Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama 9781350124363, 9781350124370, 9781350124400, 9781350124394

Citation preview

TRAGIC BODIES

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Also Available from Bloomsbury THE MATERIALITIES OF GREEK TRAGEDY by Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND POSTHUMANISM by Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel DEEP CLASSICS by Shane Butler FRANKENSTEIN AND ITS CLASSICS by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens and Brett M. Rogers

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TRAGIC BODIES EDGES OF THE HUMAN IN GREEK DRAMA

Nancy Worman

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Nancy Worman, 2021 Nancy Worman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image: A Mi-Voix 1958, Dorothea Tanning © The Estate of Dorothea Tanning / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Worman, Nancy, 1963– author. Title: Tragic bodies : edges of the human in Greek drama / Nancy Worman. Other titles: Edges of the human in Greek drama Description: London; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: This book argues for a new way of reading tragedy that attends to how bodies in the ancient plays pivot between subject and object, person and thing, living and dead, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human. At the same time, it explores the ways in which Greek tragedy pulls up close to human bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts, their coverings or nakedness, and their postures and orientations. Drawing on and advancing the latest interplays of posthumanism and materialism in relation to classical literature, Nancy Worman shows how this tragic enactment may seem to emphasize the human body, but in effect does something quite different. Greek drama instead often treats the body as a thing that has the status and implications associated with other objects, such as a cloak, an urn, or a toy for a dog. Tragic Bodies urges attention to key scenes in Greek tragedy that foreground bodily identifiers as semiotic materializing. This occurs when signs with weighty symbolic resonance distil out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and conflation orchestrated through proximity, contact, and sensory dynamics. Reading the dramatic script in this way pursues the felt knowledge at the body’s edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration attuned to how bodies register at tragedy’s unique intersections—where directive and figurative language combine to highlight visual, tactile, and aural details.—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020019736 (print) | LCCN 2020019737 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350124370 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350124363 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350124387 (epub) | ISBN 9781350124394 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Greek drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism. | Human body in literature. Classification: LCC PA3131 .W67 2021 (print) | LCC PA3131 (ebook) | DDC 882/.0109162—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019736 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019737 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3501-2436-3 978-1-3501-2437-0 978-1-3501-2439-4 978-1-3501-2438-7

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Antigone? She came whirling out of the dust-cloud to where the vultures were reeling and flung white sand over the blackened foot. She stood there letting fall white sand over the blackened foot. Then behold! Virginia Woolf, The Years

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For Froma and Helene ~ In memory of my father Nathaniel Patterson Worman

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Prologue: Skin to Skin in Greek Tragedy

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1

Touching Oedipus: Proximities, Contact, and Affective Intimacies

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The Sibling Hand: Manual Erotics and Violence

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Familial Coverings: Skin, Cloaks, and Other Outerwear

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Strange Containers: Bodies and Other Tragic Vessels

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Bodily Alterations: Undress, Prosthesis, and Assemblage

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Mysterious Objects: Corpses, Ghosts, Statues

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Final Scenes: Beyond the Human

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Bibliography Index Locorum General Index

255 273 281

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated to Froma Zeitlin and Helene Foley, two of the world’s most influential feminist scholars of Greek tragedy. So much of what I know about tragedy stems from their teaching and writing. Froma sponsored my dissertation at Princeton— an amazing experience during which I often pitched ideas that she quickly exposed as flimsy or at least half wrong. Her breadth and understanding, together with her fiercely funny dismissals of duller scholarly endeavors, felt then and feel to me still utterly unique. Helene bookended this singular education, tempering my celebration of Clytemnestra (e.g.) when she taught me as an undergraduate and proving herself an enduringly precise critic and stalwart supporter during our (now many) years as colleagues at Barnard. I offer this book to both as a small token of my gratitude and admiration. This book is also in memory of my father, Nathaniel Worman, who died on September 24, 2018. Despite the fact that he somehow avoided most of the body’s indignities for more than ninety years, he once told me that his doctor often recorded in his notes, “Thinks he’s dying.” The northern Vermont newspaper for which he served as editor and then writer at large off and on for four decades designated him “Franklin County’s Storyteller”; his curiosity and generosity of spirit made him a very good listener. He encouraged my bookishness and always had a surprising question for me when I described new projects. He was intrigued by this one, although when I told him about my interest in prostheses and physical alterations, his response was, “What’s wrong with the human body?” I have many colleagues to thank for their collaborative engagements and invitations, but my most heartfelt gratitude goes to Victoria Wohl, as well as Alastair Blanshard, Sarah Nooter, Verity Platt, Alex Purves, and Phiroze Vasunia. Our ongoing conversations have moved me and made me laugh; some of the most fun I have had as a scholar has occurred in their company. Victoria generously read draft chapters of this book and offered crucial suggestions for deepening the argument and sharpening the framing. Together with Alex and Verity, she and I organized and participated in a number of workshops, roundtables, and conferences that fostered many of the guiding ideas in Tragic Bodies. Alastair has offered a kind (if sometimes skeptical) ear to this and other projects, as well as inviting me to Brisbane as an R. D. Milns Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland in 2016. Sarah has a talent for identifying broader venues for presenting work, which has made for lively times together with some of our more adventurous colleagues. Phiroze repeatedly invited me to present my work at the Institute of Classical Studies and at University College London, including most notably a roundtable for the book in draft form, which advanced my understanding of the project considerably. I am grateful to all of the participants, especially Rosa Andujar, Rachel x

Acknowledgments

Bowlby, Emma Cole, Simon Goldhill, Katherine Fleming, Ahuvia Kahane, Miriam Leonard, Sebastian Matzner, Daniel Orrells, Oliver Taplin, and Tim Whitmarsh. The other group that has provided the most inspiring engagement for this project is made up of students at Barnard and Columbia, especially those in my Tragic Bodies lecture and seminar sequence and in the graduate seminars on tragedy and feminist thought that I taught in 2017 and 2018. These include (in alphabetical order) Ward Alexander, Julia Arnade-Colwill, Lila Etter, Hanna Graybill, Rowan Hepps Keeney, Emma Ianni, John Izzo, Cat Lambert, Izzy Levy, Guoshi Li, Charlotte Lucas, Caitlin Morgan, Cristina Perez, Charles Pletcher, Asya Sagnak, Phoebe Salzman-Cohen, Aydan Shahdadpuri, Daniel Sofaer, Vanessa Stovall, Max Tamola, Rebecca Teich, and Lien Van Geel. Among these I single out Rowan Hepps Keeney, who offered their invaluable knowledge and assistance in devising the Tragic Bodies seminar as a sequel to the lecture, and Emma Ianni, Cat Lambert, and Vanessa Stovall, each of whom I have worked with individually on related and very illuminating projects. Maria Combatti, Pieta Päällysaho, and Caleb Simone, dissertation advisees writing on Greek literature and aesthetics, advanced my understanding of ancient embodiment, the sensory, and affect over years of stimulating discussions. I thank the Society for the Humanities at Cornell for its support in the academic year 2016-2017, during which time I drafted the majority of Tragic Bodies. At Cornell I made some great friends among the Fellows; I am especially grateful to Gloria Kim and Alicia Imperiale for helping me think about the fold, among many other kindnesses. I thank my home institution as well, not only for general support but more specifically for the Presidential Research Award, which provided funds for the roundtable “Subjectivities, Senses, Surrounds” that I organized with Verity Platt and Caleb Simone in November 2018. I am grateful to other colleagues and friends for their interest in and support of this project, especially during the time when my father was dying. These include Aziza Mirzan Ali, Charles Brittain, Tina Campt, Elizabeth Castelli, Pam Cobrin, Joy Connolly, Juliana Driever, Rachel Eisendrath, Nicole Giannella, Ella Haselswerdt, Will Holland, Lisa Hollibaugh, Valery Joseph Upson, Nikolas Kakkoufa, Cath Kane, Athena Kirk, Eric Lee, Jonathan Massey, Monica Miller, Helen Morales, Diane Moroff, Melissa Mueller, Marc Norman, Brad Samples, Jess Samples, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Anthony Schneider, Andrea Schulz, Scott Stein, Stefan Tornquist, and Carl Wennerlind. I remain thankful for the support and friendship of Alice Wright, the acquisitions editor of Classics and Archeology at Bloomsbury Academic, who guided this book through its early stages. I am also grateful for the hard work and attentiveness of Georgina Leighton, who took over Alice’s role in later stages, as well as that of Lily Mac Mahon for editorial assistance and Rachel Walker for production at Bloomsbury and Merv Honeywood for oversight of the typesetting. With her usual wit and perspicuity, Cat Lambert did a superb job of proofreading and indexing, for which I am ever thankful. My greatest appreciation and gratitude I save for my husband, Iakovos Vasiliou, whose darkly funny prospect always somehow eased the strange burdens of writing about challenges to body and soul. Earlier versions of some of the discussions in this book appear in articles from 2015 to 2020, citations for which can be found in the Bibliography. xi

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PROLOGUE SKIN TO SKIN IN GREEK TRAGEDY

And in the gleaming flame mingling my body with my dear husband’s, placing my skin next to his skin, I shall enter Persephone’s bedchamber. σῶμά τ᾽αἴθοπι φλογμῷ πόσει συμμείξασα φίλῳ, χρῶτα χροῒ πέλας θεμένα, Περσεφονείας ἥκω θαλάμους. Euripides, Suppliant Women So says Evadne, aloft on the crag, before she leaps onto the pyre of her husband, the Argive warrior Capaneus. The scene is a stunning one, with its heightened attention to bodies and dress, its grim erotics, and its intense emotional cadence—a combination of effects that this book explores. Approaching embodiments in ancient Greek tragedy from six distinct angles, it focuses attention on their sensory, affective, metaphorical, and material extensions and urges awareness of the dramatic text as thick with aesthetic and figurative potential. These discussions also trace the ways in which vibrant bodily inflections triangulate in relation to sense perceptions, spatial orientations, and semiotic materialities, as words and actions in concert precipitate the stuff of signification onto the stage. Then figurative schemes take material form, as with the familial “trap” of Aeschylus’ Oresteia manifested in Clytemnestra’s murderous tapestries, or the incestuous bonds of the Oedipus family staged in touching (and “touching”) assemblages. As such the dramatic text offers up in the fullness of its realization layered, often contradictory experiences that combine figurative images with indications of enactment, including what theorists of theater semiotics call proxemics (nearness indicators), blocking, deportment, sensory effects, skin and surfaces, contact, and costuming.1 This is the 1

On the complexities of semiotic reference in drama, see Ubersfeld (1977), Serpieri (1978), Elam (1980), Issacharoff (1989), Aston and Savona (1991), Fisher-Lichte (1992); cf. Edmunds (1996) and Kampourelli (2016) for theater semiotics in Greek tragedy more specifically. Wilms (2014) offers a wider range of ways into thinking about tragic aesthetics, including semiotic and phenomenological. For a revisionist theorizing of theatrical ways of meaning that advances a materialist semiotics, see Knowles (2004); while the book does not engage with more recent work on materialism and thus focuses more on new historicism and cultural materialism, it is useful for its promotion of “thick” readings. See also Fortier ([1997] 2016: 22–28), who points out that Barthes’ essay on costume urges attention to social, interactive apprehension of (e.g.) texture; cf. Barthes ([1964] 1972: 41–50), although my notion of the materialities of signs does not depend upon hypothesizing about actual productions, as he is doing there. The volume edited by Reinelt and Roach (2007) collects essays on a variety of useful interventions in theater theory, including materialism and performance studies.

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Tragic Bodies

layered experience that I seek to explore in the present study; and my central claim is that attention to such details can recharge and even reorient contemporary readers’ senses of how tragedy animates embodiment at the edges of human inhabitation. Consider the opening scene of Sophocles’ Ajax, which foregrounds a full range of sense perceptions. Athena, a mere voice to Odysseus, accosts him as he circles around alone before the tent of Ajax in the Achaean camp. “I always see you [δέδορκά],” she says, hunting your enemies, “as now I perceive you [ὁράω]” tracking the footprints of Ajax like a “keen-nosed [εὔρινος] Spartan hound.” While she affirms that the hero is inside his tent, dripping sweat from forehead and “sword-killing hands [χέρας ξιφοκτόνους],” she cautions, “but it’s not for you to go peering about [παπταίνειν] within” (1–13). “Oh voice [φθέγμ᾽] of Athena,” Odysseus responds, “easily known [εὐμαθές] to me, even though you are unseen [ἄποπτος], I hear and grasp your voice with my mind [φώνημ᾽ ἀκούω καὶ ξυναρπάζω φρενί], like the bronze-mouthed bell of a Tyrrhenian trumpet [χαλκοστόμου κώδωνος ὡς Τυρσηνικῆς].”2 He has learned, he explains, that Ajax has laid a “murderous hand [κατηναρισμένας / ἐκ χειρός],” (26–27) on the animals in the camp, thinking that they were his enemies. This exchange between invisible but deafening deity and sharp-sniffing, printtracking, keen-eared human is quickly offset by the bloody-handed, crazy-eyed Ajax, who appears at the door of his tent and in a fit of madness thinks that he sees the goddess. If this were any genre other than drama—that is to say, if we were to treat this scene as a read text—the sheer density and complexity of the sensory orientations would be striking, but their resonance would work primarily through language and visualization in the mind’s eye. There are at least ten words indicating sense perceptions or their organs in the first fifteen lines, and yet while the indications of sights and sounds may call up sense memories and affective impressions in the reader, the perceptual experience would operate on this one circuit: text on the page, images in the mind, sensations in the body.3 But as a genre drama has an anomalous status, insofar as the read text encompasses only one of its registers (i.e., the linguistic) and thus only part of its mimetic range.4 Unlike other ancient poetic genres, and in at least one regard more like the visual arts, drama activates a richer perceptual surround, since its “text” in its fullest potential both puts bodies on view and itself plays directly on the body’s senses.5

2 Cf. Odysseus’ response to Athena’s address in Rhesus, likely a much later play that nevertheless sustains their conventional close relation in similarly sensory terms (if not via a trumpet analogy): “For I perceive the familiar sound of your voice” (φθέγματος γὰρ ἠσθόμην τοῦ σοῦ συνήθη γῆρυν, 608–9). Note, however, that the latter play also introduces what would seem like the opposite of this aural intimacy, when Athena disguises her voice as Aphrodite’s in order to trick Paris (646–74). While anomalous in extant tragedy, the trick is conventionally that of specially talented female figures (e.g., Helen in Odyssey 4, the Delian maidens in Hymn to Apollo). 3 But cf. Young in Purves (ed., 2017), on the powerful effects that poetic language can have on the reader’s senses. 4 As Aristotle, for one, emphasizes: see the opening of the Poetics for his formulation of tragedy’s medium (opsis, spectacle) and modes (lexis and melopoiia, speech and song) (1447a16–18, 1450a7–12). 5 I set aside the question of Homeric epic as a performance genre, since what I am attempting to clarify here does not make any claims about actual ancient performances, only about textual indicators of dramatic enactment.

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Skin to Skin in Greek Tragedy

So let’s take another look at our opening scene. A lone figure is on the ground onstage, visibly tracing circles (cf. κυκλοῦντ᾽, 20) in front of the stage-building (skēnē).6 He does not speak but searches with his eyes and “sniffs,” while a voice trumpets over his head, identifying him as Odysseus. He then begins to speak himself, emphasizing his keen sense of hearing and mind’s “grasp” (but lack of sight) of the voice’s source, identifying it as Athena and its quality as like that of a military horn (which also fits the setting). He and the voice then call up a third figure, but for the moment only in the mind’s eye, the hero Ajax, whom Athena affirms is within but whom she warns Odysseus off of seeing. Ajax then emerges onstage, his bloody hands indicating that his primary sensory orientation has been (violent) touch; he only “sees” what is not in fact there, neither in narrative (diegetic) space nor mimetically onstage. While vision is arguably drama’s primary perceptual medium, here seeing is triangulated initially by smell and hearing and then secondarily by touch. We can note as well that the scene only includes touch in the narration rather than as visible enactment through mimetic and deictic (i.e., pointing) gestures onstage, a difference that would not register so weightily in other genres. Since this is drama, its own embodied enactment alters the status of the sense references in the written text, doubling down on some (e.g., Athena and the audience view Odysseus, Odysseus and the audience hear and the latter likely also sees Athena), countering some (e.g., the audience watches Odysseus not seeing Athena), and indicating others through image repetition (e.g., Ajax’s murderous touch, at first unseen by any mortal).

1. Figuration, Embodiment, and Semiotic Materialities I offer this opening scene as an entrance point to my study on tragic embodiment for its rich orchestration of the three main senses that Greek tragedies engage (sight, sound, and touch), for their metaphorical extensions and use as character inflections, and thus for the ways in which this tragic script envisions the senses and embodied figurations for enactment on stage, as well as how they stimulate affective responses in the characters and chorus as well as (by implication) the audience. These dramatic effects invigorate a lively sensorium, in which characters’ directorial gestures that highlight emotions, perceptions, and their postures in relation to significant others and/or objects model for the audience sensory reactions, communicating judgments about aesthetic, physical, and ethical orientations. The same could of course be said of drama more generally; and

6 On the spatial imagery, see Worman (2001). Commentators disagree about whether Athena is visible above the stage building on the machine (mēchanē) but as we have no other examples of a divine voice resounding onstage without a body, convention would seem to indicate her presence (see esp. Mastronarde [1990: 274–75, 278]). Cf., e.g., Athena and Poseidon at the opening of Trojan Women and Athena’s pivotal role in Rhesus; in both cases the deities are apparently unseen by humans but scholars take them to be present on the mēchanē (see Perris 2012: 160–61). Cf. as well Euripides’ Ion, where the characters do see Athena when she appears atop the stage building (1549–50), as is the case with Thetis in Andromache, the Dioskouroi in Euripides’ Electra, and Heracles in Philoctetes. Cf. Sofer (2013) on invisibility in drama more generally.

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while theorists of theater semiotics have gone some way toward indicating how such complexities work in the realm of signification, they largely set aside questions about enactment, embodiment, and other physical or material coordinates. One puzzle, as I see it, is just how “thick” we think the ancient dramatic text actually is. That is to say, even if the play script of the Ajax doesn’t offer much by way of reconstruction of actual productions, I would argue that it does engage a realm of enactment more or less bound to ancient production conventions and settings, as well as “structures of feeling,” Raymond Williams’ phrase for capturing culturally embedded affective dynamics and embodied experiences.7 This would entail, for instance, that staging an opening scene in which a fond Athena observes Odysseus as a “sharp-sniffing Spartan hound” triangulates blocking and proxemics, sensory activation and reaction, and the referencing of an animal commonly known to fifth-century Athenians for its fine hunting skills. This orchestration ties such effects and references to familiar spaces and knowledges and thus structures experiences both specific to the ancient context and graspable as aesthetic coordinates in the modern. Much work has been done on the ancient setting of Attic tragedy, including its historical and cultural contexts, its institutional undergirding, the rituals surrounding its productions, its material effects (costumes, masks, props), and its built performance space and spatial orientations.8 Such historical details are not my focus here, quite obviously, but the aesthetic schemes that I illuminate assume the sensory and material groundings of the Athenian context while also aiming to deepen awareness of these schemes as art. By this I mean sensitivity not only to formal elements, but also to the capacity of artistic products (in this case dramatic poetry) to refract and extend culturally imbedded experiences—what Williams terms “constitutive social practices”—such that they resonate with readers or viewers in other cultures and time periods.9 As Elizabeth Grosz has noted, art creates from the chaos of the real “networks, planes, zones of cohesion, which do not map this chaos so much as draw strength, force, material from it.”10 And it is this extracting and orchestrating of materials and their “forces” that may craft unfamiliar, even inhuman, sensations and inhabitations—such that, for instance, Antigone’s bodily inhabitation in Sophocles’ play ultimately shares features with her rocky tomb, as she becomes a Niobe without the children (825–31), her “vault”

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Williams (1977: 128–35); these shape cultural production and the reception of its media—the historical, material, and affective conditions in which art emerges in and through its practices. 8 The bibliography is enormous, as this has been a dominant strain in the scholarship, especially since the 1990s; here I cite only a selection of studies most proximate to my own. On historical and cultural contexts and performance, Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), Seaford (1994), Csapo and Slater (1995), Goldhill and Osborne [eds.] (1999), Roselli (2011); institutional undergirding, Wilson (2000, 2007), Csapo (2007); the rituals surrounding productions, Wiles (1997), Rehm (2002); music, Murray and Wilson (2004), Power (2010); actors, Easterling and Hall (eds.) (2002), Duncan (2005); material effects (costumes, masks, props), Taplin (1993, 2007), Worman (1999), Ley (2007a), Wiles (2007), Csapo (2010), Wyles (2011), Mueller (2016); built space and spatial orientations, Arnott (1961), Taplin (1977, 1978), Wiles (1997), Worman (2001), Rehm (2002), Csapo (2007), Ley (2007b). 9 Williams (1977: 19, cf. 38, 53, 132–35). 10 Grosz (2008: 8).

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Skin to Skin in Greek Tragedy

penetrated after her death by a cadre of men. And while it is not only female bodies that may be rendered barely human and thus more easily mistreated, these do suffer literal and figurative violations frequently enough that such threats seem to hover around the action of the plays in which they appear. Indeed, Grosz and other prominent feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Teresa de Lauretis have emphasized the extent to which western thinkers treat embodiment itself as essentially feminine, an inherent vulnerability that Greek tragedy exploits when depicting debilitated heroes.11 On the tragic stage familiar objects and practices may take perverse turns in this way, through figurative language that draws together things and actions otherwise understood as distinct. Think, for instance, of Clytemnestra’s “dogs” (i.e., the Furies) in the Libation Bearers, which collapse the battlefield eater of carrion with a vengeful and demonic mothering (924, 1054). Such conflations verge on the obscene, in that the eye (or mind’s eye) recoils from contemplating the fullness of their metaphorical extensions. They also highlight the drama of tragic metaphor itself, since when a plot offers up an officiant as himself a slaughtered beast on the altar, as with Aegisthus in Euripides’ Electra, the spectator registers the shock that comes from taking the figurative as real (i.e., “real,” within the dramatic frame).12 From this angle what it means for Iphigenia to be “replaced” by a deer on the brink of her murder at Aulis takes on a new cast, as the animal both functions as a metonymy for the slaughter of innocents and shadows her humanity throughout the play, since it is the animal-loving Artemis who demands the sacrifice.13 Attending to the enactment indicated by the play script and thus to the theatricality of figurative imagery, as well as its material or “material” extensions, can help to further our understanding of the ways in which dramatic texts sort out power, authority, and acts (righteous or otherwise) in relation to embodied identity—not only male and female, but also citizen and foreigner, old and young, aristocrat and slave, and human and creature or object.14 While a number of influential readers of Attic tragedy have long recognized the centrality of visual imagery in the genre, in recent years some scholars have been calling for a greater awareness of how theatrical objects, affect, and sensory impressions (especially sound) communicate aesthetic and political orientations.15 Elsewhere I have discussed style and the body in tragic performance, emphasizing among other things dress, deportment, and aesthetics; in this study I aim to deepen my own focus and to contribute to this growing awareness by theorizing at the intersection

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E.g., Grosz (1994); Irigaray ([1977] 1985); de Lauretis (1984). See further below. Cf. Henrichs (2000: 173–88); also Pucci (1992). 13 Cf. Iphigenia’s body-proxy relation to the wooden statue in Iphigenia in Tauris and see further in Chapter 6. 14 See (e.g.) Hall (1989), duBois (2003), McCoskey and Zakin (eds.) (2009), Paillard (2017). From my perspective, these must be taken together if we are to apprehend fully the material quality of dramatic signification— that is, as indexical (i.e., as concrete entities, postures, etc. indicating themes, concepts etc.) and viewing itself as sensuous and mimetic, as a kind of “feeling with”; see Marks (2000) and further below. For a sustaining of attention to the semiotic in such affective encounters, see Brinkema (2014). 15 E.g., Wohl (2015a, 2018), Mueller (2016), Nooter (2017), Weiss (2018a), Haselswerdt (2019). For the earlier emphasis on visuality, see esp. Zeitlin (e.g., 1980, 1991) and Segal (e.g., 1985b, 1990); also Seale (1982). 12

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Tragic Bodies

of theater semiotics and aisthēsis (i.e., aesthetics in its most inclusive, embodied sense), concentrating attention especially on the body’s surfaces and edges.16 I thus also seek to fill in a gap often left open in the critical literature, which until recently has tended to treat dramatic texts as just that—texts. This may have contributed to the tendency among scholars of Greek tragedy to focus on the language alone, whether in philological studies or in more theoretically adventurous ones, which in turn led to a readerly myopia—an inattention both to performance elements and dramatic materialities.17 It seems a mark of this scholarly oversight that in 1998 R. Drew Griffith published an article on “corporality” in Greek tragedy, a topic that at the time seemed adequately addressed in a twenty-five page essay.18 That said, the attention of scholars such as Page duBois, Patricia Easterling, Helene Foley, Nicole Loraux, Ruth Padel, Pietro Pucci, Nancy Rabinowitz, Charles Segal, and Froma Zeitlin to gender and sexuality on the one hand and ritual and theatrical space on the other has, since the 1980s, changed radically classicists’ sense of tragedy as an embodied civic and political practice.19 My own work on tragedy, like that of many others, has been profoundly influenced by the insights of these scholars; and if the present study aims at innovation, it does so at least in part as a further unfolding and deepening of their shared devotion to careful assessment of representational regimes, particularly in regard to gender. That said, since my focus on tragic embodiment highlights both materials and metaphors, as well as senses and affects, it also attempts to rise to the provocations of theoretical innovators such as Eugenie Brinkema, who asks, “What would happen to the study of both affectivity and form if we were to reintroduce close reading to the study of sensation?”20 Thus attention to the details, philological and otherwise, of bodies and their sensations ground this study throughout, even as it takes on larger questions as well, especially those that tend to cluster at human edges—both in the sense of skin and surfaces and of existential margins (e.g., the nonhuman, the undead). At its broadest vantage my discussion starts from an awareness that bodies, however we conceive them in their social and cultural specificities, are tragic in their temporalities and limitations. They have beginnings and ends, show the passage of time, command only very circumscribed spaces, and are subject to incursion, vulnerable in many

16 See, e.g., Worman (1999b, 2000, 2001); newer work gives some sense of how my current approach incorporated and furthered this earlier one (e.g., 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019). 17 That is, with the exception of modernists’ interest in ancient ritual, which helped to draw attention to performance (and vice versa), as most famously Jane Ellen Harrison (see, e.g., Mills 2014), who influenced Woolf and who was picked up again later in the century during a renewed focus on ritual and anthropological approaches. See, e.g., Zeitlin (1965), Foley (1985), Seaford (1994), in contrast to (e.g.) Goldhill (1984, 1986) and Rutherford (2012), who focus on language and reading. The rise in other fields of performance studies and cultural politics has also influenced classicists and helped to mitigate this oversight; see (for a sampling of emphases) Taplin (1978, 1993), Wiles (1997), Goldhill and Osborne (1999), Goldhill (2000), Wilson (2000), Green (2002), Grethlein (2003), Hall (2006), McCoskey and Zakin (eds.) (2009), Csapo (2010), Roselli (2011), Mueller (2016). 18 Griffith (1998); see also Segal on the Electras (1985b) and Zeitlin on “somatics” in Euripides’ Hecuba (1991). 19 E.g., Zeitlin (1980, 1990), Pucci (1980, 1992), Rabinowitz (1984, 1993), Foley (1985, 2001), Loraux (1985, 1995), Easterling (1987, 1997), duBois (1988, 2003), Padel (1990, 1992, 1995). See also Griffith (2001). 20 Brinkema (2014: xvi).

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Skin to Skin in Greek Tragedy

regards.21 They also expose existential boundaries and their undoings: not only between living and dead, but also human and animal, divine and human, female and male, elevated and debased, racially (or otherwise) marked and unmarked. This may be why in dominant western cultures embodiment itself tends to be racialized and feminized, such that “female” especially serves as the universal signifier of the body’s materialities, limitations, insults, and weaknesses.22 While recent decades have witnessed an explosion of scholarly and more general interest in embodiment and bodies of all sorts, particularly in relation to issues of power, knowledge, and identity, academics and cultural critics alike have often avoided questions about what is conventionally termed the “human condition” while assuming—again, until recently—that this condition is what matters, is the only embodied perspective worthy of articulation and understanding.23 Furthermore, readers of Greek tragedy have tended to think about embodiment (when they think about it at all) as essentially naturalizing, which involves attempts to assimilate the ways in which the tragedies depict physicality and the senses to familiar understandings of human inhabitations, orientations, and feelings. Likely because of a modern investment in theatrical realism, this is how most scholars approach such questions, even when emphasizing an anthropological awareness of ancient ritual practices, sociality, and so on.24 But in fact the plays of all three canonical dramatists often represent modes of embodiment as strangely other than the “normally” human—as strained, alienated, or perverted in relation to the affective and material situatedness of lived experience. Dire exigencies may render the human body less substantial and agential than a tapestry or a statue; alternatively, other objects, creatures, or even places may be annexed to or exchanged for bodies, extending or collapsing them spatiotemporally as well as existentially. Gods’ bodies, in contrast, largely remain at a distance and tend to elude or confound human perception—witness Athena in the Ajax scene or Hippolytus’ “whiff ” of Artemis in the play named for him.25 Human bodies on the ancient tragic stage thus tend to pivot between subject and object, human and not, and so serve as vehicles for confronting the edges of the human, for thinking beyond or without or instead of it.26 At the same time, Greek tragedy pulls up

21 But contrast Nancy’s ideas about “being singular plural” ([1996] 2000), which theorizes identity formation as relational, so that the limits of the self materialize as “with” rather than “self-other” or “same-different” (i.e., in conjunction rather than opposition); see (e.g.) the discussion in Watkin (2007), with objections. 22 As Miller notes, “Some things and some people are seen as more material than others” (2005: 3); on the Platonic history of this gendering, see Irigaray ([1974] 1985), Butler (1993). Aristotle even thinks of the female as a birth deformity (Generation of Animals 737a). 23 This is the case despite the work in the past few decades on post-humanist perspectives and the post-human (e.g., Badmington [2000, 2003], Wolfe [2010], Herbrechter [2013]); see further below. 24 This is especially evident in scholars’ readings of Euripides; see (e.g.) Lloyd (1986), Goff (2000), Swift (2009). 25 That said, one play centers around a god in pain: the Titan Prometheus in the drama Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus. And then there is Heracles, who is not quite human but suffers terribly and perishes spectacularly in at least one play featuring him (Sophocles’ Women of Trachis). Cf. Vernant (1991: Chapter 1) on gods’ bodies in epic. See further in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. 26 On stuff, things, materials, and materialities, see (e.g.) Brown (2004, 2015), Miller (2005, 2010), Bennett (2010), Morton (2011).

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close to bodies, examining their physical edges, their surfaces and parts (e.g., head, hands, eyes, wounds, skin), their coverings or nakedness, and their postures and movements (e.g., upright, in collapse, ranging, fixed in place). As such it engages a spectrum of aesthetic and affective dynamics, including emotional response and sensory reaction, as well as hands-on maneuvering, embrace, or attack. Enactment such as this may seem to emphasize the human body (or “human,” i.e., male, Greek, “normal,” etc.), but in effect it does something quite different, making an object of the body, but not only or even primarily in the sense of familiar notions of objectification (e.g., voyeuristic gazing). Rather, it treats the body as a thing that has the status and implications of other objects— like a sieve, an urn, or a toy for a dog. Bodies thus become coextensive or trade places with things, which in their turn take on a vibrancy or vitality that saps the human form.27 That said, tragic language highlighting characters and props can be quite, well, lively. Orchestrations of embodiment in Greek tragedy often indicate interactions among the senses and thereby encourage an embodied knowing in the audience, a recognition and “feeling with” that is culturally shaped and determined.28 This is the type of experience that has led contemporary theorists of aesthetics and affect—including, most dashingly, Jacques Derrida—to think with philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Maurice MerleauPonty, and Jean-Luc Nancy about how the senses work in concert and how touch in particular merges with other senses in a full-body experiencing of the visual field. If this sounds suspiciously male in its scheme, I aim to follow feminist and queer theorists such as Eve Sedgwick, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Vivian Sobchack, in putting their insights to provocative use.29 In this study I draw special attention to scenes in the tragedies that foreground such sensory experiencing of bodily inflections as a type of semiotic materializing, where signs with weighty symbolic resonance distill out on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for contention and imbrication, as well as for closeness, contact, and affective dynamics. This way of reading the dramatic script would pursue more fully the “sensuous knowledge” at the body’s edges that tragic representation affords, a consideration more attuned to how bodies—compellingly abject, barely human, strangely assembled, too proximate—register at tragedy’s unique intersections, that is, at points where directive, enacted, and figurative language suggests or indicates explicitly visual, tactile, and aural details. In addition, these intersections also reveal how language and the body contend with each other, signification framing and marking the body, which always by its nature exceeds and eludes meaning in

27

Cf. Wohl (2015b: 43). See again Williams’ “structures of feeling” (1977: 19, 131). 29 Derrida ([1999] 2005), engaging with Nancy ([1992] 2008, [1993] 1997), among others. See Grosz (1994), Haraway (1988, 1991), Ackerman (1999), Sedgwick (2003), Sobchak (1992, 2004); also Massumi (2002). Cf. also Marks (2000: 153), who follows Sobchack in formulating a “tactile epistemology” based primarily on the insights of Deleuze’s work on cinema (e.g., [1983] 1986); cf. Bergson ([1911] 1988), Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1992), Benjamin ([1955] 1978), Horkheimer and Adorno ([1947] 1972); see also Marks (2002). On ancient materialist ideas about sense perception, see esp. Porter (2010). Cf. Eagleton’s argument that modern aesthetics was “born as a discourse of the body”—that is, not merely as art appreciation but rather involving “the whole region of human perception and sensation” that aisthēsis invokes (1990: 13). 28

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language.30 It may be here as well that tragedy most showcases its special modes of conjoining sign and thing so as to reveal the limits of each. Where language stumbles, fails, evades—or, conversely, proliferates in frenzy—there the body begins. One of the more striking aspects of Athenian tragedy from this angle is the fact that this hedging around of the body in language sometimes takes its most vibrant forms in narratives describing offstage actions and events. I thus include, when pivotal, metaphors and metonymies in messenger speeches and other such narratives, which may seem to contradict a focus on intersections of enactment and figuration. And yet the stunning violence that features centrally in many such narratives suggests that they aim at direct contention with dramatic enactment and as such offer a greater sense of the power of language to tell what onstage mimesis cannot show. These diegetic trajectories thus often engage in depictions so vibrant as to compete with dramatic spectacle for impact; they may also fashion imagistic overlays and extensions of onstage enactment that are sufficiently vivid to affect how the enactment unfolds. To take a well-known scene as an example, consider the moment just before Oedipus finally emerges with his mutilated eyes at the end of Oedipus the King, in which the exchange between the chorus and the messenger who has just reported Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’ self-blinding resonates menacingly with the impact of what he has told them. He exclaims that Oedipus is “shouting [βοᾷ] for someone to unbar the doors,” his words precisely recalling the king’s shouting and door-bolt wrenching in the narrative, to reveal the “killer of his father, the—of his mother” (τὸν πατροκτόνον, / τὸν μητέρ᾽ –)—at which point the messenger breaks off, declaring that he cannot say the unholy things to which Oedipus was giving voice (αὐδῶν ἀνόσι᾽ οὐδὲ ῥητά μοι) (1287–89). With his own just-told tale still reverberating in the air, he pauses in what seems not merely a chaste reluctance to name the act, since he has in fact just repeated Oedipus’ own words to this effect (cf. 1256–57). Rather, it is as if the horror of that mother-lover hovering over her dead body, dripping with the “dark rain” (μέλας / ὄμβρος, 1278–79) of his own blood, stops the messenger cold. And then Oedipus appears at the palace doors, at which sight the chorus cries out, “Oh suffering terrible [δεινόν] to look upon, the most terrible [δεινότατον] of all I have ever encountered!”—their words echoing directly the messenger’s repeated use of deinos to describe Oedipus’ shouting and bellowing within (1260, 1265). Taken together their exclamations ring with Oedipus’ noisy and violent embodiment, just as he comes out of the door. In what follows I first orient my discussion in relation to two topics central to it: (1) tragic aesthetics and the body in pain; and (2) bodily edges and skin, as well as theorizing dramatic enactment as a “second skin” that sustains attention to embodiment and sensory borders. I then set forth the organization of the chapters, highlighting where and to what extent they take up aspects of these topics.

30

See Noland’s contention that Butler’s work tends to overlook the limitations of signifying schemes, and particularly language, to capture the affective, the gestural, and so on (2009: 170–77). Cf. Garner (1995).

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2. Tragic Aesthetics What makes a body beautiful or ugly, the object of praise or target of insult? In posing a question such as this, I am not seeking generalized aesthetic judgments (whatever that would mean) but rather those specific to the parameters of Athenian tragedy and the semiotics of the ancient theater. Scholars such as Jeffrey Henderson, Helene Foley, and Gwendolyn Compton-Engle have fostered lively discussions of bodies, their parts, and their trappings from the opposite end of the aesthetic register—namely, the laughable or debased bodies of iambic poetry and especially Attic comedy.31 Indeed, the trend among scholars has been to regard embodiment in drama as more relevant to discussions of comedy, since it is a genre so focused on stuff and parts, domestic, obscene, and otherwise. At least two essential insights from this work have proved useful for my thinking about how to frame a study of tragic embodiment. First, from Homer on into the classical period, literary representations rank bodies in a hierarchical fashion, associating lofty forms with epic and tragedy and lowly ones with satire and comedy. Second, the body itself is a costume, an insight familiar to art historians that Compton-Engle uses as a starting point for her discussion of comic costume.32 While in comedy the “body as costume” was literal, insofar as actors donned a body costume with the fitting comic protrusions and so on, the fact of this skin sac as central prop in one dramatic genre encourages attention to bodily surfaces and the body as container in another. And while I am largely setting aside comic representation in this study, my own work and that of those just cited aims to foster awareness of these dramatic practices as developing alongside, as well as engaged with and influencing, each other. We might thus expect tragic drama to follow Homeric epic in its bodily rankings, despite the intervening centuries, since like epic it commemorates the heroic world. Homeric poetry indicates quite clearly how this kind of evaluation works: the heroes are ranked according to certain characteristics, many of them aesthetic ones.33 They tend to be tall, swift, gleaming, and straight striding; and if, like Odysseus they are stockier than the ideal, this carries its own distinction in its suggestion of stalwartness and firm command (e.g., Il. 3.195–98). High-status female characters also may exhibit some distinctive shimmer, though special qualities such as this tend to be reserved for Helen and the goddesses, especially Aphrodite. Others are not so blessed: Thersites, the notoriously abusive and abused haranguer of Iliad 2, serves as the paradigm of the radically unheroic body, being pointy-headed, hunch-shouldered, and bow-legged. But the Homeric aesthetic is comparatively uncomplicated in this regard: heroes tend to be fine and noble (unless they are in disguise) and others are not. Extant tragedy certainly does offer some excellent specimens of manhood: think of Sophocles’ glamorous Oedipus, whom the Thebans treat as close to the gods; or Euripides’

31

E.g., Henderson ([1975]1991); Foley (2000); Compton-Engle (2015); see also Bassi (1998), Green (2007), Worman (2008), and Csapo (2010). 32 Compton-Engle (2015: 16–17); cf. esp. Bonfante (1989). 33 See Monsacré (1984: 51–54); Vernant (1991: 28); Worman (2002: chapter 3); Purves (2015).

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Heracles, the “gloriously victorious” (kallinikos) hero whom the chorus lovingly adorns with praise. Of course, both of these heroes suffer grotesque devolutions of stature in the course of their dramas; and many more characters suffer on stage in some kind of physical anguish, most famously Philoctetes, Heracles at the end of the Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and Hippolytus in Euripides’ play of that name. So here too one may look to discern a fairly obvious bodily hierarchy that runs from powerful to debilitated, manly to effeminized, celebrated to rejected or reviled. But think now about tragedy as an artistic medium: what are its aesthetics? What does this dramatic form foreground as compelling or beautiful? How does the semiotics of theater (i.e., the fact that dramatic meaning is built from a combination of text and spectacle) affect this vision? Karl Reinhardt, in a famous essay on Oedipus, argues that “peculiar to Attic tragedy as a whole” is “the habit of luxuriating in horror, of investing terror with a kind of voluptuousness.”34 There is an arresting moment in Aristotle’s Poetics, one that often confuses or repulses readers, when he claims that viewers of tragic spectacle take pleasure in the imitation (mimesis) even of hideous things: “What we view with pain,” he says, “ images of these same things, especially when very precisely rendered, we enjoy gazing upon, as with forms of the vilest animals and corpses” (ἃ γὰρ αὐτὰ λυπηρῶς ὁρῶμεν, τούτων τὰς εἰκόνας τὰς μάλιστα ἠκριβωμένας χαίρομεν θεωροῦντες, οἷον θηρίων τε μορφὰς τῶν ἀτιμοτάτων καὶ νεκρῶν, 1448b10–12).35 For some a degree of shame may attach to the idea that one could enjoy such sights, as is the case in Socrates’ tale in the Republic of one Leontius, who scolds his eyes for desiring to look at the executioner’s corpses (439e). But Aristotle’s emphasis is on the act of reproducing, which he considers itself a thing of great value, if well executed. From this perspective the bodies of debilitated and debased heroes would clearly give pleasure, although we might hesitate with Aristotle to call their depiction beautiful. But should we? The philosopher David Hume, in an influential though notoriously puzzling essay entitled “Of Tragedy” (1757), makes a claim somewhat similar to Aristotle’s, when seeking to explain the pleasure to be had from painful sensations: “. . . [T]ragedy is an imitation; and imitation is always of itself agreeable. This circumstance serves still farther to smooth the motions of passion, and convert the whole feeling into one uniform and strong enjoyment.”36 He also assumes that beauty is a central element in tragic expression and spectacle, which like oratory may arouse heightened passions and give pleasure thereby.37 Thus, according to Hume,“sentiments of beauty,” meaning appreciation of the art form in its various aspects,

34

Reinhardt ([1947] 1979: 99). Cf. Kristeva’s emphasis on psychic states; the image of abjection with which she begins seems to turn Aristotle’s corpses to different effect and yet looks somehow familiar: “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death  . . . I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” ([1980] 1982: 3). See also Worman (2000). 36 Hume ([1757] 1987: 220). 37 “The impulse or vehemence arising from sorrow, compassion, indignation, receives a new direction from the sentiments of beauty. The latter, being the predominant emotion, seize the whole mind, and convert the former into themselves, at least tincture them so strongly as totally to alter their nature” (Hume ([1757] 1987: 220). 35

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transform painful, reactive sensations into this elevated kind of pleasure.38 This notion of conversion recalls Aristotelian catharsis as well as Longinus’ conception of the sublime (ὕψος), the wondrous impact of which, he says, “leads to ecstasies” (εἰς ἔκστασιν ἄγει) (1.4). Aristotle is certainly aware, even sometimes emphasizes, that psychagogia, or emotional transport, lies at the heart of tragic effect (e.g., Poet. 1450a33–35). While he locates this power most of all in the plotting, he also acknowledges that visual effects are “transporting” (ψυχαγωγικόν, 1450b17), and that the unexpected is an awesome thing (τὸ θαυμαστόν, 1452a4–6). These all contribute to what Stephen Halliwell terms “the piercing psychological ‘shudder’ of ekplexis.”39 But Aristotle also attaches the perception of beauty to a calmer element, namely the dramatic art’s formal shape, when he urges that the tragic plot should resemble a beautiful creature (καλὸν ζῷον, 1450b34, 38).40 An abstracted kind of vision shapes how he conceives the tragic aesthetic: beautiful plots must imitate beautiful creatures in the sense that they must be of a certain magnitude; like proportionate bodies that afford “well-viewed” (εὐσύνοπτον) contemplation, when plots are to scale they achieve coherent recall (1450b32–51a5). Both Aristotle and Hume seem, at these moments anyway, to be thinking of the combined effects of language and spectacle that constitute tragic experience. But it is not clear that either of them are very interested in, or attach any aesthetic notions to, the bodies on the tragic stage, except insofar as these contribute to the pleasures afforded by mimesis and plotting. Consider again Sophocles’ Oedipus. How does Sophocles’ imagery envision the heroic body and target it through insult? When does it tell the audience what to see, how to look? One of the most notable things about Oedipus, but something that scholars have not shown much curiosity about, is the ways in which his status and stature do not match his modes of speech. He is at his most blunt and insulting when most elevated and grand; and, conversely, most gracious and delicate in his verbal negotiations when most debilitated. Admittedly, Homeric epic shows awareness of such conflicts. The former mismatch can signal ethical failure in Homer: Odysseus famously rebukes both Euryalus and Antinoos for not having the words or disposition to match their high statuses and fine statures (Od. 8.174–79, 17.454). The latter mismatch is a combination that epic dramatizes most fully in the figure of Odysseus, who as castaway and then beggar must work hard to offset his sullied form with graceful words (as with Nausicaa and Penelope in Odyssey 6 and 19, among others). Tragedy contributes something unique to these intersections of the body and language, an aesthetics particular to it but dependent like other dramatic sub-genres on

38 Cf. Romantic notions of the sublime, which seek to capture the ways in which certain experiences (of nature or art) encompass both horror and joy. See, e.g., Kuhns (1982), Ramazani (1989) (on Yeats and “tragic joy”); for ancient aesthetics see Porter (2010, 2016), Peponi (2012); on the modern invention of the tragic, see Goldhill (2012: ch. 6) and Leonard (2015: ch. 2). 39 Halliwell (2011: 230); he is thinking of the verb φρίττειν (Poet. 1453b5) (n. 50); and even the ever-elusive notion of catharsis may have some place here. Cf. Holmes (2008: 231–81); she illuminates the mysteries of heroic embodiment and suffering as a site of uncertainty and fascination (242–44). Also Segal (1985b: 7–23), on the “tangled undergrowth and dim forests of the soul” (14). 40 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 264c1–5.

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the layered quality of the semiosis, which (again) builds up from the language of the script to the possibilities of its performance. Within this dramatic frame, the most dilapidated of forms may replace the most heroic as objects of reverence, and perhaps even of beauty, precisely because of the paradoxical qualities of tragedy’s aesthetics. And, conversely, the glorified figure may appear debased, by virtue of his mistaken place in the order of things. So, to take my main example, the lofty Oedipus issues curses at an as yet unidentified criminal, a kakourgos of the basest sort, and threats to a blind and decrepit seer. His insults revolve ultimately upon his own status and stature, since he emerges as their target, both criminal and blind; and only then might he, in this new debilitated state, become an object of tragic beauty. For Reinhardt Sophocles’ Oedipus alone “luxuriates, writhing and pointing to himself, flowering in his torment”; and although other Sophoclean heroes surely do exactly this (witness Ajax in his swag of corpses, Heracles on the bier), Reinhardt’s language captures some of the effects I aim to address.41 a. Bodies at the Human Edge This brings me to viewing the body in pain (to use Elaine Scarry’s phrase), arguably the dominant aesthetic experience of tragedy. I largely focus on viewing and touching, and to a lesser extent hearing, in relation to the representation of pain—physical or emotional (often both), threatened or realized (again, often both)—and its affective impact on internal characters and audiences (i.e., the chorus).42 Scholars have done substantial work contextualizing the tragic representation of pain, disease, and their embodied sensations in relation to the Hippocratic corpus; my discussion seeks to supplement this work while expanding awareness of these sensations as phenomenological experiencing.43 That is to say, I am most interested in how such sensuous, embodied ways of knowing ground the representation of physical pain, one of the most nebulous bodily sensations but one also clearly central to tragedy. Scarry locates the body in pain—and different types of tragic experiencing, Philoctetes’ being a favorite example—at the intersection of sensation and its object, where different power-knowledge configurations conspire to inhibit or foster access to tools, resources, and pleasures.44 In contrast to more recent theorists’ emphases on sensory combinations, Scarry distinguishes the senses, especially vision versus touch, to highlight the control and understanding that comes of surveying from a distance (i.e., as an object in the visual field) in contradistinction to perceiving the body up close, vulnerable, and in conjunction with the self. For her own reasons, however, she largely avoids clear

41 Reinhardt ([1947] 1979: 99) does also mention Heracles, but insists that Oedipus’ dramatic self-indicating is distinct. 42 Scarry (1985; esp. pp. 164–66). 43 There is now a substantial bibliography on disease in the Greek imaginary, but for tragedy in particular see especially Biggs (1966), Padel (1985), Worman (2000), Holmes (2008, 2010), Allan (2014). 44 Scarry (1985: 5, 7, 10, 17, 53); for the formulation of “power–knowledge” relations in relation to the history of the body, see Foucault ([1975] 1995: 25–30). For example, the bow operates in Sophocles’ play as all three (tool, resource, pleasure); an instrument of power, it also promotes or impedes knowledge and cathects desires among characters.

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differentiations between pain and its representation, which means that she tends to elide how mimesis is mediated by the body.45 In fact tragic representation frequently bridges the remove that vision (and sound as well) can afford, calling out for a whole-body experience in which touch may activate a feeling of proximity and shared sensation. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva dwells on the imagination’s cringing responses to tactile qualities that characterize the abject—the untouchable, barely conscionable, and yet compelling outcast object—and highlights the affects generated by it. One of her central instances, not so surprisingly, is the debilitated Oedipus.46 Kristeva regards Oedipus at the end of Oedipus the King as most importantly what Creon terms him: an agos (1426), a polluted figure whose visible scarring both draws attention to and yet obscures the nature of his crime (i.e., blinding does not directly signify incest). Abjection has a curiously entangled relationship with touch, such that it signals the introduction of a different aesthetic and ethical dimension into the tragic frame, indicating other types of psychic experience on and off stage. Kristeva’s descriptions of this psychic drama intermittently dwell on tactile sensations (real or imagined) and the repulsion that these may incite, as with the skin that forms on milk (cette peau à la surface de lait) but also blood, putrefaction, corpses—a whole théâtre vrai of untouchable things.47 Although the mind and flesh may recoil from the abject, Kristeva’s own dramatizing of it suggests its ineffable attractions—think again of Leontius’ struggle with his eyes’ desire to look at corpses. And disgust, as Sara Ahmed has pointed out, works on the surface of bodies, by means of what she calls a “sensuous proximity,” an inter-corporeality that may transform this border/skin contact into some repulsive object. In tragedy this sometimes expresses a horror of one’s own embodied history, as when the post-traumatic Oedipus reconfigures his incestuous acts as a festering scar (ὔπουλον, OT 1396). As Ahmed notes, the close-in experiencing that arouses disgust and abjection fosters the eroticizing of this proximity, since “it involves contact between skins,” “disturbing” them with the possibility of desire.48 In tragedy such shuddering attention revolves mostly around male and human bodies, while female embodiment tends to be more distanced and veiled, literally or figuratively. When dead bodies are displayed onstage, sometimes in pieces (as with Pentheus and likely Aegisthus in Euripides’ Electra), they are usually male; but female corpses also may be offered to the spectatorial eye, as with Cassandra in Agamemnon, Clytemnestra in Libation Bearers, Alcestis in Euripides’ play of that name, Phaedra in Hippolytus, and Jocasta in Phoenician Women. Some of the male bodies suppurate (e.g., “bleeding” in the verbal

45

Cf., e.g., Marks (2000: 139); Noland (2009: 170). Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 99–105). Cf. Detienne (1992) on impurity as a central theme in Theban myth. 47 Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 10–11). Cf. Golder on Aristotle in Purves (ed.) (2017: 60n. 32): In Generation of Animals, Aristotle distinguishes between flesh (ἡ σάρξ) and skin (τὸ δέρμα) “the skin is formed by the drying of the flesh, like the scum on boiled substances. Thus, when I speak of flesh I refer not to what is most immediately the outer limit of the body, which is a form of flesh already degenerating or corrupted into something else” (2.6, 743b9–15). For further psychoanalytic and cultural theorizing about skin, see (e.g.) Anzieu ([1995] 2016), Benthien (2002), Connor (2004), Howes (2005). 48 Ahmed (2004: 86–88). 46

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description of the onstage body), while female bodies do not; and a number of them are not quite dead. As Chapter 1 explores in detail, tragedy also privileges male pain, including the one extant example of a suffering deity (Prometheus), as noted above. We only have two or possibly three examples of female physical suffering (as opposed to lamentation, of which there is plenty) in an onstage mimesis: Io in Prometheus Bound, Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, and in a more limited sense Hecuba in his Hecuba and Trojan Women. This also entails that among the extant plays only those definitely ascribed to Euripides show an interest in displaying female pain; Sophocles’ dramas are much more likely to depict this suffering in narratives of offstage actions, as a carefully privatized and domesticated physicality, while Aeschylus’ plays foreclose it almost completely—the single exception being a play that is likely not his (Prometheus Bound). Thus in the surviving tragedies displaying bodies in pain conforms to a gendered scheme that matches the political reality, treating male bodies as more valued public objects and more worthy of focus, mourning, and celebration, while female bodies tend to either mediate or focalize this attention or to be effectively quarantined in offstage interior spaces.49 That said, certain female characters disrupt the gendered scheme in overt ways, wresting attention and control of plot from male interlocutors and serving as riveting examples of figures who exceed the confines of mythic hierarchies and the limitations of their male authors. Witness Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Electra and Antigone in Sophocles’ plays, and Euripides’ Medea and Hecuba, as well as his Helen in his play named for her. While Antigone has gained the most attention for her rebellious stance across the ages, these other female characters are more consummate stage managers, even if some of them ultimately fail to win their ways. As many chapters that follow attest, these characters also gain dramatic attention for having some of the most riveting inhabitations—for being aesthetically excessive, affectively compelling, and politically disruptive or disturbing.

3. A Net the Gods Made Man is quite ill in Aeschylus, but still thinks of himself somewhat as a god and does not want to enter the membrane, and in Euripides, finally he splashes about in the membrane, forgetting where and when he was a god. Antonin Artaud, “The Theater and Anatomy” My investment in theorists who focus on the body and its senses, including especially its sensuous edges, leads to another major aspect of this study that needs some clarification and emphasizing: the critical innovations with roots in modernism that have generated awareness of bodies and their edges as well as a whole discursive strain, including some extremely creative tropes. To begin with a well-known example: an arresting aspect of Virginia Woolf ’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek” is its emphasis on embodiment and its

49

Cf. Zeitlin (1985a), Easterling (1987), Padel (1990).

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material extensions—on bone, muscle, stone, cloth, and skin. From Woolf ’s colonialisminflected and yet perceptive prospect, a hot, “tawny,” outdoors physicality is central to Greek tragedy, the poetry being so grounded in the body that, as she puts it of Aeschylus, phrases “rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene.”50 She says similar things about Sophocles, and her emphasis on embodied aesthetics hinges quite generally on this mysterious materializing. My discussion thus turns not only on skin in its more specific or fleshy senses, but also skin as surface, crust, fold, or “membrane,” to use Antonin Artaud’s visceral image for how Aeschylus and Euripides differ from each other.51 Although Artaud’s energies are focused on envisioning new forms of radical theater rather than characterizing old ones, his notion of Greek tragedy as confronting whether or not to “enter the membrane” captures something importantly adjacent to Woolf ’s aesthetics and something central, I submit, to the texture of tragic representation. It also, of course, captures something about modernists’ characterizations of the project of art (and perhaps especially the dramatic arts) more generally: the visualizing of humans as trapped in their very material bodies and of art as trying (and mostly failing) to grasp what Simone de Beauvoir called “the force of things” (la force des choses).52 In these conceptions, sometimes the “membrane” or “net” is forged of the stuff of embodiment itself, as with George Seferis’ casting of Euripides’ vision of human veins as “a net the gods made to trap us in like wild beasts.” At other times it is artistic mimesis that forges the nets, which get “torn to ribbons” by the “unseizable” force of life itself, as Woolf puts it in an especially tragic meditation on wartime attitudes in Jacob’s Room.53 I find generative the second skin of this theorizing, in which the body as a sac or net holding life forces becomes an image used to think through both existential entrapment and the traps art sets to capture it. I would hazard that the Greek tragedians all, in their different ways, worked with this conundrum and at this intersection—not only of making art and human living, but more specifically of the materialities of violence and war on the one hand and ritual and dramatic enactment on the other. This is not to say that Attic tragedy in fifth-century Greece and modernist writers shared in any real sense “structures of feeling” (again, the lived experiences shaping and shaped by cultural practices). Rather, I am highlighting here what we might think of as strategies—both figurative and theoretical—for confronting the edges of the human in times of imperialist expansion and war. This is the terrible stuff that tragedy is made of: bodies in extremis or in pieces, skin and bones, shadow and ashes, the barely living and the powerful dead. And I think it is the recognition of this texture (i.e., a sharp-edged, brutal, visceral style that collages such grim

50

Woolf ([1925] 1984: 30, cf. 25, 30). Artaud (1946), cited in Derrida [1967] 1978: 233). Cf. Derrida ([1967] 1978: 241): “Artaud too speaks of a ‘visual and plastic materialization of speech’ (TD 69) and of making use of speech ‘in a concrete and spatial sense’ in order to ‘manipulate it like a solid object, one which overturns and disturbs things’ (TD 72)” (referring to Theater and Its Double). See also Cull (2009). 52 This is the title de Beauvoir gave to the third volume of her autobiography, which covered the years after the Occupation (pub. Paris 1963). 53 Woolf ([1922] 1960: 156), Seferis ([1944] 1981: 388–89); see Westling (1999) and further in Worman (2019). 51

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materials) that drives modernist thinkers to turn to the Greek dramatists for aesthetic inspiration when writing (directly or indirectly) about war and its aftermath. An adjacent but similarly generative theoretical strand turns on the notion of the fold, which opens out this modernist body as bounded thing to one more continuous and ajar. Paradigm-breaking theorists from Nietzsche on have used the fold as a technology that fosters disruptions of simple binaries such as surface and depth, inside and outside, nature and culture. Both as image and actuality, the fold operates in the hands of theorists like Gilles Deleuze as a material refutation of such oppositional orders, since its inside becomes its outside becomes its inside . . . And so on, in a continuous pleating, as if the world itself were built by vast and multiple enfoldings.54 This is why Nietzsche celebrates the Greeks for stopping at “the surface, the fold” and Derrida argues that metaphor does its work “in the fold of phusis” which is mimesis—that is, not its double or simulacrum but itself outside in, as it were, like the pleat of a cloak.55 Feminist theorists have argued that the innovations of Deleuze, as well as other scholars focused on the post-human in recent decades, advance awareness of the body as pleated, imbricated, and invaginated in this way, as opposed to the fantasy of a smooth and closed whole surface.56 Tragic bodies often evidence such enfoldings and vulnerabilities, with outerwear extending the body or serving as a second skin and insides threatening to spill out of wounds and other apertures.57 Bodily integrity from this angle is always in danger of its opposite, of becoming entangled with inanimate objects, and perhaps especially familial ones, as does Orestes with his mother’s tapestries in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers or Pentheus with his deadly mother-wear in Euripides’ Bacchae. Alternatively, the human body may be rendered food for beasts, the latter a common warrior’s menace to his enemy from Homer on. While Agamemnon and Menelaus only threaten this treatment of Ajax’s corpse in Sophocles’ play, in Antigone Polyneices’ suffers such incursion, a terrible pleating of outside in, as his uncovered body is consumed by birds and dogs.

4. Setting the Scene While my study at least touches on nearly all of the tragedies of the three canonical dramatists, its discussions cluster around four dominant representational arenas in the 54

Deleuze ([1988] 1991: esp. 236), where Deleuze uses the example of Mallarmé’s fan as “l’unanime pli” with “fold following fold”; cf. Deleuze ([1988] 2006). See also Deleuze on Foucault, where he calls the fold “the inside of the outside” ([1986] 1988: 97); cf. Brinkema (2014) on the tear as a structure like the line of a fold, what she terms “the curve of the plica” (23). Merleau-Ponty (1964, 1968) works more with the image of the chiasmus rather than the fold to argue for the contiguities between the world and its objects and the perceiving body, but the ways in which he articulates his notion of the “flesh of the world” intersects in useful ways with Deleuze on the fold as well as on Spinoza and the interconnective dynamics of affect. 55 See Nietzsche (1887] 1974: 38), Derrida ([1972] 1982: 237, 241), and further in Worman (2015: 28–34, 59–65). 56 See, e.g., Grosz (1994: 198 ff.), Halberstam and Livingston (1995), Haraway (1991), Benthien (2002), Stephens (2014). 57 As Henrichs (2012: 181) has noted, in a study of tragic depictions of human and animal sacrifice, “Tragedy reeks of blood and is strewn with corpses.”

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extant dramas. These are: (1) Oedipus and his family, especially in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides; (2) the family of Atreus, especially Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Electra plays; (3) outcast heroes, especially Ajax, Philoctetes, and Heracles; and (4) female characters in distress, some of which are included in the first three groups but some not (e.g., Antigone and Electra versus Medea and Hecuba). The aesthetic patterns traced here do not register with equal force in all of the plays, and some feature touch or various materialities more prominently than others, but I argue that these patterns have dominant force across the genre quite generally. The overall scheme of the chapters that follow seeks to think with skin and the fold, in the sense of tracking how material surfaces and bodily folds operate in tragedy, as these layer and pleat by means of contiguities, confluences, and extensions—but not only this. The theoretical affordances of the fold also structure the chapters and the orchestration of their discussions, which is to say that they operate in this pleated fashion as well. Thus some images, characters, and scenes turn up repeatedly in the chapters, as they are viewed from distinct but related angles and with distinct but contiguous emphases. The focuses of the chapters themselves dovetail closely with each other in similar fashion, such that some bear an inside-out or hinging relation one to another.58 The study as a whole also follows this enfolding pattern, moving effectively from the outside in and back again: viewing and touching bodies in pain (Chapter 1), hands and handling (2), material covers and layers (3), bodies as containers and their insides (4), bodily prostheses and assemblages (5), and finally bodily doubles and proxies (6). a. Proximities, Touching, and Handling (Chapters 1 and 2) In the first two chapters of this study I address many of the ways in which tragedy envisions such intimacies. Chapter 1 looks especially at Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, as well as other bodies in pain, including Io, Heracles, Philoctetes, and Phaedra and Hippolytus. Chapter 2 takes up manual contact and handling more particularly, in the plays that feature the siblings Electra and Orestes as well as Antigone and Polyneices, focusing primarily on the two Electra plays, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Euripides’ Phoenician Women and Orestes. I use the term “envision” purposefully, because the genre dictates that touch—alone among the three senses typically represented (again, largely excluding smell and taste)—remains just that: viewed and an object of haptic visuality (i.e., enacted through mimesis onstage) or envisioned and “viewed” in the mind’s eye (i.e., through diegesis, narration of events offstage).59 It is thus the one represented sense in which the audience cannot participate directly, at least in its most fully haptic form, that is, as touch rather than resonance, sense memory, or

58

I owe greater clarity about the book’s structure to Victoria Wohl. I.e., as both are designated by the dramatic text; in the case of Attic tragedy this is effectively a script that includes indications of stage directions, blocking, entrances, exits, and so on. See Bassi (2005: 252) on the paucity of evidence for ancient productions and the importance of taking account of “visual perception as it is presented within the texts themselves.” 59

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multi-sensory experience. And yet touch is also the most embodied and essential of the senses; as such it serves as a primary analogy for sense experience more generally, as well as undergirding both early ancient theories of sense perception and contemporary arguments about the types of embodied knowledge that interactions among the senses and sense memories afford.60 Orchestrations of tragic scenes often suggest such interactions and thus seem to encourage an embodied knowing in the audience, a recognition and “feeling with” that is culturally shaped and determined. This is the type of experience that has led contemporary thinkers on aesthetics and politics such as Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks to regard spectatorship as what Marks terms “an act of sensory translation of cultural knowledge.”61 These directorial gestures incite reactions in other characters and the chorus, which in turn model such responses for the audience, communicating judgments about physical and ethical orientations (i.e., “cultural knowledge”). For somewhat obvious reasons scholars of tragic effect often privilege viewing and spectacle when analyzing what constitutes its distinctive aesthetics.62 And yet while spectacle may serve as the essential frame, it alone cannot account for all of the combining and layering of sensations generated onstage and aimed at arousing mimetic response in the audience. In Sophocles’ dramas, not only the Oedipus plays but also Women of Trachis, Ajax, and Philoctetes, the visual display of heroic bodies in pain almost always includes the significant positioning and touching of them—usually handling them with care while manhandling hovers as a threat—for the viewing and verbal or postural reactions of the internal audiences. Because touch depends on proximity, it is the only perception engaged by the dramatic event that models shared space and bodily sensation. And because of its special status, it calls attention to how in drama affect may express itself between bodies, rather than as the emotional expression, posture, or vocalizing of a single body.63 It thus highlights affect as what exceeds the body and draws others into

60

See Purves’ Introduction in her edited volume Touch and the Ancient Senses (2017); see again Marks (2000: 140–53) on “haptic visuality”; also Fisher (1997a, 1997b) on “interperformance” and “distal touch” in performance art; Witmore (2012) on Shakespearean theater and the Aristotelian notion of “sensing with” (sunaisthanesthai). On ancient materialist theories of sense perception, see again Porter (2010); also Butler and Purves (eds.) (2014) on ancient ideas about synaesthesia. 61 Marks (2000: 153); cf., e.g., Sobchack (1992, 2004). 62 E.g., Seale (1982), Segal (1980, 1993b), Wiles (1997), Rehm (2002). 63 Deleuze ([1970] 1988: 127–28). On Deleuze’s expansion of Spinoza’s notion of affect as “escape,” see (e.g.) the cultural geographer Thrift (2004: 61–63); cf. also Sedgwick (2003: 17–19) on touch and affect. Cultural critics and literary theorists (following Sedgwick and others), theorize affect as not synonymous with emotion, since they associate it more closely with the body’s experiences; see Papoulias and Callard (2010: 35–36) on the emancipatory politics of this theorizing, vs. Berlant (2011), who exposes the manipulative potential of affect in the cultural and political sphere. Cf. Leys (2011: 443), who points out that for both these cultural theorists and the neuroscientists whose work they cite, “[A]ffect is a matter of autonomic responses that are held to occur below the threshold of consciousness and cognition and to be rooted in the body.” While I make no claims about precognitive reaction and so on, these theorists’ focus on the body’s close surround and the linkages between touch and affective experience emerge from their interest in performance studies and the “body in its lived materiality” (Leys 2011: 440); see also Clough and Halley (2007).

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its circuit; in performance settings this circuitry is expressed in the tragic shudder (e.g.) as a group experience.64 Specific to tragedy is the experience not only of bodies in distress but also of affects and postures that emanate violent potentialities, whether violence committed or violence threatened, by characters or to them. In many scenes heroes or other central characters (especially female) are approached hesitantly and handled gingerly, sometimes in contrast to threat, so that proximity and touch are central aspects of the spectacle. Thus the intensity of the sensory experience for the audience involves the kind of attraction-repulsion that accompanies violent acts and the marks (e.g., scarring or wounds) of their aftermath. Proximity and touching, then, uniquely draw the audience in close to debased, debilitated, or otherwise disturbing characters—and this despite the fact that these characters may themselves still entertain fantasies of violent revenge. If the choruses in tragedy are any indication, the “sensing with” that touch encourages would arouse in the audience mimetic awareness of leaning in close, reaching out, and rearing back—that is, a registering of intimate bodily postures that exceeds typical experience of emotional expression among actors onstage (i.e., as seen and heard from a distance, such as weeping or screaming). Again, I reserve for Chapter 2 a focus on hands and handling gestures and images, which often involve violence and/or erotics and even sometimes propel action in certain tragedies. For reasons that are appropriately unsettling, sibling hands are particularly prominent in the Theban plays and those involving Electra, where manual contact, including manhandling, frequently carries an erotic charge. In his book engaging with the work of Nancy, Derrida notes the special place of hands as a metonymy for bodily movement and sensation in theorizing touch, but also as an agent of autoaffection, as an experience of the toucher touching and being touched.65 In tragedy this registers forcefully in intimate contact, where family members call out for fond hands and offer their own—handling that may also be coercive or shadowed by sex and violence, as is especially the case with the family of Oedipus and the members of the house of Atreus. b. Bodily Folds, Edges, and Containers (Chapters 3 and 4) Many scenes in tragedy reveal similarly disturbing orchestrations of proximities, touching, bodies and their edges—and hence skin. Again, closeness and touching in tragedy often make for a sorry spectacle, as relatives embrace corpses, long to lie down with them in death, lament the tears that melt their own skins, or warn against further

64 Cf. the kind of sensory mimesis that Walter Benjamin argued is an essential aspect of what he terms the “mimetic faculty”; compare also the self-analogizing that Kaja Silverman captures as “flesh of my flesh,” arguing that many influential artists and thinkers have envisioned human relationality as a “flesh” rooted in an admission of kinship, an “ontological connectedness” and correspondence (2009: 4, 152–54). For Benjamin ([1955] 1978) on mimesis and aura, see Marks (2000: 139–40). On the chorus’ “emotive” role, see Calame (2013). 65 Derrida ([1999] 2005: 159–215), meditating as well on Husserl, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty; see Carman (1999) on the phenomenology and the body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty; cf. Purves’ Introduction (2017).

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violence to them (e.g., scoring, piercing). Similarly unsurprising is the tendency for those characters that handle others with care to be female and the man-handlers to be male. More striking, however, is the erotic tinge that often attends these scenes, giving a perverse twist to tragic pleasure. I take up such effects especially in Chapters 3 and 4, beginning with a study of Orestes’ display of the bloody cloak that his mother used to trap and kill his father in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Here attention to deixis and semiotic reference fosters awareness of how such stage objects in their materiality—as, for instance, in Libation Bearers Orestes urges the viewing of a maternal cloak deep-dyed by paternal blood—accumulate gendered but nonhuman inflections (e.g., mothers as sea monsters, as deadly traps like winding sheets). These figurative assemblages impinge upon characters, in this case effectively driving Orestes mad. While in general my emphasis on senses and things aims to counter the post-structuralist tendency to privilege linguistic semiotics by paying close attention to embodiment, enactment, and objects, in this case it also suggests a way of reading the trilogy against what most readers have taken to be its grain: that is, to emphasize, in this drama so crowded with symbolism, the material extensions of signs. I thus urge sensitivity in Aeschylus’ trilogy to details that sit at the intersection between gender and this type of semiotic materializing, where signs with weighty symbolic resonance emerge on the dramatic stage as concrete sites for gender contention and imbrication, as well as for closeness, contact, and affective dynamics. To put it in a manner germane to these plays: what happens when a son confuses his mother with her murdering device, which has now become his own and an object displayed to the audience by means of some complicated stage business? To ask this question is also to attend to dramatic semiotics and registers—as objects are always “objects” onstage— while focusing on affect and enactment; it is also to ground broader gender dynamics in relation to specific character inflections and their material signs. Precisely at such moments of emotional intensity, when one might expect dramatic language to highlight naturalizing, empathic viewing, Greek tragedy instead encourages seeing the body as an aesthetic object or assemblage, and a profoundly strange one at that. Then skin (Gr. chrôs, derma66) becomes surface, boundary, palette, a membrane or container that may leak like a sieve, while close-up viewing and haptics draw attention to its vulnerabilities and inhuman or post-human qualities.67 Skin operates largely in this 66

Tragic dramas use chrōs (also sarx, flesh) almost exclusively; and while extant plays often avoid actual terms for skin (which could have to do with the formality of the genre and costume, but the sample is very small), Euripides’ tragedies contain the most references, likely due to his tendency to focus on visuality, dress, and the body’s surfaces. 67 As mentioned, in recent decades affect, post-humanist, and “new materialist” studies have offered some challenge to this traditional focus on the human perspective and being as natural and universal, the human body as clearly distinct, unique, and normative, and human signification (esp. linguistic) as exhausting all expressive modes. Earlier influential concepts can be found in Deleuze ([1970] 1988), Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 1977, [1980] 1987), Williams (1977), Scarry (1985), Haraway (1991); for more recent innovations, see (e.g.) Badmington (2003), Sedgwick (2003), Ahmed (2004), Brown (2004, 2015), Thrift (2004), Miller (2005, 2010), Clough and Halley (2007), Bennett (2010), Gregg and Seignworth (2010), Wolfe (2009), Leys (2011), Morton (2011), Herbrechter (2013), Brinkema (2014).

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most formal of genres under cover, so to speak, buffered and replicated by protective layers like clothing, shields, and shelters of various sorts. As skin is always already a cultural object, tragedy depicts race, class, and/or gender markings on it in more or less violent ways, which most often also means sexualizing it if it is female, dark, or otherwise exotic.68 Such gestures both mask the body and draw attention to its surfaces, as with the Danaids’ veils in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, which cover at least part of their faces and thus highlight their exoticism along with their dark skin. We can compare as well the tattered clothing to which Euripides’ Electra draws the eye by calling it a sorry “stall” (cf. αὐλίζομαι, El. 304) for her filthy skin. The erotics that often subtend these intimate moments shade into fetishism when the bereft living mark themselves—again, sometimes literally, by scoring the skin or stripping—as alien surfaces or containers. Meanwhile they fondle and mourn corpses as empty vessels or even replace them with the same, as with the urn that a disguised Orestes claims to be a container for his ashes in Sophocles’ Electra. Greek tragedy thus tends to treat bodies living and dead as just such enfolded, mutable, and propulsive objects, as charged with emotions and sensations that extend or overlap their physical dimensions. Corpses in particular may be met with ambivalence and hatred that can swallow one whole—as Orestes fears of the dead Clytemnestra and her murderous materials in Libation Bearers—or with overwhelming love that verges on necrophilic contamination, like the terrible pull of Polyneices’ corpse in Antigone. Those handled with love may also be seen as both being and needing containment and cover (e.g., Tecmessa with Ajax or Antigone with Polyneices), or as matched and coextensive with containers for the dead (e.g., funeral urns, coffins, trenches, chambers). While scholars have addressed the social and ritual aspects of handling the dead, in addition to the civic, political, and formal aspects of these plays, I focus on the affective and semiotic details of these conjunctions of bodies and/as objects.69 In Chapter 4 I argue that the tragedies often represent bodies dead and living as “strange containers”—that is, as contiguous with and like shelters or jars and settled on an existential edge. So, for instance, Sophocles’ Antigone stages and figures her body as commensurate with her death chamber, while in Euripides’ Orestes the siblings sigh for a cedar coffin as their final bodily shell. Such scenes frequently highlight as well bodily surfaces and their undoing, as they melt or transform from human to creature or thing, focusing attention on how the living are drawn not only to the dead but also to the inorganic. Then bodies become odd objects and objects take on a life of their own—so that, to quote Jane Bennett, “the us and the it slip-slide into each other.”70

68

See especially Benthien (2002); also Connor (2004). Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1995, 2004), Foley (2001: 19–56), Hame (2008) on ritual; on civic and political aspects, see Smith (1967b), Whitehorn (1986), Mendelsohn (2002), and especially Wohl (2015a: 89–109). Most of these scholars are attentive to gender roles in civic and ritual contexts. 70 Bennett (2010: 4). Cf. Derrida ([1987] 1991) on ashes as the ultimate trace and further in Chapter 3. Since I am discussing dramatic representation, I am making no claims about actual objects, as Bennett (2010) does, problematically in my view; cf. Baudrillard ([1972] 1981) on cultural objects and the “political economy” of their semiotics; also Brown (2004, 2015), Miller (2005, 2010). 69

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c. Assemblages, Extensions, and Proxies (Chapters 5 and 6) This focus on murderous cloaks and empty urns leads into the discussions of Chapters 5 and 6, on bodily juxtapositions and extensions (e.g., “nudity,” prostheses, assemblages) and bodies and likenesses at the edges of nonbeing (e.g., statues, ghosts,“nothings”). In contrast to the staged resolution of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, for example, both the cloak scene in Libation Bearers and a number of key moments in Euripides’ Andromache orchestrate a situating of bodies at the intersection of enactment and figuration that foregrounds them as what Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari characterize as “assemblages”—that is, as combinations, extensions, or layerings of bodies and other entities.71 At such moments, aesthetic details and staging of bodies taken together reveal a tendency to experiment with tactile, intimate, boundary-dissolving transformations and “becomings”—body-tothing, human-to-creature.72 The attention paid in the plays to the feel of this “slip-slide” materiality, to these emergent or merging edges, also dovetails with affectivity as an embodied dynamics—think, once again, of Williams’ “structures of feeling.” In drama this embodied, socially embedded patterning of sensation is orchestrated among individual perceivers and circulates on and off the stage.73 In Chapter 5 I address such effects in particular relation to figurations and intimate stagings that alter bodies by means of extensions and assemblages, including juxtapositions with other bodies and objects and the ways in which metaphors extend or overlay these. Interacting with such groupings intensifies the sensory connections among characters and internal audiences, while the strongly gendered familial dynamics of many pivotal scenes inflect the emotional shudder that attends them, as mothers haunt sons and sisters seek to lie down with brothers or other wrong objects of affection (e.g., a father’s wife, a mother’s husband). Euripides’ tragedies appear especially attuned to such post- or extra-human combinations, pulling in close to bodies clutching statues while a swirl of images attaches other people and things to them. Thus Andromache in his play of that name clutches and in effect becomes a statue, while she trails Trojan metonymies into the scene; or as in Iphigenia in Aulis before the girl’s (near) sacrifice, when Agamemnon embraces Iphigenia and verbally inserts Helen and Troy between them. Intimate machinations such as these draw attention not only to mimesis as likeness and lack between living and dead but also to bodily margins. If tragic skin is an edge (of the body, of the human), it is also a conduit and extension, fostering contact and connection or suffering violence and incursion. Props such as weapons or supports may

71 Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987, 79–82, 115–17, 398–403, e.g.); cf. Bennett (2010, 23–24). See also Delanda (2006) on assemblage theory and Sofer (2003) on the liveliness of props. Seely (2012: 250–51) has highlighted such transformative aesthetics in avant-garde fashion designers, claiming an “ontological” fusion in the ways in which fabrics “endlessly fold in and out of the surfaces of the body, as skin and cloth, organic and nonorganic, body and thing become one” (describing designs of Rei Kawakubo), a mode he terms “affective fashion.” 72 See Wohl (2005) on this type of gendered “becoming” in the Bacchae. 73 Bennett (2010: 4); Williams (1977: 131–33). On affectivity see Deleuze ([1970] 2001); Sedgwick (2003); Gregg and Seignworth (2010).

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also extend the body’s edges tactilely, some of which may be human, so that contact and extension can join bodies together, skin to skin, for good or ill. If Chapter 5 pays special attention to these intersections and assemblages, Chapter 6 considers bodily proxies such as statues and animals and inhuman or barely human doublings and devolutions like ghosts and near corpses. As Derrida has pointed out in a discussion of mimesis and metaphor in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, likenesses always indicate what has gone missing or proves elusive, such that seeking it out brings satisfaction.74 This captures at least one aspect of how tragic effects operate; Derrida also points to Aristotle’s idea that reproducing even horrific sights can foster enjoyment (Poet. 1448b10–12), however mysterious that enjoyment may be, since for Derrida mimesis always edges on absence that haunts the scene.75 “Life-like,” after all, carries with it the frisson of the sudden awareness of its other side—not only that it is not real but also that its opposite hovers: the undead, the corpse or ghost that retains its power. Plato may worry that likenesses are mere copies, participating in a lower realm of being; but tragedy’s concern (and Derrida’s as well) is with the edge that likeness makes manifest—between the figurative and the actual, between somethings and nothings (as both Philoctetes and Electra term themselves), and between the living and the dead.76 While actual ghosts are relatively rare in the extant tragedies, those there are have striking and distinct qualities, from the furious Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Eumenides to the silent figure who may or may not be Alcestis at the end of Euripides’ play of that name. And eerie doubles abound in statues and spectral other selves, such that even those merely referenced may take on the menacing materiality of apotropaic figures in ancient rituals involving the dead. So, for instance, in a chorus in the Agamemnon, when Helen deserts Menelaus a phantom haunts the halls and statues mock the husband with their blank gaze.77 One further thing to notice here initially: statues in these tragedies almost all represent female figures, this is true even of analogies to statues. This tendency suggests that, within this representational scheme, female embodiment is intimately bound up with mimesis, as Froma Zeitlin has argued so influentially.78 One question we may want to ask, when faced with all these tragic bodies and those who draw close to them, concerns what I would term the larger (i.e., not just the civic and democratic) politics of their aesthetics. Jacques Rancière has argued that aesthetics and politics share in the delimitation of the sensible, and in narrower relation to tragic form he regards Aristotle as redefining what he terms its “politicity,” that is, its transition from a porous set of civic practices to an enclosed system of representation. In this framing of “a history of aesthetic politics,” he remarks, “Politics plays itself out in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the audience, as meaning produced

74

Derrida ([1972] 1982: 240n. 43; French 286n. 29). In fact this notion of eerie likeness may also respond to Aristotle’s definition of tragic pleasure as “pleasure from pity and fear through mimesis” (τὴν ἀπὸ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου διὰ μιμήσεως, Poet. 1453b12). 76 See also Worman (2015). 77 I.e., figures deployed to ward off phantoms, such as are found in funerary ritual (see Steiner 2001). 78 Zeitlin (1981, 1985a). 75

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by the actor’s body, as games of proximity or distance.”79 We may thus want to beware of depending too much on Aristotle for our understanding of tragic aesthetics, not to mention its politics, about which he has little to say directly (in the Poetics) and what he does say (e.g., in Politics 8) is elitist and anti-democratic.80 Insofar as tragedy itself (to paraphrase Rancière) lends bodies and figurations to political hierarchies, it hinges on the allure of aristocratic violence, as figuration and staging startle audiences, pulling them close in to the action and interpellating them in its dynamics.81 We could also question the glorification of aristocratic violence by aesthetically compelling manipulations, as this enthralling and implicating of audiences effectively justifies it. Further, perhaps we should wonder about the politics of horror itself, which like the sublime may work as a gendered domination, by means of what Terry Eagleton calls the “virile strenuousness” of its compulsion, as it “crushes us into admiring submission.”82 Such fascination with the edges of the human can paradoxically turn attention aside from difficult ethical questions, so that, riveted by the terrible and somehow beautiful spectacle of corpses that haunt and remain ciphers, audiences forget to ask what matters. Whether it matters, for instance, that many tragic characters are rigidly prideful aristocrats who care too much about their trappings or that the gender dynamics of so many tragedies tip the balance of sympathy toward the male. To be honest, I am not as interested in these latter questions (which in any case are overly familiar by now), as I am in the question of whether we can regard ancient tragic enactment as shaking open and proliferating meaning rather than promoting a moral or political message. The key to understanding this proliferation lies in the eerie mechanics of tragic figuration, which in combination with the staging of tragic bodies makes for some very strange spectacles. I urge that this fuller pursuit of the “sensuous knowledge” at the body’s edges afforded by tragic representation constitutes a political reading in Rancière’s encompassing sense, insofar as considering bodily senses and inhabitations at all has its politics, as Grosz has argued so trenchantly.83 I would insist further that this politics reveals its keenest edge when one attends closely to how abject, barely human, or strangely assembled bodies register at tragedy’s unique intersections. There figurative language and enactment together achieve a pleating and multi-sensory aesthetic impact.

79

Rancière ([2000] 2004: 17–19). See Hall (1996), Rhodes (2003), Heath (2009); cf. Worman (forthcoming b). 81 See Wohl (1998: xxx–xxxiii); the notion of “interpellating” is Althusser’s (1971: 1–60). 82 Eagleton (1989: 57). 83 Grosz (1994). 80

25

26

CHAPTER 1 TOUCHING OEDIPUS: PROXIMITIES, CONTACT, AND AFFECTIVE INTIMACIES

The tragic and sublime fate of Oedipus sums up and displaces the mythical defilement that situates impurity on the untouchable “other side” constituted by the other sex, within the corporeal border—the thin sheet of desire . . . Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror This study begins close in to the body, with a consideration of the ways in which proximity, touch, and affective dynamics are envisioned on the tragic stage and an ultimate focus on Sophocles’ Oedipus. I use the term “envisioned” purposefully, since the genre dictates that touch—alone among the other senses typically represented, which chiefly include sight and hearing but largely exclude smell and taste—remains just that: directly presented to the eye and witnessed as an object of vision or described and offered only to the mind’s eye. It is thus the one represented sense in which the audience cannot participate directly, at least in its most fully haptic form, that is, as touch rather than resonance, sense memory, or multisensory experience. And yet, as Alex Purves has noted, touch is also the most embodied and essential of the senses.1 As such it serves as a primary analogy for sense experience more generally, as well as undergirding both early ancient theories of sense perception and contemporary arguments about the types of embodied knowledge that interactions among the senses and sense memories afford.2 Orchestrations of tragic scenes often suggest such interactions and thus seem to encourage an embodied knowing in the audience, a recognition and “feeling with” that is culturally shaped and determined.3 This type of experience, which has led contemporary theorists of aesthetics and affect such as the film theorist Vivian Sobchack to treat spectatorship as an “address of the eye,” draws upon shared bodily consciousness. A sensory awareness catalyzed by viewing fosters a sense of lived inhabitation as “mine” but also capable of extension from the body doing the watching to those depicted and back again.4

1

Purves 2017: 1–2. See esp. Sobchack (1992), Marks (2000). 3 Cf. Williams (1977: 19, 131). 4 Sobchack (1992: 260–63); this is a gross oversimplification of her innovative formulation of a “semiotic phenomenology” (1992: 6) engaged especially with the work of Merleau-Ponty [1962]); see again Marks’ (2000: 139–53) notion of a “tactile epistemology,” which is heavily influenced by Sobchack’s work. Cf. Marks (2002); Sobchack (2004); also Deleuze on cinema (e.g., [1983] 1986). See again Porter (2010) on ancient materialisms, as well as Eagleton’s argument about aesthetics as “a discourse of the body” (1990: 13). 2

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As I note in the Prologue, in the past theorists of tragic effect often privileged viewing and spectacle when analyzing what constitutes its distinctive aesthetics, although in recent years a growing number of scholars have supplemented this focus by attending to sound, movement, and touch.5 Touch on the dramatic stage is an effect of sight—that is, internal and external audiences view it, rather than feeling it on their own skins. And yet since touch depends on proximities between bodies, it models the sharing of physical spaces and sensations, as well as activating awareness of how affect circulates among those engaging with each other in this way.6 One of the most notable aspects of this “group experience” is just how male-centered and -generated it is. Given the remarkable preponderance of powerful female characters in tragedy, it may seem strange that extant plays do not focus for the most part on female bodies in pain.7 Some of the tragedies show more concern with male suffering, as is especially the case with those of Sophocles, while others appear more interested in female characters’ emotional distress, which is especially true of those of Euripides. This emotional agony sometimes arises in relation to the heroes and/or family members they mourn, but only one or two dramas stage the physical pain of females: Io in Aeschylus’ (or Ps.-Aeschylus’) Prometheus Bound and perhaps Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus. Even if we consider as well the unusual and pain-free death onstage of Alcestis in Euripides’ play of that name and the terrible demise of the Corinthian princess in the messenger speech of Medea, this remains a tiny fraction of bodies depicted in physical anguish in the extant plays. Why should this be? From one angle it seems that female bodies are effectively domesticated in tragic representation, meaning that they and their various sensations and sufferings are treated as appropriately more cordoned off from public viewing. It is also the case that familial, mysterious, or hidden emotional distress is more conventionally associated with female characters, while male characters—including the one who is also divine—suffer such psychic anguish in the open, largely as a result of wounds to reputation or body. Compare, for instance, the agonies of Prometheus, Ajax, or Hippolytus versus the sorrows of Atossa, Deianeira, or Alcestis. While this insight, if such it is, is too schematic and polarizing to capture properly the subtleties of tragic representation—as, for instance, we may recognize Clytemnestra, Medea, and Electra as insistently public and murderous, while Cassandra, Antigone, and Phaedra (among others) expose their pain on stage—it has the dubious merit of conforming to fifth-century gender prejudices. An additional complication is the fact that tragedies do depict in abundance the physical effects of emotional distress, as these are played out on bodies, especially on the surfaces of female bodies as their flesh and skin bear the marks of the wearing, scoring, 5

E.g., Seale (1982), Segal (1980, 1993b), Wiles (1997), Rehm (2002) versus Zeitlin (1991), Worman (1999b, 2001, 2017), Mueller (2001, 2016), Nooter (2017). Contrast Budelmann (2000), who focuses on shared linguistic dynamics as achieving such communal experiences. 6 Deleuze ([1970] 1988: 127–28). On affect see again Sedgwick (2003: 17–19); also Thrift (2004: 61–63), Clough and Halley (2007), Papoulias and Callard (2010: 35–36), Leys (2011: 443). 7 Since most of the plays we have were popular in early reception (i.e., that is why we have them), it appears that the gender divide is at least loosely conventional.

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and melting that come with grief. Other chapters examine in detail sorrow’s ravages, while this one centers on more directly physical sources of pain: the eating of male (and occasionally female) flesh by venom, poison, or madness and its piercing by sharp objects. The scenes that display such effects highlight with terrible specificity what has happened and is still happening to these bodies in pain, as if encouraging with this intimate catalog shared bodily sensations and affective responses. Again, among the canonical tragedies the few extant plays of Sophocles stand out for the consistency with which they center on the male body in physical pain, while Euripides’ tend to focus more on emotional distress, especially of female characters. The few remaining dramas of Aeschylus suggest some interest in various types of mania and the extremities of fear and sorrow, but none of these results directly in physical agony (e.g., Cassandra, Orestes, Xerxes, the Danaids). The only play, and this one only perhaps by Aeschylus, that centers on extreme torture is the one that also sets the limit for it as tragic spectacle. This is Prometheus Bound, in which the anguished god is permanently pinned to a rock at the edge of the world (and center stage) and exchanges information with Io, a more fleeting but nonetheless quite distinctive enactment of female pain onstage. While I take up this play and a few of Euripides in the next sections, the chapter focuses for the most part of Sophocles’ sustained interest in reacting to and handling male human suffering.

1. Sensing Bodies In this chapter I focus on viewing the body in pain and touch in relation to pain’s representation, as well as its affective impact on characters and audience. My discussion thus inflects arguments in favor of sensuous, embodied ways of knowing with a focus on one of the more nebulous aspects of perceptual experience, as Elaine Scarry has explored in detail.8 In Sophoclean tragedy especially, this sense of proximity is often more horrifying than otherwise, as heroes in pain are usually tainted by their deeds and suffering for them, sometimes to disgusting effect, as with Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes. Such figures serve as still center points that radiate sensorily and affectively outward by means of significantly embodied prostheses: think of Ajax pierced on his enemy’s sword, Philoctetes’ residue of stinking rags, the poisonous cloak that unhinges Heracles’ joints and flesh. This is the type of sensory horror Kristeva dwells on when discussing the abject, emphasizing skin-crawling sensations stimulated by the tactile qualities that characterize it and the affects generated in shuddering reaction to it.9 As noted in the Prologue, Kristeva regards Oedipus as a polluted figure whose visible scarring both draws attention to and yet obscures the nature of his crime. From this perspective there is something peculiar about his taint and its bodily markings, something my focus might

8 9

See further in the Prologue, citing Scarry (1985); see esp. the discussion on pp. 164–66. Again, see Kristeva (1980: 99–105) and cf. Ahmed (2004) on disgust; see further below in section 3.

