pathological female body in medicine.41 To illustrate my point regarding the pathologisation of the female body, the female principle is frequently cast as weaker than the male. For example, in the treatise On Generation 6, a girl will result if the weaker seed of the female prevails, a boy will result if the stronger seed of the male prevails.42 The female foetus is also considered to be inferior in nature to its male counterpart.43 So, too, if the pregnant woman has a ‘poor’ complexion, it will be a girl (Aphorisms 5.42).44 The description of Io’s suffering and resulting cure does appear to be remarkably close to the Hippocratic notion of the female body and its dependence upon the male body for health via irrigation, insemination, and the subsequent weighing down of the flighty womb with a baby. Sexual intercourse with a man and bearing a child are seen to cure many female pathologies – the female needs the male body. The male body is very much Io’s panacea as Zeus liberates Io from her initial state of suffering, brought on by the sting of the gadfly, prior to meeting Zeus.45 Zeitlin also remarks that Zeus is cast not as the source of Io’s suffering but as her ‘cure’.46 Here the male body, albeit the divine body, heals the female body through giving her a child. The female suffers by virtue of her unstable body, prone to pathologies arising from sources which emanate from within and without. Longinus, a writer from a much later period, illustrates this continued theme of the unstable nature of the female. Longinus writes of Sappho’s poem fragment 31, ‘Is it not wonderful how she summons at the same time soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, colour, all as though they had wandered off apart from herself?’ (Longinus, On the Sublime 10.3).47 In light of the fundamental instability of the female body in this model,

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Becoming Female the source of Io’s suffering might therefore be the defective female body itself, as she moves from parthenos to gune. The Greek terms used in the Io episode in Suppliants shed further light on this potential pathologisation of the female body in this text – ‘ponoi atimoi (undeserved suffering), odunai (labour pains), and nosos (sickness)’ are used to characterise her state before Zeus delivers her (Aeschylus, Suppliants 561-63).48 In the Greek tradition, it seems the female can be imagined as afflicted by illness and suffering by virtue of having a woman’s body. The female body risks inclining towards pathology when left to its own devices. The balance of the female body between health and sickness therefore appears precarious at best. But perhaps more importantly for my argument here regarding the enduring ancient association of the female body with pain, Zeitlin finds the story of Io appears to offer ‘the female both sexuality and childbirth without ponos, without pain’.49 (The Danaids desire this also, but in their case it seems to be related to their wish to stay parthenoi, avoiding the transformation to the state of the adult woman’s body that is thought to come with sex and childbirth.) The promise of sex and childbirth without pain adds to this emerging image of pain as the condition of the female body, in a way that perhaps cannot be said of the male body. This contrasts strongly with the notion of the female body as having a direct role to play in the undoing of the male body. The male body is whole and healthy in itself it seems. Whilst there appears to be a model prescribing that the male should not engage excessively in sex because of its depleting effects, this does not appear to indicate that the male body is innately prone to pathology.50 In the realm of tragedy, the Euripidean Hippolytus is negatively portrayed as going against the order of things by wishing to be a parthenos and refraining from sex. The concern for his body does not appear to be the issue, however, rather a concern for the continuation of the line of the father and the patriarchy. The male does not seem to have been cast as suffering as a result of his body, but appears to suffer instead as a result of external events or his behaviour – for instance, when his body is opened up in war, from disease (nosos), and from excessive behaviour (for example, indulgence in food and wine). However, once the male appears in the genre of tragedy, where the male often becomes female or is revealed as female as a result of the feminising processes of tragedy, the male begins to suffer as a result of his inner (feminine) nature and his vulnerable body (as might be argued with regard to the Sophoclean characterisation of Heracles in Trachiniae, for example). This prevalent alignment of the woman and ponos seems to be in part due to the perceived agonies of childbirth. Zeitlin writes of ‘the ponoi associated with the feminine condition’, where ‘desire, sexuality, and childbirth’ seem to merge. Loraux, in The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man, also suggests, when discussing the ponos of

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering labour, that ‘the model for suffering is feminine’.51 The experience of labour is used metaphorically to describe the suffering of the warrior in epic, since labour is seen as ‘the most painful torments of all, which devolve on women’.52 This interest in the pain experienced in childbirth is continued, voiced, and explored in the male imaginings of Attic tragedy.53 For example, the character of Medea famously says that she would rather go into battle than give birth: ‘What they [men] say of us is that we have a peaceful time living at home, while they do the fighting in war. How wrong they are! I would very much rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child’ (Euripides, Medea 248-51). The experience of birth and its intense pain generally seems to have been thought of by these male poets as the height of suffering, as profound and life-changing, and in some way connected forever to the woman, attached to her ‘body-memory’.54 In Euripides’ Hippolytus (161-5) the Chorus remark: ‘unhappy is the compound of woman’s nature; the torturing misery of helplessness, the helplessness of childbirth and its madness are linked to it for ever. My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain }’. Childbirth in this example is cast as opening the woman up to an ongoing condition of suffering – the helplessness and madness of childbirth are eternally linked to woman’s phusis (nature).55 As a result of this perception of the excruciating experience of the pain of childbirth, women are thought to be deeply attached to their children. The male attachment to the child is often imagined quite differently, as I explore in Chapter 3. Loraux remarks in Mothers in Mourning that this bodily attachment between mother and child is cast as: } a bond that is without mediation, exacting, painful, and that Euripides’ choruses sometimes describe as ‘terrible’: terribly tender, terribly strong, simply terrible. That very thing that makes of the ‘race of women’ a philoteknon genos (a ‘race’ that loves its children), by welding forevermore the maternal body to the memory of the newborn } the young daughter Iphigenia incarnates for her mother a life that has barely been detached from her own body } as if Clytaemnestra could not stop giving birth in endless parturition as long as her daughter lived.56

This intimacy of the female body with pain and suffering seems so enduring that female characters are often cast as emotional midwives for male characters’ pain in tragedy. Padel suggests that the female characters experience this pain for others: ‘Female stage-figures specialise in inner pain on other people’s behalf: an emotional analogue to childbirth’.57 This empathy with pain might endow her with the perceived aptitude for understanding the pain of others, and extend to an uncanny ability to cause pain to others’ bodies in tragedy.58 The female in tragedy displays a special gift for transmitting suffering to the male (for example, Phaedra, Helen, Deianira, and Clytaemnestra exhibit such a talent).

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Becoming Female The susceptible female body The female is also thought to be uniquely open to suffering because of the perception of her psukhe and soma as open. The female body is frequently cast as boundless and formless because of her loose, spongy flesh, and wet, liquid nature in medicine, tragedy, and philosophy, for example. (The quality of wetness on a general cultural level creates various levels of difference between the male and female, endowing the female with ‘her’ inclination to the boundlessness of passion, for instance. Emotion, also a characteristically feminine trait, is seen as wet and boundless in this culture.59) This temperament entails a lack of firm bodily and psychic boundaries, opening the female body to suffering entering from without. The vicissitudes of fluids and the tumult of emotion are thought to affect the female body-self (by virtue of its perceived porosity) far more than its male counterpart. Euripides’ Phaedra is an excellent example of this, and her openness to the onslaught and flux of emotion, eros, has ramifications for the men in this play – her suffering is transmitted to the male protagonists, via the deltos in a sense.60 Furthermore, pain and suffering are thought to enter the body from both without and within in Attic tragedy. This perceived weakness of the female body to penetration from without, alongside her propensity for disruption from within, might offer some rationale as to why the female is traditionally thought to be so open to pain and suffering. As part of this notion of the female body’s tendency towards formlessness, the female is also cast as prone to a state of dissolution. If pain is the natural state of the female body, the experience of ponos is also constructed as leading to an experience of dissolution. Pain obliterates, disturbs boundaries, and the female, given her open nature and lack of boundaries, is particularly vulnerable to the dissolving effects of pain. This model of the female body as prone to dissolution is also evident across genres (such as literature, medicine, science, and philosophy).61 The idea of female flesh in this culture entails a notion of dissolution – within the Hippocratic model of female flesh, for example, the female body is cast as loose and spongy, lacking the form of the male body. The potential for the dissolution of a woman’s body is evident in the medical model, a model which King argues feeds from and is part of its wider cultural milieu.62 The Hippocratics also display a notion of the decomposition of the parthenos’ body into the woman’s body – the flesh and the poroi break down into porousness in the process of becoming a woman (a process that is completed by childbirth and lochia).63 Aristotle’s notion of the female body as matter and the male body as form also entails a perception of formlessness and perhaps implies this female tendency towards dissolution (Aristotle, Generation of Animals 716a5-23; see also Aristotle, History of Animals 538b7-8). Tragedy offers at least two example of female dissolution – the dissolution of the princess in Euripides’ Medea could be interpreted as a theatrical enactment of this theme, and Io in Aeschylus’

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering Prometheus Bound (also on the brink of womanhood, like the princess in Euripides’ Medea) undergoes a process of dissolution in a sense, dissolving into a heifer (Euripides, Medea 1186-1201; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 561-88, see also Aeschylus, Suppliants 43-8). This openness of the female body to penetration from without also serves as a contributing factor in the formulation of the unstable nature of the female. The characterisation of Io in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, for example, suggests that the female mind and body are both open to entities entering from outside the body, and that distortion of mind might lead to distortion of the body. The reverse also seems true here – distortion of the body can lead to distortion of the mind, in a kind of dynamic demonstration of Paul Valery’s remark, ‘At the end of the mind, the body. But at the end of the body, the mind.’64 This kind of interrelationship of body and mind seems particularly evident when it is the female under discussion. The character of Io, played by a man playing a woman, is given the following words: ‘At once my shape was changed, my mind distorted. Horned, as you now see, stung by the gadfly’s stabbing goad, convulsed and mad, I rushed on }’ (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 672-5). Or, as Padel notes (offering different examples), tragic emotions ‘lacerate innards’ (including the mind) and result in ‘torn bodies’ on the stage. Yet Padel finds there is sometimes a discrepancy between the character whose mind is rent by tragic passion (whether caused by the divine or the human) and the character whose body is cleft as a result of another’s torn mind.65 This would seem to suggest a separation of the body and the mind, a model that does not appear to have currency in the pre-Platonic world of classical tragedy. Characters who suffer wounded innards usually appear to suffer on the surfaces of their bodies in a kind of holistic experience of suffering and the two sets of examples Padel points to – Phaedra and Hippolytus, Heracles and Deianira, could also be cited to illustrate this point. These characters seem to suffer both in mind and body. Their internal suffering appears to be expressed via their bodies; they are ravaged by suffering, inside and out. Any immense suffering of the body seems to implicate the mind, and vice versa. The notion of tragic ponos seems to emerge as an axis where the mind-body is rarely, if ever, split. Padel herself builds her argument on the observation that inner wounds are physical wounds in tragedy and advances the idea of the embodied mind.66 It does seem, however, that the one who suffers as a result of the original sufferer’s curse or actions (the secondary sufferer), regardless of intention, seems to suffer more dramatically (Pentheus, Hippolytus, and Heracles, for example). The secondary sufferer is typically male, and in this sense perhaps the ante of histrionics is upped when the undoing of the male is staged. This kind of pattern of amplifying male suffering would seem to be a feature of tragedy, and is again linked to the female (who transmits suffering) as the examples of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Deianira and Heracles suggest.

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Becoming Female * Because of this perceived openness to outside influence and her status as the conduit of tragic pain, the female body and persona are evidently the perfect vehicles and emblems for the Attic stage and its action founded on the activity of mimesis. The male is thought to be vulnerable to outside influences, but, outside of tragedy, the male body and psukhe are constructed as far more efficiently bound than the female (on the surface – the text at times might betray this insistence on the inviolability of the male. For example, the genres of historiography, medicine, and funeral oration might seem to argue for an impenetrable, bound male body, but this male body is certainly vulnerable to being opened up in war in these works, thus in a sense contradicting this ideal, providing an omnipresent subtext of penetrability.) The feminine (regardless of the subtext of the penetrability of the male body) is the ideal model for tragedy, particularly with regard to this context of suffering, for both the poet and the actor. Female characters function as ‘a natural site for inner pain’, as both ‘a social and sexual emblem of private parts suffering invasion } by the outer world’.67 As I have argued, the feminine (whether it is applied to ‘female’ or ‘male’ bodies represented on stage) is used in tragic male mimesis as a site of suffering and pain to articulate tragic visions of the vulnerability of ‘humanity,’ but perhaps more interestingly, to make the male become female, become tragic. Part 3. Mimesis, tragic dissonance, and the female body A further strand in this theme of the female body as the perfect vehicle for mimesis may be found in the prevalent model of the female body as illusory, mimetic, deceptive, and dissonant in ancient Greek culture. (This model seems at times to extend across the genres of epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, medicine, and historiography.) The male body will in turn mime this enduring model of the feminine in the space of tragedy. To understand the radical nature of this male mimesis, the model of the female body as deceptive and dissonant needs further elaboration. The female is consistently depicted as having an ever-changing, intentionally, or alternatively accidentally, mimetic body. (Helen seems to be one of the best examples of the intentionally mimetic female, whilst Io appears to be accidentally mimetic – she displays a lack of control over her metamorphosis into a cow.68) Indeed, the female body functions as a – if not the – primary signifier of the important concept of mimesis in ancient Greece.69 Euripides’ representation of Helen’s body as an eidolon perhaps best illustrates these issues. In essence, Helen as eidolon raises the notion of the changing nature of the female body and throws into question the

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2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering nature of appearance and reality, exteriority and interiority, absence and presence. These issues also implicitly emerge in the representation of the body in general and in the notion of the feminine in particular within tragedy. Helen’s body serves as the ‘fulcrum’ for tragedy in many ways, and reveals the traces of many of these ancient Greek notions and associations regarding the female body and its relation to drama. Helen’s body emerges as an important and provocative theatrical device,70 and as eidolon invokes the theatrical art of illusion. (For example, Euripides’ Trojan Women turns in a sense on the presentation of Helen’s body: see 891-93, 1023-6. Euripides’ Helen also utilises the motif of Helen as eidolon to great effect.) Helen encapsulates the proclivities of the female for metis and mimesis, cast as deftly manipulating logos and soma via her shimmering body and mimetic voice. (Again this is crystallised in Euripides’ Helen.71) The figure of Helen also personifies the tragic topos of the instability of the female body-self, and its concomitant affect on the male. A comment of Ann Carson on the female body in myth is perhaps also suggestive for this discussion of the mimetic qualities of the female in tragedy. In her article ‘Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire’, she writes: In myth, woman’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.72

The female seems to demonstrate an effortless capacity for mimesis. Women in myth, for example, seem to spontaneously change shape, to change bodies without necessarily wanting to. Women do not seem to be able to redirect this change of form, to control their bodies. However, Helen might serve as a most threatening exception here, in myth, epic, and tragedy. She appears to be able to control mimesis in the male imagination. For example, the mimetic potential of the female enables Helen to mime the voices of the Greeks’ wives from inside the Trojan horse in the Odyssey 4.266-89. Furthermore, this instability of the female typically leads to the male hero’s tragic downfall, to the suffering the male body-self experiences on the tragic stage. The female body also leads the male body-self to the condition of what may be termed tragic dissonance. Tragic dissonance is in one sense an outflow from the state of suffering – the experience of suffering leads in turn to an experience of dissonance. Tragic dissonance is a condition of the tragic universe, an aspect and effect of mimesis. But most importantly, the female functions as the primary model of dissonance and it is this model that the male begins to mime in the process of becoming female. In her capacity as the model of tragic dissonance, the female is essentially cast

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Becoming Female as disharmonious, ‘at odds with herself’.73 The character of Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus emerges as perhaps the greatest example of this concept of tragic dissonance. Phaedra’s suffering prompts the chorus to remark: ‘woman’s nature is a dustropos harmonia, a discordant harmony, and there is wont to cohabit with it an ill, unhappy helplessness that goes together with travail and unreasoning thoughts’ (Euripides, Hippolytus 161-4).74 Woman, and in particular, Phaedra, exhibits a fracture between outer disguise and inner motive in ancient Greece (a fracturing which is perhaps also mirrored on a metatheatrical level by the fact that a male plays the female role here). Dustropos harmonia is essentially the condition of woman as gune – here in Euripides’ Hippolytus (164) the female is cast as being opened up to the ongoing condition of dissonant harmony via the intense experience of childbirth, which leaves its unsettling and maddening mark forever on the woman. In this context, it is noteworthy that female helpers in tragedy are typically parthenoi, girls whose bodies have not yet been opened up to the vicissitudes of womanhood and its condition of dustropos harmonia. Dissonance between exterior and interior (which appears to be at the heart of the notion of tragic dissonance) is also vividly demonstrated by the archetypal figures of Pandora and Helen. Both Helen and Pandora are thoroughly associated with the female body, and with the ancient Greek notion of the female body’s inclination to hide or manipulate the truth via her propensity for masking, concealing, dissembling, and creating illusions. Both Helen and Pandora (who is known as kalon kakon, the beautiful evil: Hesiod, Theogony 585) have beautiful carapaces which hide evil interiors, leading them (and the men around them) into the condition of dissonance, a disjunction between exterior and interior. The female body in tragedy and elsewhere in Greek literature in this set of images is a simulacrum (Helen), a deceptive imitation (Pandora) or a ‘counterfeit coin’ (Phaedra), and these concepts also betray a notion of dissonance. Male tragic heroes, most particularly, Heracles, Hippolytus and Pentheus, will in turn taken on these characteristics of dissonance.

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3

The Precarious Male Body The male self must put himself at risk because that self is always at risk. Froma Zeitlin1 } Greek and Roman ‘manhood’ itself, once unexamined and taken for granted }, now came under the spotlight, and revealed itself to be complex, multifarious, and far from the seamless whole that Graeco-Roman texts proclaimed or implied. Jonathan Walters2

Part 1. The male relation to the body If the female is cast as ‘body’, as explored in the previous chapter, what is the male relation to the body? The male body should, according to one set of images, be controlled, detached, and disciplined. The genre of tragedy appears to disrupt and confound such a model, with its tragically embodied hero who suffers and becomes uncontrollable, passionate, and attached. The importance of the body for the male cultural project in classical Athens is undeniable – the male body is buffed and paraded in the gymnasium and palaestra, it is the male’s chief weapon in warfare, and a profoundly important rhetorical instrument in the democratic polis. The male body emerges as fundamental to the achievement and ongoing proof of andreia (manliness, manly courage), but it also serves as a devastating point of weakness for this process of masculinisation – the body is vulnerable. Indeed, the principle of andreia as a becoming also leaves the male prone to instability. An example of this lack of fixity in the model of the male body can be seen in Hippocrates, Regimen 1.28, in a discussion regarding the three different types of male bodies ranging from the most masculine male to the hermaphrodite, we hear ‘these three men are born, but the degree of manliness depends upon the blending of the parts of water, upon nourishment, education, and habits’. Masculinity, it seems, can come undone at any moment, as I will explore in Chapter 4. The male is at times cast as acorporeal, most particularly in the genre of funeral oration. This theoretical state of bodilessness holds some distinct advantages for the male. ‘By giving up their bodies’, as Jane Gallop notes (in a discussion regarding the modern benefits of the male transcendence of the body in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction), ‘men gain power – the power to theorise, to represent themselves, to exchange women, to reproduce themselves and mark their

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Becoming Female offspring with their name. All these activities ignore bodily pleasure in pursuit of representation, reproduction, production.’3 Thus, on one level, precisely by giving up the association of the body, the male can theorise the body as female, and engage in that most important cultural activity, the production of meaning. In another work, Thinking Through the Body, Gallop remarks further on the advantages of such a ‘disembodied consciousness’.4 The male project relies upon ‘the other’ (sex, class, and race here) to incarnate the body whilst also caring for ‘the Master’s body’, ‘so he could consider himself disembodied, autonomous, and free to will’.5 Classical Athenian male culture also seems contingent upon the feminine carrying the sign of the body to an extent, and perhaps this affords the male the kinds of symbolic benefits Gallop suggests for his modern successor. It might, however, seem odd in a culture that so eroticises the male body that the body is read as female. Classical statuary and vase-paintings offer a tradition of the Athenian male as gloriously corporeal. Countless statues celebrate beautiful nude young male bodies, and in one of the most corporeal of genres, erotic vase-paintings, the male is emphatically embodied, on display. (Here the female body is also exhibited in various states of undress, although the female body in the public art of statuary is usually clothed, in stark contrast to the proud nudity of the male body.6) This disparity between representations of the male body is perhaps an effect of genre, since different attitudes towards the body emerge in different genres. Thus, whilst in the realm of art, the male is, as I have discussed, sublimely corporeal, in the genres of philosophy and funeral oration the male tends to be represented in a more disembodied state. Within the realm of philosophy, particularly with regard to the Platonic dialogues, the body issue is complicated, given that the body appears as a primary metaphor in Plato. Furthermore, there appear to be variations within the Platonic oeuvre itself – the male might appear more embodied in the Phaedrus than the Symposium, for instance. However, generally the female is designated as ‘body’, and the male is regularly cast as achieving a certain level of transcendence, a status that is paradoxically often accomplished via the body. For example, kleos (glory, a kind of everlasting fame), is accomplished through a complicated relationship that involves risking and giving up the male body, as I explore below in more detail. A further contrast to the female relationship with the body might be found in the common construction of the male as less invested in the body, often depicted as disregarding the value of familial bonds in order to serve the state. The intimacy the female is thought to have with regard to the body (in part because of the experience of childbirth and caring for the bodies of children and other family members) is not in evidence with the same intensity for the male. Agamemnon, for instance, is depicted as sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia for fair winds to facilitate the expedition

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3. The Precarious Male Body to retrieve Helen from Troy and end his brother’s humiliation. Here Agamemnon’s bodily relation to his daughter is presented in a completely different light to the traditional relation of the mother to the daughter’s body (However, Clytaemnestra does not appear to be the model mother – she is reported to have abandoned Electra and Orestes in Euripides’ Electra, 1008-10, 1086-93.) Yet Attic tragedy does offer scenes of strong emotional bonds between fathers and children, expressed in scenes involving intimate touch. Agamemnon is more than once represented as having a close relationship with his daughters (both Iphigenia and Electra), even though, and this is an important point, he is depicted as choosing state over family in his decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. For example, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis 635ff., 1210ff., the relationship between Iphigenia and Agamemnon is close indeed. And in Euripides’ Electra 1102, we hear from Clytaemnestra: ‘My child, from birth you always have adored your father.’ Intimacy between male bodies is evident in the common gesture of the son gently touching the father. Thus in Sophocles’ Ajax 1409-12, the son touches the father gently, and in Euripides’ Hippolytus 1431-32, Theseus and Hippolytus embrace. It does seem, however, that the intensity of this bodily connection can in no way compete with that of the mother, who seems to be depicted as forever bound to the bodies of those she carried within her. To illustrate further the relation of the male to his body, it is useful to turn to archaic epic constructions of male bodies. Whilst these images derive from another time, place, and genre, this material might be used to contextualise tragedy’s constructions of the male body. The roots of some of these archaic attitudes might extend at times to the classical period. Furthermore, tragedy seems to represent the mythical world of heroes in contemporary ways, with a classical (and tragic) spin.7 More specifically, the Homeric Odysseus provides the foundation for the theatrical body, first and foremost because he disguises his body (and this has interesting and destabilising ramifications for the male project).8 The Odyssean model of the male body (disguise and survive, rely on logos) and the Iliadic model of the body (the body that becomes wounded, bleeds, and dies) are both important for tragedy’s purposes, however. And yet Zeitlin rightly observes that Odysseus emerges as a problematic figure in tragedy. So, too, Ajax, the model for the Iliadic hero, is problematised in the tragic world (see Sophocles’ Ajax).9 With this in mind, it might be said that the Iliadic hero experiences a complex relationship with his body, and this perhaps provides a touchstone for the tragic hero’s fraught experience of his body. The Iliadic hero’s body serves as his instrument to attain kleos, but in order to achieve this he must ignore his body’s demands and desires for survival, sustenance, eros and nostos (homecoming). As Murnaghan observes, this leads to a kind of ‘alienation’ from his body, to a tension between ignoring and

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Becoming Female addressing the longings of the body.10 Citing an episode from the Iliad involving Hecuba’s appeal to Hector to preserve his life, Murnaghan writes: Here the complete alienation from his body to which Hector is committed by virtue of his position as the chief Trojan hero can be measured in the way the call of the body that he must resist is expressed not through his own body but through that of his mother } Hecuba tries to recall Hector to the value of saving his own body by reminding him of the attachment he once had to hers. She reminds him of a time when, as a child, he shared a preoccupation with the needs of the body that she, as a woman, continues to feel, but that he, as a grown man, is committed to ignoring.11

This example dramatises the opposition between the desires of the body and the private sphere, encoded female, and the desires of the state, the public sphere, coded male, and the subsequent dilemma faced by the male who has to choose between the two. Hector follows the male principle, affirming his status as aner, and withstands his mother’s appeal to remember her body, his close association with it and his own body in turn. He sacrifices his body, or the connection with the body/maternal body, in order to attain heroism. In this episode, Hecuba, by asking Hector to remain within the palace walls and value his connection to her body, his family, and the home above all else, in a sense asks him to act like a woman, since this would in effect render him ‘female’, as only women, young boys and old men (the feminine element) stay behind the palace walls in times of war. Hector, like a ‘true’ Greek aner, chooses the public sphere, to be(come) a man, fulfilling his duties as a male leader and hero rather than becoming female via choosing to survive and honour his private bonds as son, husband, and father. Woman, on the other hand, cannot escape her entrenchment in the private sphere nor the demands of the body. Ideally, as Murnaghan points out, an Iliadic hero tries to maintain a continual state of ‘disengagement from the body’, where he avoids descending into a state of ‘inactivity and sensuality’,12 both associated with the female in the Homeric epics and elsewhere. In this light Odysseus begins to look like a highly suspect hero for most of the Odyssey. Odysseus allows his body to take over when he stays with Circe and Calypso. He satisfies their sexual whims and becomes inert, weeping like a girl on Calypso’s island (4.555-60, 5.151-8).13 The characterisation of Odysseus in the Odyssey is in stark contrast with the model Iliadic hero. Odysseus engages with the body, and therefore becomes female, putting his male body/identity deeply at risk. To resurrect his male identity, he must return home, cleanse his house, and then think about future quests. Odysseus finally returns to movement (movement seems in part to generate andreia in ancient Greek culture) and living by his wits. Thus, he returns to being, or, more aptly, becoming Odysseus, to acting like a man. Odysseus does

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3. The Precarious Male Body not just arrive at the condition of manhood; he, like all men, must prove again and again his worthiness of the appellation andreia by continuing to make the right choices. Masculinity appears to be so tenuous – one miscalculated choice and masculinity comes undone. It is this unravelling of heroism that tragedy seems so interested in dramatising. This consideration of epic heroism is instructive in some ways for the later period of classical male culture. The family versus state tension quite clearly continues to operate for the Athenian male on a representational level. The male body is positioned as public and continues to be cast as perennially in conflict with the body’s longings.14 Or, in another sense, public/private tensions continue to turn on the male body-self. (Although consider Sophocles’ Antigone – ‘she’ faces the dilemma of deciding whether to be dutiful to the state or her family. But perhaps this is an expression of the complicated masculinisation of this heroine, who is played by a male actor.) Plato in the Republic seems to offer a partial solution for this male predicament of the tension between public and private. Here Plato outlines a commune where the attachment to the family and the competing claim for male loyalty to the state are solved by abolishing the family. The Republic does not appear to solve the dilemma of the desires of the body, however. In a culture where the male is depicted as developing and revelling in his body at the gymnasium each day, and cultivating it sexually, he is still required to sacrifice it for the call of duty, as, for example, the genre of funeral oration suggests. Classical Athenian men appear to be permitted to indulge in the pleasures of the body far more freely and openly than women, and this might foster a potentially dangerous libidinal attachment to the male body, threatening the potential sacrifice demanded by the state. The epic theme of male sacrifice as an avenue to achieving and maintaining andreia and the alternative path of preserving the male body as an act which leads to the unravelling of andreia also appears in classical discourse. Elizabeth Spelman, citing Plato’s Laws 944e, writes that for a warrior ‘to have more concern for [his] } body than [his] } soul is to act just like a woman’. A warrior who tries to save his body by surrendering to the enemy rather than sacrificing himself for the state should receive the fitting punishment of being ‘turned into a woman’.15 Because the warrior displays a ‘womanish’ soul and connection to the body, the implication is that his outer body should reflect his inner nature, and he should therefore become female. A similar idea may be found in Plato’s Timaeus (90e-91a), where ‘all those creatures generated as men who proved themselves cowardly and spent their lives in wrong-doing were transformed, at their second incarnation, to women’. Here ‘weak’ and ‘debauched’ men are born again as women in a body more fitting to their inner character. If a man fails to exhibit andreia, he risks a figurative fall ‘from the ranks of the brave and manly to the opposite class of women’, as Jack Winkler remarks.16

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Becoming Female * The dilemma the body poses for the male arises in part from the cultural prescription which declares the male body has great value, but also requires the hero to take risks that profoundly jeopardise this body in order to achieve andreia. Helen King offers a vignette of the male body operating as a citizen in this culture, highlighting the parts of the male body that are of particular value on a public level. She notes that the Greek polis is cast as: } a city-state within which there is an emphasis on particular parts of the body; the arms and hands which bear weapons and practise crafts, and the voice which is central to the oral culture of the polis, based as it is on the ideal of participation by all citizens. Activities such as athletics and bodybuilding, which in our society are performed for the sake of the individual, were performed for the state.17

The greatest trial of manhood is to be prepared to give up this body for the state. This act of renouncing the body leads to true kleos, which leads to a figurative surpassing of the boundaries of the body.18 Spartan women seem to have been thought to achieve a measure of kleos through risking and at times giving up their bodies in childbirth. Loraux finds some evidence for a possibly similar attitude in classical Athens, although it does not appear to be as institutionalised as it is in Spartan culture.19 Given a certain equivalence of childbirth and war as trials for women and men in ancient Greece,20 it might be asked if the more danger and pain in labour a woman is cast as experiencing, the more of a ‘woman’ she is thought to become? Or, perhaps it would be more apt to say the more of a ‘man’ she becomes in the sense that she is valorised in male terms. (However, it might be difficult to argue for a woman becoming more of a man here, since the ponos of childbirth is cast as a quintessentially female experience.) This particular facet of the male relationship to the body – of denying the body – warrants further discussion as it may shed more light on the relationship of the male to the body. Classical Greece might be characterised as a highly militant culture, constantly at war with both its close neighbours and own city-states. Zeitlin identifies a ‘politics of force and expediency’ at work, where ‘the body of the other is depersonalised, made a spectacle for others’ eyes or discarded as no longer useful’.21 The other must be objectified in this way, in order to facilitate the acts of atrocity common in war via the banishment of the emotion of compassion – the emotion which, paradoxically, is admitted during the performance of Athenian tragedy. (Tragedy in this sense undoes the opposition between self and other, encouraging identification or at least empathy with the plight of the other. According to Aristotle, Poetics 1453a, the tragic effect

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3. The Precarious Male Body depends upon the audience member feeling pity and fear for the tragic hero.) Thus, warriors might be cast as trying to refuse the supplicant’s touch. The touch of the other, the contact of bodies, threatens to melt the barrier between self versus other. It is to the body that Iphigenia turns as a last resort, when she feels speech fails her in an attempt to supplicate her father: If I had the tongue of Orpheus so that I could charm with song the stones to leap and follow me, or if my words could quite beguile anyone I wished – I’d use my magic now. But only with tears can I make my arguments and here I offer them. O father, my body is a suppliant’s, tight clinging to your knees. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1211-18

When words fail to win her father over, she relies on her tears (a bodily fluid) and on the touch of her body (a body that should be precious to Agamemnon), to elicit recognition of the father/daughter connection and circumvent her father’s intention to sacrifice her. Empathy or pity, a most important emotion in this culture, does appear at times to be a disallowed emotion for a man.22 The ideal man must for the most part preclude pathos from his dealings with the other, particularly in war. However, in this culture a balance must be sought, a man must permit touch at times, even the touch of the other. The male has to make the right decision whether to give in to a supplicant. This practice of supplication, a tenet that forms part of the cultural code, demonstrates the dilemma the touch of another holds for the male. Touching another provokes a crisis of boundaries which must be navigated.23 The touch of the supplicant brings with it the recognition of others’ vulnerable bodies, and a subsequent reminder of the male’s own body, thus entailing a further predicament for the male. The character of Odysseus in Sophocles’ Ajax (121-6) expresses this sentiment poignantly: ‘I pity him in his utter distress, though he’s an enemy, yoked as he is to catastrophic fate. And here I see myself as much as him. I know that we are nothing more in all our life than feeble images or fragile shades.’24 In the context of this discussion of the male relationship to the body, and more specifically, the role restraint plays in the expression of the ideal male body, Michel Foucault’s book The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2 is useful. Whilst some critics argue Foucault overstates this model of the restrained male body, and this is perhaps a fair analysis, Foucault’s model may still be considered with the awareness that it is a limited philosophical/medical model.25 This declension of the male body-self as rational, restrained, does exist, but it is not the only one, as tragedy makes patently obvious, with its heroes who appear as feminine, irrational, undisciplined, multiple and split, rather than singular and foreclosed. Foucault finds some images pointing to a heroisation of the man who can control the desires of the body. This model adds to a picture of a

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Becoming Female desirably disciplined male body. (This is not necessarily the only model current at this time, but appears to be an exemplar nonetheless, at least in the genres of philosophy and medicine.) Such men demonstrate ‘selfrestraint’, and are ‘} masters of themselves and their cravings }, able to renounce sexual pleasure’.26 However, to control rather than abnegate the body seems to be the ideal, as Euripides’ Hippolytus may suggest. Hippolytus’ renunciation of the sexual aspects of the body appears to be inappropriate, hostile to the rhythms of nature,27 and perhaps avoiding the agon of culture. In the spirit of the cherished Greek ideal of moderation, a man should rule the body’s desires in a demonstration of enkrateia (a term Foucault uses to advance his model of the male body’s management of desire).28 The exercise of complete sexual abstinence is dangerous for the state in a sense, a less than desirable practice for both women and men, since the polis depends upon both for the propagation of its culture. Thus, sexual congress with women is often cast as a dangerous necessity. (Although Plato’s work seems to hint of dangers in male-to-male eros as well. The quality of enkrateia might also become compromised in male-to-male relationships – see, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 251-2.) In this sense, the pederastic induction of the young male into male culture, where an older man indoctrinates him into the polis via the rites of pederasty, might also be read as a lesson in enkrateia, introducing the young male to a defining quality of andreia. The ephebe (of which Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae seem to be representative) learns self-control, how to manage the body and its unruly desires (and here Hippolytus and Pentheus fail miserably).29 The ‘agonistic relationship with oneself’, to borrow a phrase from Foucault, begins.30 This is an education young girls miss out on, in part because women are often thought to be almost incapable of exercising enkrateia and sophrosune, and therefore need a kureios (be it father, uncle, brother or husband) to rule their wanton bodies.31 Furthermore, the custom of pederasty could be read as an apparent passage from the femininity of youth to masculinity through the (older) male body. Here the young male plays the supposedly passive, non-desiring role.32 In his role as the passive partner, the young boy is characterised in one image from Plato’s Laws (836e) as ‘the impersonator of the female’.33 This image also brings to mind the young male in tragedy who falls easily into the condition of impersonating the female, the best example being Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus might also mime the female in a sense – the unwilling parthenos, a common theme in Greek literature. (The Danaids in Aeschylus’ Suppliants are representatives of this model.34) The young male will eventually become the penetrating, active older male, the opposite of which is the kinaidos, the effete, the penetrated ‘womanish’ man. In the process, the young male plays the female in preparation for playing the ideal male role of the dominator.

