Euripides' Revolution under Cover: An Essay 9781501704055

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Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

A volume in the series Cornell Studies in Classical Philology Edited by Frederick M. Ahl, Annetta Alexandridis, Theodore R. Brennan, Charles F. Brittain, Gail Fine, Michael Fontaine, Kim Haines-Eitzen, David P. Mankin, Sturt W. ­Manning, Alan J. Nussbaum, Hayden N. Pelliccia, Verity Platt, Pietro Pucci, ­Hunter R. Rawlings III, Éric Rebillard, Jeffrey S. Rusten, Barry S. Strauss, and Michael Weiss A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Euripides’s Revolution under Cover An Essay

Pietro Pucci

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2016 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pucci, Pietro, author.   Euripides’s revolution under cover : an essay / Pietro Pucci.    pages cm. — (Cornell studies in classical philology)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-5017-0061-3 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Euripides—Criticism and interpretation.  2.  Gods, Greek, in literature.  3.  Anthropomorphism in literature.  I.  Title.   PA3978.P83 2016  882'.01—dc23   2015036262 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii   1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition

1

  2. Anthropomorphism

4

  3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia14   4. Some Connotations of Sophia20   5. Polyneices’s Truth

30

  6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric

32

  7. E  ros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War

34

  8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye

43

  9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?

46

10. Phaedra

49

11. Hermione: The Andromache61

vi   Contents

12. Female Victims of War: The Troades71 13. The Survival in Poetry

79

14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”

82

15. T  he Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the Suppliant Women95 16. P  olitical Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress

103

17. How to Deliberate a War

112

18. Democracy and Monarchy

121

19. The Battle

125

20. The Rescue of the Corpses

128

21. Return to Arms

138

22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority

142

23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City

154

24. Pentheus and Teiresias

158

25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round

163

26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon

169

27. Initiation and Sacrifice

176

28. Victory and Defeat

185

29. Euripides’s Poetry

191

Bibliography205 Subject Index

217

Index Locorum

225

Acknowledgments

During the elaboration and writing of this book I received help and inspiration from many scholars, including my Cornell colleagues, who decided to publish it in the Cornell Studies in Classical Philology series. In particular, I received valuable suggestions from Hayden Pelliccia, who offered creative comments on my earlier version of the book; Fred Ahl, himself an important Euripideanist; Jeffrey Rusten, with whom I frequently talked about my work; Charles Brittain; and Michael Fontaine. Glenn Altschuler read parts of the book with a strong concern for its style. Peter Potter, of Cornell University Press, provided insightful suggestions about the structure of the essay. Michele Napolitano helped me with some details of the bibliography. I thank all of them. To mention all the scholars and friends with whom, for many years, I spoke of Euripides, or whose works I read would require a much longer preface. They are represented in my text, and they contributed to the creation of this portrait of Euripides’s fascinating and disquieting writing.

Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

1.  Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition The title of this book is an oxymoron. Revolutions can be conceived under cover, but then they explode. The Euripidean revolution I describe in this book is not explosive in this way, nor is it prepared with great fanfare. The book’s title reflects an aspect of the oxymoronic and paradoxical poetics of Euripides’s plays. This study focuses on what I take to be the two overarching aims of Euripides’s poetic game and law of composition: to elaborate a consistent criticism of the anthropomorphic nature of the Greek gods, and to provide audiences and readers with the wisdom and the strength to endure the distress of life. Together, these two aims are at the heart of the Euripidean revolution. They are also deeply inter-connected. The criticism of anthropomorphism undercuts the interventions that the gods, armed with human-like passions and finalities, enact among the mortals. The suspension of these interventions leaves human beings responsible for their actions, but also deprived of any external recourse. If Zeus—to take an example—ceases being perceived as the god administering justice, and appears as merely another name for “Necessity,” the prayers of wronged and humiliated human beings will have no recourse: their prayers will be in vain. In this condition, what they need is the wisdom and the strength to endure the injustice they are suffering. Euripides’s plays are indeed designed to administer just this teaching and deliver these resources with healing effects. His language aims at being a language of sophia, in the sense of an enlightened, sensitive, and performative poetic event. Since both aims, the criticism of anthropomorphism and the rousing of individual wisdom, derive from philosophical and sophistic culture, they introduce flashes of enlightened thought in Euripides’s texts.1 The revolutionary momentum lies in the first aim, suspending the traditional anthropomorphic view of the gods. 1.  I employ the word “enlightenment” and its cognates, though I am aware of their anachronistic impropriety when applied to fifth-century Greek culture. With these words I do not intend to evoke the complex meanings and implication of the ­eighteenth-century cultural revolution, but only some of its connotations: the emerging in the fifth century of a philosophical and a literary production that questioned and criticized the previous mythical conglomerate or hypertext, and in turn brought about new ways of thinking. It privileged the value of evidence, the analysis of language, the knowledge of comparative cultures, the individual experience, the working of reason

2    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

According to the traditional view, to the mythical hypertext, the gods control human destinies and act through impulses and motivations that are similar to human ones. Euripides’s plays develop various strategies to demystify this view of the divine. I mention here only a few. The plays portray the gods behaving in criminal, unwise, and arbitrary ways through indomitable passion. This behavior convinces a character like Heracles that such beings cannot be gods. At times, the plays suggest that the traditional gods are the embodiments of impersonal and cosmic forces: Zeus is Necessity, Aphrodite is sex, Dionysus is wine, and so on. When the gods are stripped of their human-like passions and personal motivations, the whole carapace of the traditional myth is subverted. Sometimes the two poetic aims are explicitly contrasted in exhilarating dramatic debates that appear almost philosophically inspired: in the Troades, Hecuba, arguing against Helen, extols the sinful responsibility of the adulterous woman who tries to justify her ruinous behavior by attributing it to Aphrodite’s doing. The rich and fertile innovations that I am describing have not escaped the critics of Euripides’s plays: Zeitlin, Lloyd, Kovacs, Mastronarde, Roisman, Allan, Goldhill, Dué, and Susanetti, to name only a few recent scholars, have dealt with these aspects of Euripides’s theater. Yet, for some of them it has been impossible to characterize these innovations as enlightened strokes capable of subverting the ideological structure of Greek mythology. Others, who have, on the contrary, appreciated the tremendous intellectual energy of these ideas, have often found it difficult to interpret an entire play as fully marked by enlightened principles. And there is a factual reason, among others, for this. Euripides had to introduce the new philosophical principles and dramatic effects in plots and productions that traditionally staged anthropomorphic gods. This initial condition was unavoidable and created what I call his “under cover strategy”: a representation of anthropomorphic gods that endeavored to empty the anthropomorphism from those figures, and to intimate a different divine notion. and intelligence (sunesis). I prefer the word “enlightenment” to the word “rationalism” that is often used by historians of the period: reason and rationalism come to us from the same eighteenth century, and have even today, especially after Freud and postmodernism, hazy outlines and questionable implications. When I employ the word “reason” I generally add the Greek word to which I am referring.

  Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition    3

This strategy triggered a variety of textual tactics, including the introduction of double plots, long philosophical and political debates, enlightened utopias, apparently contradictory arguments, ironic scenarios, and, on occasion, what I have called—following Genette (1983)—“metalepsisscenes,” that is, scenes that in tone and substance disrupt the main flow of the text. In this book I expose these enlightened textual strategies, demonstrating their referential power both within particular scenes and with respect to the interpretation of the entire play. To cite only one example, in the political arena, the Suppliant Women stages a sort of double plot: Theseus, starting from a position of enlightened principle, analyzes the legitimacy of the Athenian armed intervention in Thebes and decisively denies it, but, after his mother’s pleading, he accepts this military intervention, which then unfurls as the plot of the play. The first denial, however, with its innovative motivations, frames Athens’s entire action in the play, casting suspicion on the city’s alleged political generosity, justice, and greatness while intimating that this portrait is a mere propagandistic myth. A careful analysis of these textual strategies, coupled with an appreciation for the implicit connotations that emerge from them, has allowed me to elaborate new interpretations of passages, scenes, or plays many times visited by Euripidean scholars. For whatever reasons, most critics have been cautious about the direction I have chosen: a few have preferred to make of Euripides—malgré lui—a traditional poet; while those who appreciate the innovative and sophistic energy of his dramas have not always seen how far and deep this energy goes.2 Although in principle I might have traced Euripides’s main aims across his entire corpus, I have chosen to study them in plays and scenes that focus

2. On the conservative side, see, for instance, Kovacs (1987) and Mastronarde (2010, 156–61), who argues for a cautious view of the gods in Euripides: he endeavors to integrate Euripides’s “novelties” in the rich and complex variety of moral and theological aspects that the “literary” figures of gods possess in Greek myth and especially in Greek tragedy. In this integration, Euripides’s enlightened views would not produce any revolution. On the opposite side, Dodds (1929, 1951), Loraux (especially 2002), and Goldhill (1986, 161ff. and 233ff.) open new paths and offer—as I will show—creative suggestions for my analysis. For a particularly original reading, see Segal (1993, 214ff.), who interprets the characters’ views of the gods as a revelation of the characters’ own natures and values. The list of great Euripideanists is very long: for an instructive survey of the views of Euripides’s gods in the second half of the twentieth century, see Kullmann 1987.

4    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

on some of the most debated issues of his time: language, eros, and politics. The interpretation of Euripides’s views on language, eros, and politics is arduous and highlights complex, unresolved questions; yet, though unresolved, the mirage of a language of truth, the uncheckable power of sex, and the frustrating game of politics on display in Euripides’s theater yield many exciting insights, pleasant and hopeful promises, and admirable utopias. But men in power and rulers of the cities seem unable to fully appreciate what is at hand, and because of this they force other human beings to endure violence and nonsense. Unwise prophecies and nasty inspirations complete the tragic scenario.

2. Anthropomorphism Euripides employs a number of different textual moves that have the effect of suspending or undercutting the gods’ anthropomorphism. I will single out a few of these moves here. One of the more frequent ones consists in conflating the divine image with a cosmic principle that depersonalizes the gods and limits the richness of their portraits and timai (honors and attributes). As a consequence, human beings confront a universal, indifferent force and not a personally motivated indomitable power. In the Alcestis, Admetus returns home after the funeral ceremony for his wife and is unable to confront the emptiness of his house and the desolation of his new life. Nothing can bring Alcestis back, and appropriately the Chorus of his friends tries to console him by singing a hymn to Anankē (Necessity): I have soared aloft both with the Muses3 and with high thought, and having engaged in many reflections, I found nothing mightier than Necessity.4 . . . Of this goddess alone it is impossible to approach either the altars or the image, nor yet does she pay attention to sacrifices. May you not, lady, come upon me with mightier force than formerly in my life. Truly, whatever

3.  This passage opens up the problem of the very interpretation of διὰ μούσας, for we do not know whether the Muses are intended here as the goddesses of music and poetry or as a simple hypostasis of songs and poems. 4.  κρεῖσσον οὐδὲν Ἀνάγκας ηὗρον. Susanetti (2001, 258–59) reads in these lines an autobiographic touch.

 Anthropomorphism   5 Zeus nods to, he brings it to fulfillment with your assent. And you subdue with your violence the steel among the Chalybi, and there is no respect (αἰδώς) in your unrelenting heart. (Alc. 962–83)

Dodds (1929, 101) writes: “For Euripides, Man is the slave, not the favorite child of the gods (Orestes 418),5 and the name of the ageless order is Necessity. Kρεῖσσον οὐδὲν Ἀνάγκας ηὗρον cry the Chorus of the Alcestis 965 (cf. Hel. 513 and the repeated instances that Man is subject to the same cycle of physical necessity as Nature, frs. 332, 419).”6 Dodds is correct in not identifying Necessity with Death as some readers do:7 although the collaboration of Anankē with Death is touched on especially in lines 966–72, and although Zeus is the god who killed Asklepios because he brought men back to life (Alc. 3–4, 121–29), in this context Anankē has a greater range of powers than human death. Continuing his analysis, Dodds writes: “All else is guesswork. Is Zeus some physical principle like the ether (fr. 869; cf. 836, 911, 935) or is he the mythological projection of what is highest in ourselves? Or is he just another name for ‘Necessity’?” Avoiding a specific answer, he continues: “Euripides lets his puppets speculate, but Euripides does not know. His own position seems to be fairly summed up in one of the fragments (793):8 ‘Men are not masters of these high arguments. He that pretends to have knowledge concerning the gods, has in truth no higher science than to persuade men by assertion.’ And with that the whole of the traditional Greek mythology crumbles to the ground.” Dodds then contrasts this skepticism with Euripides’s “religiosity” and, after quoting the famous passage in the Hippolytus, 189ff., he offers his well-known interpretation of the Bacchae. 5.  Orestes: “We are slaves of the gods, whatever the ‘gods’ are” (δουλεύομεν θεοῖς, ὅτι ποτ’ εἰσὶν οἱ θεοί). See West 1987: “whatever ‘the gods’ are: a Euripidean cliché (after Aesch. Ag. 160), cf. HF. 1263, Tro. 885, Hel. 1137, Ba. 894, fr. 480. We are governed by powers we do not understand.” Also “whatever the gods are” might question and suspend their traditional anthropomorphic nature. Thus it is obvious that human beings are subject to Necessity. 6.  Euripides is probably not the first to assert equivalence between Zeus and Necessity. For instance, in Hesiod, Theog. 615–16, the will of Zeus is implicitly identified with Necessity, though of course from a different perspective and with different consequences.. 7.  See, for instance, Parker 2007, 247. 8.  In Kannicht, TGF, this is fr. 795, and I will cite it from now on as fr. 795.

6    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

The reader will have observed that Dodds does not take fr. 795 as a speculation by one of Euripides’s puppets but as Euripides’s own fundamental speculation that ultimately sinks the whole mythology. The passage, indeed, sounds like a new version of Protagoras’s famous declaration regarding the gods, and nothing prevents us from attributing it to one of Euripides’s puppets, rather than to Euripides himself. Indeed, this is the inevitable difficulty with all the ideological and theoretical statements in Euripides’s work—we are not sure to whom to attribute them. Dodds’s commentary leaves open two questions related to that vision: First, how can the universal forces, which in Euripides appear to be synonyms or substitutions for the traditional gods, be understood as divine entities and objects of cult, since they are also indifferent, cosmic principles? Second, how can their specific relationship to the traditional gods be described? Necessity, Eros, and Tukhē are attached in some substantive way to traditional gods: Zeus, Aphrodite, and Hera. This conflation of anthropomorphic divinities with cosmic principles creates critical difficulties in Dodds’s analysis, especially when he suggests that Aphrodite in the Hippolytus may be a simple hypostasis of sex. This does not convince me. A cosmic force acquires divine power and does not deprive the traditional divinity of its divine personality. A sort of conflation occurs whereby the traditional god and the cosmic divine force coalesce in a hybrid nature. This conflation has a traditional ring, and, though conceptually difficult for us moderns to accept, the hybrid form did appear normal to the archaic Greeks. One has only to see how Gaia (Earth) in Hesiod’s Theogony is simultaneously the planet Earth and the anthropomorphic character Earth, wife of Ouranos, to realize the frequency and the normality of this feature. In the Theogony we read: “And he [Ouranos] used to hide his children in a cavern of Earth (Γαίης ἐν κευθμῶνι) as soon as each was born” (156–58); “Vast Earth groaned (ἡ δ’ ἐντὸς στοναχίζετο Γαῖα πελώρη), being tight-pressed inside, and she thought up a crafty and nasty wile (δολίην δὲ κακὴν ἐπεφράσσατο τέχνην)” (159–60). The “vast” earth and the crafty Earth are the same divine person, and both sides of this hybrid entity are holy, divine. Because the ancient Greeks were accustomed to conceiving the divine in such a form, it ought not to have been difficult for them to conceive of Zeus as a “person,” an impersonal process, Necessity, and a divine phenomenon of the sky. In Euripides’s dramas, such conflation undermines the traditional anthropomorphic gods to the extent that it may be shown to undercut their

 Anthropomorphism   7

personal purposes and aims. Furthermore the hybridization shows a face of the divine that, deprived of personal favorable or hostile intentions, allows mortals to design their own strategies of assent, resistance, or endurance. Phaedra is able to devise strategies that may help her to defeat the sexual desire that tortures her. She fails, but her attempt constitutes a sublime move toward self-control and self-realization. The cosmic, depersonalized force exists as a new god in conflation with the traditional god, as the passage from the Alcestis quoted above confirms: Of this goddess alone it is impossible to approach either the altars or the image, nor yet does she pay attention to sacrifices. May you not, lady, come upon me with mightier force than formerly in my life. Truly, whatever Zeus nods to, he brings it to fulfillment with your assent.

The Chorus asserts that Necessity is a goddess. They add that she does not accept rituals. Accordingly, the temples, sacrifices, and images through which human beings try to communicate with and persuade their gods are meaningless and useless if Necessity and Zeus are the same god. This recognition invites human beings to probe what in their individual lives or their society depends on Necessity, the law of nature—another cosmic principle attributed to Zeus—or Chance. Chance is a devastating addition to the anthropomorphic Olympus, for the culture of Euripides’s century discovers how much in life depends on it. In Thucydides, for instance, intelligence (gnōmē)—as one of the determining forces in the making of human history—gradually loses ground to “chance.”9 Only when Zeus does not contest Necessity is it then legitimate and useful to pray to the goddess Anankē that she may be lenient: “May you not, lady, come upon me with mightier force than formerly in my life. Truly, whatever Zeus nods to, he brings it to fulfillment with your assent.” The Chorus embraces both Zeus and Necessity, and in this way the friends of Admetus subvert the structure of the Olympian gods: as Necessity cannot be addressed and has no personal intentions or ends, the hope of the one who prays is that Zeus may find Necessity available to deliver what the human being prays for.10 Even in this pious case, the autonomy   9.  See Edmunds 1975; Nussbaum 1986. 10.  Zaidman 2001, 129–30.

8    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

and power of the traditional gods are drastically undercut, since they depend on the external assent that no argument or persuasion can deliver. One aspect of this question is directly confronted (although resolved in a different way) by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro, when both the priest and Socrates realize that ritual practice is something that gods do not need, and consequently they conclude that it cannot justify or explain “piety.” At this point, it may be useful to consider the minidrama that is played out in the Alcestis through the character of Thanatos (Death). Thanatos is already known from the Iliad (16.453–57 and 681–83), where, with his brother Hypnos, he carries the body of Sarpedon home to Lycia for burial by his kinsmen. In the prologue of the Alcestis, Thanatos starts a dialogue with Apollo. Death appears as black-robed (Alc. 843) and winged (a sort of conflation of Thanatos and Hades, 261) and carries a sword. No supernatural elements mark his entrance. He should probably be defined as a daimon or as an “ogreish creature of popular mythology,” as Dale (1954, 54) suggests; or as a figure like Charon with his boat (252–57). Insofar as he is Death, however, he is certainly a figure connected with the rule of Necessity. Necessity, therefore, is embodied in synonymic, personalized figures other than Zeus. Apollo asks Thanatos as a favor to take the body of an old human being instead of a young person. Apollo assumes that Thanatos may accept a switch, such as Apollo had obtained from the Moirai. Thanatos refuses, justifying his decision by saying, “You know my ways” (Alc. 61). “Yes, ways hateful to men,” Apollo replies, “and hated by the gods” (62).11 Apollo, of course, should have known that these ways are unchangeable, because they are those of Necessity (here Death), but the text has Apollo playing a fablelike role, which, in agreement with Heracles, undercuts the laws of Necessity (Alc. 64–69). In fact, Alcestis also breaks the laws of Necessity in some way, since she accepts death in place of Admetus, whose death was indeed necessary unless someone chose to die in his stead. Her choice has altered the necessary sequence of the events. Immediately after the Chorus’s celebration of Anankē (Necessity), Heracles defeats Thanatos and snatches Alcestis’s body from Thanatos’s arms. 11.  A short argument ensues about Thanatos’s timai: if Thanatos chooses younger victims his timai are larger. As Apollo turns this point around, Thanatos mocks him. Thanatos is Death, the figure of the human necessity of dying, and cannot be persuaded, even by a god, for he hears no prayers, just like Anankē.

 Anthropomorphism   9

This outcome contests, at least at the metadramatic level, the inescapable and violent power the Chorus attributes to Anankē: “And you subdue with your violence the steel among the Chalybi, and there is no respect (αἰδώς) in your unrelenting heart” (Alc. 980–83). Heracles has defeated the will of Death, Apollo has saved Admetus, and Alcestis’s choice has voided the necessity of Admetus’s death.12 The celebration of Necessity just before Heracles’s exploit has serious ironic and metadramatic significance. By having Heracles defeat the figure of Necessity the text extols the power of the son of Zeus and may suggest playfully, as in a fable, that in the figure of the double, Zeus and Necessity, Zeus seems now to be the stronger of the two. Heracles’s victory brings to fulfillment Apollo’s initial prophecy that Alcestis will be free from death. Apollo in the play is not only prophet but also musician, and in both roles he oversees Admetus’s destiny, mocking, like a poet, hateful but noninvincible Death and preparing with our poet the a fable-like atmosphere in which Alcestis is snatched from Death’s hands. In comic roles, Euripides’s Apollo can be sympathetic and wise. But besides these internal divine connections, the antagonistic force of Alcestis and Heracles has a deep hunan consistency and function in the drama. What challenges Necessity, in both events, is Alcestis’s love for Admetus and Heracles’s love for Admetus.13 Love is here the mere human force (indeed, with no divine name and figure) that drives Alcestis to die and Heracles to risk death. This force is individual, extremely serious and motivated, standing against the impersonal figure Zeus/Necessity and the daimon Thanatos.14 If Euripides’s audience and readers are familiar with his writing principles they will understand the play as follows.15 The scene in which Alcestis

12.  “Irony” in this context and rhetorical function is a particular form of falsehood hidden under a veneer of truth. Note that, in the case of the sources or quotations of both parties, the irony would be directed at philosophers, on the one hand, and myth, on the other. 13. Apollo’s philia for Admetus has provided the condition for Alcestis’s and Heracles’s love to manifest its unlimited force. 14.  Both Necessity and Zeus agree on the law that forbids the resurrection of mortals. Zeus is made present in the play as a figure of Necessity when the Chorus narrates that he killed Asklepios, who was bringing the dead back to life (Alc. 121–30). Heracles invokes Zeus solemnly as he moves to fight against Thanatos (Alc. 837–39). 15.  In the light of my reading in Pucci 2011.

10    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover

dies on stage with a serenity equal to Admetus’s despair unfurls serious intimations and delivers a healing effect. First, as Alcestis shows, there is no need to be terrorized by death: it is a severance from what is dear, but nothing else. She prepares herself for it with extraordinary dignity and without a tear, unless on the bed for whose sake she has chosen to die. The text stages the only theatrical performance of dying in all of Greek drama; at least it is a scene that is unique in all of Greek theater as we know it. The audience ought to have shivered and shuddered at various moments of her singing, including her farewell to life (243–44): “ O Sun, light of the day, circlings of high, racing clouds”; her hallucination of Charon’s presence (252–53): “I see, I see the two-oared boat in the lake. Charon, the ferryman of the dead, his hand on the boat pole calls me”; and her moving “farewell” to her children (270–71): “Children, children, your mother is no more, no more! Farewell, my children, joy be yours as you look on the light of the Sun!”16 For this poignant part of her performance, she sings. The immediate contact with death, the sense of isolation it creates, the severance it enacts are communicable only at a transcendent and spiritual level: one in which words are music. Then she returns to a spoken and reasoned performance: with lucidity and dignity she declares her last wishes and insures that Admetus will not impose a stepmother on her children. She expires serenely, even finding words to console Admetus (375–93). The members of the audience learn about death, feel pity, and create in themselves an emotional repository to protect the self from death’s unexpected and violent arrival. During the funeral scenes, the audience learns that human beings should be prepared for their death: when death shall reach them, they will suffer less. Death belongs to the realm of Necessity, a goddess without temples and cult. The audience and the readers also learn the hard law of sacrificial generosity (870–71). Admetus can no longer live without Alcestis. He tries to kill himself (897–902). Through his paradoxical behavior, the text explicitly shows to the audience that it is not true that “nothing is more valuable than life“ (301). Alcestis has transgressed that principle, and now Admetus, for whom she has died, is ready to follow her. He, who had accepted his

16.  She picks up her emotional address to the Sun and heaven with which she had begun her singing: the life that she loses will be continued by her children.

 Anthropomorphism   11

dear wife’s death in order to live, discovers that death for him is now more valuable than life. Necessity does not frighten him anymore. He loves death (866–67: “I envy the dead, I love them, I long to be in their place”).17 Since these healing emotional and conceptual effects have been delivered, through painful and shuddering utterances and actions, Euripides can now offer, through the resuscitation scene, a metatheatrical comment on them. The resuscitation of Alcestis by Heracles is a fairy-tale event whose consoling outcome does not simply produce the happy end of the play; the literal rescue of Alcestis from death matches the metadramatic rescue of the audience from the fear of death. The final scene leaves Alcestis poised between life and death: she cannot speak yet or enjoy the consciousness of being alive. It is as if the text wanted to tell the audience that the story moves between fictional comedy and real life: the story is a mere comedy, just theater, but its healing and shivering effects are real and should little by little deliver their remedies and spiritual advantages. As I have tried to show in this brief analysis, the conflation of a divine figure with a cosmic force produces an impersonal principle, “Necessity.” The mythological figures, Zeus, Thanatos (the personified name of death), and Charon (the bogeyman) with their dramatic interventions, are finally absorbed by the realm of Necessity. Now human beings can face this impersonal power without fear, and even discover that Necessity does not need to be constraining at all; indeed, one may even learn to embrace it. Another example is offered by Troades 884–88, where Zeus is assimilated both to his traditional figure and to Anankē and other principles: ὦ γῆς ὄχημα κἀπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν, ὅστις ποτ’ εἶ σύ, δυστόπαστος εἰδέναι, Ζεύς, εἴτ’ ἀνάγκη φύσεος εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν,

17. He performs this role by chanting in “recitative anapaests”—therefore not s­ inging—and, as Susanetti (2001, 252–53) observes, in the exchanges with the Chorus, Admetus does not have the guiding role that is usual in other tragic laments: he answers at each moment to the solicitation of the Chorus. He is listening to his friends’ consoling words, and at the same time he is lost and gazing at another world. As Parker (2007, 222) remarks, “Admetus’ first anapaestic system [861–71] features much repetition and much anaphora at the beginning of consecutive dimeters and even half-meters.” It is indeed a passage of extreme despair, as he does not even seem able to proffer words, but screams (e.g., 862–63): ἰώ μοί μοι, αἰαῖ . / ποῖ βῶ; ποῖ στῶ; τί λέγω; τί δὲ μή;

12    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover προσηυξάμην σε· πάντα γὰρ δι’ ἀψόφου βαίνων κελεύθου κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ’ ἄγεις. You who support the earth and have a seat on it, Whoever you may be, so enigmatic to know, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the intellect of Man, I pray to you. Truly, moving by a silent path, You lead all human affairs to justice.

All the difficulties that interpreters encounter in trying to resolve the enigma of the “divine” in Euripides are present in this passage. First, this amalgam is attributed to Hecuba, one of Euripides’s puppets, as Dodds would call her, but when the strategy of conflation is repeated throughout Euripides’s work, it becomes clear that this is Euripides’s chosen game. It is indeed an odd combination. Zeus is conceived both as a character in traditional mythology and as the double of Aither, Anankē, or Nous. As a character in traditional mythology, he has a seat on earth, on Dodona, on Mt. Ida, as readers of Homer well know. It is hard to know him as Aeschylus’s Zeus in Agamemnon 160; and he is the god of justice in Hesiod, where he receives prayers as the father of Justice (Dikē), prayers that could not be addressed to him as Nous or Necessity.18 As a support of the earth, Zeus is identified with Aither, following Diogenes of Apollonia’s theory about Air as divine principle, main source of life, and support of the earth. The line in Euripides, γῆς ὄχημα κἀπὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν, “You who support the earth and have a seat on it,” can be compared with the last line of Hippocrates, De flatibus liber 3 (= DK 64 C2): καὶ μὴν ἥ τε γῆ τουτέου βάθρον, οὗτός 18.  Some readings (see Diels 1887, 12–13) have explained all three designations as deriving from Heraclitus: for instance, the idea that Zeus leads all mortal business to justice can be compared to Heraclitus’s view of the lightning that rules all. But the philosophical references seem to me less obvious or relevant than the reference to the well-known attributes of Zeus: in Hesiod (Theog. 902; Op. 256ff.) he is father of Dikē (Justice), and this must have been a familiar and specific reference for the audience. It is the phrase “a silent path” that makes interpretation of this reference difficult: this detail seems to emphasize the enigmatic nature of Zeus, for it suggests the unknown and invisible ways in which Zeus proceeds in establishing justice. It should be added that Menelaus’s astonishment, and his failure to understand the prayer, underline not only the skillful combination of traditional and new features, but also, and especially, his mythological, and traditional, way of thinking, a trait that Euripides likes to attribute to Menelaus: see, for instance, Orestes 396–97.

 Anthropomorphism   13

τε τῆς γῆς ὄχημα, κενεόν τε οὐδέν ἐστιν τούτου, “Furthermore the earth is the base of the air, and the air is the support of the earth, and nothing is void of air.” As Diels (1887, 14) notes, Hippocrates and Euripides have before their eyes the same passage of Diogenes of Apollonia, but “the sophist has preserved the technical word βάθρον that corresponds to ὄχημα, while the poet has preferred a paraphrase.” Nous, as divine intellect or mind, which controls the world and of which man partakes, is a principle found in Empedocles (DK 31 B 134) and Anaxagoras (DK 59 B 42 e 47–48), in addition to Euripides’s fr. 1018. The precise source of the notion “the law of nature” is more difficult to identify. Heinimann (1945, 130–31) connects it with a popular idea derived from the sophists and drawn from the scientific and medical explanation of nature and Man. Menelaus, in whose presence Hecuba utters the prayer quoted above, fails to understand it and accuses her of applying a “new” sense or new features to the gods in her prayer (Tro. 889: τί δ’ ἔστιν; εὐχὰς ὡς ἐκαίνισας θεῶν). Euripides must have loved writing this line. The novelty is mindboggling for the poor Menelaus. The concoction would not even be a prayer unless it were recognized that Zeus’s just decisions are in agreement with the laws of nature, which of course is a very questionable expectation.19 Yet not impossible: as we will see in the Suppliant Women, Theseus imagines a natural world whose laws have the imprint of an anonymous and cosmic divine will that is not easy to identify with a specific Olympian god. The passage from the Troades is ironic. At the communication level it qualifies in amusing tones the relationship between Hecuba and Menelaus. At the message level the audience remains unsure about how serious the allusion to Anaxagoras and the other philosophical sources is, and whether, in accord with this composite figure of Zeus, Helen should be punished because of her betrayal of Menelaus. What insures Zeus’s just decision is explicitly mentioned in the last line of the prayer: his multiple attributes weaken both his protection of justice and Hecuba’s pretense that her claim is fair. It is impossible to know how Necessity of nature or Nous 19. Hecuba reserves the attribution of justice to Zeus for the last appeal of her prayer, perhaps as the most important issue in her mind, since she is determined to add arguments and accusations that prove the justice of condemning Helen to death, as Menelaus seems to have decided to do.

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would judge Helen’s errors. As we will see, Hecuba manages to condemn Helen without any support from Zeus and his Dikē. On the basis of this brief analysis of two passages, I can anticipate some remarks that will find confirmation and elaboration through the interpretation of other, longer passages in Euripides’s plays. Flashes of philosophically enlightened thoughts may appear in just a few lines, but their effects may be pervasive, across an entire play. In addition, the rhetorical construction of the passages we have considered (and many others), with its conflation of the religious and the secular, the anthropomorphic and the depersonalized, creates difficult, but fertile ground for interpretation. It may not be possible, after all, to define an all-embracing, detailed, and consistent theology in Euripides. It becomes clear, however, that through various strategies, in different characters, and on diverse occasions, Euripides fragments the identity of the traditional gods, questions their nature, while displacing it with cosmic principles, and disrupts the exclusive privilege of mythological narrative. He clears the horizon of established, all-powerful anthropomorphic powers, allowing the human mind to turn to itself and see itself as the center of its own thinking and doing.

3.  The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia My reading of Euripides aims to show that his plays stage ideological horizons in which the self (i.e., the human mind or consciousness) appears to be the autonomous source of its decisions and actions. I draw attention to sophia because its conceptual field was fertile ground for the intellectual battle that took place in Euripides’s time.20 Many characters and choruses in Euripides’s plays emphasize the healing function of sophia, which, as Euripides seems to argue, protects the self from instantiations of otherness 20.  For Protagoras, sophia is the most important virtue of man. See Plato, Protagoras 317a ff., 330a ff.). For a new way of understanding and interpreting the relationship between Euripides and the sophists, see Kerferd (1981), who devotes a chapter to the sophistic “theory of language” (68–77) and discusses other cultural aspects of language (see, for instance, 161–71); see also Conacher 1998; Allan 1999–2000, 145: “Euripides was neither a follower nor an opponent of any individual sophist, but a powerful and penetrating thinker who explored contemporary ideas in an individual way.” For the influence of Antiphon the sophist, see Diano 1961; for the influence of Prodicus, see Romilly 1986; and for the influence of the sophists on Aristophanes, see Willi 2002.

  The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia   15

and alterity. The ideation of an autonomous self, or at least of a self that through various intellectual strategies succeeds in achieving autonomy and protection, is an implicit consequence of Protagoras’s principle that “man is the measure of everything.” This Protagorean man was not exclusively the collective Mankind, but also the individual man, the man in the street. In the Cratylus (385e–386e) Plato presents Protagoras’s view of the beings (onta) of the world as one, according to which “the essence of each thing is relative to each man,” “each thing is for each man privately,” and “things are relative to us and drawn up and down by the image we have of them (or by the way they appear to us).”21 If this had been Protagoras’s real view of human perception of the onta, it is difficult to imagine how a conversation would have been possible. Yet, Protagoras’s principle would certainly not prejudice his view that language ensures the socially accepted perception and naming of things, as demonstrated by his awareness that language only occasionally fails to evoke the very nature of things. But how the subjective perception of things could intrude in Protagoras’s view of truth and of language’s socially valid performance is a question that cannot be answered, because his works have been lost. If every individual—whether its subjectivity is taken as singular or collective—represents its particular perception of the onta through language, even through deformations and distances, language will always be subjectively true (Euthyd. 283e–286d).22 How, then, can any speech be contested or disproved? Protagoras probably did not resolve this paradox but simply displaced it through the strategy of the dissoi logoi. The grounds on which the new logos, initially weak, succeeds in defeating the traditional, strong logos are questionable once the criterion of objective truth is eliminated. What is the efficient element that produces the victory of the new and weaker logos? Sheer rhetoric? This is Aristotle’s view, as he identifies Protagoras’s principle of “making the worse appear the better argument” as “a lie, not a real but an apparent probability and not found in any art, unless in rhetoric and eristic” (Rhet. 1402a5–28).23 Then imagination and innate talents are a requisite for a successful rhetorical display.

21.  In the Theaetetus (151–152a), Plato attributes to Protagoras a doctrine of perception, with corollaries pointing to similar subjectivity. 22.  See Ford 1994. 23.  ψεῦδός τε γάρ ἐστιν, καὶ οὐκ ἀληθὲς ἀλλὰ φαινόμενον εἰκός, καὶ ἐν οὐδεμιᾷ τέχνῃ ἀλλ’ ἐν ῥητορικῇ καὶ ἐριστικῇ.

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Protagoras seems to put forward an argument for the greater utility of one of the two logoi in the Theaetetus, where he is portrayed as responding to Socrates’s question about the utility of teaching wisdom, since every man has his own opinions, and all opinions are therefore true (161d3-e3). In his answer, Protagoras changes the register of the discussion from true/ false to good/bad and illustrates his point with the example of education. Teaching, he says, can be useful and beneficial: just as for a sick man health is a better condition, so even in education it is necessary to change man from a worse to a better habit; accordingly as a doctor provides the change through drugs, the sophist does it through speeches. For no one ever induced someone holding false opinions to hold true opinions. And indeed it is not possible that one thinking of things that for him do not exist or other things of which he has no experience, may think these to be always true.

How Euripides created individual characters of such tremendous vitality and of a mind-set derived from Protagoras’s writings is fascinating. Euripides invented the words and the themes, and the healing logos, of the characters’ liberated consciousness, shrouding them with sympathy and pity, and giving them voice to express their isolation, and their defenseless exposure to violence and the nonsense of life. In a lost play of Euripides, Theseus seems to refer to this healing logos: Having learned the following from a wise man, I imagined in my mind cares, calamities, and inflicted on myself exile from my fatherland, and premature deaths (thanatous . . . aōrous), and other ways of evil, so that if I had to suffer some of the things that I imagined in my mind I would not be stung more sharply (mallon dakoi) by the novelty of the event (neōtes prospeson).24

24.  Euripides, fr. 964, lines 1–6. The imagination, as Theseus’s words show, stimulates words, impressions, and emotions that constitute, as Diano (1961) has suggested, a new mental exercise, a practice against pain, a technē alupias. The idea of the advantage of being prepared for the advent of troubles and sorrows must have been a Euripidean commonplace: it is also found in Eur. Phryxus fr. 818C. In the wake of Diano’s work I have commented many times on the Euripidean texts concerned with this practice; see Pucci 1980, 29ff.

  The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia   17

A sophos taught this lesson to Theseus. This “remedy” may have been cited, in the lost play, as an effect that poetry produces by exciting this sort of imagination. What is certain is that characters in Euripides’s plays observe that this sort of remedy is expected from poetry. For instance, the Nurse in the Medea argues: You would not be wrong to call men of old foolish and not at all wise (σκαιοὺς κοὐδέν τι σοφοὺς): for while they invented songs for festivities, banquets, and dinner parties, merry music for life, no one has discovered how to stop men’s hateful grief by means of poetry and songs of many notes. . . . And yet it is a gain that men heal (κέρδος ἀκεῖσθαι) these ills by means of songs. For where are pleasant banquets, why do they raise loud songs to no purpose? The abundance of the feast at hand provides mortals with a pleasure of its own. (190–203)

I call attention to the following points: the medical image of “healing,” an adaptation in modern ideology of the traditional view that poetry induces “forgetfulness of evils and rest from cares” (Hes. Theog. 52); the notion of “gain,” which is so central in Medea’s perception of her revenge; and the fundamental idea of the sorrows that human beings must endure.25 The foolish and unwise poets who created epic poems and songs for the symposia and who are the subject of attack here contrast sharply with and give relevance to the sophoi poets who create tragic poetry, which through its rhetorical and musical strategies possesses the healing power to assuage the sorrows of mankind. Tragic poetry, when produced by a sophos poet, provides pleasure and with it various remedies, gains, and strategies that reduce and control the painfulness of life. Theseus (in fr. 964, lines 1–6) describes the remedy of a sophos through which one finds a lasting, and healing, effect by imagining or foreseeing evils that might befall one. The defensive stronghold that Euripides’s poetics has erected in the self against sorrows—which today we include in the notion of “otherness”—is actually weaker than he seems to think. Otherness (alterity) is revealed in the forms and structures that trap and divert identity and autonomy by throwing them into the meandering paths of difference, supplements, displacements, and dispossessions. The instances of otherness begin with 25.  I provide a detailed analysis of this passage from the Medea in Pucci 1980, 24–26.

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language itself, since language fails to produce any identity between itself and the world it presents and evokes. This upsetting difference is acknowledged by Phaedra (Hipp. 385–87) when she realizes that the notion of aidōs (respect, veneration, etc.) fails to identify a specific context. Euripides’s language of sophia fails to avoid all the diverse connotations, and splits, of sophia itself. The citadel of the self, of man as measure of everything, which sophia should create and shield, is therefore already open and accessible to what inevitably threatens it: difference, otherness. In fact, the identity of the word sophia itself is trapped by its different connotations and values, since it means “wisdom” but also “cleverness” and “shrewdness,” and the positive and negative aspects of these connotations are amplified in different contexts. “Wisdom” itself can connote the wisdom and the art of the old poets or those of the new, enlightened contemporary philosophers and poets. As we will see, Medea’s sophia constitutes a rhetorical skill that is at once wise and clever and devises a revenge that is both self-destructive and healing for her. The conceptual and rhetorical mind-set of sophia is a sort of pharmakon, at once healing remedy and dangerous poison, through which every theme, posture, and matter must pass, and by which each is affected. Sophia is also of crucial importance in Euripides’s work as the source of major cultural correlates. The most significant of these correlates for Euripides’s tragedies is “pity,” which emerges, as Orestes observes in the Electra (294–96), only among sophoi, by which he means wise, sensitive, refined persons.26 It is the poetic expression of this wisdom, sensitivity, and refinement that produces pity and accordingly makes Euripides the most tragic of the tragedians, as Aristotle states in the Poetics. It is remarkable that the character who argues about the nature of pity is Orestes in the Electra: his traditional heroic role as the destined and brave avenger of his father’s death does not prevent Euripides from making him a sophos, an enlightened mind, who will question the wisdom of Apollo’s oracle. As sophia frames the intellectual world of Euripides, it also transforms the mythical characters of epic and tragedy into sensitive and inquiring minds, conversing with the philosophical views of modern time. 26.  As I have shown in Pucci 2007, “pity” and “self-pity” are present in some texts in Euripides’s time but are virtues that the city’s political ideology rejects or fails to recognize.

  The Protection of the Self and the Role of Sophia   19

Euripides’s revolution reveals itself openly in the act of subverting the traditional image of the aristocratic hero. Orestes himself recognizes that pity is split, and describes one of its paradoxes: “Pity is not found in ill-bred ignorance, but only in the wise. And in fact when the wise man possesses a mind that is too wise, there is a price to be paid.”27 As commentators point out, Orestes means that sensitivity and intellectual refinement carry a certain penalty, for they add sorrow for others to one’s own. Pity affects self-awareness as self-pity, as Orestes will personally experience in the play. Pity straddles consciousness and imagination, the self and the other. Sophia offers other remedies or enlightened solutions for the diverse issues and problems of life, such as poetry, song, understanding, wise love, real piety, and so on. Although difficult to attain, these remedies signal ideational solutions, gesture toward a different world, and charge the mythical interpretation of the world with a lack, a fault, a questionable rejection of what in the enlightened world appears to be closer to wisdom, sensitivity, or sophistication. This enlightening effect reveals human blindness and life’s nonsense. Thus Euripides’s writing rests on the split foundation of sophia, whose coincidental and opposite effects are spread across his entire corpus. Accordingly we find juxtaposed and opposite versions of almost every issue. Sophia constantly questions the anthropomorphic nature of the gods, constructs hybrid and oxymoronic divine figures, and contests, with devilish skill, the wisdom (sophia) of the traditional gods. Whether Euripides’s sophia illuminates an issue or displays its own ambivalent connotations, it ultimately casts doubt on the traditional views, and favors a critical posture. The oxymoron in Euripides is not merely a rhetorical figure; it has a deconstructive, critical force. Among its split connotations, sophia has a face turned toward inquiry and dissent, and this modern face unequivocally disturbs the traditional one.28 27.  Other passages in Euripides underline this or analogous points: see in particular Heracl. 458–60: “Wise men must pray that they will have a wise man for a foe, not one of ignorant pride, for in that case the wise will get respect [pity (aidous)] and fairness in full measure.” 28.  This critical development is the soul of this book. In my earlier work I emphasized the juxtaposed, opposite versions of every issue, failing to realize that by merely denying exclusivity to a religious, metaphysical phenomenon, the text places it insidiously in an optional, and therefore uncertain, disputable category.

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4.  Some Connotations of Sophia It will not be surprising that, during the debates (agōnes) in Euripides’s plays on so many different topics,29 the speakers often develop an argument through which they both define their rhetorical art, its necessity, and its success and condemn the malevolent effects of their adversaries’ rhetoric. Confronted with these arguments and the negative representation of rhetoric, modern readers often assume that it is the intent of Euripides’s tragic text to communicate to the audience a deep suspicion about rhetoric. Suspicion certainly emerges, but the circuitousness of the theatrical gestures and the complexity of tones that are manipulated by sophia deserve some credit and serious attention. In the Medea, the agon between Jason and Medea begins with a series of accusations and insults and develops into a formal debate about the wisdom of Jason’s new marriage. Medea declares that her attack on Jason will bring her some solace: “But you [Jason] did well to come, for it will relieve my soul to tell you how wicked you are, and you will suffer as you listen to it” (472–74).30 The truth of the facts does not seem to be Medea’s first avowed concern. In fact she will not pay attention to one point that Jason may intend seriously, his desperate need of royal support.31 At any rate, she does not care any longer about Jason’s prosperity: she—actually her ­thumos—has already decided to destroy him. Her rhetorical skill and pleasure appear as an anticipation of her full victory. Jason gives formal definition to his response by saying first (522), δεῖ μ’, ὡς ἔοικε, μὴ κακὸν φῦναι λέγειν, “It appears that I must be no mean speaker”—a statement that resemanticizes, through the litotes μὴ κακὸν,

29.  See Dubischar 2001, with copious bibliography, on the Euripidean agon. 30.  εὖ δ’ ἐποίησας μολών·ἐγώ τε γὰρ λέξασα κουφισθήσομαι ψυχὴν κακῶς σὲ καὶ σὺ λυπήσηι κλύων. To admit the pleasure produced by abuse and insult, and throw it in the face of one’s adversary, can probably be considered a Euripidean motif. There is indeed a strong hyperbaton here, as the order of the words should be λέξασα κακῶς σὲ; see Kühner-Gerth 2:601; and the observation on p. 1952 that the hyperbaton “is designed to contrast λέξασα κουφισθήσομαι as harshly as possible with λυπήσηι κλύων, in other words to emphasize how the feeling of relief (κουφισθήςομαι is perhaps a medical term) will emerge from her insulting attack.” Note also the mocking tone of “You did well to come here,” which lets us assume there are positive reasons, not abuse and insults. 31.  See Dubischar 2001, 312.

  Some Connotations of Sophia   21

the idea of being a clever (sophos) speaker. Euripidean characters are often portrayed in the act of qualifying the nature, style, and presuppositions of the language that they plan to use.32 Indeed, through this rhetorical qualification, which serves as a proem to their attack in the contest (amilla, “fight”), they proudly display their weapons and strategies, the decisive support for their fight. A Homeric hero, before the actual fight with another warrior, in the glow of his full armor, often exhibits evidence of his valor and attempts to scare his opponents by recalling his known heroic deeds. Analogously, but with less material evidence, the Euripidean character, before beginning an aggressive argument in a sparring match, is made to extol with shrewd manipulation the natural power that gives the chance of victory to his or her speeches.33 At the same time, the gesture of speaking is split when a dramatic character defines the sort of language that he or she will enact, since the display of the conscious way in which the character will speak is itself a theatrical gesture, added to his or her assigned theatrical role. In other circumstances Jason would not need to tell Medea how he wants to speak to her.34 This specific form of theatricality renders the character theatrically 32.  Though this device is part of the rhetorical tradition, Euripides’s use of it is extraordinarily frequent: see Medea (Medea 579–83), Theseus (Hipp. 925–31; Supp. 195– 99), Hecuba (Hec. 1187ff.), Aithra (Supp. 297–300), Polyneices (Phoen. 469–72), Eteocles (Phoen. 499–503), etc. 33.  In many other debates (agōnes) in Euripides, the structure of the dissoi logoi is evoked through words similar to those we have encountered: thus Theseus defines the debate about democracy/tyranny that the Theban Kērux has begun by saying (Supp. 426–28): “This Herald is a clever talker and argumentative! Well, since you have opened up this debate [403ff.], hear me out: for it was you who started a contest of words.” The word for “contest,” ἅμιλλαν (428), is the same as in Medea 526. See note 36. Had Theseus spoken in prose he could have described the controversy with a specific Protagorean word, antilogia (dispute), from the probable title of one of Protagoras’s works (DK 80 A1 4). Aristophanes uses this word possibly with direct allusion to Protagoras in Frogs 775 (see Dover 1993). For examples of an analogous presentation of a debate, see Hel. 138, Phoen. 588, Soph. Electra 1492, and Thuc. 3.67.6. Also in court trials defendants often qualified their speech, stressing, for instance, that their language will be simple and truthful (see Plato, Ap. 17b) or emphasizing their inexperience of court language, etc. But Euripides’s characters present a description of their speeches’ styles and aims not before judges who have to decide about a charge, as in court trials, but often only before their rivals, as I suggest, in a sort of pre-fight show. 34.  On theatricality, see Weber 2004.

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ambivalent and makes his role double and the place he occupies on the stage uncontrollable, since, by this split, he looks at himself speaking and becomes a spectacle to himself. He has a role that is traditionally defined as “theater in the theater,” and whose structure is necessarily strange and uncontrollable. Indeed, the theatrical split affects Jason’s role as follows: by defining his art of speaking and showing it, as a theatrical proem for the audience (“I must be no mean speaker”), Jason provides the necessary foundation for his speech (the skill of a careful pilot of a ship) and places himself in an actual, real controversy; yet, simultaneously, by speaking as he does, he displaces himself into a fake place, leaving undetermined his real historical place, and presents himself as actor and spectator of his theatrical role. In the frame of a metaphysical interpretation of language, unless language is authorized by its coincidence with the onta—or its synonymic substitutes, the gods, truth, and so on—all utterances a subject produces are false or self-deceptive or ironic, and, in any of these manifestations, they are intended to be self-serving. Here Jason grounds the source and the effect of his language not in its truth, but in its skillfulness. The drama of action becomes a wordy, linguistic contest. Euripides’s explicit gestures of placing language in the foreground in relation to actions, and of making language play the role of an autonomous accomplice of human behavior, are features of all his plays and are characteristic of the writing of the sophistic age. Scholars have noted this trend in language and writing and in society in general. Kerferd (1981, 78), more radically and more suggestively than others, speaks of a fundamental change in Athens toward a society “in which what people thought and said was beginning to be more important than what was actually the case. In its extreme modern form this leads to the doctrine that there are no facts and no truths, only ideological and conceptual models and the choice between these is an individual matter.” Indeed, in more recent years such relativism has been compared with the situation of virtuality that prevails in our own world.35 35.  A sort of parental relationship between the sophistic age and our own has been often observed and illustrated: see, for instance, W. K. C. Guthrie’s (1968, 22) comments on the Athenian enlightenment from a conservative perspective of sorts: 22): “I need not expatiate on the amount of common ground that exists between this moral climate and our own: the relativism, the abandonment or reversal of previously accepted standards, the permissiveness, the widespread diversity of opinions.”

  Some Connotations of Sophia   23

As Jason prepares to respond to Medea’s reproaches, he provides the following introduction to the question of his royal marriage (546–51): “For it was you who started a contest of words (ἅμιλλαν λόγων). As concerns your reproaches against my royal marriage, here I shall show first that I am wise, second, moderate, and, third, that I am a great friend of you and of my children.”36 Jason sounds here like a teacher instructing his students about how to compose and organize a speech. While with his reference to “a contest of words” Jason is made to allude to the conceptual frame of a contest of dissoi logoi,37 he is also made to avoid the technical term, although he uses sophos in a way that it must be understood to mean “wise,” not “skillful” or “shrewd,” since he is rejecting the accusation of being the latter. But the double connotation of the word is inescapable,38 for, as he will show, his marriage is also a self-serving and shrewd move. In her response to Jason, Medea offers the following proem (579–83): How far diverse I am in many views from many mortals! To my mind the unjust man who is a clever speaker (σοφὸς λέγειν) incurs the greatest punishment. For, since he is proudly confident that through his tongue (γλώσσηι) he will beautifully cloak injustice (τἄδικ’ εὖ περιστελεῖν), he dares all sorts of knavery. Finally, he is not very clever (sophos).39

36.  ἅμιλλαν γὰρ σὺ προύθηκας λόγων. / ἃ δ’ ἐς γάμους μοι βασιλικοὺς ὠνείδισας, / ἐν τῶιδε δείξω πρῶτα μὲν σοφὸς γεγώς, / ἔπειτα σώφρων, εἶτά σοι μέγας φίλος / καὶ παισὶ τοῖς ἐμοῖσιν· Medea 546 = Suppl. 428. On ἅμιλλα λόγων, see Wilamowitz (1895, on HF 1255), for whom this expression is the headline of Euripides’s rhetorical showpieces; and Collard 1975, 2:159–60. 37.  I often use the expression “a character is made to allude, to say, etc.,” because, as in this case, the Jason of the mythical tale certainly did not know the dissoi logoi. Modern readers are often unaware that the Greek audience may have felt the chronological and cultural disjunction that the character’s language often produced. 38.  Evidence regarding the mistrust that terrible skill at language created among large sections of the Athenian world is provided, for instance, by Cleon in Thucydides’s presentation of his speech (3.37–38). Distinguishing the real wise man from the false one is also difficult for Plato (Soph. 221d and ff.). 39.  ἦ πολλὰ πολλοῖς εἰμι διάφορος βροτῶν. / ἐμοὶ γὰρ ὅστις ἄδικος ὢν σοφὸς λέγειν / πέφυκε, πλείστην ζημίαν ὀφλισκάνει· / γλώσσηι γὰρ αὐχῶν τἄδικ’ εὖ περιστελεῖν  / τολμᾶι πανουργεῖν· ἔστι δ’ οὐκ ἄγαν σοφός. The image of cloaking in order to hide is interesting: rhetoric is already a pernicious addition in this image.

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One can imagine Medea listening to herself as she contrasts herself with sophoi speakers. She uses the word sophos with its negative connotations (“clever,” “shrewd”), as if she herself were antisophist and a sophē, of the traditional kind, really “wise,” someone who says things as they are. She charges rhetoric with cloaking, covering, things with beautiful garments— condemning beauty as mere artifice and seduction. She condemns rhetoric as an addition that, today, we often call a “supplement.” She pretends to speak as a conservative sophē who displays things in their true ­nakedness— as if her entire proem were not already a cloaking, a covering. She stigmatizes rhetoric as though she were adopting a metaphysical view of language, but she does so disingenuously, just as the sophoi (when “clever”) might.40 She elaborates this point through the opposition of “tongue” and “knavish deeds”—a favorite rhetorical device of the time.41 And of course she finds Jason “not very sophos,” meaning “not very clever,” for she knows exactly how to destroy his argument immediately, and later, how to ruin his entire life. Here she contests his argument with a simple point: if you really needed royal support for me and for the children’s life, “you should have married with my consent and not in secrecy” (586–87). Some interpreters take Medea’s argument as completely honest,42 and perhaps in principle it is, but in the reality of the situation it is easy and disingenuous for her to imply that through a frank discussion of the issue, she might eventually have given her consent to Jason’s marriage. With this improbable concession (586–87), she dismisses his earlier statement that the source of her resentment and bitterness is her jealousy (568ff.). When Medea in response claims that he has fallen for the young princess, she shows that she is in fact jealous, and the audience may rightly be suspicious of her rhetorical turns. 40.  See how she tries to reject the definition of sophē (clever, shrewd, etc.) that Creon applies to her (Medea 285 and 305). 41.  The rhetorical antitheses logos and ergon, onoma and ergon, etc., set the notions of “appearance” and “reality” in stark contrast and accordingly enhance the solidity of reality (the onta, facts, events, etc.) while depreciating the word as mere wordiness, appearance: Alc. 339: λόγωι γὰρ ἦσαν οὐκ ἔργωι φίλοι. “[My parents] were loving me in words not in fact.” Orestes 454–55: ὄνομα γάρ, ἔργον δ’ οὐκ ἔχουσιν οἱ φίλοι οἱ μὴ ‘πὶ ταῖσι συμφοραῖς ὄντες φίλοι. “Those who are not friends in misfortunes have only the name of friends, not the reality of friendship.” The paradox is of course that this devaluation of the word accompanies the hypervaluation of the power of the word. 42  Dubischar 2001, 308–9; and Origa 2007, 66–67.

  Some Connotations of Sophia   25

Ultimately, if she is “far diverse . . . from many mortals” in both speech and deeds, it is not because, as she suggests by contrast, she speaks well, in accordance with justice, but because she is by far more sophē, in all the connotations of the word sophia, than the others. Her rhetorical skill has stronger effects than simple persuasiveness: it has a sort of nature difficult to define and name, analogous to her magic and its power. She has been able to obtain from the king a concession that he had decided not to grant. She is now silent about her plans for revenge, while heaping up accusations against Jason, true and strong accusations, charging him with treachery. She belittles, derides, his excuses, at the same time strengthening her own resolve for revenge. Just before Jason’s entrance we hear her admonishing herself with imperatives and using persuasive language to urge herself to plunge to the depths of wickedness: Come on, Medea, spare none of the arts, none of the expedients that you know; face the awful deed: now is the moment of boldness . . . and then you are a woman, and we women by nature are unable to accomplish noble actions, but we are the wisest (sopho-tatai) doers of all sorts of wickedness. (401–9)

Medea proudly and enthusiastically appropriates male misogynistic stereotypes: “Yes, they call us the most skillful”—again sophia (in malam partem)—“in committing wickedness, fine! Let’s prove to them, by destroying them, that they are right.” Her ruinous thumos allows her to appropriate the perverse male insult regarding “females’ natural ingeniousness at inventing evil.” Yet only a clever woman (a sophē) can so devilishly appropriate that offensive sophia and turn it against the offenders.43 The theatricality of Medea’s self-admonishment is more conspicuous here than in the earlier examples we examined, and its effects even more evident. She displaces herself. She consciously behaves like an actress who knows how to use acting to impress an audience, and here the audience is herself and the Chorus. It is impossible for us to decide whether she really needs this exhortation to launch herself into the criminal revenge or she aims at having the Chorus as a silent accomplice of her revenge. Is she the innocent soul desperately inciting herself to dare the un-daring deed in a

43.  Schein (1990, 68) speaks of Medea’s “terrifying display of [her] skill and power”; Mastronarde (2002, 239) of her “manipulative power.”

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world that is brutal to her, or is she an unscrupulous magician of the word seducing the women of the Chorus? Or is she both at once? Even the contradictory connotations of the word sophia fail to cover Medea’s complex spiritual situation. Her goal is the destruction of everything she gave to Jason, but besides giving her a sense of victory and restoring her lost self—a self that was more zealous than wise44—in achieving this goal she will mutilate her self as she kills her children.45 And what about the death of the young princess and of her father? Medea’s revenge is a case of a phenomenon that has great dramatic and cultural importance in Euripides’s poetics.46 Here, the formidable energy that she both embodies and communicates with her reversal of misogynistic stereotypes (401–9) stirs up the Chorus violently. The women of the Chorus sing a hymn of sympathy (410–45) that endorses what Medea has said. The hymn is not a simple expression of approval, but a “manifesto,” an elaborate acknowledgment that as a consequence of Medea having spoken as she has, glory and honor will come to the female gender (415–20). Poetry itself is put on trial. Apollo did not grant women the sound of the lyre: they would have sung a hymn against the male race, which from time immemorial has abused and misrepresented the female race (421–30). By making the male stereotypes of women her own and by using them against men, Medea seems to the Chorus to turn the entire civilization upside down. She overthrows the present world of values, which is grounded in the real and rhetorical power of men (410–14). The women of the Chorus sing: “The waters of the holy rivers run back to their sources; justice and all other values are turned back: men think deceits, and there is no trust in the gods.” According to the Chorus this reversal is happening as a result of Medea’s rebellious stand against the male world. The women of the Chorus have heard Medea’s derision of the male-dominated marriage, her legitimate accusations against Jason, and her plan for violent revenge. In the reversal they describe, trust in the gods is also failing. Of course, one of

44.  One has to measure the total devotion Medea felt for Jason as she committed crimes even against her family in order to help him to reach his goals. Her passion was as great as that of Alcestis or Evadne. 45.  I have followed this process in my work on Medea (Pucci 1980). 46.  I will analyze some aspects of the structure of “revenge” below in my discussion of the Bacchae in section 23.

  Some Connotations of Sophia   27

the gods, Apollo, denied the sound of the lyre to the female race. And an endless and offensive misrepresentation of women followed. Through the poetry of Euripides’s Chorus, poetry recognizes the unfairness of poetry toward women. Of course, this recognition does not change the actual course of the action; it is a metaleptic moment and amounts only to poetry gazing at itself.47 But the consequences are serious. If women had had their own song all this time, the world would be different: there would be different marriage, different trust, and a wise song that could help mortals. There would be no Jason’s betrayal, and no Medea’s revenge. Through the Chorus, poetry sees a chance that it has never had. Medea’s sophia has opened up a new horizon that shows what is offensive and unfair in the actual world. Readers may be justifiably suspicious of Medea’s sophia, but when such wisdom allows the Chorus and their audience to see the scandal of the present world, and to envision a utopia, they are compelled to acknowledge the inquisitive, revelatory force of that sophia. For it is indeed a scandal that the Chorus is able to recognize through Medea’s sophia; and the denunciation of the scandal uncovers the brutality of the present reality. Soon we will hear Jason extolling the benefits of the civilization (536–44) that Medea has exposed with her words, and that the women of the Chorus think has ended.48 She has spoken as a reformer and a prophet, in the eyes of the Chorus. Of course, a world in which the female gender is no longer abused but is granted honor and glory through Medea’s sophia is a utopia. Indeed, as Medea plans the murder of her children, the Chorus will drop their endorsement of her and will celebrate the glory of Athens’s sophia (835–45), which is of course the glory of male sophia. The audience and readers may question how Medea’s brutal murder will bring honor and glory to the female gender. Some critics still do. Yet a scandal remains a scandal even if it is denounced through a questionable act. Let us not forget that at the final moment of her revenge it is her thumos (passion), not her sophia, that rules

47. On metalepsis, see section 14. 48.  The destabilizing power of this utopia escapes the critics. Page (1938, 104) writes, “Euripides ignores the poetry of Sappho, Corinna, Praxilla, Telesilla”; and analogously Mastronarde (2002, 243–44) comments on the inaccuracy of Medea’s claim and mentions the female poets the audience knew, Sappho, Praxilla, etc. Thus, Medea is not an accurate historian of Greek literature.