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encourage us to regard as a weird incommensurability between this body’s sensuous history and its visible demarcations, since touch rather than vision would seem a more fitting sense for a perpetrator of murder and incest to truncate. It is all the more interesting for my purposes, given the blinding’s dramatic ironies as a visible sign.10 Thus, for instance, at the end of Oedipus the King the newly blind hero orchestrates the chorus’ approach to and viewing of himself as an object of tragic pleasure—the aesthetic experience that Edmund Burke piquantly termed “delightful horror.”11 And in the midst of all this visual maneuvering, which holds the onlookers in thrall at a careful distance, Oedipus makes one very intimate move: while the chorus cringes (and presumably the audience with it), Oedipus gropes about for his daughters and gathers them to him, so that they serve as props for a profoundly unsettling tableau. Attention to a materialist semiotics would encourage, in this instance, the recognition that touch is a physical act and a sign with multiplying significances, as contact and support indicate (e.g.) bonding, steadfastness, and incest, the family story lending a uniquely creepy turn to such proximities.12 In Sophocles’ dramas more generally, responses to heroic forms tend to fall into two primary categories of aesthetic response, one of which reproduces tragic experience (sight) while the other offers possibilities for reactions that lie outside of its scope (touch), at least in its narrower sense (i.e., bodily contact).13 Among directorial gestures onstage various types of touching are thus distinct from, but parallel to emphases on viewing. Again, touch is a much more intimate sense than seeing or hearing, both of which can take place at a distance. In fact Sophocles sometimes shows how these latter senses may reinforce or heighten the impression of distance, objectifying and/or isolating objects of perception. Consider, for instance, the arrivals of the heroes early on in the Philoctetes and Ajax: the chorus exclaims at Philoctetes’ lonesome cry from offstage, which signals for them his status as cipher and outsider; Tecmessa encourages the chorus to look as she displays Ajax’s slumped, post-manic form to them, which in its bloody isolation only puzzles them further.14 Touch instead brings things and people closer, attaching body to body and engaging less often awesome or terrifying effects than piteous or tender ones. As historians and theorists of western aesthetics often emphasize, touch is persistently denigrated in the tradition as a sense not appropriate to higher art forms.15 The sheer proximity of the body can complicate its reception, since embodiment in its humbler iterations runs counter to the elevating effects of art. As such we may be tempted to 10 Oedipus claims that he had blinded himself so that he would not face seeing his family, either living or dead (Oedipus the King 1371–77), but the irony of the sensory switch-off remains. 11 Burke ([1767] 1958: 73). 12 Note that many commentators have sought to excise this ending; see the discussion in Dawes (1982). 13 Though sound is also central to the hero’s performance of his pain—think especially of Philoctetes—the staging of and aesthetic responses to heroic embodiment most often privilege the visual and include touch as a crucial aspect of the tableau. 14 See Worman (2000, 2001). Cf. Jouanna ([2007] 2018) and Susanetti (2011) on the political ramifications. 15 E.g., Paterson (2007); cf. Field (2001), Sedgwick (2003). As Slaney notes in her reading of Herder in Purves (2017), the exception proves the rule, as those thinkers who focus on touch deliberately counter a perceived bias in favor of sight as the primary sense. See also Purves’ discussion in the Introduction to this volume.

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consider touch less tragic, since its aesthetic contributes a lowly and almost private aspect to this public commemoration of heroes.16 On the other hand, tragedy also frequently dramatizes rituals associated with handling the dead, which lends some dignity to touching bodies. So, for instance, in the later part of Sophocles’ play Ajax’s giant corpse is both a protection for and protected by his family members, who warn the aggressive Agamemnon and Menelaus to keep away from it, as well as the more helpful Odysseus.17 Also important for our purposes is that these scenes indicate the extent to which touch can be violent, a crucial extension of the abuses that Creon levels at Oedipus in the Colonus play.18 Again, onstage touching is for the audience primarily a visual event, as actors’ gestures show them the effects of tactile sensations, as well as who and what individuals are in relation to others. And yet such gestures may themselves provoke a fuller sensory awareness, as mimesis and memory settle the perceiving bodies in close to the onstage experience.19 Thus characters intermittently desire to touch bodies, sometimes warn others from presuming to do so, or draw back from contact (e.g., Oedipus’ withdrawal from Polyneices in the Colonus play; cf. Odysseus from Hecuba in Euripides’ Hecuba). Heracles’ orchestration of his body’s impact, for instance, focuses on handling it in its pain, especially grasping it and lifting it up as if for better viewing (Women of Trachis 1018–25). In Philoctetes Neoptolemus physically assists Philoctetes, but it is the assistance more than the touching that the scene emphasizes. For reasons that themselves carry with them the shock of tragic experience (i.e., parricide and incest), the plots that involve Oedipus foreground touch in a manner unparalleled elsewhere in Sophocles’ extant plays.20 In Oedipus the King the hero’s transformation from noblest to debased (kallistos to athlios) appears to render him more approachable at the play’s end; and something similar occurs in Oedipus at Colonus. This startling difference is marked particularly by proxemics.21 While Oedipus remains the bold king with his senses physically intact, his only gestures toward others are commanding or abusive and tinged with violence. When, in contrast, he is blind and debilitated, he seeks fond physical contact with his daughters (OT 1480– 83) and connections to others, as long as they are Athenians (1321–23, 1469–74, 1503–10; OC 173, 200–01, 329, 1112–13, 1130–35).22

16

See Kaimio (1988), who points out that instances of touch in tragedy increase toward the end of the century. 17 Worman (2001); and cf. Worman (1999a, 2000) on the character of Odysseus in fifth-century tragedy and fifth- and fourth-century oratory. It is worth adding here that Rhesus, which is likely the only extant fourthcentury tragedy, sustains his ambiguous profile, including a vibrant image of him as a beggar in disguise at Troy (710–16). 18 Again, see Kaimio (1988); also Kosak (1999). 19 This is largely Bergson’s notion ([1911] 1988), although he emphasizes memory while Benjamin ([1955] 1978) focuses on mimesis; see Marks (2000: 145–53) for the importance of their awareness of such sensations as acculturated rather than natural and universal. 20 Cf. Derrida on mimesis and metaphor: “[W]hen mimetic ellipsis is in play, Oedipus, the serpent, and parricide are not far off ” ([1972] 1982: 240, n. 43). See also Pucci (1992). 21 See Serpieri (1978); Elam (1980). 22 See further below, section 3.

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Since the plays highlighted in this chapter emphasize viewing and touching bodies in relation to particular characters and at distinct moments in their plots, I have divided the core of my discussion into two sections: one on the display, reactions to, and handling of Prometheus and Io, as well as other heroes (mostly Sophoclean) on the edges of the human (Heracles, Ajax, and Philoctetes). I also include “sidebar” (i.e., parallel) considerations of two such heroes in Euripides (Hippolytus and Orestes) and two of his female sufferers (Alcestis and Phaedra). The other section turns to the complex sensory puzzle that Oedipus embodies and stage-manages for his audience.

2. Witnessing and Handling Bodies in Pain To grasp more fully the sensuous knowledge that tragic representation in its semiotic materialities affords, in this and the following sections I explore how abject bodies and their affects register at points where directive language suggests or indicates explicitly visual and tactile details, where sight and touch together achieve an uncanny aesthetic impact. Such sensory intersections frame tragic heroes (especially in Sophocles) as frightening but compelling objects, emphasizing the language and stage business that highlights sensory response and bodily stature, at moments when the hero and/or other characters draw attention to and encourage the viewing and touching of the abject body as a tragic entity. If the Oedipus plays foreground such moments most emphatically, other plays also contribute significant details for characterizing and understanding these experiences. Further, these dramas and others like them encourage the audience to regard the sensory impacts of these bodies, which have both aesthetic and ethical significance, by highlighting internal reactions to them. That is, characters—including the heroes themselves—regard and handle the heroic body as an object to be appreciated or denigrated. They tell the chorus (and thereby the audience) what to look at and see in it, how to approach and handle it; and the heroes themselves often highlight the great chasm between their formerly elevated statures and the devolutions of their bodies into objects of horror and pity. a. Prometheus and Io Up Close I propose to begin a consideration of such sensory complexities by taking a look at what is perhaps the most unique and sustained display of tragic bodies in pain, in this case two that are not (or not quite) human: Prometheus and Io in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.23

23 This play has received less attention for its themes and imagery than for the apparent mystery of its authorship, about which I have little to say; but see e.g. Carpanelli (2012: 49–51) on what he calls “violenza carnale,” comparing Io and the Danaids; also White (2001) and cf. Bassi (2010) on language and torture in the play. On the vocabulary of pain, medicine, and constraint in relation to, among other things, Prometheus’ gifts to humans and to the Hippocratics, see Dumortier (1935), Fowler (1957), Conacher (1980), Griffith (1983), Garson (1984), Karp (1996).

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This protagonist’s status as a suffering divinity in a desperate struggle with that ultimate torturer, Zeus, places him not only at the outer limits of the human but also at the founding of pain’s primary source for tragic heroes: transgressions of divine will or dominion. The play pairs this display of male suffering with a more fleeting glimpse of female agony in the figure of Io, who stops off to exchange grievances with Prometheus, in the course of being tormented around the borders of the known world by the everjealous and angry Hera. At the outset of the action of Prometheus Bound the god Kratos (“Power”) commands Hephaestus to bind Prometheus, opening a scene that highlights not only the material details of this process but also the reason for the punishment. Prometheus has transgressed divine and human realms by transversing the one to import a crucial element—fire—to the other, a move that also indicates his function as a borderland figure marking distinctions between these spheres. In addition, Kratos’ command serves to indicate the marginal setting, Scythia, which for contemporaneous Greeks was itself a distant territory whose denizens they regarded as barely human. While Hephaestus protests briefly that he would rather not nail his kinsman to the “wintry chasm” (φάραγγι πρὸς δυσχειμέρῳ, 15), he acknowledges his lack of autonomy in the affair. He then addresses Prometheus directly and describes his torture to come: he will pin him to the “inhuman crag” (ἀπανθρώπῳ πάγῳ) with bronze bonds, far away from mortals, and neither their voices nor their forms will he perceive (οὔτε φωνὴν οὔτε του μορφὴν βροτῶν / ὄψῃ). His skin will be scorched (σταθευτός) by the sun’s blazing beam, which will change its bloom (χροιᾶς . . ἄνθος) (19–24). The ever-present torture of the agony will wear on him continuously (ἀεὶ δὲ τοῦ παρόντος ἀχθηδὼν κακοῦ / τρύσει), as he pays Zeus’ price for his human-loving nature (φιλανθρώπου τρόπου). Sleepless and pinned in this unbending posture (οὐ κάμπτων γόνυ), he will emit many wails and useless groans (πολλοὺς δ᾽ ὀδυρμοὺς καὶ γόους ἀνωφελεῖς, 21–34). Hephaestus’ catalog of Prometheus’ woes thus situates him precisely in relation to bodily sensations and proximities: he will be in terrible pain but in so remote a setting that no one will alleviate this by feeling with him—that is, by the sympathy that witnesses and shares in anguish and that serves as a central (though frequently problematized) component of tragic dynamics. There is of course a vivid irony in opening a tragedy by emphasizing the protagonist’s isolation from human ears and eyes, one that this play shares with others, including most prominently those involving the wounded Oedipus (e.g., the ends of Oedipus the King and The Phoenician Women as well as much of Oedipus at Colonus and Philoctetes).24 Such scenes suggest a broader interest among dramatists, and perhaps particularly Sophocles, in staging heroes’ statuses as outsiders by highlighting their sensory isolation in a manner that encourages attention to the aisthesis of the performance setting.25

24

See further below, sections 2 and 3. Compare, for instance, the description of Lemnos in the opening of Philoctetes: ἀκτὴ μὲν ἥδε τῆς περιρρύτου χθονὸς /Λήμνου, βροτοῖς ἄστιπτος οὐδ᾽ οἰκουμένη (1-2). I owe this observation about the similar vocabulary to Cat Lambert. 25

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In the case of this scene in Prometheus Bound, the sensory and affective experiencing is channeled through the character of Hephaestus, who continues to express great distress at his work allotment. Kratos admonishes him not to “sing dirges” (θρηνεῖσθαι) over the transgressor, while Hephaestus responds by calling his handiwork exceedingly hateful (ὦ πολλὰ μισηθεῖσα χειρωναξία) (43–45). With Kratos pushing him to get on with the work, Hephaestus moves around Prometheus’ body and, in what seems like an overt demonstration of the envisioning powers of tragic deixis, matches the material fixings of the torture to the tortured body. “Here,” he says, “are the fetters at hand [πρόχειρα ψάλια] for you to see [δέρκεσθαι],” while Kratos urges him to put them on Prometheus’ hands (ἀμφὶ χερσίν) and nail them to the rock, making sure to fit them close (ἄρασσε μᾶλλον), pinch them (σφίγγε), and leave nothing loose (μηδαμῇ χάλα) (54–59). They move on to his chest, which is fixed by “the ruthless jaw of the steel wedge” (ἀδαμαντίνου νῦν σφηνὸς αὐθάδη γνάθον) driven straight through. Laboring close up, Hephaestus cries out at the brutality, “Oh, oh, Prometheus, how I groan over your suffering!” (αἰαῖ Προμηθεῦ, σῶν ὑπερστένω πόνων). When Kratos scoffs at his pitying reaction, Hephaestus responds that Prometheus in pain is literally a sight for sore eyes— namely, “a sight painful to the eyes” (θέαμα δυσθέατον ὄμμασιν) (64–69). They then move on to bindings for the ribs (πλευραῖς μασχαλιστῆρας), thigh hoops (σκέλη δὲ κίρκωσον), and piercing foot fetters (διατόρους πέδας) (71–76).26 The moment is stunning for the material detailing of the punishment as well as the agonized recoil at the suffering it entails, an insistence on the stuff of physical experiencing that aims at arousing not merely the audience’s horror and sympathy but also their own embodied sensory responsiveness. While the drama unfolds by means of repeated emphasis on the witnessing of suffering, this hands-on, close-up reaction foregrounds the haptic calibrations of pain that Scarry finds to be crucial to its sensory dynamics and their apprehension by others. Prometheus Bound juxtaposes this non-human body in pain to its female counterpart, another anomalous figure: the human-cow Io, who is also Prometheus’ dramatic opposite in her extreme mobility. It is not only that the power of Hera’s goad to drive her on traces the very borders of the known world and situates her as originary and singular in this regard as well. But also, unlike the fixing of Prometheus’ pain center-stage, Io’s agony can only be viewed in its fullness as a narrative of what will happen elsewhere, a difference that may serve as a nod to the conventional wariness around homing in on female bodies in their various specificities, while also highlighting the limitations of tragic mimesis. When Io comes onstage mid-way through the action of the play (561), she enters singing anapests and inquires in a fashion common to tragedy about where she is and with whom she is interacting. This direct request for information devolves almost immediately into screams and a more emotionally intense meter (dochmiac), wailing

26

Note that the term μασχαλιστῆρ comes from μασχαλίζω, which denotes most commonly the gruesome mutilation of the corpse, including the looping of extremities around the neck. These resonances would be present to contemporaneous audiences, especially given that the verb is used to describe the desecration of Agamemnon’s corpse in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (439).

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out her experiences as the gadfly hounds her, her speech interrupted much like that of Philoctetes, who also pivots drastically from direct inquiry to pain-driven outcry. She calls her tormentor a “phantom of earth-born Argos” (εἴδωλον Ἄργου γηγενοῦς), explaining that even though he is dead the hundred-eyed Argos continues to torment her with this fly (566–70).27 Her language suggests that the gadfly is an outgrowth or appendage of Argos, as if the dead monster had left live residue in the form of this torturing insect. And in fact her presence onstage is bracketed by the relentless agony that the gadfly inflicts, as she begins and ends her episode screaming in pain. In the course of three hundred or so lines, she unfolds the source of her torment (beginning with dreams of unclear origin that promise lofty marriage), sustains an artificial calm long enough to hear about her future from Prometheus, and leaves with more cries and a horrific description of her maddening pain. The verb she uses to describe the gadfly’s effects is χρίω, which can mean to touch lightly or anoint and which in tragedy denotes most commonly coating with poison, as Deianeira does unwittingly with Heracles’ cloak and Medea very wittingly with her “marriage gifts” of gown and wreath.28 This verb thus draws attention to surfaces, to the hand brushing the skin or the ointment smeared on cloth; the meaning specific to Io’s physical condition also highlights outer-edge contact, in this case the surface wound caused by a pricking of the skin. For the first fifty lines of her time onstage this is what she foregrounds, then: the effects of Argos’ “phantom” fly on her body’s surfaces, the tormenting of her flesh. Her repeated use of χρίω (cf. 597, 675, 880), in combination with her screams and exclamations (565, 576, 580, 598, 602, 877), serves as the most enduring image for this pain, while her outcries also focus on lamenting her fate and wondering how she might find release from torture, including being consumed by fire, covered by the earth, or eaten by sea monsters (583–84). It may well be the fact that she is barely human that makes acceptable this unusual onstage attention to the female body in physical pain, which renders her performance adjacent both to male heroic figures and to female characters in emotional agony. That she is essentially a rape victim in waiting, undergoing the gadfly’s constant jabbing as a kind of precursor to the ultimate violation of the virgin’s bodily surfaces, makes this scene all the more disturbing. Not only does it intervene in the midst of the ongoing torture of the male body pinned to a rock; it also offers a sustained affective and kinesthetic contrast to the dynamics that surround the god in pain. As noted, Io spends most of her time onstage singing and screaming, with the female chorus responding as if they are feeling her agonies. In fact they are her relatives, as Prometheus notes (705–06); like her they react strongly and cry out repeatedly (e.g., 687, 694), to Prometheus’ manifest irritation (cf. 696–97). She also highlights again and again the bodily deportments that the goad inspires, suggesting dance moves of an unusually wild type. While her repetition of χρίω sustains attention to the skin’s torment, as noted (cf. also repeated cognates of 27 In a common version of Io’s story (to which this one clearly conforms), Hera sent Argos to watch over Io and Zeus retaliated by sending Hermes to slay him. 28 See further in Chapter 3 (2).

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μογέω, as well as μαραίνω at 597), she thus expresses this attention to contact and the materialities of actual or potential bodily torment predominantly through frantic song and dance. As she screams in pain she also points up her accompaniment by the “clearshrilling, hypnotic” aulos (i.e., the double pipes, ὑπὸ δὲ κηρόπλαστος ὀτοβεῖ δόναξ  / ἀχέτας ὑπνοδόταν νόμον, 574–75), the eerie sonics of which contribute to the impression of the sensory intensity that she brings onto the stage.29 She then calls on Zeus and asks why he has “yoked” (ἐνέζευξας) her with this “sting-driven terror” (οἰστρηλάτῳ δὲ δείματι) that wears on (τείρεις) her such that she is miserable and frenzied (δειλαίαν παράκοπον) (578–82). As punctuation at the end of this sense-laden, dynamic strophe, she cries out, “Do you hear the voice of the cow-horned virgin?” (κλύεις φθέγμα τᾶς βουκέρω παρθένου, 588). Prometheus responds wryly, “How can I help but hear?” (πῶς δ᾽οὐ κλύω), while his description of her suggests a more multi-sensory perception that includes visual witnessing of her fly-maddened spinning (οἰστροδινήτου κόρης).30 Io herself has emphasized repeatedly the leaping and dashing that this fly has caused; and Prometheus’ unusual image (the word οἰστροδινήτος is found only here) contributes to a pervasive sense of her frenetic deportment. Indeed, from the outset she comes across as sudden and rapid in her movements. She effectively bursts onto the stage, without the conventional announcement of approach, interrupting the chorus’ discussion with Prometheus of his marriage to Hesione, to which they have turned as “a separate song” (διαμφίδιον . . . μέλος, 554). The timing feels both abrupt and pointed, given Io’s troubled relation to traditional marriage rituals, not to mention the fact that both she and Hesione are related to the chorus of Oceanids. She immediately describes herself in mobile terms: she is made to roam far and wide by the gadfly’s goads (cf. many forms of πλανάω),31 which drive her wild (κέντροις / φοιταλέοισιν, 597–98). Rushing furiously (λαβρόσυτος) and leaping about with torturing cravings (σκιρτημάτων δὲ νήστισιν  / αἰκείαις, cf. νήστιν, 599–600, ἐμμανεῖ σκιρτήματι, 675), she punctuates her references to maddened movements with screams such as ἔ ἔ (599, 602) and, more distinctly, ἰώ (598). That is to say, her monody is conspicuously highpitched, literally (in tonal indications) and figuratively (i.e., emotionally); and this tonal impact is intensified by combinations with the indicated movements. The centerpiece of Io’s scene is in some sense the counter to this mobile intensity, as she and Prometheus narrate different parts of her story, she her past, he her future (640–876). This is how she, the chorus, and the audience learn that she will roam the borders of the world, driven on by Hera and her “bitter suitor” (cf. πικροῦ . . . / μνηστῆρος, 739–40). After ranging widely, from Scythia to the Bosphorus and on to Ethiopia, she will finally be “touched” by Zeus, who impregnates her with his “unviolent hand” alone (σε Ζεὺς

29

On the tonalities and associations of the aulos in tragedy and elsewhere, see Wilson (1999), Martin (2003), Steiner (2013), Simone (diss. 2020); on sound in Aeschylus, see Nooter (2017). On ancient dance and its modern reception, see Lawler (1964), Ley (2003), MacIntosh (ed.) (2010), Olsen (2017). 30 The adjective οἰστροδίνητος is apparently a hapax, suggesting very distinctive movement as well. 31 I.e., πεπλάνημαι, 565, πλάνᾷ, 572, τηλεπέπλαγκτοι πλάναι, 576–77, πολύπλανοι πλάναι, 585, cf. δυσπλάνῳ παρθένῳ, 608.

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τίθησ᾽ἐγκύμονα ἐπαφῶν ἀταρβεῖ χειρὶ καὶ θιγὼν μόνον, 848–49) and give birth to the aptly named Epaphus, who will flourish by the wide-flowing Nile (851–52). While I address details of the ways in which Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women situates a similar misrecognition of Io’s rape in Chapter 2, here I offer the incident as a central example of how the violence indicated in Io’s narrative parallels her onstage frenzy. Underscoring this conjunction, she reacts sharply to the predicted violence and its perpetrator, crying out that the mention of Zeus is “bitter” (ἰώ μοί μοι· ἕ ἕ, 742) and ending her scene in screaming pain. Her final words onstage are prefaced by sharp exclamation (ἐλελεῦ ἐλελεῦ, 877) and the return of the torturing gadfly’s effects, which she describes in horrifying detail: the convulsive pain (σφάκελος) and brain-beating frenzy (φρενοπληγεῖς / μανίαι) heat her skin, although the fly’s barb that pricks is “without fire” (οἴστρου δ᾽ἄρδις χρίει μ᾽ἄπυρος, 879–80). Her heart knocks at her ribs with fear, her eyes roll in her head, and she is carried away by a “furious blast of madness” (λύσσης / πνεύματι μάργῳ). As she describes her state in these lurid terms, she also suggests that the mania shapes her style: her tongue is uncontrollable, such that “murky speech beats randomly at waves of dark delusion” (θολεροὶ δὲ λόγοι παίουσ᾽εἰκῇ / στυγνῆς πρὸς κύμασιν ἄτης, 885–86). Then, having wailed this last ominous and tumultuous image, she runs from the stage. b. Witnessing Heracles’ Agonies In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis Heracles’ wife Deianira gives him a robe that she paints with what she thinks is a love potion, since he has taken a younger woman as concubine, the captive Iole. The potion given to Deianira by the centaur Nessus, which proves to be poison, ultimately destroys Heracles, who emerges onstage only at the drama’s end.32 The body-to-body maneuvers in this scene are my focus here, while Chapter  2 tracks the prominence of murderous hands in the play and Chapters 3 and 4 treat its materials and imagery of containment in more detail. The drama and its central couple thus feature repeatedly in the chapters that follow, as its vivid depictions of bodily contact, wrappings, and containers conjoin at the creases of their various dimensions. This incremental pleating also renders Women of Trachis a rich example of the ways in which the fold structures my discussion as incremental explorations of different sides of the same skin (so to speak). Let’s begin with a first look at onlookers, that is, the onstage viewers and handlers of this body in extreme distress. Just before Heracles is carried in on his bed of pain, the chorus of women cries out that the mere sight of him may be deadly. They wish that a wind might blow them away, so that they not experience death “straightaway” when looking upon the horror (μὴ ταρβαλέα θάνοιμι / μοῦνον εἰσιδοῦσ’ ἄφαρ, 957–58). They claim that their fear arises from the report that the attendants are bearing home “some unspeakable phenomenon” (ἄσπετόν τι θαῦμα, 961). When Heracles enters, his attendants and he himself depict the pain he is suffering as a devouring thing, wild and implacable

32 On the play generally see Musurillo (1961); Easterling (1968), (1981), (1982) (comm.); McCall (1972); Segal (1977); Lawrence (1978); Segal (1981, 1995).

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(e.g., 975, 985–87, 1028–30, 1054–57)—the monstrous enemy of his final laboring (cf. 1046–47). Heracles also terms this new fiend “the inexorable flower of frenzy” (ἀκήλητον / μανίας ἄνθος);33 and he deems a long shot (lit. “a wonder [seen] from afar”: θαῦμ’ ἅν πόρρωθεν ἰδοίμην) the possibility that some singer or artful surgeon (τίς γὰρ ἀοιδός, τίς ὁ χειροτέχνης / ἰατορίας) might release him from his agony (998–1003).34 True to form, he soon calls for violence, demanding that someone “cut off the head” of his pain (ἀπαράξαι 〈μου〉 / κρᾶτα . . . τοῦ στυγεροῦ, 1015–16, cf. 1034–35).35 The visualizing intensity of Heracles’ language—which combines frenzy’s flower and its singer / surgeon, the ravening beast of pain, and a sense of wonder—frames his staging of the suffering of this more-than-human body as a terrifying, mysterious, and resonant event. Like Philoctetes, he cries out repeatedly in anguish; but unlike him he insists on exhibiting his body as the quintessential “wretched form” (ἄθλιον δέμας, 1079), exemplary in the visibility of its torment, the perfect tragic object.36 In his stage-managing of the scene, he puts his son Hyllus to work as the in-house model for the audience’s experience of the moment, encouraging both kind and violent touching as well as close-up viewing. Echoing the elderly attendant who calls upon Hyllus to hold onto him (cf. σὺ δὲ σύλλαβε, 1019), Heracles enjoins his son, “Hold me, here . . . here, lift me up!” (τᾷδέ με, τᾷδέ με / πρόσλαβε κουφίσας, 1024–25). But then as the disease assaults him (θρῴσκει δειλαία), he cries out repeatedly and finally urges Hyllus instead to take up his sword and strike him under the heart (παῖσον ἐμᾶς ὑπὸ κλῃδός) (1028–35).37 In his central speech he wishes the same death on Deianira as punishment for her, not yet knowing that she has already committed this final act herself. He laments at length the loss of his glorious body at the hands of a woman’s poison (as he thinks), ordering Hyllus to bring her out with his own hands and place her into his father’s (δός μοι χεροῖν σαῖν  . . . ἐς χεῖρα, 1066–67), so that, with this son to father, hand-to-hand transfer, he can assess husband and wife as two suffering bodies laid out side by side—his poisoned, hers defiled (λωβητὸν εἶδος, 1069). So here we have a concertedly tactile, grotesquely embodied version of the family triangle, as son and father serve in Heracles’ distorted vision as manhandlers of their mother and wife. This envisioned proximity seems to drive Heracles to a further conflation: since he has been poisoned by a woman whose nature is “feminine and unmanly” (θῆλυς οὖσα κἄνανδρος φύσιν, 1062), he

33

Cf. Reinhart on Oedipus and the “flowering in his torment” (1947: 140); and see further below. On this and other medical terms in the scene, see Allan (2014: 267–69). 35 See Biggs (1966) on what she terms the “disease theme” in this and the other plays discussed here; Budelmann (2007: 444–46) and Allan (2014) on Sophocles’ representation of pain; also Holmes (2008: 242–44) on the hero’s body in pain as a site of uncertainty and fascination. 36 Heracles’ stage-managing would seem to offer a counterexample to Scarry’s argument that pain is all experience and without object, since here he uses his body as precisely the object of vision that Scarry aligns with viewing from a distance (1985: 164–70). And yet his lapses into screaming agony suggest a consciousness alternating between the urge to display and abject frenzy. Cf. Kristeva (1980: chapter 1) on abjection and its affects; and see further below, section 3. 37 As does Philoctetes with his foot and then his whole body (Phil. 747–48, 1204–07). For more details on the impact of the disease on the bodily surface, see Chapter 4. 34

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deplores that he “moans and cries out like a girl” (ὥστε παρθένος  / βέβρυχα κλαίων, 1071–72) and finds himself to be a feminine wreck (θῆλυς ηὕρημαι τάλας, 1075).38 Next Heracles calls upon Hyllus for a new task: proximate viewing of his father’s wreckage, so that first his son and then the chorus may engage in an intimate form of haptic visuality. “Draw near to the breast of your father” (προσελθὼν στῆθι πλησίον πατρός, 1076), he says, “and look at the evidence of the sort of misfortune I am suffering” (σκέψαι δ’ ὁποίας ταῦτα συμφορᾶς ὕπο  / πέπονθα) (1076–78). He then expands this intimate viewing of his body to urge the chorus and attendants to view it (1078–80): I shall show these wounds from under their coverings— see, all of you view my wretched form, look upon its misfortune, how pitifully I suffer. δείξω γὰρ τάδ’ ἐκ καλυμμάτων. ἰδού, θεᾶσθε πάντες ἄθλιον δέμας, ὁρᾶτε τόν δύστηνον, ὡς οἰκτρῶς ἔχω. This sorry, feminized body in its insistent directorial frame compares very miserably with the hero’s form of old, the one which Heracles then hails in a heraldic lament, naming its glorious parts: “Oh hands, hands, oh back and breast, oh dear arms!” (ὦ χέρες χέρες, / ὦ νῶτα καὶ στέρν’, ὦ φίλοι βραχίονες, 1089–90).39 Instead of this marvelous specimen of manhood, his body is now “unstrung and bedraggled” (ἄναρθρος καὶ κατερρακωμένος, 1103), a “nothing” that cannot even crawl (τὸ μηδὲν ὦ . . . μηδὲν ἕρπω, 1107–08). Recall that at the outset of this scene the female chorus fears that viewing such a terrible devolution, in which the hero’s near-dead body serves the dramatic function of the terrifying revelation of corpses extruded from the skēnē door, might itself be deadly. They also wish for escape from this sight, since they have heard that it is unspeakable. Their affective postures thus communicate shrinking and withdrawal, rather than any sensory participation in the “becoming” (or rather, the un-becoming) of this once heroic form.40 Heracles urges the opposite: no matter how terrible the viewing, it must be undertaken— and close in, body to body, as if by sheer proximity the viewers could share fully his horrifying experience.

38

This is an unusual move in Sophocles; heroes in distress often call themselves wretched, nothings, close to dead, but they rarely invoke female weakness as an appropriate image for their unraveling (see Worman 2012). But since Heracles thinks that Deianira is responsible for the loss of his beautiful hero’s body, he interweaves his mourning of it with vicious fantasies of manhandling hers and fears for his own loss of manly force. Cf. Kosak (1999: 105–07), who argues that touching itself effeminizes the hero, since it is an indication of helplessness. 39 The heraldic blazon of parts is a figure of praise poetry, on which see Lanham (1991: 61) and cf. Bakhtin ([1965] 1984: 426–27) on comic abuse; here Heracles strikingly juxtaposes the heroic form with its opposite— the abject body. Cf. also Barthes (1974: 214–15) on the blazon’s reversion of the body to the “dust of words.” 40 Again, see Deleuze ([1970] 1988: 127–28) on affect as immanence; also Thrift (2004: 61–63).

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i. Sidebar: Hippolytus’ Sensory Economies. One of the most arresting things about the death throes of the young hero in Euripides’ Hippolytus, which like those of Heracles in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis take place toward the play’s end, is the intense but contracted nature of the scene that stages Hippolytus in pain.41 The plot of the play centers on what is on one level a contest between Artemis and Aphrodite, statues of which stand in the forecourt of the house (i.e., onstage): because Hippolytus has foresworn contact with women in honor of Artemis, Aphrodite has inflicted his stepmother Phaedra with desire for him. A more mundane domestic register parallels this loftier one, in which the nurse and the chorus of women from Troezen witness how Phaedra’s emotional distress has ravaged her body and attempt to tend to her. I take up this earlier scene below (section 2c.ii); here I focus on the other body in pain at the end of the play, which comes about as another result of divine displeasure. This one occurs after Phaedra has killed herself and left a letter accusing Hippolytus of violating her; because Theseus thinks this true, he calls down a curse promised to him by Poseidon upon his son. The god accordingly rears up beside Hippolytus as he races his chariot along the shore, taking the form of a bull and sending his horses into a frenzy. He ends up mangled by their terror, a victim of a surreal combination of divine and animal compulsion. When Hippolytus is carried onto the stage in a near-dead state, the chorus cries out at “the young flesh and golden head all mangled!” (σάρκας νεαρὰς καὶ ζανθόν τε κάρα διελυμανθείς, Hippolytus, 1344–45) and he responds with cries of agony that are eventually quelled by the voice of his favorite goddess. In some contrast to Heracles, whose extended and elaborate multisensory impact on the action of the Women of Trachis is remarkable enough that I discuss aspects of it from a number of angles, Hippolytus in pain is a tightly orchestrated focusing of effects, fast-paced and dense with anguished exclamation. This lasts just over one hundred lines of action-packed staging (as opposed to Heracles’ 250 or so) and includes the hero borne in on a litter screaming in pain, his lamentations over his agonies and his fate (both spoken and sung), the goddess Artemis engaging with and comforting him, and the reconciliation with his father Theseus. His first exclamations about his mangled body are punctuated by these cries (e.g., αἰαῖ αἰαῖ at 1347, ἒ ἔ, 1354, φεῦ φεῦ, 1358), as well as vivid references to the “leaping” pains in his head. A rather general phrase (“The pains leap in my head,” διά μου κεφαλῆς ᾅσσουσ᾽ ὀδύναι, cf. ὀδύνα μ᾽ὀδύνα βαίνει at 1371) is followed by another more visceral or even clinical (“The convulsion shoots through my brain,” κατὰ δ ἐγκέφαλον πηδᾷ σφάκελος) (1351–52) that recalls the intensity of Io’s agony at the end of her scene in Prometheus Bound (cf. 879–80). In amongst sharply worded exclamations at his father’s curse and his own horses’ role in his demise, like Heracles he also requests careful “handling,” using terms that are similarly precise in their physical references as well as sounding like stage 41 On various themes and imagery in the play, including shame, knowledge, sexuality, and signs and cursing, see, e.g., Segal (1965, 1970, 1972), Zeitlin (1985b), Rabinowitz (1987), Luschnig (1988), Goff (1990), and Mueller (2011a).

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business. He requests of one of the slaves carrying him to hold on, so that he may rest his exhausted body (σχές, ἀπειρηκὸς σῶμ᾽ἀναπαύσω), as well as cautioning them as a group to handle his torn skin gently (ἀτρέμα, δμῶες, / χροὸς ἑλκώδους ἅπτεσθε χεροῖν) and asking, “Who is on my right side?” (1354–60). He then makes a more overt and detailed call for display, ordering them in an elegantly balanced pair of phrases to lift him up carefully and draw him forward with muscles held tight (πρόσφορά μ᾽αἴρετε, σύντονα δ᾽ ἕλκετε), calling upon Zeus as his witness (1361–63). The scene thus runs parallel to that of the Women of Trachis in this regard as well, although again Hippolytus’ diction is more concise, his pacing more rapid—both of which seem in keeping with his chaste athleticism and reserve, as opposed to Heracles’ sexually rapacious, violent, and generally excessive type. These directives soon dissolve into sung lamentation, punctuated by further cries (αἰαῖ αἰαῖ, 1370, ἰώ μοί μοι, 1384), but again the symmetry and elegance of this articulation of pain is striking, as the song matches the speech in length and balance between outcry and exclamation. Hippolytus now moves from bewailing the terrible pains in his head in clinical terms to the word repetition (epanodos) conventional in lyric lamentation: “And now the pains, the pains come upon me” (καὶ νῦν ὀδύνα μ᾽ὀδύνα βαίνει), he keens, “release me and let Death the Healer (Θάνατος Παιάν) arrive” (1371–73). He wishes, again in chiming phrases,that he might be destroyed on the spot (προσαπόλλυτ᾽ἀπόλλυτε); he wants to cut his life in two (διαμοιρᾶσαι) with a two-edged sword (ὑπ᾽ἀμφίτομου λόγχας) and lay it to rest (εὐνᾶσαι). We can note here as well the doubling and symmetry, with the repetition of two-ness and the pair of supplementary infinitives. After again invoking his father’s curse and again uttering cries of grief (ἰώ μοί μοι, 1384), he returns to the desire expressed at the outset—namely, that death may take him—but in parallel terms. Now he wishes that black Hades (Ἅιδα μέλαι- / να) and Night may lay him to rest (1388–90). Instead Artemis addresses him. The goddess, who comes down in an extended deus ex machina, has been standing silently present above the scene building since Hippolytus was borne onstage. He responds that he can smell her, an unusual sensory awareness for contact that is barely—or perhaps barely humanly—perceptible. “Oh divine breath of scent!” (ὦ θεῖον ὀδμῆς πνεῦμα), he exclaims, declaring that although he is in a bad way he senses her and this lightens his body (ἐν κακοῖς ὢν ᾐσθόμην σου κἀνεκουφίσθην δέμας) (1391–92). Artemis responds to his olfactory sensitivity by pointing out that she cannot weep for him, despite her pity in looking upon him (ὁρῶ· κατ᾽ ὄσσων δ᾽οὐ θέμις βαλεῖν δάκρυ, 1396). Nor can she witness his death, another prohibition that she expresses in notably synesthetic terms: “It is not right for me to look upon the dead,” she says, “nor sully my eye with dying breaths” (οὐδ᾽ ὄμμα χραίνειν θανασίμοισιν ἐκπνοαῖς, 1437–38). The phrase also echoes in reverse Hippolytus’ whiff of her divinity (cf. θεῖον . . . πνεῦμα, 1391), a sensual alignment that lends the scene an evanescence, a trace breath at the edge of the body, the human, and life. While Artemis encourages Theseus to embrace his son and draw him close (σὸν παῖδ᾽ἐν ἀγκάλαισι καὶ προσέλκυσαι, 1433), despite the hand he has had in his ruin, she herself draws back from the death scene and, as if imperceptibly, is gone. 41

Tragic Bodies

c. Covering and Touching Ajax Something parallel to the feminine recoil from viewing torment in Women of Trachis, and the male insistence on it, occurs in the Ajax at the first discovery of the hero’s corpse.42 As the chorus of sailors cries out at its discovery, Tecmessa declares it “not to be looked upon” (οὔτοι θεατός) and seeks immediately to cover it.43 She asserts, “No one, not even a friend, would dare to view him bubbling up dark blood from his nostrils and his gory wound” (917–19): Οὐδεὶς ἄν, ὅστις καὶ φίλος, τλαίη βλέπειν φυσῶντ’ ἄνω πρὸς ῥῖνας ἔκ τε φοινίας πληγῆς μελανθὲν αἶμ’ . . . When Teucer arrives on the scene he demands a viewing, although he deems it “the most painful to me of all spectacles that I have seen with my eyes” (ὦ τῶν ἁπάντων δὴ θεαμάτων ἐμοὶ / ἄλγιστον ὧν προσεῖδον ὀφθαλμοῖς ἐγώ, 992–93). He reports that he heard rumors, but now the actual sight of the draped corpse destroys him (ὁρῶν ἀπόλλυμαι, 1001). “Go ahead and uncover [it]”, he says, “so that I can look upon the entire woe” (ἴθ’, ἐκκάλυψον, ὡς ἴδω τὸ πᾶν κακόν, 1003). He then exclaims upon viewing, “Oh, sight hard upon the eye!” (ὦ δυσθέατον ὄμμα, 1004). At the end of his lamenting Teucer leans in and grasps his brother’s body, seeking to lift it free of the sword (σ’ ἀποσπάσω, 1024). This wrenching of Ajax’s giant corpse initiates a series of encounters that center on how it ought to be treated and how (literally) handled. First Menelaus comes barging in and declares that no one has the strength to bury such a giant corpse in his tomb (τοσοῦτον ὥστε σῶμα τυμβεῦσαι τάφῳ), demanding that it be exposed on the shore as food for the sea birds (1062–65). He adds that he and the commanders now rule entirely over Ajax, “guiding him with our hands” (χερσὶν παρευθύνοντες, 1067–69) and he warns Teucer that if he attempts burial he will end up buried himself (1089–90). They argue, Menelaus stomps off again, and Tecmessa enters with the child Eurysakes. Teucer instructs the boy to come and stand by his father’s side and touch the body (πρόσελθε δεῦρο, καὶ σταθεὶς πέλας, / . . . ἔφαψαι, 1171–72), holding in his hands (ἐν χεροῖν ἔχων) locks of hair from the three family members (1073–74). He urges him to hold onto and guard the hair (ἔχ’ αὐτόν, ὦ παῖ, καὶ φύλασσε) and to fall upon and hold the body (προσπεσὼν ἐχοῦ). He then commands the chorus (i.e., Ajax’s crew) to stand nearby and protect the body and its suppliant (ὑμεῖς  . . . πέλας  / παρέστατ’, καὶ ἀρήγετ’), lest someone come to pull them apart. When they do so, they sing of Ajax while living as a “bulwark against fear in the night and missiles” (νυχίου δείματος / . . .προβολὰ /

42 This is of course parallel to Artemis’ engagement in Hippolytus’ death scene as well, although her divinity at least purportedly drives her withdrawal there. 43 See Finglass (2009: 274–78) on Tecmessa’s covering of the body as a possible unveiling of herself; unveiling, as he shows, can be an act of female mourning; cf. Segal (1980: 128–29 and 1981: 117) and Worman (2001: 242–44) on the significance of the cloak and the imagery of enfolding.

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καὶ βελέων, 1211–13), their zeugma indicating both the material defense of Ajax’s famous shield and giant size and what these signaled (i.e., a general sense of protection).44 Enter Agamemnon, after a brief choral interlude, who does indeed threaten and insult the whole family, thus providing the affective opposite to the intimate handling that Teucer had just orchestrated. Teucer argues with him as well, and declares that if he should cast out Ajax’s corpse, he will cast out as well the three family members prepared to lie with it (βαλεῖτε χἠμᾶς ὁμοῦ τρεῖς συγκειμένους, 1306), as if their hands on his body achieved a permanent bond. Then Odysseus, in this play the consummate diplomat, intervenes and slowly turns Agamemnon aside from his violent intentions. He also offers Teucer assistance with the burial, but Teucer is reluctant to accept his helping hand (lit. “I shrink from allowing you to touch the tomb,” τάφου μὲν ὀκνῶ τοῦδ’ ἐπιψαύειν ἐᾶν), lest he do something that would seem badly handled to the dead man (τῷ θανόντι . . . δυσχερές) (1394–95). The play ends with preparations for the burial, in which Teucer sets the chorus members to various tasks and requests that Eurysakes “lovingly touch [Ajax’s] sides and lift them up with me” (φιλότητι θιγὼν πλευρὰς σὺν ἐμοί  / τάσδ’ ἐπικούφιζ’, 1410–11).45 i. Sidebar: Alcestis in the Borderland. The oddest aspect of another of the three onstage deaths in extant tragedy, that of Alcestis in Euripides’ play, is the absence of expressions of pain.46 While Ajax’s suicide by the sword also includes only his expressions of emotional distress and then his family’s mournful handling of his corpse, Alcestis’ slow demise should offer much more opportunity for the detailing of physical agony and the handling of her near-dead body. We can compare not only Heracles’ agonies but also those of Hippolytus, another character who dies onstage. Instead of cries of pain and exclamations over physical woes, what dominates her death scene is the eerie sense that she expresses repeatedly of the proximity of the underworld, her apprehension of it as just right there, while those living bodies around her seem barely proximate and do not, for the most part, touch her. The lack of touch also distinguishes this body in extremis, as the present chapter should make vibrantly clear. It is as if she were already at some distance from the living, such that their apprehension of her experience also sets her apart.47 For instance, the chorus hails her entrance by urging visual attention (cf. ἰδού

44

This is a good example of what I call the “materiality of the sign”: here enactment and figuration intersect around the corpse, amplifying its theatrical presence as a sign and object of defense. Cf. Worman (2001); also Burian (1972), Henrichs (1993). 45 Note that a similar scene ends the Women of Trachis, with Hyllus and attendants hovering around Heracles’ body, in preparation to carry him to his burial. 46 Counting Hippolytus as well as Ajax, with Heracles at the very end of Sophocles’ play a possible fourth. See esp. Markantonatos (2013: 56–85), who notes many of the “death’s edge” details of this scene but focuses more on narrative style and structure; contrast Chong-Gossard (2008: 80–83), who overplays Alcestis’ empowerment. 47 See Bassi (2018) on the “morbid materialism” of the play and its blurring of the divide between living and dead. See also Foley (1992) on the drama type, Rabinowitz (1993) on gender dynamics more generally, Dellner (2000) on the weird economies of the death exchange; and cf. Rehm on the “marriage to death” theme (1994).

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ἰδού, 232) to her and characterizing her as “moldering down under the ground to earthly Hades with sickness” (μυραινομέναν νόσῳ  / κατὰ γᾶς χθόνιον παρ᾽ Ἅιδαν, 236–37), while she utters no cries or indications of physical anguish during her time onstage. Her first lines, sung in processional anapests, address instead the sun and whirling clouds above, the house of her marriage and her bridal bed at Iolcus, and then—as if offering further geographical orientation of a place nearby—she declares that she sees (ὁρῶ . . . ὁρῶ, 252) also the lake and the ferryboat, with Charon at the helm, calling to her (Χάρων μ᾽ἤδη καλεῖ, 254–55). While Chapter  6 addresses more fully death-related phantom or proxy figures in Alcestis, here I want primarily to highlight how Alcestis’ bodily expiration seems to afford her a distinctive sensory apprehension rather than the more mundane but also more excruciating experience of bodily distress. While at one point she does request to be supported48 and express awareness of a weakness in her legs (κλίνατ᾽, οὐ σθένω ποσίν, 267) as well as a darkening of her vision (σκότια δ´ἐπ᾽ὄσσοισι νὺξ ἐφέρπει, 269), her attention seems more fixed on the ghostly realm adjacent to her. Thus the shadow that is creeping over her eyes is of a piece with her sense of being led into the courtyard of the dead (νεκύων ἐς αὐλάν, 260) by a winged guide (Thanatos  / Hades) who gazes at her from under dark-gleaming brows (ὐπ᾽ὀφρύσι κυαναυγέσι  / βλέπων πτερωτός, 261–62).49 In sharp contrast to Alcestis’ distanced vision and lack of physical intimacy, Admetus’ spoken responses to her sung entrance are pitiful as well as commonplace, focused on laments of his impending loss and attempts to revive his failing wife. He appeals repeatedly to the gods, while she behaves as if she were already with at least one of them. After a particularly plaintive request that Alcestis rise up and stay with her family instead, claiming that their own lives rest with her (ἐν σοὶ δ᾽ἐσμὲν καὶ ζῆν καὶ μή, 279), she rouses herself enough to speak at some length. This seems to focus her for a moment on her living circumstances, such that she wrests a promise from Admetus not to remarry, addresses her children directly, and hands them over formally to her husband (375–76). This brief gesture—which does seem quite formal and even formulaic (cf. the precise wording, χειρὸς ἐξ ἐμῆς δέχου·/ δἐχομαι, φίλον γε δῶρον ἐκ φίλης χερός)—may not involve actual touching, although it does serve to settle Alcestis more firmly in her family circle. At this final moment of her life, everything seems to pull in close, divine realm to the human and humans to each other. Admetus now cries out as if he too can apprehend Hades close at hand (cf. ὦ δαῖμον, 384), while her head droops and her eyes flutter (385–88). Soon she can no longer see those close around her—and then she is gone (390–95).

48 Alcestis may sink onto a couch, as seems a necessary prop for the carrying out of such a high-status death scene (see Dale ad 238–43, 266ff.). 49 There is a textual crux here, since although Thanatos is the winged figure that the audience would have already seen onstage, the manuscripts may read Ἅιδας; for various editors’ suppositions and Dale’s solution, see her apparatus and commentary (ad loc.).

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d. Handling Philoctetes and his Proxy/Prosthesis The bodies of both of Heracles and Ajax are threatened with violence by the sword and both at their own hands; and the action contrasts this violence, again in both cases, with the witnessing and gentle handling of their dead or near-dead bodies. The handling of weapons thus is closely juxtaposed with the treatment of the heroes, an unnerving coincidence that the Philoctetes draws out to the greatest extent. There the central struggle is over the Greek army’s need for Philoctetes’ bow, at least initially as opposed to Philoctetes himself, so that he and his proxy/prosthesis become entangled in the affective dynamics of the play. The army needs the bow, but they recoil from the hero, because he is such a noisy, festering thing (cf. 7–11). The play highlights repeatedly the grossness of the hero’s suppurating foot and the pain he suffers from it, as well as the sensory enmeshing it encourages (e.g., crying, oozing, viewing).50 Only Neoptolemus, sent by Odysseus to take the bow from Philoctetes, gets in close enough to serve as affective companion to this body’s excruciating sensory effects.51 When he draws near, Neoptolemus is overwhelmed by sympathy for Philoctetes’ condition, and between these two there are repeated intimate negotiations around handling his pain as well as his bow (e.g., 667–70 vs. 761, 816–17). Of the three plays discussed in this section, the Philoctetes stages what is by far the fullest experience of the hero’s body in pain. A pair of central scenes places side by side the handling of the bow and the intimate witnessing of his disease and sharing in its painful emanations. Philoctetes first urges Neoptolemus to approach and touch the bow (παρέσται ταῦτά σοι καὶ θιγγάνειν, 667), declaring that he should know himself as the only one worthy to touch it (ἐπιψαῦσαι, 669). Immediately after this exchange they enter Philoctetes’ cave, so that Neoptolemus can be in close attendance at his suffering (τὸ γὰρ / νοσοῦν ποθεῖ σε ξυμπαραστάτην λαβεῖν, 674–75). When they emerge after a brief choral ode, Philoctetes has an attack, screams that the disease is consuming him (βρύκομαι, 745), and calls out for Neoptolemos to take up his sword and cut off his foot (747–48; cf. 1204–07).52 Neoptolemus cries out in horror and pity, eventually asking Philoctetes whether he wants him to hold and touch him (βούλῃ λάβωμαι δῆτα καὶ θίγω τί σου;, 761). Instead, in a move that effectively offers the bow as a less abject proxy for his debilitated body, Philoctetes insists that Neoptolemus take it and keep it under careful guard (762–66). In fact, it is remarkable that the two do not touch except in formal pledge (see 50

That is, Philoctetes is a sensory virtuoso, screaming, festering, and even stinking, to the extent that he draws back from the assistance of Neoptolemus’ attendants (889–91); I address this festering foot in more detail in Chapter 4. On the Hippocratic background, see Biggs (1966), Kosak (2006), Allan (2014); cf. Worman (2000), Telò (2018). This is the only indication of stink in the plays under discussion here, a comparatively lowly sense perception especially when bad, and thus different in affective impact from (e.g.) Hippolytus’ whiff of Artemis mentioned above. But cf. Cassandra’s scenting the carnage in the house of Atreus (Ag. 2305–11), the Erinyes’ sniffing the blood on Orestes (Eum. 253), and the stink of Polyneices’ corpse (Ant. 412); and see further in Chapters 5 and 6. 51 Again, cf. Scarry’s contentions about the close-in experiencing of pain versus viewing from a distance (1985: 164–70). 52 Cf. Heracles (Trach. 1013–14, 1031–34) and Hippolytus (Hipp. 1375–76); Pucci (ad. 263-84) remarks instead on Philoctetes’ emphasis on his isolation.

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below), especially given that this play and this scene in particular stages such an elaborate display of the body in pain, complete with an affective companion.53 Instead the two characters handle the bow, and once Philoctetes has offered up this proxy item, the pain overwhelms him again. Now he accompanies his screams with threatening fantasies of the Greek commanders suffering similar agonies (791–95), interspersed with requests that Neoptolemus stay close to him. After this second outburst he also asks that Neoptolemus give him his hand in a pledge of loyalty (ἔμβαλλε χειρὸς πίστιν), and Neoptolemus complies (813–14)—again, the one time in all of this intimate experience of bodily suffering that the two touch.54 The scene ends with Philoctetes collapsed in a fevered sleep while Neoptolemus stands over him, holding the bow. The struggle over this weapon reaches its fullest pitch with the re-entrance of Odysseus, a bold schemer in this play. He brings with him a more violent form of touching, since he commands his attendants to seize Philoctetes, in order to prevent his threat of suicide (1003). An extended struggle ensues, during which Odysseus and Neoptolemus also draw their swords on each other; but because this is not a tragedy in the fullest sense, the weapons do not take on the ominous qualities or carry with them the grim atmosphere of the other two dramas. i. Sidebar: Orestes in Bed. Euripides’ Orestes offers an interesting contrast to the staging of Philoctetes’ body, although the bodily suffering it highlights is the result of madness and its display is restricted to one scene. This is also true of both Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Io in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, if we can consider Io’s goad as inflicting more mental than physical anguish. From the outset Orestes focuses on the shattered and outcast circumstances of both siblings, as they are now matricides threatened with death by angry Argive citizens. Helen, Menelaus, and Hermione hover in the background of this disaster, operating primarily as targets for the siblings’ often violent distress.55 Various characters draw near to assess and distinguish the physical marks of their debased states and they respond in kind. Electra, Helen, the chorus, and Orestes all highlight sense perceptions, in a progression ordered by increasingly intimate proximities: Helen emphasizes sight, the initial exchange between Electra and the chorus of Argive women centers on sound effects that emanate from bodies (voiced breath and footfall)—a kind of haptic sonics—and Electra and Orestes focus on touch.

53

See Schein (2013: 236) on the tenor of this scene and ad 263–66 on touching as a mark of weakness (citing Kosak [1999], who compares Heracles in the Women of Trachis and Pentheus in the Bacchae). Kosak (1999: 95–98) makes the point that touching among male characters who are not related is rare, which underscores the delicacy of the characters’ affective postures in this scene. Telò (2018) argues that these dynamics amount to the staging of affect as contagion. 54 Neoptolemus does help Philoctetes stand up in the next episode, a gesture paralleled by another intimate sense experience—namely, the hero’s concern about his smell (889–91). 55 For readings that focus on some of the most crucial aspects of the play for my purposes, see esp. Zeitlin (1980), Wohl (2012); for a thorough study of the play, see e.g. Porter (1994). For the disease imagery and representation of madness, see Smith (1967a), Theodorou (1993), Kosak (2004).

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The play opens with Orestes lying asleep on a bed (ἐν δεμνίοις, 35) apparently in the courtyard before the palace, Electra keeping vigil at his side.56 After a brief scene featuring a typically remote Helen, he awakens and initiates in concert with his sister a back-andforth maneuvering of his Furies-tortured body, which in this play has rendered him a near invalid. The scene includes quite a lot of handling, bodily contact, and stage business, set in action by the entrance of the chorus. As soon as they appear Electra cautions them with detailed attention to footfall: “Come forward with a quiet foot, do not strike, let there be no clatter” (ἡσύχῳ ποδί  / χωρεῖτε, μὴ ψοφεῖτε, μηδ’ ἔστω κτύπος); and they respond in kind, “Quiet, quiet, set down lightly the tread of your shoe, do not clatter” (σῖγα σῖγα, λεπτὸν ἴχνος ἀρβύλας  / τίθετε, μὴ κτυπεῖτ’) (136–41). She instructs them further to keep their voices like “a breath of the panpipes’ delicate reed” (σύριγγος ὅπως πνοὰ / λεπτοῦ δόνακος) and to “step over there, away from the bed” (ἀποπρὸ βᾶτ’ ἐκεῖσ’, ἀποπρό μοι κοίτας). When they obey she then reverses their direction, urging them to “draw in, draw in, come forward gently, gently come” (κάταγε κάταγε, πρόσιθ’ ἀτρέμας ἀτρέμας ἴθι) (145–49). Note that the focus is on the sound that emanates from footfall and accompanying voice (here the dance and song that Electra directs) and that Electra emphasizes proximity, repeatedly encouraging their breathy, soft choral orchestration. We can note as well the inter-sensory quality of the moment: Dionysius of Halicarnassus comments that their first words held the same note, and a scholiast says that the verses were all sung at the top of the register, but very quietly.57 As the chorus members softly breathe out their piping song and step close on gentle foot, they and Electra together create a warm body-to-body atmospherics that lends a protective intimacy to the scene. Upon Orestes’ awakening affective expression immediately shifts to the most proximate sense: touch. Electra inquires whether he wants her to touch him and lift him up (βούλῃ θίγω σου κἀνακουφίσω δέμας) and he responds by saying urgently, “Take hold, take hold” (λαβοῦ λαβοῦ δῆτ’), requesting in addition that she wipe the crust from his mouth and eyes (217–20). As befits this closest in of senses, the unpleasant detail is arresting for being so much the opposite of the distancing, elevating horror that viewing heroic bodies often inspires, such that it, like the intimacy of the scene, strikes a domestic rather than a tragic note. Orestes continues this matching of body parts, asking Electra to raise up his torso with hers (ὑπόβαλε πλευροῖς πλευρά) (221–24), now highlighting ribs, which usually figure in intimate bodily contact that accompanies familial or occasionally friendly propping up of bodies in distress, as with Pylades’ rib-to-rib support of Orestes later in the play (800).58 In Sophocles’ plays we see this with Heracles and Ajax,

56 Helen indicates where Orestes and Electra are and thus the mimetic use of the stage-building as palace when she calls to Hermione to come out of the halls (ἔξήλθ᾽, Ἑρμιόνη, δόμων πάρος, 112); as with other plays featuring this sibling pair, most of the spaces they occupy are marginal or exilic in one way or another. Rhesus is the only other extant play that opens with a character asleep onstage: the chorus of Trojan watchmen enter in the night, looking for Hector and then rousing him from his pallet of leaves (χαμεύνας φυλλοστρότους, 9). In the latter play, as Perris (2012) argues, the stage-building has a practical but no mimetic use: it does not appear to represent anything, as it is never referenced, though it is likely used to support the machine). 57 DH De comp. verb. 63; schol. ad 176. The meter is mostly dochmiacs, with some iambo-trochaic lines. 58 See further in Chapter 4 (1c).

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whose children are variously instructed to assist in lifting up by touching the paternal sides or ribs.59 The scene in Oedipus at Colonus, which I discuss in the following section, fashions something a bit different, a rib-to-rib contact that stages a kind of bodily parity and matching among Oedipus and his sibling children. In the case of Orestes, this rib maneuvering numbers among many bodily details, including the wiping of his mouth and eyes (ἐκ δ᾽ὄμορξον ἀθλίου / στόματος ἀφρώδη πελανὸν ὀμμάτων τ᾽ἐμῶν), the pushing back of his filthy hair from his face (καὐχμώδη κόμην / ἄφελε προσώπου), the lowering of his body back onto the couch (κλῖνόν μ᾽ἐς εὐνὴν αὖθις), and the raising up of it again and turning it (αῦθίς μ᾽ἐς ὀρθὸν στῆσον, ἀνακύκλει δέμας). This last request prompts Electra to ask if he wishes to put his feet on the ground (ἦ κἀπὶ γαίας ἁρμόσαι πόδας θέλεις) (222–35), so that he remains upright at least for a moment, as an indication of his momentary return to sanity. In its attention to minute detail the handling and display of this ailing body are quite distinct from the elevated horror of Ajax and Heracles, in the highlighting of gross specifics and the intimate tenor. That Orestes’ sickness is not fatal may contribute to this sense that the scene is less than fully tragic, although Electra does seem to think that he is already among the dead, uttering an exclamation that recalls the earlier Electra plays (ὀλόμεθ᾽ἰσονέκυες, ὀλόμεθα·/ σύ τε γὰρ ἐν νεκροῖς, 200–01). But rather than heightening the intensity of the scene, this deliberate echoing points up Euripides’ ironizing and innovating, as it contributes to the sense that these characters may be debased versions of their former selves. ii. Sidebar: Phaedra in Bed. While Hippolytus’ pain shares some gory details with the bodily unraveling of Heracles, Phaedra’s more closely resembles Orestes’, especially in suffering the result of mania rather than direct physical harm. In this regard the physical harrowings of both Phaedra and Orestes occupy a middle ground between such harm and the ravages of emotional torment. And yet both also share with other stagings of heroes in pain an emphasis on showing the body immobilized and the physical specificities of this state, as distinct from other scenes that showcase female suffering, which is often ambulatory, as well as from the one other distinctive female body in pain—namely, Io— whose agony is most distinguished by its mobilizing force, as noted above. The scene that features Phaedra’s pain is orchestrated in a triangulated fashion that is also similar to that staging Orestes’ manic sleep and awakening. In the chorus’ entry song (parodos), they set up this scene by relating their own domestic one: from a friend who was washing the purple mantles (πορφύρεα φάρεα, i.e., royal fabrics, 126), they have heard news of the queen. She lies on her bed, her body worn down by illness (τειρομέναν νοσερᾷ κοίτᾳ δέμας) and shades her shining head with fine mantles (λεπτὰ δὲ φάρη ξάν-  / θαν κεφαλὰν σκιάζειν); nor has she eaten for three days, her mouth unfed (ἀβρωσίᾳ / στόματος) and her body pure (δέμας ἁγνόν) of sustenance, seemingly due to

59

Cf. Pylades to Orestes: περιβαλὼν πλευροῖς ἐμοῖσι πλευρὰ νωχελῆ νόσῳ (800). In Euripides’ depiction Pylades stands in a similarly intimate relation to the sick man (cf. also 1069–84).

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some secret grief (κρύπτῳ πένθει) that makes her wish for death (131–39). The chorus then speculates about the causes of her malady, concluding with a generalizing strophe about the “uneasy harmony of women” (δυστρόπῳ γυναικῶν / ἁρμονίᾳ), who live with the helplessness of childbirth and the loss of sense (ἀφροσύνας) that attends it. And they confirm, “this draft has darted through my womb as well” (δι᾽εμᾶς ᾖξέν ποτε νηδύος ἅδ᾽ / αὔρα) (162–66). As with the nurse’s subsequent pondering of Phaedra’s condition, this moment introduces the possibility that “female complaints” and their affective contingencies might be what ails her, which contributes to the sense that her affliction is a physical and emotional condition brought on by forces beyond her control. The chorus members then see the nurse and attendants coming out of the house with Phaedra in obvious distress; they lower her onto a couch (cf. δέμνια κοίτης, 180), while the chorus exclaims at the physical evidence of her pain: her brow dark-clouded (στυγνὸν οφρύων νέφος), her body ravaged and pale (δεδήλεται / δέμας ἀλλόχροον) (172–75). After the nurse responds with more focus on her own troubles and expresses frustration that her mistress refuses to reveal the source of her pain, Phaedra’s first words are a request to the attendants for help with her body (198–202): Lift my body, straighten my head, I am unstrung in my own limbs. Take my lovely arms, attendants, the mantle is heavy for my head to hold— take it off, spread my hair on my shoulders. αἴρετέ μου δέμας, ὀρθοῦτε κάρα· λέλυμαι μελέων σύνδεσμα φίλων. λάβετ᾽ εὐπήχεις χείρας, πρόπολοι, βαρύ μοι κεφαλῆς ἐπίκρανον ἔχειν· ἄφελ᾽, ἀμπέτασον βρόστρυχον ὤμοις. The nurse, with maxims ready to hand like many a good slave in Greek tragedy, urges calm, telling her that she should be brave and not toss about so much (μὴ χαλεπῶς / μετάβαλλε δέμας), that noble types bear such agonies with tranquility, and that mortals must suffer (203–07). Phaedra’s response is to cry out (ἀῖ ἀῖ) and wish she could go to pure springs, to meadows, and then to mountain woods with the hounds—which brings her to Artemis and her racing grounds (207–31). That is, in her love-sickness she yearns for all of the spaces that Hippolytus frequents and his divinity oversees; and when she regains a measure of calm she wonders at herself and feels intense shame. She exclaims over her misfortune (φεῦ φεῦ τλήμων) and asks the nurse to cover her head again (πάλιν μου κρύψον κεφαλήν), saying that she is ashamed at her words; she then demands cover a second time (κρύπτε), since she is weeping and her “eye is turned to shame” (καὶ ἐπ᾽αἰσχύνην ὄμμα τέτραπται) (243–46). The nurse obeys and subsequently pivots between worrying about herself and trying to wrest information from Phaedra about the source of her troubles. While the remainder of the scene includes exclamations of woe 49

Tragic Bodies

and pain from Phaedra (e.g., οἴμοι, 311, φεῦ, 344, ἰὤ μοι, αἰαῖ, 569) and similar echoes from the nurse and chorus, once her head is covered those onstage refer to the physical impact of her love pangs as if she were not there. The mantling of her head and eyes instead renders her visible as an object to be assessed; and this is underscored by the fact that, as Glenn Most points out, the veiling also precipitates the cutting off of what he terms “discursive contact” between Phaedra and the other characters that lasts for a good sixty lines (250–310).60 Echoing their earlier expressions of distress, the chorus again exclaims over her weakened and wasted form (ὡς ἀσθενεῖ τε καὶ κατέξανται δέμας, 274), to which the nurse confirms that Phaedra has entered her third day without food and apparently aims to starve herself to death. To further questioning, she adds that the queen conceals her pain (κρύπτει γὰρ ἥδε πῆμα) and claims that she is not sick (κοὔ φησιν νοσεῖν) (275–79). The nurse does eventually address Phaedra directly, declaring that if she is in fact “ill from some unspeakable evil” (κεἰ μὲν νοσεῖς τι τῶν ἀπορρήτων κακῶν), the women are here to treat her sickness (συγκαθιστάναι νόσον). Or, she continues, if her ailment can be told to men, a doctor should diagnose it (293–96). Her alternatives reiterate the chorus’ speculations about female (i.e., gynecological) conditions, which sustain the possibility that Phaedra is also physically ill, a possibility that the nurse’s repeated use of a central term for sickness (nosos) reinforces. Phaedra only speaks again when the nurse’s rambling speculations stray into a line of thought that introduces Hippolytus, at the voicing of whose name she cries out in pain (οἴμοι, 311). The exchange that ensues between her and the nurse brings her back fully into verbal and physical contact, as the nurse supplicates her physically by grasping her right hand and knees, seeking to wrest information from her. The prominence of the proxemics and contact indicated by their language suggests that Phaedra has now moved from being handled with care to suppliant grappling that carries a physical and psychological pressure. When the nurse grabs her, she says sharply, “What are you doing? Are you hanging from me by force of hand [βιάζῃ χειρὸς ἐξαρτωμένη]?” The nurse responds, “Yes, and by your knees too!” They struggle, Phaedra exclaiming at one point, “Go away, by the gods, release my right hand [δεξιάν τ᾽ἐμήν]!” But then she gives in, yielding, as she puts it,“to the honor of your [suppliant] hand” (σέβας γὰρ χειρὸς αἰδοῦμαι τὸ σόν) (325–35). When she reveals the object of her desire, the nurse and chorus both respond with shrieks and lamentation, to which she responds with a noble speech announcing her intention to commit suicide. Among the many striking aspects of the blocking of bodies in the play concerns Phaedra’s presence and placement on stage, especially the fact that she may remain onstage, both living and dead, for most of the action. She doesn’t leave the stage until line 732; soon after the nurse screams from within the palace that Phaedra has hung herself

60 Most (2008: 63); cf. Smith (1960). On the staging, the doubled choral group, and gender dichotomies of the spatial scheme, see especially Easterling (1991); also Mueller (2016: 163–70). Hippolytus enters directly after Aphrodite’s prologue with his hunting companions and they sing a brief hymn to Artemis; then they exit into the palace, and the chorus of local women enter, singing about their concern for Phaedra, as detailed above.

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and the chorus members debate over whether they should go inside to help (777–89). When Theseus enters, the chorus tells him the terrible news and he dashes inside the palace, returning immediately on the rolling platform (eccyclēma) with the dead Phaedra at his side (790–817). As there is no indication that her corpse is ever carried offstage again, she may well remain there while the rest of the plot unfolds, including the return of the dying Hippolytus.61 This would mean that the two bodies lie, if not side by side, at least both in the same stage space, forming a physical bracketing of the action that foregrounds the conjunction of sexual agony and painful death. Of these plays, then, Women of Trachis and Hippolytus emphasize the detailed viewing and touching of the hero’s body in pain, while Alcestis centers less on handling or display and more on sensing at the edges of human life. Philoctetes stages the most elaborate sensory and affective surround for his ravaged form, with the handling of the bow standing in for touching and propping up Philoctetes himself. So too with Orestes and Phaedra, though in shorter compass and with the chorus participating more fully in the sensory engagement. In some contrast, the scenes in the Ajax center around a dead body, so that there can be no similar sensory and affective intimacy between sufferer and attendants. And yet the careful covering and uncovering of the hero’s corpse and the family’s holding onto and gentle handling of it communicates a sense of shared space and sensation, such that Teucer’s declaration that exposing Ajax will expose the whole family equally serves to underscore the profound claim of these familial proxemics. Further, for all of these plays, the characters and chorus members repeatedly draw in close to the characters’ abject bodies, mediating sensory and affective sharing for the audience. These intimate gestures also thereby counter some of the distancing effects of that abjection, the nearness of the emotional and physical experiences bridging at least to a certain extent the isolation of extreme suffering. Finally, in these scenes close-in viewing provides a sensory experience that parallels touch, sharing its intimacy and impact.

3. Oedipal Proxemics and Touching If we take a broad view of touching and other such intimacies in tragic representations of the Oedipus story, an immediate contrast emerges. While Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes and Euripides’ Phoenician Women treat the same events—the attack on Thebes by an Argive army led by Oedipus’ son Polyneices against his brother Eteocles and their subsequent killing of each other—the similarities end there. Aeschylus’ play stages plenty of sensory effects, especially as viewed by the messenger who serves as lookout and heard by the female chorus, but there is very little proximate engagement among 61 Barrett (ad 1090 ff.) does not address the issue, while Halleran (ad 1101) just assumes that Phaedra’s corpse, what he terms “the powerful visual stage property of the entire scene,” is removed, since Theseus cannot leave her there on the eccyclēma. While he may be right, the absence of any textual detail is curious.

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characters, let alone any touching. Euripides’ Phoenician Women, on the other hand, foregrounds physical intimacies and contact among characters, especially at the very end of the play when Antigone and Oedipus mourn their dead.62 This stark difference may be at least in part due to changes in tragic conventions over the decades between the plays, given that Aeschylus’ play was produced in 467, while Euripides most probably wrote his version in the last decade of his life.63 And yet the dramas are orchestrated so differently that it is tempting to see authorial inclinations in play as well, with Aeschylus centering the action on lofty, distanced visual effects and group reactions to these and Euripides pulling in close to the bodies of characters and their intimate tactilities and intersections. In Sophocles’ plays Oedipus’ body evokes intensified versions of such responses and group dynamics, as it devolves from heroic to debilitated. In Oedipus the King his confidence and physical dominance suffer a complete reversal, but as with Heracles in Women of Trachis the drama does not focus in on his actual body until late in the action, when it is no longer lofty. In Oedipus at Colonus the hero is onstage for most of the play and his body is focused on repeatedly, most especially for its horrifically debilitated state, as well as being handled gently and aggressed by turns. a. Sensing Oedipus In Oedipus the King the path to Oedipus’ tonal and physical reversal is a tortuous one. It begins in earnest with an agonistic exchange early on in the drama, in which the blind seer Teiresias warns Oedipus of his terrible devolution. He offers up a shadowy proxy for Oedipus and highlights (unsurprisingly) sight rather than touch, the vision of which is so cruelly dismantling of his kingly status that he cannot countenance it. He responds with violent anger, brutal insults, and a telling myopia, as if the seer’s words were calculated only to provoke and deceive him.64 Although Oedipus greets Teiresias graciously enough, he is soon addressing him as “worst of evils” (ὦ κακῶν κάκιστε, 334) and declaring him to be the criminal he seeks. He accuses him of being “blind” in all of his senses: “in ears and mind and eyes” (τυφλὸς τά τ’ ὦτα τόν τε νοῦν τά τ’ ὄμματ’ εἶ, 371). To this Teiresias responds, in a moment full of foreboding, “And you are wretched uttering these insults, which soon everyone will turn upon you” (σὺ δ’ ἄθλιός γε τοῦτ’ ὀνειδίζων, ἃ σοὶ / οὐδεὶς ὃς οὐχὶ τῶνδ’ ὀνειδιεῖ τάχα, 372–73). This quickly drives Oedipus to expound at greater length upon his sense of betrayal. He opens his speech by invoking his own wealth, sovereignty, and “skill beyond skill” (ὦ πλοῦτε καὶ τυραννὶ καὶ τέχνη τέχνης/ ὑπερφέρουσα, 380–81) as the source of such

62

On the manual contact, see Chapter 2 (1); on bodily assemblages and attachments, see Chapter 5 (2a). See Mastronarde’s Introduction; he thinks after 411–09 is most likely (1994: 11–14). 64 See Pope (1991) on Oedipus’ status and attitude. Neither Teiresias nor Creon gives Oedipus any obvious reason for his suspicions, beyond being slow to tell him what he wants to hear. Long ago Bernard Knox remarked on the strangeness of readers’ insistence that Oedipus the King is a play about fate; and at no juncture is this notion more clearly challenged than when the hero’s quick anger and outsized insults prevent him from hearing the seer, which thereby drives forward the plot that he has so cleverly devised. Of course, in Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus offers just this reading of his fate: he is not responsible, a plaything of the gods, etc. 63

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slander, claiming that Teiresias and Creon are plotting against him. His language is highhanded and insulting in the extreme; Creon, he says, desires to overthrow him and thus has sent in “this trick-stitching sorcerer here, a crafty beggar” (ὑφεὶς μάγον τοιόνδε μηχανορράφον,/ δόλιον ἀγύρτην), who is (again) “blind in his craft” (τὴν τέχνην  . . . τυφλός) (387–89). Oedipus also points out that unlike Teiresias he solved the Sphinx’s riddle, so that in his accounting the sovereign has all the skill that the seer ought to possess. Teiresias responds to Oedipus’ invective by once again rebounding the king’s taunts about his debilities. In a matched reversal of terms that succinctly clinches status and stature, the blind seer asserts his independence and his insight (410–14): For I am no slave of yours, but of Loxias Apollo, and so I will not inscribe myself in Creon’s service. But I declare, since you even taunt my blindness: You, though sighted, do not see where you are among evils, nor where you live, nor with whom you live. οὐ γὰρ τι σοὶ ζῶ δοῦλος, ἀλλὰ Λοξίαι, ὥστ’ οὐ Κρέοντος προστάτου γεγράψομαι. λέγω δ’, ἐπειδὴ καὶ τυφλόν μ’ ὠνείδισας· σὺ καὶ δεδορκὼς οὐ βλέπεις ἵν’ εἶ κακοῦ, οὐδ’ ἔνθα ναίεις οὐδ’ ὅτων οἰκεῖς μέτα. The seer goes on to deform the king’s glorious stature into a monstrous entity: a “doublestriking, deadly footed curse” (ἀμφιπλήξ . . . δεινόπους ἀρά) will, Teiresias warns, drive Oedipus from the land, in shadow (σκότον, i.e., blind), and with no harbor or mountain crag empty of his cries (417–21). Teiresias’ responses reduce the body of the king in tangible terms, so that here for the first time the tragic language throws up a kind of shadow figure, the shape of things to come: the cursed, blind, and friendless outcast. The end of the play fulfills this prophesy to the letter, when the blinded Oedipus reenters, fully aware of his curse and demanding exile. The audience hears him first: he shouts from offstage, “Open the doors!” in a directive gesture that is in keeping with his managerial style.65 The messenger cautions the chorus about the viewing experience to come: “Soon you will see a spectacle such as to arouse pity even for one horrified” (θέαμα δ’ εἰσόψει τάχα  / τοιοῦτον οἷον καὶ στυγοῦντ’ ἐποικτίσαι, 1295–96). The chorus then exclaims at the sight, “Oh suffering terrible for mortals to look upon” (ὦ δεινὸν ἰδεῖν πάθος ἀνθρώποις, 1297), a figure that conjoins in a close affective embrace Oedipus’ bodily pain with their own at seeing him.66 They soon claim that they cannot look at him (ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ἐσιδεῖν/ δύναμαί σε), although, as they state in a pairing that would have pleased Aristotle, 65 That is to say, Oedipus remains imperious to the end; Reinhardt emphasizes Oedipus’ oversight of this revelation (1947 [1979]: 140). See Nooter’s fine reading of the scene (2012: 92–98); also Seale (1982); Segal (1993b). Panoussis (2002: 151–52) oddly thinks that Oedipus is relatively passive in this scene. 66 Cf. Aristotle’s definition of pathos in Poetics 11, which as here conjoins the suffering body with the pain of looking; see further below.

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“there is much to learn and much to gaze upon” (πολλὰ πυθέσθαι, πολλὰ δ’ ἀθρῆσαι). And they add a comment on the frisson that the tragic sight entails: “Such a shudder has laid hold of me” (τοίαν φρίκην παρέχεις μοι) (1303–06). As I discuss in the Prologue, their use of deinos directly echoes the messenger’s repeated characterization of Oedipus’ shouting within. I would add that their emphasis on seeing not only responds to Oedipus’ selfblinding but also reiterates the messenger’s elaborate depiction of the sensory and affective horror of this blinding and supplements the king’s vocal excesses in the narrative that they have just heard.67 Here at the play’s end, Oedipus’ physical stature contrasts so fully with his intellectual and political one as to be singularly appalling.68 Oedipus now emerges as a “miserable form” (ἄθλιον δέμας)69 whose careful viewing he demands, a polluted thing that shocks Creon by its “uncovered” condition, as if it were already a corpse.70 Oedipus does indeed seem to luxuriate in his ravaged state (as per Reinhardt), a perversely aestheticizing extension of the play that is so elaborating as to give some editors pause.71 Like Heracles he lingers on the details of his physical undoing, offering his maimed body as the center point around which sensory and affective reactions cluster. As he fully confronts his status as a polluted being and expatiates on what he has been and done, he also engages in directorial gestures, drawing all eyes and some hands to him. By means of his manipulation of tragic viewing and proxemics, Oedipus insistently frames himself as the tainted and suffering target of communal denigration, so that here as well the hero oversees his defiled body’s tragic impact.72 To the chorus’ question as to how he could dare to put out his own eyes, Oedipus responds in a manner that again has double resonance as a hero’s distress and a comment on tragic spectacle—now what amounts to a direct rejection of it: “Why is there any need for me to see, who have no pleasure in the looking?” (τί γὰρ ἔδει μ’ ὁρᾶν, / ὅτῳ γ’ ὁρῶντι μηδὲν ἦν ἰδεῖν γλυκύ;, 1334–35). As Oedipus rehearses the gruesome facts of his family history and his own devolution, he repeatedly invokes sense perceptions, especially sight, and the pain they may bring. He opens his first speech in this final scene by asking again what he could possibly look upon with pleasure, rejecting even the thought of his children as desirable objects of sight (1371–77). He laments that he, “raised the single most glorious man, even among Thebans” (κάλλιστ’ ἀνὴρ εἷς ἔν γε ταῖς Θήβαις τραφεὶς) has now robbed his own self of the city’s proud trappings—citadel, tower, and statues of the gods—by unknowingly cursing the criminal. And he declares (1386–90),

67 For the tactile details of the blinding, see Chapter 4 (3b.i). For a more general discussion of how messenger speeches dovetail or suppplement onstage actions, see Barrett (2002). 68 Cf. again Reinhardt (1947 [1979]: 99). 69 Oedipus the King 1388; cf. Oedipus at Colonus 576, Women of Trachis 1079. 70 ἀκάλυπτον, Oedipus the King 1427; Cf. καλύψατ’, 1411. See also Ajax 916, 1003, Antigone 28, Women of Trachis 1078. 71 Again, some chose to excise sections of the final scene and/or credit them to later productions; see Olson (1989) for bibliography and overview; also Dawe’s commentary ([1982] 2006: 192–93). 72 Again, cf. Heracles at the end of Women of Trachis. On Euripides’ treatment of some aspects of this dynamic, see Zeitlin (1991).

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If there were a protection from hearing for the fountain of my ears, I would not hold back from locking up my wretched carcass, so that it would be blind and hear nothing. For to keep thoughts dwelling outside of evils is sweet. ἀλλ’ εἰ τῆς ἀκουούσης ἔτ’ ἦν πηγῆς δι’ ὤτων φραγμός, οὐκ ἂν ἐσχόμην τὸ μὴ ἀποκλῆισαι τοὐμον ἄθλιον δέμας, ἵν’ ἦ τυφλός τε καὶ κλύων μηδέν· τὸ γὰρ τὴν φροντίδ’ ἔξω τῶν κακῶν οἰκεῖν γλυκύ. In this recounting of his horrors Oedipus also achieves an exquisite calibration of antitragic aesthetics, moving from one sense to another and rejecting any pleasures that might be counted among tragedy’s bitter joys. His “wretched body,” which is this moment’s perfect object, seems to him something to be locked away, its senses cut off from any but the mildest of thoughts. It had, he now understands, always been a monstrous thing, for all its original beauty—“fairness,” as he says, “with an under-scar of evils” (κάλλος κακῶν ὕπουλον, 1396).73 Now that this body is revealed as the wretched thing it is, he matches his desire for its release from painful sights and sounds with a demand that he be tossed out or killed or covered over by the sea, so that he can never be looked upon again (ἔξω μέ που / ἐκρίψατ’, ἢ φονεύσατ’, ἢ θαλάσσιον / καλύψατ’, ἔνθα μήποτ’ εἰσόψεσθ’ ἔτι, 1410–12). That is, he now, in his ongoing manipulation of the spectacle, desires to remove himself from the stage as an object of tragic pleasure. As a supplement to all of this cauterizing of his other senses, Oedipus first seeks physical contact directly after he has demanded to be thrown out and thereby hidden from sight and hearing, as if this more lowly sense perception were better suited to his new status as a figure deserving condemnation. Touch, that is to say, seems to be of a different order at this moment in his tragedy’s unfolding. “Come,” he says to the chorus, “deign to touch this wretched man—be persuaded, do not fear” (ἴτ’, ἀξιώσατ’ ἀνδρὸς ἀθλίου θιγεῖν. / πίθεσθε, μὴ δείσητε, 1413–14). Although just before this he has lamented that by his hands the fatal crossroads drank his father’s blood (αἵ τοὐμὸν αἷμα τῶν ἐμῶν χειρῶν ἄπο / ἐπίετε πατρός, 1400–01), now he reaches for the hands of others. He seeks out his daughters in particular, explaining in markedly haptic terms how close they were: “Everything I touched they always shared” (ἀλλ’ ὅσων ἐγὼ / ψαύοιμι, πάντων τῶνδ’ ἀεὶ μετειχέτην, 1464–65). As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, which focuses on manual contact in particular, the staging at this late moment settles attention on Oedipus’ new dependence on this sensory replacement, as he finds his daughters with his hands and compares this tactile apprehension to sight (1469–70, cf. 1480–81).

73

Cf. again what Ahmed terms “border objects” (2004: 86–88).

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b. Oedipus in Abjection? Similarly, in Oedipus at Colonus, the play in which the exiled and debilitated Oedipus effectively stumbles into seeking sanctuary in Athens, he repeatedly reaches out for his daughters as a sensory replacement that is nonetheless unnerving for its pitiful necessity. It does not help matters that he is a horrifying sight: when the elders of Colonus who make up the chorus first enter they exhibit trepidation upon seeing and hearing Oedipus (he is “frightening to look upon, frightening to hear”, δεινὸς μὲν ὁρᾶν, δεινὸς δὲ κλύειν, 141). And yet they quickly turn to guiding him around the sacred grove by means of carefully orchestrated directives that indicate with unusual precision the blocking of this special stage presence. They do this from a distance, but with the more intimate assistance of Antigone, who reaches out to touch Oedipus, as he requests (Oedipus: “Now touch me” [πρόσθιγέ νύν μου]; Antigone: “Yes, I touch you” [ψαύω καὶ δή], 173).74 He may in his ravaged state seem similar to Philoctetes, but the initial receptions of these two exiles are quite different in relation to emotional response and proxemics. The step-by-step direction and hand-to-hand maneuvering of Oedipus’ body (again, especially by Antigone, who also props him up, 200–01) draw him in close to the communal interaction in a manner distinct from the fearful and distanced postures that the chorus and Neoptolemus (at least initially) adopt when confronted by Philoctetes. Although Oedipus is similarly outcast, and Creon at least thinks him worthy only of insulting forms of touching (i.e., manhandling), his daughters and the Athenians handle him with extreme care. Lowell Edmunds has remarked on the ways in which the action of Oedipus at Colonus centers around the body of the debilitated exile, placing it in careful proxemic counterpoint to other characters and ultimately ushering it offstage with some ritual pomp.75 While there is little question that this late drama frames Oedipus from the outset as a debased and outcast presence, the tensions it generates around this status appear to foster rather than impede communication (see further in Chapter  6). When Theseus recovers Oedipus’ daughters from Creon’s attempted abduction later on in the action, Oedipus again seeks them out (especially Antigone) physically, reaffirming the bond with them that is emphasized repeatedly when they are first onstage.76 He also fully marks out the stage business of their reunion: “Lean your torso into me, child” he urges each daughter, “embracing me on either side, in-growing to me who grew you” (ἐρεισατ’, ὦ παῖ, πλευρὸν ἀμφιδέξιον / ἐμφύντε τῷ φύσαντι, 1112–13). This is a remarkably detailed and physical family reunion, reverberating despite its apparent sweetness with echoes of the language of sowing that Oedipus and others used in the earlier play to revile the overdetermination of his kinship bonds.77 This threesome thus forges an arresting but

74

On the spatial indicators and proxemics of the scene, see Edmunds (1996: 51–53). Edmunds (1996); see also Murnaghan (1988). 76 Oedipus at Colonus 1102–03, 1112–14; cf. 173, 200–01 (Antigone), 329 (Ismene). 77 To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss; cf. Oedipus the King 1210–12, 1256–57, 1485, 1497–98; cf. 259–60, 457–60. See Knox (1957: 113–16). The verb ἐμφύω, literally to “implant,” also has the haptic sense of to “cling on hard to the hand” in Homer. 75

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adumbrated tragic entity; it is simultaneously moving and unsettling, an anomalous assemblage within any aesthetic scheme. Its ethical impact is equally ambiguous, since the poignancy of the familial tableau urges mutual support and incorporation, while the blind man’s need for touch seems only too convenient given the double bond with his daughters that lends this tableau its incestuous cast. At the center of all this physical contact in the Colonus play is Oedipus’ body, for which Oedipus himself urges a special consideration and the strange status of which he highlights. Isolated and yet unnervingly familiar, for Kristeva Oedipus remains a figure of abjection at Colonus, but now by signaling in language the “the gouged-out eye, the wound, the basic incompleteness” of the human condition.78 This Oedipus dramatizes by talking and gesturing his way toward exalted status and the grave, so that communication and contact in this play run counter to the isolating horrors of abjection. Thus Theseus, the Athenians, and by extension Athenian audiences receive the abject body of the outcast hero with a wary but profound reverence. It is, as Oedipus himself admits, “not excellent to the eye” (οὐ σπουδαῖον εἰς ὄψιν, 577), which means that, in Aristotle’s terms, it is not conventionally tragic (Poetics 1449b24–25; cf. 1448a1–2, b34–35). It is compelling and yet frightening to approach or touch, an anomalous form just beyond reach of comprehension if not of hand. This is precisely the confluence that Kristeva characterizes as central to the abject, especially in relation to Oedipus when he is at Colonus: deserving of rejection or reverence? Profound or perverse? Revolting or sacred? Such awareness captures something deeply mysterious about the Oedipus plays. Touch should be the impossible gesture in the handling of Oedipus, and not only because he is ravaged and outcast and thus tainted. His sexual adventures with his mother and his murderous encounter with his father suggest that in this family sheer proximity has a terrible realization in touch. And yet Oedipus at Colonus seems to indicate quite the opposite, to offer as a corrective the helping and the healing hand.79 In keeping with this reverential treatment, late in the play Oedipus undergoes a final transformation from abject and piteous to transcendent—at the edge of rapture and close to the gods.80 In his final moments onstage, we see this elevated aesthetic played out in sensory and affective terms, as Oedipus breaks with the sensations and emotions that he shared with his daughters and Theseus to move into a space beyond. Now, in his lofty state he cannot be handled or guided, as he warns his daughters: “Come forward, but do not touch, let me find the holy tomb myself!” (χωρεῖτε, καὶ μὴ ψαύετ’, ἀλλ’ ἐᾶτέ με  / αὐτὸν τὸν ἱερὸν τύμβον ἐξευρεῖν, 1544–45). As the light that is no light to him touches his form for the last time (ὦ φῶς ἀφεγγές . . . / νῦν δ’ ἔσχατόν σου τοὐμὸν ἅπτεται δέμας),

78

Kristeva (1980: 105) : “l’oeil crevé, la blessure, l’incomplétude fondamentale”. See again Edmunds (1996); also Murnaghan (1988). Cf. Euripides’ Phoenician Women, which ends with touching as protecting and caring for the dead, though not without the shadow of the family drama lending the contact a creepy resonance. 80 Haselswerdt (2019) discusses the relation of sound to these effects in the play; cf. Susanetti (2011) on the broader politics of such relations. For the place of the sublime in ancient aesthetics, see Porter (2010: 453–519, 2016). 79

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he moves as if in processional off the stage, exclaiming in priestly fashion to those gathered around him, “Blessings on you forever!” (εὐτυχεῖς ἀεί) (1549–55). This drama centered on viewing and touching the tragic form continues in the messenger’s speech, now at a sensory remove for both chorus and audience but with the additional aural accompaniment of a thunderous divinity. As the messenger relates, when Zeus Chthonios rumbles in forewarning, Antigone and Ismene quake and weep and fall at their father’s knee in lamentation (ἐς δὲ γούνατα / πατρὸς πεσοῦσαι ᾿κλαιον, 1607–09). Oedipus first embraces his daughters (πτύξαις ὲπ’ αὐταῖς χέρας, 1611); but then the god roars out an inquiry as to why he delays, which causes everyone’s hair to stand on end (1624–25). He then commands his daughters to join hands with Theseus in a shared pledge of loyalty (δός μοι χερὸς σῆς πίστιν ἀρχαῖαν τέχνοις / ὑμεῖς τε, παῖδες, τῷδε, 1632–33). As he moves off, he nudges his children away with gentle hands (ψαύσας ἀμαύραις χεραῖς, 1639), since only Theseus can accompany him further into the grove. But soon the point comes at which even Theseus cannot draw close to his near-heavenly form: when Oedipus vanishes, the messenger explains, “The king himself held up a hand to his head, shielding his eyes, as if from some awesome terror made manifest and unendurable to look upon” (ἄνακτα δ’ αὐτὸν ὀμμάτων ἐπίσκιον / χεῖρ’ ἀντέχοντα κρατός, ὡς δεινοῦ τινος  / φόβου φανέντος οὐδ’ ἀνασχετοῦ βλέπειν, 1650–52). Even in the narrative, and even as it recedes from what is already a profound sensory remove, Oedipus’ body sustains its unique character as something to be carefully handled while he carefully handles others, until at last it retreats into a fully mysterious realm and slips from the audience’s grasp as a tragic object. The peculiar intensities of the tragic experience lie at least partly here, where verbal directives and proxemics highlight the body’s stature and senses, drawing the audience’s own sensory reactions and perceptions toward abject sights and urging their uncanny attractions by indications of proximity and touching. These directorial gestures and the tremulous reception of the internal audiences model for the audience how to look, draw near, and respond to touch—as well as how to understand what such proxemics and handling mean in relation to debilitated characters (usually male heroes) and their abject bodies.81 Further, focusing on the moments that stage reactions to the devolutions of heroic forms opens a distinctive angle on this impact, foregrounding frictions between debased yet intimate and carefully maneuvered bodies on the one hand and the elevating, often distancing language of tragic awe on the other. This brings us back to aesthetics and aisthēsis, to art and the body’s sensory and affective surround, and so to the special status of touch within the aesthetic scheme. Of the senses central to tragic enactment (again, setting aside taste and smell), only touch demands body-to-body proximities, and thus the sharing of space and experience. While the audience can see and hear in parallel with the chorus and characters onstage, touch is both unshareable and yet the sense that encourages its extension via the “tactility” of

81

See Worman (1999b, 2000, 2001).