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3. The Precarious Male Body This figure of the kinaidos, scorned because he is an adult male citizen who allows himself to be penetrated, also invokes his opposite, the important and recurring model of the ideal adult male body as impenetrable. Indeed, as Winkler writes, ‘inviolability’ is the very basis of the ideal male body. The male citizen’s body is (ideologically) ‘sacrosanct’.35 This distinguishes the Athenian adult male from women and slaves, both cast as endlessly penetrable, and fits in with other literary representations which depict the ideal adult male body as hard, bounded, strong, and impervious. The hardness of the hoplite’s body (the ‘good’, sound, firm body) appears to be contrasted, as Winkler notes, with the softness of the kinaidos’ body, who allows himself to be penetrated and therefore acts like a ‘woman’.36 Yet perhaps scholars apply these binaries of male and female, active and passive, penetrator and penetrated, too stringently.37 Thus King writes that ancient Greek medicine exhibits a model where both male and female bodies are made up of ‘hard parts’ and ‘soft parts’, both cast as similarly ‘fragile’.38 The genre of tragedy serves in a sense to undo these oppositions, so that the hard hero’s body becomes soft, mollified by suffering, the feminising process of tragedy. For example, Sophocles’ Ajax, a highly masculine hero, is initially compared with a sword. His mind is cast as unyielding, his body hard, his will and speech as strong as iron.39 He is thus the traditional hermetic male hero. Pity, however, threatens to weaken the body-self and make this warrior ‘womanish’.40 Ajax moans: Strong oath and iron intent come crashing down. My mood, which just before was strong and rigid, no dipped sword more so, now has lost its edge – my speech is womanish for this woman’s sake; and pity touched me for wife and child, widowed and lost among my enemies. Sophocles, Ajax 649-54

Instead, the warrior’s body-self should remain impenetrable, for the most part resisting the emotion of compassion, penetrating and wounding the bodies of others.41 Another model of masculinity might be understood as taking this restrained, controlled male body even further. In the genre of Athenian funeral oration, the male almost becomes unbodied. In perhaps the ultimate expression of restraint, the male must be prepared to sacrifice his body-self for the higher purpose of the polis. Funeral oration is a discourse which centres on the theme of ‘the beautiful death’, and exhibits a tendency to elevate the male above the body. The funeral oration takes the suffering of the body and turns it into something else, choosing to ignore suffering and highlighting instead the glory of sacrifice for the state in an efficient stroke of propaganda. Funeral oration thus emphasises death rather than suffering.42 Or, as Loraux writes, ‘what makes a man is his death, which erases the body and inspires the encomium’.43 Funeral orations glorify death and tend to repress the actualities of bodies lost,

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Becoming Female producing a bodiless citizen. The contrast with tragedy, as a space where the male hero appears in a sense to be all body, is immediate and apparent.44 Tragedy might be understood in this light as a genre that gives the male back the body, concentrating on loss, suffering, and wounded bodies-selves. In effect, tragedy seems to unmake its male heroes. This apparent decorporealisation of the male body in the genre of classical funeral oration might also suggest a concurrent heightening of the already established association of the female with the body at this time. Under the logic of the sliding scale of masculine and feminine, an important model for the expression or formulation of gender and sex in antiquity, what one loses the other will surely gain.45 In this sense, the female gains the body, and the male gains immortality, in the form of everlasting kleos as a hero. (Although in tragedy, where the male gains the body, the female does not appear to gain immortality, with the exception of Euripides’ Medea perhaps.) The male must give up his libidinous connection to his body in some ways to reach this glorious apex of masculinity, whereas the female ends with the body, or lives on vicariously through the ‘no body’ of her son. Part 2. Suffering and the male body The body, as I explored in Chapter 2, is associated with the female because of its vulnerability, weakness, and openness to penetration, qualities thought by the classical Athenians to define the female body. Suffering and pain also appear to be associated with the female body. So, when a man suffers, he might be seen as becoming female. How, then, does the male body negotiate the problem of suffering, with its taint of the feminine, and its revelation of violability? On an overt level, the armed male body appears to be one strategy devised to protect this secretly vulnerable body. (The passage from boy to man might also be understood as a transformation from the unguarded, vulnerable, and penetrable youth’s body to the armed citizen’s body.46) But the practice of warfare and its implications for the scarred, wounded male body complicate the male project of generating andreia. Men wound each other’s bodies – they open each other’s bodies up – and given the cultural associations of the open, penetrable body with the female, it seems this might render men ‘female’ in war. Their bodies might thus be turned into ‘women’s bodies.’ Within the Homeric tradition itself, and also the tragic genre, there appears to be an image of warriors becoming ‘bleeding virgins’ at the hand of the enemy.47 Warriors’ bodies are, in this image, symbolically rendered female by the penetrating blows of another man’s weapon. Furthermore, Don Fowler finds some images of men being mortally wounded that are similar to those images of girls being ‘deflowered’.48 Although his argument predominantly draws on Roman sources, he points to a few ancient Greek images of young warriors being deflowered in

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3. The Precarious Male Body death.49 A classical Athenian example of the equation of young warriors and virgins might be found in Aeschylus’ Suppliants. Here the Danaids hope that the people of Argos will be spared the scourge of Ares, who is depicted as machlos (‘lewd’ or ‘wanton’), ‘pluck[ing]’ the ‘blossom’ of ‘youth’, ‘shear[ing] off its tenderest bloom’ (Aeschylus, Suppliants 6646, 636).50 In this play, dying warriors and deflowered parthenoi are, according to Zeitlin’s reading, in some ways commensurate, an interpretation which would seem to bolster Fowler’s suggestion that fallen warriors might at times be likened to deflowered virgins.51 This interchange is more explicit in the work of Vernant, who writes: ‘Marriage is for the girl what war is for the boy } a girl who refuses marriage, thereby also renouncing her “femininity”, } becomes the equivalent of a warrior.’52 But Loraux is even more emphatic: ‘} since it is considered part of the same semantic field, the natural flowing that ensures the healthy functioning of a woman’s body is put on the same level as the gaping wound in the male body’.53 Elsewhere, Loraux finds another model where the wounding of a man in the heat of battle makes a man become more masculine. These wounds are interpreted as marks of both inner and outer andreia, the defining quality of manhood.54 Such wounds might appear to have a two-fold effect – both the victim and the perpetrator appear to have their manhood enhanced. In this sense, the discourse of wounds might therefore serve as a subtle qualification or resolution to the problem of the penetrated male body, perhaps existing to protect the male from the stain of becoming female through the opening of his body in the process of being wounded. Wounds here appear to make the man; the opening of a man’s body by another man marks him as male. Gaping wounds appear in epic to reveal and communicate a man’s real character for his peers to see.55 Loraux suggests that virility is a quality inscribed on the open wounds of the male’s body, and Matthew Leigh also believes that this ‘valorisation of wounds in antiquity’ is in evidence in ancient Greece.56 Here, the body of the male warrior should be marked, scarred on the front to denote fearlessness and bravery in war. A wound to the front of the body is received while facing one’s opponent, a wound to the back is received whilst running away from one’s adversary, and as such is the ‘mark of disgrace’.57 This kind of mark, a glaring symbol, renders a man as ‘womanish’. Yet interestingly, this image of the male becoming more masculine as a result of wounding does not appear to be a classical Athenian topos. Elsewhere Loraux writes that andreia does not need to be inscribed on the surfaces of the male body via wounds in the classical period. The classical Athenians are relatively silent about the implications of wounds received in war for the project of andreia. Indeed, the body inscribed might be read as the body ‘subjugated’.58 To be inscribed by another, whether in the form

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Becoming Female of a wound or a tattoo, is to become objectified, cease being (or perhaps more aptly, becoming) an aner and thereby become feminised. As a rule, the master inscribes the bodies of both slaves and women.59 Inscription is a phallic activity performed by citizen men on the bodies of others and this might account for the reticence Loraux discerns in viewing andreia as written on the body via the wounds and scars of battle. Furthermore, it must also be remarked that these epic examples of men becoming more masculine via the act of being wounded do not appear to be part of the typical ideology of masculinity evident in this culture. Loraux herself writes that these examples are ‘most definitely } found outside the orthodox logos of the city’.60 As such, these unconventional examples of the perception of the wounded male body might even form a kind of resistant subtext against ambiguous images of masculinity, an alternative, albeit marginalised, tradition operating within the constraints of masculinity in epic. Whilst the question of the acceptability or meaning of being wounded by another man might remain open, to wound oneself, especially mortally, however, does not appear to mark a man an aner. Indeed it may mark a man as female since suicide is traditionally a ‘woman’s death’ (at least in tragedy).61 Ajax’s death is problematic in this regard – he wounds himself, and might thus cast doubt on his andreia according to convention.62 However, Loraux argues that Ajax kills himself in a masculine way, with the sword.63 In Loraux’s analysis, Ajax adheres to the rule that a man’s death must involve the spilling of blood, the opening of the male body. (The preferred way for a woman to die in tragedy is, in contrast, by hanging, which seals the female body and prevents any blood from spilling.64 This appears to reverse certain cultural configurations of ‘live’ bodies, inverting one frequent set of images depicting the male body as closed and the female body as dangerously open.65) But it could be argued that Ajax still commits suicide, which is, particularly in the realm of tragedy, a woman’s death. He is not killed by another man’s hand, but by his own.66 I would make a further qualification with regard to epic and tragic considerations of being wounded as a masculinising or feminising act. In tragedy, the male hero is at times depicted as returning from the Trojan war, his body resealed, only to be undone or opened up by the hand of a woman (a reversal or disruption of the norm, where women traditionally close the male body in funeral rites, sealing the wounds).67 Women in tragedy are far more lethal to a hero than the male enemies he crosses in warfare. He survives the risk of war, of being fatally wounded by another man’s hand, and returns home a hero, only to be turned into a ‘woman’ by the malignant hand of the wife. (Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Oresteia is perhaps the starkest example here.) This distinction – the question of who is committing the act of maiming and killing – is of utmost cultural importance. Whilst a male opponent might enhance andreia, a female opponent strips the hero of his masculine glory and devastatingly

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3. The Precarious Male Body feminises him. Tragedy regularly appears to cast the processes of suffering and wounding as feminising the hero, in part because suffering is usually inflicted by a woman. Tragedy thus presents a grave problem for its male hero, since women have the ability to open his body to the experience and signification of the feminine. Afflictions: the transmission of suffering from female to male As part of this topos of the male mimesis of the female, the role the female plays in the process of the male becoming female also needs to be observed. The notion of the female body as a transmitter of suffering to men is built into the model of the female body’s close relation to pain (as I discussed in the previous chapter). Women bring the tragic condition of suffering to the bodies-selves of men. In the semiotics of the trope of woman as sufferer in classical Athenian tragedy, women, by virtue of their openness to suffering and their ability to command suffering, make men vulnerable to this condition of suffering, spreading this affliction, and changing the bodies of men irrevocably. (For example, this can be argued with regard to Deianira and Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Clytaemnestra and Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.) This sentiment has a strong resonance elsewhere in Greek literature, beginning with the body of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony. Perhaps in this sense, Pandora becomes the template for the women of classical Athenian tragedy who make men suffer. Pandora is created as a punishment, a ‘precipitous trap, more than mankind can manage’ (Hesiod, Theogony 590), and she opens men up to the penetration of suffering and death. In short, she delivers men to the mortality of the body, severing their previous state of an idyllic intermingling with the ‘deathless ones’, free of worry, disease, and old age. Here man sinks into the condition of the body (with all its negative implications) as a result of the suffering inflicted by the female and her deceptive, seductive body, and in a sense, by falling into the body, the male becomes female. The theme of the female transmitting suffering to the male reaches an apex in the figure of Helen in tragedy. As purveyor of untold suffering to male bodies, Helen is often cast as facilitating the induction of men into the complexities of ‘tragic consciousness’.68 Helen, who is cast as delivering the devastation of war to men, functions, like Pandora, as a catalyst for propelling the male into the human condition of corporeality and mortality. The female, throughout what is known as the Greek tradition, is cast as the ‘bearer of the tragic’, and Helen is one of the most insistent examples of this motif.69 The character of Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus also serves as an excellent example of the transmission of suffering from the female to the male in tragedy. Phaedra’s hidden desires are revealed (Euripides, Hip-

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Becoming Female polytus 593), and the contagion of suffering is transmitted from Phaedra’s body, racked by a wasting kind of suffering, to the men in the play (Theseus, but most especially Hippolytus). Not inconsequentially, this fulfils Phaedra’s wish that Hippolytus will also share in her nosos, disease (line 730).70 The female body infects the male body with suffering, and the illusion of the discrete male body is undermined. Thus female characters in tragedy frequently become carriers of suffering, and woman, who is constructed as the ‘natural’ sufferer, often displaces or transfers this pain onto man and, in effect, makes the male become female. Not only do tragic women make men suffer, they often cause the man to undergo osmosis to female form, insidiously turning the man into a ‘woman’ in a sense. This seems to be a fairly common theme in tragedy – think, for example, of the tragic characterisation of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. She fatally slashes Agamemnon’s body with an axe while he is vulnerable, naked in the bath, and turns him into a woman in a sense by robbing him of his kleos. This topos can also be seen in the demise of Sophocles’ Heracles, precipitated by Deianira, and in the destruction of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Pentheus, at the hands of Phaedra, Agave, and the Maenads. By concentrating on the viscerality and painful vulnerability of the male body, tragedy directly contravenes the topos of the beautiful death, where a meritorious opponent opens up a man’s body to death. Tragedy thus at times seems to pervert the beautiful death, concentrating instead on the viscerality and violability of the body exposed by the hands of the malevolent female. Two ways of interpreting the wounded male body therefore emerge, and are suggestive of the context in which tragedy’s feminised, suffering male hero might be read. The male might be either masculinised or feminised by the process of being wounded, and this in turn depends upon the sex of the wounder. The suffering, wounded hero in tragedy seems to become deeply feminised, his fate sealed by the fact that his suffering is inflicted by a woman. Part 3. Dissonant heroes Suffering, given its association with the female body, poses a deep problem for the hero in tragedy, calling masculinity into question. The state of suffering leads the male hero into the feminine condition of tragic dissonance, or, to put it a slightly different way, the male becomes tragically dissonant once in the realm of tragedy, like the female. This condition of dissonance is also set in motion by the male act of playing the female (which is mirrored on both performative and textual levels; a performative ‘fact’ which also comes to affect the tragic hero textually). The notions of deception, illusion, and dissonance which surround the mimetic female body, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, begin to affect the male

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3. The Precarious Male Body body engaged in the process of mimesis, and lead to a fundamental destabilisation of the surety of the male body-self. Thus, while Porter writes: ‘woman, as the body out of place, produces the fantasy of its opposite, the [male] body in place, the coherence of the body itself’,71 this idea of ‘the [male] body in place’ is shattered in tragedy, as the male comes to mime the characteristic dissonance and disharmony of the female body-self. The female has been cast as ‘naturally’ mimetic, prone to changing form, intentionally and unintentionally. Men in myth are also cast as shifting shape, perhaps drawing on or appropriating the (apparently already established) trope of the mimetic female.72 But mimetic males are usually cast as able to change back ‘at will’ to their original shape in myth73 – in this sense they improve upon this ability of the female in myth, in an expression of Protean form. The tendency of the male to display more mastery over form in myth than the female in turn implies a model where men are more in control of their boundaries.74 But perhaps only divine males (Zeus and Dionysus, for instance) are cast as able to deftly manipulate form. The tragic male hero does not seem to be thoroughly successful in his appropriation of the mimetic powers and significations of the female. In the genre of tragedy, mortal men often appear to fail to control form, and by extension, fail to control their bodies. Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, for example, becomes unstuck in his mimesis of the female. Only Dionysus, most pointedly, a god, manages the threat of playing the female and emerges unscathed, indeed, strengthened in this play. With classical Athenian mimesis comes the power of representation, but also the disconcerting condition of tragic dissonance, and in the case of Pentheus, this dissonance is taken one step further, to an expression of Dionysian dissolution. This serves as an insidious reminder of the potential for male identity to become destabilised by the feminine/ by the Dionysian. Once disguised as a woman, the male body-self is opened up to the full force of femininity/mimesis and in this text the male is subsequently disassembled. The effect of dissonance, like the feminine, appears difficult to control once it is released or activated. So tragic dissonance becomes the condition of the male body in tragedy. Most disturbingly, the notion of tragic dissonance upturns the kind of consonance desired of the male body-self. The aristocratic concept of kalokagathia, where the beautiful aristocratic body reflects a good and noble interior, is an enduring and prevalent model of the ideal male. The female body seems to have been imagined as far less likely to display this concept of kalokagathia, since even the best women are women after all, prone to deception and the dissonant pressures of the female body.75 The genre of tragedy seems to disturb this notion of kalokagathia, following the model of the dissonant female. Tragedy seems concerned with the duplicity of the outer body (the parts that are seen) and its frequent failure to reflect what is within (the parts that are unseen). The

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Becoming Female presentation of the body-self emerges as a complex topos, which complicates the straightforward consonance implicit in the model of kalokagathia. In this sense, the genre of tragedy seems to disturb another ancient tenet of heroism: ‘appearance is reality’.76 (This notion is perhaps implicit in the notion of kalokagathia.) This appears to be the case for the Iliadic hero. The unfortunate Thersites is the clearest example here – he is negatively characterised as bearing an ugly body and ugly personality (Iliad 2.212-76). But in tragedy, things become complicated; the hero can no longer rely on appearance, both the appearance of others and his own appearance. For example, the supremely masculine appearance of Sophocles’ Heracles in Trachiniae belies a feminine interior. In the space of tragedy, what is within the body does not necessarily correspond to what is outside the body. Karen Bassi, in her discussion of the ideal model of masculinity in currency (‘the male body hides nothing, } there is no discrepancy between what is seen, } and what is not seen’),77 also writes about the important role ‘external appearance’ plays in the constitution of the warrior’s body. The exterior of the warrior’s body functions as a marker or ‘true sign’ of the warrior’s ‘identity’ in the Iliad.78 In the post-Homeric world of the Odyssey, however, this ideal becomes complicated, and the Odyssey almost seems to serve here as a forerunner of tragic dissonance and its disturbance of kalokagathia.79 The motif of the disguised Odysseus subverts this ideal register of the hero, jeopardising his manhood and disturbing the aristocratic ideal. When a man disguises himself he hides his masculinity (a man should display his body proudly, preferably nude), and thereby risks feminisation, falling into the long-standing association of the feminine with disguise.80 And yet Odysseus survives as a result of his ability to disguise himself whilst his companions perish. In the post-Homeric world, perhaps a man must learn to negotiate the interplay of those qualities considered feminine and feminising. However, Odysseus’ manipulation of his body, his use of disguise and deceit, seems nonetheless to indicate mastery in the Odyssey, whilst in the realm of tragedy, the tragic hero’s use of manipulation, deceit, and disguise does not securely convey this sense of mastery and masculinity. This discussion of Odysseus and his manipulation of the notion of kalokagathia via his use of disguise points to the notion of deception and dissonance inherent in the process of mimesis. The actor crystallises this theme, disguising himself to play a part, hiding his ‘true’ interior and exterior. This might serve as a stark example of the male body’s ability to dissimulate (outside of the text in a sense as well here). Furthermore, as part of this complication of the ideal of kalokagathia in tragedy, the body is often conceptualised as hiding its truth within. This theme of truth residing in the body might also be understood as following an ancient approach to the body as the container of truth, a model which, further-

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3. The Precarious Male Body more, has its roots in the feminine. The body of the other (the female, the metic, and the slave) is often configured as the receptacle of truth.81 The female is (again) viewed as displaying a proclivity for hiding this truth from the male subject in search of truth, sometimes unwittingly (for instance, Jocasta in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Deianira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae), often knowingly (Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Helen in Euripides’ Trojan Women).82 In order to consider the question of kalokagathia and the consonance and dissonance of the body-self further, a provocative generalisation of David Morris’s is useful, especially within this discussion of the body’s capacity to hide and obscure truth: The body, of course, functions like a verbal sign in Greek culture. It carries an unmistakable prestige and clear meaning. Simply by looking at him, Philoctetes knows that Neoptolemeus is of noble birth. The body in this sense cannot lie. It conveys, for example, the inner greatness of spirit that Aristotle saw as the proper endowment of tragic character.83

But one of the major problems the body presents in tragedy, it seems, is that the body does indeed ‘lie’ – both within and without the text. (The dilemma that the body can lie is expressed within the texts of tragedy at times, as I discuss below, and as for the body lying ‘without’ the text, the actor’s body disguised as a woman or another character is in a sense deceptive.) This capacity of the body to lie, an extension of the body’s ability to hide the truth within, is seen as a proclivity of the female (again the figures of Helen and Clytaemnestra are excellent examples).84 This idea of the female’s ability to deceive (which is also an expression of tragic dissonance) is, however, not a new development specific to the genre of tragedy, but a long-standing topos. But what is perhaps a newly dominant concern in tragedy is that the male body-self also becomes afflicted, like the female body-self. When the male body lies, dissimulates, becomes other (the essence of mimesis), it draws on a feminising tradition – one that goes back to the figure of Pandora, as I discussed in Chapter 2, whose dissembling body presents itself mimetically, like a beguilingly beautiful parthenos. Pandora has a beautiful exterior which hides an evil interior, and is thus a figure of dissonance. Bodies within tragedy (characters’ bodies) are also often charged with lying. The body thus might be said to regularly fail to convey a ‘clear meaning’, by bearing the potential to deceive. (In this sense, the body, inextricably tied up with logos as I suggested in Chapter 1, is also by extension tied up in the problem of signification.) This is a distinct and enduring concern with regard to the female body, but in the realm of tragedy, the male body also becomes affected, difficult to read. This is one of the principal problems tragedy presents, and part of the deep problematisation of the male hero, which seems such a feature of the genre. Plato

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Becoming Female in the Republic might be understood as really focussing in on this particular dilemma. For example, his character Socrates makes a case for mimesis, in its imitative function, as falsification, and also raises, amongst other concerns, the dissonance created by the tragic genre revelling in a type of male hero that the audience is ordinarily discouraged from identifying with, much less emulating. This tragic interest in the question of dissonance appears to reach an apex in the works of Euripides. Euripides’ plays display a penchant for turning the aristocratic notion of kalokagathia on its head at times. The Electra is an outstanding example of this – the inner nature and the outer body of the male body-self, thought to reflect each other in the earlier Archaic period in an expression of kalokagathia, becomes deeply fractured in this play. The poor farmer, aristocratically barred from kalokagathia, displays dignity and decency, both qualities lacking in the highborn characters of the play. Orestes regrets: Alas, we look for good on earth and cannot recognise it when met, since all our human heritage runs mongrel. At times I have seen descendents of the noblest family grow worthless though the cowards have courageous sons; inside the souls of wealthy men bleak famine lives while minds of stature struggle trapped in starving bodies. Euripides, Electra 367-72

So, too, in Euripides’ Orestes the aristocratic characters are for the main part brutal and degenerate when they should, in accordance with the precept of kalokagathia, display goodness and nobility. (Electra, Tyndareus, and Orestes are distinguished by their viciousness in this play at lines 1302-6; 518-25, 608-16; and 630-3, 716-18, 750-1, 1130.) Victoria Wohl offers an interesting discussion of kalokagathia. She believes: ‘this heroic aesthetic [of kalokagathia] is adopted by tragedy, though not, of course, without problems } [But whilst] this ideal is not always met }, the failures are marked as such, and reaffirm the ideal even as they challenge it.’85 However, whether Euripidean tragedy could be said to ‘reaffirm’ the ideal of kalokagathia with any great measure of regularity is open to question. A feeling of tragic dissonance rather than a notion of kalokagathia might be interpreted as frequently permeating the plays of Euripides. Sophocles’ characterisation of Heracles in the Trachiniae might also be interpreted as disruptive to this masculine ideal of kalokagathia when his outer body fails to reflect his inner nature. Pain and suffering might be thought to undo the maleness of the hero and make him into a woman. Here the outer body, a trenchantly masculine body in this instance, conceals the feminine within, and this feminine interior is unmasked by ponos, and implicitly, by mimesis. If pain and suffering are thought to reduce the body to any semblance of ‘truth’, the male body, indeed the greatest male body in this tradition, Heracles’ body, is put to the test, and

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3. The Precarious Male Body what is revealed through the test of ponos is the feminine within. This femininity is a startling revelation in one sense (and once again indicates that the body can indeed ‘lie’, contradicting Morris’s suggestion the outer body invariably reflects the inner man accurately in Greek culture).86 The dissembling body, an intentionally or unintentionally deceptive body that manipulates appearance and interpretation, is very much a subject of Attic tragedy. The theatrical body displays an almost unlimited mimetic ability, and this is part of the problem mimesis presents for male culture.87 The unknowable nature of another’s, and indeed one’s own body-self, a feature of tragedy, is perhaps the opposite of kalokagathia. Euripides’ characters often despair of finding a way of surely knowing a person’s character, in a further expression of the difficulties inherent in interpreting others. Theseus, echoing Hippolytus’ earlier comment on the counterfeit nature of women (line 616), wishes for the voice to be marked with some kind of indicator of decency or treachery: If there were some token now, some mark to make the division clear between friend and fiend, the true and the false! All men should have two voices, the one the just voice, and one as chance would have it. In this way the treacherous scheming voice would be confuted by the just, and we should never be deceived. Euripides, Hippolytus 924-31

This remark is repeated in a sense in Euripides’ Medea when she expresses a desire for a mark on the body to signify the nature of the person. Medea sings: ‘O God, you have given to mortals a sure method of telling the gold that is pure from the counterfeit; why is there no mark engraved upon men’s bodies, by which we could know the true ones from the false?’ (Euripides, Medea 516-19).88 Therefore, the ideal relationship of the body-self, kalokagathia, becomes perverted in the genre of tragedy, as the male, in the process of becoming other, also begins to mime the tragic dissonance which marks the female. The male body becomes like the female body, disturbing and obscuring truth, proving to be unreliable and difficult to read. The male body no longer functions in an unproblematic manner as a mirror of the inner man as it seems to in Homer’s Iliad, for example.89 The outer often masks the inner in tragedy, and the insides of the body may hide the true character of a person. In tragedy, a beautiful exterior does not necessarily guarantee a beautiful interior, and men begin to mime this ancient representation of women and their bodies reaching back to Pandora and Helen. When men enter tragedy, the space of the feminine, they seem to decline into this fractured and dissonant condition of the female. They too become split subjects, tainted by the feminine by virtue of the genre. Hippolytus, a perfect counterpart to Phaedra,90 is a prime example here, miming the dissonance that is second nature to the female body-self. Phaedra’s words

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Becoming Female – ‘my hands are clean but my mind is not’ – are echoed by Hippolytus’ later declaration, ‘my tongue has sworn but my mind has not’.91 The process of tragedy produces effects of tragic dissonance between and within inner and outer, male and female, self and other, effects which place the male body at risk.

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4

Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female } Not to display bravery (andreia, literally ‘manliness’) lays a man open to symbolic demotion from the ranks of the brave and manly to the opposite class of women. Jack Winkler1 } the tragic genre } is linked to Greek notions of gender, and } for the most part man is undone } by feminine forces or himself undergoes some type of ‘feminine’ experience. On the simplest level, this experience involves a shift } from active to passive, from mastery over the self and others to surrender and grief. Sometimes there is madness, always suffering and pathos } Froma Zeitlin2

The genre of tragedy reveals the susceptibility of the male body to the feminine, and this notion of masculine selfhood being constantly subjected to revision by its negotiations with the feminine and indeed the masculine warrants further consideration. The figure of Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae functions as an outstanding paradigm of this tragic process of the male hero becoming female and serves to exemplify some of the main issues that have been raised with regard to the configurations of male and female bodies in tragedy. Heracles also embodies the notion of the male hero becoming tragically dissonant in a dramatic fashion. The Euripidean characterisations of Hippolytus and Pentheus, whose stories might be interpreted as paralleling or deepening the topos of the suffering male body of Heracles and his process of becoming female, are useful in this context. Within this discussion, three interrelated models of the tragic male body-self negotiating the problem of the feminine emerge – the configuration of masculinity as a becoming (and here I focus specifically on the male becoming female), the undoing of masculinity by the feminine, and the revelation of the feminine within. This notion of masculinity as a becoming is prevalent in tragedy. The becoming nature of masculinity seems built into language. In her article ‘Coming of Age in Ancient Greece’, Gloria Ferrari writes: ‘the basic metaphor by which the ancient writers refer to the acquisition of manhood is } that of change; for instance, in the verb andron, which means “to change someone into a man” in its active forms and “to become a man” in the passive.’3 Furthermore, in Greek culture, from the epic characterisations of Odysseus to the male characters of the tragic stage who fare so badly, masculinity must be constantly proven. Andreia is not a state the male

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Becoming Female arrives at and relaxes into, indeed an aner must constantly prove, and, in the process risk, his masculinity. The activity of risking the male body seems to be crucial to the exercise of andreia, masculinity, from Homer onwards.4 The more jeopardy, the greater the glory, or excellence, arete, in a sense, or the greater potential for devastation, as the Bacchae may suggest. Pentheus risks his fledgling masculinity, becomes female, and then comes utterly undone. For in the practice of andreia, in the attempt to achieve and constantly re-negotiate and prove male identity, the male is at risk of becoming other, most specifically and disturbingly, becoming female. The term, ‘becoming female’, implies that the male metamorphoses into the state of the other. The female seems to have been cast as the foremost other in one dominant tradition, preceding the other states of alterity (the animal, the monstrous, and the barbarian, for example).5 The male walks a tightrope between becoming male and becoming female, and the suggestion that this process can never be resolved remains a disquieting, disruptive subtext within any official proclamations of ‘secure’ masculinity. The feminine poses the gravest risk for the male in tragedy. The male is continually threatened by the spectre of the feminine, in danger of reverting to or becoming female. For instance, the male might return to the femininity of youth or arrive at the femininity of old age. Aristotle characterises male youths as feminine – ‘a boy actually resembles a woman in physique }’ (On the Generation of Animals 716a5-23).6 The passage from boyhood to manhood is often imagined as a passage from femininity to masculinity,7 whilst the passage from manhood to old age might be imagined to return the male from masculinity to femininity. For example, the man returns to the femininity of old age, as old men stay home with the women whilst younger men go off and fight wars. So, whilst the model of the femininity of youth seems to decree that the feminine is symbolically discarded upon becoming an aner, the model of sexual/gender identity as a becoming dictates that the male can always revert to the feminine once again. This notion of becoming serves as a demonstration of an ancient model of the two sexes based not on mere opposition but instead occupying either end of a ‘continuum’ which can be readily crossed.8 In this construction of the sliding scale of sexual difference, the feminine is both an imminent and innate menace to the male body and identity. This model seems far more threatening than the model of sexual difference, also a model in currency in ancient Greece. It might also be observed that the ‘two-sex model’ of sexual difference and the ‘one-sex model’ of the sliding scale of difference both seem to be involved in the notion of becoming. In the model of sexual difference, the female is configured as other, as different to the male, and this otherness/ difference is often then located or revealed within the male. Tragedy, in a culture where the male body is rigorously valorised, is surprising in its persistent mutilation, penetration, and feminisation of

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female the male heroic body. As discussed in Chapter 3, Homeric epic also demonstrates an interest in the fallen male body. But in epic, a genre which precedes tragedy, a general pattern seems to emerge of the male body-identity as valorised, mutilated, then heroised. Tragedy seems to take these themes of Homeric epic and push them to their furthest extreme. Tragedy appears to display a deep interest in undoing critical cultural themes, in undoing its main cultural symbol, the male. In this sense, Classical Athenian tragedy stages the shadow of an earlier conception of masculinity. It focuses on the suffering of the victim, reversing the tendency of epic to emphasise the bravery of the hero (although this is complicated, since epic focuses on details of bodily suffering, and tragedy also focuses on bravery). Tragedy challenges the male ideal far more than epic, perhaps in part because the challenge to the male does not typically originate in the form of another man, which would be implicitly masculinising in this culture, but from the feminine, and this seems to be feminising to the male in this culture. Homer’s Odyssey does deal with this theme, but returns its hero safely to masculinity by the epic’s close. Tragedy seems to play relentlessly with this notion of masculinity as a becoming, locating any potential weaknesses in the system and exploiting them. The tragic or its key protagonist, the feminine, regularly dismantles masculinity, often revealing the feminine interior. This concept of the revelation of the feminine within the male hero involves a catalyst (typically the female who inflicts the weapon which is intimately ‘hers,’ tragic suffering) triggering the process of the male becoming female, which in turn might be interpreted as exposing an existing feminised interior. (This is complicated, however, by the fact that the male plays the female inflicting tragic suffering.) Within this equation, the female threatens to emerge in the male at any time in the practice of andreia. As Winkler suggests, ‘ “woman” is not only the opposite of a man; she is also a potentially threatening “internal émigré” of masculine identity’.9 This notion of the feminine within the male, a deep, internal threat to the kind of pure aner that the character Socrates appears to covet in Plato’s Republic, seems to be explored in Euripides’ Bacchae and Sophocles’ Trachiniae, for example. Another sub-theme which has emerged in the above discussion, of the undoing of the masculine by the feminine, seems to be related to both these themes of the expression of masculinity as a becoming and the revelation of the feminine within. The male bodyself, by virtue of becoming female (which might paradoxically reveal the feminine is within all along), becomes unstable. Whether this body-self can be reconstituted within tragedy, by tragedy’s closures, is a question to be addressed in Chapter 5. In the space of tragedy, this process of masculinity under eternal revision often goes horribly wrong for the male hero, and he becomes fatally feminised (Sophocles’ Heracles, Euripides’ Hippolytus and Pentheus all appear to be represented as experiencing this pattern). Tragedy

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Becoming Female imagines the male body (to use Maria Wyke’s words introducing Erik Gunderson’s ideas on the male body of the Roman orator), as ‘always on the verge of failing, of threatening to collapse into illegitimate effeminacy and thus ruin its bearer’.10 The male body-self in tragedy is perennially open to ‘gender trouble’,11 constantly threatened with being exposed as unworthy of the great appellation of andreia. The male body-self is unstable, pressured by the generic imperatives of tragedy, often collapsing into the feminine. The feminine seems to function as both the interior and margin of the male body-self, whatever male culture needs it to be. But perhaps tragedy’s deepest threat to the masculine is that this constitution of masculinity as a becoming suggests the male bodyself is somehow unattainable. The true aner functions as a seductive mirage, an unrealisable dream. Tragic suffering plays an important role in the undoing of the male, in the male becoming female, and the revelation of the existing feminine within the hero. The process of ponos is thought to play an important role in configuring or sexing the body as male and female in this culture, serving to position the aner (man) and gune (woman) in their culturally accepted adult states.12 It is through the intense experience of ponos in war that a man achieves or maintains his masculine identity and it is through the intense suffering of labour that a woman achieves her feminine identity as gune. Yet tragedy presents the underbelly of this constitutive quality of pain and suffering – it focuses on the potential effects of ponos as a dismantling force, particularly with regard to male bodies and identities, leading to the confounding of sexual difference. (This is paradoxical, given that the usual pattern suggests suffering and pain lead to sexual difference.) Tragedy seems to delight in the deconstructive qualities of suffering and pain on bodies-selves and families (think again of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, Hippolytus in Euripides’ play of that name, and Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, for example). Part of this devolution of male bodies depends upon the ancient Greek association of suffering, pain, and perhaps even disease (nosos), with the female body, a familiar model which emerges from many extant Greek works. Tragedy, performed by male actors, is a mimetic re-enactment of this equation of suffering with the female. Tragedy, it might be argued, reinscribes the male as female, as the feminine becomes the tragic condition for the male. The ambiguities of Heracles The Sophoclean characterisation of Heracles in the Trachiniae might be interpreted as resolutely ambiguous. The kinds of ambiguities so redolent in Sophocles’ portrait of Heracles also appear in later Heraclean myth. However, Michael Silk believes such Heraclean ‘anomalies’ are ‘absent from much of the literature of early and classical Greece’.13 Tragedy would