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her decision: there again a continuous displacement of her language with respect to her wisdom. Let us try to understand why the chariot of the Sun will be there to protect her, make her invulnerable, and take her to Athens. With the appearance of the chariot, Euripides’s text produces not only a surprise on stage, but also a formal, dramatic shock. A few lines before Medea appears in the Sun’s chariot, the Chorus sang (1251–54): “O Earth and ray of the Sun that lightens all, look, look at this ruinous woman, before she lays her bloody hands on her children in the act of murder!” This invocation and its apotropaic request could be interpreted as an emphatic gesture by the Chorus to draw attention to Medea’s sacrilegious act, and to make their last possible appeal to stop her. But in view of the arrival of the chariot of the Sun, sixty lines later, the passage should also be read as a prayer placed here in the text to underscore the opposite outcome, because the Sun has looked down on Medea with his shining, all-revealing rays and not only has not intervened, but is making her invulnerable and safe to go to Athens. The Sun does not consider Medea’s murder sacrilegious, or her access to Athens impious. With this formal gesture, the text has a shocking effect on the audience. It raises Medea to a sort of divine stature.49 By granting her prophetic powers Pindar (Pyth. 4.9–56) had done something similar in an earlier generation. The success of Euripides’s formal device must produce surprise and enchantment in the audience and readers.50 Thus, the song of the Chorus attacking male abuse of the female gender, and the evocation of the coming of a different poetry, may make real sense, at least from a divine vantage point on human affairs. It will not surprise readers of this book that the divine gaze that acquits Medea is not that of an anthropomorphic god, though it is considered a progenitor of Medea (406), but that of a divine cosmic power, the sun. The text seems to suggest that, in the view of a power that illuminates things in depth and from on high, Medea actually achieved a kind of balance between the violence she suffered

49. Structurally she occupies the position of a deus ex machina, as some interpreters have correctly seen. She has become the sort of semidivine being she was before meeting Jason. 50.  Pleasure is indeed an aim of poetry, as one of Euripides’s characters says in Suppliant Women 178–79: “I would like to be like a poet, who must give birth in joy to the songs he gives birth to. If he is not in this disposition of mind, he cannot give pleasure to others, if he himself is in distress. He has no right to do so.”

  Some Connotations of Sophia   29

and the violence she committed. She destroyed the life she had given to the society that pretended to be civilized and scandalously betrayed her, a society in which women have no real marriage, no politics, no poetic song. Although the pain caused by her self-mutilation was so complete that it made her invulnerable, unassailable by any other sorrow—perhaps this is a meaning of the unassailable chariot of the Sun—she pays the price that all avengers pay in Euripides’s drama: her revenge places her in the same painful situation as the defeated Jason. He tells her (1361): “You, too, grieve and fully share my pain.” She cannot deny it, but only assert that punishing him gives her a gain (1362): “Be well assured: my grief is a profit if you cannot laugh at me.” Or more radically, in accordance with another meaining of luei: “It annuls my pain that you cannot laugh at me.” In both cases the text makes her recognize her pain, but, in the latter connotation, also the absolute almost divine satisfaction of her victory.51 It remains to question the text’s own sophia as it exposes Apollo’s injustice and explicitly accuses him of refusing women his blessing and therefore wronging the female race. Here the name of Apollo could simply be a hypostasis for “poetry,” and imply no theological criticism. Yet the epithetic evocation of Apollo (Φοῖβος ἁγήτωρ μελέων, 428) designates him as a real being, and the sophia that inspires such comments—the attack on the ancient poets, and the coming of a new song—is typical of theological criticism.52 Do Apollo’s blunder and injustice ultimately justify Medea’s acts? Medea’s story is the lucid and pitiful story of a human adventure, and simultaneously the lucid and pitiful story of a human horror. We are enticed by the formal success of the text, its shrewdness, and its power. It may be true that if women had had access to the gift of Apollo from the beginning, along with men, society would be totally different. We are shaken by the Nurse’s words at the beginning of the play, and want to believe in 51. {Ια.} καὐτή γε λυπῆι καὶ κακῶν κοινωνὸς εἶ. / {Μη.} σάφ’ ἴσθι· λύει δ’ ἄλγος, ἢν σὺ μὴ ‘γγελᾶις (Medea 1361–62). On the double meaning of line 1362, see Pucci 1980, 164: “Nothing can eliminate from this text the ambivalence whereby Medea is made to say simultaneously that her revenge is an illusory, paradoxical gain and that it is an absolute gain.” 52.  μοῦσαι δὲ παλαιγενέων λήξουσ’ ἀοιδῶν / τὰν ἐμὰν ὑμνεῦσαι ἀπιστοσύναν. / οὐ γὰρ ἐν ἁμετέραι γνώμαι λύρας / ὤπασε θέσπιν ἀοιδὰν / Φοῖβος ἁγήτωρ μελέων· The epithet “lord of the songs” and the action “never endowed” evoke an anthropomorphic divine context for Apollo.

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what they promise: “And yet it is a gain that men heal these [hateful ills] by means of songs” (199–200). We want to believe that this song, written by a male, gives us that gain by portraying the violence and blindness of civilized Greece against women, in particular against the love and innocence of the foreign magician. The text may give us a gain also by showing how terms like “love,” “justice,” “laws,” “sophia,” “poetry,” used by this civilized world to describe itself, fail to signify the innocence of Medea’s unlimited love and the violence of her self-assertion after she finds herself betrayed and abandoned. She embodies some unknown, unspeakable, almost divine signifier that mocks those “civilized” terms, and points to her spiritual force, which is at once terrible, self-destructive, self-asserting, and innocent.

5.  Polyneices’s Truth Another problematic example of sophia is provided by Polyneices in the Phoenician Women. In initiating his debate with Eteocles, Polyneices contrasts “justice” and “truth” with a connotation of sophia (Phoen. 469–72): ἁπλοῦς ὁ μῦθος τῆς ἀληθείας ἔφυ, κοὐ ποικίλων δεῖ τἄνδιχ’ ἑρμηνευμάτων· ἔχει γὰρ αὐτὰ καιρόν· ὁ δ’ ἄδικος λόγος νοσῶν ἐν αὑτῶι φαρμάκων δεῖται σοφῶν. The discourse of truth is naturally simple, and justice does not need complicated explanations, for it has for itself the right context.53 But the unjust argument, since it is in itself sick, needs sophisticated remedies.

Polyneices, like the speaker in a fragment from the Antiope,54 envisions and elaborates the structure of two conflicting logoi and specifies their 53.  To be separated from the kairos ought to mean here that the logos is a lie, for it is not coherent with the right context. See below on Hipp. 385–87. Mastronarde (1994), too expansively, and yet unclearly, glosses: “Just claims have all by themselves the proper measure, so as to persuade the audience.” 54.  Antiope (Kannicht, TGF 5, 1, 189); Kambitsis (1972, xxi and 64) reads as follows: ἐκ παντὸς ἄν τις πράγματος δισσῶν λόγων / ἀγῶνα θεῖτ’ ἄν, εἰ λέγειν εἴη σοφός. “Facing every matter, some one clever at speaking could produce a contest of two [opposite] arguments.” It is not clear who makes this statement: Kannicht (TGF 5, 1, 591) proposes, with a question mark, Amphion.

 Polyneices’s Truth   31

for­mal characteristics (one is simple, and the other complex) and their respective themes (truth and untruth, justice and injustice). The purpose of his argument is to assert—against the sophistic frame of the dissoi logoi— the unswerving essence of truth. Echoing a passage in Hesiod’s Theogony (26–28), Polyneices, on the one hand, envisions truth as simple and, on the other, argues that in order to look like truth, lies need shrewd rhetorical devices (pharmaka). In the logic of the dissoi logoi, this sick discourse would be the weak one and would win, but in the metaphysical outlook of Polyneices it should of course be defeated. Polyneices, however, is making such assertions in Euripides’s time, and his metaphysics declaring that the discourse of truth is “simple” entails a great deal of philosophical innocence, or shrewd manipulation. In fact, the natural simplicity of the discourse of truth (ἁπλοῦς ὁ μῦθος55 τῆς ἀληθείας ἔφυ) was an important theme of a debate that was current at the time, in which Achilles’s straightforward and simple mode of speaking (see, for instance, Il. 9.312–14) was contrasted with the “polytropy” of Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is worth noting that Socrates favors the polytropos and the pseudes, since knowing how to lie also means to know the truth.56 Furthermore, the medical image (φαρμάκων δεῖται σοφῶν—[the unjust argument, since it is in itself sick] “needs sophisticated medicines” to look healthy57) is crucial for various reasons. First, it is clear that the speaker attributes a negative connotation to σοφῶν—a gesture that identifies his argument as antisophistic. Secondly, the reference to a professional art is a typical rhetorical strategy of Euripides’s time and furthermore recalls the same medical image in the passage of the Theaetetus in which Protagoras explains how, just as a doctor changes disease into health through medicines, so the sophist changes a man into 55.  The difference between muthos and logos is significant: the muthos—designating a speech—is the heritage of the epic (especially Iliadic) tradition and of the texts depending on it. Also the intimate connection of truth with justice is part of archaic thinking; see, for instance, Il. 16.387–88; Hesiod, Op. 225–26. See Pucci 1977, 45–81. 56.  See Antisthenes in schol. Od. 1.1; and Plato, Hippias Minor 365a-b. On this topic, see Pucci, “The Proem of the Odyssey,” in Pucci 1982. Some substantial doubts regarding the straight and truthful speaking of Achilles in passages of the Iliad have been raised by Mitsis in Mitsis and Tsagalis 2010, 51–76. 57.  It is not absolutely clear whether Polyneices implies that the drugs merely hide the disease of the untruthful discourse, as I have taken it, or heal the disease by rhetorically changing the arguments.

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someone with better habits through logoi.58 Speech produces effects like a drug and does not single out truths and lies. Polyneices, of course, reverses the sequence and the outcome: through shrewd drugs, the unjust argument does not heal but hides or manipulates its sickness. The difficulty lies in the statement that “justice has the kairos.” If this statement implied an identity between words and things (the onta), then the formulation would be obviously anti-Gorgianic and antisophistic. However, kairos does not mean things as they are, but, at most, the correct “context,” the right “occasion” for a (truthful) word. But a word could have an ambiguous or confused context or occasion, and it would still have a kairos. Polyneices’s argument, as our analysis has shown, has certainly been doctored by a good rhetoric that is reminiscent of sophistic language and strategies. A sophistic language to debunk sophistic arguments? For, in the end, how is one to distinguish the pharmaka that manipulate truth from the pharmaka that Polyneices uses to support the simplicity of truth? We are drowning in the troubled waters of Protagoras’s dissoi logoi. It is difficult to say whether these points are sufficient to discredit the innocence of Polyneices or simply to suggest that in the age of Euripides even the defense of truth against the sophists’ arguments is already imbued with the sophists’ rhetoric and assumptions. The latter view is more plausible.

6.  Hecuba’s Rhetoric Hecuba’s musings on the deficiency of language can be compared to Medea’s presentation of her speech discussed above. In a debate before Agamemnon, Hecuba responds to what Polymestor has said (Hec. 1187–94): Ἀγάμεμνον, ἀνθρώποισιν οὐκ ἐχρῆν ποτε τῶν πραγμάτων τὴν γλῶσσαν ἰσχύειν πλέον· ἀλλ’ εἴτε χρήστ’ ἔδρασε χρήστ’ ἔδει λέγειν, εἴτ’ αὖ πονηρὰ τοὺς λόγους εἶναι σαθρούς, καὶ μὴ δύνασθαι τἄδικ’ εὖ λέγειν ποτέ.

58.  See section 4.

 Hecuba’s Rhetoric   33 σοφοὶ μὲν οὖν εἰσ’ οἱ τάδ’ ἠκριβωκότες,59 ἀλλ’ οὐ δύνανται διὰ τέλους εἶναι σοφοί, κακῶς δ’ ἀπώλοντ’· οὔτις ἐξήλυξέ πω. Agamemnon! Men’s language should not be stronger than their deeds: but if someone did noble deeds he ought to speak nobly, if bad deeds, cracked words [i.e., they should ring false]. And he should never be able to embellish unjust things. Those who have brought this art to perfection are sophoi [clever people? sophists?], but they cannot remain skillful until the end and are badly ruined. No one yet has escaped.

Like Theseus in the Hippolytus, Hecuba expresses the utopian wish that language might convey the marks of a truthful or a false speech. What is extraordinary about Hecuba’s and analogous statements is that their utopian desire that language should provide an absolute criterion of truth is not borne out in their own speeches, for while they approve of the truthful language of the Hesiodic Muses (Theog. 28), in fact, just by saying so, they speak like clever sophoi. Indeed in their utopian declarations they hide the destructive strategies they are actually implementing. Hecuba asserts the failure of the clever speaker, when she has already utterly destroyed Polymestor, and when, in truth, she is herself speaking as a clever speaker. In her debate with Polymestor before Agamemnon, Hecuba defends the revenge she has already taken on Polymestor, and her defense is a masquerade, a pretense, since Agamemnon is a complicitous judge, who, in an earlier scene, had already agreed with Hecuba that she should seek revenge.60 The ethical nature of this masquerade is analogous to the ethical 59.  The word seems to me to belong to the technical language that the expansion of professions (sophists as educators, doctors, architects, etc.) in the second half of the fifth century produced or intensified. Compare Aristophanes, Ranae 1483: {ΧΟ.} Μακάριός γ’ ἀνὴρ ἔχων {Str.} / ξύνεσιν ἠκριβωμένην. / πάρα δὲ πολλοῖσιν μαθεῖν. “Blessed the one who has a perfect intelligence. It is possible to understand it by many (examples or proofs)” (Dover). But Del Corno: “Beato l’uomo che ha l’ingegno esercitato”; Kovacs: “keen intelligence,” etc. This makarismos contrasts with the next attack on Socrates. 60.  Some commentators take Hecuba’s attack on dishonest rhetoric as a serious indictment, whether by Euripides or by Hecuba herself (see Perdicoyianni 1991, lines 1191–93; Collard 1991, lines 1187–94); but it should be understood that she uses a standard theme (e.g., Soph. Ant. 1045ff.), knowing very well that she herself, by being in complicity with the judge, is speaking essentially to satisfy the game now requested after their agreement.

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nature of the action that produces revenge. Language is a weapon like the knife that blinds Polymestor. In the few examples that we have examined, the characters do not simply speak, argue, and challenge each other as theatrical characters do; they take care to describe in detail how language enables them to win or lose their cases. Action has become rhetoric. Even murderous acts of revenge are carefully anticipated, planned, and organized through false and ambivalent language, which first of all narrates its own ability to reach the proposed goal, revenge. The characters are shown to be manipulators of their own language, just as the dramatist is, and therefore they become figures of theater, of his theater, critical and clever readers of their own language. Since their real identity lies in their own theatrical hands, it remains undetermined, as Medea and others clearly show. The measure, the qualification, of their rhetorical art are always dependent on some aspect or connotation of sophia: skill, expertise, shrewdness, deceptiveness, sophistication, wisdom. The characters are all rhetoricians, pupils of Gorgias and Protagoras, able to decide how to speak, and narrating the terms on which they and their enemies fashion their own speeches. Their theatricality is one of the means by which Euripides transforms the characters of myth, who originate in an aristocratic hypertext and theological world, into rhetorically conscious, fictional, characters. The invention of “literature” begins here. Euripides’s sophia is often able to disregard its own polysemic connotations and intends to deliver a truly “wise” message, but of course the dissemination of sophia’s connotations cannot be stopped, and the wisdom might always remain simultaneously a shrewd attempt, an artifice, and a form of deception. Only the audience will be able to decide, based on the effects that it will experience.

7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War The revolutionary novelty [of Protagoras] lies in his pointing to “man” . . . “man” is the being that you find before you each day, the “everyone” of whom Euripides speaks in fr. 1018: “the mind [nous] in each of us is god.” (Diano 1954, 282)

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There is agreement among philosophers, essayists, and philologists that Euripides’s dramas often focus on the irresistible power of sex and stage sexually delicate, even kinky situations, in which the characters are conscious of being victims of that power. For instance, Bertrand Russell (1961, 38) writes: “Euripides, especially, honoured the two chief gods of Orphism, Dionysus and Eros”; and Friedrich Kittler (2009, 311–58), emphasizing the sexual passion of Euripides’s female characters in particular, describes Euripides provocatively as a “pornographer.” The contrast that Kittler draws between various chaste male characters in Euripides’s plays (Hippolytus, Ion, the modest autourgos of the Electra, Orestes, etc.) and some female characters (Medea, Phaedra, Helen, Her­ mione, Evadne, etc.) is particularly eloquent. The contrast between these characters would also seem to justify Aristophanes’s own provocative indictment of Euripides as a misogynist who portrayed harlots and whores. In the last thirty years there has been an explosion of works devoted to Greek sexuality and to women and sexuality in tragedy, particularly in Euripides.61 Sexuality, as Foucault insisted also fairly recently, is an extremely complex phenomenon: each civilization inscribes it, with open questions and unresolved problems, in its own culture, and this inscription does not simply interpret the phenomenon but in some way controls and also partially “creates” it.62 Desire, therefore, is deeply structured by

61.  I mention here works especially devoted to Euripides’s plays: Michelini 1987, which analyzes the feminine, gender, and the erotic in Euripides; the volume Powell 1990; Seaford 1990; Zeitlin 1996; Foley 2001; Sissa 2003, 129ff.; Mendelsohn 2002. A very rich and perceptive analysis of the multiple situations and conditions in which sexuality is deployed in Euripides (adultery, rape of slaves, sexual acquiescence of captive women, concubinage, marriage imposed by parents, etc.) is presented in Scodel 1998. 62.  In Greek culture the difficulties for interpreters are increased by the lack of specific words for “sex” and “sexuality”; names like Eros and Aphrodite, and words like philia, mōria, margan, aphrosyne, and lekhos, to mention only a few, involve larger semantic fields; and some of them may imply love with no direct, explicit evocation of sexuality, while others indicate only libidinous sexuality. Especially when women speak, words like “eagerness” or “zeal” are bowdlerized expressions for passion and blind infatuation. See, for instance, Medea 485. This linguistic situation is by itself a symptom of the cultural frame in which sex in Greek is inscribed: it is in fact comprehended by divine agencies—with their metaphysical underpinnings—and autonomous human drive, and it embraces a broad spectrum of opposite or collaborating attitudes, partners, ethical evaluations, etc.

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cultural norms and political expectations. In Euripides’s time one fundamental issue concerning desire is the question of its provenance: does it come from the gods or from the other, or more specifically from what the self sees in the other. Of course desire threatens the autonomy of the self, not only because sexual desire is the desire of the other, of the body of the other, but also because its locus is at least in part the unconscious, not easily accessible to the self. This latter aspect unwittingly favored the traditional view that desire was inspired by Aphrodite, and that the self had no control over it. To cut through all the complexities of this phenomenon, and to come directly to Euripides, the first aspect of sexuality in Euripides that strikes us is, as already mentioned, the violence with which it assails its subjects— most often women—in excessive, perverse, and sometimes destructive forms. This violence is deployed in a particular way and has particular effects: it dislocates and dispossesses the self, making it a puppet of a drive that the subject often cannot clearly diagnose or identify. Eros is one of the most insidious and piercing instantiations of otherness and can ensnare the whole of a human being. This representation of sexual drive threatens Euripides’s metaphysics, which gestures toward an imagined self, which, through its sophia, is able to build a solid and sure stronghold against forces that would pierce through it. His treatment of sex and of its effect tries to control the paradox: on the one hand, his texts recognize the uncontrollable drive of sex as instilled in men by a divine entity, Aphrodite or the cosmic principle of reproduction; on the other, they attribute it to the lewd and perverse desire of the subject. This paradox finds a dramatic form in the debate between Helen and Hecuba in the Troades. It seems unthinkable that in the age of the Peloponnesian War and the sophists, the cause of the Trojan War could still be presented as Helen’s adultery.63 In fact, Troy is not the only case of a city that was ravaged by the consequences of sexual passion: to win Iole, as the women of the 63. Herodotus’s reasonable arguments that Helen never reached Troy, since otherwise the Trojans would have given her back to the Greeks, Aristophanes’s parodies making Aspasia a copy of Helen (Achar. 524–29), Gorgias’s allegorical use of Helen, and Thucydides’s downgrading of Helen’s responsibility (1.9.1–3)—none of these examples or others persuaded Euripides to question openly the traditional epic explanation. He had a different, more intriguing issue to discuss.

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­ horus sing in Hippolytus 545ff., Heracles slaughtered her father, EuryC tus, king of Oichalia, sacked the city, and murdered her brothers.64 Troy fell as a consequence of an analogous violent love affair, as Helen, stricken by passion for Paris, followed him to Troy, abandoning her husband and child. Her responsibility for the Trojan War is referenced endlessly (e.g., Tro. 596ff., 766ff.), preparing us for the debate (agōn) between Helen and Hecuba. The motivation for the debate is odd. Menelaus is determined to kill Helen, who is now his prisoner, and Hecuba has decided to levy further heavy accusations against Helen in order to strengthen what Hecuba rightly deems to be Menelaus’s frail resolve.65 The debate itself is dramatically absurd, since it changes Menelaus’s role from the wronged party to a judge and makes Hecuba the prosecutor in the face of a defender (Helen) who does not recognize Hecuba’s role as such.66 The absurdity of the debate highlights its futility with respect to the plot: the debate has mainly a poetic, cultural justification,67 as we will see, and represents a typical metalepsis of Euripides’s sophia. The accuser here (Hecuba) is an odd (atopos, as the Greeks would say) character: she is immediately culturally defined by her presentation of a conflated portrait of Zeus (884–88)68 and cuts a bizarre philosophical figure, not identifiable with the role-symbol of raped and suffering Troy that she plays for the greater part of the drama. She is a character out of her time and role, therefore metaleptic, analogous to other odd Euripidean characters, such as Theonoe in the Helen. 64.  Aphrodite is held responsible for the destruction of Oichalia (Hipp. 545ff.) in a harrowing description: “The Oichalian filly unyoked abed, manless before and unwed, she [Aphrodite] yoked from Eurytos’ house and like a running Naiad or a bacchant, amid blood, amid smoke in a bloody bridal gave her, did the Cyprian, to Alkmene’s child; oh unhappy in your bridal” (W. S. Barrett trans.). The story is mythical, and the city of Oichalia is variously located, in Messenia, Thessaly, and by Sophocles (Trachiniai) in Euboia. See Carter 2011, 61. 65.  Hecuba is of course correct in doubting Menelaus’s decision: at 864–65 Menelaus had declared that he did not fight to get Helen back—a hint that Helen may not have been the cause of the war—but only to punish Paris. 66.  Menelaus cannot be a fair judge, and, at any rate, Helen refuses to speak directly to Hecuba, for she is, after all, still a Trojan foe, as she is also for Menelaus. 67.  On the Gorgianic rhetoric of its structure, see Goldhill 1986, 236–38. 68.  See section 2, pp. 11–12.

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Helen, the defender, speaking only to Menelaus, upholds the epic view that her passion was provoked by Aphrodite and asserts that Aphrodite herself came with Paris, when he arrived in Sparta (940ff.): He came with a powerful goddess at his side, this bane, curse of myself. . . . What was I thinking when I left the house and followed the stranger, betraying the fatherland and my home? Punish Aphrodite and be stronger than Zeus who is king of all the gods but a slave to her.69 I deserve pardon.70

The traditional narrative, familiar to Euripides’s audience, concerns the judgment of Paris:71 the myth associates Aphrodite with her beauty and with her rivalry with two other goddesses and mentions her promise to give Paris a beautiful woman. Helen, defending herself, proves that this story is true: she is indeed at the origin of it, and accordingly she is diachronically the first to narrate it. That is why she knows all the details so well: for instance, she can describe exactly what each goddess promised to Paris (924ff.).72 She exhibits, so to speak, evidence of whatever innocence 69.  The theme that the gods themselves are unable to resist the seduction of Eros is found in much of the literature of this time: see Eur. Hipp. 453–56, HF 1314–19; Ar. Clouds 1074–82; Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 6, 7. In Eur. Hipp. and Ar. Clouds, the theme is used by shady characters with a corrupting purpose or a cynical slant. Theseus upholds this theme in Eur. HF, but he is contradicted by Heracles. We will return to this theme when we consider the “mimetic” sources of sexual passion in section 9. 70.  By asking for indulgence and pardon, Helen is made to follow the archaic principle of “double motivation,” so common in epic poetry, according to which divine inspiration does not fully excuse the doer. 71.  The judgment of Paris is mentioned in Cypria fr. 1 (Bernabé 1987) and Il. 24.28–30. The artistic tradition, represented by vase paintings, was a strong and continuous medium that endorsed the whole tradition of the judgment of Paris: see Dugas 1960, 62. According to Cypria fr. 1 (Bernabé 1987), Zeus planned, through the Trojan War, to lighten the weight of mortals upon Earth; in the epic tradition Helen is the daughter of Zeus; in the Cypria, Helen is the daughter of Nemesis and Zeus (fr. 9 Bernabé 1987); in Od. 11.298–304 her brothers have Leda as mother, which implies an original version with Leda as the mother of Helen and Zeus as the father. 72.  Helen’s speech is extremely well conceived and constructed. She begins as a skillful sophos (914–15: “Whether I will appear to speak rightly or wrongly, perhaps you [Menelaus] will not reply to me, since you consider me an enemy,” ἴσως με, κἂν εὖ κἂν κακῶς δόξω λέγειν,/οὐκ ἀνταμείψηι πολεμίαν ἡγούμενος). By accusing him of being unfavorably prejudiced against her, she makes him feel to be wrong

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Aphrodite’s intervention allows her to claim, and she even adds mention of her own merits.73 In this representation of Helen and the judgment of Paris, the text intimates that the story is new for Menelaus at least, and perhaps also for Hecuba. The physical presence of Aphrodite at the meeting of Helen and Paris in Sparta refers literally or metaphorically to the divine source of Helen’s passion and explains its uncontrollable power. The queen of Troy cannot contest Helen’s story but laughs,74 and then points out the unreasonable aspects of it (983–88): In your words, Aphrodite—this is really very ridiculous—came with my son to Menelaus’s house. Could she not have remained tranquil in heaven and carried you to Troy with the whole city of Amiclae? My son was supremely handsome, and when you saw him your mind became Aphrodite.75

and unfair toward her. Her use of myth is skillful: why accuse me, she says, when this woman—she does not mention the name Hecuba—is the one who is really responsible, since she bore Paris, and her husband did not manage to kill him when the dreams signified the destructive destiny of Paris (919–22). Already Andromache had intimated that Paris was the cause of Troy’s ruin (597ff.). Hecuba will be unable to contest these points. 73.  She demonstrates to Menelaus that Paris’s choice of Aphrodite’s promise was a great advantage for the Greeks: while she is the victim of Aphrodite’s gift to Paris, had Paris chosen Hera’s or Athena’s plan it would have been a disaster for the Greeks. She is actually paying bitterly for the advantage the Greeks got. Helen’s last statement is beautifully composed: ἃ δ’ εὐτύχησεν Ἑλλάς, ὠλόμην ἐγὼ (935: “In what Greece is fortunate, I am ruined”). See Dik 2007, 58 n. 25. 74.  The specifically ethical tone of this laughter is discussed by Gregory (1999– 2000, 66–67). 75.  The conceptual operation that Hecuba carries out is described by Socrates in Plato, Phaedrus 229e: “to reduce mythical beings to verisimilitude”; αἷς εἴ τις ἀπιστῶν προσβιβᾷ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἕκαστον, ἅτε ἀγροίκῳ τινὶ σοφίᾳ χρώμενος, πολλῆς αὐτῷ σχολῆς δεήσει, “If someone does not believe in these [strange natures of mythologi­ cal beings] and proceeds through a somewhat crude wisdom [or science] to reduce each one to verisimilitude, he will need quite a bit of leisure.” Biehl (1989, commenting on lines 976–81) takes the same line of interpretation: the criticism of the mythos is performed through the argument of eikos (what is “plausible,” “natural”).

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Hecuba locates the source of Helen’s erotic passion in Helen’s lewd gaze, which found pleasure in Paris’s beauty and made her mind mad with love. To prove her point, Hecuba produces etymological evidence (989–90): And when you saw him [Paris], your mind (nous) was turned into Cypris (ὁ σὸς δ’ ἰδών νιν νοῦς ἐποιήθη Κύπρις). For the mortals call all their acts of folly Aphrodite, and the goddess’s name rightly begins with “folly.”76

With this etymological evidence she can state that the mind of Helen, seduced by the sight of Paris’s beauty, “became Aphrodite”—that is, folly, madness. Aphrodite was not present at the scene of seduction, as Helen claims, but eventually in the lewd gaze of Helen. Hecuba follows the deconstructive strategies of the sophoi (983), their rhetorical tricks,77 within whose cultural frame man is responsible for his passions and modes of being. Three points must be made. First, the two arguments do not really have anything to do with each other: Hecuba cannot contest Helen’s experience or prove that it is false; she can only say that it is unbelievable, and assume that her version is more convincing. For a certain part of the audience, it is only more economical. Second, though the source of erotic passion is totally different in the two versions, its effects are the same. Third, while Hecuba is made to speak in terms similar to a passage from Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen (19: “What wonder, then, if the eye of Helen, delighted by Paris’s body, provoked in her soul desire and craving for love?”),78 Helen is made to speak as if she had come from the third book of the Iliad.79 Two texts, two versions of the source of eros, and two Helens look like o­ pposites: they are both so deeply rooted in the Greek world that it is no wonder that

76.  Tro. 989–90: ἦν οὑμὸς υἱὸς κάλλος ἐκπρεπέστατος, / ὁ σὸς δ’ ἰδών νιν νοῦς ἐποιήθη Κύπρις· / τὰ μῶρα γὰρ πάντ’ ἐστὶν Ἀφροδίτη βροτοῖς, / καὶ τοὔνομ’ ὀρθῶς ἀφροσύνης ἄρχει θεᾶς. Hecuba may imply that the lewd gaze of Helen is an instantiation of Aphrodite’s power, and argues that it is ridiculous to think that she would come with Paris to seduce Helen. 77.  Teiresias uses etymology in the Bacchae to describe the real meaning and significance of a name or an event; the practice is also common in Plato. 78.  εἰ οὖν τῶι τοῦ Ἀλεξάνδρου σώματι τὸ τῆς Ἑλένης ὄμμα ἡσθὲν προθυμίαν καὶ ἅμιλλαν ἔρωτος τῆι ψυχῆι παρέδωκε, τί θαυμαστόν; 79. See Il. 3.399ff., where Helen submits to Aphrodite’s order. Such a “quotation” in Euripides’s text is often ideologically significant.

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Hecuba cannot dismiss Helen’s adversarial version except with laughter and some rhetorically scornful questions (976–82).80 The prosecution fails to prove that an innocent competition among goddesses did not take place:81 and this failure shows that to prove that the gods do not act is just as difficult as proving that they do. Given that the prosecution is unsuccessful on all levels, it seems uncertain which of the two versions the audience should prefer.82 Yet Euripides’s textual strategy of noncommitment is only apparent: he holds his revolutionary views under cover, but not completely, for here the ethical argument in favor of the secular view is implicit in Hecuba’s version and indirectly suggested by Poseidon in the prologue of the play. As Poseidon is leaving Troy behind, the city itself already destroyed, he describes the women who are prisoners and soon to be carried away as slaves: among them he sees Helen and states that she is “rightly considered a prisoner” (35: ἡ Λάκαινα Τυνδαρὶς Ἑλένη, νομισθεῖσ’ αἰχμάλωτος ἐνδίκως).83 The 80.  It is understandable, within the mythical frame, that the goddess of love would want to be recognized as beautiful. Beauty is one of the Greek gods’ most salient characteristics. In addition, Athena might wish to be recognized as being beautiful, independently from any desire for marriage. The questions of the prosecution are weak, since the secular ideology cannot contest the basic premise of Helen’s defense—namely, the traditional, humanized nature of the gods. Once the relationship between Hera and Zeus is called a marriage, all the feelings that this institution and relationship involve can be assumed to pertain also to the divine couple. Accordingly, Hera’s craving to be considered the most beautiful goddess is not so extravagant: Zeus deserves such a wife. In Hymn to Aphrodite 41, Hera is described as “the most beautiful among the goddesses.” Croally (1994, 148) comments: “Hecuba seems to accept, on behalf of the goddesses as well, the ideology that offers only marriage and childbirth as a definition of woman’s self.” 81.  Reading line 975 in accordance with the MSS ἅi παιδιαῖσι καὶ χλιδῆι μορφῆς πέρι ἦλθον πρὸς Ἴδην, and not, with Diggle and other eds., who accept Hartung’s correction of the text, οὐ παιδιαῖσι καὶ χλιδῆι μορφῆς πέρι ἦλθον πρὸς Ἴδην. 82.  Croally (1994, 157) writes regarding this agōn: “From the substance of the arguments themselves, it would have been difficult for the audience to decide whom to favour as a winner of the debate.” I too have noted in some of my previous publications that the audience was left without any indication of what version to believe (see, for instance, Pucci 2007), but in this new work I show that the text in fact indicates to the spectators indirectly that they should favor the enlightened version. 83.  The postponement of ἐνδίκως to the end of the line emphasizes the word. The epithets are also important: Tyndaris implies that Helen has no connection with Zeus, and Lacaina intimates that she is a traitor.

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god implies that Helen, being guilty of adultery and betrayal, must be treated, with complete justice, as a captured enemy. Poseidon seems to ignore Aphrodite’s role in Helen’s adultery, and, at any rate, eventual divine instigation of her flight to Troy does not give her the right to leniency or special consideration. The idea that men are responsible for their crimes and must be punished for them is also upheld by Athena in the prologue (85–86). Poseidon’s assertion does not change the debate’s unresolved outcome, but it does indirectly suggest that Hecuba’s denial of Helen’s innocence is correct. Indeed, Hecuba’s point is the same as Poseidon’s. However, whether her arguments are conclusive or not, and where they actually lead, are other matters. If mortals attribute folly to Aphrodite, as Hecuba asserts, then there is no conclusive evidence for laughing at Helen’s claim that Paris came accompanied by Aphrodite, for if she is a goddess, she can still inspire folly, even while remaining in heaven. More intriguing is the next argument (988): And when you saw him [Paris], your mind (nous) was turned into Cypris (ὁ σὸς δ’ ἰδών νιν νοῦς ἐποιήθη Κύπρις).

This assimilation of Helen’s mind with Cypris sustains the etymological explication that Hecuba provides for the name Aphrodite as “ἀφροσύνη  =  folly,” which depersonalizes her figure and identifies her with “sexual craving.” It is therefore sexual desire that shines in Helen’s eyes, and, accordingly, Hecuba’s previous statement (“Could she [Aphrodite] not have remained tranquil in heaven and carried you to Troy with the whole city of Amiclae?”)84 conveys a sarcastic denial (“This is really very ridiculous”): if goddess Aphrodite had really inspired Helen’s passion, as Helen claims, she did not need to accompany Paris: what was present in Helen’s eyes was Aphrodite’s depersonalized power, that is, “sexual folly.” For, when she saw him, her mind (nous) was turned into Cypris, that is, into a sexually craving soul. Hecuba, in accord with her conflated view of Zeus as god of the law of nature, and Nous, implies that Aphrodite too is conflated with a cosmic force, that of sex. 84.  The expression “with the whole city of Amiclae” has a hyperbolic function.

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8.  The Lewd Gaze of the Eye With the identification of the gaze as the starting point of the emergence of erotic passion, the representation of the erotic process is eloquent and enlightened. The analogy with Gorgias’s expression in his Encomium of Helen (19) is undeniable: “What wonder, then, if the eye of Helen (τὸ τῆς Ἑλένης ὄμμα), delighted by Paris’s body, provoked in her soul desire and craving for love (προθυμίαν καὶ ἅμιλλαν ἔρωτος)?”85 This view, according to which the lover is the source of his/her own passion, goes along with the alternative traditional explanation according to which the source of desire resides in the object itself—for instance, in the cheeks or the eyes of the seducing object.86 The subjective responsibility is not highlighted in this version, but still the source of passion remains within the relation of subject and object without evoking a divine instigation.87 As the subjective gaze in viewing a desirable object produces erotic passion, the text suggests that the enemy is not outside but inside us. We will see this internal enemy in Phaedra, Hermione, Pentheus, and others.

85.  Notice here how sexual desire is defined; ἔρωs by itself often refers to a delayed desire; see Weiss 1998, 50. 86.  See Pearson 1909, 256–57; West 1966, line 901, p.  409. In Hipp. 525–34, the young women of the Chorus sing: “Eros, Eros, you who distill desire down in the eyes (ὁ κατ’ ὀμμάτων στάζων πόθον) [of those who fall in love], bringing sweet delight to the souls of those you make war against, never show yourself to me for my hurt, and never come without harmony. For neither the shaft of fire nor of stars surpasses that of Aphrodite, launched from the hands of Eros, the child of Zeus.” The women speak in accordance with the metaphysical view that Eros induces love. The passage shows the ambiguous effects of Eros. He brings sweet delight to the souls of those he makes war against: in this way the text confirms the traditional ambivalence of love, sweet and bitter at once. The destructive effect of Eros is stressed in the last two lines of the next strophe (541–42): “he who destroys mortal men and sends them through all sorts of disgraces when he comes.” 87.  I quote here a few examples of this alternative version. Hesiod says that the eye of the beloved is what kindles desire in the lover (Theog. 910–11): “[Thaleia], from whose eyes, as they glanced, flowed love that dissolves the limbs: and beautiful is their glance from beneath their brows.” In this understanding of eros, desire emanates from the external object and flows into the beholder, who as a result falls in love. Something divine—like the shafts of Eros—emanates from the beautiful source. The subjective gaze as mediator of the erotic desire is found also in Homer; see Il. 14.294, where Zeus is suddenly taken with amorous passion for Hera by looking at her.

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In Hecuba’s description, the object has a fascinating “splendor”: “My son was most beautiful, and seeing him, your mind was made Cypris. . . . When you held him before your eyes, a splendor in his exotic dress and gold, you became utterly wanton in your mind” (Tro. 987–92).88 Hecuba mantains that Paris’s beauty is the source of Helen’s craving, but it is Helen’s wanton and greedy glance at Paris’s beauty and wealth that turns her mind into lewd and wicked desire and adultery. In modern and recognizable terms, our love is the passion that sustains our imagination as we see something valuable in the object we gaze at.89 Hecuba’s representation of Paris’s erotic beauty is supported by Iliad 3.390–94,90 where Aphrodite, in disguise, invites Helen to come to Paris, who waits for her in his bed. He has been defeated in a duel by Menelaus and miraculously rescued by Aphrodite, who has brought him from the battlefield to his bedroom: Come here: Alexander urges you to come home; he is in the bed with spiral ornaments, shining in his beauty and raiment; you would not say that the man was returning from a battle with a warrior, but rather that he was going to dance, or resting after recently ceasing from dancing.

88.  ὃν εἰσιδοῦσα βαρβάροις ἐσθήμασιν χρυσῶι τε λαμπρὸν ἐξεμαργώθης φρένας. According to Hecuba’s words, Helen’s eyes evaluate, measure, and are—we may say— pleased and imprisoned by the splendor, the shine, of gold and the robes. Her greed— we may say with Hecuba—and her desire are aroused by her gaze (see also 993–97). Croally (1994, 151) correctly and eloquently shows how in this evaluation of Oriental richness, Hecuba “demonstrates her temporary Greekness.” 89.  On the role of imagination in erotic desire, see the beautiful description by Carson (1986, 62ff., esp. 63), in which she gives the example of how Homer represents the old men on the wall of Troy watching Helen pass, and “let out a whisper: ‘It is no discredit for the Trojans and well-greaved Athenians to suffer long anguish for a woman like that.’ (Il. 3.156–57). Helen remains universally desired, universally imaginable, perfect.” And again, after an analysis of some famous literary texts: “It is in the difference between cursive and typeface, between the real Vronsky and the imaginary one, between Sappho and “the man who listens closely”, between an actual knight and an empty suit of armour, that desire is felt.” Notice “the difference,” i.e., the lack, the imaginary, the illusion. 90.  δεῦρ’ ἴθ’· Ἀλέξανδρός σε καλεῖ οἶκον δὲ νέεσθαι. / κεῖνος ὅ γ’ ἐν θαλάμῳ καὶ δινωτοῖσι λέχεσσι / κάλλεΐ τε στίλβων καὶ εἵμασιν· οὐδέ κε φαίης / ἀνδρὶ μαχεσσάμενον τόν γ’ ἐλθεῖν, ἀλλὰ χορὸν δὲ / ἔρχεσθ’, ἠὲ χοροῖο νέον λήγοντα καθίζειν.

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Also in this passage the gaze is summoned, though only implicitly: “you would not say” implies “if you were looking at him.”91 Euripides has not forgotten the precious detail of Paris’s splendor—“shining in his beauty and raiment”—and has Hecuba use a similar phrase to describe the attraction Helen’s eyes felt for Alexander.92 In the episode in the Iliad, Helen is not at all impressed with the shining beauty of Paris, because her eyes are already turned away from him, and initially she refuses to come to Paris. Desire needs a shining surface: beauty. But what sort of beauty does it need? We would not be able to say which sort of beauty shines in Paris, that of a warrior or that of a dancer. And what about his rich clothing?93 Yes, it provides additional brilliance to the eyes and the greedy mind. Is it needed? Certainly it seems to produce a flow of desire.94 In Euripides’s passage, beauty and raiment produce splendor, something that receives the lewd, interested gaze of the beholder and triggers her desire.95 This analysis reminds me of the analogous, though sterner line Paul de Man takes in this matter: “Rather than being a heightened version of sense experience, the erotic is a figure that makes that experience possible. We do not see what we love, but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all” (1986, 53; emphasis mine). 91. Aphrodite in Hymn to Aphrodite 56–57 falls in love with Anchises at first sight: “When then smile-loving Aphrodite saw him, she fell in love with him, and passion violently took possession of her mind” (τὸν δὴ ἔπειτα ἰδοῦσα φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη ἠράσατ’, ἐκπάγλως δὲ κατὰ φρένας ἵμερος εἷλεν). See Propertius, who, in the specific context of lovemaking, says, “oculi sunt in amore duces” (2.15.12). 92.  ὃν εἰσιδοῦσα βαρβάροις ἐσθήμαςιν χρυσῶι τε λαμπρὸν ἐξεμαργώθης φρένας. The verb ἐξεμαργώθης and cognates like margos are of popular origin (DELG); they are often used by Euripides to describe human and especially female wantonness; see, for instance, Andr. 936–53 and 949. 93.  Rich, radiant clothes and jewels are important tools of seduction: in Hymn to Aphrodite 84–90 six lines describe pieces of jewelry that “shine like the moon” on her body and make Anchises fall in love with her. In Eur. Andr. 146ff., Hermione describes the signs of her erotic distinction and power: “Wearing on my head tiaras of pure gold, and draped in luxurious garments . . . I came here [to Phthia].” 94.  This is similar to the modern explanation of the act of seeing: through light, objects radiate and reach the eyes. 95.  Loraux (1989, 232–37) has shown how Helen in the Iliad appears somehow as a “phantom,” and how as such she excites erotic desire. Her beauty is like that of the goddesses, therefore like something extraneous to herself, and having no describable, concrete “body.”

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9.  The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite? Even without divine intervention, the subject, being the source of her/ his own eros, falls into a passion, so strong that it is just as divine. Euripides must have meditated on the violence of sexual passion and appreciated how the traditional attribution of erotic desire to Aphrodite explained what enlightened theories could not, and what we moderns attribute to the dominance of the unconscious, inaccessible, in part at least, to our consciousness. His allusion to Homer’s Helen in the third book of the Iliad invites us to reflect on the intellectual predicament in which Euripides must have found himself, as a thinker and a dramatist, in interpreting the irrational and perverse nature of human sexual drive (ἀφροσύνη). Whatever Homer’s dramatization of Aphrodite’s presence meant to Homer and his audience, and whatever they thought of divine inspiration in this matter, the goddess’s presence could explain the irrational behavior of Helen, and her return to make love with Paris after having strongly rejected that intercourse. Aphrodite’s instigation and imperious will could easily explain and make manifest the mysterious, mad, and commanding force of erotic passion. In Euripides’s time and culture, Gorgias suggested that if Helen was seduced by the logos she was as innocent as if she had been inspired by Aphrodite, since the logos has divine force (Encomium of Helen 8: “It accomplishes most divine effects”). By means of this simile, Gorgias aggrandizes the power of the seducing logos: he depersonalizes Aphrodite and attributes her power to the logos. However, he needs an Aphrodite with divine power to give meaning to his simile. Turning then to secular terms, Gorgias writes that the logos has the same effect on the soul as a pharmakon has on the body (14). Love (eros) would also have affected Helen in a natural-physical way, for sight molds the nature of the soul (15–19): “So if Helen’s eyes, pleased by Alexander’s body, transmitted an eagerness and striving for love to her soul, what is surprising? If eros is a god with a god’s power, how can the weaker repel and resist it? But if it is a human malady . . .” (19). Gorgias gives an account of the uncontrollable drive of sexual passion either by comparing it—in secular terms—to a malady, or to a logos, or, in metaphysical terms, by attributing it to Eros. He needs to emphasize the physical, communicative forces (speech, sight, etc.) of desire by means of metaphorical or hypothetical images (“If

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eros is a god . . .”) that compare these physical forces to divine power. Although Euripides understands that the divine in Gorgias’s argument is merely figural and hypothetical and serves rhetorical purposes, on stage the poet has no way to represent these aggrandizing figures with metaphors or hypotheses. In the Hippolytus Aphrodite is a real being, both as a depersonalized figure of sex and as a character planning a plot. Euripides uses the debate between Helen and Hecuba resourcefully: though evoking the divine and human source of passion through two separate cultural contexts, Helen and Hecuba nevertheless recognizes the same divine violent and mindless effect—thus the etymology proposed by Hecuba (ἀφροσύνη, 989–90) takes all its sense.96 Dodds, following the thread started at Alcestis 963ff., where Zeus can be seen as a possible hypostasis of Necessity (Anankē), hypothesizes about whether in Troades 998 “Aphrodite is only a hypostatized lust.”97 I would make a small correction in Dodds’s view by omitting “only”: by attributing divine power to natural forces, the text leaves open a conflation with the traditional goddess Aphrodite. Natural forces and divine figures may occasionally be mentioned as being the same or different from each other, but the one never really erases the reality of the other. Hecuba herself, while considering the judgment of Paris with a degree of skepticism, still defends the ethics of the three goddesses. She defends Hera, for instance, saying: “In view of what did the goddess Hera conceive such desire for beauty? Perhaps in order to get a better husband?” (977–79).98 Hecuba argues on the mythological level, accepting the anthropomorphic nature of the three goddesses, just as Teiresias will do in the Bacchae. There he identifies Dionysus as “wine” and then offers a mythological explanation of his relation to his father, Zeus, creating the possibility of integrating his depersonalized Dionysus into Dionysus’s whole anthropomorphic mythology. Accordingly, the identification and the distinction between the two divine aspects of the mythological figures are always implicit, and the aspect

96.  Dodds (1929, 101) connects this line with Euripides fr. 1018, which asserts, “Our nous is god in each of us.” 97.  Dodds 1929, 101 n. 5. 98.  τοῦ γὰρ οὕνεκ’ ἂν θεὰ / Ἥρα τοσοῦτον ἔσχ’ ἔρωτα καλλονῆς; / πότερον ἀμείνον’ ὡς λάβηι Διὸς πόσιν;

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of the cosmic power does not efface the traditional figure.99 In the Iliad, the conflation often characterizes the divine nature of Zeus, who is simultateously lightning and thunder and a ruler of the order of things. As he agrees with Thetis’s request to honor Achilles by granting victory to the Trojans, he nods, and he shakes the “immense Olympus” (Il. 1.528–30). He is an immense manifestation of violence, light, and sound and a conscious ruler of Being. What is remarkable and unexpected is that though he is described in this impersonal and cosmic way, nevertheless he laments that to fulfill Thetis’s request will be a “disaster”: he will have to quarrel with his wife (1.518–19). The personal and dramatic representation of his anthropomorphic figure emerges and clashes with the cosmic one, creating an incredible hybridization. This hybridization is itself conceptually difficult, but it is there. Just as in Homer, in Euripides too one of the two aspects becomes salient or dominant, according to the argument or the scene. The anthropomorphic and dramatic aspect of the god dominates in the traditionally staged action and ideology, but then in Euripides it becomes the target of disbelief (“it is ridiculous”) and of rational disapproval, while the depersonalized and cosmic aspect both serves this criticism and opens up innovating interpretation: Aphrodite as ἀφροσύνη, folly of a lewd mind. In the Hippolytus the innovating interpretation leads Phaedra to focus on the source of mortals’ ruin; in the Heracles it suggests a new form of virtuous and pious life, as Heracles discovers. In our passage, Hecuba attacks Helen’s view of anthropomorphic Aphrodite, implicitly indicting the goddess’s self-serving motivation—that of compensating Paris for having chosen her as the most beautiful goddess. Hecuba mocks Helen’s self-serving aim—that of appearing innocent. In her polemic, through the conflation of Aphrodite with mad sexual power, she attributes to it, willingly or unwillingly, a divine nature, an irresistible force. Sophia depersonalizes Aphrodite, and divinizes sexual power. Thus, Hecuba claims that Helen’s lewd eye filled her mind with this mad power. 99.  I transcribe here Dodds’s “lyrical” interpretation (1929, 102): “The Kypris of the Hippolytus is none other than Venus Genetrix of Lucretius, the Life Force of Schopenhauer, the élan vital of Bergson: a force unthinking, unpitying, but divine.” It is this sort of writing that makes Dodds endlessly inspiring and fascinating. Among his contemporaries, Dodds is one of the most radical interpreters of the divine in Euripides. Schadewaldt (1926, 109–11) emphasizes the contrast between the mythological and the secular; and Lesky (1960, 129) reads Troades 988 in the sense that “Cypris entered in Helen’s nous [“mind”] and took possession of it.”

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At the level of an impersonal cosmic power, a sort of reasonable piety becomes paradoxically conceivable: Hecuba defends Hera against what she deems to be an offensive story, Hera’s competition for the price of beauty (976–78): “Why should the goddess Hera conceive such a great desire to be beautiful? So that she could get a better husband than Zeus?”100 The debate between Helen and Hecuba offers a philosophically and ethically enlightened explanation for the nature and effects of eros, but it does not change anything—neither the passion and suffering of the characters nor their ethical approach to life.101 Menelaus is the presumed judge of the debate, and he declares that he is persuaded by Hecuba’s argument (1035ff.), but he will not punish Helen. As Hecuba has foreseen, he will direct his gaze at Helen and will again be seduced by her. He was warned, but he is not a sophos, and his gazing at Helen is still, paradoxically, unschooled and defenseless. We understand better now why, in accordance with Euripides’s poetics, it is not philosophy that helps men to live better, but poetry, for “it is a gain that mortal men heal these [hateful griefs] by means of songs” (Medea 199–200).

10. Phaedra You [Eros] turn aside the minds even of the righteous toward injustice, to their ruin. (Sophocles, Antigone 791–92)

In the first part of the Hippolytus, Phaedra, after her confession to the Nurse, seems to relax: she describes the painful trajectory of her attempts

100. Often a nonanthropomorphic interpretation of deities allows Euripides’s characters to practice a thoughtful form of piety: Teiresias, for instance, while embracing Dionysus as “wine,” magnifies his blessings and is ready to dance and celebrate the god (see below, sections 20 and 21). This piety is therefore an outcome of sophia conceived as “wisdom” and “intelligence,” and “reasonableness” (synesis). 101.  The debate is oddly and arbitrarily placed at a moment and in a place in which groups of slaves are being dragged away from their native land, and the glorious city of Troy is going up in flames. The debate changes, modifies, touches, none of this. It is a sort of intellectual show. Poetry is also possessed by some madness, as it wants, at any cost, to show its smartness and novelties.

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to silence her shameful passion for Hippolytus. She is unaware of being Aphrodite’s victim without hope of escape, and, acting within a secular frame, believes that she can silence and suppress what the audience knows from the prologue to be an inextinguishable passion implanted in her by Aphrodite. In this way Euripides stages the split/conflation that he has dramatized in the debate of the Troades between the traditional, anthropomorphic and the cosmic, natural source of sexual desire.102 The text presents a conflicting scenario. On the one hand, despite Phae­ dra’s belief, the staged action will show that the real source of her love is unique and comes from Aphrodite, as the goddess herself declares in her prologue. On the other, the poetic force of the drama lies in the intellectual and spiritual effects triggered by Phaedra’s false belief: they create an immortal theatrical character. The poetic discoveries—existential novelties, emotional drives, confusion, harrowing pain—all come from Phaedra’s mind and words. Aphrodite’s curse would have no story without Phaedra’s belief in the natural source of her passion and in her sustained struggle to repel it. As we are going to see, the novelty of Phaedra’s confession, and her belief in the natural source of love, are contained in a metaleptic frame that assures the audience of the autonomy and sincerity of her experience. On the other hand, the role of the goddess is inscribed in the conflation of her traditional anthropomorphic attributes and those of natural sexual drive. Thus she is at once the traditional cultic figure and the impersonation of the cosmic sexual principle. This double textual strategy will have important effects. I start by analyzing Phaedra’s confession and its specific language: I pondered before now, other times, during the night’s long watches, how it is that the life of mortals has been ruined. (Hipp. 375–76)

Phaedra’s meditations will develop within an anthropological frame: she does not hark back to any divine source to explain the ways in which 102.  Of course Euripides refers also to the split between Helen and Aphrodite that Homer dramatized in Il. 3.383ff. See the detailed analysis by Susanetti (2005, 26). The fact that the audience is the unique witness of Aphrodite’s scheme produces a double effect: on the one hand, the audience gains the advantage of knowledge and control of the action in comparison to the human characters of the play; on the other, the scandal of the characters’ ignorance comes to the fore, as Janka (2004, 224–25) has very well described.

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mortals destroy their lives, but sees human feelings and attitudes as the reason for mortals’ failures. Love too is explained within this frame. Yet the anthropological frame and the confident feeling of control it provides are undermined by the ambiguity of Phaedra’s words. Her pondering can be understood either as a serious and responsible commitment to understanding mankind’s predicament, or as a presumptuous project, since she is blind to the real source of her love. Analogously, the detail “during the night’s long watches” could underscore her long, focused meditation or remind us that the text, through Hippolytus’s words (106), has defined Aphrodite as the goddess who “is worshipped at night.” Phae­ dra tells us that she has engaged in nocturnal pondering at other times, but these meditations of course are relevant to her present situation, her actual failure to overcome her passion, and her consent to confess her passion publicly. Euripides’s textual strategy of disclosing these ambiguous undertones might suggest that in fact Phaedra’s desire—without her being aware—speaks eloquently, in spite of her serious attempts to silence it. The autonomy of the self is a pious utopia; the language by itself brings forth the otherness in the self. Isn’t Phaedra’s project ridiculously ambitious and destined to fail? Aren’t her nocturnal meditations always steeped in her fear of an actual sexual downfall? Doesn’t Aphrodite reveal that Phaedra built a temple to her as she fell in love with Hippolytus (29–32)? Since it is plausible that Euripides intends the hidden passion to be acting here and in all the other cases, including hallucinations, he must have understood and observed in vivo the various forms in which language bespeaks the otherness of human beings, including the form that operates in what we today call the return of the repressed.103 Euripides shapes an extraordinary literary portrait. Phaedra’s anxious meditation, her desire for self-analysis during the long, silent nights, her wish to give her own problems a theoretical ground, and the linguistically

103.  Even if Aphrodite is really a dramatic presence in the play, I am suggesting that the text does not imply that Phaedra’s doubleness of language is the necessary consequence of Aphrodite’s game; an erotic passion, even when not produced by a god, would in any case be speaking beyond the subject’s control. On Phaedra’s language and passion, see Goff 1990, 27–54; Zeitlin 1996, 238, 244–45; Zeitlin emphasizes the confusion in Phaedra’s language between herself and Hippolytus—what I refer to as “displacement of the subject.”

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ambivalent connotations of the language she uses reveal a character of great originality, unknown in Greek literature. Like a lyric poet, she opens her painful experience up to our intense sympathy, not through everyday, social language, but through a language that issues uncontrolled from her soul, penetrates things, and creates insights. This intimate spiritual portrait reveals the remoteness of such a character from any religious, familiar, or political community. Phaedra is a queen, and yet she is alone, with no one to talk to, except a nurse of simple mind. Phaedra is one of a number of Euripidean characters who represent and experience the terrible isolation of a subject from the surrounding traditional culture. These characters are often women; they experience this isolation and alienation more often than men, since women do not belong, strictly speaking, to the culture of the city. Thus women suffer the otherness of human life more acutely. In her isolation and alienation, intimate language is Phaedra’s only comfort. Yet simultaneously such language is a poison: it gives Phaedra the illusion of controlling her passion, though it could simply be the effect of her passion; it liberates her from the untenable weight inside her, but its lightening effect is provided by a sympathetic addressee, and therefore a complicitous being. As she ponders why mortals destroy their lives, Phaedra expresses an anti-Socratic principle that has been discussed by Dodds (1929, 101–3; 1951, 186–87) and others (Holmes 2010, 259 n. 125). She states: What we know and understand to be noble we fail to carry out, some from idleness, others because they give precedence to some other pleasures than honor; for there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and leisure, a pleasant bane, and respect (aido-s). (380–85)

No divine agency ruins mortals’ noble aspirations; the ruinous weakness resides in their spiritual nature. Because Phaedra has such a problematic and comprehensive knowledge of how passions emerge, it would be interesting to hear from her which pleasure or situation she yielded to when she fell in love with Hippolytus. But she is silent on this point. From her argument, we must deduce that she too must have yielded to some pleasurable feeling, some special gazing. Her silence on this is a mark of her extreme reticence and her ambition to

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be and appear noble.104 In the prologue, however, Aphrodite tells us that, by her own devising, Phaedra fell in love with Hippolytus, some time ago, in Eleusis: ἰδοῦσα Φαίδρα καρδίαν κατέσχετο ἔρωτι δεινῶι τοῖς ἐμοῖς βουλεύμασιν. Phaedra saw [him], and her heart was seized by a terrible passion. This was my work. (26–27)

Here the gaze is the source of erotic passion, and Aphrodite is in some way identifying her action with the gaze, with the natural force of sex. According to Aphrodite, Phaedra then built a temple to her in Athens, “since she loved a love not in her country” (29–32).105 Phaedra tells us nothing about any of this. The detail that she built a temple to Aphrodite because of her love for Hippolytus contradicts the strategies that Phaedra, as she tells us, enacted as soon as she felt wounded by love: she decided “at the outset to conceal her malady in silence” (393–94);106 then to bear her madness nobly, overcoming it by means of self-control (398–99); and as an extreme and fatal last resort, when she realized the failure of these strategies, to die (400–402). The building of a temple to Aphrodite also contradicts Phaedra’s inquiry into and analysis of the human reasons for the downfall of mortals’ lives. If, by building a temple, she demonstrated her belief that Aphrodite had something to do with her malady and madness, why did she not simply say, “We fail because of the gods’ will, since we mortals are merely their puppets.” This is the view, of course, that Aphrodite’s prologue leads us to expect, but Phaedra’s pondering and confession (373–430) deny this expectation and compel us to recognize the conviction and confidence she gained after she realized the futility of building a temple. In other words, even if she built a temple for Aphrodite, her confession would signal her will to proceed alone to conquer whatever the dedication of a temple and other practices could not overcome. Because of this different 104.  On Phaedra’s role in the first Hippolytus and on the roles of Aphrodite in the new play, as the goddess becomes the cause of Phaedra’s fall, see Zeitlin 1996, 280–82. 105.  Euripides makes here a fictional connection between a shrine to Aphrodite on the Acropolis and a sanctuary to Hippolytus close to it (32–33). 106.  ἠρξάμην μὲν οὖν ἐκ τοῦδε, σιγᾶν τήνδε καὶ κρύπτειν νόσον· (393–94)

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register, we should consider Phaedra’s confession as a sort of metalepsis, or enlightened version, of her earlier attempt to heal her passion. This metaleptic window will be closed, and Phaedra herself, falling in line with all the mythical premises, will speak of Aphrodite as the victorious goddess, who destroys her (724–27). Metalepsis is exactly what allows myth to remain an irremovable reference,107 for it gives access to something that may well contradict or deconstruct the mythical story; yet the myth will not be suppressed, and the rationalist, deconstructive, version will appear as a variant or merely as a parenthesis. Through this strategy, metalepsis both saves the mythical story and undermines it. Through the parenthesis of Phaedra’s confession therefore, Aphrodite is momentarily suspended from performing as the traditional goddess, but this suspension does not prevent her from being, in the play, a real character, an effective dramatic agent, as her victory over Phaedra’s resistance and the final appearance of Artemis will also confirm. She is therefore at once the jealous goddess, planning to destroy a man through the ruin of an innocent woman, and the divine, cosmic force of sex (447–50): φοιτᾶι δ’ ἀν’ αἰθέρ’, ἔστι δ’ ἐν θαλασσίωι κλύδωνι Κύπρις, πάντα δ’ ἐκ ταύτης ἔφυ· ἥδ’ ἐστὶν ἡ σπείρουσα καὶ διδοῦσ’ ἔρον, οὗ πάντες ἐσμὲν οἱ κατὰ χθόν’ ἔκγονοι. She lives in the shining aither, dwells in the wavy sea, and everything comes to life from her. She is the one who spreads the seeds and desire wherefrom all of us in the world are born.108 107.  “Greek rationalism or Greek enlightenment, in contradistinction to the modern enlightenment, is able and compelled to give its views a mythical expression. Modern enlightenment is wholly unmythical. If it uses metaphorical expressions, like Prometheus, etc., that is wholly unnecessary.” According to this view, however, the Greek enlightenment was incapable of unmythical expression: “There cannot be a popular enlightenment. This is the reason why they are all compelled, more or less, to engage in a mythical presentation of their doctrines.” See Strauss 2001, 39–40. 108.  See also 1277–80 with Barrett’s commentary. It is remarkable that this cosmic definition of sex under the cover of Aphrodite is given by the Nurse: in Euripides often the socially inferior characters are those who state general, abstract principles, and produce new views; e.g., the Nurse in the Medea, the Chorus in the Alcestis and in the Troades.