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sense memory and embodied spectatorship. If by such means touch drops one in close, sometimes terrifyingly so, its dramatization also has need of sight for its impact—a kind of mirror effect of Oedipus’ sensory deprivation. In fact, this need may expose the outermost of all those uncanny reverberations for which Oedipus’ blind groping serves as the catalyst: his sightless need for touch both echoes and compensates for his transgressive handling of his parents, while the audience effectively shares his need by experiencing this sensory compensation in reverse.

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CHAPTER 2 THE SIBLING HAND: MANUAL EROTICS AND VIOLENCE

When vision tends no longer to distinguish itself from the seen or the visible, it is as if the eye touched the thing itself—or better yet, in the event of this encounter, as if the eye let itself be touched by it. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy The scholarly emphasis on sight in Greek tragedy has until recently tended to eclipse proper attention to the multiple (and often conflicting) sensations generated onstage and induced in the audience.1 Although an emphasis on other senses may be expected in the plays that center on the blind Oedipus (especially in Oedipus at Colonus), in this chapter I include another family and a different “touching” narrative: the manual contact dramatized most especially in Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes. At significant moments in both the Oedipus plays and in these ones, close-in viewing and bodily proximities (whether enacted or envisioned) lead to touching, in the sense of intentional manual contact aimed at a particular outcome, which is usually protective or aggressive. These moments lend the sibling drama a charged and unsettling tenor, as sisters fondle brotherly tokens and brothers lay hands on their sisters. Such intimate dynamics represent what we might think of as extreme proxemics, in that they aim at getting as near to another or others as possible, and even sometimes merging with them, as with Oedipus and his “ingrowing” siblings.2 Indeed, in the dramas with which I am most concerned here, the strongly gendered tensions of pivotal scenes often inflect the emotional atmosphere that attends them with psychic recoil, so that proximity itself carries violent or perverse undertones. Thus, for instance, in Euripides’ Electra the sister spies her brother drawing near and sees a rapist, while he claims (long before revealing himself) that there is no one he has more right to touch. Sophocles’ Electra, in contrast, wants to lie with her brother in the urn that she clutches; similarly, when Orestes, in Euripides’ play of that name, embraces Electra and declares that their love replaces children and the marriage bed, she responds by wishing they could lie together in the same coffin.3 I take up this play with bodies and containers in more detail in Chapter 4; here I want to focus attention instead on manual contact and handling as the most intentional and 1

E.g., Seale (1982); Segal (1980, 1993b); Wiles (1997); Rehm (2002). On proxemics, see again Serpieri (1978) and Elam (1980). 3 Cf. Antigone, where this most enmeshed of family members declares her loyalty to the dead Polyneices in similarly proximate (and provocative) terms: “I shall lie with [Polyneices], [female] loved one with [male], criminally fulfilling sacred rites” (φίλη μετ’ αὐτοῦ κείσομαι, φίλου μέτα / ὅσια πανουργήσασ’, 73–74). 2

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directed aspect of the tactile and proximate dynamics that I set forth in Chapter 1. As the previous chapter indicates, many tragedies feature various types of bodily tactility and touching, but highlight proxemics and witnessing rather than the purposive aspects of handling. Again, in tragedy this is almost never neutral, being either protective or aggressive, even when misread by characters as one or the other. Tactility and touch more generally may, in contrast, occur without purposive handling, but it is very rare that characters come into contact with one another’s other body parts without intending to (in fact, I cannot think of an example).4 This is as opposed to touching with very meaningful intention (think, again, of Oedipus’ familial rib contact). One complication of focusing in on this most deliberate of bodily contact in this way is a problem of terminology, since in ancient Greek (as in modern) the term for hand, cheir (Gr. χείρ), may extend all the way up the arm in effect—so that, for instance, someone may throw her hands / arms around others (e.g., Jocasta with her sons, see below), while someone else may distinguish the two, as Heracles does in Women of Trachis (“Oh hands, hands [χέρες], oh back and breast, oh dear arms [βραχίονες],” 1089–90).5 Where it seems relevant and significant I thus treat references to arms as indicating the natural extensions of manual contact, especially in cases of embracing or supplication. That said, hands themselves have a unique function in relation to touch, not only as its most prominent intentional instruments but also as the metonyms for contact more generally. In this way they focalize conceptions of touch, so that despite the fact that they are not organs unique to their sense (as are eye, ear, nose, tongue) they often stand in for more general bodily contact and thus function as if they were.6 Their complex configuration, multiple capabilities, and sensitivities contribute to the ways in which theorists have treated haptic experiences as multi-sensory; that is to say, it is not only skin’s whole-body inclusiveness but also hands’ purposiveness and focalizing capacities that render them unique sensory instruments. In chapter 8 of On Touching Derrida, discussing Husserl’s analysis of touch in the latter’s Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, notes that he singles out the hand as its primary organ and unique to humans.7 While Derrida is critical of this human-centric focus, he also highlights the fact that Husserl considers touch to be the essential body-constituting sensation, with the hand as the vehicle for the “double apprehension” of the touched hand touching that Merleau-Ponty also focuses in on in The Visible and the Invisible.8 Derrida’s discussion as a whole assumes the primacy of the hand in theorizing touch while also pointing out the assumptions that this entails, including that it serves as the physicalized metonym for hapticity more generally. As he

4

Even contact that misses carries intention, as when Haemon attempts to stab his father and misses (Ant. 1231–34); but note that this gesture even achieved would not involve direct manual contact. 5 See further in Chapter 1. 6 That touch does not have a unique organ is, to be sure, one of the difficulties of analyzing it, as Aristotle worried over (De Anima 2.11.422b19–23); and in fact in other chapters I focus more on skin, which he identifies as the primary medium of touch. 7 Derrida ([1999] 2005: 159–82, chapter 8), on Husserl ([1952] 1989). 8 Merleau-Ponty (1968: 130–35).

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puts it in an earlier chapter centering on Nancy (as well as Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze and Guattari), “the haptical virtually covers all the senses wherever they appropriate a proximity.”9 That is to say, not only do hands serve a prosthetic function as extensions of or supplements to other sense organs—as in eye–hand coordinating, for instance—but they also ground the whole-body technics of drawing near to something or someone. Thus there is, for Bergson and his followers, a sense in which the optical becomes haptical, as if the eye were reaching out to an object and feeling its contours. As Derrida also points out, in Corpus Nancy discusses touch as “local, modal, fractal,” as a means of both calling attention to the immediacy of touch and tracking its limits and its reflexivities, including the self-touching that he terms syncope.10 In the sections that follow I first rehearse in brief the staging of Oedipus in Sophocles’ plays that draws attention to manual contact among family members, what Oedipus refers to as “the sibling hand.”11 I then consider Euripides’ Phoenician Women as a gendered and sensory reorientation of the family story in Sophocles, which foregrounds the female members and implicates them and the spectators in an excruciatingly handson close encounter. As Chapter 1 argues, in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays directorial gestures and the tremulous reception of the internal audiences model for spectators in the theater audience ways of seeing, approaching, and reacting—as well as suggesting what such proxemics mean in relation to this familial bonding, in which every intimate gesture carries an incestuous taint. In some contrast, the affective and sensory handling orchestrated in the sibling plots of the Atreid clan suggests that existential distancing or disorientation and disturbing proximities lie just beyond or behind their close encounters, so that intimations not only of incest but also of violence and (self) deception hover around their contact and connections. I look in detail at Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra plays as well as Euripides’ Orestes and Iphigenia in Tauris, all of which feature familial plotting that lends actions an at times startlingly sensual and brutal edge. The sibling dramas thus sustain a level of menace, with loving contact offset by the murderous hand—and the Electra plays are striking in this regard as well. In Sophocles’ version the counterpoint to Electra’s fondling of the urn is her own violent appendage, while in Euripides Electra lays her hand with Orestes on the deadly sword at their mother’s breast. In the final section of the chapter I consider an adjacent cluster of effects: manhandling or manual menacing that is not all in the family but that involves sexual and racialized threats (and so shares dynamics with sibling touching) or of wounding and death (and so also involves weapons as manual prostheses). The former is especially prominent in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, where Zeus “Toucher” looms as both generator and violator, as well as in Euripides’ Andromache, although there the menace is cast more overtly in dehumanizing terms.12 The latter (i.e., 9

Derrida ([1999] 2005: 124). See also the discussion in Being Singular Plural ([1996] 2000); Derrida ([1999] 2005: 11–31, Chapter 6). 11 Sophocles, Oedipus the King 1481: τὰς ἀδελφὰς τάσδε τὰς ἐμὰς χέρας; cf. Euripides, Orestes 221–22 and further below. On Oedipus’ feet, see Catenaccio (2012). 12 I.e., Andromache is distanced as a foreigner and a slave, as well as associated in affective terms with the statue of Thetis that she embraces as suppliant. 10

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the weapon as manual prosthesis) is especially evident in Sophocles’ Ajax, in which the hero’s murderous hand clutching Hector’s sword carries a threatening charge throughout the first half of the play, culminating in him turning it on himself. Something similar occurs with Oedipus, in which the murderous hand is one he cannot recognize as his own until painfully late in the action. As might be expected, Heracles’ hands in Euripides’ play devolve from protective to destructive in the course of the action, as well as resonating in illuminating ways with his physical presence in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis.

1. Hands-on Family At the end of Oedipus the King, the blind Oedipus begs Creon to allow him to touch his daughters with his hands (καὶ μάλιστα μὲν χεροῖν  / ψαῦσαι μ’ ἔασον). When Creon complies, he exclaims to them, “Touching with my hands I seem to have you, just as when I saw!” (χερσί τἂν θιγὼν / δοκοῖμ’ ἔχειν σφᾶς, ὥσπερ ἡνίκ’ ἔβλεπον) (1466–70). But they appear elusive, so that soon he is asking piteously, “Oh children, wherever are you? Come here, come to my hands, these that are sibling” (ὦ τέκνα, ποῦ ποτ’ ἐστέ· δεῦρ’ ἴτ’, ἔλθετε / ὡς τὰς ἀδελφὰς τάσδε τὰς ἐμὰς χέρας, 1480–81). Despite the pathetic tenor of the scene and the obvious need for the blind man to replace his lost sense with this other one, it is difficult to avoid the disturbing extensions that touch must carry with it for this family: the shadow of incest, the sibling hand that is also a paternal one.13 In its heated emphasis on familial haptics and proximities, Euripides’ Phoenician Women seems to take up the challenge of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and hand it on (so to speak) to Oedipus at Colonus. As Chapter 1 explores, the plays involving this troubled clan and especially its patriarch Oedipus emphasize the sensory experience that the audience cannot share: touch. Once Oedipus has lost his sight—among extant tragedies the standard dramatization of which is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King—he repeatedly calls out for this supplement, asking to touch and be touched, demanding positioning and proximity. The audience witnesses this charged sensory supplement in full force at the end of Oedipus the King and pretty much throughout Oedipus at Colonus. Given the family history, this emphasis on touching carries with it perverse undertones, inflections of incest always hovering around any fond familial embrace.14 Euripides’ Phoenician Women, in prominent contrast, foregrounds Jocasta as the play’s affective pivot and narrator: she orchestrates much of the looking, the touching, and the telling.15 Produced a few years before Oedipus at Colonus, the play covers the action of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, namely, the attack of the Argive army led by the exiled

13

I consider the more self-reflexive resonances of Oedipus’ distinctive hands at the end of this chapter. See also Worman (2017). 15 See Saxenhouse (2005) and Lamari (2007) on the gender dynamics; Rawson (1970) and Swift (2009) on familial relations; Scharffenberger (1995) and Lamari (2010, 23–29) on Jocasta’s multiple narrative modes; Papododima (2016) on the dynamics of fear. 14

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Polyneices and Eteocles’ attempted defense of Thebes.16 In Aeschylus’ play Jocasta and Oedipus are nowhere to be seen, since the one is dead, the other in exile. Euripides instead surrounds the filial battle and deaths with close-in sibling and parental dynamics, orienting the familial discord by means of an array of aesthetic indicators, including dress, postures, proximities, and touching. The most striking of these for our purposes involves Antigone, although her role is importantly calibrated in relation to her mother’s initially more dominant affective orchestrations. I take up other aspects of Phoenician Women in Chapter 5, which centers around clothing and bodily attachments; here I want to isolate a few late scenes that highlight touching and especially familial hands. As one might expect, this emphasis on hands comes most to the fore when Antigone is left nearly alone with a family of corpses. Her description of the ends of her brothers’ and mother’s lives, while it replays the scene that the messenger relayed to Creon earlier, also engages in a kind of hand-shadowing of the gestures to come. As she tells it, at the end Eteocles reached out a damp hand (ὑγρὰν χέρα) and wept; Polyneices asked his mother to close his eyes with her hand (ξυνάρμοσον δὲ βλέφαρά μου τῇ σῇ χερί); and finally Jocasta slit her throat and fell upon them, throwing her hands/arms about both (περιβαλοῦσ’ ἀμφοῖν χέρας) (1433–59). Left alone, Antigone calls upon Oedipus, demanding that he come from the halls and witness (as best he can) the destruction of their family: “Leave your chambers,” she shouts, “come out with your ruined eye [ἀλαὸν ὄμμα], show your wretched self, you who drag out a long-laboring life, having cast a murky darkness over your eyes [ἀέριον σκότον ὄμμασι / βαλών]” (1530–35). When he enters, Antigone sustains this focus on his sensory deprivation, immediately confirming what has happened in a manner in keeping with it: “Your sons and your wife,” she cries, “no longer look upon the light—she who guided your blind-stepping foot [πόδα σὸν τυφλόπουν]” (1547–49). Oedipus moans repeatedly, driving Antigone to exclaim, “If only you could see the four-horsed chariot of the sun and cast the rays of your eyes upon the bodies of the dead!” (1562–64). Her emphasis on sight bridges the eye–hand coordinating of her description of her dying family and the handling of corpses to come. It also lends a palpable “haptic visuality” to the scene, as the action slowly draws in close to laying hands upon the dead. The final scene revolves around Oedipus and the unique aesthetics that his presence initiates. It is conducted as a series of sensory exchanges, centering on the language of touching and hands. He asks to touch Jocasta (ψαύσω) and Antigone replies, “Here, touch your dearest one with your aged hand” (ἰδού, γεροιᾷ φιλτάτης ψαῦσον χερί). He does so, calling her both mother and wretched wife, as if in confirmation of the perversion that lurks behind his putting hands on her dead body. He then asks for his sons, and that Antigone stretch forth what he terms his “blind hand” (τυφλὴν χεῖρ’) to their faces. Again she complies with guiding words: “There, touch your dead sons with your hand” (ἰδού,17

16

Euripides’ play is also aesthetically engaged with this play, but more at the level of visual imagery. Since ἰδού literally means “look,” its repetition here raises the possibility that it serves as an injunction aimed at the spectators, as a way of compelling the gaze and thereby implicating both chorus and audience in the affective dynamics of the scene. 17

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θανόντων σῶν τέκνων ἅπτου χέρι) (1693–1700). The exit from the stage of this sad pair is achieved in similar terms and by engaging similar sensory connections. “Stretch forth your dear hand” (χέρα φίλαν), Antigone says, and when Oedipus begins to move forward, she conducts him precisely, saying, “Here and here step with me, placing your foot here and here” (τᾷδε τᾷδε βᾶθί μοι / τᾷδε τᾷδε πόδα τιθείς) (1710–22). Together they sing a lament for their fate, he regretting the Sphinx (1728–33) and she her lost virgin days, while still swearing she will bury her brother (1737–46). He joins her in her maiden’s regrets, now intermingled with her bold challenge. At the last he turns to the audience (πολῖται) and asks that they “look upon this Oedipus here” (λεύσσετ’ Οἰδίπους ὅδε), now overtly interpellating the audience as witnesses in a mode in which he cannot join (1758). As with Sophocles’ Oedipus, at this moment the blind hero seems to be at once the most and the least tragic of objects: most aesthetically vibrant and yet least capable of participating in the affectivities of the very art form that he always and until the very last insists on stage-managing.18

2. Killing Versus Loving Hands (Aeschylus to Sophocles) The other prominent family whose manual contact carries a parallel combination of violent and erotic overtones is, again, that of the house of Atreus. From the prospect of our focus on manual contact, violent or otherwise, Aeschylus’ Oresteia looks to be pitched between the mother’s murderous hand in the Agamemnon and Orestes’ mother-killing hands in the Eumenides.19 In the first play this comes to a head when Clytemnestra emerges from the palace (likely on the rolling platform) with the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, celebrates her deadly victory, and responds to the chorus’ horror with an explicit demonstrative gesture that reveals her unwavering control and finality: “This is Agamemnon,” she says, “my husband, and a corpse, the work of this my right hand, a righteous craftsman” (οὗτός ἐστιν Ἀγαμέμνων, ἐμός  / πόσις, νεκρὸς δέ, τῆσδε δεξιᾶς χερὸς  / ἔργον, δικαίας τέκτονος, 1404–06).20 Her pairing of the fierce deixis with the designation of her hand as craftsman renders her dead husband an object of her making, while her hand takes on the status of human agent rather than tool.21 18 As with the end of Oedipus the King, commentators have long questioned the authenticity of parts of the final scene, including especially these trimeters at the end. Since the lines appear to address the Athenian audience directly (i.e., they cannot be addressed to the internal chorus of Phoenician women and no one else is present), scholars are united in regarding them as interpolated, much like those at the end of Oedipus the King (e.g., Pearson [1908: xli–ii]; Powell [1911: 22–24]; Mastronarde ad loc.). For my purposes, this matters little if at all, since either way they are part of the play as received and thus key to the conventions of Oedipus’ representation. 19 The references dominate the second half of the first play (Ag. 1111, 1350–57, 1496, 1520) and the first half of the third (Eum. 42, 102, 592, cf. 237, 280, 313, 317, 446, also Cho. 1055). Cf. Worman (2018). 20 The only other primary references to hands in the Agamemnon involves the earlier revenge of Atreus, who tricks his brother Thyestes into eating his own children (1217–22, 1582–97). Taken together with the manual violence in the trilogy as a whole, it serves as backdrop to later plots involving the siblings. Scholars have accordingly focused attention on other more prominent images in the trilogy, including nets and animals— e.g., Goheen (1955), Lebeck (1971), Heath (1999). On coverings and nets, see Chapters 3 (1a) and 5 (1); on creatures, see Chapter 6 (1a.i). 21 I thank Cat Lambert for this crucial observation.

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The end of the Libation Bearers echoes this focus on the murderous hand, but as if in reverse: when Orestes cries out that he sees the “dogs” (i.e., the Erinyes) of his mother, the chorus responds, “You have the blood still fresh on your hands” (ποταίνιον γὰρ αἷμά σοι χεροῖν ἔτι, 1054–55). In the final play the priestess of Apollo at Delphi reels back out of the temple upon spotting Orestes sitting within, dripping blood from his hands and holding both a newly drawn sword and the suppliant’s olive branch (αἵματι / στάζοντα χείρας καὶ νεόσπαδον ξίφος / ἔχοντ᾽ ἐλαίας θ᾽ὑψιγέννητον κλάδον, 41–43). When he emerges he claims that his hands are clean (οὐδ᾽ ἀφοίβαντον χέρα, 237, cf. 280, 446)— despite the fact that the ghost of Clytemnestra draws attention to the gashes made by his “mother-killing hands” (πρὸς χερῶν μητροκτόνων, 102) and the Erinyes think very much otherwise (313, 317). He also needs the protection of divine materials, such that he shuttles from Apollo’s omphalos at Delphi to the wooden statue (bretas) of Athena in Athens (80, 259, 409, 439, 446, 1024); and he himself later states directly that he slit his mother’s throat with his “sword-drawing hand” (ξιφολκῷ χερί, 592). Thus in this earliest extant dramatizing of the violent house of Atreus, Aeschylus foregrounds the face-off between mother and son, with Clytemnestra dominating the first play, Orestes the second, and the mother’s avenging Furies the third. The gory haptics of the trilogy orchestrates a progression from the forceful, murderous, hands-on maternal presence to the retreating, “purified,” hands-off son’s orientation, so that the finale effectively cauterizes the family’s manual taint. Electra registers as a player only early on in this mother–son drama, unlike the two later plays named for her, where she serves as the primary affective conduit and manual orchestrator. Sophocles’ version of the Electra story may or may not be chronologically the second of the three extant plays featuring the avenging of Agamemnon’s murder.22 The play centers on a character in ceaseless mourning for her dead father and absent brother. This Electra is outspoken and abusive, especially when faced with her mother, a craven, defensive Clytemnestra; she also slights her sister Chrysothemis, who is more conventional and restrained. A morally challenged Orestes opens the plot and then enters the action more fully midway through, tricking not only Clytemnestra (as in Aeschylus’ play) but also Electra and Chrysothemis into believing him dead. Electra mourns over the empty urn that she thinks contains his ashes and he finally relents, revealing himself and then moving with her to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The drama ends with the fulfillment of this revenge, but in a reversal and revision of Aeschylus’ plot, in the final scene Orestes offers the still-living Aegisthus (as well as the chorus and audience) a quick peek at Clytemnestra’s corpse, before maneuvering him inside to his death.

22

See Marshall (2017a) on the play as a whole; Bennett Anderson (1932) on the character of Clytemnestra in Libation Bearers. Mueller (2016: 114–15), following Carlson (2001), discusses the “ghosting” that occurs when characters and significant objects repeat from play to play; Carlson regards this phenomenon as a dramatic form of intertextuality (113). Jebb (1908: xxx–xxxii) treats the dating as a puzzle, but hypothesizes on stylistic grounds that Sophocles’ play is not earlier than 420; cf. Denniston (Oxford 1939: xxxiii–xxxix), who thinks this obvious, arguing that Sophocles’ plot is more similar to Aeschylus’ and dating Euripides’ Electra to 413. Finglass (2007: 1–4) regards the dating as less important than commentators have argued; cf. Cropp (1988), who provides a judicious overview of the problem.

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Scholars have often argued that this Electra is only a forceful presence when Orestes is absent and that with his entrance her role shrinks and she retreats, but in fact she scarcely leaves or shuts up, whether crying out in awful despair or shouting in ferocious celebration.23 In her excesses of grief she reaches out toward those she mourns, envisioning a helpless and hopeless proximity since she can no longer offer a helping hand. This is most marked in the disturbing scene in which Orestes tricks Electra into believing him dead, when he enters in disguise and shows her a vessel that he claims holds his own ashes and she cries out at the “burden” that he holds in his hands (τοῦτ᾽ἐκεῖν᾽. . . / πρόχειρον ἄχθος, 1115–16).24 The deictic matching (i.e., “this is that”), what Aristotle in the Poetics identifies as a convention central to tragic recognition, emphasizes close inspection and hands-on identification.25 In this case the match is made in an excess of emotion, which contributes to the wrenching spectatorial awareness that it is in fact a mismatch. She demands at once that he give it to her to hold in her hands (δός νυν πρός θεῶν . . . εἰς χεῖρας λαβεῖν), and when he hands it to her she clutches it, saying, “Now I touch with my two hands what is in fact nothing” (νῦν μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲν ὄντα βαστάζω χειροῖν, 1129). Although these same two hands once hid Orestes away (χειροῖν / κλέψασα τοῖνδε), now her loving hands (φίλαισι χερσὶν) cannot care for his dead body, care already undertaken by stranger hands (ἐν ξέναισι χερσί) (1136–43). When Orestes finally reveals himself, their moving recognition scene is undercut by the fact that it is generated by Orestes himself having orchestrated the lie that led to Electra’s lament over an empty jar, so that his reticence and deception only fosters and amplifies her exclamatory mode. And in fact they turn out to be an ill-matched pair. As they turn from their hands-on interchange of the urn for Orestes, Electra moves to other emotional and sensory stimulations. In one particularly high-pitched progression that reiterates the dynamics of the lament and recognition, Electra calls attention to the intensity of her perceptual experience, emphasizing the extremity of her pleasure in seeing and hearing one whom she had thought moments before to be ashes in an urn. As Orestes urges silence, she asks who would keep such silence when he has appeared (σοῦ πεφηνότος  / μεταβάλοιτ’ ἂν ὧδε σιγὰν λόγων;) and now she looks upon him so unexpectedly (ἀέλπτως ἐσεῖδον) (1260–63). The long-deprived Electra then celebrates the sensory accompaniment to her touch, an eye–ear–hand coordinating that demonstrates how haptic experiencing encourages the appropriation of a proximity (to paraphrase Derrida) by other senses. She requests that Orestes, having seen her in so much misery (πολύπονον ὧδ’ ἰδών), not deprive her of the pleasure of his face (μή μ’ ἀποστερήσῃς / τῶν σῶν προσώπων ἁδονὰν μεθέσθαι)

23

Cf. Kitzinger (1991: 298–327) vs. Nooter (2012: 101–23). On readings of the scene that focus on various aspects of it as an object, see Segal (1981: 278–79); also Ringer (1998: 187–99), Mueller (2016: 116–24), Billings (2018). This “urn-body” fiction parallels that in which Orestes’ tutor tells Electra and Clytemnestra an action-packed and gory tale of Orestes’ death in a chariot race, which ends with his body being mangled beyond recognition; see further in Chapter 4 (2a). 25 Finglass (ad loc.) notes the staccato phrasing and the use of the “touto ekeino” convention (Arist. Poet. 1448b17). Mueller (2016: 122) has noticed the emphasis on hands. 24

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(1275–77). He agrees, and turning to the chorus of women, she celebrates her affective pleasures: “Oh dear friends,” she exclaims, “I hear a voice I never hoped for; nor could I hold in my emotion voiceless, without a cry, once I heard” (ὦ φίλαι, ἔκλυον ἃν ἐγὼ / οὐδ’ ἂν ἤλπισ’ αὐδάν· / οὐδ’ ἂν ἔσχον ὁρμὰν / ἄναυδον οὐδὲ σὺν βοᾷ κλύουσα) (1281–84). And so now she holds him; now he has appeared with his beloved face (νῦν δ’ ἔχω σε· προυφάνης δὲ φιλτάταν ἔχων πρόσοψιν, 1285–86).

3. Siblings Hand-to-Hand (Euripides) Euripides, in a characteristic move that makes palpable the unnerving fascination aroused by getting close in to the outcast and the almost dead, combines figurative and staging tactics to encourage a creeping awareness that the drive to violence may foster perverse attractions. While scholars have often characterized Euripides’ aesthetic strategies as aiming at theatrical realism, in fact his combinations of effects tend more toward alienation and disorientation.26 Euripides’ Electra and Orestes are no exception, as these plays stage a series of disturbing confluences of the figurative with visible embodiment, repeatedly dislodging any clear sense of moral orientation or existential grounding. a. Sinister Hands As in Sophocles’ Electra, in Euripides’ play close-up viewing draws attention to the bitter details of Electra’s appearance. Unlike Sophocles’ hero, however, Euripides’ Electra is focused, in a manner that registers as increasingly perverse, on the details that shape the physical statuses of herself and those around her. She is obsessed with clothes and bodies, living and dead. She expatiates on her own ragged appearance and near nakedness and characterizes herself as on the edge of human existence, since Aegisthus has exiled her to a “deadly marriage” (θανάσιμον γάμον, 247) by consigning her to a farmer in the Argive hinterland. She thus appears disoriented or perhaps wrongly oriented, her priorities warped from the outset. And in fact commentators on the Electra have been even more negative about this version of the character than that of Sophocles, deeming her self-interested and “cold,” adjectives suggesting the male tenor of the assessment.27 But Euripides’ Electra is not so much lacking in tenderness (whatever that could mean) as strangely situated at the intersection of sex and violence, such that her character repeatedly expresses overly intense and often misdirected reactions to proximate affective dynamics. All of her energy comes across as aimed at one or the other (i.e., sex or violence): she throws herself at strangers, engages in an angry flirtation with the dead, and twice in ten lines threatens to die by the sword if aggressed or defeated. She devises the plot of the murder of Clytemnestra and she plays an intimate role in both her mother’s and Aegisthus’ death:

26 27

See, e.g., Zeitlin (1980); Goldhill (1986: Chapter 10); Lloyd (1986); and Torrance (2011). E.g., Denniston (1939: xxviii); cf. Lloyd (1986: 2) and Torrance (2013: 17), who note similar judgments.

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Orestes offers her the latter’s body for cruel sport;28 and toward the end of the drama she goes inside with Orestes to place her hand with his on the mother-killing sword. Hands in this play thus carry a sinister eroticism that frames and orients Electra’s attitude. From the outset of the action the murderous hand serves as a metonym for violent familial plotting, an emphasis that comes to perverse fruition in the scene in which Orestes kills Aegisthus. The sibling touch, while initially possessing an erotic edge, also focuses Electra’s warrior affect, as in plotting with Orestes she thrills to grasp the sword and the victory crown. The fact that most of the hand imagery involves Aegisthus and Electra further underscores the perverse dynamics of the drama, uniting them in violence in a familial chiasmus mirrored by that between Clytemnestra and Orestes at the play’s end. Their hands-on dynamics is the more salient, however, beginning with the farmer’s repeated use of the phrase “the hand of Aegisthus” (Αἰγίσθου χερί  / χερὀς, 10, 17, 28), always in the sense of a tool for killing. The dominance of this particular manual metonymy in the farmer’s narrative sets up Aegisthus as the primary agent of violence in the family drama, a revision of the Aeschylean tradition in which Clytemnestra acts almost completely alone.29 And yet Aegisthus never appears onstage until dead, so that his resonant manual potential activates a kind of shadow play, a series of murderous gestures effectively upstaged by the sibling spectacle, which includes them wielding his corpse as a grisly toy. Sibling contact thus plays riveting mimetic counterpoint to this offstage manual threat, due in no small part to Electra’s affective intensities. When she sees Orestes and Pylades moving toward the house, she immediately assumes that they have come with violent intent. She warns the chorus of women to run off down the path and says that she will head toward the house for refuge. When she approaches, Orestes seeks to detain her, touching her and urging, “Do not tremble at my hand” (μὴ τρέσῃς ἐμὴν χέρα). Electra reacts violently, crying out to Apollo (of all deities) and begging Orestes not to kill her. When he declares that he would kill her enemies instead, she replies, “Get away, do not touch what you ought not to!” (ἄπελθε, μὴ ψαῦ’ ὧν σε μὴ ψαύειν χρεών). His response only heightens this charged atmosphere, since he asserts that there is no one else whom he has more right to touch (οὐκ ἔσθ’ ὅτου θίγοιμ’ ἂν ἐνδικώτερον) (220–24). She fails to pick up on this cue, asking him instead why he is lying in ambush; and rather than answering her directly he begs her to stay, to which she responds tartly, “I’m all yours, since you are the stronger” (πάντως δ’ εἰμὶ σή· κρείσσων γὰρ εἶ) (225–27). Electra is full of such charged and provocative gestures, as at this point she quickly moves on to a description of her mother lounging on embroidered pillows, attended by Persian slaves who are draped in Persian robes pinned with golden brooches.30 Meanwhile Aegisthus leaps into her father’s chariot and grips his scepter with bloody hands (μιαιφόνοισι χερσί) (314–22); when drunk he throws stones and abuses at the tomb.

28

As the chorus says Clytemnestra offered Agamemnon’s to Aegisthus, cf. 164–66. See also on the vase tradition (e.g., Vermeule 1966, cf. Dyer 1967). 30 I.e., Clytemnestra’s luxury is such that even her slaves are finely dressed. Cf. Emde Boas (2017) on Electra’s linguistic habits. 29

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Her focus on material indicators of bodily status, intimacies, and touching is both challenging and disorienting, as she navigates a proximity that she does not yet know to be sibling.31 It is all the more disorienting, then, that Euripides effectively elides the fond embrace that conventionally marks the recognition scene, leaving Electra (and the audience) without the satisfaction for which she is angling. When, more than 200 lines later, it finally emerges that the stranger before her is Orestes, she says, “Is that you?”, he confirms that it is, the chorus sings out briefly in celebration, and Orestes turns brusquely from sisterly endearments (cf. φίλας μὲν ἡδονὰς ἀσπασμάτων / ἔχω) to the business of murder, saying that he will return such affections in due time (χρόνῳ δὲ καὖθις αὐτὰ δώσομεν) (581–97). As commentators note, the phrase suggests that Electra has been more demonstrative than he during the choral interlude.32 As Electra pivots between familial erotics and violence, she soon turns her hand to the sword and outstrips Orestes in her bloodthirsty zeal. She plots her mother’s death with a perverse (given her deprivations) and cruel plan of feigned childbirth. And when the siblings pray for success, Electra threatens in bold outcry to her dead father that she will “run [her] liver through with a two-edged sword” (παίσω γὰρ ἧπαρ τοὐμὸν ἀμφήκει ξίφει, 688) if Orestes dies while trying to kill Aegisthus. This verb (paiô) is the same one that Sophocles’ Electra uses when crying out for Orestes to strike his mother down (1415) and that the messenger uses later in Euripides’ play to describe the gruesome manner in which Orestes killed Aegisthus (841). Here Electra’s envisioned violence against her own body is equally brutal, but since it follows directly on a demand for Aegisthus’ death (“And I declare to you: Aegisthus will die!” καί σοι προφωνῶ . . . Αἴγισθον θανεῖν, 685), it lends an added frisson to her urgency. She then bids Orestes to be a man (ἄνδρα γίγνεσθαι), commands the chorus to “set the battle cry aflame” (πυρσεύετε / κραυγὴν ἀγῶνος τοῦδε), and declares that she will stand at the door with sword in hand (ἔγχος χειρί), since never while living will she submit to the violation of her body (σῶμ’ ἐμὸν καθυβρίσαι) (693–98). The dynamics of this sequence gives Electra’s character a further volatile turn, as she closely juxtaposes violence to her own body with that to Aegisthus’ and then right after this imagines defending herself from violent advances. The hand of Aegisthus that carries such violent potential in the prologue returns in the messenger’s speech. This recounts in exceedingly gory detail Aegisthus’ handling of a sacrifice he is making to the Nymphs, the intervention of Orestes’ murderous hand, and the culmination of this switch-off in Aegisthus’ own death at the altar. First Aegisthus cuts hairs from the head of his victim (a calf) with a knife, placing these on the fire with his right hand (δεξιᾷ, 812); then he slits its throat. When he calls upon Orestes (who claims to be a Thessalian stranger) to take up the knife and show his “native” skills, the latter seizes this “well-hammered Dorian” tool with his two hands (χεροῖν, 819), the detail of make and provenance giving additional snap to the gesture. He grabs the calf by the foot, holding it in outstretched hand (ἐκτείνων χέρα) (823). He flays the hide and Aegisthus puts his hands to the entrails, fingering and frowning over them (826–29). 31 32

On the body imagery, see further in Chapter 5 (2b). E.g. Denniston ad loc.

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Orestes interrupts his pondering by calling for a Thessalian axe, and while Aegisthus still hangs over the entrails, Orestes rises up on tiptoe to smash the spine of his enemy (841).33 This swift changing of hands on knife and axe forecloses Aegisthus’ agency and especially his violent hand, so that he ends up the victim of his own sacrifice in a manner all the more brutal for this shocking switch. When Orestes returns to the stage with Aegisthus’ dead body, the presence of this much-desired corpse only intensifies the charged atmosphere around Electra. She shouts out a victorious song, demanding that Orestes and Pylades accept victory crowns from her hand (στέφανον ἐξ ἐμῆς χερὸς / δέχου, 887–88). Vaunting over her enemy’s body offers to this furious virgin the prospect of new proxemics and affective connections, as she focuses on Aegisthus’ feminization and his bedding of her mother, with so much emphasis on his perceived sexual transgressions that she achieves a grotesque conversion of the abject dead into fetish object. (930–37).34 And with a brutal suitability, as soon as she brings to an end her hovering over the corpse, here comes Clytemnestra. Electra confronts her mother aloft in her chariot and surrounded by Trojan serving girls, offering to grasp her “fortunate hand” (λάβωμαι μακαρίας τῆς σῆς χειρός;, 1006), her sardonic adjective giving a keen edge to the gesture. When Clytemnestra enters the house, Electra declares the “sacrifice” ready, with basket held aloft and sharpened knife (1142–43). Clytemnestra’s hand has itself been turned to violence, as the chorus recalls in horror when Electra leaves the stage: “With her own hand [αὐτόχειρ] she killed, taking the axe in her two hands [ἐν χεροῖν]” (1160–61). When Orestes and Electra reemerge, together with the dead bodies of their mother and Aegisthus (the latter possibly headless, see Chapter 6, section 4), Orestes cries out for the chorus to look upon the “twin corpses,” slain by a blow from his hand (χερὸς ὑπ᾽ἐμᾶς) (1179–81). While the moment recalls his solo entrance and speech in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, it emerges in Euripides’ version that Orestes did not act alone. In lines that editors attribute to Orestes or Electra, but that for symmetry and cohesion ought to be Electra’s,35 she describes how Clytemnestra reached her hand up to touch her child’s cheek (1215) and hung from her, so that she dropped her hands from the weapon (χέρας ἐμὰς λιπεῖν βέλος, 1217). When the chorus asks how they could stand to look upon their mother dying, Orestes explains that he covered his eyes with his cloak and Electra adds that she urged him on, grasping the sword with him to finish the deed (ξίφους ἐφηψάμαν ἅμα, 1225). While tracking this hand-to-hand action may distort somewhat the overall texture and dynamics of the play, it does illuminate its privileging of violent over fond or erotic touch. These are hands ever ready to seize the sword; and even when Electra and Orestes angle towards each other and finally embrace, their murderous futures quickly overwhelm the moment. That said, both the sibling hand and the possibilities of parental contact—

33

For further details focusing on skin, flesh, and innards, see Chapter 4 (3b). Cf. her farmer husband, who did not touch her out of respect for this hierarchy. 35 See Denniston ad loc., who rehearses editorial choices and points out that otherwise the kommos loses its balance between Orestes and Electra and argues that the chorus’ response following these lines (“Wretched/hardhearted woman,” τάλαινα) makes more sense as an address to Electra than an exclamation about Clytemnestra. 34

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including Electra’s obsession with Aegisthus and Orestes’ ogling of his mother in her final suppliant crouch—are shadowed by a sinister erotics compounded at the end by their emergence with their skins “mingled” (πεφυρμένοι, 1173) in their mother’s blood.36 b. Handling Orestes It is worth noting that all of the sibling dramas involving the Atreid family, most of which are Euripidean, feature manhandling Orestes, fondling him, or handling him with care. He is the only character who, in the plots that run from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the aftermath of the murder of Clytemnestra, ranges in age and thus bodily inhabitation from an infant to a fictional corpse, mangled unrecognizably and then ashes in a jar. While he is handled as an infant in Iphigenia in Aulis, that play centers less on manual contact than on familial groupings; I thus reserve my primary discussion of it for Chapter 5. In contrast, the plot that covers the other end of the sibling trajectory, Euripides’ Orestes, does highlight such contact, but that involving the adult Orestes in his Furies’-driven illness. Of the plays discussed in this section, the Orestes dramatizes sibling proximities most insistently, whether it be fond, close-in caretaking or murderous plotting. The structure of the play as a whole careens from one dire situation to the next, with the post-matricide Orestes and Electra threatened with death by angry townspeople, to which they respond by looking to kill alternately themselves or others.37 As in the other Euripides play featuring these violent siblings, Electra is the one who fashions the most outrageous murder plot. This time she gives a brutal turn to Pylades’ suggestion that they kill her mother’s sister, the always transcendent Helen, advising that they put a knife to the throat of their cousin Hermione, as protection for slaying her mother.38 And as in the Electra, a divinely engineered conclusion adds a further jolt to an already disorienting concatenation of attitudes and actions. This time Apollo appears on high with Helen at his side and commands Orestes to remove the knife from the throat of his future wife. This late command underscores something that has haunted these sibling dynamics all along, in this play as well as in Electra: such hand-to-throat moments raise questions about how well either sibling can assess what constitutes appropriate contact and connection among relations. If Electra in the earlier play suspects that Orestes may accost her, here she readily offers up her female cousin to the knife, and Orestes just as readily takes her into his violent embrace.39 In fact, it may be the intensity and isolation of their sibling bond that drives Electra and Orestes to value others so little. 36

See further in Chapter 4 (3c). Again, see Zeitlin (1980) on the role-playing; Wohl (2015: Chapter 5) on the dizzying plot. 38 See Parry (1969: 343) on Electra’s “brutalization.” He notes in particular her screaming out commands at the attempted murder of Helen; this also echoes Electra’s murderous yelling in Sophocles. 39 Commentators have been disturbed especially by this hostage-taking, Parry (1969: 343) regarding it as evidence that Orestes “entire inner universe has been perverted” and Porter (1994: 87) noting that for modern readers this plot point is “particularly repugnant.” Porter argues, in contrast, for understanding the capture of Hermione as an act of rebellion by a desperate hero, but surely this does not account for the perverse proximities it suggests. Parry also calls the play as a whole “the dark night of the Greek soul” (352). See the overview of reactions in Wright (2006: 33–34). 37

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As detailed in Chapter 1, at the outset of the play Electra and the chorus look upon Orestes, sunk into his deathly slumber; and while Electra cautions them about raising their voices or clattering their feet she also utters by now familiar sentiments of brotherloving sisters in Sophocles and Euripides. “We are destroyed,” she cries, “as good as corpses, destroyed; you are among corpses and my life is gone” (ὀλόμεθ’, ἰσονέκυες, ὀλόμεθα· / σύ τε γὰρ ἐν νεκροῖς, τό τ’ ἐμὸν οἴχεται, 200–01). She and the chorus hover over Orestes’ body, worrying at his limp appearance, and when he stirs, Electra moves in closer to aid his movement. She asks if he would like her to raise him up, explaining in response to his affirmation that the labor is sweet and she is not ashamed to tend sibling limbs with a sibling hand (τὸ δούλευμ’ ἡδύ, κοὐκ ἀναίνομαι  / ἀδελφ’ ἀδελφῇ χειρὶ θεραπεύειν μέλη, 221–22). The moment is striking for its echoing of the more notorious sibling bonds in Oedipus’ family, which at least in Sophocles serve to highlight his tragedy as fundamentally human. In typical Euripidean fashion, however, what should be deeply affecting is disturbed by the slight tremor of perversity that the echo contributes to the scene, which together with the focus on details like bodily filth and excretions unsettle its register. Soon after this Electra exclaims as Orestes’ eyes begin to spin again (ὄμμα σὸν ταράσσεται); and while he screams at his mother and her Furies, she tries to calm him, assuring him that he does not see what he thinks he does (253–59). She declares that she will not let him go (οὔτοι μεθήσω), “entwining” him with her hand/arm (χεῖρα δ᾽ἐμπλέξασ᾽ἐμήν), so that she may hold back (σχήσω) his “pitiful leaping and bounding” (lit. “leaping pitiful leaps,” πηδᾶν δυστυχῆ πηδήματα) (260–64). He struggles with her, demanding that she release him (μέθες) and claiming that she is one of the Furies come to throw him down to hell. He then calls for his bow, crying out that he will wound the Furies with “mortal hand” (βροτησίᾳ χερί, 271). The moment reiterates eye–hand coordinates evident in other scenes but in this instance underscores its lack, as Orestes cannot lay hand on what he does not see. It also emphasizes further the siblings’ lonely plight, as his bouts of madness hold Electra in the limbo of tending one not quite dead. In a later episode that serves as confirmation of the siblings’ desperate isolation, they reveal the violent potential of their physical bond when they debate how to kill others or themselves and each other. Electra laments the impending loss of her brother, crying that she longs to throw her arms about his neck (ἀλλ᾽ ἀμφιθεῖναι σῇ δερῇ θέλω χέρας)—to which Orestes responds somewhat unkindly, “Sure, if this is any pleasure, to throw your arms around [περιβαλεῖν χέρας] those so close to death” (1042–44). But while Orestes initially resists he soon gives way, saying that he wants to respond “with the affection of hands” (φιλότητι χειρῶν). And so he exclaims in kind: “Oh beloved object of my embrace” (ὦ φίλον πρόσπτευγμ’ ἐμόν). Electra sighs in response, wishing that they could share the same sword and lie together in death (1047–54).40 Throughout the many turnings of this twisted plot, the fond sibling touch punctuates focus on the killing hands of those who reach for the sword or have already done so, to

40

For further on this wish for shared container, see Chapter 4 (2b).

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bloody effect. That these are usually the two siblings should not, by now, come as a surprise. One of the most arresting moments occurs when the chorus sings an ode rehearsing the horror of the Atreid curse and especially the matricide. They declare “the noble [act] that is not noble” (τὸ καλὸν οὐ καλόν) and vividly illuminate its tactilities: the cutting of parental skin, the gore-laced sword (819–22). Imagining the mother’s screams and pleadings, they demand: “What on earth [has] more sickness, tears, and piteousness [τίς νόσος ἢ τίνα δάκρυα καὶ τίς ἔλεος] than taking maternal blood on the hand [ματροκτόνον αἷμα χειρὶ θέσθαι]?” (832–34).41 The telescoping effect of these details, which distill the killing down to the bloody sword in the murderous hand, fashion them together as the central dramatic metonymy for the siblings’ act. c. Pure and Polluted Hands As I discuss in some detail in Chapter 5, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis features fond contact between parents and daughter rather than siblings, with both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra clutching Iphigenia at different moments in the action. The supplication scene between Clytemnestra and Achilles stages the only prominent references to manual touching, although there is one repeated image that focalizes the violence in the play: the father’s knife at the daughter’s throat.42 And while Iphigenia does handle the baby Orestes at pivotal points in the play, her maneuvers neither feature hands nor carry any erotic overtones—or at least, not between the siblings, as may be expected given that Orestes is an infant at this earlier stage of the family story.43 In fact, Euripides’ Iphigenia plots dramatize quite distinct types of familial contact: if Iphigenia in Aulis centers more on parent–child contact, Iphigenia in Tauris contributes significant details to the larger pattern of touching between siblings, while the violence among family members serves as background and framing for the plot. For reasons that may have to do with the radical estrangement that marks the plotting and recognition scene of Orestes’ other sibling drama, Iphigenia in Tauris does not exhibit a hands-on erotics and bonding parallel to the Electra plays.44 Iphigenia’s role as a temple officiant whose job it is to purify strangers for sacrifice to the goddess Artemis, together with the violent family history that Orestes relays to his sister, shapes the central scene, pairing barriers to manual contact with murderous handling. Since the action of the play takes place in a setting that serves as a “barbarian” double for the bloody house of Atreus, with Artemis’ gore-soaked altar central to the staging, an

41 See further on this passage in Chapter 3 (1c). This is an overt echo of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, when the ghost of Clytemnestra is furiously recounting her slaughter: οὐδεὶς ὑπὲρ μου δαιμόνων μηνίεται / κατασφαγείσης πρὸς χειρῶν μητρόκτονων (101–02). 42 Cf. Iphigenia in Aulis 875: φασγάνῳ λευκὴν φονεύων τῆς ταλαιπώρου δέρην; 1428: πέλας σῆς φάσγανον δέρης; also 1516–17, 1560, 1574. See e.g. Rabinowitz (1993: 31–54), Scodel (1996). 43 Again, see further in Chapter 5 (3c). 44 But see Mueller (2018: 83–87) on the way their eventual sibling embrace is inter-leaved with the folds of the letter that Iphigenia has written to Orestes, both of which enclose Iphigenia protectively and facilitate her escape; and cf. again Deleuze (1988 [1991]).

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intertwining of this hands-on violence with that one frames the action of the whole. It moves, accordingly, from Iphigenia’s repeated rehearsal of her past, focusing on her slaughter by her father’s hand, to the herdsman’s report of Orestes’ bout of madness and his and Pylades’ hand-to-hand combat with the locals, their capture and entrance with bound hands, her emphasis on her hands-off role in the killings, and on to the embracing of the siblings’ recognition scene and strategic handling of the goddess’ statue that Orestes has been ordered by Apollo to carry off to Athens. When Orestes first realizes who Iphigenia is, he rushes to take her in his “unbelieving arms” (ἀπίστῳ περιβαλὼν βραχίονι), a move that precipitates a horrified reaction from the chorus. “Stranger,” they cry out, “wrongly do you defile the officiant of the goddess, putting your hand on her untouchable robes!” (ξέν᾽, οὐ δικαίως τῆς θεοῦ τὴν πρόσπολον / χραίνεις, ἀθίκτοις περιβαλὼν πέπλοις χέρα) (795–99). Once the siblings achieve mutual recognition, they embrace and Iphigenia recalls him as a babe in the arms of his nurse (ἀγκάλαισι νεαρὸν τρόφου) and then exclaims that she fears he will fly from her arms (δέδοικα δ᾽ἐκ χερῶν με μὴ πρὸς αἰθέρα ἀμπτάμενος φύγῃ) (834–44). The scene thus first highlights the difficulties involved in this sibling contact, including ritual prohibitions, fear of loss, and something more ineffable and menacing: their shared violent past. Their discussion thus quickly turns to Iphigenia’s slaughter—with Agamemnon’s knife at her throat (φάσγανον / δέρᾳ θῆκέ μοι μελεόφρων πατήρ, 852–53), as noted— and eventually to Orestes’ explanation of how his mother’s terrible fate fell into his hands (ἐς χεῖρας ἦλθε, 941). Given the horrors of their familial news, it is significant that during this extended exchange of information they continue to hold onto each other, the bloody details of the daughter’s sacrifice and the parental slaughter unsettling the apparent warmth of the embrace. Indeed, together with the sacrificial setting and Iphigenia’s role in slaughtering others, the audience may well wonder at this wrenching reversal, which brutally juxtaposes bound hands and murderous ones with those clutched in fondness. Although at an earlier point Iphigenia emphasizes that others have not regarded her own hands as murderous (e.g., as she notes of the victim who scripted her letter, οὐχὶ τὴν ἐμὴν / φονέα νομίζων χεῖρα, 585–86), it is clear that she regards herself as implicated in the ritual violence. As she later declares in response to Orestes’ rehearsing of the familial murders, “I am not angry at him who killed me; I would release my hand from your slaughter [σφαγῆς τε γὰρ σῆς χεῖρ᾽ἀπαλλάξαιμεν ἂν] and save our house” (993–95). The siblings’ extended conversation and close contact drives the usually taciturn Pylades to warn them against lingering in such clinging lamentation, fitting though these embraces may be (χειρῶν περιβολὰς εἰκὸς λαβεῖν) for those long separated (902– 06).45 They do eventually move onto plotting their escape, which Iphigenia devises to center on the stratagem of claiming that Orestes has touched the statue of the goddess with impure hands (cf. σοῦ θιγόντος, 1041) and that he and it must be taken to the sea for purification. When Orestes wants reassurance that only Iphigenia will carry the

45

Similar to his role in Orestes, Pylades is a more lively presence than in earlier plays: in this instance, while the siblings muse over their past, he attempts to move them toward action.

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image, she replies that she alone may touch it (θιγεῖν γὰρ ὄσιόν ἐστ᾽ἐμοὶ μόνῃ); and when he asks how Pylades may also escape, she declares that he too has blood-pollution on his hands (χεροῖν  . . . μίασμ᾽ἔχων) (1044–47). The escape plot thus refracts the imagery that surrounds Orestes and his miasma in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and extends it in a more exotic locale, pivoting their escape stratagem around Orestes’ impure hands and the handling of a wooden statue (cf. βρέτας, 980, 986, 1040, 1044, etc.).

4. Other Manual Menaces If we set aside the central role played in tragedy by the bloody hands of the house of Atreus, what remains is largely the use of force cast as violent forms of handling others. Often this takes on an ethnic or racialized cast, as those who engage in manhandling are outsiders (either non-Athenian or non-Greek), or those who suffer it are vulnerable because they are so.46 Both are in play in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, in which the Egyptian-born daughters of Danaus seek refuge in the land of the Argives, with whom they claim kinship bonds, and escape from their full-blooded Egyptian pursuers, the real outsiders in the drama. A similarly racialized aggression menaces Andromache in Euripides’ play of that name, in which many characters express their prejudices with venom and Hermione and Menelaus treat Andromache as a slave to be manhandled and even killed at will. An extreme case of such manhandling by outsiders is really creature-handling and occurs only at a distance, when in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis Deianira tells the female chorus of her violation by the centaur Nessus and his swift dispatching by Heracles. Elsewhere other Greeks may be represented as outsiders and therefore more brutal than the home crowd (usually Athenians), as in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, which opposes protective and welcoming Athenians to aggressive and violent Thebans.47 Finally, heroes driven mad by divinities often lay violent hands on others, as is the case especially with Ajax in Sophocles’ play and Heracles in Euripides’. Medea is a special case, in this regard as in so many, since she takes control of both the plot and her own murderous hand, turning these against Jason’s new family as well as his old. a. Manhandling Women Athenian tragedy stages plenty of sexual aggression, primarily male on female (as might be expected), although famous exceptions such as Clytemnestra and Medea work against that dominant strain. Most often such violations and sacrificial slaughters target nonGreek victims (as noted) and occur elsewhere in time and space; and although some of

46

See Lape (2010); cf. also Hall (1989), Vasunia (2001), Bakewell (2013). A similar dynamic is in play in the strange propaganda play that is Euripides’ Children of Heracles, in which Athenian values outstrip Argive, especially in “foreign” relations—in this case the protection of suppliants. That said, since manual contact is less central to its plotting than physical groups, I save extended discussion of the play for Chapter 5 (3b).

47

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these have a riveting impact on the action onstage (e.g., that of Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba), here I focus on two representative examples of the dramatization of violence against women that includes both described assaults (i.e., past or anticipated) and those enacted onstage: Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women and Euripides’ Andromache. i. Zeus Toucher. Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women dramatizes in a quite startling manner what we might think of as Zeus’ heavy hand.48 This takes shape incrementally in the drama in a manner that offsets the more reverential notion of him as manually swaying fate’s scales or meting out justice with the more ambivalent and ultimately menacing sense of him as “Toucher.” That is, his is the hand of both protector and rapist. Since the drama revolves around the flight of a large group of women from forced marriage to (and violation by) an equally large group of men, the menace is increasingly palpable. And since this play more than any other one extant dramatizes the plight of a mass of racialized female characters—the fifty daughters of Danaus,49 who are both Egyptian and Argive—the combination of the main “character” as an undifferentiated mass of young women, the fact that they are fleeing sexual violence, and the exoticism of their “dusky” skin is uniquely unsettling. While Suppliant Women sustains an ambivalent tone around Zeus’ violence, the defense of the Egyptian-Argive women by Argive men against their Egyptian aggressors suggests that “black Zeus” the divine Toucher could also be up to no good.50 The play thus holds out the possibility that the violent hand and the one that protects may be one and the same. This is not a case of highlighting the notion that any strange man may be a violator of women, as when Electra thinks Orestes has come to harm her. Rather, it suggests something even more ominous and sadly common in the fate of women throughout history the world over: that the vulnerable have to choose from among their aggressors and welcome as protector the most powerful of them. The Athenians appear to have treated this idea as central and originary: when Zeus rapes Io, the progenitor of the Argive race (including the daughters of Danaus), the hand he lays on her is both aggressive and generative and the races that result conjoin European and African sovereignty. The Danaids emphasize from the outset that their own hands have suppliant prostheses (ἐπιχειριδίοις, 20, cf. 392) in the form of boughs decked with woolen fillets. But the most prominent handler in the drama is Zeus, from whom they claim descent as “toucher and on-breather” (ἐπαφῆς καὶ ἐπινοίας / Διός) of the gadfly-chased cow Io (τῆς οἰστροδόνου  / βοός) (15–18). Danaus later tells the Argive king Pelasgus that “Zeus 48 On race and ethnicity in the play, see Vasunia (2001: 33–58), Bakewell (2013); also Hall (1989 passim), Seaford (1980), West (1984), Mitchell (2006), and see further in Chapter 3 (3). On sexuality and fertility as located in the touch, see Zeitlin (1996: 149–53), Vasunia (2001: 44–45), Bacharova (2009); and cf. Murray (1958: 32–41). On rape culture in myth, see Zeitlin (1983); in Athens and tragedy, Omitowoju (2002), Rabinowitz (2011). 49 Likely represented by the conventional chorus of twelve. 50 In Sophocles’ Inachus this Zeus is explicitly called “black,” marking his Egyptian provenance; see Seaford (1980) and West (1984). See Wohl (2010) on the relevance to this play of Guyatri Spivak's critique of colonialism (Spivak [1986] 2010) and further in ch. 3 (3a).

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Toucher” (Ζεύς γ᾽Ἐφάπτωρ) delivered Io’s baby by hand (χειρί) (313). In the ode that follows this scene the chorus relates the story of her rape and the birth of the child Epaphus, clearly named as his father’s son. As they tell it, only the hand of Zeus could soothe the maddened cow-girl, with which he controlled her (νιν χειρὶ κατέσχεν, 575) throughout her wandering life. She is finally stopped by his “painless power” (ἀπημάντῳ σθένει) and “divine on-breathings” (θείαις ἐπιπνοίαις), the disturbing effects of which are manifested in her response: tears (576–79). Io grasps a “prop” (λαβοῦσα δ᾽ἕρμα), the image itself bridging the phallic and the generative, as her grasp of a birthing prosthesis is in keeping with this scene of handling; she then gives birth to the son from whom the Danaids are descended (588–89). Their hymn ends in celebrating their powerful forefather—Zeus, lord creator of their race “by his own hand” (αὐτόχειρ ἄναξ, 592). While the girl chorus celebrates this rape as protective and generative, they fear to the point of hysteria the touch of their Egyptian aggressors.51 And apparently rightly so: when their pursuers are approaching by ship they cry out to their father that they are afraid that the men will never keep their hands off of them (οὐ μὴ . . . δείσαντες ἡμῶν χεῖρ᾽ἀπόσχωνται, πάτερ, 756), declaring them sex-mad and animals (762–63). The girls then begin to sing with heightened intensity that they would rather die by the noose than have a hated husband touch their skin (χριμφθῆναι χροΐ, 789). When the Egyptians land and come at them, they enter into excited responsion with them, the battle of words including (in a fragmentary section) words like “grabber” (μάρπτις, 826, 827) and indications that the girls are being pulled by the hair and pinched (τιλμοὶ τιλμοὶ καὶ στιγμοί, 839).52 Soon they are wailing that the “two-legged snake” is pressing close (μαιμᾷ πέλας δίπους ὄφις), while the Egyptians threaten to tear off their clothes (904). The drama as a whole thus frames the sexual threat of the Egyptians as manhandling, while Zeus’ touch is held up as its opposite, in a move that renders sexual contact both racialized and deeply ambiguous. ii. Andromache Bound. Of the scenes in which female characters are aggressed by others, male or female, Euripides’ Andromache stands out for its similar emphasis on foreignness, physical vulnerability, and manual contact—in this case featuring manhandling that includes the binding of Andromache’s hands so violently that they bleed. Other plays do not underscore the violence toward female characters to this extent, or if they do the scenes are quite circumscribed and do not focus on the handling so much as the man (i.e., the aggression), as with Creon’s seizure of Antigone in Oedipus at Colonus (813–95). This is as opposed to sacrificial figures such as Iphigenia, whose seizure is foreclosed by her free offering of herself (cf. IA 1363–64), Polyxena in Hecuba (barely touched, freely submitting), and Macaria in The Children of Heracles (threatened but untouched). The most interesting and unique case from this prospect is Helen, whom Euripides depicts as effectively untouchable (i.e., almost no one lays hands

51 52

See Zeitlin 1996: 154–55 on “mad” virgins in the Hippocratic corpus. Or possibly branded, though that makes less sense (cf. Bowen ad loc.).

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on her in Helen, Trojan Women, or Orestes), her semi-divine stature serving as an ineffable shield.53 The charged atmosphere of Andromache, with its warring wives and absent husband (Achilles’ son Neoptolemus), makes for a peculiarly debased and provocative plotting. Although Andromache is the primary target of aggression, both fathers menace and insult enemy daughters—Menelaus Andromache and Peleus Hermione—while the women accuse each other of angling for sexual dominance by violent means. The Trojan War stories (here warriors’ denouements) intersect with those of the House of Atreus when Neoptolemus is killed by Orestes, who drops in at drama’s end to save Hermione, his cousin and future wife. For the first third or so of the play, Andromache sits as a suppliant in Thetis’ temple, clutching her statue.54 She is finally tricked into letting go of the statue when Menelaus threatens her son; she tells Menelaus that she is now in his hands (χειρία55) and begs her son to weep and “enfold the hands” (περιπτύσσων χέρας) of his own father (i.e., Neoptolemus), telling him that she has gone to her death to save their child (411–18). The chorus looks on pityingly and pleads with Menelaus to relent, but he instead orders his (other) slaves to bind her hands (ἀμφελίξαντες χέρας, 425) and reveals that he has tricked her in order to deliver her into his hands for slaughter (εἰς χεῖρας . . . τὰς ἐμὰς ἐπὶ σφαγήν, 429). They leave the stage, and after a brief choral interlude she returns “yoked” (cf. ζεῦγος, 495) to her son and effectively continues the song, beginning with the physical bondage: “I am sent under the earth with bloody hands trapped by bonds [χέρας αἱματη- / ρὰς βρόχοισι κεκλῃμένα],” she cries (501–03). When Peleus arrives and sees her state, he asks why her hands are bound (χέρας βρόχοισιν ἐκδήσαντες, 555–56), in response to which she falls at his knees (προσπίτνουσα γονάτων) in supplication, while noting that though she does so she cannot reach his beard with her hand (χειρὶ δ᾽οὐκ ἔξεστί μοι  / τῆς σῆς λαβέσθαι φιλτάτης γενειάδος, 573–74). He then orders the servants to release her “double-folded” hands (τῆσδε χεῖρας διπτύχους), to which Menelaus objects, declaring that he, Peleus, will never wrench Andromache from his hand (ἐξ ἐμῆς χερός) (577–87, cf. 660–61). They argue at some length, exchanging insults most notable for their regional prejudices bordering on racism, and then Peleus commands Menelaus’ attendants to step aside, so that he can free Andromache’s hands (715–16). While Menelaus hovers, apparently at a loss, Peleus struggles with the knots, asking why he had so injured her hands (ὥδ᾽. . .τῆσδ᾽ἐλυμήνω χέρας), as if tying up a bull or a lion (719–20). Menelaus retreats and Peleus soon leads Andromache and her son offstage.56

53 That is, except for Orestes in the play named for him: He grabs Helen by the hair but then gets distracted, loses hold, and she vanishes (Or. 1466–72, 1490–96). Antigone is also a special case, but in a more relevant regard; I address her tending and handling further below, section 3 (d.i). On Helen’s unique embodiment, see e.g. Worman (1997, 2001); also Blondell (2013). On related imagery in the play, see Lloyd (1994), Kyriakou (1997), Allan (2000: 178–79), Torrance (2005), Stavrinou (2016), Pucci (2016: 61–66); and see further in Chapter 3 (1c). 54 On the constellation of effects that this staging creates, see further in Chapter 5 (1b) and Chapter 6 (2b). 55 Note that Peleus later points out that Menelaus failed to take Helen in hand (χειρία λαβών, 628), while his aggressions toward Andromache are outrageous. 56 I return to various aspects of this play’s embodiments and materials in Chapters 3, 5, and 6.

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b. From Handled to Handling Certain tragedies stage the shifting of power and dominance as a hand-off from one character or group to another, as control of the plotting and of other bodies effectively changes hands. Such manually driven reversals tend to frame male-to-female transitions, such as the movement of violence from Nessus and Heracles to Deianira in Women of Trachis and that from Pentheus to the maenads in Bacchae. Others center on the violent hands of those who would conventionally be targets of manual aggressions—that is, female characters. Clytemnestra and Medea are the most obvious examples of the latter, who, together with others such as Hecuba, Agave, and Creusa, form a subset of actual or would-be murdering mothers, usually of their own children. Procne also turns up in choral odes as an avian figure for female lamentation, since after killing her child she becomes a nightingale, the bird most representative of keening song in tragedy.57 I restrict my discussion here to Medea, the only play that pivots around the mother’s violent hands, while first taking a look at the two dramas conspicuous for their transitions of manual violence: Women of Trachis and Bacchae. i. Violating Creature Hands. Sophocles’ Women of Trachis begins much like the Andromache58 and like it features the violence that arises from taking two wives—here envisioned as housed under one blanket (539–40). In the case of the Women of Trachis the violence is more circuitous in that it is sparked by Nessus’ violation of Deianira, who is then himself violated by Heracles, while she completes the round of violence. Proxemics and handling together drive the drama of Deianira’s seizure, which in turn drives the action of the play, as this results in her obtaining the poison with which she inadvertently kills Heracles, who turns up in extremis at the drama’s end.59 As she tells the female chorus when describing how she will win back Heracles’ attentions, as Nessus was ferrying her across the river by hand for pay (μισθοῦ ᾽πόρευε χερσίν) he touches her with violating hands (ψαύει ματαίαις χερσίν). She screams and Heracles turns and shoots an arrow from his two hands (χεροῖν), which pierces the breast and enters the lungs of Nessus (559–68). From this wound comes the “love potion,” with which Deianira anoints a robe that she sends to Heracles with deadly effect.60 The handling of the poison effectively transfers this creaturely violation from Heracles to Nessus to Deianira and back again (i.e., finally to Heracles), as the hero’s poisoned arrows make the bloody potion that Nessus instructs Deianira to gather from the wound

57

Niobe is another common figure in choral odes, though the murder of her children is indirectly her fault, since her maternal pride causes Artemis to kill them. Murkier still is the variant of the Procne myth involving Aedone and her son Itylus, whom she kills by mistake out of jealousy of her sister-in-law Niobe (schol. Od. 19.518; cf. Aesch. Supp. Women 60–63). That murderous mothers would form a prominent category in tragedy should not be surprising, given their centrality in myth as generators of life who are therefore fear-inducing for their power over and control of it (cf., e.g., divine familial violence in Hesiod’s Theogony). 58 As Davies notes (1991: 55). 59 On various aspects of the imagery, see further in Chapters 1, 3, and 4. 60 For more details on the poison and its material effects, see further in Chapter 3 (2a).

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with her hands (χερσίν, 573). This may be why she introduces her tale with the assertion that she has come to tell the chorus something she has devised with her hands (χερσὶν ἁτεχνησάμην, 534), as well as why she characterizes the boxed robe as a “gift from her hand” (δώρημ᾽  . . . τῆς ἐμῆς χερός, 603), since she then goes on to give very explicit instructions as to how this gift must be handled. It seems equally significant that her violation by Nessus leads not only to Heracles’ destruction, with the final scenes of the play focusing on the careful handling and display of his ruined body, but also to Deianira turning her hand on herself.61 As the nurse tells the chorus, she set her own hand to the deed (χειροποιεῖται), which propels the chorus to say wonderingly, “Some female hand dared to do such things?” (καὶ ταῦτ᾽ἔτλα τις χεὶρ γυναικεία κτίσαι;) (891–98). The nurse confirms this daring in detail, down to the “vehement hand” (συντόνῳ χερί) with which she bares her side (923–26) and, while the nurse runs to get her son Hyllus, drives the sword home (931–32). ii. Mad and Maenad Hands. Chapters 3 and 4 consider central scenes of Bacchae in some detail, but I want to highlight an initial patterning that serves as a fitting transition between the violent handling of these representative outsider female characters and Medea’s handling of others, which I take up in the following section. The Bacchae seems at first to echo the focus on binding hands and physical subjugation in Andromache, while later giving way to something like the opposite of this phallic aggressivity and much more like Medea’s deadly maternal hands.62 As I discuss in passing in Chapter 3, Pentheus expends much of his increasingly furious energies early in the play in seeking to control the hands of others, whether keeping them off of him (343) or, more insistently, threatening others with binding their hands (e.g., δεσμίους χέρας, 226, cf. 437, 447–48, 615). Sometimes this emphasis on bondage does not focus on hands (e.g., 259, 355, 444, 545–49, 633–35, 648, 1035), but the general menace Pentheus perpetrates remains one of catching and trapping—that is to say, of laying hands on others with a violent purpose. Because Pentheus’ enemy is Dionysus in disguise, he does not ultimately succeed in imprisoning anyone, even though he goes so far as to threaten pretty much everyone onstage, including the chorus of Asian bacchants. Instead Dionysus turns this manual menacing on Pentheus, in a slow but inexorable reversal of his violent compulsions. The first inkling of this change comes when a shepherd tells of the Theban maenads arming their hands with their ritual wands (θύρσοις διὰ χερῶν ὡπλισμέναι, 733), at which the shepherds scatter. The maenads then fall upon a herd of cows “with weaponless hand” (χειρὸς ἀσιδήρου μέτα, 736): one tears apart with her hands a calf still bellowing, some turn on the heifers (737–42), while others make short work of bulls with their many hands (μυριάσι χειρῶν, 745). Soon the closer consequences of this emerge, when the stranger tells the chorus that Pentheus will go to Hades torn apart by the hands of his mother (ἄπεισι μητρὸς ἐκ χεροῖν κατασφαγείς, 61

For the handling of Heracles, see Chapter 1 (2a); for the cloak/skin conjunction, see further in Chapter 3 (2a). On the charged dynamics of the play, see esp. Wohl (2005); also Foley (1980), Segal (1982), Padel (1985), Vernant (1988), Zeitlin (1993), Barrett (1998), Lada-Richards (1999), Thumiger (2007: 111–28). 62

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858). As the plot reverses in the dressing scene, the maddened Pentheus thinks that he might be able to tear up the peaks of Mount Cithaeron with his bare hands (χεροῖν ἀνασπάσω, 950). By the scene’s end he envisions himself dreamily being carried in the arms of his mother, with the stranger completing the image (ἐν χερσὶ μητρός) in a singularly menacing manner (966–70).63 Then the stranger calls out to Agave and her sisters to stretch forth their hands (ἐκτειν᾽ . . . χεῖρας, 973) to receive the young man who will be their ultimate prey. When the time comes a horrified slave of Pentheus returns from the mountain to report that the Theban women turned maenads had set upon his master, tearing up the tree on which he sat, rendered trapped and too visible by Dionysus, with their many hands in unison (μυρίαν χέρα, 1109–10). Agave fell upon her son, ripping his headband from his hair; but when he reached up to touch her cheek (παρηίδος ψαύων) and said piteously, “It is I, mother, your child Pentheus” (ἐγώ τοι, μῆτερ, εἰμί, παῖς σέθεν / Πενθεύς), she was too maddened to hear (1114–19). And then, in a terribly precise hand-off of manual violence, she began the slaughter by seizing his left hand and wrenching it from its socket, the god now giving her hand strength (ὁ θεὸς εὐμάρειαν ἐπεδίδου χεροῖν, 1128). Eventually all of the women had bloodied their hands (ᾑματωμένη / χεῖρας) in tossing his flesh about (1135–36).64 The scene concludes with Agave taking Pentheus’ head in her hands and piercing it on the end of her thyrsus (κρᾶτα  . . . λαβοῦσα  . . . μήτηρ χεροῖν, 1139–41). The full and resonant consequences of this maternal hand come to the fore at the end of the drama, when Agave returns feeling madly victorious, declaring that she and the others hunted beasts with their bare hands (lit. “the white-bladed fingers of our hands,” λευκοπήχεσι χειρῶν ἀκμαῖσιν, 1206–07, cf. 1209). In a precise inversion of Pentheus’ threat to turn the hands of the bacchant chorus from their drums to the loom (χεῖρα δούπου τοῦδε . . . ἐφ᾽ἱστοῖς, 511–14), she tells her father that she left her shuttle beside the loom to aim at higher things, namely hunting beasts with her hands (θῆρας ἀγρεύειν χεροῖν, 1237). She calls upon Cadmus to receive into his hands what she carries, to which he replies, in a gruesome piece of stage business that also emphasizes tragic spectacle, “Oh grief beyond measure and impossible to look upon, you have carried out this murder with wretched hands [ταλαίναις χερσίν]!” (1244–45). In her dawning realization of what she has done, Agave looks again at what she holds and cries out, “Ah, what do I see? What is this that I bear in my hands [ἐν χεροῖν]?” And then she describes first the emotional impact of her returning vision—”I in horror see the greatest pain [μέγιστον ἄλγος]”— that is, the head of her son Pentheus (1280–86). iii. Medea’s Violent Hand. Medea’s manual menace serves as the final fitting transition from addressing manhandling women to violent heroes’ hands turned against other foes (including themselves). Much like the sinister reversal that Dionysus effects because of

63 64

See further in Chapter 3 (1b) for the details of the dressing scene. See further in Chapter 4 (3a) for the fleshly details of the messenger scene.

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human insults to his divinity, there is a pivotal moment in Euripides’ Medea, when a slighted and vengeful Medea takes control of the plot and turns it against Jason’s two families, including the one in which she has a share.65 She invokes Zeus, Zeus’ Justice (Dikē), and the light of Helios, inviting them to be beautifully victorious (καλλίνικοι, 765) with her, and then she lays out her plan. A key element of it is the sending of her children to Creon and his daughter (Jason’s new wife), bearing gifts that she has anointed with deadly poisons (784–89). The children go off with the gifts in their hands (ἐν χειροῖν, 784, cf. 956) and the princess receives them and places them on her skin (λαβοῦσα κόσμον ἀμφιθῇ χροΐ, 787, cf. 980–81). If we take note of Jason’s question at 959, “Why did you empty your hands of these [gifts]?” (τῶνδε σὰς κένοις χέρας;), this transfer from Medea’s hands to the children’s and then to the princess’ skin effectively forces the murderous hand to come. That is to say, once the princess and king are dead, Medea must flee alone and because she is loathe to relinquish her children to Jason, attention turns to what she will do with those hands. The chorus speaks fearfully of Medea’s grim intentions (857) and the possible drenching of her hand in her children’s blood (τέγξαι χέρα φοινίαν, 864), which together with the reiteration of the handing over of the gifts (956, 959, 973, 981) seems to lead inexorably to the infanticide. The language emphasizes this violence as by Medea’s own hand and of her own blood; and while she feels she must not leave this deed to another more hostile hand (ἄλλῃ . . . δυσμενεστέρᾳ χερί, 1239), when she leaves the stage the chorus responds with horror at the idea that she would commit such an act herself. They pray to Earth (Gē) and her ancestor the sun god Helios to bear witness before she casts her bloody, murderous hand (πρὶν φοινίαν / περιβαλεῖν χέρ᾽αὐτοκτόνον, 1253–54) on her children, regarding her as a bloody Fury (φοινίαν τ᾽Ἐρινύν, 1260) bent on destruction. Soon they hear the children screaming from within—one crying out, “Where shall I escape my mother’s hand?” (ποῖ φύγω μητρὸς χέρας;) and the other replying miserably that he doesn’t know (1273–74). The chorus members wonder whether to enter the house and intervene; and while one child responds, “Yes, please help!” the chorus calls to Medea, admonishing her as so hardhearted like iron or stone that she would deal such a fate with her own hand (αὐτόχερι, 1281). They declare that they have only heard of one other woman (μίαν  . . . μίαν  . . . γυναῖκ᾽) who cast her hand (χέρα βαλεῖν) on her own children, naming the hapless Ino, who like so many of Zeus’ conquests suffered the consequences of Hera’s anger (1282–88). While it is manifestly not true that Ino is alone in her role as murderous mother (as detailed above), the chorus’ emphatic “one . . . one . . . woman” underscores the solo act that is Medea’s. When Jason enters soon afterward, they tell him that the children are dead, again emphasizing Medea’s killing hand (παῖδες τεθνᾶσαι χειρὶ μητρῴᾳ σέθεν, 1309). Sharply contrasted to the ongoing alarm at the specter of Medea’s violent hands are especially her kissing and touching the hands and skin of her children (1070–75, cf. 905–06), which I discuss in more detail in the following chapters.66 We can compare also 65 The bibliography is extensive, though few scholars address Medea’s hands and handling; but see esp. Mueller (2001); also Foley (2001), Torrance (2007). 66 Chapters 3 and 4 offer more details on skin and surfaces in these scenes.

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Medea’s request that Jason raise the children by hand (ἐκτραφῶσι σῇ χερί, 939) or her pain that her killing of them would foreclose the possibility that they wrap her corpse with careful hands (χερσὶν εὖ περιστελλεῖν, 1032–35). The final struggle with Jason over touching and burying the children concludes this trajectory. When Medea appears in her chariot above the scene building, the first thing she emphasizes is that he will never touch her again (χειρὶ δ᾽οὐ ψαύσεις ποτέ, 1320); nor will she allow him to touch his children, as she eventually reveals. When he requests this one favor, she declares that she will bury them with her own hand (σφας τῇδ᾽ἐγὼ θάψω χερί) and bear them up to the temple of Hera Akraia (i.e., on Acrocorinth) for safekeeping (1378–80). Jason cries out that he longs to kiss their dear mouths (lit. “embrace,” προσπτύξασθαι) and begs Medea to allow him to touch (ψαῦσαι) their soft skin (1399– 1403). When she refuses, he calls upon Zeus and the other gods as witness that she has murdered his children and forbidden him to touch and bury them with his hands (τέκνα κτείνασ᾽ ἀποκωλύεις / ψαῦσαι τε χεροῖν θάψαι, 1411–12). At this she flies off with them, removing them from his hands forever. c. Violent Hands of Heroes As should be very clear by this point, Athenian tragedy often highlights characters’ hands as menacing and murderous, primarily those of male heroes gone astray or paradigmatically violent. My primary examples are characters who flesh out the suggestion of phrases such as the one discussed above—“the violent hand of Aegisthus” from Euripides’ Electra—and who represent a variety of manual aggressions. I focus here on violent hands whose actions are most distinctively framed in this way: Ajax in Sophocles and Heracles in Euripides as central examples of the type, while Oedipus serves as the distinctive outlier. As may be expected, his hand represents a special form of manual menace, as he is ultimately driven to turn his murderous intentions on himself. While this is true of Ajax as well, the mystery of the Oedipus plot pairs sex and violence and emphasizes self-knowledge, which lends a peculiarly profound and disturbing tenor to the ways in which his hand punctuates the action of the drama. i. Heracles’ Killing Hands. As with some other heroes who have a history of violence, Heracles’ hands tend to be highlighted when menacing and murderous, although like Ajax and Oedipus he may not know on what or whom he is laying these deadly agents. In Euripides’ Heracles he returns from Hades to find his family threatened by the tyrant Lycus and declares his intention to kill him, leading his family—who are fearfully clinging to him—into the palace to carry out this threat. But this fond reunion is shortlived: Hera sends a madness upon him that causes him to turn on his family instead, killing them all and destroying his house. In the final scene he comes back to himself and is rescued by Theseus, who leads him offstage and from Thebes to Athens.67 While in the chorus’ hymn in his praise these hands fight monsters and although he declares that he will use them against Lycus, when it comes to the killing it is his family

67

See also Padilla (1992), Worman (1999b), Papadopoulou (2005), Holmes (2008).

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who suffer at their actions. Driven mad by the demon Lyssa, he thinks that he is embattled with his enemy Eurystheus, as in a terrible shadow play he turns his hand on his children and finally his wife (in this case Megara). We get a first glimpse of this murderous potential when he returns from Hades to find his family dressed up to die at Lycus’ command and declares that the work of his hand (τῆς ἐμῆς ἔργον χερός) is to overturn the halls of the tyrant, cut off his head, and throw it to the dogs as a plaything (ἕλκημα) (565–68).68 He then enters the palace, fondly towing his family by the hands (λαβών γε τοῦσδ᾽ ἐφολκίδας χεροῖν, 631–32). Although the chorus sings out in celebration, events soon take a dark turn and when the messenger emerges from the halls and declares the children dead, the chorus cry out, “Dreadful murders and dreadful hands on the bow, oh!” (δάιοι φονίοι / δάιοι δὲ τοκέων χέρες, ὤ, 914–15). The messenger then details how the frenzy struck Heracles in the midst of a purifying ritual: he freezes just as he is about to dip the torch with his right hand (χειρὶ δεξιᾷ) into the lustral water, his family standing about him in silence (925–30). Suddenly his eyes begin to spin and he laughs madly, declaring that killing Eurystheus is the work of his hand alone (ἔργον μοι μιᾶς χειρός, 938) and that he will cleanse his hands once that deed is completed (ἁγνιῶ χέρας, 940). Throwing away the ritual basket that he is carrying, he asks for weapons to hand instead (τίς δ᾽ὄπλον χερός, 942) and turns them on his family members one by one. As with Medea, the emphasis here is on the solo act: his father Amphitryon makes this clear to him when he awakes from his post-manic sleep and inquires with horror as to who murdered the bodies that surround him: “Your hand alone did all of these deeds” (μιᾶς ἅπαντα χειρὸς ἔργα σῆς τάδε, 1139). The interwoven ordering of Amphitryon’s words implicates, as if literally, the hand in the acts. The scene is punctuated by what should by now be familiar dynamics: eye–hand coordinating effectively triangulates Heracles’ murdering hand with both his veiling his eyes out of shame and his shrinking from contact because of pollution. While I discuss in Chapter 3 the material surfaces and coverings involved in this exchange, here I want to emphasize the insistent pairing of manual and visual maneuvers. When Heracles first awakens, Amphitryon urges him emphatically to look upon (ἰδού, θέασθαι) the bodies of his family, at which sight he recoils, exclaiming, “Woe is mine! What sight is this that I so wretched see?” (οἴμοι τίν᾽ὄψιν τῆνδε δέρκομαι τάλας;, 1132). Soon he spies Theseus approaching, which sends him into a frenzy of shame at the thought that if Theseus merely looks upon him mired in his blood guilt he will be tainted. “He will see me,” he says in horror, “and the child-murdering defilement will reach the eyes [τεκνοκτόνον μύσος / ἐς ὄμμαθ᾽ ἥξει] of this dearest of guest friends” (1155–56).69 Heracles then covers his head, which precipitates an altercation between him and those who would look upon him. Theseus commands Amphitryon to uncover Heracles’ head (ἐκκάλυπτέ νιν), while Amphitryon begs Heracles to do so, asking him to uncover his eyes (πάρες ἀπ᾽ὀμμάτων) and supplicating him by beard, knee, and hand (ἀμφὶ 68

On bodies or body parts as “toys,” see further in Chapter 6. Cf. προστρόπαιον αἶμα, 1161; αἰδόμενος τὸ σὸν ὄμμα / καὶ φιλίαν ὁμόφυλον / αἶμά τε παιδοφόνον, 1199–1201; ἀνόσιον μιᾶσμ᾽ἐμόν, 1233.

69

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γενειάδα καὶ / γόνυ καὶ χέρα σὰν) (1207–08). Theseus continues to insist that he uncover his eyes (ὄμμα δεικνῦναι τὸ σόν70), at which Heracles gestures from under his cloak, causing Theseus to ask incredulously, “Why do you shake a hand at me, signalling murder? So that you may not cast defilement on me by talking?” (τί μοι προσείων χεῖρα σημαίνεις φόνον; ὡς μὴ μύσος με σῶν βάλῃ προσφθεγμάτων;) (1214–19). His irony contributes a further sensory indication to the exchange, since he interprets Heracles’ hand gesture as a replacement for speech. The fear of taint by sensory contact thus operates as if through haptic extension, with ear and eye being treated as vulnerable to physical corruption by perception that is likened to actual touching. ii. Ajax, Sword in Hand. The opening scene of Sophocles’ Ajax similarly features the hero’s violent hands, but in this case he has been maddened by Athena and so turns them on animals instead of his human enemies. The most interesting thing about Ajax’s destructive touching, because it is so puzzling, thus involves the ontological conundrum set up by the mismatch between his intended and actual victims. Since he means to kill humans he could be felt to be brutal in the extreme; and yet, since he is first deluded and then deeply shamed, he seems more pitiable than otherwise. This, at any rate, is Odysseus’ reaction to him. Despite his fear of Ajax’s violent hands, which serve in the conversation between him and Athena as a riveting metonymy for Ajax’s ferocity, he resists her invitation to boast at his enemy’s downfall and ends the scene with an uncharacteristically existential remark. As I discuss in the Prologue, when the play begins Ajax is nowhere to be seen; instead the audience watches Odysseus attempting to “track” him like a hound by following his footprints. This action the dramatic script indicates by setting up Athena as witness, so that the audience looks with her at Odysseus circling around in front of the stage building. He himself cannot see her—in fact some commentators think that she may not be visible at all, since only the mad Ajax reacts to her as if she were.71 Adding to this challenging visual counterpoint is the fact that the play appears to open in the very early morning, as the light is just coming. No one but Athena (who must be assumed to have special vision) has seen Ajax heading into his tent, sweat dripping from his head and “sword-killing hands” (στάζων ἱδρῶτι καὶ χέρας ξιφοκτόνους, 10). The play thus opens in a very “dramatic” manner, with the audience entering the situation at the crack of dawn and a point in the middle of the action: like Odysseus, viewers of the scene have effectively just missed Ajax, while the goddess was there looking on. That is to say, in this uniquely vibrant, sensory feast of a scene, only the goddess sees Ajax’s killing hands, and these in an image remarkably dense with tactility and surface effect. Not only are his hands “sword-killing”; they are also dripping, but with sweat rather than blood—or really with both, since the adjective ξιφοκτόνους indicates this latter substance as well.

70

Cf. below, 1226–27: ἐκκάλυψον ἄθλιος κάρα / βλέψον πρὸς ἡμᾶς. As noted in the Prologue; Stanford (ad loc.) argues that Athena appears on the stage building, noting that some commentators assume this, while at least one other (Kitto) thinks that she speaks from offstage. 71

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So here we can recognize a dramatic effect that I treat in more detail in Chapter 4, namely, that what the body excretes (blood, sweat, and tears) draws the audience in close to its surfaces. But this reference to Ajax’s sweating hands is only that, a narrative reference, not mimetically present onstage, which one might think could set them at a safe distance—from Odysseus and his fellow warriors as well as from the audience. I would argue, however, that this reference to offstage hands makes the effect more chilling, as it hovers on the edge of the vision, having just missed Odysseus’ own body and by implication those of the other warriors. In fact, the scene makes painfully clear that he and the others barely escaped the terrible potential of those dripping hands. As if emphasizing this near miss, Odysseus returns to the image when he and Athena enter into a discussion of what has occurred. He tells Athena that a scout has glimpsed Ajax leaping over the plain “with a new-dripping sword” (νεορράντῳ ξίφει, 30) and when Athena tells him what has happened, he inquires as to what Ajax was casting his “senseless hand” (δυσλόγιστον . . . χέρα, 40). She replies that he thought that he was staining his hand with his (Odysseus’) blood (ἐν ὑμῖν χεῖρα χραίνεσθαι φόνῳ, 43), in response to which he asks fearfully how she held this hand off, although it was “so eager for murder” (χεῖρα μαιμώσαν φόνου) (50). Athena replies to his questions about Ajax’s violent appendages—with both dripping sword and staining hand as gruesome prostheses—by focusing on the other dominant sense in this scene as in so many others: sight. She replies that she averted Ajax’s eyes, “fencing him off ” (ἀπείργω) with delusions (51). In this way he thought that he had killed the two Atreid leaders, holding them with his own hand (αὐτόχειρ κτείνειν ἔχων, 57), but instead had slaughtered many animals. She declares that she will show Ajax to Odysseus, again “fencing off ” the beams of his eyes, so that they are turned from his face (ὀμμάτων ἀποστρόφους / αὐγὰς ἀπείρξω σὴν πρόσοψιν εἰσιδεῖν).72 She then immediately calls to Ajax to come out: “You there! You who bind your captives’ arms [τὰς αἰχμαλωτίδας χέρας δεσμοῖς ἀπευθύνοντα], I call upon you to emerge!” (69–72). Like certain other scenes that feature violent manual contact, the eye– hand coordination—or rather its purposeful misdirecting—orients their exchange in palpable terms. The “murderous hand” metonymy also punctuates the action to come at significant junctures: it is picked up by Tecmessa (219, 230), Ajax himself (366, 453, 661–62), and the messenger (772) and set in contradistinction to his hair-tearing (310) and mastering hand (490). Tecmessa’s language is the most striking for its rich sensory clustering of manual action, tactility, and deixis. Emerging from the tent after the chorus’ opening song, she acts as the first messenger of the play, expressing her grief in anapestic response with the chorus and then describing the offstage scene of Ajax’s murderous rampage and subsequent horror at his delusion. In the anapests she offers compressed, vibrant shards, most notably for our purposes when she exclaims, “Such things you would see inside the tent—the hand-hacked victims, blood-dipped, sacrifices of that man!” (τοιαῦτ᾽ἂν ἴδοις σκηνῆς ἔνδον  / χειροδάϊκτα σφάγι᾽αἱμοβαφῆ,  / κείνου χρηστήρια τἀνδρός, 219–20). 72

For further on this fencing vocabulary and its relevance to Ajax’s character, see Worman (2001); cf. Mueller (2016: 135–40) on the significance of Ajax’s shield in the play and further in Chapter 3 (4b).