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female seem to function as an exception to these other portraits, delighting in the ambiguity of the hero. Interestingly, both Silk and Jameson remark that Heracles is rarely the subject of tragedy, even though he is according to many scholars, ‘the most popular hero of Greek mythology’.14 When Heracles does appear in tragedy, Silk believes the ‘heroic’ Heracles who acts as saviour might be more common than the ‘suffering hero’, indeed, Sophocles’ Trachiniae and Euripides’ Heracles might seem original in their focus on the suffering hero.15 The suffering Heracles nevertheless does seem perfect for tragedy’s purposes. The very qualities that make him ripe for comedy and satyr drama also make him an ideal tragic hero – he is prodigiously flawed in a sense and open to suffering, with his pronounced masculinity and endemic femininity (embodying the Dionysian dissolution of opposites that is a feature of this genre).16 Silk makes a distinction between the heroic Heracles and the suffering Heracles, but it might be argued that the heroic Heracles and the suffering Heracles are in a sense one and the same. The heroism of Heracles is in part founded on his ability to endure the sufferings of his labours. It is only in tragedy that the unity of the two facets of the hero become challenged and perhaps split, so that the suffering Heracles becomes less than heroic (or his heroism remains less intact). He becomes less, or other than, the suffering male body. Part of the reason why Heracles does not appear more often as the suffering hero is perhaps related to his semi-divine status, as Silk suggests.17 This status precludes him from the limitations of the body to an extent, and therefore makes him ‘untragic’.18 The gods are not constructed as tragic figures because they lack mortal bodies – although they might at times suffer (for example, Homeric gods on the battlefield are hurt, penetrated), they are not bound by the mortality of the human body.19 Heracles might therefore cut an appropriate tragic figure only when he is feminised, when he is brought back to the limitations of the (mortal, female) body. * In Sophocles’ Trachiniae Heracles is emphatically feminised by suffering, and exhibits a type of body confusion. He becomes female, bearing a kind of femininity of the body-self, and a concomitant collapse of masculinity. The Sophoclean Heracles is wounded, open, oozing, melting, dissolving. A larger-than-life hero (all other superhuman beasts could not defeat him), he is led to his death by a woman, which serves to feminise him. His wife Deianira becomes male in a sense, miming the heroic male in her act of gift-giving and her death by the sword, which further adds to the feminisation of Heracles.20 His will, obdurate in the past against great odds, becomes feminine via tragic suffering – he cries like a parthenos. Karteria,

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Becoming Female endurance, plays a fundamental role in the process of becoming male and/or retaining masculinity. But, unable to endure any more suffering, the hero famous for endurance decides to die.21 So, too, Heracles emerges in Sophocles’ Trachiniae as tragically dissonant – as I have argued in Chapter 3, the inner and outer of the body, thought to reflect each other in the earlier Archaic period in an expression of kalokagathia, start to become dissonant, like the female body-self, in tragedy. The masculine exterior of Heracles, under the pressure of suffering, is, in a sense, forced to reveal the feminine within, unmade and divested of its recognisable masculinity. The notion of masculinity, in its (unstable) formulation as a becoming, is resoundingly illustrated when the greatest of men, Heracles, comes undone. The man who is all body, and whose mythos at times seems to suggest he can reach beyond the body, becomes only body in the end, just ‘like’ the female. Heracles is the ideal specimen for tragedy’s purposes. The characteristics of Heracles set the stage for his tragic process of becoming female. These feminine traits of the great, brawny, male-bodied Heracles are built into his mythos prior to Sophocles’, or perhaps in a sense tragedy’s, inevitable feminisation of him (given the apparent feminising actions of the genre of tragedy on the male hero). Heracles’ mythos, in part because of his prolific association with the feminine, reveals an in-built potential for destabilisation and the subsequent feminisation of the great hero. Or, to put it another way, his mythos holds within it the possibility of the revelation of the feminine within. Indeed, Heracles not only borders on the feminine, the feminine is often made to manifest within his body and on its surfaces (a highly contested space for inscribing masculinity and femininity), as his excess is taken to the extreme and the borders of the feminine and masculine are frequently blurred within him. So Heracles has a complicated association with the feminine, and his association with the masculine becomes complicated as a result. The following characteristics, which are typically associated with the feminine, seem to lead into this notion of the feminised Heracles: his mythos is characterised by complexity, ‘profound antitheses’ and ‘doubleness’,22 and the ambiguities of Heracles (civiliser/beast, man/woman, for example) are built in to his entire mythology. Indeed, it could be argued that Heracles’ ambiguities constitute this hero.23 Heracles is marked by excess – excess of sex, appetite, or, in short, excess of body, and, thereby, of the feminine. His associations with bestiality, animality, madness, and suffering also appear to align him with the feminine.24 However, alongside the notion of the feminising potential of these associations, and here, specifically, excessive sex drive, is a strain of thought that sees this kind of sexuality in a man as masculinising. Loraux refers to the ‘voraciousness’ of the belly, especially Heracles’ belly, as indicative of a ‘vigorous male sexuality’.25 Christopher Faraone finds a model of excessive passion and sexuality as masculine in the genre of

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female ancient Greek love magic. Here the male is a ‘real’ man when he is passionate, sexual, angry.26 The Satyrs might function as an interesting example – they seem to be a manifestation of male sexual excess. However, François Lissarrague cautions: it ‘would } be a mistake to see in the satyrs’ ithyphallicism a positive sign of hypervirility’.27 The Satyrs’ and Heracles’ extreme sexuality, excess of body, or excess of masculinity, could be interpreted as endowing them with a feminine association. According to the logic of Greek thought, this excess of masculinity might also lead paradoxically back to a subsequent ‘assimilation’ to the feminine, if a man cannot rule his body’s appetites.28 Once a man lacks the ability to exercise enkrateia with relation to the appetites, he might cease being, or perhaps more aptly, becoming, a ‘true aner’ until he can re-establish this quality of self-rule. Furthermore, whilst there seem to be two possible models at work here, one of excessive sexuality as masculine, a sign of virility, and another casting excessive sexuality as feminine, the former might not be part of the orthodox way of thinking. When we consider Heracles’ mythological history we start to see a pattern of mimesis, and this serves as further evidence of his association with the feminine (given that mimesis is thought to be a defining skill of the female). Heracles’ body seems to be endlessly open to mimesis. He mimes monsters, gods, men and women, regularly taking on the form of his adversary – when he battles with beasts, he becomes a beast, when he encounters the female, he becomes female.29 A chameleon or Protean figure, his shape-changing seems to attend a gift for mimesis. Heracles’ ability to deform others and reform himself is both his strength and his downfall (a familiar sentiment elsewhere in Heracles’ mythos). This mimetic ability leads logically in a sense to his mimesis of the female body (via the experience of suffering). Heracles almost becomes a male counterpart for Helen’s mimetic body here. But it is a dangerous process, as Sophocles’ Trachinaie could be read to suggest. Heracles becomes perilously unstuck by the feminine, forced to ape the female in body and emotion unwillingly. The robe Deianira gives Heracles plays an important part in facilitating his fall into the feminine. Indeed, it seems to trigger the process of Heracles becoming female, ruining his masculine body. Interestingly, the robe is regularly referred to as a peplos, a woman’s robe.30 The cloaking of the hero in a peplos serves to further emphasise Heracles’ feminisation, present on so many levels in the Trachiniae. In this play, the fatal peplos, a gift from Deianira smeared with the Centaur’s venom, is both ‘a winding sheet, a woman’s trick’ which ensnares Heracles just as surely as Clytaemnestra traps Agamemnon in a robe or sheet.31 The peplos is also, in Loraux’s words, ‘an ambiguous garment that will make Heracles into a “woman” ’.32 However, in a move which reflects the frequent mixture of sexual metaphors and sexual difference in this play, Heracles’ robe is also referred to as a khiton, a man’s robe.33

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Becoming Female In this process of becoming female, apparently initiated by the robe, Heracles almost seems to follow the initiatory arc from girl to woman, mimicking the girl’s initiation into womanhood in a sense. Heracles laments that he becomes a parthenos, weeping like a girl (1071-2). Is this metamorphosis into the parthenos even more humiliating than becoming a woman? Perhaps not, given that the parthenos’ body might be more like a male body than a woman’s body – the woman’s body seems to have been imaged as a dissolved, ‘broken down’ body (in one model offered by the medical writers, for example).34 The parthenos’ body has presumably not yet undergone the devolution or metamorphosis of form that leads to the gune’s body. Nonetheless, Heracles’ fall to the state of a parthenos appears as a humiliating diminution of form and of status. Many modern commentators have remarked on the curious casting of Heracles as parthenos or bride.35 This motif of the male being cast as a bride before dying in tragedy might be an extension or progression of the feminisation of the male in tragedy. Ormand, Pozzi, Segal, and Seaford all observe that the Trachiniae represents a ‘parody of wedding rituals in which Heracles is a bride’.36 Ormand perceives a further indication of this motif in Heracles’ declaration that he will show his tortured body by lifting his veil (1078).37 The great brawny man becomes the bride, parodying the arrival of the bride in his arrival from Caenum and miming the removal of the veil of the bride.38 In this context the veiling of the bride, serving to protect the parthenos from the gaze of men, keeping her purity intact, seems pertinent. The casting off of the veil by the bridegroom is seen, in a sense, as the first penetration.39 Heracles’ decision to offer his wounded, suffering body up for further penetration through the gaze of others might be interpreted in this light. Instead of revealing a beautiful face and form as a bride might ideally display in this part of the marriage ritual, Heracles disturbingly reveals the male body as suffering, wounded.40 Heracles’ tears seem to act as a further trigger in his descent or devolution into the feminine. His tears are represented as humiliating and far from pleasurable and appear to indicate a subsequent loss of heroism. Heracles declares he weeps like a parthenos, explicitly calling attention to his feminisation here (1071). Heracles, the hero known for his ability to endure, gives in to tears and suffering. Heracles moans: ‘Pity me, for I seem pitiful to many others, crying and sobbing like a girl (parthenos), and no one could ever say that he had seen this man act like that before. Always, without a groan I followed my painful course. Now in my misery I am discovered a woman’ (1070-75). Heracles’ tears in Euripides’ Heracles are also cast as aberrant, indicative of a demise from the masculine – ‘For countless were the labours I endured; never yet have I refused, never yet have I wept, and never did I think that I should come to this: tears in my eyes’ (1353-6). Heracles continues to cry and lament in this play, and is eventually castigated by Theseus at the end of the play: ‘No one who sees you playing the woman will approve’ (1412).41

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female Tears, a visible expression and register of ponos, are regularly depicted as ‘female’ (thelu) and unworthy of the heroic man, as Menelaus decides in Euripides’ Helen (947-53, although this is ironic, given that Menelaus, the infamous cuckold, is rarely cast as heroic himself). This representation of tears as womanly seems quite characteristic of the classical Athenian period. According to Loraux, ‘} weeping was, in the classical period, the prerogative of women’ and ‘} tears, which are essentially feminine, are forbidden to virile men’.42 Tears and emotion in general are considered to belong to the realm of the wet, the liquid, and concomitantly aligned to dissolution and the feminine in Greek thought.43 So, too, the activity of male weeping is usually confined to very young or very old men, as Segal writes.44 In this context, the weeping Heracles of Sophocles and Euripides might serve as stark exceptions, presumably represented in the prime of manhood. The act of crying thus appears to be feminising to the male in one prevalent tradition, but as we might expect given the intricate and complex perception of what is considered to be acceptable behaviour for the male and female in this culture, this is not uncomplicated. Lamentation is cast as the tour de force of the female. The lamenting Electra of Euripides is perhaps the best representative of this (Electra 113-26). The recent curtailment of mourning in society leads to theatre serving as perhaps the only acceptable public outlet for this pleasure in lament, conduct that is now elsewhere considered to be unsuitable for the male. In tragedy the male appropriates this female role of lamentation.45 However, the question whether lamentation is aberrant or acceptable behaviour for the male within the space of tragedy, and how the subsequent tears and lamentation of the audience might be interpreted, remains open.46 If Heracles’ weeping feminises him, it also self-reflexively calls attention to the ambiguous position of the audience. Whilst weeping seems to have been allowed, perhaps even desired in its audience members, as proof of the poet moving the audience, the audience’s suffering is also potentially insurgent, subverting the conventional behaviour required of a man (that of endurance, karteria, which, depending upon the source, relies upon a lack of weeping).47 The character of Socrates in Plato’s Republic seems to suggest that even the apparently acceptable behaviour of weeping in theatre can be interpreted as womanish, unbecoming, and dangerous conduct for the male (here invoking both actor and audience). So, too, within the genre of tragedy itself, tears can function as feminising behaviour for a man, as the examples from Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Euripides’ Heracles and Helen cited above suggest. Weeping, on balance, appears to be an ambiguous and troubling activity for a male, within and without the space of tragedy. After becoming the parthenos, Heracles then seems to proceed to subtly mime the next stage of the passage from the parthenos’ body to the gune’s body, impersonating the maternal body in the rigours of labour. Heracles

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Becoming Female undergoes a type of suffering which does seem to be cast in terms resoundingly like the way labour is presented in this culture. The ponoi of Heracles and the ponoi of labour are both characterised by tearing, shooting, burning, spasms of pain, pain that disorients (Sophocles, Trachiniae 9851040; tearing, shooting pains are also described at 1082 and 1254).48 But perhaps even more significantly, Heracles himself describes his suffering as odunai, a term that is associated with labour pains (985-6). His suffering is so intense that it might only be compared to that of a woman in labour, which seems to function as the benchmark for ponos in a prominent cultural tradition.49 Furthermore, Heracles struggles to articulate adequately his experience of pain, but he tries again and again to characterise what is happening to him. This might serve to mime what is thought to be the enormity of the female experience of labour, also cast as pain that is hard to define.50 In this context, it is also worth noting that in Socrates’ objections to the male playing the part of the female on the stage, playing a woman who is in love, sick, or in labour is singled out for particular disapproval (Republic 3.395e), perhaps because these are the most corporeal (and feminising) experiences, and also carry the greatest potential for histrionics. This motif of Heracles suffering like the gune in labour seems to be extended so that Heracles not only experiences the odunai of the labouring woman, but also experiences his body as a broken body. His arms, hands, back, and chest are torn, disfigured, unstrung, and broken (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1089-91; Heracles also outlines the demise of his beautiful body at 1052-7 and 1103-6). Heracles draws attention to the nosos set in motion by the enveloping robe which facilitates this process of becoming other – ‘see what has become of you from what you once were’ (1090-1). This nosos tears him to shreds, unhinges his limbs, and makes him a ‘miserable ruin’ (1103-6). Perhaps this in some way mimes the gune’s body, thought of as a ‘broken down’ body in some medical images, and ‘deformed’ (e.g. in Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 737a28: ‘for the female is as it were a deformed male’).51 This broken down body of the female is one step away from ‘the possible dissolution of } womanhood’, as King observes.52 In this context of Heracles’ movement from parthenos to gune, it might be fruitful to pause on Euripides’ characterisation of Hippolytus in the play of the same name. Hippolytus also seems to travel the path of female initiation, moving from parthenos to gune, in a theatrical fulfilment of Phaedra’s desire that he will experience her sickness (Hippolytus 730).53 He first mimes the parthenos in Euripides’ play. Indeed, he directly refers to himself as a parthenos (‘I am a virgin, parthenos, to this day’, 1004; ‘that most hated Goddess, hated by all of us whose joy is virginity, parthenia’, 1302). However, the term parthenos cannot necessarily be unambiguously translated as virgin – as Guilia Sissa suggests in her discussion of the

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female complications of Greek parthenia. Her work suggests is it perhaps more appropriate to translate parthenos as ‘unmarried girl’.54 This might serve to further emphasise Hippolytus’ mimesis of the female, in a further, ironic illustration of the feminised positioning of Hippolytus from the start to the finish of this play. Hippolytus’ status as a male ‘virgin’ does seem unusual and problematic. (Whether there was a category of male virgins in ancient Greece is uncertain, and seems unlikely judging by the extant evidence.55) With his refusal of eros and repudiation of the conventional male roles of warrior and husband, he might be compared with the Danaids, parthenoi who also reject eros and the female’s conventional role as wife. Instead of allowing their bodies to be penetrated, the Danaids will penetrate and open up the bodies of their bridegrooms with the (phallic) sword, becoming male in a sense. So, too, in another role reversal, instead of fighting other men in battle and becoming a man through the trials of war, Hippolytus wishes to hunt beasts, to hunt in the wild with Artemis, and therefore to stand outside the processes of culture.56 Hippolytus refuses the male initiation process, and instead experiences the pattern of female initiation. He will not take the risks necessary to achieve the status of hero and instead becomes female, a logical extension of his refusal to become male, and a tragic formalisation of the way he positions himself as parthenos. Hippolytus’ experience of ponos also mimes the experience of the parthenos becoming a woman through the process of labour.57 Hippolytus, like Heracles, is delivered to this state of extreme suffering via the process of succumbing to tears (1079, 1178); and, like Heracles, this suffering is set in motion by the female, in the form of Phaedra and Aphrodite, leading to the curse of Theseus. So Heracles, and now Hippolytus, seem to experience sufferings ‘that are unnamed except in the world of women’.58 When Hippolytus experiences a type of suffering like labour, he also uses the term for the feminine pains of labour, odunai, to describe his pain (1351, 1370). Hippolytus’ pain is very like the shooting pains of labour (although he experiences them in his head, 1351-2), and his body is explicitly described as broken in Zeitlin’s translation (1239).59 The male experience of spasms of pain like those of a woman in labour might be a feature of this Dionysian genre, a facet of Dionysian sparagmos in a sense. As Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae, ‘the violent principle of Dionysian cult is sparagmos, which in Greek means “a rending, tearing, mangling,” and secondly, “a convulsion, spasm.” ’60 (It might also be said that Heracles and Hippolytus, who experience rending and tearing pains, experience a more subtle form of sparagmos, whilst Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae experiences the most explicit form, a literal sparagmos, 1124-40.) Furthermore, as part of his passage through the feminine, Hippolytus will mime the dustropos harmonia of the female,61 the condition the female body-self arrives at during labour, and the condition that remains hers by virtue of this indelible event. He experiences the tragic dissonance that

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Becoming Female defines the female body-self, in an additional demonstration of the process of the male becoming female. The fall of Hippolytus, like that of Heracles, might thus serve as a dramatic expression of Aristotle’s theory of the law of tragic peripeteia (reversal of circumstances), as Zeitlin notes,62 which further emphasises how men might fall to the condition of the feminine and become female. In another sense, Hippolytus, who wishes to deny himself the pleasures of the body in eros, instead encounters the other side of the ancient Greek erotic equation, suffering.63 (Hippolytus again might be compared to Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, who wishes to experience eros, but instead experiences suffering.) He experiences his body as both penetrable and vulnerable to suffering (a model of the body which is usually configured as feminine,64 as the model of dustropos harmonia in this play suggests). Hippolytus thus becomes painfully aware of his body via the torment of tragic suffering (and Heracles also becomes aware of the limitations of his body via ponos in Sophocles’ Trachiniae). In the words of Loraux, ‘at the beginning of the play only Phaedra, who suffered from it and destroyed it, had a body’, now Hippolytus is aware he too has a body.65 Like Heracles, Hippolytus also demonstrates a lack of enkrateia. Both immoderation in the form of a complete lack of enkrateia, as in the case of Heracles, or immoderation in the form of an excess of enkrateia, as in the case of Hippolytus, appear to be thought of as undesirable behaviour for a man. Hippolytus takes enkrateia too far – whilst he might initially seem to be the opposite of the Sophoclean Heracles in this sense, he appears to be like Heracles in his excessive nature, this time demonstrating excessive abstinence rather than Heraclean licentiousness. Hippolytus might also be interpreted as taking enkrateia to such an extreme that he falls into the category of the opposite, the female. As I suggested earlier, the ideal of enkrateia dictates that a man should rule the desires of the body with moderation, and thus Hippolytus fails to become a man in this sense. * A further aspect of the process of Heracles’ becoming female, and yet another thread in his mimesis of the parthenos and the gune, is evident. He is cast as wounded, violated, and penetrated in Sophocles’ Trachiniae.66 Both the parthenos (in this sense as bride) and gune seem, in a subtle way, to be open to wounding, violation, and penetration at times.67 Heracles, the wounder and penetrator extraordinaire (behaviour which distinguishes him as an aner), is in turn wounded and penetrated. (Although this is not new – his whole mythos oscillates around the wounding of others and the experience of being wounded.68) Sophocles seems to concentrate on the opening up and wounding of Heracles’ body, turning the general pattern of classical Athenian discourse in on itself (where the male body is often cast, as Zeitlin notes, as a wounding ‘instrument of power’, ‘impenetrable’

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female to others).69 This is potentially feminising given the ideology of penetration in this society. Whilst a male being wounded by another male in war might in one model be cast as masculinising, Heracles’ wounded body comes at the hands of his wife, and is therefore perhaps unremittingly feminising, as I pursue at greater length in Chapter 5. The poisonous robe, the agent of the female, may be interpreted as violating Heracles’ body on a symbolic level via the coupling of Deianira and Nessus (in the form of the erotic philtre). His body is penetrated by Deianira’s love charm, opened up by both Nessus and, perhaps more confrontingly, by Deianira. Heracles casts his experience of the damaging peplos in terms which evoke a mimesis of sexual ‘wounding’.70 He cries, the robe ‘lunges, lunges again }’ (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1026). Concomitantly, there is an earlier theme of Deianira perceiving sex as a wounding act in the Trachiniae. In this context, Bruce Heiden’s suggestion in Tragic Rhetoric: An Interpretation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae that Deianira perceives sex as tearing her body seems relevant, as Heracles also characterises his body as torn to shreds by the experience of suffering. There seems to be an image earlier in the play of Deianira perceiving sex as tearing – ‘whose flower he tears away’ (548-9).71 Dorothea Wender takes this further, remarking that Deianira ‘equates sexual penetration with being stabbed, wounded, injured’.72 Heracles’ description of the ponoi the robe causes as lunging also brings to mind the notion of stabbing – a sword is lunged into a body. Heracles might therefore subtly mime the experience of the female (in this instance, that of Deianira), once more. The work of Victoria Wohl is relevant to this discussion of Heracles’ body as violated. She suggests that the exchange of women between men plays a foundational role in the constitution of masculinity in this society. Wohl locates the gender trouble in tragedy at the point of the exchange of women between men. She states, ‘the result of these failed transfers is catastrophe: the relationships between men that should be cemented are instead sundered; the men who should be declared virile and heroic subjects are emasculated and eviscerated }’.73 This suggests that Heracles instead becomes the parthenos, the object of exchange, when Deianira usurps the male role of gift-giver, becoming the aner. This episode therefore appears as a perversion of the exchange of the parthenos rite and a further example of the tragic interest in becoming. Heiden seems to take this analogy beyond the parthenos, suggesting that Heracles’ body is depicted as castrated and mutilated as a result of the nosos caused by the robe.74 To conclude that Heracles’ body is literally castrated seems to stretch the evidence from the play too far, though Heiden seems to stop short of this. But Wohl, who also engages with the work of Heiden, submits: ‘We do not have to take Heracles’ self-proclaimed ruination so literally in order to see its effect on Heracles’ masculine identity: it is the phallus he has lost, not necessarily the penis (as Heiden acknowledges).’75

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Becoming Female It is possible to find other examples of the male body being violated by the actions of the feminine in tragedy. The bodies of Agamemnon, Hippolytus and Pentheus to a degree might be interpreted as violated; their bodies are also opened up by the treacherous acts of women. Agamemnon’s body is subjected to an extreme and explicit form of violation. Clytaemnestra stands over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra in a dominant male position, as she talks of netting her prey in a perversion or exchange of male and female roles: I stand now where I struck him down } That he might not escape nor beat aside his death, as fishermen cast their huge circling nets, I spread deadly abundance of rich robes, and caught him fast. I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony he buckled at the knees and fell. When he was down I struck him the third blow } Thus he went down, and the life struggled out of him; and as he died he spattered me with the dark red and violent driven rain of bitter savored blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds. Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1378-92

Agamemnon, pierced and bleeding from the wounds Clytaemnestra carves on his body, perhaps becomes female (although his accidental act of fertilising her with the blood that spurts from his wounds might masculinise him), and Clytaemnestra becomes the fertilised shaft of corn, both male and female. (Clytaemnestra is fertilised, hence female, and a penetrating shaft, hence male.) Hippolytus’ body might also be interpreted as violated as a result of female eros and Phaedra’s curse. His body is mangled by the horses’ reins, and perhaps implicitly violated. However, the violation of Pentheus’ body is far less tenuous. His body is explicitly violated by his mother and other female relatives in Euripides’ Bacchae – the flesh is ripped from his body, his body is torn apart, he is dismembered, and finally decapitated. This penetration and violation of the male form in tragedy by the feminine might even lead to the male becoming formless (as the example of Pentheus’ torn flesh and body cited above suggests). Heracles’ body could be interpreted as formless, undergoing a process of dissolution, and miming the ‘natural’ state of the female body, in this sense its tendency towards formlessness and dissolution. As I discussed earlier, a state of pain is almost thought to be the ‘natural’ condition of the female body. As part of this nexus of ponos and the female, the female body is cast as having a tendency towards dissolution. The female body is in general thought to be less defined than the male body, and when Heracles’ suffering body loses its sharply articulated form via his experience of extreme ponos, he might be interpreted as falling into the condition of the abject female body. Pain seems to be cast as leading to dissolution, to dissolution of the body-self. (For example, Sophocles’ Philoctetes in Philoctetes, reduced to his wound, seems to be cast in such a way.)

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female Heracles’ body, with its chiselled mask of muscles and definite form, is disquietingly reduced to the monstrous formlessness of the female body via the processes of tragedy in a most disturbing turn of events for the (notional) male audience.76 This formlessness usurps his renowned form, his armour of muscles, destroyed by Deianira’s poisonous cloak eating away at the recognisable male signifiers of the body. For example, in Sophocles’ Trachiniae 986, Heracles cries ‘The filthy thing eats me again’. The robe, a telling object of female death-dealing, unforms, deforms and melts his magnificent body, manifesting the Chorus’s earlier desire for Heracles to arrive ‘all desire when the beast’s inducements, all dipped in persuasion, have melted him’ (661-2). The Trachiniae offers a striking description of bodily suffering and the subsequent feminisation of Heracles wrought by Deianira’s poisonous robe: Many are the toils for these hands, this back, that I have had, hot and painful even to tell of. But neither the wife of Zeus nor hateful Eurystheus has ever condemned me to such agony as this that the false-faced daughter of Oeneus has fastened upon my shoulders, a woven, encircling net of the Furies, by which I am utterly destroyed. It clings to my sides, it has eaten away my inmost flesh; it lives with me and empties the channels of my lungs, and already it has drunk up my fresh blood, and my whole body is completely killed, conquered by these unspeakable fetters. Sophocles, Trachiniae 1046-57

The following passage also serves to describe Heracles’ dissolution of male form, once again in a most dramatic manner: Oh, oh, the pain! That malignant tearing scorches me again, it shoots through my sides, it will have me struggle, it will not let me be – miserable, devouring sickness } Now it feeds on me again, it has sprung out, it blooms. O my hands, my hands, O my back, my chest, O my poor arms, see what has become of you from what you once were. The lion that prowled the land of Nemea, that scourge of herdsmen, that unapproachable, intractable creature, with your strength once you overpowered it } and I have had my taste of ten thousand other toils, but these hands let no one set his trophies over me. Now look at me, torn to shreds, my limbs unhinged, a miserable ruin sacked by invisible disaster, I who am called the son of the most noble mother, I who claim to be begotten of Zeus in the heavens } Sophocles, Trachiniae 1081-1106

This passage might be interpreted as highlighting how he is devoured by the nosos set in motion by Deianira, and hence, devoured by the feminine. These lines also provide a dramatic outline of the demise of Heracles’ beautiful body – hands, back, chest, and arms are all ravaged by the robe, he is ‘torn to shreds’ and the poison is so insidious that it unstrings his limbs, and thus implicitly appears to deliver him to a state of dissolution. Perhaps a concept of dissolution is also suggested in Heracles’ comment

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Becoming Female ‘} the vile thing is destroying me – savage, unapproachable sickness’ (1026-8). Dissolution might function as an aspect of destruction Thus, in the process of becoming female, or becoming tragic, the male often undergoes a process of dissolution and formlessness, and this might be understood as part of the overall pattern of the hero becoming female. Heracles, Hippolytus, and Pentheus might all be interpreted as losing their bodies in a sense to the formlessness of the female body, divested of the masculine quality of the bound body in their passage through the feminine. There seem to be two aspects of this in Hippolytus’ story – his death is in one sense a mimesis of hanging (he is hung by the reins of his horses), and hanging is thought of as a ‘formless’ (and feminising) death.77 Hippolytus’ body is also characterised as ‘loosened’ by the actions of his horses,78 and this might serve as another hint of formlessness. Indeed, Hippolytus’ body is deformed, mangled by the reins of his horses. This topos of dissolution and formlessness is perhaps unsurprising given Dionysus, the god of mimesis, boundlessness, and dissolution, rules the genre of tragedy.79 Dissolution and formlessness could in this sense be understood as fundamental aspects or tools of mimesis. The figure of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae acts as the most extreme example of the dissolution or devolution of the male into female form/lessness. Pentheus, the young male ruler of Thebes, undergoes a startling dissolution into the feminine (dressed as a Bacchante) and then into a final state of formlessness, a process triggered by his attempt to disguise himself as a woman. (This might also invoke the process of the male actor playing the female part, and involve a subtle question about the surety of casting off the feminine after the performance for the actor and the community of men, the audience.) The feminine plays an instructive role in this process of Pentheus’ dissolution. Adopting female costume, miming how he thinks a woman acts, Pentheus is punished by the Maenads, including his mother, who tear his body apart, literally deconstructing his body. Dismembered and decapitated by his mother and female relatives, Pentheus’ body loses its form in extremis (see Euripides, Bacchae 1124-41), going beyond even the ‘natural’ state of formlessness of the female body. In another sense, the male character of Pentheus is disassembled onstage, initially when he is enticed to adopt a female persona, and this adoption of the feminine is then replicated on his body in an enactment of gender making the body operative. (Clothing affects Pentheus; he becomes the female by taking on her attire, 925ff.80) The dismemberment of the body by his mother and the Maenads is staged via a horrifying textual description of bodily suffering. The bits and pieces of Pentheus might have been represented on the stage judging from the text (1218ff.),81 thus providing a visual tableau of the deconstruction or dissolution of the male to accompany the gruelling descriptions of his physical demise. There is also – in a further demonstration of the feminine nature of

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female mimesis in this culture – a dissolution of roles that occurs in the performance of tragedy. The process of Pentheus’ dissolution is on one level triggered by his act of disguising himself and playing the female. This may serve as a metatheatrical reference to the actor’s possible dissolution of self in order to play the other, as a further thread in the process of the male becoming female, another layer of mimetic dissolution. So, for example, as Bassi notes, given that there were only three principal actors, the actor would have had to ‘change the gender of his persona within a single performance’.82 She remarks that the actor playing Deianira in all likelihood would have played the role of Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, and it is also possible that the same actor played both the roles of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Agave and Pentheus. The question of the audience’s awareness of such dissolution and exchange of roles might also be left open.83 If the male hero, and again Heracles functions as a good example here, envisages himself becoming female as a result of the tragic suffering which leads to his dissolution into the feminine, then this also suggests that male form is intensely vulnerable. The fantasy of inviolability is revealed as just that – a fantasy. Furthermore, this suggests that female form functions per se as the suffering, dissolving body, regularly cast as inimical to the masculine. Femaleness in tragedy is in one image a sheath to be put on to cause suffering and lead to the demise of the male body, like the insidious robe that Deianira gives to Heracles, which eats away at his masculinity. Thus the feminine serves to deliver the male once again to the experience of the tragic. The tragic notion of the unmaking of the male body might also be raised in relation to this topos of Dionysian dissolution. Whilst Pentheus functions as an excellent example of the ‘unmaking’ of the male, Sophocles’ Heracles also provides an interesting example of the unmaking of the male body in a slightly different way.84 Heracles’ discovery of the limitations of the body reverses the order of male culture – of the young male initiate (ephebe) shedding the feminine connections of the body (boundless, wet, young, soft, passive, penetrated) for the male role (dry, bound, adult, hard, active and penetrator). If tragedy often dramatises the ephebe’s story, as some commentators have suggested, of the passage from female to male,85 then Heracles seems to turn from male to female, from aner to ephebe, reversing the coming-of-age theme. This episode might therefore function as a further example of dissolution – a dissolution from the adult form of manhood to the more feminine form of youth. In this sense too, Heracles’ body becomes the denouement in Sophocles’ Trachiniae in his fall from the magnificence of the male body, and subsequent return to the feminine.86 It might also be argued that the male body/identity is tested in the figure of Pentheus and Hippolytus in Euripides’ plays Bacchae and Hippolytus respectively. But the ephebe body/identity (and Pentheus and Hippolytus are both cast as ephebes), perhaps stands less chance of standing up to the feminising tragic process than the full or ‘secure’ adult

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Becoming Female male body of Heracles. As I suggest above, this culture seems to have constructed the transition from boy to man as a passage from the feminine to the masculine, or at the very least from the ambiguous male/female status, body and identity of youth. This path is conventionally symbolised by the ephebe wearing female dress and then discarding it for male dress in initiation rites.87 Both Pentheus and Hippolytus might conceivably be more vulnerable to this devolution into the female body, into becoming female, since they are closer to the apparent category of the feminised youth. The ephebe has only recently separated from the feminine (in both the form of the maternal and the feminine within, since the child, pais, is considered feminine in this culture).88 But perhaps tragedy teaches that the male never really escapes the feminine, both within and without the male body, that the male body is never secure from this threat. In this sense, for example, Pentheus’ youthful proximity to the influence of the female might be understood as a contributing factor in his demise. He has not yet learnt how to deal with the seductive power of the feminine for the male. It might also be remarked (in this context of the vulnerability of the ephebe to the feminine) that the fall of the great Heracles, a mature aner, into the feminine seems all the more disturbing, suggesting that this lesson can never be fully mastered by the male. The feminine within – Heracles’ hamartia So Heracles’ suffering leads to a fall from the splendours of the adult male body and a descent into femininity. Sophocles’ characterisation of Heracles appears to push his association with the feminine beyond a simple mimesis of the feminine, to a revelation of an existing femininity within the male. In Sophocles’ Trachiniae Heracles himself points to the feminine within, which is revealed by the intense suffering his body undergoes as a result of Deianira’s philtre. Threateningly, the feminine works on the male to reveal the feminine within him, thus moving from the external surfaces to the internal regions within his body. The outer surface layers of the masculine are flayed, only to expose the nucleus of the feminine. Here the female, true to female form (or formlessness) could be read as threatening to obliterate the great hero. The male body is perhaps reduced to a performative surface, and the great male exterior of Heracles may serve as a façade for the essence of female innards. (Or, to put it another way, the male becomes gender, the female becomes sex/the body.) In this image, the insides of the body are already female, and the outside changes to match the inside in a rather ironic expression of tragic consonance (given that the male body becoming female would normally be interpreted as an example of tragic dissonance). If the Trachiniae on one level seems to hint that Heracles’ downfall is caused by something within him, this is reminiscent of the Aristotelian

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4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female fatal or tragic flaw argument (hamartia).89 There is a suggestion that Heracles’ lack of enkrateia (and this is demonstrative of an internal femininity) leaves him open to the onslaught of the feminine/the tragic, which then reveals his inner femininity and leads to his downfall.90 Perhaps the logic here is that Heracles’ lack of enkrateia, demonstrated on many levels by his excess in all things, dictates he cannot help but give into the body, to eros, and therefore the revelation of his feminine within is somehow inevitable. Or, in another way, the process of Heracles becoming female might be interpreted as a theatrical manifestation of this lack of enkrateia. The genesis of Heracles’ fall is already within his own nature, this decadence is in evidence before he puts on the robe. Because he does not rule himself, he cannot, in accordance with social custom, rule his wife Deianira as a kureios should, and Heracles’ inability to master his own desires therefore leaves him open to the prospect of others (specifically, the female) mastering him, both from within and without. Thus, whilst the female agent in the form of Deianira on one level defeats him, it is perhaps primarily the feminine within Heracles that finally overpowers him. In one way they are two sides of the same coin, as the performative essentials of tragedy seem to suggest (the roles of Heracles and Deianira both potentially being played by the same actor). Heracles’ devolution is rich in tragic irony – the greatest man ends up being the least manly in a way. In his weakened state, the feminine within is exposed. The feminine, now written on the (costumed) surfaces of the male body and coursing within, is revealed by suffering, whatever its aetiology. Furthermore, Heracles might be interpreted as destroyed by his (female) body, because in the end, regardless of his spectacular embodiment and physical feats, his body-self is revealed as vulnerable, open to suffering and death. The viscerality and vulnerability of the body casts the (male) body as feminine. But this notion of the feminine within also suggests the male is a cultural addition to the core of the feminine (a notion which again deeply essentialises the female).91 The masculine becomes a husk, and masculinity/gender becomes performance. The only sex is female. This theme is also forcefully suggested in Euripides’ Bacchae. Whilst both masculinity and femininity are revealed as performative (in particular via the portrayal of Pentheus, first hypermasculine, playing the part of the Greek male ruler to excess, 248-54, 343, then hyperfeminine, playing the part of the female Bacchante, 925ff.), the core of the body seems to be resolutely feminine (in accordance with this culture’s formulation of the feminine and the body). By the end of the play, all the characters are in one way or another dressed as female – Tiresias, Cadmus, Dionysus, and Pentheus – in a devastating demonstration of the dominance of the feminine both within tragedy and within the cultural formation of gender and sex.