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Phaedra induces the audience and readers to draw a distinction between the two aspects of Aphrodite: within the ideological coordinates of the play, she is wrong, but, within the frame of philosophical and enlightened views, she is right, and true to life. Audience and readers confront her secular, autonomous view of the sexual phenomenon and are compelled to sympathize with the rich, disquieting character she presents to them. Phaedra has refused to surrender to the greatest pleasure of the sexual act in order to protect her noble image and has silently resisted the urges of her passion.109 Yet now she speaks and yields to some relief or escape from her passion. It is a minimal break in her code.110 First, she yields to the relief of confessing her passion to the Nurse, with the additional comfort of showing the nobility of her resistance and of upholding her decision to die. But her plan fails: she realizes only later that by speaking she made a shameful concession to her imagined pleasure. Second, she trusts the Nurse to find some means to cure her passion: this sudden and liberating hope induces her to trust, beyond her true conviction, the Nurse’s ability

109. Holmes (2010, 254 n. 109) draws attention to Aphrodite’s description of her silence through the violent hyperbaton of the adverb “silently”: . . . στένουσα κἀκπεπληγμένη / κέντροις ἔρωτος ἡ τάλαιν’ ἀπόλλυται / σιγῆι (39–40). On the theme of the κέντρον (“goad of love”), see Janka (2004, 223), who compares it to the analogous motif in the Trachiniae. 110.  In the prologue, Aphrodite says (42): “I will show the affair to Theseus, and it will be revealed.” In fact, what will be revealed is only a lie, and it would seem not to be necessary for Phaedra to be in love with Hippolytus, but sufficient that some Iago would convince Theseus of the “affair.” See Barrett 1964, 165, on the “mystifying and misleading” words of Aphrodite. But in fact, as Hayden Pelliccia suggests to me, Aphrodite is the relevant god, and an injured Aphrodite proceeds through Aphrodisiac means; she can achieve the lie only by way of the passion: she needs two people in order to destroy one. For Hippolytus to be engulfed and destroyed by passion, the passion must be there, must be real. So Phaedra is necessary, not just “collateral damage,” Thwarted passion (Phaedra) = thwarted Aphrodite destroy Hippolytus. Indeed Phae­ dra figuratively identifies herself with Aphrodite when she says her last words: “By shaking off the burden of this life, I shall delight Aphrodite who destroys me. Bitter the love whose victim I shall be, but in dying I will be a ruin for another being, that he may know not to be arrogant at my pains: he shall share this sickness of mine and learn to be temperate” (725–31). The cruel irony of the last word is worthy of the cruel goddess. Phaedra in this moment is like the Aphrodite that Racine (Phèdre 1.3.306) describes as follows: “C’est Vénus tout entire à sa proie attachée.”

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and honesty. Third, she has proclaimed her desire and in her imagination enjoyed the closeness with Hippolytus through her hallucinations (208– 31). Thus, despite the firm grip she thinks she has on it, Phaedra’s passion speaks out and enjoys some pleasure. Phaedra yields to the Nurse’s supplications (325, 330), at least in part because she has been tricked by language: she has felt aidōs (reverence, respect) when confronted with the Nurse’s entreaties (335: δώσω· σέβας γὰρ χειρὸς αἰδοῦμαι τὸ σόν, “I shall grant your request: I respect your suppliant hand”). Her own weakness and the Nurse’s aggressiveness have induced Phaedra to grant “reverence” to the Nurse—as piety demands; but her concession acquires the negative connotation of “improper respect” or “giving up and yielding to impossible pressure.” Now, too late, Phae­ dra recognizes the slippery and dangerous nature of aidōs, to which she has yielded and on which she had meditated in her nocturnal thoughts in the past, learning how the noun deceptively carries opposite values in its single form.111 Besides, she had determined to maintain the strictest silence, “for nothing can be trusted in language: it knows well how to admonish the thoughts of others, but gets from itself a great deal of troubles” (395–97).112 She is not yet aware that language will explode in her house, publicizing her shamelessness113 and forcing her to kill herself, and, in order to save her reputation, to destroy somebody else. She is not aware that her desire 111.  Hipp. 385–86: αἰδώς τε· δισσαὶ δ’ εἰσίν, ἡ μὲν οὐ κακή, / ἡ δ’ ἄχθος οἴκων· εἰ δ’ ὁ καιρὸς ἦν σαφής, / οὐκ ἂν δύ’ ἤστην ταὔτ’ ἔχοντε γράμματα, “and aidōs: there are two of them, one is good and the other a disaster for the house; if the kairos [context] were clear, the same letters would not have two logoi, evaluations.” Dodds (1925) analyzes in depth the psychological processes that revolve around the meaning of aidōs in the whole play, as Phaedra chooses it on the wrong occasion (akairos), and Hippolytus violates his sophrosyne. 112.  γλώσσηι γὰρ οὐδὲν πιστόν, ἣ θυραῖα μὲν / φρονήματ’ ἀνδρῶν νουθετεῖν ἐπίσταται, / αὐτὴ δ’ ὑφ’ αὑτῆς πλεῖστα κέκτηται κακά. She describes the effects of her language without the awareness that troubles emerge as she speaks. The troubles language engenders by itself proceed from the slippery context (kairos), for language does not communicate things as they are, but stimuli of these things, as Gorgias suggested. 113.  See Goff 1990, 50: “Her disease spreads throughout the play; although it is indeed unspeakable (293), once it is spoken it becomes even more communicable and contaminates the beds of those outside Theseus’ family (462–63).”

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speaks when she loudly curses the women who actually satisfy their lewd passions (407–18): May the woman perish miserably, the one who first began to defile her marriage bed with other men! This ill first grew among women from noble houses; and whenever noble women resolve on base actions, surely the base born will regard such actions as good. But I also hate women who are chaste in words, but in secret possess an indecent daring. How, O Cypris, Lady of the Sea, how can these women look their husbands in the face?114 How can they not shudder lest darkness, their accomplice, and the timber of the house break into speech?

Phaedra is evidently one of those women “who are chaste in words” but not chaste in their minds, though she has not yielded, as they have, “in secret” to “an indecent daring.” As Barrett (1964, 235) writes, “Moral disapproval becomes all the more violent when it is tinged with envy.” She is indeed stunned that these lewd women may satisfy their desire in silence, without “the timber of the house break[ing] into speech.” This adunaton has a double effect. On the one hand, it points to the terrible scandal, since this silence still suggests to her imagination and that of the audience an indecent, salacious scene. On the other hand, the adunaton suggests that the silence is safely guarded by the house and by the darkness. Desire can be satisfied without any scandal. Phaedra’s contemplation of the lewd women’s affairs functions, therefore, as the source of a mimetic effect: she violently rejects the lewd women as models, but their affairs trouble her imagination. We will encounter specific mimetic models producing vicariously erotic desires in section 21, devoted to Hermione. Her language also turns out to be a confession of

114.  Here again, as when she built the temple for Aphrodite, Phaedra views Aphrodite as a chaste, censorious goddess, a helper against indecent passions. The cruelty of the goddess is as infinite as her power. Compare 400–401, where, however, Phaedra terms her own passion “Cypris,” merely by antonomasia. The centrality of the gaze is again remarkable: chaste women with lewd imaginations should not be able to look into the faces of their husbands, because their eyes are full of lewdness aimed at the adulterous object of their desire.

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self-hatred, since she is also, in part at least, one of those women.115 Phae­ dra cannot recognize the ambivalence of her language: the same surface of her language that allows her to build an image of her nobility and brings to light a piece of her aristocratic suffering twists, so to speak, and, as in a Möbius strip, brings to light the other side of herself—the sick one, the shameless one. Her language has the double face of the pharmakon,116 remedy and poison. Why does Phaedra finally consent to speak? Probably, as Dodds suggests, Euripides was aware that a repressed passion cannot be silenced forever.117 Indeed, before her explanation, Phaedra had reached a point of such emotional saturation that she spoke her desire aloud and publicly, yielding to her imagination (208–11, 215–22, 228–31) as an intruding, hallucinatory speech coming from outside herself.118 Indeed, imagination is the process by which self-consciousness loses control of itself through images, mental drift, and dreamy trips, turning away from identification with itself, and assumes the language of others and leads to a sort of psychic death.119 As Barrett (1964, 200) writes, “Now the passion . . . comes subconsciously to the surface in a series of wild wishes to be in the places where Hippolytus is and doing the things he does.” 115.  See, on this point, Holmes 2010, 260. 116.  Goff has written a brilliant book on the tricky nature of language in the Hippolytus; on the pharmakon that Phaedra fears and hopes for and that the Nurse promises, Goff (1990, 48–49) writes: “The pharmakon is both the subject of her [the Nurse’s] discourse and that discourse itself, which has exactly the weakening and disorienting effect of a drug or a love potion. . . . The pharmakon becomes a metaphor for the self-conscious evasive possibility of language enacting as it does so precisely such an evasion.” 117.  Dodds 1951. See also Knox 1952, 7, and his treatment of the strategies of silence and language in the Hippolytus. 118.  As Phaedra returns to her senses she asks herself: “Where was I driven out of my good sense? I was out of my mind, I fell in the maddening doing of a daimon” (240– 41: ποῖ παρεπλάγχθην γνώμης ἀγαθῆς; ἐμάνην, ἔπεσον δαίμονος ἄτηι). For the representation of delirium in tragedy, see Effe 2000. See the beautiful analysis of the physical symptoms of Phaedra’s passion in Holmes 2010, 252ff. A dramatic and graphic representation of the split between the “real Helen” and her eidolon is of course staged in the Helen. See Zeitlin 2010. 119.  See Derrida 1967, 261.

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Phaedra speaks in anapaests, which sound, as interpreters have imagined, like a recitativo in modern opera, though the presence of some long lyric alphas instead of etas suggests that her delivery might be lyric or quasi lyric: Would that I might draw a drink of pure water from a dewy spring, taking my rest lying under the poplar trees in a luxuriant meadow! (208–11)

One detail sounds as if it came from Hippolytus’s language: the “pure water” recalls the idea of purity that is deep in the mind of Hippolytus (102, 1003; see Segal 1970). Another detail hints at Phaedra’s desire: “rest” in “the locus amoenus” suggests the relief of losing herself in the places where the lovers hide. Then, Phaedra’s desire becomes explicitly vocal:120 In Heaven’s name, I love (eramai) to shout to the hounds and, past my blond hair, to throw a Thessalian javelin, holding in my hand the sharp-tipped spear. (219–22)

Her identification with Hippolytus is strong here, as she would like to shout to the hounds, just as he does, imitating his voice; but the fortissimo must have been to shout the verb eramai, “I love, I am in love with,” which lets the word for “love,” even “sexual love,” issue from the dry lips of Phae­ dra and resound in the world.121 As Phaedra’s eros radically drives her being, voice, and utterance into a hallucinating fantasy, it brings her closer to Hippolytus. It is distance that desire wants to erase, for eros needs unity, as is well understood by lovers (Plato, Symp. 192d). She is no longer herself. She sees herself as a huntress,

120.  Thouxai (to shout) is possibly onomatopoeic, and the actor must have shouted aloud the words eramai kusi tho¯uxai to underline her liberation from her long silence and repression of words. Notice the lyric, long a in line 220, which lets us guess that Phaedra may provide a quasi-lyric delivery. 121.  The verb eramai follows after a pause, and the actor could insert a short pause after it, singling it out emphatically. The Nurse notices the force of the verb, as she questions Phaedra: “What is this care for hunting? What is this love (erasai) for fountain springs?” (225). The verb, however, when applied to nonerotic activities carries connotations of desire and eagerness.

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which makes no sense, as she and the Nurse recognize later,122 but this role gives her pleasure, since it allows her to imagine her closeness to Hippolytus. That’s why she suffers shame and pain in returning to her senses (247–49). Objectively, however, her fantasy increases the distance between her and the desired object. He is nowhere and is more than ever unreachable by her in her present posture. Perhaps the most explicit expression of desire occurs when Phaedra imagines herself having “to subdue [or tame] Venetian mares” (231: πώλους Ἐνετὰς δαμαλιζομένα). Of course, Hippolytus is the one who subdues and tames the mares, but the verb δαμαλίζω is a poetic form of δαμάζω, which suggests not only “taming” horses, but also, since Iliad 18.432, subjecting a maid to a male. Here the displacements effected by desire are staggering.123 The difference between the imagining self and the object is here erased by Phaedra’s greatest longing, that of being taken by Hippolytus. Phaedra becomes aware that she has “wandered from the path of good sense” (240), and that this wandering, or flight of the imagination, is bad, but to return to the senses is a torment (247–49). In this magisterial way, Euripides makes Phaedra speak of her desire in all her utterances when she is not fully conscious of doing so, when she consciously fights against it and silences it, and when she believes she has found innocent, perhaps even useful, relief in the Nurse. Through such displays, Euripides brings to the stage the insuperable contradictions that trouble human minds, the poor defense the mind has against the perverse games of otherness and against language’s complicity with these games. It is because of this sharp psychological portrayal—so often and so felicitously repeated and elaborated in Euripides’s plays—that critics often praise him, in comparison with the epic poets and the other two dramatists, as the master of “psychological drama.” Although there is some truth in this praise, it would represent a critical shortsightedness to define

122.  On the mimetic force of this scene and on the inverted roles of the parthenos and the kouros, see the brilliant commentary in Zeitlin 1996, 283–84. 123.  As Zeitlin (1996, 284) suggests, Phaedra’s words for her delirious utterances “attest to the slippage of the boundary between the chaste and the erotic. What does she want to be? In desiring and desiring to be desired in turn, yet also desiring not to desire she plays all the roles at once.”

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Euripides’s work as “psychological drama.” His is metaphysical drama. Its poetic composition unravels the mythical texture, contesting the divine nature of the traditional gods by taking out or loosening the stitches that depict the mythical gods as human-like characters, and superimposing on the gods new, depersonalized forces that Euripides’s age was discovering, and to the discovery of which Euripides’s own sophia was contributing. Euripides invents the literary character, victim of those cosmic forces (see 447–500), and gazes at this human being with the sympathy of one who knows that sympathy is one of the rare gifts that humankind can ever receive.

11.  Hermione: The Andromache In the Andromache,124 Hermione, the wife of Neoptolemus, finds herself sexually and affectively shunned by her husband, who prefers his concubine, Andromache, the wife of the dead Hector. Humiliated by this situation, Hermione, during Neoptolemus’s absence, tries and fails to kill the child Andromache had with him. Hermione then expects Neoptolemus to come back and kill her. At this point an earlier suitor of hers, Orestes, appears, and Hermione explains her situation (Andr. 920–50): He [Neoptolemus] has all the rights to kill me. . . . This house seems to take voice and drive me forth.125. . . [930] The talking with bad women undid me. They puffed me up with folly by speaking like this: “Are you going to put up with this wretched captive, a slave, in your house, sharing 124.  The scholia inform us that the Andromache was not performed in Athens (schol. Eur. Andr. 485); see Allan 1999–2000, 149–51. The Andromache is, in my view, one of the best plays of Euripides, rarely praised as it deserves; it represents human frustrations, deceptions, and violence, as the victims of war and sex fight each other, on a pitiless horizon of divine brutality, human impotence, and finally utopia. The brutality is essentially that of Apollo, and his central, negative role may explain why Aphrodite is not a divine target. 125.  Of course, Hermione’s house—like the house of the adulteress whom Phaedra mentions (Hipp. 415–18)—does not speak, but Hermione’s consciousness speaks for it: the split between her consciousness and the surrounding world is represented by the house as the place of domesticity, familiarity, constituting the identity and the closedin area of the self.

62    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover your marriage bed?” . . . Yes, I listened to these Sirens’ words, their clever, knavish, deceitful chatter, and I became inflated with foolish thoughts. . . . These women are teachers of evil. One woman corrupts a marriage looking for a profit. Another, an adulteress herself, wants company in her disease; and many act out of sheer lewdness. This is the source of the disease in the houses of men.

Hermione had tried to kill herself, but her slaves prevented her suicide, and now she mentally reconstructs the steps leading to her fall.126 As Phaedra observed, corruption comes from noble houses, and here Hermione repeats that judgment.127 Moreover, like Phaedra, she indicts language and mimetic influence as the causes of her corruption. Allan (2002a, 144) has noted this power of language: “It is the very power of logos which is ultimately made the scapegoat of her reckless action (cf. Gorgias Hel. 8).” Just as Phaedra in Hippolytus 379ff. includes among ruinous pleasures “long conversations (304: μακραί τε λέσχαι) and leisure (σχολή), a pleasant bane (τερπνὸν κακόν),” so Hermione indicts as the source of her ruin the conversations/visits of bad women (“The talking with bad women undid me. They puffed me up with folly”), and their intent to induce their friends to fall into the same vices that they possess (Andr. 930ff.). There are some striking points in Hermione’s explanation of her downfall. First of all, sexual desire does not emanate from a divine source. It is not purposely implanted by Aphrodite in the heart of the subject as a gift or as a poison: human beings are not puppets in the hands of gods, but masters of their consent to sexual passion. Second, sexual desire finds a congenial setting in idle talking: seeing and hearing about the love affairs of others, speaking about them, imagining them, envying them, and finally imitating them. Again and again in Euripides, as in 126.  In her palinode Hermione asserts that wives must offer themselves in total submission to their husbands; she repeats, in less radical terms, the same point made by Andromache in Andr. 223ff. I agree with Allan (2002a, 182) that “the incongruity of her extreme submission calls her view into question” and that “in a daring way Euripides . . . challenges women’s reproduction of the dominant (male) values of their culture.” 127.  Her aristocratic temper and her snobbish attitude, as opposed to that of Peleus, for instance, emerge even from this palinode, as it points out the social distinctions (914, 941–42) on which her pride is grounded.

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Gorgias, through its emotional power language awakens and spurs passions. The staging and highlighting of the insidious work of this arousing language is a literary creation, a theatrical novelty, even, as we would say, the output of “romantic” imagination. It must have had powerful effects on the audience. Language as spur and stimulus to passions is the language of imagination, of the other. Here the object of erotic desire for the subject is not simply the object itself, but the object as seen and flattered through the image that the mediating model presents to the subject. The flattering image that a mediator presents is the splendor of the object, that splendor that caught Helen’s eye as the illusory target of her desire.128 Of course, myth offers a very powerful model, the source of mimetic influence in the matter of love—Zeus himself. The Nurse of the Hippolytus uses Zeus’s example to persuade Phaedra to satisfy her passion physically (453–54): the poets, she says, know well that Zeus fell in love with Semele. Phaedra, however, recognizes the bewitching and corrupting power of the Nurse’s words: My soul is all made ready by desire, and if you continue to champion shamelessness eloquently, I shall be all spent on what I am now fleeing. (503–6)

She rejects the Nurse’s proposal and Zeus’s mimetic influence, and thus also the poets (451–54) who champion Zeus’s and other gods’ love affairs. Euripides puts his own art before the eyes of the audience: he contrasts a cosmogonic view of Aphrodite (447–50) with what the traditional poets say about Zeus, the lover. With the metadramatic gesture of identifying the work and the persuasive language of the poets as the avatar of divine corruption, the text makes a witty attack on myth. “Witty,” because Euripides, through Phaedra’s and Hermione’s palinodes, separates himself from the poets and condemns the mimetic influence of indecent, even divine, models, as if he were not himself a poet, and as if the mentioning of such a model were not by itself already corrupting. 128.  For the splendor of the object, see above, sections 5 and 6. In our time, this mimetic effect has been analyzed with rich insight by Girard (1965, 1977) in a discussion of the general notions of “mimesis” and “mediation.”

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Although Euripides sometimes attributes sexual passion to men, most often he depicts women’s passion.129 Scenes in which women acknowledge their sexual urges and weakness have a confessional tone, creating a mood of regret and exposing a pitiful frailty. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, for instance, Francesca narrates her adultery with Paolo, while Paolo weeps besides her.130 When male characters attack the lewdness of women and describe their insatiability for the bed, their insults leads them sometimes to sheer nonsense—Jason, for instance, is driven to imagine different and odd methods of procreation (Medea 568–75).131 When Pentheus in the Bacchae imagines that his mother and the other women maddened by Dionysus desert their homes and work to enjoy symposia and sexual license, he turns against them the lewd desire that possesses him (Bacchae 811ff.; and see section 21). Euripides’s proclivity to portray sexually uncontrolled women has been a subject of scorn, criticism, and concern, from Aristophanes’s satirical attacks to scholarly interpretations in recent years.132 The present 129.  Andromache in Troades 667–68: “I detest the woman who, throwing her former husband out of the new marriage bed [or new sexual situation], loves the new one”; Electra in Electra 1035 asserts that woman is a “thing of folly” (μῶρον μὲν οὖν γυναῖκες); Menelaus in Troades 1055–59 makes the same assertion; Pentheus in the Bacchae is obsessed by his fantasy of women’s lewdness; Hector, according to Andromache, had lovers and bastard sons (Andr. 222ff.); Agamemnon comes home with the prophet Cassandra, installs her in his bed, and plans to keep two women at the same time in the same house (Eur. El. 1032ff.); Heracles destroys a city to get possession of Iole (Eur. Hipp. 545–53), etc. 130.  Great poets, when representing female passion and folly, have women speaking about themselves: Homer has Helen speaking of her own betrayal and shame. 131.  “Not even you would say so, if sex were not exciting you [literally, “tickling you”] (εἴ σε μὴ κνίζοι λέχος). But you women are so far gone (in folly) that if all is well in sexual matters [literally, “the bed”], you think you are satisfied, but if some trouble touches the matter of sex [literally, “the bed”] (ἢν δ’ αὖ γένηται ξυμφορά τις ἐς λέχος), you regard as hateful your best and truest interests. Mortals should beget children from some other source. And there should be no female sex (θῆλυ δ’ οὐκ εἶναι γένος). Then mankind would have no pain” (568–75). This male misogynism, even this specific version of it applied to sexual reproduction, is expressed in a similar way by Hippolytus in the eponymous play, 618ff. 132.  See Russell 1961, 38; Kittler 2009, 311–58. I single out two other authors for their different interpretations. Codino (1965, 150) gives an anthropological explanation of what he calls the permanent unilateral and monomaniacal passion of females in Homer. Starting from the example of Andromache’s mode of being (Il. 6.389 and 22.460–61: “She ran out of the house as a bacchant, her heart racing hard”) and

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study and the work of Foley (2001) and Dué (2006), for example, offer contemporary reactions to this view. Critical attention to Euripides’s alleged misogynistic treatment of women derives in part from a thematic selection or anthologization of suitable passages extrapolated from whole scenes and whole plays, and in part from a misunderstanding of the message of these troubled scenes. Kittler (2009, 311–58), for instance, contrasts sexually powerful females with weak males in Euripides and identifies this contrast as a general tendency on the part of Euripides. One could reverse this contrast, however, and oppose faithful women—Andromache (in the Troades), Alcestis, Evadne, Helen (in the Helen), Thetis, and even Clytemnestra (in the Iphigenia in Aulis)—to unfaithful, sexually violent, abusive males—Jason, Heracles, Neoptolemus, and Theseus (in the Hippolytus). This different contrast does not deny the text’s explicitness about the particularly difficult nature of the female, the δυστρόπωι γυναικῶν ἁρμονίαι (Hipp. 162), or the male audience’s potential enthusiasm for listening to women repeat, against themselves, some of the male stereotypes of women. Yet when these stereotypes are used, they are always qualified by a particular ideological frame. Medea appropriates them for use against males; Phaedra envisions them with envy and hatred. Hermione’s experience of a corrupt society and her palinode have less dramatic depth than Phaedra’s experience and resistance to her passion, but the former’s image of female corruption contrasts with the image and words of Andromache, icon of a wife’s fidelity, and, at the end of the play, with Thetis’s extraordinary affection for Peleus, her mortal husband. All of the scenes that illuminate males’ and females’ troubled sexual experiences are similar in one respect: they all reflect the individual alienation from the integrity of a common culture. Euripides’s own text is the immediate and eloquent witness of the disintegration of the old culture and the invasion of new alienating cultural interests; his text endlessly extending his analysis to the feminine emotions, he considers the social conditions of women’s lives—they live in the closets of their oikos (home), emotionally dependent on their masters—as the determinants of their specific emotionality. On the other hand, Mendelsohn (2002, 154) offers a fascinating description of the Greek view of women: “Because her essentially liquid nature [as opposed to the hardness and denseness of male bodies] places her squarely within the world of the elements, of plants, animals, and female wantonness, woman is thought of as inimical to civilization itself.” I do not quote his entire description.

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brings new, exciting idols to the stage, and surrenders to the pleasure of trying all of them and speaking their “other” languages. Among these idols, Eros is particularly important because it is the mode of being that tests and finally transcends the subject’s self-identity by forcing the self to confront “otherness.” In this confrontation a subject may, at any moment, destroy itself. Forces like the goddess Anankē, Chance, and ecstatic inebriation are instantiations of “otherness” in other plays of Euripides, but Eros is the optimal dramatic resource, because it strikes deep into the marrow of the human being. Although it attacks males and females equally, women are more frequently its prey, because they are less protected than men. Men are subjected to other instantiations of otherness—in war, glory and death; in politics, power and defeat—because they are fighters and political leaders. Women, on the contrary, especially in the cities, are deprived of these and other experiences and encounters. Euripides’s time was characterized by intense cultural interest in women and in sexual matters.133 Thus he was alert and sensitive to human beings’ experience of the destructive effects of alienation of the self through sexual passions and obsessions. But Euripides understood otherness as a human predicament that was independent from specific political and social condi133.  Sex is a theme that emerges, often with new features, in other writers of the age, for all of whom the theme is crucially important. The theme is too vast to be treated in a note; I give only a few references here. Thucydides rewrites the story of the tyrannicides: a love affair was the reason Aristogeiton and Harmodius murdered the tyrant Hipparchus, according to Thucydides (6.54–59), and the same Thucydides declares that this explanation of the cause of the plot is unprecedented (6.54.1–3). Xenophon closes his Symposion with a description of a sexually exciting mime featuring Dionysus and Ariadne, a scene that arouses the audience and does not leave Socrates unaffected (Symp. 9.3–6); the same author in the Memorabilia (1.2.24) intimates that even respectable women pursued Alcibiades. Aristophanes’s comedies mock a new erotic style of which Agathon and Alcibiades are the sexual models. The painters represent a new, extravagant erotic mode of life and a new problematic concerning gender and paint transgressive, seductive, and languid figures of lovers, of which Adonis is an example; see Shapiro 2009. The Hippocratic writings show an intense interest in the nature, diseases, etc. of women: see Ando 2000. Euripides himself focuses often on the specific nature of women: for instance, in Hipp. 161 he describes it as “an awkward harmony,” and elsewhere he sees it as being prone to several forms of suffering (see Loraux 1981a, 51–53).

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tions. He also chose language as an inescapable instance of otherness; he understood language’s emotional power, its circuitous meanderings in its attempts to deceive, as Phaedra recognized (240: “I wandered from the path of good sense”), or to persuade, and its dissimulating and lying words saying things that sound perfectly true but are false. The latter, of course, are also the strategies that Eros loves to employ, even before loving anything. Although Euripides was not familiar with the theory that attaches meaning to the movement and play of the trace, his thought was attuned to this way of understanding the picture of the world. Classical rhetoric calls these contradictions paradoxes or oxymora, but, in fact, as Euripides understands them, they are the coincidental movements of opposite terms, as in a “trace,” whose meaning and identity depend on the fact that the full term is followed by the empty one, the vital by the dead one, and so on.134 Otherness, of course, also ensnares faithful loves and may turn them into tragic experiences. No event, no mode of being, fails to be marked by that condition that also marks Euripides’s poetic language. The uncontrollable and meandering valence of sophia, which is the icon and immediate term of Euripides’s poetics, speaks for itself. There is no fullness of human love/sex (for either male or female) that does not challenge the autonomy of the self or sits in the sure harbor of comfort and pleasure.135 The most radical example of the transformation of a loyal and d ­ evoted love into a total loss of the self is offered by Evadne in the Suppliant Women. She throws herself on the pyre of her husband, Capaneus (Suppl. 990–1071): she wants to die with him and to love him eternally. In her first strophe she contrasts the first wedding ceremony with the one she is now going to celebrate by throwing herself onto Capaneus’s pyre: she sings (990–1008): What light what gleam did the Sun on his chariot reverberate and likewise the moon astride her steed . . . in the day when the city of Argos with songs raised tower-high the happiness of my marriage and of Capaneus of the bronze panoply! 134.  For the trace as the absolute source of sense, see Derrida 1967, 68–69, 90–95, 108–10. The number and the variety of oxymora in Euripides are unprecedented: examples such as dusphamous phamas (Hec. 194), megalopolis polis (Tro. 1291–92), and poros aporos (IT 987; cf. Medea 362; fr. 430) are endless. 135.  This would be the pious prayer of the women of the Chorus (Hipp. 528–29).

68    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover It is that I have come, running from my house raving like a bacchant (δρομὰς ἐξ ἐμῶν / οἴκων ἐκβακχευσαμένα)136 seeking the blaze of his pyre and the same tomb, to bring to an end in Hades the pains and the toils of life137; for it is the sweetest death to die with loved ones as they die. (995–1008)

Evadne compares and contrasts the sun’s and the moon’s light on the day of her marriage with the blaze of the pyre and the tomb (πυρᾶς φῶς τάφον τε) that she is seeking now. The fire of the pyre and the tomb are thought to be complementary through the syndetic particle te. The natural light of the stars and the fire of the pyre designate two opposite worlds, the natural and alive one and the artificial and dying one. Indeed it is not a marriage that her song now celebrates but her death, and, as far as death is concerned, she has chosen the right light and place for the sweetest death, that of dying together with loved ones. The text implicitly opposes also the choral song of the whole city celebrating her marriage—a makarismos—and the solitary and delirious song with which she announces her own death in the tomb of her husband. Life is hard even with a loving husband, but to lose him is a worse pain: it can be compensated for only by dying with him, the sweetest death. She sings the new makarismos, appropriate to the situation. Her language both inflames her mind and helps her to taste the pleasure of her deliriousness. When she says that she has rushed out of her house “like a bacchant,” she uses a metaphor, referring to the generic sense of the

136.  δρομὰς often connotes the unnatural swiftness of ecstatic enthusiasm, like that of a bacchant (Collard). She identifies “her” house so as to begin to focus on the “privacy,” the “monomaniac” aspect of her decision that she will underline in her song, especially when she will celebrate her unique virtue with respect to all the other women in the world (1059–61). 137.  Seaford (1993, 126), in accordance with his personal interpretation of Dionysus, asserts that the phrase makes sense only as a negation of the first makarismos. There is no need for such an interpretation: Evadne in something like a makarismos universalizes her situation and emphasizes pains and toils in order to make her perverse exemplarity more impressive as the wisest and the most pleasurable human choice. The reader will not fail to notice that even in her delirious expression, the issue is the one I have attributed to the theater of Euripides: the constitution of a discourse that removes or controls the pains of life.

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word ekbankheuomai as “frenzied,” “possessed,” in this case, “by eros.”138 The metaphor demonstrates her joyful, almost mystical excitement and simultaneously announces the displacement of her consciousness and mind: through the“metaphor,” she gives a name to that displacement. Evadne is barely capable of distinguishing the various impulses that motivate her: love, ecstasy, a longing for a blessed life, and the appeal of a glorious deed (see 1015, 1059–63). All these impulses, however, merge into one—the delirious thought of sharing a new marriage with Capaneus. Evadne’s delirious rush (“running,” 1000) intends to suppress the terrible difference that obtains between “the blaze of the pyre,” whose glow and illusory unity with Capaneus fascinate her, and the real object, the husband, (πόσει . . . φίλωι), who is burning in the pyre.139 She longs to melt with Capaneus, husband and wife, into an indissoluble marriage (1018–22): With a leap into the fire, I mingle my body with that of my dear husband (πόσει συμμείξασα φίλωι) through the blazing fire, and placing my body close to his body, I will come to the bedchamber of Persephone.

In her imagination, she appropriates the fire both as what will melt her and her husband together and as what will serve as the bed of their love: the verb summeignumi has here a double connotation: it is commonly used to express sexual copulation and Evadne means just that, while of course the fire will achieve a different mingling by combining the ashes of both bodies. It is only through the first connotation of the verb that she would be able to reach Persephone’s bedchamber. Evadne feels close to Persephone, who was once dragged alive to Hades. Both Eros’s language and mythos cheat Evadne in some way, by instilling in her the hallucinating pleasure of a miraculous mingling and blessing. She is a sublime and horrific new literary, operatic character.

138.  Euripides uses this metaphor also in Hec. 1077 and elsewhere. 139.  According to Chantraine (1946–47, 221–22), posis (husband) in Homer has a juridical rather than sentimental connotation. The vocative form is never found, and when Andromache turns to the dead Hector in her supreme farewell she calls him with the vocative ἆνερ. In Attic the vocative appears, for instance, in Eur. Alc. 323. In the previous strophe, Evadne has evoked her marriage and called Capaneus her husband with the poetic word gametes (998).

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Song increases the self-affecting power of the voice, gives the words a theatrical charge, and creates the pathetic illusion of identity between the message and the soul. In reality, Evadne becomes a captive of her medium, a prisoner of sound and fury: she is an operatic actor acted on by an orchestra that leads her song.140 The idea of a burial in which the remains of two friends are placed together in the same vessel is found in Iliad 23, where the ghost of Patroclos appears to Achilles and asks him to find a common place for their bones: Do not place my bones apart from yours, Achilles, but with them, just as we grew up together in your house . . . so let a single vessel, the golden two-handled urn the lady your mother gave you, hold both our bones. (83–93)

Achilles agrees (243–44), and the Odyssey confirms the double burial (24.76– 77). The idea is picked up by Euripides in the Alcestis, where Admetus explains to his dying wife that he will have his remains placed in the same coffin with her, and “my side [will] be stretched close to your side” (365–67). Evadne repeats this expression—but with a difference. Both Achilles and Admetus foresee the mixing of their bones with their partners’, but only after their own deaths, whereas Evadne throws herself on the pyre alive to obtain that mingling through the fire. She terms her gesture “the sweetest death.” Euripides’s desire to stage a new literary figure, a figure totally operatic, that is, driven by a madly passionate voice, must have been strong, and the force of the merciless oxymora—the identity of I and love, of love and death, of joy and torture—impossible to ignore.141 140.  Euripides’s innovation in transforming traditional dramatic scenes from recitation into operatic performances has been often commented on. Obvious examples of this innovation are, for instance, the operatic transformation of the scene in which Orestes murders his mother in Aesch. Cho. 892–930 into a sung “duet” between Ores­ tes and Electra in Eur. El. 1206–32, and the transformation of an entire Messenger’s scene into a musical performance in the Orestes (1368ff.). Euripides’s musical novelties have been the subject of many recent studies; see, for instance, Hordern 2002, 33ff.; D’Angour 2007; Csapo 1999–2000. This recycling from one genre to another could be part of the musical revolution. The need to recycle dramatic scenes that already had a long tradition must have been strongly felt especially by a dramatist like Euripides who was so sensitive to the cultural novelties of his time. 141.  See below, sections  17 and 18 where I  analyze the political significance of Evadne’s gesture.

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Alcestis is also set up for self-sacrifice, as she is shown to be willing to die in the place of her husband. Her tragic experience, however, and the poetic effects of the Alcestis are different, since she is destined to return to life.142 For Medea, marriage is a completely negative experience: When a woman comes into unknown customs and practices, she must somehow be a prophet, since she has not learned this at home, with what sort of man in particular she shall deal as a husband.143 If, after we have spent great effort on this task, our144 husband lives with us without resenting the marriage yoke, our life is enviable. Otherwise death is preferable. For a man, whenever he is annoyed with the company of those at home, goes elsewhere and rids his heart of the nausea145 [turning to some male friends or someone of the same age].146 But we must fix our gaze on one soul only. (Medea 238–47)

Although Medea’s speech is also intended to win the sympathy of the women of the Chorus,147 her description of marriage repeats themes we have heard in other confessions that had no “persuasive” purpose. Fixing one’s gaze on only one soul refers to a faithful relationship. But the husband, the object of the gaze, ostensibly proves how different he is from what his wife’s gaze wants him to be. In fact, he turns away from her, no longer offering any splendor, any reception to his faithful wife’s gaze. Then, death is preferable.

12.  Female Victims of War: The Troades The dispossession of the self is a physical and graphic reality for captured slaves and raped queens in Euripides, for his world is a cruel one, in which women face gruesome destinies. Young girls are often sacrificed for the fatherland or the family or even on the whim of a dead hero. Euripides demands pity from the audience for violence that has no motivation. 142.  On Alcestis, see Pucci 2011. 143.  With οἵωι (of the MSS)—“with what sort of man in particular she shall deal as a husband”—the text stresses the unknown character of the husband. 144.  Notice the switch from generalizing description to personal experience. 145.  The word “nausea” carries medical connotations. 146.  A metrical irregularity in the line and its puritanical import have convinced editors that the line could be a later addition. 147.  Carter 2011, 66.

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Before Andromache is carried away as a slave in the Troades, the text allows her to meet her mother-in-law, Hecuba, in a spectacular scene of lamentation.148 A lyrical and pathetic dialogue ensues, and through often broken lines (antilabai), the two women lament the series of horrors they have experienced: they describe their fall from a state of blessedness (581), apostrophize the dead Hector (587, 592–93), and proclaim the collapse of everything—as Andromache epigrammatically puts it, “Nobility is enslaved! O immense change!” (614–15). As the dialogue continues in trimeters, Andromache, knowing that she will soon be thrown into Neoptolemus’s bed,149 appeals again to the dead Hector in a new apostrophe (673–76): In you, dear (phil’) Hector, I possessed a husband (andr’) who sufficed for me, great in intelligence (xunesei),150 in birth, in wealth, in courage. You received me as a virgin from my father’s house, and you first yoked my virgin bed.

The physical absence of the addressee makes this apostrophe particularly eloquent.151 The past does not return, the dead do not answer, words fall

148.  See Susanetti (2008), who emphasizes the appearance of Andromache in a chariot, which is usually the conveyance of kings, but here, on the contrary, Andromache is being transported into slavery. Dué (2006, 13–14) offers a brilliant thematic analysis of the lament at 577–97 and of the connotation of pothos (ibid., 75–81), which also describes Andromache’s longing at 596. 149.  Even in a monologue, Andromache can speak of sex only through metaphors: the yoke and the virgin bed. The image of the “yoke” to designate intercourse is traditional: at 669–70, Andromache applies the same image to animals. The expression, however, sounds striking here as Andromache, in the same passage, parallels it with the “yoke of slavery” (678): she implies that since Hector has died, his loving relationship with her (“the yoke of her virgin bed”) is transformed into a rape under the yoke of slavery. The same figure, the “yoke,” evokes the female’s loving or hateful subjugation to a male. Euripides displays here his sensitive appreciation of the nonsense of human life. 150.  Euripides gives a modern touch to this portrait by granting sunesis (a contemporary, fashionable word) to Hector. 151.  This sort of absence is frequent, of course, in the appeals to a dead person in a funeral lament; see, for instance, Tro. 1313–14; Supp. 802–4, 808, etc. Hecuba, at the end of the Troades, kneels, beats the earth, and calls to her dead children (1302ff.): “My children, hear, listen to your mother’s voice . . . as I place my aged limbs on the ground and strike the earth with my two hands.” Easterling (1993, 20) interprets this gesture as a compensation for the violence of the ending.

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into nothing, and yet they aggrandize the past in order to make the present even more unbearable. Pity and self-pity ensue from these words. Andromache brings to the fore the sign and indelible mark Hector left in her body, the physical change, the submission to a yoke152—the birth of a child—all indelible traces of him, although he himself is lost and gone. The sudden or unexpected fall from prosperity, happiness, and wealth to poverty, misery, and destitution is a dominant theme in Euripides’s poetry. In Euripides, this spectacular transformation is usually experienced by an individual who is not wise enough to keep in mind that everything may indeed collapse one day. Euripides’s metaphysical gesture toward the utopia of a self that through a particular connotation of sophia would be able to oppose and nullify the otherness, and establish a stronghold of resistance, is never clearer than in these passages. The unexpected changes are the work of tukhē, daimōn, and anankē—entities that are constantly mentioned as responsible for men’s individual destinies and evoke no specific anthropomorphic god, no individual moral responsibility, but are merely names for chance (tukhē), divine force (daimōn), and necessity (anankē).153 Andromache has been chosen, she says, to be “the wife” of the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus (660: Ἀχιλλέως με παῖς ἐβουλήθη λαβεῖν 152.  The metaphor of the “yoke,” in an erotic context, belongs to a more traditional culture than that of the “gaze.” Andromache’s apostrophe to Hector recalls the scene in book 6 of the Iliad where the couple foresees the destruction of Ilion, the death of Hector, and Andromache’s day of slavery. She sees herself working at the loom of another house and carrying water (Il. 6.456–57), while in Euripides that day means her sexual subjection, “the yoke of slavery.” This difference is symptomatic of the more violent text of Euripides: rape involves a stronger and more intimate humiliation than the exploitation of physical effort in labor. It also reflects the concern with sex that explodes in the age and work of Euripides. 153.  In accordance with Euripides’s poetics, tragic poetry warns and prepares the audience and readers for the worst: this psychological preparation will soften the pain when evil befalls them. Thus Euripides’s plays often purposely dramatize the sudden change in characters’ lives from happiness to misery to demonstrate to the audience the harrowing effects of not being prepared. For instance, the Chorus tells Admetus, who cannot overcome his grief over the death of Alcestis (Alc. 926–28), “In the middle of your good fortune, this grief came to you when you were unprepared for evil”; Admetus was specifically unprepared for being spiritually dragged to death by Alcestis’s sacrifice. Medea, speaking of the devastation caused her by Jason’s treason, says (Medea 225), “An unexpected blow (ἄελπτον πρᾶγμα) fell on me and destroyed my life.” On tukhē in Euripides, see Zürcher 1947, 139, 149ff.

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δάμαρτα),154 but she knows that she will actually be his concubine. Her pride and modesty do not allow her to accept the shame of the real noun. However, she recognizes that she “will serve in the house of murderers” (660: δουλεύσω δ’ ἐν αὐθεντῶν δόμοις), and the impossible sexual situation in which she will find herself, if, to remain loyal to Hector’s memory, she refuses her sexual consent to Neoptolemus (661ff.): If I put out of my mind the dear head of Hector, and if I open my heart to the present husband, I will appear disloyal to the dead. But if I loathe my present husband, I shall be hated by my masters.

Her dilemma is that she must either uphold her self-image or accept the image others impose on her. She realizes that her potential hostility toward her master might even be vain and ineffective, for she continues with a scandalous fact (665–66): And yet they say that a single night dispels the hostility a woman feels for the bed [sex] of a man (τὸ δυσμενὲς γυναικὸς εἰς ἀνδρὸς λέχος).155

We understand that Andromache’s euphemism “a single night” actually refers to an orgasm, and that it is this excitement that causes a woman who was not consenting before to change her mind. Though couched in euphemistic terms, this assertion of the seductive power of sexual violence is unique in Greek theater. Aphrodite is not mentioned in this striking statement. We have here a clear implication that the presence and functions of the gods are dictated by, among other things, the ethical nature of the character. Here the noble Andromache is portrayed as unable to attribute such 154.  Andromache does not say “concubine” but uses a venerable word, δάμαρτα, which means “legitimate wife” and, as Chantraine (1946–47, 224) notes, is always accompanied by the name of the husband, since Homer (e.g., Il. 3.122). Scodel (1998, 137–54) perceptively writes: “The complexity of the situation is marked by δάμαρτα · δουλεύσω at the beginning of line 660: a damar is usually a legitimate wife, but she clearly does not believe this will be her status since she juxtaposes it with δουλεύσω.” The Andromache of Euripides will in some way justify the touch of pride with which Andromache in the passage of the Troades says of herself that “the son of Achilles wanted to take me as his legitimate wife.” 155.  καίτοι λέγουσιν ὡς μί’ εὐφρόνη χαλαῖ τὸ δυσμενὲς γυναικὸς εἰς ἀνδρὸς λέχος. The word lekhos in poetry often stands for “marriage,” but here it must designate “love,” “lovemaking,” “sex” of the man.

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a degrading task to the goddess.156 This scandalous fact is introduced by “And yet they say”; “they say” hints at the anonymous and universal reference to a known mimetic model. In acknowledging the mysterious power of an orgasm Andromache also reveals her disgust, rejection, and expectation (“And yet they say . . .”) of something troubling and frightening, as if potential moral failure were looming over her self-control. Euripides is aware, as we are today, that consent implies an earlier resistance, or even hostility, and that consent creates, for the conscience, a difficult gray realm in which constraint and opportunity are present simultaneously. It is a surprise when Hecuba, the mother of Hector, responds to Andromache, showing a boldness that is uniquely Euripidean (697–700): No, my dear daughter, do not think any longer of Hector’s destiny (τύχας). Your tears will not bring him back safe. Honor instead your present master and give to this man the dear enticements of your ways.157

Sex is the power that allows female slaves to survive, to help others to survive, and to accomplish whatever noble action remains possible for them: thus it is not unethical for them to resort to it.158 The idea that sex is a means of survival is one of the play’s predominant themes,159 and in ­recognizing 156.  Jason, for instance, has no trouble attributing to Aphrodite’s influence the crimes Medea committed to save his expedition; in this way he discredits Aphrodite instead of himself (Medea 527–28). Hecuba, in a tone almost similar to that of a procuress, appeals to Aphrodite and to the nights of love her daughter Cassandra gives to Agamemnon (Hec. 824–30: “Well then—perhaps this part of my speech will be for naught, appealing to Aphrodite, but still I shall make the point—my prophetic daughter . . . Cassandra . . . sleeps at your side. What weight will you give, my lord, to those nights of love? Or what return shall my daughter have for her loving embraces in bed, and what return shall I have for her?”). 157.  The word δέλεαρ in line 70, φίλον διδοῦσα δέλεαρ ἀνδρὶ σῶν τρόπων (“giving to this man the dear enticements of your ways”), is the only example in Euripides with this sexual connotation. The word has no certain etymology, but Chantraine (DELG, s.v.) inclines to give some credit to the popular etymology that connects delear with dolos (tricks, cunning). Again, Aphrodite is not mentioned: the specific context of this scene is totally alien to any traditional narrative. 158.  Even though Astyanax will be murdered, and therefore his survival will cease to grant a moral justification for Andromache’s sexual consent, her uneasy and troubling position remains the same. 159.  Scodel (1998, 153) has rightly emphasized this sexual feature of the play against the traditional interpretation of it as an antiwar “manifesto.”

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the dire necessity of sex, the text consistently avoids judging it in condemnatory ethical terms. Slaves’ strength lies in possessing ways to become masters: sex is one of those ways.160 The language of the play is bursting with sexual images, beginning with Poseidon’s description of the Trojan horse as “pregnant with weapons” (11: ἐγκύμον’ ἵππον τευχέων) and including the use of passive forms of verbs, with reference to Troy and to women, as Guidorizzi and Schirripa (2001) have remarked,161 and the analogy repeatedly drawn between Hecuba and Troy.162 These images evoke the violence of rape, and implicitly the similarity between sexual violence and the violence that destroyed Troy. The city of Troy, with its smoking ruins, becomes the laboratory, so to speak, of Euripides’s rhetoric: the glorious city lies raped, destroyed, and survives only through the memory of its past—of which the play is, fictionally, the source—through the apostrophes of mothers, sisters, and wives to their men, all of whom are dead (673–76, 1313–14). Women and children are gathered to be shipped away as slaves, and for the last time they gaze at their houses (201), roads, and temples, now in flames (1318). The sacrifices and prayers to the gods by generations of citizens were in vain: “The gods did not listen before when we called on them,” cries Hecuba (1281). The women of the Chorus, in contrast to Hecuba’s sophistication, voice popular concerns: Euripides underlines the cultural differences of his characters. In their first choral performance (198ff.) the women lament their harrowing prospects, no longer to work “on a Trojan loom” but in a foreign country”; they are aware that they will suffer greater horrors when they will “be brought to the bed of a Greek (cursed be that night and its fate!)” (202–4). Yet, in addition to this awful dispossession, the women also consider specific details of their predicament—namely, the nature of their masters 160.  Cassandra too acquiesces to the sexual demands of Agamemnon, who has fallen in love with her, and she acquiesces with a revengeful purpose—namely, to ruin Agamemnon. From the Trojan perspective, this is a noble purpose. 161.  See 8, 9, 29, 33, 35, 60, 114, 140, 142, 240, 264, 295, 448, etc.; Guidorizzi and Schirripa 2001, 140–41; Craik 1990. For instance, Craik shows that Hecuba’s pains because of her bodily posture (112ff.) might evoke the image of rape. 162.  See 9, 142, 474–80, 603, etc. The comparison beetween the capture of Troy and the tearing of a woman’s veil is explicit in the Iliad: see Nagler 1974, 44–63; Monsacré 1984, 68–69.

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and of the places where they might serve as slaves. In their song, they give free rein to their imagination, and hope to be allotted to decent places, to the houses of good masters. Once again the language of imagination is the language of the other: the women have never seen any of the places they describe, and simply repeat what they have heard, gazing with dreamy eyes at almost mythical places. They sing their paradoxical preferences: “O that I might come to the famous and blessed land of Theseus!” (207–9); or Thessaly, “a holy territory . . . laden with wealth, I have heard tell, and plentiful fruitfulness. This would be my second place after the holy and sacred country of Theseus” (214–19);163 or Sicily, which is “proclaimed by heralds for its crowns of excellence” (223);164 or Magna Graecia, where the most beautiful river Crathis “tinges with red the blond hair” (227).165 Echoing a song of escape or even a song at the outset of a trip, the women fantasize, dream, about their good chances, but the praise they lavish on some places must have produced conflicting feelings in their audience, as it does for readers today. On the one hand, the text creates an uncomfortable feeling of inappropriateness, and even of escapism and dissonance: the women’s devastating destiny does not jibe with their poetic recreation of the pleasant, even desirable features of their appointed places of destitution. By making the women beautify cities and regions that will be their places of confinement, the text sounds disrespectful of 163.  Athens is extolled as both holy and sacred, divine (ζαθέαν). This adjective as applied to cities is Homeric (e.g., Il 1.38 = 452); it also occurs in Aeschylus fr. 284, but never in Sophocles. In Euripides it is used frequently; see, for instance, line 1070. In “This would be my ‘choice’ or ‘preference’,” as translators sometimes render the Greek, the words “choice” and “preference” are not in the Greek, but they render the uncanny situation in which the women are represented as desiring a better place for their worst humiliation. 164.  Euripides’s reasons for choosing these places, apart from the obvious captatio benevolentiae in praising Athens, are not overtly political, as Westlake (1953) has shown. See, for instance, on the choice of Sicily: “The unmistakable allusions to the Sicilian expedition . . . contain no hint that the poet either approved or disapproved of the project” (183). In March, at the time of the performance, Sicily was simply on the audience’s mind, because of the prospect of the expedition. “The phrase καρύσσεσθαι στεφάνοις ἀρετᾶς, 223 (‘proclaimed by heralds for its crowns of excellence’) is strikingly Pindaric; it appears to be metaphorical and not to refer literally to victories at the national festivals” (183 n. 2). 165.  The detail that the water of the river dyes blond hair seems a coquettish comment, and very awkward in this context.

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their destiny: they are made to speak as if they were selecting a place to visit as tourists. The detail of line 227 is especially abrasive. The poetic beauty of the possible restoration of a decent life is tempting, but of course escapist and deceiving. On the other hand, the women’s anguished dream of decent places is understandable and produces pathos in the audience—namely, the disquieting realization that in their agonizing wait a desperate assertion of life emerges. The uncontrollable play of chance (the allotment) that will determine their destiny is both desperate and hopeful. Chance (Tukhē) rules events in Euripides’s view of human life. Not everything is the same, even for slaves: Athens, Thessaly, Sicily, and Magna Graecia are rich, beautiful, and holy in different ways, and more livable than other places. The detail in line 227 makes the women and us believe that care for beauty is still a means of survival, perhaps even of success.166 Chance and slavery join the violence of Eros, now a living and human master, to perfect Euripides’s world of endless victims, laments and grief, and non-sense. In the sexual experience to which the slaves are submitted, each of them is alone, a pawn of an allotment, a “persona” reduced to the nakedness of her body, to its enticements (delear, 700), a being whose extorted consent shines as the despicable rescuer (203–4). This choral song is a variation of a similar text sung by the Trojan women in the Hecuba (444–83). There we find the same imaginary and ambiguous mood (escapist and desperate) and an analogous catalogue of different places where the winds (chance, tukhē, 444ff.) and/or the oars of the ship (the will of men, 455–57) may take them. Here the description of various places includes ritual features that have suggested different interpretations; but the most salient observation is that the slaves’ song comes after Polyxena’s determination to die rather than be a slave (342–437).167 With the knife for the sacrifice poised on her throat, she says: I was “similar to the goddesses.” . . . And now I am a slave! Firstly the name in its strangeness makes me desire death. Then perhaps I may get a 166. The text mentions incessantly the precious objects that enhance feminine beauty, and the dresses that add to the erotic seduction. 167.  Gregory (1999, 97–98) eloquently describes how the text implicitly contrasts Polyxena and the slaves’ choice: “The opening and closing of the ode can be read as a lyric meditation on Polyxena’s stated preference for death over a life of slavery.”

  The Survival in Poetry    79 cruel-hearted master . . . me, the sister of Hector. . . . Some slaves bought from who knows where will defile my bed, a bed once deemed worthy of royalty. It shall not be! (356–67)

In contrast to this proud, aristocratic rejection of life—imposed, indeed, on her by the Greeks—the women of the Chorus utter their acceptance of life, imagining places and reporting their rich ritual traditions, in which, however, they will be treated as chattel (448–49). Religious feasts and practices are part of the common and familiar network within which human beings may find solace, but slaves will be excluded from some of these rituals.168 The different places (“or . . . or . . . or”) that the women of the Chorus would prefer for a life of misery express this ontological choice: the acceptance of life, at any price, in any place, in any condition. This is perhaps symbolic of Euripides’s view of human life. To be like a goddess means to die young, while to be a human being means to accept the a priori necessity of living through the game of inexorable tukhē. Yet to be prepared, to make sure that one is not caught out unexpectedly, is an initial advantage in tukhē’s game.

13.  The Survival in Poetry Returning to the Troades, Hecuba frames the whole glorious and painful adventure of Troy as the song that the poets will sing (1242–45): If a deity had not overturned things, throwing what was on the ground below, we would have been unknown and not sung of, nor would we have provided themes to the songs of the men to come.169

Hecuba speaks in harmony with epic poetry and borrows from it the power to reduce the senseless and manifold devastation of the world to a sensible and simple image. For the proud aristocratic characters—like Polyxena, 168.  See Gregory 1999, 98. 169.  This translation accepts Stephanus’s correction εἰ δὲ μὴ of the MSS reading εἰ δ’ ἡμᾶς. Even with the MSS reading, the text asserts the Homeric notion that the gods send woes to men so that they may become themes of songs (Il. 6.357–58; Od. 8.579– 80). Some interpreters take μούσαις as the Muses and translate “a theme of song for the Muses of the men to come” (Kovacs).

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Cassandra, and Hector—sacrifices, defeats, and heroic death are sources and themes for songs immortalizing their glory. In Homeric poetry, indeed, the hero dies with the prospect of being sung of forever (Il. 22.304– 5).170 The prospect of immortality through song gives sense and meaning to the violence that has been shown on stage. But this is not the destiny the slave women, the raped queen, and Euripides’s tragic poetry recognize as their own. The text makes this distinction clear as Hecuba continues, speaking of the funeral for Astyanax (1248–50): He [Astyanax] has all the funeral adornments that he needs. But I believe that it makes little difference to the dead whether they get a rich funeral. That is the empty vaunt of the living.

Hecuba acknowledges the indifference of the dead to the honors they receive after death. Implicitly, then, the text suggests that it is meaningless to live your life in order to warrant a great postmortem celebration. When you are dead, you will not know anything about it. More explicitly than Hecuba, the Chorus dismisses the continuity of the Trojan legend. As the text details the physical destruction of Troy’s walls, the burning of its temples, and the quaking of the entire land of Troy, the Chorus realizes that the name of Troy will fall with the walls and the temples: CHORUS:

Soon you [temples of the gods] will fall down to the l­ ovable earth, and be without a name. HECUBA: Dust rises with the wings of smoke toward heaven: I do not see my house any longer. CHORUS: The name of this land will also disappear (1323: ὄνομα δὲ γᾶς ἀφανὲς εἶσιν)

The Chorus dismisses what Hecuba has said in lines 1240ff.: silence will cover forever the ruins and dust that the city is now. Not only the name of Troy but even the names of the gods will vanish: finally they will receive the status they deserve, for they were absent even before. In the poetic code of epic the disappearance of a name is a great disgrace (see Il. 13.227: νωνύμνους ἀπολέσθαι; Od. 1.234ff.), but Euripides’s 170.  Pucci 2002, 33–34.

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poetics assumes that disgrace is an inevitable part of human history.171 It appropriates this inevitability through a decisive, lucid, and meaningful image—that of aphanes, “nonappearance,” “invisibility,” “disappearance” (1323). The word stands in contrast here to its use by Hecuba in her passage inspired by Homer: ἀφανεῖς ἂν ὄντες οὐκ ἂν ὑμνηθεῖμεν ἂν, μούσαις ἀοιδὰς δόντες ὑστέρων βροτῶν. [If the divine had not overturned us] we would have disappeared [been made invisible], and we would not be sung of, nor provide themes to the songs of men to come. (1244–45)

This is Homer. Euripides sings of the inevitability of the aphanes, of what disappears. The passage is sung in a lyric exchange (kommos)172 between the queen and the women of the Chorus. The pathos reaches its highest point, as Barlow (1986) notes in her commentary, through its apostrophes, assonances, repetitions, oxymora (ἁ δὲ μεγαλόπολις ἄπολις, 1291–92), and frequent resolutions of the lyric iambics. The singing voices enhance the emotional force of the passage. Euripides’s poetry gives lyric voice and emotional power to the sad realization that nothing, not even the name of a great city or great god, will remain. This is the spiritual misery of human life. In reflecting on this play and its message, we can make a few new observations. First, the name and deeds of Troy are not forgotten, since the play itself proves Troy’s vitality. Second, the literary and musical power of the text brings sense and pathos to the highlighting of nothing and non-sense. The harsh acceptance that total nihilism follows a glorious and long history of a great city is shocking both in principle and in the present: the text proves that the Homeric heroic view of poetry has prevailed. At this point, Homer could reproach Euripides and teach him a lesson. But Euripides could answer that Homer is simply defending and supporting his own poetic job-security as a poet: an immense advantage arises for the poets from staging exceptional heroes ready to die in the hope of becoming the themes of that immortal song. But under the ashes of a 171.  See in this sense Di Benedetto’s (1998) comments on the passage. 172.  On this kommos in relation to other Euripidean and tragic kommoi, see Hose 1990, 240–41.

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burnt city, the poor victims see no future glory, only disappearance and nothingness. And who knows how many cities in the long past have been destroyed and left no name. Euripides could answer in this way, but it is undeniable that in his work the darkness of non-sense and nothingness, for which the sophos must prepare himself, is illuminated by the lucid reason and enchanting elaboration that depict it: Euripides’s artistic representation reveals itself as a bright, seductive spot in the the darkness of human life.

14.  Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature” You who support the earth and have a seat on it, Whoever you may be, so enigmatic to know, Zeus, whether you are the necessity of nature or the intellect of Man, I pray to you. Truly, moving by a silent path, You lead all human affairs to justice. (Troades 884–88)

The audience must have thought it odd when Hecuba, a character from the old epic story, performing as the queen of Troy, appeals to Zeus as Anaxagoras might, and argues against the mythical view in the style of a Xenophanes, Antiphon, or Protagoras. She explicitly mocks, in her attack on Helen’s self-defense, the most sacred epic and tragic convention, the divine epiphany. The audience must have thought that she had suddenly left the cultural frame of the story and had taken on a metadramatic role, declaring to them that she did not belong to the traditional story. This change in narrative sequence, tone, and consistency is a rhetorical phenomenon known as metalepsis.173 In her philosophical invocation of Zeus in the Troades Hecuba also presents herself and announces her enlightened role in the debate she provokes. Her shocking invocation is therefore part of the whole episode, and though the episode seems to have no dramatic function, and only a limited cultural one, the new conception of sex presented in it has a clear

173.  Genette 1983, 234–37. For the adaptation of this rhetorical device in art and literature at the end of the fifth century, see Lorenz 2007, 116–43; and Pucci 2011, 324.

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significance throughout the poet’s corpus. Love and sex are not the blessing or the poison delivered by a benevolent or hostile Aphrodite, but a natural force and stimulus acting inside human beings. Analogous cases, in which a character plays an extended and coherent enlightened role, include Phaedra in the Hippolytus, Theseus in the early part of the Suppliant Women, and Teiresias in the Bacchae. The extended roles of these characters do not have any immediate dramatic consequences, and yet they have a critical effect on the significance of the plays in which they occur. Whether or not the extended roles of these characters and their limited influence on the action of the drama should be called metalepseis is a matter of choice; what counts is the opposition of these characters to the cultural premises of the mythical stories. Although their adversarial roles are dramatically suspended, even suppressed, the significance of these characters is undeniable. Indeed, in these roles Hecuba and the others abandon the specific phenomenology of the myth and become what we call “literary” characters.174 Especially in the case of traditional heroes, like Theseus, Hecuba, Ores­ tes, among others, that is, characters with a specific aristocratic and heroic pedigree, their transformation into sophoi, into enlightened and brainy persons, is particularly shocking and fully appropriate to the Euripidean revolution.The integration of these characters into the realm of sophia leaves them necessarily in disharmony with their traditional figures and tragic actions, but shows the essential limitations and weakness of their traditional ways of being, and traces a gesture toward a different conception of both their being and their actions, as we have seen already in previous chapters and will see again in this chapter. Perhaps the most incisive and powerful example of a hero’s sophistic, metaleptic, and anticontextual role is Heracles in the eponymous drama. Toward the end of the drama, Theseus dissuades Heracles from committing suicide: the madness, during which Heracles massacred most of his family, was sent to him by Hera, and he should reconcile himself to his awful deed. Even the gods, Theseus says to encourage Heracles, do awful deeds—for instance, Zeus holds his father in prison—and yet they live and go on, indifferent to the consequences of their crimes. After Theseus’s talk, Heracles decides to preserve his life, but, rejecting the 174.  See Frazier 2009 on the literary aspects of Euripides’s work.