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Her vision shifts the emphasis from the hand clutching the sword to the results of this manual-prosthetic combination—the bodies “hand-hacked” and “dipped,” sacrificial victims of “that [now infamous] man.” The unusual compounds (e.g., χειροδάϊκτα is a hapax; αἱμοβαφῆ is also rare) underscores the sense of a unique and sensory density that calls out for haptic viewing (as indeed Tecmessa does with ἴδοις) and feeling with the actors. An equally intense resonance attends another phrase she uses, when she refers to the “striking hand” (παραπλήκτῳ χερί) and “dark sword-thrusts” (κελαινοῖς ξίφεσιν) with which Ajax cut down his victims.73 While in the first half of the play Ajax does a few other things with his hands, including tearing his hair and dominating his woman, the “murderous hand” metonymy is matched in the second half of the play by an apposite but opposite action: the protective and gentle handling of Ajax’s corpse (see further in Chapter 4). But it is the sword-in-hand permutations around which the action pivots, such that Ajax’s ruse and suicide both center (literally, viscerally) on it. Ajax himself orchestrates this, highlighting the weapon as having a malevolent agency—this gift that he took into his hand from “hostile Hector” (χειρὶ τοῦτ᾽ἐδεξάμην / παρ᾽ Ἕκτορος δώρημα δυσμενεστάτου, 661–62). He underscores the violence that attends such exchanges with a proverb: “Enemies’ gifts are no gifts and ruinous” (ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δῶρα κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα, 665). And he begins his suicide speech with this same deadly prosthesis, almost as if in direct address (ὀ μὲν σφαγεύς, 815), labeling it the gift of his most hated and bitterest (μισηθέντος ἐχθίστου) enemy, now fixed in hostile ground (ἐν γῇ πολεμίᾳ) (818–19). He prays to Zeus to insure that Teucer will come upon him pierced on the “new-dripping sword” (νεορράντῳ ξίφει, 828), using the same tactile compound adjective that Odysseus does early on in the play and then falling upon its object. His final action thereby clinches verbally and physically the opening scene, since he brings onstage the same dripping sword and pierces his body with it. d. Oedipus Encore One of the most striking aspects of Oedipus the King, dramatically speaking, is that the recognition scenes slowly, inexorably collapse king and criminal into one overdetermined being: every relation is doubled (son and criminal/patricide, son and king/ husband, sibling and father), so that every revelation must revolve around this one body, with its telltale sore feet and murderous hands. The discovery of just what those hands have done results in Oedipus’ signature displacement, since rather than cutting them off—and think what they have touched!—he destroys his eyes.74 Perhaps because scholarly convention has it that the eyes are what matters, in the sense that they symbolize a ruinous myopia, few commentators have noticed the prominence of hand imagery in the play.75

73

This is Stanford’s suggestion for the plural (ad loc.) See Chapter 4 (3a) for further on the blinding. 75 But see again Catenaccio (2012), who tracks the (greater) significance of Oedipus’ feet in a parallel manner. 74

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Early on in the action Oedipus twice uses the term αὐτόχειρ (“by his own hand,” 231, 266, cf. 107) of the criminal he seeks, when threatening him with punishment and exile. He reasons that Laius’ murderer may wish to do him harm as well by this same hand (τοιαύτῃ χειρί), so that it behooves him to find him and scatter defilement to the winds (139–41). As he slowly learns what he has done (i.e., murdered Laius, married his wife) and then who he is (i.e., son of his murder victim and the victim’s  / his wife), he incrementally puts together the deeds as happening “by his hands” (ἐκ χεροῖν ἐμαῖν, 821) and doomed to be so, though at first he does not understand whom he ought not to have touched (996). The horror of these two sets of hands being in fact the same rivets him once blind, as he cries out that the αὐτόχειρ is none other than himself and thus he has no wish to see (1331–35), later rehearsing how the crossroads drank the blood of his father spilled by his own hands (τῶν ἐμῶν χειρῶν ἄπο, 1400). Thus it is that in the figure of Oedipus—and by means of a proliferating prosthetics that runs throughout the Theban plays as well—the menace of the sibling hand emerges as not merely one that may alternate ominously between sex and violence, but also one that hovers forever on the edge of unknowing, as ignorant, violent, and resistant family members reach for what they ought not. But here too Oedipus exceeds in his incestuous intensities, since even at the end, with his awful understanding of whom he is annexing, he stretches out his hands to his sister-children. i. Sidebar: Tainted / Tending Hands. Antigone, Sophocles’ earliest engagement with Oedipus and kin that plots action latest in the story, evidences a keen sense of these selfwounding hands as possessing a shared familial taint. In the opening scene between Antigone and Ismene, when Antigone requests that her sister join her in burying Polyneices (lit. “lift with this hand,” τῇδε κουφιεῖς χερί, 43), Ismene responds as if she cannot take her eyes from this gesturing and terribly significant body part. “Don’t you remember,” she exclaims, “how our father himself smashed his eyes with his self-working hand [αὐτουγρῷ χερί], while his mother-wife strung herself up in a noose and our brothers killed each other with hands one after another [ἐπαλλήλοιν χεροῖν]?” (52–57).76 While Antigone’s touch is one that tends, as when later she pours dust over the corpse of her brother with her hands (429), these hands are transgressive in a manner adjacent to those of her family members. It is not only that she is disobeying the law, but also that her sibling hands—like Electra’s and Orestes’ as well as her own brother-father’s—carry with them the shadow of incest. This not only because of her family history: early in the play she is explicit in her desire to lie with her brother “loving with beloved” (φίλη . . . φίλου μέτα, 73). Then on her way to her death she hopes that her father, mother, and brother Eteocles will find her “dear” (three times: φίλη . . . προσφιλής . . . φίλη, 896–98), since with her own hands (αὐτόχειρ) she washed and dressed their corpses and poured libations at their graves (900–02). Now, Antigone concludes, she has won herself a

76

This is a slightly paraphrased version. Cf. Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, where the brothers’ shared fate is foregrounded more than their murderous hands.

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marriage tomb as recompense for her final “burial” (i.e., the sprinkling of dust that she managed for Polyneices). In lines that commentators have long loved to excise, claiming that they are “unworthy” of Sophocles (see Jebb [1902]), she explains that she has chosen her dead brother over a husband (910–15). It follows that, in a perversion of marriage ritual, Creon takes her by the hands (διὰ χερῶν . . . λαβών) and leads her to her “marriage tomb”—“unbedded, unsung [ἄλεκτον, ἀνυμέναιον], having no share in wedding or children” (916–18).77 In gathering all of these charged depictions of manual contact together for perusal I do not mean to suggest that these plays center around perverse handling or incest or even that this is a sustained subtext in many of them. Rather, I am urging attention to how many tragedies highlight manual contact at the intersections of sex and violence, contributing to central scenes’ embodied aesthetics and emotional intensities. As family members or friends reach out toward each other, often coordinating eyes and hands by figurative and mimetic gestures, they draw spectators into proximities whose reverberating dynamics unsettle individual subjectivities and representational conventions. And since this is tragedy, such emergent proximities can almost never be only protective or comforting—in fact, tragic effect is achieved by the menacing possibility of their opposite: the outraged body, the violent hand.

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Thus Creon leads her off by the hand like a bride of death, while Haemon, who should have taken this hand instead turns his own on himself (αὐτόχειρ αἱμάσσεται, 1175–77). On the tomb as equally perverse shelter, see further in Chapter 4 (2d). On this “marriage to death” imagery, see Rehm (1994); cf. Ormand (1999).

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CHAPTER 3 FAMILIAL COVERINGS: SKIN, CLOAKS, AND OTHER OUTERWEAR

The picture and the actor’s mimicry are not devices to be borrowed from the real world in order to signify prosaic things which are absent. For the imaginary is much nearer to, and much farther away from, the actual—nearer because it is in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual, with all its pulp and carnal obverse [son envers charnel] exposed to view for the first time. And the imaginary is much farther away from the actual because . . . [art] offers to vision its inward tapestries, the imaginary texture of the real. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” In recent years scholarly attention to dress, including dramatic costume in particular, has burgeoned, apace with heightened attention to stage space, props, and other performative elements.1 Most approaches start out from historicizing reconstructions of the ancient setting and its conventions and materials; Oliver Taplin’s work has been particularly influential in encouraging readers of ancient drama to look to vase painting for visual information about costume, among other details of the ancient stage setting.2 While such studies are invaluable and deeply enrich scholarly and artistic thinking about the actual stuff that built out the classical dramatic script in live performance, a more theoretically oriented—though no less materially grounded—aesthetics drives my discussion. By this I mean that, while aiming to avoid positivistic reconstructions of tragic scenes and their details, I direct attention as fully and meticulously as possible to the feel, texture, coloration, and so on, of the materials indicated in the play scripts, including those emphasized as onstage in the mimesis, those described in choral invocations or messenger narratives of offstage embodiments, and figurative references to materials intersecting with either one. In this way I hope to show the many ways in which such material references in tragedy open out onto larger concerns about human embodiment and its cladding. In this chapter I consider prominent coverings that tragedy deploys to settle bodies in extremis on the edges of human inhabitation and at the margins of experience. Here skin and its trappings layer, fuse, enfold, or make for monstrous combinations, so that (to take again the end of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers as an instance) a son’s affective energies and 1

See especially Wyles (2011), with bibliography; also Brooke (1962), Arnott (1983), Riis (1993), Lee (2004), Cleland, Harlow, and Llewellyn-Jones (2005), Roccos (2006), Ley (2007), Powers (2014: 79–97), Mueller (2016: 42–69). Among the discussions of individual plays or features most useful for my purposes are Battezzato (1999–2000), Lee (2004), and Stavrinou (2016). Cf. Llewellyn-Jones (2002) on female dress in Greek culture more broadly; Hall (2006: 100–41) on the mask, artwork, and aesthetics in tragedy. 2 Taplin (1993, 2007); cf. also Taplin and Wyles (2010).

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creaturely inhabitation become entangled in a horrific parental object: his mother’s murderous tapestry drenched with his father’s blood. In such moments where the one ends and the other begins becomes difficult to discern, as is also the case in Euripides’ Andromache, where a daughter loses her bearings once she relinquishes her hold on her wealthy father’s finery. Both cloak and fancy clothing throw into sharp relief what other significant objects tend to—that is, their agency, their power to hold characters in thrall and to propel action.3 Then the materialities of signs (again, concrete manifestations of figurative relations) precipitate on stage at the edges of bodies, as contact and closeness render metaphors or symbols visible and tactile. At these moments clothing may take on resonance as a second skin, or, alternatively, an alienating carapace to be violently wrenched from the body. Solid objects may, in turn, appear porous, malleable, or saturated with human features, becoming extensions of or proxies for the characters that interact with them. While Aeschylus’ dramatic style is famously dense and imbricated, rife with synesthetic and animating imagery, the scenes from the Oresteia that I take up in the first section below are quite distinct in relation to embodiment and material proximities. In fact, I would argue that the plotting itself unravels a cluster of effects and identifications, such that the quintessentially thick semiotic and theatrical object (the murderous cloak) that punctuates the end of Libation Bearers is resolved into distinct items and actors in Eumenides. This is quite different than what tends to occur in Euripides’ plays that feature resonant draperies; there resolution is most often ephemeral and materials may fuse too permanently with characters, to their deadly ends (e.g., Medea’s poisoned gifts, Pentheus’ dress-up). Sophocles’ dramas focus more attention on heroic outerwear, including skin, such that even when unstrung like Heracles in Women of Trachis or under duress like Ajax their celebrated forms and famous layers (Ajax’s shield, Heracles’ pelt/skin) hover around their debilitated forms. To be clear, these are not the only places in the plays of the dramatists that stage these sorts of layering and fusion, nor the only scenes that center on skin or clothing, although both are most prevalent in Euripides. Thus Chapter 4 considers how bodies may operate in tragedy as “strange containers,” which necessitates some attention to bodily surfaces, while my primary concern in the present chapter is with materials such as cloaks, robes, shields, and also skin—in the sense of what works by folds, fastenings, wrappings, and so on.4 That is to say, what works like cloth rather than like a sac or vessel. Skin may obviously 3 Cf. Mueller (2016), Telò and Mueller (2018). I mean this frame in a more limited sense than some theorists, including classicists; Bennett (2010: 98–100) is the outer edge of what I can see as the “life” of objects, and even she concedes that anthropomorphizing is unavoidable. 4 There are traces in earlier and later imagery of this sense of skin or flesh as a cloak for the body: e.g., Empedocles fr. B126 (σαρκῶν ἀλλογνῶτι περιστέλλουσα χιτῶνι) as well as the soul’s “body cloak” in Plato’s Phaedo (87b–e). Cloaking or covering also serves as an image for decoration in language that may be appropriate but may also deceive or distract, as with style and metaphor (e.g. Arist. Rhet. 1405a13–14; cf. Isoc. 5.25–27; Pl. Gorg. 465b4–5; Cic. Orat. 78–79; DH Dem. 18.35–41, Isoc. 12.22, 13.4–7, 15.15; Anaxim. Ars rhet. proem 2.2; see Worman 2015: 52–53). In tragedy the most pointed instance of this is Hecuba’s claim in Trojan Women that Helen has blamed the gods for her actions in order to give embellished cover to her wrongdoings (τὸ σὸν κακὸν κοσμοῦσα, 981–82). I thank Victoria Wohl for calling my attention to the Empedoclean image and its similarity to Plato’s.

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be envisioned as either one, or sometimes both (as wrappings may contain or aim to contain the whole), and as such it serves as the hinge between the two chapters.5 The most significant examples of the coverings that I address in this chapter take the form of contact and entanglement with bodily surfaces that pivot the plot significantly between family ties and materials (sections 1 and 2). My discussion begins with the plays in which this is most notably the case. As this focus on skin, cloth, and coverings suggests, the image of the fold is essential and central to this chapter, as theorized by Deleuze among others.6 I discuss in the Prologue to this study how the fold disrupts simple binaries between surface and depth, inside and outside, and how as image and actuality it operates as a material refutation of such fixed borders. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “flesh” or “fabric” of the world as contiguous and continuous with human embodiment and thus perception dovetails with this Deleuzian sensitivity to perception’s contours, although Merleau-Ponty uses the image of the chiasmus to trace them.7 This world fabric enfolds the body and other objects such that the latter are “encrusted into its flesh,” allowing for the double movement of imagination’s grounding in the “pulp and carnal obverse” of bodily perception, as well as manifesting its “inner tapestries” to the eye. In her book on skin as a porous and mutable metonymy for identity, Claudia Benthien argues that Western cultures often figure female skin as both concealment and invitation, as a veil but a diaphanous one.8 Such sexist inflections set it together with racialized skin, and especially dark or black skin (male or female), as potentially deceptive and typically sexualized, in contrast to which elite white male skin operates as the naturalized and public norm. Most recent theorists of skin promote an awareness of it as a product of culture and thus one bodily covering among others, while the notion that female and/or racialized skin may serve as both veil and lure provokes compelling questions about how to read the bodily coverings of slaves, foreigners, and women in particular, as I take up together in section 3.9 This chapter considers the range of bodily covers that tragedy illuminates, from inner layers (i.e., skin and complexion) to outer (e.g., cloaks, shields), focusing especially on where these merge or clash in relation to the characters who inhabit them. I am most interested in the plays that center on such metonymies for entrapment and/or protection, though with more focus on the materialities of the metonymic objects (e.g., colors, textures, movement, and so on) than with their extrapolations. That said, the really significant, plot-driving bodily covers typically situate characters in relation to familial

5

Chapter 5 explores more fully how such representational strategies foster strange combinations, with a focus especially on Euripides, and Chapter 6 considers statues and other bodily proxies in all three dramatists. 6 Deleuze ([1980] 1991, [1988] 2006). 7 Merleau-Ponty (1964: 163–65, cf. 1968). 8 Benthien (2002: 87–94). See also Stephens (2014: 12–16). 9 See especially Mehuron (1993), Halberstam (1995), Connor (2004), Cheng (2013), Stephens (2014), as well as Fanon ([1952] 1967), the study that still serves as a catalyst for such awareness. See also Chapter 5, which considers disrobing in tragedy from the angle of bodily imbrication and assemblage.

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bonds and conflicts, which suggests that tragedy stages them precisely as material connections.10 Thus the first sections below address parental and spousal clothing, while later sections expand the purview to consider broader identity markers that serve as outerwear, such as race (skin) and warrior status (shields).

1. Parental Carapaces In this section I focus on three elaborately staged parental carapaces: Clytemnestra’s murderous cloak as displayed by Orestes in Libation Bearers, Pentheus’ maternal drag in Bacchae, and the fine adornment that Menelaus’ riches provides his daughter in Andromache. Since Euripides’ plays contain some of the most striking manipulations of dress and undress as bodily alteration and layering, in Chapter 5 I also consider more fully the removal of clothing, some of which is not overtly marked as parental, including Electra’s reduced and “naked” state in Electra, Antigone’s undressing at the end of Phoenician Women, and Polyxena’s offstage stripping in Hecuba. Here and in section 2 I am primarily concerned with familial clothing as deluding or tainted carapace and trap. The dramatists depict such attire as if it possessed something akin to familial traits, passed down from parent to child, occasionally for better but mostly for worse. a. Maternal Trap In the Oresteia pivotal moments feature materials and bodies—most especially the deepdyed and then bloody tapestries and the corpses—that enfold, impinge, and ooze across the plots of the plays. One of the most famous scenes in tragedy, and one that scholars have made much of, occurs in Agamemnon when Clytemnestra persuades Agamemnon to step onto the rich fabrics that she has strewn on the ground, supposedly for his royal comfort.11 Agamemnon has entered aloft in a chariot and likely with a large retinue, as editors have surmised and as would be befitting of his status. He delivers a bloodthirsty, boastful speech, looking to celebrate his victorious return from the Trojan War; this and the fact that he has his captive consort, the Trojan priestess Cassandra, with him, could scarcely please Clytemnestra. Because of the intensely inter-implicating dynamics of bodies and their wrappings in this pivotal moment, I use the couple’s wrangling with them as a frame for Chapter 5, which treats such assemblages as central to certain types of plotting, especially in the plays of Euripides. This combinatory, propulsive effect also characterizes Orestes’ redeploying of the same murderous materials in Libation Bearers, such that aspects of the later scene are most relevant here, since this is where clothing as parental snare comes to a head in the trilogy. We can note here as well a moment at the end of the Agamemnon

10 11

For an earlier treatment of such material family connections, see Worman (1999b). See especially McClure (1999: 80–92), Morrell (1997), Lee (2004), McNeil (2005), Mueller (2016: 51–57).

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that sets up Orestes’ plying of the maternal trap, when Clytemnestra’s lover Aegisthus appears onstage and greets the “glad light of the justice-bringing [δικηφόρου] day,” declaring how happily (φίλως) he sees (ἰδών) “this man here” (τὸν ἄνδρα τόνδε)—that is, Agamemnon’s corpse laying before him—now “wrapped in the webbing robes of the Erinyes” (ὑφαντοῖς ἐν πέπλοις Ἐρινύων) (1580–81).12 When Orestes appears with the corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus near the end of Libation Bearers, he replays and revises his mother’s plying of her device in the tapestry scene, as well as this later moment with Aegisthus. He begins the angry speech that celebrates their deaths with a command that the chorus (and thus the audience) look upon (ἴδεσθε, 972, 978) their murdered bodies and the tapestry that was his mother’s murdering device. This is not an unusual imperative in tragedy, but it does especially mark the emergence of a startling sight and often refers to a tableau on the eccyclēma— the rolling platform mentioned in Chapter 1, which typically extruded from the central stage door the consequences of tragic violence.13 It thus also frequently signals the moment at which a character encourages a kind of seeing that is literal and demonstrative (i.e., deictic, even sometimes pointing to actual referents displayed on stage), as well as interpretive, in the sense of framing it as a material sign. At these pivotal moments the audience is enjoined to “see” what they are looking at in relation to the character(s) onstage and off, as well as to the plotting, situating them in relation to categories such as male–female, human–animal, god–thing, and so on. In this case Orestes’ framing of his corpses and the cloth highlights the imagery of beasts and traps that knits this material emplacement together with preceding speeches and actions of the trilogy, which effectively unravels in the final play. Revealing tableaus such as this one illuminate a patterning of imagery that must be viewed as a pattern in order for the audience to comprehend its far-ranging significance. The enactment indicated by the play script offers the contrasting alternations of male– female, human–beast or –object as reinforced on stage by blocking and proxemics and thus vividly communicating these larger ramifications. Further, the responses of the chorus members—who are male citizens in Agamemnon, foreign female slaves in Libation Bearers, and female demons in Eumenides—help to define the role of the audience as viewers of the action by way of identification or contrast. This particular instance traces a pattern of entrapment that involves a murderous male character in dehumanizing isolation, but who initially struggles for an institutional kind of sense making: that of the law court. After Orestes has pointed out the fallen state of his mother and her paramour Aegisthus, he repeats his exhortation to the “hearers” to “look upon also [or again]” the mechanism that entrapped his father (ἴδεσθε δ’ αὖτε,

12

Cf. Cassandra on Clytemnestra as a “net of Hades” (1115) and the chorus’ and her associations of this with the Erinyes (1119, 1188–92, 1433); cf. Bennett Anderson (1932), Goheen (1955), Lebeck (1971), Ferrari (1997); and see further in Chapters 5 and 6. Cf. Mueller (2016: 60–63) on the richness of the prop’s imagery. 13 Although Pickard-Cambridge ([1952] 1968) argues against the early use of the device, later commentators have pointed out how difficult numerous scenes would be to play without this kind of visible display; cf. Arnott (1961), Dale ([1956] 1969), Worman (2001).

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τῶνδ’ ἐπήκοοι κακῶν, / τὸ μηχάνημα, δεσμὸν ἀθλίῳ πατρί, 980). He orders his attendants to “stretch it out and, standing in a circle, display the covering of the man” (ἐκτείνατ’ αὐτὸ καὶ κύκλῳ παρασταδὸν / στέγαστρον ἀνδρὸς δείξαθ’, 983–84); and he hopes that Helios, who looks down upon “all these things” (ὁ πάντ’ ἐποπτεύων τάδε, 985), might see (ἴδῃ, 984), and so serve as a witness (μάρτυς, 987) that he behaved justly. Orestes’ initial statements thus explicitly block out the movement onstage in relation to the handling of materials and call forth the female chorus as audience, using pointing language to draw the eye to the concrete manifestations of his mother’s murderous actions. The moment is orchestrated to foreground the prop in close proximity to actors and audience: Orestes stands in front of the stage building (here representing the halls of Agamemnon) with his male attendants surrounding him with the drapery held aloft, facing the female chorus in the orchestra, while the audience looks with the chorus at the tableau he has created. The haptic visuality of the moment is striking in its choreographed manipulation of materials and the layering of actors and objects: Orestes enfolded by his mother’s device, and the foreign slave chorus looking on with the (originally) largely male citizen audience. This maternal enfolding seems to have contaminating implications for the son, as in his increasingly baffled explication to the chorus members Orestes calls the tapestry a “binding” (δεσμὸν), which he then glosses as a “manacling for the hands” and a “fettering for the feet” (πέδας  . . . ξυνωρίδα, 982).14 Encircled by this drapery, he then becomes entangled in the figurative folds, wheeling back and forth between his mother’s cloth and corpse, asking the chorus, “What does she seem to you?” (τί σοι δοκεῖ)? Answering his own question, he deems Clytemnestra a “sea-serpent or Echidna” (μύραινά γ’ εἴτ’ ἔχιδν’, 994), echoing a central characterization of her established in Agamemnon and earlier in Libation Bearers (Ag. 1233; Cho. 249). He continues confusedly, “What shall I deem it/her [νιν]?”—a net for a beast (ἄγρευμα θηρός), a winding sheet for a corpse (νεκροῦ ποδένδυτον), a curtain for the bath (δροίτης κατασκήνωμα, 997–98)? He declares that this cloth that serves as a visual indicator of his mother’s murderous type really is a net, a trap, and a foot-entangler (δίκτυον μὲν οὖν / ἄρκυν τ’ ἂν εἴποις καὶ ποδιστῆρας πέπλους, 999–1000), a device fit for a highway robber.15 In this momentous outburst, then, Orestes gathers all the strands of monstrous and entrapping images and gestures that have overshadowed the action of the Oresteia up to this point and signals an essential pattern to come. It is picked up and transformed in the Eumenides, when Clytemnestra’s furious ghost, “as forceful in spirit as she was in the flesh” (so Froma Zeitlin), calls for vengeance.16 We are confronted in this last play with not only the weird physicality of Clytemnestra, who harshly demands that the audience view the gashes next to her heart (ὁρᾶτε πληγὰς τάσδε καρδίας, 103), but also her dogs the Furies, who are seen asleep until she rouses them to hunt Orestes. The Pythian priestess who witnesses these creatures inhabiting Apollo’s temple at Delphi describes

14

Sider (1978: 26) emphasizes the circular pattern, but suggests an unworkable staging of the display; cf. again Goheen (1955), Lebeck (1971), Lee (2004), Mueller (2016: 60–63). 15 I should note that editors have attempted to sort out Orestes’ frenzy by moving text around; see Bond ad loc. 16 Zeitlin (1965: 506).

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their hideous carapaces as not only dripping with gore; they are also “hideous in every regard” (ἐς τὸ πᾶν βδελύκτροποι, 52). Their dark outerwear is, she continues, “drapery unfit for statues of the gods or the houses of humans” (καὶ κόσμος οὔτε πρὸς θεῶν ἀγάλματα / φέρειν δίκαιος οὔτ᾽ ἐς ἀνθρώπων στέγας, 55–56).17 The Furies themselves state explicitly that they “have no share in white-robed rituals” (352); and it is only at the end that Athena names them defenders of her wooden image and redresses them in red cloaks, as if they were metics at the Panathenaia (1028).18 Their guise in the majority of the play is effectively that of Clytemnestra’s hellhounds (cf. 131–32, Cho. 924); they are inhuman forms that wear the dark mantle of the underworld until they don the crimson at the drama’s end. This final play thus treats the parental carapace in an extended sense, as fostering monstrous extensions of the maternal trap. i. Sidebar: Covering Mother. At the end of Euripides’ Electra Orestes indicates a different cloak than his mother’s famously entrapping one from Aeschylus’ trilogy. This is the garment that he cockily threw back from his shoulders when preparing to flay the sacrificial calf and then to smash Aegisthus (on which see Chapter 4, 3a.iv). It is also the one that he used more proximately to this moment and in a more craven manner, to shield his eyes from his mother’s body as he killed her (1221–23). And now he offers this cloak as a cover for her dead body, to staunch (cf. καθάρμοσον) her wounds (1227–28). But it is Electra who takes it up and covers her mother’s corpse, saying, “See, I wrap the cloak around her, loved and unloved” (ἰδού, φίλᾳ τε κοὐ φίλᾳ / φάρεα τάδ’ ἀμφιβάλλομεν, 1230–31). The moment, which comes as a final punctuation to the siblings’ murderous choreography, registers as a tactile counter to the formidable Clytemnestra and her drapery, cauterizing her body and domesticating her dark surface extensions. Earlier in the play, in distinct contrast, Electra had depicted her mother as so sunk in her Phrygian luxuries (Φρυγίοισιν ἐν σκυλεύμασιν) that even her attendants sport fancy robes of Idaian wool pinned with golden brooches (Ἰδαῖα φάρη χρυσέαις ἐζευγμέναι / πόρπαισιν), while her father’s dark blood still stains the walls (αἷμα δ᾽ἔτι πατρὸς κατὰ στέγας μέλαν σέσηπεν) (314–18). Clytemnestra herself later claims that she and Aegisthus set up most of Agamemnon’s war spoils in the temples of the gods, keeping the Phrygian girls as compensation for the slaughter of Iphigenia (1000–03). This latter scene highlights the aesthetic and ethical gaps between Electra and her mother: she accuses Clytemnestra of setting her flaming curls before the mirror long before Iphigenia faced sacrifice (ξανθὸν κατόπτρῳ πλόκαμον ἐξήσκεις κόμης, 1071); Clytemnestra, for her part, expresses horror at Electra’s grimy and ill-clothed skin (ἄλουτος καὶ δυσείματος χρόα, 1107). And as she heads unwittingly towards her death in Electra’s humble abode, the latter snidely remarks, “Watch out lest you smudge your robes on the smoky walls”

17

See Maxwell-Stuart (1973), who after doing some fine philological work on the descriptive vocabulary, decides the Erinyes were envisioned as a species of bat(!) On the details, see further in Chapter 6 (1c). 18 See Headlam (1906), Mitchell-Boyask (2009: 96); cf. Lee (2004), Noel (2013), Mueller (2016) on materials in the trilogy.

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(μή σ᾽αἰθαλώσῃ πολύκαπνον στέγος πέπλους, 1140). And then Orestes screams from within his horrified attachment to her body at the moment of murder, including her bared breast, her birthing legs (γόνιμα μέλεα), and her hair (1206–09).19 b. Pentheus’ Mother-wear One of the most gruesome demonstrations of the dangers of tangling with maternal attire of any kind occurs in Euripides’ Bacchae. As many scholars have discussed— though none as insightfully as Victoria Wohl—Pentheus’ sneering assessment of Dionysus’ guise as the Lydian stranger, his prurient interest in what women do when he is not there to see, and his maddened desire to masquerade as his mother, end up killing him.20 That his resistance to Dionysus takes the form of an obsession with mocking the stranger’s physical appearance as feminine and with binding his body suggests that there is something perverse at work, as like so many characters in Euripides’ dramas he pivots wildly between sex and violence. While I discuss briefly in Chapter 2 how violence toward and by hands drives the plot to Pentheus’ ruin, and return to his “inside out” corpse in Chapter 4, in this section I take up the role of bodily coverings in the play, including connections between costuming and binding. Explicit references to clothing and appearance regularly punctuate the action of the Bacchae, and unlike most other tragedies, they are all quite exotic. This is in keeping with the drama’s emphasis on Dionysus’ eastern guise as the Lydian stranger, as well as the indications of the outlandish aspects of his ritual. But it is not only that the chorus of bacchants sing in the parodos of wild outerwear such as the snaky crowns, pine boughs (thyrsoi), and fawn skins of Dionysian celebrants (99–114), nor only that the Theban women sport similar accoutrements, as described by the first messenger. All of the primary male characters also don Bacchic dress of one sort or another, including Dionysus in his Lydian guise, Teiresias and Cadmus in their celebrants’ gear, and finally the maddened Pentheus in his maenad’s garb. Indeed, in the course of the drama, a growing sense of coercion and menace attaches to the various costumes, as even in an early scene the old celebrants treat their dress as properly respectful and obedient and warn Pentheus against mocking and rejecting it. Cadmus includes a familiar lesson learned: his other grandson Actaeon, torn to pieces on Mount Cithaeron by his own hounds because he mocked the goddess Artemis (337–40). “May you not suffer the same fate,” he concludes ominously; and Pentheus will in fact meet his end in the same place as his cousin, torn to pieces not by his hunting dogs but rather by his own maenad mother and her sisters.21 When Cadmus adds, “Come, I shall 19

I analyze this grouping in detail in Chapter 4 (3c). The bibliography on the Bacchae is enormous; influential studies with focuses related to mine include Winnington-Ingram (1948), Gallini (1963), Roux (1972), Segal (1982), Foley (1985), Padel (1985), Vernant (1988), Zeitlin (1993). On dressing, masking, and spectating, see esp. Wohl (2005); also Foley (1980), Barrett (1998), Thumiger (2007: 111–28). 21 Dodds (ad loc.) notes that Actaeon is mentioned repeatedly in Bacchae (230, 1227, 1291), considering this an indication that the play urges awareness of the story’s parallelism. 20

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crown your head with ivy,” Pentheus responds as if he were being threatened with contamination: “Take your hands off of me,” he says, “do not wipe off [ἐξομόρξῃ] your folly on me” (343–44). The ferocity of his response illuminates his disgust as what Ahmed highlights as “an exposure on the skin’s surface.” She underscores that disgust hinges on touch and proximity, as contact is experienced as an “unpleasant intensity” which has the effect of what she captures as “surfacing,” namely bringing the skin into shuddering awareness of things fetishized and/or abjected. In fact Pentheus’ body vibrates with disgust at surfaces and contact, which is also sexualized, as Ahmed points out of disgust in general—a “disturbance” of the skin by desire.22 In this intensely metatheatrical play Pentheus’ skin disturbance manifests itself mostly as a fascinated fear of dress-up that he associates with sex and his mother. And it turns out that this fear is hardly misplaced, since it will come to haunt and destroy him.23 In his exchange with Teiresias and Cadmus, Pentheus focuses his sexually charged imagination on the Theban women who have been driven by Dionysus to the mountains, and on Dionysus himself. The young king is sure that the women are drinking and having sex (221–25), and he threatens to bind the hands (δεσμίους χέρας, 226) of whomever he catches and put them in jail. He will hunt them (θηράσομαι), he vows, including his mother and aunts and the whole bacchic crowd (228–32). Then Pentheus turns to hearsay about the Lydian stranger come to town, a “magician charmer” (γόης ἐπῳδός), with perfumed golden curls and a sexy look, the vision of which drives him to violent fantasy: he will stop him from beating his thyrsus and shaking his locks by cutting his neck from his body (τράχηλον σώματος χωρὶς τεμών, 241). After reacting so furiously to the suggestion of donning similar gear, he vows to overturn the haunts of the women, casting their ritual ribbons (στέμματ᾽) to the breeze (347–50). He then orders his men to track down the “woman-shaped stranger” (θηλύμορφον ξένον), who he imagines is spreading a sexual miasma. As he puts it, the stranger is “importing a new disease to the women and polluting their beds” (ὃς ἐσφέραι νόσον / καινὴν γυναιξὶ καὶ λέχη λυμαίνεται, 353–54). He concludes by telling his men to bring his quarry back in bonds (δέσμιον), to be stoned to death (355–56). When Pentheus comes face to face with the stranger, his servant relates that his attempts at capture and binding have been thwarted in distinct ways: the bonds fell from the hands and feet of the bacchants (443–47), but the stranger submitted calmly to being bound. He did not grow pale (ὠχρός), nor did his cheek lose its blush (οὐδ᾽ἤλλαξεν

22

Ahmed (2004: 83–88). Dodds (ad loc.) considers the violence of his response “a fine psychological stroke,” arguing that it indicates that Pentheus intuits the ritual dress’s dangers for him. Cf. Wohl (2005), who engages with psychological and psycholanalytic readings but offers a subtler means of understanding this violent reaction, as of a piece with the violent erotics of Pentheus’ reactions to Dionysus and his ultimate desire to become his mother. While I have a slightly different sense of how Pentheus’ urgency is oriented, Wohl’s reading of the proliferating sexual and gender identifications that she terms “Dionysiac contagion” is very compelling. Cf. Zeitlin (1996: 341–43) on Pentheus in relation to mimesis and the feminine; Thumiger (2007: 138–46) on family ties and gender in the play; also Buxton (2009) on discriminating among the characters in relation to the implications of Dionysiac dress and gendering.

23

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οἰνωπὸν γένυν)—he just stood there smiling (γελῶν), which made the servant feel ashamed (437–41). Pentheus orders him to release the stranger’s hands and proceeds to assess his bodily contours with a prurient eye: he finds his form “not unattractive [οὐκ ἄμορφος], at least to women,” his hair long and falling along his cheeks—and “full of desire” (πόθου πλέως). He notes his white skin (λευκὴν χροιάν), a feminizing feature that makes him suspect a beauty regime (cf. ἐκ παρασκευῆς), as well as sexual pursuits in the shadows (ὑπὸ σκιᾶς / τὴν Ἀφροδίτην καλλονῇ θηρώμενος) (453–59, cf. 487, 958). In his fear and erotically charged fury, he threatens to cut off the stranger’s soft tresses (ἁβρὸν βόστρυχον), as a first move that only underscores his fascination. He then demands that the stranger “release this thyrsus here from [his] hands” (θύρσον τόνδε παράδος ἐκ χεροῖν), the deictic adjective heightening the sense of the scene as, at least on one level, about props and costuming, and on another related one about the trappings of desire. Indeed, Pentheus’ emphasis throughout these early scenes on dress, skin, deportment, and violent contact communicates his fetishizing of and anxieties about the erotics of coverings and proximities. As Wohl has argued, the scene reveals Pentheus’ own conflicted desires for this womanish man.24 I would add that, when taken together with his urge to violence, and especially to binding, it also has a sadistic cast. For Pentheus sex and violence are closely aligned, and these are themselves bound up (so to speak) in outerwear and its contraptions, including both the bacchic prostheses (e.g., wreathes, wands) that he fears and his own penchant for bondage. He repeatedly menaces the stranger with cutting, binding, and stripping—neck, hair, hands, wand—all of which the latter maintains as in the service and under the protection of Dionysus.25 At the end of the scene Pentheus again threatens incarceration and is so incensed by his exchange with the stranger that he turns on the chorus as well, saying that he will sell them or put them to work at his looms (511–14). That he means the foreign bacchants present onstage rather than the Theban women who have escaped is indicated by two more deictic references: “these women here” (τάσδε) and “this din” (δούπου τοῦδε) (i.e., from the beat of the drum, βύρσης κτύπου). Both of these again give a metatheatrical charge to his attentions, as he seeks to turn their hands from playing instruments in choral celebration to work at the loom, from onstage autonomous enactment to offstage slave labor. It is a measure of Pentheus’ drive to violation that he sees the selling and enslavement of women as his next move; and the fact that his animus is aimed at the chorus further underscores the sadistic tenor of his gestures. The parodos suggests that, as the typical ritual dress for celebrants of Dionysus includes the fawn skin and ivy wand, these foreign bacchants would have been costumed in some variation of this ritual gear, together with

24

Wohl (2005: 144–45). On hands and binding in the play, see further in Chapter 2 (4a.i). Scholars have noted the intense theatrical and existential doubling of the scene, as Dionysus, god of the mask, remains in disguise but alludes repeatedly to the proximity of the deity (e.g., Foley [1980], Segal [1982], Vernant [1988], Carpenter and Faraone [1993], Thumiger [2007: 186–89]). This is not, of course, my focus here, except insofar as the layering of “Lydian stranger” over “Dionysus” heightens the sense of the disguise as costume and outerwear. 25

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the drums to which Pentheus reacts here. That is to say, they serve as a proximate visual reminder of the dress as camouflage for sex that he associates with his mother, as well as the foreign threat of the god. Perhaps most egregiously in this drama starring Dionysus, he effectively takes aim at the play itself, since with the chorus in chains the action would grind to a halt.26 The chorus accordingly casts Pentheus as, among other things, a wildfaced monster (ἀγριωπὸν τέρας) and inhuman (οὐ φῶ- / τα βρότειον) (537–44), as if to further accentuate his status as violator of human–divine relations and distinctions.27 The Lydian stranger, for his part, describes Pentheus panting, dripping with sweat (ἑδῶτα σώματος στάζων ἄπο), and gnashing his teeth as he struggles to tie up the creature that he thinks is the stranger (616–21). Soon a shepherd arrives from Cithaeron and reports on the Theban maenads, both their freakish prostheses (including snaky hair, lion cubs at the breast, wands that draw wine and honey, 680–711) and their surreal violence (engaging in bare-handed sparagmos, wielding wands as weapons, running swiftly as hounds and birds, 731–50).28 These maddened bacchants stand in sharp distinction to the onstage chorus of celebrants and yet seem to inflect the latter’s presence with exotic implications, as Pentheus’ urge to incarcerate them indicates. But this Theban group sends him into a frenzy of activity: he reacts to the shepherd’s tale with characteristic militancy, ordering his attendants to draw up an army and expressing horror that he is suffering at the hands of women (781–856). The stranger warns him that his weapons will be useless and offers to lead him to the mountains without armor, but Pentheus suspects a trap and immediately calls out for just that (i.e., his armor). Over the course of the next fifty lines, the stranger leads Pentheus to accept, at least provisionally, his plan of dressing up as a Theban maenad in order to infiltrate their bacchic scene. He moves from horror at the idea of wrapping his skin (στεῖλαί νυν ἀμφὶ χρωτί) in a linen gown (βυσσίνους πέπλους), women’s wear that he shies from but then shows great curiosity about. Twice he says, “What garb [τίνα στολήν] are you talking about?”—and the stranger describes long hair, dress, headband, thyrsus, and fawn skin, with Pentheus repeatedly interjecting “and then?” (828–35). When he has the full picture, he reverts to his position that he cannot possibly put on such a womanly costume (θῆλυν . . . στολήν, 836), but as the stranger points out that it is either that or bloody battle, he is soon acknowledging that disguise may be the best course of action. When Pentheus leaves the stage, the stranger tells the chorus, in a terrible clinching of costume to deadly end, that he will attach [προσάψων] to Pentheus the adornment [κόσμον] that he will take to Hades, torn apart by his mother’s hands (867–69).29

26

Of course, this would be a religious violation as well, since the chorus members are celebrants of the deity in a uniquely double manner (i.e., within and without the fiction, as “bacchants” and as a chorus in a dramatic festival in celebration of Dionysus). 27 See Thumiger (2007: 128–38) on the animal imagery. 28 On this offstage “chorus,” see Murnaghan (2006). 29 The term kosmos often has an ominous resonance in tragedy, perhaps in part because of its association with Helen—see Worman (1997, 2002: 24–25, 123–28).

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Pentheus’ bewitching outerwear is divine but also familial, and not only because he dresses up to look like his mother and her sisters. Since Dionysus is also Pentheus’ other cousin, it is this cousin’s ritual garb that will ultimately deliver him dressed up as and to his mother. The relation between costuming and violence is thus over-determined as all in the family, much like other more immediately destructive contact (cf., e.g., Heracles, Medea)—that is, although he is not poisoned by his outerwear it leads directly to his exposure and death. Here specularity and physical contact together ruin bodily integrity, as the stranger repeatedly prods Pentheus about his scopophilic desires (811–15, 829, cf. κατασκοπήν, 838).30 In the following scene the cousins engage in a detailed onstage mimesis of maternal dress-up that repeatedly invokes looking, seeing, and appearing, thereby also drawing the spectator’s eye to bodily postures and materials.31 “Since you are so eager to see forbidden sights [ἃ μὴ χρεὼν ὁρᾶν], come outside,” the stranger calls, “and be seen by me [ὄφθητί μοι], in the outfit [σκευήν] of a woman, a maenad, a bacchant, spy [κατάσκοπος] of your mother and the bacchant crowd” (914–16). As scholars have noted, Pentheus is particularly concerned to look like his female relatives, inquiring whether he has the stance (στάσιν) of his aunt or of his mother (925–26).32 This the stranger confirms as if his attire achieved a fully successful disguise: “Seeing you I seem to look upon them” (αὐτὰς ἐκείνας εἰσορᾶν δοκῶ σ᾽ὁρῶν, 927). They then engage in some costume arrangement, the stranger tucking up a lock of Pentheus’ hair that has slipped from the headband, fixing a strap, and checking that the folds of his robe (πέπλων / στολίδες) lie evenly along his ankles (928–38). Unlike Orestes (who is only on the verge of madness), the delusional Pentheus remains unperturbed by this very material maternal enfolding. The tucking and arranging of pleats stages Pentheus’ disguise as tactile folding and covering, a “surfacing” (to invoke Ahmed again) that is something like the obverse of his former disgust. Or rather: his disgust not converted but, precisely, folded—its inside out, manifested as mother-wear. Pentheus then tries out some dance moves (941–44) and is soon fantasizing about tearing up the crags of the mountains to find the maenads having sex (949–58), his violent urges still driving him, as if pressing up against his new dress. The combination of Dionysus’ mania, which has made him see double and gotten him into the costume, and the ferocious (not to mention phallic) compulsion to tear up the world, is jarring in the extreme. All the more so as it culminates in him imagining himself luxuriating in his mother’s arms, as in a brutally ambiguous back-and-forth, Pentheus and the stranger envision him returning (966–70): Stranger: Another will lead you from there. – being conspicuous to all – carried aloft

30

Pentheus: She who bore me, yes. – for this I go – such a treat!

See Barrett (1998) on the spectatorial emphasis in the scene; and cf. Thumiger (2007: 111–21). Note also that Dionysus has driven Pentheus to see double, which the stranger characterizes as “seeing what he needs to see” (924). 32 Wohl (2005: 141–42); see also Foley (1980). 31

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– in the hands of your mother – and such spoils! Δ. κεῖθεν δ᾽ἀπάξει σ᾽ἄλλος ἐπίσημον ὄντα πᾶσιν φερόμενος ἥξεις . . . ἐν χερσὶ μητρός τρυφάς γε τοιάσδε

– you spoil me! – I grasp what I deserve. Π. ἡ τεκοῦσά γε. ἐπὶ τόδ᾽ἔρχομαι. ἁβρότητ᾽ἐμὴν λέγεις. καὶ τρυφᾶν μ᾽ἀναγκάσεις. ἀξίων μὲν ἅπτομαι.

The scene ends with the stranger calling out, “Stretch out your hands [ἔκτειν᾽ . . . χεῖρας], Agave and you sibling daughters of Cadmus!” He will call upon them again soon, when he reveals Pentheus to them as their animal prey, as I take up in more detail in Chapter 4 (3a.ii). c. Paternal Wear On and Off In Euripides’ Orestes, just after Orestes has left to seek aid at his father’s tomb, the chorus offers a description of him at the point of murdering his mother (839–41): Oh wretched man, when from the gold-woven cloak you saw the maternal breast rising up, you made a maternal slaughter . . . ὦ μέλεος, ματρὸς ὅτε χρυσεοπηνήτων φαρέων μαστὸν ὑπερστέλλοντ᾽ ἐσιδὼν σφάγιον ἔθετο ματέρα . . . Just before this exclamatory moment, the chorus offers the image of the children cutting parental skin with “fire-born handiwork” (τοκέων / πυριγενεῖ τέμειν παλάμῳ / χροί) and cautions them against “displaying the gore-laced sword to the rays of the sun” (μελάνδετον δὲ φονῷ / ξίφος ἐς αὐγὰς ἀελίοιο δεῖξαι) (819–22). Their combination of elaborate craft language for the skin-cutting tool with its fretwork of blood makes it of a piece with the image of the maternal breast framed by its gold-threaded mantle. These two vivid closeups of parental skin bracket Clytemnestra’s scream (cf. ἰάχησε), her blood on Orestes’ mother-killing hand (ματροκτόνον αἷμα χειρί), and his Furies-driven, rolling, bloodshot eyes (φόνον / δρομάσι δινεύων βλεφάροις) (825–38). While the chorus is alone onstage during this ode, their song serves as the affective hinge between Pylades’ intimate handling of Orestes’ diseased body (791–806) and Electra’s hearing of their death decree. She declares at the outset that she will share in all that happens to her brother, whether she must “break off [her] breath” (πνεῦμ᾽ἀπορρῆξαί με δεῖ), as she puts it, by stoning or the sword (863–65). 105

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Euripides’ Andromache stages a couple of scenes that are adjacent to Orestes’ and Electra’s engagement with the maternal carapace as a forceful driver of the action. The remarkable tactility and proxemics that orient Andromache’s suppliant grip on Thetis’ statue, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 5, is quickly followed by the entrance of Hermione, who immediately offers up a contrasting set of bodily prostheses. She makes much of her elaborate carapace, her body’s ornate edge (κόσμον, 147), including her crown, golden veil, and decorated gown, as visible indications of her father Menelaus’ wealth and power.33 That this is the first thing she says upon entering suggests from the outset her frantic vanity and assertions of status. Her gambit reveals the opposite of what it aims to assert—namely, her alienated and insecure relationship to these implements of authority (to paraphrase Bourdieu),34 despite the fact that they ought to serve as her own second skin, since she arrived to wed Neoptolemus with a large dowry, while Andromache is a slave (δούλη, 155).35 Her insistence that her dress and riches ensure that she can speak freely, while on the surface a crude political equation, also suggests something much more unnerving: namely, that a naked Hermione would be a silent one, that divested of such dressy extensions she would have no voice.36 And of course clothes are so easily removed, as her later actions make clear. The bodily coverings are thereby rendered other to the self, fashioning a parental carapace worn with unease or an object to warp and abuse. Unlike Orestes and his attempts to control the deadly enfoldings of the maternal cloak, Hermione treats her rich daddy’s draperies as more protectively powerful than they are. Her speech suggests that she locates in them not only this defensive economy but also its offensive extension as a tool to bend others to her will. Later on in the action, as reasons for Andromache’s stalwart grip on the statue of Thetis become increasingly clear, Menelaus arrives, threatens Andromache and her child more actively, is ultimately held off by Peleus, and deserts the scene. This drives the mercurial Hermione to attempt suicide, as she fears her husband’s reprisal for her aggression toward Andromache. Now she enters tearing crown and veil from her head— as if her father’s desertion could only be answered by this removal of familial adornment and its bodily counterparts of unblemished skin and abundant hair. As she puts it with ominous melodrama, “I shall make a slaughter of my hair and terrible shreddings of my cheeks” (σπάραγμα κόμας ὀνύχων τε δάι᾽  / ἀμύγματα θήσομαι, 826–27). Tossing her elaborate mantle from her head, she cries, “Off from my hair to the winds with my finespun veil!” (ἔρρ᾽αἰθέριον πλοκάμων ἐ-  / μὼν ἄπο λεπτόμιτον φάρος, 830–31). In a provocative turn, her nurse responds as if Hermione were engaged in a fuller dismantling:

33

Emphasized by Lloyd ad loc.; cf. Kyriakou (1997), Allan (2000: 178–79), Torrance (2005). On the Spartan origin of the clothing and its import, see Stavrinou (2016). Cf. Pucci (2016: 61–66) on the erotic tenor of the play. Note that Menelaus himself is decked out in armor, as Andromache points out scornfully when he manhandles her (εἰς γυναῖκα γοργὸς ὁπλίτης φανείς, 458). On the character dynamics in relation to domestic space, see Stavrinou (2014). 34 E.g., Bourdieu (1991: 70, 109); he uses the Homeric skeptron as an example. 35 Again, on Andromaches’ slave status, see further below (3b). 36 Marx once commented, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided,” by way of punctuating his description of the loss of the sense of oneself effectively in one’s possessions (Marx [1927] 1974: 351–52).

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“Cover your breasts/chest, fasten your robe!” (κάλυπτε στέρνα, σύνδησον πέπλους, 832).37 Hermione confirms that she has bared more than her head (cf. τί δὲ στέρνα δεῖ καλύπτειν πέπλοις;, 833), declaring this gesture only right since her deeds (i.e., the violence she has motivated) stands “clear and revealed and uncovered” (δῆλα καὶ  / ἀμφιφανῆ καὶ ἄκρυπτα, 834–35). Body and actions thus acquire an equal footing in relation to enactment, as she makes herself naked (“naked”) to materialize the exposure of her wrongdoing. That is, the one is visible and literal (within the conventions of the tragic text), the other figurative and ineffable, and yet offered to the eye in a transfer effected by the “undress” of the staged gestures. In her distress Hermione proceeds to threaten her own body in the same ways that she had earlier threatened Andromache’s: fire and the sword (841–44, cf. 811–13). In fact she indicates that she is pondering such equations, when she cries out in her distress, “To which of the statues shall I rush as a suppliant? Shall I, a slave, fall at my slave’s knees?” (τίνος ἀγαλμάτων ἱκέτις ὁρμαθῶ; / ἢ δούλα δούλας γόνασι προσπέσω;, 859–60). As if to say, “Shall I now take on the suppliant posture and slave status that my enemy occupies? Where is my Thetis?” Tellingly she calls upon her father first, bewailing his abandonment of her and declaring that she will no longer stay in her “bridal shelter” (νυμφιδίῳ στέγᾳ) (854–57).38 Her stripping off of her finery and questioning new possibilities of stature and status together reveal a shocking recognition that familial clothes do indeed make the woman—or at least, that this is how Hermione understands her relation to her fancy outerwear. From this perspective, then, the gestures and questions would not register merely as metatheatrical but something weirder: that for this character the clothes themselves have a power that she does not, as if the inanimate carapace of the father were the vibrant force at play here instead of the living human that is the daughter.39

37 See Stavrinou (2016) on the Spartan costume as well as the gesture more generally. Note that chest- and/ or breast-baring seems to run in the family: witness Clytemnestra in Libation Bearers and the Electra’s; Helen here (cf. Andr. 629–30) and in Trojan Women. While I am not making any claims about theatrical realism (i.e., that the male actors actually bared their “breasts”), since this would hardly be in keeping with the physical formalities of tragedy (including dress and deportment), it is noteworthy that in tragedy this rare gesture is shared by these female relatives among a few others. Mastronarde (Phoen. ad 1490–91) considers this a gesture of mourning, comparing Antigone’s uncovering to this moment in Andromache, as well as Clytemnestra’s in Libation Bearers (citing Garvie ad 896–98). But these are all quite different in emphasis: Clytemnestra’s is not a gesture of mourning but rather a plea for mercy; and Antigone’s taking off of her veil and loosening of her crocus-colored robes (1491) makes no mention of breast baring, emphasizing instead her virgin’s dress (perhaps: Mastronarde ad loc. thinks the color indicates luxury, but see Swift [2009: 64–65]). And then there is the anomalous scene that the herald Talthybius relays in Hecuba, in which Polyxena bares her chest and breasts for sacrifice (558–65); see further in Chapters 5 and 6. 38 See Llewellyn-Jones (2007) on the commensurabilities of clothing and houses; and further in Chapter 4, on bodily containers and as “shelters.” 39 That Hermione is Helen’s daughter may contribute to a sense that this human is in thrall to her material implements, as the mother trails such vanities through the backgrounds of many Euripidean dramas (e.g., Hecuba, Orestes) and the foregrounds of others (esp. Trojan Women); see Worman (2002: 118–22). Cf. also the parodos of Agamemnon, where Helen is her own assemblage of objects and sensory effects: a “delicate ornament of wealth, a soft shaft of the eyes, a heart-biting flower of desire” (ἀκασκαῖον δ᾽ἄγαλμα πλούτου, / μαλθακὸν ὀμμάτων βέλος, / δηξίθυμον ἔρωτος ἄνθος, 741–43).

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2. Spousal Mantles A parallel cluster of associations surrounds the carapaces that spouses may provide, especially those set on destruction, whether wittingly or not. These tend to be in fact the opposite of protective—like Clytemnestra’s murderous cloak, they are almost always traps—which may also indicate some registering of the poisonous nature of the marital relationship in ancient settings (mytho-historical and contemporaneous), most especially for women.40 And of course Clytemnestra’s device itself has a double function as the husband’s snare and the son’s tainted proof, so that it serves in my scheme as a hinge between these familial categories and bodies. As plied by spouses or other relatives (e.g., Dionysus in the Bacchae), such poisoned outerwear can have the ability to turn the body effectively inside out, as the skin droops in folds or rags like its own mantle, melting, tearing, releasing froth and blood, dissolving and mixing in a manner so horrifying as to be describable only by analogy, so that (as with Clytemnestra’s robe in Orestes’ hands) metaphors proliferate.41 Because this “inside out” transformation tends to occur at the body’s edges, some of the most intense and meaningful overlap between this chapter and Chapter 4 emerges here. As mentioned in the introduction above, the primary focus in this section as in others is with materials that cover, fold, or tear and thus with inter-implications between skin and cloth or other similarly layering carapaces. As section 4 reveals, even shields fit this pattern; despite their lack of pleats (etc.), they consist of layers of hides and metal and as such duplicate human skin as another bodily fold. Moreover, as Aeschylus’ story about Heracles’ enwrapping the baby Ajax suggests (fr. 83 TGF ), some protective coverings may be so powerful as to create the kind of continuity that the materiality of the fold indicates, as the lion skin imbues the infant with its toughness, but only where it covers him (see further below, 4b). a. Deianira’s Fiery Robe In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis the most compelling conjunction for my focus on bodily coverings is that between the poison cloak and Heracles’ famously tough and resilient skin, as the cloth mantle dissolves the hero’s own fleshy one. Significant covers and other materials in the play are largely held off at a distance, as Deianira describes to the chorus the potion, the robe, the wool, and the robe’s box but shows none of these (except eventually the box onstage). In her sexual bitterness she turns her sights first on another material presence, describing the captive Iole as “cargo” (φόρτον) and “merchandise to wreck my mind” (λωβητὸν ἐμπόλημα τῆς ἐμῆς φρενός). She casts the humiliation of the presence of this young rival as another bodily covering, this time one shared: together

40

The squandering of human potential under patriarchy is not restricted to antiquity, of course; here I am merely pointing up the dramatists’ frequent staging of violence toward and by female characters, including rape. See e.g. Rabinowitz (1998, 2011) and further in Chapter 2 (4a.i) as well as below (section 3). 41 See Mayer (1997) on the garment as weapon; cf. Lee (2004).

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she and Iole are “two embraced under one coverlet” (δύ᾽οὖσαι μίμνομεν μιᾶς ὑπὸ  / χλαίνης ὑπαγκάλισμα, 536–40).42 Her antidote for this new burden, as she explains, sits hidden in a bronze flask (λέβητι χαλκέῳ κεκρυμμένον, 556), kept carefully in an inner chamber of her rooms (578–79, cf. 686, 689–90). Across three separate speeches Deianira unfolds the salient aspects of her materials. She took the potion/poison from the wound of the shaggy-breasted (δασυστέρνου) Nessus as he was dying (557–58); this she later explains he incurred from Heracles’ poisoned arrow, which he shot at the centaur for violating his bride (564–68). The arrow entered his breast and as he died he instructed her to gather the clotted blood (ἀμφίθρεπτον αἷμα) from his wound, in which the black-galled arrow of the Hydra was dipped (μελάγχολος / ἔβαψεν ἰὸς). He claims that this will make a love-charm (τοῦτο κηλητήριον) for Heracles; and it is with this potion that Deianira in turn coats the robe (χιτῶνα τόνδε ἔβαψα, 580, cf. 674–75), carefully packing it away in a wooden box (cf. 621, 692).43 This inside–outside contamination, as the centaur’s toxic, bloody excretions are smeared on the surface of the cloth, only to turn Heracles’ skin into frothy rags, fashions one of the more imbricated and grotesque enfoldings in Greek tragedy. The chorus later ponders the horrible stuff of this doubly monstrous poison, lamenting that the centaur’s trick has smeared (χρίει) the hero’s sides with a bloody cloud (φονίᾳ νεφέλᾳ) from the “clinging poison” (προστακέντος ἰοῦ) of the dappled serpent (αἰόλος δράκων), gripped (προστετακώς) as Heracles is by the terrible specter (δεινοτέρῳ  . . . φάσματι) of the Hydra. The murderous, deceiving goads (κέντρ᾽) torment him confusedly (ἄμμιγα), boiling up (ἐπιζέσαντα) on his skin (831–40). In contrast to the rich sensory detailing of how the poison hovers monstrously at the body’s edges and openings (and see further below), Deianira offers little detail of the robe beyond its fine weave (e.g., ταναϋφῆ πέπλον, 602); it is a cover that must be kept hidden until revealed to all in full ceremonial display. As she hands it over to the herald Lichas to give to Heracles, she bids him to tell her husband that no one before him may put it over his skin (ἀμφιδύσεται χροΐ), nor may it be seen by the light of the sun or exposed to fire, not before he stands conspicuous in the open, showing it to the gods (κεῖνος αὐτὸν φανερὸς ἐμφανῶς σταθείς / δείξῃ θεοῖσιν). So, Deianira declares, did she vow that she would adorn Heracles, wrapping him in “this robe” (στελεῖν χιτῶνι τῷδε) and showing him to the gods as a “new officiant in new garb” (φανεῖν θεοῖς θυτῆρα καινῷ κανὸν ἐν πεπλώματι) (603–13). Her control of the robe and her plot effectively dissolve when she witnesses the wisp of wool with which she had anointed it transforming in a manner that horrifies her. This occurs when she tosses it aside and inadvertently exposes it to the sun, as Nessus had warned her against doing. This “fleecy wool of a gleaming ram” (ἀργῆς οἰὸς εὐείρῳ πόκῳ) disappears in a mysterious burst of self-consumption (ἐδεστὸν ἐξ αὑτοῦ φθίνει) that so puzzles and frightens Deianira that she feels the need for a longer explanation. And so

42 43

See Wohl on the economies of this arrangement (1998: 17–37); cf. Ormand (1999), Kitzinger (2012). For more on the containment imagery, see further in Chapter 4 (2c.i).

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she describes to the chorus how carefully she did as the centaur told her, keeping the potion hidden away from sun and fire, anointing the robe secretly in her inner chambers, and enfolding it untouched by the sun’s rays in the hollow box (685–92). But then she dwells again on the piece of wool, how a shaft of sunlight happened to strike it, and as it heated it transformed, melting away to nothing and consumed by the earth (ῥεῖ πᾶν ἄδηλον καὶ κατέξηκται χθονί), crumbling like sawdust (πρίονος / ἐκβρώμεθ᾽). After this there boiled up from the earth a clotted froth (ἐναζέουσι θρομβώδεις ἀφροί) like the “rich juice of the gleaming fruit” (γλαυκῆς ὀπώρας ὥστε πίονος ποτοῦ) poured on the ground (697–704). When her son Hyllus arrives in a fury at what he thinks is his mother’s intentional wounding of his father, he confirms the fears already aroused by her witnessing such withering and seething, describing in horrible detail its work on the surfaces of and ultimately deep within Heracles’ body.44 Just as the hero is about to make a great sacrifice as a thanks offering for his victories, Lichas arrives with the deadly cloak (θανάσιμον πέπλον, 758). Heracles puts it on and at first appears to be fine, delighting in his fancy new outerwear (κόσμῳ τε χαίρων καὶ στολῇ, 764). But then the altar flames leap and he begins to sweat, as the garment enwraps his ribs (προσπτύσσεται / πλευραῖσιν) clinging close (ἀρτίκολλος) as if glued by a craftsman (τέκτονος) at every joint (ἅπαν κατ᾽ἄρθρον) (767–69). Pain shoots up from his bones like the bite of a snake (ἐχίδνης) and he shouts for Lichas, demanding to know with what treachery he brought “this robe here” (τόνδε . . . πέπλον, 774). When Heracles hears that Deianira sent it, a spasm seizes his lungs (σπαραγμὸς αὐτοῦ πλευμόνων ἀνθήψατο) and, grabbing Lichas by the ankle, he dashes him on a rock so that his white brains run out over his hair (κόμης δὲ λευκὸν μυελὸν ἐκραίνει) and his skull is smashed and bloodied all over (διασπαρέντος αἵματος θ᾽ ὁμοῦ) (777–82). The gathered crowd cries out in terror, and the hero convulses with such violence, shouting and screaming (βοῶν, ἰύζων), that the hills thunder all around. He curses Deianira and his marriage, which he deems “mating with ruination” (λυμαντήν) (786–93). Upon hearing this noisy, gruesome tale, Deianira leaves silently, driving the chorus to express concern that this makes her look guilty (813–14).45 When the nurse returns with the tale of her suicide, she highlights a contrasting set of material covers, some of which recall Deianira’s comment about suffering as one of two wives under one bedspread (539–40). Now the nurse describes how her mistress roamed weeping about the house, falling before altars and touching familiar objects. Finally rushing into the bedroom, as the nurse watches from the shadows, Deianira spreads coverings over the bed (στρωτὰ βάλλουσαν φάρη) and throws herself on them, sitting in the middle, bursting forth in hot springs of tears (δακρύων ῥήξασα θερμὰ νάματα) and saying to her marriage bed and chamber (λέχη τε καὶ νυμφεῖ᾽ἐμά), “No longer will you welcome me in these

44

See Finkelberg (1996) on the stasimon; also Stinton (1990). Note that other female characters intent on suicide leave in silence, though elsewhere the chorus reads this differently: cf. Jocasta in Oedipus the King and Eurydice in Antigone.

45

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beddings” (ἐν κοίταισι ταῖσδ᾽) (915–22). In the end she loosens her gown where the golden broach is fixed over her breast (χρυσήλατος / προὔκειτο μαστῶν περονίς), baring her entire side and shoulder (924–26). The nurse goes running to warn Hyllus, but when they return Deianira has already driven the sword into her ribs (930–31). He screams and groans over her, falling on her with kisses (στόμασιν) and stretching out beside her rib to rib (πλευρόθεν πλευρὰν παρείς) (932–39). This narrative intervenes between Hyllus’ report of Heracles’ undoing and his arrival onstage, so that the plot is as if literally pleated and unfolding, moving from one material covering to another, from the seething wool and the cloak in the sunshine to the tearflooded bedding and loosened dress deep inside the house. As the earlier scene of the wool’s disintegration portends, the cloak of Nessus becomes a kind of outer membrane for Heracles’ suffering body, which is displayed in the final scene as made “ragged” by the “encircling web” (ὑφαντὸν ἀμφίβληστρον, 1052) that clings to him, ravaging him inside and out.46 His material undoing resonates in compelling ways with that of Clytemnestra on the platform with the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, where she represents her own “boundless encircling” (ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον, 1382) as crucial to the bodily destruction of her husband. While the devastation is not made of the same cloth, so to speak, since her cloak is a trap that enables bodily ruin rather than being itself the stuff of ruin, the scenes share an emphasis on the female plying of deceptive, hellish webs. Because Heracles thinks that Deianira knowingly gave him the poisoned cloak, as his disgust surfaces he envisions it as woven by the Erinyes and fastened to (καθῆψεν) his shoulders by his “guile-faced” (δολῶπις) wife (1050–52).47 In his ignorance, then, he makes a Clytemnestra of Deianira and sees himself as not only consumed without and within but also “moaning and weeping like a girl” (ὥστε παρθένος / βέβρυχα κλαίων), rendered weak and womanly (θῆλυς), as if the cloak carried some sort of feminine taint (1071–75). When onstage at the end this is what Heracles has been reduced to: a girlish man but also a ragged cloak of a body, something that he uncovers to show the skin’s destruction, the “eating of flesh” (βέβρωκε σάρκας) of one who wears pain’s membrane as if still plastered to his ribs (πλευραῖσι . . . προσμαχθέν) (1053–55).48 When he orchestrates the

46 For more on displaying the body in pain, see Chapter 1 (1); for displaying the male body in drama, see Hawley (1998), Worman (2012), and above (Chapter 1, introduction). Cf. also Chapter 4 (3), where I discuss what is inside and comes out of the body in greater detail. For disease imagery, see Biggs (1966), Padel (1985), Worman (2000), Holmes (2008), (2010), Mitchell-Boyask (2012), Allan (2014). 47 Again, see Ahmed on how disgust works on the body’s skin, as well as “surfacing” border objects—that is, what the mind throws up as repulsive, exposing bias and so on (e.g., racism, misogyny) (2004: 85–89). In this case the Erinyes may serve this function, as the displaced target of male rage at (perceived) female power and autonomy; and while Heracles appears to deploy this metonymy more consciously than not, the fact that he hurls it out while raving reveals how easily available the equation wife-Fury is to him. 48 On Heracles as sacrificial victim, see Seaford (1994), Calame (1998). For the possible connection of this welding of the cloak to the flesh as a “marriage” or “joint dwelling” (reading ξυνικοῦν for ξυνιποῦν, 1055), see Ormand (1993) and the objections of Pozzi (1994). Cf. again Llewellyn-Jones (2007) on clothing and shelter; also Mitchell-Boyask (2012) and Allan (2014) on medical metaphors and images. On the end of the play, see Easterling (1981); Roberts (1988); Holt (1989); Liapis (2006).

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display of his ravaged form, he pulls back his outer coverings (cf. δείξω ἐκ καλυμμάτων, 1078), to show this inner layer of pain. Like Philoctetes, he cries out repeatedly at the agony, describing it as shaking him and eating him within (e.g., 1081–84); but he also represents his body itself as “unfastened and torn to shreds” (ἄναρθρος καὶ κατερρακωμένος), like a tattered old cloak flapping open in the wind. In sharp contrast to this sorry garment he places his former bodily glory, the back and arms with which he fought monsters at the ends of the earth, arms that no one has “set a trophy over” (1089–1102).49 His repeated emphasis on his frame (cf. δέμας, 1056, 1079) suggests an opposite type of outerwear— something like a protective skin, the fleshy armor that he famously wore in myth.50 Given the remarkable richness of the material and sensory details that cover and— directly or indirectly—destroy three separate bodies, it seems important to pause here and attempt some clarifications. First, despite the repeated emphases on cloth, clothing, and covers, the most impending and terrifying material presence is that forged by the contact and mingling of poison with other materials, including blood, wool, skin, and viscera, as this is activated by the sun’s rays or by the heat of fire. In this way conventional dress and coverings recede and dissolve, while bodily coverings such as wool or hair and bare skin are exposed to disintegration, melting, bloodying, and piercing. At the same time female coverings, chambers, and containers are poised to isolate and secrete; and even if they turn out ultimately to be spaces of ruination they serve effectively as an aesthetic counter to the open celebration of and then lament for the manly hero’s body. What this pattern may materialize (in effect) in relation to the marital pair in question seems distinctly polarizing: the wife huddles jealously under her shared blanket, ignorantly murderous, and walled within her domestic scene, while the husband roams abroad, sending home sex slaves and roaring his fury across the hills. b. Medea’s Poison-wear As many scholars have noted, tragedy characterizes poison as the female weapon of choice, the most notorious expression of which takes center stage in Euripides’ Medea.51 If the poison that Deianira unwittingly plies cannot ultimately be traced back to her own deadly intentions, the opposite is true of Medea. The poison plot in that play is all hers, and if her onstage preparation and the subsequent messenger speech contain some imagery quite similar to the scenes that take place on and off stage in Women of Trachis, the former is more notable for its single-handed orchestration and concentrated intensity. While Deianira may express her sexual melancholy in the material metonymy of the coverlet, Medea’s heroic fierceness drives a much more global critique: women are always at a disadvantage, though braver and cleverer; and if the ways of the world flowed in reverse, they would be sung as they ought.

49

For more on hands and arms in this scene, see Chapter 2. This is true of Ajax as well; on Heracles and his “cloak of flesh” in Euripides, see further below (3c). 51 This famous play has a large bibliography, but the most relevant scholarly contributions for my discussion are in Pucci (1980), Loraux ([1985] 1987), Burnett (1998), Foley (2001), Torrance (2007). 50

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Abandoned in a foreign land and furious at being effectively caught in her husband’s plot, Medea responds with the tools at hand—in this case not a coverlet or cloak, but an entire outfit for her rival. Her sense of totalizing outrage means that she also manages the action of Medea; and the messenger speech in which one of her revenge plots is fulfilled (the killing of Jason’s new family) is quickly followed by her other (the killing of his old one).52 The horrific details of this poisoning are not presented in theatrical display (i.e., onstage mimesis), but as with Women of Trachis, the cumulative sensory effects build across the modes, including narrative, choral reflection, and embodied reaction. Medea’s devising of her poison-wear, which includes a robe as well as a veil and diadem, takes place onstage and with slightly more material display; in contrast to Deianira’s carefully boxed robe, the text suggests that Medea’s gifts are carried onstage on a tray or in an open basket.53 We can note in particular the repeated emphasis on clothing and skin as Medea prepares her plot and the chorus exclaims over it. First she describes the delicate gown and gold-plaited crown in an alliterative chiasmus (λέπτον τε πέπλον καὶ πλόκον χρυσήλατον), a line that gets repeated likely because its chiming quality draws sensory attention to it as well as the fancy gifts (786, cf. 947–49).54 Then she explains that when the princess puts this adornment around her skin (ἀμφιθῇ χροΐ), it will destroy her and anyone who touches her (ὃς ἂν θίγῃ) (787–88), since she (Medea) will anoint the gifts with potions (τοιοῖσδε χρίσω φαρμάκοις δωρήματα, 789) (cf. 805– 06, 1065–66). When she describes the gifts to Jason, she claims that they are regarded most beautiful of those now among mortals (καλλιστεύεται / τῶν νῦν ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν, 947–48), as indeed the princess’s eventual reaction to them suggests. That Jason accepts this elaborate adornment as his due, as a suitable gift from his first wife to his second, points up the vain and myopic figure he cuts in the play, as well as his lack of commitment to the marital bond. After her children have left to take this poison-wear to the Corinthian palace and only Medea remains onstage, the women who make up the chorus fear for their lives and envision in vibrant terms the death of the princess. The new bride will, they say, receive Destruction (Atē) in the golden headband (χρυσέων ἀναδεσμᾶν) and herself with her own hands (αὐτὰ χεροῖν) place around her golden hair (ξανθᾷ δ᾽ἀμφὶ κόμᾳ) the adornment of Hades (τὸν Ἅιδα  / κόσμον) (978–81). Sensory delight in the fabulous clothing will drive her: “Immortal grace will persuade her to wrap herself in the gleaming robe and gold-woven crown” (πείσει χάρις ἀμβρόσιός τ᾽αὐγὰ πέπλον / χρυσότευκτόν στέφανον περιθέσθαι). And so she will go among the shades in her bridal wear (νυμφοκομήσει) (982–85).55

52

Cf. Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial and its powerful staging by Theodoros Terzopoulos, in which the one actor who plays Medea says and does everything. 53 Unlike in Women of Trachis, where the containers—the flask holding the poison and the gift box containing the robe—are explicitly foregrounded (658, 685–92), in Medea neither is mentioned. As I argue in Chapter 4, the imagery of containment has a particular resonance in Sophocles’ play, which it does not in Medea. 54 Mastronarde (ad loc. and at 949) brackets the second usage, noting that the repetition suggests that one is an interpolation. 55 See Rehm (1994) on the bridal imagery; cf. Ormand (1999).

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The messenger speech that describes the physical destruction of the princess and her father Creon brought about by Medea’s deadly gifts dwells with some relish on the unfolding horror. To an even greater extent than most other messenger speeches concentrated on visceral details (the only exception perhaps being Bacchae), the scene that takes place in diegetic space fashions a competing aesthetic intensity, as the imagery of bodily ravaging is much more extreme and dramatic than anything shown onstage. The speaker is one of the household slaves, who saw the children enter the palace and be greeted warmly by his fellow servants, while he himself happily followed them into the women’s chambers (1141– 43). When she espied Medea’s children approaching, the princess cast a startled glance at Jason and then covered her eyes (presumably with her veil, προυκαλύψατ᾽ ὄμματα), turning away her white cheek (λευκήν τ᾽ἀπέστρεψ᾽ἔμπαλιν παρῃδα, 1147–48). He urged her to relent, turn her head back again, and welcome the gifts; and when she looked upon them she could not resist, but soon was taking them up to try on (1159–62): She enwrapped herself in the embroidered gown and, placing the golden crown on her curls, she arranged her hair in the gleaming mirror, smiling at the lifeless image of her body. λαβοῦσα πέπλους ποικίλους ἠμπέσχετο, χρυσοῦν τε θεῖσα στέφανον ἀμφὶ βοστρύχοις λαμπρῷ κατόπτρῳ σχηματίζεται κόμην, ἄψυχον εἰκὼ προσγελῶσα σώματος. The princess then rose from her seat and flitted about the room “delicately with her pale foot” (ἁβρὸν βαίνουσα παλλεύκῳ ποδί), checking repeatedly that the gown hung straight (1164–66). Then it all went wrong. Her skin changed color (χροιὰν ἀλλάξασα), she stumbled (λεχρία πάλιν), her limbs convulsed (τρέμουσα κῶλα), and she fell back onto her chair. Soon a white froth (λευκὸν ἀφρόν) bubbled forth from her mouth, her eyes rolled (ὀμμάτων τ᾽ἄπο / κόρας στρέφουσαν), and her skin drained of blood (αἷμα τ᾽οὐκ ἐνὸν χροΐ) (1168–75). She shrieked, the servants ran to alert the king, and then she groaned as her headband spat fire and the gown’s fabric bit into her white flesh (λευκὴν ἔδαπτον σάρκα, 1189). She rose again from her seat, this time aflame and shaking her hair and head from side to side (σείουσα χαίτην κρᾶτά τ᾽ἄλλοτ᾽ἄλλοσε, 1191) to get rid of the crown, which only made the blaze more intense. Overcome, she fell to the ground, unrecognizable—and barely describable. The slave can only say that the position of her eyes (ὀμμάτων . . . κατάστασις) was not clear, nor her lovely face, since blood dripped from her brow and mingled with the fire (συμπεφυρμένον πυρί), while her flesh flowed off of her bones like piney tears (σάρκες δ᾽ἀπ᾽ὀστέων ὥστε πεύκινον δάκρυ . . . ἀπέρρεον (1197–1200). Everyone, the slave says, was afraid to touch her—and he now deems her body a corpse (νεκροῦ, 1203; νεκρῷ, 1205). When Creon entered he threw himself upon her, moaning and embracing and kissing her, crying that she has left him “an aged tomb” 114

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(γέροντα τύμβον, 1209).56 But when he tried to rise up again, he was stuck to the delicate robe like ivy to a laurel tree; as he struggled to pull away, his old flesh is ripped from his bones (σάρκας γεραιὰς ἐσπάρασσ᾽ἀπ᾽ὀστέων) (1212–17). Soon two corpses lie together on the ground. As in the Women of Trachis but with more elaboration on the grisly details, the scene pulls up close to the intermingling of materials and human skin and flesh, so that where one ends and the other begins becomes impossible to discern. Father and daughter are also entangled in a “terrible wrestling” (δεινὰ . . . παλαίσματα, 1214), such that their bodies are not only fused, but outside unfolds inside as the flesh tears open like the cloth that grips it. The scene also highlights the coloration of the skin and flesh of the princess, as it changes from fair (pale cheek, white foot) to deadly pallor (bloodless skin, white flesh). Meanwhile the body’s edges and apertures work up and dissolve in white froth and dripping resin, as her features melt away and the flesh falls from her bones. The golden diadem of the dressing scene devolves as well, into spurting fire mixed with blood, while the delicate gown becomes a clinging fiend that bites into the flesh.57 The intense focus on skin, flesh, and bone in the scene thus cruelly perverts the girl’s sensuous pleasure, such that her enjoyment of the golden crown, her “lifeless image,” and light, white footwork render her tottering, aflame, melting, and then dead. These offstage horrors impinge on the scene that follows to such an extent that they drive Medea immediately to the murder from which she had previously shrunk: that of her beloved children.58

3. Racialized Carapaces Susan Lape describes Athenian narratives about origins as shaped by what she terms, following Anthony Appiah, “racialism,” which she defines as a “value-neutral concept employed to characterize the beliefs of a group linked on the basis of putative hereditary features.” This concept can include racist attitudes such as notions of superiority (physical, moral, intellectual, etc.), and Lape argues these are at work in Athens, although she notes that scholars tend to cast them in other, less charged terms (e.g., kinship).59 In this section I consider the few extant plays that center action and character around racial distinctions, only one of which highlights skin color: Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women. While many tragedies include household “servants” (usually slaves), who often function as attendants and messengers, or more overtly captive slaves (usually Trojan women), who may make

56

Cf. Iolaus as a “tomb” in Children of Heracles (τύμβου τὸ μηδὲν ὄντος, 167); and see further in Chapter 4 (2c). Note that the Nurse had earlier worried that Medea would “set alight” (ἀνάψει) the cloud of groaning (νέφος οἰμωγῆς) with more anger (107–08). Mastronarde (ad loc.) notes the synaesthetic character of the image and its atmospheric suggestion of stormy, destructive lightning. Cf. Medea’s threat to “set the bridal house on fire” (ὑφάψω δῶμα νυμφικὸν πυρί, 378). 58 Cf. Chapters 2 (4b.iii) and 4 (1b.i). 59 Lape (2010: 32–33); cf. Appiah (1990). See also McCoskey (2019), who explores the complexities and legacies of race in antiquity more generally. 57

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up the choruses, in only one drama of Euripides do racialized distinctions really dominate: Andromache.60 This is not to say that “barbarian” labels and/or foreign statuses are not prominent in other plays; they certainly are, most notably in Aeschylus’ Persians and in Euripides, including Medea, Hecuba, Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen, Orestes, and Bacchae.61 As Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has demonstrated, Medea in particular cuts an exotic figure in contemporary vase imagery, sporting a distinctively “eastern” dress and headgear. Since, however, her own outerwear is not emphasized in this drama of Euripides nor in some others, I consider here the few that do so in relation to foreignness, race, and slave status, focusing primarily on female characters, since this is the intersectional point with which tragedy seems most concerned.62 We can recall here Benthien’s notion of female and black skin as a veil, since this item of clothing turns out to be quite relevant to the intersection of gender and slave status. Here as elsewhere I am largely interested in these distinctions at their intersections, in this case where race and gender fall together and manifest as embodied and as coverings; this means mostly references to skin and dress, but also other foreign or slavish markers, such as deportments associated with the treatment of skin, clothing, and binding. From this prospect the most interesting tragedy is Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, while Euripides’ Hecuba and Andromache in particular contribute some useful contrasting details. a. Dusky, Exotic Of all the extant tragedies, Suppliant Women most prominently foregrounds the racialization of the body’s exterior trappings. The chorus of Danaids are strongly marked as other to the Argives with whom they claim to share heritage—not only descended from Io, the girl turned cow, but also female, virginal, “dusky,” luxuriously dressed, and highly emotional.63 In the course of the play, they do not just wish for death or threaten to seek out its instruments, like so many choruses and individual characters. Rather, they claim that if they are not given sanctuary they will make anomalous use of their foreign dress by hanging themselves from the statues of the gods of the temple in which they

60 On “tragic slaves,” especially in Euripides, duBois (2003: 138–46); cf. McCoskey (1998) on the Oresteia and Rabinowitz (1998) for the broader tragic context. 61 On foreigners and “barbarians” in tragedy and elsewhere, see Saïd (1984), Hall (1989), Vasunia (2001); cf. Chanter (2011) on reading tragedy (against Hegel) with state-instituted slavery in mind. For a controversial account of the racial histories of Greek and Egypt, see Bernal (1987); also the articles “revisiting” Bernal in Lefkowitz and Rogers (eds.) (1996). 62 Sourvinou-Inwood (1997). 63 See especially Zeitlin (1996: 127) on the gender dynamics. On choral identity more generally, see Foley (2003); by her calculations (Appendix B, p. 26), which includes indications from fragments, that the Danaids are foreign is not uncommon, but that they are free and foreign and virgins is much more so. See also Murnaghan (2005) on this and other female groups; Swift (2010: 279–96) the chorus’ profile in relation to song types; Bowlby (2009: 75–100) on Freud and modern reception of the Danaids; and Sansone (2016) on the size of the tragic chorus. For the historical and political context, see Burian ([1974] 2007), Sommerstein (1997); on the suppliants as metics, Bakewell (2013), and cf. Kasimis (2018: chapter 2) on the Ion in this regard.

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have taken shelter. I address this attachment imagery briefly in Chapter 5 and suppliants at statues in Chapter 6; here it is most relevant as part of the visual and tactile scheme that situates the Danaids in relation to their outerwear, including their own dark skin.64 So let’s follow how the play works up a portrait of these foreign girls from the inside out, in effect—from skin to clothing and suppliant prostheses. In the long opening parodos, which also serves as a prologue, the chorus announces their exotic, hybrid family history. Descendants of Io and Zeus and their son Epaphus (“Touch”65), they are Argives born by the Nile: fond of Ionian lamentation (that is to say, eastern Greek), they “rend” (δάπτω) their tender, sun-warmed (εἱλοθερῆ) cheek, “beflowering” (ἀνθεμίζομαι) themselves with lamentations, hoping that some kinsman will be friend to “these fugitives from the land of mists” (τᾶσδε φυγᾶς  / ἀερίας ἀπὸ γᾶς) (70–76). They wear veils of Sidonian linen that they repeatedly “fall upon with ripping” (πολλάκι δ᾽ἐμπίτνω ξὺν λακίδι λινοσινεῖ Σιδονίᾳ καλύπτρᾳ, 120–21, 131–32) as a gesture of mourning and desperation.66 With building intensity, they declare toward the end of the parodos that they, a “dark-skinned, sun-struck race” (μελανθὲς  / ἡλιόκτυπον γένος), will turn with their suppliant boughs (σὺν κλάδοις) to Zeus of the dead, hanging (ἀρτάναις) themselves if the gods of Olympus do not heed them (154–61).67 The Danaids’ skin, drapery, and deportment thus all mark them as distinctive: exotically dark and “eastern”/”southern” faces at least partially veiled, and extreme in affect and gesture, with their flowering lamentation, their pouncing and ripping.68 Elsewhere in Aeschylus (most prominently in Persians) tearing linen seems to be a mark of the east, while the possibility of facial veiling is suggested later, when the girls refer to speaking from “shaded mouths” (ὑποσκίων  / ἐκ στομάτων, 656–57).69 That just after their second 64

See further in Chapter 6 (2a). See Zeitlin (1996: 149–60) on the emphasis on contact and sex—from the “gentle generative” hand of Zeus to the brutal would-be rapist Egyptians. For more on manual contact (and a meditation on just how “gentle” Zeus’ hand could possibly be), see Chapter 2 (4a). 66 Because commentators (including recently Bowen [2013]) have sometimes taken such kinaesthetic indications quite literally, it seems important to note as well that, as elsewhere with lamenting choruses, the dance moves indicated by their song would have been performative and referential rather than actual. On ancient dance, see Lawler (1964), (1965), Fitton (1973), Naerebout (1997), Olsen (2017); on the reception of ancient dance, see MacIntosh (2010); on kinaesthetics and performance, see Noland (2009); also Foster (1998) on performativity in relation to race and gender. 67 Vasunia (2001: 37–38, cf. 47–53) points out that in Sophocles’ Inachus the Zeus who mated with Io is black, to account for the dark-skinned race they spawned, as well as noting that this is also tied to his role as Zeus Chthonius, or lord of the underworld. See also Seaford (1980); West (1984). 68 See Saïd (1978) on such “orientalism,” which among other things aligns the east with sex. Cf. Iliad 6.289–90, cf. Odyssey 15.104–19. From Homer on linen connotes “eastern” luxury, hence the label “from Sidon,” a busy port in the Levant. For Egyptian linen see Herodotus (2.37.2–3); for Athenian custom regarding linen, see Thucydides (1.6.3). Bowen (ad loc.) presumes that Athenian merchants could purchase such linens in Sidon, though of course the label is likely more generic. For the tearing of clothes as eastern, Bowen also compares Libation Bearers 27–31, but this reference is more ambiguous. Cf. Rosenbloom (2006b) on the tearing of linen as a pervasive metaphor in Persians that begins as the heart’s tearing of its “black tunic” (μελαγχίτων, 115) and is gradually exteriorized (45). 69 It is possible (despite Bowen ad 656–57) that the “shading” refers to the suppliant boughs under which they huddle; cf. τάσδ᾽ ἕδρας κατασκίους, 346, κλάδοισι νεοδρόπος κατάσκιον  . . . ὅμιλον, 354–55. On veiling in Greek culture more generally, see Llewellyn-Jones (2002, 2003). 65

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reference to their veils they also describe their journey as made in a “flax-sown house” (λινορραφής / τε δόμος. 134–45) on board the ship heightens the visual impact of their covered apartness, the tent redoubling their veiled and shaded embodiment.70 The Danaids are also conspicuous aurally, shrieking high notes and low as the tears fall (θρεμένα  . . .  / λιγέα βαρέα δακρυπετῆ, 111–12), and singing in a foreign tongue (καρβᾶνα δ᾽αὐδάν) that the Argive land nevertheless knows (κοννεῖς, 129–30).71 When they end their ode and their father finally speaks, his focus suggests that he has found their performance alarming in its intense emotionality. Accordingly, he embarks upon some detailed deportment training, instructing his daughters in how to hold the suppliant bows properly (in the left hand) and cautioning them not to say anything beyond respectful and mournful words, nor to accompany these with any look or gesture too bold (τὸ μὴ θρασύ). Their expressions, he urges, must not be irresponsible (τὸ μὴ μάταιον), while their eyes should remain calm in their chaste faces (σωφρονῶν  / ἴτω προσώπων ὄμματος παρ᾽ἡσύχου). Nor must they speak too quickly or too slowly, nor too boldly (θρασυστομεῖν), since they are foreigners and refugees (191–203). Danaus’ speech is remarkable for its emphasis on posture, gesture, and vocal temper, as if to underscore not merely the youthful over-expressiveness of the chorus but also their outlandish cast. And in fact this is what Pelasgus, the Argive king, first comments upon, when he enters with his own chorus of Greek soldiers (234–37): From where is this un-Greek-dressed crowd that I address, luxuriating in their foreign robes and headbands? For not Argive is the garb of you women, nor from elsewhere in Greece. ποδαπὸν ὅμιλον τόνδ᾽ἀνελληνόστολον πέπλοισι βαρβάροισι κἀμπυκώμασιν χλίοντα προσφωνοῦμεν; οὐ γὰρ Ἀργολὶς ἐσθὴς γυναικῶν οὐδ᾽ἀφ᾽Ἑλλάδος τόπων. But then he notes the suppliant branches and position at the altar, which he finds alone in keeping with Greek origins (243). When Danaus explains that they are indeed Argive, Pelasgus thinks that this must be impossible because of their appearance—to him they look far more like Libyans than locals, or possibly denizens of the Nile region. This sends him into a frenzy of racialized associations: could they be Indian nomads who ride saddled (ἀστραβιζούσας) on camels in a region near the Ethiopians? Are they bowwielding, manless (ἀνάνδρους), meat-eating Amazonians? He then wisely asks for more information (277–90). 70 On the associations between bodily coverings and housing in ancient Greek thought, see Llewellyn-Jones (2007); for further on the relation of this to bodily containment, see Chapter 4. 71 Note that even as they exclaim, “O land, you know well my foreign voice!” they use language that is barely Greek: καρβᾶνα δ᾽αὐδὰν εὖ γᾶ κοννεῖς (119), as both καρβᾶνα and κοννεῖς are of uncertain origin and meaning, being pretty much without any etymological context in Greek; cf. Chantraine ([1968] 2009), s.v.).

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In the course of his questioning the Danaids reveal that they sit at the altar of the gods in flight from marriage to their Egyptian cousins, which they claim will render them slave (δμῳΐς, 335). Pelasgus shudders as he looks upon their seats shaded with the suppliant boughs (346, 354–55), hesitating between fending off the violence the girls fear and that which they may precipitate, while they argue with him about the pollution that he may incur by not honoring suppliants (359–80). The foreign fancy dress of the suppliants figures prominently later in the action, when the Egyptians do indeed aggress them physically, threatening to pull and pinch them (839), as well as “tear the handiwork of clothes” (λακὶς χιτῶνος ἔργον, 904) and drag them off by their hair (κόμης, 909, cf. 884).72 As Phiroze Vasunia emphasizes in his discussion of the play, there is a long history of attributing violence against women to racial others; and the fact that the Danaids’ saviors are Greeks further underscores the racist cast, as well as what Vasunia terms (following Malek Alloula) the “generalized perversion” of the Egyptian characterization.73 When Danaus spies the Egyptians approaching in their ship, he points to their “black limbs emerging from white clothes” (μελαγχίμοις / γυίοισι λευκῶν ἐκ πεπλωμάτων, 719–20) as their distinguishing feature, the high contrast further emphasizing their difference from Greeks as well as from the dark-skinned Danaids, since the latter are somehow both Egyptian and Argive. The Egyptians’ assault on the girls, whom they regard as their legal property, reveals them as grabbers and rippers as well as shouters (even their lust is “clamorous,” μάταισι πολυθρόοις, 820); that the marriage itself can only look to their victims as a “tearing by force” (δαΐκτορος βίᾳ, 798) underscores their brutality and even animality. At one point in the struggle the Danaids scream that the “two-legged snake, the monster, is panting near” (μαιμᾷ πέλας δέπους ὄφις, / ἔχιδνα, 895–96), which like the reference to “tearing by force” suggests fears of not just bodily but also genital contact. While the girls characterize themselves earlier as heifers, thereby assigning themselves their own role in the animal world, this is a conventional metaphor in tragedy for virginal young women, as Nicole Loraux has pointed out.74 While it may be that they are more cow than other young women, given their descent from Io, the metaphor of the snake is quite clearly phallic and deadly in the context of a struggle to elude rape. b. Slave or Slavish As Page duBois notes about midway through her book on slavery, “Women, like slaves and dogs, stand both inside and outside of human space.”75 In fact, it can be difficult to

72 See Wohl (2010) on the relevance to the play of Spivak’s critique of such dynamics as “white men saving brown women from brown men,” quoting Spivak ([1988] 2010: 297). On the girls’ threat to hang themselves by their headbands and belts, see Burian ([1974] 2007) and Bednarowski (2010). See further in Chapter 6 (3). 73 Vasunia (2001: 33–40). Alloula’s (1986) study focuses on Algerian women in the early decades of the twentieth century, but the critique is capacious enough to be relevant. 74 Loraux ([1985] 1987: 34–37). On animal–human slippage in tragedy, see Thumiger (2006, 2007: 128–38). 75 duBois (2003: 147).

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discern differences in autonomy in relation to female and slave characters in Greek representation, given the containment and control of women’s bodies more generally, which takes its most demeaning (and common) form in the sex slave. In tragedy aristocratic slaves are, as mentioned, usually Trojan women who are mostly made to serve in Greek beds. These, more than other slaves clearly marked as “slavish” (i.e., quasicomically fearful, pandering, luxury-loving, and/or “barbaric”), serve to bring close but not too close the specter of potential subjugation that haunted a society dependent on institutionalized slavery and more or less permanently at war.76 As duBois’ book as a whole also emphasizes, slaves are humans who, like women, are objects as well, possessions to be protected or mistreated as their owners see fit and allotted little agency or freedom of movement. For the purposes of this section, the sense of female characters and slaves as objects is relevant particularly to how these barely human bodies are settled in relation to covering versus binding, since female slaves effectively trade one for the other. A vibrantly explicit example of the loss of cover occurs in the passage with which duBois starts her discussion on female slaves, but she does not comment upon the detail in which I am interested.77 Deep into the action of Euripides’ Hecuba, the chorus of enslaved Trojan women sing of their past lives. The scene takes place in the bedroom, after an evening’s entertainment, the husband of the narrator lying on the bed: “I was tucking my hair up into its binding net [πλόκαμον ἀναδέτοις μίτραισιν ἐρρυθμιζόμαν], glancing into the boundless gleams of my golden mirror [χρυσέων ἐνόπτρων], about to fall on my cushioned bed [ἐπιδέμνιον  . . . εὐνάν]  . . .” (923–27). Then a shout is heard throughout the city and everything changes in an instant: “I left my beloved bed with a single robe (μονόπεπλος), like some Dorian girl, . . . and seeing my bedmate dead I am led away” (933–38). From snood and mirror and cushioned bed to utter loss and near-naked homelessness, as if in an instant: the Trojan women track this as a loss of dress, particularly of headdress, gone like their city shorn of its crown of towers (ἀπὸ δὲ στεφάναν κέκαρσαι / πύργων, 910– 11).78 Such images cast sexual subjugation as rape—that is, as clothes torn from the body soon to be abducted and forced onto an enemy’s bed. Given that Hecuba is a play steadily interested in dressing and undressing, we should not be so surprised to find this brutally swift and terrible plunge in status etched in relation to clothing. The moment is bracketed on the one side by Hecuba lying prone onstage fully covered, as if she were a corpse (συγκεκλῃμένη πέπλοις, 487), sullying her head in the dust (κόνει φύρουσα δύστηνον κάρα, 496, cf. τὸ πάλλευκιν κάρα, 500); Polyxena’s offstage stripping to the waist before death (557–70); and Hecuba’s dead son Polydorus lying on the stage still dressed in his Trojan clothes (733–35). On the other side, directly following the ode, falls the detailed, tactile narrative of Polymestor’s

76 duBois (2003: 138–39). See also Seaford (1990) on female containment and further in Chapter 4 (2d). The most obvious example of this clearly slavish type is the Phrygian slave in Euripides’ Orestes; see further below. 77 Cf. duBois (2003: 131–32). 78 See again Llewellyn-Jones (2003, 2007) on head coverings and the evidence that slaves went without; for Dorian dress as comparably skimpy, see Battezzato (1999–2000).

