Greek Literature in the Classical Period: The Poetics of Drama in Athens: Greek Literature [1 ed.] 0815336853, 9780815336853

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Greek Literature

Volume 4 creek Literature in the Classical Period:

the Poetics of Drama in Athens

Edited with introductions by

Gregory Nagy Harvard University

Routledge

Taylor &Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Series Content Volume I

THE ORAL TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND OF ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE

Volume 2

HOMER AND HESIOD AS PROTOTYPES OF GREEK LITERATURE Volume3

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE ARCHAIC PERIOD: THE EMERGENCE OF AUTHORSHIP

Volume 4

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD: THE POETICS OF DRAMA IN ATHENS

Volume 5

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD: THE PROSE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ORATORY

Volume6

GREEK LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY Volume 7

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

Volume 8

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE ROMAN PERIOD AND IN LATE ANTIQUITY Volume 9

GREEK LITERATURE IN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD

Acknowledgments

The editor wishes to thank the following scholars for their help and encouragement: Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, Victor Bers, Emmanuel Bourbouhakis, Casey Due, Mary Ebbott, David Elmer, Corinne Pache,Jennifer Reilly, Panagiotis Roilos, David Schur, Roger Travis, T. Temple Wright, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis.

Published i n 2001 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue , New York, NY 10017 Published i n Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milto n Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge i s an Imprint of Taylor & Francis Books, Inc . Copyright c2001 by Routledge All rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reprinted o r reproduced o r utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical , or other means, now known or hereafter invented, includin g any photocopying an d recording, or in any information storag e or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers . Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatio n Data Greek literature / edited with introductions by Gregory Nagy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references . Contents: v. 1. The oral traditional background of ancient Greek literature — v. 2. Homer and Hesiod as prototypes of Greek literature - v . 3. Greek literature in the archaic period : the emergence of authorship — v. 4. Greek literature in the classical period : the poetics of drama in Athens — v. 5. Greek literature in the classical period : the prose of historiography and oratory — v. 6. Greek literature and philosophy — v. 7. Greek literature in the Hellenistic period — v. 8. Greek literature in the Roman period and in late antiquity - v . 9. Greek literature in the Byzantine period . ISBN 0-8153-3681-0 (set) - ISB N 0-8153-3682-9 (v. 1) - ISB N 0-8153-3683-7 (v . 2) - ISB N 0-8153-3684-5 (v. 3) - ISB N 0-8153-3685-3 (v. 4) - ISB N 0-8153-3686-1 (v. 5) - ISB N 0-8153-3687-X (v. 6) - ISB N 0-8153-3688-8 (v. 7) - ISB N 0-415-93770-1 (v. 8) - ISB N 0-415-93771-X (v. 9) - ISB N 0-8153-21. Greek literature-History and criticism. I . Nagy, Gregory. PA3054.G742001 880.9~dc21

2001048490

ISBN 0-8153-3681-0 (set) ISBN 0-8153-3682-9 (v.l) ISBN 0-8153-3683-7 (v.2) ISBN 0-8153-3684-5 (v.3) ISBN 0-8153-3685-6 (v.4) ISBN 0-8153-3686-1 (v.5) ISBN 0-8153-3687-X (v.6) ISBN 0-8153-3688-8 (v.7 ) ISBN 0-4159-3770-1 (v.8) ISBN 0-4159-3771-X (v.9)

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of thi s reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Contents

v11 tx

Series Introduction Volume Introduction

1

Section A. Tragedy 1. Figures in the Text: Metaphors and Riddles in the Agamemnon

47

2. Shield of Eteocles

59

3. The List of the War Dead in Aeschylus' Persians

73

4. The Danaid Trilogy

92.

5. Tycho von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff on the Dramatic Technique of Sophocles

107

6. Why Is Oedipus Called Tyrannos?

113

7. Gods' Intervention and Epiphany in Sophocles

146

8. Oedipus at Colonus: Exile and Integration

158

9. Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus

226

10. Antigone 904-920 and the Institution of Marriage

243

11. Bed and War

265 290

12. The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides' Electra Froma I. Zeitlin 13. The JII t..Q2: of Phaedra and the Meaning of the Hippolytus

293

14. Review of E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons: An Autobiography

Gloria Ferrari

Helen H Bacon

MaryEbbott

Reginald Winnington·lngram

Hugh Lloyd·]ones

Bernard M. W. Knox

Pietro Pucci

Laura Slatkin Charles Segal

Shelia Murnaghan

Nicole Loraux

E. R. Dodds

Robert B. Todd

v

vi

301 321 325 351 365

378 406 425 443 465 488 514 529 559

Contents Section B. Comedy 15. Plato Comicus and the Evolution of Greek Comedy Ralph M Rosen 16. Who Is Dicaeopolis? Ewen L. Bowie 17. A City in the Air: Aristophanes' Birds David Konstan 18. Philocleon's Fables: Ancient Storytelling and a Modern Analogue Philip A. Stadter 19. Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis Oliver Taplin Section C. "Ritual" and Drama 20. Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians: Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth Christian Wolff 21. The Black Hunter Revisited Pierre Vidal-Naquet

22. The Cults and the Legend of Oedipus Lowell Edmunds 23. Unspeakable Words in Greek Tragedy Diskin Clay 24. Something to Do with Athens: Tragedy and Ritual Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood 25. The Tragic Wedding Richard Seaford 26. Dancing in Athens, Dancing on Delos: Some Patterns of Choral Projection in Euripides Albert Henrichs 27. Glaucus Redivivus Leonard Muellner Copyright Acknowledgments

Series Introduction

This nine-volume set is a collection of writings by experts in ancient Greek literature. On display here is their thinking, that is, their readings of ancient writings. Most, though not all, of these experts would call themselves philologists. For that reason, it is relevant to cite the definition of "philology" offered by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the preface to Daybreak, he says that philology is the art of reading slowly: Philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow- it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it Iento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today; by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of "work," that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to "get everything done" at once, including every old or new book:- this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate fingers and eyes. (This translation is adapted, with only slight changes, from R. J. Hollingdale, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices ofMorality [Cambridge, 1982].) Nietzsche's original wording deserves to be quoted in full, since its power cannot be matched even by the best of translations: Philologie namlich ist jene ehrwiirdige Kunst, welche von ihrem Verehrer vor Allem Eins heischt, bei Seite gehn, sich Zeit lassen, still werden, Iangsam werden-, als eine Goldschmiedekunst und -kennerschaft des Wortes, die Iauter feine vorsichtige Arbeit abzuthun hat und Nichts erreicht, wenn sie es nicht Iento erreicht. Gerade damit aber ist sie heute nothiger als je, gerade dadurch zieht sie und bezaubert sie uns am starksten, mitten in einem Zeitalter der "Arbeit," will sagen: der Hast, der unanstandigen und schwitzenden Eilfertigkeit, das mit Allem gleich "fenig werden" will, auch mit jedem alten und neuen Buche:- sie selbst wird nicht so Ieicht irgend womit fenig, sie lehrt gut lesen, das heisst Iangsam, Vll

Vlll

Series Introduction tief, riick- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, mit offen gelassenen Thiien, mit zanen Fingern und Augen lesen ... (Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenrothe. Nachgelassene Fragmente, Anfang 1880 bis Friihjahr 1881. Nietzsche Werke V.1, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari [Berlin, 1971], 9.)

This is not to say that the selections in these nine volumes must be ideal exemplifications of philology as Nietzsche defined it. Faced with the challenge of describing their own approaches to Greek literature, most authors of these studies would surely prefer a definition of "philology" that is less demanding. Perhaps most congenial to most would be the formulation of Rudolf Pfeiffer (History of Classical Scholarship I [Oxford, 1968]): "Philology is the art of understanding, explaining and reconstructing literary tradition." This collection may be viewed as an attempt to demonstrate such an an, in all its complexity and multiplicity. Such a demonstration, of course, cannot be completely successful, because perfection is far beyond reach: the subject is vast, the space is limited, and the learning required is ever incomplete. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that disagreements persist in the ongoing study of ancient Greek literature, and thus the articles in these nine volumes necessarily reflect a diversity of opinions. There is ample room for disagreement even about the merits of representative articles, let alone the choices of the articles themselves. It is therefore reasonable for each reader to ask, after reading an article, whether it has indeed been true to the an of philology. The editor, a philologist by training, has his own opinions about the relative success or failure of each of the studies here selected. These opinions, however, must be subordinated to the single most practical purpose of the collection, which is to offer a representative set of modern studies that seek the best possible readings of the ancient writings.

Volume Introduction

The readings in this volume are organized around the dramatic festivals of Athens and the theatrical genres that emerged out of this context, especially tragedy and comedy. (On the Greek term theatrokratia, as used in Plato'sLaws 701a to describe the eventual domination of other poetic genres by the genres of Athenian state theater, see Nagy 1994/199 5:47-48 .) Ofthese two genres, tragedy is exemplified by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As for comedy, the dominant figure in the classical period, retrospectively, is Aristophanes. Within the lengthy history of Athenian state theater productions, the classical period is confined to a relatively narrow time frame extending roughly from the first third of the fifth century to the early fourth century B.C.E. Later phases of theater are meagerly attested; for example, the Dyscolus of Menander survives as the only near-complete text from the era of New Comedy in the late fourth century B.C.E. (on Menander, see in general Goldberg 1980). Even this welcome survival is owed not to medieval manuscript transmission but to discoveries of papyrus texts of Menander in the twentieth century of our era. In the second century B.C.E., Apollodorus of Athens (FGH 244 fragment 43, ed. Jacoby) still had access to the texts of 105 comedies by Menander, of which only 8 were known to have won first prize in dramatic competitions. This proportion indicates the degree of artistic competition- and the vast volume of poetic productivitystill in force in the postclassical era of the late fourth century. The drastic narrowing of the classical canon of Greek drama after the fifth century B.C.E. is evident from direct ancient testimony about the eventual fate of the dramas composed by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: the texts of these three dramatists- and only these three- were designated by the state of Athens in the second half of the fourth century B.C.E. as the official "state script" for ongoing performances of classical tragedy in this postclassical period ("Plutarch," Lives ofthe Ten Orators 841f; see Nagy 1996:174-175). Even in terms of such a narrow categorization of classical drama, the category is still in some respects too broad. The earliest attested texts of classical tragedy, as exemplified by Aeschylus, reveal many features of archaic, as distinct from classical, poetic traditions. If it were not for the simple fact that the poetry of Aeschylus, like that of Sophocles and Euripides, must be situated historically within the cultural context of Athenian state theater, it would be convenient to categorize Aeschylean poetry as part of a vast artistic continuum represented by archaic poets like Pindar (Nagy 1990:391-392). A particularly striking archaic feature of Aeschylus's verbal art is his use of metaphor, which connects directly with archaic lX

X

Volume Introduction

conventions actually attested in the visual arts of his time (Ferrari 1997, compare Bacon 1968- articles 1 and 2 in this volume; see also Nagy 2000). In general, Aeschylus's use of poetic wording is remarkably precise in its referentiality, and this kind of precision can be taken as yet another distinctive feature of archaic poetry. For example, his poetic catalog of enemy casualties in the Persians amounts to an artistic reworking of genuine archaic Greek conventions of publicly announcing the casualties of war (Ebbott 2000, article 3). The organization of Aeschylus's tragedies tends to be monumental in scale, suited to the spectacular dimensions of an artistic superstructure known to this day as trilogy. The prime example is the Oresteia trilogy, produced in 458 B.C.E., consisting of Agamemnon, Libation·Bearers, and Eumenides (rounded out by the satyr drama Proteus). The Suppliants represents another of Aeschylus's trilogies (the second and third tragedies of this set are lost, as is the satyr drama that went with it); its dating, and its interpretation in light of its historical context, were radically revised in the middle of the twentieth century, thanks to information contained in a papyrus originally published in 1952 (Winnington-Ingram 1961, article 4). The tragedies of Sophocles represent the acme of classical Athenian poetry. To appreciate the artistry, it is essential to understand the dramatic technique in action, as evidenced by the words of the poet themselves (Lloyd-Jones 1972, article 5). Also, the communicative power of Sophocles' poetry needs to be viewed in the context of contemporary Athenian history: for example, the moral crises of his best-known tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus, reflect the contemporary moral crises inherent in the Athenians' hegemony over other Greek states (Knox 1954, article 6). Even the traditional title of this drama is relevant: since the state of Athens rules over an empire, as the dramatized words of Pericles declare in the account of Thucydides (2.63.2-3), Athens is a "tyranny" when viewed from the outside, even though it remains a democracy from within. The virtuosity of Sophocles as poet and dramatist has elicited a rich variety of modern critical responses, as exemplified by the studies included in section A (besides those already mentioned, these are articles 7-11: Pucci 1994, Slatkin 1986, Segal1981, Murnaghan 1986, Loraux 1995). Of the three canonical tragedians, however, Euripides seems to inspire the greatest interest among experts and nonexperts alike. His tragedies leave moderns with lingering impressions of modernity, in part because he seems to be ever engaged in testing the classical forms while all along demonstrating how masterfully he can deploy them for individualized artistic purposes (Zeitlin 1970, article 12). Modern critics have been particularly struck by Euripides' psychological insights. A classic example is a study by Dodds (1925, article 13), who analyzed the poetic treatment of Phaedra's state of mind in Euripides' Hippolytus by applying perspectives derived from the work of Sigmund Freud (Todd 2000, article 14). The risk of skewing the interpretation of tragedy by resorting to anachronistic perspectives is real but evidently worth taking. Section B is a sampling of studies devoted to the vast and relatively underexplored subject of classical comedy. The risk of skewing the interpretation is in this case even more pronounced. Historical perspectives are needed, with emphasis on studying the earlier attested phases of poetic traditions that eventually

Volume Introduction

XI

culminated in classical Athenian comedy (Rosen 1995, article 15). Even Aristophanes, whose eleven surviving comedies provide the basic textual evidence for classical comedy, needs to be studied in the historical context of his own artistic evolution as playwright (Bowie 1988 and Konstan 1990, articles 16 and 17). The interaction of comedy with other genres, such as the "low art" of fable {Stadter 1997, article 18), indicates its rich complexity as a sort of new "supergenre" containing residual older genres (Nagy 1990:385-404). There are many other interactions to be found, the most important of which is the close linkage between comedy and that other great Athenian "super-genre," tragedy (Taplin 1986, article 19). The functional complementarity of tragedy and comedy is a most telling sign of the ongoing organic relationship between the theatrical festivals of Athens and the overall traditions of classical poetry. The historical reality of Athenian theatrical festivals is in fact the key to understanding classical drama as a tradition that centers on performance. All along, the ancient Greek traditions of composing drama were interwoven with the traditions of performing it, and it is the ritual background of such performance that makes classical theater seem so alien to modern mentalities of literary criticism. Section C illustrates the importance of scholarly efforts to integrate the skills of literary criticism with the need to explore the ritual background of Athenian classical drama (articles 20-26: Wolff 1992, Vidal-Naquet 1986, Edmunds 1981, Clay 1982, Sourvinou-lnwood 1994, Seaford 1987, Henrichs 1996). In the field of anthropology, a basic intellectual challenge is the task of studying the interrelation of ritual and myth in all its worldwide cultural varieties. A most illuminating case in point is the interrelation of ritual and myth in classical Greek drama, which reveals a dazzling intensity of variation even within a relatively unified cultural milieu. The myths and rituals centering on the story of the boy-hero Glaucus, who drowned in a jar of honey, provide a particularly interesting example, since Glaucus is a central figure in three tragedies composed by the three canonical poets of tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Muellner 1998, article 27). Further Readings Burkert, W. 1966. "Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual." Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7:87-121. Connor, W. R. 1989. "City Dionysia and Athenian Democracy." Classica et Mediaevalia 40:7-32. Easterling, P. E. 1997. "Constructing the Heroic." In C. Pelling, ed., Greek Tragedy and the Historian, 21-37. Oxford. Goldberg, S. 1980. TheMakingofMenander's Comedy. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Goldhill, S. 1987. "The Greater Dionysia and Civic Ideology." journal ofHellenic Studies 107:58-76. Griffith, M. 1995. "Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia." Classical Antiquity 14:62-129. Knox, B. M. W. 1952. "The Lion in the House." Classical Philology 47:17-25. Reprinted in Knox 1979:27-38. - - - . 1979. Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater. Baltimore.

X1l

Volume Introduction

Mastronarde, D. J. 1986. "The Optimistic Rationalist in Euripides." In M. Cropp, E. Fantham, and S. E. Scully, eds., Greek TragedyandltsLegacy, 201-211. Calgary. Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession ofan Epic Past. Baltimore. See especially chap. 13, "The Genesis of Athenian State Theater and the Survival of Pindar's Poetry." - - - . 1994/1995. "Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater." Arion 3.2:41-55. - - - 1996. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge. - - - . 2000. "'Dream of a Shade': Refractions of Epic Vision in Pindar's Pythian 8 and Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100:97-118. Seaford, R. 1976. "On the Origins of Satyric Drama." Maia 28:209-221. Winkler, J. J. 1985. "The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis." Representations 11:2662. Zeitlin, F. 1965. "The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus' Oresteia." Transactions of the American Philological Association 96:463-508.

FIGURES IN THE TEXT: METAPHORS AND RIDDLES IN THE AGAMEMNON

''S

GLORIA FERRARI

silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks." 1 This line is the earliest recorded expression of the idea that word and image are interchangeable as well as equivalent. Later, Aristotle set forth the notion that the mind holds visual images in his treatises on the mind and memory: 2 IMONIDES CALLED PAINTING

And for this reason as no one could ever learn or understand anything, without the exercise of perception, so even when we think speculatively, we must have some mental picture (q>(ivtao11a) of which to think; for mental images are similar to objects perceived except that they are without matter.