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arguments that Theseus has presented, begins with an astonishing declaration (1340–46): Alas! What you say is only subsidiary to my pains. And I do not think that the gods have illicit love affairs, that they bind each other with chains, and I have never believed, and I will never be convinced, that one is master of the other. A god, if he is truly a god, needs nothing. These are the sad stories (δύστηνοι λόγοι) of the poets.

Here the metadramatic function of Euripides’s characters is even clearer than in the previous examples. At this moment,175 Heracles denies the divine cause of the events that the audience has seen performed on stage, and defines the account of Hera’s responsibility as “the sad stories of the poets.” With this assertion he implicates Euripides. Of course, it is Euripides who wants to be implicated here and charged with staging “sad stories” about the gods, who, by behaving as the plot has shown, are not really gods. In saying that the gods need nothing, Heracles speaks about the gods as Xenophanes did, and denies the whole myth in which his own life is inscribed— that of Zeus’s paternity, Hera’s jealousy, and her persecution of Heracles. In other words, if the events happened as they have been staged, they may be either fictional or actual occurrences, but they were not caused by the will of gods. Hera is simply the name of what could be called “chance,”176 as Heracles is made to suggest rather cryptically in lines 1392–93: “We all have miserably perished, struck by the blow of Hera’s chance.” Earlier, in line 1357, he says, “We must be, as it seems, slaves of Chance.” The divine motivation for Heracles’s madness derives from myth, but the text corrects the myth and attributes the motivation for madness to the 175.  Earlier (1263–68, 1303–10) Heracles had not broken the mythical frame. 176.  Papadopoulou (2005, 85ff.) examines with great learning and sensitivity the legitimacy of the interpretation that I am advancing here; she seems attracted by it, but decides against it—calling it an “authorial intrusion” (92)—on the basis of what I think is her excessively “literal” approach to the text, and of her inability to identify exactly the specific nature (metalepsis) and purpose of this intrusion. Thus she ends by saying that the characters’ criticism of myth “does not invalidate the myth in question. In other words, Euripides does not use his characters in order to undermine myth” (113). I argue that, on the contrary, these “authorial intrusions” do undermine myth, but in a specific and distinct way: Hera, besides being the anthropomorphic jealous wife of Zeus, stands, as Papadopoulou brilliantly realizes (174), as a divine figure of chance.

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power of chance lying under the figure of Hera. Euripides also suggests that a cosmic or impersonal force lies behind the figure of a traditional god in Alcestis 962–83, where he combines Anankē with Zeus in such a way that the two become inseparable and almost undistinguishable: “And what Zeus decides is accomplished with your agreement.” Analogously, in speaking of Hera’s tukhē, Heracles is made to suggest, after his open denial of divine interference, that if the name Hera is used, it points rather to the force of “Chance,” not to the traditional divine being who has been a jealous and dreadful agent in the play. Chance becomes a divine power aligned with a goddess whose anthropomorphic attributes have been in part silenced and in part extended and transcended in order to embrace it. Other important details point in this direction. Madness is called Lyssa: Lyssa is the feminine form of Lycus (= Wolf), and this etymological connection between the one who in a fit of madness was going to kill Heracles’s family and the one who did it points to the purely natural essence of Heracles’s madness. In other words, the identity of the names induces audience and readers to recognize the identity of the outcome: without Heracles’s chancy arrival, Lycus would have killed Heracles’s family just as Lyssa causes Heracles to do. Both divine Lyssa and human Lycus are mad, in the two sets of events, but this shows that the destruction of Heracles’s family could be the work of mere human madness and hatred. The human being and the goddess act through analogous feelings, aiming at the same violence and exhibiting what mortals here and in other plays complain is inappropriate behavior on the part of the gods, who act like mortals. The chancy arrival of Heracles did not save his family, because another Chance neutralized the first chance. It is anthropomorphic Hera who has neutralized that saving chance, and if her name hides another chance, Heracles’s madness falls under the control of Tukhē. Lycus’s attack on Heracles as the “bowman” should be read, at the symbolic level, as an attack on the fighter who acts in accordance with chance (tukhē), since he arrives unexpectedly, hides himself, and so on, as the long, traditional polemic against the bow suggests, and as he acts in arriving suddenly and surprisingly to stop Lycus. Heracles himself is a character who is both master of and under the thumb of Tukhē. Finally, the total absence of Zeus from the action of the play once more points to the supremacy of Tukhē. As in the previous example, the text, with an explicit gesture, inscribes the staged actions in the realm of poetry (“the sad stories of the poets”) and defines

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poetry as a creative production, distinguished from the traditional theology. Heracles does not deny his madness but contests that it was caused by a nasty plot of Hera, and explicitly defines it as an event due to Chance, but a Chance (Hera’s tukhē, 1393) whose divine power is conflated with that of Hera, the wife of Zeus, and is lacking personal, self-serving motivations. The ambivalence of the “conflation” allows the text to refer to Chance (Tukhē) or Hera depending on the context. Of course, Heracles implicitly denies his birth from Zeus, but simultaneously, looking right into the face of the goddess, Heracles implies that if—as some in the audience believe—she did plot his madness, out of jealousy, by this purpose and deed, she is not a goddess. True gods, as Euripides often repeats, transcend the emotional needs of human beings. By denying Hera’s responsibility, and by attributing his madness to Tukhē, Heracles uncovers and explores a new form of piety.177 He will not follow the example of Ajax, who could not overcome the drastic humiliation overtly inflicted on him by Athena, and killed himself; Heracles, recognizing that he, like all human beings, is a slave of Tukhē, discovers the virtue and the piety of endurance and prepares himself to live that experience in Athens thanks to Theseus’s hospitality and friendship. As Heracles’s decision to conserve his weapons seems to intimate, his wise endurance requires him to live with and to withstand the consciousness of the terrible deeds he has committed. The traditional heroism of an Ajax is dismissed by the gesture of the sophos Heracles: suicide is replaced by a painful consciousness of his own failures. The pain that ensues from this conscience is difficult or impossible to sublimate: Heracles realizes that he cries and that he cannot stop crying (1412), a psychological reaction that, as he says, he had never expected to suffer (1351–55): “I shall have the courage to endure life (εγκαρτερήσω βίοτον). I shall come to your city . . . I have experienced countless trials . . . I never shed tears and I never thought I should come to this that I should actually weep now.” As Tartaglini (apud Rossi 1995, 341) comments, “It must have been a revolutionary event for the Athenian audience to watch Heracles weeping as a woman: compared to a woman (1412) and deprived of his heroic ethos, he now finds a new dignity in the consciousness of his frailty and in friendship.” 177.  Heracles wonders, for instance, what to do with his glorious, but now murderous, weapons (1378–85); he experiences the pain and the humiliation of weeping (1354– 56, 1411–12), and the dependence on friendship, though the text cannot be silent on its frailty (see Pucci 1980, 186–87).

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If Heracles’s new experience of endurance’ s moral and psychological consequences corresponds to the general human condition, then, ideally, every ritual and institution that prepares human beings to endure and to shed tears helps them to sustain the blows of both Necessity and Tukhē. Epic and tragic poetry in particular are among these institutions performed on festive religious occasions. Without knowing it, Heracles, by indicting the poets’ sad mythoi, in fact celebrates Euripides’s power of poetry to help people to be wisely ready to the vicissitudes inflicted by Tukhē and Necessity. The discovery and description of this new piety are fundamental features of Euripides’s tragic writing. For if the traditional stories of the anthropomorphic gods are merely sad mythoi of the poets, and if it is foolish to give them credence, then it would appear that Euripides’s bringing them on the stage had only an instrumental purpose, that of denouncing their lack of truth. But the play Heracles shows us how much else is attached to that denunciation: the text fashions and presents a new form of heroism, one that we could call stoic, and that depends on the dismissal of the anthropomorphic interpretation of the divine. Otherwise two alternative solutions would remain open to human beings, that of Ajax or the one suggested by Theseus when he advises that as the gods commit all sort of crimes and yet live without being bothered by their conscience (1315–21), so too should human beings. In response to Theseus, Heracles denies just that interpretation of the divine and identifies it as the sad mythoi of the poets, referring specifically to Theseus’s line 1315. The debate over and criticism of divine anthropomorphism permeates the whole play and lurks even where it is not at once visible. Hera’s revenge against Heracles takes a peculiar and paradoxical form, when one considers aspects of her cult and myth. She is the goddess of marriage and protector of the young: in the former role, she is consistently called Teleia (literally, “who brings [marriages] to accomplishment”; Aesch. Eum. 214ff., Pind. N. 10.18, Ar. Thesm. 973–76). Some rites associate her with the defense of children (Hera Acraea in Corinth: schol. Eur. Medea 264). Violating all these cultic and mythical aspects she causes Heracles to murder his wife and his young children. It is scandalous behavior that defiles the holiness of the anthropomorphic goddess and confirms that this is “the sad story of the poets.” Some critics (see Bond 1981, xxii-xxviii) find that as goddess of marriage Hera was professionally and personally concerned with Zeus’s adultery, and that “her conduct to Heracles cannot be called capricious or irrational” (Bond, xxv). In other words, it seems, she was correct in punishing the son

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of an adulterous relation in order to protect the holiness of marriage. Hera exacts a revenge that is a reverse form of retaliation, a sort of homeopathic revenge that is analogous to that of Dionysus (see section 24). Dionysus, in his revenge, is analogously “rational,” since, in order to punish Pentheus, he employs the very powers and rites that his enemy had refused to recognize and celebrate. Cadmus finds that Dionysus’s violence is exaggerated and that he behaved like an angry mortal, not like a god. This reproach is grounded on the ideal premises that inspire Heracles’s denial that Hera, if she is really a goddess, is responsible for his madness. In both cases the two mortals’ judgments constitute the metatheatrical way for Euripides to affirm that divine revenge is the “sad story of the poets”— that is, it is a traditional event attributed to anthropomorphic gods who, in fact, according to a wiser view and a deeper piety, also represent depersonalized and universal divine principles. Then the victorious pride of the revenger becomes questionable, for Heracles can survive and endure the disaster that anthropomorphic Hera eagerly inflicted on him just by denying that such a Hera produced it. The play unfurls a new, revolutionary form of heroic and virtuous life, grounded on the cosmic presence of Chance, and implicitly deconstructs the self-gratifying nature of revenge. Orestes offers an exemplary and instructive case for analysis of Euripides’s enlightened transformation of traditional characters. In the Electra, Orestes and Electra, after the murder of their mother, reach the conclusion that they committed the crime because they unwisely followed a wrong divine order. With this conclusion they take full responsibility for the crime. In line 1177 Orestes begins his song of remorse: O Earth and you, Zeus, who sees whatever mortals do, glance at this murderous, abominable carnage, the two corpses stretched on the ground, by a blow of my hand, in payment for my woes.

Orestes invites Earth and Zeus178 to view the pitiful spectacle of the carnage (ἴδετε τάδ’ ἔργα φόνια μυσαρά); it is as if he were inviting the divine world to recognize the moral scandal produced by the divine advice. Recollecting what 178.  In this invocation Earth and Zeus function merely as two witnesses; Orestes attributes to Zeus the nature of the Sun who sees everything (as Aesch. Eum. 1046, Soph. OC 1086, and Eur. Medea 1251–52). After the dochmiac in line 1177, the passage continues in iambic measures.

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he did, he invites his sister and the audience to look at the gestures and events of that pitiable scene (1206–7). The whole action is relived through theatricality. The spectacle he invites Earth and Zeus to watch ends with emphasis on “my hand.” The synecdoche is important because it selects the material agent of the murder and leaves the moral agent unmentioned until the responsibility of Apollo is mentioned. His order, Orestes states, was not just (1190–93): ἰὼ Φοῖβ’, ἀνύμνησας δίκαι’ ἄφαντα, φανερὰ δ’ ἐξέπραξας ἄχεα, φόνια δ’ ὤπασας λάχε’ ἀπὸ γᾶς Ἑλλανίδος. O Phoebus, your oracle sang an obscure justice, but clear as the day are the griefs you have exacted and the criminal lot you gave me as banished from Greece.179

Orestes’s condemnation of Apollo’s oracle precedes the condemnation that Castor, with clear authority, will pronounce in his deus ex machina appearance, saying to Orestes (1244–46): [The punishment of your mother] is just but not your act. Phoebus, yes, Phoebus—but since he is my lord—I am silent: yet, though he is wise, he did not give you a wise oracle.180

Orestes’s sense of guilt and self-pity here contrasts with his feelings in the Choephoroi, where, as Garvie (1986, xxxii-iii) notes, until the moment that Clytemnestra shows her breast, Orestes never questions the matricide or feels revulsion for it.181 In fact, no Pylades urges the Euripidean Orestes to dismiss the respect (aidōs) for his mother’s appeal and to obey Apollo’s 179.  The beautiful antithesis, set in a chiasmus, is anticipated by the address to Phoebus “the Radiant.” That “the Radiant” should proffer an “obscure justice” sounds like a oxymoron, which totally discredits the wisdom of the god. 180.  Commentators (Aelian 140; Cropp 1988, xxxi and 183) explain the paradox by assuming that it was wise for Apollo to decree that Clytemnestra had to be punished, but unwise to appoint the wrong person to do the right job. See Pucci 2009, 234 n. 21. 181.  For a more detailed analysis of this scene and a discussion of the play’s amusing and devilish criticism of Aeschylus, see Pucci 2009, 231–34. In this essay I show that the Erinyes never appear on stage to trouble Orestes but are only mentioned by Castor, the deus ex machina, in a series of instructions that contrast with the plot of the play and are intended to mock the Aeschylean version of the drama.

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order, as Pylades does in the Choephoroi (900–902), ending with the imperative “Count all men your enemies, rather than the gods” (902). Aeschylus’s theodicy persuades Orestes to proceed with the murder, while in Euripides’s text, Orestes’s operatic recollection reveals that as his mother showed her breast and supplicated him, the sword fell from his hand, and his sister had to help him in the final blow. A real upheaval of dramatic, anthropological, and religious views—a revolution—takes place in this scene: the god is unjust and inept; the traditional heroic character has a new sensitivity, realizes the unwise gesture he is accomplishing and closes his eyes, and thus closes his mind; after the murder, he feels remorse and self-pity and communicates them to himself and to the audience through a song. It is the communication of a new solitude. Apollo’s injustice belongs to a theme that Euripides develops in many plays: gods do not guarantee justice and goodness among mortals, either, as in this case, because they lack wisdom, or because they act improperly, as Apollo does in the Ion (1553–63), or because they are excessive in their punishment and behave as vengeful mortals (Bacch. 1346–48; HF 1340–46). By recognizing the error of having obeyed Apollo’s order, Orestes unwillingly condemns the Greek belief in the anthropomorphic theology, and weeps for himself as a victim of that belief. Euripides brings Orestes and the traditional story that accompanies him from past hypertext to the attention of the audience: in that theology gods not only err, but they are not even in agreement on what they deem correct and just. It is on this very point that Socrates questions Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue (7a8a), and Euripides’s text intimates that Apollo and Castor disagree on what would be right for Orestes to do. Sheer arbitrariness commands their decisions, and a poor fellow pays all his life for one of those decisions. Euripides’s allegiance to the victims of that theology represents a radical inversion of not only Aeschylus’s but also Sophocles’s fidelity to the divine order, whatever it is. Indeed, even Sophocles has his characters follow the path of divine will. For example, Philoctetes decides (and persuades Neoptolemus) to abandon the Trojan venture, since it is led by a corrupt elite of which Philoctetes has long been a victim, but then Heracles appears as deus ex machina and induces Philoctetes to go to Troy. Euripides holds out to his spectators the possibility that his tragic representation will help them become wise and endure their grief; he assures

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them that if they are wise and sensitive, his work will give them joy. None of the other dramatists draw so close to their fellow human beings. Orestes’s and Electra’s use of song to revisit their act of murder puts them at two removes from the act itself and three removes from the scene in Aeschylus. The audience must have enjoyed the allusions to the Aes­ chylean text and appreciated the amusing virtuosity with which Euripides transformed the dramatic gesture of the mother exposing her bare breast to her son, and its unmistakable symbolic value. Moreover, the theatricality of Ores­tes’s and Electra’s reminiscences (“Did you see how the luckless one . . . ,” 1206–7) makes them pitying spectators of their own deed, and thus splits them into agents and spectators, increasing the audience’s pity for their error and remorse, while reducing the horror of the deed itself. Finally, the virtuosity and beauty of their voices in the singing performance may transform the gruesome murder into an uplifting musical piece. In Euripides’s Orestes, the murderer of his mother, Orestes, is tormented by the Erinyes, who occasionally become visible to him, and to him alone, as hallucinations troubling his mind and leading him to madness. In an obvious conflation, the Erinyes are the external specters of Orestes’s remorse. Electra is aware that his illness comes from inside him (314: “even if one is not ill, but fancies one is”),182 and Menelaus, observing that Orestes seems more like a corpse than a living being (385ff.), questions him further about his illness (394ff.): ORESTES:   The god (ὁ δαίμων) is lavish in troubles for me.183 MENELAUS: What’s wrong with you? What illness destroys you? 182.  West 1987: “a perceptive comment on the power of auto-suggestion”; Electra “is hinting that Orestes’s illness may be all in his mind.” 183.  Orestes speaks of his troubles as sent by his (divine) destiny, or daimōn, a word whose religious latitude is undefined and here could refer to Apollo. Indeed, Orestes does not cease accusing the god (calling him also Loxias—the Ambiguous) of having forced him to accomplish an unjust, unholy deed (284–93). But daimōn also has a sort of metaphorical not-divine and not-external reference: see, for instance, IA 1136. In our passage, it could also refer to Orestes’s depersonalized destiny, which is lavish in troubles, as he first murdered his mother under the impulse of Apollo and now realizes how wrong he was. His conscience corrects his previous concession to Apollo’s order, and he realizes that he should have disobeyed, for the arbiter of moral judgments is human conscience.

92    Euripides’s Revolution under Cover ORESTES:  My consciousness, since I am conscious that I have done awful things (ἡ σύνεσις, ὅτι σύνοιδα δείν’ εἰργασμένος)184 MENELAUS: What do you mean? Clear words are the wise thing, not obscure ones (πῶς φήις; σοφόν τοι τὸ σαφές, οὐ τὸ μὴ σαφές)

We encounter here an illustrative use of sophia. The word is used by Menelaus to indicate the “wisdom” that ensues from traditional cult, myth, and praxis, and here it is purposely opposed to sunesis, the new word of the enlightenment, meaning “consciousness,” “comprehension,” “reason.” Ores­ tes is a sophos, but a sophos with sunesis, while Menelaus is a sophos within the tradition. According to the traditional sophia, the subject’s crime, passion, remorse, and irrational gestures in general (atē) are directly connected to an external divine entity, god, or daimon. Divine intervention, however, does not fully relieve mortals of responsibility, and they feel guilty even when they accuse the gods for their crimes. Helen, in the Iliad, calls herself a bitch but owes her passion for Paris to Aphrodite, and still in Troy she follows Aphrodite’s erotic injunctions (3.413–20). In accord with the epic model, Menelaus expects Orestes to indict the Erinyes for his madness; he fails to understand what Orestes means by sunesis. It is indeed a new word in Euripides’s time, and here the audience must have smiled at the shrewd provocation: the dissent, which between the two characters depends essentially on Menelaus’s cowardice, comes into being and unfurls as a linguistic misunderstanding. What could be more sophistic than this sort of inception? The anachronism of the word characterizes the difference between the new sophos Orestes and the old aristocratic character, Menelaus. Orestes intellectually exits from the culture and premises of his myth and speaks as an enlightened modern man. Menelaus does not understand what it means to attribute the madness and torment that follow upon the crime to sunesis, and so defines this way of thinking as “not clear” and “unwise.” 184.  Porter 1994, 302: “Orestes’ reference to sunesis that haunts him is cited repeatedly in histories of Greek thought and ethics as the earliest extant reference to what today we call “a guilty consciousness.” Porter (311) correctly comments: “A good deal of the surprise occasioned by Orestes’ words lies in the manner in which he discounts the religious obligations that form such an important part of his motivation in the earlier tradition and are invoked by Orestes himself in his later speech at 579 ff.” See also Garzya 1997.

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The enlightened, Protagorean revolution is presented here with all its intrinsic power. However, the revolution cannot prevail and impose its in­ novative views. Though Orestes knows that he himself, in fact his mind, his sunesis, are the source of and the solution to his troubles, he is forced to explain his madness and torment in accordance with the mythological code (398–400): ORESTES:   I mean, what destroys me most is my grief (λύπη) . . . MENELAUS:  A dread goddess, but still curable. ORESTES:   . . . and fits of madness in requital for my mother’s blood.

Menelaus defines grief (λύπη) as a goddess, as he is inclined to attribute a divine nature to whatever has great power over man; but he is probably speaking symbolically because he continues with “but still curable.” In the Troades a new word and new attributes designating Zeus also confuse Menelaus because they do not describe the god in the traditional ways.185 Orestes tries to comply with Menelaus’s comprehension of things—he badly needs Menelaus’s support—and replaces “consciousness” with “fits of madness” (μανίαι), which can of course be caused by the Erinyes. As we have seen, we may attribute Orestes’s evocation of the Erinyes to his hallucinations—that is, to the illness of his mind—but Menelaus and the audience may take his hallucinations as having been caused by the Erinyes. Indeed, when Orestes continues, obligingly, in accordance with Menelaus’s expectations and describes his madness as a vision of “three maidens that look like night” (408),186 Menelaus agrees: “I know the ones you mean. I don’t wish to name them” (409). Of course, he means the Erinyes. Thus, in order to be clear and to avoid being called unwise, Orestes changes the “consciousness” of the enlightened culture into the Erinyes of the tradition. The scene illustrates the cultural panorama, in which enlightened words and ideas are silenced. Whoever uses them will find himself marginalized in the social, cultural, and religious contexts in which individuals are defined and recognized. Euripides learned this through his own experience. A part of the play dramatizes this new marginalization of the individual by representing the clash between Orestes and the political body. 185.  See section 7. 186.  In Aesch. Eum. 321ff. the Erinyes are daughters of Night.

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The popular assembly condemns him and Electra to death. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Orestes’s crime is inscribed in a divine plan of which Apollo is the guarantor and which is recognized in Orestes’s trial in the court of the Areopagus: accordingly, Orestes is defined as merely the executor of that plan and absolved. In Euripides, and already in the Electra, Orestes is characterized as a sensitive, wise spiritual being, who stigmatizes Apollo’s oracle as an unwise order; and in the Orestes, his sophia, the mark of his marginalization in political and religious contexts, brings about extreme consequences, and he is condemned by the city. The play’s development after this condemnation and after Pylades’s arrival should be analyzed and understood as a response to this marginalization, which is increased by the absence of Apollo. Had the enlightened view been recognized, the tragedy would have taken a different course. Menelaus’s ignorance here, as in the Troades, reflects the cultural fragmentation of the audience of Euripides’s play: part of the audience must have appreciated the sophisticated and ambivalent conflation of the old and the new, and the irony with respect to the traditional diehards, but most of the audience must have shared Menelaus’s view.187 The text mocks Menelaus, cautioning the audience, “Do not wonder about this sophisticated stuff if you do not want to appear as silly or as unsophisticated as Menelaus.” But perhaps it also cautions the author in the contrary sense: “Do not indulge in this sophisticated mockery and rejection of the old, mythical views, for you risk, as Orestes himself does, more than the simple misunderstanding of a king.” The cultural panorama allows that the revolution is conceivable, can be revealed, but in practice, within that context, cannot win.

187.  Many texts indicate that writers at the end of the fifth century were aware of the radical fragmentation of the Greek cultural/political unity, if it ever existed as the traditionalists imagined it, in accord with their ideology. Thucydides (3.82.4) laments the broken unity of language caused by civil war, which of course parallels the broken unity of the polis and of families. Phaedra in Eur. Hipp. 411–12 describes the split between noblewomen and commoners: “For when the women of noble station take pleasure in base acts, the common ones will regard these acts as noble.” Society is culturally and ethically divided; the actions of the cultural elite are not understood by traditionalists and commoners. The topic of the changing meanings of words in political and moral registers is pursued by Plato (Rep. 557e), apparently in response to Thucydides, and by Isocrates (Panath. 131), in response to Plato, as Romilly (2005, 167–74) has shown.

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15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the Suppliant Women To this point in my analysis of the Euripidean revolution I have tried to uncover its troubled vision of the subject with respect to the manifestations of the subject’s otherness, destiny, passions, and desires. In particular I have attempted to show how Euripides’s questioning or voiding of aspects of the anthropomorphic deities allows him to envision new forms of piety and wise modes of life. I now turn to Euripides’s commentary on political theory and practice: I will trace the inspiration Euripides takes from enlightened philosophy, and his commentary’s implicit criticism of the politics enacted by Greek cities, especially Athens. Euripides’s view is innovative, but the political reality is hostile to it. My analysis here focuses on three plays: the Suppliant Women, the Erechtheus, and the Bacchae. The ancient commentator on the Suppliant Women, perhaps Aristophanes of Byzantium, who wrote the bit of plot summary (hypothesis) we possess, describes the play as a “eulogy of Athens” (egkōmion tōn Athēnōn). The play stages the patriotic legend that extols Athens’s generous retrieval and burial of the dead Argive champions, whom the Thebans refused to bury. The mythical plot both celebrates Athens’s willingness to protect the divine law of burial, even at the cost of a difficult war against Thebes, and emphasizes Athens’s civilizing mission of preserving Panhellenic customs.188 Euripides’s text, however, transforms the colors and lighting of this patriotic fresco. First we see Theseus, the king of Athens, rejecting the Argive plea to rescue the corpses, because the champions’ assault against Thebes was foolish and impious. In support of this decision Theseus propounds a theory of politics that contradicts and dismisses the grounds of the champions’ attack against Thebes. Unexpectedly, under the emotional injunction of Aithra, his mother, Theseus changes his mind and leads the war against Thebes. Though the

188.  Other myths celebrated Athens’s civilizing mission: for instance, the myth of the Heracleidae and the myth according to which Orestes was acquitted by an Athenian jury with Athena sitting as the judge. This sort of myth flattered the image the Athenians had of their city, singled out their city as privileged among the Greek cities, and of course indirectly legitimated the imperialistic ventures of the Athenians. Euripides undermines Athens’s authority in Orestes myth in the Electra and the Orestes.

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new motivations contradict the previous ones, they hardly legitimize the war of aggression. Thus both Theseus’s earlier and his new arguments strip the myth, on different grounds, of its idealistic and solemn purpose. Finally, after the Athenian victory, a desperate mood descends on the suppliant mothers, dramatically underlined by Evadne’s suicide on Capaneus’s pyre and by the children’s commitment to take revenge. The rescue of the corpses does not end the war; it only ignites a new war with its own sacrificial violence. The rich tapestry that I only summarize here is presented in a very complicated text that is extremely subtle and cautious, so much so that the Suppliant Women has been interpreted in two very different ways: from antiquity to our own times, it has been understood as a serious encomium of Athens, while recent readings have underlined the critical, censorious, even parodic picture of Athens’s politics that surfaces in the text.189 That the same play is read in opposite ideological directions is not unusual in Euripidean criticism, and this potentiality should make us prudent and attentive, rather than apprehensive and paralyzed. We have in our hands the key to the alleged duality of Euripides’s ideological positions. Here, through Theseus’s theorizing, Euripides suggests that a philosophically sustained view of politics would and should produce great benefits for humanity. If, however, the political reality is such that an enlightened and even providential notion of politics remains unheard, it will continue to be the source of much human suffering and misery. The key to Euripides’s dual ideology is operating in the text from the first words of the play. The Argive mothers have invaded Demeter’s temple in Eleusis and have interrupted the proceedings of the festival of the Proerosia, a pleasant, Panhellenic ritual celebrating Demeter and the fertility of the earth. In their first song, the mothers, who form the Chorus of the play,190 recognize their intrusion and make clear that they are not

189.  For the interpretation that highlights the crisis of the political virtues in the play, see Di Benedetto 1971 and Rossi 1995, 339–40. 190.  The mothers of the seven champions can only be seven in number, but as the Chorus in Euripides has fifteen members, they must have numbered fifteen; yet, in terms of a choral voice, they signify the singular, unified voice of the seven mothers. Besides the mothers, there are probably also the sons of the Seven—who later become a supplementary chorus—and various attendants.

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there for the joyful celebration of the festival, but in order to beg for help in retrieving the corpses of their sons (63ff.). Their supplication is made intensely pitiable by their deliriously repetitive language (they mention their children’s deaths four times), their hysterical gestures of intrusion (“I supplicate,” “look at me!” “grant me!” “another context of laments is coming,”191 etc.), and especially their enactment of raw gestures that are typical of a funeral procession (scratching their cheeks with bloody nails, 76ff. and 47–51). This emotional turmoil unfolds without any mention of a god, such as Zeus, protector of suppliants, and assumes the form of a funeral lament (threnos) without any corpse present. The mothers’ performance occurs in a void, as a surreal scene, not only because it interrupts another, different ritual, but because it lacks the expected references, the gods and the corpses, and is constructed, before the altar of Demeter, only on distressing, pitiable, delirious sounds, language, and gesturing. It is pure emotional display, powerfully rhetorical in its pathetic effects and at the same time “surreal,” outside the right place and time, exaggerated, and deeply musical.192 The woman the mothers have surrounded with their supplicating branches is Aithra, the mother of Theseus. From the beginning she too bears the imprint of Euripidean style and poetics: she is a sophē woman. It is exceptional for the notion of sophia to be so present in the realm of politics, as it is in this play. In Thucydides, the word sophia never occurs, and sophos appears only once, employed by Cleon in his attack on those whom people of reactionary persuasion today would call “intellectuals” (xunetoi), “who want to appear smarter (sophōteroi) than the laws” (Thuc. 3.37.4). But in Euripides’s Suppliant Women—which scholars label a political play—this notion of new and old wisdom and shrewdness occurs twelve times, painting the play’s politics with particularly Euripidean strokes. 191.  ἀγὼν ὅδ’ ἄλλος ἔρχεται γόων γόοις (71–72) exemplifies how the Chorus’s language emphasizes the mere sound of words, creating near anagrams, paregmena (γεραιά, γεραιῶν ἐκ στομάτων 42), repetitions of words, and so on, and producing empty cognitive information (“old ladies have of course old mouths”) and a stream of miserable sounds of pitiable words. 192.  It is rare in tragedy to have a Chorus of old women—Aeschylus, Choeph. 171 is another example—and it is understandable why it would be so: the nature of theatricality is strongly constrained by old age and the role of the mother.

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Aithra, Theseus’s mother, feels pity for the suppliant Argive women,193 as she explains in the prologue to the play, and sends a messenger to summon Theseus so that he may either remove the sad spectacle of the mothers or discharge his duty to the suppliants by performing a pious act toward the gods—that is, burying the dead bodies (38–40). Aithra would not be a Euripidean character or a woman of Euripides’s time if she did not comment on her decision to summon Theseus (40–41): “For it is natural for women, if they are wise (sophai), to do everything through men.”194 The statement is simple and sounds like a conventional piece of women’s wisdom, recognizing their own weakness, but in the present context it is no longer simple or conventional. The audience realizes that from the beginning Aithra wants her son to recover the corpses of the seven champions,195 but since an ­alternative solution is open to her son, that of rejecting the mothers’ and Adrastus’s pleas (38–40)—a solution that he will in fact pursue at first— the audience will expect Aithra to use her sophia in order to obtain her wish. Thus the momentous political decision that Theseus will take of engaging in war against Thebes is inscribed from the beginning, even before being explicitly defined, in the emotional deliberation of a wise/shrewd woman. Indeed, both these characteristics are explicitly detailed and confirmed a little later, when, after Theseus’s refusal to help Adrastus and the mothers, Aithra cautiously intercedes with him (293): “May I say something, my son, noble for you and for the city?” And Theseus answers (294): “Yes, for much wisdom (polla . . . sopha) comes even from women.” Theseus’s condescension in the phrase “even from women” throws light on the bigotry of the time,196 but the passage also forces the audience to recall 193.  Bernek (2004, 268) appropriately emphasizes this point. Even the setting encourages Aithra’s sympathy for the mothers: she is there to celebrate the sacrifice in honor of Demeter, who is the giver of grain, but also a mother who suffered terrible pain because of the abduction of her daughter, Persephone. Goff (1995) elaborates on the importance of this mythical pattern in the construction of Aithra’s role, as does also Kavoulaki (2008, 297). 194.  πάντα γὰρ δι’ ἀρσένων γυναιξὶ πράσσειν εἰκὸς αἵτινες σοφαί. 195.  Burian (1985, 213 n. 4) makes this point very clearly: “While deferring to her son’s decision, she states the alternative in a way that seems almost preemptive (138–39 note esp. anagkas hikesious and hosion ti drasas).” 196.  It is not clear whether the text presents Theseus’s bigotry ironically or intends this as a serious, objective statement. I favor the former alternative. A worse condescension marks Pericles’s words addressed to women at the end of his funeral oration: “If

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Aithra’s comment at 40–41: “For it is natural for women, if they are wise/ shrewd (sophai), to do everything through men.” Thus, Athens’s glorious myth about its moral and political superiority in Greece is born among ironic innuendos: it is the brainchild of a smart woman who is not even Athenian.197 While the political role of women in tragedy is generally adversarial to the city,198 some mothers and some girls in Euripides’s drama cooperate enthusiastically with the city’s political aims. The voluntary decision199 of young women to offer their neck to the knife of sacrificers in order to save the city or the genos is a phenomenon that has tried the hermeneutics of the critics.200 Aithra is the mother who advises her son to wage war and does not I have to speak also of womanly virtue (εἰ δέ με δεῖ καὶ γυναικείας τι ἀρετῆς, . . . μνησθῆναι) . . .” (Thuc. 2.45.2). The condescension here is conveyed less by kai than by ei de me dei, and lies in his point that men’s silence about women is their glory. Pericles is a man, and with these words he achieves his purpose. 197.  “Aithra’s conversation with Theseus shows her to be a canny manipulator of masculine speech and logic” (Mendelsohn 2002, 164); cf. also Albini 1985, 357. 198.  Aeschylus’s female characters—Clytemnestra, the Choruses of the Suppliant Women and the the Seven—and Sophocles’s Antigone, not to mention Deianeira in Sophocles’s Trachiniai, are powerful personalities who constitute a menace to the established political order; they are the external factors, the negative, adversarial entities that political power finds hard or impossible to assimilate. The endless laments of women in funeral rituals and Electra’s unceasing lament in Sophocles’s play have often been interpreted as the traditional way for tragedy to challenge or undercut political power from the outside, and to display the various adversarial political tendencies that male, democratic ideology rejects in those ritual lamentations. See Loraux 2002. 199.  Aelion (1983, 115) states that the sacrifices of human victims in Euripides are always “volontaires ou consentis.” Some cases are complex: Polyxena agrees to die, but it is an agreement after compulsion (see the next note). According to Sonnino (2010, 120– 212), the sacrifice of the oldest daughter of Erechtheus would have been neither voluntary nor agreed to. For the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Euripides’s IA, see Pucci 2005. 200.  Critics have found it difficult and embarrassing to explain Euripides’s predilection for human sacrifice of young victims: of course no contemporary event or practice explains it, and it must therefore be attributed to the canon and rules of his poetics. According to Nancy (1983) the sacrifices serve to discredit the heroes of the traditional myth; according to Loraux (1987, 63) this sacrifice “gives a double satisfaction to the spectators: to transgress through the imagination the interdiction against murder and to dream about virginal blood.” Zeitlin (1990) contrasts the victims to the female characters of other cities, such as Thebes. Goff (1995) connects the politically cooperative female characters in Euripides to specific rituals. In Foley’s view (1985) Euripides, through irony, deprives the myth of its original gravity. I see an emotional

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fear exposing him to the dangers of battle. Yet, in this attitude, she is a pale version of Praxithea in Euripides’s Erechtheus: when the oracle demands the sacrifice of Praxithea’s and Erechtheus’s daughter, the mother asserts (fr. 360 Kannicht, 12 Sonnino, line 4), “I shall give my own daughter [to the polis] to be killed.” This bold offer contrasts with the reaction the audience expects from a tragic parent: for instance, Demophon, when facing an analogous request for a sacrifice, refuses to kill his child, using words that stand in direct opposition to those of Praxithea (Heracl. 411): “I shall not kill my child.”201 Praxithea’s readiness to offer not herself but her daughter to the fatherland suggests the silencing of her natural maternal love for her child and its transformation into love for the city. She feels in herself the eros citizens should feel for their city (the land of their fathers), the eros that Pericles (Thuc. 2.43.1)

connection between the pitiful representation of the young victims offering ­themselves to death and the spectators’ pain as they offer themselves, in their imagination, to the pain of those innocent deaths, so courageously faced; through that fantasizing experi­ ence, the audience meditates on the inevitable encounter with their own death. They may shiver for the shed virginal blood and admire the exceptional temper and moral beauty of the victims. As a result they become wiser and are purged of fear, as if they had themselves performed, imaginatively, a self-sacrifice, and obtained its charis. Sometimes, however, the vanity and cruelty of the sacrifice are strongly denounced—for instance, in the case of Polyxena in the Hecuba. Once the sacrifice is imposed on her, she proudly accepts her death in order to escape the life of a slave, and exhibits her aristocratic poise in a splendid utterance. The audience not only felt pity for her but also fantasized on the basis of her heroic posture and—as the Messenger describes—on the beauty of her body and countenance at the moment of the sacrifice. For the modern sensibility there is an uncomfortable and sentimental streak in the representation of such a pure exceptionality. See Pucci 2007. 201.  See O’Connor-Visser 1987, 158. The tone and the fierceness of the arguments display a patriotic enthusiasm and ideological fanaticism that we find in no other parents facing the sacrifice of their children. On the contrary, tragic parents, at least in principle, reject the sacrifice, and in the Phoenissae the father, king of the city, even accepts the risk of seeing his own city defeated, when he tries to prevent the death of his son Menoeceus, whose sacrifice is the condition for victory. A  parent, even a heroic mother, would be expected to feel and express the terrible pain of having to subject her daughter to the knife of the sacrificer even for the safety of the fatherland. Tragic mothers hate to lose their children in war, as Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis and Suppliant Women show. Clytemnestra in the former is horrified by the sacrifice and by the callousness of her husband. In the latter, the mothers lament that they raise their children for an unhappy fate, that their labors, their pangs, have been in vain, and proclaim that they should not even have given birth to any children (see Supp. 789, 918ff.).

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exhorts them to feel.202 After this assertion, Praxithea resorts to the conventional arguments familiar to the citizens and the audience by way of Athenian propaganda, the same arguments we find in the words of Thucydides’s Pericles and those of Lysias and other authors: Athens is the best city; Athenians are lucky because they are autochthonous; children are generated to serve the fatherland (“I shall give this daughter who is not mine except by nature to be sacrificed in favor of this land,” 38–39);203 there is honor in a common tomb; saving one’s life is vain if the polis is destroyed, and so forth. Praxithea’s consent to give her daughter’s life to the city is noble and seems necessary to the city’s survival, but the text qualifies her rhetoric as preposterous (she cannot offer the life of others, even that of her own child, as a gift). She justifies this gift by defining her daughter as an odd substitute for a male child that she does not have (22–26);204 the replacement is indeed disadvantageous for the daughter, but it suggests, in Praxithea’s view, a sort of masculinization of the female child. Male and female differences are blurred in the case of serving the fatherland. Through these rhetorical manipulations, Praxithea avoids calculating the awful price she exacts from her daughter and from herself. And, finally, she attributes to herself a power that belongs instead to her daughter (12, 51–52): “At the cost of one life, it is not possible that I will not save this land.” In her enthusiastic projection of victory, and in her conviction regarding its optimal outcome, Praxithea is made to give false predictions. Referring to her husband and two other daughters, she says (34–36), “To my daughter, to her alone, as she dies for the city, one crown will be given, and she will save her mother, and you and her two sisters.” Euripides would not be Euripides if he did not offer these promising words only so that they might be contradicted. In fact, Poseidon will kill Erechtheus, and the two girls will kill themselves: Praxithea’s victory will leave her in personal desolation. In the end Athena also has to intervene to prevent Poseidon from destroying Athens; the sacrifice of Praxithea’s daughter was not sufficient: it did not even save her family. 202.  On the Thucydidean passage and on eros for the city, see the instructive essay of Wohl (2002, 30–72). 203.  Notice the powerful negative “the not my daughter” in the Greek: τὴν οὐκ ἐμὴν . . . πλὴν φύσει δώσω κόρην θῦσαι πρὸ γαίας. 204.  εἰ δ’ ἦν ἐν οἴκοις ἀντὶ θηλειῶν στάχυς / ἄρσην, πόλιν δὲ πολεμία κατεῖχε φλόξ, / οὐκ ἄν νιν ἐξέπεμπον εἰς μάχην δορός, / θάνατον προταρβοῦσ’;

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Of course we do not know how the audience reacted to Praxithea’s fanatical patriotism and to the partial failure of such an immense sacrifice. The examples of other tragic texts suggest that the spectators felt both to be a shock. They may have expected that she would at least express some pain while proudly giving her daughter to be sacrificed for the city. Indeed, parents’ and especially mothers’ lamentations for the death of their children are conventional in tragedy, as Praxithea herself recognizes (12, 28–31): When the tears of the mothers escort their children, they feminize many of them as they set forth to battle. I hate the mothers who choose for their children to live instead of glory, and encourage them to cowardice.

This “hate” comes from her castigation of the motherly love in herself, and her sublimation of it as an eros for Athens. That Praxithea’s love for the city can overcome her natural motherly love both indicates the extent of her feeling and points to a sort of paradox, or perversion—a sort of aberration.205 The fact that women, whose silence and invisibility in the city 205.  Things are never simple in Euripides. In her epiphany as dea ex machina at the end of the Erechtheus (fr. 370 Kannicht, 17 Sonnino, lines 95–97—and this passage qualifies her message) Athena nominates Praxithea as her own priestess. This version, according to which Praxithea would be the first priestess of Athena Polias’s cult, does not agree with the tradition in Etym. Magn. 386, 4 (Gaisf.), as Sonnino (2010, 401) points out. It is then plausible that Euripides changed the traditional version in order to give a deserved reward to Praxithea. The reader is then induced to ask what the purpose of the sacrifice was, if the other two daughters killed themselves, the king was mangled by Poseidon, and the city was saved by Athena. Besides the specific datum concerning the foundation of the priesthood, it is impossible for us as readers to determine whether Euripides’s eventual invention of Praxithea as first priestess of Athena Polias’s cult would have conveyed some eloquent message to the audience, allowing them, for instance, to recognize, or to hope for, an analogous patriotic feeling among the priestesses of Athena Polias and especially in the priestess who was active at the time of the play’s performance. Scholars are divided: some believe in tracing links between Euripides’s etiologies and the cult (e.g., Calame 2011), and others (e.g., Scullion 2000) are skeptical about concrete links. In the case of the Erechtheus, while the death and heroicization of Erechtheus coincides with the construction of the Erechtheum in the same year as the play, other etiological features do not agree with the actual cult. In previous mythological versions it was Ion and not Erechtheus who fought against Eumolpus (Sonnino 2010, 45ff.); analogously, while in Euripides it is only the oldest of Praxithea’s daughters who is sacrificed, in the cult there must have been a collective sacrifice of all three daughters (Sonnino, 96–97).

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were—according to Pericles—a sign of their virtue, become in Euripides either the saviors of Athens or the agents of the mythical rescue of the Argive champions raises the question of whether the text intends to show the hegemonic success of the polis even within the feminine gender or, rather, to qualify women’s cooperation as a symbol of overall excess, an aberration even of patriotic feelings and passions in current Athenian political life. I endorse the latter interpretation. Allegorically and symbolically women’s love is a simulation—as Vidal-Naquet (2001) argues—of citizens’ love: the text may suggest that the citizens’ love for their fatherland, as required in all these years of war, is a disproportionate love for the city’s sacrificial violence. And indeed this loving abnegation is not always successful, as the limited success of the daughter’s sacrifice teaches Praxithea and the audience, and as the generous, but questionable intervention of Aithra teaches the audience of the Suppliant Women. Indeed, Theseus’s different approach to the practice of politics and his neat rejection of Adrastus’s plea offer a different angle from which to reproach just this excess and aberration.

16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress At the beginning of the Suppliant Women, Theseus presents a carefully studied political theory, a serious analysis of human progress on the basis of which he rejects Adrastus’s plea. He begins to speak like a sophist debater,206 and asserts that in human life the good things surpass the bad (195–200). With this introduction he lets his listeners understand that Adrastus is responsible for his own troubles and disgraces. It must have been a truly jarring and unexpected event for the audience to have the young leader of Athens, the creator of Athenian democracy, come before them and expound a theory of human progress in terms that they would associate with thinkers like Anaxagoras, Democritus,

206.  ἄλλοισι δὴ ‘πόνησ’ ἁμιλληθεὶς λόγωι τοιῶιδ’ (195; “I labored in debate with other men, and my argument went like this”). On this expression as the headline of a rhetorical show, see Collard 1975; Morwood 2007.

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Protagoras, and Critias.207 Theseus celebrates the universal process of diakosmesis, a process that a god initiated: I praise the one among the gods who in due measure separated (diestath­mēsato) our life from chaos and a brutish state,208 first by instilling intelligence in it and then by providing the tongue to utter words so as to understand speech. (201–4)209

Theseus underscores as the first source of mankind’s progress the effect of sunesis, “intelligence,” “consciousness,” “understanding.” All mortals— men and women—keep on refining their life, setting themselves apart from bestial and irrational behaviors. In praise of human progress, Theseus mentions international trade (209–10), but not war,210 agriculture (205–6) 207.  The theme seems to have been popular: we find it in Soph. Antigone 355ff. and in ps.-Aesch. Prometheus 476–506. Anaxagoras’s influence on Theseus’s theory, usually neglected by modern scholars, has been strongly supported, in my view correctly, by Diano (1952, 18–22). Among Anaxagoras’s fragments related to Nous, fragment 12 is especially relevant to Theseus’s argument: “Nous [Mind] came to control the whole revolution, so that the revolution would begin. . . . And Nous gave heed to all things coming together, separating out and breaking up; and whatever sorts of things were to be—what were and are no longer, what are and what will be—Nous put all in order (diekosmēse)” (trans. Sider 2005). On the basis of Euripides fr. 1018, “Nous [Mind] is god in each of us,” it is even possible to postulate that “the god” Theseus makes initiator and guide of human progress is human Nous (Mind), in its collective force, as in Anaxagoras. On the other hand, Metrodorus of Lampsakos, a pupil of Anaxagoras, interpreted Zeus allegorically as Nous (DK 61, 6). 208.  αἰνῶ δ’ ὃς ἡμῖν βίοτον ἐκ πεφυρμένου / καὶ θηριώδους θεῶν διεσταθμήσατο (201–2). Notice the long hyperbaton that leaves the nature of the agent of the revolution undefined until the middle of the second line. The agent is at any rate “the one among the gods,” and this formulation of course lets the reader imagine a sort of impersonal “Divine.” 209.  πρῶτον μὲν ἐνθεὶς σύνεσιν, εἶτα δ’ ἄγγελον/ γλῶσσαν λόγων δούς (203–4). The word for “intelligence” (σύνεσιν) is one of the many abstract nouns ending in -sis dear to the sophists, and in particular to Anaxagoras. Euripides often uses this word with particular forms of emphasis (see, for instance, a macroscopic example in Or. 395– 98; and see above). Here (Supp. 203) it stands out because it occurs in a resolved iambus and in caesura. Aristophanes (Ran. 893–94) mocks Euripides for the use of this word, by selecting it as one of the “private gods” of Euripides’s poetry and rhetoric, together with “Aither,” “Pivot of Tongue,” and other curious entities. 210.  International trade of course implies peace. Unjust wars, Theseus says later, are the result of the passions and vices of young men (232ff.).

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but not laws, prophecy (211–12211), sunesis, but not sophia. By emphasizing the gifts the god grants to men even in nature with a providential finality (“the rain from heaven, so that it might nourish what grows from the earth and quench our thirst,” 205–7), and by assuming that nature itself speaks the mind of the god, for instance, in sacrificial victims, Theseus extols more than a beneficial nature; he grants to nature a divine finality.212 But who is this god? The text does not allow us to give any cogent answer. I imagine that the anonymous god could be Zeus in his function as Anankē or as Nous (the human Mind)—the references are obviously to Alcestis 962–83 and Troades 886—or an impersonal divine drive, the Divine.213 But of course the possible alternatives are too many to feel confident in any one. Theseus’s theory is Euripides’s brilliant literary creation: whoever we may imagine this god to be, he is evoked as an anonymous god and as a sort of cosmic principle. I disagree with the scholars who contend that this theorizing part of Theseus’s argument is irrelevant.214 They argue that this representation of Theseus as a sophist, setting forth a teleological view of the cosmos and its life, has no effect on the dramatic action that follows. By this argument, the readers fail to surmise what effect the double and opposite version of the myth had on the theatrical audience. I will show that Theseus’s version will contribute to discrediting the historical truth and to suggesting the ethical 211.  Theseus’s support for prophecy enacted through animal victims implies a consistent “divine pronoia” that puts nature at the service of men (see also 205–6). This divine pronoia demands mortals’ reverence toward the gods, and therefore also an ordered and legal system of life. 212.  The description of progress in Soph. Ant. 332ff. does not follow a precise line of development but heaps up the deina (tremendous deeds) of humanity, while Euripides’s description sets out a systematic line of progress; hence the difference in style— poetic, lyrical, and allusive in the Antigone; prosaic, in iambic trimeters, and succinct in the Suppliants. At the end of the Antigone, Sophocles mentions the unconquerable presence of death, while here Theseus, though confronting the corpses of heroes, is made to be silent on this destiny of humans. Politically speaking, the city never dies: it lives through agriculture, trade, and religion. Sophocles is always alert to the mysteries, the holes, the silences, the ambiguities that the gods leave in men’s lives. 213.  Some in the audience may have thought that this providential god could be Zeus, who, in the popular imagination, is the rain god. In the philosophical religion, Pherecydes, for instance, identifies him as Aither (DK 7 A 8, 9). Of course there are other possible identities, as we have seen. 214.  E.g., Grube 1941, 231.

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callousness of the mythical version. The latter unfolds as a great story but reveals itself as a flattering tale that celebrates the pretended greatness of Athens. Athens’s greatness lies in other achievements than that of waging a war in order to bury questionable heroes. Theseus’s theory is serious and coherent: it summons up analogous popular contemporary descriptions of progress, and so is intended to contribute to an important vision of mankind’s history. Furthermore, it explains etiologically the ethical reasons for Theseus’s refusal to help Adrastus, and it grounds some of his political ideas, such as the notion of euboulia (intelligent deliberation, prudence, 161). And, finally, and more importantly, by this representation, Euripides induces his audience to think about the grounds that would inspire a political theory and establish a political art: this specific vision should be the foundation for a politics aiming at shunning bestiality, irrationality, and foolishness, at promoting the life of the community through intelligence, refinement, and the discrimination of values, and finally at respecting the gods, as they are viewed in this providential role.215 In some respects, Theseus’s system recalls Aristotle’s view of the political end (telos tou politikou biou) in the Nicomachean Ethics. Even if it is dangerous to compare texts so far removed from each other in time and purpose, it is remarkable that for Aristotle “the supreme Good must be the object of the most authoritative of the sciences,” which is “the science of politics” (1.1.4); that the “good of men must be the end of the science of politics” (1.2.8); and that the true statesman seems to be the one who has made a special study of virtue, since his aim is to make citizens good and law-abiding men (1.13.1 = 1102A). Aristotle agrees that “honor” is only a superficial end of politics, its real end being “happiness” (eudaimonia), over and above virtue (1.5.4ff.). 215.  Socrates, as he explains in the Phaedo (97b8-c5), derived from his reading of Anaxagoras’s diakosmesis a teleological view of the world, not dissimilar from the one Euripides’s Theseus derives from the diakosmesis worked by a theos. The analogy is remarkable; Socrates discovered with great enthusiasm Anaxagoras’s theory that “the nous is the one that by separating orders is responsible for everything” (νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος): “And I thought that, if this is so, the ordering mind orders everything and manages everything in the best way possible” (καὶ ἡγησάμην, εἰ τοῦθ’ οὕτως ἔχει, τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν καὶ ἕκαστον τιθέναι ταύτῃ ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ).

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In this light, Theseus appears to have made a study of politics, to have assumed a specific end or purpose of the political life, analyzed the classes of society, recognized which is the virtuous one among them, and appreciated the aspects of wisdom that inspire the guiding god. To compare Theseus’s program with one that is even more remote than Aristotle’s might be foolish, but it might suggest the desire for a politics that really takes into account the good of mankind as it is rooted in human nature. French scholars today call “le politique” the politics that can be separated from “la politique”: “le politique” does not simply view human beings as citizens who live in the polis serving the state’s interests and sacrificial violence (laws, rights, duties, and war) but envisions them as “beings” whose human essence extends beyond their city’s walls.216 What makes Theseus’s political theory idealistic is that it is not affected by any conflicts with otherness. In Theseus’s view, mankind develops by erasing bestiality, savagery, and lack of reason and by moving toward a self-promoting selfhood, with the collaboration of nature, which is mainly positive. As he puts it, “In human life the good things surpass the bad things” (195–200). Conflicts, passions, and death, otherness in general, are in this way inevitable but do not jeopardize the good things of life. Theseus perceives humanity as a whole and does not focus on the life and needs of individual poleis (city-states). This is unrealistic: the practice of the political craft in Euripides’s times was essentially the art of controlling the conflicting sections or classes of the state and dealing with the competition among states. Theseus ignores these various forms of civic and international struggle and envisions a human movement ascending toward a sort of divine, upgraded identity. Euripides achieves an extraordinary “coup de théâtre” by placing the same character, Theseus, at the head of two opposing views of myth and its political significance. In his first role, Theseus rejects the task of retrieving the corpses and accuses the Argive champions of injustice; in his second role, he reverses his earlier views and leads the Athenian army to recover the corpses. The “coup de théâtre” consists in showing Theseus first implicitly scorning the glorious myth of Athens, and then, at the behest of his mother, championing that same myth. The play initially dramatizes this contrast. 216.  See Loraux 2002.

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Euripides must have smiled bitterly when he decided to make Theseus both the protagonist of a patriotic legend and the philosopher who carefully refutes the ethical foundations of that legend and refuses to be its protagonist. Euripides’s purposes are obvious if, as is most probable, he produced the play after the battle of Delion in 424 B.C., in which the Athenians were defeated by the Thebans in a large infantry action. The audience, composed in great part by the veterans of that ruinous battle, must have reacted to Theseus’s idealistic politics, which envisioned peace, commerce, and intelligence. Euripides knew that any alternatives to the imperialistic politics were difficult to implement in the current political reality, but he decided to provoke and stimulate the attention and the conscience of an audience that had suffered grievously under that very regime. He could hope that a political project reported under the name of Theseus and envisioning peace and international understanding would appeal to them. Modern criticism that emphasizes the irrelevance of Theseus’s theorizing and of his rejection of Adrastus, on the grounds that they have no effect on the rest of the dramatic action, misses the shock of the contrast between the external reality—the Athenian defeat by the Thebans—and the theatrical, legendary victory of the Athenians over them. In the light of this contrast, Theseus’s initial theorizing remains constantly present in the mind of the audience as a positive alternative, a beneficial political craft, while the motivations for the war and the glorious victory of the Athenians against the Thebans loom as themes of propaganda and mythical edification. The paradox that the same man may pursue a political course opposed to his previous one allows the text to show by what sort of rhetorical means and premises a political and ideal project can be corrupted and effaced. The ideal project seems utopian; the real one is absolutely disastrous. The impossibility of implementing an enlightened version of the world politics deepens the audience’s awareness of the non-sense and misery of politics and of human beings’ destiny. Starting from his understanding of an impersonal, cosmic, and nonconfrontational impulse leading humanity toward some sort of divine end, Theseus scrupulously inquires into Adrastus’s political behavior, condemns his military decision, and finally rejects his plea. In his inquiry Theseus learns that Adrastus has committed foolish, irresponsible acts: he has given his daughters in marriage to two exiled persons, Tydeus and Polyneices, the

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former a murderer and the other a son cursed by his father. His military decision was prompted by his interpretation of a puzzling oracle of Apollo enjoining him to marry his daughters to a boar and to a lion: when the two exiled persons—fighters as furious as wild animals—arrived at Adrastus’s house one night, he gave his daughters to them (133–50).217 After this, in the hope of reinstalling Polyneices on the Theban throne, he led the disastrous expedition against Thebes, contravening the will of the gods and Amphiaraus’s prophecy (155–58). It is at this point that Theseus comments on Adrastus’s lack of euboulia, “good counsel or deliberation” (159–61): THESEUS: Did you so easily disregard the divine will? ADRASTUS: Yes, the clamor (thorubos) of young men put me out of my mind. THESEUS: It is bravery (eupsykhia) that you pursued rather than good counsel (euboulia).

Thorubos (clamor, tumult) contrasts with the sunesis (conscience, reason) the beneficial god installed in men; and here absurdly it is thorubos that determines Adrastus’s decision. The spectators cannot have missed the allusion to the scandal of the practices in their own assemblies. Theseus exhibits his disapproval in a pointed comparison of two important political notions eupsykhia and euboulia. As Hesk (2011, 128 ff.) has shown, “good deliberation” was very important in political practice, discussion, and theory at the time in Greece: the aristocratic leaders preferred “prudence” and “good counsel,” while the democratic leaders were more prone to “daring” (tolma). In our text such a distinction does not seem to be intended, and the word refers, as Hesk suggests (128), to “a more general fifth-century perception that good political and military decisions must involve some consideration of what the gods want.” But the force of the expression in our text becomes clearer when it is considered in opposition to eupsykhia. The latter designates “courage” of a specific kind—instinctual, innate b­ oldness—and characterizes the Peloponnesians as possessing such courage, in opposition to the Athenians, who cannot acquire that

217.  Mendelsohn (2002, 149) underscores the exogamic aspects of this marriage in contrast to what seems to be the endogamic view of Theseus. On exogamy, as a peculiar aspect of Greek society, see Carson 1990.

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sort of courage through education. The Corinthian speaker in Thucydides 1.121.4 makes this point: And once our skill is on a level with theirs [the Athenians], certainly we would be superior in courage (eupsykhia). The advantage that we have by nature, they cannot acquire by learning.218

“Clamor” and “instinctual boldness” induced Adrastus to war: nothing could be more opposed to good council (euboulia) and intelliegence (sunesis). Adrastus has no chance of persuading Theseus. Accordingly, in his plea, Adrastus does not try to justify his blunders; he confesses that he made them and appeals to Theseus’s pity: his own supplicating gesture, physically and humbly performed, in the presence of the suppliant mothers, speaks for itself.219 He evokes the sophia to which his supplication appeals (176–79): It is a wise thing (sophon) for the prosperous man to look on poverty, and for the poor man to turn his gaze on the rich in envy so that desire for money may seize him, and for those who are not unfortunate to look at what is pitiable.220

With these words Adrastus appeals to a sort of democratic sensibility that sympathizes with human suffering, and asks for compassion. But Theseus follows a different understanding of sophia, that of a sophos who feels pity for the pains and disgraces that someone suffers unjustly and unreasonably,221 but not for those that someone deserves as a consequence 218.  ὅταν τὴν ἐπιστήμην ἐς τὸ ἴσον καταστήσωμεν, τῇ γε εὐψυχίᾳ δήπου περιεσόμεθα. ὃ γὰρ ἡμεῖς ἔχομεν φύσει ἀγαθόν, ἐκείνοις οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο διδαχῇ. See Romilly 1986, 8. Here Theseus uses the word eupsykhia in a negative way, characterizing the Peloponnesians’ unlearned, instinctive boldness. 219.  On a “feminized Adrastos,” see Mendelsohn 2002, 149ff. 220.  σοφὸν δὲ πενίαν τ’ εἰσορᾶν τὸν ὄλβιον πένητά τ’ ἐς τοὺς πλουσίους ἀποβλέπειν ζηλοῦνθ’, ἵν’ αὐτὸν χρημάτων ἔρως ἔχηι, τά τ’ οἰκτρὰ τοὺς μὴ δυστυχεῖς δεδορκέναι. The text has some resonance with Hesiod, Op. 20–24, where Competition (Eris), just as sophia here, pushes the poor to imitate the rich. 221.  Pity is a feeling that issues from sophia and belongs only to the sophoi: see Eur. El. 294–95: “Pity is not found at all among ignorant people, but only among the wise” (ἔνεστι δ’ οἶκτος ἀμαθίαι μὲν οὐδαμοῦ, / σοφοῖσι δ’ ἀνδρῶν).

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of his foolish behavior. Certainly Adrastus, Theseus says, behaved as one of those who believe themselves to be wiser (σοφώτεροι) than the gods (218–19).222 He was impious, and Theseus refuses to become Adrastus’s ally and to rescue the corpses of the Argive champions: if he were to join his action with Adrastus’s, he would infect himself with the same folly.223 Adrastus protests against Theseus’s condemnation and rejection (253–56): I did not choose you, my lord, as a judge of my woes, nor as a chastiser and a punisher of my deeds, if I am found to have acted wrongly, but to have your help!

The passage is certainly intended as metatextual: Euripides has Adrastus bitterly accusing Theseus of behaving in a way that the audience knows to be opposite of the conduct that the myth attributes to him. Since the spectators know that, according to the myth, Theseus would retrieve the bodies, they are puzzled, and the text invites them to share Adrastus’s provocation and protest and ask themselves whether Theseus will change his mind, and when, and how, if ever. Of course he will, but in a surprising way, such that the audience is far from imagining.224 The passage is also essential to show the serious presence of Theseus’s ideal views during the course of the next action. For Adrastus will later confess that he did behave in an unfair and inconsiderate way when he dismissed the compromise offered by Eteocles and rushed to war (739–41): Eteocles proposed an agreement with moderate requests; we refused to accept them and then we were destroyed.225

222.  δοκοῦμεν εἶναι δαιμόνων σοφώτεροι. / ἧς καὶ σὺ φαίνηι δεκάδος, οὐ σοφὸς γεγώς. 223.  The language of infection and disease is prominent in Theseus’s statements (220–28). 224.  Bernek (2004, 275) interprets the metatexual intention differently: Euripides would have shaped Theseus’s performance as appropriate to the situation. Our interpretation of Theseus’s role diverges radically from Bernek’s. 225.  At this point the solution of the conflict through persuasion in Aeschylus’s Eleusinians (Plut. Thes. 29.4–5 [= fr. 268 Mette]) comes to light for the audience.