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blinding, which features attention on the part of his attackers (Hecuba and other Trojan women) to the fine weave of his clothing (1152–54). Most of these moments I discuss in more detail in other chapters; from my focus here on slavish dress, the most compelling material details cluster around Hecuba, including especially the scene early in the drama in which she confronts Odysseus. Now a slave herself, as she emphasizes repeatedly in the parodos, she reminds Odysseus of the time he entered Troy in ragged disguise (δυσχλαινίᾳ τ᾽ἄμορφος) and dripping with blood from brow and chin (ὀμμάτων τ᾽ἄπο φόνου σταλαγμοὶ σὴν κατέσταζον γένυν) (240– 41). “Oh yes!” he says—to which she replies, “And you grasped [ἥψω] my knees in your distress?” “So that my hand,” he agrees, “pretty much died in your robes [ἐνθανεῖν γε σοῖς πέπλοισι χεῖρ᾽ἐμήν].”79 Hecuba then puts the point on her inquiry: “And you were my slave [δοῦλος] then?” (242–47). Odysseus agrees that he owes his life to her, but when she kneels and grasps him in turn (ἀνθαπτομαί σου, 275), he refuses her request. The prouder Polyxena scorns to take such a posture at his knee, addressing Odysseus in response to her mother’s pleas. “I see,” she says drily, “that you have withdrawn your right hand under your cloak [δεξιὰν ὑφ᾽εἵματος κρύπτοντα χεῖρα] and turned aside your face [προόσωπον ἔμπαλιν στρέφοντα], lest I reach out to touch your cheek [μή σου προσθίγω γενειάδος]” (342–44). The inversions of status and stature in this exchange, together with the plying of past and present materials and exposed or covered skin, grounds the exchange in bodily intimacies, from Odysseus’ ragged cloak to Hecuba’s queenly robes, from his hand frozen on her covered knee to it hidden away in his cloak. While I consider in more detail manual contact in other settings in Chapter 2 and suppliant assemblages in Chapter 5, from our vantage here the scene shows close up the dizzying reversal of fortunes as an exchange of material and postural configurations. And no one wins this rematch: despite being restored to his former station, Odysseus emerges in this scene as the more slavish, in the sense of appearing craven, while Hecuba grovels abjectly at his knee, powerless and an actual slave, while Polyxena effectively turns her own haughty cheek. As I discuss above (section 1b), similar calculations orient Euripides’ Andromache, a drama in which Neoptolemus’ two wives—Hermione with a dowry and Andromache as a slave—face off over their respective statuses, as calibrated in relation to dress, deportment, and physical debasement. It seems useful here to add a few notes on Andromache as a slave and Hermione’s slippage in that direction, as well as assessing the impact of the general racism that pervades the play. Early on the former Trojan sovereign (as Andromache later calls herself, τὐραννος ἦ Φρυγῶν, 204) describes how she was led away from Troy, “throwing over her head hateful slavery” (δουλοσύναν στυγερὰν ἀμφιβαλοῦσα κάρᾳ) like a veil, as she left everything behind in the dust (109–12). The metaphor implied by the action of throwing something over the head (ἀμφιβαλοῦσα κάρᾳ) shapes an image of Andromache that seems arrestingly parallel to that of the ode in Hecuba, of the Trojan woman being led away in only a dress. Andromache instead

79

Tierney ad loc. notes that the expression is a hapax in extant usage. See also Foley (2015: 38–42) on the scene.

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replaces her lost veil with slavery itself, as if bowing her head to its realities might provide protective cover.80 Hermione’s ensuing efforts to bend Andromache to her will, both literally and figuratively, include calling her a slave (δούλη, 155) and menacing her as if physically with visions of her body pressed into lowly service and postures such as that for cleaning the floor (164–68). Throughout her confrontation with her rival, Hermione sustains an emphasis on what we might call an aestheticized politics of rank, focusing on the body’s affects, postures, and potencies, from the begetting of children (157–60, 170–74), to sexual desire, to the boons that gold can bring. In a vivid assertion of embodied power and its reverse, she declares that if Andromache wishes to avoid death, she must “give up her opulent, lofty thoughts [ὀλβίων φρονημάτων] and fall at her knee [προσπεσεῖν τ᾽ ἐμὸν γόνυ], sweeping her house and sprinkling water by hand from golden bowls [ἐκ χρυσηλάτων  / τευχέων]” (164–67). From the head aloft with thoughts to the slavish posture at the knee, cleaning the floor with water from the mistress’ bowl: Hermione achieves a head-to-toe transvaluation of Andromache’s status, not to mention a clearly relished physical domination. She soon follows up this fantasized humiliation by threatening Andromache in vivid terms, claiming that she will set her on fire or cut her skin with terrible wounds (χρωτὶ δεινῶν τραυμάτων ἀλγήδονας) (257–59). She also ridicules Andromache for sleeping with the enemy (170–73) and treats the role of bed slave as an indication of the foreigner’s supposed penchant for incest and familial bloodshed (173–76): This is the way of all barbarians: father lies with daughter and son with mother, brother with sister, and kin murder each other . . . τοιοῦτον πᾶν τὸ βάρβαρον γένος· πατήρ τε θυγατρὶ παῖς τε μητρὶ μείγνυται κόρη τ’ἀδελφῷ, φόνου δ’ οἱ φίλτατοι χωροῦσι . . . That Hermione’s bit of prurient racism in fact describes the plots of many Greek tragedies must be Euripides’ little joke, but it also reveals the crude and shallow quality of her calculations, as she follows up by telling Andromache not to bring such customs to Greece (177). Later she goes so far as to threaten her rival with death, as if hoping her recalibrations of Andromache’s status had fully transformed her into a slave object and thus property to be dispensed with as she likes (257–59). When Menelaus intervenes and tells Andromache that he is holding her son hostage, commanding her to relinquish her hold on Thetis’ statue, he makes it clear that such brutish handling of other humans runs in the family. While Andromache mocks him for 80

On the figuring of aidōs as a mantle, see Ferrari (2002: 72–82); it “does for the social persona what the mantle does for the person who wears it” (80).

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bending to his childish daughter’s will (cf. ἀντίπαιδος) and entering into battle with a slave (δούλῃ) (326–28), he affirms that he does indeed count her among his own slaves (cf. δούλων), property (χρήματα) held in common with Neoptolemus (374–77, cf. 585). In despair Andromache recalls being pulled along to the Argive ships by the hair (κόμης ἐπισπασθεῖσ᾽, 402) and offers up her body to be slaughtered, hung by the neck, or bound (σφάζειν φονεύειν δεῖν ἀπαρτῆσαι δέρην, 412).81 Menelaus has his household slaves seize her and bind her hands behind her back (ἀμφελίξαντες χέρας, 425), declaring his intention to kill her and to leave the fate of her son to Hermione. He concludes with a final insult, ordering her inside the house, to learn that slaves cannot disrespect those who are free (εἰς ἐλευθέρους δούλη γεγῶσα μήκεθ᾽ὑβρίζειν μάθῇς, 433–34). When Andromache returns after a brief choral interlude, her hands are still bound and her child is clinging to her; they sing a pitiful duet and she urges him to fall at Menelaus knee in supplication (529–30).82 As the action pivots, Peleus arrives to save Andromache and she falls in turn at his knee (572–73); Menelaus then relents, leaving the stage and the play. Soon the mercurial Hermione understands just how tenuous this hold on freedom may be. It seems useful to recall here that she measures her predicament in direct relation to her relinquishing her veil (830–31), since she has been found out in her murderous plotting and abandoned by her father. She thus fears inversions of status and posture, especially that she will herself be reduced to supplication at her enemy’s knees, as noted above (δούλα δούλας γόνασι προσπέσω, 860). For all her shallowness and mercurial cowardice, the moment resonates with the anxiety that duBois emphasizes as a pervasive feature of daily Athenian life, for male and female alike. Further, her removal of her veil conforms precisely to this loss of status, as slave women go effectively naked into the world, unprotected by sheltering house or headscarf, and thus without the cover that would redouble the allure of their own once-delicate skin.

4. Shields, Pelts, and Similar Shells The most obvious “second skin” of warrior heroes in epic and tragedy is the shield, as Melissa Mueller has discussed in relation to Ajax.83 The most famous of these is of course the one Hephaestus makes for Achilles in the Iliad, which the poet emphasizes as coextensive with his fierce and flashy exterior in a manner that Achilles himself recognizes (19.12–23). There is some evidence that Achilles’ shield carried resonance in lost plays that parallels that of Ajax and those of the Argives in Seven Against Thebes.84 Other Iliadic heroes carry shields that match their types in one way or another, such as

81

Note the asyndeton, which gives her line a panting intensity. For other such familial clusters, see Chapter 5. 83 Mueller (2016: 135–40); see also Goff (2010), Weiberg (2018). 84 E.g., the Achilles’ ode in Euripides’ Electra; see King (1980); cf. Mueller (2016: 136). 82

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the notably vicious insignia on Agamemnon’s, described at the beginning of book 11 before his horrifyingly violent rampage through the Trojan ranks. Then there is Heracles’ monstrous shield as zealously detailed in the pseudo-Hesiodic fragment of that name, which while full of grotesque violence like his life is strikingly distinct from his signature outerwear in tragedy and later myth (i.e., the lion skin). I should emphasize that heroic weaponry is only relevant to my study in this relatively narrow regard: in close conjunction with skin and the tangible, tactile details that inflect character, as covering, extending, or being otherwise than these. In what follows I consider briefly how the shield emblems offered to the mind’s eye in lavish ecphrasis in Seven Against Thebes turn on precisely this equation between the warrior and his defensive weapon, even as the entire scene operates only as envisioning in narrative and thus only as a verbal tableau that nevertheless leads to destruction. In some contrast but with similarly active force, the handling of weaponry and other protective dress in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles closely tracks the heroes’ visible statuses and self-conceptions, driving character orientation and plotting. I take up these two plays in turn.85 a. Emblems as Outerwear As Froma Zeitlin demonstrates in an influential study of the shields in Seven Against Thebes, Eteocles and the scout who describes the shields of the Argive attackers engage in what amounts to a semiotic matching game.86 The scene unfolds as a set of complementing pairs, with each shield’s iconography calibrated to its owner and countered by his enemy warrior’s character and lineage. Even though the shields are never displayed,87 and even though Eteocles claims at the outset that no shield can wound without its accompanying weapon, Zeitlin meticulously reveals how empty the boast is, as with a mounting intensity his own facing off with his brother’s shield leads directly to his death. My concern here is less with the shield features as signs; nor am I only interested in the ways in which the shields signal the coordinates of the warriors’ individual characters.88 I stress instead how the descriptions operate as material outerwear for the warrior in action, as if each emblem achieves by sensory impact what it signs. While this is keeping with Zeitlin’s sense that the semiotic movement brought about by the descriptions has propulsive power in the plotting, the focus here as elsewhere is on affect, aesthetics, and the materialities of the signs.

85

While Hector’s shield in Trojan Women is an intensely resonant object, it serves more as coffin than second skin; I thus discuss it in Chapter 4, in the context of tombs and “tombs” (2c.ii). 86 Zeitlin ([1982] 2009); also Bacon (1964), Palladini (2016: 113–33). For other issues, including modern reception, see Torrance (ed.) (2017). 87 There has been some dispute about whether the original staging would have included representations of the shields in some form; this seems unlikely, but it is not my focus here. 88 We do not, in any case, know very much about most of the warriors named. At least one scholar (Poochigian 2007) has argued that the Theban warriors were present onstage as silent characters, as a visual instantiation matching the shield’s descriptions, but there aren’t any unambiguous indications of this.

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Let me take the most riveting examples to indicate how this focus contributes to our awareness of what the shields are in broader relation to bodily coverings. A couple of the shields and equipments of the warriors make various types of noises, mostly literal bells and whistles (e.g., Tydeus, 386–87; Eteoclus, 463–64), and the Argives especially are noisy with war cries and boasts.89 Amidst the general clamor two icons stand out for their metal-worked images and express claims: the giant Capaneus’ shield, which features a naked man carrying a blazing torch, accompanied by the words “I shall burn the city” (πρήσω πόλιν, 434); and the “very violent” Polyneices’ shield, which bears the image of a woman leading a man that reads in part, “I shall lead this man” (κατάξα ἄνδρα τόνδε, 647). Both shields are forged at least partially in the most fancy of gleaming metals— Capaneus’ has a gold-wrought message to match the blazing torch, while Polyneices’ figures are in gold—and both feature embodiments of the stated threat. If Capaneus’ naked burning man is in keeping with his scoffing at Zeus’ thunderbolt (which will later get him killed by the same),90 Polyneices’ is more contrived, materially intricate, and much more ambiguously framed by the scout. Polyneices carries a “new-made, well-rounded [εὔκυκλον] shield” with a double device, “skillfully contrived” (προσμεμηχανημένον). The female figure guides the male “modestly” (σωφρόνως) and “claims” (φησιν) that she is Justice (Dikē) (642–46). The scout’s description includes not only the material details but his own reading of them, including the sensory pleasures of the crafting and the golden picture, as well as the postural details of the figures that suggest to him a certain affective coloration of the scene. Rather than pursuing what this emblem may indicate about Polyneices’ character, I would direct attention to the ways in which the scout’s eye-witnessing achieves a kind of haptic visuality (i.e., a “feeling through the eyes”) that gives its signs material weight and tactility. There is something aesthetically and thus dramatically forceful about the fine craftsmanship and subtlety of the details, as well as its wordy message, which reads in full: “I shall lead this man and he shall hold his city [πόλιν ἕξει] and shall stroll [τ᾽ἐπιστροφάς] in his ancestral house” (647–48). The two verbs “hold” and “stroll” themselves communicate a sense of commanding, embodied action, while the shield’s balanced circle and double image instantiate the claim in its very materiality. As Polyneices’ special outerwear, then, it serves as an redoubling of his own doubled and matched siblinghood, while also rendering as a visible and tactile threat the superiority to which he lays claim. b. Ajax Unshielded The Homeric Ajax is a huge (πελώριος) warrior who carries a giant shield, a massive thing that scholars have recognized as Mycenean (i.e., oblong rather than round). When

89

Cf. Weiss (2018b) on synesthesic effects in the early action of the play, which I think sets the audience up to be sensitive to the shields’ sensory impressions. 90 As is dramatized by the scene with which the Prologue begins, which culminates in Evadne’s suicide on his funeral pyre (Eur. Supp. 980–1113); see further in Chapter 5 (2c.i).

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Priam looks down from the Trojan wall and asks Helen who this warrior is, he describes him as bigger and taller than any other as well as broad foreclosed futures shouldered (μέγας τε / ἔξοχος Ἀχαίων κεφαλήν τε καὶ εὐρέας ὤμους, Il. 3.226–27). With this matched body and shield he is the herkos Achaiōn, as Helen calls him in response to Priam (Il. 3.229, cf. 6.5, 7.211), the towering defense (πύργος, Il. 7.219, Od. 11.556) of the Greek troops.91 When Ajax and Hector engage in hand-to-hand combat in book 7, the Homeric poet describes the shield in detail, as fashioned by the best leatherworker with seven layers (ἑπταβόειον) of hides of sturdy bulls and an eighth layer of bronze (7.220–23). Even Hector is impressed with Ajax’s power (7.289–90) and the Trojans are relieved when he escapes the huge warrior’s might and “untouchable hands” (χεῖρας ἀάπτους) (309).92 In Pindar Ajax has especially tough and protective skin (Isthmian 6.35–56). This is secured at his birth by none other than Heracles, who comes to visit him in his infancy and prays that he possess an outer layer as impenetrable (ἄρρηκτον, 47) as “this skin” (τόδε δέρμα) that enwraps him, as well as a heart to match. Aeschylus tells the story somewhat differently, with Heracles securing Ajax’s tough exterior by wrapping him in the lion skin so that he is vulnerable only where it gapes (at the ribs, fr. 83 TGF ). A pair of speeches by Antisthenes depicts Ajax claiming to fight “without a wall” (ἀνεῦ τεῖχος, Ajax 9), while Odysseus teases Ajax for the opposite—namely, porting his own “wall” (τεῖχος, Odysseus 7) around with him, in the form of his giant shield. Its seven layers, Odysseus claims, show no marks to prove Ajax’s bravery and have so protected him that he escaped the Trojan War without a single wound.93 As Stanford notes, Sophocles makes no direct reference to the tradition of Ajax’s uniquely tough exterior, instead suggesting that this defended body has its analogue in his character, which he represents as iron-hard and inflexible.94 So while Ajax is a “shield” in and of himself, Odysseus also introduces him at the outset of the action as “Ajax shield-bearer” (Αἴαντι τῷ σακεσφόρῳ, 19).95 Further, the fact that the main focus of Ajax’s fury in the play is his loss of Achilles’ arms to his enemy Odysseus furnishes another form of protective outerwear for framing the hero’s character and orienting his plot. When he first appears after his bout of madness, he emphasizes this loss as rendering him effectively “naked” (γυμνόν), without the “great crown of good reputation” (στέφανον εὐκλείας μέγαν) that he so surely deserves (464–65). When his aptly named son Eurysakes (“Broadshield”) enters, he accordingly hands over his giant shield to him, declaring him better suited to its use. “Hold the seven-layered, impenetrable [ἄρρηκτος] shield, wielding it by its well-stitched strap,” he tells him, declaring that his other arms will go with him to his grave (574–77). He has already promised that he will leave his

91

See Worman (2001); also Mueller (2016: 135–40) on the Iliadic details. On Ajax’s hands, see further in Chapter 2 (4c.iii). 93 See Prince (2015) for the text and commentary. On Heracles’ own shield in Hesiod, see Martin (2005), Brockliss (2017). 94 Stanford (1963: 276–77). See the discussion in Mueller (2016: 134–54); also Burian (1972); Henrichs (1993). 95 Stanford (ad loc.) treats this as merely differentiating him from the Locrian Ajax, but its prominent position and the fact that a place-name epithet would have sufficed suggests that the term is more meaningful. 92

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brother Teucer as a guard at the gates (562–63), so that his son will have all the defenses he himself appears to be in the act of relinquishing. In Chapter 4 I discuss in more detail the “strange container” that Ajax’s giant body registers as; here I am underscoring instead the ways in which the hero’s impenetrable and shielded stature generates a sense of his hardness and recalcitrance. Indeed, when he gives the speech that many scholars have deemed deceitful, declaring that he will go to the shore to purify himself after his murderous actions, he notes that minds may be hardened (περισκελεῖς φρένες) and that he, who has been so tough—as if dipped in iron (βαφῇ σίδηρος ὥς)—has found his mouth tempered by Tecmessa (cf. her earlier plea that he “be softened,” μαλάσσου, 594). Yet it turns out that this is not really the case: when he next emerges at the shore, he fixes a sword in the sand and declares his intention to fall upon it, “piercing his side” (πλευρὰν διαρρήξαντα)—that is, highlighting the manner of his suicide in language that clearly recalls his otherwise miraculously shielded skin.96 c. Heracles’ Fleshly Outerwear Late in Euripides’ Heracles, the hero remarks on his own special body with its “cloak of flesh” (σαρκὸς περιβόλαι᾽, 1269), the youthful covering with which he ventured into the world and undertook the Labors. While the drama does not sustain attention only to this fleshy mantle, it does contain a lot of play with what elsewhere I have termed “costume and connection,” including Heracles’ wife Megara dressing up herself and her children in fancy funereal dress, a son recalled as being draped in his father’s lion skin, and Heracles himself covering and uncovering his head in distress.97 The plot features a distinctive network of cloaking and connecting images that settle resolutely at the outer edges of Heracles’ body (unlike in Sophocles), while the plot involves him treading the edges of the world of the living. Both are in keeping with his figure in mytho-history, as a hero with many family ties, who sometimes wears outerwear of domestic crafting, at others an animal cloak in which he polices the borderlands. The network of connections surrounding the hero and his family manifests as visible, material attachments and covers, which the plot unravels and then refastens to Theseus. In Heracles’ absence, Megara, Amphitryon, and the children cling as suppliants to the altar that the hero had dedicated to Zeus Sotēr in celebration of his victories; the children also cling to her, while she dresses them actually and in memory and embraces them. This cluster of the near dead moves offstage briefly when Megara demands of Lycus that she be allowed to enter the palace with the children in order that they don “the finery for corpses” (cf. κόσμον . . . νεκρῶν, 329). They then return and Megara performs what is effectively a lament for the children, both their pasts and their foreclosed futures. Then,

96

Again, see Worman (2001) on the imagery. Worman (1999b); see also Padilla (1992); Holmes (2008). I address the details of Heracles’ handling in Chapter 2 and the familial assemblage in Chapter 5. 97

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as she recalls, the children donned her husband’s famous gear—Heracles playfully casting his lion skin over the head of one boy (στόλην τε θηρὸς άμφέβαλλε σῷ κάρᾳ / λέοντος), the covering with which he had armed himself (ἐξωπλίζετο) (465–66), and handing his “defending” (ἀλεξητήριον) club to another (470–71). This physical clustering around Megara transfers itself to Heracles when he arrives soon after, not as the shadow or dream Megara would have settled for (494–95, cf. 517– 18), but as the powerful live replacement for his dedicated altar. He exclaims at the “garments for corpses” (στόλμοισι νεκρῶν, 546) in which his children are dressed; and when he inquires further, “What is this adornment of the children suitable for those below?” (κόσμος δὲ παίδων τίς ὅδε νερτέροις πρέπων;), Megara responds, “We are already enwrapped in these coverings of death” (θανάτου τάδ᾽ ἤδη περιβόλαι᾽ ἀνήμμεθα)98 (548–49). Both of them use deictic pronouns to point verbally (and thus physically in the enactment) to the garments, which serve to emphasize their strangeness as the drapery of death on living bodies. That is, this is the opposite of the protective gear with which Heracles armed himself, the second skin and prosthetic club that form his unique bodily extensions. Instead this outerwear makes corpses of those still alive, readying them for the tomb in a manner deeply ominous and in this play a terrible foreshadowing of the violence to come. Soon Heracles is demanding, “Will you not rip from your hair these coverings [τάσδε περιβολάς] of Hades and look upon the light, releasing your eyes from the shadow [σκότου]?” (562–64). He announces his intention to kill Lycus, but when he tries to move inside the palace (and off the stage), he finds his family still clinging to him, such that he must drag them all “like a boat,” taking “these appendages” (τάσδε ἐφολκίδας) by the hand (629–32). When Heracles reemerges near the end of the play, he is surrounded by the corpses of his family and tied to a pillar of his ruined house (cf. 1032–38). The chorus and his father Amphitryon hover nearby, terrified of him and exclaiming at his state. Together they engage in a sensory and affective back-and-forth, the chorus members crying out at what they look upon while Amphitryon cautions them to keep back and be quiet (e.g., ἑκαστέρω πρόβατε, μὴ / κτυπεῖτε, μὴ βοᾶτε, 1047–48). The scene recalls the one that falls early on in the Orestes, in which Electra and the chorus approach the sleeping Orestes, but this responsion contains a keener sense of menace, since the focus of their attention is covered in blood and sits among the victims of his extreme violence. The protective atmospherics that I noted in the Orestes scene is here instead a tremulous hesitation that silences voice and footfall (cf. also 1043–44, 1059, 1068), as chorus and father move back and forth before Heracles and his gore-soaked form. When Heracles awakens and Amphitryon tells him what he has done, he considers suicide options, listing alternatives that parallel in more destructive terms Oedipus’ desire to hide himself away at the end of Oedipus the King. He then throws a “darkness” over his head (κρατὶ περιβάλω σκότον), covering himself in shame when he sees

98

See Worman (1999b) for the significance of haptōmai compounds, which I would now highlight more emphatically as haptic in the modern sense (i.e., as indicating multi-sensory proxemics and contact).

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Theseus99 arriving (1159–60). Theseus exclaims in turn at the horrifying scene before the ruined palace, asking why his friend sits with his “wretched head” covered with his mantle (τἰ γὰρ πέπλοισιν ἄθλιον κρύπτει κάρα, 1198). While Amphitryon urges him to remove the cloak from his eyes and show his face to the sun (1204–05), supplicating him tearfully, Theseus tries argument. There is no darkness (σκότος), he declares, that holds such a black cloud (μέλαν νέφος) as to hide (κρύψειεν) Heracles’ misfortune (1216–17). “Uncover your wretched head!” (ἐκκάλυψον ἄθλιον κάρα), he then demands, and look upon the day (1226–27).100 Heracles protests, asking whether Theseus sees what he has done; and when Theseus responds that he has heard and that his friend “signals evils to one looking” (ἤκουσα καὶ βλέποντι σημαίνεις κακά), he asks why Theseus urges him so strongly to uncover his head (1229–31). The emphasis here on seeing and hearing not only recalls quite precisely the deictic gestures and language of the scene in which Heracles greets his children in their death finery; it also parallels the covering and uncovering of the hero’s head and eyes, since his motivation for cloaking stems from a desire not to be seen. In the conversation that ensues, it becomes clear that he not only feels terribly ashamed but also fears the spread of his miasma (1233), as if his blood-soaked mien could somehow stain Theseus from a distance—a haptic visuality with a distinctly ancient cast.101 This culminates in actual contact, as Theseus tries to help Heracles rise and the latter recoils at the thought that he would smear blood on his friend’s cloak (ἀλλ᾽ αἷμα μὴ σοῖς ἐξομόρξωμαι πέπλοις). Theseus’ response to this is, effectively, “smear away!” (ἔκμασσε), after which he instructs Heracles to put his arm around his neck and declares that he will guide him to Athens (1399–1402). From the prospect offered by considering the ways in which these tragedies manipulate material coverings, especially familial carapaces, I offer a few provisional conclusions. First, the material presences in these plays only share some basic elements, while the enactments and figurative extensions orient them in quite distinct ways in relation to particular character inflections and relations. Thus, all clothing and carapaces are not equal, despite their tendencies across many plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to signal engagement with and entanglement in familial bonds. And yet, to take our main examples, the maternal and paternal outerwear both indicate the dangers of parental extensions—that is, the broad reach of their fateful inhabitations rendered viscerally present by the material implements of their power. Further, if familial draperies are often tainted (literally, psychically, figuratively) with violent intimacies, other bodily coverings isolate and/or exoticize characters, as with the Danaids’“oriental” dress and Andromache’s “veil of slavery.”

99

See also Chapter 2 (4c) on eye–hand coordinating in the scene. Note that Heracles’ vocabulary seems to be infected by wretchedness: e.g., he uses ἀθλίως to describe how he will go about his future three times (every ten lines) from 1265–85. 101 I.e., one that suggests a materialist theory of vision (cf. Democritus, Empedocles); and see Porter (2010: 154–56). 100

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I am hoping that this vantage may also help to clarify my broader aims, as well as what they are not. In juxtaposing these scenes I am not arguing for hypothetical reconstructions as “material” clarifications of the staging indicated by the play script, although my readings are informed by work that highlights ancient stage and costume conventions.102 Rather, I am highlighting how these dramatic scenes and their indicated enactments ply layered and proliferating materials that are, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, annexes or prolongations of bodily inhabitations and orientations.103 In the hybrid perceptual space created by such dramatic actions, a daughter may tear off her father’s fancy carapace only to find herself bereft of orientation and sanctuary, “naked” like a slave. Or, alternatively, a son may attempt to put a murderous end to his entanglement with his imperious mother only to tangle with her robes, revealing in his psychic and perceptual struggle with this transition the elusiveness of mastery and control, as well as the enfoldedness of the human body with its nonhuman objects and extensions. Thus Hermione sees her father’s ornaments as a protective proxy self and Orestes sees his mother’s device as a monstrous, tainting trap— but importantly, in their very material prostheses or supplements, in the handling of cloth around body. As with the ominously fastidious enwrapping of the deluded Pentheus in the maternal folds of Bacchae, at the end of Libation Bearers the intensity achieved by proximity, props, and some super-saturated language offers up a sign as it distills into all of its messy materiality: riddled with holes, handled by everyone, a deep-dyed and blooddrenched device readymade for frenzy.

102 103

See again Taplin (1993, 2007), Csapo (2010), Wyles (2011). Cf. Merleau-Ponty (1964: 163).

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CHAPTER 4 STRANGE CONTAINERS: BODIES AND OTHER TRAGIC VESSELS

The body under the skin is an over-heated factory and, outside, the patient glistens, he shines, from all his pores, burst open. Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society1 In this chapter I consider how the tragic poets orchestrate embodiment at its material edges—that is, where surfaces resonate with the frictions of contact, cathexis, and degradation, where bodies and containers fall together. Then skin becomes husk, a jar is clutched like a baby, and siblings seek tombs as the ultimate shared bodily shell. Distinctive scenes in a cluster of influential tragedies situate bodies dead and living as “strange containers,” as contiguous with and/or like shelters for substances and as settled on an existential edge. These scenes highlight by metaphor and enactment how the living are drawn not only to the dead but also to the inorganic, as bodies become odd objects and objects take on a life of their own, what Jane Bennett frames as “the becoming otherwise of things in motion as they enter into strange conjunctions with each other.”2 Further complicating such conjunctions is the fact of dramatic mimesis itself, since both “living” character and “dead” object (whether corpse or urn) are signs for things. Again, they are not material in any normal sense but rather visualized/visible markers in a plotted, discursive patterning; as such they have resonances and leave traces distinct in kind from things in the world. Thus, for instance, an urn is not only an “urn” (i.e., a sign [both word and prop] for the thing used in actual practice), but also a locus for pondering containment, proximity, family history. As I discuss in the Prologue, one of my contentions is that the “second skin” of approaches to dramatic enactment that attend to bodily surfaces and sensuous engagements with the world reframes familiar details and aspects of plays and thus reveals novel prospects. Consider, for instance, Artaud’s emphasis on what Derrida terms the “flesh of the word,” by which he means its sensual, material elements such as sonority, tone, extension—this “splashing about in the membrane” that reanimates both “plastic”

1

Le corps sous la peau est une usine surchauffée / et dehors le malade brille, / il luit / de tous ses pores éclatés (Artaud 1958: 195). Deleuze and Guattari quote these lines at the outset of Anti-Oedipus ([1972] 1977: 3); Massumi’s translation is slightly different. 2 Bennett (2010: 118).

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language as well as the theatrical body.3 For my purposes in the present chapter, Artaud’s (and secondarily Derrida’s) emphasis on “fleshy” language, as well as his casting of the ancient dramatists’ approaches to their form in terms of sensuously inhabiting (or not) a sac of skin, animate this sense of the body as strange container. If, as Claudia Benthien remarks (following Bachelard and others), the house is a primary metaphor for the body, in tragedy other types of containers dominate, most of which are associated (as one might expect) with death: urns, coffins, tombs. Benthien notes as well that such analogies envision the body as a hollow vessel and that this is particularly dominant in Western tradition as a metaphor for the female body, for rather obvious reasons.4 While none of the extant tragedies features pregnant bodies, which are also only rarely referenced in metaphorical usage or narratives (as opposed to childbirth or having children), a few do treat certain inner spaces in ways that suggest analogies to the bodies of the female characters who inhabit them, as I discuss further below (2c.iv–d). The long history of envisioning the female body as container has obvious groundings in sexual difference and reproduction; Elizabeth Grosz and others have pointed this out, as well as that the emphasis has traditionally been on the female as a leaky vessel, seeping uncontrollably, as opposed to the hard, impermeable male body.5 Greek tragedy, and I would hazard tragedy more generally, overturns this gendered scheme, depicting male characters as if anything more likely to seep fluids, with the exception of tears, which are largely a female excretion. But as the discussions that follow reveal, tragedies frequently center around challenges to bodily integrity; and while it may be the case that the Greek imaginary shapes the fluid, leaky body as female, in tragedy all bodies are vulnerable in one way or another. In what follows I consider first tragic bodily surfaces in relation to containers, and second containers as bodily proxies; then I turn the insides out, considering what gets excreted or spilled from tragic bodies once they are violated and so dying or dead. Throughout I attempt to maintain close attention to the details of how surfaces and containments emerge at intersections of enactment and figuration in onstage mimesis or in vibrant reporting of offstage actions that resonate with adjacent enactments. As I discuss below (2d and 3a.i), one of the strangest plays from this angle is Sophocles’ Antigone, since the most meaningfully embodied actions take place offstage and are reported in three different narratives, while the onstage indications (e.g., proxemics, contact, and accompanying metaphors) remain quite muted in this regard, except in one central instance: Antigone’s lament and final removal from the stage.

1. “Material” Edges Some of the most prominent stagings of bodies and/as containers can be found in those dramas that center on one of tragedy’s favorite families: the house of Atreus, the fateful 3

Artaud (1958: 84–93); Derrida (1978: 239–40); cf. the later version in Murray (ed.) (1997), where Derrida also emphasizes Artaud’s “materialization of speech” (241). 4 Benthien (2002: 25–26), citing Bachelard (1964). 5 Grosz (1994: 198 ff.). Cf. Padel (1985: 100–04); Zeitlin (1996: 344, 351–52).

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unraveling of which is captured in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra and Orestes, among others. In isolating this family and set of stories I do not mean to suggest that the imagery considered here does not turn up elsewhere—it does, and in forms that share features with the plays centered on the house of Atreus, some of which I discuss in later sections. In addition, there is a whole other set of discussions to be had if one were to focus only on the covers (e.g., cloaks/nets, see Chapter 3) or the viscera (e.g., poisoned flesh, crushed spines, suppurating wounds, see further below, section 3). In the present section I address where these intersect: the surface textures, excretions, and points of contact that align human bodily edges with other materials and containers. Tragic language thereby transforms bodies into strange things, yet these bodies also elude or exceed their capturing in words, such that the experiencing of them—both as expressed by choruses or other characters and as offered to audiences—multiplies or collapses sensory intensities. Then images themselves proliferate, run together, or gape open, while bodily materializing impinges on even the most detailed, joint-to-joint articulation. a. Husk Consider a moment late in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, which dramatizes Agamemnon’s killing by his wife Clytemnestra. At this point she emerges (likely on the rolling platform) flanked by the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra. She declares triumphantly that she had to deceive and entrap as she did, else she would not have been able to “fence the toils of ruin too high for overleaping” (πημονῆς ἄρκύστατ’ ἂν / φράξειεν ὕψος κρεῖσσον ἐκπηδήματος, 1375–76).6 Like fishermen who cast their “boundless, circling nets” (ἄπειρον ἀμφίβληστρον), she declares, so did she cast her “evil abundance of cloth” (πλοῦτον εἵματος κακόν) around Agamemnon and strike him down (1382–84). She offers these tropes in celebration, and the chorus receives them in horror. The spattering of her husband’s blood fell on her, she tells the elders, like a “murky drop of bloody dew” (ἐρεμνῇ ψακάδι φοινίας δρόσου) on the budding seedpod (γάνει σπορητὸς κάλυκος) (1390–92). It is a stunning scene. Unlike Lady Macbeth, Clytemnestra welcomes death’s splatter, the “murky raindrops” on her body’s thriving husk. She also thrills at the success with which she deployed her “net”—the ensnaring cloak discussed in Chapter 3, which her son will display in a murderous frenzy in the second play, as if driven mad by its entanglement with his mother and father both.7 More relevant here is the clustering of material surfaces in enactment and metaphor, such that signification takes on a startlingly

6 Toward the end of the first play, the chorus despairs at the “spider’s web” that ensnared the king (1492), and Aegisthus vaunts over Agamemnon’s corpse as caught in what he calls the “fences of justice” (τῆς Δίκης ἐν ἕρκεσιν, 1611). For the imagery see Goheen (1955); Zeitlin (1965); Lebeck (1971); Carne-Ross (1981); Heath (1999); Lee (2004). 7 For more on Clytemnestra’s and Orestes’ hands, see Chapter 2 (2); and again, see Chapter 5 for the tapestry scene.

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lurid cast: Clytemnestra between the corpses, perhaps clutching her “fish”-catching cloak, covered in her husband’s bloody dew, swelling like a seed-pod in the rain. We might turn back for a moment at this point to compare the visceral threat that Clytemnestra spits at Cassandra as she exits into the palace, leaving this lone virgin foreigner alone with the chorus Argive elders. “She has left her newly captured city and come here,” she says, “nor will she understand until her strength has foamed away in blood [πρὶν αἱματηρὸν ἐξαφρίζεσθαι μένος]” (1065–67). The image is viciously tactile, the foaming blood an inverse of the generative capacity that aphros would normally connote, as of the sea’s bounty or of semen—or both, in the figure of Aphrodite, who lurks with Helen behind the plotting of the Oresteia.8 From this angle, Clytemnestra seems to be alerting Cassandra and the elders that she will shortly return with her corpses and celebrate her own husband’s fertile rain of blood on her skin. The materializing of the violence in these substances thus serves to settle sex and death close to each other and to the skin. To return once more to the later scene: One point of contact in this cluster is the blood-rain on body-husk, a vision of the body’s surface as porous casing ready to receive nutrients—as of course in some senses it is. In this case, though, the nourishing liquid is another’s life-blood, which both gives Clytemnestra’s thriving shell a vampiric cast and yet also threatens to expose the bodily sac as fragile membrane between blood and blood. And soon enough: Clytemnestra’s bold deictic (οὗτος, “this here”) gesture indicating “the work of this (τῆσδε) right hand” gives way in the next drama, when she bares maternal breast to Orestes’ sword point in desperate supplication and emerges next on the rolling platform as herself a corpse, her own murderous cloak spread around her, plied by her increasingly frenzied son. The trilogy as a whole stages this inside–outside bodily permeability as a kind of pleat in the net/pod/cloak, as if survival depended on not getting caught in its folds. Which, of course, is impossible. There is a moment at the end of Oedipus the King that resonates in revealing ways with the Oresteia scenes considered together, when Creon arrives on stage and urges not exile (or drowning) for the tainted king, but house arrest. Thus his stage directions focus on the stage building (skênê): he wants Oedipus covered up and brought inside, where not only no human but no god such as Helios, nor the earth and weather, can look upon him (1424–28): If you are still without shame in respect to mortal offspring, reverence at least the all-nourishing light of lord Helios, and do not show uncovered a thing so polluted that neither the earth nor the holy rain nor light will welcome it. ἀλλ’ εἰ τὰ θνητῶν μὴ καταισχὺνεσθ’ ἔτι γένεθλα, τὴν γοῦν πάντα βόσκουσαν φλόγα αἰδεῖσθ’ ἄνακτος Ἡλίου, τοιόνδ’ ἄγος 8

On Helen’s eerie presence, see further in Chapter 6 (2b).

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ἀκάλυπτον οὕτω δεικνύναι, τὸ μήτε γῆ μήτ’ ὄμβρος ἱερὸς μήτε φῶς προσδέξεται.9 A tussle ensues, effectively over alternate endings, which has encouraged editors’ rejection of the various sections of the last hundred lines of the play. For our purposes, however, the tension over different means of disposing of this tragic object contributes to the sensory textures among which it pivots. Thus Oedipus’ insistence on the necessity of cauterizing his senses and confiscating his athlion demas, treated in detail in Chapter  1, is only heightened in intensity by Creon’s emphasis on covering and containment. Rather than being nourished like Clytemnestra by the “dew” of her transgressive acts, Creon regards Oedipus’ tainted husk as rejected by sun, rain, and the earth itself. Thus here in the final moments of the play the Oedipal body—this abject and contaminated (near) corpse—is offered to the eye as tragedy’s perfect (anti-)object, the paradigmatic strange container.10

b. Wax Theorists such as Julia Kristeva and more recently Sara Ahmed and Eugenie Brinkema have spent time thinking about the affective energies that vibrate at the body’s edges, emotions and sense-reactions like disgust, desire, or intense sympathy, a “feeling with.”11 As the Prologue details, Kristeva starts from skin as the edge between vulnerable self and abject other and Ahmed pursues this in a meditation on disgust as occurring on the surface of the skin. Brinkema spends an inordinate amount of time on a tear that may not be one, in this case a drop captured in a still from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, which sits at the edge of the dead woman’s eye.12 For my focus this close-in theorizing, this working and thinking right at the body’s edges, encourages awareness not only of sensory details and intimate contact but also of how tragic scenes organize these. Brinkema emphasizes in particular attention to the ways in which representational strategies orient and structure affective experience, so that, for instance, what matters for tears is how, precisely, they are situated in relation to aesthetic considerations such as stylistic texture and visual or tactile details.13 Take, for example, Sophocles’ Electra, who certainly sheds a lot of tears.14 Early on in the drama the chorus asks why she is ever “oozing an insatiable lament” (τάκεις  . . . ἀκόρεστον  / οἰμωγάν, 121–22), warning her that she will destroy herself with groans 9

Again, Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 83–86) emphasizes the importance of Oedipus as agos. See further below (3b.i) and in Chapter 6 (4c). 10 Compare here as well Euripides’ Andromache, which dramatizes contrasts among bodily “shelters,” including Thetis’ temple as a sanctuary for Andromache, Hermione’s ornamental dress as protective paternal shell, and the latter’s subsequent realization that her own bridal oikos is no safe haven, now that she has misbehaved and her father has abandoned her. See further in Chapter 3 (1c) and Chapter 6 (2b). 11 Kristeva (1980); Ahmed (2004); Brinkema (2014); see also Marks (2000), Barker (2009). 12 Brinkema (2014: chapter 1). 13 Brinkema (2014: 36–41). 14 See Kitzinger (1991) and Nooter (2012) on Electra’s mourning and voice.

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(στενάχουσα διόλλυσαι, 141). Electra responds only to confirm that she is indeed moldering with tears (δάκρυσι μυδαλέα, 166), to grieve that her life is slipping fast, and, echoing their words, to agree that she is “melting away” (κατατάκομαι, 187).15 So here we have tears as transforming the body, as agents of decay that work on the surface of the skin like fire or mold, melting or mildewing it as if it were wax or metal—or, more weirdly, the skin itself as excreting a waxy lamentation, as when the chorus asks about her oozing. There is also, in the structuring of the scene’s enactment, a close-in experiential exchange around these effects, with the chorus members viewing and Electra confirming, that highlights surface details as less the natural emanations of a grieving woman than evidence of malignant substances that both telegraph her excessive indulgence in mourning and threaten her material being. In “On Now Knowing Greek,” Virginia Woolf characterizes Electra as “blunted and debased by horror,” a phrase that indicates the novelist’s awareness of this dramatic physicality, that Electra’s bodily surfaces are being worn down (“blunted”) by her material circumstances. Sustaining this attention to texture, she quotes Electra’s invocation of Niobe, the paradigmatic mourning mother “ever weeping in [her] rocky tomb” (ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ εἰεὶ δακρύεις, 151–52). For Woolf Electra’s language contains both power and danger, the richness of the poetic gestures compounded by the implicit enactment of the actors as if standing there “with their bodies and their faces.”16 i. Sidebar: Medea Pale and Melting. In Chapter 3 I discuss in more detail the various descriptions of Medea’s deadly outerwear and its hideous merging with flesh and skin; here I want to direct attention instead to how it and the pale bridal skin that it will melt is prefaced in disturbing ways by Medea’s tearful visage and her “melted” and pallid complexion. Right from the start we are told by the nurse that she lies inside the house without food, wracked with pain, melting in tears (συντήκουσα δακρύοις), harsh and unresponsive as a rock or sea wave, never turning her pale white neck (μή ποτε στρέψασα πάλλευκον δέρην) to heed her loved ones (24–30). When the chorus of Corinthian women enters and hears Medea crying out from within, they worry about her condition and express friendly sympathy (134–38). The Nurse explains that a royal bed holds Jason, while Medea melts away her life (τήκει βιοτήν) in her chambers, her mind softened not at all (οὐδὲν παραθαλπομένη φρένα) by the advice of friends (140–43). The staging of this entrance is strikingly dramatic, as Medea remains offstage, crying out her agony in lyrics strangely triangulated with the Nurse and chorus, who together forge the body of the parodos. The different metrical signatures of each body (lyric Medea, anapestic Nurse, anapestic and lyric chorus) underscore their distinct sensory and affective states, while the sonic variation contributes to a sense of synaesthetic and spatial elaboration. When, for instance, Medea prays to be struck on the head by

15 Cf. Electra’s speech after hearing of Orestes’ supposed death: rather than continuing to be a slave to her enemies, she vows to “wither away” her life (αὐανῶ βίον) at the gates (819). 16 Woolf ([1925] 1984: 28–30), quoting Jebb’s translation, as she does throughout; cf. Antigone and see further below (section 2d). For more on Andromache as Niobe, see Chapter 6 (2b).

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lightning (φλὸξ οὐρανία, 144) and the chorus cautions her not to be so “shattered” (χαράσσου) by her loss, nor “melt away” (τάκου) in mourning for her bed (158–59), they sing out these vibrantly tactile images in distinctive modes and places. Indeed, Medea is not even singing with the Nurse and chorus, but rather is lost in her own interiority (both spatially and emotionally), even as the chorus responds to her cries.17 In their agitation at the destructive turn of her temper, they wish that she would welcome their refrain (δέξαιτ᾽ὀμφάν) and send the Nurse inside to fetch her. The gap between their voices and her ears thus drives the action, bringing an end to Medea’s multi-sensory isolation. Much later in the play, Jason arrives for a second time (this one at Medea’s summons), and she offers him an apology and calls for the children. Soon she is sighing over them, wondering (cryptically to Jason) whether they will continue to live to stretch out their loving arms (φίλην ὀρέξετ᾽ὠλένην, 902). In her consternation she expresses the tension of her situation directly: she exclaims that she is close to weeping (ἀρτίδακρύς εἰμι) and full of fear (φόβου πλέα); though apparently resolving her quarrel with Jason, she is nevertheless “filling this tender gaze with tears” (ὄψιν τέρειναν τήνδ᾽ἔμπλησα δακρύων, 903–05). Her deictic gesture, together with her contrary impulses, stir the chorus, who also find a “glistening tear” (χλωρὸν ὡρμήθη δάκρυ) rising in their eyes and worry over what is to come (906–07). Her emphasis on the physical sensations and textures generated by her mixed emotions, this trembling fullness and wetness, initiate an affectivity among the female characters onstage, as they all seep and shudder with apprehension at what is to come. Jason alone appears unmoved, first launching into an obnoxious discourse on female jealousy and then assuring Medea that her sons will be well cared for in their new family. But even he cannot eventually help but note her expression; he finally breaks off to ask why she is wetting her eyes with swelling tears (τί χλωροῖς δακρύοις τέγγεις κόρας) and has turned aside her pale cheek (στρέψασα λευκὴν ἔμπαλιν παρῇδα) (922–23), questions the children’s tutor later echoes (1006–07, 1012).18 The focus on her eyes and the turning aside of her pale cheek all resonate with the depiction of Jason’s new wife in the messenger speech to come—who, as we may recall, turns her own pale cheek and covers her eyes at the sight of Medea’s children—while the characterizing of Medea’s tears as “glistening” or “swelling” (chloros) contributes a dynamic tactility to her expression.19 As elsewhere in such scenes, language does all the work here; since the character would have been masked, the verbal details register more forcefully than they otherwise might, lending what Brinkema would call “an affective exteriority, an ectoaffect” to the masked surface.20

17

See Mastronarde’s discussion of the meters and dynamics of the parodos (2002: 188–92). While the earlier question at 1006–07 may be an interpolation, as it echoes exactly Jason’s question here, the fact that it is repeated suggests that the tutor’s similar questions about her expression alerted someone (ancient producer, actor, scribe?) to the parallelism and thus the dramatic emphasis. See Mastronarde ad loc. 19 See Mastronarde ad loc., who notes that the tenor of this usage may include a “visual suggestion” of glistening or swelling like droplets. 20 Again, Brinkema (2014: 23) emphasizes tears not as realistic expressions of interior states but as one among many forms of affects, “wet shedding” that has a shape and structure to be read essentially (for her) without the body. In this she parts ways with Deleuze (as she notes, 24–25), where I obviously do not. 18

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After Jason leaves and Medea is once again alone with her children she exclaims over their glances, smiles, and “bright eye” (ὄμμα φαιδρόν, 1038–43) and kisses and fondles their hands and skin in expressions of self-induced agony. This latter moment is very affectively engaging, but it too has a deeply perverse edge, as with mounting intensity she moves from dearest hand to dearest mouth (ὦ φιλτάτη χείρ, φίλτατον δέ μοι στόμα), from noble posture to face (καὶ σχῆμα καὶ πρόσωπον εὐγενές), and finally from sweet glance to tender skin and loveliest breath (ὦ γλυκεῖα προσβολή,  / ὦ μαλθακὸς χρὼς πνεῦμά θ᾽ἥδιστον) (1070–75). I say perverse in this case because this type of mournful enumeration of physical features elsewhere in Euripides occurs in scenes of lamentation, where the body or bodies regretted in such tactile detail are dead. While we can compare Andromache in Trojan Women embracing Astyanax before he is thrown from the city walls, this moment is not her doing and is paired with Hecuba keening over his shattered body when he is carried in on his father’s shield (1173–84, see further in 2c below); think also of Cadmus hovering over the dismantled body of Pentheus in Bacchae (1310–20, see further in 3a below). c. Crust Although Woolf only addresses it obliquely, the close-in focus on Electra’s surfaces and affective resonance occurs in lyric responsion, which accounts somewhat for its rhythmic insistence on the body’s melting, moldering surfaces and helps to generate a sense of intimacy and intensity. This is orchestrated somewhat differently in Euripides’ Orestes, which addresses a later phase of the siblings’ story. First to come upon the pair is Helen, who enters from the palace to find Electra huddled over the collapsed body of Orestes and inquires rather obtusely how they are doing. Electra answers tartly that Helen can see for herself (παροῦσ’ ὁρᾷς), as she sits sleepless over the body of her brother, who is all but a corpse (ἄϋπνος πάρεδρος ἀθλίῳ νεκρῷ, 81–83). True to her character in most tragedies, Helen is more concerned with her own mission, which is to convince Electra to take offerings to Clytemnestra’s tomb, since she fears reaction from the citizens. Electra notes that she is clearly occupied at the sickbed, repeating the proximal image of “sidesitting” (lit. “I am not at leisure in my side-sitting,” ἀσχολός  . . . προσεδρίᾳ, 93). After Helen leaves, Electra comments on her vanity, noting that in mourning for her sister she had only cut the very ends of her hair to preserve its beauty (128–29). Thus Helen signals attention to seeing and appearance, with her divine beauty and fancy dress standing in stark contrast to the siblings in distress. Electra draws attention in the prologue to what shedding the “maternal blood” (μητρὸς δ᾽ αἷμα) has done to her brother: similar to the surface effects caused by the excesses of both Electras, he is “utterly melting away” (συντακείς, 34, cf. 283) with a bestial disease and “has not taken food down his throat nor given washings to his skin” (οὔτε σῖτα διὰ δέρης ἐδέξατο, οὖ λούτρ᾽ἔδωκε χρωτί). He lies enwrapped in coverlets (χλανιδίων δ᾽ἔσω κρυφθείς); and then when the mania lifts, he weeps (39–45). When a little later Electra brings the chorus up close to view Orestes, they hover fearfully while she tends him, lifting him up at his request and wiping the drool from his mouth and the 138

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frothy crust from his eyes (ἐκ δ’ ὄμορξον ἀθλίου στόματος ἀφρώδη πελανὸν ὀμμάτων τ’ ἐμῶν) (217–23). They carry on this intimate toilette and maneuvering for a moment, while Orestes moves about restlessly, requesting that Electra get his dirty hair out of his face, lie him back down, and then raise him up again. The scene ends with Electra going inside to bathe and rest, at Orestes’ request, as if in their closely matched states her body’s care might compensate for his filth and restlessness. In both the prologue and this early scene the vocabulary is so mundane and detailed that some past commentators have seemed mildly offended, as if referring directly to skin and its excretions were inappropriate to such an elevated genre. Such tactile, material details are quite the opposite of the distancing, elevating features that tragic viewing often foregrounds. The scene emphasizes instead close viewing and touching, as the chorus leans in to peer at Orestes stirring under his covers and Electra handles his filthy skin. The substances that his orifices excrete occur naturally, the vocabulary encompassing the crust and ooze of other animals and plants, not to mention the froth (aphros  / aphrōdē) that calls to mind sexual excretions.21 As such they further intensify the sense of intimacy, working up his surface effects as a kind of viscous fretwork, like the lacey foam at the sea’s edge or the roping slaver of a dog. Ahmed argues that registering such “stickiness” is an “effect of surfacing” that activates what she calls “histories of contact.”22 In this case, the hand-to-skin intimacies of Electra and Orestes arouse awareness of what normally repulses—that is, the abject, the gross animal qualities of sickness and mania. In the moment this reaction is registered only to be bridged, as the healthy and living are drawn to the ill and nearly dead. An episode later on in the play extends this stickiness and welcomed contamination to the intimacy between Orestes and Pylades. The latter arrives from Phocis, greets Orestes with great fondness, and tells him that he hears that the Argive citizens are out for his blood. When Orestes confirms this, Pylades exclaims, “You would demolish me as well!” (συγκατασκάπτοις ἂν ἡμᾶς, 735). He tells his friend that his father has banished him for assisting Orestes, who then worries that Pylades has been contaminated by association with him (ἔοικε καὶ σὲ τἀμὰ λυπήσειν κακά, 768). They strategize and finally decide to go to Agamemnon’s tomb and pray to him for help, at which point Orestes expresses another concern: that the Furies may catch him again in their frenzy (οἴστρῳ κατάσχωσ᾽). When Pylades declares that he will care for him, Orestes replies, “It is difficult to touch a sick man” (lit. “ill-handled,” δυσχερὲς ψαύειν νοσοῦντος ἀνδρός). “Not for me,” Pylades says stoutly; and although Orestes worries that his friend may catch his insanity (cf. λύσσης μετασχεῖν) as if it were a disease, Pylades encourages him to “cast the side sluggish with sickness on [his] side” (περιβαλὼν πλευροῖς ἐμοῖσι πλευρὰ νωχελῆ νόσῳ), so that they can make their way together through the city (791–802). As in Electra’s tending but with a slightly less intimate tenor, here Pylades’ loving stalwartness

21

See above (1a) for the relevance to the Oresteia of foam imagery and its connection to semen and Aphrodite. But cf. also Odysseus’ encrusted disguise in Rhesus (ὕπαρφρον ὄμμ᾽ἔχων, 711), which suggests that such coatings usually take repulsive forms (as here with Orestes). 22 Ahmed (2004: 90–91).

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overcomes the grossness typically associated with diseased surfaces, offering rib-to-rib contact to help his friend.

2. “Human” Vessels: Jar, Coffin, Tomb Let us turn at this point from the body’s actual surfaces to containers that serve as bodily proxies. As mentioned, these are mostly grim funereal objects such as urns, coffins, and tombs, as befits the genre. My interest in them is again focused on surfaces, on the ways in which their handling and referencing often situates them in strange relation to bodies in their spatial dimensions, such that what they could possibly contain or be takes on a phantasmagoric cast. At other times the action frames these interiors as uniquely perverse encasements that seem especially suited to their inhabitants, like a second (or third) skin. a. Urns and Bodies Here, for instance, is Orestes at the outset of Sophocles’ Electra: “hidden” onstage (i.e., out of sight of Electra) with his old tutor, he describes past and future actions. He explains that, having concealed an urn in the bushes near his father’s tomb, he plans to return with this “bronze-ribbed” (χαλκόπλευρον) substitution and to claim that his body has perished, being now burnt and reduced to ashes (τοὐμὸν ὡς ἔρρει δέμας / φλογιστὸν ἤδη καὶ κατηνθρακωμένον) (51–58).23 The chronotopic conflations here are dizzying, as the present Orestes envisions his future self holding his own ribbed “form” (cf. τύπωμα, 54) that purports to contain all that remains—that is, ash and bone. The tale the tutor later tells to Electra and Clytemnestra, of Orestes’ horrific death in a chariot race in Phocia, compounds this effect by adding another fictional body to the collection: that of a form dashed to the ground and mangled so badly “that no one of his loved ones looking upon his pitiful form would know him” (ὥστε μηδένα / γνῶναι φίλων ἰδόντ᾽ἂν ἄθλιον δέμας, 755–56). Then, the tutor claims, the Phocians fed Orestes directly to the flames, rendering, as he succinctly puts it, “his giant body meager ashes in a small bronze jar” (ἐν βραχεῖ / χαλκῳ μέγιστον σῶμα δειλαίας σποδοῦ, 758). The explicit pairing of the mangled form and the bronze urn, both fictions to mask the presence of the actual body of Orestes, sets up the central scene in which this vessel is brought onstage to serve as the crucial physical pivot in the recognition of each other that unfolds between the siblings.

23 Cf. Libation Bearers 686, where Orestes tells Clytemnestra that the “ribs/sides of a bronze basin/urn” (λέβητος χαλκέου πλευρώματα) contain her son’s remains. Garvie (ad loc.) points to Agamemnon 444 and Sophocles, Electra 1401 for the use of λἐβης to indicate urn; see Dunn 1998, who takes Sophocles’ neologism to point to other heroic (i.e., Homeric) outerwear, against e.g. Segal (1980), who argues that it points up artistry and thus deception. The word τύπωμα only turns up elsewhere in tragedy at Euripides, Phoenician Women 162, where Antigone uses it to exclaim over her sight of Polyneices in his flashy armor—a moment that could support either reading, as it conjoins aesthetic impression with heroics. On this last passage, cf. Stieber (2011: 234–36) and further in Chapter 5 (2c).

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As Chapter 2 details, the scene with the urn involves an intense focus on hands and handling, on human–object contact and connection. I want to take another look at this scene, now with more emphasis on physical surfaces and containment. When Orestes carries out this action, entering and showing Electra a vessel that he claims holds his own ashes, she gasps out, “Oh wretched am I, as I now clearly perceive that this in your hand, as it seems, is that burden!” (οἲ ’γὼ τάλαινα, τοῦτ’ ἐκειν’ ἤδη σαφὲς / πρόχειρον ἄχθος, ὡς ἔοικε, δέρκομαι, 1115–16). Since she thinks that the urn is the dead Orestes’ container, her phrasing draws the gaze into the intimate but askew affective circuit created among herself, Orestes, and this vessel. Accordingly, she demands at once that he give it to her to hold in her hands (δός νυν πρός θεῶν . . . εἰς χεῖρας λαβεῖν), so that she may weep and bewail herself and her whole family together with the ashes (ξὺν τῇδε . . . κἀποδύρωμαι σποδῷ) (1119–22). Orestes gives her the urn and Electra proceeds to mourn at length over it, emphasizing in her typically eerie manner proximities that both recall familial intimacies and verge on the abyss. Clutching it, she first says pitifully, “Now I touch with my two hands what is in fact nothing” (νῦν μὲν γὰρ οὐδὲν ὄντα βαστάζω χειροῖν, 1129). Using language that disturbingly aligns her past actions with Orestes’ recent concealing of the urn, she recalls that she once hid Orestes away and sent him off, gleaming in his youth (cf. λαμπρόν), for safekeeping (1130–33, cf. 54–55). Now she laments that she cannot wash and prepare his dead body (κοὔτ’ . . . / λουτροῖς σ’ ἐκόσμησ’), nor take from the fire the “pitiful weight” (ἄθλιον βάρος) that remains. He has already been cared for by strangers, who have left him “a small burden in a small jar” (σμικρὸς προσήκεις ὄγκος ἐν σμικρῷ κύτει, 1138–42; cf., αὐτοῦ σμικρὰ λείψαν’ ἐν βραχεῖ / τεύχει, 1113–14). Her nursing of him as a child was “a sweet labor” (πόνῳ γλυκεῖ), but is now revealed as useless (ἀνωφελήτου) (1143–45), lost in a day with the wind (1150–51). Furthering her role as one settled at the edges of human living, Electra then cries out, “Our father is gone; I am dead because of you; you yourself are dead and gone” (οἴχεται πατήρ·/ τέθνηκ’ ἐγώ σοί· φροῦδος αὐτὸς εἶ θανών·, 1151–52). Holding the ashes of Orestes’ dear shape (φιλτάτης  / μορφῆς σποδόν), now a “useless shadow” (σκιὰν ἀνωφελῆ), she bewails his lost form (ὦ δέμας οἰκτρόν, φεῦ φεῦ) (1158–61). As with Antigone and her desire for grave sharing, she wishes, in an intensely weird spatiotemporal move, to crawl inside with Orestes’ ashes (as she thinks), “this [female] nothing with that nothing” (τὴν μηδὲν ἐς τὸ μηδέν), and to dwell with him below for the rest of time (1165–67). That is, she wants to be lodged together in “this your shelter” (ἐς τὸ σὸν τόδε στέγος)—that is, in the bronze-ribbed jar—which just moments before she had clutched as if it were her infant brother. Electra steadily pegs back and forth between the container that she later struggles over with Orestes—between them they use six or seven terms for it, depending on how one counts, including jar (τεῦχος), box (κύτος), shelter (στέγος) vessel (ἄγγος) and tomb (ταφή τάφος)—and what it contains (“pitiful weight,” “small burden,”“nothing,” ashes, shadow). Both of these she repeatedly compares to her brother’s lost body (“dear shape,” “sorry form”). Charles Segal once argued that the urn was more what he termed a “token of love” than an instrument of deception, since it precipitates the anguish that reveals Electra to 141

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Orestes and thus serves effectively as a recognition token and metonymy for their bond.24 And this urn certainly is one very vibrant object, riveting and drawing the siblings together even while it also functions as Orestes’ mask and body proxy. In its triangulation of affective dynamics, it activates a powerful cathexis, eliciting responses from both siblings that seem necessarily to be channeled through it. The urn also sets in motion body-to-body relations, in which Electra’s insistent gestures match her existentially with its supposed contents (again, “this nothing with that nothing,” τὴν μηδὲν ἐς τὸ μηδέν, 1165–66), which in turn raises Orestes’ sensitivity to the physical state of Electra’s sad body standing before him. Since the urn actually (within the mimetic frame) contains nothing, it operates as an uncanny theatrical device, being anything but empty in its impact. The fictive character of the prop itself precipitates true recognition between the siblings—if not, ultimately, full understanding.25 But from an affective angle things are a bit weirder than Segal acknowledges. Melissa Mueller has emphasized that Electra treats the urn like a baby, remembering her past tending and hiding away of the infant Orestes and emphasizing repeatedly her handling of it and him.26 I would add that this maternal caress has a deeply perverse cast to it, as her motherly cries are repeatedly intercut by statements of desire, elsewhere framed more overtly as erotic, to lie with her brother in his ashy tomb. Yet that baby is no baby and she is no mother to it, since the urn contains nothing and her actual younger brother stands before her. Orestes’ concealing of the urn early on in the action and Electra’s subsequent caressing of it and her brother in turn thus establishes a correspondence between container and body that is at the least affectively askew. Electra’s pitiful lament over the urn drives Orestes to regret his stratagem and he expresses shock and pity at her moldering and tattered bodily surfaces. “Is this really the famous form of Electra?” he asks incredulously (ἦ σὸν τὸ κλεινὸν εἶδος Ἠλέκτρας τόδε;). To this Electra replies wryly with another “this is that” matching phrase, implicitly pairing her body with Orestes and the urn: “This [form] before you is that one, and a very wretched one it is” (τόδ’ ἔστ’ ἐκεῖνο, καὶ μάλ’ ἀθλίως ἔχον) (1177–78).27 The emphasis on close-up viewing and the matching of sibling surfaces that their exchange establishes— Orestes’ supposedly bronze-ribbed without and ashes within, Electra’s melting and wasted—finds its resolution in the empty urn’s replacement with the body of the brother in fact standing before her. But not before the “slip-slide” materiality that Bennett highlights has unsettled the balance of affective attention, focusing in on and merging bodies and/as material objects to such an extent that the urn becomes the essential pivot. As Orestes inches toward revealing himself, he becomes increasingly disturbed by Electra's clutching of his deceptive device and demands that she let go of it (1205). 24 Segal (1981: 278–79) see also Mueller (2016: 116–24) for reading that emphasizes objects and bodies in the scene, but to different effect. 25 On the urn’s metatheatrical status, see Segal (1980: 125–42 [esp. p. 136]) and cf. Segal (1981: 278–79, 287); also Ringer (1998: 187–99). 26 See Mueller (2016: 121–23). Note that she also emphasizes the prominence of hands and handling; cf. McClure (2015: 226), but only in passing. 27 Cf. Electra's phrase for Orestes’ ashes cited above: they are a “pitiful weight” (ἄθλιον βάρος, 1140).

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She responds in distress at being asked to relinquish the urn, which she terms “beloved” (τὰ φίλτατα), crying out, “Oh bereft am I of you, Orestes, if I am to be stripped of your tomb!” (ὦ τάλαιν᾽ ἐγὼ σέθεν Ὀρέστα, τῆς σῆς εἰ στερήσομαι ταφῆς) (1207–10). When Orestes tells her that she dishonors no one in ceasing to mourn over the urn, she replies, “I do if in fact this that I hold is the body of Orestes” (εἴπερ γ’ Ὀρέστου σῶμα βαστάζω τόδε, 1216). Thus while Electra’s statements repeatedly draw equivalences between the urn and the body of Orestes, her brother urges her to give it up as his substitute, first replying that she does not in fact hold him as/in the urn, “except as fashioned in speech” (πλὴν λόγῳ γ᾽ἠσκημένον, 1217). When she inquires piteously where his tomb might be, he finally presents himself as its replacement, declaring that Orestes lives as he himself “has life in him” (εἴπερ ἔμψυχός γ᾽ ἐγώ). Electra then at last makes the proper match (“And you are that man?” ἦ γὰρ σὺ κεῖνος;), relinquishing the empty vessel for the living one standing before her and asking whether she really holds him in her arms (ἔχω σε χερσίν;).28 To this he responds, in an eerie echo of her desire to be entombed with him always, “So may you do for the rest of time” (ὡς τὰ λοίπ’ ἔχοις ἀεί) (1226, cf. 1165–67). b. Coffins and Beds I now turn again to Euripides’ Orestes and compare another scene in the play that stages the aftermath of their earlier tenderness. Much later in the play, the siblings reveal the violent potential of their physical bond, as well as its creepy eroticism, when they debate how to kill themselves and each other, because their matricide has enraged the populace of Argos. As in Sophocles’ Electra but now for a different, more disorienting reason, Electra laments the loss of the sight of Orestes, addressing him as possessing the body that is most desirable and sweetest to her (ὦ ποθεινὸν ἥδιστόν τ’ ἔχων / τῇ σῇ ἀδελφῇ σῶμα) and whose soul is one with hers (1045–46). Orestes soon replies that she is “melting” him (τήξεις), such that now he wishes to respond to her with the “affection of hands” (φιλότητι χειρῶν).29 This leads him to exclaim in kind: “Oh sisterly breasts, oh beloved object of my embrace; these endearments are in place of children and the marriage bed” (ὦ στέρν’ ἀδελφῆς, ὦ φίλον πρόσπτευγμ’ ἐμόν· τάδ’ ἀντι παίδων καὶ γαμηλίου λέχους  / προσφθέγματ’). Electra sighs in response, wishing that they could share the same sword and lie together in the same cedar coffin, to which Orestes responds, “How sweet would that be!” (ἥδιστ’ ἂν εἴη ταῦθ’) (1047–54). Commentators have tended to regard this exchange as a traditional “last embrace before death” (so West ad loc.), but the intimate physicality of the scene suggests that more alarming desires hover around their hands-on mourning. Indeed, in response to Electra’s wish that a cedar coffin serve as their single bed, West notes parallels to Patroclus and Achilles as well as Alcestis and Admetus—that is, to a pair regarded in the fifth century as lovers and to a husband and wife. The exchange of this sibling enjambment for 28

As Segal puts it, “Only when Electra puts down the artifact and embraces the living body can the truth be revealed” (1981: 287). 29 On the importance of haptics in this scene, see further in Chapter 2 (2).

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marriage and children, together with the fact that Pylades, Electra’s actual betrothed, breaks up their clinging embrace, only furthers the sense that their bond is overly intimate and tactile, as they melt and sigh for a shared final shelter. The scene thus offers us another container in the form of the cedar coffin, and now not as body proxy but as outer shell, as the only fitting container for sibling bodies joined skin-to-skin in an ecstasy of morbid desire. This is container as proxy bed, a frame sheltering too many bodies rather than too few. While it also recalls the wish of Sophocles’ Electra to huddle with her brother’s ashes in the urn, this iteration is much more disturbing for its fleshy inhabitation, its insistence on bodily presence and conjoining rather than material distance and absence. Even more unnerving in this strange play is the fact that their intense intimacy reaches its sharpest pitch in the midst of envisioned violence. When Electra describes her bloody plot to take Hermione hostage, Orestes exclaims, “Oh, what a man’s mind you have, while among the female kind your body is stunning!” (ὦ τὰς φρένας μὲν ἄρσενας κεκτημένη,  / τὸ σῶμα δ’ ἐν γυναιξὶ θηλείαις πρέπον, 1204–05).

c. Tombs and “Tombs” In her lament over the urn that she takes to hold her brother’s ashes, Sophocles’ Electra envisions the spatial dimensions of this vessel in a number of ways, including calling it a “hollow” (or box, κύτος, 1142) and a “shelter” (στέγος, 1165) and wishing it were a space to share, as she desires to lie in her brother’s tomb (καὶ νῦν ποθῶ / τοῦ σοῦ θανοῦσα μὴ ἀπολείπεσθαι τάφου, 1168–69). In so doing she aligns the urn with other larger containers—including one that Plato uses as a metaphor for the body (τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς κύτος, Tim. 44a)—even while she also emphasizes her brother’s physicality as a “small weight” (σμικρὸς ὄγκος, 1142) and (like her) “nothing” (τὸ μηδέν, 1166). In this section I address various alignments between bodies and tombs or other containers for and like the dead. i. Giant Trench. Something just as spatially contorted but nearly opposite occurs with Ajax’s giant corpse toward the end of Sophocles’ play, where it is treated by his family as if it were commensurate with both his shield (as a defense for them) and his tomb (as the necessary defense/honor for him).30 A full third of the play is devoted to defending Ajax’s corpse from exposure, which involves both holding onto it as if it had the protective power of a suppliant altar—that is, as if it were still a “shield” or already a hero’s tomb.31 As I discuss in Chapter 1 with an emphasis on different details, Tecmessa hurries to cover Ajax when she first comes upon his corpse (915–19), from which point the action focuses on its protective capacities and needs. After Menelaus has barged in 30

Cf. also the hero’s final resting place in Rhesus, as described by his mother, who appears on the mēchanē at the end of the play: he will lie in a silver-veined cave (ἐν ἄντροις τῆς ὑπαργύρου χθονός), a man-god (ἀνθρωποδαίμων) still looking upon the light (βλέπων φάος), (970–71). 31 I discuss the shield as protective cover in Chapter 3 (3b).

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and declared that no one has the strength to bury such a giant corpse in his tomb (τοσοῦτον ὥστε σῶμα τυμβεῦσαι τάφῳ, 1062–63), the chorus urges Teucer to hurry up and see to a “hollow trench” (κοῖλον κάπετον, cf. 1403–04), so that Ajax might sit in state in “the moldering tomb of everlasting memory” (τὸν ἀείμνηστον  / τάφον εὐρώεντα καθέξει) (1164–67). As scholars have noted, the language is strongly suggestive of hero cult, with its emphasis on the hero being established (καθέξει) in a famous (ἀείμνηστον) grave.32 I would add that it also makes Ajax somehow commensurate with his future tomb, as if it would not so much contain him as be a material representative of him, as the emphasis on memorializing also suggests (i.e., the mnēmē is a visible reminder). When soon after Teucer instructs Ajax’s son Eurysakes to come close and grasp his father (i.e., the corpse) as a suppliant (ἱκέτης ἐφάψαι πατρός), kneeling by it (θάκει δὲ προστρόπαιος), he also yokes Tecmessa and himself to Eurysakes and the corpse by cutting locks of hair from their three heads and handing these to the son to guard (φύλασσε) (1171–75). He utters a curse on anyone who should sever this bond, that he be himself left unburied and driven from the land (ἄθαπτος ἐκπέσοι χθονός), “mown at the root” (ῥίζαν ἐξημημένος) from his family like “this lock here” (τόνδ . . . πλόκον) he now cuts (1175–79). As the hair to the head, so the son to his dead father—an analogy that reinforces the sense of embodied fixity and its violent rupture that the figure of Ajax represents more generally in the action of the play.33 Teucer then commands the chorus (i.e., Ajax’s crew) to stand nearby and protect the body and its suppliant (ὑμεῖς . . . πέλας / παρέστατ’, καὶ ἀρήγετ’), which is when they sing of Ajax while living as a “bulwark against fear in the night and missiles” (νυχίου δείματος / . . . προβολὰ / καὶ βελέων, 1211– 13). As I note in Chapter 1, their zeugma underscores the double status of Ajax while living as both a material defense and general sense of protection.34 It also contributes to the strong sense that the play sustains throughout of Ajax’s physical inhabitation as more than a normal body—not just larger, which he is, but also more than human in the sense of quasi architectural, like a rampart or a giant burial chamber. Scholars have discussed in great detail aspects of Sophocles’ depiction of Ajax’s death and burial that indicate his status as the object of hero cult, but I am suggesting something that has less to do with cultic practice and more with staging and (in)human inhabitation.35 In terms of the material signifying suggested by the intersection of figuration (the chorus’ invocation of Ajax as a “bulwark”) and enactment (Teucer’s positioning of Eurysakes and the chorus around Ajax's corpse), his body is effectively a tomb and thus can serve this tutelary function, even as it is also in need of protection from those who would have it

32 Henrichs (1993) is especially forceful in his argument that the verb καθέξει constitutes a reversal of and thus an innovation on Homeric notions of the earth “holding” heroes, such that it indicates the powerful occupation of the tomb by the hero. 33 See further in Worman (2001). 34 Again, note the materiality of this semiotic clustering around the corpse, amplifying its theatrical presence as a sign for and object of defense. 35 See Burian (1972); Davidson (1985); Henrichs (1993); Barker (2004).

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exposed as carrion for the birds and dogs. At least one extant tragedy makes suppliant use of a tomb in this way (Proteus’ tomb in Euripides’ Helen); more commonly characters seek support and guidance from attendance at tombs of the dead, as in Aeschylus’ Persians and Libation Bearers, as well as the Electra plays. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus suggests that Oedipus’ tomb will serve in the future as this sort of sanctuary; and both Persians and Euripides’ Bacchae feature parental tombs onstage throughout the action, the one serving a tutelary function complete with an advisory ghost, the other signalling plot motivation and divine stature. The action at the end of Ajax reinforces the equivalence between the giant body onstage and his future tomb. When Odysseus offers to help with the burial and Teucer worries that this will seem “ill-handled” (δυσχερές) to the dead man, he says that he shrinks from allowing him to “touch the tomb of this man here” (τάφου . . . τοῦδ᾽ . . . ἐπιψαύειν). The locution, together with the deictic indicating proxemics and stage gesture, merges the two sufficiently enough that commentators from Jebb on have assumed both to be at stake, given that handling of the dead would involve lifting up and carrying of the corpse, digging of the tomb, washing and dressing the corpse, and pouring libations.36 In fact, Teucer soon enjoins the chorus to put their hands swiftly to the digging (χερσὶ ταχύνετε) and to heat water for washing the corpse, while someone goes off to get Ajax’s wartime finery (τὸν ὑπασπίδιον κόσμον) and he and Eurysakes gently raise up the corpse (1403–11).37 ii. Shield as Coffin. Hector’s shield in Trojan Women functions as what we might recognize as a remarkably intense material and affective punctuation, since it is offered to the eye as an object that still bears the bodily marks of the dead hero, while now holding the shattered corpse of his son.38 The play is little more than a funereal procession of female prisoners, all of them related in some way to Hecuba, who never leaves the stage and spends her entire time alternately lamenting and collapsing with the prisoner chorus. The action, such as it is, takes a turn for the sophistic in the confrontation between Hecuba and Helen, who leaves soon after with Menelaus, the lone free woman and untouchable to the end. The final scene centers around Hecuba’s lamentation for Astyanax, Hector and Andromache’s son whom the Greeks have thrown from the city walls.

36

Jebb (ad loc.). See Sourvinou-Inwood (2004) on the ways in which tragedy manipulates Greek funereal practices; this scene supports her arguments against the pervasive idea in the scholarship that women dominated the rituals. Cf. Foley (2001); Hame (2008). 38 Recent readings of this play focus on its aestheticization of human misery (Wohl [2015: 42–49]), its foregrounding of eros (Pucci [2016: 34–42, 71–82]), and the reduction of humans to things (Wohl [2018]). For a compelling reading of Trojan Women through Levinas as evidence of Euripides’ investment in depicting the “Other” and his association of knowledge with violence to this Other, see Shankman (2004); he offers a close reading of Astyanax’s mangled head that emphasizes the linguistic contortions and the sudden horror of the scene as evidence of Euripides’ “ethical sublime” (351). Rosenbloom (2006: 263–65), in contrast, emphasizes the political and economic underpinnings of the scene, seeing in the transfer of the shield an emphasis on older economic orders (i.e., aristocratic oikos versus imperialist polis). See also Suter (2003) on lament in the play more generally. 37

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In an earlier scene than the one on which my discussion focuses, Andromache mourns her child as he is taken away, lamenting that he clutches her robes in vain and noting grimly that Hector will not “rise from the earth” (γῆς ἐξανελθών, Tro. 754) to help him. She also, like Medea, hovers sorrowfully over his body, detailing his most beloved embrace (ὑπαγκάλισμα ματρὶ φίλτατον) and the sweet breath of his skin (χρωτὸς ἠδὺ πνεῦμα) and matching these to “this breast” that fed him in his swaddling clothes (ἐν σπαργάνοις σε μάστος ἐξέθρεψ᾽ ὅδε) (757–59). Then she cries out for him to twine his arms around her neck and fit his mouth to hers (ἀμφὶ δ᾽ὠλένας / ἕλισσ᾽ἐμοῖς νώτοις καὶ στόμ᾽ ἅρμοσον, 763–64). She finishes her chanting over her son with a violent deictic gesture: “Snatch him away,” she says, “throw him from the towers and feast on this flesh [δαίνυσθε τοῦδε σάρκας]” (775)—as if daring the Greeks to follow through on their vampiric consumption of tender child-flesh. Hecuba resumes Andromache’s skin-to-skin lamentation, but now matching Astyanax’s body also to his father’s, whose shield will serve as the boy’s own strange container. The Greek herald Talthybius explains that Andromache had requested before she was led away that he carry her son to Hecuba on Hector’s “bronze-backed” (χαλκόνωτον) shield, to use in place of a coffin of cedar-wood or stone (ἀντὶ κέδρου . . . τε λαΐνου) (1136–41). Hecuba’s lamentation over Astyanax’s shattered body not only reassembles it piece by piece, but also works up from the shield a sensory edging of her own son Hector’s lost body, so that it is as if his body as shield were coffin to his son. This affectively charged familial enchaining and encasement is prefaced by the catalog of what it contains: the little head that once sprouted in curls kissed by his mother (ὃν πόλλ᾽ἐκήπευσ᾽ ἡ τέκουσα βόστρυχον / φιλήμασιν ἔδωκεν), now smashed so that the blood “grins” (ἐκγελᾷ) through the broken bones; the little hands so like his father’s, now hanging limp in their sockets (ἐν ἄρθροις ἔκλυτοι), the dear lips (φίλον στόμα) that once, as he hung on his grandmother’s robes (ἐσπίπτων πέπλους), promised to cut a lock of his hair (βοστρύχων / πλόκαμον) to adorn her tomb (1175–84).39 Hecuba then addresses the object on which Astyanax lies, having his father’s bronzebacked shield as his tomb (ἐν ᾗ ταφήσῃ χαλκόνωτον), this guard of Hector’s broad and glorious arm (καλλιπήχυν . . . βραχίονα) still bearing the mark of his “sweet print” on its handle (ἡδὺς ἐν πόρπακι . . . τύπος). So too along the shield’s rim is the line of his sweat (ἴτυός τ᾽ἐν εὐτόρνοισι περιδρόμοις ἱδρώς), where his beard dripped (ἔσταζεν) as the moisture ran down from his brow (1192–99). Not only does Hecuba pair the boy’s little head and hand with his father’s larger ones; she also effectively resurfaces the shield with the latter’s physical excrescences, fashioning a fatherly film on it as if to hold his dead son.40 Turning from this Hector-patina to the chorus of her fellow Trojan captives, Hecuba asks for robes to drape the body (1200–01), thus adding a morbid inner

39

Cf. Zeitlin (1996: 211–12), who regards Hecuba’s reassembling as “a kind of Dionsyiac compositio membrorum,” comparing the end of Bacchae. Denniston (1936: 116), in a macabre turn, suggests that the “grinning” blood is an image for the way the white “teeth” (bone) would show through bloody “lips” (flesh). 40 Wohl argues that the shield thus becomes “more alive than the human body it bears (2018: 20–21), citing Purves’ discussion of Ajax and his shield in Homer (2015).

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layer to Astyanax’s shield-coffin, since they return with clothing stripped from their Trojan dead (αἵδε  . . . σκυλευμάτων  / Φρυγίων) as decoration (κόσμον) for the small corpse (1207–08). These robes, Hecuba declares, are the sorry remnants of the adornment (ἀγάλματα) that hateful Helen stripped from Astyanax (ἀφείλεθ᾽), destroying him and his entire house (1212–15).41 “Ah, ah—you touch, you touch our hearts!” (ἒ ἔ, φρενῶν / θίγες θίγες), the chorus cries out in sensory reaction, as if feeling the grip of this terrible desolation on their organs. Hecuba continues to press on this intensity of feeling (1218–20): What you ought to have draped around your skin in marriage, wedding the most royal bride in Asia, I now fasten this Phrygian splendor of robes to your skin. ἃ ἐν γάμοισι χρῆν προσθέσθαι χροΐ Ἀσιατίδων γήμαντα τὴν ὑπερτάτην Φρύγια πέπλων ἀγάλματ᾽ἐξάπτω χροός. Covering her grandson with this grim finery, she addresses once again Hector’s shield, the “gloriously victorious [καλλίνικε] mother of many victories,” bidding it to receive its “crown” (στεφανοῦ), namely the little dead body in its Phrygian marital cladding (1221– 22). As a final gesture, though notably out of order given what has come before, she adds that she will tend to his wounds with linen bandages (τελαμῶσιν), something his father will do among the corpses (ἐν νεκροῖσιν) (1232–34). Her turn as “wretched doctor” (τλήμων ἰατρός) suggests that he has bled through his fancy gear, in a sorry mingling of child’s blood with clothing of the dead as marriage dress. Containing this disturbing imbrication of bodies and materials is the paternal shield with its edge of sweat, which only further contributes to the material layering and concentrated aesthetics that the lamentation shapes. As both mother and father of the dead prince, it seems less that the shield is a proxy for the human parents than that their ghostly presences are annexed to it in all of its strange objecthood. iii. Vampiric Recesses. Other Euripidean tragedies suggest similarly eerie aspects of the alliance between the dead and their tombs. Early on in Euripides’ Suppliant Women Theseus, in arguing for the return of the Argive dead from Thebes, urges that the corpses be “covered by the earth” (γῇ καλυφθῆναι νεκρούς, 531), since they came from there and, as he says, “we have our bodies only while life dwells in” (οὔτι γὰρ κεκτήμεθα ἡμέτερον αὐτὸ [sc. σῶμα] πλὴν ἐνοικῆσαι βίον, 534–35). Throwing up a vision that sounds a bit “Dawn of the Dead” to modern ears, Theseus asks the Theban herald mockingly, “Do you fear that the entombed (ταφέντες) will overturn (lit. “dig up,” κατασκάψωσι) the land? That they will birth children in the recesses (μυχοῖς) of the earth to avenge

41

Again, see Llewellyn-Jones (2007) on the connections in the Greek imaginary between clothing and housing.

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them?” (544–46). Here tombs and the ground serve as the ultimate containers for dead bodies that may nevertheless disgorge a monstrous rebellion, while the living containers themselves only hold the “us” for a time. Aged male characters sometimes deem themselves “tombs” in despair or agony, as Iolaus does in Euripides’ Children of Heracles (τύμβου τὸ μηδὲν ὄντος, 167) and Creon in Medea (γέροντα τύμβον, 1209). As noted above, Andromache laments in Trojan Women that Hector will not rise up from the dead to save his son. Elsewhere (Chapter 6) I discuss ghosts and other bodily doubles, some of which do rise up from their tombs to haunt the living or the demon world—most vividly Clytemnestra in Eumenides and Darius in Persians. But as I treat in more detail there, only the vampiric extensions of Oedipus rival this riveting zombie moment in Suppliant Women, as he rises up in this guise in three separate plays by two different dramatists. In Oedipus the King he invokes the crossroads that drank the dark blood of his father at his hands (1398–1401); in Oedipus at Colonus he envisions himself as sitting underground drinking the blood of his enemies at Thebes (621–22); and in Phoenician Women he calls himself a corpse from below (1544). Taken together with the other images of the human form as temporary holder or already a tomb and the earth birthing, it contributes to our discussion an additional weirdness, of the earth as enwombed and thirsty for blood and bodies as monstrous shells. iv. Female Chambers. While there is a long tradition of thinking of the female body in particular as a container, as I note above, the image of the pregnant female body is not prevalent in tragedy, at least not in any naturalizing sense. Instead we find a host of bodily shells that redouble the sense of the female body as chamber or recess. In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis Deianira’s narrative of the “love potion” the centaur Nessus gave her pivots around some provocative play between female bodies as protected containers and contained within inner chambers and the containment of the potion/poison, first in a bronze flask (λέβητι χαλκέῳ, 556) hidden away in her bedchamber and then anointed on the robe for Heracles, which she similarly folds away in a wooden box (συμπτύξασ᾽  . . . κοίλῳ ζυγάστρῳ, 691–92; cf. τόδε ἄγγος, 622). As she tells her tale, she offers the internal audience of young women contiguous images of containment or protection and exposure, including some significant manual contact that suggests further parallels between her body’s violation by Nessus, his poisoned wound, and these containers that she thinks hold a love potion and anointed cloak.42 While other chapters contain longer and more detailed discussions of how handling (Chapters 1 and 2) and covering versus disintegrating (Chapter 3) forge interconnections among characters and plotting in the play, here I want instead to focus on the structuring of space and containment more generally. This includes the complicated enfolding of inside and outside of the house and chambers with the courtyard in between, as this is

42

See further in Chapter 2 (3b).

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mapped on and off of the stage.43 This enfolding is reiterated in the actual containers as well, only one of which the audience witnesses (the gift box), while the other (the bronze flask) is utterly protected, held off within the diegesis and inner domestic space. There is an additional suggestion here of the female body as container, which in this case is itself bodied forth by chamber and box, both with their hidden and mysterious contents. After she has not only learned of but been presented with Heracles’ new “wife” Iole (a silent character onstage only briefly), Deianira emerges from the palace and tells the chorus that she has come out of doors (θυραῖος) in secret (λάθρᾳ) explicitly to tell them what she has devised and what she suffers domestically (πάσχω συγκατοικτιουμένη) (531–35). Inside is less private, apparently, as Iole and the other captives are there with the servant Lichas, while she has a tale to tell that includes the monster who violated her and whose blood she has kept hidden (κεκρυμμένον, 556) in the recesses of her chambers (cf. μυχοῖς, 686, ἐν δόμοις κρυφῇ, 689). As the secret potion/poison is the direct result of her sexual defilement, which she then encases as if in the folds of her own “domestic spaces,” her stratagem seems perverse—not to mention doomed—from the outset. In the course of her two main chartings of these inner chambers, Deianira associates their remove with secrecy as well as protection. The nurse reveals how misguided her mistress is in thinking thus only after her death, when her suicide on her marriage bed affords a peek (through the nurse’s viewing from the shadows) not only of her body as it is bared to the sword but also of Nessus’ double violation (cf. πρὸς τοῦ θηρός, 935). Further, this inner caching stands in sharp contrast to the public performance Deianira envisions for the debut of her husband’s new robe: on display in public ritual, conspicuous (φανερὸς ἐμφανῶς) to all (608–09). And so is her death, itself hidden away in the diegesis—all the way away on the marriage bed and only glimpsed from a dark corner—distinctly opposite to Heracles’ public, onstage display of his ravaged body and his grief and fury.44 While she kills herself in this secreted space in the moment that the nurse is absent, and thus dies completely unseen, Heracles writhes, moans, and expostulates about his withering flesh for some two hundred lines, until he finally shuts his mouth just before the end of the play. This caching of female inner chambers versus male displays finds its match in other plays of Sophocles, most notably Jocasta’s suicide in Oedipus the King and Antigone’s in Antigone.45 I discuss Antigone’s “marriage tomb” at some length in the following section, but Jocasta’s “interior” deserves some brief consideration as well. The scene verges on the pornographic (in the sense of strategic bodily concealment and revelation), an impression reinforced by the penetration of interior spaces by the bellowing Oedipus. When Jocasta enters the palace for the last time, she has just understood fully the truth of her marriage— that is, that Oedipus is both her son and the killer of her husband/his father. Oedipus himself has not yet reached this point of (self) recognition, so she retreats alone. Before

43 West does not even comment on this, but on gendered space in tragedy see Foley (1982); Easterling (1987) Padel (1990). 44 For the details, see Chapter 1 (2a) and Chapter 3 (2a). 45 We can include Eurydice in this group, though in shorter compass (see 2d below).