The premise that "the soul never thinks without a mental picture" is essential in the construction of mnemonics, but memory is only one particular use of such constructs. 3 There is little doubt that Aristotle thought his pJ\crcrTjcrtV i:pr.~~ u..n tv£apa cpao~t ICOTOV OOlJlOVa *tE tOV • lillaxov UJtOAEJlOV aviEpov, 6paa~ Jl£Aai va~ JlEAciapOICJI V ata~, dOOJlEVav tOICEUCJI V. [Bollack and La Combe] But ancient hubris, sooner or later, when the time comes, is prone to generate hubris that thrives among the evils of mankind: a new grudge of sunlight, and the daemon who is unconquerable, invincible, unholy, the violence of dark ate on the roofs, resembling her parents.

Metrical and grammatical difficulties show that the text is corrupt. 53 Nevertheless an understanding that requires no major surgery is possible. From the relatively firm ground of the first three verses, stating that old hubris eventually gives birth to a new hubris, one moves to two sets of accusatives, whose relationship to one another and to the preceding hubris is unclear: the new "resentment of light" (q>aouI''P"tov, oti OEtatjvopa· l'ii'VEt yap :vETO yap

Kal

~n']v

XOfJw iml:p to ~i:/.. ncrwv. i:crtw o · ..a6,, line 89), and suggested again in the double reference to the gate of Proetus (Jines 377 and 395) at which Tydeus is stationed. The Argive Proetus, with his brother Acrisius, was known to tradition as the "discoverer" of the Argive shield (Apollodorus, Bihl. 2.2). The Argive inventor of the shield is stressed just at the moment when the Argive shield becomes the focus of the action. The Argive shield appears in Aeneid 3 (lines 635-7) in the description of the blinding of the Cyclops. et telo lumen terebramus acuto in gens quod torva solum sub fronte latebat Argolici clipei aut Phoebeae lampadis instar. Here too the round white Argive shield is associated with a baleful single eye, and the shining disk in the sky-the sun apparently. I wish il: were the moon. 10 The barely human Tydeus has a shield device which, on the surface at least, is not horrible at all. As the champions grow more human and less terrifying the shield devices grow more monstrous. The maiden-faced Parthenopacus, who ends the sequence, carries the sphinx with a dead Theban in her claws. But also, as we have discovered, the tranquil beauty of Tydeus' shield masks the deadliest threat to the house of Laius. Similarly out of the girlish face of Parthenopaeus stare the eyes of the gorgon (line 537) . This is still another expression of the ambiguity about what is really terrible, the confusion between what seems and what is, that haunts the house of Laius in this play. The descriptions of the warriors with their shields express not only the Ares outside the gates which fails to break in, but also the Ares inside the house of Laius which is about to break out, and make itself known to Eteocles and Polyneices. Polyneices, appealing to Dike and the ancestral gods of Thebes. is as much a contrast to the other attackers in appearance and

53

34

THE SHJIU.n O:i" ETEOCLES

behavior as Eteocles himself. But he proclaims his willingness to kill his brother, and Amphiaraus makes it plain that his assault on the city is nothing less than an assault on the mother who gave him life (line 584). The gap between being and seeming is not hard to see in Po1yneices. The hatred and violence masked by Eteodes' reverent and controlled manner breaks out only at the end of his response to the messenger's description of Polyneices and his shield (lines 672-.5). • •• f.if.J.t

IC(LL

~11aT';JfTO)J-al.

(t1',..,0c;· T[ .... (~AAo'i p.Q)..Aov b•St.xc:JT€po5; H I ' I apxovn r upxow KaL K) I 0 I. "'For the legends concerning Cecrops see W. H. Riischer. Ausjlihrliclu·> l.exinm der griechischen und romischen Mythologie (Leipzig I H90 I H!l-1) II. I I 0 1·1 I 02·1.

235

202

SHEILA MURNAGHAN

of marriage that places it in the category of human cultural constructs- in the same category, that is, as the human achievements celebrated in the first stasimon of the Antigone, the ode that is sometimes called the "ode on man," whose presence in this play reveals its connection to the fifth-century debate on the relation of nomos and phusis and affirms its concern with the value and limitations of such achievements. 22 The significance of this invention for women is suggested by another story told about Cecrops. 23 During his reign, a vote was taken to determine whether the city would be named for Poseidon or Athena. Since women could vote and there was one more woman than there were men, Athena won. But Poseidon was angry and flooded the territory of Athens until women were forced to undergo three penalties; they lost the vote, they were no longer citizens, and they no longer gave their names to their children. Thus the exclusion of women from political life is associated with the loss of matrilineal naming, something that only becomes possible with Cecrops' other invention, monogamous marriage, in which female fertility is controlled so that it is possible for the paternity of children to be known and reflected in their names. 24 A similar conception of how the interests of men and women may differ in relation to the family underlies the story of the wife of Intaphernes. There, a woman, who is essentially a private person, makes a choice indicating a greater allegiance to the family into which she was born and to which she is tied by blood kinship than to the family into which she married and which, by marrying into it, she helped to create. The king, who is very much a public and political figure, is puzzled by this choice. From his perspective she should be expected to prefer a member of the family she married into to her brother who, as he puts it, is less closely related ( aAAOTptntury philosophical speculation see also Robert F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles' Antigone (Princeton 1951) 86-91. "This story is told by St. Augustine (Civ. Dei 18.9), who attributes it to Varro. "On this story see Simon Pembroke, "Women in Charge: the Function of Alternatives in Early Greek Tradition and the Ancient Idea of Matriarchy," .Journal of the War!Jurg and Courtauld Institute 30 (1967) 30-31.

236

AN'JJGONE 904-20 AND THE INSTITUTION OF :\1.\RRI.\dd. /ma~r·.1 of Wrllll aJ 9EO> 590; &vEXE XEpas &vEXf. ..\&yov 592; -nfX!!- O'OL

nJxq. 594·

276

Vol.

101]

THE ARGIVE FESTIVAL OF HERA

crown his head (872, 882; cf. 887).36 together as victors :

She draws father and son

'f' \ \ I ' ' J.. I W Kai\1\LVtK€ 7TaTpoc; €K VtKTJ'/'Opov yeyws 'Op/.aTa, Tijc; tJ7T' 'D..tcp f-ULXTJ>

(880-81)

She contrasts the trivial feat of an athletic contest with the feat of slaying the enemy Aegisthus in an act of war (883-85; c£ 862-63, 386-90), but later in her speech over Aegisthus' body, she repeats the athletic metaphor (953-56). The outcome of the second contest (987) will no longer be a cause for rejoicing, but there is an echo of the theme of military victory at Clytemnestra's entrance. She comes on stage in sumptuous luxury to confront her ragged daughter. The temples are adorned with the spoils of Troy (aKDAa), but her share of the booty is the Phrygian slaves who accompany her, a small recompense for the daughter she lost at Aulis (rooo--3). It is a brilliant entrance, reminiscent of Agamemnon's fateful entrance in AeschylusY Her doom will also match his, for she too will be lured into the house to meet her death at a sacrifice on a joyous occasion.38 The verbal echo from the Agamemnon, the repetition of the aKvAa from the prologue's description of the king's death, and the choral ode whose subject is the murder of Agamemnon (1147-63) strengthen the parallels between the two events so that the opprobrium of the first murder is transferred to the second.39 But apart from this resemblance to the fate of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra's entrance is very similar to the initial entrance of the chorus. The luxury of gold and sumptuous dress is again contrasted with the ragged poverty of Electra.4° The confrontation between mother and 3 6 Kubo 23-24 proposes, that "if the scene is to be visualized in the way its epirrhematic form seems to require, the Heraean crowns are transferred from the chorus to Electra, and then from her to Orestes and Pylades" to be used for crowning the victors. 37 For example, in Aeschylus, Agamemnon enters with Phrygian captives as does Clytemnestra in this play. He receives a royal welcome as Clytemnestra docs here (988-97). As in Aeschylus, Clytemnestra utters the command to step down from the wagon (cf. A. Ag. 906, 1039, and E. El. 998). 3 8 On the development of the theme of sacrifice in Aeschylus, sec my two articles, "The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus' Oresteia," TAPA 96 (1965) 463-508, and "Postscript to Sacrificial Imagery in the Oresteia (Ag. I2J 5-37)" TAPA 97 (1966) 645-53· 39 On this point, see O'Brien J I, n. 3 r. 4o Rivier I 38 notes the contrast between Clytemnestra and Electra, but not its connection with the first entrance of the chorus.

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FROMA I. ZEITLIN

daughter take8 up the themes exposed in the earlier meeting between the chorus and Electra, but in a more intense and more personal way. Moreover, the chorus had invited Electra to participate in a religious celebration; now she invites her mother to perform a ritual for her. Finally, the chorus, at the entrance of Clytemnestra, once again establishes the ceremonial milieu. For their address to the queen is phrased in the language of the cult hymn which is sung at a festival. 4 1 The two aspects of the ritual motif--celebration and sacrifice-meet again as they did in the ode on the golden lamb which was followed by the sacrifice in honor of the Nymphs. In addition, a flawed ritual of the past is repeated in a present act of distorted sacrifice. For the discussion between Clytemnestra and her daughter, which precedes the queen's murder, focuses on the issue of Iphigenia's sacrifice at Aulis.4 2 The play opened with funerary sacrifice to Agamemnon by Orestes and the lament of Electra. The play closes with the mother's death at a birth ritual and with lamentations. Now Electra can truly ask in what choral dance can she participate (1 198). The dance she refused This point will be developed below. •• It is interesting to note that in Sophocles' Electra, the confrontation between mother and daughter also centers about the issue oflphigenia's sacrifice at Aulis (3. El. 516-609). Discussion of a ritual of the past also precedes the performance of another ritual, for Electra has interrupted her mother's ritual preparations for an apotropaic sacrifice to Apollo Lykeios. The scene ends with Clytemnestra's request to Electra to allow her to begin her sacrifice (63o--3 1) to which Electra consents (632). But the whole import of the scene is different. Clytemnestra's defiant sacrifice and prayer to Apollo Lykeios for protection reveals her as a brazen woman with no outward sense of compassion or guilt. (See John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (Oxford 1962) 153, for an excellent analysis of Clytemnestra's ritual behavior in the Sophoclean play.) Clytemnestra's sacrifice is ironically doomed to failure. The temple of Apollo Lykeios is pointed out to Orestes as the first landmark of Argos by the Paedagogus at the opening of the play (6--7). It is Delphian Apollo who has sent Orestes upon his mission. The new entrance of the Paedagogus is an even finer ironic stroke. He comes with the false news of Orestes' death, an apparently immediate answer to the queen's prayer, but it will prove her destruction. Finally, just before the queen's murder, Electra prays to the same Apollo Lykeios (1376-83) for assistance in the act, and it is her prayer that is heeded. In Euripides, the irony is of a different order. Electra, not her mother, initiates the ritual request, ostensibly for herself on the basis of their relationship, but the request is spurious. The effect of the scene, which telescopes the whole history of the house of Agamemnon-the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the echoes of the Aeschylean murder of Agamemnon, and the coming sacrificial death of Clytemnestra-suggests, not a progress towards justice, but a repetition of crime, guilt, and remorse. The details of the agon between mother and daughter will be further analyzed below. 41

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Vol.

101]

THE ARGIVE FESTIVAL OF HERA

of her own free will is now closed to her; the self-imposed exile from Argos has become a reality (IJII-15). Orestes begs her to embrace him and to raise up the dirge over him as one does for a dead man at his tomb (1325-26). The last celebration has turned to lamentation, and the chorus, who from its entrance, had set and maintained the festive mood, has participated in rituals which are far removed in spirit and execution from those of the regular festival of Hera. Celebration has proved an illusion and ritual sacrifice has become murder. Grief is the proper mood and the ritual oflament the proper ceremony.

The Festival of Hera and the Electra The chorus invites Electra to a festival and continues to perform a ceremonial function throughout the play, but this role need not be anchored to any specific festival. The question might still be asked : what is the relevance of the Argive festival of Hera to the play? Despite the scantiness of information about the details of the Heraea, an examination of the evidence we have suggests that Euripides seems to have used the events of the actual festival as an ironic counterpoint to the mythos of the play. In addition to the athletic competitions normally staged at festivals and the more unusual martial processions of armed men, 43 an outstanding event of the Heraea was a special shield contest, the xaAKEtOS. The festival itself was sometimes called the 'Amrls, and the winner of the contest was proverbial for a man who received unusual honors.44

aywv

43 Aen. Tact. 1.17: lopTfjs yd.p 1ravo~p.ov ;ew Tfj> m5.\€ws 'Apyelwv y€vop.£v'YJ>, £efjyov 1TOfL~" avv 01T~.ot> TWJJ '" Tfi ~ALiclq. avxvwv. LeBas-Foucart, Inscr. du Pllop. 112a, dpp.a 1TOA€p.tcr~pwv. 44 For a general discussion of the Heraea, see Farnell, Cults, 1.186-89, Roscher, Lexikcm, 1.2075-77, P. Stengel, RE, Heraia s.v., 8.416·-18, Nilsson, GF, 42-45. For the

textual evidence see Farnell, Cults, 1.249-50. The festival of Hera in Argos was called the 'Amrls: ClG 234, 1068, 2810, po8; IG J.II6, 129. For the dywv XnAK€ios, Hesychius s.v. Cf. Pi. Nem. 10.22-23 and Schol. Pi. 01. 7·152: Kal S' '"To/ u Apy€t OtOOfL€VOS xaAKOS d.8..\ov To/ JJIK~aavn ...

TO s~ d8.:\ov df17T1s XnAKfj' o{ Ot fTTEtjJavot £K p.vpalVYJs.

The proverb is cited in Zenobius, Paroem. 6. 52: c1s T~v £v u Apy€t da1rloa Ka8e'A.wv

cnp.vWETat and 2.J:

news €l TfjS '"

Apy€t da'!TlOos.

w

Another interesting point which might connect the shield ode to the Heraea is that late tradition makes the famous Heraeum (where the festival was celebrated) the place where Agamemnon was chosen leader of the expedition to Troy and the point of departure for the Greek host (Dictys Cretens. Bell. Tro. 1.16). It is thought that the

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66o

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In the light of the contest, the ode on the shield of Achilles assumes a still greater significance and serves as a relevant transition between the Heraea parodos and the central events of the play. Moreover, the prominence of the theme of military and athletic victory is thereby equally justifiable. The chorus, in singing the shield ode and an epinician song to the victor, have recreated the circumstances of the Heraea, but in an entirely new context. For the epinician song is sung, not to celebrate the conclusion of an athletic contest, but to celebrate the accomplishment of murder, and the murder is one which has taken place at a sacrifice to which the author of the act was invited as a guest.4S It is no less disturbing than the dance of Aegisthus on Agamemnon's grave and his gloating taunts (323-31), which are matched by Electra's speech over the corpse of the slain Aegisthus (907-56). Secondly, the Heraea was also called the Hekatombeia because of the large number of sacrifices offered during the celebration.46 When the chorus enter, they tell Electra that the Argives now proclaim the forthcoming sacrifice in honor of the goddess (171-73). I have already pointed out the importance of the sacrifice motif in the play metopes of the New Temple in the Heraeum contained scenes of the Capture of Troy, while the western pedimental sculptures represented the departure of the heroes. See Paus. 2.17.3 and the discussion ofWaldstein (above, note 16) 146-53. The old temple accidentally burned in 423 B.c., and the date for the completion of the new temple is set either around 416 or 410, according toP. Amandry, "Observations sur les monuments de I'Heraion d'Argos," Hesperia 21 (1952) 270-74. The date of Euripides' Electra is equally vexed (see Conacher's summary of the bibliography on the problem, 202-3, n. 9). The most that can be said is that the dates of the temple and of the Electra can overlap. 45 S. Adams, "Two Plays of Euripides," CR 49 (1935) 121, makes another point: "That makes it seem the more horrible that he should not only strike down his victim from behind, but should even then make so miserable a job ofit (842 ff). It is to emphasize by contrast the crude wretchedness of all this that Orestes is so emphatically compared by the Chorus and Electra to a Victor in the Games ... " On the motif of corrupted hospitality, see O'Brien 34-36. 46 For the name Hrkatombeia cf. Hesychius: dy6JVXaAK£ios· Td: Jv "Apyn 'EKaTOJLflaia. Schol. Pi. 01. 7.152: 1TaV7Jyvplaylw once (627) with reference to Aesgisthus' sacrifice. Electra, before the murder of Clytemnestra, speaks of the sacrificial bull, Aegisthus ( 1142-44). In tlus same contest, Electra also refers to tl1e ritual basket that is raised again (1142). The mention of the basket is not an arbitrary choice of a sacrificial detail, for we are told that a virgin girl, who was a basket bearer (kaniphoros) at this festival, was the one who began the sacrifice, a cult role which Electra can readily fill. 47 Earlier, Electra, in response to the chorus' admonition of the power of the goddess, had spoken of the futility of prayers to the gods (198200). But the scene in which Electra, Orestes, and the Old Man plan their intrigues against the royal couple ended with their prayers to the gods for success in their enterprise. It is Electra who ominously appeals to Hera, the goddess who rules over the altars of Mycenae: "Hpa

'TE

flwpiiJV ~ MvKYJvalwv Kpa'TEis

(674)