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Thus, Theseus is correct to condemn the injustice of Adrastus and his expedition: from Theseus’s point of view, Adrastus acted foolishly, and we can imagine how he could qualify Adrastus’s grounds for rejecting Eteocles’s conciliating request: he probably acted under the incitement, and the thorubos, of the young fellows, and under the pressure of their ambitions, as Theseus has shown in his analysis of the frequency of wars. The condemnation is devastating: who would know better than Theseus the false or questionable grounds on which myth has built the glorious and edifying image of Athens? Irony, moreover, pervades the entire mythical process: the legendary narrative acquires truth—namely, its claim to have been a historical event—only because it has been produced by the traditional politics, which eventually finds moral support in the legendary event. It is a vicious circle. Theseus in his first role is shown as refusing to play the game; thus tragedy and the edifying myth are canceled. Adrastus invites the mothers to depart, telling them: “Our prayers in the gods’ name have been unavailing” (258ff.). Several late plays by Euripides use the same dramatic strategy as Theseus’s scene in the Suppliant Women. In the Bacchae, as we shall see in section 24, Teiresias’s speculations on the nature of the Dionysiac religion and on the benefits of receiving Dionysus in the city constitute a parallel example: the seer, at the outset of the play, offers an alternative policy toward Dionysus that if accepted by Pentheus would defuse Dionysus’s hostility and would bring the tragedy to an end. This dramatic strategy is recognizable in different forms in other plays: in Phoenissae 318–21, Jocasta, in a pathetic encounter with Polyneices, recognizes his just cause and laments in a lyric song his unjust lot: “You left deserted the paternal house, as an exile, when you were driven away by your brother’s outrageous action, desired by friends, desired by Thebes.” Jocasta’s firm conviction seems to open up the possibility of a variation on the traditional story, but when the two brothers meet under her direction, Jocasta accuses Polyneices no less violently than Eteocles. Here too, as in the other examples, the enlightened version is presented and then silenced. The world has the opportunity, but not the capacity, to become better.

17.  How to Deliberate a War It appears to be an unrealistic move when Aithra brushes aside Theseus’s political decision, his respect for justice and his piety toward the gods.

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Reducing him from legendary figure to “my child”—she addresses him, ὦ παῖ—she urges him to use Athens’s force “to compel violent men who prevent the dead from obtaining due burial and rites, and to stop those who are confounding the law of all Greece” (Supp. 308–12). Theseus certainly knew the laws of burial, but they did not not induce him to embark on a military intervention: possibly he realized that the Thebans wanted to give a harsh message to the aggressive Argives and that at any rate it was not his legal or religious duty to invade Thebes in the name of these laws. Aithra begins cautiously, first testing her son’s receptiveness to her speech,226 and then noting the futility of women’s eloquence (299: ἀχρεῖον τὰς γυναῖκας εὖ λέγειν).227 The latter observation is disingenuous, because she is a shrewd and very successful speaker.228 As in the case of the authoritative intervention of Praxithea, so here in considering Aithra’s authoritative advice, we must raise the question of the provocation intended by the text. As I suggested, it is improbable that by these interventions the text conveys the hegemonic success of the polis in obtaining the absolute cooperation of the women. The dramatic role of the mothers in the play contradicts this assumption: their total despair over the death and mistreatment of their sons overwhelms whatever sympathy they may have conceived for the city’s military activities.

226.  See the elaborate and suggestive analysis of Mendelsohn (2002, 164ff.): “Aithra herself alludes here to gendered conventions that forbid such speech to women, even if she sets about violating them. . . . Indeed the repeated allusion to the convention of feminine silence (sigē) even as she steps forth to speak constitutes a concentrated bit of praeteritio.” The role Euripides chooses to give to Aithra is also unexpected when one considers the version of her story in the standard tradition. When Aegeus was in Troezen, he met Aithra in a chance encounter: he was drunk and what happened occurred vini vitio. Furthermore, Aithra never came to Athens; only Theseus went to Athens, when he had grown to manhood, to reach his father, Aegeus. Accordingly Aithra is a foreigner: no institutional qualification defines her, and being a sophē attaches her only to sophia. 227.  The expression εὖ λέγειν implies approval of either the content of the speech or merely its rhetorical skill (Barrett 1964, 248), and here the audience might expect one or the other, though in Euripides the latter connotation is more frequent. The powerful preterition and the controversial force of εὖ λέγειν demonstrate the rhetorical skills and formidable shrewdness of Aithra, before she begins to argue. 228.  Mendelsohn 2002, 164ff.: “Women’s speech is literally transformed here from something akhreion (useless) into the opposite, the etymologically related khrēst’ epē.”

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It is more convincing to conclude that the text intends to qualify the nature of the current politics of Athens. The authoritative examples of the two female characters, Praxithea and Aithra, imply a simulation according to which they embody the perverse eros for the city that the political authority in Athens was demanding from the citizens: it was imposing on them constant duties and a course of action that led to continual sacrificial violence.229 Taking female characters as “allegories” for this exacerbated eros allows the text to highlight its emotional, feminine aspect, its being foreign to really serious politics. Aithra urges Theseus to consider the will of the gods lest he err by dishonoring them (301–2: ἐγὼ δέ σ’, ὦ παῖ, πρῶτα μὲν τὰ τῶν θεῶν /σκοπεῖν κελεύω μὴ σφαλῆις ἀτιμάσας).230 She seems to imply that he is disregarding not only the reverence owed to suppliants,231 but also, and more importantly, the divine law concerning the burial of corpses. The latter is her only serious argument for carrying out a violent rescue: from the outset she defined the task of burying the corpses as a divine law (19, 301), and she is the first to define it as a Panhellenic law. But how serious did her argument sound to the contemporary audience? Although her ethical and religious motivations may make perfect sense within the context of myth, the audience, familiar with the reality of things, must have entertained a much less orthodox view about the “laws” 229.  The classic example of a woman’s authoritative intervention in an arena that is extraneous to her social role is that of Andromache in Il. 6.431–34, when she gives military advice to Hector: “Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart, / that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow, / but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city / is more open to attack, and where the wall may be mounted.” Hector will not follow his wife’s advice based on the needs and affection of family; it is not out of pity and love, but in view of his kleos (glory), his education, and the respect of the Trojans that he determines the military action. At any rate the fall of Troy is inevitable, he says, and he can try only to delay that fateful day. 230.  She warns him using the same word (atimaō) that Theseus had used to accuse Adrastus of a similar fault (230), i.e., not honoring the will of the gods (230–31: μάντεων λεγόντων θέσφατ’ εἶτ’ ἀτιμάσας, / βίαι παρελθὼν θεοὺς ἀπώλεσας πόλιν); her language also recalls Adrastus’s own confession that he did not consult the seers: “Alas, you charge me where my blunder was the greatest” (156: οἴμοι· διώκεις μ’ ἧι μάλιστ’ ἐγὼ ‘σφάλην). The resonance of these repeated words in analogous accusations is strong and undeniable. 231.  The mothers, however, have not performed the ritual gesture toward Theseus directly and have never mentioned Zeus and the gods who protect suppliants.

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concerning the burial of corpses. The notion of divine law is of uncertain origin,232 and “Panhellenic law” may be applied selectively, and its actual legal constraints are indeterminate: it was neglected by the Greek cities in the case of traitors and special criminals, for instance.233 Thus while these definitions are unproblematic in the mythical context of the plot, they are open to question and controversial at the level of the current Athenian political reality. Even accepting the general constraints of the laws of burial, there is, however, no law, human or divine, that compels a state to make war against another state because the latter is violating a specific “divine or Panhellenic law.” At the level of message—that is, at the level at which the text refers, for the spectators, to actual political issues—the suggestion of foreign intervention is controversial and provokes various ideological responses. The propagandistic effect of the theme of Panhellenism, already exploited by Aeschylus fifty years earlier, is undeniable, for it grants Athens support, in the mythical lore, of its Panhellenic mission. At the time of the play (424–420?), this Panhellenic mission has become indistinguishable from Athens’s imperialism.234 Of course the audience may have reacted

232.  The Chorus of the Antigone recognizes Creon’s right to make a decision about the corpse of Polyneices and leave it unburied (“It is in your power to use any measure at all, I suppose, about both the dead and all of us, the living,” 211–13). Antigone herself states, in a famous line, that she would not have buried anybody else but her brother (905–12). Creon, after the terrible experience, cries (1113): “I suspect that it is best to go through life preserving the established laws”—“established,” but not divine. 233.  Griffith (1999, 29–33) collects evidence that makes it difficult to ascertain, in ac­ tuality, the real constraint and orthodox nature of this law. I cite Thuc. 4.97–98, which records the debate between the Thebans and Athenians concerning the restitution of the bodies of the fallen Athenians during the battle of Delion in 424. The arguments on both sides make clear that the execution of the “law of all Greece” depended on various details and conditions, and blackmail. The Thebans, in the name of the sanctuary and of Apollo, warned the Athenians that they should first leave the temple and then retrieve the bodies (Thuc. 4.97). It was only when the Boeotians reoccupied the sanctuary that the Athenians were allowed to retrieve the dead bodies (101). Some scholars think that Euripides’s Suppliant Women was inspired by this episode (see Collard 1975, 10–11; and Bowie 1996), though the theme itself, independently of historical events, was also traditional, at least from the time of the Eleusinians of Aeschylus, fifty years earlier. 234.  Goff 1995, 72. In the debate between Nicias and Alcibiades concerning the help the Egestaeans demand from Athens (Thuc. 6.9–18), Nicias argues that the Athenian forces should be reserved for eventual intervention in crucial areas and not be

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differently to this political “provocation,”235 but few spectators could have missed the mythical source and patriotic rhetoric of the alleged “Panhellenic duty” or act of “justice” that Aithra urges Theseus to accomplish. Beyond this religious and political justification—which in the current Athenian politics has limited and questionable ethical force—Aithra can marshal only rhetorical appeals. She appeals to Theseus’s courage (tolmēron from tolmē, “daring,” “boldness,” 305): we recall that Theseus had just accused Adrastus of “pursuing ‘daring’ (eupsykhia) rather than good counsel (euboulia)” (161). Aithra’s passionate appeal dismisses good counsel and neglects the alternative of negotiation: she needs to extol daring (tolman), not only because she has no illusion that the bodies may be rescued in any other way than by war, but also because her strongest appeal is to Theseus’s personal reputation for courage. She hurries to sustain her appeal by begging Theseus to save his “heroic” reputation: Furthermore, someone will say that it is because of physical cowardice that you took fright and declined the task when it was possible for you to win a garland of glory for the city; they will say that you struggled against a

used to help “allies who have been wronged” “and are begging for assistance and whose interest is to tell lies and make us believe them, who have nothing to contribute themselves except speeches” (6.10.2, 12.1). We are reminded of Theseus’s rejection of Adrastus’s entreaty. In his speech Nicias offers a description of Alcibiades that corresponds closely, in some details, and at some junctures, to Theseus’s description of the young people who multiply wars with no regard for justice. Nicias suggests that Alcibiades “entirely for his own selfish reasons will urge you to make the expedition—and all the more because he is still too young for his post. . . . He hopes to make some profit out of his appointment. Beware of him, too, and do not give him the opportunity to endanger the state” (6.12.2). In theatrical representations, Demophon, the king of Athens, in Euripides’s Heracleidae, rejects an Argive intervention aimed at removing Argive citizens from Athenian territory, asserting (243ff.) that he would no longer be sovereign of his land if he allowed foreigners to carry suppliants away from an Athenian altar. 235.  The variety of spectators’ reactions to the text’s references has been brilliantly analyzed by Hall (2009) and Hesk (2011). “These citizens,” Hesk writes (2011, 127– 28), “would experience a multiple, oscillatory form of the ‘surrogacy’ will that Hall discusses in relation to Sophocles’s Trachiniae. On the one hand, Athenians are thinking about the motives and competences of the generals and demagogues who advise and harangue them. On the other, they are thinking about their own deliberative powers as citizen voters. A few are reflecting on the content of the advice they have given to the people as leaders and the intentions that lie behind that content.”

  How to Deliberate a War    117 wild boar, a laborious but trivial contest, but where it was necessary to labor at the sight of helmets and spear points you were found to be a coward. (315–19)

What she intends as a compliment, however, turns into an insulting remark and a sarcastic blow. By imagining the enemies’ mockery of Theseus’s legendary deeds, Aithra mocks his civilizing accomplishments. Indeed, within the version of myth his killing of monsters was testimony to his mission, but Aithra, interpreting the mythical deed in the frame of actual politics, derisively defines it as a trivial contest in comparison with a real battle. The enlightened community of spectators realizes that Theseus’s killing of the boar Phea has no real pertinence to the job of leading the Athenian army to war. Aithra’s implication that Theseus’s mythical deed required a courage that now he would be shown to have lost if he does not wage war is irrelevant and ridiculous. Aithra then launches a passionate rhetorical appeal that reflects the propagandistic themes of the time (321–23): Do you see how when your fatherland is scoffed at as inconsiderate (ἄβουλος), it turns its terrifying eyes back on the scoffers (τοῖς κερτομοῦσι γοργὸν ὄμμ’ ἀναβλέπει)? For it grows through its struggles (ἐν γὰρ τοῖς πόνοισιν αὔξεται).236

Ponoi (struggles), as the source of success, may be invoked to characterize any sort of risk taking, but not to motivate it.237 Furthermore, this 236.  The asyndeton in line 321 helps convey her rushing emotion; the figura etymologica κεκερτομημένη / τοῖς κερτομοῦσι strengthens the sarcasm of Athens’s rebuttal; the choice of the word ἄβουλος, in view of Theseus’s remarks in line 161, is perverse; the text’s choice of γοργὸν ὄμμ’ to describe Athens’s wild gaze at those who mock her is also perverse. The attribution of the epithet γοργὸν (terrifying) to some champions (for instance, to Parthenopaeus in Aesch. Sept. 537) does not remove, but rather reinforces the adjective’s reference to the monster Gorgo, whose eyes, in some versions, were petrifying. Athens, then, is described through an epithet that recalls the sort of monsters that the civilizer Theseus once destroyed. 237.  In Thuc. 6.18.2 Alcibiades opens up Aithra’s phrases and maintains that he­ suchia would not increase the empire and could even be detrimental to it. He contends that the military help offered by Athens to those who ask for it is the means by which the empire has grown and must continue to grow. There is no word about justice. See

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catchphrase is later rejected by Adrastus, who says that it is better to avoid struggles (954).238 Theseus had observed that young leaders love to multiply (without justice) painful and destructive wars (232ff.).239 The final theme of Aithra’s peroration is a bold statement: as Theseus’s mother, she should fear for her son’s life, yet, she asserts, she is pushing her son toward the risks of war for his own and for Athens’s glory. She justifies her boldness by saying that the war is just and has the support of the gods (306–10 and 328). She, however, disregards this protective presence of the gods when she entrusts her son’s life and victory to the “cast of dice,” as she says, meaning tukhē (328–31). Tukhē (Chance) is an amoral entity with no regard for justice. Aithra’s readiness to have her son risk the dangers of war is the theme that most strikes Theseus, as he will respond: For what will the ill-disposed men say of me when you, who have given me birth and are worried about me, are the first to urge me to undertake this struggle? (343–45)

Though less fanatical than Praxithea, Aithra still transforms and sublimates her natural motherly love into eros for the city; as this eros takes possession of the city when the city wages a war, it becomes eros for the sacrificial violence of the state. Grossmann, 1945, 130; and for the cherished notion of Athenian help for suppliants, see P. Low, Interstate Relations in Classical Greece Cambridge University Press 2009, 203. For the opposition of Athenians and Spartans on these matters, see Thuc. 1.68–71; 90.1. 238.  Aithra’s statement that Athens grows through struggles is repeated by someone (probably Erechtheus himself) in the Erechtheus; fr. 364 Kannicht, 20 Sonnino: “Blessings grow for mortals from labors.” It is probably one of the arguments that the king presents in the act of offering his daughter as sacrifice. 239.  Theseus’s young, ambitious leaders resemble the demagogues described in Thuc. 2.65.7ff., and later in the Suppliants by the Theban herald (411ff.). If the spectators identified Theseus’s young leaders with the post-Periclean demagogues, they would have attributed to Theseus the conservative attitude of both Thucydides and the herald! Theseus may have appeared to them, at some junctures and in some of his remarks, as a democrat of the Periclean persuasion. Yet all these contemporary references, while giving a sense of the contemporary political context and its catchphrases, when interpreted in the fictional contrast between Theseus the political philosopher and Theseus the protagonist of a mythical story, serve to illustrate this contrast rather than reveal specific traits of the character in his double, opposing roles.

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Theseus’s silence in his volte-face is necessary in order to prevent his earlier refusal to play the hero of the legend from unraveling in an explicit controversy.240 At first, Theseus reaffirms his general position (334–35), but as he realizes that the mothers’ and Adrastus’s request puts his reputation on the line and that his refusal of their request will endanger his “heroic” image, he asserts his willingness to retrieve the bodies and to engage the Thebans (338–41).241 He is also trapped by the oxymoronic situation of the loving mother who sends her child into a dangerous fight.242 The sophos Theseus, a responsible and lucid leader in his first philosophical and political performance turns into a family man and a fable-like character, appropriate to the glorious legend he now impersonates. As a consequence of his change of role most of Theseus’s previous philosophical and political views are turned upside down.243 I would like to 240.  Morwood (2007, line 346) quotes approvingly Hesk (2011, 130): “This change of mind is by far the starkest volte-face performed by any character in extant Greek Tragedy.” We should, however, also recall Iphigenia’s change of heart in Eur. IA, “where,” according to Aristotle, Poet. 1454a31, “the Iphigeneia who begs to be spared bears no resemblance to the Iphigeneia who appears thereafter.” See also Pucci 2012a on Euripides’s Helen. 241.  Personal honor and reputation become stimuli and motivations for the war. Even Aithra feels that her reputation is at stake, as Mendelsohn appropriately shows (2002, 167). 242.  In the Iliad (18.55–60) Thetis delivers a sort of funeral oration for her still living but already close to death child, Achilles, whom she sent to Troy: “I gave birth to a flawless and mighty son / the splendor of heroes; and he shot up like a young tree / and I nurtured him, like a tree grown in the high ground of the orchard. / I sent him away with the curved ships into the land of Ilion / to fight with the Trojans; but I shall never again receive him (τὸν) / returning home to the house of Peleus.” The Greek text acquires emotional intensity through the striking position of τὸν (59), the enjambment in line 60, and the elaborated simile comparing Achilles to a tree, which as a natural thing will meet its destiny of decay and death, while the mother, who speaks, is immortal and completely removed from the natural world: there is indeed an odd jump and disconnection between the literal “I gave birth” (τέκον) and the completely metaphorical “he shot up like a tree” (ἀνέδραμεν ἔρνεϊ ἶσος). Through all this emotional utterance, Thetis does not explain why she sent Achilles to fight in Troy. 243.  Some of these reversals are outrageous. He is now made to maintain that “our life is a series of struggles” (550), after he stated that in public debates he had upheld the principle that the good in life surpasses the evil (195–97); he is now shown to behave as the young leaders whom he had indicted because they multiplied wars without justice, but merely in order to acquire or secure honor (232–34); his mother, of course, claims that this war is just. What aggressor does not claim so? Theseus’s philanthropic

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touch on one of these views in particular. In his earlier proclamation Theseus had asserted that to make common cause with Adrastus meant to ally himself with unjust, wicked people, and that the gods destroy just people who ally themselves with the unjust, making no distinction among them (223–29). Adrastus himself will later confirm his own wickedness when he confesses that Eteocles was ready to come to an agreement through moderate requests, but Adrastus rejected them (739–40). If this earlier posture of Theseus is correct, then Aithra’s strong appeal to various ethical grounds loses solidity. It is odd in fact that Theseus does not mention the theme of justice in his new role as protagonist of the legend in his conversion speech. Indeed, within the formal mythical frame of the plot, the divine support of Justice for both burying the bodies and attacking the Thebans raises no serious objection. And it is on the basis of mythical imagery that Theseus will later flaunt the theme of justice, at the moment of his ultimatum: The news will never be brought to the Greeks that the ancient laws of the gods came before me and the city of Pandion and were annulled. (562–63)

and democratic sensitivity is much less sharp now. He is made to be ready to start a war to sustain his heroic image, as those young leaders do for their honor. And he counts on the citizens’ blind assent to his will (349–53): “I want all the Athenians too to approve this decision, and they will approve it, since that is what I wish. If I share with them the word, I would have a more willing people. I brought this people to sovereignty by freeing the city and giving them equal vote.” The citizens are pawns he can move around as he wishes, and their assent is an empty gesture. As Goff (1995, 66) perceptively observes, “Theseus bizarrely coordinates the conflicting vocabularies of democracy and autocratic leadership.” Though the general meaning of 349–50 is clear, the translation of these lines differs among interpreters. I follow Collard, but Kovacs translates: “But if I add my reasons I will have more of the people’s good-will”; and Albini (2000): “Certo avendo concesso al popolo il diritto di parlare, posso trarne maggior sostegno.” Lines 352–53 also allow a different meaning: “I brought down the people to one man’s rule, when I (nominally) set this land free and made its people equal” (see Mendelsohn 2002, 170–71 n. 56). Of course this is not what Theseus means, but the relative ambivalence of the text is an indication of how Euripides invites his audience to judge Theseus’s new posture. On this passage, see the illuminating analysis by Croally (1994, 209–10), who compares Theseus’s commitment to democratic procedure with Pelasgus’s commitment in Aeschylus’s Suppliants, showing the limited and ambiguous posture of Theseus.

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In the rhetoric of ancient myth—within which the Law is making a timely epiphany—this posture is perfect, but with regard to a real war, for an audience that has a fresh and tragic experience of it and of its motivation, these are just empty words. No Law and no Justice appeared before the Athenian army when it moved to fight in the battle of Delion. The audience is made able to see and measure the abysmal split separating legend and reality, fiction and truth. The spectators realize that the edifying Panhellenic mission is the brainchild of the mother of its legendary protagonist, who had earlier denounced its unreasonable pursuit. Aithra’s brainchild is qualified by feminine touches that motivate the military enterprise through passionate love for the city, and through heated rhetoric about personal issues (honor, motherly love, filial devotion) that produces perverse ironies.244 Not everything in the simulation of current Athenian political practice is feminine: the propagandistic catchwords, the adventurousness of the project deprived of real substance—all this might allude to Athens’s politics and undermine the seriousness of as grave a decision as waging a war. The spectators may recall that in Aeschylus’s Eleusinians Theseus had rescued the Argive corpses not through war, but through persuasion.245 It is tragically ludicrous that such a decisive activity as politics has to be enacted in the way in which Aithra and Theseus are shown to enact it.

18.  Democracy and Monarchy On his return with the army, Theseus holds a political debate (agon) with the Theban herald. A taste for debate is the only trait Theseus’s two opposed roles have in common: even as the protagonist of an old legend, he 244.  I am not sure how the audience would react to Theseus’s statement—his unique, original point—that implies that good children take care of their parents (360–64). 245.  Lupher 1980, 225: according to Plutarch (Thes. 29.4–5), “Aeschylus was followed by the majority of the historians.” Euripides keeps both versions, Aeschylus’s and his own, which is also that of Herodotus, constantly before the minds of his audience: “Theseus will suggest it twice (347 and 385–90) and the chorus, too, will reassert it at a moment of great tension (602)” (Lupher, 226–27).

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remains, given the opportunity, a bit of a sophist. In the contest with the undemocratic Theban, he begins aggressively: HERALD:   Who is the master (tyrannos) of this land?      ... THESEUS: First, you began your words, stranger, on a false note by looking for a master (tyrannos) here. The city is not ruled by a single man. (Supp. 399 . . . 403-4)

The Herald certainly does not use the word tyrannos in malam partem, since he comes from a country where the leader (king or master [tyrannos]) is a monarch, and since he considers such government to be better than democracy. Of course only the audience can appreciate the pretended misuse of the word tyrannos by the Herald. Therefore the audience realizes that the aggression comes from Theseus, who exploits the possible negative connotation of tyrannos to attack the Theban, and to begin to extol Athens’s democratic constitution.246 Now, for a politician who should try or seriously intends to persuade his adversary, this approach is far from advisable, even in the face of the Herald’s poor diplomacy.247 The spectators realize that the text requires their complicity as spectators and democrats in order to enjoy Theseus’s quip: and this complicity intensifies the theatricality of the whole scene. The two speakers are not speakers of a bygone age, but contemporary characters of an agon (399–455), and the agon itself is an almost fixed theatrical construct. Its odd feature here is that it has no real dramatic function and unfolds merely as a sort of political entertainment, contrasting the pros and cons of democracy and monarchy.248 This debate is alien to the specific theme of the play; it is anachronistic, reflecting the polemical and propagandistic issues of the time of the play; its only contextual reference lies in the allusions to some analogous issues Theseus presents to Adrastus. It could be considered an amusing metalepsis.

246.  In this play the word tyrannos is used with a negative connotation only by Theseus and only in this agon. 247.  It is true that the Theban has failed in courtesy, for he certainly knows the name of the Athenian leader and yet pretends not to know it. 248.  The dramatic irrelevance of the debate is stressed by Grube 1941, 89.

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The text evokes the language used by Thucydides to describe the conflict between the Periclean elite and the post-Periclean democratic radicals.249 Specifically the Herald charges the democratic politicians with aiming at private gain (413).250 Theseus himself, in his earlier speech at 232–45 (if the passage is genuine),251 had charged the young, ambitious leaders in the city—they “enjoy being honored” (232)—with multiplying wars without justice, “one in order to be a general . . . ; another in view of gain” (235: ἄλλος δὲ κέρδους οὕνεκ’). Theseus was not attacking democracy there; indeed he ultimately defends it by celebrating the middle class, which saves the city.252 Rather, he was indicting the pursuit of gain as a vice that occurs in every era; the idea can be traced back to Solon, who deplores such ambition: “The citizens themselves by their own recklessness, captivated by the desire of riches [or “trusting in their riches”], wish to destroy the city” (3 G.P. 2. [4 W. 2] 5–6; see also 11ff.). I assume that these earlier charges of Theseus against young politicians pursuing private gain refer to the ever-present vice that pollutes many states. Thus the passage may be saved from the editor’s brackets, and the picture Theseus draws can be seen as providing further evidence of the way in which the text turns politics into an activity that, like many other crafts, is a source of human disorder and unhappiness.253 249.  Commentators on the play (e.g., Morwood 2007, lines 409–25) provide the relevant references to this controversy. 250.  The Herald singles out the speaker who “leads [the city] this way and that to suit his private gain” (413: πρὸς κέρδος ἴδιον ἄλλοτ’ ἄλλοσε στρέφει). Thucydides uses the same words regarding the Athenians who, after the death of Pericles, “for the sake of private ambition and private gain pursued policies which were bad for themselves and for the allies”(2.65.7: κατὰ τὰς ἰδίας φιλοτιμίας καὶ ἴδια κέρδη κακῶς ἔς τε σφᾶς αὐτοὺς καὶ τοὺς ξυμμάχους ἐπολίτευσαν). Morwood (2007, lines 409–25) ingeniously speculates about “whether by putting such anti-democratic sentiments into the mouth of this unappealing character, Euripides may be offering us a satire on upper-class responses to democracy.” 251.  Kovacs strikes these lines out as an interpolation, following Wecklein’s and Müller’s suspicions. 252.  It does not appear that Thucydides ever mentions the tripartition of the city and the saving role of the middle class. Perhaps Euripides derives this view from some of his philosophical sources. 253.  Even arguing about political matters is viewed as useless: at the end of the debate, the Herald concludes (465–66), “As regards our debate, you hold to your opinions and I to the opposite.” Euripides stages an enthusiastically presented (see the figura

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When Theseus and the Herald finally come to the real issue, both maintain rigid positions and show that no agreement is possible. The Theban pleads for peace,254 Theseus for the burial of the Argives’ bodies; but it is the Athenians who are being aggressive here, for they have no right to invade Thebes in order to rescue the Argives’ corpses. Theseus has difficulty using the divine law of burial as an argument in defense of his aggression, since Zeus has burned the body of Capaneus. He resorts to a philosophical or popular argument: we do not possess our bodies; they belong to the earth. “Allow . . . them,” Theseus urges, “to go back to the place from which each part of them came to the light, the soul to the aither, the body to the earth” (531–33).255 This argument is reasonable, even admirable, but it is not a fitting justification for attacking Thebes in order to send bodies and souls to their appropriate places, if indeed it is true that the lack of ritual burial prevents souls from reaching the aither. And the idea that Theseus should make war so that the soul of Capaneus might reach the aither would be comic if it were not palliated by the noble context and the tragic performance.256 In the end, having failed to persuade the Thebans (566ff.), Theseus issues an ultimatum, in the name of the “ancient law of

etymologica in line 427: ἀγῶνα καὶ σὺ τόνδ’ ἠγωνίσω) debate (with the expression ἅμιλλαν λόγων, on which see section 4, note 33) and shows that it is useless. While each member of the audience must have been pleased that his own views were represented and defended, the conclusion pessimistically invites the spectators to hold to their political agenda, dismissing others’ views and debates. 254.  Peace, he says, is the greatest blessing for mankind; it is dearest to the Muses; war is destroying Greece. Although these statements are put in the mouth of the unappealing Herald, they sound strong and true. The mention of the Muses is particularly noteworthy. The poet—through a metadramatic intrusion—gives his support to peace. 255.  The separation of soul and body at their final destination is already announced in Epicharmus (DK 9 = Plut. Cons. ad Apoll. 15, p. 110): “earth back to earth, the breath (pneuma) on high.” It also seems to appear in Empedocles (DK 8); for the idea that nothing dies, see also Anaxagoras (DK 7). The principle seems to have become popular enough that it was used in the epigram for the dead of Potideia (432 B.C.). Euripides uses it frequently; in Helen 1014 its expression is puzzling: “The mind (nous) of the dead does not live, but it has an immortal intelligence (gnōmē) once it has reached the immortal aither.” See Collard 1975; Morwood 2007 (with bibliography); Pucci 2005. 256.  Theseus openly contradicts the optimistic views that he had earlier defended (195–200). Now he says (549–50): “Foolish mortals! Learn of mankind’s woes! Our life is a series of struggles!” Kovacs strikes the whole passage (549–57), but its purpose may be, as I believe, to show how a philanthropic and teleological notion of politics and a merely tactical one conceive human troubles and miseries differently.

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the gods” that “has come in person before me and Athens”;257 and the war becomes reality (559–63). In the choral song that follows, the mothers, while expressing their fears and hopes in song, mention Io, the cow, Zeus’s prey, the ancestress of Argos’s royal house (628–29). Theseus is engaged in the battle and fortunately cannot say anything about this animal transformation. Again, the Chorus enacts a scene of terror and hope: at the last moment they find hope in the invocation to the gods whom, they say, they invoked before (626: κεκλημένους μὲν ἀνακαλούμεθ’ αὖ θεούς). Collard refers to the choral song at 377–80, but neither in that song nor on any other occasion has the Chorus invoked the gods. Of course as suppliants, the mothers must have invoked the gods (see 262), but the play does not show them doing this. For a play that unfolds a mythical story, the absence of divine intervention is noteworthy: gods are mentioned in this passage and when “divine law” is attributed to them, but they do not appear. After the victorious battle, the Chorus comments, “Now, seeing the unhoped-for day, I believe in the gods [or “I honor the gods”], as it is the custom” (731–32),258 which summarizes their previous attitude. And Theseus, leaving for battle, thinks of the gods: “I need only one thing more, to have [on my side] the gods who reverence justice [only those of course]. . . . Valor accomplishes nothing for mortals unless it has the god’s good will” (594–97). This sentiment is admirable, but is it a prayer? At any rate, during the battle, as we will see, it is not a god who helps Theseus, but a magical club he got from the robber Periphetes.

19.  The Battle Critics and commentators (see Morwood 2007) seem especially concerned to extrapolate, from the Messenger’s description of the battle (634–730), the location of the actual territory before the wall of Thebes that the text 257.  This impersonation of the law has of course an epic and mythical quality: it sustains the mythical register of the plot. But the audience may have asked why Theseus forgot to make inquiries of the oracles, when he had just reproached Adrastus for having neglected this pious duty before starting the war. Was Law coming to Theseus a sufficient sign of divine approval? 258.  The meaning of nomizein theous is an enigma for Hellenists: while sometimes it is understood to mean “to believe in the gods,” most often it is understood as “to honor the gods in accordance with their cults.” Here the latter meaning is hardly satisfactory.

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describes to the audience.259 From the point of view of my research, the really exciting aspect of this description is that it repeats some important episodes and tactics of the “battle of Delion” in 424 B.C., as described by Thucydides (4.96).260 Historians and critics have shown that the odd episode described in lines 678–79 resonates as an allusion to the presence in the Theban army of a special elite body of three hundred warriors called parabates, “warriors moving alongside the charioteers” (Diod. 12.70). In Diodorus’s description of the battle of Delion these warriors are fighting in front of the Theban army, while in the Suppliants they descend from the chariots and fight, aided by the charioteers (674–77).261 With the exception of the initial battle of the chariots, the tactics of the battle in Euripides’s and Thucydides’s texts are analogous. In the battle of Delion, the Athenians are victorious on their left wing, but defeated on their right wing; through a simple reversal in Euripides’s description the Athenians are defeated on their left wing, but victorious on their right wing. At this point the two supreme generals make the tactical decision that changes the outcome of the war. Pagondas sends two cavalry squadrons to help his defeated wing, facing the Athenian left wing: under this attack, the Athenians, who were victorious earlier, now retreat and as a consequence lose the battle of Delion and rush to flee. In Euripides’s text, Theseus, seeing his left wing defeated, shouts a few words of encouragement and, wielding his club, intervenes in the battle on the left wing: he creates havoc among the Thebans and wins the battle. There is no response in either text to Pagondas’s and Theseus’s decisive interventions: neither 259.  This concern is stimulated by the archaeological and topographical information the passage provides, and by the Messenger’s statement that he was witnessing the battle from Thebes’s walls at the Electran gate (651), therefore from an identifiable vantage point. 260.  “It is one of the only two encounters of infantry of any magnitude in the Peloponnesian War. . . . It is one of the more fully and reliably described hoplite battles of classical Greek history” (Hornblower 1991–2009, 303). Socrates participated in this battle, and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium (221a) presents a picture, both exciting and sublime, of Socrates’s retreat during the Athenian flight. 261.  For Diodorus, see Casevitz 1972, 127; and for the passage in Euripides, Giles 1890; Goossens 1962, 418–19; Collard 1975; and Morwood 2007. The parabates are mentioned once in Homer, Il. 23.32, appropriately as fighters alongside the charioteers; the context is the funeral for Patroclus. Euripides seems to have combined a Homeric allusion and the contemporary use of the parabates; Thucydides does not mention them, but their old-fashioned way of fighting had survived and appears in vase paintings and in the text of other historians.

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the Athenian Hippocrates (in Thucydides’s description of the battle) nor Creon (in the Suppliants) is mentioned as reacting to those decisive tactics. Thousands of the Athenians sitting in the theater and watching Theseus’s victory over the Thebans on stage had taken part in the battle of Delion, in which they were defeated. As the play was performed after the battle of 424262—for instance, in 423 or 422—it is impossible that the audience of veterans did not take note of the parallel tactics of the two battles. The play therefore occasioned an excruciating recollection for the defeated soldiers sitting in the theater—the rehearsal, line by line, of what they had experienced on that fateful day. It is impossible to know what their reaction to this violent Euripidean provocation might have been. The mythical description in the play includes Theseus’s “Epidaurian weapon”—that is, the club Theseus took from Periphetes, the Epidaurian robber (714–15). It is with this magic club that he insured victory. Yes, the veterans in the audience must have thought, this is the weapon of fairy­ tales, of edifying patriotic stories; we had no magic, but we confronted a very strong enemy who attacked us before we were ready. This is what happens in real life. They must have acknowledged with great distress the uncrossable distance between the fable-like tale with its patriotic manipulations and the cruel reality of the actual battle. The stark contrast between the play and reality undermines the idealism of the saga, introducing full distrust of its mythical “truth.”263 In addition, although Euripides’s text stresses the terrible violence of the battle (684ff.), with dead soldiers on both sides, it makes no mention of the Athenian victims who helped retrieve the Argives’ bodies; there are funeral rituals only for the latter champions.264 262.  The description of the battle and the mention of the parabates imply that Euripides wrote the play after the battle. 263.  From this critical perspective, I obviously reject the idea that Euripides introduced the battle in order to show “for what ideals a democracy should be prepared to fight” (Webster 1967, 124). 264.  It is unclear how to interpret this silence about the Athenian victims. From the point of view of the mythical plot, the text could intend to hide these losses in order to magnify the full success of Theseus’s war; on another level that reflects closely contemporary events, through this silence the text would show the moral unaccountability of the political strategies. The veterans in the audience, who lost their friends in the battle of which they have heard on the stage a partial replica, have certainly felt the textual silence about the fallen soldiers. Possibly, and this is the third alternative, they understood that the Argive mothers lamenting for their children would represent also the Athenian mothers lamenting the death of their sons.

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20.  The Rescue of the Corpses At this point the tone and the themes of the play change radically. In the presence of the Argive corpses, which ostensibly would be placed on the stage, their mothers, friends, and children lament their death and contemplate the future that remains for the survivors. Athens’s splendid action of rescuing the corpses is almost forgotten;265 Theseus’s glory is mentioned of course, but the supposed idealism and nobility of the event are covered by the darkness of death that descends on the stage and dominates the dramatic action.266 The luminous figure of Justice disappears behind the somber shrieks of despair. The political sphere is replaced by the private one: the mothers’ tears, the funeral oration, and Evadne’s leap onto Capaneus’s pyre. Only the final words of the champions’ children and of Athena ex machina set a new political and military project in motion. The mothers of the Chorus begin with a very brief and conventional recognition of the glory of the general and the city (Supp. 778–81), and then immediately (778–836; see also 918–24 and 955–79) comment on the approach, appearance, and removal of the corpses, filling the stage with the darkest despair. The mourning oxymora, adunata, and rhetorical questions explode: the mothers no longer have a reason to live; indeed they are neither alive nor dead (968–70); they are therefore not of this world (“I wander like a cloud,” i.e., neither in the aither nor on the ground, 961); they reject the meaning of marriage and of childbearing (“What need had I of children?” 789; see also 822–23); they complain about having suffered “the most bestial of griefs” (τὰ κύντατ’ ἄλγη κακῶν, 807),267 where the figurative connotation (“outrageous”) of the adjective does not efface its denotation referring to a dog. Human progress began—as Theseus ­argued—with mankind’s separation from a “bestial status” (theriōdes, 265.  Its absence creates a need for someone to recall Athens’s action firmly, as Athena will do in the deus ex machina scene. 266.  Burian (1985, 145) underlines the profound change in tone and theme in the second part of the drama. He adds that the pessimism of this part of the play undercuts “the final meaning of the action we have just seen so brilliantly succeeded.” Though I do not agree with this view, Burian is correct in his identification of a completely new dramatic tone here. 267.  The adjective is from epic and is a hapax in Euripides: it is the superlative form of the adjective, which derives from the root kun-, meaning “dog.”

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202): indeed, not even griefs should be “bestial” in Theseus’s earlier view of human nature. This somber atmosphere of a living death emanates from the “spectacle” of the approaching dead corpses: For us to look upon the bodies of our sons is bitter, but a beautiful spectacle (θέαμα) if I ever behold it, seeing the unlooked-for day, the greatest of all woes. (782–85)268

The text promises a spectacle (θέαμα) that produces contradictory, oxymoronic feelings for the mothers. Since literal seeing retrieves something of the presence of a material thing and grants a sort of perceptual appropriation, the act of seeing is often used metaphorically to recuperate that feeling of appropriation and presence. In the choral passages, we have various examples of metaphorical usages of “seeing”: “to see the unexpected day” (784– 85); “the sharpest evil of being bereft of children” (793), “destiny” (808); “a sea of pains” (824); “a bitter marriage and utterance” (833–34). The sorrows of human life appear as a film before the eyes of both audiences.269 The mothers’ rejection of maternity (“What need had I of children?” 789) has tremendous force here thanks to various dramatic details. First, at the beginning of the play, the mothers interrupt the Proerosia, a festival of fertility, with their supplication; they sit by the altar of Demeter, who symbolizes the pain of motherhood (33–36); they arouse the sympathy and pity of Aithra and others because their children are dead and unburied (34–35, 286–92). They repeat their desperate lament later when they are not permitted to view the bloody and disfigured bodies of their children (955–79). 268.  ἐμοὶ δὲ παίδων μὲν εἰσιδεῖν μέλη / πικρόν, καλὸν θέαμα δ’ εἴπερ ὄψομαι, / τὰν ἄελπτον ἁμέραν / ἰδοῦσα, πάντων μέγιστον ἄλγος. The chiasmus of the oxymoron, “bitter, beautiful” (πικρόν, καλὸν), underlines the mothers’ happiness about the retrieval of the corpses and their pain in seeing in them the vanity of their labor in childbirth, and of their motherly love. 269.  This theatricality, however, creates the risk that the spectators may not see exactly what they are invited to see. When Adrastus asks, “O city of Argos, do you not see my destiny?” (808), the apostrophe, by making what is absent (the city of Argos) present and percipient, underlines the rhetorical power of this empty sight of seeing. The spectators realize that the image embedded in a rhetorical question reveals, possibly against the intention Euripides grants to Adrastus, the inanity of political support and moral help.

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Their desire to die will be reflected in the act of Evadne, and their rejection of maternity by Iphys, who after the suicide of his daughter cries (1087–91): I saw others begetting children, and I began longing for them, and I was dying from this longing; but if I had known this and experienced what it means for a father to lose his children, I would never have come to this point, to this present grief.

The spectacle provides a concrete vision of the war’s irreparable cost. What from the point of view of the city’s politics was merely a bad decision has a different meaning for the parents of the dead: they created life only to give it to death—a double death, of their children and themselves (966–68, 1104–6).270 Politics is not especially concerned with the effects of its actions on individual lives: whenever it is concerned with these effects, it sings the praise of the victims and (ideally) silences the laments of the parents. The history of politics is the history of sacrificial violence.271 It is praise of the fallen champions that Adrastus is now going to deliver. In his dialogue with the Chorus (the kommos) he delivered a strong palinode and endorsed a peaceful policy.272 Theseus, arriving with the 270.  See Scully and Warren (1995, 4), who see the same reversal: “Victory brings lament and brightness gives way to despair.” 271.  For this expression, see Bosteels 2011, 70. We do not know whether the Argive mothers pushed their children, the champions, to war as Aithra pushes her son Theseus to war, but if they did they become an illustration of the contradiction that democracy makes plain. On the one hand, as citizens holding power, they choose what they want, but then, as objects of the power, they become victims of their decision. Recall what the Theban herald said (481–83): when people vote for war, no one reckons on his own death, but thinks that others will die. 272.  Adrastus’s emphatic expression ἥσυχοι μεθ’ ἡσύχων (952) not only makes a contemporary political reference but also contrasts with Aithra’s rejection of quietness and her glorification of polypragmosyne in 323–25: “It [Athens] grows great through toils. . . . Cities that keep quiet live obscurely [without shining glory] and remain obscure while contemplating prudence.” Adrastus’s words attest to the edifying, yet potentially sinister rhetoric Aithra used to induce Athens to go to war. The text designs a sort of trajectory in Adrastus’s view of the Theban war, a trajectory that takes different directions and different tones (739–41, 811–14, 911–17, 950–54), depending on the argumentative or emotional occasion. The absolute psychological consistency of characters is rarely Euripides’s dramatic goal. Burian (1985, 150) sensibly focuses on the contradiction between the “optimistic sentiments of [Adrastus’s] own oration,” with its lesson on courage, and his condemnation of “the folly that leads men to war.”

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corpses, calls Adrastus “the wiser” man, one who has the skills to teach the children “from where, from where these men [the corpses on stage] became distinguished among mortals for their courage” (841–43). The passage is intended to be a shock and a provocation: Theseus had originally reproached Adrastus for pursuing courage rather than prudence (161: εὐψυχίαν ἔσπευσας ἀντ’ εὐβουλίας), but now, as he attributes to Adrastus a didactic role, he asks him to praise the courage (εὐψυχίαι) of the champions, employing the same word he had used earlier as a condemnation.273 His ideological reversal is complete. Most of the audience, on the basis of their recent experience, must have thought that the praise of euboulia was wiser, but they might have agreed that the praise of eupsykhia was of course suitable for the mythical tale that they were watching, where magic clubs can win the fight. Theseus assumes a sort of Panhellenic role when he transfers the epitaphios logos, a typical Athenian institution, to the Argive Adrastus and his fallen heroes. The myth crowns Athens with a Panhellenic mission. In Theseus’s instructions to Adrastus, the doublet “from where, from where these men became distinguished among mortals for their courage” (841– 42), suggesting a rhetorical emphasis, could represent the difficulty of identifying the sources of men’s virtues, and of discerning the specific forms of education that the city should provide to its citizens and leaders.274 Only in the mythical aura in which all of this part of the dramatic action is steeped, such sources are direct and unproblematic, and easily lead the champions, as Theseus argues, to become distinguished among men for their courage. Accordingly, whether Theseus means it or not, he promotes the champions’ courage as an example for their children to follow: in this virtuous and providential aura of the play, the fact that the champions’ courage led them to an unjust war and an awful defeat is passed over in silence. The contradiction continues in Theseus’s next instructions: he suggests that Adrastus 273. Between Theseus’s indictment (161), and then praise (843), of Adrastus’s eupsykhia, Adrastus has recognized his foolish error (739–41): “Eteocles proposed an agreement with moderate requests; we refused to accept them and then we were destroyed”; notice the strong asyndeton that emphasizes the effect of the refusal. Then Adrastus recites his palinode: “Cities, you could bring your disgraces to an end by means of talks, but you settle your business through murders rather than talks” (748– 49). “Talks” could be rendered in both lines by “reasoning.” 274.  This was a popular and debated topic in Euripides’s time: see Plato’s Protagoras.

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should avoid celebrating the champions’ military action (846–56),275 and leaves him the task of choosing the theme of the oration. Through these seemingly inconsequential details, the text perhaps suggests that a traditional politician, within the frame of his political craft, especially a politician who, like Theseus, has a patriotic agenda to defend, has difficulty determining an instructive theme of praise that will celebrate the citizens’ courage without at the same time magnifying the city’s usual sacrificial violence. It appears to be difficult to have the former without the latter. Adrastus tries to resolve this political conundrum by celebrating mainly the champions’ civic, social, and bourgeois virtues; since he loves his friends, and the epitaphios must offer praise,276 he will omit all the negative traits of his companions. But even so, even the praise of civic, peaceful virtues, once they are conceived within the ideology of the city, leads inevitably, whatever Adrastus’s intentions may be, to the celebration of military glory, and the talents and aspirations of warmongers. Adrastus begins his address as follows, according to the MSS: ὁρᾶις τὸν άβρὸν οὗ βέλος διέπτατο; Καπανεὺς ὅδ’ ἐστίν, Do you see this soft man that a missile transfixed? He is Capaneus.

Few contemporary editors have the courage to print this reading, although a respected editor, Gilbert Murray, did. The interpretation that this text suggests is that the body of Capaneus is soft for the bolt of Zeus. The image recalls an Iliadic motif, according to which the spear point passes through “the soft neck” of a warrior (Il. 17.49, 22.327).277 Here the image is reinforced and made eloquent by Adrastus’s gesture indicating what remains of Capaneus, his corpse (Καπανεὺς ὅδ’ ἐστίν). With this description, 275. Theseus’s suggestion that the military theme be avoided sounds metatextual or allusive: it makes an ironic reference to Aeschylus’s dramatic practice, arguing that is impossible for a soldier in the middle of military action to observe as a witness the movements and events of the battle. See Burian 1985, 187. This metadramatic reference to the pleasure Aeschylus takes in describing battles and shields couples him with the politicians who celebrate the city and its sacrificial violence. 276.  Loraux 1981a, 48: the Athenian epitaphios banned all lamentation and focused exclusively on the glory (kudos, eukleia, etc.) of the fallen soldiers. 277.  This interpretation was advanced by Hooker1972, 64–65.

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Adrastus evokes Capaneus’s mortal nature and its inevitable weakness in relation to any weaponry; simultaneously, by mentioning simply a missile, a bolt,278 which everybody knows to be Zeus’s, he avoids making an explicit connection to the notion of divine punishment. The emendation contemporary editors choose here blots out all of this.279 Interpreted as the MSS propose, the expression τὸν άβρὸν suggests Adrastus’s sympathy and pity for his comrade—his version of truth and fairness (see 859). Immediately after, Adrastus speaks of Capaneus’s “affable mouth” (εὐπροσήγορον στόμα, 870), and the audience, remembering Capaneus’s challenge to Zeus, “I swear that I will sack the city whether the god wishes or not” (498–99), would certainly have smiled and asked themselves whether Euripides was making fun of the flattery Athens conveyed to the public through the epitaphioi logoi.280 But, at the level of pure communication, Adrastus means that Capaneus was affable to him, to his friends, if not to the gods. He has paid for his defiance to Zeus: he has been burned by the lightning, and has become a sort of sacred body (see 935). In the mythical purview that dominates the stage, Capaneus’s death singles him out as one who has been touched by the divine. Moreover, the audience’s smile—if there was a smile—would certainly have been tempered by the sight of Capaneus’s corpse on the stage, and the emphasis on his miserable death—“Do you see this soft man that a mis­ sile transfixed? He is Capaneus!”—and the private expression of sympathy for the dead man that Adrastus shares with the audience: “He was a true friend to his friends, both present and absent” (867–68). Even a publicly arrogant man can be truly kind to his friends and his wife, as Evadne’s 278.  The word βέλος is generic for a thrown weapon, though accompanied by the name of Zeus it is also used to indicate his bolt. 279.  The modern edd. accept Tyrwhitt’s emendation τὸ λάβρον: “Do you see the man whom the violent bolt transfixed?” Although this emendation is indirectly supported by Polyb. 5.9.5, it involves, nevertheless, an emphatic displacement of the epithet from its noun. In addition, notwithstanding the paleographical ease of the emendation, it is difficult to explain how the supposedly original τὸ λάβρον, which is so comprehensible, became the difficult τὸν άβρὸν. Perhaps the best argument against the emendation is that it is not needed. 280.  On the basis of this passage and of other features, the funeral oration has often been read as an ironical piece; see, for instance, Mendelsohn 2002, 188ff. But the mythical aura within which the play interprets the events makes the revaluation of the heroes serious. Euripides displays the insidious way in which myth operates.

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self-sacrifice will soon prove. Adrastus testifies to the simplicity of Capane­ us’s habits and perhaps even quotes his unrefined language: “He asserted that excellence does not lie in the fodder for the belly:281 modest fare is enough” (865–66). We are allowed a glimpse of the man himself in his private way of being and speaking. And yet, as I have noted, this portrait is intended to shock. In celebrating Capaneus and the other champions, the text forces the audience and readers to feel sympathy for characters who have been violent and unjust. This is the first shock. But beside this initial shock, another emerges: the life of a man belongs to the city. Adrastus praises his friends as citizens, their bios (life) as spent in the service of the city, their amiable and peaceful activities in support of all the goals of the city. The force of this ideology is recognizable in each portrait: Capaneus is a perfect communicator with his citizens; Hippomedon lives in the countryside, and the goal of his “harsh tasks,” “hunting” and “bending the bow,” is to make his body “a useful gift to the city” (887). Here the amiable and peaceful activities incline toward more dangerous ends and yet are viewed as useful to the city, not to Hippomedon himself or his family. What is more personal and private in some of these portraits derives, as a narrative, from the etymology of the individuals’ names. Parthenopaeus’s excellence resides not in being a great lover, among other talents, but in fighting, as a metic, for his new country; Tydeus, if the text is genuine,282 is praised for his military inventiveness. From an early age Hippomedon rejected the pleasure of the Muses; Parthenopaeus was no stubborn disputant; Tydeus was not brilliant with words. Adrastus speaks before the corpses of the champions, in contrast to the circumstances of the Athenian funeral oration,283 and this setting of his speech reminds us that the peaceful mores of the champions did not prevent them from rushing into an unjust war in which they were deservedly 281.  οὐ γὰρ ἐν γαστρὸς βορᾶι / τὸ χρηστὸν εἶναι, μέτρια δ’ ἐξαρκεῖν ἔφη. The word βορᾶι often indicates the food of animals and is used only derogatorily to refer to human food. Of course we do not know the tone of voice Adrastus would use in this portrait. 282.  See Collard 2007, 120. One of the arguments in favor of the hypothesis of an interpolation or of some tampering is that Adrastus praises Tydeus’s military experience in contrast to his lack of eloquence, although Adrastus has acknowledged the advantage of logos over action in 739–41 and 748–49. 283.  The Athenian funeral oration was delivered after the funeral and the burial.

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defeated and destroyed. Since finally courage is the main virtue the city is concerned with and since courage (euandria, 913) can be taught just as children learn a language, the children of the fallen champions will immediately learn the lesson.284 Thus the scene instructs the audience that friendly meetings with the citizens, and peaceful physical activities, disconnected from spiritual and unpolitical concerns, ultimately serve the sacrificial violence of the city. The traditional political ideology allows only itself as the subject of its discourse, itself as the final end, and itself as the target of eros. It is a bitter lesson that Adrastus delivers to the audience. In the next passage of significance (980–1071), Evadne rushes to the edge of the temple in a storm of erotic madness, ready to throw herself into the flames of Capaneus’s pyre and exulting in the idea of dying, and then living in love with him forever.285 I have already touched on some surprising aspects of this scene (see section 11, pp. 101ff.), and I now focus on one point in particular: Evadne’s belief that by throwing herself on Capaneus’s pyre she is performing a glorious and edifying deed.286 Evadne does not care how successful or unsuccessful a political or military leader Capaneus was; she does not care that he challenged Zeus: she loves Capaneus. The poetic text elaborates freely what the death of the beloved partner means for an individual, for a subject. Euripides dares to display the ultimate effect of this loss, and to stage it in the most spectacular and gruesome way, as Evadne jumps into the fire to be and die

284.  If Socrates had been present at the performance of the play, he might have asked himself and his friends, “What does courage (eupsychia) mean?” just as Plato will have him do in the Laches. And in what circumstances is courage needed? 285.  The extraordinary quality of this scene has been described by Rehm (1994, 112) as follows: “As far as we know, nothing like [the Evadne scene] ever took place in fifth-century tragedy, before or after Supplices, and it would be hard to find a more theatrically daring moment in the history of the stage”; quoted in Morwood 2007, 219. 286.  I am recalling her imaginary mingling of her body with that of Capaneus— expressed through the verb συμμείξασα (“mingling,” 1019f.). The verb has its common sexual connotation, but it has other resonances in the play: “It is worth pointing out that the verb . . . is the same one with which Theseus condemned Adrastus’ involvement with the Seven: lampron de tholerôi doma summeixas to son [222; cf. 224]” (Burian 1985, 220 n. 52). Her words “I will never, because of concern for my life, betray you as you lie dead beneath the earth” (1023–24) match those of Alcestis (Alc. 180), when she explains the reason she has decided to die for Admetus.

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with Capaneus. The naked theatricality of her gesture is readable in every word as she sees and describes herself through her decision and act. We are far from the mythical exemplarity of Athens’s generosity and victory and from the chorality that extols that example. A singular soul rushes to her death for love. Her gesture is not dictated by wisdom (sophia), since erotic passion does not know wisdom. Yet her gesture has a political significance, for it constitutes her response to the sacrificial violence of politics. Though no state or community can recognize the civic or political exemplarity of her gesture, she makes a display of it. Indeed, as she celebrates her glorious gesture, she evokes her victory over the female gender and calls herself kallinikos (“glorious in victory,” 1059).287 There is only one other character in the play who is called kallinikos, and that is Theseus. Adrastus referred to him in this way at the beginnng of his supplication: Theseus, lord (anax) of Athens, glorious in victory (o- kallinike, 113), I have come as a suppliant to you and your city.

Theseus is kallinikos as the leader of the most powerful Greek city, the victor over monsters, the civilizer of humankind. Beyond the characters’ intentions, however, what connects Theseus’s victory with Evadne’s victory is the rescue of Capaneus’s body. He has rescued it to be burned in the pyre, but she rescues Capaneus’s life and the irreplaceable value that his life has for her, by means of her own death. It is by dying with him that she brings him back to life. This is her victory. The different sort of salvation and victory the two gestures perform does not need to be stressed: the one is steeped in a mythical political tale, the other is true to life; the one is an edifying fiction, the other is a tragic event; the one communicates Euripides’s ironical and perverse view of political propaganda, the other his gaze at the abysmal unaccountability and fierceness of human passions. Furthermore, Evadne is kallinikos as the victor over all women, in asserting her radical, never-ending loyalty to her man. Thanks to this epithet and to the theatrical exposure that her act receives, Evadne’s message and gesture have another kind of political significance: she defiantly asserts and 287. {Ευ.} ἐνταῦθα γὰρ δὴ καλλίνικος ἔρχομαι. / {Ιφ.} νικῶσα νίκην τίνα; μαθεῖν χρήιζω σέθεν. / {Ευ.} πάσας γυναῖκας ἃς δέδορκεν ἥλιος (1059–61).

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displays as exemplary extremely private values that any community would censure and forbid. As she evokes the heroic glory of her gesture (1015: “for glory’s sake I shall jump”; cf. 1055 and 1059), the text makes clear her belief that she is providing a sublime example to be followed, and gives her gesture an epic grandeur. Since her father is certainly right in trying to stop her from jumping onto the pyre, Evadne’s endowing her gesture with political significance raises another set of questions for any state or community. Indeed, it is unclear whether a state would have the right to stop acts based on private decisions and beliefs analogous to Evadne’s gesture of infatuation. Given the radicality of her infatuation, however, it seems correct to assume that some authority should stop her, even if it means that she would be deprived of what she experiences as ecstatic joy, or a state of grace. The audience is left to meditate on the rights of individuals to pursue their most radical decisions, on the admiration that total self-abnegation before high principles may produce, and on the mysterious hidden forces of human nature. One thinks of characters like Hippolytus, Ion, and Alcestis as representative of analogous individual choices and extreme determinations. Evadne’s suicide leads Iphys (1080–1113) to an extravagant utopian fantasy (men should have a second youth and life to correct their previous errors), and to complain both about the uselessness and futilty of procreation, and about the desolation of his remaining life. In a certain way the latter complaint contradicts the former; in fact, Iphys seems to learn from her death the absolute sweetness of having a daughter (1101–2): “Nothing is sweeter for an old father than a daughter.” The logical contradiction is unavoidable: as Evadne suffered the irreparable loss of joy with Capaneus, and she restored this joy by killing herself in the pyre. The sober lesson of this contradiction is that in human experience, it would seem to be far better not to have known happiness than to have known it and then to have lost it. The individual’s reaction to his loss is tragic, as Euripides has dramatized in many plays, including the Medea, the Hecuba, the Troades, the Andromache, and the Heracles. Yet human beings cannot refuse happiness for the mere fear of losing it some day. The hard lesson of the sophos to Theseus telling him to keep present in his imagination the usual evils that may and will befall human beings provides a harsh remedy for this spiritual situation.

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21.  Return to Arms Beyond the brightness of the setting, Rilke’s work dares to affirm and to promise, as few others do, a form of existential salvation that would take place in and by means of poetry. . . . It may seem surprising to characterize Rilke’s work as positive and affirmative when it puts such stress on the main negative themes of modern consciousness. Rilke has an acute awareness of the alienated and factitious character of human reality, and he goes far in his refusal to grant any experience the power to suspend this alienation. . . . Severed forever from the plenitude of self-presence, Rilke’s figure of humanity is the frailest and most exposed creature imaginable. He calls man “the most ephemeral” (Ninth Elegy), “the most fleeting” (Fifth Elegy), “the creature that is incessantly departing” (Eighth Elegy), and that can never establish itself in an appeased presence to itself or to the world. (De Man 1979, 23)

The children of the Argive champions have heard Adrastus praise their fathers’ courage: they now carry the urns containing the ashes of their fallen fathers, take over the empty houses (Supp. 1132), and express a wish for vengeance (1143ff., 1150ff.). The mothers, though weakly, protest against the new evil (1147–49, 1156–57). The scene in which Athena appears in the theologeion has archaic and epic tones: she asks Theseus to compel the Argives to swear loyalty to Athens and prophesies the war of the Epigoni, celebrating their victory over Thebes. The function of the dea is to exalt the political stature of Athens, which has increased through war, and to ensure that Athens enjoys the political benefits of its victory. Through her divine endorsement, Athena brings under her authority and sponsorship a plot that has hitherto seen no divine involvement. Theseus had entreated all the gods who care for justice (594–97), but their participation, if any, would be confirmed only by his victory. No sacrifice has been requested,288 and the miraculous help during the battle has been provided by the robber Periphetes’s club (714ff.). The distance between the mythical club and Athena’s reappropriation of the whole war is comic: she appears unexpectedly before characters that have never explicitly mentioned her during the entire dramatic action, and 288.  Although Athenian military help is offered in the Heracleidae, as here in the Suppliant Women, in the former a sacrifice is demanded by the god to assure victory.