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5

Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? The male self } is judged by the degree to which he maintains autonomy and bodily integrity and defends himself against threats of ridicule, shame, and, most of all, effeminization. Froma Zeitlin1 The very male in them will make them false.

Euripides, Hippolytus 970

The question whether the feminised hero returns to manhood remains. There is perhaps reason to argue a reassertion of masculinity in Sophocles’ characterisation of Heracles at the end of the Trachiniae. Some scholars interpret a Heraclean return to the stance of the traditional masculine patriarch (kureios) in his command to his son to marry his concubine Iole and burn him alive on a pyre. J.K. MacKinnon, for example, thinks Heracles speaks here as ‘a typical heroic warrior who regards the preservation of his property } as an integral and necessary component of his honourable status, and who sees his son to be, in this matter, an extension of himself’.2 Kirk Ormand argues that the enforced marriage between Hyllus and Iole reasserts the patriarchal order.3 Victoria Wohl also sees a reaffirmation of maleness by the close of the Trachiniae.4 Heracles’ insistence that Hyllus marry Iole asserts, according to Wohl, a form of control over Iole (and thus over her body), righting this perverse and dangerous situation (for the kureios) whereby Iole has controlled him.5 Heracles has also failed to control Deianira, given that she destroys him. His orders to Hyllus to kill him and marry Iole might be interpreted as instituting mastery over self and sovereignty over the female once more. In this way, if Heracles perpetrates the act that goes towards defining men – the exchange of women – he might return to virility in the end. A further illustration of Heracles’ potential return to manhood might be found in his behaviour at the close of the play. Anticipating his death, Heracles orders Hyllus not to shed tears when making the funeral pyre – ‘Let me have no tears, no mourning. Do your job without lamentation, without tears, if you are your father’s son, or even below I shall wait for you, a crushing curse forever’ (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1199-1203). These lines might offer a further potential illustration of ‘manliness’ and an additional repudiation of the feminine. Heracles refuses to allow his body to be resealed via the attentions of women, who traditionally clean the body, seal any wounds, and return the body to some sense of wholeness and aesthetics. He refuses the attentions of women by ordering his death

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? by burning – there will be no body left to reseal. Instead he wants his body to disappear, or disintegrate, on the funeral pyre. Cremating the live body will remove all traces of the disgrace Heracles has suffered. Furthermore, this passage might be interpreted to depict Heracles mourning his own death – as Rehm remarks, like a ‘woman who traditionally sings the funeral lament and whom he fears he now resembles’.6 In another sense, this passage might serve as an example of his cruel nature to the end, ordering his own son to kill him, without the relief of mourning, with the additional threat of placing an eternal curse on his son if he does not carry out his orders. The harsh depiction of Heracles at the end of the Trachiniae has caused much controversy in the interpretation of this play, leading many commentators to think Sophocles means to further portray Heracles in a negative, unsympathetic light.7 Sophocles’ Heracles is often thought to be ‘one of the most unpleasant characters in Greek tragedy’,8 and part of this summation depends upon the final characterisation of Heracles. Others have instead argued that he is cast more positively here, demonstrating care for his son and Iole. Rush Rehm believes that Heracles’ character is rescued by the end of the play (to an extent), changing from ‘an aggressive and brutish male to a more sensitive and (relatively) passive sufferer [which] increases the audience’s sympathy for him’.9 However, by the end of the play the portrayal of Heracles does not appear to soften – he still appears harsh and brutal in his treatment of his son (see 1221-48). It is also possible that Sophocles adds the detail of Hyllus being made to kill his father – a detail which might further cast Heracles in a negative light.10 It does seem, on balance, that Sophocles portrays Heracles in a distinctly negative light to the end, but the question of whether he is a sympathetic figure may not be relevant to the question of whether he returns to masculinity. Whilst he might appear an unpopular figure to the audience, his insistence that Hyllus kill him might signal a reassertion of manhood within the context of classical Athenian culture. He is still an unsavoury, brutal character, but his domineering nature might be indicative of his attempt to reassert himself as the father/kureios. However, whilst this appears to be acceptable behaviour for a patriarch at this time, it does not necessarily dictate that the audience is directed to (or indeed will) sympathise with Heracles. (Individual differences between audience members will mean that not all spectators will respond in the same way.) It might instead, for example, point to the harshness of this rule of the kureios dictating the lives of all family members. Heiden suggests Heracles might be perceived as a severe ‘totalitarian’ ruler, and this could have had some negative resonance in the democratic audience.11 This may somehow undercut or subtly destabilise his return to masculinity. At the close of the play, Heracles is cast as preparing to meet his death with no apparent trace of his earlier tears. According to Segal, Heracles’ previous ‘surrender to weeping’ is reversed as he approaches his death,

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Becoming Female and is replaced with a ‘firm, enduring silence’.12 Such an attitude seems representative of masculine behaviour, of a possible return to manhood. Lines 1259-63 would also appear to support such a reading: ‘Come then, O my tough soul, before this sickness is stirred again, set a steel bit in my mouth, hold back the shriek, and make an end of this unwanted, welcome task.’ Whilst Michel Jameson translates sklera as ‘tough’, Heiden instead translates it as ‘hard’. This might add to an image of a return to the masculine characteristic of hardness, although the notion of a hard soul is somewhat ‘absurd’, as Heiden remarks, given the Greek notion of soul, psukhe, as ‘breath’.13 Language might undercut Heracles’ intention here. The instructions Heracles gives Hyllus, according to Heiden, might further demonstrate an attempt to regain his masculine persona and to mark Heracles’ death with qualities of ‘dryness, hardness, and maleness’.14 Dryness, a quality attributed to the male body, might be signified by his lack of tears; hardness and maleness might be signified by the kind of wood used – wild olive, which is ‘specifically called male’ (1196), and oak, characterised as ‘deep-rooted } suggest[s] a solid connection with the ground’.15 Thus the Sophoclean Heracles might in this light be interpreted as becoming male once more in his decision to face death with the same resolve and silent endurance that he has shown in the past, without the weeping and crying he has uncharacteristically displayed in this recent course of events. (According to the play this is uncharacteristic behaviour. However, outside the play and deep in Heracles’ mythos, this is characteristic behaviour.16) The importance of a classical hero demonstrating the quality of endurance, karteria, should not be underestimated, it seems.17 Silvia Montiglio, in her valuable study Silence in the Land of Logos, talks of ‘the new ideal of heroism, which favours the endurance of the hoplite’.18 The hoplite above all is meant to withstand ponos, to endure and bear the pain inflicted by the enemy.19 This model of the hoplite’s endurance is different from the old style of epic heroic endurance, personified in the form of Odysseus, who endures by way of his cunning nature and a strategic use of silence. (Odysseus bears the opposite type of heroism to Heracles in a sense – he uses his wits, his phrenes, to dominate and conquer his opponents. But this kind of heroism also carries the tint of the feminine – the employment of guile and deception is often considered a feminine tactic. Interestingly, Sophocles casts Heracles as using the tactic of guile in Trachiniae 274-9, although this does seem to be presented as aberrant behaviour for Heracles.20) In Montiglio’s view it is Heracles, not Odysseus, who functions as the prototype for the enduring hoplite and the ephebe in tragedy. (This point regarding Heracles as a model for the ephebe is significant, given tragedy’s apparent movement of staging the hero’s return to the state of the ephebe via the process of the feminine, of tragic suffering.) Odysseus instead will become, according to Montiglio, the model for the philosophers, with his mastery of phrenes (wits) over soma (body).21

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? This exceptional ability of endurance associated with Heracles might be interpreted as coming to an end in the Trachiniae – instead of enduring ponos, he decides to die. Given Montiglio’s argument regarding Heracles as the model for the hoplite in tragedy, Heracles’ decision to no longer endure takes on a deeper significance. A fine or ‘beautiful death’ for a hoplite is, according to Loraux, one that is ‘accepted and not sought’.22 Although the interpretation of a man’s decision to die or live when experiencing suffering and/or humiliation will shift and change according to time, place, and genre, it appears that in general, at this time, it is considered to be ‘more’ masculine to endure and die ‘naturally’ (rather than commit suicide, for example). Heracles’ choice to die might thus be interpreted as feminising him – a hero should live with his suffering and wait for death to come to him according to the dominant cultural model. Euripides’ Heracles might instead appear to display a more conventional heroism than the Sophoclean Heracles.23 On one level, the Euripidean Heracles might be perceived to move from the complete ignominy of madness (perhaps a feminising nosos, sickness), from a passage through the feminine, where he suffers and weeps like a woman, to the masculine in his decision to endure at the end of the play. Heracles asks, ‘} would it not be cowardice to die? } I shall prevail against death }’ (Euripides, Heracles 1347-9).24 In this context of endurance, the Sophoclean Heracles begins to look potentially dubious as far as traditional andreia goes. The conventional celebration of Heracles as the most enduring of heroes makes his lack of endurance in Sophocles even more remarkable. The question of Heracles’ display of his suffering body might also impinge on this consideration of a return to masculinity. This rests upon whether the display of his maimed body indicates an act of control or whether it serves to feminise him further It seems reasonable to interpret Heracles’ revelation of his suffering body, robbed of its former magnificence and reduced to a hideously maimed state, to the internal audience (and implicitly the actual audience of the play) as an act designed to elicit pity (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1070-1104). But might Heracles’ act of uncovering his suffering, wounded body be interpreted as a sensational and subversive act given his masculine status? Instead of wishing to hide his suffering like Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (831-2), and Heracles in Euripides’ Heracles (1157-62), Heracles displays his wounded body and asks that it be seen (hence the gaze of another penetrates his body further). However, this might also masculinise Heracles, if we follow the argument of Loraux that I presented earlier in Chapter 3. The witnessing of their wounds by other men in Loraux’s reading might verify, validate, and return men to masculinity in epic, but the question of how this might be interpreted in the genre of classical Athenian tragedy remains open. The way Heracles chooses to die seems to cast a further pall over any

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Becoming Female safe, indisputable return to masculinity. The death of Heracles is hardly demonstrative of the patina of glory given to those who die in battle. Heracles’ death appears as a type of suicide – by choosing to die, Heracles is in a sense committing suicide, even though he orders his son Hyllus and friends (presumably other young men) to carry out his death. Suicide, according to Loraux, is generally a woman’s death in tragedy and as such might serve to feminise a man.25 A more conventional depiction of the suffering hero in tragedy might cast the hero as yearning for the sword or spear to end his suffering. For example, the Euripidean Hippolytus expresses the following wish: ‘O for a spear with a keen cutting edge to shear me apart }’ (1375-6; this is ironic given that Hippolytus does not appear to be a conventional hero). The sword makes a man ‘male’, and for death to befit a warrior, blood must be spilt and his body split by another man. (Conversely, for a death to befit a woman, blood must not be spilt and the body must be closed in the act of death. This is an interesting reversal of the typical image of the male body as closed and the female body as open.) Loraux writes in The Experiences of Tiresias: For a man the only honourable death is the one, whether it is accepted or chosen, that is brought about by the blade. Whether the result of blows struck in the heat of the battle or the solitude of suicide, the wound that opens the flesh makes a man’s body a virile body.26

Thus Loraux believes Ajax’s suicide in Sophocles’ Ajax is in some ways a heroic death.27 Ajax (traditionally a far less ambiguous hero than Hippolytus), sets up his sword (a gift from Hector) so that it is like an opponent (or an ‘actor’) and falls upon it. He kills himself, a feminine act, but in a ‘virile’ way, in Loraux’s interpretation. (Interestingly, Sophocles might be interpreted as subverting the distinction between a heroic death and a feminising suicide here by depicting the hero as choosing a woman’s death, suicide, but executing it in the fashion of a manly death, by the sword. Does Sophocles challenge this apparent oxymoron, manly suicide?) By configuring the sword as another man in a sense, perhaps the character Ajax tries to mitigate any possible taint of feminisation resulting from his choice to commit suicide. Nevertheless, Ajax’s death is a suicide, and therefore appears to be a woman’s death, even though he tries to reinterpret it in the fashion of a warrior. Ajax’s death is not an uncomplicated hero’s death, and his masculinity and heroism may remain destabilised by the conflation of male and female signifiers.28 Sophocles’ decision to portray Heracles’ desire to be burnt alive becomes interesting in this context of the dictum that ‘the only honourable death’ for a man is the one delivered by the sword.29 In his introduction to his translation of the Trachiniae Jameson notes:

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? } our play contains the first sure reference to Heracles’ decision to be burned alive on the pyre } The story of the pyre cannot be original with Sophocles, for we see it on Attic vases beginning in the early part of the century, and it seems always to have been connected with his becoming a god.30

So, whilst Heracles’ death on the pyre appears to be a strand in Heracles’ mythos, Sophocles chooses to emphasise this strange manner of death. And, as Jameson queries, why does Sophocles eschew any allusion to Heracles’ apotheosis, which serves as ‘the final resolution of the hero’s agony? For Heracles here expects death, and there is not the slightest hint of apotheosis, although it is explicit in the poet’s Philoctetes’.31 The lack of reference to Heracles’ apotheosis in effect focuses the audience’s attention on the suffering and mortality of Heracles here and now, without the distraction and comfort of the apotheosis known elsewhere in his mythos. His suffering as a mortal is emphasised, his elevation to the status of god withheld. The story of Heracles’ apotheosis would also mean Heracles becomes something else entirely, an immortal. Instead, Heracles is once again pared back to the suffering body. The way in which Heracles chooses to die creates more complications. Whilst Loraux believes that Heracles’ ‘body is wracked with intense pain [and] he suffers like a woman but dies like a man’,32 the text seems on some level to fail to support such a reading. Unlike the Sophoclean Ajax and Haemon who might be interpreted as executing ‘manly suicides’,33 Heracles chooses to be burnt alive on a funeral pyre. This type of death appears to be highly unusual in tragedy, and most uncommon in classical Athens. His manner of death seems distinctly ‘unGreek’, and in fact could be interpreted as ‘oriental’. As Pericles Georges writes, the act of burning a man alive is considered to be barbaric, representative of the practice of ‘barbarians who burn or butcher the human body and use it in atrocious ways’.34 This oriental ‘suicide’ might therefore throw further confusion on his status as a man and feminise Heracles, given the strong trope of casting the oriental/barbarian as feminised other.35 In this sense, Heracles might become a kind of eastern, feminised fetish. The only point of reference for this kind of death in tragedy is the eastern act of suttee that Evadne commits in Euripides’ Suppliant Women (1070-2).36 But even Evadne fares better than Heracles – she is able to fling herself on the pyre, whereas Heracles’ body and will are so annihilated by the poisoned robe that he will have to be placed on the pyre by his son. Heracles’ projected suicide thus becomes potentially disruptive to the conventions of classical andreia on several levels. Perhaps even more damning for Heracles, it is Deianira who dies by the sword, and, although she commits suicide and hence experiences a woman’s death, she might in this sense die more ‘like a man’ than Heracles (given his proposed style of death). Deianira could be interpreted as becoming male here, a counterpart to Heracles’ body-self becoming female.

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Becoming Female She modifies her body by stabbing herself with the male weapon, the sword, and opens her body up in a mimesis of the preferred way for a man to die (although some feminine signifiers are still evident in her death).37 Deianira’s act of dying (by the sword) like a man might therefore appear further to accentuate Heracles’ ambiguous, if not womanly, death. Interestingly, Heracles’ (projected) death has also been interpreted as a mimesis of the quintessentially female mode of suicide in classical Athenian tragedy, hanging. Victoria Wohl writes: ‘defeated by a woman, Heracles dies an emasculating death, killed not in combat }, but by a love potion, while wrapped in a peplos – a woman’s robe, and moreover his wife’s gift and handiwork – making his death more akin to a female suicide by hanging than to a manly death by the sword’.38 This mimes the most vilified way for a man to die in classical Athens. Heracles’ wife is the only one who can destroy him in a tragic end to his long and arduous career of conflict with men and monsters: Neither the spear of battle, nor the army of the earth-born Giants, nor the violence of beasts, nor Greece, nor any place of barbarous tongue, not all the lands I came to purify could ever do this. A woman, a female, in no way like a man, she alone without even a sword has brought me down. Sophocles, Trachiniae 1058-63

This defeat is the finale, a last echo of the earlier defeat of Heracles by another woman, Iole – ‘Against all else he has won by sheer strength; but by this love for her he has been completely vanquished’ (488-9). He is thus in one reading defeated twice by the female – first by his desire for Iole, and then by Deianira. The problem of why Heracles orders himself to be killed is important for establishing whether he successfully negotiates a return to the masculine or heroic identity. The text may suggest that he does this because of the shame of being conquered by a woman. Aeschylus’ Choephoroe provides a singular example of the humiliation of a man being killed by his wife. Here Agamemnon’s son Orestes wishes he had been killed on the battlefield by another warrior, in glory, rather than slain in the bath by his wife (Aeschylus, Choephoroe 345-50). Another character of Sophocles, Creon in the Antigone, also demonstrates this attitude, singing ‘I must } not let myself be beaten by a woman. Better, if it must happen, that a man should overset me. I won’t be called weaker than womankind’ (677-80). According to the terms of andreia, Heracles might not return safely, resolutely, to the designation of aner if a woman occasions his death. His status as hero is seriously undermined. But Heracles has in the past been defeated by a woman, so why does he want, in effect, to kill himself now? Because of the utmost humiliation of being beaten by his wife? Perhaps it is because his body-self has been thoroughly subjected to feminisation and disfiguration. Heracles seems to

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? be characterised as histrionic in this section of the play, crying: ‘the false-faced daughter of Oeneus has fastened upon my shoulders, a woven, encircling net of the Furies, by which I am utterly destroyed } my whole body is completely killed }’ (Sophocles, Trachiniae 1050-7). But in fact, the disease does not kill Heracles within the play, and there is subsequently some uncertainty as to whether it is lethal.39 If, however, we accept at face value Heracles’ humiliation at being led to such suffering of his body-self by Deianira, Heracles might be interpreted as attempting to engineer to die like a man. He does arrange to be killed by another man rather than allowing the robe of Deianira to take its course and kill him (if indeed it is fatal). By ordering his son to kill him (leaving aside, for the moment, the complication of the way he chooses to die, being burnt alive on the pyre), his death might be interpreted as in some way that of a man. Ormand, for example, believes Heracles tries to act like a man and dominate his opponent here.40 In this context, Heiden’s suggestion is relevant: ‘in ordering his own death Heracles rhetorically escapes his entire ignominious situation. His suicide makes it impossible to say that he was killed by Nessus, Deianira, or anyone else, an important victory for a hero.’41 If the most powerful monster beats him rather than a woman, his manhood might emerge more or less intact, somehow salvaged even though he has experienced such suffering and humiliation. In this context, it might be possible to interpret, as Heiden suggests, that ‘Heracles’ killer’ is ‘someone that Heracles himself had killed’,42 thus promoting an image of self-mastery (and removing agency from his wife). However, the ‘real’ cause of this disease is not established within the text with any certainty. Whilst Heracles believes that Nessus has cast him the death card, Heiden submits that Heracles might need to believe that Nessus is his murderer, since ‘then he would not be said to have been killed by a woman, but instead by one of the monsters he fought, perhaps the most powerful, since he has the power to act from the beyond the grave’.43 In this sense, Heracles might be interpreted as leaping to embrace Nessus as the ‘real’ cause of his death. The cause of Heracles’ death remains open to interpretation, and the possibility remains that the actions of Deianira might instead prevail as the real cause of death, if we accept that the nosos caused by the robe is fatal However, another uncertainty also exists – Hyllus says he will prepare this but he will not light the pyre, presumably someone else will – another man? Any image of self-mastery is surely undercut by the number of uncertainties generated in this play. * The ancient tenet of masculinity as a becoming and the uncertainty of life converge in a popular aphorism: ‘Call no man a hero until he is dead.’44 The notion of masculinity as a becoming and the concomitant fundamental instability and uncertainty of andreia seem implicated here. A man could

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Becoming Female lose his heroic status at any time, and only at death might a hero be fixed as hero, finally becoming a man at the point of death. The type of death a man experiences appears to be crucial for the consolidation of andreia. Sophocles’ Trachiniae begins with its own version of this aphorism (2-3): ‘You cannot know a man’s life before the man has died, then only can you call it good (khrestos) or bad (kakos).’ Part of this interpretation of whether a man’s life is good or bad lies in a consideration of whether he has an end fitting for an aner, and displays the behaviour of a man at the point of death. The play is thus framed with this reminder of death as the ultimate event in deciding andreia. In this light, the audience does not see or hear of the actual event of Heracles’ death, and therefore, an unequivocal statement proclaiming his safe return to heroism, to andreia, cannot be made. Without seeing his behaviour at the moment of death, the audience cannot assess whether Heracles dies like a man. The question of Heracles’ safe return to andreia therefore appears to be left open. The exodos of the Trachiniae also gives way to this prevailing notion of uncertainty. Heiden thinks the ‘mysterious exodos’ holds, ‘for the rhetorically self-conscious spectator, } a recognition of the predicament that both characters and audience share, the predicament of continual uncertainty and interpretation’.45 Furthermore, the play ends on an ‘inconclusive’ and ‘incomplete’ note,46 failing to provide comfort and closure, only the chorus singing: ‘you have seen a terrible death and agonies, many and strange, and there is nothing here which is not Zeus’ (1276-8). So much is open to interpretation in this play, a tragedy where language and the body are, so to speak, clearly rhetorical. In such a play it seems impossible to argue with any certainty for a reconstitution and celebration of the hero. This uncertain ending to the Trachiniae mirrors (and re-creates) the uncertain identity of Heracles. There might be enough evidence to suggest an attempt to return to masculine status, but the text remains equivocal and ambiguous on the success of this attempt. The only guarantee is of more uncertainty and continued suffering. The last image the audience has is presumably of Heracles’ body remaining racked by suffering dealt by the hand of his wife, and in this sense the feminisation of Heracles does appear on some level to remain intact. It might be argued, under the conditions of masculinity as a process of continual becoming that does not end until a man is dead, the possibility remains of a return to masculinity, since Heracles does not die in the Trachiniae. However, such a return to masculinity does not appear to be staged within the text of the Trachiniae, and is therefore withheld from the audience. Is Sophocles’ characterisation of the hero Heracles representative of the position of the tragic male hero in general on any level? Do other tragic heroes return to masculinity within the texts they appear in, or do they remain troubled? Is Hippolytus, who also experiences a passage through suffering, through the feminine, depicted as becoming an aner in the end?

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? As I discussed in Chapter 4, like Heracles, Hippolytus could be interpreted as depicted as initially female (as parthenos), becoming even more feminised as a result of his suffering (almost like a gune in labour, experiencing odunai), and like a woman in the manner in which he dies (he is hung by the reins of his horses, like a woman hung by the rope, such a frequent topos in tragedy. This is the cause of his death, although he does not die until later onstage – 1457-8. The Euripidean Hippolytus, again like Sophocles’ Heracles, might be interpreted as finally becoming an aner by demonstrating a certain amount of endurance and stoicism (in short, andreia) in the face of death (1457). Most noteworthy is Theseus’ appellation of Hippolytus as aner towards the end of the play (1460), as Segal remarks.47 But is Hippolytus really entitled to this best of names? He might gain audience sympathy, but not necessarily manhood. (And this is a reversal of the possible interpretation of Heracles as unpopular with the audience, but perhaps returning to masculinity via his resumption of the role as kureios.) Hippolytus’ position as patron over the hymeneal, over parthenoi, is in some ways a humiliating if not deeply ironic kleos for a man to have, and almost suspends him in the state of the (female) parthenos. The closing lines of the play might also be interpreted as creating more uncertainty with regard to the position of Hippolytus as aner. The Chorus sing, ‘This is a common grief for all the city; it came unlooked for. There shall be a storm of multitudinous tears for this; the lamentable stories of great men prevail more than of humble folk’ (1462-6). Charles Segal asks if Hippolytus deserves to be a part of this category of ‘great men’ to be lamented by the community at large: ‘is the public affirmation of sadness in the play’s closing lines really appropriate to a marginal, privatistic dropout like Hippolytus?’48 The characterisation of Admetus in Euripides’ Alcestis provides another interesting contrast to Sophocles’ characterisation of Heracles (particularly with regard to Heracles’ choice to die). This play appears to function as another example of the disturbance of heroism.49 Here Admetus is feminised because he will not die, and instead lets his wife die in his place. Euripides’ Alcestis might be interpreted as ironically pointing out the tensions inherent in this stoic model of masculinity, where men should endure suffering and not desire death. Here Admetus becomes a ‘coward’ by refusing to die and allowing his wife to take his place (perhaps a metatheatrical pun on mimesis, where actors and characters are constantly taking each others’ places, and where this time a ‘woman’ takes a man’s place).50 Furthermore, he is cast in the feminine role of mourning the dead hero; he clings to life, and ineffectually weeps.51 Admetus remains, like a woman mourning her husband, and is thus duly feminised. He is again feminised, as Segal remarks, because he ‘will be remembered for his ignoble behaviour, whereas Alcestis will live on in the cultural memory as a kind of heroised ancestor } She wins the “good

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Becoming Female fame” or eukleia generally reserved for males like Heracles }.’52 Alcestis dies like a hero, achieving immortal fame, the man’s highest honour, the telos of a life of andreia. The case of Alcestis and Admetus might therefore be interpreted as a further and most effective dramatisation of this configuration of the male becoming female. In one sense it might be argued that Admetus appears to remain feminised at the end of the play, relatively passive and ineffectual (1108-52). Any potential return to manhood via the exchange of the enigmatic Alcestis figure at the end of this play seems undercut by the ambiguity of this episode.53 Heracles gives a woman who appears to be like Alcestis to Admetus. If this is indeed Alcestis, ‘she’ might return to ‘womanhood’ by being handed by Heracles to the care of her husband. However, because of the uncertainty surrounding whether this is in fact Alcestis, such an appraisal cannot be made securely. So, too, the uncertainty of this episode suggests that any interpretation of this exchange is destabilised, and in turn, the assessment of Admetus as an aner is also undermined. Euripides’ portrayal of Heracles (in Heracles) also configures Heracles in a similar way to Admetus – he too will not die, even though Heracles swore he would kill whomever murdered his wife and children (563-82, cf. 1146-52). Heracles might be interpreted as clinging to life under the guise of enduring, and therefore potentially cast as a coward, because he fails to fulfil his oath.54 His will has been enervated. Even though on the surface it seems he adheres to the logic of masculinity (to endure suffering), this may actually cast him further as a coward. Like Admetus, perhaps the feeling is Heracles should die. In a typical Euripidean contortion of convention, Heracles’ failure to kill himself ironically casts him as a failed hero (given the kind of topography of suicide that Loraux unearths). Euripides appears to complicate this conventional trope of endurance, turning the apparent ideal on its head. Some fundamental inconsistencies evident in the model of endurance (karteria) and its application to the exercise of andreia seem to be raised here. But most importantly for the purposes of my discussion, the Euripidean figures of Admetus and Heracles might also serve to affirm the notion that the male hero is regularly feminised in tragedy by virtue of the genre he appears in. Whether he endures or decides to die, the tragic hero, it might be argued, is feminised either way because of tragedy’s feminising processes. In the light of my discussion above of the thematic concerns of endurance, heroism, and closure which appear in Sophocles’ Trachiniae and centre on the figure of Heracles, Euripides’ Heracles is a highly interesting play to consider further. The Euripidean Heracles has been contrasted to the Sophoclean Heracles with regard to the decision to endure or die. As I discussed above, in the Heracles he might initially appear to be more in the mould of the hero in his decision to endure his fate, seeming to return to virility.55 Yet the Euripidean Heracles is in many ways uncertain in his masculinity as well, most specifically, because he is potentially portrayed as a coward.

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? This time, his decision to endure might be interpreted as jeopardising his heroism. Heracles’ choice to live appears, rather than a ‘positive decision’, to be a position he reluctantly embraces, shamed into it by Theseus.56 Theseus, impatient with Heracles’ implied histrionics and his return to lamentation, has to exhort him to stop crying – ‘Rise up } have done with tears’ (Heracles 1394, cf. 1313; on Heracles’ tears see also 1353-6). Heracles’ decision to endure seems motivated by a certain unmasculine inertia – he seems unable to do anything, aside from weep and lament. Theseus eventually castigates Heracles to stop playing the part of a woman (‘No one who sees you playing the woman will approve, 1412).57 Heracles might therefore be interpreted as choosing endurance because Theseus instructs him to. He is in this sense a passive hero, and this is reinforced by the last image of him as a little boat to be towed in Theseus’ wake (1424). Another strand in this destabilisation of the hero is the reduction of Heracles, as Francis Dunn remarks in his article, ‘Ends and Means in Euripides’ Heracles’, from an extraordinary hero to a murderer of his wife and children, to an outcast, and finally, perhaps even more confrontingly, to an ordinary family man and friend.58 Heracles’ desire to be an ordinary father acts as a repudiation of heroism and one of its primary qualities, kleos.59 This might be interpreted as a potentially devastating destabilisation of the heroic ethos, and in particular, the military character of classical Athens at this time. If Heracles/ the Athenian hoplite is to stay home looking after his children instead of going off to perform his labours/ to war, he risks feminisation. (In a further illustration of tragic mimesis and tragedy’s tendency to reverse or confuse gender roles, Megara, Heracles’ wife, plays the part of Heracles, choosing a heroic death, 294ff. Intriguingly, ‘she’ also sings, ‘I must imitate my husband here.’) However, before the audience even meets Heracles onstage, he seems to be marked as an uncertain hero by his use of the bow. The bow is regularly associated with the antihero and the barbarian. Heracles’ dubious status as archer might add to the feminisation of the Euripidean Heracles, as Dunn also explores.60 The archer seems at times to be cast as ‘unwarlike and effeminate’, in the words of Bassi.61 There is a strong emphasis on the bow in this play, and concomitantly, on the question of cowardice, courage, and heroism. Lycus questions Heracles’ famous heroism, claiming his victories over the hydra and the Nemean lion were the result of Heracles trapping them in nets, ‘not strangled, as he claims, with his bare hands’ (Euripides, Heracles 153-4). He then calls him: } a man who, coward in everything else, made his reputation fighting beasts, who never buckled shield upon his arm, never came near a spear, but held a bow, the coward’s weapon, handy to run away? The bow is no proof of manly courage; no, your real man stands firm in the ranks and dares to face the gash the spear may make. Euripides, Heracles 157-64

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Becoming Female Amphitryon counters this, questioning this traditional tenet of masculinity/ warfare. He argues that the man who uses the spear is dependent upon his fellow soldiers fighting well, whereas the archer is independent. The man who uses the bow can ‘stand far off, shooting at foes who see only the wound the unseen arrow plows, while he himself, his body unexposed, lies screened and safe }’ (198-201). Interestingly though, a little later he says that if he was young and strong again, he would grab his ‘spear and bloody [Lycus’] brown hair }’, rather than the bow (233). The Chorus of old Theban men also ‘ache to hold a spear’ (267). Heracles uses the bow to kill his sons and wife (although he does use the club for one son). Once the audience hears of the feats he performs, or plans to perform with the bow, the picture of Heracles’ bow as ‘problematic’ is reinforced. The bow thus appears to play a significant role in destabilising any reading of the reaffirmation of Heracles’ heroism within Euripides’ Heracles. Furthermore, the ending of Euripides’ Heracles, like that of Sophocles’ Trachiniae, generates much uncertainty, and again raises the issue of how to assess heroism/andreia when a play lacks closure. Dunn has explored the unsettled ending of Euripides’ Heracles in detail, pointing to how ‘the play’s persistent evasions of order resist familiar approaches to closure’. This play displays a ‘series of endings’, which are repeatedly undone to reveal yet another ‘ending’. The final ending of the play is one that is part of a ‘larger, unfinished’ and ultimately unknown story.62 Euripides’ play focuses on an intensely humiliating thread of the Heracles’ mythos, or, in the words of Dunn, ‘The hero’s end had been told many times in many ways }, but never with this final gesture of shame and despair.’63 In the ‘end’, Euripides appears to be deeply subversive in his characterisation of Heracles. However, others have argued for a reaffirmation of the hero and the male principle in this play. Thalia Papadopoulou contends that Euripides’ Heracles ultimately celebrates the bonds of the polis, offering a redefinition of traditional arete and the reintegration of the hero into society64 William Arrowsmith also believes that this play demonstrates a reworking of the heroic model, a transition ‘from the outworn courage of outward physical strength to a new internal courage’.65 He maintains that Euripides humanises the great Heracles (although the act of murdering his children seems inhumane in the greatest sense within this cultural context). Heracles, Arrowsmith argues, arrives at his greatest state of heroism, in ‘surely one of the most poignant codas in Greek tragedy’. Ultimately, ‘the Euripidean Heracles discovers his greatest nobility in refusing to die and choosing life’.66 Dunn’s words can be used to effectively argue against such a view: Many critics have exalted this acceptance into a new virtue, a new goal [of friendship] that offers consolation amid despair and gives meaning to a shattered world. But there is no redemption in this play, in what Ajax calls the endless trouble of day after day; just a challenge to which Heracles

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5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? responds with ordinary courage. If meeting this challenge will eventually define new, more humane values, that must be another story; this hero and what he represents are completely destroyed }67

In a play perhaps more concerned with the problem of the hero than with any other, the heroism of the ultimate hero, Heracles, appears to be critically undermined. A feeling of ‘loss’ seems to consume the end of the play, any return to heroism thwarted by the open ending.68 Both Sophocles and Euripides leave Heracles in a state of arrested, if not destroyed, masculinity. Motifs of the feminine prevail in their endings, as they do for so many heroes in classical Athenian tragedy. For that is profoundly the tendency within the genre. Attic tragedy emerges as a necropolis of defeated masculinity, a space where the feminine resides, victorious.