Thus, in form, the two acts of murder which are set in a sacrificial milieu, maintain an implied connection with the festival of Hera, but the nature of the sacrifices themselves is even more closely related to the cult of the goddess. For Clytemnestra herself seems to be presented as the priestessgoddess figure of Hera. The entrance of the queen is heralded by the chorus in a form that recalls a ritual cult hymn to the goddess. {JaulAEta was one of the important cult epithets of the Argive Hera. Moreover, the ring composition, the elaborate phraseology, the pedigree of relationship with the divine Dioscuri, the reference to the local place of habitation, the formal greetings, xa'ip£ and a£{3l'w (c£ 196--97), in addition to the term 0£pa7T£V£a0at, which denotes cult service to the gods (c£ 744) make the hymn form unmistakable.48

a

47 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 21: .;; Tfi A£yopivTJ KavfJopo; yin} y&p.wv 7Tai; Ka'Tapxop.lYTJ 'TWV 8vp.aTWV xopo{ 'Tfi 7Tap8lvwv Vfl-VOVUWV T~V 8t£OV cp8a'i; 7TaTplot€£A.ov-ro J.Ln er.ovo,_.duat XPTJUTOV, • even during his tyranny they did not deprive him of the name Good' (repeated 8, 27, II). Aristodemos then, before he became tyrant of Megalopolis, had done something which Megalopolis never forgot ; and this can only have been his defeat of Acrotatos of Sparta (Plut. Agis 3). It has always been a mystery how Megalopolis could possibly have defeated Sparta single-banded ; the history of the Arcadian League may provide the explanation. The old belief in a restored Arcadian League in the third century vanished with the attribution of the Phylarchos inscription (Syl/. 3 183) to 362/r ; and Swoboda in his Staatsaltertiimer (1913) merely says that that League was dissolved by Alexander and never revived. Yet there are many references to a later League ; for the ethnic 'ApKa~, or 'ApKar; of such a city (showing that city was in the League), is common, especially in the Delphic inscriptions. 1 I have previously pointed out (].H.S. 1922, 205) that the usual statement that Alexander dissolved the Arcadian League in 324 has no basis either in tradition or probability. In the Lamian war Arcadia acts as a unit ; and the League was in existence from 320(9 to 304(3,11 even if Cassander sometimes deprived I The cases then known are given in Hiller von Gaenringen's Testimonia to /.G. V. ii. ( 1913), unfortunately with Pomtow's now obsolete dating ; but apparently he did not draw the obvious deduction. 2 I. G. V. ii. 549, sso= Syli.• 314, where see Hiller's notes.

it of a city. It must have entered Demetrios' Panhellenic League of 303 as a unit, and would be one of the l8v'TJ referred to in that League's constitution.3 Other references to the Arcadian League shortly before or about 300 are !.G. II. 964; Supp. Ep. Gr. r, 360; possibly Arvanitopoullos, E>EuuaA.tKtl MV'TJJL€Uz 176 j and B.C.H. 1899. 519, No. 5, and apparently Delphi inv. 2382 (in I.G. V. ii. p. 69), both of which show Orchomenos was a member. Between 300 and the Chremonidean war the references are: /.G. II. 1293 (271/o for certain), and 1295 = Syll. 3 1090 (between 290 and 270) ; Fouilles de Delphes III. 46, and G.D.I. 2787=Fouilles III. 36, both somewhere between 287/6 and the Chremonidean war and both showing Megalopolis was a member; G.D.I. 2669 = Fouilles III. 14 (probably 271), which shows Stymphalos was a member; and three decrees of Dexippos' year at Delphi, early third century, 4 G.D.I. 2794, 2795, 2796 = Fouilles III. 43, 44, 45, which show that Megalopolis and Mantinea were both members. As then during this period Orchomenos and Mantinea are known members, the presumption is that Eastern Arcadia was not yet acting independently, and that the League, as was certainly the case in 320/19, still embraced the whole country. With the Chremonidean war the position changes; Syll.3 434 shows that by 266 the four eastern cities, Tegea1 Mantinea, Orchomenos, and Caphya ci had broken away from the League an"' 3 Supp. Ep. Gr. 1, 75, I. 23 ; see Cary, Class. Quart. 1922, p. 142. • See Bourguet on Fouillu III. 43·

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.08.29 E.R. Dodds, Missing Persons: An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977; reprinted 2000. Pp. x, 202. £35.00. Reviewed by Robert B. Todd, University of British Columbia ([email protected]) The Oxford University Press has just reprinted nine works of classical scholarship among seventy titles in a new series "Scholarly Classics," in which "great academic works" from its archives have been resurrected in order to allow "fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century. "1 But one further work that appears under "Classics" is an autobiography by a major scholar first published twenty-three years ago. Since it belongs to the realm of literature and has had no place in ongoing scholarly debates, its reissue and fresh access justify its being, as it were, rereviewed. E.R. Dodds' Missing Persons (hereafter MP) is an artfully written evocation of a complex life that extended from Ulster in the 1890s to Thatcher's England. Throughout it a consistent devotion to classical scholarship was maintained in the face of personal sadness (an alcoholic father, and a childless marriage), cultural disruption (deracination from Ireland), an uneven career (temporary expulsion from Oxford as an undergraduate; a hostile reception on returning there as Regius Professor of Greek), and the intrusions of two world wars (non-combatantcy in one; debilitating service and travel in the other). Yet, confronted with these challenges, Dodds did not use scholarship as an escape. Instead, he sought to enlarge the limits of the traditional language-bound Classics of his era by

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informing it with insights drawn from psychology, anthropology, and psychical research, and by extending its range to include neglected authors of late antiquity, while all the time maintaining firm roots in traditional scholarly techniques. Classicists are familiar with this general picture of Dodds' achievement, as well as with the susceptibility of his approach to the charge of anachronism. His career and work have, however, been directly addressed in only a handful of special studies, and these have revealed that his autobiography is not the only, and not always the best, source for interpreting and understanding his oeuvre in the context of his life and times.2 We know now that Dodds wrote Missing Persons in the wake of his wife's death after a prolonged illness,3 as a work of consolation more than an apologia, and, above all, not as an intellectual and scholarly memoir. It is perhaps best described as a phenomenology of the self, in which the author focuses on his experiences and the dissociations he detected in them (the "missing persons" of his title; cf. MP, 192-195). The language is simple and unrhetorical, 4 and the tone unsentimental. It contains vivid narratives Gourneys to Serbia, China, and the United States) and a host of defining incidents charged with unstated meaning (e.g., images of his father's alcoholism [MP, 3], or glimpses of scholarly obsessiveness from A.E. Taylor and Max Pohlenz [MP, 75 and 166]). Such immediacy generally predominates over analysis, and when the latter occurs (as on Ireland [MP,

82-83], or the decline of Classics [MP, 172-176]) it emerges as rather stale and derivative. The result, then, is a biography not primarily designed to engage fellow professionals or to gratify historians of classical scholarship. These constituencies want more information about the great scholars whom Dodds knew; instead, they find them passed over in cursory, even evasive, terms.s And though remarkably frank about some aspects of his

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personallife,6 Dodds is also too fastidious for gossip (declining even to name his bitterest foe at Oxford)/ Yet his silences invariably raise crucial questions, and since classicists discovering, or rediscovering, this autobiography may be most interested in those concerning the origins and evolution of his scholarship, those are the ones I shall pursue here. Dodds' academic career had three phases: (i) the years 1917-1933 in which, after taking his Oxford degree, he worked intensively on Neoplatonism, while teaching at the universities of Reading and Birmingham; (ii) the period that began around the time of his return to Oxford in 1936 and is marked by his two most important and influential works, the edition of Euripides' Bacchae (1944) and The Greeks and the Irrational (1951); and then (iii) his last decade at Oxford, when he devoted himself to his edition of Plato's Gorgias (1959), returning to the study of ancient irrationalism only in retirement, with Pagan and Christian in An Age of Anxiety (1965). MP provides much factual information on these stages yet explains too little of why the author took up particular areas of study and why he changed from one to the other. Whether through reticence, indifference, or a sense of its irrelevance to his autobiographical project, he leaves (perhaps invites) the reader to supply such an analysis. 8 First, in the case of Neoplatonism, and Plotinus, we learn that his friendship with the inspired amateur Stephen MacKenna was fueled by a "common love" ofPlotinus, which went back, he adds, to a class at Oxford with J.A. Stewart "and perhaps a little further" (MP, 63). How much further? Did he encounter him first at school, or in the circles of the Hermetic Society of George William Russell (AE), which we know he joined before he took Stewart's class (MP, 55)? 9 And why did he persist in working on Plotinus, and later Produs, during the 1920s when such authors were so obviously non-canonical within British Classics? I have suggested in

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this journal (BMCR 99.11.19) that it was easier for him to do so in provincial locations, where he had fewer and less challenging students (cf. MP, 90, 92), than would have been the case at Oxford. But we have to speculate. Dodds provides only details, such as the memorable story (MP, 92) of an audience having to be drummed up at the last minute for a paper on Plotinus at Oxford in 1926. That anecdote, as they say, speaks volumes, but volumes that we must decipher; Dodds doesn't do the job for us. Secondly, why did Dodds shift in the 1930s and 1940s to studying authors from the classical period? He refers offhandedly (MP, 91) to taking "compassionate leave" in the late 1920s from what he revealingly calls "enslavement" to his edition of Proclus' Elements of Theology for "lesser enterprises, including a couple of papers on Euripides." But the papers mentioned here as parerga introduced Freudian psychology into an analysis ofPhaedra's state of mind in the Hippolytus, and proposed a relationship between Euripides and contemporary irrationalism that anticipated The Greeks and the Irrational.lO Both papers also appeared just as Dodds was moving towards a throughly secular Weltanschauung. While his book of poems (1929) reflects N eoplatonism and its dualistic psychology, 11 justtwo years later (and here we have to go to the archives) he delivered a paper that embraced secular morality, and offered a version of modern instinct-based psychology. 12 Such an intellectual framework was more readily adapted to pagan classical literature than to the texts of N eoplatonism. His career dovetailed with this development when he returned to Oxford in 1936 and had to teach the canonical classical syllabus. An invitation to edit the Bacchae came in his first term as Gilbert Murray's successor, and by accepting it Dodds reestablished links to his Oxford undergraduate years, when Murray's lectures on Euripides' Bacchae had been his "most exciting intellectual adventure" (MP, 28). But the account of his development that I

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have given here is only skirted in Missing Persons. Thus he notes (MP, 169) that by "willingly" agreeing to edit the Bacchae he was able to show that he knew about something other than Neoplatonism. But he does not indicate why he preferred this task rather than joining Paul Henry in editing Plotinus, as he was invited to also in 1936 (a fact he omits).13 And whom did he think needed showing that he knew something about Euripides? The final phase of Dodds' career might have been expected to lead to publications similar to The Greeks and the Irrational; he had, after all, planned to take the story of ancient irrationalism down to late antiquity. 14 Instead, he buried himself during the 19 50s in an edition of Plato's Gorgias. Initially conceived in the late 1930s as a culturally responsive project at a time of European political chaos, 15 this project turned into a rather traditional piece of work, resembling the edition of the Poetics by his predecessor but one, Ingram Bywater, rather than emulating the outreaching studies of his immediate predecessor, Gilbert Murray. There is something sad about the sixty-year old Regius Professor collating a manuscript in Cesena on a Sunday in the 1950s (MP, 174) when he might well have been offering ground-breaking seminars to advanced students had he been disposed to accept invitations to teach in the United States. (A combination of advancing years and McCarthyism deterred him [MP, 183184].) The upshot was an edition in which extensive work on the text led to his "bloating [the commentary] with trivia (MP, 172). As such, his edition 11

was perfect for "Mods." students, "Mods." (Honour Moderations) being Oxford's preparatory five-term program of linguistic study; see MP, 177178 on Dodds' unsuccessful efforts to reform this system). In this restrictive environment Dodds had to lecture to raw undergraduates on set 11

books it involved drudgery (MP, 128) and in the post-war years lectures 11

;

on Homer that yielded no scholarly publications (MP, 170-171). Though he

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does not say so, it was arguably this system that condemned him to produce an edition of the Gorgias with which he was himself dissatisfied. The Oxford Press must be congratulated for reprinting this autobiography. It deserves to be read by a new generation of classicists, one that will, however, have to cope unaided with prosopographical challenges (name dropping of the obscure is one ofMP's more maddening features). They ought in particular to rejoice in encountering a scholarly career that, partly through the accidents of history and personal circumstance partly through the determined will of an intellectually curious individual, extended well beyond the normal academic confines. They will not see its like again. But historians of classical scholarship should be warned. Missing Persons is at best a catalyst for the unfinished task of analyzing a rich and varied career, and assessing an influentiallegacy.16

1 In summary form these are: A.E. Astin, Cato the Censor; E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae; A.B. Bosworth, From Arrian to Alexander; C.M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry and Pindar; J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Antioch; W.D. Ross (ed.), Aristotle: Parva Naturalia; S. Treggiari, Roman Freedmen; and M.L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. 2 D. Russell, "Eric Robertson Dodds," PBA 67 (1981) 357-370 is important both for biography and interpretation and for its insightful judgments (at 357 and 370) on MP. Two broader studies by Italian scholars are: G. Mangani, "Sul Metodo di Eric Dodds e sulla Nozione di 'irrazionale'," Quaderni di Storia 11 (1980) 173-205, and G. Cambiano, "Eric Dodds: entre psychanalyse et parapsychologie," Revue de l'histoire des religions 208 (1991) 3-26. I have published the following: "E.R. Dodds: A Bibliography of his Publications," Quaderni di Storia 48 (1998) 175-194; "A Note on the Genesis ofE.R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational," Echos du Monde Classique I Classical Views n.s. 17 (1998) 663-676; and "E.R. Dodds: The Dublin Years (1916-1919), with reprints of two early articles," Classics Ireland 6 (1999) 80-105 (= http:! /%20www.ucd.ie/ -classics/99/todd.html). 3 Russell (note 2) 357, and confirmed by several other sources. 4 Hence the effectiveness of the anaphora in the main paragraph of MP, 194, a concluding paeon to fortune with four successive sentences beginning "It was fortune."

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5 For a model of this kind of memoir see 0. Skutsch, "Recollections of Scholars I Have Known," HSCP 94 (1992) 387-408, expertly edited by Anton Bier! and Wiliam Calder. 6 We learn of his first erection (MP, 10-11) and an unsuccessful visit to a Maltese brothel (MP, 46; veracity questioned by W.M. Calder III, CW 73 [1979-80] 305306, but defended by B. Gentili, QUCC n.s. 7 [1981] 175-176) and are treated to a ringing self-condemnation for his conduct towards his first fiancee (MP, 79). There is enough here to satisfy diehards of the confessional school. 7 Kenneth Dover, Marginal Comment (London, 1994) 39-40 supplies the name for those who may be interested. 8 Russell (note 1) 357 suggests that Dodds was also defensive about the eccentric nature of his studies. He refers to Dodds' anecdote in his Presidential lecture to the Classical Association (PCA 64 [1964] 11), where a person encountered on a train told him that he thought a professor of Greek was an "extinct animal." Russell, writing in the Age of Thatcher, quoted this as "extinct monster." 9 He applied to join this Society in mid-1913; see A. Denson (ed.), Letters from AE (London, 1961) 85. 10 "The aidos ofPhaedra and the Meaning of the Hippolytus," CR39 (1925) 102104, and "Euripides the Irrationalist," CR 43 (1929) 97-104. 11 Thirty-Two Poems (London, 1929), from which, if N. Annan, The Dons (Chicago, 1999) 142 is to be believed, Maurice Bowra quoted at parties to Dodds' discredit. Bowra had hoped to become Regius Professor at Oxford. Careful readers will find ambivalence in Dodds' two references to him at MP, 126 and 127. 12 "The Ordinary Man's Ethics" (Dodds Papers, Bodleian Library, Box 31/1), a lecture delivered in the academic year 1931-32. 13 The evidence is in the correspondence file on the Bacchae in the Archives of the Oxford University Press. 14 See R.B. Todd, "A Note on the Genesis of E.R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational," (n. 2 above). 15 Plato: Gorgias (Oxford, 1959), Preface, v. 16 In an article forthcoming in Quaderni di Storia I plan to discuss in greater detail some of the external evidence that can be used to enlarge Dodds' own account of his professional career.

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Plato Comicus and the Evolution of Greek Comedy Ralph M. Rosen In tracing the formal changes in comic drama from the fifth to the fourth centuries, it is common to point to such things as the waning role of the chorus and parabasis, an increasing subordination of lyric elements, and a tendency towards more coherent, unified plots.l But changes in subject matter, topoi, themes and tone are more difficult to ascertain, especially in light of the wholly fragmentary nature of the comedy that survives from the period between Aristophanes and Menander. Handbooks tell us that along with the decline of the Athenian polis at the end of the fifth century, such hallmarks of Old Comedy as personal invective, obscene language and political satire also disappeared. But such generalizations obviously stem from the careless assumption that fourth-century comedy must have been more like Menander than Aristophanes. In fact, when one looks at the comic fragments from the middle decades of the fourth century, it is striking just how many elements normally associated with Old Comedy appear.z Still, however artificial and imprecise the labels we assign to literary movements may be, most scholars would agree that they remain constructs useful for organizing the undifferentiated material history leaves us. In the case of Greek comedy the general division between the "Old" and the "New" began at least as early as Aristotle, who could speak at Eth. Nic. 1128a22 of 7taAata and Katvft comedy. 1 See, for example, Norwood, Greek Comedy 58-60, and SchmidStahlin, Geschichte 450-52. 2Hunter, Eubulus 20-30, in his concise survey of the characteristics of Middle Comedy, makes it clear that some of the crucial features of Old Comedy, e.g. political satire, tragic parody, and mythological burlesque (see below, pp. 123-26), did not suddenly disappear in the fourth century.