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seems to want to regain control over the city. Her endorsement does not even touch the “divine and Panhellenic law” regarding the burial of the corpses, which has been the only serious motivation offered for waging war against Thebes. Whether or not Justice appeared to greet Theseus as he moved his soldiers into Theban territory does not concern her. Her mention of the corpses (1210–12) is limited to the concern that they have to be brought to a sanctuary at Isthmia, and her aim is basically political.289 The goddess who appears in the theologeion is not the god described by Theseus (201–4) as guiding human progress: the latter probably would not be able to appear in any event, since he is not anthropomorphic, but rather a sort of “spirit” of mankind. He has left his trace in the unfolding of the dramatic action only as an ideal and a message that by the mere possibility of their ideation negatively qualify the real politics of Athens. They specifically reject Athens’s endorsement of the fable-like myth of the city’s allegedly generous Panhellenism. Euripides brings Athena back at the close of the play because she is the true icon of Athens’s religious and political history, the goddess who now aggrandizes the political success of the war through an archaic ritual of which the characters seem completely unaware.290 With imperious authority Athena decides what Theseus must do, and solemnizes her request for a formal alliance with Argos through mythical stories and old rituals, partly invented by Euripides for this occasion. In a word, she plays the role of many Euripidean dei ex machina who bring back and endorse, against the real action on the stage, the pure, mythical acccount of the events.291 289.  She acknowledges that the bodies had been burned by Theseus in the precinct of the temple of Eleusis (982–83), but she does not mention that the ashes were given to the children by Theseus; now, however, she wants the bodies, again purified by fire (1211), to be put in tombs by the Isthmus (1210–12). Collard 1975, lines 1211–12: “An Argive army invading Attica from the Peloponnese would inevitably pass the triodos [where the road to the Isthmus left the road to Thebes and Delphi] and have to brave its [that of the tememos (precinct) marking the pyres of the dead] warning.” 290.  Theseus seems to have completely forgotten a precious tripod that Heracles had given to him to deliver to the Pythian hearth (1198ff.), which apparently remained instead in Theseus’s house. 291.  Castor, the deus ex machina in the Electra, has just this corrective function, though the purpose of his strategy is different. He ends the play by instructing Orestes to do exactly what the Aeschylean myth in the Eumenides would have him do. Castor, however, fails to realize that the version of the story narrated in the Electra prevents

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As Athena praises the revenge the children of the champions will take against Thebes, she uses the epic image of Diomedes and Aigialeus as “lion cubs, sackers of the city” (1223).292 In particular we are reminded of Diomedes and Odysseus, who in Iliad 10.297 “went like two lions.” While the mothers had protested against the children’s desire to be able to take revenge (1146–49), Athena enthusiastically embraces their violent purpose.293 Thus warlike Athena, far from playing the role of the cosmic providential god, appears as the Iliadic war goddess and the patroness of belligerent and imperialistic Athens. She cares nothing for the justice of the war, for the mothers’ tears and despair. She closes the play by foreseeing and approving of the strategies and activities of the usual politics, not the politics that cares whether the state’s growth brings progress, that promotes conciliatory speech and acts among men, that creates prosperity through international commerce and peace, but the politics that rushes to war. The part of the audience composed of fanatical patriots must have liked Athena’s intervention and hated the rest of the play. For the play has shown the tragic course of the Athenian policy, pursuing an imperialistic program under the cover of a generous and civilizing Panhellenic goal. The text has identified this cover with the myth of the Athenian recovery of the Argive champions’ bodies, and has displayed the insubstantial, even self-deceiving, political grounds, reminiscent of the actual Athenian that traditional myth from being enacted, for Apollo would not be able to defend Ores­ tes, since Orestes has found the oracle unjust, and Athena could not vote for Orestes, since Castor himself has called Apollo’s oracle unwise. By hiding his text behind Castor’s misreading of the Electra, Euripides manages to dismantle the whole plot of the Eumenides. With a swift stroke the whole play becomes impossible: a gesture that is endlessly shrewd, nasty, and amusing. See Pucci 2012b. 292.  “To describe the sons of the Seven as lion-cubs is, after all, to bring the drama back full circle to the motif of bestiality, to a world of humans cast as wild beasts— boars, lions, the beasts to whom Adrastos so fatally married his daughters—the world, in other words, that the play has struggled in so many ways to leave behind” (Mendelsohn 2002, 220–21). 293.  The allusion the text may make to the ceremony that opened the Athenian theatrical festival, in which the orphans of the dead soldiers were presented, ultimately suggests another feature of Athena’s Panhellenic project: she incorporates, allusively, the Argive children into an Athenian ceremony.

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political practice, with which that myth is sustained and endorsed. Theseus’s victory is followed by lugubrious scenes of pain and madness, and by the return to arms. It is with this specific politics in mind that Euripides has the Theban herald proclaim, “If death stood before his [the citizen’s] eyes as he casts his vote, Hellas would not be perishing from spear madness” (484–85).294 However, a careful analysis of Athena’s role shows that her victory is at the same time her weakness, both at the theatrical level and at the level at which the theatrical event gestures, that is historical reality. In the economy of the play, Athena’s support of the children’s (the Epigoni’s) war deprives Theseus’s generous intervention and the (forgotten) deaths of Athenian and Theban soldiers of political import and meaning. Thus she voids the very significance of the action represented in the play. If the real political goal has always been for the Epigoni to take revenge for the death of the champions, Theseus’s war for the burial of the champions makes little sense. Athena, in fact, is not concerned with the ethics or religious law regarding burying the corpses. Thus the mythical celebration of Athens’s Panhellenic concern and civilizing influence becomes marginal and unimportant. Theseus with his magic club and his brave Athenians actually fought for creating the circumstance of a new war, the real one. Athena’s endorsement of the Epigoni and fierce support of the Athenian intervention symbolize the divine approval of the bellicose policy of the Athenians. This bellicose policy, however, fostering the constant wars among the Greek cities, led all of them to ruin, first as they were weakened and wrecked by their sacking of each other, and finally, in failing to achieve any unity or alliance as they fell, one by one, under the Macedonian empire. 294.  εἰ δ’ ἦν παρ’ ὄμμα θάνατος ἐν ψήφου φορᾶι, οὐκ ἄν ποθ’ Ἑλλὰς δοριμανὴς ἀπώλλυτο. The epithet of Hellas, δοριμανὴς is an absolute hapax in Greek literature, and therefore an impressive word; it is emphasized by its metrical position in caesura and its form (a dactyl), and also by its partial metrical correspondence with the word θάνατος in the previous verse. The Theban herald certainly does not speak of the Theban citizens who do not vote, but of the Athenians. Moreover, “the tense used in the apodosis of the conditional sentence (imperfect) locates it in present time” (Morwood 2007, line 485).

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22.  The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority While the audience of the Suppliant Women (424–420?) was left without hope of change in Athenian politics, the plots of both the Bacchae and the Iphigenia in Aulis, performed between 405 and 400, announced, in different ways, the annihilation of the polis’s political power and authority.295 In both plays, the polis’s ability to organize and harmonize the collective life of the city, explodes—at least initially—in dealing with women’s issues: in the Bacchae, the entire female population abandons the city, and the king is unable to recall them and punish them as he wants to do; in the Iphigenia in Aulis, the sacrifice of Iphigenia provokes an institutional crisis that is resolved only when she consents to be sacrificed, and then turns into a sort of savior “hero.” It is an eloquent fact that political failure and impotence manifest themselves in contact with that part of the population that state politics has never consented to make a partner in its power and actions. In the years that saw the performance of the Bacchae and the Iphigenia in Aulis Athenians were living through the final defeat of their city and its humiliating surrender, the destruction of the city’s walls, unsettling social turmoil, and developments that included the installing of the Thirty Tyrants, violent persecution, and the return of democracy. Euripides could not have foreseen these dramatic events, but it is at least symbolic, if not suggestive of the poet’s sensitivity, that his last plays envision a city that is torn into pieces by dissent and a political elite troubled by an institutional crisis. Euripides had died in Macedonia in 405, and his two plays were performed in this defeated Athens after his death. The Bacchae is a difficult play. Mythical and religious features are imbricated with cultic and ritual features; religious and psychological aspects of the political representation of the city overlap, making it difficult to determine which of these actually constitutes the essence of the dramatic action. The presentation of Dionysism in the play has been the subject of a century

295. See the brilliant remarks of Susanetti (2010, 20–23) on the “emptiness of power” in the Bacchae and the comparable situation regarding sovereignty in the Iphigenia in Aulis: “a sovereignty made of incoherent and oscillating decisions, of ambitions that are forcefully pursued and abandoned . . . Pentheus who hunts spectres, Agamemnon and Menelaus who repent of their decisions and prove to be inadequate to their role and duty provide the same evidence for a sentence of condemnation.”

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of debate, the history of which has been outlined by many in recent years, including Dodds, Grube, Segal, Henrichs, Seaford, and Versnel, among others. From Nietzsche’s positive and influential evaluation of the Dionysiac to the critical view that with the Bacchae Euripides showed his religious conversion, from the understanding of Euripides as a rationalist who in the same play upheld the belief that tantum religio potuit suadere malorum to more recent analyses that emphasize the many contradictory features and absolute polarities of Dionysism, the Bacchae today opens itself to such a variety of interpretations that a reader can only come away from the play confused.296 Hoping not to add to the confusion but to clear the interpretative path, I take a new approach that emphasizes the political aspect of the play. I consider this aspect through two overlapping conceits. The city is at the center of the dramatic action because of a paradoxical structure that prefigures and transcends both Pentheus’s decision to reject Dionysus and the city’s ridiculous powerlessness in the face of the god. The paradox unfolds as follows. On the one hand, Dionysus needs the city in order to have his rituals celebrated among the other religious institutions. It is the city that builds temples, invents myths, gives life to a divine being, and represents the gods on the theater’s stage. On the other hand, Pentheus denies that Dionysus is a god and keeps him out of his city. Accordingly, Dionysus, in an emotional, anthropomorphic reaction, feels terrible resentment and pursues a violent and gruesome revenge. Thus he satisfies his offended pride, but his revenge does not establish ipso facto his worship in Thebes. This is the paradox, with which the question of the god’s anthropomorphism is closely imbricated. 296.  Dodds’s work has been a springboard for more recent interpretations. To remind readers of the essence of his rich and complex interpretation, I quote briefly from his commentary (1960, XLV): “The moral of the Bacchae is that we ignore at our peril the demand of the human spirit for dionysiac experience. For those who do not close their minds against it, such experience can be a deep source of spiritual power and eudaimonia. But those who repress the demand in themselves or refuse its satisfaction to others transform it by their act into a power of disintegration and destruction, a blind natural force that sweeps away the innocent with the guilty.” The influence of Nietz­ sche and Freud is clear in Dodds’s comments, but he is also speaking about litera­ture as something that counts in our life. While his vision of Dionysism is abstracted here from the specific dramatic action and from the theatricality of the action, Dodds offers an extremely perceptive description of the play’s innovative features and its “old-fashioned style.”

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The political importance I attribute to the play is reinforced and richly problematized if we take seriously Teiresias’s role and arguments as part of the whole meaning of the play. Thus I begin my analysis of the play with the edifying dialogue between Teiresias and Cadmus—the founder of Thebes—and the dramatic exchange that follows between them and the young king of Thebes, Pentheus (Bacch. 170–369).297 Teiresias’s speculations and advice (266–327) interpret Dionysiac religion in a way that would delegitimize Dionysus’s vengeful action and accordingly suppress the tragic narrative. Indeed, Teiresias, who has already been touched by the bliss of Dionysiac grace (189–90), offers a sophistic argument that would justify the reception of Dionysus into the city.298 The conditions for the acceptance of Dionysus are the subject of Teiresias’s long, elaborate argument here. For some modern critics,299 Teiresias’s argument functions in the play as a sort of failed or even adversarial interpretation of Dionysism, as if the rest of the play were intended to disprove the narrow, and essentially utilitarian, view he offers. But this is an unreasonable reading. Teiresias’s argument is framed at the beginning of the play by a dialogue with Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and the sharp rebuttal of Pentheus, the new king of the city: the prominent position and elaborate deployment

297.  Lloyd (1992, 10) calls this dramatic exchange of ideological views an “epideixis,” a scene with “some superficial resemblance to the agon.” 298.  With “sophistic” I indicate one of the philosophical influences that, as we will see, inspire Teiresias’s speculations. The structural and theoretical purpose of Teiresias’s arguments, and the dramatic effect of his arguments on the economy of the whole play, are similar to the purpose and effect of Theseus’s first scene in the Suppliant Women, which I have discussed in section 15. In the Bacchae too, a sort of sophistic proposal illustrating the blessings of Dionysism would suppress the tragic narrative. 299.  E.g., Segal 1982, 295ff., and in particular his observation that “Teiresias is proven a poor reader of the tragedy, an inept moralizer of its message” (303). Segal, however, has understood the exemplary importance of this scene for the interpretation of the whole play. Other features in the play lead critics to impugn the serious dramatic impact of Teiresias’s performance: for instance, they find Teiresias and Cadmus grotesque when they claim to be rejuvenated but then display the embarrassing and difficult movements of old men (188–94). Why should they not act as rejuvenated old men? As Taplin (1978, 75) notes, “Scholars have found it hard to gauge the tone of the episode and to explain why Euripides should demean the reverend elders in this way.” That is because, of course, he does not demean them.

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of Teiresias’s argument indicate its importance in providing a possible example of how an enlightened interpretation might redefine Dionysism and deal with it politically. In the economy of the play Teiresias’s argument also encourages the audience to meditate about the issues the play raises, in contrast to Pentheus’s decision and action. The audience of 405 would certainly be familiar with a Dionysus whose religious traits are closer to those of Teiresias’s Dionysus than to those the god exhibits in his gruesome revenge. Pentheus comes on stage very agitated and troubled. Without noticing Cadmus and Teiresias he begins an attack on the Dionysiac rituals (248–62): the rituals are just a pretext for women to enjoy symposiastic and sexual license in the wilds of the mountains. Both the women’s rituals and the mountain wilderness are external to the political sphere of the citystate, and thus are aspects of its alterity. Pentheus describes the disturbing image of the Stranger who takes sexual advantage of the women. He plans to capture and behead him. He laughs at the story of Dionysus being saved in the thigh of Zeus. Then he becomes aware of a wonder, the spectacle (248) of Teiresias, the old, blind prophet of Apollo, and Cadmus, his own grandfather, who are ready for the ritual, and mocks them.300 Teiresias begins his response with an examination of Pentheus’s language in a kind of proem whose rhetorical and metatheatrical function we have often analyzed: Whenever a smart man (ἀνὴρ . . . σοφὸς) takes brilliant starting points for his speeches, it is not a great task to be eloquent. You have a glib tongue as if you had good sense, but there is no good sense in your words. A man who

300.  ἀτὰρ τόδ’ ἄλλο θαῦμα· τὸν τερασκόπον ἐν ποικίλαισι νεβρίσι Τειρεσίαν ὁρῶ. As we have seen many times, Euripides loves to present the dramatic action as a “spectacle.” Here the spectacle (θαῦμα) is linguistically sustained by a wordplay, since τερασκόπον explains etymologically the meaning of the name Teiresias (“interpreter of signs, omens [terata]: Chantraine, DELG, s.v. τέρας); Teiresias becomes a “speaking name.” Teiresias’s and Cadmus’s ritual postures are at once what they subjectively perform and what Pentheus invites the audience to see (ὁρῶ), i.e., to experience as a (comic) theatrical wonder, a ridiculous miracle (old men dancing), indeed a θαῦμα, again evoking its possible etymological connection with thea, “sight,” and theatron. We see here an example of Euripides’s usual rhetorical virtuosity.

146    Eu ripides’s Revolution under Cover is skillful at speaking and owes his power to rashness proves a bad citizen, since he has no brain. (266–71)301

Teiresias defines Pentheus’s behavior by the rhetoric of his discourse, and as we are aware, there is no direct correspondence between the discourse and nature of a speaker: here too we have a clear example in Pentheus of someone who is eloquent and starts speaking well but does not possess good sense. Euripides accords Teiresias the privilege here of being a very wise sophos.302 In fact, Pentheus will not be able to respond to Teiresias, and the Chorus will praise, conventionally perhaps, the prophet’s sōphrōsune, or wisdom (328–29). Teiresias acknowledges the brilliant starting points of Pentheus’s speech—perhaps Pentheus’s description of the women’s departure from the city, the Stranger’s disturbing looks, and certainly Pentheus’s mockery of the myth of Dionysus saved in Zeus’s thigh; however, he absolutely denies that Pentheus’s nasty interpretation makes any sense or shows any wisdom; it simply displays the king’s rashness and overconfidence. It is bad, for a king, to be a “bad citizen.” Teiresias understands the phenomenon of Dionysism and begins his lecture on it, with a prediction (272–83): “This new deity at whom you scoff—I cannot tell you how great he will be in Greece.” The audience realizes that the prophet does know the truth, for at the end of the fifth century this was the case. Teiresias continues:

301.  Teiresias’s passage exhibits the great compositional skill of the contemporary rhetoricians. Notice the sophistic antithesis ἔργον and λέγειν (267: οὐ μέγ’ ἔργον εὖ λέγειν·); the rhetorical use of two words from the same root: φρονῶν . . . οὐκ ἔνεισί σοι φρένες (268–69), placed in a chiastic relation. The expression ἀφορμάς has several technical connotations (see Dodds [1960, line 267], who, however, misses the specific connotations I and most recent translators see). The expression characterizes Teiresias’s critical language as being modern and enlightened. Most translators render καλὰς as “good,” “honest”; of course this translation is possible, but it misses the reproach the line seems to me to address indirectly to Pentheus’s rhetoric. The beauty of speeches is often a sign of their falsehood, manipulation, and destructiveness. This point is made often by wise and/or clever sophoi (Medea 580, 583; Hipp. 486–87; Hec. 254–57 and 1187–91; Or. 907–8, etc.). 302.  We have to imagine that Euripides’s own sophia, in his writings, misses, at some point, the awareness of its diabolic ambivalence, and takes itself to be pure “wisdom” without double connotation, as if it were simply sunesis (comprehension, consciousness).

  The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority    147 There are two primary principles among mankind (τὰ πρῶτ’ ἐν ἀνθρώποισι), young man. There is the goddess Demeter (she is Earth—call her by whatever name you please): she feeds men on dry foods, while he who has come after, Semele’s offspring, discovered the complementary element303 and introduced to mortals the moist draught of the vine (βότρυος ὑγρὸν πῶμ’ ηὗρε). This stops the sufferings of miserable mortals when they are filled with the flow from the vine, and grants sleep and oblivion of daily sorrows: nor is there any other cure (pharmakon) against distress.

Again, the audience must recognize the truth of Teiresias’s description of the divine power of wine. Yet various excellent critics consider this piece of religious interpretation a “satire” of sophistic allegorizing, or a hypocritical statement.304 Some critics base this judgment on Teiresias’s earlier assertion, “We do not practice sophistry where the gods are concerned” (200). It would seem that Teiresias denies the obvious. I believe that this assertion does not contradict anything in Teiresias’s performance. Lines 200– 204, which some critics expel from the text,305 do not imply that Teiresias will refrain from using smart and enlightened arguments when speaking about Dionysus: the passage specifically refers to the ritual practice Teiresias and Cadmus enact (195ff.) as they prepare to dance, at their advanced age; thus Teiresias says something like (200–204): “We are not playing the clever minds concerning the ancestral traditions [of worshipping] the gods; . . . no discourse, not even the wise invention of the most subtle minds, will overthrow them; [we will honor the gods], even if someone scoffs at me because I am going to take part in Bacchic dance at my venerable age.”306 Interpreted in this way, the passage does not conflict with the sophistic nature of Teiresias’s lecture on Dionysus as inventor of wine. Of course the loyalty he claims to traditional worship raises questions: how can the new invention of wine be accommodated to the old traditions, and how can one justify the practice of the cult in honor of the god if the equation of Diony303.  In accordance with Diggle’s and Kovacs’s text: ὃς δ’ ἦλθ’ ἔπειτ’, ἀντίπαλον ὁ Σεμέλης γόνος. 304.  Grube 1941, 404–5; Winnington-Ingram 1948, 48; Segal 1982, 294. 305.  Diggle expunges 199–203 because of grammar and content difficulties. See Susanetti 2010, 182, for a defense of the passage. 306.  Teiresias’s acknowledgment that at his and Cadmus’s age their ritual insignia and dancing may provoke laughter both shows how deeply committed they are to honoring the god and simultaneously stifles the effects of Pentheus’s later mockery of them (250–52).

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sus with wine (284–85) or with the “inventor of wine” erases all or part of his anthropomorphic and mythological makeup? We have often encountered and acknowledged the difficulty of the latter question. Teiresias’s portrayal of Demeter, in which he calls her “Earth” and describes her as nurturing mortals with solid food, comparing her to Dionysus, who is inventor of liquid food—wine307—is built on sophistic principles, the naturalistic interpretation of the anthropomorphic gods of myth, and the opposition of solid and liquid. Scholars quote the influence of Prodicus here, who asserts that “the ancients considered all the things useful to life gods . . . and accordingly bread was considered Demeter and wine Dionysus” (DK 84 B 5). Although the gods are thus materialized and depersonalized, they do not cease being objects of cult, as Dodds (1960, note 274–85) shows and as Teiresias makes clear for Dionysus in 200–203 and 284–85.308 We have seen that even Theseus’s theos, who leads humanity to a higher form of civilization, is anonymous, depersonalized, and cosmic and yet is worshipped, at least as an oracular deity. Even Anankē is prayed to by the Chorus of the Alcestis, because, though she herself is unreachable by any form of ritual, she is a goddess and is conflated with Zeus, or allied with him. Aphrodite too is constructed as a divinity of sexual reproduction,309 and yet she is simultaneously the anthropomorphic figure of myth.310 Zeus

307.  When Teiresias says that Dionysus “has invented” wine (279), he uses heuriskein, a verb of intellectual discovery, while the god himself, speaking as the Stranger, uses the verb phuein, as Segal (1982, 69) notes: “a word that stresses the connections with the powers of nature, growth, vegetation (651): . . . ‘the god who makes the manyclustering vine to grow for mortals’.” This intellectual touch is characteristic of Teiresias’s style. 308.  Winnington-Ingram 1948, 48–49: “Though his [Teiresias’s] language is guarded and does not rule out personal deities, it is clear that he is in fact equating Demeter and Dionysus with their gifts as the great ‘primary things’—an equation made (as his lecture-room manner would remind the audience) by a famous fifth century Sophist. . . . To make it may be sound ‘comparative religion’, but is surely dangerous to mythology.” See also Griffith 1999, 296: “Even rationalists such as Protagoras tended to accept divination.” 309.  In this role she is compared to our Dionysus by Roth (1984). 310.  The double role as divine and human is a peculiarity of the character Helen in Euripides’s Helen: she is obviously the daughter of Zeus (otherwise she would not have been transferred to Egypt by Hermes, nor would she have known about her double),

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is identified with the law of nature, with Aither, and with Nous; Demeter is Earth also in Phoenissae 685–86.311 The intellectual and religious process whereby traditional anthropomorphic features are associated with depersonalized forces is complex and is represented in various sources: allegorists like Theages of Regium; the early natural philosophers, including Thales; philosophers and poets such as Empedocles and Xenophanes; and the sophists.312 As the possibly closest model, I have cited the process that Socrates describes in the Phaedrus when he explains how the sophoi translate a mythical feature into a natural and plausible (kata to eikos) one (Plato, Phaedrus 229c-e). Yet it remains problematic to attribute the different cases of depersonalized gods to a specific source, or model. There are significant variations in this extensive process of demythologization: for instance, the goddess Anankē and her conflation (whatever sort of relation it implies: identification, substitution, alliance, etc.) with Zeus entail a different religious ideational process than the ideation of an anonymous god leading mankind to progress. If as discoverer of wine Dionysus is identified with it (284–85), this identification would involve a total materialization of the god, drunk on all occasions in life, and a depersonalization whereby one would call him “wine” instead of Dionysus. But as inventor of wine he is a divine discoverer and may deserve to be called, as he obsessively desires to be called, “the son of Zeus.” And Zeus is not a vine.313 Aphrodite in the Hippolytus must be interpreted at once as the anthropomorphic goddess and as a cosmic depersonalized force: the theological difficulty, as we have seen, lies in the fact that when she acts as a depersonalized force, she cannot simultaneously be an anthropomorphic

but simultaneously she plays the role of the poor daughter of her human father, Tyndareus. See Pucci 2012a. 311.  Di Benedetto (2004, lines 339–40) points out “la convenzionalità e l’inters­ cambialità” of the names in Teiresias’s argument and distinguishes this use from the cultural one in Phoenissae 685–86. 312.  In the Derveni papyrus (end of the fifth century or beginning of the fourth), a commentary on an Orphic poem, it is asserted that the names of Demeter, Earth, Mother, and Rhea “are always the same thing” (col. 12 Betegh). 313.  In his final words, Teiresias calls Dionysus “the son of Zeus” (366), while earlier (278), when he calls the god the inventor of wine, he refers to Dionysus as “the son of Semele.”

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goddess. But she is, at least partially. Here too, in Teiresias’s sophistic teaching, a Dionysus who is inventor of wine (βότρυος ὑγρὸν πῶμ’ ηὗρε) could hardly conceive a human-like revenge. Yet he does. The fact that wine is divine, and that Dionysus is its inventor, master, and god expedites the conflation in specific contexts and on specific occasions. Teiresias, like many Euripidean characters belonging to traditional myth and literature, changes his nature and turns into a sophos: he is no longer simply blessed by the oracles and predictions of Apollo as we perceive him the first time in the Iliad, but is imbued with the wisdom of Prodicus, and teaches a sophistic lesson to the king. We have seen many Euripidean characters, Heracles, Orestes, Theseus, and others, transformed from solemn and heroic aristocrats into enlightened discussants, questioning the very cultural soil from which they have risen. Sophia has created a new elite and a new sensitivity. Teiresias’s message has specific humanitarian force and poetic richness. Commentators rightly stress the sophistic opposition between the solid food and the liquid drink (277–83): αὕτη μὲν ἐν ξηροῖσιν ἐκτρέφει βροτούς· ὃς δ’ ἦλθ’ ἔπειτ’, ἀντίπαλον ὁ Σεμέλης γόνος βότρυος ὑγρὸν πῶμ’ ηὗρε κἀσηνέγκατο θνητοῖς, ὃ παύει τοὺς ταλαιπώρους βροτοὺς λύπης, ὅταν πλησθῶσιν ἀμπέλου ῥοῆς, ὕπνον τε λήθην τῶν καθ’ ἡμέραν κακῶν δίδωσιν, οὐδ’ ἔστ’ ἄλλο φάρμακον πόνων. She [Earth] nourishes men on dry foods, while he who has come after, ­Semele’s offspring, discovered the complementary element and introduced to mortals the moist draught of the vine (βότρυος ὑγρὸν πῶμ’ ηὗρε). This stops the sufferings of miserable mortals when they are filled with the flow from the vine, and grants sleep and oblivion of daily sorrows: nor is there any other cure (pharmakon) against distress.

The most important conceptual and tonal antithesis, however, is between what “feeds”—solid or liquid—and what produces a cure against the human distress: as wine, Dionysus of course is drunk, but his effect is not that of quenching thirst, but that of curing “the sufferings of miserable mortals.” In line 281 the text becomes explicitly poetic and full of

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pathos with that ταλαιπώρους βροτοὺς, which is a Pindaric and tragic expression,314 and with the double mention of mortality in the same line. Tαλαιπώρους is the only epithet in the passage and is here striking The chiasmus παύει and δίδωσιν, while graphically contrasting the ideas of “taking away” and “giving,” opens and closes a powerful description of the psychological distress of mankind: λύπης is in a dramatic enjambment; λήθην τῶν καθ’ ἡμέραν κακῶν / constitutes a strong hyperbaton. This text sounds serious and sympathetic to the wretched conditions of humans and should in no way be taken as a parodic passage. This sympathy suggests an ideology adversarial to the city and its institutions, for the assertion that Dionysus/wine is the exclusive remedy for daily pains (“nor is there any other cure (pharmakon) against distress,” 283) of miserable mortals (men and women, slaves and free) implies that the institutions and gods of the city, the temples and sacrifices to the gods, fail to provide anything of the sort. Both the city and temples are the location of exhilarating feasts, but neither offers, unless Dionysus/wine is present, solace for daily human suffering. Teiresias omits mention of the great deeds of the elites—for which there is no need of solace—referring instead to troubles and sorrows everyone shares, especially those who are less protected by class privilege. Teiresias touches on the truly democratic aims and effects of Dionysus’s rituals, from the Dionysia to the symposia and the private, domestic drinking-parties. Even in the restrained and temperate version of Dionysism offered by Teiresias, it constitutes an aspect of the otherness of the city’s politics and culture, an aspect of the behavior that is “transgressive of the political,” as I have called it. It may be symptomatic of this trend and disposition of Dionysus’s cults that in Aristophanes’s Acharnians, Dicaeopolis and his family celebrate the Rural Dionysia to hail the peace he has made with Sparta in violation of Athens’s will and policies (Ach. 201–2: “Myself, released from war and misery, I will go inside and celebrate the Rural Dionysia”). Teiresias’s subsequent descriptions of Dionysus’s divine power as prophetic inspiration and a threatening military presence do not add anything 314.  Pindar fr. 197; the adjective does not appear in Aeschylus unless in the ps.Aesch. Prometheus 231, in a pathetic passage, and 317, 623; it appears eight times in Sophocles and often in Euripides.

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to the god’s anthropomorphic status. Only Teiresias’s reinterpretation of the mythical episode in which Zeus saved Dionysus’s fetus by placing it in his thigh (286–97)315 inscribes Dionysus in a traditional, anthropomorphic scenario. Teiresias knows Hera’s mythical hostility toward Dionysus and invents a story in which Zeus creates a phantom, a double of Dionysus, and gives it to Hera as a “hostage,” homēros. By equivocation, Teiresias explains, men took homēros for mēros (thigh) and fabricated the story of Dionysus saved in Zeus’s thigh. This explication is Teiresias’s invention—as it is probably Euripides’s invention—and has at least two objectives. First, his interpretation clears the tradition of what in the eyes of many (including Pentheus) was considered a ridiculous event. He replaces it with a more standard mythical device, a phantom (which has an epic pedigree and is used by Euripides also in the Helen, for instance), which allows him to engage in philological wordplay.316 His second objective is more important, and religiously suggestive. By inventing the story that Zeus fashions a second Dionysus from a piece of Aither, Teiresias obtains a double Dionysus, one who is Olympian, divine like Aither, and part of Hera’s retinue, and another who is identified with the inebriating force of wine, and is therefore constantly present in human life.317 The religious and philosophical impact of this mythical story is mind-blowing.

315.  On the origin and popularity of this mythical story among the Greeks, see Dodds 1960, lines 88–98 (p. 78); on the mythical fertility of the male, see Susanetti 2010, line 96 (p. 168). 316.  Teiresias did not know the interpretation modern scholars give of Dionysus’s birth from Zeus’s thigh; see, for instance, Burkert 1985, 165: “The birth from the thigh is a no less enigmatic counterpart to Athena’s birth from the head. Whereas the armed virgin is born in a higher way, Dionysos is born from a part of the body with erotic and even homoerotic associations. A wounding of the father god is presupposed in both cases. The thigh wound stands in relation to castration and death, obviously in the context of initiations.” Homeric Hymn 1, to Dionysus (Hom. Hymns, ed. and trans. M. L. West [Cambridge, 2003]), denies that Dionysus was born in Thebes, and asserts that Zeus generated him far from men and hiding from Hera. 317.  Dodds (1960) opines that Hera threw away the dummy, but this is not supported by anything in the text. Furthermore, a piece of Aither is divine, as Zeus himself is identified with Aither in Troades 884ff. and fr. 941 Kannicht; see Pucci 2005. It cannot be so easily disposed of: even thrown away, it remains a double of Dionysus, just as Zeus fashioned it. Helen’s double in the Helen departs from earth to heaven. As Hayden Pelliccia reminds me, the false Hera of Pindar, Pyth. 2.33–48 is made from nephela instead of aithēr, but nevertheless gives birth. The game of doubles is played by

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First, making Aither-Dionysus the hostage of Hera divests the story of Hera’s traditional jealousy in a surprising way, for Hera no longer has any motivation, since he has become her hostage, to persecute Dionysus and drive him mad. Thus even the story of his restoration to sanity by Rhea would no longer hold.318 Second, in making Dionysus a god in Hera’s retinue, Teiresias may allude to a Dionysiac feature of other mythical narratives—for instance, the story of the Proitids, in which he is connected to Hera.319 Thus in a single new version of the myth, Teiresias does not just get rid of the enigmatic if not ludicrous episode of “Zeus’s thigh-womb” but enriches the Olympian pantheon by providing suggestions for different relationships between Dionysus and Hera.320 Modern critics have made sarcastic comments about Teiresias’s fabrication of myth here,321 but they have failed, in my view, to recognize the complex wisdom of Teiresias’s version. He rewrites a whole page of mythology with what seems to be mere wordplay.322 Some new critical remarks can be made about this intellectual image of Teiresias. By staging Teiresias as the inventor of a new version of myth concerning Dionysus, Euripides makes Teiresias the model for mythical narrators. Specifically, he identifies the a double Dionysus in the third episode (629ff.). See Susanetti 2010, 195–96, for the dynamics of the doubles. 318.  Callixenes of Rhodes in FGrHist 627 F 2 Jacoby, p. 174. 319.  According to Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.2.2, the three daughters of Proitos went mad, because they refused to honor Dionysus. But in other sources, Hera plays a role in the madness of the Proitids. See Detienne 1986, 11ff.; 1989, 3ff., with bibliography. Kowalzig (2007, 275–77) shows the similarities between the two versions and suggests their causes. 320.  Bollack (2005, 26–27) also sees in Teiresias’s interpretation the creation of a permanent double figure of Dionysus: “deux figure du Bachique, l’une heroïque etait vraie, et l’autre singulière et tarabiscotée devenait ‘mithique’.” 321. Diller 1968, 480: Teiresias’s etymological explanation of the myth of the god’s birth “makes the absurd appear more absurd”; Segal 1982, 294: “Teiresias’ version seems a bit unworthy of his prophetic reputation. Is Euripides suggesting traces of senility?” 322.  Since Homer (with his etymological plays on Odysseus, mētis, etc.), the sophoi liked to play etymological games, but in the sophistic age such games became even more popular and tended to be critical and deconstructive. In Teiresias’s description of the god there is no bull, no sparagmos of Dionysus’s body, etc. Yet Teiresias asserts that Dionysus loves to be honored by men, just as Pentheus loves to be honored by his citizens (319–21); and at the end of his appeal to Pentheus he insists that Dionysus is the son of Zeus (366).

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theater on whose stage Teiresias appears as a contributor to the invention of mythical stories, and as fertile ground for contrasting and debating different versions of myth. The divine sources of myth (such as the Muses) are absent, and the individual creativity of experts is displayed. Hence Euripides revives the old mythical Teiresias, prophet of Apollo, dressing him as a sophist, and portrays him as an inventor of myths in this new Euripidean myth, the Bacchae. Had Dionysus been aware of his new Teiresian image, he would have praised Teiresias, as the Chorus does, and halted his revenge. But Euripides wants the conflict between the two characters and the social and ethical reality they represent, since this struggle is ordered by Zeus, who symbolizes necessity (1349). On the stage, the conflict is represented as a divine revenge enacted by a twice anthropomorphic god, carried by his deep and merciless resentment toward Pentheus, while at the allegorical and symbolic level, the conflict explodes as an inevitable collision between an intolerant City and an offended God, between the city’s prerogative of fully controlling its citizens and the ecstatic rituals aiming at possessing the same citizens Euripides develops this conflict to its extreme conclusion, and this exposes the intolerance of both, while demonstrating the lack of Teiresian wisdom in both. The city in the person of Pentheus and his family will be completely defeated, but the god will not gain full victory. For the god finds himself in a contradictory position: on the one hand, he wants to be recognized by Thebes and to obtain official honors from the city; on the other, he will use his rituals to kill Pentheus and exile the royal family, and will still end up excluded from the city.

23.  The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City It is the Bacchae’s very textual complexity that calls into question the critical attempt in recent years to exactly gauge which parts of the Dionysiac “gospel” and myth in the play are mythical or even invented, and which correspond to historical cult in the various Greek cities. The mythical features that Euripides’s poetic text borrows, transforms, hyperbolizes, bends to parody, and invents constitute complex and questionable

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grounds for the research of religious historians and the literary critics who follow them. And this may explain why such research has not been particularly productive. For instance, the question of whether there is any allusion in the play to a Bacchic mystery has been answered on the whole in the affirmative (see, for instance, Seaford 1996, 41, 157–58), but the terms and presence of this mystery remain disputed.323 It is also significant that different regions of Greece celebrated different rituals: it is probable that the Athenian spectators of the Bacchae in 405 had no experience of a Bacchic oreibasia.324 For most of the audience it must have been simply a “myth.” Perhaps a different sort of analysis would be more attuned to the poetic text and lead to more concrete conclusions. I propose to consider which religious features of Dionysism as presented in the Bacchae’s parodos would be accepted and integrated in the polis according to Teiresias’s enlightened interpretation of Dionysus. The audience is exposed to these two exceptional texts, which convey very different and yet to a certain degree compatible visions of Dionysism, and is certainly invited to compare them. Teiresias would have trouble accepting the Bacchants’ orthodoxy concerning their myths.325 He would certainly reject the idea that the intellectual life in the city is dictated by the simple folk, the most ignorant part of the population; yet at the same time he has no objection to the women rushing to the mountain. He himself is heading to the mountain with old Cadmus. Thus he would probably have no disagreement with the collective rapture of the Bacchants (72–76): Blessed is the one who, by divine favor in knowing the ritual performances of the gods, lives a holy life and in his soul is a member of the god’s company.

323.  Clinton (2003, 55) raises some doubts about the Bacchic mystery in our play: “In the maenadic cult reflected in Euripides’ Bacchae nothing is said about the afterlife; the initiates normally do not suffer; and there is no mention of mysteria or mystai. The participants are Bacchai not mystai.” 324.  Versnel (1998, 149) attests that “nothing is known of ritual oreibasia in Attica.” 325.  The myth that Teiresias sweeps away is a sacrosanct truth for the Bacchants (88–98).

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He would certainly not speak this abstract, new, and extraordinary language: the newness of the idea of the Bacchants produces difficult syntax,326 oxymora (e.g., 65–66), similes comparing humans and animals, and a complicated relationship between the physical and the spiritual, with dancing, leaping (see 65–66), running, and other strenuous activities creating ecstasy. He would not believe that the epiphany of the god, and the continuous accompaniment of the music of pipes and percussion instruments, could increase the spiritual exaltation and lead to the beatitude of the spirit,327 to the point where the Bacchants would fall on the dead prey and eat the animals raw in an inhumane fashion (135–40). Teiresias would disagree with the sparagmos and the raw meat diet of the Bacchants, since he limits the ecstatic implementation of the ritual to wine, singing, and dancing.328 He would accept celebrations of the god in which the benefits of wine and inebriation were sung, not the god’s anthropomorphic traits, beauty, and persecutions. This limitation perhaps explains why by the end of his interpretation, Teiresias feels less blessed by rejuvenation (363–66) than he had felt at the beginning of his praise of Dionysus (186–90). He would certainly reject the explicit mythical detail extolled by the Bacchants in the parodos that Zeus’s lightning killed Semele 326.  For instance, θιασεύεται ψυχὰν (75) has been rendered in various ways: “who produces in himself the soul of a thiasotes” or “joins his soul to the worshipful band” or “joins the Bacchic revel-band in his very soul”; see also the difficult expressions in 113–14. 327. See ὦ μάκαρ, ὅστις κτλ. (72–75), where μάκαρ implies sharing the god’s divine beatitude. 328.  Another Euripidean character, Hippolytus, enjoys a sort of divine companionship, as he remarks in his prayer to Aphrodite (Hipp. 82–86): “So, my dear goddess, take this crown for your golden hair, from my devoted hand. I alone among mortals have this privilege: I am with you [Artemis] and I speak with you, I hear your voice, though I do not see your face.” Also for Hippolytus, as for the Bacchants, exclusive service to the god is a privilege (a geras, a gift, given by the goddess herself, for Hippolytus; a divine favor or destiny, eudaimonia, for the Bacchants), and it consists in spiritual participation within the divine. Of course the differences are as conspicuous as the similarities: the Bacchants participate in the divine through communal ecstasy, the thiasos being also the source of the rapture of the soul, and through a ritual that involves choral singing, dancing, wine drinking, and wearing sacred insignia, etc., while Hippolytus performs his ritual service through individual activities and gestures such as hunting, offering a crown to the image of the goddess, and engaging in a constant dialogue with her. He has a relationship of philia with her. She intervenes in the action only at the end through the conventions of dea ex machina.

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(90–93). On the other hand, Teiresias would approve of the Bacchants opening their cult to other gods. In the parodos, the Bacchants do not mention Apollo,329 or any other Olympian god, with the exception of Zeus.330 They intend to bring Dionysus to the city of Thebes, and Euripides has them sing of no god of Thebes.331 The definition the Chorus gives of sophia constitutes a point of disagreement with Teiresias: And the craft of wisdom is not wisdom, nor is it wisdom to think no-­mortal thoughts: life is short, and therefore a man who pursues great things may miss what lies at hand. This behavior, in my view, is that of madmen and fools.332 (395–402)

329.  Teiresias had celebrated the association of Dionysus with Apollo (306ff.: “One day you will see him [Dionysus] also on the cliffs of Delphi”), and the Chorus had recognized that Apollo’s prophet was honoring Dionysus (328–29). At the end of the play, when everything has been reversed by his savage vengeance, Dionysus prophesies that as a punishment Cadmus will lead a band of barbarians into Greece and sack Delphi. 330.  In relating the Corybantes’ invention (120–34) the Chorus also evokes Zeus incidentally, and implicitly the myth of his stay in their cave. 331.  In Sophocles’s Antigone (1115–54) when the Chorus prays to Dionysus, “the pride of the Cadmean nymph, ” i.e., Semele, in a sort of hyporchema, asking for his presence as a purifier, they mention the places, besides Thebes, where he has cults— for instance, on Parnassus and in Delphi (1126–30). As Seaford (1996, 178) writes, “The participation of Dionysus in the ecstatic worship of his maenads in Mt. Parnassos above Delphi was a topos in Vth century drama”; and he cites, besides Soph. Ant., also Eur. Ion 714–18 and Ar. Nub. 603–6. The Chorus of the Bacchants cannot mention any ­Bacchic cult in Greece because Thebes is the first seat Dionysus establishes, but they could have mentioned the reception of Dionysus by other gods, as Teiresias does. The a­ bsence of this reference is particularly significant, since close to the tomb of his mother, which Di­ onysus himself describes (Bacch. 1–10), there was, as Euripides and part of the audience knew, another sanctuary, that of Dionysos Kadmeios: “Dionysos Kadmeios reigned alongside Apollo over the assembly of the Theban gods. . . . Hence the god who presented himself to the city as a stranger was of all the gods of Thebes the most powerful next to Apollo who is here again his accomplice” (Detienne 1989, 18). 332.  τὸ σοφὸν δ’ οὐ σοφία, / τό τε μὴ θνατὰ φρονεῖν. / βραχὺς αἰών· ἐπὶ τούτωι / δὲ τίς ἂν μεγάλα διώκων / τὰ παρόντ’ οὐχὶ φέροι. In this text, “thinking no-­mortal thoughts” is still part of οὐ ςοφία. The conventional translation of τὸ σοφὸν δ’ οὐ σοφία is “cleverness is not wisdom” (Dodds, Kovacs), but τὸ σοφὸν is not necessarily “cleverness,” and the verbal oxymoron is lost. I enlarge the meaning of τὸ σοφὸν, translating line 395 as “the craft of wisdom is not wisdom” to conserve the same denomination, as in Greek, and meaning “the crafts, cleverness, cunning, etc. that wisdom may

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This passage should be considered alongside the passage that closes the Chorus’s song (424–32): [The god] hates the man who does not care for the following things: to live by day and sweet night a life of bliss;333 to keep his wise heart and mind far away from men beyond measure. I would accept what the simple folk believes and practices.

The Chorus makes the charge of madness and folly regarding the intellectual arrogance of Pentheus and simultaneously presents the principles of their own “gospel.”334 The sophia that they uphold, to the extent that it includes peaceful, commonsensical, and wise attitudes, is suitable to Teiresias’s city, but the Bacchants contradict it at the end of the play, when they support the whole black comedy of the god (1185ff.). Thus, as this comparison has shown, the enlightened state could integrate some aspects of the Dionysian “gospel” but would limit the anthropomorphic aspects of the god’s image and reject those mythical, cultural, and magical features that in the course of the action constitute the weapons of Dionysus’s revenge.

24.  Pentheus and Teiresias In the first part of his appeal to Pentheus (309–27), before the king orders his men to destroy Teiresias’s religious seat, Teiresias strongly recommends that Pentheus accept Dionysism, whose blessings for mankind he has explained: “Come on, Pentheus, believe me, do not be too confident that sovereignty rules men” (309–10). Teiresias could not be more explicit about the weakness of political power in relation to other powers, display are not wisdom.” Translation into Romance languages has some advantages and disadvantages: “Il sapere non è vera sapienza” preserves the same denomination, but “sapienza” is not “wisdom,” and “il sapere “ is neither “cleverness” nor “cunning.” 333.  We should remember that the women of the Chorus have abandoned their native land, Lydia, and have followed the Stranger since he moved toward Greece (55– 57): they were indeed with him, night and day, for a long time. 334.  It is improbable that the ethical attack directed at the wrong sophia (395–96) is addressed to Teiresias, who has spoken as a sophos. Indeed he himself had rejected the excessive sophistication that would exclude the practice of worshipping the gods (200– 203), and the Bacchants have praised his interpretation of Dionysus.

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especially in satisfying the human need to forget everyday sufferings. Neither a monarch nor any other political leader can satisfy this need: Don’t think that kingly sovereignty is what rules men, nor, if you hold an opinion, but your judgment is sick, take that opinion for good sense. Receive the god in this land, pour libations, share his rites, and put a garland on your head. (310–13)

Dionysus is truly a god and needs to be worshipped. In this respect he is not unlike a king: Don’t you see how you are pleased when the crowd stands at your gates, and the city shouts out the name of Pentheus? Dionysus too, in my opinion, delights in being honored. (319–21)

The god is portrayed with anthropomorphic and cultic traits, without any reservation about their incongruity. Teiresias implicitly suggests that multitudes would crowd the cult of Dionysus just as they throng the palace of the king. There is no threat to the authority of the king. The king is recognized by the whole city as its leader, and the parallel drawn between him and Dionysus implies his followers’ absolute loyalty. Pentheus, however, has rejected Teiresias’s and Cadmus’s political advice and replaced their arguments with his own perverse obsessions: Women have abandoned our houses under the pretense of participating in the Bacchic rites and are running in the shadowy mountains, honoring this new god, Dionysus, whoever he is, with dances. (217–20) . . . They slink off one by one to lonely places to serve the lust of the males: the pretext is that they are sacrificing Bacchants, but they honor Aphrodite not Bacchus. (222–25) . . . All those I have captured the guards hold in the common prison, their hands bound; those who are still missing I will hunt out of the mountain, Ino, Agave, who bore me to Echion, and Autonoe, the mother of Actaeon,335 and I will put them in iron chains, and I will quickly stop these indecent bacchanals. (226–32) 335.  Most editors since Collmann bracket the two lines containing the names of Agave and her sisters. But Dodds and recent editors (see Susanetti) show the dramatic relevance of Pentheus’s singling out with rage his family’s females, who should not have followed all the other women.

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If Pentheus fails to recognize that the madness of the Theban women is god-sent (32–36),336 and instead attributes their desertion to indecent motivations, it is because he does not expect women to behave differently. He is represented as a tyrant;337 he also shares a trait that is common among tyrants: he is a misogynist.338 He speaks and acts as a political leader who considers women natural enemies of the city—note the violence of his repression and punishment of women: “I will put them in iron chains”—and more like animals than humans. Pentheus depicts some of the women’s behavior in the mountains as almost bestial: for instance, the image of the women “leaping in thick shaded mountains” (ἐν δὲ δασκίοις ὄρεσι θοάζειν, 218) does not simply connote an erotic atmosphere (Di Benedetto 2004, line 218); it also recalls a place inhabited by beasts, the “thick shaded forest” (δάσκιον ὕλην) of Odyssey 5.470ff., where Odysseus plans to sleep but is afraid he will become prey and food of beasts (δείδω μὴ θήρεσσιν ἕλωρ καὶ κύρμα γένωμαι). Lines 222–23 (“They slink off one by one to lonely places to serve the lust of the males”) also suggest the women’s bestiality: the verb meaning “slink off,” πτώσσουσαν, recalls πτώξ, “hare.”339 Pentheus himself will be described by Teiresias as agrios, “savage and bestial”; in this portrait of the king, the city has symbolically already lost its own civilizing mission. Furthermore, Pentheus’s tyrannical and lustful 336.  It is inconceivable that Pentheus, though absent from Thebes when his mother leaves, did not seek or imagine any other motivation for his mother’s exit than her lewdness. Even accepting his blindness with regard to his mother’s ethics, how could he not be struck by and not try to interpret the odd, unexpected phenomenon of all the Theban women’s desertion of the city? Are they all lewd and unfaithful? 337.  Many critics emphasize this trait, including Diller 1968, 477; Dodds 1960, XLIII; Segal 1982, 56; and Susanetti 2010, 21 and 158: “Pentheus is agrios, savage in his political action.” 338.  Heath (1987, 121 n. 58) recognizes in Pentheus the “two basic prejudices of Greek males about women, their propensity to alcohol and their propensity to illicit sex: so Pentheus’ suspicions are inevitable.” 339.  Both forms are etymologically connected with the verb πτήσσω, which often describes the crouching of animals. Mendelsohn (2002, 154) observes that Greek males viewed women as part of “the world of the elements, of plants, animals”; as “wanton” and “inimical to civilization itself.” Among the psychological traits of the tyrant, his sexual appetite and lust are emphasized, for the tyrant felt himself to be master sexually of everyone in his state. I have already mentioned Hipparchus’s courting of Harmodius, and since Harmodius had rejected his advances, Aristogeiton’s fear that “Hipparchus could use his power in order to take Harmodius by force” (Thuc. 6.54).

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feelings are tinged with a repressed desire to be witness to and chastiser of the alleged orgiastic sexuality of women, and especially of his mother. Pentheus’s response to the women’s desertion, as he characterizes it, is typical and classical: his castigation of women’s lewdness conceals his perverted sexual desire for it. Through this image of Pentheus, Thebes’s king, the Bacchae presents a city-state that has lost its cultural and religious integrity, through its mistreatment of personal and communal rights, and through its mistrust of the gods; a city-state in which sexual seduction satisfies the leaders’ lechery and/or helps their political success. Teiresias promptly corrects Pentheus’s misrepresentation of the Bacchants’ sexuality (314–18): Dionysus does not compel women to be controlled in sexual matters: you must look for that control in human nature, for even in ecstatic rites, the chaste woman, if she is truly so, will not be corrupted.

Starting with an expressive asyndeton, and making the sophistic distinction between physis and nomos (on which see Dodds 1960, lines 314–18), Teiresias scolds the young king for his perverse view of the Bacchants’ rites. He ends by offering himself and Cadmus as an example (322–27): You see, Cadmus and I—whom you mock—will crown our heads with ivy and will dance, two white heads, but it is our duty to dance.340

This is an important assertion: the religious rituals that the city should accept have ecstatic power, and in fact Teiresias and Cadmus have already confessed that they feel the rejuvenating force of their ritual insignia (188–90).341

340.  Teiresias’s pious display of the Dionysiac insignia will be reflected poignantly in Pentheus’s transformation into a Bacchant, which the audience knows will be his ruin; and Pentheus’s mockery of Teiresias’s piousness will be echoed in the god’s mockery and destruction of him. 341.  Modern criticism rejects my argument that Teiresias’s conception of Dionysism is meant to be a serious and valid political alternative. There are two objections to my interpretation: (1) Teiresias’s representation of Dionysism is ironic, satirical, rationalistic, contradictory (it both depersonalizes and anthropomorphizes the god); it is imagined by a senile man, made ridiculous by his readiness to engage in ecstatic

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In an act of irrational and violent disagreement, Pentheus orders the obliteration of Teiresias’s seat of augury, and it is “at this point that Teiresias calls him for the first time agrios ‘savage’ (361). The epithet questions his civic responsibilities and places him in the bestial realm outside civilization” (Segal 1982, 56).342 Pentheus’s command that Teiresias’s seat of augury be destroyed declares to the audience his foolishly dangerous confidence in his power: unlike the audience he is naturally unaware of the destruction that befalls cities in tragedy when they dare to mistrust the advice of a prophet (Soph. Ant. 1933ff., OT 316–462). Public expectation of Pentheus’s ruin and the absolute silence imposed on Teiresias after the first scenes certainly help critics to dismiss the dramatic meaning and legitimacy of the seer’s speculations and debate with Pentheus. Yet it is inconceivable that Euripides devoted more than three hundred lines to this scene just to add some tyrannical traits to his portrait of Pentheus, or to produce some laughter about the old men’s embarrassing dances. These cannot be the legitimizing grounds of the scene. The depersonalization of the figure of Dionysus through what we recognize as a quotation from Prodicus certainly seems foreign to, or inappropriate for, the culture at the time of the foundation of Thebes and for the cultural frame of the myth of Dionysus’s revenge. But we are not the spectators of the play sitting in the Theater of Dionysus in 405. For them, Teiresias was a famous prophet, and thus what he says about the future of Dionysus—“I cannot tell you how great he will be in Greece (273)—is, as they experienced it, the absolute truth. And they would also consider dancing, and therefore cannot be presented by the poet as a valid political or religious alternative. In my expositions, I have tried to respond to the different aspects of this first objection. (2) Teiresias’s representation does not portray the complexity of the god’s nature, his contradictory powers, which are summarized in the formula that the god uses for himself: “most sweet and most ferocious.” This second objection would be serious if it were appropriate for the prophet’s message: Teiresias analyzes Dionysism independently from Dionysus’s display of his mythical powers (the maddening of the women, of Pentheus, etc.); he considers the religious and human advantages of Dionysus as god of wine, inebriation, dancing, and singing. Dionysus uses that definition of himself to justify his merciless revenge. The Chorus fully accepts and praises Teiresias’s description of the god (328–29: “Old man, with your words you are not demoting Apollo, and by honoring Dionysus, the great god, you are wise”). 342.  Some critics emphasize his “atheism,” but this aspect of Pentheus is limited to his denial of Dionysus’s divine nature. Otherwise he honors the gods (45–46).

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what Teiresias says about the nature of the god to be equally prophetic and true. It is a fact that their Dionysus is Teiresias’s Dionysus, rather than the Dionysus of the perverse king or the ferocious Dionysus of the revenge. Finally, the whole drama is conceived from the point of view of Teiresias’s interpretation of Dionysism and of his belief that the city needs to accept Dionysus: the tragic conflict ensues, as we will see, exactly from the specular reversal of Teiresias’s enlightened views.

25.  Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round In the first round of his attack on Thebes, Dionysus plays the role of man, perfectly simulating man’s weakness and in fact counterfeiting his weakness only in order to publicly mock the impotence and ineptness of the king (616). “Publicly” means in fact before the external theatrical audience since certainly he has, besides his own vast self-complacency, no internal audience for his endless comedy of simulation and mockery: the text makes him play a contriving game with Pentheus, not in order to persuade Pentheus but to exhibit the god’s unlimited and spectacular power to the external audience and to us readers. This unlimited power crushes a character that could be defeated by much less force and ingenuity. Dionysus’s simulation by splitting his character into a fake victim and a real mocker makes him unconquerable, but also complacent and petty. See poor Pentheus, determined to mock and destroy the god: how blind he is about the same game, which his adversary plays much better than he. It is not the case then, as one commentator says, that Dionysus immediately confuses the mind of Pentheus; rather, Pentheus is defeated in the game that he plays by the superior intelligence and power of his enemy. Politics is really impotent before the mythical power of the gods, be it that of Aphrodite or of Dionysus. And even outside the mythical and anthropomorphic context, as Teiresias had said and as Pentheus’s servants themselves know well (769–74), Dionysus/wine is the only god that frees men from their daily stresses and pains. Dionysus provokes Pentheus, even asking him to reveal the terrible penalties Pentheus intends to inflict on him (492): “Tell me what I must

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undergo; what is the terrible penalty you mean to inflict on me?”343 This is mere mockery: the god—and the audience—knows very well that he will suffer none of the penalties Pentheus is going to recite: the god provokes Pentheus to catalogue the various cruelties he plans, only in order to expose to the audience Pentheus’s inept, merely vocal violence and brutality. Indeed, Pentheus is unable to repeat the murderous threats he uttered ­earlier—he was going to stone Dionysus (355ff.), cut off his head (241), hang him—and now makes ridiculous threats to cut his delicate curls (493) and take his thyrsus (495), as if these were terrible penalties. His dramatic humiliation increases, as he does not even carry out his threats.344 Dionysus recites a play within the play and organizes it as a chorodida­ skalos;345 he is the god of theater and exploits the theater’s conventions of simulation. He plays a double game—one for himself and the theatrical audience, and one for Pentheus and the Chorus. Indeed the Bacchants of the Chorus, too, are unaware of the Stranger’s divine identity and are therefore in some way victims of Dionysus, as they will experience fear and anxiety for no reason (610–12). The god is a variety of theatrical personae simultaneously: the god, his human impersonation, a victim in the eyes of the Chorus and in accord with the intentions of Pentheus, and a conquering master in his real being and in the eyes of the audience.346 343.  εἴφ’ ὅ τι παθεῖν δεῖ· τί με τὸ δεινὸν ἐργάσηι; (492). The imperative suggests urgency and shows a profound change: the god commands and then selects the argument. 344.  There is no certain textual evidence that Pentheus actually carries out the threats he makes. Even when the god tells Pentheus, “Take it [the thyrsus] yourself,” the text need not imply subsequent action, since Dionysus’s arrogant “Take it yourself!” is a superb response to the king’s impotence and suffices. Editors too confidently insert notes in the text indicating that action follows the threat: see, for instance, Kovacs’s insertions in the Loeb edition. 345.  This aspect of the play is carefully analyzed by Foley 1980. 346.  The different aspects of his personality are symbolized by the smiling mask that he carries (439): in itself, the smiling mask communicates his divine nature to the audience (tragic characters do not conventionally have smiling masks) but does not prevent the characters—who in accordance with the theatrical simulation do not act on a stage but in real life—from recognizing him as a human being. See Foley’s insightful analysis (1980, 129): “The mask, then, represents the god to the audience, mispresents him to the characters, and . . . in the final scene the mask must be interpreted as an artifact or symbol representing the god, or as much as we, or the characters, can ever visually and directly experience of him.”

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When Pentheus sends the Stranger to prison, and tries to bind the god, he ties a bull instead (618ff.). Since the bull is a potential figure and vehicle of the god,347 the text is intended to be satirical: Pentheus would be unconsciously correct if the god were really, physically, a bull, but as the god himself knows well, this is only a mythical, imaginative identification. Dionysus is never a real bull. He does have some bull-like traits that are uniquely his own: for instance, he is described earlier by the Chorus as having horns (100); Pentheus, when maddened by the god, sees the Stranger/ Dionysus as a bull (921–22); and, conversely, when sane, Pentheus takes a bull for the Stranger/Dionysus (618–19). Besides these examples, however, Dionysus undertakes his revenge without assuming the bull image. When during the sparagmos Agave murders Pentheus, she believes that he is a lion,348 and not a potential image of the god.349 The king believes that he is involved in a serious struggle with the Stranger, while, in the eyes of the audience, he is a poor fool, ridiculed by the god in a black comedy—a comic victim, as Foley puts it (1980, 22). The smiling mask of the god assures the audience that he is immune to the tragic pains he would suffer as a man, while the smiling mask is meaningless for Pentheus and the Chorus, since it is only a theatrical medium. Not only the action but the mere exchange of words between Pentheus and Dionysus shows the audience that the god mocks the king: he invents lies about himself (461–64) and avoids giving the information the king demands (471–75, 478). Dionysus claims that Dionysus is present close by himself, and while this false claim makes sense to the audience, it confuses Pentheus and mocks his ignorance of the character’s true identity (470, 498,350 500). Pentheus’s humiliating performance hits bottom when 347.  See lines 100 and 921–22. 348.  On the animal metamorphoses and shapes of the Greek gods, and on the exception of Dionysus, see Burkert 1985, 64–65. 349.  The polarity of “sweetness and ferocity” is not a specific trait that singles Dionysus out, since he shares this characteristic with other gods. Aphrodite in the Hippolytus is literally characterized in the same way (443–46); her destruction of Phaedra and Hippolytus is cruel and inhuman, though as goddess of love she is the sweetest goddess (even in Bacch. 402ff.). Artemis can be a cruel goddess (Aesch. Ag.; Eur. Hipp.), as well as a lover of beasts and humanly sweet (Eur. Hipp.). 350.  “Dionysus himself will free me when I desire.” The audience knew the figure of Dionysus Lysios, and possibly also the formula Bάκχιος αὐτός ἔλυσε, which would explain the word αὐτός in the line, as Di Benedetto suggests (2004, 26).

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the god accuses him of being completely ignorant of everything: “You do not know what your life is, nor what you are doing, nor who you are”; the king responds: “I am Pentheus, the son of Agave and of my father Echion” (506–7). For the audience, the literal innocence of Pentheus’s anagraphic answer is a sign of his inevitable condemnation, for, just as the smiling god says, he does not know what he is doing or what he is saying, nor therefore who he is in that specific moment. Dionysus also openly and frequently insults Pentheus (see lines 476, 490, 502). At 502, Dionysus asserts: “He [the god] is here with me. Since you are a godless man, you do not see him.” At this point Pentheus explodes in a fit of anger (503): “Seize him: He is treating me and Thebes with contempt.” The god continues to insult him (504): “I forbid it: I am sane and you are insane!” It is important to note that it is only when Pentheus feels that the god scorns both the city and its king that he interrupts their exchange and orders that the god be arrested. The guards come to take Dionysus away, but the god does not comply, as he did in his earlier arrest (439); instead he threatens Pentheus, first by recalling the meaning of Pentheus’s name (508) and then by announcing his own untouchability, and warning of punishment by Dionysus (515–18). He is taken away still confident, insulting, and winning. The god’s resentment toward Pentheus is legitimized by the king’s denial of Dionysus’s divine nature and by the exclusion of his cult from Thebes.351 But his resentment goes deeper. Like any human child who never knew his mother but was raised by his father, he misses her. The first words he utters when he appears on stage are about his mother: Close to the palace I see the tomb of my mother, slain by lightning, and the ruins of her house smoldering with the still living flames of Zeus’s fire, Hera’s immortal violence against my mother. (6–9)352 351.  The motivation for Dionysus’s revenge can be traced in mythical narratives about the initial resistance to his cult, a theme with a mythical-ritual schema evoking the Minyades, Lycurgus, the fishermen, etc. See Burkert 1985, 164ff. In contrast to several critics who believe that Dionysus initially tries to persuade Pentheus and uses his “miracles” to convince him that Dionysus is a god (see, for instance, Versnel 1998, 166), I think that from the outset Dionysus is intent upon punishing Pentheus. 352.  The word “mother” is repeated twice, the second time with an emphasis on the possessive “my,” in a hyperbaton and with strong assonance between the two words: μητέρ’ εἰς ἐμὴν. The immortal flames of Zeus’s fire are an eternal indictment of Hera’s violence.