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she goes, however, she cries out “Oh, oh, ill-starred! (ἰοὺ ἰού, δύστηνε), declares these her final words, and leaves the stage, while the chorus worries “lest evils break forth from this silence” (μὴ ᾽κ τῆς σιωπῆς τῆσδ᾽ἀναρρήξει κακά, OT 1071–75). Oedipus has no such concerns, since his myopia is so sustained that he thinks Jocasta merely a snob and thus distressed that he may be lowborn (1078–79). When, however, he realizes at last who he is, he rushes into the palace and, as the messenger soon relates, crashes through the halls in search of her. Like Deianira, she had already passed this way, tearing her hair, rushing straight into the bedroom and the bed (εὐθὺ πρὸς τὰ νυμφικὰ λέχη), and slamming the door (πὐλας . . . ἐπιράξασ᾽) (1241–44). Through it the servants can hear her wailing about the dead Laius and her double marriage and children, but they are distracted from her end, the messenger says, by the entrance of Oedipus, who bursts in roaring (βοῶν γὰρ ἐσέπαισεν), such that all eyes turn to him as he rushes around (1251–54). Shouting dreadfully (δεινὸν δ᾽ἀύσας), he leaps at the door of the bedchamber, tears open the bolts of the door, and falls inside. From behind him the servants see Jocasta hanging by a noose from the ceiling; Oedipus bellows, again dreadfully (δεινὰ βρυχηθείς), and loosens the noose, laying her out on the floor. In what is the most well-known and consequential gesture of the narrative, he then seizes the brooches from her dress and stabs out his eyes (1260–70).46 The differing sensory punctuations and movements through space are very emphatically gendered, as Jocasta rushes in silently and heads straight for the bedroom, only crying out once she is cloistered within. Shut away from the eyes of the servants, she is rendered doubly invisible to them by the drama of Oedipus’ entrance, to whom all eyes turn as he roars and rushes about. The effect of his chewing up the scenery (as it were) is that Jocasta slips her neck into the noose and herself out of life unseen and unheard. Even when he bursts into the bed chamber and finds her hanging, he further upstages her and violates her space and body by tearing out the brooches pinned to her dress (αἷσιν ἐξεστέλλετο) and bleeding over her (cf. συμμιγῆ, 1280). As I discuss more fully in Chapter 1, like Heracles Oedipus ends the play by orchestrating an extended display of his mutilated body, even as he claims himself to want to perceive nothing at all, while Jocasta remains cached and invisible in her chamber. d. Nest and Vault One of the most famous moments in tragedy figures the mourning Antigone crying out bitterly as a bird in her empty nest when she looks upon “the bedding orphaned of her nestlings” (κενῆς / εὐνῆς νεοσσῶν ὀρφανὸν βλέψῃ λέχος) as the dead Polyneices lies stripped and bare (ψιλόν) (423–27). This occurs offstage, of course, but its sensory details are, like many such moments in messenger speeches, so vivid as to compete with the onstage enactment. One of the men charged with keeping watch over Polyneices enters, leading Antigone, and tells of seeing her emerge from a cloud of dust. The scene he sets is vibrantly, or perhaps I should say revoltingly, tactile: the guards sweep away the dust 46

On his mutilation of his eyes, see further below (3b.i).

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covering the corpse, which the guard who was appointed messenger had described in his first report as dust strewn on “thirsty” skin (κἀπὶ χρωτὶ διψίαν / κόνιν παλύνας, 246–47), as “veiled” with a light coating of dust (ἠφάνιστο . . . λεπτὴ . . . κόνις, 255–56), and not “torn” (σπάσαντος, 258). In the second report the guards, “baring well the dank body” (μυδῶν τε σῶμα γυμνώσαντες εὖ, 410), settle at some distance from it in order to avoid the smell (ὀσμήν, 412). Again, the mention of this lowly sensory contact (smell) is extremely rare in tragedy, since it usually signals apprehension of the type of physical debasement more in keeping with comedy.47 Here it highlights instead the effects of exposure: not only putrefaction, which would occur anyway, but also the sensory apprehension of it, which intimates the wrongness of its bare state.48 As if to confirm this, a dust storm arises, filling (πίμπλησι) the plain, marring (αἰκίζων) the leaves on the trees, and choking (ἐμεστώθη) the air; and so it is that the dead body lies bared of its meager covering, while living ones are coated with dust. The guards shut their eyes to the grit, and when after a while the storm passes, they open them to see Antigone, shrieking “the sharp cry of a bitter bird” (πικρᾶς  / ὄρνιθος οξὺν φθόγγον, 423–24). I discuss Antigone’s handling of this corpse and others in more detail in Chapter 2; here I want instead to draw attention to the dynamics of containment and its reverse— not merely uncovering but utter loss, as the nest stripped of its young makes its curious match with Polyneices’ bare body. For reasons that I find puzzling, commentators tend not to notice that the analogy is not so much between the nestlings and the corpse as between it and the nest. That is to say, as the young are to the nest, so is the dust to the body. So here we have by implication Polyneices’ bare “nest”—a strange container indeed—with his “mother” hovering over it and bewailing its loss of protective cover. Adding to the sense of disorienting conflations is the fact that the word “nest” is never used; instead we have two terms for bed, which in their most common metonymic extensions mean “sex” or “marriage.”49 In his discussion of analogical metaphors in the Poetics, Aristotle offers a formula “as a is to b, so c is to d,” also noting that a term may go missing (as in calling Ares’ shield a “wine-less cup”).50 In this case what is lost carries less weight than what is gained: the erotic cast of Antigone’s relation to her brother, which is more fully developed in a later scene but has some resonance here in the exchange between Creon and Antigone, when she asks how she could gain greater glory than by burying her brother (502), which seems a very limited and death-oriented agenda for

47 The only strikingly smelly body featured onstage in extant tragedy is that of Philoctetes (Soph. Phil. 889–91). 48 Cf. Achilles worrying over the worms eating Patroclus’ corpse and his mother’s cauterizing of it with nectar and ambrosia (Iliad 19.23–27). 49 Steiner notices this aspect of the metaphor (1984: 226–27); see also Honig (2009), Wohl (2009); Cavarero (2010). 50 Aristotle, Poetics 1457b32–33; his example is the cup of Dionysus and the shield of Ares affords the “shield of Dionysus” and the “cup of Ares,” as well as this “lost” term (cf. Worman [2015: 28], on Derrida’s notion of this as “wandering of the semantic”).

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such a brave girl.51 She also declares that she “cannot share in hate but in love” (οὔτοι συνέχθειν ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν, 523). Woolf quotes these lines in Three Guineas when offering her trenchant critique of how male wealth and power depend on the intellectual and economic exiling of women, while Butler regards them as evidence of Antigone’s rejection of the traditional (male-policed) kinship bonds and thus the symbolic order.52 My emphasis, while informed by such insights, is on how such statements are shadowed by her brother’s “bed/nest” and her fierce but doomed attachment to it. Antigone’s own final cladding, the “rocky vault” (πετρώδει  . . . κατώρυχι), as Creon calls it (774), emerges in her exchanges with the chorus and infamous final speech as an equally aberrant space—what the chorus terms the “bridal chamber where all lie” (τὸν παγκοίτην  . . . θάλαμον, 804).53 Like Electra and Andromache (in their eponymous plays),54 in her song with the chorus Antigone invokes Niobe, a favorite bereft mother of the mourning woman. But because of the stony cover that awaits her, the analogy sits askew of its target setting. That is, in Antigone’s case, Niobe’s fate as an ever-weeping rock-face is matched not so much to her own tear-soaked skin, as with Electra and Andromache, but rather to her future as inhabitant of the rocky vault. It is on the details of this stony surface that she focuses in her song (825–31): . . . [Niobe] like straining ivy the stony growth subdued; and her, melting, the rains— as men say—and the snow never left, and she drips under the ever-weeping brows of her cliff-face. Most like to her the god puts me to bed. . . . τὰν κισσὸς ὡς ἀτενὴς πετραία βλάστα δάμασεν· καί νιν ὄμβροι τακομέναν ὡς φάτις ἀνδρῶν, χιών τ᾽οὐδαμὰ λείπει, τέγγει δ᾽ὑπ᾽ὀφρὐσι παγκλαύτοις δειράδας· ᾇ με δαίμων ὁμοιοτάταν κατευνάζει.55 Antigone’s claim to be like Niobe thus precipitates (so to speak) a further analogy: that of Niobe’s “surface” and Antigone’s enclosure—the rocky outer shell that will be her final 51 See Butler (2000), who argues that Antigone’s bloodline is “something more like ‘bloodshed”’ (4) and critiques Hegel’s and Lacan’s (mis)readings of her character; cf. Eagleton (2010) on Lacan’s Antigone; Honig (2010) on Antigone as a political actor, and Kristeva on Antigone’s life “at the limit” (2010: 220–23). See also Wilmer and Žukauskeité (eds.) (2010). 52 Woolf ([1938] 2008: 272n. 40); Butler (2000: esp. 53–54). 53 See Seaford (1990) on Antigone’s vault and the containment of women in tragedy; also Butler (2002); Wohl (2009); Eagleton (2010); Chanter (2011); Honig (2013) on the political implications. 54 For Electra, see above, section 1b; for Andromache, see Chapter 6 (2b). 55 Cf. Homer, Il. 24.614–15; Jebb has a long note on the “of Siphilus” in Lydia, a monumental cliff-face that some identify with Cybele. See Stieber (2011). Steiner follows Hölderlin in emphasizing the weight of the inorganic in the analogy (1984: 96–97).

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bodily encasement. We can notice even more, namely that this further analogy assimilates Antigone to her tomb, so that as Niobe is “subdued” into rock, Antigone is “put to bed” in the vault that is both her lost marriage and her body proxy.56 She ends her song by lamenting the shared familial taint in terms that recall this image, crying out over the horror of the maternal bed (lit. “maternal horror of beds,” λέκτρων) and sleeping with one’s own offspring (κοιμήματά τ᾽αὐτογέννητ᾽) (862–65). She sustains this focus on bodily surfaces, familial intimacies, and containment in her final extended speech. There she places her incest-inflected relationship to her brother before a potential husband, declaring that even with the latter dead and “melting/ moldering” (ἐτήκετο, 905) she would not strive to bury him as she does her brother, since she could always have another. This moldering body that she would not bury recalls not only the one whose dank skin she worked so hard to furnish with protective cover. It also more proximately resonates with her own encasement, as she had just before this greeted her tomb as her “marriage chamber and deep-dug [κατασκαφής] home” (891), a fittingly deviant space for one who would lie with her brother (cf. “loving I shall lie with him, beloved,” φίλη μετ᾽αὐτοῦ κείσομαι, φίλου μέτα, 73).57 In addition, she contrasts this weird image of the unburied husband in a future already foreclosed with those other familial bodies so lovingly tended (900–03).58 Creon has just ordered the guards to “enfold [Antigone] in the covered tomb” (κατηρεφεῖ  / τύμβῳ περιπτύξαντες) and essentially offered her the choice of dying or living entombed (ζῶσα τυμβεύειν στέγῃ, 888), so that in the end she commits suicide in this space that is somehow commensurate with her. The disturbing aspects of this tombbody emerge more fully later on, when Creon, urged on by a fearful chorus after Teiresias’ terrible warning, rushes to free Antigone from her rocky encasement (cf. ἐκ κατώρυχος στέγης, 1100). He calls out to his attendants to hurry off with axes in their hands (or crowbars? Gk. ἀξίνας, 1109), with which he aims to pry open the tomb. They leave the stage, and after a choral ode a messenger returns and describes a scene of surreal violation and death, which, he says, has left the king a “breathing corpse” (ἔμψυχον . . . νεκρόν, 1167). After going to bury the half-eaten corpse of Polyneices (on which see further in the next section), Creon and his attendants head off to the “stony-floored bridal chamber, the cavity of 56

The analogies that the chorus makes after Antigone leaves the stage are more conventional, since they are to others who have been imprisoned (Danae, Lycurgus, 944–65). Compare the scene in one of Euripides’ “political” plays, Children of Heracles, when Macaria offers herself as sacrifice to save her family and her Athenian defenders. She emphasizes her wish for the savior’s death and envisions her brave deed and honored tomb as her “treasure-store” (κειμήλια) in place of children and virginity, rendering death and tomb together equal and opposite to life and the womb. And yet she finishes the thought with hesitancy that resonates with the fact that she is a sacrifice to Persephone (“if there is anything under the earth,” 588–92). She ends on a similarly vampiric note, hoping not to go on existing and having cares below, while her reference to what she has lost also resonates with Persephone’s own story as one married to death. For our purposes what matters most is this parallelism between bodies and other containers, here including the productive womb as kind of storehouse that the virgin’s tomb must replace. 57 I do not mean to suggest that the language of philia has dominant erotic overtones, but rather that the fact that the terms can mean husband and wife together with the promise of lying together, lends the scene its incestuous shading. 58 See further in Chapter 2 (3d.i).

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Hades” (λιθόστρωτον / νυμφεῖον Ἅιδου κοῖλον, 1204–05).59 As they approach, the father of Antigone’s would-be groom hears cries as yet indistinct and then the shriek (φθόγγος) of his son—the third such ominous sound described in the play—reaches him (1209–14).60 He orders his servants to go down into the cleft torn open in the rocks (ἁρμὸν χώματος λιθοσπάδη) and along the passage up to the mouth (στόμιον) of the chamber (1215–17). Within this bridal cavity they find Antigone strung up by her own veil (lit. “the corded noose of cloth,” βρόχῳ μιτώδει σινδόνος), with Haemon clinging to her and lamenting his ruined marriage (lit. “bed,” εὐνῆς and λέχος, 1221–25; cf. Antigone’s “bed” at 423–24). Then as Creon rushes in Haemon spits in his face (πτύσας προοσώπῳ, 1232) and lunges at him; when he misses he then turns his sword on himself, spraying red blood over his would-be bride’s white cheek (ὀξεῖαν ἐκβάλλει ῥοὴν / λευκῇ παρειᾷ φοινίου σταλάγματος, 1238–39) in a terrible inversion of first coitus. So corpse lies with corpse, concludes the messenger, the aptly named Haemon “gaining his marriage rites [τὰ νυμφικὰ / τέλη] in the halls of death” (1240–41). This disturbing scene, with all of its surface effects, coloration, sensory details, and quasi-human, ominously gendered geography, plays out before the chorus and Eurydice, who has already signaled her extreme emotional vulnerability from the outset. In her only lines in the play, she describes how the cry (φθόγγος) of familial woe fell upon her ears (δι᾽ὤτων) as she was drawing back the bolts of the front door. She falls back (ὑπτία δὲ κλίνομαι) in terror and faints away (κἀποπλήσσομαι) (1186–89). But still, she wishes to hear—and then when she does, she turns and re-enters the palace without a word.61 The chorus wonders at this, worrying at such a heavy silence (σιγὴ βαρύ, 1251); as does the messenger (cf. σιγῆς βάρος, 1256), so much so that the latter says that he will go in himself and make sure that she is not “hiding secretly” (κρυφῇ καλύπτει) some purpose in her heart (1251–56). When he returns the palace doors are thrown open to reveal yet another corpse, this time Eurydice’s (1293).62 While I do not want to overstate the prominence of the gendered topography of bodily containment and exposure, it is difficult to avoid a sense that such an orientation is essential to the tragic impact of this final scene.63 The emphasis on interior cavities, clefts, entrances, passageways, and their breaching and penetration, together with the explicit mapping of the “marriage tomb” as Antigone’s encasement and body proxy, as well as the “death-sex” that occurs within, all encourage chorus and audience to view her as a violated container. While other scholars such as Mark Griffith and Melissa Mueller have emphasized Antigone’s spatial isolation, Mueller arguing ingeniously that she is something of a metic in her own town, I would urge more attention to her inhuman qualities, her proximity to not only the gods (especially Zeus and Hades)

59

Jebb contends that λιθόστρατον is meant to invoke the marital couch (ad loc.). These cries erupt in the narratives of the guard (Antigone as mother bird), Teiresias (the birds glutted on Polyneices’ flesh at the city altars), and the messenger (Haemon). 61 Cf. again Jocasta (OT 1071–75). 62 Griffith (2005: 120–21) notes that Antigone’s corpse is apparently just left there in the cave, cordoned off and enclosed as a female should be but also exiled from the city and the play. 63 Cf. Padel (1990); and cf. again Seaford (1990). 60

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and the dead, but also creatures and things (e.g., birds, rocks).64 From this perspective— and despite the echo of her violated “cave” in Eurydice’s fainting at the door—her bodily extensions and proxies do not stop merely with this feminized mapping, as compelling as it is. Rather, in juxtaposing Polyneices’ nest/bed and Antigone’s tomb/ couch as paired containers and body proxies that postures and gestures inflect with erotic meaning, I am framing the play’s enactment and figuration as more of a piece with the familial taint than scholars have tended to think. The final turn in this reorientation project of mine is the looming presence of Polyneices’ corpse, to which I turn in the next section.

3. Inside Out Although tragic representation tends to preserve the body as doubly or triply cloaked, from covered skin to full robes and/or shields to encasements of various sorts, previous chapters and earlier sections of this one have already provided glimpses here and there of unprotected or disturbed bodily surfaces, including exposure to wounding and deterioration by neglect and tears or death’s putrefaction. Subsequent chapters add to this the occasional baring (“baring”) of breasts as a gesture of despair and the troubling of bodily integrity by extensions, doubles, ghosts, and statues. In this section I address what has been hovering at the body’s edges and will continue to do so—namely, what it contains, eruptions and decimations of this carefully sustained shell that are startling in their grisly details. While there is little indication in the tragic script of what mimetic conventions would have shaped such moments and how, onstage enactment insistently directs the eye to the features of such bodily collapses, and narratives of offstage action often go further, offering up elaborately gory specifics and contending with tragic spectacle in affective intensity. Some special bodies get double treatment: here once again the narrating and staging of Oedipus is most conspicuous, while the stagings of other Sophoclean heroes (especially Heracles and Philoctetes) sustain an emphasis on tragic abjection and its pleasures that is almost as pointed and powerful. Such concatenations of onstage and offstage images and details highlight the powerful effects of tragic language—what it can do, as well as what it cannot. That is to say, if narrative descriptions have the capacity to show by means of vivid visualizations what enactment cannot, this is also its limitation in relation to the spectacle of bodies onstage. Most of what erupts from tragic apertures is blood, but tears, sweat, and viscera frequently mingle with it, whether literally (within the tragic fiction) or figuratively. Most often, as this chapter and the previous one especially highlight, inside and outside are not so clearly distinguished, despite tragedy’s penchant for full drapery and representational formality. Poison in particular works on the body’s surfaces, melting them and mingling

64

See Griffith (1999); Mueller (2011a).

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them with its agents (usually material coverings such as cloaks or robes), so that the corporeal boundaries dissolve in the “ectoaffect” created by the verbal scrim. Alternatively, the question of what is inside the body may be reframed as what is left of it, as when ashes and bone in jars replace the mangled corpses of the dead. Poisoning, crushing, cremation: not only does tragedy treat such assaults on bodily integrity as inevitable and pivotal to its aesthetics, it also occasionally reveals directly the continuity between human killings and animal sacrifice. Further, if touch and handling can make for physical intermingling and bodily coverings and containers obscure bodily edges by supplement and reduplication, attending to the “inside out” of these bodies reveals more extreme disintegrations of physical edges and thus challenges to the very conception of the body as discrete and self-contained, as well as skin as its essential boundary. At the more monstrous end of things we find Aeschylus’ Furies, who drip gore from their eyes (ἐκ ὀμμάτων λείβουσι δυσφιλῆ λίβα, Eumenides 54), while at the more human extreme we might place Euripides’ Hippolytus, whose tattered form the chorus laments by highlighting its beauty—”the young flesh and golden head all mangled!” (σάρκας νέαρὰς καὶ ζάνθον τε κάρα διελυμανθείς, Hippolytus, 1344–45). Yet his strange death is distinctively otherworldly and inhuman, with Poseidon’s bull sending his horses wild, so that it is they who effectively kill him (cf. 1355–57).65 a. Skin, Flesh, and Blood Two bodies, one more attended to by scholars and the other less so, have distinctive resonances onstage as haunted or haunting and then so utterly decimated as to unsettle characters’ orientations and directions: Polyneices in Sophocles’ Antigone and Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae. While not quite bodies without organs—which, for Artaud, would be those that violently disrupt conventional theatrical representation—they come close to shattering the aesthetic experience as something a spectator can absorb and comprehend.66 That the most grisly aspects of their bodies’ destructions are held off from staged mimesis and thus direct sensation contributes to this near miss; and yet the animal feasting on the corpse of the one redirects the action (Polyneices), while the dismembered head of the other shatters familial coherence (Pentheus). i. Polyneices Outside In. One of the most disturbing presences from this prospect is the corpse of Polyneices in Antigone. It is a much more forceful body than it ought to be, given that it is both dead and never onstage. In saying this I am not only pointing to the obvious, namely that it is the fulcrum for the action of the entire play, though that is also true. I mean in addition something more concrete: the visualization of Polyneices’ embodiment is resolutely tactile and sensually pervasive, from the first glimpse in the guard’s earliest report of the dank corpse covered with a fine layer of dust to its bits and 65 I take up this scene briefly in Chapter 1 (2), for its apparent parallelism and yet sensorily distinct relation the final scene with Heracles in Women of Trachis. 66 See Artaud (1958); Derrida ([1967] 1978); and cf. Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 1977).

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pieces toward the drama’s end.67 If we now take a closer look at the dynamics that settle around the surface of this propulsive body, we can note first that its light covering of dust, which the guards find a painful miracle (θαῦμα δυσχερές), does provide surprising protection. As noted, there is no sign that beasts or dogs have come near or torn it (σημεῖα  . . . ἐλθόντος  . . . σπάσαντος, 254–58), and this though the ground remains unbroken, hard, and dry and the body not entombed (τυμβήρης μὲν οὔ) (249–55). Because the guards later brush away the dust from the body’s moldering skin, it returns to haunt the city in a stomach-turning fashion. When Teiresias comes to warn Creon of the omen he has witnessed, he highlights most of all the failure of sacrificed flesh to signify, since the altars and throats of the birds are glutted with pieces of Polyneices’ exposed corpse. “I heard,” the blind seer says, “an unintelligible cry [ἀγνῶτ᾽φθόγγον] of birds, shrieking [κλάζοντας] terribly, with a barbarous insanity.” He adds that he knew that they were tearing at each other, since the “clatter” (ῥοῖβδος) of their wings was not without meaning (οὐκ ἄσημος) (1001–03). Fire would not burn and in the ashes “dank ooze seeped from the thigh bones” (μυδῶσα κηκὶς μηρίων ἐτήκετο) of his offering, which smoked and spat (κἄτυφε κἀνέπτυε) while a viscous smoke coiled up (καὶ μετάρσιοι / χόλαι διεσπείροντο) and the bones lay exposed from their fatty cover (καὶ καταρρυεῖς / μηροὶ καλυπτῆς ἐξέκειντο πιμελῆς) (1008–10). Thus the voices of the birds of prey are horrifying; they shriek a strange language, since they have tasted the fat of a slain man’s blood (ἀνδροφθόρου βεβρῶτες αἵματος λίπος) (1021–22). As scholars have noted, after this first gruesome description, Teiresias tells Creon explicitly that he has turned things inside out (lit. “upside down,” ἄνω βαλὼν κάτω), putting a living soul underground while keeping a dead body above it (1068–71). What is less attended to, though, is that this inversion also furthers a sense of these bodies as paired: Teiresias despairs that Polyneices’ corpse was left luckless, without burial rites, unholy (ἄμοιρον, ἀκτέριστον, ἀνόσιον, 1071), which echoes Antigone’s triad of loss (she exits “unwept, friendless, unwed,” ἄκλαυτος, ἄφιλος, ἀνυμέναιος, 877). More to the point here, though, is the pairing of Polyneices’ corpse with another body—the animal sacrifice that fails, because the gods’ altars are choked with carrion “food” (βορᾶς, 1017). Both the skin of the corpse and the animal bones “seep” (μυδῶν, 410; μυδῶσα, 1008), while the fat of the animal leaks away and that of the human chokes sense. The thigh bones sweat and smoke, while pieces (σπαράγματα) of human flesh stink up the hearths of the city (cf. ἀνόσιον ὀσμήν, 1081–83). Let us pause here to attend properly to the multi-sensory abjection that Teiresias’ description of this corpse and its animal double shove to the fore. While all of the tactile disturbances that Polyneices’ corpse arouses occur in narrative and thus at a distance, the repeated emphasis on its moldering skin, its odor, and now its bloody bits and pieces sustains it as a clammy presence hovering at the edges of the action. That Teiresias is blind 67 Cf. Chanter (2011), who argues rightly that Polyneices’ corpse is a site of abjection in the play, though she is more concerned with the political consequences of this than the aesthetic details; also Cavarero (2010), who emphasizes Polyneices’ corpse and incestuous bonds in what she terms a “carnal implosion” (50).

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adds to the impression that this is an essentially anti-mimetic scene—that is, one in which the predominant mimetic sense in drama (sight) recedes, while sound, touch, and smell animate and ground its impact. Then there is the final horror in this abjected presence: the quasi-cannibalistic character of the feasting birds, whose fatty “food” impedes their cries and, as Teiresias emphasizes, interpretation. There is an unthinkable material mingling (not to mention inversion) in the image of human blood impeding the animal throat, a sense that Kristeva identifies with the abject—“what,” as she says, “I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”68 And so outside in: the body’s exposure has “buried” it in monstrous alternative containers, as the bits are now housed in the bellies of animals. ii. Pentheus in Pieces. As we might expect, Euripides composed two of the most gruesome and extended scenes in all of Greek tragedy, both of which contain depictions of bodily disintegrations but as quite different processes. As with other exceedingly gory imagery in tragedy, both take place in vibrant messenger speeches, the one relating the effects of Medea’s poisoned gown and diadem, the other the tearing apart of Pentheus in his maenad-wear. I address other details of these plays in Chapters 2 and 3; here I want to focus briefly on the aesthetic impact of the dismantling in the Bacchae that the speeches linger over, as well as their role in the plot. The scopophilic tenor of the Bacchae’s dressing scene discussed in Chapter  3 is picked up again in the second narrative (and hence on a different register), when the messenger describes Pentheus as trying to get a better look at the maddened Theban “bacchants.” This leads him to take a seat on the tree that Dionysus bends to the ground like a bow in order to set him up to be seen by the bacchants, from which they tear him down and apart. The scene as related is quite singularly macabre, its intensity redoubling the first narrative, in which a shepherd depicts the Theban maenads tearing heifers and bulls limb from limb. There, the shepherd says, you could see ribs and hooves tossed up and down (ῥιπτόμεν᾽ἄνω τε καὶ κάτω), shreds of skin (κρεμαστά) hanging from branches, smeared with blood (ἀναπεφυρμέν᾽αἵματι) (740–42). They separated a bull from its “garment of flesh” (σαρκὸς ἐνδυτά) more quickly than the blink of an eye and then they flew off like birds (746–50). The narrative of the human dismantling is much more elaborate, and accordingly much more excruciating, as the physical description generates its own corresponding sensory and affective experiences. When Dionysus called out to the Theban women as “some voice from the upper air” (1078), sending a bolt of lightning, and then crying out again (1088), they fell to the attack. They managed to tear up the tree on which Pentheus sat and knock him to the ground, then set upon him, his mother standing on his ribs and wrenching his arm from its socket (1125–27). Meanwhile his aunt Ino worked on the other side, ripping apart his flesh (ῥηγνῦσα σάρκας), along with the other maddened women. A great uproar arose: Pentheus was groaning as long as he had breath (ἐμπνέων), while the women were shouting in triumph (1129–33). One held a shoulder, another a

68

Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 3); cf. again Cavarero (2010), Chanter (2011); also Brandese (2010).

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foot; his ribs were laid bare (γυμνοῦντο); in the end everyone had bloodied their hands tossing the flesh of Pentheus (σάρκα Πενθέως) like a ball (διεσφαίριζε) (1134–36). Then comes the capstone: Agave took his head in her hands and fixed it on the point of her thyrsus, carrying it as if it were that of a mountain lion down from Cithaeron (1139–43). It is left to Cadmus and his attendants to gather the pieces, spread out in the folds of Cithaeron (ἐν Κιθαιρῶνος πτυχαῖς / διασπαρακτόν, 1219–20), which he has carried in on a litter toward the drama’s end. A similarly grisly scene takes place in Medea, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3, because its fleshy disintegration is so fully intermingled with the poison-wear that causes it as to necessitate taking them together. This is true as well of Heracles’ body in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, the tattering of which I also treat in Chapter 3. Pentheus’ dismantling, in some contrast, is not so closely connected to his outerwear, even though his dressing up as a maenad does lead to his demise. Instead, like the cattle, his body is reduced to its constituent parts, hanging from tree boughs and settling into the folds of the mountain slopes, scattered across the wilderness as was Polyneices’ corpse across the city.69 And so inside out: bodily integrity in these scenes is breached to the point that its barriers dissolve or what was within now cloaks something outside and inhuman—a rock, a branch, an altar for animal sacrifice. b. Wounds, Apertures In the parodos of Euripides’ Hecuba the chorus describes the Greek army as demanding that Achilles’ tomb be christened with “glistening blood” (στεφανοῦν αἵματι χλωρῷ, 126), in response to a demand by his ghost that he be sated in this vampiric fashion. They have voted that it be Polyxena’s, considering a slave’s life hardly worth the hero’s honor. The chorus of fellow Trojan slaves lament their fates and hers, envisioning her fallen over the tomb, dripping black blood from her throat (δειρῆς νασμῷ μελαναυγεῖ) (150–53). The image is repeated in the messenger speech recounting her slaughter: Neoptolemus prayed to Achilles, raising the cup and offering him the “pure black blood” (μέλαν / ἀκραιφνὲς αἷμ’) of the girl (534–37); soon after he quickly stepped to the task, severing her windpipe so that the blood gushed forth (κρουνοὶ δ᾽ἐχώρουν, 567–68). All of this blood-letting takes place offstage, of course, as is the convention for gruesome slaughter. In this section I address for the most part wounds that are eventually displayed onstage, including a body that likely emerges in pieces: that of Aegisthus in Euripides’ Electra. i. Oedipus’ Eyes. The conventional (and crushingly familiar) wisdom around the centrality of the blinded eyes in Oedipus the King is that it signals a confirmation of the “blindness and insight” insight—namely, that one such as Oedipus may have eyes but not

69

See Wohl (2005: 149–50), who regards the merging of Pentheus’ body with the natural setting as of a piece with other “becomings.”

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“see,” as Teiresias tells him so ominously in their confrontation (413–14, cf. 337–38, 419, 454–56).70 But from the perspective of bodily surfaces, marking, and vulnerabilities, what emerges as more weighty is the nature of the displacement, what Kristeva terms “a revealed and yet invisible abjection,” since the mutilation marks on the surface of the body not the nature of the transgression but both the denouncement and its effacing, erecting a kind of boundary wall for the cordoning off of Oedipus from his sin.71 The spatial framing of this blinding reinforces the sense that there is something deeply paradoxical at work in the report of its details and revelation in the final scene, in relation both to Oedipus’ self-discovery and to tragic mimesis. As I note in the Prologue and above (2c.iii), the sensationalized staging of his self-mutilation includes a messenger speech that is quasi-pornographic, reinforced by its orchestration of interior spaces. And as with Haemon’s spurting out his life blood on Antigone’s pale cheek in her marital tomb, the description of Oedipus’ eyes reverses the natural flow (so to speak), as the husband bleeds over his dead wife after penetrating her inner chambers. Snatching up the golden pins from her own dress (ἀποσπάσας . . . εἱμάτων χρυσηλάτους περόνας ἀπ᾽αὐτῆς), in a gesture (mentioned above) that only furthers the sense of his violation of his mother-wife’s body, Oedipus dashed them into the sockets of his eyes, screaming that they will not see what he has done, nor, being darkened (ἐν σκότῳ), will they ever look upon those whom they ought not (1268–74). Chanting (ἐφυμνῶν) such things he stabbed his eyes repeatedly, so that his bloody eyeballs stained his cheeks (γένει᾽ἔτεγγον), not oozing (μυδώσας) drops of gore but pouring down in a “black rain of bloody hail” (μέλας ὄμβρος χαλαζῆς αἵματος) (1275–79). The specificity of the blood’s gush and consistency is startlingly palpable, including its outstripping in dramatic gush the softening and oozing that marks other tragic surfaces, such as Electra’s tear-melted body and Polyneices’ dank corpse. The messenger also depicts it as the direct excretion of the incest: “These affairs,” the messenger concludes, “have erupted [ἔρρωγεν] from both, not singly, but evils mingled [συμμιγῆ κακά] for husband and wife” (1280–81). With this final gesture of familial violation, then, Oedipus transforms himself into this paradoxical tragic object, his body marked with a sign of its corruption that somehow also obscures what he has done. Or, to part ways with Kristeva, it does so at least for Oedipus, if not for the messenger and the chorus. If Oedipus defends his self-mutilation as a kind of ocular piety (i.e., so that his eyes won’t see what they “ought not”), the messenger emphasizes the bloody corruption instead, since he frames the blinding as a perversely sexual and contaminating. Then Oedipus comes onstage in order to display his self-mutilation, while the chorus exclaims in horror that they both cannot and must look (1303–06).72 ii. Ajax’s Nose. The language of covering and protection discussed above (section 2c) that organizes much of the action around Ajax’s corpse cannot quite protect its witnesses

70

See most influentially deMan (1983) for the trope; for the ancient context, see Bernidaki-Aldous (1990). Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 84); cf. Ahmed on “border objects” (2004: 87). 72 Cf. Chapter 1 (3a). 71

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(and the audience with them) from seeing (or “seeing”) what that body contains, as blood spurts from its nostrils upon discovery and still seeps from its veins at the end of the play. Tecmessa declares this leakage “not to be seen” (οὔτοι θεατός), but she nevertheless describes how he is “bubbling up dark blood from his nostrils and his gory wound” (φυσῶντ᾽ ἄνω πρὸς ῥῖνας ἔκ τε φοινίας  / πληγῆς μελανθὲν αἶμ᾽) (915–19). Tragic convention indicates that her language is necessary to the impact of the scene, as the original costuming and staging would not have included any such realistic details. So too when Teucer asks Eurysakes to assist him in lifting up the corpse at the end of the drama: “Gently touching his ribs, lift him up with me,” he urges, “for still the warm pipes spurt up the dark life-blood” (φιλότητι θιγὼν πλεύρὰς σὺν ἐμοὶ / τάσδ᾽ἐπικούφιζ᾽· ἔτι φὰρ θερμαὶ / σύριγγες ἄνω φυσῶσι μέλαν / μένος, 1410–13). These details and others discussed in this section raise questions as to what is the point of highlighting such gory features in so elevated a genre. Within the aesthetic scheme they introduce a tactile element to the orchestration of action around bodies and/as containers, sometimes literally so, as with the detail of blood welling up from “warm pipes.” As such they encourage affective connection or repulsion, a “feeling with” or shudder of disgust (or both) that the original staging alone would not; and while as concrete details they do not extend the body as metaphor can, they do deepen its theatrical inhabitation. Then there is the pleasures of the horror that attends such sudden turns to the “theater of the viscera” (to borrow from Artaud),73 the shock of the body as not only container but one leaky and collapseable. iii. Aegisthus’ Spine. Compare the messenger speech in Euripides’ Electra, in which the servant portrays Orestes as carrying out the murder of Aegisthus without hesitation, so that it is not moral crisis that gives the narrative of his death its shocking force but rather the reverse. Smoothly infiltrating Aegisthus’ sacrifice to the Nymphs, Orestes turns the ritual into the “sacrifice” of Aegisthus, a ghastly collapse both of a conventional metaphor for murder in tragedy and of the human victim’s body.74 This the messenger describes in hideous specificity, perhaps as a twisted courtesy to Electra, who elicits his speech by a bloodthirsty demand for details (cf. 772–73). He relates that Orestes, having been invited to join the ritual, takes up the knife to gut the calf. He grabs the calf by the foot and “lays bare its white flesh” (λευκὰς ἐγύμνου σάρκας), holding it in outstretched hand (ἐκτείνων χέρα) (823). He flays the hide (βύρσαν ἐξέδειρεν), the messenger says, “swifter than a runner completes a two-lap horses’ course” (824–25)—his knife by implication “running” the full circuit of the calf ’s body. Aegisthus then puts his hands to the entrails, to “read” their omen, a hands-on seeing that the narrative lingers over, as he lifts up and frowns over the liver without its lobe and the blocked gall-bladder (826–29). Orestes interrupts his apprehensive pondering by calling for a Thessalian axe, ostensibly to split the breastbone of the animal in preparation for roasting. Instead, while Aegisthus

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Artaud (1958: 84–93). See Henrichs (2000).

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still hangs over the entrails, Orestes rises up on tiptoe to strike him on his spine, smashing the vertebrae (ἐς σπονδύλους ἔπαισε, νωτιαῖα δὲ / ἔρρηξεν ἄρθρα). Aegisthus’ whole body convulses (πᾶν δὲ σῶμ’ ἄνω κάτω / ἤσπαιρεν), he screams, and he dies horribly in his own gore (δυσθνῄσκων φόνῳ) (841–43). In typical Euripidean fashion, this scene combines gory details with a further repulsive turn, as the officiant becomes a beast on the altar, with Orestes turning all too smoothly from flaying the animal to crushing his enemy’s spine. When Orestes enters with this corpse, he hands it—or some of it—to Electra as “prey left out for beasts, a plaything for birds” (θηρσὶν ἁρπαγὴν πρόθες / ἢ σκῦλον οἰωνοῖσιν), something to pierce on a stake (πήξασ’ ἔρεισον σκόλοπι) (897–99).75 We could add to this a staging problem that further heightens the intensity of the body in pieces. As commentators have noted, the text suggests that Orestes may enter bearing either Aesgisthus’ head alone or his body in parts, contributing to a sense of the corpse as alien bits of a thing pitched by living, human hands into grotesque spectatorial play. iv. Philoctetes’ Foot. The suppurating foot that has rendered Philoctetes an outcast in Sophocles’ play functions as a more extreme and focused index of heroic debility than that of many others, especially since he remains alive, in agony, and onstage for most of the play. In this regard in particular his foot renders him more like Oedipus, pain’s virtuoso performer, than like the spurting corpses whose bits and pieces sometimes figuratively leak or are actually carried back into the onstage action. The body (and especially the foot) of Philoctetes is a fully abject entity, a thing “dripping with a ravening disease” (νόσῳ καταστάζοντα διαβόρῳ πόδα, Phil. 7), so revolting that it has led to his outcast state, as Odysseus credits it with Philoctetes’ abandonment on the deserted island. The wound was so painful that it caused him to cry out repeatedly, as Odysseus explains, and he disrupted the army camp in this way (βοῶν, στενάζων, 11); later in the play Philoctetes’ concern about the wound’s stink (κακῇ / ὀσμῇ, 890–91) suggests that it is not just the noise that led his fellow soldiers to drive him off. I once argued that the language of the drama itself reflects this noisy infection; here I am more concerned with the palpable reactions of the characters to the wound’s sensory presence, its texture and pulse, and its resonance in the sonorous suffering of the outcast, whose groans, shouts, and cries reverberate throughout the play.76 Thus Neoptolemus, upon seeing the detritus of the sick man in the cave where he lives, cries out at the sight of the rags “steaming and ballooning with disease” (ἰοὺ ἰοὺ· καὶ ταῦτά γ᾽ἄλλά θάλπεται / ῥάκη, βαρείας του νοσηλείας πλέα, 38–39). After he has entered into an alliance with the sick man, they emerge from his cave and Philoctetes suffers an attack as the pain pulses and surges. He screams that the disease is consuming him (βρύκομαι, 745), and calls out for Neoptolemos to take up his sword and cut off his foot (747–48; cf. 1204–07). When he collapses, Neoptolemus calls attention to the visible

75

Cf. Heracles’ threat that he will cut off the tyrant Lycus’ head and toss it out as a carrion toy (lit. “a draggedin thing”) for dogs (ῥίψω κυνῶν ἕλκημα, Her. 568). In this scene as in others, the implications of the phrasing frame the corpse (or its parts) as something dragged about and toyed with. 76 Worman (2000); cf. Biggs (1966); Holmes (2008, 2010); Mitchell-Boyask (2012); Allan (2014).

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marks of his condition, as the latter sprawls an exhausted sleep at the end of the scene. He points out the drooping of the hero’s head (κάρα γὰρ ὑπτιάζεται τόδε, 822) and leakage at his foot’s tip, highlighting its bloody eruption: “a black, blood-filled vein has burst at the tip of his foot” (μέλαινά τ’ ἄκρου τις παρέρρωγεν ποδὸς/ αἱμορραγὴς φλέψ, 824–25; cf. 783–84).77 Philoctetes’ isolation matches this monstrous appendage and its suppurations, including the “borderland space” (τόπον ἐσχατιᾶς, 144) to which Neoptolemus directs the chorus’ attention at the outset of the action; they accordingly term him a “fearsome traveler” (δεινὸς ὁδίτης, 147). They envision him crying out in the wilderness, without answer to his call except the “open-mouthed echo” (ἁ δ’ ἀθυρόστομος/ ἀχώ), which resounds his bitter lamentations (πικρᾶς / οἰμωγᾶς) (182–90). As he approaches his cave he can be heard groaning heavily from afar (βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐ- / δὰ, 208–09); the chorus of sailors tries to place him, remarking that his calls are not those of one piping a song like a country shepherd (i.e., not an identifiable rustic mode (οὐ μολπὰν σύριγγος ἔχων/ ὡς ποιμὴν ἀγροβότας, 213–14). Rather, he sounds more like a shipwreck who “cries out something fearsome” (προβοᾷ γάρ τι δεινόν, 218). Later they regard Philoctetes’ isolated endurance with wonder, remarking on how he “kept hold on a life so full of tears” (690– 91), which they liken to that of a beast or a child (cf. ἐνθήρου ποδός, 698; παῖς, 703). When Philoctetes suffers an apoplectic fit as the flux of pain takes over, he momentarily loses his ability to communicate normally (730–826). His interchanges with Neoptolemus become increasingly punctuated by nonverbal howls and screams (e.g., ἆ ἆ ἆ ἆ, 732, 739; παππαπαππαπαῖ, 754, 785–86; ἀτταταῖ, 790; cf. Trach. 986, 1084). The hero’s physical volatility is compounded when the young man regrets his deceptive, Odyssean ways and reveals the plot to the anguished hero. Philoctetes then reverts to a mode that clearly resembles the “borderlands” voice the chorus identified at the outset, apostrophizing the features that form his rustic setting and casting himself as non-human. He deems himself “a corpse, or a shadow of smoke, a mere phantom” (νεκρόν, ἢ καπνοῦ σκιάν,/ εἴδωλον ἄλλως, 946–47), “nothing” (οὐδέν, 951; cf. 1217), “naked” (lit. “bald,” ψιλός, 953), and food for the beasts he once hunted (957–58). Thus Philoctetes’ pustulating foot effectively oozes and pulses its way out into the sounds of the drama, as the hero’s sonority gives it a synaesthesic impact, as if one could feel pain in the ear—what the film theorists might call a haptic aurality. The predominance of extra-linguistic expressions, together with his lyric plangency, lend the play a unique sonic register, while the distancing of the hero as a borderland living corpse renders his voice both literally and figuratively one emitted from the edges of human inhabitation.78 Woolf captures this voice in Mrs. Dalloway, when Septimus Smith, shattered by the war and in desperate need of mooring, opens his mouth to words that fall “like shells, like shavings from a plane . . . hard, white . . .” And then he hears his dead friend Evans: “He

77

Cf. Hippolytus 1375–76. Cf. Sobchack (1992) and Marks (2000) and the discussion in the Prologue. See Nooter (2012: 134–46) on Philoctetes’ sounds; also Nooter (2017) on extra-verbal soundings in Aeschylus. 78

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sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids.”79 c. Female Insides? One of the primary normalized ways in which the body serves as a container is, again, in pregnancy. Tragedy, rather unsurprisingly, makes this supposedly familiar inhabitation also strange, at times even monstrous, in the rare instances when it intimates pregnancy at all. This is not to say that the tragic stage is not littered with mourning mothers, but rather that the female body as pregnant host is not foregrounded, except as a “small weight” now lost, as by proxy in Sophocles’ Electra and more directly in Euripides’ Suppliant Women. Yet, perhaps also unsurprisingly, the Electra plays offer two moments of eerie female containment, both of which suggest that for these children the maternal bond can only be a bloody one. i. Oh Mother! Take, for instance, the scene at the end of Euripides’ Electra, when Orestes blanches at the sight of his mother even at a distance and Electra says witheringly, “Don’t tell me that pity seizes you, now that you have seen your mother’s form?” (μῶν σ’ οἶκτος εἶλε, μητρὸς ὡς εἶδες δέμας;, 968).80 Orestes’ attachment to his mother’s body is soon after this openly eroticized as all in the family: in the midst of the killing he describes looking upon her body in supplication, his eyes traveling from her bared breast to her “birthing legs” (γόνιμα μέλεα), to her hair  . . . (1206–09). When these two incredibly violent siblings emerge with Clytemnestra’s corpse, the chorus exclaims, “But these very ones [οἵδε] are coming out of the halls, defiled [πεφυρμένοι] by the new-spilt blood of their mother!” (1172–73). The participle πεφυρμένοι indicates a surface mingling or sullying that underscores the extent to which the children have tainted themselves with this spillage, a sullying of their skins that has an affective resonance of which they both seem very aware. Given Orestes’ heightened sensitivity to his mother’s body, the siblings’ murder imparts to this blood a doubled force as the material excretion of menstruation and birthing conjoined with the spillage of the maternal slaughter, such that the bloody children onstage physically bring their mother’s insides out. ii. Ares Within. We may compare a point late in the action of Sophocles’ Electra, when Orestes’ caution after revealing himself to Electra seems to signal awareness of her harsh sensibilities, of what she may be not only on the surface but also on the inside. To his pleas that she restrain her cries of joy at discovering him, she responds with fierceness, swearing by “the ever untamed Artemis” (τὴν ἄδμητον αἰὲν Ἄρτεμιν) that she will not fear the women of the house, even as he reminds her with some apprehension that

79 Woolf (1925 [1981]: 70). In the manuscript version, Evans speaks to Septimus in Greek verse and returns to Greece when he dies (cf. Dalgarno [2001: 75]). 80 Note that Orestes hesitates, less driven as he is than his sister; so also in Aeschylus though not Sophocles.

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women may have an “Ares within” (1241–44). It is, of course, Electra herself whose “Ares” he worries about controlling at the moment, and this characterization heightens the sense not only that Electra herself has an inhuman dimension but also that she and Clytemnestra share a certain ferocity of purpose.81 In fact, before Orestes’ arrival onstage Electra had planned to murder Aegisthus (if not her mother) herself (954–57, 1019–20); and now she will not be silenced, despite her brother’s increasingly urgent pleas that she lower her voice and restrain her boldness. The chorus later confirms this impression of ferocity, when as Electra makes her one brief exit from the stage they invoke Ares: “Look where Ares stalks onward, breathing the unstoppable bloodshed” (ἴδεσθ’ ὅποι προνέμεται  / τὸ δυσέριστον αἷμα φυσῶν Ἄρης, 1384–85).82 In their alarm they see a menacing, pulsating vision of relentless pursuit and panting violence: the deity himself trailing mangled bodies spurting blood. This is the Ares within come out, an anticipation of slaughter that Electra confirms by her swift return to the scene, so that as the sword enters the maternal flesh within the halls, it is she who remains onstage as the visible figure of revenge.83 She calls upon the chorus to listen and look (cf. ἀκούετ’, ἰδού) as Clytemnestra cries out, yells a bitter response to her mother’s request that the child take pity on its bearer, and screams out her bloodthirsty encouragement to Orestes as he drives the sword home (“Strike twice if you have the strength!,” παῖσον εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν, 1415).84 Electra’s relentless focus on sensation and embodiment emerges finally here as fiercely centered on her mother’s body and the sword at her throat, her emphatic verbalization effectively conveying outside Orestes’ inside act. Thus while her brother may be the direct agent of the act, he is invisible and silent, is to say that initially it is she rather than he who precipitates Ares onto the stage in all of his sensory and affective horror. Which is also to say that this moment brings her inner Ares out into the open. When Orestes and Pylades emerge, the chorus again sees the god and his gore exposed: “The blood-red hand drips with Ares’ victim!” (φοινία δὲ χεὶρ / στάζει θυηλῆς Ἄρεος, 1422–23) they cry out in horror, as if the slaughter were there right before them. d. Ash and Bone I want to turn back briefly to the earlier pivotal moment in Sophocles’ Electra, the one revolving around the urn, since once we consider the insides of these tragic vessels, this

81

As Kells (1966) perceives; see also Wright (2005b: 185). As I indicate above, this shared ferocity has its beginnings in Aeschylus’ play, where the same actor would have left the stage as Electra to return as Clytemnestra, thus sustaining a forceful female presence. 82 Although they quickly shift to plurals and then to clearer references to Orestes (1391–94), the image punctuates her movement most proximately. Cf. Eteocles’ remark in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes: “This Ares feeds on, the blood of humans” (τούτῳ γὰρ Ἄρης βόσκεται, φόνῳ βροτῶν, 244). 83 Many scholars have worried over the play’s morality, regarding Electra as either a victim or ruthless motivator of its harsh mandate; see Foley (2001: 146–47), with bibliography. 84 Woolf quotes these lines as “cries that give angle and outline” to the action ([1925] 1984: 26), evidence of Greek tragic style in its force and compression.

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theatrical object seems even stranger. Unlike the human containers, or other more honest signs, it has nothing inside—or rather, affectively speaking it has nothing and everything, as the ashes supposedly lying within are for Electra the sorry traces of all that is lost. Her emotional projection fashions for the empty urn a chronotopic elsewhere—a past in which it is Orestes as fondly tended infant, now rendered a different kind of “small burden” (1130–48), and a future in which it would serve as a double coffin (1165–70), miraculously holding both her brother and herself. An adjacent but even more elusive dynamic shapes the plotting of Euripides’ Suppliant Women, a play that revolves around corpses that only emerge at the end as ashes in jars.85 While scholars have addressed the social and ritual aspects of handling the dead as well as the civic, political, and some formal aspects of Suppliant Women, this section like others focuses on the sensory and semiotic details of these conjunctions of bodies and/ as objects.86 In the course of the play the mourning mothers envision the corpses of their sons as embraced body-to-body and as statue-like adornment (agalma) for the city, while the ashes of the dead are a small and sorry bulk in a container too slight, as is the case with Electra’s urn. The play dramatizes a matching and contrasting of containers and corpses by means of a series of expressive gestures that accumulate force across the scenes driving the plot of the play.87 Late in the action the Argive mothers respond to the loss of their children in battle with a set of affective matches that undoes Theseus’ earlier image of the pregnant dead mentioned above. They first envision this loss as a palpable transfer of the weight (τὸν ἐμὸν . . . / μόχθον) they formerly carried in the womb (921–22). In contrast, the life that remains has transmogrified into the wandering of a cloud driven by cruel winds (πλαγκτὰ δ᾽ὡσεί τις νεφέλα / πνευμάτων ὑπὸ δυσχίμων ἀίσσω, 961–62). The grandsons of the suppliants finally carry in the ashes (lit. “limbs,” μέλη) of their fathers, which they deem “a weight not un-heavy [βάρος μὲν οὐκ ἀβριθές] because of sorrow, and everything altogether in a small space [ἐν δ᾽ὀλίγῳ]” (1125–26). The mothers respond with a similar emphasis on the sorry replacement, this “small bulk of ashes” instead of bodies (σποδοῦ τε πλῆθος ὀλίγον ἀντὶ σωμάτων) (1130–31). They envision their sons as held by the air (αἰθὴρ ἔχει) and fluttering off to Hades (1139–40), but still grasp at the slight remainder, saying, “Come, let me embrace the ashes under my breast” (ἀμφὶ μαστὸν ὑποβάλω σποδόν, 1160), and crying out that they may no longer look upon the “treasure” (ἄγαλμα) that was their sons (1163–64, cf. 632). In an eerie turn that lends the scene its “slip-slide” materiality, the containers of the ashes (i.e., the urns) are never mentioned, so that this substance that Derrida recognizes as the ultimate trace—simultaneously something and nothing—is clutched directly up under the maternal breasts, close in and merging but also a wisp of loss, like the dear kiss (φίλον φίλημα) now gone from the cheek (1154).88

85

For more details on affective and actual merging with corpses in the play, see Chapter 5 (2c). E.g., Sourvinou-Inwood (1989), Foley (2001), Hame (2008); on Suppliant Women, see (e.g.) Smith (1967b), Whitehorn (1986), Mendelsohn (2002), and especially Wohl (2015). 87 Cf. Wohl (2015: 89–109). 88 Derrida (1987). 86

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What should be inside thus seems in this case to be out: the ashes offered up as if from out of their urns, while the mothers grasp at these scant remainders of the dead bodies foreclosed to them. Precisely at these moments of emotional intensity, when one would expect dramatic language to highlight naturalizing, empathic viewing, Greek tragedy instead handles corpses and their traces as aesthetic objects, and profoundly strange ones at that. Contained and containing, heavily intimate and evanescent, they take on a semiotic doubling and intensity like other vessels—like a tomb, an urn, a house for a life. Virginia Woolf ’s positioning of Greek tragedy as a “hot” aesthetic terrain may participate in the romanticizing, colonialist reflexes that delimit the European selfperspective, but that fact does not diminish the revelatory power of her focus on Sophoclean materialities, on bone and stone. For Woolf as for Artaud, Greek tragedy is an essentially embodied form, drama being what the latter calls a “visual and plastic materialization,” a “language of objects, movements, attitudes, and gestures.”89 Even if we accept Artaud’s notion that Aeschylus’ characters disdain to “splash about in the membrane,” this attention to enactment and materiality helps to hold the focus close in to the body’s surfaces, to recognize in this “plastic” medium what intersections of figuration and enactment entail about how formal details render palpable form. To recognize, for instance, in Electra’s handling of her “small burden in a small jar” (1138– 42) that the urn sets in motion haptic and body-to-body relations, in which both siblings’ insistent gestures bridge presence and absence to render disorienting equations. Not only do they match her present moldering form and Orestes’ absent infant or dead one with the urn’s bronze-ribbed surface, but they also ultimately make the Orestes onstage a body double. Thus when he tries to take back the urn, she grasps it desperately as the “body of Orestes” (1216), so that the characters and indeed the whole plot of the play spin dizzily—just for a moment—around this one small jar.

89

Artaud (1958: 69, 90).

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CHAPTER 5 BODILY ALTERATIONS: UNDRESS, PROSTHESIS, AND ASSEMBLAGE

Early on in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the play that dramatizes Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter in the interest of reaching Troy, the Greek leader confronts his loss. “Go away,” he says to the enthusiastic and loving Iphigenia, “it’s not good for young women to be seen.” But then he continues (679–85), First give me a kiss and your right hand, for you will be away from your father for too long. Oh breast and cheeks! Oh gleaming hair! What a burden the Phrygian city and Helen have become for you.—I stop there, for a swift flood springs from my eyes as I touch you. Go inside! φίλημα δοῦσα δεξιάν τέ μοι, μέλλουσα δαρὸν πατρὸς ἀποικήσειν χρόνον. ὦ στέρνα καὶ παρῆδες, ὦ ξανθαὶ κόμαι, ὡς ἄχθος ὑμῖν ἐγένεθ᾽ἡ Φρυγῶν πόλις Ἑλένη τε,—παύω τοὺς λόγους· ταχεῖα γὰρ νοτὶς διώκει μ᾽ὀμμάτων ψαύσαντά σου. ἴθ᾽ἐς μέλαθρα. The scene as a whole has a distinctly unnerving affective and sensory quality to it, as Iphigenia greets her father eagerly, exclaiming how she longs to embrace “fatherly breast to my breast [πρὸς στέρνα πατρὸς στέρνα τἀμά]” (632) and how glad she is to see him. She quickly notes, however, his shifting facial expressions, including grimacing and incipient tears (648–50), with the costuming conventions of tragedy adding to the scene’s affective peculiarities: in its original enactment, Iphigenia’s close watch on her father’s expressions would have taken place in language alone, since the characters were masked. That is, as so often in the genre, powerful directive language tells the audience how and what to see, effectively overlaying the visible action with a linguistic scrim. What then unfolds in tandem with this intimate reading of paternal expressions (“expressions”), what gapes between this greeting and Agamemnon’s sending his daughter inside, is a space of journeying, as the daughter’s leaving-taking (in “marriage” / sacrifice) overlays the father’s campaign to fight the Trojans.1 It is this 1

On Iphigenia’s status and the marriage/sacrifice conjunction, see Foley (1982).

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that affectively intervenes at the end of the scene, as the two embrace with Troy and Helen between them, pinned between her breast, cheek, and hair and his tear-flooded eyes and hands. Tragedy’s peculiar aesthetics have long encouraged scholars to ponder this type of layered tableau, with its positioning of bodies in close assemblage, its gestural conventions only somewhat illuminated by verbal indicators, and its affective dynamics often situated somewhat askew of the concrete visual formalities such as masking and costume. Herbert Golder, for instance, has argued that tragic choruses were orchestrated largely as a series of gestural, moving tableaux, highlighting by means of a kind of physical shorthand the scenes described in diegesis (i.e., in their songs and other narratives such as the messenger speech).2 While this is largely speculative and too aesthetically unsubtle to comport with the nuances of extant tragedies, he is not wrong to emphasize the centrality of such groupings to the orchestration of tragic spectacles. As the scene featuring Agamemnon and Iphigenia suggests, Euripides is a virtuoso orchestrator of assemblages whose intersecting, enchaining parts and eerie effects resemble more a mobile, transforming montage than a formal tableau. His purported realism would seem to conflict with these strategies, which so often make for alienation and disorientation and which many have characterized as “contradictory,” “ironic,” or “tasteless.”3 Further, while Sophocles’ heroes (or the few that survive in their dramatic details) emanate a strong sense of implacable physicality, Euripides’ central characters tend to be elusive, changeable, or warped in their affective and sensory presences. Consider, for instance, his Heracles, the play that Gilbert Murray once termed “brokenbacked,” with its initially absent and then ferociously hands-on hero, whose surreal transformation turns him murderous and then mournfully philosophical. Or take Electra in the play of that name, as she pivots from lamenting the state of her clothes, to an obsession with her brother, to murderous plotting. J. D. Denniston regards this Electra as one “whose soul tenderness is all but dead,” but this manly regret hardly captures the myriad oddities of her orientations and actions.4 In my view Euripides’ tragedies aim less at realism than at fostering something like the reverse of this: weirdly eroticized combinations or layerings of bodies (including of corpses) and those proximate to them by means of both actual gestures and figurative extensions.5 His dramas’ representational strategies amplify—to surreal, paradoxical, and/or artificial effect—aesthetic and affective intimacies and proximities at the edges of the human (esp. skin/clothing, living/dead, human/creature or /object), both between

2

Golder (1996). See also Foley (2003, 2007) on the complexities of choral identity and of its formal elements. She emphasizes the variety of choral types, as well as the group presence. 3 See Michelini (1987: 3–51) on the earlier background; Goff (2000) and Torrance (2013: 1–6) on later developments. Contrast Wohl (2015a) on Euripidean politics and the tortuous manipulations of his plots. See also Worman (forthcoming a) 4 Denniston (comm. Electra xxviii); Lloyd (1986: 2) and Torrance (2013: 17) cite some other choice language from scholars. 5 For the metatheatricality of some of the moves I have in mind, see, e.g., Zeitlin, (1980), Segal (1982), Wright (2005a), Torrance (2011, 2013).

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or among characters and between characters and audience. Some aspects of Euripides’ emphasis on aesthetics clearly point to art forms, especially sculpture and painting; of the three canonical writers of tragedies his show the greatest attention to visual details. Further, the ways in which Euripides’ plays situate bodies at the intersection of enactment and figuration (as when Iphigenia and Agamemnon clutch “Helen” and “Troy” between them) often also foreground embodiments in constellated and contiguous formations that Deleuze and Guattari might have recognized as “assemblages,” meaning combinations, extensions, or layerings of bodies and other entities that they theorize most extensively in A Thousand Plateaus.6 Because of their wildly revisionist orchestrations of traditional philosophical approaches to subjectivity and the state, scholars have often celebrated such theorizing as radically anti-normative and even feminist. From this angle their emphasis on notions such as “assemblage” and “becoming,” the fluidity of which is so disruptive of unified human selfhood, dismantles Freudian schemes that privilege the psychoanalytic subject as male, as well as (though more implicitly) heterosexual, elite, and white. Yet these radical schemes tend to both fetishize and marginalize the feminine (not to mention the “native,” the “exotic,” and pretty much any other non-white-male embodiments).7 This too they could be said to share with Euripides’ representational strategies, which often pull up close to female characters and expose them to tactile, intimate, boundary-dissolving transformations and “becomings”—body-to-thing, human-to-creature, and so on. If, as Andrew Lattas argues, Deleuze and Guatarri’s assemblages allow “post-modernist male philosophers to become sorcerers, woman, and animal,” then we may expect that Euripides’ aesthetic radicalism risks similar appropriations.8 In an approach that parallels the focus in Chapter 2 on Sophocles’ staging of heroes in extremis, this chapter centers on Euripides’ propensity for staging bodily assemblages and intersections. Among the three dramatists, if scholars have often been dismayed by Euripides’ distinctly unnerving aesthetics and charged bodily proximities, they tend to admire Aeschylus for his elaborate imagery and Sophocles for his purported aesthetic reserve, as evidenced at least in part by the latter’s tendency to focus on heroes in distress.9 While Chapter 2 discusses some of Euripides’ dramas that respond to or intersect with

6

Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), cf. Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari ([1972] 1977); also Wohl (2005), Grosz (2008), Bennett (2010) 23–24. See again Seely (2012, 250–51) on the “ontological” fusion of the ways in which fabrics and bodies fold into each other. 7 See Lattas (1991). See also Gouloumari (1999), Haraway (2008); and further below. 8 Lattas (1991: 107); Deleuze and Guattari attribute the notion of “becoming” to Spinoza. We may note that Lattas’ own language reflects this fetish, in so far as he treats “woman” and “animal” as monolithic categories as opposed to (e.g.) “sorcerers.” See further in Worman (forthcoming c). 9 I say “purported” because many of Sophocles’ most riveting scenes are quite excessive and grotesque; but since his reputation since antiquity is one of piety and moderation, this judgment infects readers’ estimations of his aesthetic choices. Cf. Worman (2012) and see Haraway (1988), on embodiment as “significant prosthesis”—that is, the contours or parts visible from specific culturally embedded prospects.

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Sophocles, this chapter looks more closely at a few of Aeschylus’ central groupings, since some of the most striking examples of Euripides’ clustering effects resonate especially with Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Euripides’ orchestrations of these dynamics often pivot around a distinctively dressed or undressed body (or both, in sequence), one that is female or old or both, usually in dire circumstances, and near to the dead. In many of his plays intimate handling, clothing or coverings, and disturbing eye–hand coordinations signal violence and vulnerability, pain always somewhere in the making. Further, the fact that these dynamics are prominently focused on female bodies suggests that the charged handling of them is central to Euripides’ aesthetic schemes. In a late chapter of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari discuss fabric as a material model for thinking about smooth versus striated human perceptions and demarcations of objects in space. Pursuing a distinction that they draw throughout the book, they articulate the operations forged by fabric in sedentary societies thus: “[C]lothes-fabric and tapestry-fabric tend to annex the body and exterior space, respectively, to the immobile house: fabric integrates the body and the outside into a closed space.”10 I propose this awareness of how such materials function actively, even agentially, as a useful illuminating frame for understanding the dynamic interplay of female bodies and fabrics in tragic drama, and perhaps especially in Euripides.11 From this prospect, we may see more cohesive patterns in how materials and bodies cluster, hinge together, or unfold and expose or extend each other across tragic plots, as well as what these have to do with each other. Take, for instance, clustering and unfolding: only if we understand both as operations that connect and orient bodies in relation to domestic materials and spaces can we see that they are different machinations of the same system. And that, whether figured in images or enacted onstage (or usually both), these convergences of bodies and materials impinge upon plots, transforming relations among characters and precipitating actions. This brings me to the difficulties of distinguishing one aspect of such patternings— the material coverings—from the other, namely the amassing and extending. Chapter 3 addresses the details of various types of bodily attire in relation to layering and protection or disintegrating, including of skin; this chapter instead seeks to work in the other direction, tracking connections outward from bodies to other bodies and things. Thus prosthesis, unfolding, and assemblage: then Clytemnestra’s tapestries in the Oresteia (e.g.) may reveal themselves as not only cover and trap but also ligature and prosthesis, tying family members to each other and to their fateful house. So too may Electra’s morbid focus on her ragged clothes in Euripides’ play register as a material means of drawing both Orestes and Clytemnestra into her domestic scene, such that they become

10

Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 476). See Mueller (2016) on objects as agents; cf. Bennett (2010), also Combatti (2020) on materials and perceptions in Euripides. Cf. Wohl (2018) for an analysis of the role of metaphor in unsettling the relations between humans and things; for her language operates as a destabilizing force, while I am emphasizing here its powers of amassing and proliferation. 11

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annexed to her plot. Or consider Antigone in Phoenician Women, as she ends the play unfolding herself from her virgin’s garb and attaching herself as living prosthesis to her dead brother’s wounds.12 The majority of this chapter focuses on two groups of plays that contain prominent scenes of female characters pivoting between dress, undress, and physical attachments or groupings, some of which are staged as spectacular, erotically charged scenes that aestheticize female self-sacrifice and necrophilia. These are three plays ranging from the Trojan female captives to the two families that dominate extant tragedy (Trojan Women, Electra, and Phoenician Women) and three plays featuring other captive and/or mourning female assemblages (Hecuba, Andromache, and Suppliants). The discussion then considers another three plays that pair the threat of child sacrifice with parental intimacy (Heracles, Children of Heracles, and Iphigenia in Aulis), a dynamic that makes for some ominous bodily combinations.

1. Fleshly Extensions First, however, I turn again to the elaborate mergings of bodies and materials highlighted from different angles in previous chapters: those of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The most prominent of these are, of course, the tapestries plied by Clytemnestra in Agamemnon and taken up by Orestes in Libation Bearers, which together with the son’s entanglement with the maternal breast make for riveting assemblages. While I discuss the latter scene in Chapter  3 with a focus on parental coverings and entrapment, here I highlight the earlier scene (and return briefly to the latter) from what is effectively the other side of the fold—namely, bodies as material groupings and the animated clustering of things.13 As Victoria Wohl, Melissa Mueller, and others have discussed, Clytemnestra’s tapestries in the Agamemnon comprise a uniquely saturated theatrical object.14 Not only a metonym for wealth and power, a commodity fetishized into singular agency (so Wohl), it is also a rivetingly tangible stage object, even within the confines of the dramatic script (so Mueller). I want to emphasize an aspect of these fabrics that extends such insights in another direction: namely, the mergings of bodily surfaces and material coverings across the plays and thus the inter-implications between objects and characters and of characters with each other. What I am interested in here is how such mergings and

12

The latter converges also with a pattern in Sophocles that I have discussed elsewhere, in which characters (especially sisters) liken themselves to corpses and/or seek to lie with them in death (e.g., Soph. Elec. 1151–52, 1165–67, Ant. 73–74; Eur. Or. 1147–54). Since this is clearly a mode that shares features with the more overtly eroticized necrophilic gestures in Euripides, I point it out where relevant in the sections that follow. See also Worman (2015). 13 On the creaturely imagery, see e.g. Goheen 1955, Zeitlin 1965, Lebeck 1971, Carne-Ross 1981, Heath 1999. 14 Wohl (1998: 86–89, 104–05); Mueller (2016: 48–64); see also Goheen (1955), Lebeck (1971), Morell (1997), McClure (1999: 80–92), Lee (2004), Noel (2013).

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enfoldings not only entangle bodies but also revise human embodiment itself as coextensive with the flesh of the world.15 We can thus notice (with many others) that when Clytemnestra responds to Agamemnon, she does so with deep and ominous irony, offering him the vision of his body gashed full of holes like a fishing net (τέτρηται δικτύου πλέον), inserting it into the vast web of trapping images directly before he steps onto the tapestry and into her snare. Or, she adds, he would have needed to be three-bodied, like the monster Geryon, with a three-fold cloak of earth (χθονὸς τρίμοιρον χλαῖναν) to cover him (868–73). Both images feature coverings, one a fishing net, the other a large woolen cloak typically worn by men. Both also envision Agamemnon dead, one conflating his body with the cover, as a “net” full of holes, the other rendering it a monstrous corpse under heavy folds of earth. Clytemnestra follows up on these menacing metaphors at the end of her speech, when she invites Agamemnon to step upon the rich materials that she has ordered her maidservants to lay out at his feet, fashioning what she terms a “crimson-strewn path” (πορφυρόστρωτος πόρος, 910). From my prospect Clytemnestra’s language forges an ominous conjunction, as her verbal gesture has the force of a material threat—not just that Agamemnon will end up trapped and perforated or pressed down under layers of earth, but also that his body is the net, a conflation that Orestes will later make between Clytemnestra and this same cloth snare. And so like family like fabric: the material proliferation is such that it subsumes bodies in the house of Atreus, as the vital sinew among them and of them. With Wohl we might recognize here a monstrous version of commodity fetishism, as the fabric snare itself increasingly seems to have not just a life of its own but all the life of the house. When Orestes displays this tapestry in Libation Bearers, now drenched in both of his parents’ blood, most crucial from our angle here is how distinctively entangling it is as a theatrical object. We may recall that his speech presenting it to the chorus and audience aims to serve as a clarification of what has happened and who is who in relation to family roles and justice, with the hero calling out for a divine witness as if he were in some supernatural court of law. Instead what happens is quite the reverse, as the object he displays effectively drives him into a frenzy of associations, in which the cloak, the mother, the father, and the son are all enmeshed as one monstrously proliferating theatrical sign. While the chorus breaks out in distress (αἰαῖ αἰαῖ, 1007, 1009), declaring as if in direct response to this tangling and pleating that “suffering flowers for the survivor” (μίμνοντι δὲ καὶ πάθος ἀνθεῖ, 1009), Orestes continues to focus insistently on the robe, now designating it his witness (μαρτυρεῖ δέ μοι φᾶρος τόδ’, 1010–11) to what has happened. Deep-dyed (cf. φόνου δὲ κηκίς and πολλὰς βάφας, 1012–13) with his father’s blood and itself the tool of his mother’s grievous deed, he stands beside it (παρών, 1014), and addresses what he now calls “this murderous web” (πατροκτόνον γ’ ὕφασμα προσφωνῶν τόδε, 1015).

15

Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1968; see also Nancy ([1993] 1997) and Derrida ([1999] 2005: 183–89).

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As Orestes hovers with the cloak over his corpses his own shifting interactions with them seem to drive him to despair of determining right action. He warns that his mind is whirling again, as "fear is ready to sing and dance with anger" (φόβος / ᾀδειν ἔτοιμος ἠδ᾽ ὑπορχεῖσθαι κότῳ, 1024–25). The female chorus, however, urges him to resist this associative swirl and briskly conflates his characterizations of the dead, asserting that he saved the city of Argos by “cleanly cutting off the heads of the twin serpents” (δυοῖν δρακόντοιν εὐπετῶς τεμνῶν κάρα, 1047). Their succinct assurance appears to comfort Orestes not at all, however, as he soon echoes their reference to snakes by crying out at the terrifying forms of the Furies that he alone sees hovering, their hair entwined densely with serpents (πεπλεκτανημέναι / πυκνοῖς δράκουσιν, 1049–50). He is lost in a crowd of female phantasms, while the chorus on stage cannot see what he sees— they remain in the role of spectators, joined with the audience in their sense of the manifest. His frenzy now tips the chorus’ metaphor over the edge into terrible vision, as he sees that his mother and her “dogs” (κύνες) do indeed haunt the scene (1053–54). The gap between his sensibility and theirs further intensifies his isolation from the human, as well as his entanglement in the conflations of beast and trap, father and mother, human and object. Thus while Orestes repeatedly encourages the chorus to view the tableau, and to consider its significant aspects in relation to the familial entanglement traced by the network of images, they fail utterly to understand what they see as a trap, and thus to fear for Orestes’ own implication in the very network (and net) that he indicates. So too with the interpretation of monstrous familial portents: Orestes and others (first Cassandra, then Clytemnestra) read mother and son into the signs as demon serpent and serpent killer, while the net is the trap both for his father and of and for his mother, then held out as if to capture the son in its deadly embrace. Since in the trilogy Clytemnestra is likened to a net (Ag. 1116, perhaps Cho. 996 etc.) and to a serpent (Ag. 1233; Cho. 249, 994), Orestes to a serpent (Cho. 549, 928) and the net’s supporting corks (506), the verbal imagery and the props together catalyze a nightmarish conflation of self/son and (m)other, the beast and its trap.16 This threatens the very coherence of Orestes’ identity— an enjambing of roles that soon overwhelms him and seems to precipitate his frenzy. Given this confluence of self and other, male and female, and mother and son, perhaps it is wrong to insist, as some scholars have, that the Oresteia clearly centers on gender oppositions that make Orestes’ ultimate victory inevitable.17 Not only does the lament 16

Cf. also Clytemnestra’s question as to how she could “fence the nets of ruin too high for overleaping” (πημονῆς ἄρκύστατ’ ἂν / φάρξειεν ὕψος κρεῖσσον ἐκπηδήμαντος, Ag. 1375–76); when the chorus laments that their king has been trapped in “this web of a spider” (ἀράχνης ἐν ὑφάσματι τῷδε, 1492), Clytemnestra rejects this role, declaring that in her shadow stands the ancient avenger of the house (1500–04). At the end of the play, Aegisthus vaunts over Agamemnon’s corpse as caught in what he calls the “fences of justice” (τῆς Δίκης ἐν ἕρκεσιν, 1611). In Libation Bearers Orestes wishes that he might catch Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in the same bondage in which his father was entrapped (ἐν ταὐτῷ βρόχῳ, 557). In the Eumenides Orestes will be threatened with entrapment in the hunter’s net (ἀρκυστάτων, 112; ἀρκύων, 147) and the Furies’ binding song (ὕμνον . . . δέσμιον, 306), which his encircling of himself with his mother’s tapestry foreshadows. On the imagery, see Fowler (1967) and again Lebeck (1971); also Sider (1978), Roberts (1985), Lee (2004: 262–69). 17 See especially Zeitlin (1978: 149–84); also Rabinowitz (1981).

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with the chorus (kommos) in Libation Bearers offer a keen sense of Electra’s strong voice and forceful hand, which recalls in its firmness Clytemnestra’s fierce hold on right action in the first play;18 there is also the lurking menace of the Furies (402, 651, 924), and the dramatic snap of Clytemnestra’s demand for an axe (889), which recalls for the audience her fearsome command over the corpses in Agamemnon. With the intensities of Cassandra in the first play, as well as the dominant presence of Clytemnestra’s ghost and the blood-thirsty Erinyes in the third, the trilogy sustains a keen sense of female potency, especially in vivid assemblage. This may be at least in part what Euripides found so compelling, as many of his plays refract clusters of bodies (especially female ones) and objects from these plays. Trojan Women, Electra, Andromache, and Hecuba organize characters and actions in relation to such groupings in really striking ways, deploying material inflections of character that pick at the tactile orientations of Aeschylus’ trilogy, working up their features into provocative elaborations.19

2. Female Assemblages and “Nudity” In the extant plays of Euripides the two families that most dominate the tragedies—the house of Atreus and the family of Oedipus—also have distinctive connections to dress, bodily proximities, and eroticized violence. The other Euripidean characters that tend to display similarly charged bodily combinations are those in the excesses of mourning and the captive Trojan women, the latter for reasons that are bound up more with their slave statuses than with familial perversities. The Atreid family members dominate many of Euripides’ dramas with their skewed attachments to material riches and to other humans. Clytemnestra and Helen most frequently trail onstage suggestions of vanity and luxurious adornment as well as physical threat, and Helen’s daughter Hermione follows suit. As Chapter  2 details, Electra and Orestes are similarly distinctive, their charged proxemics, manual contact, and handling of objects suggesting “unnatural” or violent intimacies. This section first considers Euripides’ Trojan Women and Electra, taking cues from the prominence in Aeschylus’ depiction of materials and mergings among members of that blighted clan in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Trojan Women refracts the Cassandra scene from Agamemnon in ways that intensify her sensory impact, her prophetic scattering of corpses (including her own naked one), and her plying of materials. While all of Euripides’ dramas involving members of the Atreid family turn at some point around bodily adornment and states of undress as vain, perverse, and/or violent gestures, Electra stands out for the proliferating ways in which such bodies and materials carry a sexual charge.

18

See further in Chapter 6 (1b). We can compare Iphigenia in Tauris and Orestes, both of which also engage with the imagery of the Oresteia but in ways more relevant to Chapter 2. 19

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Euripides’ “Oedipus” drama that stages some parallel dynamics has a quite different tonal quality, one less sinister but still edged around with sex and death. Phoenician Women features Jocasta and Antigone instead of Oedipus, who only emerges at the end of the play when called out by his furiously mourning daughter. Despite scholars’ claims that the play dramatizes Antigone’s maturation into the caretaker of the family and its dead, from the prospect of this chapter its tactilities and groupings emerge as more provocative and challenging than naturalizing interpretations can account for. a. Cassandra Undressed and Extending It seems fitting to begin here with Cassandra, since she appears in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Trojan Women as a wild outsider at the extremes of strange assemblage: strewing the stage with ominously materializing portents, seeing crowds of corpses (including her own), and stripping herself of her ritual dress. In both dramas she stands alone in this house of horrors, whether discerning these menacing specters on the façade of the palace in Agamemnon or lighting them up as if with the bridal torches that she carries in Trojan Women. The liminal space that she inhabits thus bears a special relation to what I have been terming the edges of the human, as her unique vision allows her to peer into the abyss and scent the breath of the tomb. i. Looming Phantasms in Agamemnon. In Aeschylus’ drama Cassandra is an exotic and enslaved presence who spends most of her time onstage crying out at the grim figures that she perceives billowing around the halls of Agamemnon. Her inhabitation of female subjectivity at the edges of death and the creaturely seems to render even the bird metaphors so familiar for female mourners insufficiently monstrous or demonic and thus no fitting refuge for her in her foreignness, isolation, and horrific end.20 The monstrous shadows to which Cassandra alludes in equally shadowy terms rear up as if right before her, looming over her and the chorus of old men. While she sees it all, including the violence about to happen and that of the Atreid past, they see nothing, so that like Orestes and the cloak in Libation Bearers she is lost in a welter of phantasms and they cannot follow. They do slowly come to understand that Cassandra detects each detail of the familial carnage, although at first she cries out at things she can only barely name, wondering at the infants bewailing their own roasted flesh (1096–97), a headstrong woman (τάλαινα) brightening her husband with bathwater (λουτροῖσι φαιδρύνασα) for some terrible end (1109), a net that is also a wife (ἄρκυς ἡ ξύνευνος, 1116). The chorus wonders in turn, greeting these fast-flying images with little understanding while they increasingly align their responses with hers, as when they react to her net-wife equation by declaring, “The speech does not brighten me [με φαιδρύνει]” (1120).

20 On Cassandra’s status and costuming in the play, see e.g. Tarkow (1980), Schein (1982), Griffith (1988), Mazzoldi (2001), Mitchell-Boyask (2006), Debnar (2010). On her status in relation to other female characters, particularly Clytemnestra, see McCoskey (1998), Doyle (2008).

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Interwoven with Cassandra’s tracing of past and present violence are two primary strands of imagery that tie her status and body closely to this familial trauma. One highlights her dress directly and through analogies, including references to various types of cladding and concluding in the vision of her own body on the altar. Running parallel to this are the alternatives that she throws out for how her onlookers (and the audience) are to understand who she is: from a hawker of portents to a wanderer, a beggar, and finally a slave. Thus, for instance, when she is about to shift from song to speech, the chorus responds to her lament for her own fate by invoking Itys, who with Procne, his murderous mother turned nightingale, serves as a prominent figure for mourning (1140–45).21 Cassandra reacts with a startling inversion of the tragic convention, crying out, “Oh, Oh for the life of the sharp-voiced nightingale!” (ἰὼ ἰὼ λιγείας βίος ἀηδόνος). She then follows this with an anomalous view of that life: “The gods clad her body with wings [περέβαλον γάρ οἱ πτεροφόρον δέμας / θεοί] and gave her a sweet life instead of tears.” For her own self, she adds, there is only the cleaving (σχισμός) of the double-edged spear (1146–49). Instead of invoking the nightingale in conventional fashion, then, Cassandra rejects the bird wings and voice as too “sweet” to suit her vulnerable status and dire situation. When she turns to address the chorus directly she claims, again very strikingly, that her prophesying will no longer be “looking out from under veils like some new-wedded girl” (ἐκ καλυμμάτων  / ἔσται δεδορκὼς νεογάμου νύμφης δίκην, 1178–79). She offers another series of metaphors, one of which gives the impression of palpable portents about to break over her and the chorus’ heads, as she discerns them “like a wave surging toward the gleams [κύματος δίκην / κλύζειν πρὸς αὐγάς] of this great pain” (1181–83). The image echoes another prominent strain of liquid images that interweave tears, dripping blood, bathwater, and rivers (e.g., 1096–97, 1111, 1121–22, 1137, 1148, 1157, 1164) and leads into her vision of the blood-drinking chorus of Furies chanting from the roof of the house (1186–93).22 She then asks whether she has hit the mark like an archer or is rather some false prophet, an idle-chatting hawker (ἢ ψευδόμαντίς εἰμι θυροκόπος φλέδων), challenging the elders to admit how right she is (1194–97). Her speech thus brackets this demon chorus with two distinct guises that she explicitly rejects: the veiled bride and the omen-hawker. The exchange with the chorus that follows leads into another pair of speeches that effects a similar offsetting of grim portent with Cassandra’s own embodied status. They inquire as to how she knows what she does, foreigner as she is (1199–1200); and when she replies that she is a priestess of Apollo, they wonder about her precise relationship with him. She admits that he desired her, they wrestled while he panted with delight (πνέων χάριν), but she lied as she pledged herself to him and he retaliated by making her prophesies such that no one would believe them (1203–13).23 Then she cries out

21

On nightingales see Williams (1997), Suksi (2001). Cf. τὴν γὰρ στέγην τήνδ᾽οὔποτ᾽ ἐκλείπει χορός (1186); βρότειον αἷμα κῶμος ἐν δόμοις μένει . . . συγγόνων Ἐρινύων (1189–90). 23 Note that the chorus seems to believe her and to be convinced that she knows what will befall her, although they are less understanding of her other indications as to Clytemnestra’s murderous intentions. 22

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again, as the seer’s pain shakes her (στροβεῖ ταράσσων) when she sees shadow-images (ὀνείρων προσφερεῖς μορφώμασιν) of the slaughtered children of Thyestes, holding their own guts in their hands (χεῖρας κρεῶν πλήθοντες . . . σὺν ἐντέροις τε σπλάγχν᾽) (1214–22). One horrific vision follows another, as soon she distinguishes herself with the slave’s yoke (τὸ δούλιον ζυγόν) that she wears as Agamemnon’s concubine among a crowd of creatures: the toothless lion sprawling in the master’s bed, the fawning female dog turned evil monster (δυσφιλὲς δάκος), who is like a “double-fanged viper or Scylla” (ἀμφίσβαιναν ἢ Σκύλλαν τινά), or a smoldering mother from hell (θύουσαν Ἅιδου μητέρ᾽) (1223–36).24 As the chorus continues to quaver their way toward some understanding of the horrific assemblages swirling around her, Cassandra screams once more at the pain that Apollo inflicts on her, which she now terms a flame (πῦρ), as if she were actually singed by her vision of the burning demon mother. Now she sees a female lion coming to kill her, or some witch mixing her (Cassandra’s) slave-price into her brew of fury (ὡς δὲ φάρμακον / τεύχουσα κἀμοῦ μισθὸν ἐνθήσει κότῳ) and whetting the knife (1258–63). As if in direct response to this vision of her compromised place in this mix, she then spurns “these mockeries” that she wears (καταγέλωτ᾽ἔχω τάδε), the deictic indicating that she gestures toward the staff and seer’s wreath at her throat (σκῆπτρα καὶ μαντεῖα περὶ δερῇ στέφη). “At least you,” she says in bitter address to her implements, “I can ruin [διαφθερῶ] before I die—go to hell, I throw you away!” (ἴτ᾽ ἐς φθόρον· πεσόντα τ᾽ὧδ᾽ἀμείψομαι). Faced with death she wishes to divest herself of what little cover she has, exclaiming, “Look here! Apollo himself has stripped me of my prophet’s attire!” (ἰδοὺ δ᾽, Ἀπόλλων αὐτὸς ἐκδύων ἐμέ χρηστερίαν ἔσθῆτ᾽). She imagines him looking down on her, watching as she was endlessly mocked in Troy by “these ornaments” (τοῖσδε κόσμοις καταγελωμένην μέγα), which she now casts to the ground (1264–72). Recalling her earlier challenge to the chorus about whether she is an idle hawker of portents, Cassandra now laments that like some “wandering collector” (φοίτας ὡς ἀγυρτρία) she was called beggar, endured being bereft and hungry (πτωχὸς τάλαινα λιμοθνὴς ἠνεσχόμην, 1273–74), rejected by her people and thus reduced to this status as Apollo’s punishment even before her enslavement by Agamemnon. In place of her familial altars she now spies the chopping block (ἐπίξηνον μένει), dripping with her warm blood as sacrifice (θερμῷ κοπείσης φοίνιον προσφάγματι) (1277–78). She ends this speech by wishing for a swift death, that the strike be true and that, without struggle, her life-blood flowing away, she may close “this eye” (ἀπορρυέντων ὄμμα συμβάλω τόδε), the emphatic singular and the demonstrative together suggesting both her prophet’s vision and her human organ (1292–94). Soon after Cassandra approaches the house but then reels back in distress, groaning at the reek of carnage that she scents (φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ). While the elders assure her that this smell comes from slaughtered beasts at the hearth, she replies, “There is a vapor like that from the tomb”

24

On Scylla, the female sea monster that hovers opposite the whirling, many-armed Charybdis, her waist ringed with rabid dogs, see Homer, Odyssey 12.101–26, 222–59, Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.730–34, 14.51–74.

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(ὁμοῖος ἀτμὸς ὥσπερ ἐκ τάφου πρέπει) (1305–11). From starving beggar in her home town to warrior’s slave in Argos, she now hovers as if literally at death’s door, sniffing the breathy stench of corpses.25 Once more she heads resolutely toward the halls, calling out to the elders, “Oh strangers, I do not tremble in fear like a bird in the bush” (οὔτοι δυσοίζω θάμνον ὡς ὄρνις φόβῳ, 1316), which recalls her earlier rejection of the chorus’ analogy between her and the nightingale. She ends with a similar echo: as before this she had emphasized her “slave’s yoke,” now she wishes vengeance for her slave’s death, a thing “easy to hand” (δούλης θανούσης, εὐμαροῦς χειρώματος, 1326). Her scene as a whole thus teams with such striking pairings and assemblages, as her dense and shadowy visions cluster around her, while she turns from guise to guise until she finally divests herself of the one she actually wears. As she says, even these visible, material indicators of status and identity are misleading, as they reduced her to a beggar at Troy and a slave at what is for her a house of Hades. ii. Dancing with the Dead in Trojan Women. As in Agamemnon, Cassandra’s wild unspooling of lethal trajectories in Trojan Women culminates in her envisioning of her slaughter and her divesting herself of her ritual garb. In Euripides’ play the setting is different: she enters as she is about to be handed over to Agamemnon on the shores of Troy. Just before she comes onstage, the herald Talthybius expresses alarm as he catches sight of torches within the prison camp and wonders whether the women are setting fire to it. Hecuba responds that it is only her crazy child rushing about (παῖς ἐμὴ / μαινὰς θοάζει, 306–07). Cassandra’s fiery, tempestuous entrance sets up a vivid material frame, as she comes onstage singing a frenzied marriage hymn, calling upon everyone to lift torches and dance with her. She contrasts her song particularly with her mother’s laments, enjoining her to dance with her as well: “Twirling your foot here and there with me [πόδα σὸν / ἕλισσε τᾷδ᾽ἐκείσε μετ᾽ἐμέθεν], carry out the delightful step” (332–34). Her maddened movements terrify everyone, such that the chorus of Trojan women cry out to Hecuba to hold her back, lest she leap into the arms of the Greek army (lit. “lift her nimble step,” κοῦφον αἴρῃ βῆμ᾽). They describe her as behaving like a bacchant (βακχεύουσαν), which with her own verbal invitations and their request to Hecuba indicates that she is lurching about and difficult to control (341–42). Hecuba responds by demanding that Cassandra give her the torches, since she cannot carry them properly in her mad rushing (οὐ γὰρ ὀρθὰ πυρφορεῖς / μαινὰς θοάζουσ᾽); she then hands them over to the chorus members, asking them to exchange their tears for her wedding songs (δάκρυα ἀνταλλάσσετε, 348–52). The core of Cassandra’s scene is thus prefaced by this frantic song and dance, the leaping flames of the torches and her whirling steps arrested by the mourning Hecuba and her crowd of women. Cassandra then relinquishes her singing as well, turning instead to a series of prophetic rants that trace 25 Cassandra’s emphasis in this exchange on smell is (as I have noted previously) an unusual sense perception in tragedy; compare her earlier encouragement of the chorus to “track by scent the ancient evils” (κακῶν / ῥινηλατούσῃ τῶν πάλαι πεπραγμένων, 1184–85).

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future arcs, from her “marriage” to Agamemnon and the familial carnage to come, to Trojan versus Greek fates, to Odysseus’ long way home. She then turns back to her own fate, ending with a vision of her naked corpse and stripping herself of her garlands.26 For our purposes one particular trajectory stands out: the arc that spans from her wild torch dance to her dead body, while her frantic presence and the punctuation of her divestment also serves as an aesthetic and affective counterpoint to Hecuba’s subsequent collapse and envisioning of her future self in rags. After Cassandra’s song this arc begins with her calling upon her mother to crown her victorious head (πύκαζε κρᾶτ᾽ἐμὸν νικηφόρον), since hers will be a marriage more destructive (δυσχερέστερον γάμον) than Helen’s (353–58). She claims that she will kill Agamemnon; and whether she means this directly or indirectly (i.e., that her presence will drive Clytemnestra to kill him), with her bold assertion and swift pivot to the axe at her own throat and then Agamemnon’s (πέλεκυν  . . . ὃς εἰς τράχηλον τὸν ἐμόν εἶσι χἁτέρων) she piles up the corpses, as she declares next that her marriage will also precipitate the matricide and the fall of the entire family line (359–64). When Talthybius responds to this and other boasts with disbelief, Cassandra dismisses him in turn as an audacious hireling (δεινὸς ὁ λάτρις, 424) and recounts further horrors, now for Odysseus’ return. She then pivots violently once again, recoiling at her own tangent and demanding, “Lead on at once, let us be married to the bridegroom in the halls of Hades [ἐς Ἅιδου νυμφίῳ γημώμεθα]” (440). She envisions Talthybius’ end and then her own (443–45): And the gorges flowing with icy waters will offer my naked corpse, tossed out by my husband’s grave, to beasts to feast upon—I, the servant of Apollo. κἀμέ τοι νεκρὸν φάραγγες γυμνάδ᾽ἐκβεβλημένην ὕδατι χειμάρρῳ ῥέουσαι νυμφίου πέλας τάφου θηρσὶ δώσουσιν δάσασθαι, τὴν Ἀπόλλωνος λάτριν. And then she throws down her seer’s garlands, addressing them directly as in Agamemnon: “Oh wreaths [στέφη] of the god dearest to me, mystic decorations [ἀγάλματ᾽εὔια], farewell!” While her skin is still chaste, she adds, she will tear them from it (cf. χρωτός . . . χρόα, 453). She then tosses them to the winds (δῶ θοαῖς αὔραις . . . τἀδ᾽) and looks about for the commander’s ship, bidding her mother not to weep and declaring that she will arrive among the dead victorious (ἥκω νικηφόρος), having destroyed the house of Atreus. The scene ends with Hecuba sinking speechless to the ground (ἄναυδος εἰς πέδον πίτνει, 463); and when she does once again give voice to her woes she foresees her own grim future as an aged slave in Greece, making a bed for her shriveled back on the ground

26 See Rosenbloom (2006a: 260–63) on this image and Cassandra’s critique of the “expenditure” of Iphigenia’s sacrifice.

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(κἀν πέδῳ κοίτας ἔχειν / ῥυσοῖσι νώτοις), with her roughened skin clad in equally rough rags (τρυχηρὰ περὶ τρυχηρὸν εἱμένην χρόα πέπλων λακίσματ᾽) (494–97). Her language suggests close continuity between her body and its surrounds, including the bare ground, her wrinkled skin, and the tattered clothes. Further, the contrast between daughter and mother in deportment and embodied projections serves as a bookend to their opening “dance,” with both bodies first entwined and then left defenseless, their exposed skins materializing their subsequent fates. Yet in Euripides’ version of this thrillingly wayward prophet, her stripped-down state and projected future also renders her a victor, as if she had exchanged her prophet’s garlands for a crown of corpses. b. Electra Dirty and “Naked” for Orestes As Chapter 2 notes in passing, from early on in Euripides’ play named for her, Electra expends much time and energy despairing of her loss of status, which in this play so full of suggestive incongruities manifests itself primarily as a loss of the proper toilette and clothing.27 Although she tells the chorus of Argive women who come to invite her to a celebration of the local cult of Hera that her heart is not fluttered by fancy parties and golden necklaces (οὐκ ἐπ’ ἀγλαΐαις  . . .  / ἐπὶ χρυσέοις ὅρμοις), she also urges them to consider whether her dirty hair and ragged clothes (πιναρὰν κόμαν  / καὶ τρύχα τάδ’ ἐμῶν πέπλων) are suitable for the daughter of Agamemnon (175–89). When they offer to lend her a dress (190–92), she states more fully the traditional reason (i.e., the one in keeping with Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ representations) that she cannot participate: she is too much in mourning, wasting away, an outcast from her father’s halls. But the plot has already suggested a reason that she should be worried about her appearance: before she sings her monody announcing who she is, Orestes thinks her an attendant or slave (cf. προσπόλον τινά, δούλης γυναικός, 107, 110).28 Electra’s focus on her body’s edges, on her lack of fitting cover and her filthy skin, highlights it as carapace and maltreated object, a lowly cover for her high-status self. Her alienation makes of her body a nonhuman, emergent thing, something to be looked at askance and yet also fetishized, insofar as her emphasis on her embodiment repeatedly calls out for fixation and titillation. Indeed, from the prospect provided by our focus here, Electra’s “hands off ” response to Orestes in disguise (220–23) not only carries intimations of sexual touching (i.e., rape) but also draws attention to a new mutation of this body’s edge and a further “dirty” cast. Now she imagines her body, which she has emphasized as physically degraded,

27 On the political cast of Electra’s situation, see Wohl (2015b); on her “corporeality,” see Segal (1985). Zeitlin ([1970] 2003, 262–63) notes that many scholars have commented on the fact that her appearance is her choice, despite how she deplores it; Zeitlin quotes, among others, Grube (1941: 301), who attributes this choice to “the perverse pleasure she takes in enlarging upon her poverty.” See also Torrance (2013: 17–18). 28 Cf. Libation Bearers 10–20, in which Orestes notes Electra and her attendants wear mourning dress and thinks he recognizes her; and Sophocles’ Electra 78–81, in which his tutor hears Electra cry out from within and guesses that it is a servant, but Orestes intuits that he is hearing his sister.