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Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions Beneath all these/her borrowings and artifices, this other still sub-sists. Beyond all these/her forms of life or death, still living. And as she is dis-tant – and in ‘herself’ – she threatens all values with instability. In her they can always collapse: truth, appearances, will, power, eternal return. Miming them more or less adequately, this other remains un(equ)ivocally. Luce Irigaray1 The pitiful remains lie scattered }

Euripides, Bacchae 1137

The lack of closure and resolution apparent (in varying degrees) in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Euripides’ Heracles might be representative of a general tendency in tragedy. Thomas van Nortwick argues that epic appears to ‘resolve the issues raised in the course of the narrative’, whereas tragedy, as far as we can tell (given that these plays were originally performed as a trilogy followed by a satyr play), seems to leave these issues unresolved, and is typically characterised by a lack of closure.2 Michael Silk offers an alternative position on tragedy: ‘comedy values disturbance; other genres can simplify it; but not tragedy’.3 Yet tragedy, from Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Euripides’ Bacchae, might be read with reason as a genre concerned with disturbance and dystopia, reflecting its patron god Dionysus, who rules over dissolution and disruption. Whilst this emphasis on Dionysian dissolution and the destabilisation of the tragic hero remains speculative given the lack of extant trilogies, it would, however, seem reductive to argue that tragedy’s open-ended closures can thus be neatly accounted for. In this sense the argument of Ruby Blondell, Mary-Kay Gamel, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Bella Zweig seems relevant. In their introduction to Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, they write: ‘In the earlier period the tragedies sometimes formed a connected trilogy, like Aeschylus’ Oresteia } But Euripides and Sophocles both seem to have preferred individual, self-contained dramas.’4 The endings in tragedy are often disconcerting and tenuous, and even in plays which seem to offer a certain sense of closure this is often hollow and unconvincing. This may be interpreted as a particular concern in Euripidean tragedy. For example, Euripides’ tendency to close his plays with the gods, in the form of the deus ex machina, might in this sense function as a deliberate measure to disrupt any semblance of an ending.5 Elsewhere, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, for example, the threat of the feminine

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions and the savage may seem to have been neutralised. However, this trilogy might also be read as open-ended and unstable.6 Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Oresteia appears to be utterly de-heroised, and the heroism of the only other potential hero, Orestes, is deeply in question. It might be argued that the masculine principle is secure again by the close of the trilogy – in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, there is the gesture of the containment of the female and the reinstitution of the masculine as the dominating principle. But this ending is destabilised by all that has come before; the triumph of the male is undercut by the diffusive, uncontainable power and ineradicable presence of the female in male culture. The fact that Orestes, or the male principle, wins by only one vote seems to further destabilise any outright triumph for the male.7 This trilogy, which seems to reinstitute the male as dominant more emphatically than any other tragedy, is less secure, less resolved than it initially appears. A feeling of irresolution is created by the trilogy lacking an exodos.8 As I discussed in Chapter 5, if a play ends with uncertainty, this may then destabilise the masculine. The lack of closure typical of tragic endings leaves the male hero troubled, and the omnipresent threat that the male might become other, falter and lose his claim to heroic status, remains implicit in these open endings. In classical scholarship, there is a common interpretative stance arguing for tragedy containing the chaos that it unleashes by tying up its plays with neat endings. For example, Segal argues that the end of Sophocles’ Trachiniae might be understood as an observation on the ‘civilising power of tragedy’: } the cathartic process by which unleashed violence is once again absorbed into an ordered structure shown elastic enough to contain it. The tragedy lets loose chaos in a fearful destruction of the boundaries between man and beast, but at the same time its aesthetic form asserts the framework which can contain and neutralize that violence.9

This idea of tragedy as enacting closure, tying up loose ends and sealing all instability within its production, does not seem to account for the deeply unsettling endings of some of the plays and the complications tragedy presents, unheeding the deep threat of the feminine/ the other.10 This recent interpretation of tragedy might be interpreted as following the Aristotelian lines of katharsis as expressed in the Poetics, whereas my interpretive approach follows the challenges of the feminine, tragedy and mimesis that are explored and presented as unresolved in Plato’s Republic. (I will return to the Aristotelian and the Platonic models of tragic mimesis at the end of this chapter when I consider the position of the audience in greater detail.) The genre of tragedy might instead be interpreted as uncivilising and unsettling, open-ended, and far from comforting.11 So many disturbing

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Becoming Female events have taken place that any attempt at closure may not mitigate the horror that has come before. The frame of theatre might therefore fail to work as a stabilising closure. The horrific conclusion of the Bacchae destroys any such illusion of the containment and resolution of violence within this play (and perhaps this extends to any play, given that the Bacchae seems in some ways to be the tragedy about the genre of tragedy). If Pentheus may be read to signal and invoke the complex position of the male actor and spectator of such male mimesis of the female/other, his dismemberment and defragmentation are so complete that the notion of tragic katharsis (which appears to be related to this hermeneutic of tragedy containing chaos by the end of its plays) seems exposed as unsound. The furious onslaught of the feminine in the Bacchae might even go so far as to violate the tragic frame. Such an effect might be created via the potential for the audience to identify with Pentheus, who might be read on some level to symbolise the male’s tenuous position as actor/viewer/voyeur in tragedy. Pentheus, like other tragic heroes, is Theban and therefore non-Athenian, a fact which may seem to refute my suggestion that the character of Pentheus might invoke the male audience member.12 However, the nature of classical Athenian tragic mimesis and its emphasis on Dionysian dissolution mean that differences between self and other (and therefore Athenian and non-Athenian) are disturbed on many levels, for the character and the actor, and perhaps the audience too. As part of this equation, it is also perhaps the nature of tragedy to exceed the boundary of the stage via its attempt to affect its audience. Tragedy holds within it a vicarious and subtly menacing risk to the Athenian spectator, and these non-Athenian characters often seem to represent, invoke, or implicate Athens and/or the Athenian male. Thus some scholars may speculate that Pentheus is a metonym for Athens/the Athenian male,13 and Pentheus may indeed invoke the spectator in his position as a (failed) controller of mimesis, of the feminine. Sophocles’ Trachiniae in itself might be read as providing a deft refutation of this cathartic view of tragedy. Heiden makes this point eloquently: Heracles does indeed claim to be a purifier and to possess self-control; some spectators may well have felt reassured when the play ended without its violence transgressing the boundary between orchestra and audience. But according to our reading, this } does not represent a temporary dissolution of boundaries, but rather temporarily makes it possible for its spectators and readers to glimpse the liminal state of all existence at all times. And part of this recognition, if and when it occurs, may be the recognition that the play does not remain enclosed within the orchestra, that it is open to interpretation, and that its effects cannot be predicted or controlled.14

So the very facts of text and performance, of the processes that go to make

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions up mimesis, ordain that meaning, and the repressed element of the feminine, the other, can never be fully directed and contained. Mimesis itself is boundless and unlimited. The audience might interpret the play in a manner that differs from the poet’s intentions. The poet cannot control the meanings of his play, just as the other (the feminine, the body, the bestial, and suffering, for example) cannot be properly controlled once unleashed. Wyke’s words on the ancient body seem appropriate here, applicable to the ancient notion of the feminine and tragedy as well: ‘the ancient body is ... a semiotic system which its bearer can never fully master’.15 This might also be extended to the body’s creator and interpreter – the poet, as creator of the textual body, and the interpreter of this body, the audience member, cannot master the body under scrutiny. Meaning is never singular; its possibilities are plural and endless, everything is constantly open to reinterpretation. The basic problems of the masculine, the feminine, suffering, dissonance, and the body remain, slipping through any illusory net of male control in Attic tragedy. ‘Banish the body, banish the woman; they immediately return’, as Loraux writes,16 though her following point is debatable: ‘But at the end it has to be admitted: Herakles takes part in the process that follows, in which the woman and the body are finally challenged, } absorbed to the point at which they become invisible }’.17 The body and the feminine might instead by interpreted to continue to still haunt discourse, exceeding the containment and control of logos. * I have argued for the tendency of the tragic genre to continue this feminisation of the hero to the end. There is another position, which has at times emerged in my discussion, that of the conflation of the masculine and the feminine within the tragic hero. However, a further variation on this position, which is presented by Loraux in the Experiences of Tiresias, needs to be considered. Essentially, she argues this tragic passage through the feminine and subsequent conflation of the masculine and feminine within the hero serves only to reaffirm the male, to make him more virile. She enjoys a certain amount of consensus with fellow eminent critics, Rabinowitz, Zeitlin, and Wohl.18 Loraux’s argument appears to centre on the observation that ‘Greek formulations of the difference between the sexes must be approached via the notion of exchange }’.19 Within tragedy, this exchange between the sexes is most discernible, perhaps part of a larger theme of tragic exchange in the genre of tragedy, and this is an interpretative position quite a few commentators adopt. Segal, for instance, identifies a theme of the tragic reversal of opposites in Sophocles’ Trachiniae.20 Perhaps the most significant exchange is the one that takes place between Heracles and Deianira. As I have discussed, Heracles becomes female, miming the female body-

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Becoming Female self and Deianira becomes male in some ways, miming the male body-self (in her act of gift exchange and manner of death). The robe might serve in itself as a signifier of the tragic exchange of the masculine for the feminine in Heracles and the feminine for the masculine in Deianira, as Loraux observes.21 The ambiguous, complicated ends of Deianira and Heracles might be interpreted as leaving the conflation of masculine and feminine evident within both characters alive. Deianira ends as the warrior/wife, Heracles as the womanly man. Here the most apparently masculine man and the most apparently feminine woman end up reversing and conflating identities. The likelihood that Heracles and Deianira are played by the same actor in the original production might further leave the masculine and feminine associations of Heracles and Deianira and the kind of ‘sexual ambiguity’ so prevalent in this play in situ.22 (The question, of course, is whether the audience would have been aware of this, but it seems possible, given the metatheatrical quality of this theatre, that the audience may well have been made conscious of the fact that the same actor plays Heracles and Deianira.23) Sophocles’ Trachiniae does not seem to allow these tragic ambiguities that have been brought out to play to be solved into neat male and female roles by the close of this play. Loraux’s notion that Heracles’ virility is only enhanced by his femininity in Sophocles’ Trachiniae appears to adhere to a model of the conflation of the masculine and the feminine, of tragic exchange, but with an implicit and important theme of the male triumphing in the end, with the feminine, by implication, safely circumscribed within the male.24 While there is a clear emphasis on the model of sexual difference as a separation of the sexes, or binary opposition, in the classical period, Loraux points to another model, a far more ‘unorthodox’, subversive and fluid construction of sex and gender, which has its basis in Homeric epic, but she seems to see this in evidence in classical Athens as well.25 In this model, if it is in evidence, the male gains and the female seems only to lose. The passage through the feminine serves to strengthen and affirm the male in the end, in this reading. A male taking on feminine signifiers may serve to cast a man’s masculinity in relief, fully accentuating and even perhaps proving andreia. To use Loraux’s interpretative stance, Heracles becomes female and then something else, perhaps a ‘truly’ tragic hero, whose skin and identity are paradoxically strengthened with manliness via the feminising experience of tragic suffering. Loraux finds Homer and Plato provide a context for this conflation of the masculine and feminine within the male as a strengthening act, for the failure of the feminisation of Heracles to destabilise the masculine, and in turn, possibly serving to constitute the masculine. In her summation, there is no ‘true’ andreia without the feminine.26 The Homeric heroes are given far more latitude than classical Athenian formulations of the hero

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions allow. The Iliadic hero is permitted to be fearful, to cry, and may ‘be called a woman without any loss to his virility’.27 However, a few qualifications might be made. Loraux focuses on ancient Greece, blending eras and genres, and this is a valuable technique – for example, Foucault’s and Laqueur’s considerations of cultural materials, deriving from a wide span of time, place and genre, lead to the emergence of some very interesting patterns.28 But whilst such a contextual approach is profitable, the roles of genre, time and place perhaps also need to be considered – what is heroic in the genre of epic might be quite different to what is considered heroic behaviour in tragedy. Thus Loraux’s methodological approach might in this instance display a tendency to conflate archaic epic attitudes with the genre of classical tragedy. Attitudes to gender differentiation of role and acceptable behaviour change markedly from the heroic archaic age to the classical age. Classical Athenian culture is thought to be, judging by the extant representations, more rigid in its distinctions between the sexes.29 Whilst her work suggests an attractive alternative to this, it is nevertheless a marginal model, as Loraux herself remarks. She acknowledges that the more prevalent model insists upon a division between male and female, and she concedes that this model of a conflation of masculine and feminine within the hero, expressed in the notion of ‘the heroic weakness of strength’, is an unorthodox model.30 Whether it is indeed a classical model also remains open to question. Loraux’s appealing model of the feminine strength of the masculine warrior, a warrior who can cry and suffer with no loss to his sense of virility, might remain, principally, an epic model. How such a model might be negotiated in tragedy, in one sense the genre of subversion, is another question. Whilst tragic heroes might engage with the Homeric model at times, the interplay between the models of archaic and classical masculinity appears dense and intricate, often difficult to gauge. In this sense, is tragedy critiquing the model of archaic epic, subverting the norms of this earlier period, or does the subversive in tragedy become the model, and the norm, in tragedy? This much might be said – the genre of tragedy often appears to rework the Homeric model. Tragedy focuses more intensely on the misfortune of the hero than epic, and again the distinction needs to be raised that Homeric heroes are typically killed by men and glorified, whereas the tragic hero is often killed by a woman, and his heroism is severely jeopardised. The epic hero seems to finish far more securely than his tragic counterpart does. Furthermore, whilst the heroic age of epic appears to be more elastic in its formulation of how a hero might behave than the classical period, feminising behaviour also appears to be cast as deeply disruptive to masculine identity within epic at times. This virile model of the suffering hero seems to be qualified in the Odyssey, for example. Odysseus’ manhood is deeply imperilled by the way he behaves when he is with Circe. Here he famously weeps by the shore of Circe’s island, and is under the rule of Circe

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Becoming Female for a year, subject to complete inertia (Odyssey 5.82-4, cf. 5.150-8; Odysseus has to be galvanised into action by Calypso – she devises his return home at 5.233ff.). In short, he seems feminised. Until he can restart the epic trajectory for heroism (movement) and subsequently make his desire for nostos, his day of homecoming, a reality, his virility appears to be in danger. (And here lies a problem for the tragic hero – he is staged, for the most part, at home.) Odysseus does, however, manage to return to manhood. This is demonstrated through his decisive, if brutal, act as kureios. So, too, Penelope is cast as the good wife, who does not challenge her husband’s masculinity, unlike Clytaemnestra, who lies in wait for Agamemnon and feminises him forever by slashing him in the bath. To follow the interpretive stance of Loraux here, the question might be asked if Odysseus is cast as becoming more masculine as a result of his feminising interlude? The ending of the Odyssey could perhaps be read in this way. Loraux also points to Plato, who uses the feminine to masculinise and virilise the philosopher (his version of the hero, in a sense).31 It could be said, however, that Platonic philosophy has very different generic imperatives to that of classical tragedy. Indeed, in at least one instance, tragedy becomes Plato’s bête noire for its very disruption of masculinity, for its feminisation of tragic man. Ironically, Plato does allow his hero, Socrates, to execute his own mimesis of the feminine. In Platonic philosophy the feminine might seem to be firmly sealed within the body of the philosopher, swallowed as securely as Zeus swallows Metis in myth. However, although the Platonic mimesis and appropriation of the feminine seem masterful, the feminine, by the very terms it is cast in, might continue to disrupt his Protean Socrates, to thwart his attempt at manipulating and controlling the feminine in order to strengthen the masculine project.32 The feminine and the body do not always appear to be securely sealed in Plato either, indeed the two seem to be beyond his control, and this is not surprising given the terms they are set up in – as excess, always threatening to exceed the frame. For example, the body is an insistent presence in Plato. An apparent nemesis for the Platonic project, the body dominates the logoi of Platonic philosophy in a most persistent way at times. This discussion does, however, raise the important question of whether the tragic process of playing the female, becoming feminine, either reaffirms or undermines the male subject. The question remains whether the tragic hero (of whom Heracles is an excellent representative) devolves into the feminine or revises the traditional masculine principle via his experience of the tragic feminine. I have argued that Heracles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae does not appear to achieve a traditional form of kleos by displaying stalwart endurance and courage (the very qualities of andreia) in a secure way. However, the Sophoclean Heracles might be interpreted as functioning as a new kind of hero (along with Sophocles’ Ajax). Beaten by a woman, he might choose to die rather than wait for the robe of

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions Deianira to kill him, and his andreia might remain somehow shakily intact. This prompts the question, is Sophocles questioning the hero and expanding the definition and ambit of the hero, thus revising heroism to a new form? Perhaps in Ajax’s suicide and Heracles’ self-directed death, Sophocles expands the boundaries of heroism, incorporating suicide, the woman’s death, by making suicide heroic. Or perhaps Sophocles is being iconoclastic on another level. Sophocles does seem to be decidedly enigmatic and potentially subversive in his characterisation of Heracles. Robert M. Torrance writes: Such is the Women of Trachis, a sombre tragedy in which the egotism and lust of one man, Greece’s mightiest warrior, through an ironically linked sequence of events, brings untold suffering on himself and on all around him, while the gods watch in unconcern. That quality of active heroism in the face of adversity which, in one way or another, hallmarks Sophocles’ other dramas has no place here }33

This observation suggests Sophocles might revise his own notion of heroism here. He may in this sense be interpreted as taking the heroes of heroes (Heracles and Ajax), pushing them through the paces of the feminine and making them unheroic. I have argued that Heracles’ andreia does seem to be left to drift unstably in this play. Whilst Heracles’ mythos in general might cast Heracles’ andreia as strengthened by his negotiation with the feminine (as Loraux argues), this does not necessarily appear to be the case within the text of Sophocles’ Trachiniae (a distinction Loraux does not make). If Heracles does manage to resurrect a male identity at the end, he does not seem to be cast as more triumphant as a result of his passage through the feminine. His masculinity appears to be battered rather than strengthened by his experience of the feminine, of the tragic. This position is perhaps reinforced by the uncertainties which pervade the character of Heracles to the end of the Trachiniae. So, whilst masculinity and femininity can be interpreted as coinciding in the great hero Heracles, as Loraux remarks, rather than reaffirming the hero, this seems to generate instability in the hero, to continue to perturb the hero, and therefore, the masculine principle. Heracles ends as he began – his ambivalence, imperfection, and contradiction still in place. This conflation of the masculine and the feminine in Heracles at the end of the play generates a ‘final’ uncertainty for the masculine project. A further disruption of the masculine by the feminine is evident in Wohl’s comment: ‘Deianira’s memory is repressed, the very question of her guilt or innocence forgotten. But the repressed returns, and the presence of the female in the final scene unsettles, even as it enables, the paternal symbolic.’34 The unsettling effect of Iole at the close of the play might also be likened to the disturbing presence of the enigmatic Alcestis at the close

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Becoming Female of Euripides’ Alcestis. In both plays, the feminine seems to threaten, to continue to trouble the male, disrupting the ending of the plays. The problem of the feminine will continue to be re-staged. The feminine ‘remains un(equ)ivocally’, as Irigaray suggests.35 Thus, whilst tragic configurations of sexual difference might be ‘approached via the notion of exchange’,36 the hero often becomes derailed by the feminine in this mimetic genre. The feminine might be interpreted as continuing to subtly undermine the male subject, thus conforming to the perception of its uncontrollable, disruptive, and subversive nature within this culture, a perception which is given full dramatic rein in tragedy. The uneasy coincidence of the masculine and feminine within the hero carries a subtle or explicit threat to undo the male hero once more. Tragedy often fails to provide a neat circumscription and appropriation of the feminine. The tragic hero often remains deeply affected, even tainted, by the feminine, challenged by the feminine behaviour tragedy induces in him and forces from him (as I argue with regard to Heracles, Hippolytus and Pentheus in particular, whilst Admetus, Agamemnon, and Ajax function as other examples). The feminine appears to be less utilitarian, less compliant than Loraux’s model suggests, retaining an implicit and at times explicit power to disrupt normative masculine discourse. The feminising space of tragedy seems to be far more dangerous to the heroic identity than is often allowed. In tragedy, the deconstructive effects of the feminine cannot be fully resolved, the threat of the feminine to the masculine cannot be annihilated, as Euripides’ Bacchae dramatises. A suggestion that tragedy, the male hero, and male culture at large, walk a fine line between regeneration and decimation (via the feminine, via suffering) remains active in the plays, as the Bacchae once again illustrates. The male body-self, I have argued, continues to carry hints of instability, of uncertainty, and this might lean the tragic hero back toward the category of the feminine. If masculinity is uncertain the female is never far away, and the male remains threatened by the possibility of falling into his other, the shadow self of the feminine. The tragic process of the feminisation of the male hero might therefore be interpreted as posing a grave risk to the apparently constant ontological male project of generating and securing male identity. I have argued that the model of the masculine in tragedy portrays masculinity as an endless process of becoming, of proving a man’s worth for the defining attribute of manhood, andreia. In ‘miming’ the female body and suffering like a woman, Heracles risks slipping into femaleness, like the younger, ostensibly less secure men of tragedy seem to do with ease (Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae). This risk (of becoming female) is perhaps Heracles’ most dangerous labour. Yet it is also his most ordinary one, a risk every man faces (in less spectacular terms) under this formulation of andreia as a becoming, of the positioning

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions of the feminine as the threatening other which might invade the body-self, or worse, expose itself as already within the aner. This process of becoming female and returning to andreia has emerged as a dangerous practice, one that even the great Heracles might fail. Only the greatest of the gods can withstand this prodigious threat to the male identity and body, since only Dionysus and Zeus appear to be cast as managing this problem successfully. The process of the male becoming female serves as an avenue to power for the gods, as the tradition of Zeus swallowing Metis, here ingesting the maternal body, and giving birth to the good daughter of the patriarchy, Athene, demonstrates. His sovereignty seems to be sealed in the myth of his maternal interludes. Zeus, the father of the gods, affects an enhancement of his masculinity and power as a result of his mimesis of the mother’s body. So, too, in Euripides’ Bacchae, Dionysus is the only man to come out of the vortex of the mimesis of the feminine smiling. In tragedy, by contrast, the male mimesis of the female often ends in disaster for the male within the text. Heracles appears to lack any control over becoming female via the devastating effects of Deianira’s poisonous robe. Pentheus, on the other hand, appears to have a semblance of control over his mimesis of the female – he dresses himself as a woman with the help of Dionysus. But Pentheus, like Heracles, utterly fails to control the inexorable effects of the feminine once this process is set in motion. In this context, the cultural concept of the male having ‘more’ mastery over the body (and perhaps the convention of male actors taking on the female form reinforces this model of the male manipulation and control of form) seems shaken. Euripides’ Bacchae and Sophocles’ Trachinaie might be interpreted as exposing this as an illusion. This illusion of the control of form is stripped away. Male mimesis at times connotes power, mastery, and domination in Greek mythology. But when a mortal man attempts mimesis or falls into the condition of mimesis in tragedy, the dismantling of the masculine and the dominance of the feminine and/or an unsettling conflation of masculine and feminine (with a subsequent destabilisation of the masculine) often follow. Interestingly, Odysseus in epic seems to be the one mortal who manages mimesis successfully (although Odysseus does not appear to face the greater challenge of miming the female and returning to the male successfully; he seems predominantly to disguise himself as another man). He does not seem, however, to be cast in his positive capacity as a successful manipulator of mimesis, and of form, in tragedy.37 Tragedy does not appear to take up his mimetic inclinations, and perhaps this is precisely because of his record of success. So tragedy seems most interested in exploring the topos of male mimesis when it goes awry – the male accidentally/tragically begins to mime the female body-self, and often becomes, in the process, disempowered, penetrated, wounded, humiliated. Occasionally he may be permitted to recover

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Becoming Female – the masculine principle in the Oresteia might in the end be salvaged, although the stability of the male recovery seems always open to question. Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, in Segal’s reading at least, might be interpreted as demonstrating a return to masculinity (he gives orders and endures, for instance).38 But there is perhaps room to destabilise this reading – the Sophoclean Oedipus might be able to be read along Euripidean lines. Like Euripides’ Heracles, in Oedipus the King we hear Oedipus will consign himself to exile, but he does not carry out the other punishment he swore he would mete out to the killer (put the killer to death), who in the end is himself. The audience hears he will exile himself, although this act is withheld at the end of the play. Apollo’s rite of purification gives two options – to remove the plague ‘by banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood, since it is murder guilt }’ (100-1). Although Segal argues that blinding is worse than death,39 the ‘mere’ death of Jocasta for example, both Heracles and Oedipus might be deheroised (paradoxically, given the apparent attitude towards suicide in classical Athenian tragedy, a woman’s death) by their failure to kill themselves. Elsewhere, in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus is represented as a ‘very old man, lacking the usual heroic attributes of youth, physical vigour, and aggression’,40 details which might complicate the interpretation of this tragic hero. Furthermore, Oedipus’ end is shrouded in mystery – he disappears in Padel’s interpretation, and this is a most unusual death for a mortal in tragedy, death without suffering.41 Oedipus’ death might thus be interpreted as disconcerting, uncertain. This carries similar implications to Sophocles’ and Euripides’ portraits of Heracles in the Trachiniae and the Heracles respectively – andreia continues to be disturbed by the uncertainties generated in tragedy. Therefore, Heracles’ body, penetrated and ruined, sexually conflated, remains destabilised, and might be interpreted as symptomatic of tragedy at large. The ‘city of men’, to use Peter Mason’s phrase,42 depends upon the adult male body’s impenetrability. The exercise of the individual citizen with regard to his body – the dream of the inviolability of his body – is linked to the overall soundness of the community as a whole in a sense. Tragedy’s community – with its figurehead of the suffering, mutilated, polluted hero (for example, Oedipus, Heracles, Orestes, Hippolytus, and Pentheus) – is typically sick, afflicted. Masculinity is built on a fundamental instability in a sense, and it is this instability that tragedy seems to focus on and expose for all its dramatic worth. Thus, tragedy might be interpreted as thoroughly disturbing any notion of the classical male body as an unwavering subject for the inscription of gender and the expression of male hegemony, a desire which appears at times in male discourse (for example in Plato, who might be interpreted as attempting to ‘remake’ the male hero in a way tragedy does not allow).43 By undermining the stability of the male body-self, the male hero seems doomed, unable to recover. The kind of consciousness that tragedy forces upon the male, the dustropos harmonia or tragic dissonance of which

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions the female body-self is the best model, seems to prevent the male from returning to any position of stability and certainty. I turn to the peplos of Heracles for a decisive word on the disruptive power of the feminine in the male subject in tragedy. The poisoned robe, at times explicitly called a peplos (a woman’s garment, for example at 602, 613, 674), that Heracles wears perhaps gestures, like the robing scene of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, towards the actor playing the part of the woman in Athenian drama, and by extension, to an important application of the feminine in drama. Here the effects of mimesis, of the feminine, like the poison which is activated once Heracles wears the robe, are staged as difficult to master once released (as Euripides’ Bacchae will dramatise even more forcefully). The feminine cannot be easily cast off at the end of performance, nor incorporated safely into the masculine. Yet Loraux maintains Heracles is depicted as mastering this robe in the end. Heracles, according to Loraux, manages to ‘circumscribe the feminine contained within’ the peplos.44 But the robe continues to have a devastating effect on Heracles (for example, ‘a woven, encircling net of the Furies, by which I am utterly destroyed. It clings to my sides } my whole body is completely killed }’, 1050-7). It might be argued that his command to Hyllus to burn him perhaps intends to destroy the peplos, but this act is withheld from the audience. He does not appear to dominate or master the robe by the close of the play within the text. Whilst there might be reason to interpret a Heraclean return to andreia, the example of the peplos does not seem to provide support for this view. The peplos, an enveloping female garment, appears to have beaten him to the end – the robe devastates Heracles, deforming his body irrevocably. But most disturbingly, Heracles is still wearing the robe (which has led to his feminisation and ruin) at the close of the play. The robe remains, clinging fast to Heracles. If, as Loraux comments, the ‘wearing and giving of clothing’ serves to define and negotiate the stability and place of the sexes and their relationship to one another,45 the fact that Heracles still wears the peplos on stage at the end of the play might gesture towards a continued lack of stability of the masculine and feminine within the hero. The peplos might therefore function as a visual reference to his continued feminisation, to the disturbance of his claim to masculinity, and perhaps ultimately, point to the dissolution of the male hero in tragedy. The epitaph for the tragic hero might thus read: This was Pentheus whose body, after long and weary searchings I painfully assembled from Cithaeron’s glens where it lay, scattered in shreds, dismembered throughout the forest, no two pieces in a single place. Euripides, Bacchae 1217-21

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Becoming Female In the destruction of Pentheus, the endlessness of becoming could be interpreted as arrested – for a moment. Vernant, for example, writes on the ‘nonbeing’ of the body-self in the following way – if a body is subject to ‘disfigurement’ and ‘denaturalisation’, ‘it is no longer recognisable as his own, or even as a human body, or even as a body at all’, and this ‘reduce[s] him to a state of nonbeing’.46 The endlessness of becoming, however, continues even into the ‘state of nonbeing’ – the body becomes the corpse, and the corpse continues becoming something other when it is interred or cremated. But interestingly, the endless nature of becoming is also expressed with regard to the audience, as the audience too becomes female. The effects of tragedy – the audience becomes female This relentless process of the male hero becoming female, of the dissolution or disturbance of masculinity, might somehow extend to the position of the audience in tragedy. The audience, via the experience of tragedy and its interaction with the suffering bodies onstage, might also become female. The bodies of audience members appear to have been cast as involved in the process of watching Athenian tragedy, directly affected by watching and listening to Attic tragedy, experiencing a katharsis of the emotions tragedy brings to the surface. (Earlier in this chapter I considered the effectiveness of such a katharsis; I will leave this qualification aside for the moment, and focus instead on the way tragedy trades on the body and affects its audience.) Segal, following Aristotle, notes that the poets elicit somatic responses from their audience members.47 The fundamental concerns of the plays are typically framed in terms of the body. These concerns are expressed in ways that appeal to the emotions and empathy of the audience members via the representation of the impact of events or acts which affect these bodies on stage, coupled with the reported horrors of the characters’ bodily experiences. The emotions of fear and pity are imagined as highly physical sensations experienced by the audiences’ bodies.48 Emotions are thought to have a liquefying effect on the body – the wetness of emotion is a recurring topos. The female body-self is frequently associated with wetness. Emotion, considered to be a ‘wet’ state, is concomitantly thought of as feminising. As part of this rationale, women are also seen as far more open to the onslaughts of emotion. The male body is thought to enjoy a superior state of dryness, and should maintain this state. The wetness of tragedy is problematic in this light and perhaps evidence of a further layering of tragedy’s feminising processes, of men becoming female.49 Anne Carson comments that the wet arouses ‘a deep and abiding mistrust’ because of its perceived capacity for ‘transform[ation] and deform[ation].’50 I suggest that this proclivity to ‘transform and deform’ links wetness even more

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions closely with the feminine, since the female displays such a skill in tragedy and myth. The male is therefore threatened with deformation by tragedy’s onslaught of wet emotion, an onslaught which potentially changes a man’s shape. This threat serves to undermine the effectiveness of the theory of katharsis as a secure procedure effectively purging disallowed emotions, implicitly reaffirming and strengthening the male spectator. The problem of the control of the emotions and the appetites is a long-standing topos in ancient Greece. Emotion, like the feminine, the body, and suffering, is unpredictable, and once released cannot be easily controlled or directed. It threatens to wreak havoc on the male body-self, on the audience, to remake the male as female. The reaction to Phyrnicus’ play on the recent sack of Miletus exemplifies this concern – it reportedly affected the audience so deeply that poets were subsequently banned from representing anything so distressing and contemporary (Herodotus 6.21).51 The genre of tragedy was certainly thought to have the capacity to bleed over into the body-self of the spectator. A strong image of the physicalities of tragic katharsis thus begins to emerge, and this notion of an imagined bodily reaction of audience members stretches beyond the activity of watching theatre. Segal points to a similar representation of a bodily reaction in one of the first known works of literature in this culture, the Odyssey, where Odyesseus has a ‘strong somatic response’ to the songs Demodocus sings of the fall of Troy.52 He also refers to Gorgias (a rhetorician who is a contemporary of the tragedians), whom observes that poetry in general (and tragedy comes under this rubric) brings out a reaction of ‘fearful shuddering and much weeping’ in the bodies of its audience.53 A further aspect of this power of poetry over bodies can be seen in the ways words might mould the body of the ‘author’ as well. In another genre, that of old comedy (with its own distinct generic imperatives), Aristophanes allows for a mimetic effect of the subject material on the body-self of the author, as the words of Agathon in the Thesmophoriazousae demonstrate (146-52): I wear my garb according to my thought. The creative man, you see, must shape his ways In accordance with the plays to be composed. If someone be composing women’s plays, His body must needs share in women’s ways In plays of men, he has already what it takes. Whatever we don’t have, we must capture by mimesis.54

While words mould the body of the author, the author can also mould his words by shaping his body in this description. Logos and soma operate (once again) as two intersecting and affective avenues, this time with a focus on the author’s ability to become other.