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Psychology aside, there is a crucial fact: his mother’s family members mistreated her, as they refused to believe in her relationship with Zeus and mocked her as a liar. Dionysus covers the sacred ground of his mother’s tomb with grapevines (10–12). When Dionysus shakes Pentheus’s palace, the Bacchants of the Chorus see and behold “the fire around Semele’s holy tomb, the flame left behind by Zeus’s lightning” (596–99).353 Dionysus confirms that Bacchus (ὁ Βάκχος) lit the fire on his mother’s tomb (623–24). In his first act of revenge and epiphanic divine manifestation, Dionysus keeps the figure and destiny of his mother present. Like any mortal child, Dionysus reacts with violent pain at the loss of his mother, and, like the god he is, he hates his mother’s family for denying his divine origin and nature. In the end he will use that very reason to justify his gruesome violence: “I, a god, was treated with contempt by you” (1347). The smiling god even as he is led away as a prisoner shouts either from the inside of the palace or from the theologeion, making himself recognizable through his voice, though he is invisible to the Chorus: “Ho, there, hear my voice, ho Bacchants, ho Bacchants . . . I say once more, I, Semele’s and Zeus’s son!” (576ff.).354 He causes the palace to shake (earth quaking, 585; see 585–89, 606, 623); he orders the burning (collapse) of the palace (595), which is reported at 633; he creates fire around Semele’s holy tomb (595–99). Again and again he insists on the identity between the son of Semele and the son of Zeus—which Pentheus denies. This is a great epiphanic scene, sung by the Chorus and Dionysus and showing the god to be potentially master of the city. But the god does not press for his victory here, and the text presents this spectacle in a qualified way.355 In all the upheaval, only Pentheus actually acknowledges the miraculous power of the god, when he wonders how the god has released himself 353.  I read Διὸς βροντά with Diggle. 354.  Dionysus responds to the Chorus, who had entreated the god to appear (553– 55). It is obvious that the Bacchants do not see him, and scholarship cannot decide whether Dionysus shouts from behind the scenes (“inside the house,” as the Chorus says, 589) or from the theologeion, becoming visible only to the audience. In the latter case the theatrical perception of the Chorus and the audience differs, just as their interpretation of the smiling mask: the Chorus is blind to theatrical and staging conventions. 355.  See Seaford’s (1996, 195–98) excellent analysis of the symbolic meanings and allusive references; he argues that Dionysus’s self-release, the lightning, the thunder, and the destruction of the house suggest, within this text, the ritual of initiation.

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(643–46).356 What, on the other hand, is experienced and visually perceived by the Chorus and the audience remains a matter of debate among scholars. Some argue that the flames by the tomb and in the house and the shaking and falling of the palace’s columns were not staged, while others believe that the staging of fire and destruction, if only in a few minimal details, took place. I prefer the former interpretation: since it is not theatrically possible for flames to surround the palace (594–95) or for the palace to crumble in ruins, Dionysus must be causing the Chorus, at least, to hallucinate (603–4 and 633–34: “He [the god] broke the palace to the ground, and everything was shattered”). The crumbling of a few stones from the facade of the palace would have made the terrifying description ridiculous. The Chorus probably sees and experiences, through hallucinations, what the god tells Pentheus, while the audience might have assumed that what is described must have occurred somehow even if there was no evidence of it on stage. Indeed the lack of evidence makes Dionysus’s description and the Chorus’s words more terrifying because what the god says and the Chorus experiences cannot be false, and yet it is not visible. This is a double miracle. Thus the audience may have been frightened by the power of the god. Dionysus does not take possession of the city, but he could. When he describes himself in the scene in the stable (620–21), Dionysus portrays his conquering power as an effortless action: “He [Pentheus] was panting hard out of rage, his body was dripping in sweat, he was chewing his lip.357 I sat close to him, placidly looking at him.” Again, Dionysus’s aim is to make Pentheus an object of pathetic ridicule, and he is explicit about this (616–17): “That was just it, how I humiliated him (ταῦτα καὶ καθύβρισ’ αὐτόν): he thought that he was tying me up, but he did not lay a hand on me.” He puts on an air of being a sophos who can endure Pentheus’s rashness. Indeed he quips (641): “It is a wise man’s part to practice gentleness and self-control (πρὸς σοφοῦ γὰρ ἀνδρὸς ἀσκεῖν σώφρον’ εὐοργησίαν).”

356.  For the traditional theme of the god’s self-release, see Hom. Hymn 7; and Seaford 1996, 195–96. In our text Dionysus is able to release himself because he was never really tied up, as he explains to the Chorus (618–19): “He [Pentheus] found a bull, and it was this animal’s legs and hooves that he roped up.” Perhaps Dionysus made the bull look like himself, and this trick deceived Pentheus. 357.  Di Benedetto (2004, lines 620–21) points out the mock heroic description of Pentheus’s efforts.

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The god, the giver of ecstatic experiences, of joy and pain, is here amusing himself in sarcastic playfulness. How he amuses the audience is another matter: perhaps he embarrasses them, as they feel both approval for the god’s humorous mastery and pity for the mocked king. We are reminded of the cruel and sarcastic game that Athena plays with Ajax in the Sophoclean play, and of the pity that even Odysseus, Ajax’s adversary, feels for the victim of the goddess. Modern readers sense the atmosphere of a black comedy, and rightly so: had the god wanted to take possession of the city, he would have done it by now. But he prefers to savor and display his vengeful acts: the next step will be more serious and tragic, as he puts into motion a reverse strategy of retaliation whereby the cults to which Pentheus denied access will be the ritual frames of his spectacular death. He prepares his revenge far from the city, on the mountain Cithaeron.

26.  Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon Dionysus invites Pentheus to listen to the Messenger’s account of the miraculous deeds the Theban Bacchants have performed on the mountain (677–774). His narrative reveals that the Theban Bacchants, Pentheus’s mother and aunts among them, are not enjoying sexual license, as the king believes: rather, they are modest and blessed by a miraculous nature that provides them with streams of water, wine, milk, and honey. The Bacchants are fully part of the natural order: they use snakes as belts; they suckle whelps of wild beasts; they perform the sparagmos, tearing cows apart with their bare hands. Reacting to a first aggression, they hurl themselves as enemy troops upon two villages, where they turn everything upside down, and snatch children and other booty from the houses. When the villagers rush to arms, the Bacchants defeat them, for the Bacchants are completely invulnerable: their thyrsi wound the armed men of the villages and put them to flight. As the Bacchants go back to their abodes, “the snakes with their tongues clean the drops of blood from the skin of their cheeks” (680–768). As Versnel (1998, 135) notes, “This is myth.” In the pages that follow, however, he discusses the unsolvable question of the relation between myth and ritual, and specifically how much of historical ritual picks up or

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reflects, in some modified way, features of the mythical scenario. Quoting the huge number of scholars who have written on this topic, from Dodds to Henrichs to Vernant,358 Versnel shows that no certain solution has ever been reached. Whether myth and ritual are parallel, or whether one—but which one?—reflects the other, and to what extent, remain open questions.359 Important as the question of the relationship between myth and ritual is for understanding the nature of maenadism in the religious life of the Greeks in Euripides’s time, it seems secondary for the appreciation of the dramatic and religious significance of the scene and of the play. The spectators certainly appreciated the gap between myth and their contemporary rituals, and certainly took into account the measure of invention and exaggeration that the mythical picture includes. It is also necessary to acknowledge Dionysus’s purpose in creating the regressive horizon in which women are made capable of accomplishing divine feats: these women will be his mythical weapons against Pentheus. Outside the control of the city, human beings tend to feel either like animals or like gods. Dionysus gives the women the power to play—rather than just experience—these oxymoronic roles, and causes the natural world to comply. He builds up the whole body of the Theban Bacchants as a living instrument that he can use to wage his fight: a perfect automatic instrument resembling a cohesive community, a ghastly parody or perversion of a civic community—in fact, an invulnerable weapon. All this is, of course, mythical invention. The forest is the Bacchants’ home and habitat, which they share with wild, but miraculously tame animals;360 their peaceful behavior is con358.  Henrichs 1984; Vernant 1985. 359.  See Bollack’s (2005, 17–18) pertinent and lucid observations: “It is not easy to determine what in the play reflects the cult and the rites. There are sufficient allusions for the audience to recognize them. Yet, each feature may have been transformed from its familiar shape and adapted to the needs of the plot, which has been freely invented by the author within the setting of a theatrical epiphany and a deceptive initiation. The meaning, even that of the cult itself, is found in that of the tragedy. The Dionysism of the Bacchae plays a theatrical role; it plays also with the Dionysism: it makes fun of the historians of religion.” 360.  They sleep “lying on their backs upon fir-branches . . . others on the ground amid oak leaves” (684–85): this text offers an example of how the whole scene has been read by scholars who are interested in investigating how the myth reflects the ritual. Seaford (1996, 205–6) for instance, suggests that the “detail of sleeping on leaves

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nected with food and drink provided by nature; the sudden sign of aggression changes their communal gathering into an invincible army, madly and iniquitously destroying two villages and carrying away unnecessary and extravagant booty.361 The sparagmos occurs in a mad fit of violence against peaceful cows and has no real justification unless it is meant as a dress rehearsal for the audience before the next, real performance, of the human sparagmos. Dionysus could have used his magic power to induce the Theban women to dance in the city. But he wants to display his revenge. Besides, had he wanted that access to the city, he would have had to bring back the Theban Bacchants to their human consciousness. For the Theban Bacchants on the mountain are both beasts and goddesses, so that Dionysus, who is a god—and can receive no honor from this magic hybrid—has no real interest in them—unless as his weapon of revenge. This use of the Bacchants as a destructive bestial-divine weapon removes Dionysus from the city, where human beings are neither beasts nor gods.362 Only within the structure of difference is recognition possible, and only within it can devotion and cult exist.363

may derive from an actual practice of maenads with ritual significance,” and cites “the women sitting on supposedly antaphrodisiac plants at the Thesmophoria” and similar details. The spectators perceived that Euripides does not neglect to characterize the Bacchants even in their sleep with references that correspond to some ritual. Yet they must also have realized that the main reason why the Bacchants sleep among branches and leaves is because they are in a mountain forest. They have been forced to abandon the protection and comfort of the city, by Dionysus’s design, and whatever ritual allusion colors the Bacchants’ sleep, the audience will first perceive the mythical madness inflicted on them and the animal wilderness of their habitat. 361. This is a surprising action that is not supported by any Dionysiac cultic reference. 362.  Bollack (2005, 37) writes that the god makes the Theban Bacchants “Erinyes pursuing their own race.” 363.  The Chorus of barbarian Bacchants has abandoned their families and cities; they follow the god, in a state of devotion rather than of ecstasy; they ignore the real identity of the person they are following, and they seem to be hallucinating, for instance, when they dream of Aphrodite or the Muses (402ff.). The god treats them with no regard for their feelings and anxieties, and he is silent about what they will do after having sung their god throughout the play. Is this final silence due to the theatrical law or to Dionysus’s indifference to them, women without a city?

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The scene of the Theban Bacchants’ bliss, with its miraculous union of human, divine, and bestial features, creates both fascination and terror among spectators and readers: fascination because Dionysus sweeps away with a simple gesture all the labors and trials that reason and civilization underwent to escape from that animal-human combination, and terror because the return to that regressive mode of life threatens the city with its absolute alterity or otherness: women have taken over, organized a working society, and are stronger than men. They are close to nature and the divine, as if they were emanating from the earth: in enjoying total power and being creatures absolutely different from the males, they must terrorize the male audience and provoke the male imagination, and its subdued fear, the spectre of the “city of women.” This spectre is troubling the Athenians’ consciousness, as is evident in the Aristophanic comedies in which the threatening phantom of the “city of women” becomes real and adversarial to the male city. On the other hand, Dionysus cannot occupy Thebes, since his city is now the city of the Bacchants, a city that he governs and controls through his rituals, and that became an undefeatable and blind instrument of war in his hands. In the next scene (775–861) Dionysus persuades Pentheus to come to the mountain, which objectively means for the king to leave the protection of the city. The high point of the scene, and of the play, comes at line 810, where, after Pentheus’s repeated order to rush to arms (809), the god invites him to see the Bacchants, and Pentheus unexpectedly accepts (810–16): DIONYSUS: Listen! Do you wish to see them sitting together in the mountains? PENTHEUS: Very much so. I would give a lot of gold to do so, a lot! DIONYSUS: Why have you fallen into a great passion for this? PENTHEUS: It would distress me to see them drunk. DIONYSUS: And yet it would please you to see the spectacle that is bitter for you. PENTHEUS: To be sure, sitting in silence under the firs.364

364. {Δι.} ἆ· / βούληι σφ’ ἐν ὄρεσι συγκαθημένας ἰδεῖν; / {Πε.} μάλιστα, μυρίον γε δοὺς χρυσοῦ σταθμόν. / {Δι.} τί δ’ εἰς ἔρωτα τοῦδε πέπτωκας μέγαν; / {Πε.} λυπρῶς νιν

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The modern interpretation of Dionysus’s exclamation (ἆ·), his invitation to Pentheus, and the unexpected, joyous acceptance by Pentheus has been influenced by Dodds’s magisterial explanation (1960, 172–73): What happens is . . . the beginning of a psychic invasion, the entry of the god into his victim, who was also in the old belief his vehicle. . . . The god wins because he has an ally in the enemy’s camp: the persecutor is betrayed by what he would persecute—the Dionysian longing in himself. From the first that longing has been skillfully excited by the Stranger (475); the barriers of self-control have been weakened by what happened in the stable; Pentheus’ rage at the Herdsman’s narrative shows the breaking point to be near—it is his last desperate self-assertion.

To the extent that, as Dodds observes, Dionysus has skillfully excited in Pentheus a voyeuristic desire, with its implicit perversion, the god has used his own rites very cynically. He represents the illicit behaviors that are transgressive of the political, since an almost invisible line separates at this point Dionysus’s persuasive sexual seduction from the accusation the king of Thebes earlier addressed to him. And the god will continue to be seductive by instrumentalizing his rites of initiation and sacrifice to trap and murder Pentheus. Most recent interpreters follow Dodds’s line of interpretation in general. Susanetti, one of the most insightful readers of the play, writes (2010, 240): “Pentheus’s ‘great desire’ is at any rate a sort of regressive and infantile

εἰσίδοιμ’ ἂν ἐξωινωμένας. / {Δι.} ὅμως δ’ ἴδοις ἂν ἡδέως ἅ σοι πικρά. / {Πε.} σάφ’ ἴσθι, σιγῆι γ’ ὑπ’ ἐλάταις καθήμενος. For the translation of the extra metrum ἆ, see Dodds (1960), who renders it as “Stop,” stopping Pentheus, who is moving away. For the omission of the question mark at the end of 815, see Di Benedetto 2004, 419–20; in the same line notice the assonance between ἴδοις and ἡδέως. Line 812 is odd: to interpret it as Winnington Ingram does (as quoted by Dodds), “the stranger feigns a shocked surprise,” implies that Dionysus knows beforehand that his offer to see the Bacchants would immediately receive the most enthusiastic acceptance by Pentheus. But Dionysus has no way to anticipate it—later he does not seem to expect Pentheus’s readiness to exhibit himself as a Bacchant to his citizens (see 961)—and he might be genuinely surprised and concerned to understand Pentheus’s change of mind. Line 814 hardly constitutes an answer to Dionysus’s question: Pentheus seems to realize that he has shown excessive desire and hastens to express the opposite feeling: Yes, I would love to see them, but I would also be sorry to see them drunk.

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eros, since it aims not only at catching the sight of the Bacchants and watching their presumed sex acts, but also at detecting the mother, and observing her in the secret horizon of her sexuality, evoking a sort of hallucinated and shattering ‘primal scene’. . . . The phantom of incest seems to move on the stage.” Some aspects of this line of interpretation are undeniable in my view:365 Dionysus’s inquiry in 812 makes the immediacy of Pentheus’s exploded desire explicit, and the god’s further inquiry in 815 reveals the contradictions in Pentheus’s desire, its conscious and unconscious, moral and perverse, stimuli.366 Yet I think that Pentheus’s sudden leap into his perverse desire, into the seductive trap provided by the god, has been facilitated by the conscious feelings that have emerged and developed in the course of his confrontation with the Stranger/Dionysus. He has become conscious of his powerlessness: through the defeats he has suffered at the hands of the god, he now suspects and intimates, though not explicitly, that his army could be defeated, and knows that his authority in the city is seriously questioned.367 The ally Dionysus finds in the enemy camp is Pentheus’s defenselessness and his need to embrace a solution that saves, if only formally, his civic role. His summons of the army in 780–85, with its hyperbolic and descriptive list of the various contingents, does not prove that “Pentheus is unteachable” (Dodds 1960, 172)—that is, deaf to the Messenger’s description of the Bacchants’ invulnerability—but just the contrary, that he has realized the impossibility of waging war against them. He confronts his desperate situation by presenting a massive catalogue of forces and by embellishing his description of the army’s skills and power—“the riders of the swift-footed horses, those who brandish light shields and those whose hands make the

365.  There are of course dissenters: Heath (1987, 121), for instance, thinks that the audience has attributed Pentheus’s sudden change of opinion to atē: “Dionysus has made his victim mad.” The psychic invasion, like the effect of atē, must not have been very strong if the god realizes later (850–52) that he has to madden Pentheus, for without a “light madness” he will not be willing to dress as a woman. 366.  Line 815, especially in connection with line 829, has also been interpreted as a metatheatrical reference to tragedy’s effects on viewers. Indeed, Dionysus offers Pentheus the spectacle of voyeurism and makes him a theatēs, a spectator (829). 367.  From the first guard (441–42, 449–50) to the messenger (668ff.), his men disagree with him. For the last time he refuses the god’s entrance into the city (804–9), but his appeal to the army remains unheard (780–85).

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bowstring sing.” No general has ever summoned his army in such a lyrical way, even strengthening the sound of the might of his troops with alliterations on p—is the name Pentheus itself the model for this figure of speech?368 This rhetorical performance is Pentheus’s desperate attempt to pretend to himself that he still has power. As Winnington-Ingram (1948, 101) remarks, Pentheus uses this recital of forces as a sort of incantation to allay his fear.369 Indeed, Pentheus’s summons of the army hangs in the air, and nothing happens. Pentheus’s sound and fury are quickly silenced by Dionysus, who warns, “You all will be put to flight” (798). The Messenger’s account is too recent and impressive for Pentheus to forget, so that he lamely says to himself (800–801): We are at loss with this stranger with whom we are wrestling. He will not stop being silent neither under punishment nor when acting.

It is a confession of impotence: the pluralis maiestatis has an empty force; the image of wrestling implies that Pentheus feels that he is in the hold of a wrestler; and the future tense in “he will not stop being silent” means that there will be no armed resolution of the conflict. The conflict is already resolved in favor of the god. It is therefore understandable that a few seconds later when Dionysus offers Pentheus the alternative to come to the mountains to see the Bacchants, Pentheus jumps at it: his secret desire explodes in a soul that has been deprived of its usual defensive resources. The male authority and political power that, in his view, kept women modest and controlled in the city have vanished, and Pentheus must now realize that he is the agent and victim of its disappearance: against his will, up on Cithaeron women continue to be free and allegedly even unbridled and licentious—a spectacle never to be seen again. The king who wanted to bring the libidinous women back to the city’s prison, and has realized his failure to do so, suddenly receives the chance to control them and to be their master: his desire unconsciously/consciously changes direction and 368.  Furthermore, Pentheus speaks in the name of the entire Greek nation (779), assuming that he is invested with a greater authority and legitimacy. 369.  Again, Pentheus makes emphatic and hyperbolic threats in 796–97, before the god silences him.

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induces him to become their master as their voyeur in the mountains. The ambivalence of his psychological status is expressly indicated by the insistent use of the verb idein (“to see,” 810, 814, 815), which at once covers the ideas of checking and of being a voyeur. The reverse face of the male moral role, castigating women’s lewdness, is revealed as the perverse male desire for women’s lewdness. Of course he is still king of Thebes, even if his new perspective does not match the ethics and laws he embodies. He still refers to his civic role for a strategic purpose (828, 838), but he is aware that he is on a new track. Yet these two facets of his personality do not easily cohere: when he calls “bitter” the spectacle that he will view, the spectacle of women’s drunkenness (814), he focuses on “drunkenness”—the god’s blessing—but it is unclear to the audience and readers whether he suspects, or wishes, that the spectacle be more prurient than that. He is trying or feigning to be his old self, but we do not know how he can hold the two facets of himself together. It is true that his desire to see, watch, or spy on the Maenads’ indecent behavior remains a conscious desire throughout the action, even when he was not under the “light madness” inspired by the god (851; see 469–87). Pentheus’s surrender at 812ff. is therefore not fully unconscious, for the consciousness of his impotence turns the perverse desire that has been always present in him into an explosive, open expression.

27.  Initiation and Sacrifice From line 862 on, Pentheus passes through a fictive, parodic initiation, and then, as a savage animal victim by the way of the sparagmos, is murdered/ sacrificed by his mother. There is no spiritual elation in these acts, which are performed through fakery, mockery, and black comedy. In several respects, Dionysus’s revenge recalls other actions of retribution in earlier tragedies, among them the anguishing scene in Sophocles’s Ajax where Athena maddens the hero, mocks him, and leads him to the most humiliating and suicidal despair. Closer to Dionysus’s ferocious mangling of his victim are the revenges exacted by Hera in the Heracles and by Aphrodite in the Hippolytus. Both goddesses instrumentalize their own cultic and mythical privileges in order to destroy their victim. Heracles,

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having been born from an adulterous relation, defiles Hera’s prerogative as goddess of marriage; as revenge, she causes him to kill his wife and his young children. Hippolytus refuses to honor Aphrodite, goddess of love, and she obtains her victory by inspiring love in Phaedra. The gods exploit the resource of instilling madness to reach their goals. Both appear unnecessarily cruel, and unsympathetically complacent in their merciless persecution. More importantly, Euripides underlines the anthropomorphic aspects of the goddesses in their cruel punishment: he emphasizes the personal commitment to destroy their victim, while at the same time showing that they are figures of a depersonalized force and principle, Aphrodite being the figure of cosmic sex and Hera of tukhē. By this double identification, the text highlights the human-like psychology of the goddesses and the absurdity of this traditional conception. Their ghastly persecutions of mortal victims, who are easily punishable by simpler interventions, become the tragic events in which the oxymoronic aspects of the anthropomorphic divine come into view: excessively godlike in their powers, but like mortals in their intentions, they use their sacred attributes and rites for unholy purposes, while, as cosmic forces, they would be fully depersonalized. Dionysus’s revenge falls exactly within this tragic and oxymoronic frame: his revenge at the end will be attributed to Zeus’s will, that is, to Necessity, and he will be accused by mortal Cadmus of having been excessive in his punishment, that is, too ferocious. As I have already suggested, Dionysus equates his desire “that the city fully learn that she is not initiated to his rites” or “fully learn his rites as she is not initiated to them” (39–40) with the project of teaching a lesson to Pentheus, the emblem of the city. The god had begun with a political act of subversion by maddening all the women of the city, and, by pushing them to the mountain as beasts/goddesses, he had jeopardized his chance to have them sing in the city and establish his rituals there. It is now time for Pentheus to become the executor and victim of Dionysus’s rituals with the cooperation of the maddened Theban women on the mountain. In this way Dionysus’s revenge turns into a reverse form of retaliation: Pentheus dies through the very rituals he refused to accept in the city. The mortal Medea in the eponymous play by Euripides enacts an analogous form of reverse retaliation: the enamoured princess finds barbaric

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the way in which Jason—the singer of the civilized city, of its justice and laws (Med. 534–38)370—betrays her; accordingly she inflicts a barbaric punishment on the whole set of guilty civilized people (see 1329–40). She inscribes her revenge in a sacrifice she herself establishes, through which she, though in a sort of pretension, justifies the gruesome death of her children and imbues her barbaric gesture with sacredness (1378ff.). Reverse retaliation is common in Euripides. The tragedian chose this tragic structure for many of his plays for ideological reasons: revenge does not produce any positive result; rather, after an enormous expenditure of energy, planning, and brutal violence, it simply satisfies the pride of the one who has been offended. It is absolutely fruitless: it does not create any real gain for the avenger. Aphrodite will be punished viciously by Artemis who will destroy one of Aphrodites’s devotees. Hera will be accused by Heracles of not being a goddess, if she really is responsible for his madness. In some sense, revenge may produce a victory that is at once a defeat. Framed in this way, revenge in Euripides’s theater represents the non-sense and endless pain that afflict human beings. It is a dark gem of his theater. Dionysus’s revenge is fully inscribed in these tragic patterns, and the ritual and mythical features are adapted to serve them. He obtains from his revenge a victory that is simultaneously a partial defeat: his exclusion from the city. The choral ode sung after Pentheus’s capitulation (862–912) is, as the audience and readers would expect, a joyful song: the image of the fawn that escapes the terrifying hunt suggests that the Chorus of Bacchants is now free to dance and enjoy their rites. The Chorus continues to believe that Dionysus is a mortal “Stranger,” and therefore vulnerable to Pentheus’s violence. The audience cannot share either the sense of liberation or the joy of the Chorus. Rather, the spectators realize that Dionysus has exploited the Chorus’s ignorance, and that Euripides’s representation of the Chorus’s exultation is perverse, showing that they are secondary in Dionysus’s scheme. 370.  Jason indecently lectures Medea about how much she owes him (Med 534– 38): μείζω γε μέντοι τῆς ἐμῆς σωτηρίας / εἴληφας ἢ δέδωκας, ὡς ἐγὼ φράσω. / πρῶτον μὲν Ἑλλάδ’ ἀντὶ βαρβάρου χθονὸς / γαῖαν κατοικεῖς καὶ δίκην ἐπίστασαι / νόμοις τε χρῆσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἰσχύος χάριν· “You gained more in return for saving me than you gave, as I shall show you. First, you live in the land of Hellas instead of a barbaric country; you learn justice and the use of the laws with no concession to violence.” He is also unwisely self-assured: Medea has already planned a most violent revenge.

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In fact, there is a remarkable silence about the possibility that the Chorus’s rituals may finally take place in Thebes itself, the ultimate objective of the Bacchants’ whole enterprise. In a previous ode, they had sung: “But now, blessed Dirce, you reject me, though I am celebrating, adorned with wreaths, on your banks. Why do you reject me? Why do you flee from me?” (530–34). Now, as the god announces the end of Pentheus, the Bacchants should expect to have access to Dirce, the river of Thebes, and to rejoice for this victory, but their thoughts are elsewhere; they are focused on revenge: “Never should a man’s thought and deed be above the laws” (890–91). The singing of Dionysus’s praise in his own city vanishes from their souls. The Bacchants refer to their earlier song and return to the theme of sophia, which they had treated in lines 389–96: Peaceful life and good sense remain untossed (by storm) and bind together households. For though they dwell far off in the sky, the heavenly ones see the affairs of mortals. And the craft of wisdom is not wisdom, nor is it wisdom to think no-mortal thoughts.

But now, after the god has announced how Pentheus will pay the penalty, they sing the following as a refrain (876–80 = 897–901): What is wise craft? Or what gift from the gods is nobler in the sight of men than to hold the hand of mastery over the head of enemies? What is noble is always dear.371

According to the standard Greek view, the Chorus considers revenge a noble practice, but of course here they suspend the peaceful tone and 371.  This passage has been interpreted in different ways. Lejnieks (1984), Seaford, and a few others have read the passage as conveying the opposite message, that revenge is not noble. In my view, the initial question, τί τὸ σοφόν; “What is wise craft?” referring to 389, shows that the Chorus is no longer asking what sophia is, but what cleverness, or crafty art, is. The Chorus might be referring to the Stranger’s shrewdness in bringing Pentheus to his ruin through a mendacious initiation. What follows could be a disjunctive “or,” or an assertion, “to be sure.” Even with the disjunctive, the Chorus would refer to Dionysus himself, who, as the Stranger tells them (848), will take charge of the revenge. Accordingly, revenge is both crafty and noble, and in this way the Chorus supports whatever Dionysus will do, and accepts with approval the human cleverness of the Stranger.

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moderate principles of their earlier statement. Indeed, what is craftier than their own simulations when they will support Dionysus’s game with indecent feigning? In the scenes that follow (912–1023), Pentheus is initiated by Dionysus, who dresses his victim as a Bacchant. The Stranger/Dionysus turns his victim into a puppet by inspiring “a light madness” in him.372 It is actually a sort of full madness that drives the king to behave in ways that contradict all his conscious being. The audience realizes that, after all his exhibition of power, the god has been strangely ineffective and has sown no seeds of doubt or confusion in Pentheus’s mind. The god himself must recognize that, in possession of his reason, Pentheus does not have sufficient Dionysian longing in his soul. Going to oversee the Theban Bacchants has strengthened his royal awareness. The god must therefore madden his victim, and we need to carefully distinguish the folly that Dionysus now instills in Pentheus from the divine folly that Plato evokes in the Phaedrus when Socrates describes the four divine follies, and among them the initiatory folly of the Bacchants. The folly that Dionysus now instills in Pentheus is a mythical, tragic device used by the gods to exact their revenge against mortals, as I have already shown for Sophocles’s Ajax and for Euripides’s Phaedra and Heracles. In these examples of divine revenge, the characters that deserve the audience’s pity and concern are the victims. Analogously here in the Bacchae, Dionysus drives Pentheus mad so that he will consent to being initiated into the Bacchic rites. There is no reference to any initiatory madness in the first act of the god: he makes Pentheus mad because “if he is in possession of his reason, he will never put on a feminine dress”—that is, he will not dress as a Bacchant and undertake the ritual process that will lead him to folly or enthusiasm. Therefore, what is evoked here in the text is not a ritual setting, but only a mythical and tragic frame of reference. 372.  πρῶτα δ’ ἔκστησον φρενῶν, / ἐνεὶς ἐλαφρὰν λύσσαν· ὡς φρονῶν μὲν εὖ / οὐ μὴ θελήσηι θῆλυν ἐνδῦναι στολήν, / ἔξω δ’ ἐλαύνων τοῦ φρονεῖν ἐνδύσεται (850–53). The Stranger/Dionysus simulates a prayer to Dionysus, using oddly the imperative for himself: “First, however, put him out of his mind, instill in him a light (“dizzy” [Dodds]) madness, because if he is in possession of his reason, he will never put on a feminine dress; but out of his mind he will wear it.” Dodds in his commentary on lines 854–55 explains through references to ritual “why Pentheus suffers a change of personality when he puts on the holy dress and why with the tearing of the mitra at 1115 his madness seems to vanish.”

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This reference is made even more cogent by the analogous form that the maddening of the mortals allows the god to give to his or her revenge. As we have seen (in section 14), even Hera’s vengeance consists in a reverse form of retaliation, since the goddess of marriage and protector of the young punishes the man born in an adulterous relationship by having him murder his wife and his children. As the god makes Pentheus oblivious to his earlier being, he persuades him to undergo the initiatory process, to wear the Bacchants’ outfit, to handle the thyrsus, so that Pentheus acquires the joy and the enthusiasm of the Bacchic initiate. It must have been particularly depressing for the audience to see the iniquitous way in which the god mangles the identity of the king, to watch Pentheus’s vanity as he displays a grotesque pleasure in looking just like a Bacchant—specifically, like his mother—and the god’s pleasure in encouraging his victim’s coquetry. The god indulges in his insatiable desire to humiliate Pentheus, and the text gives Dionysus every opportunity to do so.373 One character looks mad; the other enjoys petty sarcasm. Pentheus loses all knowledge of who he is; he sees double; he enjoys, like a child, the idea of returning to the arms of his mother—there is no sexual perversion here (966–70); he believes he possesses a monstrous power: in short, because he is not conscious that his ruin is close at hand, he is full of joy. Yet his ecstatic elation emulates the register or mode of black comedy. Unexpectedly, the disciple is shown to surpass the expectations of the master, and lo! Pentheus wishes that the whole city may see him as a Bacchant (961: “Convey me through the middle of the Theban land”; contrast 841, and 854–55).374 This would be a spectacular way for the city to recognize the power of Dionysus and the ecstatic elation created by his

373.  Dionysus mocks Pentheus by means of the details of the ritual: whether the thyrsus should be held in the right or left hand, how exactly the robe should fall on the feet, and other equally inspiring details. The suspicion arises that Euripides is making fun of the ritual itself. 374.  At 841 Dionysos calms Pentheus’s anxiety by promising to lead him through deserted streets: ὁδοὺς ἐρήμους ἴμεν· ἐγὼ δ’ ἡγήσομαι. At 854–55, Dionysus, however, speaking to the barbarian Bacchants tells them that he longs for Pentheus to be laughed at by the Thebans as he is led across the city in female dress: χρήιζω δέ νιν γέλωτα Θηβαίοις ὀφλεῖν γυναικόμορφον ἀγόμενον δι’ ἄστεως. γυναικόμορφον recalls τὸν θηλύμορφον ξένον in line 353, the contemptuous expression Pentheus used for Dionysus.

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rituals. But Dionysus is concerned only with his spectacular revenge on the mountain and does not lead Pentheus through the city. Again and again the spectacle occurs only for the spectators, who cannot of course be either surprised or elated that Pentheus exhibits himself to them as a Bacchant. Pentheus remains in this hallucinatory state of mind under the control of the god to the moment he falls into the hands of his mother and the other Maenads. We expect the god to want Pentheus to arrive at the painful realization of his ruin, to show a sign of regret for rejecting the god, or to acknowledge his wrongs before the city—but this occurs only partially. The two characters depart for the mountain, and the Chorus sings, inciting the “hounds of madness” to whip the Theban Maenads into a frenzy, so that Pentheus’s mother will call him the “son of a lioness or Lybian Gorgon,” and justice will be exacted with his death. This is what the Chorus called to sophon in their earlier passage (897). When the Messenger comes back from the mountain to announce the death of Pentheus, no Theban is there to hear him; he has to give his account to the Chorus. As in the Medea, the Messenger has to tell an awful and anguishing story to a recipient who, by contrast, exults in it (1032–40).375 The external audience listens to the Messenger with pity and sympathy, and the contrast between the Chorus’s joy and the Messenger’s sorrow increases the spectators’ distaste for the barbarian Maenads. The description of Pentheus’s death is conveyed through several ritually evocative details: the tree,376 the sparagmos—Pentheus appears to the Maenads as a lion377—and the Theban Maenads’ ecstatic joy over their successful hunt. The terms of the sacrifice are adapted to a frame of punishment, to enact what we have called a reverse retaliation: the victim is not a bull but a human being, a king; he is not consentient but, on the contrary, entreats his executioner in a spoken scene that is wholly extraneous to the

375.  Susanetti (2010, 264) underscores the emotional participation of the Messenger in Pentheus’s wretched experience. 376.  On the ritual connection of the fir tree with Dionysus, see Susanetti 2010, 265, though in a different context; here Dionysus bends the tree to the ground and places Pentheus on it. 377.  Though the god shouts to the Theban Bacchants (1080–81), “I bring the man who makes you and me and my worship into a mockery: take revenge on him,” Agave thinks that she has killed a lion (1174; cf. 989–90 and 1141). Fortunately this hunt and sacrifice are not followed by the eating of the victim, either raw or cooked. See 1184 and Dodds’s commentary.

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sacrificial practice and can only be theatrical; the sacrificer is unconscious of what she is doing: she is hallucinating and does not recognize the real identity of whom she is tearing into pieces, in fact she hurts herself in a gruesome way through the sacrifice. Other details in the narrated scene either fit traditional tragic patterns or present new, horrifying features: the failed recognition of Pentheus by his mother, the deformation of her face in her rage and madness, the beheading of Pentheus, the scattering of his limbs, and their use in a game of catch among the Maenads. All of these details contribute to an especially gruesome theatrical spectacle. A particular snapshot from this scene is crucial to the development of the action. It occurs when, after the tree on which Pentheus was sitting is brought to the ground by the Maenads, Pentheus regains his lucidity, throws the headdress from his hair, rejecting his disguise as a Bacchant, and beseeches his mother, caressing her cheek in an act of supplication (1118–21): It’s me, mother, your child Pentheus, whom you bore in the house of Echion. Pity me, o mother, and do not, because of my errors (ταῖς ἐμαῖσ ἁμαρτίαιςι),378 kill your child!379 378.  Dodds, in his commentary, correctly stresses the emphatic antithesis “my own errors”. . . “your own child” and explains that “the offence of an individual cannot justify the violation of the blood-tie.” But I feel that the major effect of the antithesis is that of diminishing the importance of Pentheus’s errors: “Yes, mother I did err, but do not kill your own son because of this.” “Do not punish him, your son” and “Do not make a great error.” It is not clear what errors Pentheus is thinking of, and critics disagree on their “nature”—whether they are factual political mistakes and misjudgments or moral violations. It is impossible to decide from Pentheus’s words. However, as he entreats his mother, he feels that he does not deserve death. 379.  Ἐγώ τοι, μῆτερ, εἰμί, παῖς σέθεν / Πενθεύς, ὃν ἔτεκες ἐν δόμοις Ἐχίονος· / οἴκτιρε δ’ ὦ μῆτέρ με μηδὲ ταῖς ἐμαῖς / ἁμαρτίαισι παῖδα σὸν κατακτάνηις. The name Pentheus has no anagrammatic assonance with penthos (grief), as in previous passages, but with pais sethen, “your child,” in παῖς ςέθεν / πενθεύς (with an epic resonance in the word σέθεν, 1118–19); the identification “child” is repeated twice, and the word “mother” determines the m sound in line 1120. Pentheus’s caress of his mother’s cheeks is the gesture of a suppliant, but here it is simultaneously a gesture of tenderness, after all his earlier sexual innuendos. Pentheus’s definition of himself as “son of Agave born in the house of Echion” has a desperate economy (“Recognize me!”) and contrasts with the anagraphic description he had given of himself after Dionysus’s mockery that he did not know who he was. Now the god, himself a simulator of his own identity, insures that Pentheus’s mother does not know the identity of her own son.

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The recognition fails, however: “Her mouth dripped foam, and her eyes rolled” (1122). This physical description of Agave’s madness links her to Heracles—as he too, maddened by Lyssa and murdering his children, “rolls his eyes out of their sockets; his breathing is disquieted” (HF 866)— as well as to other Euripidean tragic heroes, including Medea (Med. 92ff.) and Orestes (Or. 220ff.). Pentheus’s confession that he has erred is what the god supposedly wanted to hear from him (from the city that rejected the god).380 If Dionysus had brought Agave to her senses and saved Pentheus, the god would have obtained what he wanted from the outset, the recognition that he is a god, and the celebration of his cults in Thebes (39–40). But Dionysus wants to punish Pentheus and Thebes, not persuade the king and the city. In the Ion, Euripides manages to have a mother avoid killing her son when she is on the brink of murdering him, but in the Bacchae, he does not stop the mother’s murder of her child through the sparagmos. Euripides reveals that Dionysus’s desire for revenge is the main motivation for his action. It seems as if the ritual of the sparagmos itself bewitches the god, satisfying his desire to receive a violent sacrifice in his honor, as the god he is, and offering to himself the blood of the king, thus symbolically, of the city itself. The rest of this gruesome scene has the effect of increasing the spectacular, mythical nastiness of Dionysus’s vengeance, which now embraces the whole family, and in particular Agave and Cadmus. The text derives its power from the pity that exudes from the spectacle, a pity also evoked in the next scene, when Cadmus patiently and expertly brings the maddened Agave to lucidity and, painfully, to recognition of her unspeakable error. When finally the deus ex machina, Dionysus himself, appears as a god, in the theologeion, he continues to indulge in vengeful violence against both Agave and Cadmus: exile for Agave, the transformation of Cadmus and 380.  The fact that Pentheus recognizes his errors (hamartia) shows that he acknowledges the relative legitimacy of the god’s punishment, as Cadmus too will later do. The play asserts that the anthropomorphic god had motivations for taking revenge on Pentheus, but highlights the limitless brutality of that revenge and the mortals’ awareness of its excess: Pentheus begs his mother to stop her murderous assault; he does not persuade her but produces pity in the audience. Seaford 1996, line 1121: “It is significant that Pentheus does in the end acknowledge his errors, like Kreon at Soph. Ant. 1261. Hamartia which might mean both factual and moral error is central in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy: Poetry 1453 a8.”

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Harmonia into snakes (what crime has the poor Harmonia committed?), and Cadmus’s return as a leader of barbarians to invade Greece and sack Delphi. Euripides picks up old myths and traditions to sustain the veracity and plausibility of these prophesied events.381

28.  Victory and Defeat Even a god, however, cannot escape the structural constraints of vengeance. Like Euripides’s other wretched stories of revenge, the story of Dionysus’s revenge exhibits various symmetries. The wandering of the god with his band of barbarian Maenads, looking for a city that might host them, corresponds to Cadmus’s journey with his barbarians before he and his wife will be received in the Land of the Blessed. Dionysus’s opponent, Pentheus, in his rage against Teiresias, orders the destruction of Teiresias’s prophetic seat. In accordance with an oracle of Zeus (not Apollo!), Dionysus says that Cadmus will sack the oracle at Delphi—an act that is part of the punishment the god proclaims for Cadmus. Pentheus and Dionysus gain satisfaction in the same way: Pentheus by insanely attacking the source of prophecies, Dionysus by inflicting on Cadmus—though a god is always in part agent of his prophecy—the future sack of the seat of Apollo’s oracular voice. How can a city receive such a god? At the close of the epiphany, Cadmus accuses the god of excess and of behaving just like a mortal: CADMUS: DIONYSUS: CADMUS: DIONYSUS:

We recognize these things, but you chastise us too harshly. Yes, because I am a god and was treated with contempt. Gods should not resemble mortals in their anger. Long ago, Zeus, my father, had decided so. (Bacch. 1346-49)

Dionysus does not deny that he acts harshly, but justifies it because he, a god, was insulted; then he avoids responding to Cadmus’s point that gods should not resemble mortals in their wrath, by attributing responsibility 381.  See Dodds on lines 1330–39. Seaford (1996, lines 1330–39) follows another line of interpretation: “Predictions with no apparent connection with the events of the play are found elsewhere in Euripides’ finales (e.g. Andr. 1257–62).”

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for his actions to Zeus, implying an unmotivated necessity.382 And then he disappears. Lines 1348–49 touch on the split between anthropomorphic figure and cosmic principle: Cadmus, commenting on Dionysus’s action from the anthropomorphic point of view, criticizes the excess of its violence; he finds a disproportion between the offense, and the measure and nature of the divine punishment, but Dionysus unexpectedly switches the responsibility for what happened to the ethical indifference and absolute impersonality of Necessity. Thus the fight between Pentheus’s city and Dionysus’s rights was inevitable, and Dionysus—the figure representing the otherness of the city—had to take his revenge for having been excluded, even suppressed. The text, in this significant closure, makes explicit the two lines of our reading: the polemical representation of the anthropomorphic divine characters, and the distressing vision of the failure of the state. Cadmus’s imputation that Dionysus has behaved like a mortal repeats an accusation that has been leveled against other gods—Aphrodite, Apollo, and Hera, for instance—in various Euripidean plays. The anthropomorphism of gods is absurd not because it implies that the gods should be good in order to be gods—which is a Platonic and Christian, not an archaic Greek, conception of deity—but because as universal forces they need nothing, as Heracles says (HF 1344–45), and in particular they need nothing personally or emotionally. Hence we read the frequent recriminations of Euripidean characters against the gods’ lack of sophia and justice and against their excess. These characters are correct, and they represent Euripides’s strategy of exploiting the “crimes” of the traditional gods in order to void or at least to question their anthropomorphic consistency. 382.  Heath 1987, 52: “Here the effect seems to be that of a foil; the counterfactual ideal emphasizes by contrast the misery of man’s actual state at the mercy of hard powers whose will cannot be turned aside, or subjected to human postulation.” Dodds quotes Wassermann: “Because Dionysus as god represents a universal law, the operation of this law is not measured with the measure of human good and evil”; and adds that Dionysus’s reference to Zeus is a weak evasion only “so long as we think of gods as personal agents having moral responsibility for their acts. Other Euripidean dei fall back in the same manner upon destiny or Father’s will, Hipp. 1331, Andr. 1269, El. 1247, 1301, Hel. 1660f., 1669 to justify their own actions (or failure to act) and the fate of human characters.”

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I have tried to offer explanations for this oxymoron, both by illustrating the example of the conflation of Zeus with Necessity, and by meditating on the effects of a new piety and virtuous practice. This new piety implies recognition and acceptance of the fragile condition of men, living as they do under superior forces of which they have an imprecise and incomplete knowledge. In a world without theodicy, in which evil, injustice, and misery fall on human beings often because of their wrong assumptions or for no reason at all, wise acceptance, endurance, and recognition of impersonal forces acting upon humans are a pious form of sophia. In the Bacchae, Teiresias honors Dionysus as the son of Zeus, dresses as a Bacchant, and simultaneously identifies Dionysus with wine and praises him as the only existing remedy for the stress of everyday life. And he is correct in doing so, as the Chorus says in praise of him. That the conflict was necessary is one matter but that it should take the form of a fight between an anthropomorphic god and a very young prince, through the personal psychological hostility of the two characters, is a different matter. For both the city and Dionysism aim at obtaining the unconditioned devotion of the citizens,383 but to the extent that these two institutions are personalized in a petty, ferocious, and vengeful god and in a prejudiced, authoritarian, and powerless king, the conflict, while remaining necessary, acquires the form of a gruesome revenge. When Dionysus says, “Long ago, Zeus, my father, had decided so” (1349), he depersonalizes his own actions, speaks like a mere powerful principle, and no longer needs to answer to Cadmus’s criticism about his own personal, human-like ferocity. When he ascends to Olympus, perhaps to see his father, the god is finally recognized as the god he is, but he has not gained access to the city. Representing the otherness of the city, even the transgressive of the political—in the sense that I have derived from Loraux—his access, at any rate, would be possible only under certain conditions and in accord with certain measures, as the seer, Teiresias, has shown. 383.  It is reasonable to speculate that the cities originally rejected a religion that endorsed ecstatic, displacing, modes of being, and that the same cities favored the creation of stories and legends according to which religious principles, and ecstatic madness, would be dangerous to the integrity and absoluteness of the state. There are many examples, and Antigone is a famous one.

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Through his action, Dionysus, as anthropomorphic and vengeful god, has gained the justified hostility of the city: Agave and Cadmus will carry out no Dionysiac ritual, and Agave is explicit about it: Let me come to a place where bloody Cithaeron shall never and my eyes see Cithaeron, and where I shall never be reminded of the dedicated thyrsus. Let other Bacchants take care of them. (1383–87)

The god is silent on the goal of bringing his cults to Thebes, and when Cadmus confesses the injustice that he has committed against the god and asks for his mercy, the god again shows his vengeful spirit, provoking Cadmus’s charge that gods should not be like humans. No political leader remains to administer the life of the city: both Agave and Cadmus—the founder of Thebes—must leave the city and go into exile (1352ff.). Only pain over the separation, tears, and powerlessness unite the two victims of Dionysus’s revenge: AGAVE: Where shall I turn, thrown out of my fatherland? CADMUS: I do not know, my child: your father is a poor help. (1366-67)

Agave mentions the fatherland here, and again at lines 1368–69 the land of the fathers (“Farewell, house; farewell, land of the fathers”); it is the fatherland that Dionysus has destroyed for the family of Cadmus, and, one suspects, for all the Theban women who participated in the sparagmos. Old Cadmus is unable now to help his daughter: he cannot be epikouros, “helpful”—the word has a broad application in Euripides: it is synonymous with many words (pharmakon, akos, philtron, alkē, mēchanema, iatria, etc.) that denote the resources mortals need to face the many failures and disasters of life. There are no real resources.384 Heracles’s new piety could count in the friendship of Theseus, but Agave has no support at all. The city is a desert: it paid bitterly for its political failure and its own vulnerability.385 384.  In a few lines, however, Cadmus will give his daughter the name of a possible host (1371). 385.  Since part of Dionysus’s message from the theologeion is missing (following line 1329), it is impossible to say what decision he would have made about his cults in the city, and about the barbarian Bacchants. One thing is certain, however: the latter are there on the stage, since the Chorus cannot leave. Regarding Dionysus’s rites in the

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Perhaps the intolerance and vulnerability of the city presented in the play was a message for the Athenian audience of 405 and after. The play renews the presentation of the tragic ambivalence of revenge, when revenge had become a political practice for aristocratic and popular parties. Already in 411, attempts at tyranny had threatened democracy, and Pentheus does act as a tyrant. His repression of Teiresias’s piety and wise political advice recalls Athens’s persecution of innovative thinkers, if Athens’s expulsion of Protagoras and the burning of his books—according to Diogenes Laertius—is accurate. The condemnation of Socrates is not far off. Both Teiresias and the guard speak of the need for relaxation from daily stresses and identify Dionysus as the one who delivers the remedy. The city, however, intends to imprison the women and cut off the head of the Stranger/Dionysus.386 Euripides’s message is entirely inscribed in the enlightened interpretation that Teiresias gives of the city and of Dionysus. Dionysus’s access to the city is achieved in his theater while in the play he is kept out of the city. This means that Euripides’s enlightened play conceives of both a Dionysus who is ideally no longer the vengeful one of the play, and a city that rejects Pentheus’s politics. The play, therefore, is the performance of the tragic action that ensues as the reverse of the enlightened, ideal premises that allow that performance to take place. Such premises, in inspiring the Bacchae, run the risk of attracting the hostility of the city and the god because of the negative representation the play offers of them. The reverse takes the form of a spectacular revenge already tainted by an enlightened interpretation that makes its victory also a partial defeat. In other terms, to give Dionysus city, what remains of the text suggests that he has mentioned no decision or project. No one makes any reference to the rites during the dialogue between Dionysus, Cadmus, and Agave that follows his speech. Moreover, the Theban women are still in the mountains (1381), certainly without Agave, the Stranger, or the voice of the god; and we may wonder what the Theban women will think of Dionysus’s rituals after they have participated in the gruesome sparagmos and have their king’s blood on their hands. Agave’s sisters, at any rate, will follow her into her exile. Against this backdrop, the paradox of the divine cult stands out in sharp relief, for only within the cultural and political institutions of the state are divine cults institutionalized, and are the myths that accompany them invented and transformed. At this moment, Thebes has no political institutions. 386. Euripides’s play, through Teiresias, extols Dionysism as a blessing but, through the revenge, characterizes it as an evil and nasty religion. The play shows both faces of Dionysism.

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access to the Athenian theater means to give him what in the play he cannot obtain, and to empower the city with a control over him and over itself that in the play it does not have. Only the enlightened interpretation of Teiresias in the play provides the presupposed ideological conditions that make possible the 405 performance of the play in the Theater of Dionysus. The play’s message, therefore, ends with textual paradoxes for the spectators. Notwithstanding the pain this performance caused the audience, the play simultaneously reassured them, by showing that a Dionysus as brutal as the one portrayed here would not have had access to the city. Yet, the pity the audience felt for the victims of Dionysus’s excess had simultaneously to combine with the recognition that Pentheus and Cadmus deserved some sort of punishment: DIONYSUS: If you had known to be wise, when you were refusing to, you would now have the son of Zeus as your ally and be happy. CADMUS: Dionysus, we beseech you: we have done you wrong. DIONYSUS: Late you have understood us: when you ought to, you did not know us. (1341-45)

If the spectators felt that their city was behaving with the same arrogance and arbitrary violence as Pentheus’s city, that their city was violating the oaths made in the names of the gods, and defiling the rites and the statues of the gods, then they must have felt pity and fear for their present city and for its current victims. By giving Dionysus and the city roles that Euripides’s enlightened drama criticizes through Teiresias and through the ensuing tragic revenge, the play reveals that the enlightenment is the intellectual source of the drama. Yet, as the spectators realize, not only is the voice of Teiresias derided by the city, but his ritual seat is destroyed, and had he not been old, he would have been more seriously persecuted. Now the spectators live in a city where the enlightened thinkers are persecuted. Euripides himself wrote this play in exile. In a few concluding remarks I would like to highlight the striking effects and potential purposes of Euripides’s creative and innovating philosophical and religious views. He contributed significantly to the growing crisis that beset the traditional representations of the Olympian gods at the

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end of his century. He waged his attack on various fronts, not only by constantly filling his divine characters with their most unappealing anthropomorphic images, but also by delivering a serious polemic—not deprived of humor—against the Aeschylean theodicy, and any other sort of divine beneficial teleology. He did not simply depict, as Sophocles did, an Olympus difficult to understand but ultimately responsible; he depersonalized Olympus by translating it into indifferent cosmic principles: through this process the anthropomorphic gods were shown to be ethically irresponsible. In the place of a piety for these irresponsible deities, he proposed the wisdom of a new piety, making his own plays the icon of this new mode of being. He kept on proposing innovative insights derived from philosophical speculations, although he knew that these cultural innovations would fail to persuade the bulk of his audience. The mere ideation of a new motivation for any phenomenon, and its placement in contrast to a traditional one, weaken the traditional argument and create a stimulus to doubts and thinking. The voice of innovation and of reasonable proposals resounds everywhere to reveal and highlight the misleading and destructive opposed options preferred by established norms and interests.

29.  Euripides’s Poetry Before morning you shall be here And Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries And the branded moon. (Samuel Beckett, “Alba”) In poetry, the how trumps the what. (Rachel Hadas, TLS 22 [June 2012]: 16)

In the course of my analyses I have often focused on the formal aspects of Euripides’s poetic texts. Yet, since there is great interest in the poet’s philosophical and religious views, I should exemplify some of the strategies through which the innovative, even subversive stances go hand in hand with the pitiful images of suffering characters. This connection is at the heart of Euripides’s poetic elaboration. I will also examine Euripides’s appreciation of poetry, and the troubling decisions he must have faced for each play when promulgating unpopular views on stage.

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Music is the most evident innovative aspect of Euripides’s art.387 It is an artistic feature that could be called “revolutionary” in relation to standard musical practice in tragedy, and this “revolution” is not under cover. Aristophanes had already noticed and parodied the new trends of music that Euripides instituted for the purpose of increasing in the audience the experience of pity.388 Music gives voice to emotional, confessional, and imaginary wanderings of the human psyche under the rush and grief of passion, in monodic arias, duets, kommoi, and pathetic choral odes. Euripides enlarged the musical texture of his plays especially by increasing the monodic singing, which creates in the audience the impression that the feelings emerge directly from within the psyche of the singer. In contrast to the choral odes, the monody expresses immediate and non-traditional emotions, the theatrical voice and being of the individual; in contrast to the trimeters, the monody raises these emotions to such intimate intensity that their repetition in trimeters sounds almost like a different message. It is sufficient to compare Alcestis’s singing in a duet with Admetus (Alc. 244–72) and her trimeters (280–362) to measure the difference. Phaedra’s hallucinations are performed in recited anapaests, but the presence of lyric long alphas instead of etas in her language suggests that, in contrast to the Nurse, she might be producing a lyric or quasi-lyric performance.389 The upsetting feature of Phaedra’s hallucinatory outburst is that it is itself evidence that she cannot control her passion. The spectators, knowing that anthropomorphic Aphrodite has instilled sexual craving in Phaedra, are left unable to decide whether the defeat of her reasonable and enlightened project reveals the failure of the philosophical explications denying the divine source of human desires, or proves that her enlightened attempt is still a noble human reaction, and its defeat a mere return of the repressed passion. The audience can feel pity for Phaedra’s hallucinations because they show that even a noble nature is far from being responsive to moral intentions.

387.  Several eminent critics have studied these innovative features: see especially Csapo 1999–2000; Furley 1999–2000; Wilson 1999–2000. 388.  Pucci 1961. 389.  See section 10.

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Different examples of the interaction and synergy between cool, enlightened, even subversive stances and the pitiful images of suffering human beings put on display a great variety of poetic strategies. Orestes and Electra sing as they relive the murder of Clytemnestra: this specific performance colors and ultimately defines the new theatrical characterization of Orestes, who is no longer the determined hero of the Odysssey and the Oresteia, but a sensitive, wise, and troubled young man. His singing voice transforms the dramatic shock of seeing his mother’s naked breast, producing operatic effects (1207ff.). It is in the same kommos that he accuses Apollo of having sung an injust oracle (1190–93): ἰὼ Φοῖβ’, ἀνύμνησας δίκαι’ ἄφαντα, φανερὰ δ’ ἐξέπραξας ἄχεα, φόνια δ’ ὤπασας λάχε’ ἀπὸ γᾶς Ἑλλανίδος. Alas, Phoebus, you sang an oracle of obscure justice but visible are the pains you imposed on us, and you conferred on me the murderer’s destiny of exile far from the land of Hellas.

Orestes apostrophizes the god, inserting the invocation in the dialogue between the Chorus and Electra (1178ff.). The first antithesis is built in an almost complete chiasmus with paranomasia, ἄφαντα, φανερὰ, the last word being emphasized by the metrical resolution; this antithesis is placed within the antithesis between “singing” and “doing,” ἀνύμνησας, φανερὰ δ’ ἐξέπραξας. This last word contrasts with ὤπασας, indicating the wrong companionship that Apollo, with his oracle, gave to Orestes. The whole utterance mimics the obliquity of the god himself (Loxias), while revealing it. The assonance unites ἄχεα, λάχε’ ἀ[πὸ; the whole passage insists on the same sound—a: the first vowel of “Apollo”—and its plural neuter forms that pile up abstract notions to cover up real and concrete facts. The god’s prophetic utterance is defined as “song,” whose clear performance contrasts with the obscure justice (δίκαι’ ἄφαντα) it proclaims, and ends with an action that produces grief. The description of Apollo’s deed displays the contradictory almost oxymoronic nature of his oracle. Line 971 begins with a dochmiac, ἰὼ Φοῖβ’, ἀνύμ-,390 that gives prominence to the prophetic name of the god, and 390.  Dale 1983, 67–68.

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continues with sung iambic meters, which are the measure of the whole kommos. This meter is the typical rhythm of threnody, and accordingly the contrast between the god’s invisible justice and the visible human misery is embodied in the lamenting rhythm of funeral songs. It is in this emotional recognition of divine inefficacy that the audience is induced to do a double take: on the one hand, the spectators understand the subversive novelty of the charge that Orestes hurls at Apollo: indeed, no son should be asked to take upon himself the task of punishing his own mother by murdering her. This new Orestes may be right: his elaborated stylistic antithesis, his meaningful assonances, underline the subversive force of his statement. On the other hand, his murderous role is what the tradition has established and repeatedly attributed to him and to Apollo’ s oracle: accordingly, Euripides’s text follows the traditional story, but, in various passages, reveals its ideological distance from it and, in the kommos, denies justice to the order given by the anthropomorphic god. By this denial, Euripides seems to give his audience a warning: be prepared to accept that you will not receive any help from the gods. Even the prophetic machinery may simply be the source of wrong advice and criminal orders, while the mythical stories of the hypertext present often a false, unreal theodicy. In the kommos in the Electra, Orestes realizes too late, after the deed, when he replays in his mind the awful murder, that he should have rejected Apollo’s order. His singing transmits the painful working of his consciousness about a remorse that will continue through his life and that he will have to endure. Perhaps the singing pierces his soul, giving a more accented form and resonance to this intimate message of his mind. On the message level, his singing offers to the spectators the sound of an Orestes who turns his moral experience of the murderous nature of Apollo’s oracle into a threnodic music expressing traditional laments for dead people. The audience connects this peculiar sensitivity with Orestes’s wise meditation on “pity” through which, in the Electra, Euripides created a new Orestes. The criticism of Apollo’s justice, in the sung kommos, repeats the analogous one Orestes uttered earlier in dialogue with Electra at 971–73: {Ορ}.  ὦ Φοῖβε, πολλήν γ’ ἀμαθίαν ἐθέσπισας. {Ηλ.}  ὅπου δ’ Ἀπόλλων σκαιὸς ἦι, τίνες ςοφοί; {Ορ.}  ὅστις μ’ ἔχρησας μητέρ’, ἣν οὐ χρῆν, κτανεῖν.

 Euripides’s Poetry   195 ORESTES: O Phoebus! What a demented oracle you gave. ELECTRA: If Apollo is unreasonable who is wise? ORESTES: You bade me kill one I should not kill, my mother.

Orestes breaks the stichomythic dialogue with Electra and, making the appropriate gestures, apostrophizes Phoebus, invoking Apollo with his oracular name. The breaking of the dialogue and the apostrophe to the god reveal the psychological distance between Orestes and his sister. This is an important separation from Electra, who took an active role in the revenge plot against Clytemnestra. In fact, even now she tries to defend the sophia of Apollo. The paronomasia at 973 illustrates how the oracle bade Orestes to do something that should not have been done.391 In both the sung and the unsung passages the absurdity of the divine oracle is highlighted by strong stylistic devices; but the words of the intellectual horizon, amathia, sophia, appear only in the trimeter passage, as part of an inceptive discussion. Here the prosaic words tell clearly and brutally what in both texts is the enlightened source of Orestes’s view, but, in the sung passage, this view is expressed in antithetic phrases and abstract expressions, indicating the devious nature of Apollo’s oracle. Through the singing and the appropriate music and gesturing, raising his experience to an intimate level of heart-rending confession, Orestes unwittingly subverts a century or more of Orestes myth.392 The play Orestes provides an illuminating example of the same subversion by combining the enlightened momentum with the views of a pitiful victim. As the Erinyes terrorize Orestes, the audience realizes, with Electra, that these figures are mere figments of his imagination. The reduction of the Aeschylean Erinyes to hallucinations is an enlightened step: the spectators are taught that the Erinyes Orestes sees are nothing but the manifestation of his guilty consciousness, that is, of his sunesis, as he will later explain to Menelaus. The audience is simultaneously invited to feel pity, like Electra, for Orestes’s vain terror: he is a victim of his own moral code, but unwittingly of a mythical culture that no longer holds any truth. 391.  I follow Kovacs’s translation. The paranomasia says something like “your omen bade me carry out the abominable murder of my mother.” Rhetorical preciousness informs Euripides’s poetry. Lines in his plays feature figures of speech even when there are factual statements, as in this case. 392.  See section 14.