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threatened with the additional debasement of incipient violation. Soon she returns them to the topic of her appearance, requesting of the man she still thinks a stranger that he report to Orestes first and foremost in what sort of clothes she is forced to be “stalled [αὐλίζομαι]” (i.e., like a beast), with what sort of filth she is encrusted (πίνῳ θ’ ὅσῳ βέβριθ’), and under what roof she must labor at the loom to weave her own clothing, lest her body go naked and stripped (ἢ γυμνὸν ἕξω σῶμα κἀστερήσομαι) (304–08). Her language is pointedly exaggerated, especially her use of the phrase “encrusted in filth,” which makes her sound like Philoctetes.29 The vision of her naked body is also a curious thing for her to offer a stranger, especially someone she has suspected of physical harm not minutes before. It is all the more curious given her hyperbolic emphasis on its state, so that the provocation that this “filthy animal” body achieves could only be registered by others (i.e., Orestes, the chorus, the audience) as an aesthetically charged erotic deviance, an affective experience at the edges of what is familiar and normative. After recounting the luxuries and indulgences of her mother and Aegisthus, Electra concludes her litany of outrages by announcing herself interpreter of the “many who call” Orestes, as in a bold blazon she offers up her body in its parts: hands and tongue and suffering heart and shaven head (αἱ χεῖρες ἡ γλώσσ’ ἡ ταλαίπωρός τε φρήν, / κάρα τ’ ἐμὸν ξυρῆκες (333–35).30 So here is another means by which Electra transmutes and denaturalizes her body, as her figure of speech (the blazon) dismantles and reconfigures it as a monstrous thing with many mouths.31 The play thus repeatedly highlights Electra’s focus on bodies and/as “assemblages”—as clothed and unclothed, crust and rags, whole and in parts—casting it in challenging and unsettling terms, as here when she navigates by means of grotesquely provocative edges and groupings a proximity that she does not yet know to be sibling. c. Jocasta and Antigone Undone For somewhat obvious reasons, the plays involving that other troubled clan and especially its patriarch Oedipus emphasize the sensory experience that the audience cannot share: touch. As I discuss in Chapter 1, once Oedipus has lost his sight—among extant tragedies the standard dramatization of which is Sophocles’ Oedipus the King—he repeatedly calls out for contact, asking to touch and be touched, demanding positioning and proximity. The chorus and audience witness this charged sensory supplement in full force at the end of Oedipus the King and pretty much throughout Oedipus at Colonus. And we may recall again here that for the family of Oedipus any emphasis on touching carries with it perverse undertones, the shadow of incest always hovering around any fond familial embrace.32

29

As Denniston notes (ad loc.). Cf. Hecuba 836–40: εἴ μοι γένοιτο φθόγγος ἐν βραχίοσι / καὶ χερσὶ καὶ κόμαισι καὶ ποδῶν βάσει . . . 31 On the “dismantling” capacities of the blazon, see Barthes ([1970] 1974: 214–15), Bakhtin ([1965] 1984: 426–27), Bourdieu (1991: 88); also Worman (2008: 65–71). 32 See Worman (2017). 30

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Euripides’ Phoenician Women, in prominent contrast, stages Jocasta as the play’s affective pivot and narrator: it is she rather than Oedipus who orchestrates much of the looking, the touching, and the telling.33 Produced a few years before Oedipus at Colonus, the play covers the action of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, namely, the attack of the Argive army led by the exiled Polyneices and Eteocles’ attempted defense of Thebes.34 In that play Jocasta and Oedipus are nowhere to be seen: the one is dead, the other in exile. Euripides instead surrounds the filial battle and deaths with close-in sibling and parental dynamics, orienting the familial discord by means of an array of aesthetic indicators: dress, postures, proximities, and touching. The most striking of these for our purposes involves Antigone, although her role is importantly calibrated in relation to her mother’s initially more dominant affective orchestrations. From the outset Jocasta and Antigone train their affections and eyes on Polyneices, in actual and envisioned embrace (e.g., 161–69, 303–35). While Oedipus does not turn up until nearly the end of the drama, Jocasta is there from the outset, framing the action by recounting the family story in the prologue. When Polyneices enters the city, she greets him warmly, singing out her joy and celebrating the sight of him after so long (303–05). She asks that he throw his arms around her breast (ἀμφίβαλλε μα- / στόν) and stretch out his cheeks and curly dark locks to her, “shadowing [her] neck” (σκιάζων δέραν ἁμάν) (306–09). The details of the embrace are striking for the intimate interweaving of parts: his arms about her breast, his cheek to hers, his hair overhanging her neck.35 Jocasta expands this emphasis with a similarly embodied (and perhaps meta-choral) projection, querying how she ought to greet Polyneices: “With hands and words, dancing around [you] in spinning pleasure, shall I take up the delight of old joys?,” 313–16).36 She contrasts this image of former pleasures with her present state of mourning old age, cutting her white hair in tears, letting it fall in grief, trading her white robes for dark rags (322–26). Oedipus too, she says: first he sought the knife and noose, now he weeps and moans in dim shadows (330–35). Reinforcing this sense of affective intensity is the fact that Jocasta’s lines are sung in dochmiacs, the meter commonly reserved for highly charged emotional expression. Polyneices responds in iambic trimeter, the “talking” meter, and the conversation that follows is accordingly more informational and restrained.37 Next in affective prominence is Antigone, who enters as she is handed up the stairs to the lookout tower (i.e., atop the skēnē) by an elderly tutor (paidagôgos). She then conducts a “view from the wall” (teichoscopia) that engages with Aeschylus’ shield scene in Seven Against Thebes. While Antigone surveys all of the Argive warriors, she saves her

33

See Lamari (2010: 23–29) on Jocasta’s multiple narrative modes. Euripides’ play is also aesthetically engaged with Seven Against Thebes, but more at the level of visual imagery. 35 Mastornarde (ad loc.) notes that Jocasta’s hair (in contrast) is shorn in mourning, cf. 322–23 and 372. 36 καὶ χερσὶ καὶ λόγοισι / πολυέλικτον ἁδονὰν / ἐκεῖσε καὶ τὸ δεῦρο / περιχορεύουσα τέρψιν παλαιᾶν λάβω χαρμονᾶν. 37 On Euripides’ use of metrical combinations, see Barlow [1971] 1986: 56, 60 also Mastronarde (ad 301–54) on the metrical contrast. Lamari (2010: 52) thinks that Jocasta’s mode is essentially a dirge. 34

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aestheticizing admiration and love for Polyneices. When the tutor points him out to her, she declares that she can see him, though not clearly: “I see the molded outline [τύπωμα] of his form and the likeness [ἐξηικασμένα] of his breast” (161–62).38 She wishes to fly to him and throw her arms about his “dearest neck” (δέραι φιλτάται, 166) and then exclaims at the golden glow of his armor, flashing like the sun (168–69). Commentators have remarked that in this exchange the tutor speaks in iambics, while Antigone responds in a mix of lyric meters; it also closely anticipates her mother’s singing at the sight of Polyneices and her wish for joyful, dancing embrace.39 Taken together with her highly colored, aestheticizing language, Antigone’s expressive mode draws attention to the act of viewing and responding with sensory and affective receptivity. But when, much later in the action, Jocasta calls upon Antigone to help her beg the brothers to give up their deadly combat, she responds with reluctance, claiming a maiden’s modesty in a move that scholars have regarded as a deliberate departure from Sophocles’ bold hero.40 Jocasta declares that now is no time for virgins’ dances or similar pursuits (1265), and Antigone eventually agrees.41 The odd tonal quality with which the attention to maidenly modesty inflects this urgent scene stands in jarring contrast to Antigone’s next actions, when she enters stripping off her clothes and announcing herself as bacchant for the dead. Her subsequent laments tie together maternal breast and sibling wounds; she also insists on kissing her brother Polyneices’ corpse and rejects marriage to Haemon, to whom she is betrothed in this play as elsewhere.42 Let us consider a few of these actions in turn. When Antigone enters alone with the corpses of her mother and brothers, she emphasizes her own appearance as distinctly immodest. She rushes in, as she says, uncovering her tender cheek shaded by locks of hair (οὐ προκαλυπτομένα βοτρυχώδεος ἁβρὰ  / παρῇδος), with reddened eyes and blushing face, shamelessly a bacchant for corpses (βάκχα νεκύων), snatching the veil from her hair (κράδεμνα δικοῦσα κόμας ἀπ᾽ ἐμάς) and loosening the saffron finery of her robe (στολίδος κροκόεσσαν ἀνεῖσα τρυφάν) (1484–91).43 She utters this intricate costume description in running dactyls, the urgent rhythm underscoring her frantic removal of her mantle.44 Here again Euripides introduces an unnerving physicality to the 38

This is Mastronarde’s translation (ad loc.); the language is unusual and distinctive for its allusions to something fabricated, as he notes. So also Barlow [1971] 1986: 59–60; and see esp. Stieber, who draws convincing connections to contemporaneous ideas about painting and sculpture (2011: 234–36 and 378). 39 See again Mastronarde (ad 88–201) on this combination, which as with Jocasta centers on dochmiacs; Barlow notes the shift ([1971] 1986: 60). 40 See esp. Swift (2009: 60–62); cf. Rawson (1970: 123); Foley (1985: 141–44). 41 Cf. again Jocasta’s earlier “dance” around Polyneices (312–16); and note that Antigone will next enter as a bacchant. Swift (2009) argues that this and Antigone’s taking of her father’s hand at the end constitutes a perversion of marriage ritual. Cf. Cassandra as bacchant bride in the Trojan Women. 42 Swift (2009: 62–69) regards this emphasis on traditional virginity as evidence of Euripidean realism, which would then throw into sharp relief Antigone’s rejection of its mandates and her self-sacrifice to the familial curse. For her this conversion shows character development, even though the earlier scenes are so fleeting that others have considered excising them; cf. Mastronarde’s discussion ad loc. 43 Again, cf. Mastronarde ad loc. on Antigone’s fancy dress; also Swift (2009: 60–62). 44 The Greek is strikingly so, interweaving especially veil, hair, skin, and then clothing, clustering around the “bacchant” in the center, such that the body and its coverings fold into each other; cf. again Seely (2012).

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scene by drawing close in to the body’s surfaces, with a young female character as both perceiver and focalizer. The effect is not only metatheatrical, as commentators have noted; it also distances the carapace from the speaking self, highlighting its status as material (in this case both clothing and skin) with coloration, folds, and shaded surfaces all inter-stitched, overlapping, and enfolded. It may be worth dwelling on the details of the material-body layering for a moment, at least in part as a means of reckoning with what it indicates for this desperate young female character. An illuminating comparison could be the depiction of the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (228–48) and the debate that has raged for centuries over it, given that it centers upon a similar uncovering at a moment of crisis. David Armstrong and Elizabeth Ratchford have offered an interpretation of the sacrificial scene perhaps useful to understanding what Antigone’s gestures telegraph, particularly in relation to her status and affective orientation. Building on an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Hermann, they argue that the phrase that describes Iphigenia “pouring to the ground her saffron-dyed [mantle]” (κρόκου βαφὰς ἐς πέδον χέουσα, 239) indicates that before being sacrificed she removes the veil traditionally worn by women (married or not) and directs her piteous gaze at the men surrounding her, as the Greek also indicates (cf. ἔβαλλ᾽ ἕκαστων θυτήρ-  / ων ἀπ᾽ ὄμματος βέλει  / φιλοίκτῳ, 240–42).45 The conventional term for this mantle is krēdemnon, the word Antigone uses when itemizing the garments that she discards or adjusts. The Iphigenia scene instead features a typical Aeschylean periphrasis, and herein lies the problem as well as the impetus for the centuries of scholarly ogling. In an especially distasteful example of this, Eduard Fraenkel expends some significant energy on imagining that Iphigenia instead strips herself naked, even suggesting the posture by which she might shrug out of her robes while kneeling at the altar.46 For our purposes the important point is that, if Armstrong and Ratchford are right, Iphigenia’s dropping of her veil in a setting full of men signals a gesture precisely the opposite of what a woman would normally do before a male crowd, namely, draw her veil up over half of her face.47 Taken from this prospect, then, Antigone in our scene in Phoenician Women calls attention to her undressing precisely because—like Iphigenia’s dropping of her veil—it highlights her extreme distress. In essence it says, “I am reduced to this: a body stripped of protection.” In the case of Iphigenia, the gesture points up the brutal swapping out of marriage vows for virgin sacrifice; in the case of Antigone, it forewarns of her rejection of marriage to Haemon, now that her male kin are dead. Once she has drawn the gaze of chorus and audience to her own disturbed dress and deportment, Antigone turns to the corpses, which further heightens the sense of merging and now proliferating assemblage. She addresses her beloved Polyneices first, and then

45

Armstrong and Ratchford (1985). Fraenkel ad Ag. 239; Armstrong and Ratchford do not comment on the prurient tone, although they do regret that most scholars found it merely absurd. 47 The gesture is at least as old as Homer: cf. most notably Helen in the Iliad (3.141) and Penelope in the Odyssey (e.g. 1.334). 46

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angles herself over all of the bodies, wondering to whom she should give the first lock of shorn hair—to her mother’s breast that suckled her or to her brothers’ terrible wounds (1524–29). Her juxtaposition of suckling breasts and deadly wounds, both of which emit bodily fluids (one a life giver, the other evidence of life gone) offers grotesque punctuation to her lament. It also suggests the thingness of bodies, their status as leaky containers of vital juices. Antigone’s focus on bodies in their parts draws attention to aesthetics and aisthēsis, to crafted image and sense perception, as so often in this play. She then calls Oedipus out of the halls and sustains this tenor in her description of the ends of the lives of her brothers and mother. In a piteous sequence heightened by metaphor, metonymy, and aesthetic detail she relates how Jocasta went forth with her “suppliant breast” (μαστὸν / . . . ἱκέτιν) as a plea to the brothers; how she found them in the meadow filled with lotus flowers (λωτοτρόφον κατὰ λείμακα), like wild lions, already making a blood-cold libation (ψυχρὰν λοιβὰν φονίαν) to Hades; and how she then “steeped” one of their swords in her own flesh (σαρκὸς ἔβαψεν), falling upon her dead children (ἔπεσ’ ἀμφὶ τέκνοισι) (1567– 78). Antigone’s description replays the scene that the messenger relayed to Creon earlier, which highlights manual contact more than elevating metaphor, as Chapter 2 (section 1) describes. In some contrast to this touching (and “touching”) scene, Antigone’s narrative juxtaposes human body parts (especially the maternal breast), nonhuman objects and creatures, and corpses, a cluster that sits at the intersection of enacted deportment and figuration. While Antigone hovers, bodies transmogrify from murderous lions in the flowering meadow to pitchers filled with blood, matched by the maternal “vat” that dyes a deadly tool. After this terrible conversion Creon intervenes in the mourning and (true to his conventional role) seeks to drive Oedipus out, keep Polyneices unburied, and marry Antigone off to Haemon. In the course of their confrontation, Antigone declares that she will not leave Polyneices and Creon threatens that then she will be interred with him (συνθάψεις, 1658), declaring his burial unlawful. Antigone responds that in the event they will be a famous loving pair (εὐκλεές τοι δύο φίλω), her phrase recalling similarly charged, eros-tinged language in Sophocles’ Antigone as well as his Electra.48 Antigone is also similarly persistent in Euripides’ play, requesting at the least to wash Polyneices' corpse and then to tend his wounds; when Creon denies these last rites as well, she throws herself on the corpse, saying that she will kiss it (lit., “Oh dearest one, I shall enfold your mouth at least [στόμα γε σὸν προσπτύξομαι]!” 1671).49 The moment is shocking, and not only because her gesture punctuates her extreme and stubbornly physical attachment to her dead sibling. It also suggests a match between apertures, as if with her kiss she might bind her brother’s mouth as she wishes to bind his wounds. Add to this that the body once again is envisioned as leaky container, now as a thing to be

48

That is, unmarried sibling pairs whose bonds are over-close; see above (1a) and Worman (2015). Cf. her focus on Polyneices in the final mourning scene: “O name dearest to me” (ὦ φίλτατον ὄνομα . . . ἐμοί, 1702). 49

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patched and tended, offered the prosthesis of her live body as she seeks to join her mouth to his. Antigone then confirms this quasi-necrophilic, human-thing assemblage as a form of death ritual that replaces other affections: she rejects Creon’s claim on her as daughter-in-law, threatening that she would be a murderous bride (1672–77). Taken together these scenes sustain attention to the close-up aesthetics (and thus proxemics), multisensory combinations, and affective disturbances that Euripidean tragedy so often activates, both among characters and among characters, chorus, and (by implication) audience. And once again, such effects are heightened by the entrance of the blind Oedipus, who cannot make visual contact as Antigone, the chorus, and the audience can. For the blind, that is, these scenes would remain fully equivalent in sensory terms: only to be imagined, envisioned in the mind’s eye, and thus not mimetic in the conventional sense (i.e., as visible fiction).50 For the sighted, in contrast, the scenes bring to terrible confrontation what the messenger and Antigone indicated at a distance and in elevated terms. In keeping with this staging of contrasting aesthetic and sensory modes, the actions that Oedipus and Antigone take up at the drama’s end center largely on the affective intensities of touching the dead.

2. Captive and Mourning Assemblages A parallel and equally unsettling trend runs through Euripides’ work, reinforcing a sense that assemblages of female bodies and materials at points of deadly crisis constitute a central through-line in his plays. The characters with which I am primarily concerned are also virginal or bridal and sometimes pose significant contrasts of deportment and demeanor to other female characters, while the deadly aspects of the scenes involve them most directly or proximately. In the plays that I consider here (Hecuba, Andromache, and Suppliant Women), older characters (again, usually female) may serve as focalizers and affective conduits for the audience’s apprehension of aesthetic tensions and distress, while also attempting various forms of merged embodiment at moments of physical threat or frustration. a. Hecuba and Polyxena Entwined Readers of Hecuba have often emphasized not only its grim borderland atmosphere but also what Froma Zeitlin has termed its “somatics.”51 Hecuba spends much of her time limping about, crouched in supplication, clutching at bodies, and lying on the ground or

50

See Edmunds (1996: 40–48) on the non-mimetic register that Oedipus brings onstage in Oedipus at Colonus. Zeitlin (1991: 196). See also Michelini (1987: 158–80); Rabinowitz (1993: 113–14); Meltzer (2006: 104–45). Segal is alone in his emphasis on Euripides’ use of clothing imagery (1990, 1993: 158–69), arguing that it signals transformation and contrasts between “outward appearance and true character” (168). While this assumes an interiority and authenticity that does not, to my mind, capture Euripidean character depictions very accurately, he is right to highlight the attention to dress. 51

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looking at it—deportments that contrast strikingly with the statuesque form of her daughter Polyxena, who disdains supplication and repeatedly emphasizes her lofty prospect. As Zeitlin has also emphasized, the drama pairs plots and bodies, with the first half of the play centered on Hecuba’s attempts to save Polyxena from slaughter at Achilles’ tomb and the second on avenging her son Polydorus, whom the Thracian king Polymestor murdered for his gold. Zeitlin, as well as Ann Michelini before her and Gary Meltzer after, also notice how important postures and touching are to the plot, including gestures of supplication, embrace, and menace. These contribute to the ordering of the plot as well: Hecuba supplicates Odysseus on Polyxena’s behalf and Agamemnon on Polydorus’; she embraces Polyxena while still living and hovers over the corpse of Polydorus when it is brought in after Polyxena’s murder—in fact, she thinks at first that it is the latter. In larger compass, given the complexity of the plot, the face-off between Hecuba and Polymestor also belongs to this focus, as does the ghost and corpse of Polydorus. Like Trojan Women, Hecuba takes place in the women’s encampment, although where the former is set outside of the walls of the fallen Troy and features a parade of female characters presided over by Hecuba, this play occupies the more remote fictional space of a Greek encampment on the shores of Thrace and Hecuba engages mostly with male characters, in addition to the female chorus. Physical menace hovers at the edges of the stage action in the violence to her children in the first half of the play and is matched by her attack on Polymestor in the later scenes. While I concentrate in what follows on this first half, since it is where the onstage affective dynamics center most fully on haptics, bodily edges, and dress, the pattern that I highlight should serve to indicate the connections between my focus and the plot as a whole.52 The prologue is delivered rather eerily by the ghost of Polydorus, so that the revenge plot that shapes the second half of the play is signaled from the outset. Hecuba enters directly afterward with the chorus of Trojan women, singing about her aged body and its need for hand-to-hand assistance (62–67), as well as her fears for her remaining children (90–97). The chorus swiftly confirms the most proximate evil: the Achaeans’ vote to sacrifice Polyxena at Achilles’ grave. They warn that Odysseus (one of tragedy’s favorite villains) will soon arrive, “to drag the foal from your breast and tear her from your aged arms [ἀπὸ μαστῶν / ἔκ τε γεραῖας χερός]” (142–43). The envisioned seizure of the girl from her mother, paired as it is with the helping hands of the chorus, settles attention from Hecuba’s first entrance on proximity and touching, whether caring or menacing, as well as on the pitiable animal–human embrace. Even as the chorus urges Hecuba to go and sit at Agamemnon’s knee in supplication, they complete this latter trajectory, envisioning what will happen if Hecuba’s prayers fail: Polyxena fallen over the tomb, bleeding from her gold-encircled neck in a dark flow (φοινισσομένην αἵματι παρθένον / ἐκ χρυσοφόρου  / δειρῆς νασμῷ μελαναυγεῖ) (150–53).53 The image, as commentators

52

Cf. especially the messenger scene detailing the attack on Polymestor, which also features threatening proxemics and female manipulation of dress. 53 Cf. Polyxena’s lamenting that Hecuba will see her “torn from her arms” (χειρὸς ἀναρπαστὰν) like a calf of the hills (205–08).

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have noted, is pointedly shocking, the contrast between the virgin’s throat with its gleaming adornment and the dark stream of blood drawing the eye in close. The juxtaposition of luxury and violence encourages an aestheticizing, even fetishizing attention to bodily surface, to its delicate finery and vulnerable skin alike. When Hecuba calls Polyxena forth, her response to the news echoes the language and focus of her mother and the chorus. Faithful daughter that she is, she first laments Hecuba’s fate, left without an attendant in old age, as with matched adjectives she juxtaposes herself to her mother (cf. “I wretched to wretched old age,” γήρᾳ δειλαίῳ δειλαία, 203, δειλαία δειλαίαν, 205). Echoing the chorus’ image, she grieves that Hecuba will see her “torn from her arms” (χειρὸς ἀναρπαστὰν, 206) like a mountain-bred calf, but she declares that she weeps only for her mother, since dying has for her become a preferable fate. Before she can say why, precisely, Odysseus comes on the scene to confirm the news of her sacrifice at Achilles’ tomb. When Odysseus enters Hecuba immediately supplicates him, with much emphasis on losing hold of her child and the suppliant posture and touch (e.g., 225–26, 245–46, 273– 77). He warns Hecuba not to make it such that Polyxena is ripped from her by force (ἀποσπασθῆς βίᾳ) nor that they enter into a “contest of hands” (ἐς χερῶν ἅμιλλαν) (225– 26). Hecuba responds by reminding Odysseus of his own behavior when he needed a favor from her, how when spying in Troy he embraced her knees in supplication. He confirms this, recalling that he did so at such length that his hand grew numb clutching her robes (245–46).54 Hecuba then seeks to persuade Odysseus to help her now as she helped him then. She grasps him as he grasped her (ἥψω . . . ἀνθάπτομαι), begging him not to tear her child from her hands (μή μου τὸ τέκνον ἐκ χερῶν ἀποσπάσῃς) (273–77). And she opens her plea by emphasizing the violence and stupidity of the crowd (254–57), a judgment that will come into fuller focus after Polyxena’s death. Since Odysseus refuses Hecuba and Polyxena refuses supplication, Hecuba then claims she will cling to her as ivy to an oak (398). Polyxena begs her mother to let her go, so that she not be manhandled, thrown to the ground, dragged about, her aged skin (σὸν γέροντα χρῶτα) shoved around by force, as she is torn from her daughter by young arms (ἐκ νέου βραχίονος / σπασθεῖσ’) (405–08). She asks instead that Hecuba give her “dearest hand” (ἡδίστην χέρα) to her and press her cheek to her own (παρειὰν προσβαλεῖν παρηίδι) (409–10). They grieve together, including a moment when Polyxena recalls the delights of her mother’s nourishing breasts (ὦ στέρνα μαστοί θ’, οἵ μ’ ἐθρέψασθ’ ἡδέως, 424). As she leaves, Hecuba cries out, “Hold onto your mother, stretch forth your hand!” (ἅψαι μητρός, ἔκτεινον χέρα, 439). Polyxena goes off to her death, leaving her mother collapsed onstage (cf. λύεται δέ μου μέλη, 438). Although commentators frequently emphasize the pitiful tenor of this exchange, for my focus what matters most are the ways in which metaphors, metonymies, and haptic, body-to-body gestural repetitions, both enacted and envisioned, synchronize the

54

Cf. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1515–17: βῶμον . . . / ρανίσιν αἱματορρύτοις / χρανοῦσαν εὐφυῆ τε σώματος δέρην.

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aesthetic and affective intensities of the scene. It is by means of such orchestrations that the embodiments of both mother and daughter hover on the edge of violence and death, the threats to their bodily integrity seeming imminent enough to be annexed to their semi-human inhabitations. Not only are their human bodies interlaced and transversed by plant and animal metaphors; but their violent futures appear already at hand, as avatars, prostheses, or declinations of their present selves—the foal/calf torn from the hands, the bleeding neck bent over the tomb, the ivy arms, the old skin pushed and dragged. When the herald Talthybius enters to give Hecuba news of Polyxena’s slaughter, he asks where she is, presumably because at first he does not see her lying on her back on the ground (νῶτ’ ἔχουσ’ ἐπὶ χθονί), wrapped up completely (ξυγκεκλῃμένη) in her robes (486–87). The posture is striking and unusual, as is the full covering, which is corpse-like and isolating, as well as flanked in dramatic sequence by her daughter’s death and the actual corpse of her son Polydorus, soon to be found washed up on the shore. Talthybius, a relatively sympathetic character here and in the Trojan Women, is deeply disturbed by Hecuba’s deathly pose, lamenting her former high status versus what she is now, a childless old woman, enslaved and prostrate on the earth, soiling her head with dust (αὐτὴ δὲ δούλη γραῦς ἄπαις ἐπὶ χθονὶ / κεῖται, κόνει φύρουσα δύστηνον κάρα, 492–96). Hecuba asks why he will not let her body lie (as if she were a corpse), and then whether he is there to take her to be slain as well at the tomb (501–06). Instead, however, he has come to fetch her to bury Polyxena—short of death, the only fitting activity for the mourner who wishes to expire or at least to liken herself to the corpse that she tends.55 As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, Euripides’ layered portrayal of Polyxena’s death disrupts the conventional scheme, pitting the army’s response to her nobility against the Trojan women’s horror. As Talthybius relates, the men rush to make offerings and comment on her bravery (572–82), in so sanguine a manner as to be a disturbing model for spectation in the Theater of Dionysus: they witness a virgin slaughter and their response (as told) is, “What a brave girl! How moving! Let’s give her some trinkets!” The onstage female audience reacts very differently, even though the murder is presented to them carefully enwrapped in its aura of fine feeling and sentimental reception. “Oh daughter,” Hecuba cries, “I do not know where in this welter of evils [κακῶν / πολλῶν παρόντων] I should look!” That is how she receives the scene of her daughter’s murder, and without even witnessing it firsthand. If she touches (ἅψωμαι) one painful part of it, she says, another will not let her alone, and then another calls out (παρακαλεῖ) to her, and she cannot “wipe away” (ἐξαλείψασθαι) Polyxena’s suffering from her mind so that she does not groan (585–90). For Hecuba, then, the relating of the event itself has a dominant physical presence that pulses with the bodily suffering of mother and daughter; it is a felt thing with affective dimensions, something that she touches, hears, and swabs as if it were an eerily vocal corpse. As if, that is, affectivity and “feeling with” were shaping an

55 Michelini (1987: 174–75) notes Hecuba’s posture in this scene, but associates it with the desperate postures of the suppliant.

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embodiment that does not stop at the skin but opens out onto other parts and assemblages. In keeping with her focus on the sensory tending of Polyxena’s slaughter, Hecuba eventually tells Talthybius that she will wash and bury the actual corpse herself, laying her out like an “unmarried bride” (612). While Hecuba admits as if in passing that in dying so nobly her daughter offers her some comfort (591–92), her sense of being beset by a storm of agonies belies this, as does her reverie that follows. She wonders over what in fact makes for nobility, whether it is not birth at all so much as upbringing and training (592–603). She characterizes her mind as “aiming in vain,” but what she says in fact unsettles Polyxena’s repeatedly voiced attachment to her birthright and its virtues, which itself props up the “nobility” of her slaughter and its lofty aesthetics. Hecuba’s next move further undermines the spell cast by Talthybius’ idealizing and sentimental tale. She requests that he keep the crowd back from Polyxena’s body, since in a giant army “the crowd has no restraint” (ἀκόλαστος ὄχλος) (604–08). Her words indicate a fear that fully counters the portrait that Talthybius has painted, of uplifting sentiment and respect for the dead girl—namely, violation of the corpse, and in this case the likelihood of gang rape. That Hecuba’s concern must by rights include this grotesque form of necrophilia is in keeping with the way in which the tale and its reception veer toward the obscene.56 The clash between the herald’s elevating mode and Hecuba’s grim deflation not only offers a critical slant on the scene; it also highlights embodied sensory effects and emotional reactions that pull spectators in close to the action and implicate them in its violence. This is sustained as well by the choral ode that follows, which is equally grim—not buoyed up at all by the “noble death,” but instead reading in the actions that led to the Trojan War scenes of universal horror and suffering. b. Andromache in Combination In Euripides’ Andromache the imagery of dress and bodily proximities does not dominate the plot as it does in Electra, but it does uniquely frame the play’s focus on “woman’s” concerns (i.e., marriage status and child-bearing), in relation to which material surfaces and embodiment contribute pivotally to aesthetic texture and dramatic action.57 The play at first appears to counterpose Hermione’s fancy dress and craven deportment to the demeanor of the chaste Andromache, as the Trojan Women does with her mother Helen’s. But in fact it soon becomes clear that in this play embodied aesthetics and their ethics are neither consistent nor fully familiar. And despite a generally corrupt atmosphere of self-interest and prejudice, neither are they merely domesticated and realistic, as readers of Euripides so often assume. Instead some scenes offer aberrant equations, such as luxurious adornment and free speech, or happy marriage and the

56 Michelini (1987: 167–68) points to lovers of statues and the like, as well as regarding Hecuba’s fear as a product of the contrast between her dark worldview and that of Polyxena’s. 57 On the latter, cf. Vasunia on Egyptian otherness in Aeschylus and Euripides (2001: 33–74).

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shared breast. Other scenes foreground bodies and objects in groupings that render concrete and enacted proximities forged by violence and misdirected or misused. As if materializing a figure like catachresis (“abuse” of metaphor) or hypallage (transferred epithet), such assemblages—in the enactment that the text indicates—reorganize bodies, things, and their characteristics (e.g., surfaces, postures, positions) in relation to each other, so that skin becomes worn metal or rock face while statues and clothing exert living forces, serving as both fulcrum and proxy for enactment. Consider Andromache in the opening scene: after describing her plight as a victim of the war, enslaved consort of Neoptolemus, she explains that she has come outside with the aim of taking suppliant refuge at the shrine of Achilles’ mother Thetis. A servant enters and quickly leaves, but not before announcing that her son’s life is threatened.58 Alone on stage, she declares that she will “stretch to the sky” (πρὸς αἰθέρ᾽) the laments and sorrow-songs and tears “in which she lies” (οἷσπερ ἐγκείμεσθ᾽) as if her despair were one giant tapestry or skin, reaching up into the aether and enwrapping her down below (91–93). Soon she begins to sing, casting Helen as an Ate (curse/devastation) brought to Troy trailing behind her spears, fire, ships, and the “swift Ares” (ὠκὺς Ἄρης) of Greece— that is, Achilles, who killed Hector and dragged his body around the city walls (103–08). She describes how she was led away from Troy, “throwing over her head” (ἀμφιβαλοῦσα κάρᾳ) hateful slavery like a veil, and how many tears “slipped down her skin” (κατέβα χροός) when she left city and halls and husband in the dust (ἐν κονίαις). Wondering why she must look upon the light as Hermione’s slave, worn down (τειρομένα) by her, she now clutches “this statue here” (τόδ᾽ἄγαλμα), melting “like a stony flowing stream” (ὡς πετρίνα πιδακόεσσα λιβάς) (109–16). This is quite a singular trio, in both would-be and actual proxemics, as Andromache’s clutch holds Thetis and as if Hermione, as well as pressing together substances and surfaces in tears, skin, dust, statue, and the stony stream. Andromache’s description and deportment in combination renders the effect such that, as registers collide, in between Andromache and Thetis stands Hermione, whose repeated mishandling of Andromache has already had its impact, as if on the surface of a stone. The grouping suggests uncomfortable proximities such that bodily and material surfaces converge, revising the human form in inanimate extensions and achieving a pairing of past/absence and present/presence between her tears at Troy and the stony Niobe that she is in the here and now.59 The unhappy assemblage captures the rivalry plot in its essential choreography, with Thetis serving as maternal metonymy for the fall of Troy, and thus working to bracket, together with Helen and the past on the other side, the present and presence of Andromache with her suppliant grasp. The tactility and proxemics of Andromache’s song makes an arresting set up for the entrance of Hermione, who foregrounds a contrasting array of bodily prostheses, as discussed in Chapter  3. She also underscores in brutal terms the differences between 58 Her second son, that is, by Neoptolemus rather than Hector; the latter (Astyanax) was thrown from the walls of Troy (cf. Trojan Women). 59 Cf. the similar image at 532–34 and further below.

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Andromache’s status and her own, pointing to the latter’s lack of defenses and Asian ethnicity. The desperation of her disgust at Andromache’s very proximity to her in fact (i.e., physically) and status drives her to further bigotry, as she accuses Andromache of drugging her and ruining her chances at pregnancy, casting her as another Medea come to taint and corrupt Greeks (157–60). She also questions Andromache’s self-respect, asking how she could be so stupid as to sleep with her captor. This leads her to broader insult, as she denigrates the sexual practices of the “barbarian race,” with a facile and dismissive racism (173–76).60 We might usefully recall here Ahmed’s insight that disgust works close in like this, “disturbing the skin,” as she puts it, and generating negative fantasies or replacement images to mask the fear of taint.61 Thus Hermione confronts Andromache’s foreignness and fertility with a palpably embodied recoil and the “surfacing” (to use Ahmed’s term) that attends it, focusing on the body’s affects, postures, and potencies and fashioning what is effectively an aestheticized politics of rank (157–60, 170–74), from the begetting of children to sexual desire and on to the boons that gold can bring. As with Electra, here too Euripides’ text offers up a barely married female character as focalizer of the proximity of sex and violence by emphasis on the body’s surfaces, covers, and deportments. And here too it is thereby rendered other to the self, a carapace worn with unease or an object to warp and abuse. In the case of Andromache such tensions vibrate in the face-off between a character who retains her high status and one who has lost hers, meaning between captor and captive, as opposed to one high-ranking character brought low; yet in both plays calibrations of attire and bodily stature render the incipient violence palpable, surfacing it in material terms. Andromache’s response only exacerbates this sense of ethical disorientation lodged in physicality, as in cunning periphrasis she imagines arguments against Hermione that assert her own high status, popularity, and body’s bloom (192–204). She derides Hermione as unlikable in her jealousy (205–06) and argues that women must put up with men’s philandering ways, even claiming that she gave her breast (μαστόν) to Hector’s bastard children, whenever “Aphrodite tripped [him] up” (222–25). If the ethical orientation of Hermione’s speech seems vain and cruel, at least her character has no mythic tradition to live up to. By contrast, in relation to tradition Andromache’s speech verges on sacrilege. In Euripides’ revisionist depiction, her own and Hector’s traditionally celebrated moral statures have shrunk considerably, revealing them as better than the rest primarily in their domestic compromise.62 The repeated clustering of characters and objects emerges next in the “mingled, yoked pair” (τόδε σύγκρατον / ζεῦγος, 494–95) of mother and son, when Andromache comes back onto the stage in bondage, her son huddled at her side. As I address in more detail in

60

On Hermione’s racializing of Andromache, see further in Chapter 3 (3b). Ahmed (2004: 86–89). 62 Cf. Allan (2000: 93–96), who discusses this representation of Andromache’s character as conventional and thus sympathetic, a judgment that he refines in the later discussion at 181–83. See also Kyriakou (1997), Torrance (2005), Pucci (2016: 61–66), Stavrinou (2016). 61

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Chapters 2 and 6, she now stands still as a statue with her hands bound, while her son vacillates between clasping her and attempting to supplicate Menelaus, thus revising Andromache’s own suppliant stance in the earlier scene such that she at least momentarily takes the place of Thetis. Peleus arrives shortly after to save her from Menelaus’ violent clutches and Andromache shifts to supplicate him, while lamenting that she cannot do so fully because her hands are bound. Soon after Peleus raises her up and struggles with the knots, noting his age and asking Andromache’s son to come into his embrace (ὑπ᾽ ἀγκάλας) (718–23). The resolution of this grouping and regrouping comes when Peleus together with his slave attendant shepherd Andromache and her son off of the stage (757–65). Everyone in this play is stymied by blanket prejudices that sustain moral myopias. Most important for my purposes is the fact that these prejudices are repeatedly cast in concrete, embodied, and often dehumanizing terms, connected to dress and sexual status, such that postures and proximities fashion debased assemblages. Thus Andromache’s conventional misogyny, as evidenced by her repeated insults against the entire race of women (e.g., 220–21, 272, 353–54), is matched by her focus on the body and the bed (e.g., 201, 207–25, 355–56). Peleus’ diatribe against all Spartans, in which he depicts Spartan women as man-following and thigh-revealing (597–99), and Helen in particular as a seductive disrober (629–30), has its match in Hermione’s baring of head and chest.63 Further, as a counterpoint to Hermione’s envisioning of Andromache slaving away at her feet, Peleus urges Andromache’s son to drive Hermione out of the house, dragging her by the hair (710–11). While, with the predictable exception of Andromache, scholars have generally regarded the characters in this play with distaste, its orchestration of embodiment, both staged and envisioned, at the nexus of sex and violence ultimately catches all of the characters at one point or another in moral dishabille, as even the traditionally chaste Andromache offers her breast to her philandering husband’s children. c. Maternal Assemblages Euripides’ Suppliant Women is a crowded play, from start to finish. Most of the figures onstage are female, and although they serve largely group or background roles, their desires set the plot in motion and orient it throughout. The drama takes place at the temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, where the mothers of the Argive warriors who lost their lives fighting at Thebes have come with Adrastus (the king of Argos) and their grandsons to supplicate Aethra (the mother of Theseus) for Athenian aid in claiming the bodies of their dead sons. This bleak plot stands in striking contrast to the background of the distinctive setting, which offers the counterpoint of community and female fertility in the form of Demeter’s celebrants, Aethra and her attendants.64 63 Note again the chest- and/or breast-baring of Clytemnestra in Libation Bearers and in the Electra’s, as well as Helen here and in Trojan Women. See Mastronarde (ad 1490–91) and Swift (2009: 64–65); and further in Chapters 3 (1c) and 6 (3b). 64 They are celebrating the Proerosia, an autumn fertility ritual centered on the health of crops and community, which suggests the contrast to the Argive mothers’ grief and self-focused gloom. See esp. Mendelsohn (2002: 136–41).

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Complicating the group dynamics further is the fact that there appears to be little to no agreement as to exactly who and how many are present for audience viewing; and scholars have gotten themselves into comical tangles over counting games.65 Thus some claim that the standard chorus of twelve or fifteen must have been made up of the Argive mothers plus attendants, either those of Demeter or their own; others that the chorus consists only of the seven mothers (as a radical innovation) and the other groups are silent or largely so. One commentator even suggested that the mothers are all silent, august figures and that the attendants (whoever they are) do the singing and dancing for them.66 Some think that Jocasta must have been among the group, although curiously anonymous, others that she could not possibly be so, being a Theban and/or dead. In fact, commentators have pointed out that Polyneices’ corpse and that of Amphiaorus could not be among the dead warriors named by Adrastus and Theseus, and argued that in fact only two of the mothers of all seven could be there.67 What matters for our purposes, however, is not the tally, and perhaps not even who precisely is doing the singing and dancing. I recite the conflicting accounts to give a sense of the play’s affective complexities: gauging emotional and sensory reactions and so on ought to depend on knowing who is involved, but the presence of so many groups, silent and otherwise, makes this a baroque undertaking. For the most part, in any event, the choral group has a unified appearance, perspective, and tenor, which is maternal, older, and Argive. Presumably unlike Aethra and Demeter’s attendants, who would be in festive garb, they are draped in mourning, they cry out for the degradation of their aged bodies, encourage this in others (e.g., rending the flesh, 50–51, 76–77), and match their bodies to those of their slain sons. They yearn only for this piteous physical contact and connection, their requests repeatedly highlighting the embrace of the dead. Thus, for instance, they ask that the bodies of “corpses once blooming [νεκύων / θαλερῶν σώματ’]” be placed in their hands (61–62), that “the corpses be placed in [their] miserable arms, so that [they] can embrace the sorry limbs of [their] children” (ταλαίνῃ ’ν χερὶ θεῖναι νέκυν, ἀμ-  / φιβαλεῖν λυγρὰ μέλη παιδὸς ἐμοῦ, 69–70). Like most conventional mourners of tragedy, the Argive mothers are extreme and relentless in their mourning, repeating images that tend like these to throw up before the mind’s eye close juxtapositions of the grieving and the dead. While I am not claiming that these women are unique in their matching of their own bodies with those of the dead, I do want to highlight how their affective connections work, since they serve to frame by contrast the entrance of Evadne, which punctuates my analysis. It is worth noting in addition that the chorus of women aestheticize their actions from early on, as if what they are doing constituted an aesthetic object, a public adornment, that also is a match for the dead. They cast their cheek-rending and urgency to embrace corpses as a

65

See Wohl (2015: 100–01) on the restrained language and its anti-political cast; see also Collard (1975: 18). See Collard (1975: 18); cf. Willink (1990); Morwood (2007: 143–44); Storey (2008). 67 Morwood (2007: 144); also Fitton (1961), Smith (1967b). 66

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fitting decoration of the dead for those who see it (τὰ γὰρ φθιτῶν τοῖς ὁρῶσι κόσμος, 78). In the second choral interlude the aesthetic implications of their emphases brings the relation between mourning and civic honor into closer conjunction. As they await news of Theseus’ first attempts to help them retrieve their dead bodies, they wish that he might “bring back the mother’s bloody ornament [ἄγαλμα / φόνιον]”; and only a few lines later they declare that such pious labor is itself a beautiful ornament (καλὸν δ᾽ἄγαλμα) for cities (370–73).68 As they worry over the outcome of the ensuing battle over the bodies, they deem this ornament “outraged” (τὸ σὸν ἄγαλμα . . . ὑβρισθέν, 632– 34), confirming its affective friction as a sorrowful delight. As their sons’ corpses are approaching, they reiterate this conflicted pleasure in sensory terms, declaring that it will be “bitter for me to see the limbs of children” (ἐμοὶ δὲ παίδων μὲν εἰσιδεῖν μέλη / πικρόν), but a “beautiful sight if I am really to see it” (καλὸν θέαμα δ’ εἴπερ ὅψομαι). And seeing that unhoped-for day (τὰν ἄελπτον ἁμέραν / ἰδοῦσα) they deem the greatest pain of all (πάντων μέγιστον ἄλγος) (782–85). Although Morwood thinks that the “see-sawing of antitheses” is “decidedly febrile” (ad loc.), the emphasis on seeing as both joy and pain is in keeping with the chorus’ intense focus on the paradox of the glorious dead, as well as on the confluences of bodily sensation and reaction. Once the corpses are carried in, however, their appearance renders them unapproachable, as their presence onstage brings to the fore the more grisly side of the dead as a “bloody ornament” and “beautiful spectacle.” The mothers view the bodies from afar (σώματα λεύσσω) and wish that they could die with them (794–96); and although someone (likely Adrastus)69 describes the bodies as “dripping with blood” (αἱματοσταγῆ), they demand that they be handed over, so that “fitting [their] arms with enfoldings,” they can hold their dead in an embrace (περιπτυχαῖσι δὴ / χέρας προσαρμόσασ’ ἐμοῖς / ἐν ἀγκῶσι τέκνα θῶμαι) (812–17). While Adrastus encourages the mothers to draw near, Theseus keeps them back from their sons, claiming that they would expire at the sight of the “changed” bodies (ὄλοιντ’ ἰδοῦσαι τούσδ’ ἂν ἠλλοιωμένους). Adrastus confirms that “blood and wounds of corpses are a bitter sight” (πικρὰ γὰρ ὄψις αἷμα κὠτειλαὶ νεκρῶν) (944–45), echoing the chorus’ words earlier. After all the urgency that the mothers voiced over embracing their dead, they are now told that they will get to hold only ashes, once the corpses have been burned on a group pyre. More than that, their energetic yearning to clutch these bloody bodies is now abruptly blocked by the claim that they are too weak to stand even the sight.70

68

On the virgin as an aesthetic object (ἄγαλμα), see Scodel (1996). The manuscript is corrupt here; see Diggle (1981: 18–21). 70 See Whitehorne (1986: 69–72) on the interweaving of public and private funeral rituals and the Athenian background. Although it is tempting to see this management of the bodies and blocking of the mothers’ desires as merely male rational control of female emotion and excess, Theseus also represents a more restrained Athenian mode, in the face of Argive immoderation. This is the case from the outset of the play, as embodied first by Adrastus, who lies prone, weeping, and groaning in grief at the temple doors (21–23). 69

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Throughout the action of the play, the chorus of suppliant women sustain this embodied, affectively concentrated despair, emphasizing the loss of children as physical absence, absence of life, and the life that remains as blighted (δυσαίων), as the weightless wandering of a cloud driven by cruel winds (955–62). Tears, they say, are all that they have left; keepsakes of their sons (e.g., locks of hair) lie sadly at home, and they are alone with their mourning bodies, “awakened at dawn by their own wailing and drenching with tears the folds of their gowns that cover their chests [πρὸς στέρνῳ πτύχα τέγξω]” (971–79). Their song is particularly striking for its implication that far worse than seeing their slain loved ones is the utter absence of embodiment, even in its bits and pieces. Since Theseus has held the mothers back from the corpses, as too awful to look upon (941–45), the affective crisis is complete. They cannot behold or touch the dead; and their own bodily expressions and sensations are felt as barely human (e.g., living as a wandering cloud), alienated (e.g., awoken by their own wails), and lodged in sorry materials—lost or sodden remnants that offer no protection or comfort (e.g., locks of hair, drenched clothing). i. Evadne on Fire. Enter Evadne, in the scene with which I introduced this study. She emerges somewhere above the stage, as if on a crag of the acropolis that overhangs Demeter’s temple, preparing to jump onto her husband’s funeral pyre.71 Commentators have argued over where this could be, since although the conventional spot would be a platform above the scene building, some have felt that it would be too disturbing for her to occupy the same place as Athena in the dea ex machina that ends the play.72 From the perspective of my analysis, however, this is precisely where she should be, as her enactment of a perverse extreme of wifely dedication and her aim to surpass all women in virtue render her less noble than arrogant and misguided. She thus takes up a lofty position to which she has no claim and carries out a suicidal leap in the face of protests from her aged father Iphis, to his ruin.73 Add to this that she is dressed as if for a festival or indeed a marriage, an outfit that puzzles the heart-broken Iphis. As an aesthetic spectacle Evadne thus contrasts sharply with the other Argive women, in almost every regard except for the lyric meter and sheer affective intensity.74 She first refers to the sun shining bright on a special day and to running nymphs (990–93); she then directly invokes her wedding, in contrast to which she now comes rushing in as a

71 Capaneus has a separate pyre and a prepared tomb, since he was killed by Zeus’ thunderbolt (934–38). Where this is on or off stage is another puzzle, although most commentators place it somewhere behind the skēnē, so that Evadne’s actual death does not take place onstage and against convention (see Collard, Morwood ad 980–81). But the chorus claims to see both the tomb and the pyre, which suggests that the tomb could be onstage next to the temple and the pyre just offstage; cf. the deictics τάσδε (980) and τήνδε (1011), which indicate proximity (see Scullion 1994: 78 and n. 26). In any case extant tragedies do occasionally feature onstage deaths (e.g., Hippolytus, Alcestis, maybe Ajax). 72 See Collard (1975: 15–16); Morwood ad loc.; but contrast Rehm (1994: 111–12 with n. 10). 73 That said, I am not interested in entering into debates over the reconstruction of the original staging; my point is merely that the spatial patterning would be meaningful. Cf. Garrison 1995: 121–25, who likens Evadne’s claims to Capaneus’ hubris. 74 Although the text of Evadne’s song is quite corrupt, it is clear that she sustains the aeolic rhythm of the choral strophes that precede her entrance.

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bacchant (1001), hurrying to “share the light” of her husband’s pyre and tomb (1002– 03).75 She offers a challenge to the grieving mothers, namely that if “the sweetest death is to die together with dead loved ones” (1006–07), one ought to go ahead and make that happen.76 In the next strophe she expands on this in erotic terms, saying that she will mingle her body with her dear husband’s (σῶμά . . . πόσει συμμείξασα φίλῳ), placing her skin next to his (χρῶτα χροῒ πέλας θεμένα), and thereby entering Persephone’s bridal chamber (1019–22).77 Although scholars have pointed to conventional parallels between death and marriage imagery, they tend not to emphasize the erotic tenor of the scene, perhaps because of its disturbing proximity to necrophilia.78 In contrast to the mothers’ yearnings for affective connection to the dead—specifically, their expressions of wanting to see and touch their sons’ corpses—Evadne’s desire to join her husband in a fiery, skin-to-skin embrace seems purposefully pitched to unsettle any sense of her as noble in her wifely devotion. It is also of a piece with her bold and heartless claims to her father that in leaping onto the pyre she will outstrip all other women in piety (1061), as well as with her elaborate dress (cf. κοσμεῖς). This she proudly says “intends something famous,” as she is outfitted for a “novel deed” (πρᾶγμα νεοχμόν) (1054–57). The attention that Iphis’ questions draw to her visible costume redoubles the sense that her song encourages in relation to her body, of a misdirected aesthetics and erotics. In her vanity and headlong pitch at (self) violence, she resembles Electra and Hermione, although the context of funereal piety has influenced readers to the point that many give her a positive reception as the pious wife that she claims to be. But in fact the chorus of mothers calls her act “terrible” (δεινόν) and “over-bold” (or “reckless,” πάντολμον), indicating the affective distance between her desires for skin-to-skin contact and their own. The play ends with the enactment of this difference, as they embrace and, together with their grandsons, sing over the ashes of their dead.

3. Other Familial Groupings A handful of Euripides’ plays feature familial clusters that center more explicitly on physical contact and sheltering: Heracles, Children of Heracles, and Iphigenia in Aulis. All three plays pivot around child sacrifice and the need for sanctuary, but unlike some parallel scenes that foreground statues and altars (which I address in Chapter 6), these stage proximities and attachments as protection of the family group while also carrying

75

Cf. Antigone’s re-entrance in Phoenician Women. ἥδιστος γάρ τοι θάνατος  / συνθνήισκειν θνήισκουσι φίλοις. While the mothers may ask to be destroyed with their children, the desire to lie with the beloved dead tends to be voiced in tragedy by sisters with intense connections to their brothers (esp. Antigone, Electra). The distinction is subtle, but these sisters usually emphasize lying together or at least being together with loved ones, as with Evadne’s phrase συνθνήισκειν θνήισκουσι φίλοις; see further in Worman (2015). 77 Note Evadne’s emphasis on bodily proximity and skin, as well as her use of the verb συμμίγνυμι, which has sexual connotations. 78 See Seaford (1987: 121–22), as well as Collard, Morwood ad loc. Also Rehm (1994: 112). 76

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potential threats. So, for instance, Heracles’ physical intimacy with his family resonates with his violent potential, while Iphigenia’s closeness to her father only heightens the horror of the slaughter he contemplates. a. Megara and Heracles Attaching As Chapter  3 discusses in some detail, Euripides’ Heracles orchestrates a series of interconnected scenes featuring clothing and physical connections. Here I take a narrower look at a single pair of enacted images, both of which stage a significant “yoke” of bodies. In the first one, which takes place early in the play, Megara mourns over her children, since the tyrant Lycus is threatening them all with death and Heracles is nowhere to be seen. She and the children enter, as the chorus notes, in a huddle, Megara “dragging the children with trace-rope feet” (ὑπὸ σειραίοις / ποσὶν ἕλκουσαν τέκνα, 445–46) as if they were colts in training, with Amphitryon close behind.79 Megara opens what she takes to be her final speech by asking rhetorically where the executioner is and then turns to her children. “Oh children,” she exclaims, “we are led away as a sorry yoke of corpses [ζεῦγος οὐ καλὸν νεκρῶν], old men and the young and mothers all together” (454–55). She addresses them each in turn, describing the lives that were to have been theirs. But now all that is gone, as she says; while the children had formerly enjoyed wonderful marriage prospects, now they have the Fates as brides (νύμφας μὲν ὑμῖν Κῆρας) and she offers her tears as their marriage bath (δάκρυα λουτρά) (480–82). She wonders whom to press first to her breast, whom to fix with a kiss, whom to clasp (τίν᾽ . . . / πρὸς στέρνα θῶμαι; τῷ προσαρμόσω στόμα; / τίνος λάβωμαι;) (485–87). Then, with a strangely pastoral gesture that is nevertheless very much in keeping with the slightly skewed aestheticizing tenor of so many intimately affective scenes in Euripides’ plays, Megara wishes she were a “tawny winged” bee (ξουθόπτερος / μέλισσα), that she might gather together her laments from everywhere (συνενέγκαιμ᾽ἂν ἐκ πάντων γόους) and release them in one flood of tears (ἐς ἓν . . . ἀθρόον . . . δάκρυ, 489). This figurative turn together with the enactment indicated by her deliberations over kissing and clasping achieves its own clustering effect, an inhuman assemblage that is also common to Euripidean plotting. As Megara hovers over her children, lighting bee-like on one and then another, her simile and gestures both attach her to them in an embodied realization of the figure. Megara’s clinging and hovering are brought to a melancholy conclusion at the end of the play, when Heracles instructs Amphitryon to enwrap (περίστειλον) his family members for the tomb and lay the children on the breast (πρὸς στέρν᾽) and in the arms (ἐς ἀγκάλας) of their mother, a grouping Heracles terms a “sorry assemblage” (κοινωνίαν δύστηνον) (1360–63). Recalling the “yoking” Megara uses to capture her family’s clustering at the altar, Heracles now finds that he has “unyoked” himself (κἀποζεύγνυμαι, 1375) from his family in a manner that leaves him as if naked. In fact he seems to regard his children especially as having provided cover and connection, now replaced by

79

See Worman (1999b), also Holmes (2008).

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Theseus: “Stripped of my children,” he says, “I hold you as my child” (παίδων στερηθεὶς παῖδ᾽ὅπως ἔχω σ᾽ἐμόν, 1402), the precise recalculation indicating this second yoked deportment as reproducing the first but in reverse. As he then takes up his friend’s offer of physical assistance, he deems Theseus’ helping hand a “friendly yoke” (φίλιον ζεῦγμα, 1403) and they leave the stage in this manner, with Theseus leading Heracles offstage like the appendage (ἐφολκίδες, 1424) that his children formerly were to him (cf. 631). Here again the intersection of metaphor and enactment together fashion a dynamic assemblage, as the externalization of the figure “towing like a boat” has its realization in this final physical transfer of the hero from his family to his friend and from tower to towed. That the enactment of this coupling ends the drama suggests its power to cement visibly and haptically the stature of this new Athenian Heracles—no longer a family man but secured firmly to the one who will resurrect him in political guise. b. Grandfatherly Clusterings The accretion of coverings, bodies, and objects around the aged Iolaus, nephew and companion of Heracles, in Euripides’ Children of Heracles presents an arresting series of juxtapositions, sometimes violently orchestrated. The suppliant drama begins by foregrounding Heracles’ former friend as frail protector of his children together with Heracles’ mother Alcmene. Iolaus huddles onstage at the altar of Zeus at Marathon with the male children, while Alcmene sits inside the scene building behind (here the temple) with the girls, a gendered spatialization that he explains by saying, “We think it better that young girls not appear in public” (νέας γὰρ παρθένους αἰδούμεθα, 43). At the end of his prologue, he exclaims at the sight of an approaching herald from Argos, telling the children to take hold of his robes for protection (λαμβάνεσθ᾽ἐμῶν πέπλων, 48). The herald has come to drag the suppliants back to face death at the hands of Eurystheus, and he mocks Iolaus with the stoning that awaits him. Iolaus responds staunchly that the altar will protect him, at which the herald scoffs, “Do you want to make work for these hands of mine?” (βούλῃ πόνον μοι τῇδε προσθεῖναι χερί, 63), and knocks him off the altar.80 The chorus of Marathon citizens enters and cries out at the sight of the old Iolaus thus manhandled: “See the weak old man sprawled on the ground [ἐπὶ πέδῳ χύμενον]! O poor thing, by whom did you take this terrible tumble to the earth [ἐν γῇ πτῶμα δύστηνον πίτνεις]?” (75–76). Iolaus responds by calling upon them as Athenian citizens, emphasizing that he and his charges are being attacked (βιαζόμεσθα) and their suppliant garlands desecrated (στέφει μιαίνεται), even though they sit at Zeus’ altar, casting this as an insult to both the city and the gods (69–73).81 80

Note the emphasis on the violent hand (cf. κούδὲν βιαίῳ τῇδε χρήσομαι χερί, 106); see further in Chapter 2. Scholars have mostly focused on the political and pro-Athenian atmosphere of the play, comparing it with Euripides’ Suppliant Women especially (e.g., Mendelsohn [2002]) or situating it in relation to elements in contemporary politics (e.g., Roselli [2007]). While I highlight instead the proxemics and aesthetics that orient characters in relation to stage space and each other, it is important for understanding the politics of the aesthetics in this play and in Suppliant Women that this orchestration is calibrated in racialized terms (in Lape’s [2010] sense of that term). See further above (2c). 81

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In the ensuing action the chorus emphasizes this brutal gesture as evidence of the barbarity that marks Eurystheus’ regime (cf. 101–03, 111–13, 127–29). The herald responds that he is certainly within his rights as henchman of the Argive king and predicts dismissively that the chorus will be roundly abused by their fellow citizens if they defend such an old man—“essentially a tomb, a nothing” (τύμβου τὸ μηδὲν ὄντος, 167).82 Iolaus implores the chorus and the Athenian king Demophon (who has entered to hear their arguments in the conventional agōn) to stand by the suppliants, again calling upon them as Athenians and reminding them of Heracles’ many boons to Greece, so that “the whole of Greece is witness” (219). In return, he urges, his children ask of the citizens that they not be dragged off: ”Alas,” he says, “just look at them, look!” Thus he himself entreats the chorus, “wreathing” them (i.e., the chorus leader) with his arms (καταστέφω χεροῖν), to take the children “into their hands” (ἐς χέρας λαβεῖν) (224–28). That is, he seeks with suppliant embrace to effect a transfer of the clustered children from his hands to theirs. In response the citizens and Demophon pledge protection, Demophon raises Iolaus to his feet and fends off the Argive herald; while Demophon warns the herald not to try again to drag the suppliants from the altar, the chorus warns him not to strike the herald (270–71). Soon the children and the chorus are clasping hands in a group gesture of alliance (307–08). The scene stages a series of clustered groups and attaching deportments in ways that sharply contrast protective connection and violent separation.83 Demophon and the citizens swear that they will serve as safeguards and Iolaus responds that they will remain at the altar and temple until shelter can be found for them (i.e., until they can move from one protective enclosure to another, 344–47). But then Eurystheus returns with an army and the oracles demand the sacrifice of a young girl of noble birth to “Demeter’s daughter.”84 Iolaus, sustaining his conventional role as a mercurial old man quick to despair, exclaims in an emotional (and physical?) tailspin, “Where can we turn? Which god is still unwreathed [ἄστεπτος], which country’s sheltering wall [ἕρκος] have we not visited?” (440–41). Macaria, one of the girl children huddled inside the temple with Alcmene, comes to the rescue. She offers herself as the family’s savior and sacrifice, declaring boldly, “Lead me to where this body [σῶμα  . . . τόδε] must die, wreathe me with garlands [στεμματούτε], . . . this soul [ἥδε . . . ψυχή] is ready and willing” (528–29). She only requests of Iolaus that she die in his arms (σῇ γὰρ ἐνθάνειν χερί) and he stand by to cover her body (πέπλοις δὲ σῶμ᾽ ἐμὸν κρύψων παρών (560–61). When Iolaus shrinks from this as well, the girl requests women, also sketching a protective scheme for the children and Alcmene that mirrors her desire to be covered and in caring arms (577–87). Macaria exits (both stage and plot) and Iolaus collapses, asking the children to take him and prop him by the altar (λάβεσθε κἀς ἕδραν μ᾽ ἐρείσατε) and cover his head with

82

On tombs and “tombs” see further in Chapter 4 (2c.iii). Again, see Chapter 2 on the imagery and affective dynamics of manhandling and its opposite (i.e., protective touch). 84 I.e., the Athenian cult name: Persephone is called Korē at Eleusis (see Foley 1994). 83

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“these robes” (πέπλοισι τοῖσδε κρύψαντες κάρα) (602–04, cf. 48–49). But then when the army arrives, he leaves his huddle with the children under his old man’s robes and turns to the temple for alternate shelter, enjoining his servant to bring him some of the arms that hang there (695–99). Both Alcmene and the servant regard this as ridiculous, given his aged and emotionally weakened state, and even the chorus leader characterizes his body as “all gone” (σῶμα δὲ φροῦδον, 703). Indeed, Iolaus is so feeble that he requires the servant to carry his armor to the battlefield, a detail that foreshadows disaster. And so does the fact that he needs leading, as he requests of the servant that he put the spear in his (right) hand, and let him rest his left forearm on his shoulder for guidance, an arrangement that prompts the servant to exclaim, “Must I child-lead [παιδαγωγεῖν] the warrior?” (729). They shuffle off the stage, Iolaus having exchanged his cluster of cloak and children for this new mobile assemblage, attached to a human guide who is carrying the armor that he should be wearing. But then, in a truly bizarre turn of events, a messenger returns from the field and reports to Alcmene that all is well, that in battle Iolaus’ body was transformed. He reports that when Iolaus saw Heracles’ son Hyllus about to head off in his chariot, he stretched out his right hand in entreaty (ὀρέξας ἱκέτευσε δεξιάν), mounted the chariot, and took the reins (λαβὼν δὲ χερσὶν ἡνίας). As he advances on Eurystheus he calls out for strength to Hebe (goddess of youth) and Zeus, at which two stars appear at the horses’ yoke, cloaking the entire chariot in a “murky cloud” (λυγαίῳ . . . νέφει). Out of this shadowy murk (ὄρφνης ἐκ δυσαιθρίου) Iolaus shows forth as a youth with impressive arms (βραχιόνων ἔδειξει ἡβητὴν τύπον) (854–58); in this new glorious form (cf. κλεινός) he then seizes Eurystheus’ chariot, binds his hands (δεσμοῖς τε δήσας χεῖρας), and leads him off as his war bounty (ἀκροθίνιον) (859–61). The reversal of fortune is thus staged by means of another set of transforming attachments, from Iolaus’ leaping into Hyllus’ chariot and grabbing the reins to his emergence from the cloud with shining body, and then to his capture of Eurystheus and tying him up, rendering his enemy a new appendage as spoil of war. c. Intimate Iphigenia I return, finally, to Iphigenia and her familial intimacies. In Iphigenia in Aulis her attaching deportments and affective gestures, particularly as they focus on her father, serve as a central counterpoint to Clytemnestra’s, who keeps her distance from Agamemnon. The scene depicting the exposure of Agamemnon’s plan to sacrifice Iphigenia orchestrates an arresting series of bodily interactions and assemblages. Clytemnestra enters first and then at her husband’s request calls out to Iphigenia to emerge, bringing the baby Orestes with her in the folds of her robe (χὑπὸ τοῖς πέπλοις) (1115–19). As she and her mother now know the plot, her changed countenance prompts Agamemnon to exclaim, “Child, why are you crying and no longer looking happy, fixing your eyes on the ground [ἐς γὴν δ᾽ἐρείσας ὄμμα] and covering them with your cloak [πρόσθ᾽ἔχεις πέπλους]?” She does not reply, but the indications of her expression and deportment, with the infant folded to her breast and her bent head and shaded eyes, 203

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suggest that her presence onstage sets her up as the central physical and emotional pivot in the scene. Clytemnestra then charges Agamemnon directly with planning to kill their child and when he equivocates she begins an angry speech by reminding him that she was married to him by force, since he slew her first husband Tantalus and murdered their child. Thus he has already committed violence against a child of hers, dashing this earlier one to the ground (προσούδισας) after brutally tearing it from her breast (μαστῶν βιαίως τῶν ἐμῶν ἀποσπάσας) (1148–52). She soon moves on to her new calamity, reminding Agamemnon of his three daughters and the son in Iphigenia’s arms, to which she gestures (cf. παῖδά σοι / τόνδ᾽, 1164–65), as she asks what reason he could possibly give for killing this other child. She envisions herself back at home, gazing on Iphigenia’s empty chair and bedchamber, weeping in solitude and addressing her in her absence (1171–79). She wonders what reception he should receive from them all, especially whether he can expect to embrace his children (προσπέσοις) upon his return, whether they will even look at him (προσβλέψεται) once he has killed one of them, accusing him of holding his scepter and generalship more dear (1191–95). Again, throughout all of Clytemnestra’s tracings of fond familial contact and its inverse, there her eldest daughter stands, weeping and holding Orestes in her arms. Iphigenia does not disappoint. In an arresting use of deportment and proxemics, she enters into an intimate supplication of Agamemnon, her postures and gestures recalling their fond scene of greeting. She begins by saying that she has nothing to offer but her tears and then throws herself upon him, exclaiming “In supplication I attach to your knees this body of mine [γονάσιν ἐξάπτω / ἐμὸν τόδε σῶμα], which you bore” (1216–17). She reminds him of their past embraces, when she sat in his lap and hung on his beard (περὶ σὸν ἐξαρτωμένης / γένειον), which she now grasps once again (οὗ νῦν ἀντιλάζυμαι χερί) (1226– 27). She pleads with him to give her one final fond glance and embrace (βλέψον πρὸς ἡμᾶς ὄμμα δὸς φίλημά τε, 1238) as a keepsake; and when he does not respond, she turns to a novel move, holding up the baby Orestes to supplicate him with her. “Brother,” she cries, “you are a tiny ally [ἐπίκουρος], but still weep with me [συνδάκρυσον] and beg Father not to kill your sister!” She continues, “Look, he pleads with you in silence—yes, by your beard we two fond hearts beseech you [ναί, πρὸς γενείου ἀντόμεσθα δύο φίλω]” (1245–47).85 Iphigenia’s supplication thus choreographs a singular familial assemblage, as sister and by extension baby brother cling to the body of their father.86 It also offsets in 85

Again, handling Orestes is a theme in various plays, from Electra’s fondling “his” urn in Sophocles to tending him while ill in Euripides. Cf. Godde (2000: 83–86) on the accompanying vocal gestures, especially the invocation of Orpheus (IA 1211–14). 86 Iphigenia’s second speech is a jolting reversal, what many critics view as a noble change of heart, although from the prospect of this discussion it serves to dislodge utterly Iphigenia’s position at the center of the family group and thus makes little sense in affective terms. When she moves from reattaching herself to her father in intimately intertwining supplication to offering her body (σῶμα) “to Greece,” she reverses in a flash her status as a virgin daughter fully imbedded in her family and if anything overly attached to her father. Νote also that Iphigenia uses the word sōma, as does Heracles in Women of Trachis when he asks Hyllus to care for his corpse (1194, 1197, cf. 1210). This may indicate a distance between speaker and body, as if the latter had become public property before its actual offering up as a corpse. Contrast Polyxena in Hecuba, who uses demas when speaking bitterly of her preference for a noble death (368).

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spectacular fashion the image with which I opened this chapter: the fond embrace between father and daughter with Helen and Troy (effectively) between them. Here too Helen is ever-present; Clytemnestra holds her wayward sister accountable for their familial disaster and then Iphigenia demands as she hangs from her father’s beard, “What have I to do [τί μοι μέτεστι] with the marriage of Alexander and Helen?” (1236–37).87 She may well ask, as Iphigenia like so many others has this uniquely absent presence to thank for the threat to her life. My survey of these plays suggests that the representational strategies highlighted above are quite dominant in Euripidean tragedy. In fact, I think a case can be made for their centrality not only to Euripides’ aesthetic tactics but also to identifying and exposing differences between the dynamic assemblages that he unfolds versus those more prominent in the dramas of his fellow tragedians. For instance, while the imagery and enactment of touching and handling is quite prominent in Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, once the king is blind and in need of this sensory supplement, those dramas and others such as his Electra do not stage what I would call aesthetic crises around the dressing or undressing of female bodies, as well as their pleated surface effects and elastic extensions, as Euripides’ tend to do. The connecting, stripping, enfolding, or extending of female forms pitched between sex and violence or death bring to the fore the aesthetic frictions building in his dramas, precipitating reactions and heightened sensitivity to the attractions and terrible vulnerabilities of bodies, as well as their capacities for encouraging vanity, misdirection, and delusion. Aeschylus’ baroque choreographing of bodies and materials certainly influenced Euripides’ focus on these as odd objects, as grotesque or barely human assemblages and extensions, while his sustained emphasis in his plays on the affective and aesthetic experiences that happen up close to the body’s edges (e.g., from clothing and prosthesis to manhandling and death), furthers a sense nascent in Aeschylus that an eroticism bordering on the obscene may attend tragic female embodiment. The Euripidean scenes that I highlight here all work like this, tracing intimate sensory contact by means of baroquely orchestrated, sometimes contradictory, often perverse details of attaching, posturing, and draping (or the reverse). These intricate machinations both encourage and frustrate the sensory and emotional intensities so central to the tragic idiom. That all such scenes have female choruses that enact, often together with a primary female character, the onstage engagement with and/or reception of affective dynamics also seems essential to understanding how the dramas layer aesthetic and emotional reaction and response as a gendered experience, redoubling emphasis on the erotically charged sensorium that Euripides’ dramas orchestrate. A further point in conclusion concerns the question of whether we ought to regard Euripides’ close focus on female embodiment as usefully illuminating of the ways in 87

Cf. the striking imagery of Iphigenia’s memories of her impending slaughter in Iphigenia in Tauris that I mention in passing in Chapter 2. There she describes her leave-taking for “marriage” and subsequent begging at her father’s knee as he raises his sword (359–63).

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which Deleuze and Guattari theorize bodies and assemblages. If I am right to regard Euripides’ mimetic strategies as fostering the apprehension of disruptive unfoldings, transformative ligatures, and proliferating assemblages, then like those of our modern theorists they cannot be understood as simply coercive or closing on a moral or political message, despite the fact that dominant gender hierarchies endure. Moreover, since this is Euripides, the possibility remains that this shaking up of affective experiences, this disturbance of the skin, fosters its own novel perversions, an aberrant politics of aesthetics that resists the settled, balanced unities of conventional embodiments and their plottings.

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CHAPTER 6 MYSTERIOUS OBJECTS: CORPSES, GHOSTS, STATUES

The pleasure of knowing always accommodates itself to the striking absence of its object . . . Nothing will upset the law of this pleasure . . . not even—especially not—the horror, ugliness, and unbearable obscenity of the imitated thing. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology” Derrida’s essay explores, in his typically associative and elliptical fashion, how metaphor operates in philosophical texts, but he has some provocative things to say about tragedy in the richly detailed footnote from which this quotation comes. There he also remarks, “[W]hen mimetic ellipsis is in play, Oedipus, the serpent, and parricide are not far off.”1 In the essay more generally he addresses mimesis and metaphor in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric as likenesses that always indicate what is lost, suppressed, out of bounds, the pursuit of which is pleasurable for audiences. This captures at least one aspect of how tragic effects operate; and as the quotation anticipates, further on in this same footnote, Derrida quotes Aristotle’s point in the Poetics that even when tragedy imitates corpses, the likeness brings pleasure (1448b10–12). For Derrida, however, this pleasure is mysterious, because figurative movement always edges on loss and the possibility of (frightening) return. While Aristotle argues that tragic pleasures come from the precision of likenesses, Derrida thinks that there is something about likeness itself that gives the pleasure, and it is an eerie one.2 As I note in the Prologue, “life-like” also suggests its opposite or reverse: the inanimate or the undead, the corpse that will not give up its life force or the object that itself has agency and power. Tragedy homes in on the edge that likeness reveals between the figurative and the actual, the human and not, the living and the dead. Tragedy’s mimesis constantly balances on this edge, revealing its operations even as they remain elusive, as well as simultaneously horrific and pleasurable. As I note in Chapter 2, Kristeva has suggested that the abject borders on this strange pleasure, generated as its affective dynamics are by attraction to and disgust at the barely conscionable yet compelling outcast object—and again, one of her favorite examples is the dilapidated Oedipus.3 Kristeva regards Oedipus at the end of Oedipus the King as most importantly

1

Derrida ([1972] 1982: 239–40n. 243). Derrida ([1972] 1982: 207–71). In fact this notion of eerie likeness may also respond to Aristotle’s definition of tragic pleasure as “pleasure from pity and fear through mimesis” (τὴν ἀπὸ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου διὰ μιμήσεως, Poet. 1453b12). 3 Kristeva ([1980] 1982: 99–105). See also Ahmed (2004: 86–87). 2

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what Creon terms him: a figure of pollution whose blinding both masks his transgression and affirms its necessary cauterization. One question that I flag in the Prologue to this study and that has been hovering at the edges of my own discussion may well be finally in order now: what, if anything, do such affective dramas have to do with notions of the sublime? A number of modern theorists share an attention to the tragic effects that Edmund Burke described as “delightful horror,”4 but they also tend to regard the tragic sublime and aesthetics more generally as invented in the modern period, a difficulty for anyone attempting to come to terms with the strange pleasures of tragic bodies.5 For Adorno as for others after him (e.g., Lyotard, Eagleton) any critique of the sublime must take into account that its history originates with Kant, Burke, and the formulation of aesthetics as the study of beauty in art. In contrast to this emphasis on the sublime as a purely modern phenomenon are those who regard the eighteenth century’s obsession with Longinus’ critical treatise On the Sublime as reawakening attention to a more general human awareness of art’s powerful transports and/or of aesthetics more broadly construed as sensual experience.6 In the Prologue I remark on the fact that Aristotle treats psychagogia, or “soul leading,” as central to tragic effect (e.g., Poet. 1450a33–35), an emotional transport that should be achieved through plotting, although he also acknowledges that visual effects may be thrilling or shocking in this way (1450b17).7 In what follows I address such experiences in particular relation to the figuring and staging of entities in tragedy that shadow the human body, suggesting what it could be or become, including corpses and live humans that approximate or are proximate to corpses, as well as animals, statues (including divine instantiation in icons), ghosts, playthings, carrion. As with much of the other imagery considered in this study, interactions with such strange or grim and yet proximate objects most often occur at the edges of human life and experience, a realm of eeriness and doubling settled in close to dreams, specters, and monstrous others. At the same time the strongly gendered familial dynamics of some pivotal scenes inflect the emotional unease that attends them with psychic recoil, as mothers haunt sons and sisters seek to lie down with brothers or other wrong objects of affection (e.g., a mother’s husband, as with Euripides’ Electra). Unsurprisingly, each of the three main dramatists pursues these effects by different means, in keeping with their distinctive stylistic registers. In the Oresteia, for instance, Aeschylus foregrounds corpses as precipitating ominous figurations that are forcefully manipulated by and/or have powerful effects on those who view them. The first two plays

4

Burke ([1767] 1958: 73). Adorno ([1970] 1990: 6–15); Eagleton (1989: 53–62); also Rancière, ([2000] 2004: 22–25); Ray (2005: 4–5). 6 See, e.g., Amfreville (2004: 8–20). Note that Eagleton argues that the sublime originates as a “discourse of the body,” although he locates this origin in the seventeenth century (1989: 53); see also Eagleton (1990: 13). 7 See Halliwell (2011: 230); he is thinking of the verb phrittein (Po. 1453b5); and even the ever-elusive notion of catharsis may have some place here. Cf. Holmes (2008: 231–81); she illuminates the mysteries of heroic embodiment and suffering as a site of uncertainty and fascination (242–44). Also Segal on what he romantically terms the “tangled undergrowth and dim forests of the soul” (1985b: 14). 5

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offer an arresting collection of corpses, with both Clytemnestra and Orestes commanding tableaus on the rolling platform flanked by and interacting with their victims, while the final play brings onstage a ghost, demons, and icons that draw divinities to the scene. Persians also includes a ghost rising up from the tomb, while Suppliant Women frames the chorus of fifty female foreigners as barely human, descended from and likened to calves, as well as potentially decorative extensions of the statues to which they cling for sanctuary. At the end of this chapter, I discuss the fact that Sophocles’ extant dramas spend less time on statues or ghosts than on moribund bodies, those like Philoctetes and Electra whose “bare life” (to invoke Agamben) renders them closer to animals or “nothings,” wisps and shadows of their former selves. These plays are, accordingly, more concerned with the metaphors that indicate the disturbing, elusive qualities of heroic bodies on the edges of the human, including Oedipus at the end of his life. Thus while corpses in his version are barely present, in their place the living emphasize their moldering, tattered, or “eaten” states and their existential proximity to the dead. As such they often serve as allies or proxies for corpses and may seek out quasi-erotic relations to them. Thus the necrophilic cast of some of these proximities seems purposefully disruptive of affective ties, arousing disgust and recoil at the palpably abject. As Chapter 5 should lead us to expect, Euripides combines all of these effects, and so discussions of his plays are scattered across the different sections. Central characters in plays such as Helen, Andromache, Hecuba, Electra, and Alcestis focalize unsettling figurative and staging tactics that encourage a creeping awareness of perverse attractions to the edges of life and doubles for the human. These include ghosts, statues, corpses as playthings, gestures that make for trade-offs between living and dead, human and not. Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ dead exert unnerving holds over the live viewers of their bodies, while Sophocles’ undead heroes are also presences that are difficult to assimilate or ignore, with their sullied appearances, harsh regards, and chilling senses of figurative and literal margins. This chapter thus explores the different ways in which such odd bodies operate as sublime and uncanny objects, attracting the living into confrontation with their strange pleasures and stimulating aesthetic and affective reactions central to tragic mimesis. One recurrent dynamic that binds human and object in ways overshadowed by ritual and ideas about divine inhabitation is that of suppliant and sanctuary. In a number of the plays that I analyze here, a character (or, in the case of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, a twelve-member chorus representing the fifty daughters of Danaus) seeks refuge at an altar, statue or statues, or temple in ways that call attention to their barely human embodiments. While Chapter  5 focuses on suppliant groupings, extensions, and prostheses, this discussion highlights where bodies and statues bear a proxy relation to each other, exchanging places or doubling. I take up this dynamic in the third section, reserving second place for ghosts and stand-ins, and first place for the Oresteia and its uniquely influential orchestration of humans, creatures, and objects at the intersection of enactment and figuration.

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1. Creatures and Demons in Aeschylus As Chapter 4 points out but does not explore very extensively, Aeschylus’ Oresteia is full of ominous creatures and objects, most of which hover in the offing in Agamemnon, pull up close to Orestes in Libation Bearers, and precipitate out onto the stage in Eumenides. They are also fairly well entangled throughout, even if the final play does at least appear to engage in a careful separating of father-human-gods on the one side and mothercreature-demons on the other. While the demon Erinyes are anomalous creatures, somewhere between god and monster, and thus most worthy of detailed study in this section, the trilogy also situates other characters in significant proximities to them and to the dead. They include the wild-eyed Cassandra, who reads the deadly future and past as if on the façade of the house of Atreus in Agamemnon, as I explore in Chapter 5 in relation to proliferation and assemblage. Here I focus instead on the monstrous images associated with Clytemnestra that continue to surface throughout the trilogy, as well as Electra’s doggish and deadly presence in Libation Bearers. a. Cassandra and Others on Demons While Clytemnestra is busy killing her husband inside the palace, Cassandra tells the chorus outside that the “net of Hades” (δίκτυόν τί γ’ ᾍδου) is really a “wife trap” (ἄρκυς ἡ ξύνευνος) (1115–16). So here a specially sighted virgin stands in front of the scene building sketching past and future for the elders of Argos, who struggle to follow the ominous implications of her metaphors. When they hesitate over her meaning, she cries, “Look, look!” (ἰδοὺ ἰδού), as if she were also displaying a tableau to them; and then she offers another metaphor, that of the bull caught by his cow and struck down by her dark horn (τῆς βοὸς / τὸν ταῦρον· ἐν πέπλοισιν / μελαγκέρῳ λαβοῦσα μηχανήματι / τύπτει) (1125–28).8 At this the elders rear back in a horror that they explain by a metatheatrical gesture, exclaiming that art (technê) and its words when entangled with evils bring terror to those listening (1133–35). They are saying that what prophesy (and perhaps tragedy) does with its craft forges a combination of verbal and visual effects that is monstrously confounding to behold. In fact Cassandra and her prophesies together represent some frightening inversions: here the female cow has the deadly horn; meanwhile the young woman possesses the prophet’s power, by means of which she visualizes for the quaking old men the ominous inner architecture of the house of Atreus. Her commanding presence in the scene and her knowledge contrasts sharply with the ignorance and disorientation of the chorus, who stand affectively with the audience, watching and wondering at the mysteries she indicates. The chorus extrapolates from Cassandra’s obscurely terrifying images as best they can, responding to the “net of Hades” by asking what Fury she is calling forth from

8

See Bennett Anderson (1932), Goheen (1955), Lebeck (1971); and cf. Chapter 5 (2a). Cf. Mueller (2016: 60–63) on the richness of the tapestry imagery.

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the house (1119–20) and worrying over this grim image in a striking example of haptic association, even though they do not understand. Startled and confused by the portents, they pair their “pallid-dripping” hearts (ἐπὶ δὲ καρδίαν ἔδραμε κροκοβαφὴς / σταγών) with dripping wounds from a spear (δορὶ πτωσίμοις) and the end of life (1120–24). Similarly, when Cassandra cries out at Paris’ fateful marriage, her lost home river Scamander, and her death soon to come, they reply that they are “struck by a bloody bite” (πέπληγμαι δ᾽ὑπαὶ δήγματι9 φοινίῳ) as they listen to her whimpering and screaming (μινυρὰ κακὰ θρεομένας) over her painful fate (1164–66). The chorus’ language again suggests not only that they are feeling with her but also sensing something else right there before them that they cannot quite see: the demons that haunt the family, or the family members as demons. Indeed, as Chapter 5 explores (section 2a), Cassandra throws up many monstrous images for the chorus to struggle over, most of which focus on Clytemnestra and her Furies. In Cassandra’s telling, not only do these Furies sing a bloody song, sitting like bats in the rafters of the family halls (1186–93), but Clytemnestra herself is a demon from the depths or a hellish maternal figure (1232–36). i. Demon Feeding. Cassandra’s human–creature conflations and the chorus’ approximating affections in Agamemnon come to horrifying life in Libation Bearers featuring another charged enjambment of body parts, as well as image and enactment, that anticipates the display of the maternal breast as riveting material sign. After the extended kommos, Electra leaves the stage and Orestes enters into a conversation with the chorus in which they relay Clytemnestra’s dream of nursing at her breast a “little monster” (νεογενὲς δάκος) that drew a clot of blood along with the milk (ἐν γάλακτι θρόμβον αἵματος σπάσαι) (530–33). In response to this Orestes declares that he and the creature come from the same place (τὸν αὐτὸν χῶρον), that its jaws “gaped around the breast that was my nourisher” (μαστὸν ἀμφέχασκ’ ἐμὸν θρεπτήριον) and mixed in the “dear milk” with the clot (θρόμβῳ τ᾽ἔμειξεν αἵματος φίλον γάλα). Since, he says, Clytemnestra reared this “frightful monster” (ἔκπλαγον τέρας), she must die; and having “turned serpent” (ἐκδρακοντωθεὶς) he, Orestes, will kill her (543–50).10 While the chorus of women responds positively to this reading of Clytemnestra’s dream, declaring, “I choose you as portent-reader [τερασκόπον]” (551), it is worth emphasizing how disturbing the role conflation is from an affective and aesthetic standpoint. There is something desirous and yet sinister in the way the son asserts himself as his mother’s little monster in order to take up his rightful position at her breast, as if he must get back there, close to her, and sink in his murderous “teeth.” The

9

Or by a bloody monster, as some editors write δάκει (e.g., Weir Smyth [1922]). On Orestes’ role, see Roberts (1985); on this and other creaturely images in these plays, see e.g. Goheen (1955), Zeitlin (1965), Lebeck (1971), Carne-Ross (1981), Heath (1999). Cf. Abbattista (2018) for a post-human reading of lion imagery in particular. 10 On the demon-interpreter conjunction, see esp. Roberts (1985); on Clytemnestra as nursing mother, see Marshall (2017b), citing Sophocles, Electra 589–90 and Euripides’ Electra 60–63; on the relation of the image to Hecuba’s breast-baring in Homer, see O’Neill (1998).

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vision itself, of a small and fiendish Orestes affixed to the breast of his equally fiendish mother, clinches the two of them paired with their monstrous doubles (serpent and serpent) as well as with each other (serpent to serpent). So it is that when mother and son face each other later in the action, what should be an intimate, piteous moment is disrupted by this bestial entanglement, as well as by all the indications of the violent inclinations mother and son share. Just before this scene, as Orestes and Pylades are entering with swords drawn, Clytemnestra yells, “Quick, someone bring me a man-killing axe [ἀνδροκμῆτα πέλεκυν]!” (889), envisioning a pitched battle with her own offspring. As she has realized in an instant that she is facing her murderous son, she bares her breast to him, recalling his time there “drowsing and sucking out the nourishing milk with [his] gums” (βρίζων ἅμα  / οὔλοισιν ἐξήμελξας εὐτραφὲς γάλα, 897–98). At this glimpse of maternal intimacy Orestes hesitates to nestle in again, this time with violence, arrested as he is by the sight of his mother’s bared breast. With Pylades’ support he quickly recovers, forcing Clytemnestra to reread the tender scene of the nursing infant as her serpent son come home to kill her: “Ah me,” she cries, “I have born and nourished this serpent here!” (οἲ ’γώ, τεκοῦσα τόνδ’ ὄφιν ἐθρεψάμην, 928). Like mother, like son, then: in the Agamemnon Cassandra, wavering as did Orestes over how to pinpoint the monstrous figure that she perceives (1232–33), uses this same word (dakos) of Clytemnestra (1232). Although Clytemnestra at the end warns Orestes that her own “dogs” (i.e., the Erinyes) will pursue him (ὅρα, φύλαξαι μητρὸς ἐγκότους κύνας, Cho. 924), he and Pylades march her into the palace to her death. b. Dogs and the Dead Libation Bearers is not really an Electra play, since her character quickly cedes the ground to Orestes’ ominous dance with his mother. She speaks her final lines of the play at 509 (or, if still speaking in counterpoint with Orestes, at 507), carefully marking them as such for her dead parent (“Hear also this final cry, father,” καὶ τῆσδ’ ἄκουσον λοισθίου βοῆς, πάτερ, 500). Her exit precipitously closes off her powerful presence in the first third of the play, suspending a force that the later dramatists develop. They center the action on Electra and her relationships to brother and mother, taking off in different directions from the sister’s dominant role in the intertwined sibling dynamics established early on in Libation Bearers. All three poets dramatize Orestes’ need of Electra’s motivational drive and at least two (Aeschylus and Euripides) indicate the brother’s greater vulnerability to his mother’s powerful grip on circumstances and her children both.11 In this section I take up the character inflections of Aeschylus’ portrayal of Electra that are most influential—namely, those that associate her with corpses and the edges of human inhabitation and thus that anticipate Sophocles’ depiction of her character. She enters in Aeschylus’ play in a hesitant mode, asking the chorus of slave women for instruction in how to pray at her dead father’s tomb. Her options, as she sees them, are

11

See further below, section 4a; and cf. again O’Neill (1998), Nooter (2012: 101–23), also Wright (2005b).