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Ralph M. Rosen

Exactly which poets Aristotle would include under these rubrics remains uncertain, especially since it is likely that he considered at least some of Aristophanes' plays to be "new" and it was only at the end of Aristotle's lifetime that the chief representative of our so-called "New Comedy," Menander, began his rise to prominence.3 The tripartite division of comedy as we know it (Old: to the death of Aristophanes; Middle: early fourth century to Menander; New: Menander and beyond) probably originated in Hellenistic scholarship, but even so, as Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath has meticulously discussed in his recent book on Middle Comedy, there was often considerable disagreement in antiquity about which poets belonged to what period.4 I would like to address here one of these disagreements, namely the question of whether the playwright Plato Comicus (hereafter simply "Plato") belonged, as a few ancient commentators have claimed, in any meaningful sense to Middle Comedy. The question, I believe, is more than just a trivial quibble about the category of literary history to which we should assign Plato. I am, in fact, less interested in what we choose to call Plato than in the nature of his poetic production and its relationship to subsequent comic drama. Focusing on Plato in this way enriches our conception of comic trends in late fifth-century Athens, a conception which is too often skewed by inferences drawn solely from the extant plays of Aristophanes. Now that Nesselrath has so thoroughly examined the history and descriptive validity of Middle Comedy as a literary-critical construct, we are well positioned to reconsider whether Plato fits squarely into the mainstream of Old Comedy, or whether he anticipated to a significant degree trends in comedy that we associate with fourth-century Middle Comedy. 3Cf. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy 244-49, who argues that a tripartite division of comedy existed before Menander, but that with Menander's rising fame the earlier system was reformulated to make him the representative of "new" comedy. Cf. also Nesselrath, Mitt/ere Komodie 4445, 145-49. Nesselrath argues against Janko's position that the tenthcentury Tractatus Cois/inian us (which speaks clearly of a tripartite division of comedy) ultimately descends from Aristotle's Poetics. 4Nesselrath, Mitt/ere Komodie 45, note 39 and, in general, 1-187. For a survey of the history of modern scholarship on the concept of a "middle" comedy, cf. pp. 1-29.

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PLATO COMICUS

121

From a strictly chronological point of view, of course, there can be little doubt that Plato belonged to Old Comedy. His career began in the middle of the fifth century and continued until at least the 380's, roughly paralleling the career of Aristophanes. Yet Plato has frequently been regarded as a transitional figure in the development of Greek comedy from Old to New. Some nineteenth-century scholars such as Cobet and Wilamowitz,s influenced by certain ancient testimonia, went so far as to proclaim Plato the inventor of Middle Comedy. Norwood even posited the notion of a distinct fifth-century school of comedy (with Crates as its putative leader) which had, he believed, affinities with Middle Comedy.6 Nesselrath is aware, of course, as he shows so clearly in the first half of his book, that one can define "Middle" so as to include just about anyone, as some of the scholiasts seemed to do. He has demonstrated in fact how the meaning of "Old," "Middle," and "New" tended to vary according to whatever generic teleology a commentator had in mind for comedy. Thus, for example, when a scholiast on Dionysius Thrax held that Cratinus was a quintessential representative of Old Comedy, that Aristophanes and Eupolis belonged partly to the Old, partly to the Middle, Plato to the Middle, and Menander to the New Comedy, it is 5Cobet, Observationes. Wilamowitz, Thukydideslegende 326-67 = [1969, 31]. Cf. also Oppe, New Comedy 42. On the development of Wilamowitz's views about Greek comedy and on his evaluation of Plato in particular, cf. Nesselrath, Mittlere Komodie 12-17, 34-35. 6Norwood Greek Comedy 145-77. The idea that Crates represented some sort of alternative or transitional form of Old Comedy derives, of course, from Aristotle's laconic remarks about him in Poetics 1449b7-9, in which he claims that Crates was the first one among the Athenians to "abandon the iambic form" (a tr>gedie grecque held>< P>ris X-N>nterre in M>y 1985.

I >m most gr>teful to Professors F. Jou>n >nd S. S>i'd for the invitation which prompted me to get my tdeas down on paper->nd to those present for the discussion. I am >lso indebted 10 Mich.el Silk >nd to the Journal's referee for thought-provoking criticism, not >II of which I h>ve been >ble to meet.

376

CHRISTIAN WOLFF

Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians: Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth

EuRIPIDES' lphigenia among the Taurians is usually regarded as an exceptionally well-made play, more transparently coherent and unproblematic than, say, the kindred Helen or Jon. Yet accounts of it have tended to overlook or downplay its extensive aetiological passages.! That these are almost entirely concerned with ritual, however, suggests a possible alignment with the stories of the two protagonists, one a priestess once sacrificed now sacrificing, the other, caught between Apolline oracle and pursuing Furies, in danger of imminent sacrifice, and all in a setting, before a sacred precinct of Artemis, in which cultic, and pseudocultic, activity is continually evoked and carried on. 2 What follows, I would like very much to thank for their comments and criticisms Seth Benardete. Carolyn Dewald. Helene Foley. Albert Henrichs. Sally Humphreys. Gregory Nagy. and the anonymous readers. I. On the play's construction see. e.g .. Anne Pippin Burnett, Ca1asrrophe Survived: Euripides' Plays of Mixed Reversal (Oxford. 1971) 47-72. esp. 50; and for a nice summary of the paradoxical web of its plot. Ernst Buschor in the introduction to his German translation (Munich, 1946) 92-93. Burnett. however. in what is overall the best account of IT. says nothing about the aetiologies. With Goethe she considers the play "the most humane and good-tempered of the classical tragedies'' (47): but in his version Goethe excised all the substance of the ritual material (and so of course the aetiologies). For a recent reading that sees IT in a more problematic light. cf. E. Masaracchia. "lfigenia Taurica: Un dramma a lieto finery" QUCC. n.s., 18 (1984) 111-23. 2. D. Lanza ("Una ragazza offerta al sacrificio." QS 22 [1989]5-22. esp. 13.16-18) stresses the importance of cult in IT. Cf. also A. Spira. Untersuchungen zum deus ex mach ina bei Sophokles und Euripides (Kallmiinz. 1960) 118-20. For extensive discussion of ritual in the fabric of Euripidean drama. see H. P. Foley. Riruallrony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca. 1985). I know of no comprehensive discussion of ritual aetiology in tragedy. C. Codrignani, "L' 'aition' nella poesia greca prima di Callimaco," Convivium. n.s .. 26 (1958) 527-45, is a preliminary outline. There are suggestive reflections on (Greek) aetiology generally by J. Redfield. in D. M. Halperin. J. J. Winkler. and © 1992 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

378

WOLFF:

Euripides' IT: Aetiology, Ritual, Myth

309

then. is a reading of the play in the light of its aetiologies that intends to show that the play·s formal, paradoxically turned elegance contains stronger. perhaps more unruly strains than are usually acknowledged. and that this wider scope is brought about particularly through the aetiologies. Along the way, then summarily at the end (section VI below), I would like to suggest a kind of metatheatrical attention in the play to the process of interpretation. Aetiology here is both a dramatic instrument and, more abstractly, an explanatory mode. Formally it is addressed to an audience in a way somewhat different from the rest of the play's dramatic speech, song, and action. This difference encourages interpretation and opens up the possibility of questioning, and so may effect that sometimes more discontinuous and unsettling reception of the drama that is especially associated with Euripides.

The aetiologies come in the latter part of the play. I would like to consider first a passage earlier on that illustrates a character interpreting and how we are induced to supplement that interpretation-a passage having to do with the nature of divinity and a ritual. After a report of the capture of two Greek young men and on the expectation that she, as priestess of Artemis, will directly prepare them for sacrifice, Iphigenia concludes a speech of remembered grief, despair, and vengefulness as follows: 1:0 Tij Tov 8£ov E'TT7JPWTwv Tl 'TTotwaw, S€ 8£os d1r£v !L~ Ktv£!v Tov lK£T"'v Tfjs 8£oiJ, Sto'TT£P avToiJ T£8a'TTTat. To 8£ l£pov OlSmoSHov KA7]8fjvat.

o

When Oedipus died, his friends thought to bury him in Thebes. But the Thebans, holding that he was an impious person on account of the 8 See LSJ" s.v. olKo~ L3 and cf. A. Henrichs, "Despoina Kybele," HSCP 8o (1976) 278 and n.70. With Androtion's cPK7Ja.aw' 'Epwvs, ~ p.Eyaa8Ev~s ns El. Oedipus is connected with five places in which the Erin yes received cult: Sicyon, 23 Potniai, 24 •• Kap.op{rrov~

(Aesch. Sept. 791);

rro>.vrrov~

(Sop h. El. 488; cf. the plant

1TO>.vrrollc.ov, discussed in the text below); 'TaVU1TOV~ (Soph. Aj. 837); vanp0710V~

(Orph. Argon. 1164, where the reminiscence of Il. 23.679 is significant); xa>.Ko1rov~ (Soph. El. 490). E. Wtist, "Erinys," RE Suppl. vol. 8, cols. 134-138 gives a list of epithets. •• Cult of the Erinyes as Eumenides near Sicyon: Paus. 2.11 + For Oedipus and Sicyon, see Erich Bethe, Thebanische Heldenlieder (Leipzig, 1891) pp. 67-75. The main evidence is schol. Eur. Phoen. 26, with which Bethe combines Hyg. Fab. 66 and the Homeric cup from Tanagra (CVA: France, Fasc. 23: Louvre, Fasc. 15: pp. 9-10; pl. 10, 1-4; Robert, Oidipus, vol. 1, p. 326, Abb. 49). The rescuers of the infant Oedipus are horseherders from Sicyon in schol. Eur. Phoen. 1760 and Androtion (n.6 above). Sicyon, the eponymous founder of the city, had a daughter Chthonophyle who by Hermes was the mother of Polybus (Paus. 2.6.6; cf. Nic. Dam. FGrH ii A9oF8). Ad rastus came to Poly bus at Sicyon and later became king of the city (Paus. ibid.) On a fragment of a vase from Adria which depicted the parricide, Laius is accompanied by a man called "Sikon" (CV A, Italia, fasc. 28, p. so and tav. 42; ARV', pp. 1029,19 and 1678-79; Robert, Oidipus, vol. 1, p. 288, Abb. 47). •• Potniai, a town near Thebes, named after the goddesses who were worshiped there, who were Demeter, Kore, and the Erinyes. See Wtist, RE

431

228

Lowell Edmunds

Cithaeron, 25 Colonus, 26 and the Aeropagus. 27 In addition to concrete associations of this sort, there is a more general resemblance between the characteristics of Oedipus and the Erin yes. The Erin yes, as chthonic deities, have two opposite functions: they bring blessings and destruction. Oedipus himself is so characterized by Sophocles. In Oedipus Tyrannus, he has had a long prosperous reign after ridding Thebes of the Sphinx, but he is also the cause of the plague, the polluter of the city. He is also presented in this play as having the power to impose a curse of sterility (269-272 ). In Oedipus Coloneus, he curses his sons, but he brings blessings to Attica. 28 The parallel functions of Oedipus and the Erinycs in this second play emerge from the words of Oedipus himself (457-460): 29 eciv yap VIL£i>, JJ ~EIIOL, 8£ArlJ' op.oii auv Taia8t: Tai> at:I'Vaiat 1)"/I'OVXOL> 8t:ai> MK~V 1TOtt:ia8at, 7fj8t: Tfj 7TI)At:t p.£yav awrijp' apt:ia8£ ... For if, strangers, with these reverend goddesses who protect the land, you are willing to come to my aid, you will win a great savior for this city .••

The Erinyes protect the land (cf. Ioio-12), and so will Oedipus. The parallel functions may also be implied in Ismene's report that the Thebans have received an oracle according to which they must acquire Oedipus living or dead t:~ao£a> xapw (390). The word dJaota suggests the beneficent side of Oedipus' Erinys-like power. 30 In general, one Suppl. vol. 8, cols. 91, I3o--131. Cf. Soph. OC 84 ,.;Tv&a& llt:&vam£5. Aesch. frag. 173N 2 : Oedipus killed Laius at Potniai. •• [l'lut.) de jluv. 2.3: Cithaeron was a dwelling-place of the Erinyes and was named for an inhabitant who killed his father and brother there. Oedipus was exposed on Cithacron (Soph. OT 1134, etc.). •• The source for the Erinyes at Colon us is Soph. OC. For Oedipus at Colonus, in addition to OC, Androtion {n.6 above); Paus. 1.30.4; Eur. Phoen. I70S-I707. 17 Paus. 1.28.6-7: Oedipus buried on Areopagus in a precinct of the Erinyes as Scmnai. Cf. Val. Max. 5·3·3· See Robert, Oidipus, vol. 1, pp. 38-43, on this burial site. 18 See Robert, Oidipus, vol. 1, p. 10. •• nlp.b·-. The resemblance of Oedipus to Trophonius suggests, then, that the name Oedipus might have something to do with growth, as would befit his cultic proximity to Demeter (who in OC 16oo has the epithet £uxAoos- ). The stern of the word for foot, which was rich in secondary or metaphorical meanings, occurs in the name of plants, e.g., JLEAaJL?T6owv and 7Tot\um)Swv (Theophrastus HP 9.10.4, 13.6). In the case of the first of these plants, there was a story that Melampus had discovered it, so that the hero gave his name to the plant (Theophrastus ibid.). Where did the hero get his name? He was exposed by his mother Rhodope, with all his body covered except his feet, which were burned by the sun (schol. Theocr. 3·43; schol. Ap. Rhod. 1.121). Thus he became "Black Foot." The etymology of this name is as far-fetched as in the case of Oedipus. The name Melampus must have some other explanation. The hero's discovery of the plant melampodion provides the clue. Mclarnpus is the personification of the plant that he is later said to have discovered, whereas the plant got its name from the physical characteristic indicated by the epithet JL£Aav6ppL,ov (Ps.-Diosc. 4· 162). Mclarnpus thus takes his place beside other Boeotian heroes whose names show that they were originally plants, Narcissus and Kaanthos (if from Akanthos), though the legends of course tell that the plant is named after the hero. 49 The name Oedipus, which, like the name Melampus, is explained by an exposure story, is appropriate to a figure associated in cult with Demeter. The name, suggesting a plant, is comparable with the names and the legends of the heroes Phytalus and Aras. The former offered Demeter hospitality, and in return she gave him the fig tree (Paus. 1.37.2). The latter was an autochthon at Phliasia and had his tomb nearby at Kcleai, where the Eleusinian Dysaules was also buried (Paus. 2.1 2.4). At this same place, the mysteries were celebrated in honor of Demeter. They were supposed to have been brought there by Dysaules (Paus. 2.14.1-4). He, too, was an autochthon and had a place in the precinct of Demeter at Eleusis. 50 The names and the legends of Phy.. An incest story attaches to Kaanthos: "They say that the first murder of brothers was in Thebes, when Ismenos and Klaaitos [certainly a corruption of Kaanthos] the sons of Ocean fought over their sister Melia": B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 10 (London, 1914), no. 1241, col. 4-s-•o. In Paus. 9.1o.s, Kaanthos is the son of Ocean, Ismenos the son of Apollo and Melia. '° For Dysaulcs as an autochthon see, in addition to this place, Harpocration s.v. For discussion, see F. Graf, Eleusis und die orphische Dichtung Athens in vorhellenistischer 7.eit (Berlin and New York, 1974), pp. 158 ff.

438

The Cults and the Legend of Oedipus

235

talus and Aras show that they are personifications of the generative power of Demeter. But the true autochthon is the plant, as the true mother is the earth. "Earth does not imitate woman in conception and begetting but vice versa" (Pl. Menex. 238a). Therefore human reproduction is homologized with the reproduction of plants, and this homology is even embedded in the Greek language. The word *korwos yielded Kovpos, "male youth," in Ionic and Kopos, "shoot," in Attic. 5 1 The homology is written out, as it were, in the lines of descent from Deucalion as given by Hecataeus (FGrH xFxs): Deucalion

I I

Orestheus Phytius (cf. Phytalus)

.I

Omeus 52 Orestheus has two kinds of descendants, the treetrunk which produces the vine, and Phytius, Begetter, who begets Vine. The homology of ap.1T£Aos and Oineus is clear. It is not, furthermore, simply a matter of poetic metaphor and mythical genealogy. The phrase ?Ta{Swv dpo-rcp yv7Ja{cp was part of the legal marriage contract in Athens. 5 3 The homology of man and plant also underlies the variance in legends and myths between autochthony and incest. The autochthon is in principle the begotten, but, thanks to the homology, he may also be the begetter, since the seeds of the plant fertilize the earth, its mother. The story of the autochthon may thus become a story of incest, It is not surprising, therefore, that the variance between autochthony and incest is found within one mythical genealogy, that of Klymenos, another

'1r'

01 G. Nagy, The Best, ch. IO, sect. II, n.5; cf. R. Merkelbach, "KOPOE," ZPE 8 (I97I) 8o. Cf. the metaphorical use of such words as omxv~ and £p>o~ and the creation of such words for human offspring as lia>.o~, p{~wp.a, and

rp{r ap.1T£Aw>. Cf. rfo•M·J~. "stony ground .. ; "ilex-grove" (or a place-name) (in LSJ" Suppl.). Thus I take Oineus as Vine (or Vineyard), not Vintner or Winemaker. 53 This phrase, with slight variations, occurs several times in J"vlenander. For references, see A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford, I973), on Pk. IOIO. Cf. Aesch. Sept. 752-756 (of Oedipus); Soph. Antig. 569; Trachin. 3I-33; Eur. Med. I28I; Phoen. I8; Hyps. 3 (1), col. iii Hunt; Theognis 581-582; Hes. OD 736; Alciphr. 1.6.15; Luc. Tim. 17; Lexiphan. 19; Nonnos Dionys. I2.45-47; Kaibel, Epigr. Gr. 514, 6o1. 52

1rpw•v~,

439

236

Lowell Edmunds

husband of Epikaste (Hyg. Fab. 206). He is given five different fathers, of whom two are Oineus and Schoineus, and a third is Phoroneus, the son of Melia (schol. Eur. Or. 933) and the river lnachus (Apollod. 2.1.1 ; Paus. 2.15.5). As the son of either Oineus or Schoineus and probably as the son of Phoroneus, Klymenos is the son of a plant, and thus it is not unexpected that there was a plant klymenos, named after the hero, according to Pliny, who says that it cures asthma (NH 26.41 [25]) but causes sterility in men (25.70 [33]). By Epikaste, Klymenos had a daughter, Harpalyke, with whom he committed incest (Hyg. Fab. 2o6; Parthen. Erot. 13). In other words, the husband of Epikaste is a quasi-autochthon, he bears the same name as a plant, and he is a committer of incest. (He is also, with his sister, Chthonia, the founder of a cult of Demeter (Paus. 2.35.4; Ael. HA 11.4).) Thus Oedipus, whose name suggests a plant, becomes the subject of a legend concerning, amongst other things, incest. In the figure of Aras, the same double role appears. He is an autochthon, but he is also "Plowman"- he sows the earth from which he sprang. 5 4 Oedipus, too, is a plowman of the earth from which he sprang. 55 Such are the agricultural terms in which he speaks of his sexual relations with his mother (OT 26o, 46o; cf. 1211 and 1246, 1256-57, 1405, 1485, 1497; consider also QC 533, 972, I 108, and 585 with }ebb's note). 56 " Someone said that the etymologies of Greek proper names are either transparent or unknown. The etymology of Aras belongs to the second category, but a derivation from the same stem as that of apow cannot be ruled out. This verb had a theme in -a .(Tab!. Heracl. I.I83, etc.; see Chantraine, Dictionnaire flymolo~:ique de Ia lan{fue {free que s.v.). Thus • Apas, -avTo> could be a formation I ike """>..,oJ.1w> and Aaooc!!La> from OafLO.~w, OafLO.w, on the assumption that -a>, -1] (p. I 73). Cf. p ..pI, answering L. R. Palmer, The Interpretation of 1\Twenaean Greek Texts (Oxford, I 963), pp. 228-229. ;.. When Oedipus describes his daughters' future as barren (x€puovs OT I 502), he uses an adjective that is applied elsewhere, as Kamberbeek observes, only to the earth.