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To this extent, he is made to play the traditional Orestes in the void of what made Orestes Orestes, and he is offered to the sympathy of the audience for being deceived, in some way, by a mistaken, traditional theater. The ironic maliciousness of these convoluted effects is bottomless. Irony, pity, and enlightment produce special poetic effects in the dramatic comedies Ion and Helen. In the Ion, Creusa has been raped by Apollo and then abandoned by the god as she becomes pregnant and delivers a child. While the audience knows that Apollo has taken care of the child and with the help of Hermes has placed him in Apollo’s Delphic sanctuary, Creusa is unaware of this, and lives in fear that her sexual affair will be discovered, and with a sense of guilt and the horror that the child disappeared from the place where she hid it and may have been destroyed. In a pathetic monody (859–922) she hurls her resentment at Apollo, his seductive beauty, his charming singing, his insensitiveness, and her grief for the terrible destiny of her child. The monody in anapaests with occasional dochmiacs is a “sort of anti-hymn in which the celebration is turned into blame” (Mirto 2009, 286). The ambiguous nature and effect of Apollo can be perceived in various passages; such as the passage in which Creusa describes the god’s beauty as shining and golden (887–96): “You came to me shining in your golden hair”; here “you came” (the aorist ἦλθές) announces an unexpected, surprising divine epiphany,393 and the god’s shining golden hair matches the “flowers reflecting golden light” that Creusa is collecting to prepare an ornament for herself.394 The rape occurs in a cave where the god seems to have his couch, as she screams “Mother!” In her harsh attack blaming Apollo for neglect of their common child, Creusa calls him “lover [or husband],” a “bad” one of course (κακὸς εὐνάτωρ, 912): the word is used in tragedy for both legitimate and illegitimate relations, and it is employed here by Creusa with negative force, but indicating a sort of family relationship with Apollo. The text seems intended not only to attract the pity of the audience and readers, as she expresses real pain, but also to suggest that this relationship is in 393.  ἦλθές μοι χρυσῶι χαίταν μαρμαίρων; compare Il. 1.194: ἕλκετο δ’ ἐκ κολεοῖο μέγα ξίφος, ἦλθε δ’ Ἀθήνη. 394.  Wilamowitz (1926: 127, commenting on line 887) writes: “The representation shows that the young woman was not insensitive (unempfänglich) to the beauty of the god.”

 Euripides’s Poetry   197

some way an “affair” that will end felicitously. The audience is able to perceive this tone because they know that Apollo has not only taken care of the child, but, in circuitous and dramatic ways, is arranging for Creusa to find and recognize her son, Ion. Furthermore, although Apollo appears as anthropomorphic god and rapist, he is also evoked as the god of music and poetry: metadramatically he is devising the poetic and musical action that is taking place on the stage. Creusa sings pathetically about her cruel destiny, without knowing that she is actually being led toward her full happiness. The audience’s pity for Apollo’s victim must be affected by this realization, and their feelings of pity ought to combine with an ambivalent or ironic awareness. In a certain way, Creusa exemplifies the emotional condition of the audience of a tragic play: spectators suffer as they identify with the innocent victims of violence without being fully conscious that, through this identification and through pity, they are in fact receiving the pleasure that great poetry delivers and the wisdom that pity teaches. There is an analogous correspondence between the audience and tragic characters in the case of young sacrificial victims: spectators, in sharing through their imagination the victims’ pain and courage, receive the benefits of pleasure and the harsh lesson of wisdom. All this reveals the internal reflection that is the engine of literary art: the events of the plot and the attitudes of the characters embody and provide live images of the creative principles that govern the work; even the spectators are programmed to react in accordance with these principles and thus to respond emotionally as mimetic versions of the characters. At the end of the Troades, the kommos between Hecuba and the Chorus portrays a different connection and synergy between the innovative, enlightened stance of the poet and the pitiful image of the victims. While Hecuba, as queen of Troy, is emotionally attached to the temples of the gods and the royal palace that fire is about to destroy, the Chorus displays a cool reaction to the destruction of the city (Tro. 1317–19): {Εκ.}  {Χο.}  {Εκ.}  {Χο.} 

ἰὼ θεῶν μέλαθρα καὶ πόλις φίλα, ἒ ἔ. τὰν φόνιον ἔχετε φλόγα δορός τε λόγχαν. τάχ’ ἐς φίλαν γᾶν πεσεῖσθ’ ἀνώνυμοι.

198    Eu ripides’s Revolution under Cover HECUBA: O temples of the gods and city I love . . . CHORUS: Alas! HECUBA: you are under murderous flame and point of the spear. CHORUS: Soon you will fall on the dear ground, and be without a name.

At 1317, Hecuba’s repetition of the invocation she uttered at 1295 adds pathos to the emotional scene: the word order is chiastic and highlights the contrast between the divine and human sides of Troy, both of which are overwhelmed by fire and enemy forces. There is also a tenuous, but perceivable assonance in each of the two word pairs θεῶν μέλαθρα and πόλις φίλα. Line 1318 contains a hysteron proteron and also displays chiastic order: the first figura closes what could be a long list of evils and emphasizes the enemy army; the second figura contrasts the two synecdoches, “flame” for “fire” and “point of the spear” for “army.” The temples and palace literally hold and possess these evils instead of hosting the statues of the gods and the royal family. With line 1319, the Chorus gives the final verdict: addressing the temples and the buildings of the city that Hecuba has invoked, the Chorus predicts, “You will fall on the . . . ground, and be without a name.” The apostrophe personifies the temples and city and identifies them as fallen heroes. As Biehl (1989, 455–56) remarks, the fall of the city is a metaphor that evokes the fall of a warrior, but the city will fall without glory. Thus, the women of the Chorus contradict, as we have seen, Hecuba’s epic confidence in the survival of Troy’s glory (1240–45). She had spoken in iambic trimeters, while here the whole kommos is performed through sung iambs, with frequent resolutions (see, for instance, 1312), syncopations, and occasional dochmiacs—the typical threnodic rhythm. Hecuba does not respond to the Chorus’s nihilism but turns her attention to herself (1320–24): {Εκ.}  κόνις δ’ ἴσα καπνῶι πτέρυγι πρὸς αἰθέρ’    ἄιστον οἴκων ἐμῶν με θήσει. {Χο.}  ὄνομα δὲ γᾶς ἀφανὲς εἶσιν· HECUBA: Dust, like smoke with its wing moving up to the sky, will make me unable to know my house. CHORUS: The name of the land will disappear.

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The dust of course refers to the ashes of the burning city: Hecuba introduces a simile whereby the ashes go up like smoke to the aither, the sky, but also to Zeus, of course, in view of 1078–79 and of the identification of Zeus with Aither. Perhaps Hecuba is made to imply that Zeus is the indifferent witness of the burning of the city, a city devoted to him and to the gods. The simile, the poetic device most characteristic of epic, introduces here a negative theological innuendo, the terrible absence of the divine, the divine abandonment of the world of mankind. Maliciously the text rejects the main theological principle of epic, the divine concern for mankind, through a figure of speech that is distinctive of epic. Euripides loves to play with the contrasting tones of such pathetic situations. After the simile, the ashes do what they do in a burning city, they cover Hecuba’s palace, so that she can no longer see (know) it. The palace, to which at lines 1295 and 1317 Hecuba had clung so emotionally, as to a related person, now disappears forever. Hecuba draws the audience’s pity to herself, and the Chorus confirms their view about the disappearance of the city’s name. This analysis of a few scenes only hints at the extraordinary variety and virtuosity of Euripides’s textual strategies—strategies that present bold, optimistic, enlightened, views as well as extremely pitiful and negative scenes. The bold and enlightened views consistently fail to open a serene, peaceful world, unless there is an ironic note to the text, as in the dramatic comedies. As we have seen, the reasons for the failure of the enlightened views to change the miserable conditions of the world are several: hopeful, innovative options are rejected by an entrenched society; promising and reasonable arguments about human nature are contradicted by nature itself; good will and heroic commitments are driven to disaster by madness or false oracles; political power runs to suicide because of its arrogance and blindness. All of this serves to confirm the traditional image of Euripides the pessimist, the one who brings suffering humanity to center stage. Yet Euripides is fully aware of what he is doing, and we can see his humanity on display in the way he tries to respond to each situation: through his characters he proposes different solutions and innovative interpretations of reality, often in the face of the hostility of the majority. Teiresias tries to persuade the king, and because of his insistence, he is severely punished: the scandal of his persecution worsens the picture of the cultural situation. Yet, if Teresias is seen as a possible model of the enlightened thinker, and of the poet who has created his character for the stage, his attempt

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to persuade the king, at the risk of losing everything, sounds a positive and hopeful note. In play after play, incurring immense unpopularity and hostility, Euripides never ceased to present innovative views, and the dramatic consequences when those views were rejected. Character after character—Phaedra, Hecuba, Theseus (in the Suppliant Women), Orestes, Heracles, Teiresias—is made to challenge the ethical, political, and religious premises of the traditional stories and introduce new modes of piety that would produce different stories and suggest different ways of explaining and experiencing the human condition. Indeed, the sheer presence of a reasonable argument, of an illuminating view, however utopian it may be, offers hope, even if that argument or view is ignored or fails to be accepted. Simultaneously, the ignorance or the rejection of such an argument or view appears to be the cause of the worsening of human life. There is wisdom in recognizing this economy, in presenting such options, in subverting the traditional views, which so clearly lead to human suffering, in parodying old-fashioned beliefs, and in giving sense to endurance and tears. Sympathy for humanity is more than just pity for its misery; it involves being part of a complex cultural world (of sophia) in which the resources for endurance are many: poetry, song, dancing, wine, wise love, friendship, and correct piety. I have occasionally highlighted Euripides’s poetic diction, his extremely refined rhetoric, which is rich in mannerisms as well as in bold, risqué artistic devices. Euripides’s style exhibits some of the virtuoso artificiality that can be found in some of his philosophical elaborations or extravagant utopias; the same desire for what is new and inspiring, and care for exactness and reasoning; the taste for modulating several tones and for juxtaposing constrasting views; the determination to pursue what is complex and endlessly unreachable. Euripides must have loved lavishing his marvelous intelligence and artistic talents on the production of his plays; indeed, his texts often describe the pleasure the poet feels in the creation of his songs: I shall not cease mingling the Graces and the Muses, the sweetest yoking.395 No, may I not live without poetry (amousia),396 but may I always [!] be 395. Pindar, Pyth. 9.89–90: Χαρίτων κελαδεννᾶν μή με λίποι καθαρὸν φέγγος, “May the pure light of the chanting Charites not abandon me”; and, for the association of Charites and Muses, see Hymn Hom. 27.15; Sappho 128, etc. 396.  The re-etymologization of amousia is already a creative act, giving some of the Muses’ charm to the poet in his speech-act.

 Euripides’s Poetry   201 crowned.397 Still, as an old singer, I celebrate398 Memory (Mnemosyne), and I will sing Heracles’ glorious victory in company with Bromios, dispenser of wine, and amid the music of the seven-toned lyre and the Libyan pipe. (HF 673–86)399

This passage celebrates the sweetness and the pleasure of poetry,400 and its musical instruments—the lyre, evoking Apollo, and the pipe, the instrument of Dionysus and of tragedy.401 The pleasure of creation, and the heart-rending sound of the aulos, were part of the enormously complex elaboration of which I have described only some momentous aspects. This pleasure must have emerged in the poet’s mind along with an awareness of the contradictory effects of poetry: the pleasure of poetry for both its creator and its audience must have allayed and displaced the darkness of human life that the poet’s creation brought to the stage. Moreover, if this poetry can speak the truth, and heal, it is like a rainbow, announcing the end of a storm. Euripides’s theatrical fiction disregards this paradox and pretends that its language tells things as they are, while suggesting that this is a utopia when its characters claim it. Thus his literary fiction tolerates the paradoxical views of language, according to which, while telling things as they are, it is an accessory to sinister and 397.  Poets carried a crown during the performance as a sign of their devotion to the Muses. “As celebrators of Heracles’ victory, of course they are already crowned, so the visual cue reinforces the sense that their promise of devotion will hold true” (Martin 2007, 54). The desire of the poet is to continue to sing until the last day of his life: “always!” 398.  The MS reads: “The old poet still celebrates (keladei) . . . , still I sing . . .”; Diggle, Kovacs, and others correct the MS, perhaps rightly, in view of 692–93. If not rightly, then, “the old epic poet” serves as a model, for the Chorus as a poet celebrating Heracles. 399.  Many critics refuse to read in these words any subjective feeling of the author, but for my purpose it does not really matter, since the important point is that Euripides was aware of the excitement and the seduction that poetic creation produces. 400. See Supp. 178–93, where the joy of the poet in creating and that of the audience in receiving the creation are underscored: “I would like to give pleasant persuasion to my supplication, and, though unfortunately I am not a poet, I would like to be like a poet, who must give birth in joy to the songs he gives birth to. If he is not in this disposition of mind, he cannot give pleasure to others, if he himself is in distress. He has no right to do so.” 401.  The wildly different musical effects and emotional power of the two instruments are here, momentarily at least, in agreement: “Lyre and aulos are here in a very rare tragic image of harmonious union. They are partners in celebration, not enemies” (Wilson 1999–2000, 235; see Csapo 1999–2000, 418–19).

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perverse human passions; it depicts the unbearable conditions of human life and yet simultaneously heals men’s pains and sorrows. The human condition seems then less harrowing. The cost of creating such poetry was great for Euripides: his very few victories and the constant attacks by the comedians testify to his unpopularity and to his status as a favorite comic target before large audiences. It is evidence of his incredible poetic and intellectual commitment that he did not give in. In each new play he represented mortals abandoned by the gods, and conceived the traditional gods in the questionable and critical way we have seen—being unable, of course, to be fully explicit about the contradiction that is inherent in the human form and limitation of really divine natures. Euripides’s human beings are conscious of being victims of their passions, or of cosmic forces such as Necessity and Chance, and not captives of a divine personal curse: they appear to be the latter only as a result of mythical, anthropomorphic actions on the part of the gods, but these actions are always juxtaposed with the revelation of their absurdity, injustice, and ignorance. Deity needs nothing and has a cosmic impersonal ray of action. Euripides exercised the prudence and the covering that I have proposed in order for his plays to be performed, and to avoid persecution after their performance. The picture that emerges of Euripides’s relationship to his work is complex, and we can only speculate about it. We cannot know the extent of his critical awareness and involvement in the philosophy of his time, the anguish or exhilaration he felt as an agent of a crisis that was creating a break between a glorious past and a threatening present, or the extent to which he felt free to expose himself to risk: we only have his writings to search for answers to these questions. Therefore we must open up each text, unfold what in it is bent, expose what remains in the shadows, separate what is entangled, and accept what is or appears to be oxymoronic or paradoxical—but without pushing beyond what is there or searching for specific intentions that will forever escape us. Fortunately, though, by making use of these critical strategies, we can bring the extraordinary newness and revolution of his work to light. What we end up with is a portrait of an author whose work leads us to imagine the existential and cultural decisions, uncertainties, ambiguities, and torments he must have experienced as he realized that he had to cover what he knew to be true or crucial, and pondered how and what to sacrifice,

 Euripides’s Poetry   203

or as he recognized that he was really unable to be more specific or clearer, or as he suspected that things were really more complicated and ambiguous than any philosophical explanation would induce us to believe. He realized that the tradition stored an immense wealth of wisdom and poetry that philosophy could not transfer into new terms without great losses and painful betrayals. He operated in this double world with its double truth. Many creators find themselves in the same contradictory situation at times of crisis and sudden changes. Euripides had the strength and the genius to stand for and contribute to the new, enlightened wisdom, channeling it through the traditional forms and renewing the cultural climate of the theater and of the city. We can and should continue to refine and enhance this portrait of Euripides, all the while adding to our understanding of and sympathy for the seemingly unfamiliar and yet terribly familiar work of this complex and disquieting thinker, poet, and human being.

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Subject Index

Specific citations of authors and titles will be found in the separate Index Locorum. Aelion, R., 89 n 180, 99 n 199 Aeschylus, 89 n 181, 90, 91, 99 n 198, 115, 191 Agathon, 66 n 133 aido¯s (respect), 18, 56, 89 Aither, Zeus identified with, 12, 105 n 213, 149, 152 n 317, 199 Alcestis: Ananke¯ in, 4 – 5, 7 – 9, 11, 85, 148; anthropomorphism and, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 85; death in, 8 – 11; double burial in, 70; innovative use of music in, 192; ­self-sacrifice setup in, 71; unexpected loss in, 73 n 153 Alcibiades, 66 n 133, 115 – 16 n 233, 117 n 237, 126 n 260 Allan, William, 2, 14 n 20, 62 alterity/otherness, 14 – 15, 17 – 18, 36, 51 – 52, 60, 65 – 67, 73, 95, 107, 151, 172, 186, 187 Ananke¯ (Necessity), 4 – 5, 7 – 9, 11 – 12, 47, 66, 73, 85, 105, 148, 149

anapaests, 11 n 17, 59, 192, 196 Anaxagoras, 13, 82, 103, 104 n 207, 104 n 209, 106 n 215, 124 n 255 Andromache, downfall of Hermione in, 61 – 63, 65 anthropomorphism, 4 – 14; c­ onfession of Phaedra in Hippolytus, split/conflation of anthropomorphic and cosmic explanation of eros in, 49 – 61; conflation/split of divine image with cosmic principle, 4 – 8, 28, 47 – 61, 63, 67, 147 – 50, 186; debate between Helen and Hecuba in Troades and, 41 n 80, 46 – 49; dual cosmic/­ anthropomorphic divinity in Bacchae, 147 – 50; Euripidean critique of, 1 – 2, 48, 84 – 88, 105, 186, 191; Necessity and Death in Alcestis and, 8 – 11. See also specific gods and their attributes Antiope, 30

218    Subject Index Antiphon, 14 n 20, 82 aphanes (disappearance), 81 Aphrodite: Andromache not addressing role of, 61 n 124, 62; appeal of Hecuba to Zeus in Troades and, 82 – 83; as both sweet and ferocious, 165 n 349; confession of Phaedra in Hippolytus and, 50 – 51, 53 – 55, 57 n 114, 63, 149 – 50; dialogue between Hecuba and Andromache in Troades not mentioning, 74 – 75; dual anthropomorphic and cosmic nature of, 49 – 61, 63, 67, 148, 149 – 50; eros deriving from, 36, 37 n 64, 38 – 39, 40 n 79, 42, 46; as eros itself, 2, 6, 42, 47 – 49; revenge of, in Hippolytus, 176 – 77, 178 Apollo: Adrastus’s actions driven by oracle of, in Suppliant Women, 109; in Alcestis, 8 – 9; central role in Andromache, 61 n 124; Dionysus, association with, 157 n 329, 157 n 331; in the Ion, 196 – 97; Orestes and oracle of, in Electra, 18, 89 – 90, 91 n 183, 94, 140 n 291, 193 – 95; sacking of Delphi predicted in Bacchae, 157 n 329, 185; Teiresias in Bacchae as prophet of, 145, 150, 154, 157 n 329; women not granted sound of lyre by, 26, 27, 29 Aristogeiton, 66 n 133, 160 n 339 Aristophanes, 14 n 20, 35, 64, 172 Aristophanes of Byzantium, 95 Artemis, 54, 156 n 328, 165 n 349, 178 Asklepios, 5, 9 n 14 asyndeton, 117 n 236, 131 n 273, 161 Athena, 39 n 73, 41 n 80, 42, 86, 95 n 188, 101, 102 n 205, 128, 138 – 41, 152 n 316, 169, 176 Athena Polias, 102 n 205 Athens: Acropolis, shrines to Aphrodite and Hippolytus on, 53 n 105; Areopagus, court of, 94; Erectheus, patriotic readiness of Praxithea to sacrifice daughter in, 100 – 103; polis’s loss of control and authority, 142; political myth of, 95 – 96, 107 – 8, 112, 115 – 16, 131, 139, 140 – 41

Bacchae, 142 – 90; activities of Bacchants in, 169 – 72; attempted imprisonment of Dionysus, 163 – 69; birth myth of Dionysus in, 145, 146, 152 – 54; city in, 154, 171, 172, 177, 181 – 82, 185 – 90; conflation/split of anthropomorphic and cosmic divine natures in, 47, 147 – 50, 186; death of Pentheus, 182 – 85; destruction of Teiresias’s seat of augury, 158, 162, 185, 199; dialogue between Teiresias and Cadmus, 144 – 45; Dodds’s interpretation of, 5, 143 n 296, 173; etymological explanations in, 40 n 77, 145 n 300, 153 nn 321 – 22; exchange between Pentheus, Cadmus, and Teiresias, 145 – 54, 158 – 62; Hippolytus compared, 176 – 77, 178, 180; initiation of Pentheus as Bacchant, 175 – 81; madness of Agave in, 184; madness of Pentheus, 174 n 365, 180 – 83; mask carried by Dionysus, 154 n 346; metaleptic role of Teiresias in, 83; palace destroyed by Dionysus, 167 – 68; Pentheus’s rejection of Dionysus in, 143; political focus of, 142 – 44, 158 – 59, 161 – 62 n 341, 189; recommendation of Teiresias to accept Dionysism, 158 – 63; religious features of Dionysism in, 142 – 44, 154 – 58, 161, 169 – 70; Semele, Dionysus as son of, 63, 147, 149 n 313, 150, 156 – 57, 166 – 67; sexual impropriety of Bacchants, Pentheus’s obsession with, 64, 159 – 61, 172 – 74, 175 – 76; sophia in, 150, 157 – 58, 179, 187; sophism of Teiresias in, 144, 146 – 50, 154, 158 n 334, 161; sparagmos, 153 n 322, 156, 165, 169, 171, 176, 182, 184, 188, 189 n 385; Suppliant Women compared, 112, 142, 144 n 298; wine, Dionysus as, 2, 47, 49 n 100, 147 – 51, 187; Zeus, Dionysus as son of, 47, 149, 153 n 322, 167, 185, 187 Barlow, Shirley, 81 Barrett, W. S., 55 n 110, 57, 58 beauty, in Greek culture, 41 n 80

Subject Index   219 Bernek, R., 98 n 193, 111 n 224 Biehl, Werner, 39 n 75, 198 Bollack, Jean, 153 n 320, 170 n 359, 171 n 362 Burian, P., 98 n 193, 128 n 266, 130 n 272, 135 n 286 Burkert, Walter, 152 n 316 Carson, Anne, 44 n 89 Chantraine, P., 69 n 139, 74 n 154, 75 n 157 Charon, 8, 10, 11 Cleon, 23 n 38, 97 Clinton, Kevin, 155 n 323 Codino, Fausto, 64 – 65 n 132 Craik, E., 76 n 161 Critias, 104 Croally, N. T., 41 n 80, 41 n 82, 44 n 88, 120 n 243 cultural isolation, 52, 65 – 67, 93 – 94 Cypris, 40, 42, 44, 48 n 99, 57 daimo¯n (divine force), 73, 91 n 183 Dale, A.M., 8 de Man, Paul, 45, 138 death: burial of corpses, divine law regarding, 95, 114 – 15, 139; of Euripides, 142; immortality in poetry, indifference of dead to, 80; Necessity and, 5; oration for Argive corpses, in Suppliant Women, 130 – 35; Patroclus, funeral/burial of, 70, 126 n 261; of Pentheus, in Bacchae, 182 – 85; rescue of Argive corpses, in Suppliant Women, 128 – 30; self-immolation of Evadne, in Suppliant Women, 67 – 70, 96, 130, 135 – 37; separation of body and soul at, 124; Sophocles, Antigone compared to Suppliant Women on, 105 n 212; Thanatos in Alcestis, 8 – 9, 11 Delion, battle of, 108, 115 n 233, 121, 126 – 27 Delphic oracle. See Apollo Demeter, 96 – 97, 98 n 193, 129, 147 – 49 democracy and monarchy, debate between Theseus and Theban Herald on, 21 n 33, 118 n 239, 121 – 25

Democritus, 103 desire. See eros deus ex machina, 28, 89, 90, 128 n 265, 139 n 291, 184 Di Benedetto, Vincenzo, 149 n 311, 160, 165 n 350, 168 n 357 Diano, Carlo, 16 n 24, 34, 104 n 207 Diels, Hermann, 13 Dike¯ (justice), 12, 14 Diogenes of Apollonia, 12 – 13 Dionysos Kadmeios, 157 n 331 Dionysus, 2, 47, 88. See also Bacchae dissoi logoi, 15, 21 n 33, 23, 31, 32 Dodds, E. R., 5 – 6, 12, 47, 48 n 99, 52, 56 n 111, 58, 143, 146 n 301, 148, 152 n 317, 159 n 335, 170, 173, 174, 180 n 372, 183 n 378, 186 n 382 Dué, Casey, 2, 65, 72 n 148 Easterling, P. E., 72 n 151 Electra: Castor as deus ex machina in, 139 – 40 n 291; metalepsis of Orestes in, 88 – 94; musical reliving of murder of Clytemnestra in, 91, 193; oracle of Apollo in, 18, 89 – 90, 91 n 183, 94, 140 n 291, 193 – 95; pity and sophia in, 18 – 19; remorse of Orestes in, 91 – 93, 194, 195 – 96 Empedocles, 13, 124 n 255, 149 enlightenment, in Euripides, 1 – 3; eros and, 43, 46, 49, 54 – 55; metalepsis and, 1 – 3, 82 – 83, 88, 92 – 94; pitiful victims, synergy with, 192 – 93, 195 – 97; poetic revolution and, 192 – 93, 195 – 97, 199, 203; politics and, 95 – 96, 108, 112, 117, 145, 146 n 301, 147, 150, 155, 158, 163; sophia and, 14, 18 – 19, 92 Erectheus, 100 – 103, 113, 114 Erinyes, 89 n 181, 92 – 93, 171 n 362, 195 eros, 4, 34 – 71; Alcestis, power of love in, 9; Aphrodite as origin of, 36, 37 n 64, 38 – 39, 40 n 79, 42, 46; appeal of Hecuba to Zeus in Troades and, 82 – 83; Bacchants, obsession of Pentheus with sexual impropriety of, 64, 159 – 61,

220    Subject Index eros (continued) 172 – 74, 175 – 76; confession of Phaedra in Hippolytus on, 49 – 61, 63, 67; debate between Hecuba and Helen in Troades on, 2, 36 – 42, 44, 46 – 49; Greek interest in, 66, 73 n 152; Greek terminology for, 35 n 62; Hermione’s downfall in Andromache and, 61 – 63, 65; human responsibility for, 42 – 43, 46, 62; imagination and, 44; isolation/otherness and, 52, 65 – 67; lament of enslaved Trojan women in Troades and, 72 – 76; language and, 52, 55 – 59, 62 – 63, 68 – 69; lewd gaze of the eye and, 40, 43 – 45, 48, 52 – 53; lewd women condemned by Phaedra in Hippolytus, 57 – 58; negative description of marriage in Medea and, 71; orgasm, 74 – 75; patriotic, 100 – 101, 102, 118; rape, 35 n 61, 37, 71, 72 n 149, 73 n 152, 76, 80, 196; self, dispossession of, 61 – 71; self-immolation of Evadne in Suppliant Women and, 67 – 70, 135 – 36; sexually uncontrolled women, interest of Euripides in, 64 – 65; sophia and, 36, 48, 49, 67; violent power of, 36 – 37, 45 n 91, 46 – 49 Eros, 43 n 86 euboulia (intelligent deliberation), 106, 109 – 10, 116, 131 eupsykhia (bravery), 109 – 10, 116, 131, 135 n 284 Euripidean revolution, nature of, 1 – 4, 190 – 203. See also specific plays by Euripides, and specific citations in the Index Locorum Foley H. P., 65, 99 n 200, 164 n 346, 165 Foucault, Michel, 35 Freud, Sigmund, 2 n 1, 143 n 296 gaze, lewd, 40, 43 – 45, 48, 52 – 53 Genette, G., 3, 82 n 173 Girard, R., 63 n 128 Goff, B. E., 56 n 113, 58 n 116, 98 n 193, 99 n 200, 120 n 243 Gorgias, 32, 34, 36 n 63, 37 n 67, 46 – 47, 56 n 112, 63

Gregory, Justina, 39 n 74, 78 n 167 Griffith, Mark, 115 n 233, 148 n 308 Grube, G. M. A., 122 n 248, 143 Guthrie, W. K. C., 22 n 35 Hadas, Rachel, 191 Hall, E., 116 n 235 Harmodius, 66 n 133, 160 n 339 Heath, Malcolm, 160 n 338, 174 n 365, 186 n 382 Hecuba, 32 – 34, 78 – 79, 99 n 199, 100 n 199 Heinimann, Felix, 13 Helen, 37, 119 n 240, 148 – 49 n 310, 152, 196 Henrichs, A., 143, 170 Hera: birth myth of Dionysus and, 152 – 53, 166; judgment of Paris and, 39 n 73, 41 n 80, 47, 49; lewd gaze of the eye and, 43 n 87; persecution of Heracles by, 83 – 88, 176 – 77, 178, 181; as Teleia, 87; tukhe¯ (chance), association with, 6, 85 – 87, 177 Heracleidae, myth of, 95 n 188 Heracles, 8 – 9, 11, 36 – 37, 64 n 129, 90 Heracles, 2, 19 n 27, 48, 83 – 88, 139 n 288, 176 – 77, 178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 188 Hermes, 148 n 310, 196 Herodotus, 36 n 63, 121 n 245 Hesk, Jon, 109, 116 n 235, 119 n 240 Hipparchus, 66 n 133, 160 n 339 Hippocrates and Hippocratic writings, 12 – 13, 66 n 133 Hippolytus: anthropomorphism in, 6; Aphrodite in, 50 – 51, 53 – 55, 57 n 114, 63, 149 – 50, 165 n 349, 176 – 77, 178; Bacchae compared, 176 – 77, 178, 180; confession of Phaedra and dialogue with Nurse in, 49 – 61, 63, 67; hallucinations of Phaedra in, 192; Hecuba compared, 33; lewd women condemned by Phaedra in, 57 – 58; metaleptic role of Phaedra in, 50, 54, 83; sophia and, 18 hyperbaton, 20 n 30, 55 n 109, 104 n 208, 151, 166 n 352

Subject Index   221 Ion, 35, 102 n 205, 137, 184, 196 – 97 Iphigenia in Aulis, 99 n 199, 100 n 201, 119 n 240, 142 irony, 3, 9, 13, 22, 55 n 110, 94, 98 n 196, 99, 112, 121, 132 n 275, 133 n 280, 136, 161 n 341, 196, 197, 199 justice, 12, 14, 30 – 32, 120, 128, 139 Kerferd, G. H., 14 n 20, 22 Kittler, Friedrich, 35, 65 kommos (lyric exchange), 81, 130, 193 – 94, 197, 198 Kovacs, David, 2, 3 n 2, 79 n 169, 120 n 243, 123 n 251, 124 n 256, 201 n 398 language, 4; eros and, 52, 55 – 59, 62 – 63, 68 – 69; otherness and, 67; paradoxical views of, 201 – 2; Polyneices on truth and justice, in Phoenician Women, 30 – 32; rhetoric, 20 – 25, 32 – 34, 145 – 46; sophia and protection of the self, 15 – 18 Lejnieks, Valdis, 179 n 371 Lesky, A., 48 n 99 Lloyd, Michael, 2, 144 n 297 Loraux, Nicole, 45 n 95, 99 n 200, 187 love. See eros Lysias, 101 Lyssa/Lycus, 85, 184 madness: of Agave in Bacchae, 184; as danger to integrity of state, 187 n 383; of Heracles in Heracles, 83 – 88, 180, 184; of Pentheus in Bacchae, 174 n 365, 180 – 83 marriage: Hera as goddess of, 87 – 88; negative description in Medea, 71 Martin, Richard P., 201 n 397 Mastronarde, Donald, 2, 3 n 2, 25 n 43, 30 n 53 Medea: negative description of marriage in, 71; protection of the self and sophia in, 17, 18; revenge in, 25 – 30, 177 – 78; rhetoric and sophia in, 20 – 25; sexually uncontrolled women in, 64; unexpected loss in, 73 n 153

Mendelsohn, Daniel, 65 n 132, 99 n 197, 109 n 217, 113 n 226, 113 n 228, 119 n 241, 140 n 292, 160 n 339 metalepsis, 82 – 94; of Chorus in Medea, 27; concept of, 3, 82 – 83; in Heracles, 83 – 88; of Orestes in Electra, 88 – 94; of Phaedra in Hippolytus, 50, 54, 83; sophia and, 27, 37, 83, 92, 94; of Theseus in Suppliant Women, 83, 122 Metrodorus of Lampsakos, 104 n 207 monarchy and democracy, debate between Theseus and Theban Herald on, 21 n 33, 118 n 239, 121 – 25 Murray, Gilbert, 132 Muses, 4 n 3, 33, 79 n 169, 124 n 254, 134, 154, 171 n 363, 200, 201 n 297 music/song: as innovative aspect of Euripidean poetry, 70, 192 – 95; ­murder of Clytemnestra in Electra and, 91, 193; self-immolation of Evadne in Suppliant Women and, 68, 70; women not granted sound of lyre by Apollo, 26, 27, 29 Nancy, C., 99 n 200 Necessity: Ananke¯, 4 – 5, 7 – 9, 11 – 12, 47, 66, 73, 85, 105, 148, 149; Zeus and, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11 – 14, 47, 82, 85, 105, 149, 154, 177, 186, 187 Nicias, 115 – 16 n 233, 117 n 237, 126 n 260 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143 Nous (mind), 12 – 13, 34, 42, 104 n 207, 105, 149 onomatopoeisis, 59 n 120 orgasm, 74 – 75 otherness/alterity, 14 – 15, 17 – 18, 36, 51 – 52, 60, 65 – 67, 73, 95, 107, 151, 172, 186, 187 oxymora, 67, 70, 81, 128, 129 n 268, 156 Page, Denys Lionel, 27 n 48 Panhellenism, 115 – 16, 131, 139 Papadopoulou, Thalia, 84 n 176 parabates, 126, 127 n 262 paranomasia, 193, 195

222    Subject Index Parker, L. P. E., 11 n 17 Pelliccia, Hayden, 55 n 110, 152 n 317 Peloponnesian War, 36, 126 n 260 Pericles, 98 – 99 n 196, 100 – 101, 103, 123 n 250 Persephone, 69, 98 n 193 Phoenician Women, 30 – 32, 100 n 201 pity, 18 – 19, 110, 192 – 99 poetry: Euripides’s pleasure in, 200 – 202; Troades on immortality in, 79 – 82 politics, 4, 95 – 191; Athens, political myth of, 95 – 96, 107 – 8, 112, 115 – 16, 131, 139, 140 – 41; in Erectheus, 100 – 103, 113, 114; eros, patriotic, 100 – 101, 102, 118; individual rights and, 137; life of citizen belonging to city, 134; Orestes’s clash with, 93 – 94; polis’s loss of control and authority and, 142; women, role of, 98 – 99, 99 n 198, 102 – 3, 113 – 14. See also Bacchae; Suppliant Women Porter, John R., 92 n 184 Potidea, epigram for dead of, 124 n 255 Prodicus, 14 n 20, 148, 150, 162 Proerosia, festival of, 96 Proitids, 153 Protagoras, 6, 14 n 20, 15 – 16, 21 n 33, 31, 32, 34, 82, 93, 104, 148 n 308, 189 psychological drama, Euripides’s work regarded as, 60 – 61 rape, 35 n 61, 37, 71, 72 n 149, 73 n 152, 76, 80, 196 Rehm, R., 135 n 285 revenge: of Aphrodite in Hippolytus, 176 – 77, 178; desired by Epigoni in Suppliant Women, 96, 138, 140, 141; of Dionysus in Bacchae (See Bacchae); divine, 87 – 88; of Hera in Heracles, 83 – 88, 176 – 77, 178; of Medea, 25 – 30, 177 – 78; reverse retaliation, 177 – 78 rhetoric, 20 – 25, 32 – 34, 145 – 46 Russell, Bertrand, 35

sacrifice: animal victims, prophecy through, 105 n 211; death of Pentheus, in Bacchae, 182 – 85; Euripides’s interest in young victims of, 99 – 100 n 200; not required in Suppliant Women, 138; patriotic readiness of Praxithea to sacrifice daughter in Erectheus, 100 – 103; of Polyxena, in Hecuba, 78 – 79, 99 n 199, 100 n 199; self-sacrifice setup in Alcestis, 71; as voluntary or consensual, 99 n 199 Schadewaldt, W., 48 n 99 Schein, S. L., 25 n 43 Scodel, Ruth, 35 n 61, 74 n 154, 75 n 159 Seaford, Richard, 68 n 137, 143, 155, 157 n 331, 167 n 355, 170 – 71 n 360, 184 n 380, 185 n 381 Segal, C. P., 3 n 2, 59, 143, 144 n 299, 148 n 307, 153 n 321, 162 Semele, 63, 147, 149 n 313, 150, 156 – 57, 166 – 67 sex. See eros Sicilian expedition, 77 n 164 slavery, lament of Trojan women in Troades over, 71 – 79 socially inferior characters in Euripides, 54 n 108 Socrates, 8, 16, 31, 33 n 59, 39 n 75, 66 n 133, 90, 106 n 215, 126 n 260, 135 n 284, 149, 180, 189 song. See music/song Sonnino, M., 99 n 199, 102 n 205 sophia, 14 – 34; of Aithra in Suppliant Women, 97 – 98, 113 n 226; ambivalence of, 146 n 302; of Apollo, defended by Electra, 195; in Bacchae, 150, 157 – 58, 179, 187; critical posture encouraged by, 19, 61; in debate between Helen and Hecuba in Troades, 38 – 39 n 72, 40, 48; eros and, 36, 48, 49, 67; evoked by Adrastus in Suppliant Women, 110; as means of surviving human tragedy, 1, 14 – 19, 90 – 91, 187, 200; of metaleptic “literary” characters, 27, 37, 83, 92, 94; revenge of Medea and, 25 – 30; rhetoric and, 20 – 25, 32 – 34;

Subject Index   223 self-immolation of Evadne in Suppliant Women and, 136; of Theseus in Suppliant Women, 110 – 11, 119, 137; truth contrasted with justice, 30 – 32; unexpected fall in Euripides and, 73 sophism and sophists: aims of Euripidean drama arising from, 1, 13, 14 n 20; dual anthropomorphic/cosmic nature of divinity in, 149; expansion of professions and, 33 n 59; Polyneices on truth and justice in Phoenician Women and, 31 – 32; Protagoras on, 16; of Teiresias in Bacchae, 144, 146 – 50, 154, 158 n 334, 161; of Theseus in Suppliant Women, 103, 104 n 209, 105, 122; Trojan War, as fault of Helen, and, 36 Sophocles, 90, 99 n 198, 191 sparagmos, 153 n 322, 156, 165, 169, 171, 176, 182, 184, 188, 189 n 385 Strauss, Barry, 54 n 107 sunesis, 2 n 1, 72 n 150, 92 – 93, 104 – 5, 109 – 10, 146 n 302, 195 Suppliant Women, 95 – 142; Aithra’s intercession with Theseus in, 95 – 100, 103, 112 – 18, 120; anthropomorphism and, 13; Athena’s intervention and return to arms, 138 – 41; Bacchae compared, 112, 142, 144 n 298; battle in, 125 – 27; divine invocation/intervention, absence of, 97, 125; double plot of, 3; metaleptic role of Theseus in, 83, 122; oration for Argive corpses, 130 – 35; Periphetes, magic club taken from, 125, 127, 131, 138; political philosophy of Theseus, and rejection of Adrastus, 103 – 12; rescue of Argive corpses, 128 – 30; revenge desired by Epigoni in, 96, 138, 140, 141; on rhetoric, 21 n 33; on sacrifice of children, 100 n 201; self-immolation of Evadne in, 67 – 70, 96, 130, 135 – 37; Sophocles, Antigone compared, 105 n 212; Theban Herald, debate on democracy and monarchy between Theseus and,

21 n 33, 118 n 239, 121 – 25, 130 n 271, 141; volte-face of Theseus in, 119 – 21; war, deliberation of, 112 – 21 Susanetti, Davide, 2, 4 n 4, 11 n 17, 72 n 148, 142 n 295, 159 n 335, 160 n 337, 173 – 74, 182 n 375 synecdoche, 89, 198 Taplin, Oliver, 144 n 299 Tartaglini, Florence, 86 Teleia, 87 Theages of Regium, 149 Thirty Tyrants, 142 thorubos (clamor or tumult), 109, 112 Thucydides, 7 the trace, 67 Troades: anthropomorphism of gods and, 11 – 14, 41 n 80, 46 – 49; debate between Hecuba and Helen, 2, 36 – 42, 44, 46 – 49; destruction of city, response of Hecuba and Chorus to, 197 – 99; on immortality in poetry, 79 – 82; lament of enslaved Trojan women in, 71 – 79; Zeus, Hecuba’s appeal to, 11 – 12, 37, 82 – 83 Trojan horse, 76 Trojan War, Helen as cause of, 36 – 37 truth: contrasted with justice, 30 – 32; relativistic perception of, 22 tukhe¯ (chance), 6, 7, 66, 73, 78 – 79, 85 – 87, 118, 177 unexpected fall in Euripides, 73 Vernant, J. P., 170 Versnel, H. S., 143, 155 n 324, 166 n 351, 169 – 70 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 103 war: Bacchants, as army, 169, 170; Delion, battle of, 108, 115 n 233, 121, 126 – 27; Peloponnesian War, 36, 126 n 260; Pentheus’s army in Bacchae, 174 – 75; Trojan War, Helen as cause of, 36 – 37. See also under Suppliant Women

224    Subject Index Westlake, H. D., 77 n 164 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 23 n 36, 196 n 394 Winnington-Ingram, R. P., 148 n 308, 173 n 364, 175 wisdom. See sophia women in Greek culture: Bacchants in Bacchae and, 169 – 72; bad women and Hermione’s downfall in Andromache, 62; Greek misogyny and, 25, 26, 64 – 65, 98 – 99, 159 – 60; interest of Euripides in sexually uncontrolled women, 64 – 65; isolation of, 52, 66, 71; lament of enslaved Trojan women in Troades, 71 – 79; lewd women condemned by Phaedra in Hippolytus, 57 – 58; political role of, 98 – 99, 99 n 198, 102 – 3, 113 – 14; reproduction of male values by, 25 – 26, 62 n 126, 65, 98 – 99; revenge of Medea and, 25 – 30 Xenophanes, 82, 84, 149

yoke, 37 n 64, 71, 72, 73 Zeitlin, F. I., 2, 51 n 103, 60 n 123 Zeus: as Aither, 12, 105 n 213, 149, 152 n 317, 199; Asklepios killed by, 5, 9 n 14; Capaneus in Suppliant Women challenging, 132 – 33; as father of Dionysus, 47, 149, 153 n 322, 167, 185, 187; Hecuba’s appeal to, in Troades, 11 – 12, 37, 82 – 83; Iliad, combined anthropomorphic and cosmic presentation in, 48; lewd gaze of the eye and, 43 n 87; lightning bolt of, 48, 132 – 33, 156, 166 – 67; as lover, 63; multiple attributes in Troades, 11 – 14, 37; Necessity and, 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11 – 14, 47, 82, 85, 105, 149, 154, 177, 186, 187; as Nous, 12, 104 n 207, 105; Orestes in Electra addressing song of remorse to, 88 – 89; as rain god, 105 n 213; Suppliant Women not mentioning, 97

Index Locorum

Euripides Alcestis 3–4 5 61 8 62 8 64–69 8 121–29 5 121–30 9 n 14 180 135 n 286 243–44 10 244–72 192 252–53 10 252–57 8 261 8 270–71 10 280–362 192 301 10 323 69 n 139 339 24 n 41 365–67 70

375–93 10 836 5 837–39 9 n 14 843 8 862–63 11 n 17 866–67 11 870–71 10 897–902 10 911 5 926–28 73 n 153 935 5 962–83 4–5, 7, 85, 105 965 5 966–72 5 980–83 9 Andromache 146ff. 45 n 93 222ff. 64 n 129 223ff. 62 n 126 485 61 n 124

226   Index Locorum 914 62 n 127 920–50 61–62 930ff. 62 936–53 45 n 92 941–42 62 n 127 949 45 n 92 1257–62 185 n 381 1269 186 n 382 Bacchae 1–10 157 n 331 6–9 166 10–12 167 32–36 160 39–40 177, 184 45–46 162 n 342 55–57 158 n 333 65–66 156 72–75 156 n 327 72–76 155 75 156 n 326 90–93 157 100 165 113–14 156 n 326 120–34 157 n 330 135–40 156 170–369 144 186–90 156 188–90 161 188–94 144 n 299 189–90 144 195ff. 147 199–203 147 n 305 200 147 200–203 148, 158 n 334 200–204 147 209–27 158 217–20 159 218 160 222–23 160 222–25 159 226–32 159 241 164 248 145 248–62 145 250–52 147 n 306 266–71 145–146

266–327 144 267 146 n 301 268–69 146 n 301 272–83 146 273 162 274–85 148 277–83 150 278 149 n 313 279 148 n 307 281 150–151 283 151 284–85 148 286–97 152 309–10 158 310–13 159 314–18 161 319–21 153 n 322, 159 322–27 161 328–29 146, 157 n 329, 162 n 341 353 181 n 374 355ff. 164 361 162 363–66 156 366 149 n 313, 153 n 322 389 179 n 371 389–96 179 395 157 n 332 395–96 158 n 334 395–402 157 402ff. 165 n 349, 171 n 363 424–32 158 439 164 n 346, 166 441–42 174 n 367 449–50 174 n 367 451 148 n 307 461–64 165 469–87 176 470 165 471–75 165 475 173 476 166 478 165 490 166 492 163–164 493 164 495 164

Index Locorum   227 498 165 500 165 502 166 503 166 504 166 506–7 166 508 166 515–18 166 530–34 179 553–55 167 n 354 576ff. 167 585 167 585–89 167 589 167 n 354 594–95 168 595 167 595–99 167 596–99 167 603–4 168 606 167 610–12 164 616 163 616–17 168 618–19 165, 168 n 236 618ff. 165 620–21 168 623 167 623–24 167 629ff. 153 n 317 633 167 633–34 168 641 168 643–46 168 668ff. 174 n 367 677–774 169 680–768 169 684–85 170 n 360 769–74 163 775–861 172 779 175 n 368 780–85 174, 174 n 367 796–97 175 n 369 798 175 800–801 175 804–9 174 n 367 810 176

810–16 172 811ff. 64 812 173 n 364, 174 812ff. 176 814 173 n 364, 176 815 173 n 364, 174, 176 828 176 829 174 n 366 838 176 841 181, 181 n 374 848 179 n 371 850–52 174 n 365 850–53 180 n 372 851 176 854–55 180 n 372, 181, 181 n 374 862 176 862–912 178 876–80 179 890–91 179 894 5 n 5 897 182 897–901 179 912–1023 180 921–22 165 961 181 966–70 181 989–90 182 n 377 1032–40 182 1080–81 182 n 377 1115 180 n 372 1118–19 183 n 379 1118–21 183 1120 183 n 379 1121 184 n 380 1122 184 1141 182 n 377 1174 182 n 377 1184 182 n 377 1185ff. 158 1329 188 n 385 1330–39 185 n 381 1341–45 190 1346–48 90 1346–49 185 1347 167 1348–49 186

228   Index Locorum 1349 154, 187 1352ff. 188 1366–67 188 1368–69 188 1371 188 n 384 1381 189 n 385 1383–87 188 Electra 294–95 110 n 221 294–96 18 971 193 971–73 194–195 973 195 1032ff. 64 n 129 1035 64 n 129 1177 88 1178ff. 193 1190–93 89, 193 1206–7 89, 91 1206–32 70 n 140 1207ff. 193 1244–46 89 1247 186 n 382 1301 186 n 382 Erechtheus 4 100 12 101, 102 20 118 n 238 22–26 101 28–31 102 34–36 101 38–39 101 51–52 101 95–97 102 n 205 Fragments (See also Euripides, Erechtheus) 332 5 360 100 364 118 n 238 370 102 n 205 419 5 430 67 n 134 480 5 n 5 793/795 5–6 818C 16 n 24 869 5 941 152 n 317

964, lines 1–6 16 n 24, 17 1018 13, 34, 104 n 207 Hecuba 194 67 n 134 254–57 146 n 30 444–83 78 444ff. 78 455–57 78 824–30 75 n 156 1077 69 n 138 1187–91 146 n 30 1187–94 32–33 1187ff. 21 n 32 Helen 138 21 n 33 513 5 1014 124 n 255 1137 5 n 5 1660f. 186 n 382 1669 186 n 382 Heracles 411 100 458–60 19 n 27 1263–68 84 n 175 1303–10 84 n 175 1315 87 1315–21 87 1340–46 84 1351–55 86 1354–56 86 n 177 1357 84 1378–85 86 n 177 1392–93 84 1393 86 1411–12 86 n 177 1412 86 Hercules Furens 673–86 201 692–93 201 n 398 866 184 1263 5 n 5 1314–19 38 n 69 1340–46 90 1344–45 186 Hippolytus 26–27 53

Index Locorum   229 29–32 51, 53 32–33 53 n 105 39–40 55 n 109 42 55 n 110 82–86 156 n 328 102 59 106 51 161 66 n 133 162 65 189ff. 5 208–11 58, 59 208–31 56 215–22 58 219–22 59 220 59 n 120 225 59 n 121 228–31 58 231 60 240 60, 67 240–41 58 n 118 247–49 60 293 56 n 113 325 56 330 56 335 56 373–430 53 375–76 50 379ff. 62 380–85 52 385–86 56 n 111 385–87 18, 30 n 53 393–94 53 395–97 56 398–99 53 400–401 57 n 114 400–402 53 407–18 57 411–12 94 n 187 415–18 61 n 125 443–46 165 n 349 447–50 54, 61, 63 451–54 63 453–54 63 453–56 38 n 69 462–63 56 n 113 486–87 146 n 30

503–6 63 525–34 43 n 86 528–29 67 n 135 541–42 43 n 86 545–53 64 n 129 545ff. 37 724–27 54 725–31 55 n 110 925–31 21 n 32 1003 59 1277–80 54 n 108 1331 186 n 382 Ion 714–18 157 n 331 859–922 196 887 196 n 394 887–96 196 912 196 1553–63 90 Iphigenia in Aulis 1136 91 n 183 Iphigenia Taurica 987 67 n 134 Medea 92ff. 184 190–203 17 199–200 30, 49 225 73 n 153 238–47 71 264 87 285 24 n 40 305 24 n 40 362 67 n 134 401–9 25, 26 406 28 410–14 26 410–45 26 415–20 26 421–30 26 428 29 472–74 20 485 35 n 62 522 20 526 21 n 33 534–38 178 536–44 27 537–28 75 n 156 546 23 n 36

230   Index Locorum 546–51 23 568–75 64 568ff. 24 579–83 21 n 32, 23 580 146 n 30 583 146 n 30 586–87 24 835–45 27 1251–52 88 n 178 1251–54 28 1329–40 178 1361 29 1361–62 29 n 51 1362 29 1378ff. 178 Orestes 220ff. 184 284–93 91 n 183 314 91 394ff. 91–92 395–98 104 n 209 396–97 12 n 18 398–400 93 408 93 409 93 418 5 454–55 24 n 41 579ff. 92 n 184 907–8 146 n 30 1368ff. 70 n 140 Phoenician Women 318–21 112 469–72 21 n 32, 30 499–503 21 n 32 588 21 n 33 685–86 149 Phryxus fr. 818C 16 n 24 Suppliant Women 19 114 34–35 129 38–40 98 40–41 98–99 42 97 n 191 47–51 97 71–72 97 n 191

76ff. 97 113 136 133–50 107 155–58 107 159–61 107 161 106, 116, 117 n 236, 131, 131 n 273 176–79 110 178–79 28 n 50 178–93 201 n 400 195–97 119 n 243 195–99 21 n 32 195–200 103, 107, 124 n 256 201–2 104 n 208 201–4 104, 139 202 129 203 104 n 209 203–4 104 n 209 205–6 104, 105 n 211 205–7 105 209–10 104 211–12 105 218–219 111 220–28 111 n 223 222 135 n 286 223–29 120 224 135 n 286 230 114 n 230 230–31 114 n 230 232 123 232–34 119 n 243 232–45 123 232ff. 104 n 210, 118 235 123 253–56 111 258ff. 112 262 125 286–92 129 293 98 294 98 297–300 21 n 32 299 113 301 114 301–2 114 305 116

Index Locorum   231 306–10 118 308–12 113 315–19 116–117 321 117 n 236 321–23 117 323–25 130 n 272 328 118 328–31 118 334–35 119 338–41 119 343–45 118 347 121 n 245 349–50 120 n 243 349–53 120 n 243 352–53 120 n 243 360–64 121 n 244 377–80 125 385–90 121 n 245 399 122 399–455 122 403–4 122 403ff. 21 n 33 411ff. 118 n 239 413 123, 123 n 250 426–28 21 n 33 427 124 n 253 428 21 n 33, 23 n 36 465–66 123 n 253 481–83 130 n 271 484–85 141 485 141 n 294 498–99 133 531–33 124 549–50 124 n 256 549–57 124 n 256 550 119 n 243 559–63 125 562–63 120 566ff. 124 594–97 125, 138 602 121 n 245 626 125 628–29 125 634–730 125 651 126 n 259

674–77 126 678–79 126 684ff. 127 714–15 127 714ff. 138 731–32 125 739–40 120 739–41 111, 130 n 272, 131 n 273, 134 n 282 748–49 131 n 273, 134 n 282 778–81 128 778–836 128 782–85 129 784–85 129 789 100 n 201, 128, 129 793 129 802–4 72 n 151 807 128 808 72 n 151, 129 811–14 130 n 272 822–23 128 824 129 833–34 129 841–42 131 841–43 131 843 131 n 273 846–56 132 859 133 865–66 134 867–68 133 870 133 887 134 911–17 130 n 272 918–24 128 918ff. 100 n 201 935 133 950–54 130 n 272 952 130 n 272 954 118 955–79 128, 129 961 128 966–68 130 968–70 128 980–1071 135 982–83 139 n 289

232   Index Locorum 990–1008 67 990–1071 67 995–1008 68 998 69 n 139 1000 69 1015 69, 137 1018–22 69 1019f. 135 n 286 1023–24 135 n 286 1055 137 1059 136, 137 1059–61 136 n 287 1059–63 69 1080–1113 137 1087–91 130 1101–2 137 1102A 106 1104–6 130 1132 138 1143ff. 138 1146–49 140 1147–49 138 1150ff. 138 1156–57 138 1198ff. 139 n 290 1210–12 139, 139 n 289 1211 139 n 289 1211–12 139 n 289 1223 140 Troades 8 76 n 61 9 76 n 161, 76 n 162 11 76 29 76 n 161 33 76 n 161 35 41, 76 n 161 60 76 n 161 70 75 n 157 75–81 72 n 148 85–86 42 114 76 n 161 140 76 n 161 142 76 n 161, 76 n 162 198ff. 76 201 76

202–4 76 203–4 78 207–9 77 214–19 77 223 77, 77 n 164 227 77, 78 240 76 n 161 264 76 n 161 295 76 n 161 342–437 78 356–67 78–79 448 76 n 161 448–49 79 452 77 n 163 474–80 76 n 162 577–97 72 n 148 581 72 587 72 592–93 72 596 72 n 148 596ff. 37 597ff. 39 n 72 603 76 n 162 614–15 72 660 73, 74 n 154 661ff. 74 665–66 74 667–68 64 n 129 669–70 72 n 149 673–76 72, 76 678 72 n 149 697–700 75 700 78 766ff. 37 864–65 37 n 65 884–88 11–12, 37, 82 884ff. 152 n 317 885 5 n 5 886 105 889 13 914–15 38–39 n 72 919–22 39 n 72 924ff. 38 935 39 n 73 940ff. 38

Index Locorum   233 975 41 n 81 976–78 49 976–81 39 n 75 976–82 41 977–79 47 983 40 983–88 39 987–92 44 988 42, 48 n 99 989–90 40, 47 993–97 44 n 88 998 47 1055–59 64 n 129 1070 77 n 163 1078–79 199 1240–45 198 1240ff. 80 1242–45 79 1244–45 81 1248–50 80 1281 76 1291–92 67 n 134, 81 1295 198, 199 1302ff. 72 n 151 1312 198 1313–14 72 n 151, 76 1317 198, 199 1317–19 197–198 1318 76, 198 1319 198 1320–24 198 1323 80, 81 Other Classical Authors and Works Aeschylus Agamemnon 160 5 n 5, 12 Choephoroi 171 97 n 192 892–930 70 n 140 900–902 90 Eleusinians 111 n 225, 115 n 234, 121 Eumenides 139–140 n 291 214ff. 87 321ff. 93 n 186 1046 88 n 178

fragments 268 111 n 225 284 77 n 163 Oresteia 193, 194 Prometheus 231 151 n 314 317 151 n 314 623 151 n 314 Septem Contra Thebas 537 117 n 236 Suppliants 120 n 243 Anaxagoras DK 7 124 n 255 DK 59 B 42 e 47–48 13 fr. 12 104 n 207 Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.2.2 153 n 319 Aristophanes Acharnians 201–2 151 524–29 36 n 63 Clouds 1074–82 38 n 69 Frogs 775 21 n 33 Nubes 603–6 157 n 331 Ranae 893–94 104 n 209 1483 33 n 59 Thesmophoriazusae 973–76 87 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1.1.4 106 1.2.8 106 1.5.3ff. 106 1.13.1 106 Poetics 1453a8 184 n 380 1454a31 119 n 240 Rhetoric 1402a5–28 15 Cypria fr. 1 38 n 71 fr. 9 38 n 71/ Derveni papyrus, col 12 149 n 312 Diodorus, 12.70 126 Empedocles DK 8 124 n 255 DK 31 B 134 13 Epicharmus, DK 9 124 n 255

234   Index Locorum Etymologicum Magnum 386 102 n 205 Gorgias, Encomium of Helen 6, 7 38 n 69 8 46, 62 14 46 15–19 46–47 19 40, 43, 46 Hesiod Oper et Dies 225–26 31 n 55 256ff. 12 n 18 Theogony 26–28 31 28 33 52 17 156–58 6 159–60 6 615–16 5 n 6 902 12 n 18 910–11 43 n 87 Hippocrates, De flatibus liber 3 (= DK 64 C2) 12–13 Homer Iliad 1.38 77 n 163 1.518–19 48 1.528–30 48 2.15.12 45 n 91 3.122 74 n 154 3.156–57 44 n 89 3.383ff. 50 n 102 3.390–94 44 3.399ff. 40 n 79 3.413–20 92 6.357–58 79 n 169 6.389 64 n 132 6.431–34 114 n 229 6.456–57 73 n 152 9.312–14 31 10.297 140 13.227 80 14.294 43 n 87 16.387–88 31 n 55 16.453–57 8 16.681–83 8

17.49 132 18.55–60 119 n 242 18.432 60 22.304–5 80 22.327 132 22.460–61 64 n 132 23.32 126 n 261 23.83–93 70 23.243–44 70 24.28–30 38 n 71 24.76–77 70 Odyssey 193, 194 1.1 31 n 56 1.234ff. 80 5.470ff. 160 8.579–80 79 n 169 11.298–304 38 n 71 Homeric Hymns 1 152 n 316 7 168 m 236 27.15 200 n 395 Hymn to Aphrodite 41 41 n 80 56–57 45 n 91 84–90 45 n 93 Isocrates, Areop. 20 and Panathenaicus 131 94 n 187 Pherecydes, DK 7 A 8, 9 105 n 213 Pindar fr. 197 151 n 314 Nemean Odes 10.18 87 Pythian Odes 2.33–48 152 n 317 4.9–56 28 9.89–90 200 n 395 Plato Apologia 17b 21 n 33 Cratylus 385e–386e 15 Euthydemus 283e–286d 15 Euthyphro 7a–8a 8, 90 Hippias Minor 365a–b 31 n 56 Laches 135 n 284 Phaedo 97b8–c5 106 n 215 Phaedrus 180

Index Locorum   235 229c–e 149 229e 39 n 75 Protagoras 131 n 274 317a ff. 14 n 20 330a ff. 14 n 20 Republic 557e 94 n 187 Sophista 221d and ff. 23 n 38 Symposium 192d 59 221a 126 n 260 Theaetetus 151–152a 15 n 21 161d3–e3 16, 31–32 Plutarch Cons. ad Apoll. 15 124 n 255 Theseus 29.4–5 111 n 225, 121 n 245 Polybius, 5.9.5 133 n 279 Prodicus, DK 84 B 5 148 Protagoras, DK 80 A1 4 21 n 33 pseudo-Aeschylus, Prometheus 476–506 104 n 207 Sappho, 128 200 n 395 Solon, 3 G.P. 2. (4 W. 2) 5–6, 11ff. 123 Sophocles Ajax 169, 176, 180 Antigone 157 n 331 211–13 115 n 232 332ff. 105 n 212 355ff. 104 n 207 791–92 49 905–12 115 n 232 1113 115 n 232 1115–54 157 n 331 1126–30 157 n 331 1261 184 n 380 1933ff. 162 1945ff. 33 n 60 Electra 1492 21 n 33

Oedipus Coloneus 1086 88 n 178 Oedipus Tyrannus 316–462 162 Trachiniai 37 n 64, 55 n 109, 99 n 198, 116 n 235 Thucydides 1.9.1–3 36 n 63 1.68–71 118 n 237 1.121.4 110 2.43.1 100–101 2.45.2 99 n 196 2.65.7 123 n 250 2.65.7ff. 118 n 239 3.37–38 23 n 38 3.37.4 97 3.67.6 21 n 33 3.82.4 94 n 187 4.96 126 4.97 115 n 233 4.97–98 115 n 233 4.101 115 n 233 6.9–18 115 n 234 6.10.2 116 n 234 6.12.1 116 n 234 6.12.2 116 n 234 6.18.2 117 n 237 6.54 160 n 339 6.54–59 66 n 133 6.54.1–3 66 n 133 90.1 118 n 237 Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.24 66 n 133 Symposion 9.3–6 66 n 133 Modern Authors and Works Beckett, Samuel, “Alba” 191 Dante, Divine Comedy 64, 191 Racine, Phèdre 1.3.306 55 n 110 Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies 138