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Becoming Female In turn, the effect of tragedy on the audience appears to be thought of as so embodied that Socrates in Plato’s Republic fears the experience of watching tragedy will change the bodies-selves of listeners.55 Tragedy is seen as potentially crossing the boundary of the stage, exceeding the mimetic effect, and menacing the masculinity of the men in the audience. Plato takes up tragedy’s polemic – in Book 10 of the Republic, Socrates argues that viewing drama can wreak the same negative effects on the bodies of the audience members as he defines for those acting in it. His comments are suggestive of the somatic content of Attic drama, the profound link between theatre and the feminine, and concomitantly, the deep challenge of tragedy to the male hero/subject.56 To comprehend the span of tragedy’s influence and the importance of the poet as teacher, consider the words of Simon Goldhill: ‘Plato’s attacks on tragedy as dangerous demagoguery are in part at least precisely because of the position of tragic theatre within the discourses of the polis. The playwright was a sophos, a privileged and authoritative voice, who spoke to the city } Plato and Aristotle } both } recognise its power over an audience.’57 Their work conveys the important role the genre of tragedy is thought to play in the creation and regulation of the citizen body. The following passage appears as a further register of the profound and subversive power Athenian tragedy is thought to have over the participants (both actors and audience), and the impossibility of handling the threat of the feminine in tragedy. In the Republic, Socrates provides an earlier caution against the dangers of representation, and in particular, singles out the pitfalls of the male act of representing the female: If they [the guardians of his utopian state] do take part in dramatic or other representations, they must from their earliest years act the part only of characters suitable to them – men of courage, self-control, piety, freedom of spirit and similar qualities. They should neither do a mean action, nor be clever at acting a mean or otherwise disgraceful part on the stage for fear of catching the infection in real life. For have you not noticed how dramatic and similar representations, if indulgence in them is prolonged into adult life, establish habits of physical poise, intonation and thought which become second nature? } Since then we care for our Guardians, and want them to be men of worth } we will not allow them to take the parts of women, young or old (for they are men), nor to represent them abusing their husbands or quarrelling with heaven and boasting of their supposed good fortune, or mourning and lamenting in misfortune. Far less can we permit representation of women in sickness or love or child-birth. Plato, Republic 3.395d-e

Thus the male body can be adversely and permanently affected by mimesis. The act of watching tragedy can change the body-self of the viewer. The female body, in the states of sickness, love and childbirth, is singled out as particularly disturbing This is perhaps the least desirable declension of

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions the body-self for the male to become. The experience of the tragic body is therefore thought to have potentially serious consequences for the actors and audience by at least one contemporary commentator (albeit an idiosyncratic thinker). Whilst Plato cannot be used to argue for a general way of thinking here, the suffering and feminising body appears nonetheless to be a deeply affecting and important topos in tragedy. Furthermore, Plato’s discussion serves to accentuate the mutable, changeable, becoming nature of the body-self, and is reminiscent of his statement: ‘Nothing ever is, but is always becoming’ (Plato, Theataetus 152e). In the process of ‘playing the other’, a man actually risks becoming the other on a more enduring basis, outside the ritual space of the theatre.58 The character of Socrates pursues the concern that viewing drama can wreak the same negative effects on the bodies of the audience members as he defines for those acting in it. The ‘infection’ can pass from the actor to the audience. Socrates suggests the problem lies in the male audience member learning to be womanish, to indulge in the feminine: The gravest charge against poetry still remains. It has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters, with very few exceptions } When we hear Homer or one of the tragic poets representing the sufferings of a hero and making him bewail them at length, perhaps with all the sounds and signs of tragic grief, you know how even the best of us enjoy it and let ourselves be carried away by our feelings; and we are full of praises for the merits of the poet who can most powerfully affect us in this way } Yet in our private griefs we pride ourselves on just the opposite, that is, on our ability to bear them in silence like men, and we regard the behaviour we admired on the stage as womanish } Then is it really right } to admire, when we see him on stage, a man we should ourselves be ashamed to resemble? Is it reasonable to feel enjoyment and admiration rather than disgust? } The poet gratifies and indulges the instinctive desires of a part of us, which we forcibly restrain in our private misfortunes, with its hunger for tears and for an uninhibited indulgence in grief. Our better nature } relaxes its control over these feelings, on the grounds that it is someone else’s sufferings it is watching and that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in praising and pitying another man } who shows excessive grief } For very few people are capable of realizing that what we feel for other people must infect what we feel for ourselves } Plato, Republic 10.605d-607

Poetry as a whole, according to this passage, leads to an indulgence in the body, a letting down of barriers which should rein in the body, and a subsequent fall into the feminine. A man instead should adhere to the laws of the masculine principle of restraint and rationality with regard to the exercise of the body. The indulgence in these ‘womanish’ emotions manifests as a guilty pleasure, a pleasure that is at odds with what is considered desirable behaviour for a man in the greatest sense of andreia. Here Plato sharply identifies the paradox tragedy holds for male culture. Men,

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Becoming Female who, outside tragedy, are exhorted to be(come) men, to stoically and silently bear pain, suffering, and grief, are encouraged to watch and identify, even cry with the unfortunate male and female characters of the stage. In Plato’s estimation, the indulgence in these behaviours is tantamount to effectively becoming a ‘woman’. Plato thus succinctly draws out the intense threat of tragedy to feminise its male audience. Karen Bassi offers a provocative discussion of Plato’s Republic in her book, Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. Bassi offers the following translation of Republic 395c2-d1: ‘If they [the guardians] do imitate, they should imitate from childhood what is fitting for them – men who are brave, temperate, pious, free, and all things of that sort; } nor should they imitate anything that shameful men do, so that they may not enjoy } what they imitate.’ In her interpretation, what concerns Plato is how these bodily acts and speech acts ‘affect the internal and essential dispositions of the citizen’s mind or soul’. She continues, suggesting that ‘Plato’s censorship of bodily or visualized impersonations } [are] ultimately aimed at establishing an inner core of unchanging masculinity’.59 However, this passage might also be interpreted to express an underlying concern regarding the nature of masculinity as a becoming, of the performative nature of gender. What concerns the Platonic Socrates here is perhaps precisely that there is no such unchanging core, everything is mimesis, performance, and concomitantly, a becoming, and such notions are reinforced by theatre. Any immutable core of identity is destabilised, even deconstructed, by tragedy’s processes, by the theatrical body, as Bassi herself will later suggest.60 The problem theatre holds for Socrates here is perhaps that these undesirable elements are unleashed, revelled in, and therefore men become womanish via the intricate effects of mimesis, when, given the performative nature of being and identity that tragedy makes apparent, men should instead imitate desirable manly figures to recondition their bodies-selves in more positive ways, in a further expression of the becoming nature of masculinity. Masculinity and femininity are, in the tragic model and the Platonic model expressed in the Republic, represented as malleable, performative states of being and identity. A man who performs the other might become this other – the courageous, moderate, heroic man may come undone, and worse, become female (excessive and labile, for example). This passage from Plato appears to express a concern that masculinity and femininity are not fixed, but roles to be played, open to constant revision via the relentless processes of mimesis.61 Whilst Plato expresses the problems the theatre, the female body, and the feminine hold for male culture in general, he also alludes to the performative nature of gender. One can never be a man, or be a woman, one can only act like one. This quality of mimesis is alluded to in the phrase, act like a man, which Plato uses in the quote cited above (Republic 10.605d-607). This phrase, acting like a man, is very apt given one dominating strain of the

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6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions ancient conceptualisation of gender and sex.62 The positioning of the body as a gendered being is instead a process of acting or becoming, rather than a state of being. Any kind of essence of masculinity or femininity is, again, thoroughly contested by the actions of drama. Thus the male body-self falls apart in tragedy, dismembered and fractured as a result of the processes of theatre, resigned to a state of becoming, and the state of being a man seems forever withheld in this genre. But the effects of tragedy, which reproduce the male hero as dissolute, in ‘true’ Dionysian form, also threaten to extend to the audience. The genre of tragedy threatens to fracture the audience’s experience of masculinity, and involve it too in these endless states of becoming female, in this disturbing state of the dissolution of the male-self, as the character of Pentheus seems to signify. The mimesis and watching of the other might be interpreted, following the suggestion of Plato’s Republic, to affect the self.

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Notes Introduction 1. Nietzsche 1993, p. 36. 2. For example, see Dean-Jones 1994a, Dover 1978, duBois 1988a, Feher et al. 1989, Halperin 1990b, Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990, Katz 1989, King 1999a, Konstan 2000, Loraux 1995, Monserrat 1998, Murnaghan 1987, Porter 1999a, Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993, Segal 1985, Sissa 1990b, Vernant 1991, Winkler 1990b, Wyke 1998a, and Zeitlin 1996. See bibliography and my doctoral dissertation, Tragic Dissonance, Becoming Female, and the Male Body-Self in Classical Athenian Tragedy, Monash University, 2004, for further references. 3. Foucault 1987. On the question of why the interest in bodies and sexualities, see Richlin 1997, pp. 16, 21-6 and compare Zita 1998, p. 1. On Foucault and classics see Sissa 1999, Larmour et al. 1998, Goldstein 1994, Davidson 1997, and Thornton 1997. 4. See, for example, Wyke 1998d. On the historicity of the body see Cohen 1994 and Porter 1991. 5. Vernant 1991, p. 28. 6. Vernant 1991, p. 28. 7. Nietzsche 1978, section 47, p. 101; see also Porter 1999b, p. 1, who cites this passage in his useful introduction. 8. Cf. Bordo 1993, p. 38. For a consideration of the body as text see Butler, 1987, passim, especially p. 129, Aalten 1997, p. 45, Bordo 1993, pp 35-6, Grosz 1987, and 1990, p. 72. 9. On the centrality of the body in Greek culture see, for example, Stewart 1997 pp. 1 and 4, and Sennett 1996. See Porter on the political and social expressions of the body (1999b, pp. 12-13), and cf. Humphreys 1999. On the armed or military body see Bassi 1998, pp. 100-4, and Cartledge 1998. On the body in philosophy see duBois 1985, 1988a, 1991, and Foley 1998. 10. ‘Medium of culture’ is Susan Bordo’s phrase (Bordo 1993, p. 165). 11. Here I adapt Meskell’s words on the social constructionist model of sexuality (Meskell 1998, p. 143). 12. Cf. Wyke 1998d. Porter 1999b, p. 4, also briefly refers to the ‘elusive’ nature of the body, see also Laqueur 1992, pp. viii-ix, and Zita 1998, p. 5. On the body in bits and pieces or fragments, see duBois 1995. 13. I use the term troubled throughout in Judith Butler’s sense – see Butler 1990a. Cf. Porter 1999b, p. 1 on the ‘instability’ of the classical body and see also Wyke 1998b, p. 3. 14. Gatens 1996, vii. 15. See, for example, King 1999a, Hanson 1989b, 1990, 1992b, Dean-Jones 1994, Sissa 1990b, Laqueur 1992, and von Staden 1992a. 16. For a consideration of the differences between the terms sex and gender see

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Notes to pages 4-8 Gatens 1983, Butler 1987, pp. 128-43, 1990b, p. 275, Aalten 1997, p. 45. In Laqueur 1992 sex appears to be as culturally constructed as gender, and the two are shown to have a long history of cultural entwinement. 17. See von Staden 1992c on the advent of systematic dissection in the third century BCE in Alexandria. 18. See Gold 1993, p. 76, Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993 passim, but especially Rabinowitz 1993b, Richlin 1993, and Goldhill 2004 on the question of whether to continue studying the canon of classical texts. 19. On the instability of the ancient female body see Carson 1999 and King 1999a. On the instability of the female body in modernity, consider the hormonal model of the female body in medicine/culture – the female is prey to her hormones, unstable, unpredictable. cf. Angier 1999, p. 98, and Stoppard 1992, pp. 126-7. 20. On this issue see also Wyke 1998d, pp. 2, 5, and Porter 1999b, pp. 1-2. The techniques of Gallop 1982, 1985, and Grosz 1991, who use the strategy of dismantling the father’s house from within, also suggest these texts need to be re-read and disturbed rather than rejected outright, but compare with Lorde 1984. For alternative approaches see Marsh 1992 and Cavarero 1995. 21. Wyke 1998d, p. 1. 22. Wyke 1998d, p. 5; cf. Gold 1993, p. 84. 23. Porter raises the question of ‘} what is “classical” about the classical body and classical antiquity?’ in 1999b, p. 4, see also p. 14, and Porter 2005. On the changing nature of the ancient body see Monserrat 1998. 24. On the male quality of orthos and the contrasting behaviour required of a female see Sennett 1996, pp. 49-50, 55. See also Bremmer 1992, p. 26. See Clark 1985, plate 58, for the Esquiline Venus (replica of a fifth-century BCE statue), and cf. plates 62 and 63 which depict a bronze statue of ‘a girl’, 400 BCE. This stooping pose of the female body really comes into its own in the Hellenistic era – i.e. Clark plate 64, Cnidian Venus, c. 350 BCE. Cf. Lissarrague 1990a, pp. 56-7 on the negative associations of stooping and crouching, which seem related to the representation of the slave’s body and see also Bremmer 1992, p. 23 on the crooked head of the slave and the negative connotations of crouching. 25. See Padel 1992 passim on the bodiliness of mind in Attic tragedy, but especially pp. 42-4. On the Homeric antecedents of this tragic model of the body-mind, see Onians 1951, Matson 1966, Snell 1982, Pelliccia 1995, and Clarke 1999. 26. On the notion of the ‘body-self’, see Wilshire 1982. 27. For example, psukhe (soul) becomes ‘the body’s other’ in Plato (Loraux, 1995, p. 343). See Bassi on Plato’s attempt to establish the male as eternal and ‘unchanging’ (Bassi 1998, p. 23). 28. On the complications of Plato, see the work of Halperin 1990a, duBois 1985, 1988a, Loraux 1995, and Foley 1998. 29. For example, see Plato’s Republic 3.395c-396b, 10.605c-606e. 30. On the tradition of the female body in art history, see Nead 1992. On the idealisation and eroticisation of the male body in art, see Osborne 1998, pp. 80-104, and Potts 1994. 31. Porter 1999b, p. 6, cf. Monserrat 1998, p. 5. 32. See Rabinowitz 1993b, p. 3: ‘the very word “classics” connotes changelessness’; cf. Skinner 1984, p. 4. On the changeable and unstable nature of ancient bodies see Monserrat 1998 and Wyke 1998d, p 5. 33. Porter 1999b, p. 6. 34. Butler 1990b, p. 272 (when discussing Merleau-Ponty). 35. See, for example, Culham and Edmunds 1989.

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Notes to pages 8-11 36. The quote from Nietzsche 1978, section 41, p. 101, appears on p. 1. See Kitto 1973, p. 227, for an example of this idealisation. Cf. duBois 1995, p. 24, Bernal 1987 passim and Slater 1992, pp. xxii-xxv. 37. Nietzsche 1993, p. 38. 38. Lattimore 1953, p. 4. I use this quote slightly out of its context to characterise a general idealising approach to Greek tragedy. Yet I note that elsewhere, in his introduction to Euripides, Lattimore discusses Euripides’ penchant for realism, and the ‘decay and disintegration’ of heroes. In Euripides, Lattimore believes, ‘tragedy is either transcending itself or going into a decline, in any case turning into something else’ (Lattimore 1955, pp. vi-vii). 39. On the subaltern, see Spivak 1988. 40. On this see Bernal 1987. The idealising tendency of the 1950s surely had its roots in earlier movements – see Bernal 1987, pp. 212-25 on Winckelmann. This is not the only image of Greece, however. Nietzsche focuses on the Dionysian – Nietzsche 1993 edition, cf. Bernal 1987, p. 213. The Cambridge Ritualists were also interested in addressing the underside of the Apollonian image, the Dionysian aspects. Cf. Heinrichs 1984, p. 207. On the Dionysian and the Apollonian tendencies of Ancient Greek culture see also Paglia 1991. 41. On the Greeks’ otherness see duBois 1988a, especially p. 18, Halperin et al. 1990 (on the ‘otherness’ of Greek approaches to sexuality), and see Richlin 1993 and duBois 1991 for the Greek treatment of others. 42. See Richlin 1993, p. 289 and duBois 2001 on this question. Goldhill 2004 perhaps serves as an illustration of this approach, if not idealising Greece, at the very least viewing Greece as the foundation of Western culture. However, this work is provocative and valuable. 43. The ‘unstrung hero’ is the phrase of Laksaris 1999. 44. The female body as a category/trope that is ‘good to think with’ is Boyarin’s phrase (1993, p. 77). cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 343n.6, Padel 1983, pp. 16-17, and Rabinowitz 2004. 45. This kind of tragic model of the female body squares fairly well with classical medical models of the female body. The female body seems often pathologised in the Hippocratic corpus. A striking example may be found in Hippocrates Places in Man (47, Loeb VIII, p. 95): ‘The uterus is the cause of all [women’s] diseases’. See King 1999a, Dean-Jones 1994a, pp. 58, 74 on the instability of the female. Cf. Carson’s work on the boundless, leaky, and polluted female body (1990/99). See also Padel 1983, pp. 5-6, 9, and von Staden 1992a, passim, for a discussion of the polluting female body. 46. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 352n.25 on Euripides’ Heracles, lines 1016-27. 47. Waldby 1995, p. 268. 48. The phrase ‘reproduction of femininity’ is Bordo’s (Bordo 1992). Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 373 on Socratic midwifery. See also Plato’s parthenogenetic male in the Symposium. 49. On the issue of whether women attended the theatre see, for example, Podlecki 1991, Henderson 1991b, Rabinowitz 1993a, p. 2, Goldhill 1994, Henderson 1996, pp. 16-17, Wohl 1998, p. xx, and Blondell 1999, pp. 27 and 62. See Winkler 1990a, p. 21 on tragedy’s ‘notional learners’ and Henderson 1996, p. 17 on the ‘notional’ audience. 50. On becoming, see Deleuze and Guattari 1983 and 1987, and for a feminist engagement and critique of Deleuze and Guattari, see Grosz 1994, 1999a and 1999b, Braidotti 1994, and Olkowski 1999. See also Wohl’s recent work, 2006 – she utilises Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming to rethink the Oedipal order and sexual difference, with particular reference to Euripides’ Bacchae.

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Notes to pages 11-16 51. De Beauvoir 1972, p. 295. On the performativity of gender see Butler 1990b. 52. Cf. Grosz 1994, p. 163. 53. See, for example, Lefkowitz and Fant 1988, ‘Blame’, pp. 12-19, who cite, amongst others, Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, and see also pp. 82-5 for a translation of Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals where he describes a eunuch’s ‘transition into the female state’ as a ‘deformity’ which ‘constitutes a change from the male state to the female’. 54. Foucault 1977b, p. 148. 55. Wyke 1998d, p. 2. 56. On innards as female see Padel 1992, ch. 5. 57. See Butler 1990a and 1990b, and on the performativity of gender in general, see Senelick 1992. 58. See Wyke 1998d, p. 3. 59. See p. 9. 60. Jung 1996, p. 262. 61. ‘Somatography’ is Jung’s phrase (1996, p. 264). 62. Cf. Wohl – she writes that reading tragedy ‘encourages’ the contemporary reader to be ‘anti-essentialist’ (Wohl 1998, p. xvii). See also Butler 1990b, p. 272 and 274, whose work suggests the anti-essentialist possibilities of performance. 63. Laqueur (1992) sees a ‘one-sex model’ in evidence at this time, but the ‘two-sex model’ of ‘incommensurable difference’ also seems in evidence (particularly in the pre-Platonic period). See King 1999a, pp. 7-8, 11, who argues that both models are in operation. Dean-Jones (1994a, pp. 110, 112-13) also examines the medical model of sexual difference. See Gleason 1990 on sexual difference as a sliding scale, which conforms to the one-sex model Laqueur discusses, and duBois 1988a for a discussion of a general (pre-Platonic) model of sexual difference. On tragic dissonance, cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 351 who refers to the ‘congenital dissonance’ of the female in Euripides’ Hippolytus. 64. Ormand 1999, p. 59 makes a similar point with regard to Sophocles’ Trachiniae: ‘} women’s suffering, it seems, is most meaningful when it is experienced by a man } Heracles reduced to a wailing woman } is tragic.’ 65. ‘} the body out of place’ is Porter’s phrase (1999b, p. 7). 66. Butler 1990b, p. 270. 67. Butler 1990b, p. 270. 68. Butler 1990b, p. 272. 69. Butler 1990b, p. 273. 70. To use Butler’s term (Butler 1990b). 71. Irigaray on female sexuality (1985a, p. 23). 72. See duBois on the conventional depiction of women and their bodies in tragedy as ‘objects of exchange, as fields to be plowed, tablets to be inscribed’ – 1995, p. 10. See also duBois 1988a, passim. On the female body as wet, leaky, boundless, polluting, and pathologised, see Carson 1990/99. On the female as mimetic, see Zeitlin 1985a/96, pp. 361-74, and Wohl 1998, p. 147. On the potential for female resistance in tragedy, see Rabinowitz 1993a and Wohl 1998. 73. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 347. 74. For a consideration of tragedy as a masculine enterprise – created, produced, and acted by men – see Case 1988, Zeitlin 1985a, 1996, pp. 341-74, Rabinowitz 1992, p. 36, 1995, p. 2, and Bassi 1998. 75. Cf. also Paglia 1991 on female as matter, male as form. 76. The Greek male body is often represented as hard and invulnerable in monumental art, a good example being Doryphoros, after Polyclitus c. 450 BCE; see

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Notes to pages 16-22 Clark, 1985, plate 24. For a discussion of the bloody body of the female in the medical model, see King 1983 and 1987. 77. Cf. Loraux 1995 passim, especially pp. 63-74, and Vernant 1991, pp. 50-74. 78. Vernant 1990a, p. 242. 79. For other proponents of the open-ended nature of tragedy, see Dunn 1996, Roberts, Dunn, and Fowler 1997, and Goldhill 1986. 80. Rabinowitz 1993a, Zeitlin 1996, p. 364, and Wohl 1998, pp. 178-9, although cf. Wohl 2006, especially p. 150. Zeitlin and Wohl seem to be less adamant on this point than Rabinowitz (in 1993a), although Rabinowitz seems to modify her position and allow for other possibilities in Rabinowitz 1998. 81. For example, Medea in some ways acts like a male hero in Euripides’ Medea. Cf. Blondell 1999, pp 162-6. Agave acts like a male hunter in Euripides’ Bacchae, Deianira also acts like a man when she sends a gift to her husband in Sophocles’ Trachiniae (cf. Wohl 1998, pp. 23-9), and Clytaemnestra acts like a man in Aeschylus’ Oresteia (see 940, 1401-6, but cf. 1625 where the chorus say she acts ‘like a woman’). A further complication also exists here – the male plays the female. 82. Chawaf 1991, p. 177. 83. Although there are quite a few lines missing at this point. See Dodds 1986, p. 234ff., and the sources summarised in Whitehorne 1986, p. 61ff. 84. Butler 1990a, p. 146, author’s italics. 1. The Suffering Body – Logos and Soma 1. I add ‘voice’ to this list, since it seems likely that voice would have been used to signify these characteristics as well, although this is contentious. See Rabinowitz 1998, p. 8, Bassi 1989, p. 20, McClure 1997, 1999, Lardinois and McClure 2001, and Griffith 2001, pp. 117-18, 121. 2. On how the male actor might have played the female role; whether the female role was played straight or skewed, see Bassi 1989, Rabinowitz 1995 and 1998. 3. Bassi 1998, pp. 141-3. On the implications of theatrical disguise and the male actor, and the feminising effects of disguise, see Bassi 1998, ch. 3. 4. King 1999a, p. 41. 5. On the problem of truth and the body see duBois 1991, passim, and Alford 1992, p. 81. See King 1999a, pp. 40-52 on the problem of the inscrutability and potentially deceptive nature of the body in medicine. 6. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, and see Bergren 1983 on woman’s ability to use speech deceptively. 7. See Zeitlin’s classic article on the importance of the feminine in the genre of tragedy (1985a and 1996, pp. 341-74). 8. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350 and Segal 1993a, p. 110. 9. On the otherness of tragedy (and specifically, Thebes as a space of otherness) see Zeitlin 1990 and 1993a. On the dual nature of the tragic hero as both other and familiar, see Nietzsche 1993, p. 55, Vernant 1990b, p. 34, cf. Griffith 1998, p. 20. 10. Cf. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23. 11. Hutton translation. Cf. Segal 1993a, pp. 110-11 on this passage. Note also Zeitlin’s translation of pathos as suffering (Zeitlin 1996, p. 350). 12. Zeitlin 1996, pp. 349-50. 13. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 14. Although this is not the only model – there is also a tradition of the female body as easier to treat. See King 1999a, p. 53. 15. Cf. Carson 1990/99 on this model of the female body as open and incontinent.

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Notes to pages 22-27 On the bloody female body see King 1999a, pp. 75-98. On abjection and the body see Kristeva 1982. 16. See Euripides’ Hecuba 558-70 for the startling scene of Polyxena’s sacrifice; cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 199. On Iphigenia see Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis 1510-18, cf. Rabinowitz 1993a, pp. 48-9. 17. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 207 – in Euripides’ Hecuba when Polyxena dies ‘the form of her body dissolves, and her limbs are loosened [luetai mele]’ (438). 18. Cf. Segal 1985/86, pp. 337-58 on the somatics of the Oresteia. 19. This is also Zeitlin’s point – 1996, p. 350. 20. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 21. On the shuddering of tragic katharsis see Diamond 1995, p. 153. On Aristotelian katharsis see also, for example, Golden 1992, Rorty 1992, Segal 1996, and Ford 1995. 22. Kristeva 1982, p. 28. 23. Kristeva 1982, p. 28. 24. Diamond 1995, p. 153. 25. Diamond’s term (1995, p. 153). 26. Whilst Thucydides is expansive on the horrors of the plague and its effects on the body (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.49-51), it can still be said that the genre of historiography does not appear to concentrate on the suffering body with the same contracted intensity as tragedy. Loraux (1995, p. 90) also notes the wounded body does not seem suppressed when the horrors of civil war are described. 27. Whilst pain is thought of as a universal condition of the body in a sense, the interpretation, categorisation, and indeed experience of bodily pain seems to be culturally (and perhaps genre) specific. On the culturally constructed nature of pain see Morris 1991, Edwards 1999, and King 1999b. 28. Cf. Loraux 1995, ch. 2 passim, esp. pp. 44-5 on the full associations of ponos. See also King 1999a, pp. 123-6 on ponos. Another term, ‘odines, typically means “labour pains” ’, but King comments that it is also ‘used figuratively for other mental and physical suffering’ (1999a, p. 124). In medicine ponoi might be part of the ‘healing process’, whereas odunai do not respond to treatment (King 1999a, p. 125). 29. Cf. Segal 1995b, p. 202. 30. See Loraux 1995, pp. 89-90 on the suppression of the wounds of men in Herodotus, a thematic tendency that will become a special feature of funeral oration (see Loraux 1995 passim). 31. See Vernant 1991, pp. 50-74. This ideal of the beautiful death seems to be a concern in both Homeric epic and classical Athenian funeral oration. On kalos thanatos in classical Athenian funeral oration see Loraux 1995 passim. 32. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 10. 33. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 34. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. On the chorus as representative of the audience see Vernant 1990b, pp. 33-4. 35. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 36. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 354. The home is typically imaged as female, the public space as male. On the female connection with the house see also Padel 1983, p. 8 and Reeder 1995b, p. 20. 37. However, Deianira’s death is complicated since she kills herself in a ‘masculine’ way. See Loraux 1987 on male and female methods of dying in Greek tragedy.

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Notes to pages 28-32 38. Consider the marriage ritual – the bride is veiled from the eyes of other men and only when she is married can her husband lift the veil. See Carson 1990, pp. 162-4. The penetrative male gaze is illustrated in Euripides’ Hecuba, when Polyxena’s virginal body is eroticised at the point of death (559-65, cf. Segal 1995b, p. 209). 39. This appears to be Loraux’s position (Loraux 1995). 40. Such a notion seems implicit in Whitman 1982, for example, p. 40, and Segal 1993c, pp. 73-4. 41. As Bassi comments in a general sense (Bassi 1998, p. 99). 42. On the complexities of logos see Goldhill 1986, passim, but especially ch. 1: ‘The Drama of Logos’, pp. 1-32. 43. Morris uses this phrase for his title (The Culture of Pain 1991). 44. Murnaghan 1987, p. 24. 45. This observation might not hold with regard to modern western ways of thinking about bodies either – contemporary western culture is body-saturated too. 46. Cf. Vernant 1991, pp. 38-9 on the beautification of the epic hero’s body. 47. Although the representations of classical Athenian symposia are complicated, given that many of these representations appear in the oeuvre of Plato, the apparent somatophobe. 48. On the hetaira’s body as positive and healing see Bell 1994, p. 2, and Chapter 2. On the virginal body as cast in a positive light, Euripides’ Iphigenia is perhaps a good example (Iphigenia in Aulis 1398) – women who sacrifice themselves for the state are seen in a positive light. 49. Yet in the Greek tradition (and both Sappho and classical Athenian tragedy are examples of this), pleasure is often felt simultaneously as pain. An example from tragedy might be found in Phaedra’s longing, pothos, for Hippolytus, which causes her ponos. Sappho’s approach appears to be different in that her work seems to cast this as a positive experience. Cf. Wilson 1996, pp. 66-7 on the ‘sweetbitter’ quality of eros in Sappho. On Sappho and the body see Foley 1998. 50. See Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 51. On the ephebe see Vidal-Naquet 1986 passim, Winkler 1990a, and Halperin 1990b, ch. 5. 52. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23 (my italics). 53. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23. 54. She suggests that the ‘displacement’ of physical bodily suffering should be considered in light of ‘what the bodies that are present in tragic drama are doing, for if tragedy by and large keeps bodies in states of extreme suffering hidden from view, it } always is presenting us with the sight of human bodies }’ (Murnaghan 1987, 23; her italics). 55. Zeitlin 1996, p. 349. 56. Padel 1992, p. 47. 57. This is the phrase of duBois 1988b, p. 70. 58. See, for example, Berger’s useful discussion of Derrida’s notion of logocentricism (Berger 1987, pp. 148, 166n.3). 59. Cf. Segal 1995b. On the actor’s use of gesture to accompany and amplify logoi see Boegehold 1999, pp. 53-66. On gesture see also see Thomas 1992, Bremmer 1992, Golder 1996, McNiven 2000, and Kaimio 1988. On dance in tragedy see, for example, Goldhill 1997a, p. 337, Golder 1996, pp. 2-3, and Stanford 1983, pp. 3 and 6. On the voice in tragedy see Segal 1993d, McClure 1999, Griffith 2001, and Lardinois and McClure 2001. 60. Golder 1992, pp. 330-1.

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Notes to pages 32-40 61. Zeitlin 1996, p. 349. 62. Morris 1991, p. 251. 63. Dunn and Jones 1994, in their synopsis offered on the front page. 64. King 1999a, p. 123. 65. Murnaghan 1987, pp. 31-4. 66. Murnaghan 1987, p. 34. 67. See Bassi 1998, p. 100 and ch. 3 on the problem of the theatrical body in this light. 68. Cf. Donlan 1980, ch. 4, although, as he remarks, it has to adjust to ‘the pressures which democracy placed on the open expression of class superiority’ (Donlan 1980, p. 126). 69. See Gleason 1990 on the practice of physiognomy in the ancient world, although much of her evidence comes from a later period. The presentation of the female body is very important in this culture too. Dramatic and visual representations of the female frequently show the most desirable quality for women is modesty. 70. Rouselle 1993, pp. 11-12. Her argument rests on Rome but appears to draw on Greek antecedents. 71. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23. Cf. also Loraux 1987, pp. vii-ix – she writes the action of tragedy is reported in the spoken word. She follows Baldry 1971, pp. 50-1. But consider Taplin 1978, pp. 160-1, who argues against this traditional view of the lack of action on the tragic stage. 72. On violence in tragedy see Girard 1977, Goff 1990 (in particular ch. 3, utilising Girard), Redmond 1991, Padel 1995, and Segal 1990, pp. 109-32. 73. Freud, ‘Psychopathic Stage Characters’ in Freud 1953, p. 307; his italics. 74. Outside of tragedy, in culture at large, mourning is very much the province of ancient women. Tragedy has been read as a male appropriation of this function – see Loraux 1998, Holst-Warhaft 1995, McClure 1997, p. 112, Carson 1999, p. 86, and Foley 1993. 75. See Loraux 1998, p. 37. 76. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23. 77. Segal 1995b, p. 206. 78. Segal 1995b, p. 206. 79. Segal 1995b, p. 206. 80. Murnaghan 1987, p. 23. 81. Loraux 1987, p. x. 82. The italics are Arrowsmith’s. 83. See Padel 1992, p. 65. 84. Cf. Segal 1995b. For further discussion of the gaze in antiquity see, for example, Frontisi-Ducroux 1996, Stehle and Day 1996, and Stewart 1997, pp. 13-23. 85. Zeitlin 1993b, p. 141. 86. As Segal 1995b, for example, seems to follow. 87. Golder 1992, p. 331. 88. Murnaghan 1987, p. 37. 89. On the physicalities of perception and vision, see Padel 1992, pp. 59-63. This tradition extends from Homer through to Plato and Aristotle. 90. Loraux 1987, p. vii. 91. Montiglio 2000, p. 181. 92. Padel 1995, p. 147. 93. Padel 1992, pp. 64-5. On the hypnotic, spellbinding effect [thelxis] of poetry in ancient Greece see Segal 1995b, pp. 197-8. 94. For an excellent discussion of Gorgias’ use of Helen, see Worman 1997.

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Notes to pages 40-43 95. Bergren 1983, p. 85. 96. On this see Worman 1997, p. 175. This notion of the body as text (implicit in the notion that logos, which also means discourse, has a body) persists today: cf. Cranny-Francis on the body ‘in’ the text (1995, pp. 112-13). See also Grosz 1990. 97. Worman 1997, p. 176. 98. Worman 1997, p. 176. 99. Segal’s translation, 1995b, p. 197. 100. Sophocles Oedipus the King 1303-6, cited at the start of this chapter, also expresses the shudder of pity and fear at the tragic spectacle of Oedipus. 101. Segal 1995b, p. 197. 102. Segal 1995b, p. 197. 103. Padel 1992, p. 66. 104. On the embodied nature of vision, see Padel 1992, p. 42. 105. See Scarry 1985 passim, but especially pp. 3-11 on the experience of pain destroying the victim’s ability to speak. She also discusses the ‘inexpressibility of physical pain’ (Scarry 1985, p. 3ff.) 106. Morris 1991, p. 252. 107. Morris 1991, p. 252. 108. See also Richter 1992, pp. 107-8 on this Sophoclean ‘onomatopoeia’. In another context, Segal (1981, p. 93) points to Sophocles’ Trachiniae, which provides an example of such ‘inarticulate cries of pain or lamentation’ in lines 904, 909, 936-42, 1000ff. (Segal’s line references). 109. Stanford 1983, p. 23. 110. Cf. Wise: ‘the body always wins’ in drama (1998, p. 107). To take this notion of logos as a male accomplishment further consider Bergren 1983 on the female powers of speech and mimesis. 111. Richter 1992, p. 108. 112. Murnaghan 1987, pp. 34-5. 113. Wise 1998, p. 72, quoting Aristotle, Poetics 1447b. 114. See also Bassi 1998, pp. 24-5 on this passage. Cf. Whitehorne 1986, p. 59 on the importance of spectacle in classical Athenian tragedy. 115. Whilst it might seem misguided to suggest we know more about Attic tragedy than Aristotle does, consider Vernant 1990b, p. 29: ‘} When Aristotle in the fourth century set out, in his Poetics, to establish the theory of tragedy, he no longer understood tragic man who had, so to speak, become a stranger.’ 116. Murnaghan 1987, p. 35. 117. Murnaghan 1987, p. 35. 118. Murnaghan 1987, p. 35. Although Segal’s work on the representation of Euripides and Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs suggests an alignment of Euripides with logos and Aeschylus with soma (Segal 1995b, p. 213). 119. Murnaghan 1987, p. 36. 120. Murnaghan 1987, p. 36, see lines 1206-9. Cf. Segal 1986, p. 355 on this passage. 121. Murnaghan 1987, p. 36. There is some uncertainty as to whether Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus or Euripides’ Bacchae serve as the last play. As traditional scholarship has designated it, Oedipus at Colonus is thought to have been first presented in 405 BCE, a year after the author’s death, whereas Euripides’ Bacchae, the other contender for the ‘last’ play moniker, is thought to have been written in 406 and produced posthumously in 406-405. Cf. Lattimore 1973, p. 228. 122. Murnaghan 1987, p. 37. See Kristeva 1982 on the abject body. 123. Wise 1998, p. 107.