440

The Cults and the Legend of Oedipus

237

A final illustration of the homology of incest and autochthony can be taken from another episode of Theban legend. The founder of Thebes, Cadmus, killed a serpent or dragon that was preying on his newly founded city, and then sowed the teeth of the monster in the ground. From the teeth sprang fully grown, armed warriors, who began to kill each other (Apollod. 3·4·1 ). The five survivors became the ancestors of the five clans of Thebes. The placing of a tooth in the ground is equated in Herodotus 6.107 with incest: Meanwhile Hippias, son of Pisistratus, had led the barbarians to Marathon, having the preceding night seen the following vision in his sleep. Hippias fancied that he lay with his own mother; he inferred, therefore, from the dream, that, having returned to Athens and recovered the sovereignty, he should die an old man in his own country. He drew this inference from the vision ... he moored the ships as they came from Marathon, and drew up the barbarians as they embarked on the land; and as he was busied in doing this, it happened that he sneezed and coughed more violently than he was accustomed; and as he was far advanced in years, several of his teeth were loose, so that through the violence of his cough he threw out one of these teeth; and as it fell on the sand, he used every endeavor to find it, but when the tooth could nowhere be found, he drew a deep sigh, and said to the by-standers, "This country is not ours, nor shall we be able to subdue it; whatever share belongeth to me, my tooth possesses." Hippias accordingly inferred that his vision had thus been fulfilled. 57 Hippias thought that the dream of incest with his mother would be fulfilled by his becoming tyrant of his own country once again; but the dream of incest was in fact fulfilled by his tooth being buried in the sand at Marathon. His interpretation can only mean that he equates the tooth with semen or his phallus and the earth with his mother. To return to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth, the act of sowing by a founder, which produces the ancestors of the city of Thebes, must be the monosexual equivalent of what would be an incest legend if it were told in bisexual terms. Furthermore, Cadmus has a son Polydorus, who is the father of Labdacus, the father of Laius, the father of Oedipus, the father of Eteocles and Polyneices, who slay each other, just as most of the offspring of the dragon's teeth did. Thus the legend of Oedipus, with respect to incest and the strife of the sons, seems to be a variant of the legend concerning Cadmus and autochthony. The great difference between the two legends is, of course, that the incest of Oedipus has nothing to do with origins. It is connected, rather, with the kingship of •• Henry Cary, Herodotus (New York, J8Ss), p. 394·

441

Lowell Edmunds Oedipus. The incestuous marriage, just after the killing of the Sphinx, inaugurates the kingship, and the discovery of this crime, and of the parricide, brings the kingship to an end (though not in the epic version of the legend: Hom. Od. 11.27I-28o). In the legend, the homology of incest and autochthony was forgotten, 58 and indeed the legend, in the form or forms in which we have it, caused the figure here reconstructed to change in various ways. For example, he would come, rather unexpectedly, to epitomize cleverness or intelligence. But the cardinal source of change, it can be hypothesized, was the transformation of this figure into a Theban king who could be added to the royal dynasty. 59 The legend became, in short, a legend of kingship. 60 At the same time, however, Oedipus kept his identity or identities in cult and belief and undoubtedly in local traditions unknown to us, and this Oedipus was never in antiquity really submerged in the transformation just suggested. Even the Oedipus tragedies of Sophocles, which have provided unending inspiration to a humanistic and esthetic understanding of the Oedipus legend, preserve indications enough of a pre-royal Oedipus who belongs ultimately to ancient Greek religion. 81 BosToN CoLLEGE 58 C. Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955) 428-444 = Structural Anthropology (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 202-228, argued that the Oedipus myth transposes a fundamental preoccupation of "Greek culture" with autochthony into somehow mitigating terms of "over-rated kinship," including incest. His intuition concerning autochthony was commendable, and should not have been dismissed by classicists, but his notion that the legend is a "logical tool" for' dealing with the fundamental preoccupation is mistaken. The relationship of the various, sometimes heterogeneous, elements in the legend is not simply logical. On the contrary, the paradigmatic or synchronic elements of the legend are not only logically prior but also historically prior to the syntagmatic and diachronic aspect, i.e., the narrative, and can even cause the narrative to make adjustments. The name Oedipus is an example. Thus the elements to some extent retain their heterogeneity and do not function as logical integers. 59 The Theban dynasty is syncretistic. See Francis Vian, Les origines de Thebes (Paris, 1963), p. 177. The traces of matriliny pointed out by Vian (pp. 189-190) are not, I believe, the reflection of The ban history but of mythology the association of Oedipus with Demeter. •• As I argued in The Comparative Civilizations Re'l:ieu· No. 3 = The Comparati~·e Ci6lizations Bulletin 8 (1979) 1-12. 61 I am grateful to the anonymous referee, Dr. Susan Edmunds, 1\'!r. Richard 1\lartin, and Professor Gregory l\'agy for helpful comments on this paper.

442

UNSPEAKABLE WORDS IN GREEK TRAGEDY I

Oedipus (dv6poq>Ovoc;) There is a scene in Sophocles' Oedipus which, for all its power, has lost the power it once possessed to move its Athenian audience. The only vestige of this power is a confusion in our commentaries on the line Oedipus finally extorts from a prophet who would prefer to remain silent: CIK>VEO OE OtVl0101 XEPOlV;

These lines frame the encounter between Oedipus and Teiresias and Teiresias' language reminds us that it is "hard to talk about the unsayable. " 4 If the unsayable, or unspeakable, was in fact unsaid, our theme would be silence and not inhibition. But there is a dangerous name that stirs Oedipus to anger. It is never pronounced, but it is 2 For the human silence that surrounds the murderer, d. 2~8; 1152 and 14~7; Euripidt's' Orestes 428; 481 and 1605; a silence possibly rellected in Sophocles' Trachiniae 1124-25. Cf. Euripid«.>s' Orestes 711 and the scholion which explains the silence before a murderer: ol 6€ TOipaoov. ovea ae 'llll Tav5poc; ou ~llTeic; Kupeiv.

0.

0.

we;

When Teiresias asks "didn't you grasp my meaning before" (360) he is thinking of the implications of his words to Oedipus, "the unholy pollution of this our land" (353). And this is why he goes on to ask if Oedipus is testing words; that is, is trying to make him say a word. 6 It is

'Kamerbeek"s comment on 1his verb is on the mark: ""the startling word is implic· itly likened to a beast, an evil agent 1hat should be left untouched"" (above, note I) ad loc. 6 f.6ywv is Brunck's suggestion, printed in Pearson's Oxford text. Kamerbeek notes (above, note I, ad loc.)): "'It is not certain whether L. knew of a reading f.6ywv, but there is a marginal gloss by a later hand el neipav f.6ywv Ktveic:;."' This emendation and the sense that an unspeakable word underlies 1he inhibitions of Teiresias' language is the basis of our translation 10 Oedipm" question: Didn't you understand? Are you trying 10 make me say the word?

445

280

DISKIN CLAY

not that Oedipus is making a trial of Teiresias by speaking (;>..eywv) or that he is attempting to make him speak (;>..eyetv). Teiresias knows that Oedipus is making a trial of words and that one of these words is unspeakable and, finally, unspoken in the Oedipus. Teiresias frames this word, but does not pronounce it when he says "I say you are the murderer of the man you seek to discover" (363). This is a line of strained and deliberate ambiguity. Its ambiguity is not to be explained by Teiresias' relation to the god of the oracle at Delphi who "neither speaks out, nor conceals his meaning, but gives us signs. "7 His sentence is, indeed, a riddle of sorts, but its dialect is not that of Phokis. The inhibitions which twist Teiresias' language around a word he will frame but will not pronounce are pure Attic. The relative pronoun ou inhibits the association of the words ~vea and tav6p6c;. The name Teiresias frames remains unspoken. It is one of the unspeakable words of Greek tragedy. Oedipus' reaction to its sting shows that he has put the words together and finally understood the implications of Teiresias' first charge against him (364):

a>J.... ou Tl xaipwv oic; ye nn~ovac; ~peic;. The word which is OPPI1TOV describes something human: av6po6voc; is the word which causes Teiresias such difficulty and Oedipus such pain. "Murderer," "killer," "homicide"-our sensibilities are inadequate to the word, but in Greek its dangerous field of attraction and repulsion explains the inhibitions of Teiresias' language and Oedipus' violent response to it. Sophocles: Oedipus the King, translated by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay (Oxford 1978) S9; cf. 681 where the chorus describe the quarrel between Oedipus and Kreon as a 66K110IC: ayvwc; X6ywv. Charles Segal has some sensitive remarks on this passage and the problem of naming in the O(dipus in his Trag(dy and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass. 1981) 20-44.

'The application of Heraclitus (DK 22 B 9~) to Teiresias' language seems inevita· ble and is made by Bowra (above, note I) 20!1. "Delphic" speech explains, of course, the "Phocian dialect" of Orestes in Aeschylus' Choephoroi 564; cf. 887; but, as we shall discover, the dialect of Teiresias' inhibited speech is Attic. • The evidence has been collected by Louis Moulinier, Le pur et l'impur dans Ia pensie des Grecs (Paris 1952) 81-92. In the Oedipus, Oedipus says that he will dispel the pollution that comes from Laios' murder: TOuT' lmooKeOW IJUOOC: (1~8). For the word J.IUOO6vov, 100) which is its source is Touc; auTOeVTac; ( 107). The word itself was clearly thought to be a term of great power to injure the person to which it was applied as we know, again, from the context of Athenian law, which surrounds so much of Attic tragedy. 14 And Louis Gernet has taken us a long way in our return to the power of this word in a society which felt tainted by shedding of blood which affected first the members of the family and then the city itself. As for the word itself, which first describes the murderers (in the plural) of Laios: "il est, pour l'individu auquel il s'applique un qualificati£ substantiel d'une couleur violente." 15 This word is not applied to Oedipus. There are worse names reserved for him: the word which Teiresias frames but will not pronounce; and worse than this, the word parricide. And as the search of the Oedipus moves from pollution to homicide and the murder of Laios to parricide and Oedipus' discovery that he unwittingly killed his father, the language of the play shows the same inhibitions we have discovered in the language of Teiresias. 115 (" I' 104) 20-21 as against ~0. A passage to support this distinction comes from Antiphon, Tt'tralogiat' 2~9. where the defendant speaks o£ the shame that will await his children if ht' is convictt'd of murdt'r: Mv 6! vi)v K(JT0Ail$9elsignation du meurtrier" in Droit t't sociite dans Ia Gr~u ancimnt' (Paris 1955) !16.

450

UNSPEAKABLE WORDS IN GREEK TRAGEDY

285

Oedipus cannot at first name the deed the prophet has accused him of and, when he confronts Kreon with Teiresias' painful accusation, he speaks remotely and eva~ively of "my destructions of Laios," which translates Tov£a yeveoem narpoc; . ...

And this is how Oedipus phrases Apollo's prophecy that he would, among the other horrors of his life, become his father's murderer-we; ... 1/)ovevc; 6' eaoi~llV TOU 6vou 6' ol iAtatot xwpoilat, Kal Twv6' ou61:v l:~eipyet VOJ.IO6vrnc; lS6e (479). And in Euripides' Electra, when Orestes confronts the "Contrast the bluntness of Nauck, TGF" fr. 68.1, IJ'lTepa KOTEKTOV tr'lv EIJr'lv, ppaxix; Myoc, and Alkmaion's hesitations in fr. 67.1-4. ~~For the treatment of matricide and the name for a matricide in Euripides' Electra, note 975-76, 1178. 1194 and 1226; in the Orestes, note 479, 481, 587,887, 9~5. 107~. 12!15 and 12~8. 1424, 1559. 1587-88 and 1665.

460

UNSPEAKABLE WORDS IN GRF.F.K TRAGEDY

295

thought that after he has killed Aigisthos he must next kill his mother, he realizes that he will havt> to go into exile as a matricide, with his mother's blood on his hands (975 ): J.lllTpoKTOVOmliH is an open system that included foreign residents and colonist.s. It is because the City DionysiH and the Panathenaia wen~ R lonJs for Hrliculating symbolically t.he polis as an open system that they became tht' locus for the Rrliculation of the wider system of the Athenian empire: for this WHS one of the rt>sults achieved by the fact that the Allies' tribute was brought to Athens at the Dionysia Hnd displayed in the tht>atre. while HI the nanclt>r'o tim!' womt'n ct>rtalnly took part at least as Spt"rnhlower. A Commentary on TIHwydltiPs, I. RoEa mpi!'oAa SiSoTE, (j>EpETE-7rAOKOIJOS oSe KOTOCFTE(j>EIV-xepvi!'wv TE nayas (both bride and victim are adorned and led in procession). 32 She will be sacrificed as a l)ocrxos 6:Ki)paTos raised not by cowherds but napa ... ~aTEPI vv~(j>OK6~ov 'lvaxiSa1s ya~ov (ro8o-88): here the irony deploys a traditional comparison of the bride to a young animal leaving her mother. 33 As in Aeschylus (see §9a), the death of Iphigeneia in her npoTEAEia is not imagined but real. The negative element prevails. Secondly, the arrival and final departure of Iphigeneia are presented in a manner evocative of the wedding. The elements of a normal wedding particularly relevant here are the ~aKap1cr~6s of the nuptial pair (n. 5 above) and their arrival at the house of the groom in a cart accompanied by the mother of the bride and other women. 34 The moment of this arrival was a poignant stage, often depicted in Attic vase painting, 35 in the transition of the bride to her new life, for it was here presumably that she was abandoned by her kin. Klytaimestra arrives as VV~(j>aywy6s (6ro) with Iphigeneia and her (j>Epvai (61 r) in front of the ~eAa6pa (685) of Agamemnon, in a cart or chariot (6Xi)IJaTa, 6r 1, 616), to the accompaniment of a choral ~aKaplcriJOS (59~7). Much concern is shown for the descent of Iphigeneia from the chariot (614-16). 36 In the subsequent dialogue Agamemnon speaks of a nAoiis 37 which Iphigeneia is to undertake ~OVT), ~ovw6eia' 6:n6 naTpos Kai ~T)Tepos (669), and which she :akes to mean that she is to live in another household. He then bids her farewell, xwpea Se ~eAa9pwv evT6s ... (j>iAT)~a Soiicra Se~1av Te ~o1, ~e/..1\ovcra Sapov naTpos 6:no1Ki)cre1v xpovov (678-Bo), and disguises his grief as that felt by a father at the marriage of his daughter {688~o).