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Notes to pages 44-48 2. The Female Body and the Dissonance of Suffering 1. Cixous 1984, p. 546. 2. Grosz 1992, p. 164, interpreting Irigaray on Athena. 3. See, for example, Spelman 1982, passim, duBois 1988a, 1991, 1995, p 95, Dinnerstein 1976, and Loraux 1995, p. 43. 4. Zeitlin 1996, p. 351. 5. Zeitlin 1996, pp. 351-2. 6. Zeitlin 1996, p. 352. 7. duBois 1995, p. 95. 8. Zeitlin 1996, p. 13. On the significance of the body for the figure of the mother see Loraux 1998, pp. 35-41, 51, 64, 78. 9. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p.13. 10. Zeitlin 1996, p. 210. On Hecuba as the mater dolorosa see Segal 1993d, p. 72, and Thornton 1997, p. 1. 11. Zeitlin 1996, p. 210. 12. See Zeitlin 1996, pp. 205, 207, who briefly comments on Hecuba and Polyxena in this light. 13. Zeitlin 1996, p. 13. 14. On Medea see Clauss and Johnston 1997, and the feminist translation of this work and useful introduction by Blondell in Blondell et al. 1999. 15. Zeitlin 1996, p. 13. 16. Spelman 1982, p. 119. On the representation and appropriation of the female body for the male philosophical project in Plato see duBois 1985, 1998a, 1995, pp. 77-97, Halperin 1990a and 1990b. Bell (1994, pp. 20-39) offers an alternative reading of Plato and the feminine, decoding an image of the ‘ancient sexual, sacred, healing female body’ entombed in Plato’s texts. 17. See Carson 1990 on the female’s lack of boundaries. On the taming of the female in marriage see Xenophon, Oeconomicus 7-10, Lefkowitz and Fant 1988, section 106, p. 100, Carson 1990, pp. 160-4, and King 1999a, pp. 76-7. 18. On the tradition of the male playing the female part see Zeitlin 1985a and 1996, p. 343, Case 1988, Rabinowitz 1995, 1998, Bassi 1989, 1998. 19. Cixous 1984, p. 546. 20. Bassi 1998, ch. 3. 21. Padel 1992, pp. 159-61. On personification and the female, see Stafford 1998, and Warner 1987. On the female model of both mind and body see Padel 1992, ch. 5, esp. p. 112. Conversely, an active quality is assigned to the mind in other images – Plato, for example, seems to offer a virile, active model of mind. Cf. Padel 1992, pp. 110-11. 22. Padel 1992, p. 112. 23. For a consideration of how the feminine is used in Greek culture, see Hall 1997, p. 106, and Foley 1988, pp. 1301-2. Cf. also Halperin 1990b, p. 129, whose work highlights the inconsistencies of the significations awarded to the female. 24. Irigaray 1983, p. 99. 25. For an interesting discussion of the elusive body of Helen and ‘her’ relationship with desire, see Worman 1997. Cf. Loraux (1995, p. 195), who writes that Helen ‘transcend[s] sexual differences’. 26. For general comments on Helen as eidolon, see Loraux 1995, pp. 208-9, and Zeitlin 1996, pp. 406-8, 412. On Helen as eidolon in Stesichorus’ Palinode see Bassi 1993. On the eidolon and the simulacrum see Vernant 1991. 27. Loraux also remarks that Pandora is ‘entirely and essentially a simulacrum’

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Notes to pages 49-53 (1992, p. 93; author’s italics). Loraux 1995, p. 209, uses the phrase the ‘true and the false’ to describe Helen. On Pandora as eidolon (or ikelon, as she is called, Hesiod, Theogony 572), see also Zeitlin 1996, p. 412. 28. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 197, and Worman 1997, pp. 151, 155, 199. 29. Vernant 1991, p. 189. 30. Vernant 1991, p. 189. See also Rabinowitz 1993a, pp. 71, 79, 85-7, and Wohl 1998, ch. 8 on the uncanny figure of Alcestis. 31. Wohl 1998, p. 147, Zeitlin 1996, p. 237. 32. Halperin 1990b, p. 145. 33. For example, see Bergren 1983, p. 74 on the female’s control over signification and language via the maternal body. 34. With regard to this notion of the female bringing suffering to the male, secondary sources include Padel 1983, pp. 12, 16, Zeitlin 1996, pp. 350, 352, and Carson 1990, pp. 140-1. 35. Loraux 1995 passim, but see p. 12, Padel 1983, p. 16, 1992 (where this notion seems implicit throughout, but see p. 162), Zeitlin 1996 passim, esp. p. 350 and cf. Murnaghan 1987, p. 35. 36. King 1999a, p. 32. Cf. Hanson 1990, p. 319 on insemination. 37. On the issue of dating the Hippocratic texts and determining their origins, see Rouselle 1993, p. 6, Hanson 1975, p. 567, and King 1999a, pp. 64-7. 38. Cf. Winkler 1990a, p. 57 on ‘the ephebic experience’ in tragedy, MitchellBoyask 1999 on Hippolytus, and Pozzi 1999 on Hyllus. See King 1999a, chs 3 and 4 on the medical model. 39. Cf. King 1999a, p. 23. 40. Zeitlin’s translation 1996, p. 152. 41. Cf. Hanson 1990, p. 319. 42. Cf. King 1999a, p. 8. 43. See Hanson 1992b, p. 32. 44. Cf. King 1999a, p. 31. 45. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 152, and Padel 1992, pp. 120-1. Later the term oestrogen, deriving from the Greek, oistros (meaning gadfly, sting, frenzy), will be implemented to denote a defining female hormone which is thought to produce some Io-like symptoms in women (cf. Katz 1989, p. 169). These sorts of symptoms are very much a part of the modern model of the endocrinology of the female body. 46. Zeitlin 1996, p. 152. 47. Translation: Fyfe 960, p. 157. 48. Translation: Zeitlin 1996, p. 152. 49. Zeitlin 1996, p. 152n.82. 50. See Zeitlin 1996, p. 59 who suggests this model requiring the male not to indulge in too much sex is evident in the works of Hesiod onwards. Whilst Rouselle (1993, pp. 9, 12-14) writes that this concern is not evident in the Hippocratic Writings, Foucault (1985, p. 120) points to images of the positive valuation of the act of withholding semen in Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle. This act may have been thought to have a strengthening effect on the male body in at least one source. 51. Zeitlin 1996, p. 152, Loraux 1995, p. 34, see also p. 43, and cf. Padel 1983, p. 16, and n.27. 52. Loraux 1995, p. 37. 53. Cf. Padel 1983, n.27, and Loraux 1995, ch. 1. See also Zeitlin 1996, pp. 152 on Io, 238 on Phaedra, 348 on Medea.

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Notes to pages 53-58 54. ‘Body-memory’ is a term Loraux uses (1998, p. 37). 55. See Loraux 1995, pp. 33-4 on this passage. She also interprets a link between childbirth and madness in Io’s story (p. 34). 56. Loraux 1998, pp. 38-9. Cf. Angier 1999, p. 319, who offers a modern scientific model of this bond – a mother, ‘a cellular chimera’, ‘continues to carry vestiges of that child in her body’ years later. 57. Padel 1983, n.27. 58. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 352 on the female’s knowledge of ‘how vulnerable, how open – how mortal, in fact – is the human body’. 59. See King 1999a, pp. 33, 39 on the medical model of the wetness of the female body. On the notion of the boundlessness, formlessness, and wetness of the female body in ancient Greece, Carson 1990/99 is the key reference. On the wetness of emotion see Carson 1990, p. 138. In philosophy, the female body appears as boundless, formless matter in Aristotle (Generation of Animals 716a5-23), while the male is cast as form, for example. 60. On the deltos see Zeitlin 1996, especially pp. 245-6. On the use of deltos or delta to designate the female sex organs, see Henderson 1991a, p. 146, Zeitlin 1996, p. 245n.58, and duBois 1988a, p. 130, cf. p. 147, and 1988b, p. 76. 61. The theme of dissolution and the female body is perhaps implicit in Carson 1990 (prone to dissolution via the dissolving effects of emotion: p. 138). The capacity for female dissolution seems evident in the female’s frequent and uncontrollable metamorphoses; see Carson’s summary, p. 154. 62. See King 1999a, pp. 39, 71 on the loose and spongy female body, and cf. Hanson 1990, p. 317 on Hippocrates, Diseases of Women 1.1. See King 1999a, pp. 21-3 on Hippocratic medicine as a product of its culture and p. 57 on the ‘possible dissolution’ of the female body. 63. See King 1999a, pp. 32, 72, 77. 64. Valery 1973, p. 68. 65. See Padel 1992, p. 133. 66. Padel 1992, p. 132. 67. Padel 1983, p. 16. 68. On the female’s lack of control over her body’s boundaries and subsequently the shape of her body or, in another sense, mimesis, and the male’s ability to control mimesis, see Carson 1990, pp. 154-5 and n.39. 69. See Zeitlin 1996, p. 363 on ‘the feminine figure onstage’ as the ‘mistress of mimesis }’. 70. Cf. Worman 1997, pp. 180, 181. Worman 1997 uses the term ‘fulcrum’ with regard to Helen, in the sense that Helen is a ‘fulcrum’ for desire. Helen might also be said to be the fulcrum for the feminine. 71. On metis, logos, and the female see Bergren 1983, and on logos (or speech) and the female, see Rabinowitz 1986, Skinner 1993, and McClure 1999. 72. Carson 1990, p. 154. On the female’s mimetic ability see also Zeitlin 1996, p. 362. 73. Zeitlin 1996, p. 237. See also p. 252 where she briefly describes Hippolytus experiencing ‘the same cognitive dissonance’ as Phaedra; cf. p. 351, where she writes Phaedra is ‘subject to a congenital dissonance between inside and outside’ (my italics). 74. Translation: Zeitlin 1996, p. 237.

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Notes to pages 59-66 3. The Precarious Male Body 1. Zeitlin 1999, p. 55. 2. Walters 1998, p. 190. 3. Gallop 1982, p. 67. 4. Gallop 1988, p. 19. 5. Gallop 1988, p. 20. 6. These vase-paintings were typically for private use. We cannot comment on the genre of paintings for public viewing since they have not survived. See Clark 1985, p. 1 on the artistic distinction of the naked and nude, and Nead’s useful critique of Clark (Nead 1992, pp. 12-22 in particular). See also Bonfante 1989 and Osborne 1998 on the meanings of male nudity. 7. Cf. also Bassi 1998, pp. 5-6. 8. See Bassi 1998, ch. 3. 9. Zeitlin 1996, p. 360 and n.38 on Odysseus. On the deceptiveness of Ajax in this play see Zeitlin 1996, pp. 359-60. 10. Murnaghan 1987, p. 26. 11. Murnaghan 1987, p. 26 on Iliad 22.82-5. 12. Murnaghan 1987, p. 27. 13. For a discussion of the appropriateness of male weeping in the archaic and classical periods see Segal 1993a, pp. 62-7, Loraux 1995, p. 6, Lutz 1999, p. 62. The consensus appears to be that weeping was acceptable male behaviour in epic, however, van Wees (1998, p. 18) suggests classical Athenian drama demonstrates a notion of the ‘effeminacy of tears’, reversing an epic model where it is acceptable for the hero to weep, and Monsacré’s work (1984) seems to corroborate this claim. See Lutz 1999, pp. 62-3 and Monsacré 1984, p. 57 on the appropriate and inappropriate times for the hero to cry, and for differentiation between male and female tears. 14. Cf. Zeitlin, 1996, p. 211: ‘The uses of this male body are ... public and are opposed to its physical satisfactions or desires in the private sphere.’ 15. Spelman 1982, p. 115, on Laws 944e. 16. Winkler 1990c, p. 178. A fuller version of this quote opens Chapter 4. 17. King 1999a, p. 123. 18. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, pp. 210-11. 19. See Loraux 1995, p. 24. 20. See Loraux 1995, ch. 1 ‘Bed and War’, pp. 23-43. 21. Zeitlin 1996, p. 210. 22. On the importance of eleos (pity) in Greek culture see Konstan 2001 and also Stanford 1983, pp. 21-7 on pity in tragedy. 23. Cf. Carson 1990, p. 134 on touch as a crisis of boundaries. 24. Cf. line 1338. Stanford translation 1983, p. 27. 25. See, for example, duBois 1988a, p. 2, Richlin 1991, Thornton 1997, Davidson 1997, Larmour 1998, and Sissa 1999 on Foucault’s work on the classical era. 26. Foucault 1987, p. 20. 27. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 233. 28. Foucault 1987, ch. 3, pp. 63-77. 29. On the ephebe in tragedy, see Vidal-Naquet 1986, Segal 1982a, pp. 161, 164-6, Goldhill 1990, p. 124, Winkler 1990a passim, but esp. pp. 57 and 62, and Zeitlin 1996, p. 346. 30. Foucault 1987, p. 67. 31. Cf. North 1966 and Carson 1990, pp. 142-3 on female sophrosune. Interest-

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Notes to pages 66-70 ingly, Faraone’s work on erotic charms (a model which extends to Greek myth and vase painting) suggests ‘an inverted model’ of the norm where women display a level of enkrateia or sophrosune lacking in men (Faraone 1999, p. 162). 32. See Davidson 1997, pp. 177-9 and Halperin 1990b, p. 93 on the active potential of the ‘passive partner’. 33. As cited in Spelman 1982, p. 116. Softness and hairlessness (both feminine attributes) are considered appealing in the young male body (see Halperin 1990b, pp. 88-9). Yet Winkler also argues that the practice of pederasty protects the eronemos from the taint of femininity (1990c, p. 186). 34. On the Danaids see Sissa 1990b, pp. 129-34, 162-3, 171-2, and also Zeitlin 1996, pp. 123-71. 35. Winkler 1990c, p. 179. Cf. Halperin 1990b, p. 96, Mason 1984, pp. 22-3, and Stewart 1997, p. 8. 36. On the kinaidos as the ‘socially and sexually deviant male’, see Winkler 1990c, p. 176. 37. As Loraux and Davidson seem to suggest: Loraux 1995, passim (on male and female binaries), and Davidson 1997, p. xxv. 38. King 1999a, p. 9. 39. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 40. See also Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 41. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. 42. Salazar also points out that the wounded are ignored in funeral oration (2000, p. 175). 43. Loraux 1995, p. 90. 44. Loraux instead contrasts the funeral oration’s arrangement of the male body with epic, where ‘the warrior’s body [is made] into the locus of all suffering, including the most painful torments of all, which devolve on women’ (Loraux 1995, p. 37). This is a very apt description of tragedy, and tragedy might continue epic’s concern of the female as catalyst of male suffering. I read epic for the most part as dealing out suffering and pain to men from the hands of another man, although it could be argued that Helen is at the root of all this suffering. 45. This model, one that is fairly characteristic of ancient Greek thought regarding sexual difference pre-Plato and Aristotle, also exists alongside the two-sex model. See Introduction n. 63 for references. 46. See Bassi 1998, p. 22 n. 17. 47. See Fowler 1987, pp. 187-8, 195 for Homeric examples. For such images in tragedy see Fowler 1987, p. 191, and Zeitlin 1992, p. 208. 48. Fowler 1987, passim. 49. Fowler 1987, pp. 187-9. 50. Translation: Zeitlin 1992, p. 208. 51. Zeitlin 1992, p. 208, Fowler 1987, pp. 187-9. 52. Vernant 1990e, p. 34. 53. Loraux 1995, p. 113. 54. See Loraux 1995, ch. 5. 55. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 95: ‘} with an open gash on his body, he is destined to be seen for what he is, a great hero.’ 56. Loraux 1995, p. 88, and Leigh 1995, pp. 196-7. 57. Leigh 1995, p. 196. 58. Loraux 1995, p. 89 and n. 10, p. 284. 59. As duBois traces (1991, pp. 69-71). See also duBois 1988a, pp. 130-66, and Loraux 1998, p. 75.

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Notes to pages 70-75 60. Loraux 1995, p. 88. 61. See Loraux 1987, McClure 1995, p. 3, and Zeitlin 1996, p. 351. 62. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 351, including n. 20, and pp. 359-60. 63. Cf. Loraux 1987, p. 12. 64. See Loraux 1995, p. 9 on hanging as a woman’s death, and p. 107 on the act of hanging as sealing or closing the woman’s body. See also Loraux 1987, p. 14 on the Euripidean reversal of this trope, where women die by the sword and men die via strangulation. 65. See the work of Carson 1990, whose discussion of the boundless female body is suggestive of a model of the open female body, and Sissa, who develops a model of the female body as open, able to open and close itself at will: Sissa 1990b, p. 5, cf. Sissa 1990a, p. 360. Although see Loraux 1995, p. 115, where she writes that the female body is configured both as ‘too open’ and ‘too closed’. See also Loraux 1995, p. 99. 66. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 351n.20, who argues, contra Loraux, that Ajax’s death is, regardless of its manner of execution, ‘still a suicide, } imagined far more as a feminine solution’. 67. See Vernant 1991, p. 69 on the process of preparing the corpse for the funeral. 68. Cf. Zeitlin’s general comments on woman as the model for ‘tragic consciousness’ (1996, pp. 239-40). 69. Loraux calls woman ‘the bearer of the tragic’ in her discussion of the representation of Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony and Aeschylus’ characterisation of the scourge of women in Seven against Thebes 182-201 (Loraux 1992a, p. 93). 70. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 243. 71. Porter 1999b, p. 7. 72. See Bergren 1983; her work suggests that the female is already endowed with metis and mimesis, and the male appropriates this in myth. 73. Carson 1990, p. 154n.39. 74. This model is also evident outside of myth – it appears in the medical writings. The Hippocratic notion of the male body generally displays a model of the male as bound, with tight, compact flesh. The construction of the female body is by contrast depicted as immanently open by virtue of its loose, spongy flesh (see King 1999a, p. 39, Dean-Jones 1994a, pp. 55-8, and Hanson 1990, p. 317). The Aristotelian model of the male body also casts the male as form, the female body as matter, formless (Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 716a5-23, Lefkowitz and Fant section 92, p. 82). Cf. Sissa 1989, p. 136. 75. See Donlan 1980, passim, and Wohl 1998, pp. 43, 44, 187n.33. Wohl, in a discussion of kalokagathia, suggests that a woman is not expected to demonstrate kalokagathia (1998, p. 43). 76. The phrase is from Heiden (1989 p. 156), who remarks, in his examination of the rhetoric of Sophocles’ Trachiniae: ‘For the hero, appearance is reality.’ 77. Bassi 1998, p. 103. 78. Bassi 1998, p. 123. 79. Whilst Bassi (1998, pp. 118-32) discusses Odysseus as the forerunner of the tragic actor/hero (with particular attention to his implementation of disguise, and the resulting ontological confusion this poses for masculinity), she does not appear to discuss Odysseus as the prototype of tragic dissonance or the disturbance of the precept of kalokagathia. 80. Cf. Bassi 1998, p. 123. 81. See duBois 1991 passim.

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Notes to pages 75-83 82. Although it is possible to interpret Sophocles’ Deianira as a knowing actor in Heracles’ demise: see Gellie 1972, p. 55, Winnington-Ingram 1980, pp. 77-9, Faraone 1994, and Wohl 1998, p. 44, for example. 83. Morris 1991, p. 251. 84. See Zeitlin 1996, pp. 358-60 on the problem of the female’s ability to deceive and the dilemma of male deception in tragedy. 85. Wohl 1998, p. 43. 86. I refer here to Morris 1991, p. 251. 87. The dissembling body is an enduring topos in antiquity – see King 1999a, p. 41 and compare Gleason 1990 and 1995 on the ancient practice of physiognomy and the related theme of self-presentation. 88. Cf. Padel 1990, p. 337. 89. This becomes complicated in the Odyssey, with Odysseus’ penchant for disguise, which problematises the notion of kalokagathia. 90. See Zeitlin 1996, pp. 234-5, 238 on the parallels between Hippolytus and Phaedra. 91. Lines 317, 612. However, this notion of the split subject does not seem to extend to a split between mind and body in classical tragedy. Cf. Zeitlin on the expression of the ‘duality of the self’ within these lines. She does not appear to suggest that this implies a split between body and mind, rather a division within the self, between the tongue and the mind (both embodied, I would suggest). 4. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Female 1. Winkler 1990c, p. 178. 2. Zeitlin 1996, p. 363. 3. Ferrari 1993, p. 99. See also Cambiano 1995, for example, for discussions of the process of reaching adulthood in ancient Greece. 4. Zeitlin (1999, p. 55) also discusses the notion of risk in the construction of masculinity, and Goldhill (1990, p. 126) extends this notion of risking masculinity in tragedy to the culture at large, suggesting the tragic undoing of the young male risks male society in general. 5. Cf. Cartledge 1993, pp. 11-12. 6. Peck translation, Lefkowitz and Fant 1988, section 92, p. 83. See also Segal 1982a, p. 164, Hawley 1998b, p. 50 and Konstan 2000, p. 11 on the femininity of youth, and cf. Golden 1990, pp. 7, 9, and Kleijwegt 1991 on the ambiguity of youth. 7. Cf. Loraux 1990, p. 34. 8. See Winkler 1990c, p. 182, Gleason 1990, and Laqueur 1992 on both the sliding scale (one sex model) and the model of sexual difference. 9. Winkler 1990c, p. 182; ‘internal émigré’ is Greenblatt’s term (1986). 10. Wyke 1998d, p. 9 on the work of Gunderson 1998. 11. Butler’s term 1990a, cf. Wyke 1998d, p. 9, who uses this term when introducing Currie and Gunderson’s work on the Roman era. 12. See Loraux 1995 passim, but especially chs 1 and 5. 13. Silk 1985, p. 6. 14. The quotation is from Jameson 1969, p. 64. See also Silk 1985, pp. 1, 4, Loraux 1990, p. 23, and Katz 1989, p. 167 on Heracles as the most popular Greek hero. 15. Silk 1985, pp. 3-4, although see also his n.9; cf. Jameson 1969, p. 64. 16. Segal’s work (1981) suggests Sophocles’ Trachiniae is a forum for the dissolution of differences, with a later reestablishment of order, of difference. See Girard 1977 and Goff 1990 on tragedy’s ‘dissolutions of difference’.

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Notes to pages 83-87 17. Silk 1985, p. 5, following Ehrenberg 1946, p. 146. 18. On Heracles’ ‘untragic’ status see Ehrenberg 1946, p. 146, and Silk 1985, p. 5. 19. See Vermeule 1979, pp. 123-5 on the suffering of the immortals, and Vernant 1991, ch. 1 for a consideration of the differences between the bodies of the gods and mortals. 20. Although it could also be argued that Deianira mixes the signifiers of male and female deaths. See Loraux 1987, pp. 14, 23-4, 55-6, and cf. Wohl 1998, pp. 33, 35-6. 21. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 40. 22. Von Staden 1992b, pp. 131. 23. Cf. Loraux 1990, p. 22. 24. Heracles is renowned for his insatiable appetites – for sex, food, and wine, and such excessive appetites lean him towards a feminine association. Cf. Loraux 1990, pp. 30-3. On Heracles’ madness and its link to the feminine see Zeitlin 1996, p. 352, including n25. Heracles’ association with the bestial and the animal is expressed in his wearing of the lion skin, and exemplified in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, when Deianira cannot tell Heracles and Achelous apart (lines 505-22). On Heracles’ reputation for suffering, see Loraux 1990, p. 24 and 1995, p. 40. 25. Loraux 1990, p. 31. 26. Faraone 1999, pp. 123-4. Cf. also Fisher 1998, p. 69, Braund and Most, 2003 and Konstan 2006, pp. 41-76 on the question of anger. 27. Lissarrague 1990a, p. 56. 28. Cf. Katz 1989, p. 166 on the Satyrs’ and Heracles’ excess of masculinity (which may in turn lead to an ‘assimilation } to the feminine’). The idea that Heracles’ excess of masculinity, in one dominant version, compels him towards the female also emerges from a reading of Loraux 1990. 29. Cf. Silk 1985, p. 9. 30. As Loraux points out (1990, p. 39n.70), citing Sophocles’ Trachiniae 602, 613, 674, 758, 774. 31. Loraux’s words (1990, p. 39). See Faraone (1999, pp. 113, 121-2) on women making men lose their virility – by dominating men via the use of erotic spells, women turn men into women. 32. Loraux 1990, p.39. 33. As Loraux notes (1990, p. 39 n. 70), the robe is also called a khiton (man’s garment) in this play at 580, 612, 769. 34. On the female body as a ‘broken down’ body, see King 1999a, p. 32. A related model of the female body as lacking form is evident in genres outside of medicine – see Carson 1990, pp. 153-5. 35. On Heracles as parthenos/bride see Seaford 1986, pp. 56-67, Pozzi 1994, pp. 583-4, Segal 1995a, pp. 72, 75, 91, and Ormand 1999, p. 36. 36. This is Ormand’s comment (1999, p. 36). See note above for references to Pozzi, Segal, and Seaford. 37. Ormand 1999, p. 59. 38. Cf. Segal 1995a, pp. 83-5 on both points. Seaford 1986, p. 57 and Rehm 1994, p. 79 also interpret this as a grisly mimesis of the anakalupteria. See Ormand 2003 on Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus as figures whom also seem to be represented like a woman or a bride. 39. Cf. Carson 1990, p. 163. 40. Cf. also Wohl 1998, p. 10. 41. Translation: Dunn 1997, p. 90. 42. Loraux 1986, p. 45, and 1995, p. 157.

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Notes to pages 87-91 43. Cf. Carson 1990, pp. 137-9, 153. 44. Segal 1993a, p. 65. These youths and old men appear to be, in Greek thought, closer to the feminine. 45. Cf. Loraux 1998, p. 10, Segal 1993a, p. 16, and p. 18 on tragedy as an outlet. 46. See Segal’s discussion of male tears (1993a, p. 64), although Segal perhaps oversimplifies this issue. See also Segal 1996, pp. 164-5 on the interpretation of the audience’s potential tears. 47. On the question of male endurance and silence (as opposed to weeping), also a complicated issue as silence can mark both masculine and feminine behaviour, see Montiglio 2000, especially pp. 83-4, 101-6, and 252-88. 48. Ponos is also one of the terms for childbirth (Loraux 1995, p. 29), and the term ponos is used to describe the male experience of war (Loraux 1995, p. 29). 49. See Loraux 1995, pp. 12, 40. See Loraux on the term odunai, used to describe labour (1995, p. 12, cf. pp. 14, 32, 34, 40). 50. See Loraux 1995, p. 32 on the ancient Greek model of the ‘indescribable’ nature of the pain of labour. 51. Cf. Dean-Jones 1994a, p. 182. 52. King 1999a, p. 57 on the medical model of the female body. 53. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 234; she also argues that the text ‘arranges his initiation into the world as one resembling the experience of the female body’. 54. Sissa 1990b. 55. On Hippolytus as virgin see Segal 1993a, p. 3, and Zeitlin 1996, pp. 232-6, esp. p. 235 where she writes: ‘the untouched body can only be imagined as feminine }’. Vernant (1990e, p. 34) notes that a girl who remains a virgin leans toward the male category of warrior. He does not appear to comment on what happens to a boy if he refuses marriage or remains chaste. 56. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 235 on the necessity for the parthenos ‘to enter into the temporal flow of life}’. Perhaps Hippolytus also mimes his mother (instead of his father) here – she was an Amazon, and the Amazons are cast as outside culture. 57. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 39, and Zeitlin 1996, p. 248. 58. Loraux 1995, p. 38. 59. Zeitlin 1996, p. 248. 60. Paglia 1991, p. 95. 61. See Zeitlin, who also writes that Hippolytus ‘will parallel’ this model of dustropos harmonia (1996, p. 247, see also p. 248). 62. Zeitlin 1996, p. 235. On the reversal of roles in Euripides’ Hippolytus see also Segal 1993a, pp 122-4. 63. The suffering of eros is more commonly represented in extant literature than the pleasures of eros. See Cyrino 1995, Calame 1999, and Corso 1997-98 on the suffering of eros. 64. Cf. Segal 1993a, p. 111. 65. Loraux 1995, pp. 38-9. 66. Cf. Pozzi 1994, p. 583 on the violation of Heracles’ body. 67. On sex as wounding see discussion in main text. On labour as wounding cf. Loraux 1995, p. 29. 68. See Graves 1992, p. 547. 69. Zeitlin 1996, p. 350. Her comment emerges in a discussion of Sophocles’ Ajax. 70. On sex as a wounding of the female body see Zeitlin 1992 and Wender 1974, p. 4. Cf. Padel 1992, p. 122 on eros causing a ‘stabbing, lingering, dementing pain’,

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Notes to pages 91-97 and see also Henderson on sex as ‘injuring’, ‘piercing’, ‘thrusting on or into’, ‘stabbing’ or ‘wounding’ the body of the other (1991a, pp. 45, 170-3, 176). 71. Translation: Heiden 1989, p. 84. The Danaids also provide a context for this reversal of roles. Instead of having their bodies ‘torn’ (the Danaids give the term of daiktor, ‘tearer’, to their bridegrooms, Aeschylus, Suppliants 787-90, 794-9), unwilling to be raped by their bridegrooms, they will tear their husbands’ bodies. 72. Wender 1974, p. 4. 73. Wohl 1998, p. xiv See Wohl on Deianira’s attempts to become a subject in her act of giving Heracles the robe, an act of gift exchange (1998, chs 2 and 3, but see esp. pp. 8-9, 23-9, and 36-7). 74. Heiden 1989, p. 140. 75. Wohl 1998, p. 195n.26. 76. There seems to have been a Greek ‘horror’ of formlessness which extends from Homer onwards. Cf. Harrison 1980, p. 224 and Paglia 1991, p. 106. 77. See Loraux 1987, p. 9 on hanging as a ‘formless’ death. See also Loraux 1987, p. 14, who mentions that Hippolytus is ‘fatally strangled } in the reins of his horses’, ‘in the manner of’ a woman, and Goff 1990, p. 65. On Hippolytus’ entanglement in his horses’ reins see also Zeitlin 1996, pp. 225, 248, and on Hippolytus’ death see Zeitlin 1996, pp. 231-2, 247-8, 266-9. 78. See Zeitlin 1996, p. 225. 79. Nietzsche (1993) casts Apollo, the god of order, form and boundaries, against Dionysus, the god of chaos, dissolution, and boundlessness. See also Paglia 1991, especially ch. 3. 80. Vernant talks of how the body becomes ‘operative’ via clothing and accoutrements (1991, p. 38). The robing scene of Pentheus also seems to function as a direct reference to the activity of the male-to-female actor in classical Athenian drama; cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 343, see also Segal 1982a, pp. 168-9. 81. See Arrowsmith’s note (1959, p. 215), and Dodds 1986. 82. Bassi 1989, p. 22. See Aristotle, Poetics 1449a on Aeschylus’ introduction of the second actor and Sophocles’ introduction of the third actor. 83. Bassi 1989, p. 22, see also pp. 25-8. Ormand 1999, p. 55, makes a similar suggestion with regard to Heracles and Deianira, see Vernant 1990c, p. 398 on the roles of Pentheus and Agave being played by the same actor and the audience’s possible awareness of this, and McClure 1997, pp. 114, 116, 117, 119, for a similar reading of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. 84. See Scarry 1985 for the use of the term ‘unmaking’ to think through the body in pain. 85. On the tragic representation of the ephebe see Padilla 1999, Pozzi 1999, and Mitchell-Boyask 1999. 86. Aristotle in his Poetics (1455b) suggests this plot structure is a fundamental feature of the genre of tragedy. See, for example, Zeitlin 1996, pp. 226-7 on this passage. 87. Cf. Loraux 1990, p. 34, 1995, p. 8, and see Zeitlin on Pentheus in 1985a and 1996, pp. 341-3. On cross-dressing and initiation, see Segal 1982a, p. 169. 88. The ephebe is also cast as mixing masculine and feminine within his appearance: see Dover 1978, pp. 68, 72, and Paglia 1991, p. 110, on ‘the beautiful boy’, an ‘androgyne, luminously masculine and feminine’. 89. Cf. Beye 1987, p. 148 on the mistranslation of this term, which is perhaps more accurately translated as miscalculation (Beye 1987, p. 216), and see also Segal 1993c, p. 76. Kitto serves as an example of the scholarly usage of the notion

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Notes to pages 97-101 of hamartia in the evaluation of tragic characters (1976, pp. 10, 102, 129, 191, 195, 197, 294). 90. Faraone, Segal, and Biggs maintain that something already within Heracles leads to his downfall. Faraone 1994, p. 127 discusses his lack of self-control and the erotic sickness within; Segal 1981, p. 80 suggests he is already enslaved to his own lust; and Biggs 1966, p. 228 also sees the disease of Heracles as a manifestation of his inner disease of eros. 91. The male = culture, female = nature refrain is familiar in Greek thought, exemplified best perhaps in the Pythagorean table of opposites (see Aristotle, Metaphysics 986a22ff. and cf. Lovibond 1994). 5. Heracles’ Body – Becoming Male? 1. Zeitlin 1999, p. 55. 2. MacKinnon 1971, p. 41. 3. In the form of the ‘homosocial bond’ – see Ormand 1999, p. 58. 4. Wohl 1998, chs 1 and 3, but see especially pp. 16, 178-9. 5. See Wohl 1998, pp. 5-8. 6. Rehm 1994, p. 80. 7. See Wohl 1998, p. 196n.30 for an extensive list of scholars who interpret a negative characterisation of Heracles here. 8. Winnington-Ingram 1980, p. 83. 9. Rehm 1994, p. 79. 10. Cf. Arrowsmith 1969, p. 47 – Heracles’ suicide is part of his mythos, but the detail of his son executing this suicide for Heracles is perhaps less certain. On the problem of Heracles’ commands and his characterisation here see also Heiden 1989, p. 149. 11. Heiden 1989, p. 149. 12. Segal 1993a, p. 67. 13. Translation: Jameson 1969; Heiden’s remarks may be found in Heiden 1989, p. 158. See Winkler on the importance of the concepts ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ in the expression, configuration, and regulation of the male body-self (Winkler 1990c, pp. 183-4). Halperin also suggests that hardness is the ideal and ‘softness (malthakia)’ is the ‘most unspeakable [condition] for any man’ (Halperin 1990c, p. 184). 14. Heiden 1989, p. 151. 15. Heiden 1989, pp. 151-2, see also 190n.41. On the medical model of the male body as dryer than the female body see King 1999a, p. 28, and Hanson 1990, p. 316 on the hard male body. See also Carson 1990, p. 153. 16. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 262n.152. 17. On the importance of endurance (karteria) in the model of the masculine see Loraux 1995 passim, but especially pp. 157, 169, 174, 176. See also Segal 1993c, pp. 138-41 on how Oedipus endures suffering. 18. Montiglio 2000, p. 286. 19. Cf. Loraux 1995, p. 23. 20. On Odysseus and the issue of deception and disguise, see Bassi 1998, ch. 3. On the issue of deception as a feminine trait and how this affects the male when he acts deceitfully, see Zeitlin 1996, pp. 358-61, including n.38. 21. Montiglio 2000, pp. 286-7. Although see Loraux (1995, pp. 167-77) who argues that along with Achilles and Odysseus, Heracles becomes a model for Plato to engage with and compare Socrates to, an intellectualised hero. 22. Loraux 1987, p. 9.

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Notes to pages 101-107 23. Loraux makes this point too (1987, p. 9). 24. On the question of madness as a feminising state see Zeitlin 1996, p. 352 – when Heracles is afflicted with madness, he is cast as ‘ “playing the bacchant,” and imitating the part of the woman’. See also Padel 1983 and 1992, p. 113. 25. See Loraux 1987. Heiden (1989, p. 151) also refers to Heracles’ death as suicide. 26. Loraux 1995, p. 111. She seems to modify her earlier position that death must be ‘accepted and not sought’ (Loraux 1987, p. 9). 27. Loraux 1987, pp. 8, 12. 28. I agree with Zeitlin (1996, p. 351n.20): ‘}Ajax’s death, by whatever means and in whatever mood, is still a suicide, an act the culture regards in itself as inherently shameful and therefore imagined far more as a feminine solution.’ Loraux makes a general statement to that effect – suicide in tragedy ‘was mainly a woman’s death’ (1987, p. 9). Garrison 1995 claims suicide in tragedy is heroic, but see McClure’s critique of Garrison (1995, p. 3), confirming that ‘tragic suicide } seems to stand outside the normative social and ethical system }’. 29. The ‘only honourable death’ is Loraux’s phrase (Loraux 1995, p. 111). 30. Jameson 1969, p. 64. 31. Jameson 1969, p. 65. Other scholars have looked for hints of an apotheosis in this play – see Heiden on critics who look outside the text for Heracles’ apothoesis (1989, p. 150, and cf. Rehm 1994, p. 82). On the lack of an apotheosis in the Trachiniae, see Silk 1985, pp. 11-12. 32. Loraux 1995, p. 342. 33. See Loraux 1987, pp. 12-13. 34. Georges 1994, p. 182. 35. On the oriental/feminised barbarian see Hall 1989, pp. 2, 126-7 and duBois 1982, ch. 3, but esp. p. 86. 36. Heiden, in his discussion of Heracles’ death, also compares this with ‘the mythic example of Evadne’s act of suttee’ (1989, p. 187n.11). 37. On Deianira’s ‘virile’ death see Loraux 1987, pp. 14, 23-4, 54-6. See also Wohl 1998, p. 36 on Deianira. 38. Wohl 1998, p. 9; cf. Heiden 1989, p. 187n.11. On the issue of hanging as the feminine way for a woman to die/ commit suicide, see Loraux 1987, pp. 9-10. 39. See Heiden 1989, pp. 137, and p. 158 on Heracles’ possible ‘exaggeration or distortion’. 40. Ormand 1999, p. 49. 41. Heiden 1989, p. 151. 42. Heiden 1989, p. 145. 43. Heiden 1989, p. 145. See also p. 188n.19. 44. See the similar pronouncement of Solon in Herodotus’ Histories 1.32. Cf. Rubino 1979, p. 15 on this phrase. Dunn, in his analysis of Euripides’ Heracles, also makes the point I raise in my discussion of Sophocles’ Heracles – ‘The hero } is defined above all by his end }’ (1997, p. 99). 45. Heiden 1989, pp. 150-1. 46. See Heiden 1989, p. 159. 47. Segal 1993a, p. 125. 48. Segal 1993a, p. 131. 49. See Wohl 1998, passim, especially ch. 7. Although Rabinowitz 1993a, ch. 2, also considers the Alcestis, and argues instead that this play reinforces masculinity, as Wohl ultimately does. Cf. Rabinowitz 1999, pp. 99, 102.