The next episode, in which Klytaimestra meets with Achilles and discovers the truth from the old man, is followed by a choral song celebrating the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. The aptness of this theme is obvious. The offspring of the marriage was Achilles; and it forms a contrast with the present 'marriage' (note especially the reference to the ~aKap1cr~6s at 1075-80: ~OKOpiOV TOTE Sai~oves ... ya~ov ... i!9ecrav KTA ... ere S' eni KOpa crTEijiOVCFI KTA). But it should also be noted that the practice of referring to a paradigmatic mythical or divine marriage seems to have been a practice of the contemporary wedding ceremony. 38 The arrival of the Greeks to take Iphigeneia to her death produces the prospect of a scene familiar from certain descriptions of the wedding, the bride torn from the embrace of her mother (1367, 146o). 39 Finally, the very last words oflphigeneia evoke the predicament of the bride: (1505~) lw lw . .. Aa~naSoGxos a~epa bolOS TE (j>ryyos, hepov hepov alwva Kai IJOipav oiKi)cro~ev. xaipe ~01 (j>iAov (j>OOS. The faint suggestion in Aa~naSoiixos of the wedding torches 31 Cf 1479, 15I8,/T58etc.,andasimilarambiguity at A. Ag. 1036-8 (if. §10). Cf also lA 1o8o-88. 32 For other parallels between marriage and sacrifice see J.-P. Vernant (n. 9) ch. 7; H. P. Foley in Awhusa xv (1982), I 59-80 (on the /A; a longer version in Ritual irony [Ithaca and London 1985) ch. 2). 33 Seaford in Htrmts cxiv (1986), 5o-4; Sappho ft. 104(a); S. Trach. 527-30. 34 /A 732; Schol. E. Tro. 3 15; Ov. Ep. 8.96; Nonn. Dion. 46.304; and the vase-paintings referred to inn. 27. I find that the evocation of the wedding by the chariot is suggested also by Foley, Ritual irony 7o-1. 30 Daremberg-Saglio (n. 14) s.v., 'Matrimonium' 1652-). 36 There may well be much (early) interpolation or rewriting in this scene (D. L. Page, Actors' interpolations

in Greek tragtdy [Oxford 1934)16-9); but even (early) interpolated lines arc not necessarily thereby excluded from our argument, which is not concerned with the personality of Euripides. 37 Cf below §9a. 38 Ar. Av. 1731-44; Sappho Jr. 44 (ifhymenaial), cJ. Jr. 218 Voigt; Men. Rhet. 4oo-o2 (includes Peleus and Thetis), etc.; Ps. D.H. Epid. 262; Claudian ix and Sidon. Ap. xiv (Peleus and Thetis); cJ. Catull. 64. Note also the popularity of the wedding of Pelcus and Thetis in vasepainting, e.g. on a nuptiallebts, ARV 2 585.3J. 39 Catull. 62.21-2 (surely based on a Greek model); cJ. SapphoJr. 104; S. Trach. 527-31; E. Hu. 9Q-I, 2079, 418, 611-12; Plut. Lyk. 15; Politis (n. 2) 281. cJ. IA 1087.

491

110

R. SEAFORD

of which Iphigeneia has been deprived 40 is strengthened by the subsequent suggestion of a change of dwelling place. 41 §3. Glauke in Euripides' Medea. The mhTAOI and cnet voTicrtv !ipocrepaim TE6T)AOI I alq>vt!iiws IJE t.aJ3wv wixET' lwv 'Ai!iTJs. It is in the light of this tradition that we should understand the word WIJO!ip611"0I at Aeschylus Stpttm 333 (see below, §12), as well as three passages from the Suppliants. Danaos, concerned with the possibility of male admiration in Argos, says ofhis daughters TEpEtv' 61rwpa 5' evq>uAaKTOI ov!ial.lWS. I 6TJPEI crq>e KT)paivoucrt Kai J3poToi KTA. (998-9). And when the Dana ids sing about the possibility of war, ftJ3as 8' c5:v6os a!iprnTov EO'Tw, l.lTJO' 'Aq>po!iiTas ew6Twp J3poTOAOty6s'ApT)I !Vt, b: cJ. Himerius ix t6 (Colonna); S. T•och. 144--9; Catull. 62.39-47; cJ. e.g. Politis (n. 2) iii 281.

Peek (n. 11) 1238; cf. e.g. 1162.8, 1801; Alexiou, (n. 12) 19l· •• Cf Pi. Pyth. 9·]711< AE](!wv Koipo• ..v-1a6!a 1roiav, 1~1 I xpuaocntqKivov St ol .Hj3as Kap1T0V &vfh)oCXVT' lmo6piAot as masters?', implying (in response to 336) paradoxical ex6pa against cpiAot, 'kin', who would normally also be 'dear'. 118 Now whatever the truth of this much disputed problem, it is undisputed that 338 is an argument in favour of the marriage. But if so, then the Danaids' reply (3 39) must express agreement with and development ofPelasgus' observation; 119 and so it cannot refer, as Garvie would have it, simply to the ease with which Pelasgus can abandon the Danaids. 120 The ernaAAayi] must rather be a feature of the marriage, clearly divorce-' 21 The objection that 'divorce would be the very thing that the Danaids would presumably want' 122 has no weight, for it is perfectly consistent for a woman to point to the ease with which she may be abandoned (and thereby perhaps isolated and disgraced) as one of a number of objections to entering on a marriage, particularly if S•ppho Jr. 194 Voigt (Himer ix 4); Men. Rher.

intermarriage is not alluded to until 3 87 f[' (it is

24); Dracontius 6; etc. (Reitzenstein in Humes xxxv ]1900] 97-); Prod. Tim. iii 176.19""30 Diehl 0 51) (Hc:~vcn-Earth union the first y6:~oc;. etc.) tcai oi 6Eo~oi

CJ

TWv 'Aet,valwv t:l&7ns npoahaTTov oVpav&t irpOT~EiV TO\Js y6:~0\JS.

KO'i

yfla

118 Perhaps also therefore TO ~n ee~as: sec in dct;~.il G. Thomson in Eirent ix (1971), 25-30 and (n. 46) JO.Z-tl, 450. There is no substance in the objection of FJW that 'cpiAovs can hardly mean "relation", as the idea of

mentioned there by Pclasgus!). They •lso object to

occur elsewhere in Attic (though

cJ.

v. 10).

Denniston, Tht Grttk particlts2 JS?-8; tcai ... ye is found in the play also at 296, 313, 468. 120 (n. 4l) 220; simiJ.rly FJW •d Joe .• who find an implausible link with 33 8 in the idea of male domina119

tion. which both gives the husband power and allows

Pclasgus to abandon the Danaids c..-asily! FJW also object that SvOTVX.oVvrwv should refer to their pr~stur misfortune, and that it is hard to Sl"l~ 'whou sort of mistOrtune they can envisage as inducing their cousins to dissolve: the union'. llur tht..· point is that the..· Danaids sc..·em to envisage th ..·ir prc..-sc..•nt misfOrtune, isola.tion and hostility as continuing into the..· marriage. 121 SoTuckL·r, Hcadbm, Thomson,l"tC.:{f Page on E. M~d. 2)6, Stl.'Vl'OS on E. .iudr. s.zg. l.2:! G::~rvic (n. 45) .2::.0; simib.rly FJW ad loc.; this

p•cudo-problcm prompts

J.

K. Mackinnon (CQ lxxi

I1978J 78) to take the line as an indignant question

implying that divorce is not easy.

499

R. SEAFORD

118

it is a specific response to the specific point made by Pelasgus. Another objection, that the .Danaids' murder of their husbands is even more disreputable than divorce, 123 is equally irrelevant, as it ignores the Danaids' various possible motives for the murder, e.g. resistance to defloration, revenge, certain and immediate freedom from the Aegyptiads. If 338 refers to the accumulation of property within the household by kinship marriagc, 124 then it coheres very well with our reading not only of 337 but also of 339- For a girl who marries one of her father's kinsmen will of course encounter loyalty between them and her husband. She will be without separate kinsmen of her own to supp.ort her in a conflict. 125 Hence perhaps the particular aptness of the plural q>i~ous ... KEKTT]I.lEVous. Furthermore, a dowry normally protected a woman from easy divorce, because it had in Attic law to be returned, in the event of a divorce, to her former kyrios. 126 However, 'the epikleros had no such leverage; she could not take her fortune and return to her former kyrios, for it was to him that she was married'. 127 She was therefore in an exposed position. 'The epikleros was in a sense an heiress, in that the estate always passed to the oikos of which she was a member; but the property was her husband's, and the only check upon her husband's ability to spend it was the danger of a lawsuit when her children came of age and took it over.' 128 Vulnerable in these and various other ways, the epikleros was in fact put under the protection of the archon. 129 But of course this civilised protection by the Attic state was not imagined as available to the Danaids. Indeed, the Danaids, not unlike Orestes in the Oresteia, represent the kind of problematic case which required, historically, the intervention of the state in an area originally regulated by the kin. What this problematic case means for the Dana ids is an enhanced degree of the isolation and subjugation associated even with the unproblematic marriage. The normal bride in moving from one household to another is resentful, but she nevertheless preserves with the family she has left links which will re-emerge to support her in the event of divorce or conflict with her husband or his family. 130 But the epikleros cannot look to any such support (and her mother's kinsmen do not of course even belong to her former oTKos). To put it another way, the epikleros does in a sense fail, in her marriage, to make the marital transition to another family; she remains in her own family, 132 but in a role even more isolated and subordinate (337 KEKTT]I.lEvous) than that of the normal bride in her new family. This does not mean that the play is about the problems of the rni~T]pos. There is, for example, no mention (except perhaps at 979) of an inheritance to be transmitted by the Danaids. The vulnerable isolation of women married to their agnatic cousins is alluded to only at 335--9· This anomaly does however play a subtle role in the victory of the negative tendency in the marriage ritual. In the other examples discussed in this article, the victory is effected by a factor external to the marriage itself (another woman, Creon's edict, etc.). In the Suppliants on the other hand, as in the normal wedding, the negative tendency derives entirely from the bridal 123

Mackinnon (n. uz) 77·

Thomson (n. 1 r8) E. El. 427. 124

29,

compares Pi.lsthm.

J.2

and

125 Thomson (n. 118) 29 cites Plut. Mor. 289C {the Romans, unlike the Greeks, prohibit such marriages) li. TTOJV..~v J3on6Wv TQs yvva'i'KaS OpWV"t'tS 61• 6:oei:vttav Sto\Jfva.;, ol.nc. ~J3oVA.ovro TO:s tyyVs ytvovs avvoud3etv, Onwo;, &v ol 6v8pes bSuc:Wotv aVTas, ol avyyEVEiS

13oTJ8Wotv. And

if

the protection offered by the Attic

stair (together with 6J'ouA61lfVos): n. 129 below.

See e.g. D. M. Schaps. Economic rights of womt>rt itt ancit-nt Grttct (Edinburgh 1979), 76. Add lsaeus iii 28, 0 tyyVwv would have wanted a receipt for the dowry iva 1.1t) hr' iKEivwt yhlotTo ~oSic..>$ CrnaAA6'TT&a6at, 61T6T& 12 6

~VAotTo, T~S yvvauc:Os.

127 Schaps (n. 126) 26. 128 Schaps, (n. 126) 57; if.27-8. 129

Schaps (n. 126) 38; he notes that the archot~ has

power over all possible abuses to which f'pikl~roi were

subject. Cf also Ar. Ach. Pol. 56.6; SuJo, Harpokr. s.v. '•axO>cEW Crtt-ks (London 19M3) 143-6.

500

THE TRAGIC WEDDING

119

perception of the groom and of the transition. 133 But how then in the Suppliants can the negative tendency credibly prevail? Largely because the Danaids and their cousins arc exotic semi-barbarians in a mythical era. By itself, however, this exotic factor is no more than a simple reversal in fantasy of Greek normsl 34 Whereas the endogamous isolation of the woman, with which it is combined, is both familiar to the Greeks and ideally suited to heighten the fears and reluctance of the bride.

C. THE DEATH OF THE WIFE

§s. Deianeira. The anxiety of the bride at isolation and loss of the bloom of youth (nos 1-3 above) is expressed also in Sophokles' Trachiniai (14t--9). Deianeira's negative emotions at her marriage persist into her married life, 135 firstly because of her husband's absence on his labours, but then through her own fatal mistake, with the result that finally she com plains that she is epT\Ilfl, makes up the marriage bed, gets imo it, addresses bed and VVIJtvwv (1275) imparts a suggestion of ritual song, thereby reminding us of Teiresias' prophecy at 420. 141 And there runs through the narrative the suggestion of sexual union, of areenactment of the aya>tOI ya>tOS ( 1214): in the VV>tt>IIYfi KOKcl, the suggestion of sexual union seems to me inevitable, particularly as av~~eiyvv~u is a standard word for it. It is a pity that in his recent commentary Dawe not only fails to rectify the Victorianjebb's omission of this point, but even removes one element in it by replacing the transmitted EK Svoiv by Pearson's els 6voiv ... K6:pa. 145 Finally, the of.f)os brought to Oedipus by his marriage, and which has now changed into its opposite (1282-4), may in this context suggest the doomed ~aKap1a1.16s of the wedding ceremony (cf. §7 and §12). 146 Two further points can be made in support of chis conclusion. Firstly it has been reached quite independently of Freud's view of the self-blinding of Oedipus as a symbolic self-castration in which the eyes represent the genitals. 147 I am not concerned with the truth or falsity of this view 148 More to my point is the evidence adduced in its support by Devereux for the Greek association of eye and penis. 149 Secondly we have already noted in various passages of tragedy that unity of opposites which associates the destruction of the body with the tlrsc physical union of the married couple (§4 and n. 70 above). Particularly relevant here is the death of Haimon over the body of the hanged Antigone (S. Ant. 1237-41): 150 Kai ~f3ov e· iep6v (98o-t ). Nowhere else, so far as I know, does 6aAc'x>!'l have any connection with death. Perhaps then it has here displaced 6c'xAa>~os. 150 which is elsewhere exploited for its ambiguity between tomb (or underworld) and marriagechamber.157 (b) Collard seems to me almost certainly right to suggest that the corrupt lines 992-3 AO>!'!l"c'x6' iv' C.:,Ku66m VU!lq>Ol/I'Tl""TfEUoum 61' 6pq>vaias are a reminiscence of the torch lit wedding procession (of Evadne .md Kapaneus). If so, then the point of wKV66m, 158 which refers to the (presumably joyful) urgency of the procession, 159 is an implicit association with the speed with which Euadne has now left her home ( 1000 6po~6:s, t 039 'll"T]Oi]oaoa}. There is a comparable irony in Iole as 6o6: VU>!q>a at S. Trach. 857 (see§ 11 }. And it is interesting that although she lives of course in her husband's house (t097-8}, she in fact leaves, as in her wedding, the house of her father (to38-42, 1049). Similarly, the torches which contributed so much to the splendour of a wedding are associated with the ftre in which she and her husband are now to be consumed.l 00 (c) The word "TEAEV"Ta, with which Euadne describes her approaching death, is commonly used of the wedding. Compare the same ambiguity at A. Ag. 745 yc'xJJOV mKp6:s "TEAEV"TciS (see below §9c)t•• (d) After remembering her wedding >!OKaptOJ.lOS (996-8 'Tl"OAIS "Apyovs 6ot6ais acpayitv has been widely suspected. Fraenkcl's by the erotic undertone, which he ignores (see above on 0 T 1279 EppyEV; West in BICS xxviii l•98tl 68). 6~e1av then has a special point, because a pI>ICrrWV ETIAEVO"EV I Zecpvpov yiyavoos avpat. The npoKOAV>I>IOI>IO mean 'curtain'. True, it is a rare word. However, the verb TipDKaAvTII>IO regularly refers to what covers the head, 176 generally in the plural KOAV>I>IOTO. E. IT 372 Ahrrwv 0>1>10 SIC KOAV>I>ICrrWV exovcra refers to the bridal veil. The phrase EK KOAV>I>ICrrWV occurs later in the Ag. to refer to the bridal veil (1178); its only other occurrence is at S. Trach. 1078, where I have argued {elsewhere) that there is a secondary allusion to the bridal veil. 177 Mention should also be made of A. Cho. 811 tK Svocpepas KaAOorrpas. which alludes to the ritual unveiling not of the bride but of the mystic initiand. 178 It may be objected that 'she sailed from out of the veil' is an odd sense. But it is no more odd than 'she sailed from out of the curtains'. The abruptness may perhaps be explained in part by the existing association of the phrase tK (7rpo)KaAVIlllCrrWV with the bridal veil. 179 The ritual of the 6vaKOAVTI01)p•a, the unveiling of the bride, seems to have occurred at the end of the wedding banquet, just before her departure on a chariot to her new home.' 80 I suspect that this departure may have been associated with a nautical image. If so, the association would underly various passages of tragedy, for example 181 (1) E. IT 37o-1 ev Opl.lchwv oxo•s Its aii.IOTT)p6v yai.IOV tn6p81.1EVO"OS; (2) E. Tro. 56srJO (see §r2); (3) OT 32o-3 (§6); (4) later in the Agamemno11 itselfKassandra says (1178-81) Kai 1.1!]v 6 XPTJO"IlOS olnIcrros SnEO"TlOlO"lV aflaflais /61JEAAOVV1Jq>OS. The idea that the house is about to celebrate a wedding has of course offended some textual critics. But it is in fact, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, 232 one of a coherent series of allusions to wedding ritual throughout the play, some of which I have mentioned in §5 above. The return ofHerakles is envisaged here as the re-enactment or final completion of the marital transition ofDeianeira. But at the end of the song there arrives at the house a group of female captives, one of whom is noticed from among the others 233 by Deianeira, who remarks on her apparent virginity

°

214 To the defence of la-ro'TpiJ'n'i (with an erocic sen>,..6a; cf A. Ag. 1291 "A•Sou miAas 5! ~aoS'IyO> rrpooEV\Itrrc.>. 225 449; cJ. the possibly ambiguous TOv nrnpc.>!-1ivov oVval li'OoiV llli6ov (340-1): cf Seaford (n. >3) >5o- I. 226 3t>-13; cf Jtl, Jl?, 336, 366; cf n. 5 •hove. 227 3 I 1, 3s6-(;.z.. etc.; also at other Argive and Greek sufferings: 363 I[ 221 308, po; cf e.g. E. PhoMya, 348; wirh Avypav cf e.g. M5-8; S•pphofr. 34V.

510

THE TRAGIC WEDDING

129

(cnmpos) and nobility (307-13). This is lole, the bride 234 ofHerakles. Deianeira is, without yet realising it, in the position of Klytaimcma, standing in front of 1hc house to which the new bride has been forcibly brought. ~ei\.i\.6vv~cpos begins to take on a fatal ambiguity. When Deianeira's suspicions arc subsequently aroused, she praises her again, this time for her beauty (379). 235 Later in the play the chorus, reflecting on the origin of Herakles' sufferings, mention his spear a TOT£ eoav vVIlv OOKVOS, I ~eyai\.av -rrpocrop&cra 86~0IS ~i\.6~av I vec..>v a1crcr6VTc..>V ya~c..>v, Ta ~tv KTA. (841-3). I have reproduced aoKvos (Musgrave), which is generally accepted. But the mss. aoKvov may be right. lole will not be allowed to delay her arrival with bridal oKvos. 236 And a1crcr6VTc..>V should probably not be changed to aiacrovcrav (Nauck). -rrpocropwaa suggests actual visual perception. 237 and evokes therefore the position of those waiting at the house of the groom for the bridal procession. Secondly, the sinister epiphanic role of Aphrodite (86o-1), expressing the destructive carnality of this union, is given special point by her (silent) presence even at a normal wedding. 238 She plays a similar role in Euripides' description in the Hippolyws 239 of the brutal 'wedding' of Herakles and Iole. In the Agamem.,on the deities bringing the union of Helen and Paris to completion are a Mfjv1s and an 'Ep1ws (§9b). An 'Ep1ws is present at the union of Herakles and Iole !00, but as offspring: ETeK' ETEK£ ~eyai\.av aveopTOS 240 0:8e vv~cpa 86~0101 Toicr8' 'Ep1vw (893-s\. This is comparable to the perversion we found in the Agamem"a" of the desire expressed at the wedding for children resembling their parents (§9f). §12. Andromache opens the play of Euripides that bears her name by calling on the city ofhcr birth, 9TjJ3t], from which she came to Troy to be the enviable (3T]Ac..>T6S) wife of Hektor. Somewhat later, lamenting the loss of her city and her husband, and her consequent yoking (avve3VYT)V) to a harsh fate (aTeppos 8ai1Jc..>V, 96-9), she adds that no mortal should be called oii.J31os while still alive (1oo-2), a proverb which in this context must suggest the failed 1JOKap1crll6S of the wedding ceremony (cf. §6 and §7). We are reminded of the Iliad, when the news of Hektor's death makes her shed her wedding-veil, the veil she wore TJ~aTI TWI ClTE IJIV Kopveaioil.os f)yayee· "EKTc..>p 1 !K 8611ov KTil.. (II. xxii 471-2). This bridal journey of Andromache was described in rich detail by Sappho, and may even have been paradigmatic. 241 Andromache continues (Andr. IOJ-4) 'li\.ic..>l almiVOI napiS ov YOIJOV O:i\.i\.6 Tlv' CiTav I 6y6yeT' ewaiav ts 8ai\.61Jovs 'Eil.evav, and then, after mentioning the destruction of Troy and of Hektor, (109) aUTO: 8' tK eail.al)c..>V OyOilOV rni 91iia eai\.acrcras. Here again, as in the Agamemnon and the Hecuba (§9c), the 'marriage' of Helen and Paris is associated both with a destructive deity and with a Trojan marriage that it has destroyed. Whereas at Hec. 946-9 the Trojan brides are taken by marriage from their homes, but the marriage is Helen's, here in the Andromache it is as if one bridal journey to Troy (Helen's) has put another (Andromache's) into 2 " 546, 843, 8s7. 89~ with l36 !Jevy..]i.!al>e;, followed bv I 58 l'fi\'>.]Ji.lil; ... vi•ftq 'l (a m·mph associated with Apollo's birth and upbringing). For a recent definition of nympbe and p.mhenos JS m~;rhical as well as social categories see C. CJ!ame, ThCsCc: et l'imaginairc athCnien. LCgcnde et .:uhc en Grcce antigue (Pans 1990) 191, 201, 267 n. 9, and 269 n. 31. '' Hdt. 4.33-35; Kallim. H. Delos 296-99; Paus. 1.43.4. Cf. Bruneau (n. 25) 38-48. " H. H. Ap. 147ff., esp. 156-64. This important passage, one of the earliest and most extcnsiYe performance texts in Greek poetry, has been discussed in recent ,·ears bv Calame (n. 13) 145-47, 194-204; A. !vi. Miller, From Delos to Delphi. A Liter.1n· StudY of the Homenc HYmn to Apollo (1-!ncmosme Suppl. 93. Leiden 1986) 57-65; J. S. Cia~·. The Politics ot Oh mpus. Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric H,·mns (Princeton 1989) 46-56; P. Bing, Impersonation of Voice in C.1llimachus' H\·mn to Apollo. TAPA 123 (1993) 181-98, csp. 194-96; and S. H. LonsdJle, D.mce and Ritual Pia,· in Greek Religion IB.1ltimorc/Lon· don 1993) 62-68. " Cf. Kappel (n. 19) 56i.

°

523

58

A. HEI'RJCHS, Some patterns of choral projection in Euripides

took this passage as a reference tu female performers of the dance-song- "[the epic poet] having sung in praise of the Delian women's khor6s" (3.104.5 rov yag ~llt.tmcov zogov nin• ·:t•vwniw l'~lVlio(l;)- as does the majority of modern inrerpreters 34 • Despite Thukvdides' confidence, the identitv of the Homeric Deliades remains tantalizingly vague, hovering indistinguishably between myth and cult on the one hand, and between aolde and kho1·eia on the other. While the Homeric passage reveals a remarkable level of performative self-awareness, the highlighted performance is that of a chorus singing rather than dancing. If the Delian Maidens of the Home1·ic Hymn to Apollo "represent an idealization of choral lyric," 35 they achieve this more as archetypal singers who praise both gods and mortals- including the poet himself, the "blind man who lives on rugged Chios" (169-173)- than as full-fledged performers of the dance-song. At the same time, however, the epic voice that speaks to us in the Homeric Hymn assumes the role of Musegetes as well as khorodiddskalos 36 • Like Thukydides, Euripides thought of the Delian Maidens as primarily an ensemble of dancers, as performers of the dance-song. His immediate model would have been the Delian Maidens of actual cult, although the Delian Maidens of the Homeric Hymn add poetic legitimacy and generic exemplarity to Euripides' dramatic recreation of female khoreia on Delos. With both models in mind, the playwright complicates the ritual setting by mingling different performance contexts: that of the choral dancing of the Theban elders in the distant mythical past; that of the khoreutai in the here and now of the dramatic performance in Athens; and that of the Delian Maidens during the Delian festival. These parallel settings form a pattern of ritual associations in which male merges with female, past with present, myth with cult. Euripides may have been thinking of the Athenian purification of Delos and the reorganization of the Delia in 426/5 B. C., but we need not assume that he had a particular festival or event in mindl7. The ritual occasion for the dances of the Deliades thus seems generic "whirling around in fair dance" (690 ELAlooouam KaD.lxogot) - their dances rendered timeless in the recurring here and now of the ritual performance. The Athenian audience would have recognized dancing on Delos as a ritual scenario unrestricted to a single occasion or to a single chorus. In a fusion of myth and 34 Including, for instance, A. Mommsen, Apollon auf Delos, Philologus 66 (1907) 433-58, at 435 and 455; Calame (n. 23) 147 and 199; Miller (n. 32) 64; Clay (n. 32) 49, 54 f. n. 116; Lonsdale (n. 32) 70. G. Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca/London 1990) 56 and 58 compares the Homeric Deliades to Hesiod's Helikonian Muses and describes them as "a chorus of female singers/dancers who seem to be a local manifestation of the Muses" (cf. Pindar's Homer. The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past, Baltimore/London 1990, 376, "local quasi-Muses"). 31 G. Nagy, Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond (Cambridge 1996) 56, who adds: "The Delian Maidens are presented in the Hymn as archetypes meant to be re-enacted in the local ritual context of real choral performances at Delos - in which context any real chorus-members would be equated, for the ritual moment, with the archetypal Maidens." This description also fits the relationship of Deli an Maidens ("archetypes") and tragic chorus ("real chorus-members") in Herakles. " Clay (n. 32) 51 and esp. 55: "Like his divine model, Apollo Musagetes, the poet depicts himself directing and accompanying the song of his earthly muses" (i.e. the Delian Maidens). 37 Bond (n. 19) 240f. and 244.

524

Philologus 140 (1996) I

59

history rarely found in his work, Thukydides presents the Homeric verses on the Delian Maidens as archetypical of Ionian and Athenian participation in the Delian rite and as evidence for the continuity of choral dancing on Apollo's sacred island 38 . He also informs us that an Athenian thearia accompanied by a khoros of male dancers went to Delos at regular intervals 39 • Other sources suggest that during their visit to the island the Athenian youths performed the "crane dance" (yEgavo;) to commemorate the dance first performed by Theseus and his entourage of seven Athenian youths (~HlEOL) and seven maidens (;wgf!EvOL) on the return from the Cretan labyrinth 40 . The mythical aition renders female participation in the annual crane dance virtually certain 41 • So, the concept of khoroi of men and women performing on Delos, or of a mixed female and male chorus, would have been familiar to an Athenian audience. Counting on this familiarity, Euripides pushed the gender issue even further. According to his scenario, the Delian Maidens exceptionally perform the male paean. Paeans performed by women can be found elsewhere in tragedy, in situations where the inversion of gender roles signals a tragic reversal in the action 42 • In actual cult, however, paeans were normally performed by groups of :rwav-singing male dancers. On Delos, where choral dancing was ubiquitous, female khoroi performing dance-songs other than paeans were a regular feature of the local worship of Apollo and Artemis' 3 But with the exception of the Delian Maidens in the Herakles, female performers of the paean are not attested in the Delian cult of Apollo and Artemis. Given the scarcity of our information on paeanic performance in actual cult, it is conceivable that the Euripidean scenario reflects real cult practice and that paeans were performed by the Delian Mai"Thuk. 3.104.4!. Cf. M.P. Nilsson, Griechische Feste von religioser Bedeutung mit Ausschlull der attischen (Berlin 1906) 144-49; Calame, Les chceurs (n. 23) 195f., Thesee (n. 30) 116-20, 159-61. On the occasion recorded b,· Thuhdides - the re-establishment oi the Delian festi,·al in 426/25 - see S. Hornblm,·er. A Commentarv on Thucvdides. Volume!: Books 1-111 (Oxford 1991) 517-31. "Thuk. 3.104.6. Cf. Xen. Mem. 3.3.12; Arist. Ath. Pol. 56.3; IG II' 1635.33-35 (377/76 B. C.); Plut . .Vik. 3.4-6; Him. Or. 28.10 Colonna. Perhaps these theoric dancers are identical with the ogzllOTai from leading Athenian families who danced .uound the temple of the Delian Apollo (Athen. 10.421. = Theophr. fr. 119 \X'immcr). All of these texts refer to male choruses or to khuroiwhosc gender is unspecified; the sen~ ding of female choruses from Athens to Delos is not explicitly :1rtested.

'' Kallim. H. Delos 312-15; Plut. Theseus 11.2

= Dikaiarchos fr. 85 Wehrli; Poilus 4.101; Plat. N•,,idon

58b-c refers to the mythical aition without mentioning the dancing. Cf. Laue (n. 15) 68-71; BruneJU

(n. 25) 29-32; Calame, Les chceurs (n. 23) 77i., 108-15, Thcsee (n. 30) 118-20, 158-61, and 239-42; W. H. Mineur, C.JIIimachus. Hvmn to Delos (Leiden 1984) 2371. and 2421. " Latte (n. 25) 68-71 and Bruneau (n. 25) 31 f. dissociate rhe Delian Maidens from the crane dance. In their view, this dance was performed b~· an exclusiYcl~- Athenian chorus. But in the .1bsence of conclusive t'\·idence for the participation of parthCnol in the Athenian theon~z to Delos (abo\·e. n. 39), inconceivable that the geranos was danced

by

it is perhaps not

a khon)s composed of Athenian ~-ourhs .1nd Delian \bidens.

" Examples include Aisch. Th.268, Ag. 245-47, Ch. !SCi., Eur. / . .4. 1467-69. On gender rob .md the pae.m see Calame (n. 23) 147-52; Kappel (n. 19) 80-82. 32Sf.; I. Rutherford. Apollo in ln. The Tragic Paean, Arion 3rd ser., vol. 3, no. I ( 1995) 112-35, esp. 114-16 and 124 f. ("a happ,· paean is often followed bv a disaster," on H. M. 687ff.). 43 Cf. H. H. Ap. 147-64 and Pind. PaU.n. 2.96-102.

525

60

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HF.:>RICHS,

Some panerns of choral projection in Euripides

dens 44 • But, it is more likely that we are dealing with a poetic construct in which the poet assigns performance of the paean to the imaginary chorus of Delian Maidens in order to facilitate comparison with the male chorus of Theban elders in the orchestra4 ;. Thus, despite their age and gender, the Delian Maidens emerge as role models for the old Theban khoreutai, who pledge to sing paeans for Herakles as their swan song (692-694 rcmdva; ... KVKVo; o); yEgwv aotM~ ... KEI,w'njow) 46 • The old men conclude their performance on an encomiastic note: "There is good associated with the singing of praise" (694 f. n) yag e{J I mT; U!lVOLOLV U;tUQXEL) - a hero like Herakles is good material for song;;. As in the early scene with Kadmos and T eiresias in the Bakkhai, song and dance are portrayed here as constituting a Dionniac fountain of youth and source of blessings. The most conspicuous formal feature of this concluding strophe and antistrophe is its intricate performative movement, in which choreutic, cultic-choral, and encomiastic elements are intertwined. This movement is composed of three devices forming an interlocking pattern of themes and verbal echoes, which create the impression of a concatenated musical performance linking the here and now of the theater with the cultic setting at Delos and with the distant mythical past of Herakles' Thebes. The poet achieves this effect through self-reference of the chorus (68Sf.), the projection of this chorus's dancing onto the girls' chorus performing on Delos (687-690), and the chorus's encomiastic stance (691-696). On the divine plane, too, traditional boundaries become more permeable, with Apollo joining Dionysos as both champion and recipient of the dance-song. Less than a hundred lines later, the chorus learn of the unexpected return of Herakles, who has just killed Lykos. Their joy translates into choral performance in the third stasimon: "Let us turn to the dances (761 :ngo; xogou; wamil!lEila).- Dances, yes, dances and festivities are in order throughout this sacred city of Thebes (763 f. xogoi XOQOL Kai ilai..im !LEJ.OUOL 0~~a; lEQOV Kat' aotu)." 48 Moments later, the chorus's selfreferential mood, which has so far prevailed in the play, generates a sustained pattern of choral projection, as the overjoyed khoreutai succumb to the pathetic fallacy and invite the streams and streets of Thebes to join them in the victory celebration (781-783): "0 lsmenos, wear crowns! Break into dancing (avaxogEuome), you polished streets of the seven-gated city and fair waters of Dirke! And you, maiden " Kappel (n. 19) 56f. " Calame (n. 23) 147f. treats Eur. H. M. 687ff. and/. A. 1467ff., 1480ff. as "exceptions" (the norm being male performance of the paean in actual cult). •• Cf. Calame (n. 23) 203. On the association of the swan with Apollo, song and old age see E. Fraenkel, Aeschylus Agamemnon (corr. ed. Oxford 1962) 3, 684f.; Bond (n. 19) 95 and 239f.; Mineur (n. 40) 206-11. " On the encomiastic elements of this ode see H. Parry, AJP 86 (1965) 363-74 and R. Scodel, GRBS 21 (1980) 308-11. " On the performati\'e connotations of :r.o(mi fLEI.oum compare Soph. Azas 701 vi•v y&.f! EflOi flEAEI Y.Of!EUOal and Ar. Lys. 1304f. w; LltUQTUV UflVW>fiE;. Till OlWV )';Of!OL flEAOVtl (both passages are preceded by choral self-reference).

526

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Philologus 140 (1996) I

nymphs, daughters of Asopos, who have left your father's river-home, come join in singing (ouvamboi) of Herakles' contest and fair victory. "~ 9 But, as always in tragedy, the celebration will be short-lived. The tragic reversal is imminent and will quickly change the nature of the dance. At the climax of the play, choral dancing turns into pandemonium, and Herakles becomes the victim rather than the beneficiary of choral projection, when Lyssa personified threatens to strike the hero and to whirl him around in fits of madness: "Soon I shall make you dance all the more and terrify you with the pipe" (871 rC:qa o' (yw ~ldAi.ov xogniow Kal Kataui.llOW q:o~on). In a chilling Dionysiac image, the chorus anticipate Herakles' actual seizure and envision him already "driven to dance by a mad frenzy of ringing pipes" (878f. rtavtaOLV /.uooau; xogw{)£vt' tvai•i.ot~). As their vision intensifies, they perceive Herakles' dancing madness as an anti-Dionysiac dance lacking the familiar hallmarks of Dionysiac ritual (889f.): "Now the dancing commences, a dance without tambourines, uncongenial to the thyrsos of Bromios" (KarciQXETUl xogn\pm' aTEQ rvrravwv ou Bgo~tiou KEzagw~tiva {)vgowt) 50 • They also associate Lvssa's murderous dance with the spilling of blood rather than with Dionysiac libations of wine (892 f. :rgo~ a[pcn'. o{•zi rd~ tlwvt•otabo; ~OT(ll\uv hi ZEt•rtaot i.mBc1;), and with a dire song played on the pipe (894 f.) that contrasts sharplv with the Dionysiac tunes and the Libyan pipe evoked by the chorus in the second stasimon (684) 51 • Thus conceived as a chorus gone awry and as a dance deprived of its normal distinguishing ritual orderliness, Herakles' madness gives a bad name to the dance, including the dancing and singing of the chorus. As with his portrayal of Ares as an anti-Dionysos in the Phoinissm·, Euripides' dramatization of Herakles' madness represents the Dionniac realm as a festive and nonviolent state of normalcy undermined by the violence inspired by Lyssa 52 . Taken at face value, the Dionysos of these two plays has more in common with the predominantly benign Dionysos of Attic cult and comedy than with the ambiguous, polar ~ 9 On the pathetic fallacy of en\·isaging the entire land eng:tged in the Dionysiac da1Ke see Eur. Ba. ll4 at•tilw ;-cdoa XO\?fl'OH and Kappel (n. 19) 234f. on Philodamos, PaU.n 19i. zogn·eJv Mi.q:wJv lrga

·ra

~lciKOlQU 3:

zoJga.