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Notes to pages 107-112 50. See Euripides, Alcestis 955-9. 51. Cf. Segal 1993a, pp. 63, 67, 82-6 on the ‘reversal of gender roles’ in this play, and see also Wohl 1998, pp. 138-44. 52. Segal 1993b, p. 234. 53. On the enigmatic Alcestis, see Wohl 1998, pp. 147, 174-5. 54. On Heracles’ cowardice, see Fitzgerald 1991, cf. also line 157. 55. Cf. Loraux 1987, pp. 8-9, and Montiglio 2000, p. 287. 56. Barlow 1981, p. 112, cf. Dunn 1997, pp. 90-1. 57. This is the translation Dunn offers (Dunn 1997, p. 90). 58. Dunn 1997, pp. 87, 101. 59. Cf. Dunn 1997, p. 86 on lines 575-82. 60. See Dunn 1997, pp. 96-8. 61. Bassi 1998, p. 63. Cf. Bassi 1998, p. 61, and Bassi 1997, pp. 328-9, esp. n.45. See also Salazar 2000, p. 156 on the ‘lowly status of the archer’. 62. Above quotations from Dunn 1997, pp. 83-4. Interestingly, critics who are dissatisfied with Euripides’ ending invent their own: Dunn 1997, pp. 90-1. 63. Dunn 1997, p. 88. 64. Papadopoulou 1999, pp. 302-5. 65. Arrowsmith 1969, p. 53. 66. Arrowsmith 1969, pp. 44, 47. 67. Dunn 1997, p. 101. 68. Cf. Dunn 1997, pp. 101, 107. 6. Coda: Tragedy’s Engendered Dissolutions 1. Irigaray 1983, p. 118. 2. Van Nortwick 1998, p. 13. Cf. also Easterling 1996, p. 179 who observes that the ‘open-endedness’ of Sophocles’ Ajax is ‘very characteristic of tragedy’. With regard to satyr plays, Hall (1998) suggests that the fact that tragedy is followed by the satyr play provides an affirmation of the male after the feminising onslaught of tragedy. Hall’s argument might be interpreted as dependant upon the association of the satyr with the masculine, and this is open to question. Satyr drama might instead be interpreted as extending tragedy’s preoccupation with otherness, the feminine, the boundaries between animal and divine, and most importantly, the destabilisation of the male body-self project. Thus, Lissarrague argues that ‘the satyrs are antitypes of the Athenian male citizenry’ (1990b, p. 235), and, as such, might fail to affirm the male, and instead serve to continue tragedy’s fundamental disturbance of the male hero. Lissarrague (1990b) makes an even stronger point on p. 236: ‘The presence of satyrs within the myth [as presented in Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops] subverts tragedy by shattering its cohesiveness } Satyric drama } does not seek to settle a controversy } It plays in a different key, with the displacement, distortion, and reversal of what constitutes the world and culture of men; it ... reinserts Dionysus in the centre of the theatre.’ 3. Silk 1985, p. 19. 4. Blondell et al. 1999, p. 35. See Beye 1987, p. 133 on Aeschylus as the ‘only tragedian to write dramas’ which are ‘connected’ in the manner of the Oresteia, and display ‘a continuous development of the same story line’. Whitman (1951, p. 39) discusses the Sophoclean ‘abandonment’ of the trilogy in favour of the single play, whilst Dunn writes that Euripides’ ‘Trojan Trilogy’ (of which only Trojan Women survives), ‘as far as we can tell, } is the only Euripidean production in which three tragedies dramatise successive portions of the same legend’ (Dunn

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Notes to pages 112-116 1996, p. 112.) On the tendency of Sophocles and Euripides to produce three plays which are ‘unconnected’, see also Taplin 1990, p. 40. 5. Cf. Dunn 1996, p. 7 who writes that this serves to ‘evade the boundaries of dramatic genre’. Rabinowitz 1993a offers a contrasting viewpoint, arguing (regarding the reaffirmation of male bonds in Euripides’ Hippolytus) for tragedy offering secure endings and reconstituted heroes. 6. See Goldhill 1984, p. 56, and p. 283 on the open nature of the ending to Eumenides. 7. See Goldhill 1986, pp. 30-1, 50-1 on the vote of Athena, although Seaford 1995 who seems to argue against this position. See also Goldhill 1986, chs 1 and 2, for a reading which sees the Oresteia as less affirmative and stable than other scholars have suggested. 8. Cf. McClure 1997, p. 125 who remarks (following Scott 1984, p. 76) that this trilogy does not have an exodos, ‘a feature found in every other Aeschylean play except Prometheus Bound’. Scott notes that this lack of an exodos, the exit song, ‘conveys a sense of incompleteness’. 9. Segal 1981, p. 101. See also Heiden 1989, pp. 15-16 on Segal’s position here. However, elsewhere Segal (1993d, p. 73) discusses the ‘dissolution of civic order’ in Euripides’ Hecuba, and in Segal 1996 he argues for closure in some plays and not in others. In this article (1996) he also distinguishes between ritual closure and resolution – the plays might offer a semblance of ritual closure but this does not necessarily mean that the problems the plays present are resolved (Segal 1996, pp. 162-3). 10. See also Goldhill (1990, pp. 123-8) on the challenge tragedy presents to its culture. Zeitlin 1996 is also a proponent of this view at times – for example, on p. 364 she writes that tragedy usually reaffirms the male principle by the close of its plays, ‘but before that the work of the drama is to open up the masculine view of the universe’. 11. On the lack of closure in tragedy see Roberts, Dunn, and Fowler 1997 and Dunn 1996. On the notion of tragedy resisting closure, see Seaford 1995, p. 202 and cf. Vernant 1990b, p. 33. 12. On the hero’s typical non-Athenian status see Zeitlin 1990, pp. 144-5 – she writes that the poets regularly use Thebes to stage the most challenging aspects of ‘the tragic without any risk to [Athens’] own self-image’. 13. See, for example, Paglia 1991, p. 109, cf. Arroswmith 1959, pp. 148-9. 14. Heiden 1989, p. 16. 15. Wyke 1998d, p. 3. 16. Loraux 1995, p. 144. 17. Loraux 1995, p. 144. 18. Rabinowitz is the most affirmative in this regard – see 1993a passim. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 364, and Wohl 1998, pp. 178-9. Zeitlin 1996 and Wohl 1998 appear less emphatic than Rabinowitz 1993a with regard to the final triumph of the hero in tragedy, but both make this comment nonetheless. Yet Zeitlin and Wohl appear to allow for the subversive potential of tragedy, which might implicitly undercut any position on the tragic hero as reaffirmed. Zeitlin, for example, writes: ‘tragedy cannot control the ambiguities of role playing }’ (Zeitlin 1996, p. 371, cf. Wohl 1998, p. 181). Rabinowitz also leaves open the possibility that ‘texts can misfire’, allowing for resistant readings (Rabinowitz 1993a, p. 12). 19. Loraux 1995, p. 7. 20. Segal 1981, pp. 79-80. 21. See Loraux 1990, p. 39 for a discussion of the various levels of this motif.

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Notes to pages 116-125 See Wohl 1998, ch. 2, on Deianira’s attempt at gift exchange (and her subsequent attempt at the constitution of subjectivity) and Loraux on her male and female manner of death (1987, pp. 14, 20, 23-4). Faraone is another who sees an exchange between Heracles and Deianira (1994, pp. 127-8). 22. ‘Sexual ambiguity’ is Heiden’s phrase (Heiden 1989, p. 187 n.11). 23. McCall is another who thinks both Deianira and Heracles are played by the same actor – McCall 1972, p. 142, also cited by Heiden 1989, p. 187 n.11. See also Bassi 1987, p. 22. 24. Loraux 1990, p. 39. 25. See Loraux 1995, passim, but see especially pp. 39-41, 130. 26. See Loraux 1995, p. 10. 27. Loraux 1995, p. 6. Cf. Monsacré 1984 and Salazar 2000, pp. 173-4. 28. Foucault 1987 and Laqueur 1992. 29. This is a well-accepted topos – see, for example, Pomeroy 1975, pp. 28, 58, Segal 1993d, p. 73, and van Wees, 1998, p. 11. 30. Loraux 1995, pp. 5, 88. 31. See Loraux 1995, pp. 167-77. 32. See duBois 1985 on Plato’s use of the feminine and compare Halperin 1990a/1990b, pp. 113-52. 33. Torrance 1966, p. 4. 34. Wohl 1998, p. 16. 35. Irigaray 1983, p. 118. A fuller version of this quotation opens this chapter. 36. Loraux 1995, p.7. 37. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 360. 38. See Segal 1993c, especially pp. 73-4, 134-47. 39. Segal 1993c, p. 139. 40. Van Nortwick 1998, p. 11. 41. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus disappears into the earth (according to Padel’s reading of lines 1681: 1983, p. 9). Cf. Ormand 1999, p. 149 and 2003 on the possible feminisation of Oedipus in Oedipus the King. On the rare depiction of the male body not undergoing suffering in this play cf. Murnaghan 1987, pp. 36, 37, 40. 42. Mason 1984. 43. Cf. Zeitlin 1996, p. 368 on Plato’s ‘desire to remake man’. On the Platonic desire for an immutable and eternal male selfhood and the tragic negotiation with such an ideal, see Bassi 1998, p. 23. 44. Loraux 1990, p. 39. 45. Loraux 1990, p. 39. 46. Vernant 1991, p. 74. 47. Cf. Segal 1986, p. 344. 48. Cf. Segal 1986, p. 345. 49. Cf. Carson 1999, p. 81 and Konstan 2006, p. 58 on the accepted topos of women as more emotional than men. On the delicate balance of the dry male body see Carson 1990, pp. 140-2, and Zeitlin 1996, p. 59. See also King 1999a, p. 9. Cf. Carson 1990, p. 138/ 1999, pp. 80-1 on the wetness of emotion and its feminine/feminising connotations. 50. Carson 1999, p. 80. 51. On Phynicus see, for example, Nagy 1998 p. xi, and Loraux 1998, p. 9, 85. 52. Segal 1986, p. 344. Cf. also Taplin 1978, pp. 159-71 and Stanford 1983, pp. 1-6 on the emotions Attic tragedy arouses. 53. Gorgias, Helen 9, Segal’s translation, 1986, p. 344. Segal (1986, p.344) also

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Notes to pages 125-129 refers to Plato’s character, Ion, the famous rhapsode who is cast as experiencing an extreme bodily response to the activity of reciting poetry (Plato, Ion 535c). 54. Hansen’s translation (1976, p. 169). On this passage see Zeitlin 1996, pp. 383-4 and Halperin 1990b, p. 146. 55. Cf. Rubridge 1993, p. 248 who, in a consideration of Plato’s critique of poetry in the Republic, discusses how some emotions are encouraged or discouraged because they produce ‘dispositions and behaviour that are socially desirable’ or unacceptable. 56. On the ‘inextricable’ link between the feminine and theatre, and its evidence in Plato see Zeitlin 1996, p. 371, also more generally, 1985a/96, pp. 341-74. 57. Goldhill 1997c, p. 67. 58. ‘Playing the Other’ is of course Zeitlin’s useful methodological term (1996). 59. The quotes above are from Bassi 1998, pp. 20-3. 60. See Bassi’s concluding pages to ch. 3: ‘} the theatrical body } reveals the unstable nature of an internal and unchanging essence of masculine identity’ (1998, p. 141). 61. Cf. Zeitlin, who identifies ‘a dangerous indeterminacy’ in ‘the mobility of [the] temporary reversals of drama }’ (1996, p. 371). 62. Bassi’s title Acting Like Men (1998) is also suggestive of such a concern. See also Bassi 2003, p. 46: she remarks that ‘drama } is the genre in which the Homeric exhortation to “be men” is most problematic’.

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Bibliography Where more than one edition of a work exists, I list the one consulted and referred to in this book. Primary texts Aeschylus, Oresteia – Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides, trans. with intro. by Lattimore, R., in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. with intro. by Vellacott, P., Penguin, London, 1961. Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, trans. with intro. by Vellacott, P., Penguin, London, 1961. Aeschylus, Suppliants, trans. with intro. by Vellacott, P., Penguin, London, 1961. Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, trans. Smyth, H.W., in Aeschylus I, Heinemann, London, 1926. Aristophanes, Ecclesiazousae, in Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, trans. and ed. Henderson, J., Routledge, New York and London, 1996. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, in Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, trans. and ed. Henderson, J., Routledge, New York and London, 1996. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, trans. with intro. by Sommerstein, A.H., Penguin, London, 1973. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazousae, in Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, trans. and ed. Henderson, J., Routledge, New York and London, 1996. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazousae, trans. with intro. by Barrett, D., Penguin, London, 1985. Aristotle, History of Animals, trans. Thompson, D’A.W., in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, J., vol. 1, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 774-993. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. Platt, A., in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, J., vol. 1, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984, pp. 1111-1218. Aristotle, Metaphysics in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 17, trans. Tredennick, H., Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1989. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. with intro.. and notes by Hutton, J., W.W. Norton and Co., New York, 1982. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Peck, A.L., in Aristotle, The Poetics, Longinus, On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1960. Aristotle, Poetics, in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 23, trans. Fyfe, W.H., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1932. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Freese, J.H., in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 22, Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, London, 1926.

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Bibliography Aristotle, Politics, trans. Jowett, B., in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, J., vol. 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984. Aristotle, Problems, trans. Hett, W.S., Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1957. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Roberts, W.R., in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, J., vol. 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Barnes, J., vols 1 and 2, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1984. Euripides, Alcestis, trans. with intro. by Lattimore, R., in Euripides I, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1955. Euripides, Alcestis, trans. with intro. by Rabinowitz, N.S., in Blondell, R. et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, Routledge, New York, 1999. Euripides, Bacchae, trans. with intro. by Arrowsmith, W., in Euripides V, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1959. Euripides, Electra, trans. with an intro. by Vermeule, E.T., in Euripides V, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1959. Euripides, Hecuba, trans. with intro. by Arrowsmith, W., in Euripides III, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958. Euripides, Hecuba, trans. Way, A.S., in Euripides I, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1959. Euripides, Helen, trans. with intro. by Lattimore, R., in Euripides II, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969. Euripides, Helen, trans. with intro. by Zweig, B., in Blondell, R. et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, Routledge, New York, 1999. Euripides, Heracles, trans. with intro. by Arrowsmith, W., in Euripides II, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969. Euripides, Heracles, trans. A.S. Way, in Euripides III, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1962. Euripides, Hippolytus, trans. with intro. by Grene, D., in Euripides I, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1955. Euripides, Hippolytus, trans. Kovacs, D., in Euripides II, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1995. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. with intro. by Walker, C.R., in Euripides IV, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis, trans. with intro. by Gamel, M.K., in Blondell, R. et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, Routledge, New York, 1999. Euripides, Medea, trans. with intro. by Warner, R., in Euripides I, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Grene, D. and Lattimore, R., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1955. Euripides, Medea, trans. with intro. by Blondell, R. et al., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, Routledge, New York, 1999.

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Bibliography ——— 1985b. ‘The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in the Hippolytus’, in Burian 1985, pp. 52-111, revised version in Zeitlin 1996, pp. 219-84. ——— 1990. ‘Thebes: Theatre of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in Winkler and Zeitlin 1990, pp. 130-67. ——— 1992. ‘The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus’, in Hexter and Selden 1992, pp. 203-52, revised version in Zeitlin 1996, pp. 123-71. ——— 1993a. ‘Staging Dionysus between Thebes and Athens’, in Carpenter and Faraone 1993, pp. 147-82. ——— 1993b. ‘The Artful Eye: Vision, Ekphrasis, and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre’, in Goldhill and Osborne 1993, pp. 138-96. ——— 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ——— 1999. ‘Reflections of Erotic Desire in Archaic and Classical Greece’, in Porter 1999, pp. 50-76. Zita, J. 1998. Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender, Columbia University Press, New York. Zweig, B. 1992. ‘The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes’ Plays’, in Richlin 1992, pp. 73-89.

182

Index Admetus, 107-8, 120 Aeschylus, 8, 19, 23-4, 36, 42, 45, 50-2, 54-5, 69, 92, 104, 139, 145, 149, 152 Oresteia, 23, 24, 33, 45, 50, 70, 92, 104, 112-13, 135, 147, 149 Prometheus Bound, 23, 36, 53-5 Seven Against Thebes, 145 Suppliants, 51-2, 55, 69, 149 Ajax, 34, 61, 70, 102, 110, 119, 143 death, 70, 102, 145, 151 Alcestis, 34, 49, 107-8, 141, 151 andreia, 10, 15, 59, 62-4, 66, 69, 70, 79-82, 104-8, 116, 118-23, 127 aner, 15, 62, 70, 80-2, 90-1, 95, 104, 106-8, 121 apotheosis, 103, 151 archer, 109-10 Aristophanes, 125, 139 Frogs, 139 Thesmophoriazousae, 124 Aristotle, 12, 25, 28, 40, 42, 54, 75, 88, 124, 126, 138-9, 141-2, 144-5, 149-50 Generation of Animals, 54, 88, 134, 142, 145 History of Animals, 54 Poetics, 113, 139, 149 Arrowsmith, W., 110, 138, 149-50, 152 audience, 10, 20-2, 25, 28-9, 31, 33-5, 37-40, 42, 87, 99, 101, 106-7, 109-10, 113-16, 122-7, 148-9 notional, 10, 21, 93, 133 Bassi, K., 20, 47, 95, 109, 128, 131-2, 134-5, 137-40, 143-5, 150, 152, 154-5 beautiful death, 16, 72, 101, 136 behaviour, acceptable, 87, 99, 117 becoming, 3, 6, 9-12, 14-15, 17-20, 54, 57, 59, 62, 68-9, 77, 79-92, 94-7, 103, 105-8, 118, 120-1, 124, 127-9

Bergren, A., 135, 139, 141-2, 145 Bernal, M., 133 birth, see childbirth Blondell, S., 140, 152 blood, 16, 23, 33, 37, 70, 92, 102, 122 body abject, 22, 43, 139 actor’s, 19, 20, 31, 34, 75 ancient, 1, 3-5, 7, 115, 132 audience’s, 25, 40 broken down, 86, 88, 147 classical, 1, 3, 5-7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 131-2 dead, 19, 25, 28 dissembling, 75, 77, 146 excess of, 16, 24, 84-5 feminised, 9, 28 gune’s, 51, 86-8 hetaira’s, 29, 137 live, 19, 43, 49, 99 man’s, 69, 72, 102 masculine, 15-16, 76, 85 maternal, 14, 53, 87, 121, 141 mortal, 19, 83 outer/inner, 63, 73, 76-7 performing, 31-2, 34, 39 sexed/gendered, 3, 7, 10-11 slave’s, 5, 132 speaking, 33, 41 textual, 2, 3, 19, 30-1, 115 theatrical, 7, 12-14, 20, 33, 61, 77, 128, 138, 155 tragic, 6, 14, 21, 127 tragic male, 9, 22 vulnerable, 16, 24, 52, 65, 68 warrior’s, 74, 144 woman’s, 6, 50, 52, 54, 68-9, 86, 124, 145 wounded, 38, 70, 72, 91, 101, 136 body-self , 5, 10, 18, 21, 25-6, 39, 43, 67, 74-5, 77, 81, 83, 92, 97, 103-5, 124-7

183

Index Dunn, F., 109-10, 135, 147, 151-3 dustropos harmonia, 58, 89, 122

Bordo, S., 131, 133 boundaries, 3, 19, 54, 64, 73, 113-14, 119, 126, 140, 149, 152-3 bow, 109-10 bride, 86, 90, 137, 147; see also parthenos bridegroom, 86, 89, 149 Butler, J., 14-15, 131-2, 134

eidolon, 48, 56-7, 140-1 ekkuklema, 34-5 Electra, 61, 76 emotion, 16, 25, 32, 35, 39, 41, 45, 54, 64, 85, 87, 124-5, 142, 155 endurance, 28, 83-4, 86-7, 100-1, 107-9, 122, 150 enkrateia, 66, 90, 97, 144 ephebe, 30, 66, 95-6, 100, 137, 143, 149 epic, 16, 25-6, 31, 42, 50, 53, 57, 69, 70, 81, 100-1, 112, 117, 121, 143-4 eros, 22, 35, 40, 43, 54, 61, 89, 90, 97, 137, 148, 150 Euripides, 17-19, 34-5, 41-2, 53, 55-6, 76-7, 87-8, 94-5, 108-12, 122-3, 133, 152-3 Alcestis, 49 Bacchae, 17-18, 37, 80, 95, 114, 120 Suppliant Women, 103 Trojan Women, 22, 41, 45, 57, 75 excess, 84, 90, 97, 118 exchange, 91-2, 95, 108, 115, 120, 134, 154 exterior, 58, 74

Carson, A., 134-5, 137, 140-3, 145, 147-8, 150, 154 childbirth, 44, 50-4, 58, 60-1, 64, 121, 126, 142, 148 classical Athenian tragedy/Greek tragedy, 1, 2, 8, 10-11, 19-21, 24-5, 27-8, 31-4, 40-1, 49, 50, 53-5, 71, 110-11, 131-3 closure, notion of, 106, 108, 110, 112-14, 153 Clytaemnestra, 16, 23, 36, 45-6, 53, 61, 71-2, 75, 92, 118, 135 condition of tragedy, 2, 10, 22 conflation, 10, 102, 115-16, 119 consonance, 73-5 control, 13, 16-17, 47, 56-7, 65-6, 73, 101, 115, 121 corporeal style, 14-15 coward, 107-9 Danaids, 52, 66, 69, 89, 149 daughters, 45-6, 53, 61, 121 de Beauvoir, S., 11 death, 21-3, 34, 36, 44, 67, 71-2, 83, 94, 97-107, 122 manly, 102, 104 deception, 20, 46, 72-4, 100, 150 Deianira, 14, 22, 36, 53, 55, 72, 75, 85, 91, 93, 95, 97, 103-5, 116, 151, 154 Dionysus, 19, 20, 42, 73, 94, 97, 112, 121, 149 disguise, 15, 20, 30, 47, 58, 61, 74, 94, 121, 146, 150 feminising effects of, 20, 135 and the male body, 33, 47 disruption, 13-14, 16, 59, 112, 120 dissolution, 12, 18, 54-5, 87-8, 92-5, 112, 123-4, 129, 142, 146, 149 dissonance, 7, 14-16, 18, 44-5, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55-8, 72-7, 79, 84, 115, 140 duBois, P., 131-5, 137, 140, 142-5, 151, 154

family, 45, 61-3, 82 father, 23-4, 46, 48, 52, 61-2, 65-6, 99, 121, 148 female, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9-15, 17-20, 39, 40, 44-60, 62-3, 66-73, 75, 77-8, 80-5, 87-98, 115-21, 124-6 body, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12-16, 19-22, 27-31, 43-5, 47, 49-58, 67-8, 70-3, 92-4, 132-5, 140-2, 145, 147-8; abject, 92; dysfunctional, 47; healing, 140; mimetic, 72; open, 145; polluting, 133; unstable, 4 characters, 20, 22, 27, 53, 72, 128 experience, 44, 64, 88 form, 72, 96, 121 initiation, 88-9 mimetic, 56, 73 roles, 6, 58, 87, 92, 116, 135 feminine associations, 85, 116, 147 condition, 52, 72 notion of the, 6, 7, 9-17, 20-1, 30, 42-4, 47-50, 52-3, 56-7, 73-7,

184

Index 79-87, 89, 90, 92-8, 111-21, 123, 125-8 femininity, 14, 48, 69, 77, 80, 83-4, 95-7, 116, 119-20, 128-9, 144 of youth, 66, 80, 146 feminisation, 47, 74, 80, 84-6, 102, 104, 109, 115, 118, 120, 123, 154 feminising behaviour, 87, 117 processes, tragedy’s, 108, 124 Fitzgerald, G., 152 flesh, 18, 23-4, 28, 37, 41, 54, 92, 102 female, 54 fluids, 6, 16, 22, 54 fluidity, 7, 8, 47 formlessness, 54, 92, 94, 96, 142, 145, 149 Foucault, M., 65-6, 117, 131, 141, 143 Fowler, D., 68, 144 gaze, 13, 28, 37-8, 86, 101, 138 gender, 1, 3-5, 9, 11-15, 17, 20, 27, 48, 94-7, 128-9, 131-2 performativity of, 18, 128, 134 genre of classical Athenian tragedy, 8, 10, 15-16, 27, 31, 41, 47, 50, 52, 59, 67, 73-5, 77, 79, 113-15, 125-6 gesture, 14-15, 31-2, 34-5, 40-1, 45, 49, 113, 123, 137 girl, see parthenos gods, 83, 85, 112, 119, 121, 147 Goldhill, S., 135, 137, 146, 153 Gorgias, 39, 40, 125, 138, 154 Greek culture, ancient, 1, 2, 8, 44, 56, 62, 75, 77, 79, 131, 140, 143 gune, see woman and wife Halperin, D., 131, 133, 137, 140-1, 144, 150, 155 Hanson, A., 141-2, 145, 150 Hector, 62, 102 Hecuba, 22, 45, 62, 140 Heiden, B., 91, 99, 100, 105-6, 114, 145, 149-51, 153-4 Helen, 16, 39, 40, 48-50, 53, 56-8, 71, 75, 77, 87, 138, 140-2, 144, 154 Helen’s body, 2, 56-7 Henderson, J., 149 Heracles, 9, 10, 15, 27, 35-6, 55, 58,

71, 76, 79, 82-111, 114-16, 118-23, 146-52 ambiguities of, 82, 84 characterisation of, 76, 96, 98, 107, 110, 119 death of, 105 feminisation of, 83-4, 93, 103, 106, 116 as hero, 83, 106, 119 masculinized, 101 Sophoclean, 23, 27-8, 52, 79, 82-3, 90, 95-6, 100-1, 108, 118 suffering, 83 hero, 8-10, 16-18, 26-7, 61-2, 64-5, 70-2, 74-6, 81-6, 94-6, 101-2, 104-6, 108-11, 115-20, 122-4, 143-5, 151-3 feminised, 15, 98 suffering, 83, 102, 117 tragic, 8, 10-12, 16-17, 28, 65, 72, 108, 112, 115, 117-18, 120, 122-3, 135, 153 heroism, 8, 16, 26, 62-3, 74, 83, 86, 100-2, 106-11, 113, 117-19 hero’s body, 14-15, 18, 67 Hesiod, 12, 58, 71, 134, 141 Hippocrates, 54, 59, 142 Hippolytus, 19, 30, 34, 42, 50, 55, 66, 72, 77-8, 88-90, 94-6, 102, 106-7, 148-9 Homer, 39, 80, 116, 127, 138, 149 Homeric heroes, 116-17 horror, 9, 16-17, 36-7, 114, 136, 149 house, notion of, 23, 27, 36, 45, 62, 136 humiliation, 9, 101, 104-5 Hyllus, 98-100, 105, 123 ideal male body, 65, 67 Iliadic hero, 29, 61-2, 74, 117 illusion, 57-8, 114, 121 innards, 12-13, 16, 22, 39, 47-8, 134 instability, 7, 15, 57, 59, 112-13, 119-20, 122, 131-3 Io, 23, 36, 50-2, 54-6, 141 Iole, 98-9, 104, 119 Iphigenia, 22, 45, 61, 65, 137 Jameson, M., 83, 146, 150-1 kalokagathia, 14, 33, 73-7, 84, 145-6 katharsis, 25, 113, 124-5

185

Index kinaidos, 66-7, 144 King, H., 33, 36, 50, 54, 67, 88, 131-6, 138, 140-8, 150, 154 kleos, 26, 60-1, 64, 72, 109, 118 Konstan, D., 131 Kristeva, J., 25, 136, 139 kureios, 66, 97-9, 107, 118 lamentation, 87, 98, 109, 139 language, 19, 28-9, 39-41, 43, 79, 100, 106, 141 Laqueur, T., 117, 131-2, 134, 146 Lattimore, R., 133 logos, 3, 19, 28-9, 31-4, 36-43, 61, 75, 100, 115, 118, 125, 137, 139, 142 Longinus, 51 Loraux, N., 36, 50, 52-3, 64, 67, 69, 70, 84, 87, 90, 101-3, 115-19, 123, 131-2, 135-8, 140-54 love, 34, 45-6, 88, 104, 126 male culture, 3, 10, 14, 17, 47, 49, 66, 77, 82, 95, 113, 120, 128 mimesis, 56, 71, 114, 121 marriage, 46-7, 69, 140, 148 masculine, the, 6, 7, 9-11, 13-18, 28, 49, 68-70, 81-2, 84-6, 95-7, 101, 113, 115-16, 118-21, 123, 148-50, 152-3 identity, 15, 17, 49, 62, 73, 81-2, 91, 117, 119, 121, 155 selfhood, 15, 79 masculinity, 15, 17, 59, 63-4, 66-70, 74, 79-81, 83-4, 95, 97-102, 105-8, 110-11, 117-24, 128-9, 145-6 excess of, 85, 147 mastery, 16-17, 40, 73-4, 79, 98, 100, 121 Medea, 14, 16, 45, 53, 77, 135, 140-1 medicine, 2, 3, 6, 18, 25, 47, 50-1, 54, 56, 66, 134-5, 141-2, 147-8, 150 metamorphoses, 15, 19, 56-7, 86 mimesis, 7, 14-15, 20, 27, 47, 56-7, 73-6, 85, 89-91, 94-6, 104, 113-14, 125-6, 128-9 mind, 4-7, 12, 18, 25-7, 29, 31-2, 34, 39, 47-9, 55, 61, 66-7, 78, 140, 146 female model of, 47, 140 Monserrat, D., 131-2

Montiglio, S., 38, 100, 138, 148, 150, 152 Morris, D., 41, 136-9, 146 mortality, 29, 71, 83, 103 mother, 18, 37, 43, 45-6, 53, 61-2, 92, 94, 140, 142, 148 mourning, 34-5, 40-1, 45, 53, 87, 98-9, 107, 126, 138 Murnaghan, S., 28-34, 36, 38, 41-3, 50, 61-2, 131, 135, 137-9, 141, 143, 154 myth, 20, 57, 73, 84-5, 100, 103, 110, 118-19, 121, 125, 145, 150, 152 Nessus, 91, 105 Nietzsche, F., 1, 2, 8, 131, 133, 135, 149 Odysseus, 15, 61-2, 65, 74, 79, 100, 117-18, 121, 143, 145-6, 150 Odyssey, 50, 57, 62, 74, 117-18, 125, 146 Oedipus, 16, 19, 27, 38, 43, 101, 122, 139, 147, 154 offstage, 19, 34, 36 onstage, 34-6, 107 Ormand, K., 86, 105, 134, 147, 149-51, 154 Padel, R., 39, 47, 50, 53, 55, 132-4, 136-42, 148, 151, 154 Paglia, C., 133-4, 148-9, 153 pain, in tragedy, 25-6, 56 Pandora, 20, 48, 50, 58, 71, 75, 77, 140-1, 145 parthenos, 22, 29, 50, 52, 54, 58, 69, 83, 86-91, 107, 148 pathology, 21, 51-2 Pentheus, 15, 18, 30, 32, 37, 50, 55, 66, 73, 82, 89, 92, 94-7, 114, 120-4, 149 peplos, 85, 91, 104, 123; see also robe performance, 11-13, 15, 72, 97 Phaedra, 14, 22, 27, 35, 39, 42, 53, 55, 58, 71-2, 77, 88-90, 95, 141-2, 146 Philoctetes, 22, 24, 35, 75, 92 pity, 19, 28, 35, 37, 40, 65, 67, 86, 124, 139, 143 Plato, 6, 11, 46, 60, 63, 66, 75, 113, 118, 126-8, 132, 137-8, 140-1, 154-5

186

Index Republic, 81, 87, 113, 126, 128-9, 132 ponos, 23, 26, 30, 50, 52, 64, 76-7, 82, 87-8, 90, 92, 136-7, 148 Porter, J., 7, 73, 131-2, 145 psukhe, 47, 49, 56, 100, 132 pyre, 98, 103, 105

speech, 3, 13, 22, 24, 28, 30-4, 37-43, 65, 67, 139, 142 Spelman, E., 140, 143-4 suicide, 70, 101-5, 108, 119, 122, 145, 150-1 sword, 23, 35, 39, 45, 67, 70, 83, 89, 91, 102-4, 145

Rabinowitz, N., 115, 133, 135-6, 141, 151, 153 Rehm, R., 99, 147, 150-1 Richlin, A., 132-3 risk, 17, 47, 59, 62-4, 69, 70, 78, 80, 89, 120, 127, 146, 153 robe, 23, 85-6, 91-3, 97, 104-5, 116, 118, 123, 147, 149 woman’s, 85, 104

theatre, 2, 5, 6, 10-12, 14-15, 20-1, 30-1, 42, 44, 47, 87, 114, 116, 125-9, 133 Theseus, 28, 61, 72, 77, 86, 89, 107, 109 touch, 65, 143 tragedy effects of, 10, 29, 124, 126, 129 features of, 20, 55, 77 processes of, 25, 31, 128 tragic dissonance, 13, 36, 56-8, 72-8, 89, 96, 122, 131, 134, 145 exchange, 115-16 truth, 33, 40, 58, 74-7, 112, 135

sacrifice, 22, 45-6, 61-3, 65, 67, 137 Sappho, 30, 44, 137 satyrs, 85, 112, 147, 152 Scott, J., 153 Segal, C., 36, 40, 86-7, 99, 107, 113, 115, 122, 124-5, 135-9, 143, 147-54 sexual difference, 13, 48, 80, 82, 85, 116, 120, 133-4, 140, 146 sexuality, 1, 4, 8, 9, 52, 65, 84, 131, 133 Silk, M., 83, 146-7, 151-2 Sirens, 39, 40 Sissa, G., 131, 144-5, 148 Socrates, 88, 118, 126-8, 150 soma, 3, 28-9, 31-3, 37-41, 54, 57, 100, 125, 139 sons, 37, 41, 47, 61-2, 68, 93, 98-9, 103, 105, 110, 150 Sophocles, 8, 16, 18-19, 23, 27-8, 34-5, 41-3, 87-8, 90-1, 93, 98-107, 111-12, 119 Ajax, 32, 61, 65, 67, 102, 118, 148, 152 Heracles, 72, 74, 81, 95, 99, 107, 151 Oedipus, 36, 43, 75, 101, 122, 139, 147 Philoctetes, 22, 24, 35, 41, 92 Trachiniae, 9-11, 22-3, 35-6, 75-6, 81-7, 90-1, 93, 95-6, 98-9, 106, 112-16, 118-19, 134-5, 145-7 soul, 1, 46-9, 63, 76, 100, 128, 132 spear, 102, 104, 109-10 spectator, 9, 13, 27-8, 37, 99, 114, 125

uncertainty, 7, 20, 105-8, 110, 113, 119-20, 122, 139 undoing, 9, 11, 52, 55, 79, 81-2 unmaking, 11, 18, 95, 149 Vernant, J.P., 1, 16, 49, 69, 124, 131, 135-7, 140-1, 145, 147-9, 154 violence, 8, 9, 22, 24, 29, 36, 38-9, 45, 104, 113-14, 138 virgin, see parthenos vision, 38, 138-9 voice, 15, 20, 32-3, 39, 49, 57, 64, 77, 135, 137 vulnerability, 21, 26, 28-9, 37, 56, 68, 96-7 war, 2, 52-3, 56, 62, 64-5, 68-71, 82, 89, 91, 109, 148 warrior, 53, 63, 65, 67-9, 74, 89, 98, 102, 104, 117, 148 weeping, 40, 62, 86-7, 100, 125, 143, 148 wife, 67, 70, 89, 91, 93, 104, 106-10, 118 Winkler, J., 67, 81, 131, 143-4, 146, 150 Wohl, V., 49, 91, 98, 115, 119, 133-5, 141, 145-7, 149-54

187

Index woman, 15-18, 44-50, 52-5, 57-8, 62-4, 66-7, 70-3, 80-3, 85-90, 101-5, 107-9, 123-6, 144-5 womanish, 66-7, 69, 87, 127-8 woman’s death, a, 70, 102-3, 119, 122, 145, 151 women, exchange of, 91, 98 Worman, N., 40, 138-42 wounding, 26, 39, 67, 69, 71, 90-1, 148-9

wounds, 16, 19, 21-2, 37-8, 69, 70, 92, 98, 101-2, 110, 136 Wyke, M., 4, 131-2, 134, 146, 153 youth, 66, 69, 80, 95-6, 122, 146, 148 Zeitlin, F., 21, 27, 30-2, 37, 45-6, 50-2, 61, 64, 69, 90, 115, 131, 133-8, 140-51, 153-5 Zeus, 23, 40, 51-2, 73, 93, 106, 121

188