Both here and at 751 (Kutcigznm 1tii.o; 1 of lykos' dc.leramorphoscn bei Euripides (unpublished Habilirarionsschriit, Berlin I 987) 95. 51 On the sinister connotations of the choral al•i.O; in the context of this scene (879, 895, d. 68..J) sec H. Jeanmaire, Dionnos. Histoirc du culre de Bacchus (Paris 1970) I I 2i.; R. Schlesier, Das Florenspicl der Gorgo, in: R. Kapp (ed.), Musik (C'iotizbuch S-6, Berlin/Wien 1982) I I -57. at 36i.: J. Diggle, Euripidea. Collected Essa.\·s (Oxford 1994) IC3 n. 41 ("a contrJst between the true Dion~·si:~c madness and Lyssa's per,·ersion of it"); and espe~.:i.1lly J.-P. Vern.mt, La mort d.1ns les yeux. Fi:;urcs de \'Autre en GrCce anciennc (Paris 1985) 59i. = \lort.1ls .1nd Immortals. Collected EssaYS (Princeton 1991 i lc7 ("The D.mce oi Hades"). " Cf. H. Fors. Otonnos und die St:irke der Schwachen im \\'erk des Euripid,·s (Diss. Tubingen 1964) 17-19 on the structural similarities between the Dion~·siac represent.nion of L ~·ss.1 in Ht·~·aklcs and Euripides' subsequent assimil:nion of Arcs and Dion~·sos in the Pboimss.ri.

527

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A. HE:->RJCHS, Some patterns of choral projection in Euripides

DionYSos of Bakkhai; 3. But this is tragedy, not cult. Through juxtaposition with Lyssa and Ares, the Dionysos of Herakles and Phoiniss.1i is drawn into the violent orbit of these di,·inities. Euripides' counter-Dionysiac portra,·al of madness culminating in extreme violence thus reflects the poet's unique conceptualization of violence in Dionysiac m~·th and of the polarity of Dionysoss 4 • Twenty lines later, the messenger reports Herakles' madness and violence. Surrounded b)· "the beautiful khor6s of his children" (925)- a phrase that marks the climax of the pattern of perverted khoreia - Herakles was performing the preliminary rites for a purification sacrifice, when he was stricken with madness and then slaughtered his famih· 55 . Euripides' portrayal of Herakles as a "Bakkhos of Hades" (1119 ''Atbot• pw.-zo;) and of the chorus as a potential performer of a "dance of Hades" (I 026 "Atba zogov) must have made the audience wonder whether this tragic perversion of the dance could get any worse. The Bakkhai shows that it could 56 . Harvard University Department of the Classics Cambridge, Mass. 02138 I U.S.A.

5·; On this distinction see A. Henrichs, Between Country and Ci"·· Cultic Dimensions of Dionysos in Athens and Attica, in: lv!. Griifith and D. J. ~lastronarde (eds.). Cabinet of the Muses. Essavs on Classical and Comparati•e Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Atlanta 1990) 257-77. 5' Cf. Bieri (n. 3) 861., 145, and 1551.; Zeitlin (n. 6) 177f.; Seaford (n. 6) 352-55. 55 Ci. H. P. Foley, Rituallrom·. Poetn· and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca/London 1985) 154i. The language of Dionvsiac ~aJCXria continues both in the messenger speech (966i.) and in the closing scene of the play (1085i., 1119,1122, 1142, cf. 1137); so does the metaphor of the perverted dance (1303f., applied to Hera). The fullest discussion of the Dionysiac imagery in Herakles can be found in Wilamowitz (n. 18) 3, 196, 2001.; Schlesier (n. 50) 80-118; and Bieri (n. 3) 79-89, 140-46. "' My thanks to Maura Giles for helping me extract this paper from a larger essay in which I treat the Bakkhai as well as other Euripidean examples of choral self-reference and projection. I read drafts of the longer version before the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in New Orleans in December 1992 and as the Harvard Lecture at Yale University in November 1994.

528

GLAUCUS REDIVIVUS LEONARD MUELLNER

F ROM

a vantage point in the 1990s, the loss of certain literary works from antiquity is almost as painful as the disappearance of brilliant graduate students and junior colleagues from the ranks of the academy. 1 If the dramas of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus on the myth of the Cretan Glaucus had survived intact, it is facile to suppose that, as three dramas on the same myth, they would have significantly affected the conventional view of Greek tragedy. But on the basis of what has survived, it is possible to say more: they would have encouraged approaches to Athenian State Theater that privilege its ritual, mythical, and social dimensions and that view it in the perspective of social anthropology. 2 One can make such an assumption with both confidence and irony, because having survived without its poetic representations, the myth of the Cretan Glaucus did in fact receive such attention from Henri Jeanmaire in 1939, well before E. R. Dodds devoted it to Euripides in 1959. 3 The irony has substance, because the

1 The first form of this paper was a James Loeb lecture that I am honored to have delivered at the invitation of the graduate students of the Department of Clas~ics, Harvard Univt>rsity. I wish to thank all of them for the opportunity, and in particular my hosts, Fred Naiden, Prudence Jones, Deborah Beck, Jed Wyrick, Olga Levaniouk, Tom Jenkins, and Alex Hollmann, for their gracious and stimulating company. At the same time, I wish to honor the graduate students who were my peers, who benefited the field of Classics as young people, and whose gifts as adults have now gone elsewhere: Douglas Frame, Richard Shannon, Dan Petergorsky, and Richard Sacks. Their work and their spirit are still an inspiration lo many. 2 Fragments survive of Aeschylus' Cretan Women, Euripides' Polu(e)idos, and Sophocles' Seers, some of them well-known for their content, if not their source. As works that apply the perspectivt> of social anthropology to tragedy, I have in mind E. R. Dodds, The Greeks a11d the Trratio11al (Berkeley 1959), G. Nagy, Pi11dar's Homer: The Lyric Possessilm of a11 Epic Past (Baltimore 1990), R. Seaford, Reciprocity a11d Ritual: Homer and Tragedy i11 the Developing City-State (Oxford 1994), to name only a few. 3 Henri Jeanmaire undertook a comparative anthropological analysis of the myth in Couroi et Couretes (Lille 1939) 444-450; R. F. Willetts made significant advances along

529

2

Leonard Muellner

relatively impoverished versions of the myth that we have, as I will try to show below, almost certainly go back to the Athenian dramas. But my goal is neither to dwell on the irony nor on the loss, but to enhance understanding of these lost myths. Starting with the anthropological perspective afforded by Jeanmaire and his successor, R. F. Willetts, both of whom viewed the myth in its local, Cretan context, I propose to revise their interpretation of it in the light of changes in the anthropological analysis of myth and tragic drama and to address the issue of this particular myth's meaning within the Panhellenic context, not just the local Cretan one, that its performances in the Athenian State Theater imply. 4 Such a goal converges with a significant generalization about the conservative Cretan institutions articulated by R. F. Willetts in 1955: even its most archaic institutions, he contended, were not the fossils that they may appear to be when considered in isolation. They were reused to support the evolving social structures in which they were embedded, and they therefore acquired relatively modern content and functions. That process could in fact put Cretan institutions more in tune with the rest of Classical Greece than has been thought. 5 The success of this archaic myth beyond its Cretan context supports the validity of Willetts's intuition, but it also begs questions about the meaning and power of the Glaucus myth in its Athenian context that have yet to be posed. The myth of the Cretan Glaucus survives most fully in two versions, one in The Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus 3.17.1-21, the other in Hyginus Fabu/ae 146. 6 Here is the precis of the myth in Pseudosimilar lines in 'The Myth of Glaucus and the Cycle of Birth and Death," Klio 31 ( 1959) 21-28. 4 On the Panhellenic character of Athenian State Theater, see G. Nagy, Pindar's Homer 382-413, esp. 384, citing A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. 2nd ed. rev. John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford 1968) 58. 5 R. F. Willetts, Aristocratic Society in Ancient Crete (London 1955) 14-15: "It is possible to find social features of greater antiquity in Crete [than in Sparta] if they are considered in isolation. But when they are examined within the more general context of Greek historical development, their apparent antiquity assumes relative proportions, and they can be considered not so much as survivals, serving little or no organic purpose, as important features invested with new content and new purposes. In Crete they continued to uc deeply rooted in the social life of the citizen classes, a necessary part of the social structure which had replaced the more primitive phases in which they were originally fostered. Archaic in form, they became as modem in content as the institutions they had been harnessed to support allowed them to be." 6 For the sources of the myth, see Kirchner, RE 7:1 (1910) 1407-1423. Pseudo-

530

Glaucus Rt:divivus

3

Apollodorus: Glaucus, son of Minos and Pasiphae, when he was still a child (en v~mo~ \m:apxrov), was chasing a mouse or flies (J.lUV and J.lUta~ are both attested as textual variants), fell into a storage jar (nl8o~) of honey, and died. Upon his disappearance, Minos undertook an intense search for the boy and began consulting diviners about finding him. Now the Kouretes-a group to whose name and function in the story I will return-told Minos that he had a three-colored cow in his flocks (ay£/...m) and that the person able to make the best comparison (tov ... &puna dKaam ouv118£vta) to its color would restore his child to him alive. When Minos' seers were assembled, Polyidus the son of Koiranos, a seer from Argos, likened the cow's color to the fruit of the bramble-but the text goes no further in explicating the comparison. Being compelled (avayKaaOEi~) to search for the child (nai'~), Polyidus found Glaucus in the honey jar by some divination (ttvo~ J.lavttia~)-again, no details are given. But Minos was not satisfied. He told Polyidus that now he had to restore the boy to life and had Polyidus shut up with the corpse. At first, the seer was completely helpless in the situation; then he happened to see a snake (bpaKrov) approaching the corpse of the boy. He threw a stone at the snake and killed it, out of fear that he himself would die if the body of the boy was harmed by the snake. Along came another snake. When it saw that the lirst snake was dead, it went away, then returned bringing an herb (noa), which it applied over the whole body of the first snake. Once the herb was applied, the snake came back to life. When Polyidus saw this, he was amazed, but not dumbstruck: he applied the same herb to the body of Glaucus and brought him back to life. Now Minos welcomed back his child (again, nat~), but even so, he refused to allow Polyidus to return to Argos until he had taught Glaucus the art of divination (again, J.lavtda). Being compelled to do so (again, avayKaaOEi~). Polyidus did teach the boy, but as he was sailing off, he ordered Glaucus to spit into his mouth. Glaucus did so and forgot the art of divination that Polyidus had taught him. The second version, preserved in the Fabulae of Hyginus, differs in significant details, offers more information about the nature of the divination practiced by the seer, and has a different ending. In Hyginus, the son of Minos was playing ball when he fell into the honey jar, not Apollodorus is cited in the edition of R. Wagner, Mythngraphi Graeci I. Apnllodori Bibliotheca (Stuttgart 1965), Hyginus in that of P. K. Marshall, llygirri Fabulae (Stuttgart 1993).

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chasing a mouse or flies. Minos consults not the Kouretes, but Apollo, who tells him that a monstrum "portent" has been born to him, and whoever can explain (soluere) it will restore the boy (puerum). The monstrum is a heifer, uitulus, that changes color three times a day, every four hours: first it is albus "white/ colorless," then red, then black. Minos' own seers are unable to explain the sign, but Polyidus, who in Hyginus' version hails from Byzantium, says that it resembles the mulberry, which is first white, then red, then, when completely ripe, black. Minos then tells Polyidus that he is the person who must restore his son; so Polyidus begins his divination. He sees a night owl (noctua) sitting over a wine cellar frightening away bees, which he interprets and then pulls the lifeless boy (puerum exanimem) from the honey jar. When Minos says to the seer, "You have found the body, now restore its soul," the seer denies that it can be done. Despite his protests, Minos orders him to be given a sword and shut up in a tomb (monumentum) with the boy. A snake (draco) arrives, is killed with the sword, then revived as in Pseudo-Apollodorus, and Polyidus revives the boy as the snake had revived its fellow. A passerby hears them making noise in the tomb and so informs Minos, who has the tomb opened, recovers his son, and sends Polyidus back to his homeland with many gifts. So this version ends without the episode of the compulsory instruction of the boy and the parting spit into the mouth of his teacher. Before I go on to discuss the method I will use to analyze this myth, it is necessary to speak about the sources I have just cited, their reliability, and their date. Although Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus are at best late Hellenistic and Imperial Roman sources (I st to 2nd centuries C.E.), the general assumption by recent students of this myth, from Jeanmaire to Axel Persson and Willetts, has been that they reliably preserve something much older-in the case of Persson and Willetts, much, much older. 7 In respect to Pseudo-Apollodorus, J. G. Frazer observed that the author of The Library faithfully summarizes the plots of Athenian dramas when we have them to compare with his text, 8 and, 7 A. Persson, The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times (B~rkeley 1942) 5-24, chose the Glaucus myth as a point of departure for his study of Minoan and Mycenaean religious survivals. Willetts, "The Myth of Glaucus," 21-23 considers that the myth reflects a totemic cycle of birth and death that is ultimately paleolithic in origin. See also n. 12 below. 8 Apollodorus, The Library, trans. Sir J. G. Frazer (Cambridge, Mass. 1921) l.xviii-xix.

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Glauctts Redivivus

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as mentioned above, it is known that each of the canonical tragedians wrote a drama on the Glaucus myth. In this regard, Hyginus is not different from Pseudo-Apollodorus; the Fabulae at times even explicitly ascribe versions of their myths to EuripidesY Among other things, I wish to support the hypothesis that these versions of the Glaucus myth go back to the Athenian plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. For the analysis of this myth, I propose to apply a specific method that is an outgrowth of field work on myths in small-scale societies by the anthropologist Pierre-Yves Jacopin, who spent approximately three years living with the Yukuna Indians in Colombia in the 1970s. 10 The essential assumptions of this method are as follows: first, that a myth is in and of itself systematic and coherent, and that it exists in a series of contexts, to each of which it relates as a coherent ~ystem. The first system lies in the syntagmatil: dimension, along the axis of combination, and it rules the sequence of episodes that brings about the situation that obtains at the end of the story. Rebuilding the logic of the teleological sequence of the myth is an initial task for a myth interpreter, 11 who can then begin to look at adjacent or encompassing structures on the axes of both selection and combination, for instance, a ritual associated with a myth that corresponds to the myth not term-for-term but as its own coherent system in relation to the system of the myth; or one can study a myth's place in the collection of myths with which it can appropriately be brought into systematic relation within a given cultural setting. An analysis on these levels should clarify the social function of a given myth within its cultural context.

~As in the titles: 4. lno alia Euripidis, 8. Eadem Euripidis (Marshall); see also

G. Zuntz, I11e Poli1ical Plays of Euripides (Manchester 1959) 129-152, who cites evidence that hypotheses of Euripides were a major source of Hyginus.

10 Jacopin's field work and its an.1lysis are contained in his dissertation, f.., I parole genenlfil•e: Ia myrlw/ogie des i11dims yukww (Ncuchatel 19H7); for a short example of their application, see "On the Syntactic Structure of Myth, or the Yukuna Invention of Speech," Culwml All{l!ropology 3 (1988) !31-159. For an evaluation of Jacopin's methodology, see E. R. Leach's critical introduction to M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, Myth (Ann Arbor 1982) 1-20. 11 For more specifics on the logical nature of the relationship of a myth's ccpisodes along lhc syntagmatic axis. see L. Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Menis in Greek Epic (Ithaca 1996) 52-93.

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INTERNAL, SYNTAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF MYTH I begin with a syntagmatic analysis of the myth in its two versions, episode by episode, seeking to make explicit the logic and consistency of their unfolding. The boy Glaucus, chasing a fly or a mouse, or, as Hyginus has it, playing ball, falls into a jar of honey and dies. The jar in question is called by Pseudo-Apollodorus a pithos, normally translated "storage or wine jar," a large pot that could be partially buried below the floor level in a storage room so as to leave its opening accessible to a child at a level not far from the floor. Hyginus' word for the jar is dolium, also a large wide-mouthed jar used for the storage of wine. 12 Chasing small animals and flies and playing ball are activities that effectively evoke a child's time of life, and children still have a knack for innocently getting themselves into sticky messes. But the myth immediately takes us abruptly from a child at play to the horror of his accidental death by drowning. The universal behavior of children can be an important guide to meaning in a story such as this one, but it is not likely to be sufficient. For instance, a hidden common feature to the three variants, chasing flies, chasing mice, and playing ball, may well have been apparent or suggested to the myth's audiences but is not generalizable for us. All three childish activities have associations with the terminology of initiation in Crete and elsewhere. As Henri Jeanmaire pointed out, the words mouse (JlU~) and flies (Jluta.t) each begin with the sound /mu/, and the Greek verb "to initiate" is JlUEro. 13 Similarly the reference to playing ball: the noun cr