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either to speak some empty but respectful words or to match her father’s silent and dishonored state (cf. σῖγ’ ἀτίμως, 96) and simply pour out the libation “like someone throwing out trash” (καθάρμαθ’ ὥς τις ἐκπέμψας, 98). She regards hers a bitter choice; and this sense of exile and outrage only mounts further in the brief onstage drama she orchestrates around her father’s tomb. After Orestes reveals himself to Electra, they and the chorus sing an extraordinary extended lament in which she indicates more emphatically the brutal edge that her slavish and banished life has given her character. Her antistrophes, which respond to Orestes’ initially milder prayers, accelerate from a focus on grief and the tomb (332–39) to a wish that her father had died at Troy (363–71)—the latter so ferociously expressed that the chorus first recoils and then takes up her tone, declaring that soon the whip will come down (ἀλλὰ διπλῆς γὰρ τῆσδε μαράγνης / δοῦπος ἱκνεῖται, 375–76). In her next verse Electra expands on this brutal turn, asking when Zeus will throw down his “two-sided strong” fist and smash enemy heads (καὶ πότ’ ἂν ἀμφιθαλὴς / Ζεὺς ἐπὶ χεῖρα βάλοι, / . . . κάρανα δαΐξας;, 394–96). She declares her heart raw like the wolf and from a savage mother (λύκος γὰρ ὥστ’ ὠμόφρων ἄσαντος ἐκ / ματρός ἐστι θυμός, 421–22) and then addresses her mother as “all-daring” (πάντολμε μᾶτερ, 430), which precipitates a murderous outcry from Orestes (438) and a visceral detail of Agamemnon’s murder from the chorus (i.e., hobbling under the arms, 439–40). To this Electra responds (444–49), You speak of my father’s fate; but I stood apart, dishonored, worth nothing, cordoned off in a back room like a vicious dog; and I heaved up tears more readily than laughter, pouring out my weeping lamentation in secret. λέγεις πατρῳον μόρον· ἐγὼ δ’ ἀπεστάτουν ἄτιμος, οὐδὲν ἀξία, μυχῳ δ’ ἄφερκτος πολυσινοῦς κυνὸς δίκαν ἑτοιμότερα γέλωτος ἀνέφερον λίβη χέουσα πολύδακρυν γόον κεκρυμμένα. She thus asserts her fate as somehow parallel to that of her dead father’s, emphasizing her “nothing” status and bedimmed, dehumanized, and dampened state, a borderland physicality that becomes a signature feature of her character, as the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides indicate.12 Her abrupt shift from hesitant mourner who needs instruction to the keenest voice of revenge gives this scene its fearsome focus and precipitous pitch, as Electra, Orestes, and the chorus send their voices down into the earth’s depths and up to Zeus on high. The chorus registers this alarming tenor toward the end of their song, “A tremor creeps over me as I listen to their bold prayers” (τρόμος μ’ ὑπέρπει κλύουσαν εὐγμάτων, 463). With some trepidation, they highlight the brutal 12

See further below (4a and 4b).

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nature of revenge (e.g., αἱματόεσσα πλαγά, 468; δι’ ὠμὰν ἔριν αἱματηράν, 474) and address their song to the gods that lie beneath (μάκαρες χθόνιοι, 476). It is these divinities that exert the strongest pull in the play, as the Erinyes later flood Orestes’ vision and drive him to his own precipice, ultimately tipping him over into madness. Further, since Electra indicates that her strongest affinities lie with the dead and their earthly divinities, the pressures of this gendered association impinge on the action, with creaturely violence and corpses always threatening until Orestes’ sword is at his mother’s breast (896–98). Soon after the Furies rise up, as if excreted from her very body.

c. Dark Matters The Oresteia’s third play begins not only with a central stone (the omphalos in Apollo’s temple at Delphi) but also with a god (or two), a man dripping blood, a chorus of monsters, and a ghost. All held in dissolution, with a striking lack of contact or much sensory interaction of any kind among characters and objects. The Eumenides precipitates out onto the stage what had been hideously imbedded in the parental cloak with which Orestes tangles in Libation Bearers: blood, mother, Furies.13 The stone protects him from these for the moment; as Apollo’s proxy and therefore as (rather ironically) the paternal metonymy, it fulfills the role of tutelary icon usually played by temple statues. Orestes, we soon discover, must flee from stone to statue: Apollo orders him to Athens, to clutch Athena’s wooden image there (bretas, 80, 259, 409, 439, 446, 1024) and seek her aid in extricating himself from the Furies’ curse.14 Once in Athens the weird materialities of the blood, the monsters, and the statue become evident, as by synesthetic and animating imagery the Furies seek to throw up a barrier to the orderly court argument to come. When the Pythian priestess first witnesses the interior scene at Delphi, she recoils violently from the temple door, scrabbling on her hands and knees. She is horrified by the sight of a man seated on the omphalos, dripping blood from his hands, and especially of the monstrous creatures slumbering around him, which look to her so grotesque that she cannot find their like in all the world. While Orestes and the Furies share a certain disgusting surface, oozing gore from hands and eyes (40–42, 54), they are not contiguous, touching, or even really proximate; indeed, the fact that the Furies are sleeping sets them apart from the action at this early stage. When the ghost of Clytemnestra enters in order to spur her “dogs” to the hunt (cf. 131–32, e.g.), they mutter (117–29) in their sleep but do not awake, while Orestes is already up and gone.15 It is only in their pursuit that they manage to draw near: in the next scene they find that he has moved from one safe object to another, since now he clutches the wooden statue of Athena in Athens. Once again, however, the scene highlights the affective and sensory distances between the Furies and their target. They are, to be sure, envisioned 13

For an analysis of the role of clothing and assemblages in the trilogy, see further in Chapters 3 and 5. This is the statue of Athena Polias, housed in the old temple on the Acropolis (see Sommerstein ad loc.). 15 See Nooter (2017: chapter 5) on the Furies’ sounds/voices, Johnston (1999: 252–58) on their relation to blood. On the Furies’ drapery, see further in Chapter 3 (1a). 14

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as beasts in pursuit of their prey, the vibrancy of the spilled maternal blood is such that they smell it and even see this scent “smiling” (ὀσμὴ βροτείων αἱμάτων με προσγελᾷ, 253) at them. But their intimate, sticky sensory experiencing is opposed by Orestes’ claims to have cleansed his hands by ritual purification, such that even his actual grip on the statue will not sully it, or so he later claims (cf. 445–46). Thus while Orestes sits with his arms entwined around Athena’s image (περὶ βρέτει πλεχθεὶς θεᾶς ἀμβρότου), the wooden statue that they explicitly recognize as a “defense” (ἀλκάν) (258–59), the Furies envision a much closer, in fact a vampiric proximity, threatening to suck the ruddy gore from his living limbs (ἀντιδοῦνται δεῖ σ᾽ἀπὸ ζῶντος ῥοφεῖν  / ἐρυθρὸν ἐκ μελέων πέλανον) (264–66). This monstrous chorus then performs a binding song (ὕμνον  . . . δέσμιον, 306), in which they seek to assert the power of the maternal blood to entrap him (as the murderous cloak had threatened to do).16 They warn him that neither Apollo nor “the strength of Athena” (Ἀθηναίας σθένος) can protect him from becoming a “bloodless feast for demons” (ἀναίματον βόσκημα δαιμόνων) and a shadow (σκιάν)—indeed, they claim that he is “fattened and consecrated” to them (τραφείς τε καὶ καθιερωμένος), a “living feast” of their very own (ζῶν με δαίσεις) (299–305). From their perspective, then, the goddess’ wood should be no defense for the earth’s vampiric powers and by extension their own claims on his living flesh. This is because for them his hands are not clean; despite his assertions to the contrary, they still see and smell the blood and declare themselves “upright witnesses of the dead and supporting executioners” of it (μάρτυρες ὀρθαὶ τοῖσι θανοῦσιν παραγιγνόμεναι πράκτορες αἵματος, 316–20). Despite the quasi-institutional sound of this assertion, their song and dance is heavily weighted toward the blood-steeped earth and its shadowy depths, but their enactment of such sensory inhabitations in the end activates something like the opposite of what they had hoped. Athena, the living goddess herself, appears, rustling in on the “fold” of her aegis (ῥοιβδοῦσα κόλπον αἰγίδος, 404). Their pursuit thus ends in a face-off, with human and god fully separated out on the one side and monsters and materials held off on the other.

2. Ghosts and Eerie Doubles As the poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) explores to fantastically materializing effect in Helen in Egypt, the sisters Helen and Clytemnestra share more than a destructive capacity beyond the typically human.17 They both have physical extensions and phantom presences that for Clytemnestra redouble her forceful embodiment and for Helen render it elusive and spectral. Not only does the Oresteia treat the doggish Erinyes as essentially prostheses of Clytemnestra; but her ghost in Eumenides also possesses a startlingly

16 17

See Prins (1991). See further on H. D.’s elaborations in the Epilogue.

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concrete quality, as if she were such a livid potency that even dead she is more palpably present than others. Helen, in contrast, trails through tragedy a double story as well as a phantom, since the tale that Stesichorus made famous and that Euripides stages in Helen contends that only this ghost-form went to Troy. a. Clytemnestra and Other Ghosts Throughout the action of the Oresteia, Clytemnestra’s presence resonates, whether or not she is onstage and whether she is living or dead. Some of this resonance is achieved by her remarkably dominant, aggressive, and murderous stance in Agamemnon; but it comes about as well through a proliferation of proxy images and objects, which crowd this first play, gather intensely embodied focus in the cloak scene in Libation Bearers (discussed in Chapter 3), and in the final play emerge center stage as a strangely forceful ghost with a retinue of hellish creatures to command. While elsewhere I have emphasized Clytemnestra’s self-extensions in creaturely metaphors and actual creatures, here I consider her turn as a ghost and her presence in relation to other such spectral figures in tragedy. As I note in passing in Chapter 3, Clytemnestra’s ghost has a mysterious materiality, as she appears to haunt both the living and the dead. The latter hound her (cf. ὄνειδος, Eum. 97, μηνίεται, 101), she claims, because of her murderous act, while she wanders in disgrace (αἰσχρῶς δ᾽ἀλῶμαι, 98). She has suffered terribly at the mother-killing hands of Orestes and demands that the chorus of Furies (and by implication the audience) look upon the blows from him that lie next to her heart (ὁρᾶτε πληγὰς τάσδε καρδίᾳ ὅθεν). For, she declares, “the sleeping mind has clear vision” (εὔδουσα φρὴν ὄμμασιν λαμπρύνεται) (101–05). She has no one to avenge her and regrets the many offerings that the Furies “slurped up” from her (πολλὰ μὲν δὴ τῶν ἐμῶν ἐλείξατε) in their midnight feasting (νυκτίσεμνα δεῖπνα) (106–08). Now she cries, “Hear me, as I plead for my soul (τῆς ἐμῆς περὶ / ψυχῆς)—a dream, I, Clytemnestra, now call upon you!” (ὄναρ γὰρ ὑμᾶς νῦν Κλυταιμήστρα καλῶ) (114–16). Consider the layers of sensory and material presences here: Clytemnestra wandering, berated by her fellow corpses, suffering at the hands of her son, her body visibly wounded, calling upon creatures of the underworld to aid her in her revenge, as she recalls them lapping up her offerings. If we look at this scene from the prospect offered by my typical emphasis on visible embodiment, enactment, and figurative overlays, it eludes easy analysis. For instance, Clytemnestra appears to call out for the witnessing of her wounds by the audience, until in the next line she declares dream vision clearer than seeing while awake.18 Then she directly calls herself a dream, without the cushioning effect of simile, which unless it is to be taken as bold metaphor would encourage the sense that she appears to the audience as a figment of the Furies’ sleeping minds. While this dramatic strategy may seem conventional (cf. Shakespeare, e.g.), it is more distinctively framed

18

Note that this “look here” gesture is typical in tragedy with other characters or the chorus present (and awake).

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than the stagings of the few other ghosts in extant Greek tragedy. Add to this that the Erinyes themselves have an anomalous status, being inhuman underworld creatures who themselves haunt feverish dreams. A dream within a dream, and yet present onstage, demanding to be seen, including the visible blows to the heart.19 Compare the ghost of Darius in Aeschylus’ Persians by way of contrast, as well as that of Polydorus in Hecuba.20 When the chorus and Darius’ wife, the Persian queen Atossa, call upon him, he rises from his tomb and is seen by everyone onstage. In a treatment that makes him seem presently human and alive, if also unusually knowing and farsighted, he listens to the news of what has happened (the Persian army is in retreat) and advises his wife as to what to do. While the chorus of Persian elders invokes Darius by his royal gear—his yellow slippers (κροκόβαπτον εὔμαριν) and peaked crown (τιήρας φάλαρον) (659–62)—neither they nor he mention anything about his ghost body, engaging onstage as if he were a conventional character. The phantom Polydorus in Euripides’ Hecuba serves as a different kind of contrast to Clytemnestra: he opens the play, entering the stage alone and delivering the prologue only to the audience.21 Because he is alone, his status remains more spectral, lingering on the edge of the action, seen by no one but his mother in a night vision, and then turning up as a corpse mid-way through the drama. He identifies himself as his mother’s apparition, bereft of body and hovering about her head (ὑπὲρ μητρὸς φίλης / Ἑκάβης ἀΐσσω, σῶμ᾽ ἐρημώσας ἐμὸν, 30–31); and Hecuba tells the chorus that she has dreamed of her son (ἔννυχον ὄψιν, 72). Since both of these moments make clear that his manifestation in the prologue emanates from her sleeping mind, like Clytemnestra Polydorus is actually apprehended by no one within the enactment of the theatrical mimesis. Yet he has a less bizarre status as the wraith haunting his loving mother than does Clytemnestra’s furious apparition, which aims to hound the Furies awake by direct invocation, as of deities (which they are) or the dead. That is to say, Clytemnestra’s ghost unsettles the boundaries between living and dead, human and not, inverting the conventional means by which the living call upon gods or the dead. As a corpse herself, complete with visible wounds, she ought not to be possessed of this living human capacity, even given the ancient belief that those who have died keep the physical forms that they inhabited while alive. Since the Furies are themselves creatures of the night, the earth, and the dead, Clytemnestra already operates within their realm, calling ghost to ghost in a darkened world.

19 So Edgar Allan Poe: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” (“A Dream Within a Dream,” 1849). See also Johnston (1999: Chapter 5) on female ghosts in Greek culture. 20 See Rosenbloom (2006b); also Carpanelli (2012: 103–12), who emphasizes the role of the chorus in setting up and calling forth Darius’ ghost. While we could consider Helen’s eidolon in Euripides’ Helen as well, it exists only in the diegesis and thus is less useful here; see further in the following section (2b). 21 On this ghost, see Foley (2015: 35–36); on its staging, see Jouanna (1982) versus Lane (2007).

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b. Helen’s Weird Materials In Virginia Woolf ’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” when she quotes a line in Greek from a chorus of the Agamemnon, she deems its meaning “on the far side of language” and does not translate it.22 The line she chooses itself resonates with the awfulness of the barely grasped and gone: “All Aphrodite is lost in the eyes’ blank gaze” (ὀμμάτων δ᾽ἐν ἀχηνίαις  / ἔρρει πᾶσ᾽Ἀφροδίτα, 418–19). The chorus of Argive elders sing this in reference to Helen, who could be said to be the source of much Greek tragedy, since she is depicted by Homer but even more pointedly by the tragic dramatists as the cause of the Trojan War and thus to blame for countless deaths of Greek heroes. The choral imagery adumbrates her absence from Sparta and her husband Menelaus’ pain at the empty impressions of her form—now vanished from the bed—and statues that remain to haunt him with her likeness. The lines before and after the ones Woolf quotes are much like what they describe (414–26): In the longing for her gone across the sea, a phantom will seem to rule the halls; and the grace of statues is hateful to the husband; in the eyes’ blank gaze all Aphrodite is lost. Mournful dream-visions come seeming to bear vain delight; for in vain when someone thinks he sees the sight, slipping through his hands, is gone, at once it wings away along pathways of sleep. πόθῳ δ᾽ὑπερποντίας φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν· εὐμόρφων δὲ κολοσσῶν ἔχθεται χάρις ἀνδρί· ὀμμάτων δ᾽ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ᾽Ἀφροδίτα. ὀνειρόφαντοι δὲ πενθήμονες πάρεισι δόξαι φεροῦσαι χάριν ματαίαν. μάταν γάρ, εὖτ᾽ ἂν ἐσθλά τις δοκῶν ὁρᾷ παραλλάξασα διὰ χερῶν βέβακεν ὄψις οὐ μεθύστερον πτεροῖς ὀπαδοῦσ᾽ὕπνου κελεύθοις.

22

Woolf ([1925] 1984: 30–31); see also Worman (2019: 59–60).

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The core lines of the “empty embrace” moment in the strophe (415–18) are stylistically spectral, as the stark mystery of their expression renders them ghostlike, not empty of meaning but shadowing it. Whose eyes are blank—Menelaus’ or the statues’? From whom has Aphrodite (i.e., loveliness) retreated—from Menelaus or the statues? And what specter haunts the halls—Menelaus’ or Helen’s? The more prosaic lines that follow suggest that the phantom is the absent wife, foaming up (as it were) from the husband’s desire; but many translators (including Woolf) take the first phantom to be Menelaus. While one of the stronger resonances here may be with a moment in Alcestis that I treat below, in which Admetus pledges that he will make a statue for his bed to replace his dead wife, more direct elaborations emerge in certain of Euripides’ choruses and especially in Helen. If Helen wafts through the background of Agamemnon, her stunning embodiment signaling erotic danger and death, she cuts a similar figure—serving as what elsewhere I have termed a “catalyst of ruin”—in Euripides’ dramas that address ramifications of the Trojan War, including Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis, Orestes, Andromache, and Trojan Women.23 In only one of these does she actually appear (Trojan Women), but the cumulative effect of the choral laments over her ruinous beauty renders the one play that features her (Helen) utterly anomalous, as well as endlessly complicating of her unique place in the mythic and aesthetic scheme. Helen’s other story, the one first told by Stesichorus (or so ancient convention has it) relates that only her phantom (eidōlon) went to Troy, while Hermes deposited her for safekeeping in Egypt, where Euripides’ play thus takes place. When Menelaus shipwrecks on the Egyptian shore with her phantom in tow, this other form evaporates, leaving the ragged husband and his shipmates utterly confused. Throughout the action the double’s weird materials dramatize in spectacular fashion the singularity of her beauty and body, her name and reputation, and her double-ness or duplicity (depending on the version of her story), a cluster of effects that Homer represented as the most prominent aspect of her being. As I have argued previously at some length, Helen cuts a unique figure in Homer as the cause of the Trojan War and thus the paradigmatic target of blame, whom no other character blames directly except for her herself.24 In fact, as the Trojan elders declare when they see her approaching their viewing theater of war on the ramparts, her beauty itself seems to hinder such responses (Il. 3.156–58): There can be no resentment that the Trojans and the well-greaved Achaeans have suffered such pain fighting around this woman for so long; she is very like to the immortal goddesses in visage! οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς τοιῇδ᾽ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν· αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν· 23 24

Worman (2002: 118–19); see also Jouan (1966), Clader (1976), Blondell (2013). Again, Worman (2002).

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She thus carries this double aspect from an early point in her mythic heritage, as the source of universal suffering whose divine loveliness renders her so special as to be generally protected if not always completely impervious. From Homer to Attic drama, this beauty serves as a crucial pivot for recognizing the attractions and dangers of mimesis, its pleasures and deceptions, which is also to say that Helen’s figure sits at the center of Greek thought about aesthetics as well as desire and persuasion.25 Elsewhere, in lyric poetry (e.g., Sappho fr. 16 and Alcaeus frs. 11, 134, 283 L-P) as in prose (e.g., Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ encomia), Helen’s reputation remains ambiguous in a manner related to such concerns, since it centers on whether she was abducted or went willingly with Paris, how crushing of the will her beauty in fact was, and what moral stature such questions should have.26 In Homer she herself suggests that others blame her and wish her ill for her ambiguous relationship to both moral action and the truth; and if tragedy often emphasizes the pique and censure of others, it nevertheless tends to hold at a distance the full condemnation they may feel she deserves. Except, that is, in Euripides’ Helen and Trojan Women, the former reversing the conventional censure of her figure to which Hecuba gives full voice in the latter. In Trojan Women, Helen’s embodiment stands out sharply among the mourning Trojans, not only because she has remained very fancily dressed, as Hecuba notes with disgust (1022–24) but also because, here as elsewhere, her body seems to have a unique status as supernaturally visible and yet untouchable, a decidedly odd embodiment for someone whose story is paradigmatically centered on abduction.27 In some contrast, Helen stages a version of her that appears vulnerable and distressed at what has become (in tragedy) her terrible reputation. Most relevant for our discussion, the play also offsets Helen’s claim to a chaste reputation with her body double in the form of the eidōlon that went to Troy in her stead. From the prospect of the brief backward glance at representational conventions around Helen’s figure offered above, we may also recognize that this replica merely exteriorizes and embodies in material form what her story more generally raises as the specter haunting all such tales. Namely, the sneaking suspicion that we may not know who (or indeed what) someone really is or which tale is true.28 We first encounter this other Helen at the outset of the drama, when the one staged as “real” explains in the prologue that Hera assembled a “breathing image” likened to her and fashioned from the sky (ὁμοιώσασ᾽ἐμοὶ  / εἴδωλον ἔμπνουν οὐρανοῦ συνθεῖσ᾽ἄπο), which went to Troy in her place (33–34). In combination with this airy double that both is and is not (cf. κενὴν δόκησιν, 36), the audience hears that even this real Helen before them may be an oddly made thing: the story goes, she explains, that she was born from the union of Leda and Zeus in bird form (18–21). Teucer treats her as a horrifying double, a “murderous image” (εἰκὼ φόνιον, 73, εἰκοῦς, 77) of the Helen whom

25

See esp. Zeitlin (1981), also Bergren (1983). See also Worman (1996). 27 Worman (2002: chapter 2); but cf. Juffras (1993) on the association of Helen with rape victims and abduction more generally; also Clader (1976). 28 See again Zeitlin (1981); also Ford (2010); cf. Juffras (1993), Melzer (1994), Wright (2005a). 26

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all Greece hates (cf. 81). “May the gods spit you out [ἀποπτύσειαν],” he exclaims, “for the likeness [μίμημα] you bear” (74–75). Soon after, when addressing the chorus of her Greek companions, she characterizes this engendering as one that renders her a freak (cf. τέρας) because she is egg-born (τεῦχος νεοσσῶν λευκόν) (256–59). She pairs this monstrous birth with her monstrous life (τέρας γὰρ ὁ βίος, 260), for which she identifies two sources: Hera (who fashioned her body proxy) and her own beauty (τὰ μὲν δι᾽Ἥραν, τὰ δὲ τὸ κάλλος αἴτιον). As if she were herself a statue, she wishes that she could be wiped clean of it (i.e., her beauty, ἐξαλειφθεῖσ᾽ὡς ἄγαλμ᾽αὔθις) and exchange an uglier form (αἴσχιον εἶδος) for her lovely one (260–63).29 The comic scene that introduces a tattered, shipwrecked Menelaus in conversation with an old doorkeeper heightens the sense that Helens might abound on the earth, as he hears that the strange country in which he has landed has one also (cf. 486–99). When Helen enters and approaches the altar of Proteus at which she has sought sanctuary as a protection from her Egyptian suitor Theoclymenus, she startles at the sight of Menelaus and makes a dash for the tomb. He attempts to block her, exclaiming that her appearance strikes him dumb (ὡς δέμας δείξασα σὸν / ἔκπληξιν ἡμῖν ἀφασίαν τε προστίθης), since he has just told the doorkeeper that he is guarding Helen in a cave nearby (540–49, cf. 475). Although as they recognize each other Menelaus soon worries that he may have two wives (571), a sailor companion appears and quickly relays that the wife in the cave has gone, carried away on wings of air (βέβηκεν ἄλοχος σὴ πρὸς αἰθέρoς πτυχὰς  / ἀρθεῖσ᾽ἄφαντος, 605–06). Then he sees Helen and concludes, “Oh hello, Daughter of Leda—so there you are” (ἐνθάδ᾽ἦσθ᾽ἄρα, 616). As Helen has already explained to Menelaus about the Hera-made cloud (cf. αἰθήρ, 584), he now understands and responds to the sailor in his realization with a curt “this is that” (τοῦτ᾽ἔστ᾽ἐκεῖνο, 622).30 In the moment, that is, he finally accepts that “this thing” that she told him about is that same one in the cave: an airy proxy for his flesh-and-blood wife whom he now holds in his arms. Or does he? Essential to the brilliance of Euripides’ play is that the confusion and disbelief with which characters greet this Helen sustains an atmosphere of doubt around her, such that they have to revise repeatedly what they think they know about the world and how it works. This doubt includes issues that phenomenologists might recognize as grounded in ancient epistemological questions about how much we actually know about what we perceive, as well as on ontological concerns. That is to say, the doubt turns on the stuff of being and on what exists to be perceived and how, which some theorists would take to be part of the same set of questions.31 These concerns also touch on aesthetics, of course, both on aisthēsis in the sense of perceptual experience and on ideas about beauty (or its absence) and art, including not only mimesis more generally but also the senses Helen most uniquely challenges: the visual capacity together with what it encourages, namely touch. At least, this combination is what Euripides’ play seems most pitched at 29

See Päällysaho (forthcoming dissertation) on the peculiarities of the metaphor in relation to Helen’s shame. Again, Aristotle argues in the Poetics that such matches are crucial to the tragic experience (1448b17). 31 See again Bergson ([1911] 1988), Merleau-Ponty (1964, 1968); also Derrida ([1999] 2005), Bennett (2010). 30

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querying, since it is not only the sight of Helen but also her tactility that unsettles whether the eye and hand together can discern actual substance. Whether, that is, seeing and touching Helen—a haptic combination that elsewhere in tragedy is treated as such a guarantee of authenticity—gives one any hold on her at all.

3. Suppliant Bodies and/as Statues The dynamics of Eumenides may be unique among extant plays in its crowd of nonhuman creatures and objects, but at least one other play of Aeschylus centers on the striking embodiment of its chorus, the twelve (for fifty) members of which function as the play’s main character, settled around statues and supplication or sanctuary: Suppliant Women. It shares this focus with a number of plays of Euripides, most crucially Andromache but also Hecuba, Alcestis, and Hippolytus. a. Statues and Creatures There is a supremely odd moment in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women—one among many, but still quite distinct—that occurs when the daughters of Danaus supplicate Pelasgus, king of Argos, to give them sanctuary in Greece and protect them from the Egyptian husbands who are pursing them across the sea. Immigrants seeking sanctuary and facing possible rejection by an (at least initially) protectionist leader is the plot of the play, a fact that renders their pleas and threats all the more disturbing in our present moment.32 Their exchange with the king is framed by his astonishment at their racial make-up, as Chapter 3 (3a) details. At first he cannot contemplate how they could be both Egyptian and Argive; and when he begins to understand, inquiring as to why they left their home country, they reply, “Dappled are human ills and nowhere will you see trouble of the same feather” (ἀιόλα ἀνθρώπων κακὰ / πόνου δ᾽ ἴδοις οὐδαμοῦ ἂν ταὐτὸν πτέρον, 328–29). During their ensuing argument with him over whether denying suppliants or disrespecting another country’s sovereignty incurs more pollution, they depict themselves as a heifer (like their foremother Io) beset by wolves (350–53). Soon after this they picture their Egyptian aggressors dragging them (ῥυσιασθεῖσαν) from their seats at the statues of the gods, or leading them off by force from there like a horse by the fine-woven headbands (ἱππηδὸν ἀμπύκων / πολυμίτων), while snatching at their fine-woven clothes (πολυμίτων πέπλων τ᾽ἐπιλαβὰς ἐμῶν) (423–32). Thus before the pivotal moment for the discussion here, they have situated themselves in relation to other creaturely inhabitations and trappings, including both the plumage of birds and horses’ bridles. As Pelasgus hesitates, they point again to their outerwear, highlighting their possession of breast-bands and belts (στρόφους ζώνας τε συλλαβὰς πέπλων) to use as a “fine device” (μηχανὴ καλή). When the king inquires 32

On the immigrant status of the suppliants in relation to raced and gendered embodiment, see Vasunia (2001), Bakewell (2013); cf. Zeitlin (1996), Murnaghan (2005).

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about the aim of this device of belts (μηχανὴ συζωμάτων), they declare that they will “decorate these statues here with novel votives” (νέοις πίναξιν βρέτεα κοσμῆσαι τάδε), meaning that they will hang themselves from them (ἐκ τῶνδ᾽ ὁπῶς τάχιστ᾽ ἀπάγξασθαι θεῶν) (457–65).33 Novel indeed: the girls’ “device,” a word that suggests both strategic planning and use of craft (i.e., technē), refashions their bodies by means of intricate extensions (their headbands and belts) into nothing so conventional as a statue; rather, they render themselves prostheses to bodies that are themselves material proxies (i.e., statues of the gods). Commentators on this episode have tended to view the girls as both manipulative and quasi-hysterical, which of course is not only conventionally misogynistic but also imprecise, as they make cogent arguments to Pelasgus for giving them sanctuary.34 That said, their threat to hang themselves from the statues of the twelve Olympian gods, while they are sitting in a temple devoted to them, is certainly an extreme measure and perhaps also an impious one, as attaching themselves to divine icons could suggest that the gods are responsible for their plight. But perhaps the extreme nature of their strategy has less to do with putative impieties or hysteria and more with aesthetic strangeness, with what it suggests about their embodiment and self-representation. Although the Danaids couch their challenge in terms that gesture toward Greek ritual conventions, since they claim that they will become votive offerings, this projected material state would reduce them not only to stone but also to body parts, that being what votive tablets typically represent.35 This surreal trade-off thus carries multiple threats, as from one angle the least of these would be that they are contemplating suicide; nor is it only the pollution that Pelasgus might incur from such a desecration of the temple and its images. Rather, the specter that they throw up, of their untouched and delicately decorated bodies become stony bits and pieces, as if they were puppets dedicated to the gods in hope of a cure, destroys any sense of bodily safety or integrity, perhaps even more violently than their envisioning of seizure or rape.36 In projecting their bodies as disjointed things, the Danaids effectively uncouple them from the human and attach them to the world of things. But in this case the material entities from which they would hang are statues of the gods, which lends the Danaids’ threat an elevated status parallel to their viewing of themselves as sacrificial victims, 33

Again, see Burian ([1974] 2007) on the political ethics of this threat; cf. Bednarowski (2010). On the motif of virgin and/or female suicide, see Loraux ([1985] 1987); Cantarella (1986). 34 See, e.g., Johansen and Whittle ad loc.; also Murray (1958: 79); Burian ([1974] 2007: 205); Conacher (1996: 91); Belfiore (2000: 42). 35 I.e., supplicants would hang votives in temples with depictions of the body parts for which they needed aid. Cf. a similarly strange image in Hippolytus, when the messenger (a companion of Hippolytus) ends his description of the hero’s demise by declaring that even if the whole female race were to hang themselves and fill the pinewood of Mount Ida with writing (οὐδ᾽εἰ γυναικῶν τῶν κρεμασθείη γένος, / καὶ τὴν ἐν Ἴδῃ πλήσειέ τις / πεύκην), he would believe Hippolytus to be good (1252–54). 36 We might compare here evidence of dolls or puppets used as votives at temples (e.g. Aeschylus, fr. 78 Radt), as well as images in Plato’s Republic and Laws; see e.g. Gocer (1999–2000), Kurke (2013), Folch (2015: 71–80). On puppets and machines in Greek drama, see Gerolemou (forthcoming).

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becoming like their ancestor Io in their creaturely and exotic inhabitations. It seems important to the dynamics of the drama that they be viewed as such, not only as dressed in attire that is distinguished by its luxury and its decorative accoutrements, but also as projecting themselves into bizarre and frightening extensions of the divine images.37 Rather than regarding this projection as evidence of virginal hysteria, we may want to recognize in their aesthetic novelty and boldness a challenging and effective strategy on at least two levels: it helps them to win the sanctuary that they seek and it telescopes into one vivid metonymy a dominant theme in this intense drama. b. Andromache as Stony Suppliant In Chapter 5 on “assemblages” I explore in some detail how Andromache and the statue of Thetis converge in tactile and material or “material” ways. I argue there that both the staging and enactment indicated by the text situate them in close proximity to each other, since Andromache is a suppliant in the goddess’ temple, as well as emphasizing the metaphors that conjoin them by the pairing of the statue’s presence and Andromache’s resistant and “stony” demeanor. Here I want to expand briefly on what it means for Andromache to be figured as a statue, given her status as both slave and suppliant. It seems essential to the drama’s orchestration of bodies and materials that this slave’s resistance be rendered palpable, such that she not only gains protection from the statue (which she is ultimately tricked out of anyway) but also herself sustains a statue-like endurance in the face of violence and threat. This is in stark contrast to both Hermione and Menelaus, whose contrasting venality and unpredictability restores to Andromache some of her traditional stature. We can recall first Hermione’s efforts to bend Andromache to her will, both literally and figuratively, as she calls her a slave and a barbarian (155, 173), and threatens her with visions of floor scrubbing (164–68) and eventually death (257–59).38 If Hermione cannot even retain her attachment to the rich girl’s carapace she appears at least initially to clutch with such desperate pride (a dynamic that I address in Chapter 3), Andromache faces down Hermione and then Menelaus “too strongly for a woman” (as the chorus fearfully notes, 364). In keeping with this toughness, she also repeatedly appears to be interacting or even trading places with the statue at which she sits suppliant, as at one point when threatened by Hermione she demands of her, “Don’t you see the statue of Thetis looking at you?” (ὁρᾷς ἄγαλμα Θέτιδος εἰς σ᾽ἀποβλέπον;, 246). Hermione replies that she will persist in her violent intentions, even as Andromache points out that the goddess will avenge blood shed on her altar (260). As if in response to these repeated references to statue and altar, Hermione declares that she will wrest Andromache from her suppliant seat, even if “molten lead holds [her] all around” (εἰ πέριξ σ᾽ἔχοι / τηκτὸς

37 Note, for instance, that in the ode in which the Danaid chorus tells Io’s story they include a detail of people gawking at her monstrous shape (τέρας ἐθάμβουν, 570). 38 Again, see Kyriakou (1997), Torrance (2005), Pucci (2016: 61–66), Stavrinou (2016) and further in Chapter 3 (1a).

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μόλυβδος) (267–68)—that is, even if Andromache has herself become statue in her “hard” persistence (cf. σκληρὸν θράσος, 261), she (Hermione) will pry her off, like bronze-work from its base. The moment foregrounds most of all an irreducible materiality, not only in relation to its mundane substance (i.e., the dull, practical lead),39 but also in calling attention to the proxemics indicated by the dramatic text, in this case the statue of Thetis centrally present onstage and Andromache’s deportment in relation to it. So Hermione, viewing with chorus and audience her enemy’s fierce hold on the statue, transfers its material substance to the living suppliant, as a vivid exteriorization of Andromache’s “hardness.” When Menelaus enters and commands Andromache to relinquish her hold on Thetis’ statue and promises sanctuary for her son, she responds with stringency that Hermione and he both will be tainted by their actions against her (334–37) and urges him not to meddle in women’s battles. His reply makes it clear that he counts her among his own slaves (cf. δούλων), property (χρήματα) held in common with Neoptolemus (374–77, cf. 585), which means she has no rights without her protective statue.40 In the action that follows, Andromache lets go of the statue, Menelaus binds her and declares his intention to kill her and to leave the fate of her son to Hermione. He concludes with a final insult, ordering her inside, to learn that slaves cannot disrespect those who are free (433–34). The juxtaposition of the statue and the suppliant body, aggressively reframed as a slave and thus property, suggests another analogy for Andromache’s status, namely, that her recalcitrant stance and “stony” body ought to be treated as a thing. And yet Andromache endures. She re-emerges to sing with her son, beginning with a focus on her physical status as one bound, while her son clutches her as if she now were a suppliant’s statue, crying pitifully, “Mother, Mother, I huddle under your wing [σᾷ  / πτέρυγι συγκαταβαίνω]” (501–05).41 Even more suited to her status as stony thing is the fact that she again depicts herself as Niobe, dripping tears like a “shaded stream down a smooth rock face” (στάζω λισσάδος ὡς πέτρας λιβὰς ἀνήλιος, 533–34). Soon she encourages her son to detach from her and supplicate Menelaus, who then claims to be himself unyielding as a force of nature—like a sea cliff or wave (ἁλίαν πέτραν / ἢ κῦμα, 537–38). Of course he is no such thing: when Peleus arrives to intervene, he gives way, leaving the stage and, apparently, Phthia, never to return. Andromache also exits with her child and Peleus, but she may well return at the end of the play and so be present with her child (as deictics indicate),42 standing silent as a statue onstage for the last two hundred lines. And then Thetis, whose inanimate image has served as the concrete pivot of the action in affective combination with Andromache, comes down on the stage machine to deliver the epilogue. The finale thus dramatically

39 This lead seal could apparently be used for either bronze or marble, although Stieber is not very clear on this point (2011: 128–30); I thank Verity Platt for guidance on statuary conventions. 40 On slaves in tragedy see e.g. duBois (2003), Lape (2010). 41 Cf. Andromache’s cry, “You would wrench this fledgling from under my wing?” (ἦ καὶ νεοσςὸν τόνδ᾽ὑπὸ πτερῶν σπάσας;, 441). On Andromache’s bound hands and her manhandling, see Chapter 2 (3a). 42 Cf. lines 1041 and 1246–47; see Golder (1983), Allan (2000: 74–77).

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confirms the trade-off between suppliant and statue, as Andromache takes up the role of still and soundless figure, while the goddess comes volubly to life. i. Sidebar: Hermione’s “Statue.” Despite the transvaluations of status and stature that she desires and then fears in Andromache, Hermione proves very different from Andromache in what we might recognize from this angle as material inflections of character—that is, her prominent fancy clothing, frenetic gestures, and menacing proxemics. She inhabits herself as changeable and mobile, while Andromache remains recalcitrant and statue-like throughout. These material indications are effectively finalized with the entrance of Orestes toward the end of the play, an intrusion from another plot (as it were) that further confirms both Hermione’s slippery hold on her fabric(ated) defenses and Euripides’ engagement with the Oresteia subtext. Hermione greets this entrance with a weirdly elated desperation, throwing herself at Orestes as the sanctuary she has been seeking. Embracing his knees with arms she claims are “no less weighty than suppliant garlands” (στεμμάτων δ᾽οὐκ ἥσσονας / . . . ὠλένας ἐμάς, 894–95), she declares herself bereft of any other protection. As earlier in the action, here too she engages in enactment coupled with a warped transference, a kind of embodied catachresis, as she clings to Orestes and claims for them both a new materiality with the power to protect her own body at the least. Her figurative and enacted entwining thus fashions a phantasmagoric physicality, as she slings her suppliant garland-arms around him, her living statue. She then claims that the halls themselves seem to have taken voice and driven her forth (ὡς δοκοῦσί γε δόμοι τ᾽ ἐλαύνειν φθέγμ᾽ ἔχοντες οἵδε με), her deictic οἵδε suggesting that she releases at least one suppliant arm to gesture toward the skēnē, and that the land of Phthia hates her (923–25). In response, Orestes reassures her (if that is the word for it) with his plot to kill Neoptolemus and emphasizes his prior claim on her, now urgent because his pursuit by the Furies prevents him from playing the field. He refers to them with a single phrase, “the bloody-faced goddesses” (τὰς θ᾽ αἱματωποὺς θεάς, 978), echoing their material inflection in Aeschylus’ play as well as providing explanation for his intrusion. Apparently happy in their mutual depravity, the two leave together, Orestes declaring ominously that the “Delphian rock” (Δελφὶς . . . πέτρα, 998) will see that the matricide’s new lethal plans come to fruition. c. Polyxena as Statuesque Anti-suppliant Polyxena’s death narrative in Hecuba sets up a dynamic seen elsewhere in relation to young female characters in Euripides and discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Precisely at moments where one would expect that concern for appearance and clothes are least important, concentrated and often lurid imagery (again, detailed by onlookers and sometimes also by the character herself) pulls the eye in close, highlighting form, color, and movement. Scenes discussed in Chapters  3 and 5, such as those that feature Hermione’s fancy dress in Andromache, Electra’s tattered clothing in Euripides’ Electra, and Evadne’s misplaced bridal adornment in Suppliant Women offer an opportunity for prurient ogling as well as querying it. Ancient and modern readers have usually been 226

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happy to oblige with the first move, while missing the attendant frictions roused by the second.43 Scholars sometimes view the characters as virtuous, but, as I address in more detail below, such assessments are also unsettled by Euripides’ tonal variations and attention to sensationalist aesthetics. Further, scholars have not usually recognized that clashes between what is actually shown onstage and what is described heighten the tense dynamics of these scenes, as characters react to and attempt to manage what has been displayed, described, or both. The status of Polyxena in Hecuba as lofty, statuesque, and isolated unfolds across two scenes, one with her present and the other relating her noble death. During the earlier scene (addressed also in Chapter 5), when Odysseus refuses Hecuba’s beseeching of him to save her daughter’s life, she turns in desperation to her daughter. Although she begs Polyxena to throw herself at Odysseus’ knees, Polyxena spurns supplication. She says dryly to Odysseus that she sees that he is withdrawing his hand and turning his head from her, so that she cannot reach his beard (342–44), but assures him that he has no need of such defensive gestures. She declares that she does not want to live, since before she led the life of a princess, sure to be a bride of kings, admired by all, and close to being a goddess, save by dying (351–56). She then envisions her future life as a slave, kneading bread, sweeping floors, and tending the loom, her bed tainted by some lowly type (359–66).44 Far better to choose death, she concludes; and the chorus affirms her attitude (although somewhat uneasily) with a favorite Euripidean metaphor, asserting that noble birth makes a fearsome and distinctive stamp (δεινὸς χαρακτὴρ κἀπίσημος) on those who have it (377–80). Their use of the term deinos, “terrible, fearsome, stunning,” suggests that, as with many moments like this in tragedy, they are both impressed and disturbed. They respond to what is, ultimately, a perfect tragic effect with a suitable combination of awe and apprehension. Talthybius’ narrative of Polyxena’s death occupies the distinctive register of the most vibrant messenger speeches, when a series of actions are so vividly relayed that they contend with and have an impact on staged events. As noted in Chapter 5, scholars have tended not to emphasize that Hecuba’s onstage response serves to connect the scene to the affective dynamics that take place among those present, wresting it from its original context of an act carried out before a male audience and resituating it within a female gathering. Considering that the scene as initially told evidences a manly romanticism about female purity and nobility while giving onlookers (and audience) an eyeful of bodily perfection, I want here to attend to the ways in which this framing serves to render the physical form of Polyxena both exquisite statue and embodied provocation. In keeping with his sympathetic stance, Talthybius describes to Hecuba and the chorus of Trojan women the sacrifice of Polyxena in a way that, at least on its surface, recasts her slaughter in admiring terms as a “beautiful death.”45 He focuses on the

43

See Michelini (1987: 163n. 127) for some choice quotations; and further below. Cf. Hermione’s depiction of Andromache’s servitude (Andr. 164–68). 45 See Beaney (2009) on the Romantic aestheticization of death, especially of young female death. Her prime example is Antigone, whom Hegel and Hölderlin (among others) championed in this way. 44

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aesthetics of the scene, both its sensory effects and reactions to them—including his own “double tears” (διπλᾶ  . . . δάκρυα, 518) at witnessing and then relating the event. He emphasizes that the whole crowd (ὄχλος πᾶς) of the Achaean army was present, watching as Neoptolemus led Polyxena by the hand up the mound of his father Achilles’ tomb, lifted up a libation of wine in a golden cup, and asked for silence (521–30). Talthybius hushed the crowd, and when they stood hushed, Neoptolemus prayed to Achilles, raising the cup and offering him the “pure black blood” (μέλαν  / ἀκραιφνὲς αἷμ’) of the girl (534–37)—the gold and black coloration of the scene disturbingly echoing the chorus’ forecasting of the murder (cf. 150–53).46 He signaled to his attendants to hold Polyxena down, but she waved them off, demanding that no one touch her skin (μή τις ἅψηται χροὸς  / τοὐμοῦ) and declaring that she offers her neck freely (παρέξω γὰρ δέρην εὐκαρδίως) (548–49). The moment parallels Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis 1544–67, in which Iphigenia offers her neck in almost exactly the same terms (μὴ ψαύσῃ τις Ἀργείων ἐμοῦ / σιγῇ παρέξω δέρην εὐκαρδίως, 1559–60), with Achilles and Talthybius attendant and the rowdy crowd of Argives looking on. It also recalls Polyxena’s scornful attitude toward attempting supplication in her refusal to touch Odysseus earlier in the action. At this point rejecting another’s touch contributes to a palpable sense of her isolation and steely impermeability, even as she yields her body to the knife. The male audience roared its approval (ἐπερρόθησαν, 553) and Polyxena was let go, at which point she made the gesture that flutters Talthybius and has had similar effects on subsequent audiences. She took hold of her gown at the shoulder, and ripped it to her navel (ἔρρηξε . . . παρ” ὀμφαλόν), revealing breasts, as the herald says, “as beautiful as a statue” (ὡς ἀγάλματος  / κάλλιστα) (558–61).47 Going down on one knee, she guides Neoptolemus as well as the onlookers’ eyes: “Look [ἰδού], here is my chest [στέρνον] to strike if you desire, or if you need my neck [αὐχένα], here is my throat [λαιμός] at the ready” (563–65).48 As Talthybius tells it, Neoptolemus felt some ambivalence (as well he might) about cutting Polyxena’s throat, but he nevertheless quickly stepped to the task, severing her windpipe so that the blood gushed forth (566–68). As she died, Talthybius claims, Polyxena had the foresight to fall gracefully (εὐσχήμων),“hiding what one ought to hide from the eyes of men [κρύπττουσ’ ἃ κρύπτειν

46

Cf. Segal (1990: 306). See Stieber (2011: 145–50) on the aesthetics and conventions of sculptural representations of female nudity in relation to this scene, which include Polyxena herself partially and entirely nude; cf. Foley (2015: 16–20, 43–44). Polyxena’s posture and undress at this point in the scene also suggest statues of Aphrodite bathing, on which see as well O’Sullivan (2008); for Euripides’ use of the visual arts more generally, see Hoffman (2008). See also Mossman (1995: 158–60), Scodel (1996: 121–26), Gregory (ad loc.). Cf. the compelling argument of Pucci ([1977] 2003: 158–59) that the statue reference has a “remedial” function insofar as it enables Talthybius (and by implication the Greek army as well as the tragic audience) to replace the arbitrary violence of the sacrifice with aesthetic pleasure, a move that Pucci regards as aiming at the “domestication and control” of tragic horror. 48 See Loraux ([1985] 1987: 56–61, who argues that Polyxena’s offering of her sternon has a warrior’s bravery and thus contrasts with Talthybius’ aestheticizing of her breasts. My phrase “at the ready” translates εὐτρεπής; an alternative reading is εὐπρεπής, which Scodel (1996: 122–26) thinks is evidence of Polyxena’s “deliberately manipulating” the aestheticization of her body. 47

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ὄμματ’ ἀρσένων χρεών]” (568–70).49 He also claims that the Achaeans were so moved by this beautiful end that they rushed to scatter her corpse with leaves and to offer cover or ornament (κόσμον) for it, prodding each other to honor her bravery and nobility as one might give offerings to the statue of a divinity or the tomb of a hero (572–82). The uplifting sensorium that Talthybius constructs in order to heighten the pathos and perhaps act as a balm for Hecuba has appeared to many scholars to be completely successful—moving, beautiful, and even sublime.50 But this elevated mode, if can be called such, is brutally undercut, twisted, and made to be seen for what it is by the contrast between the men’s energetic sentimentality at the end of the narrative and Hecuba’s reaction. Some careful readers of the scene do emphasize, however, that Polyxena’s final gesture before dying is disorienting (to put it mildly), given what has come before. For some it introduces a dissonant note of the concrete (and improbable) into an idealized narrative, while others regard it as one more piece of evidence that Euripides is tonally inept.51 Few emphasize that this is Talthybius’ description of what occurred, or that it is not really concrete so much as coy, insofar as the verbal periphrasis itself reiterates the covering gesture. Nor has anyone noted how the narrator turns immediately to emphasize the positive reception of the crowd and their eagerness to cover the corpse with offerings. We may well pause, then, to consider just how elevated Talthybius’ portrayal of Polyxena’s actions and murder is. To consider, for one thing, the extent to which the description pulls the spectator up close to the girl’s body, detailing its parts, both in the narration and in her statement as quoted. (I count thirteen references, including the peek-a-boo “what one ought to hide.”) While this type of detail is not uncommon in extant tragedy, and may well be especially prominent in messenger speeches, given that they tend to describe gruesome deaths, such close attention to bodies is never in the service of admiration of a naked virgin, and certainly not including reference to her breasts and (perhaps) a suggestion of her sex.52 Indeed, given the extreme formality of the tragic idiom, even the suggestion of disrobing is shocking or at the least unsettling, as indicated by Hermione’s and Antigone’s gestures discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. While Polyxena’s undressing is cordoned off visually from audience perception, the body and its postures are offered to the mind’s eye as a statue, an aesthetic object to be lingered over. That Polyxena herself gives the Achaeans (and indirectly the Athenian audience) 49 Some commentators take the phrase πολλὴν πρόνοιαν εἶχεν to mean “took much care,” “but had the great foresight” would contribute to the incongruous cast that many think attends Talthybius’ detail. 50 Cf. Eagleton (1989); Beaney (2009). 51 Michelini (1987: 163–64 and n. 127) deems the gesture “bizarre,” noting the disparate scholarly reactions (e.g., Radt [1973: 122]: “die unglaublich geschmacklose Hervorhebung” vs. Pagani [1970: 57–58]: “tutta la semplicità e la sublimità castissima”). Mossman (1995: 142) quotes Schlegel’s approbation and calls the scene “moving and brilliant”; and cf. Stieber (2011: 147), who notes that the passage is “one of the most admired in tragedy.” 52 So commentators have supposed the “what” to indicate, though it may merely mean that she covered her chest again. Michelini (1987: 161 and nn. 119, 120) remarks on the fact that tragedy does not elsewhere call female bodies beautiful (kalē); and breasts (meaning mastoi rather than sterna) are rarely mentioned in tragedy, and then only as maternal pleas (except for Helen’s breasts, predictably enough [Andr. 629]).

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some of its details is in keeping with Euripides’ other scenes featuring virgins in extremis, although their emotional states as depicted are quite distinct from hers. What all of these gestures share is a representation of female agency that also serves the (largely male) spectatorial gaze; from an aesthetic perspective such controlled disrobing should sustain a sense of these bodies as formal decoration. At such moments the body’s edges emerge as manifestly, nakedly physical, as skin and its contours—in this case analogized to the wondrous smoothness of a statue’s curves. Then the emphasis on touching the body’s surface or its prohibition, on the baring of skin, and on covering and uncovering the body, offer the audience (onstage and off ) intimate analogies for the group experience, which in this case clearly borders on the pornographic. While the suggestion of indecent peeping is swiftly foreclosed, this brief indulgence reveals what the scene has been all along: a lavish bit of voyeurism, including both the statuesque nudity that the narrator describes Polyxena as openly offering and the chaste cover-up that suggests what it conceals. The scene as a whole (including the onstage reactions) is carefully layered and pointedly perverse, in the sense of encouraging and then thwarting noble emotions in response to this statuesque body, which is achieved by drawing the eye in as if to touch the skin of this haughty girl who commanded everyone to keep their hands off.53 If she behaves as the lofty and iconic figure that she takes herself to be, the scene offers her body as an object; and although this object may be a heavenly one—an incarnation of loveliness like a statue of Aphrodite disrobing— the erotic associations that attend such images undermine the loftiness of the stature to which she aspires.54 d. Statues without Sanctuary Three plays of Euripides feature statues but do not center on human supplication and sanctuary: Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Iphigenia in Tauris. These dramas orchestrate some type of proxy relations between human characters and statues, Alcestis unfolding in relation to human stand-ins, Hippolytus featuring inhabitations of divinities, including their material icons and their active presences, and Iphigenia in Tauris aligning human forms with the wooden statue of Artemis that she protects. In their different ways they offer a window on how Euripidean tragedy calibrates human bodies, senses, and orientations in relation to the stuff of statues as well as the deities that they represent. i. Alcestis in Form Only. Euripides’ Alcestis sets up an alternative dynamic to the one I trace above, of statue-associated female characters in need of sanctuary. While Alcestis shares with all of these characters their vulnerable statuses as potential or actual victims of male violence, she offers herself up freely when her husband Admetus requests that

53

This is in keeping with Michelini’s fine analysis (1987: 163–68), although she does not consider affective or gender dynamics. Contrast Mossman (1995: 144–45, 155, 157–59), who denies that there is any sexual element (as opposed to pathos and aesthetic appeal) in the scene. 54 Again, see Stieber (2011: 145–50) on comparable statues of Aphrodite.

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she give her life in exchange for his own.55 In this she resembles somewhat Polyxena’s (or Iphigenia’s) willing sacrifice, but unlike these sacrificial virgins she fades away on her own couch, in the protected position of aristocratic wife. On her deathbed she makes one demand of Admetus that sets her up in relation to statues and replicas and that by its implications unsettles the end of the drama. She asks that he not replace her when she dies (304–08), to which he replies that he will not—or not really: in an oddly aestheticizing (and thus peculiarly Euripidean) turn, he declares that he will have a likeness of her made “by the wise hand of sculptors” and laid out in their bed (σοφῇ δὲ χειρὶ τεκτόνων δέμας τὸ σὸν / εἰκασθὲν ἐν λέκτροισιν ἐκταθήσεται). This image he will fall upon and throw his arms about (προσπεσοῦμαι καὶ περιπτύσσων χέρας), calling out her name and seeming to have his dear wife in his arms although he in fact does not (τὴν φίλην ἐν ἀγκάλαις / δόξω γυναῖκα καίπερ οὐκ ἔχων ἔχειν) (348–52). It will, he admits, be a cold comfort (ψυχρὰν . . . τέρψιν), but the replica will lighten his soul, as will the possibility that she will visit him in his dreams, which would gladden him (εὐφραίνοις ἄν), as night visions are sweet (ἡδύ) for loved ones (353–56). Admetus’ sentiments stand in interesting contrast to those expressed in the parodos of Agamemnon discussed above, in which the chorus describes the statues of Helen that mock Menelaus with her absence (414–26). The scene also sets up an unnerving possibility at the end of the drama, namely that when Heracles returns from Hades with a veiled woman who is statue-like and silent, he has brought back a mere proxy for Alcestis. Admetus exclaims at the likeness of this silent form to his dead wife, but because he thinks she must be someone else, he declares that he will not accept her into his house in honor of his promise to Alcestis. It is only when he touches her that he appears to find some confirmation of her identity, a detail that raises some peculiar questions about the veracity of haptic experiencing parallel to those that linger in the action of Helen. The exchange between Heracles and Admetus sets up this tension, as Heracles’ words clearly indicate that he aims to persuade Admetus to take the woman as a new wife. First he asks that Admetus hold her for safekeeping (γυναῖκα τήνδε μοι σῶσον λαβών, 1020), while he goes off on another of his labors. Next he declares that he is offering her to Admetus as a servant in his halls (δίδωμι τήνδε σοῖσι προσπολεῖν δόμοις, 1024), then that he won her as a prize in a wrestling contest (κομίζω τήνδε νικητήρια λαβών, 1028– 29). He never names her; both he and Admetus after him only refer to her as the object of giving and taking, most often using either the proper noun “woman” (γυναῖκα) or the demonstrative “this one here” (τήνδε). Her status as thing thus reinforces the sense that she is barely or not really human, “slip-sliding” (to paraphrase Bennett) between the “us” and the “it.”56 Admetus, for his part, strives to decline his friend’s offer, requesting that Heracles give the woman to some other Thessalian to hold (γυναῖκα . . . σώζειν, 1042–44), saying that he cannot look upon her (τήνδε ὁρῶν) without weeping (1046). He asks also how such a 55 56

See esp. Bassi (2018) on the death’s edge dynamics; also Buxton (1987), Foley (1992), Dellner (2000). Bennett (2010: 4). While gunē can also mean “wife,” this usage is not indicated by the tenor of their exchange.

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youthful woman (νέα γυνή) could be cared for, noting that she wears a young woman’s clothes (νέα γὰρ ὡς ἐσθῆτι καὶ κόσμῳ πρέπει). He worries that he cannot keep her unsullied (ἀκραιφνής) among the young men of his house, a grim indication of the constant threat of rape even in putatively protective settings such as an aristocrat’s halls (1049–54). Nor he can take her into the bed chamber of his dead wife (τῆς θανοῦσης θάλαμον) and even less bring “this one to that one’s bed” (τήνδε τῷ κείνης λέχει), lest he incur reproach from his wife’s family as well as from her memory (1055–60). He ends by addressing the woman directly and declaring in pained exclamation that she should know that she has too much the same proportions as Alcestis (ταὔτ᾽ἔχουσ᾽ Ἄλκήστιδι / μορφῆς μέτρ᾽ ἴσθι) and is like to her in form (προσῃξαι δέμας) (1062–63). This is the only time that Alcestis is referred to by name, but this name is not attached to the woman standing before him. After this Heracles and Admetus argue back and forth, the one continuing to urge the other to accept the woman, who remains standing silently between them. At one point Heracles claims that a wife (γυνή) and a new marriage (νέου γάμου) will assuage Admetus’ desire (1087). When Admetus responds that he will never marry again, Heracles keeps on pressing him, while he maintains the notion that in accepting “this one here” (again, τήνδε, 1097, 1102) he will be entering into a new union. When Admetus eventually gives way to the extent that he orders his servants to take the woman into the house, Heracles insists that he (Heracles) must place her into his (Admetus’) own hands (ἐς σὰς μὲν οὖν ἔγωγε θήσομαι χέρας, 1113). Admetus shrinks back, declaring that he would not touch her (οὐκ ἂν θίγοιμι), but Heracles insists that he only trusts his friend’s right hand (χειρὶ δεξιᾷ μόνῃ). He then enjoins him, “Dare to stretch forth your hand and touch the stranger woman!” (τόλμα προτεῖναι χεῖρα καὶ θιγεῖν ξένης) (1114–17). As Chapter  2 shows in some detail, such insistent references to handling usually indicate contact heavy with significance, whether protective measures, familial recognition, or the effective ownership of marital or slave manumission. In this case Admetus’ touching and viewing (cf. γυναῖκα λεύσσων τήνδε, 1124) of the woman brings recognition that she is his own, or so Heracles claims when his friend does lay his hand as well as his eyes on her (τήνδ᾽ὁρᾷς δάμαρτα σήν, 1126). Like so many other scenes that stage haptic experiencing as significant and propulsive, here too the eye–hand coordination makes for conclusive recognition. But as in Euripides’ Helen, whether or not this experiencing is actually conclusive evidence that Admetus really does embrace his original wife is left unsettled by the apparent doubling of her form, the hedging of Heracles and hesitations of Admetus together creating an atmosphere of mystery around it. ii. Hippolytus and his Icon. The onstage action of Euripides’ Hippolytus takes place before Theseus’ halls in Troezen; textual references indicate that the stage setting includes a statue of Artemis on one side of the forecourt gates (i.e., in the orchestra in front of the skēnē) and one of Aphrodite on the other. In the opening scene a character playing Aphrodite delivers the prologue, likely from a stage machine on the roof, in which she complains that Hippolytus scorns her. He then enters and directly engages in 232

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“conversation” with Artemis, adorning her statue with flowers and addressing her while depriving Aphrodite of any recognition, despite cautioning by a servant. Artemis comes to life at the end of the play, when Hippolytus lies ravaged by his own horses, so that the play as a whole is bracketed by these warring divinities, whose live and stony presences stand in contrast to the suffering humans. This includes the lovesick Phaedra, who tosses about on her bed of pain, as discussed in Chapter 1. While these statues thus both effectively come to life, they are not as implicated in the action as Thetis is in Andromache, perhaps because they do not serve characters as sanctuary and thus afford bodily attachments or proxies, except in an extended sense. This also means that from the prospect of enactment they are not as closely allied with a main character or characters, although the play situates Hippolytus in relation to a network of associations with Artemis and her domain (e.g., animals and hunting, pastoral and wilderness settings).57 This chain of allegiance is sustained throughout the action, effectively pitting Phaedra and her stepson against each other as human stand-ins for Artemis and Aphrodite. Since these dynamics drive the action of the drama as a whole, in this sense the goddesses do function as proxies, but not in any prominent and sustained material sense. Nevertheless, Aphrodite’s prologue does explicitly situate Hippolytus and Phaedra both in what is essentially a geographical relation to her: as she explains, before leaving Athens to head into exile with Theseus, the heart-struck Phaedra erected a temple to Aphrodite on the Acropolis, “looking down toward this land” (κατόψιον  / γῆς τῆσδε ναὸν Κύπριδος)—that is, toward Troezen, where Hippolytus roams in the mountainous wilds of the eastern Peloponnese. Thus, the goddess adds, the temple will be known in the future as “the goddess set up over Hippolytus” (Ἱππολύτῳ δ᾽ ἔπι / . . . ἱδρῦσθαι θεάν) (29–33). There was in fact a temple to Aphrodite on the Acropolis, next to which sat a shrine to Hippolytus, but here Euripides maps their close juxtaposition across the lands of Attica and Troezen, so that it is as if the goddess looms over and peers down on the young devotee of Artemis.58 So, by implication, does the lofty and dominant Athens loom over its neighboring (and wilder?) territories. Aphrodite departs as she sees Hippolytus himself approaching with his retinue of young male attendants, but not before she has noted his close affiliation with Artemis (19) and declared that while she feels no malice (οὐ φθονῶ) at being scorned by him, she will still make him pay for this error (19–22). As a parting shot, she describes Hippolytus’ throng as “shouting out” (κῶμος λέλακεν) in song for Artemis, while he does not know that the gates of Hades yawn open for him (ἀνεῳγμένας πύλας Ἅιδου) (54–57). The young men do indeed enter singing a hymn to the goddess, and then Hippolytus addresses the statue of Artemis directly, offering her a wreath from meadows undefiled (ἀκηράτου) by pasturage or scythe, home to bees, and watered by Modesty (Αἰδώς) (73–78). He claims that the wreath is his gift alone and evidence of his special relationship 57

See e.g. Segal (1965), Easterling (1991), Blomqvist (1992). See Barrett ad loc., Dunn (1992). Athens is directly across the Saronic gulf from Troezen but not proximate in any human sense of the topography; see Bernard (1988: 169–70). 58

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with the goddess, as indicated by the fact that he can hear her though he does not see her (κλύων μὲν αὐδῆς, ὄμμα δ᾽οὐχ ὁρῶν τὸ σόν) (84–86). These details, both the heavily implicating proxemics of the phrase “Aphrodite over Hippolytus” and Hippolytus’ gestural and sensory juxtaposing of himself and Artemis, do in fact render human–divine connections in material and spatial terms. These connections are especially focused on the young male protagonist, while his stepmother is merely entangled in relation to them as the victim of his error. Thus even if the statues themselves are not so central to the plot, they do play a crucial role in making characters manifest, as material extrusions and markers of their affective and ethical orientations. iii. Iphigenia’s Proxy and Orestes. As Chapter 2 details with a focus on touching and handling, the wooden icon of Artemis that Iphigenia guards in her role as priestess in Iphigenia in Tauris serves as the crucial mechanism by which she plots her escape, as well as that of Orestes and Pylades. Another feature of her priestly protection is more relevant here, as the action of the play reveals that she and this statue bear something of a surrogate relation to each other.59 This takes shape from the special treatment accorded deities and their attendants, in this case when it emerges that no one may touch either Iphigenia or the statue. Orestes finds this out the moment he recognizes his sister and moves to embrace her, causing the chorus to cry out that he must lay hands neither on her as servant of the goddess (τῆς θεοῦ τὴν πρόσπολον) nor on her robes (ἀθίκτοις . . . πέπλοις) (798–99). Later, while Orestes despairs and Pylades as usual stands silently by, Iphigenia devises a plan to escape Tauris and its aggressive king Thoas. In so doing she highlights another angle of these siblings’ tangible relationship to deities, and in this case particularly Artemis, who herself stands in some iconic adjacence to the wooden statue of Athena that Orestes clutches in the Eumenides. Iphigenia explains to Orestes that she will make use of his status as tainted matricide, a move that also recalls his polluted presence at the outset of Aeschylus’ play. She tells him that she will claim that the miasma makes him improper (οὐ θέμις) as a sacrifice to the goddess, since he is unclean (οὐ καθαρὸν ὄντα), such that she must purify both him and the divine icon that he has touched (κἀκεῖνο νίψαι, σοῦ θιγόντος ὧς) (1031–41). Thus, in a turn that now places Orestes in proxy relationship to the statue, Iphigenia declares that he and it must be taken to the sea for ablutions. When Orestes inquires whether she or someone else will carry the image, she replies that it is sanctioned for her alone to touch (θιγεῖν γὰρ ὄσιόν ἐστ᾽ἐμοὶ μόνῃ). He then inquires whether Pylades will go with them, and she assures him that she will say that his companion also has blood-pollution (μίασμ᾽) on his hands (1044–47).

59 See esp. Mueller (2018) for the atmosphere of dread in the play; cf. Said (2002), Wright (2005a), Zeitlin (2005, 2011).

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Iphigenia then turns to the task of deceiving Thoas into keeping himself and the citizens of Tauris away from the purifications, in order (she says) that they not become themselves tainted by the sight of the murderers (claiming this status for both Orestes and Pylades) and the image they have polluted. Thoas agrees that if the stain of the matricide has indeed fallen upon it (εἴπερ γε κηλίς ἔβαλέ νιν μητροκτόνος), this must be done. Iphigenia further requests that the murderers be bound (1204) and their heads covered (κρᾶτα κρύψαντες πέπλοισιν, 1207), as well as that Thoas cover his own eyes (πέπλον ὀμμάτων προθέσθαι, 1218). Taken together with the fact that Iphigenia declares that her motivation for these extreme measures comes directly from the goddess, that her icon turned away and shut its eyes (ἀπεστράφη  . . . ὄψιν δ᾽ὀμμάτων ξυνήρμοσεν, 1165–67), her emphasis on covering and the blocking of sight serves to further triangulate in sensory and material ways herself, the matricide, and the statue. That is, she orchestrates her story in such a way as to insure that no one may see her (as no one may touch her robes), including Orestes and the statue. Meanwhile she claims that the very sight of her brother (whom she does not name) will taint the eye (cf. μὴ παλαμναῖον λάβω, 1218); and she even suggests that the goddess’ image cannot bear to look upon him.

4. The Undead A remaining cluster of tragic characters stands in some sort of proxy relation to corpses and ghosts. This occurs especially when plays settle heroes in realms that we may recognize as effectively undead, including Heracles, Philoctetes, Oedipus, Electra, and Antigone. Sometimes these take the form of inhabitations as corpse-like or on the edge of death; in other instances, and especially in the case of female characters, it involves tending the dead or nearly dead and becoming ghostly themselves. If Sophocles seems to be the master of such effects, we can note that both Aeschylus and Euripides also place Electra in close juxtaposition to her dead father, though in manners distinct from each other and from Sophocles. As Chapter  1 discusses in some detail, Euripides also stages a ghostly Oedipus in Phoenician Women, who drifts like a specter through the halls and only emerges into the light (i.e., onstage) at the very end of the play. In this final section of the final chapter I thus take one more look at the characters who motivated its first formulations and have endured as most central to its focus: Electra and Oedipus. a. Electra on the Edge (Sophocles) Sophocles’ Electra play is the one most fully focused on her, so much so that she effectively upstages all of the other characters, calling out the coordinates of Orestes’ actions even as he tries repeatedly to silence her and envisioning herself as a corpse or corpse-like while the dead remain largely concealed within the stage building. In fact, once she comes onstage Electra only leaves for thirteen scant lines much later on (during a brief choral interlude, 1384–97), sustaining a fixity of place and purpose unique among these 235

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dramatizations of the Oresteia plot.60 While the siblings finally get together and manage to carry out the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus toward the very end of the action, the only moment in Sophocles’ play that a corpse is offered to view onstage comes when Orestes reveals the dead Clytemnestra to Aegisthus, and this is very quickly eclipsed. Given the proliferation of corpses in Aeschylus’ trilogy and the morbid sporting with dead bodies in Euripides’ possibly earlier play, we may wonder how Sophocles’ drama could achieve similarly compelling effects. Again, most of the visible action onstage centers on Electra, which encourages the spectator to look instead to her embodied presence for qualities associated with the outcast and the dead—although if she is effectively dead already (as she herself claims), she is one noisy cadaver. As I have argued elsewhere, tragic bodies are often threatened, debilitated, or dead, but the loudly contrary heroes in Sophocles, who mostly impede more “practical,” community-sanctioned action, tend to embody enigmatic center points.61 They frequently occupy places physically and existentially adjacent to corpses, their borderland states and eerie gestures lending them a resonant but otherworldly cast. Electra enters directly after the prologue (line 86), while her keening precedes her (ἰώ μοί μοι δύστηνος, 77). Orestes, in hiding with his servant, seems taken aback even by this overture: “Is this indeed the wretched Electra? Shall we stay and listen to her lamentation?” (ἆρ’ ἐστὶν ἡ δύστηνος Ἠλέκτρα; θέλεις/ μείνωμεν αὐτοῦ κἀπακούσωμεν γόων; 80–81).62 They retreat, Electra comes onstage alone, and quickly moves to secure her prominence in the framing of the action, aligning her mournful state with that of the dead.63 Her song begins with a focus on the act of grieving itself, pairing her many songs of lamentation with the many blows with which she has bloodied her breast (86–90). When the chorus warns her that she cannot raise her father from the dead (οὔτοι . . . πατέρ᾽ἀνστάσεις, 137–38) and that her ceaseless moaning will destroy her (ἀεὶ στενάχουσα διόλλυσαι, 141), Electra responds that this tonal excess is “fitted to her disposition” (ἀλλ’ ἐμέ γ’ ἁ στονόεσσ’ ἄραρεν φρένας, 147). The chorus finds her excessive (περισσά, 155) and then invokes Orestes, which leads Electra into a new elaboration of life on the edge. She awaits him tirelessly, she says—childless, desolate, unmarried, moldering with tears, living a boundless doom of evils (ἐγὼ ἀκάματα προσμένουσ’, ἄτεκνος,  / τάλαιν’ ἀνύμφευτος αἰὲν οἰχνῶ,  / δάκρυσι μυδαλέα, τὸν ἀνήνυτον  / οἷτον ἔχουσα κακῶν, 164–67). She laments that her life is slipping away without her father, like some worthless beggar or house slave in an unseemly dress (ἀεικεῖ σὺν στολᾷ, 191) who attends empty tables (κεναῖς δ’ ἀμφίσταμαι τραπέζαις).

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Euripides’ Electra also dominates the action of his play, but in a more mobile, reactive manner. Worman (2012). 62 While scholars have argued that in actual practice male relatives of the dead supervised traditional mourning, female mourners dominate tragedy; see Hame (2008) and cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1989), Foley (2001: 178–80). 63 Note that in Aeschylus this long kommos is sung with Orestes; in Euripides Electra sings along and then with the chorus, but in briefer compass (100 lines) and with more focus on her need for nice clothes. 61

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The imagery is complex and interweaving; let us turn back in order to pick up another strand of this life in death. When Electra first describes (and likely enacts) her cries and breast-beating, she follows this by placing her father in syntactic embrace with her mourning (lit. “How often my miserable I mourn father,” ὅσα τὸν δύστηνον ἐμὸν θρηνῶ / πατέρ’, 95). She then pictures him as cut down like an oak by woodsmen, who murderously split open his head (ὅπως δρῦν ὑλοτόμοι / σχίζουσι κάρα φονίῳ πελέκει, 98–99). She thus sets out from a traditional topos of lamentation in her emphasis on her body’s existential closeness to the corpse she mourns, but then follows this up with a strikingly brutal image that in its head-smashing echoes in reverse the violent threat of Aeschylus’ Electra. The chorus later returns to the dreadful movement of the striking blade (παγχάλκων ἀνταία / γενύων ὡρμάθη πλαγά, 195), an act they characterize as a combination of guile and lust “birthing forth terribly a terrible form” (δεινὰν δεινῶς προφυτεύσαντες  / μορφάν).64 Their language suggests something ineffable and monstrous, whether god or mortal (εἴτ’ οὖν θεὸς εἴτε βροτῶν) (198–99). Electra sees in this monstrous form the coupled horror of her mother and her lover at the moment of murder, which achieves another awful proximity between herself and her father. She cries out (205–08), My father saw outrageous deaths in the twin hands, which took my life and abandoned it, which destroyed me. τοὺς ἐμὸς ἴδε πατὴρ θανάτους αἰκεῖς διδύμαιν χειροῖν, αἳ τὸν ἐμὸν εἷλον βίον πρόδοτον, αἵ μ’ ἀπώλεσαν· Electra also compares herself to a nightingale (107, cf. 148–52), another traditional move that she then extends to include a less than conventional excess, as her simile further delineates her marginal perspective and uneasy status.65 Not only does her nightingale’s odd epithet (τεκνολέτειρ’) envision her anomalously as a Procne figure (i.e., as a mother who kills her child); it also unnervingly suggests that her mournful vigil is somehow adjacent to her dead father’s child-killing (i.e., his murder of Iphigenia).

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Cf. Electra’s claim that she mourns ceaselessly because she is compelled terribly by terrible circumstances (δείν᾽ἐν δεινοῖς ἠναγκάσθην, 221, cf. ἐν . . . δεινοῖς, 223–24). 65 On the epithet τεκνολέτειρ’ and its violent implications, cf. the chorus’ crying out in Rhesus just before the murder that they hear a sound: “sitting in her bloody nest by the Simoeis, the child-destroying nightingale hymns with many-toned voice her tuneful woe” (Σιμοέντος / ἡμένα κοίτας / φοινίας ὑμνεῖ πολυχορδοτάτᾳ / γήρυϊ παιδολέτωρ μελοποιὸν ἀηδονὶς μέριμναν, 547–50). As I note above (Chapter 5 [2a.i]) in relation to Cassandra, the nightingale is the paradigmatic figure of mourning in tragedy and especially in Sophocles (Suksi [2001]), so Electra’s citing of it is hardly revealing; it is how she invokes it that highlights her oddities.

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Virginia Woolf has famously identified Electra’s conflation of the bird with her mourning self as uniquely illuminating of the nature of poetic expression at its uncanny edge, calling Electra’s metaphor “dangerous” (28) and arguing that such gestures lie “on the far side of language” (31).66 Woolf ’s phrase points toward an edging of the sublime that anticipates effects that Derrida and Kristeva highlight when discussing figuration and tragic aesthetics. Electra, for her part, declares at the outset that she will never cease from mourning and hateful groans (ἀλλ’ οὐ μὲν δὴ λήξω θρήνων στυγερῶν τε γόων), standing before the doors of the palace and crying out to all (ἐπὶ κωκυτῷ τῶνδε πατρῴων πρὸ θυρῶν ἠχὼ πᾶσι προφωνεῖν) (103–09). At the end of the kommos she describes her sound as “wings of sharp-toned laments” (πτέρυγας ὀξυτόνων γόων, 242–43), which recalls her nightingale similes, the first of which leads directly to an invocation of Hades, Persephone, Ara (Curse), and the Erinyes (107–12). She carries much of this imagery of the mournful outcast, wasting away in the shadows or keening loudly on the precipice of hell, into her exchanges with the chorus, Clytemnestra, Chrysothemis, and finally Orestes. When Electra mourns at length over the empty urn, a scene discussed in detail in Chapter 4 (2a), she characterizes herself as dead and gone like father and brother (1151– 52) and wishes to entomb herself with the ashes, deeming both them and herself “nothing” (1165–67).67 When Orestes finally reveals himself to her, he expresses shock and pity at her outcast and tattered state (1179–89), but is soon unnerved by her cries of joy and vaunting (e.g., 1238, 1259, 1288–92, 1322). Like her excesses of despair, Electra’s joy appears equally extreme to her brother; and it is true that she sustains an intensity of emotion, whether it propels her toward awful depths or thrilling heights.68 Although she intersperses her exclamations of gladness densely with plunges into grief (e.g., 1245–50, 1285–87), Orestes worries especially that she will be “too much overwhelmed by bliss” (i.e., die of joy, λίαν ἡδονῇ νικωμένην, 1272). And in fact her joyful edge seems closely parallel to her corpse-like despair, not only in its intensity but also in its bold courting of violence, since she is shouting out her pleasure just before the palace doors, and Clytemnestra is within. Like the apoplectic Philoctetes (Phil. 731), the bloodied and “naked” Ajax (Aj. 464), and the cadaver-fixated Antigone (Ant. 74), Electra occupies in her anguished physicality a realm close to the dead. She repeatedly offers up her metaphorical suicide as evidence of her life on death’s edge, compounds these gestures by matching herself with a death that she thinks real but that turns out to be a trick, and then puts her and Orestes’ lives in danger with her wild outcry. There is something intense and unsettling about this

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Woolf ([1925] 1984: 25–26); see Dalgarno (2006) and further in Worman (2019: 52–53). Antigone articulates her commitment to the dead Polyneices more provocatively but less uncannily: “I shall lie with him [female] loved one with [male], criminally fulfilling sacred rites” (φίλη μετ’ αὐτοῦ κείσομαι, φίλου μέτα / ὅσια πανουργήσασ’, 73–74). 68 Cf. Wright (2005b); he regards her joy as evidence of “dysfunction.” As Wright points out (193n. 70), an ancient life of Sophocles claims that the dramatist died from an excess of joy; while the truth of this is obviously more than doubtful, the anecdote suggests that ancient biographers were sensitive to Sophocles’ talent for tragic sublimities. 67

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Electra, impressions precipitated at least in part by the weird contrast between her implacable presence onstage and the proximity to death’s traces that her figurative gestures bring to the fore. b. Electra Corpse Lover (Euripides) Other tragedies involve some gruesome play with corpses, including most prominently the Oresteia, Antigone, and Bacchae, but only Euripides’ Electra features a pivotal scene in which the main character insults and toys with the body of a dead enemy. As earlier chapters have indicated in relation to handling and dress, Euripides’ Electra stages a series of disturbing conflations of the figurative with visible embodiment, repeatedly upsetting any sense of moral or existential orientation. The scene in which Orestes offers her Aegisthus’ corpse to make sport of, repeating the brutal gesture of his mother, as Electra earlier claims that Clytemnestra offered Agamemnon’s corpse to Aegisthus for maiming (cf. 164–66), is no exception. The aftermath of this offering engages sinister erotics that are generated by Electra’s further manipulation of her new plaything (i.e., her mother’s dead lover). Together with her own debased body, which she now claims has just been through childbirth, she uses Aegisthus (whom attendants have carried within) as a means of tricking and baiting her mother into the house to her death. As I note in Chapter 4 (3b.iii), the text suggests that Orestes may enter bearing either Aesgisthus’ head alone or his body in parts. There is in fact a lot of play with heads here, a really unnerving intertwining of victorious heads for crowning and monstrous ones for the stake. The messenger announces just before Orestes’ entrance that he is coming with the “Gorgon head” of Aegisthus (856–57); the chorus sings out for a crowning celebration (νικᾷ στεφαναφορίαν, 862); Electra calls out for decorations so that she can crown the head of her victorious brother (στέψω τ’ ἀδελφοῦ κρᾶτα τοῦ νικηφόρου, 870–72); and when Orestes and Pylades arrive she commands them to take crowns for their heads (882, 886–88). Aegisthus had been gathering myrtle to crown his head for sacrifice when Orestes intercepted him (77–78), so that the messenger’s reference to his dead head in the hands of his killer, who is soon to be crowned victor, has a terrible resonance.69 And it only gets better. Electra’s “kakology” over Aegisthus’ corpse borders on the obscene, as she focuses on his feminization and his bedding of her mother, with so much emphasis on his perceived sexual transgressions that she achieves a macabre conversion of the abject dead into fetish object. Her obsessively sex-oriented rehearsal of Aegisthus’ wrongs transforms his corpse into a focus of erotic fascination, an entity that recalls, though in quite different terms, Orestes’ offering it to her as a carrion toy (895–98). It is only when she reaches the topic of Aegisthus’ philandering that she shows some 69 Scholars have long been in a dither over whether Orestes enters with just Aegisthus’ head or the whole corpse, but the references to the present corpse (895, 959) and the concatenation of “head” metonymies suggests that the Gorgon reference may function figuratively, rather than indicating the severed body part. Electra later orders the servants to remove the body (959–61), so that her mother will not see it when she arrives; and when she and Orestes enter after killing their mother, he gestures toward the “twin corpses” (1179). Cf. Raeburn (2000), with bibliography.

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uncharacteristic fastidiousness, declaring it unsuitable for a virgin (παρθένῳ γὰρ οὐ καλὸν  / λέγειν) to speak of such things (945–46). A mere two sentences later she is claiming that she would want a manly husband rather than a girl-faced one (παρθενωπός) like Aegisthus, as well as children who would wage war, while Aegisthus’ good looks only embellished the dance (κόσμος ἐν χόροις, 948–51). Here the literal and figurative collide, collapsing linguistic codes (i.e., parthenos  / parthenôpos, Electra / Aegisthus) as Electra sets herself in desiring proximity to the dead, again by the use of figurative transfers and a focus on the body’s surface effects. Her oblique strategies suggest that she wants something from this dead one, something she cannot bring herself to name, something her mother had and that she has been deprived of, maybe even a girl-faced man to suit her lost status as a highborn girl. In confirmation of these dynamics, Electra later uses the dead man as bait, teasing Clytemnestra that she has him “in her house” and drawing her in so that, with the more hesitant Orestes, she may drive the sword into her mother’s naked chest.70 This provocation carries its own special thrill, as Electra’s perverse maneuvers transform Aesgisthus’ corpse once again, from tantalizing plaything to murderous lure. Together with her offering of her filthy and fictionally postpartum body to her mother’s eye and her thirst for killing, this erotic play with Aegisthus’ cadaver is profoundly transgressive, as figuration reveals obscene conflations of corpse lover and corpse. c. Oedipus as Ghost and Gift I return, for one final time, to Oedipus, whose physical inhabitation remains such a riveting puzzle in the realm of tragic aesthetics. Is this strange body the ultimate abject (non)entity or a singular boon better than any other possible? Phoenician Women presents him as closer to the former, Oedipus at Colonus as ultimately the latter. As I note in Chapter 4, in Euripides’ play he haunts the house, lurking in the shadows; when he finally steps outside in response to Antigone’s near-command, he asks why he should do so, since he is nothing but a gray phantom, a wisp of air, a corpse from below, a winged dream (πολιὸν αἰθέρος ἀφανὲς εἴδωλον ἢ / νέκυν ἔνερθεν ἢ / πτανὸν ὄνειρον, Phoen. 1544, cf. 1722). That he enters throwing forth this string of evanescent or moldering bodily replacements lends his own physical presence a distinct eeriness, almost as if the audience were viewing another type of ghost scene. And in fact Antigone sustains this sense of his ghostly status. When Creon appears and seeks to exile Oedipus, she asks him why he would seek injunctions against the “wretched corpse” (ταλαιπόρῳ νεκρῷ, 1645) that is what remains of her father. Then later, as she and he slowly exit the stage, she compares his bodily strength to a dream (ὄνειρον ἰσχύν, 1721). It is difficult not to see this undead wisp of an Oedipus as meaningful on a meta-level as well, as Euripides’ commentary on the zombie-like exhaustion of the tragic conventions surrounding the figure of Oedipus.

70

For further details see Chapter 4 (3c.i) and Worman (2015).

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In fact, it may be Sophocles who initially sets this monstrous entity in motion. Oedipus also surfaces in this vampiric manner in two other plays: in Oedipus the King he invokes the crossroads that drank the dark blood of his father at his hands (1398–1401); he echoes the image again in Oedipus at Colonus, when Oedipus envisions himself as sitting underground drinking the blood of his enemies at Thebes (621–22). The first instance suggests more a macabre libation, as Oedipus calls out to the coordinates of his murder— three paths and hidden glade, oak stand and narrow passage—which “drank” (ἐπίετε) his father’s blood spilled from his hands (τῶν ἐμῶν χειρῶν) (OT 1398–1401). The second fashions Oedipus himself as a grotesque consumer, sitting in earth’s chamber: “Then,” he threatens, “may my slumbering and hidden corpse [κεκρυμμένος νέκυς], though cold [ψυχρός] at some point drink [πίεται] their hot blood [θερμὸν αἷμα]” (OC 621–22).71 This framing of Oedipus as vampiric or the living dead thus seems to have been a strand of his profile quite sustained in tragic convention, such that Oedipus’ ghostly form in Phoenician Women represents only the most enervated inhabitation. The action of Oedipus at Colonus operates in what we might regard as the opposite direction to Euripides’ drama. From the outset of the play Oedipus and others accord him and his body a special consideration and highlight its mysterious status. Early on, in a moment familiar for Sophoclean heroes, Oedipus calls himself a “wretched ghost” (ἄθλιον / εἴδωλον), commenting mournfully, “For indeed I have lost my body of old” (οὐ γὰρ δὴ τό γ’ ἀρχαῖον δέμας) (109–10).72 In the presence of Theseus, however, Oedipus claims a more heartening status for this uncanny object, making a gesture that effectively cauterizes his status as wounded outcast when he offers Theseus his “wretched form” as a host gift (ἄθλιον δέμας/ σοὶ δῶρον). He declares that his body is a unique gain (κέρδος), one better than that provided by the beautiful shape (μορφὴ καλή) traditionally associated with heroes (576–78). Although Theseus cannot quite parse this figure at the moment of its offering, he soon shows his understanding of how important it is to defend.73 This exchange in particular opens up the possibility that the abject body of the outcast hero may be received—by Theseus, by Athens, by Athenian audiences—as an object transformed. It is, as Oedipus himself admits,“not excellent/fine to the eye” (οὐ σπουδαῖον εἰς ὄψιν, 577), which means that, in Aristotle’s terms, it is not conventionally tragic (Poet. 1449b24–25; cf. 1448a1-2, b34–35). But its mysterious state renders it very valuable, a boon to those who would hold and protect it, as the ensuing struggle between Creon and the chorus, then Creon and Theseus, and finally Polyneices and Oedipus dramatizes most fully. Civic and citizen reputations are dependent on this wretched body’s safekeeping; and the violent types of touch with which the contenders threaten it and each other only heighten awareness of its special status. It is better than a 71 Cf. Sophocles’ Electra 1417–21, for the image of the dead as still living under the earth (ζῶσιν οἱ γᾶς/ὑπαὶ κείμενοι) and “stealing” (ὐπεξαιροῦσι) the “back-flowing” blood (παλίρρυτον γὰρ αἷμ᾽) of their enemies. 72 Cf. Philoctetes (Phil. esp. 946–58); also Heracles (Trach. 1078–80, 1089–90). See again Carlson (2001:113) on “ghosting” as a form of intertextuality. 73 As this “gift” indicates, their first exchange in fact bears features common to xenia interactions between aristocrats . Cf. Bowlby (2010) on Oedipus’ status as exile in relation to Derrida’s reading of the play; also Brook (2018: Chapter 5) on the supplication.

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conventionally beautiful body, and better than a merely heartbreaking one: it has become, as Kristeva says, sublime, perfectly elevated, and on its way to a realm beyond. Oedipus successfully gains his sanctuary from Theseus by recourse to a tone that combines prophecy and an adage-heavy long view, a prophetic style in keeping with his new, religiously tinged aspect and suited to his status as ritual scapegoat and trophy.74 Now Oedipus takes the long view, although his expression of how changeable the world is carries a very bitter note (610–15): The strength of the land diminishes, and that of the body, and trust dies, while its lack bursts forth, and the same breath never passes again between men who are friends, nor from city to city. Now for these friends, in later times for those, do joys grow bitter and then dear again. φθίνει μὲν ἰσχὺς γῆς, φθίνει δὲ σώματος, θνῄσκει δὲ πίστις, βλαστάνει δ’ἀπιστία, καὶ πνεῦμα ταὐτὸν οὔποτ’ οὔτ’ ἐν ἀνδράσιν φίλοις βέβηκεν οὔτε πρὸς πόλιν πόλει. τοῖς μὲν γὰρ ἤδη, τοῖς δ’ ἐν ὑστέρῳ χρόνῳ τὰ τερπνὰ πικρὰ γίγνεται καὖθις φίλα. Oedipus disrupts this cyclic imagery with the portrait of himself as vampire mentioned above, in which he is a cold corpse drinking the hot blood of warriors (621–22). He thus completes with gruesome punctuation what first sounds like an open-handed, balanced view of life’s many turns. Yet this unsettling combination of gestures has authoritative force, since it convinces Theseus to offer Oedipus protection from strife-filled Thebes and its aggressive emissaries. An escalating emphasis on contact and connection runs parallel to this persuasive philosophizing. When Theseus recovers his daughters, Oedipus seeks them out (especially Antigone) physically, reaffirming the bond with them that is emphasized repeatedly when they are first onstage (1102–03, 1112–14; cf. 173, 200–01 [Antigone], 329 [Ismene]). As I note in Chapter 1, this remarkably detailed and physical family reunion is shadowed despite its apparent sweetness with echoes of the language Oedipus used in the earlier play to revile the over-determination of his kinship bonds.75 Like Oedipus’ pitiful, spectral form (cf. athlion demas /eidōlon) this threesome also forges a striking but adumbrated tragic entity; it is simultaneously moving and unnerving, an anomalous assemblage within any aesthetic scheme.

74

Cf. Odysseus’ perspective in Ajax, which importantly encompasses fair treatment of enemies, since they are merely human and human relations are changeable. See Worman (2001). 75 To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss (1963); for the references, Oedipus the King 1043–45, 1210–12, 1256–57, 1485, 1497–98; cf. 259–60, 460. See Knox (1957: 113–16); Vernant (1978).

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Although he has essentially divested himself of responsibility for his crimes (266–74), since they were foisted on him by the gods and thus condense in a monstrous but paradigmatic form what it is to be human (962–68), Oedipus himself still registers some confusion over what his own body might be. As he is moved to confirm his bond with the Athenian king, he asks for his hand and then recoils in horror at the idea of contact with his polluted form (1130–34): Stretch forth to me your right hand, Lord, so that I may grasp it and kiss your head, if it is right. And yet what am I saying? How could I, become so wretched, wish to touch a man on whom no stain of evils settles? καί μοι χέρ’, ὦναξ, δεξιὰν ὄρεξον, ὡς ψαύσω φιλήσω τ’, εἰ θέμις, τὸ σὸν κάρα. καίτοι τὶ φωνῶ; πῶς σ’ ἂν ἄθλιος γεγὼς θιγεῖν θελήσαιμ’ ἀνδρὸς ᾧ τίς οὺκ ἔνι κηλὶς κακῶν ξύνοικος; Theseus maintains his physical distance, at Oedipus’ request (1135), but he responds to his words with warmth and with respect for the hero’s familial love, despite the “stain of evils” that mars its surface and thus impedes contact.76 In contrast to this subtle negotiation of bodily properties, fond or reverential physical contact, and verbal engagement, we have Creon, who abuses his interlocutors and attempts physical violence. Two of Oedipus’ children also mark these opposite ends: Antigone is (as elsewhere) a loyal prop, firm of speech, and brave; Polyneices is a bold, violent would-be usurper who exiled his father and has kept his distance since. Antigone emphasizes repeatedly the importance of verbal exchange (1187–88, 1193–94, 1280–83) and manages to persuade her father in a limited way, while Polyneices achieves the opposite, confirming his father in his anger and resistance. And pointedly, when Antigone succeeds in convincing her father to give her brother an audience, Oedipus deems giving in to her words a “bitter pleasure” (βαρεῖαν ἡδονήν, 1204), while he curses his son. When Polyneices appears onstage, like Creon before him he remarks on the appearance of Oedipus in his exiled state, but in more physical terms. He enters weeping, and then immediately asks whether he should not cry more for his father’s dilapidation, the features of which he then enumerates (1256–61): I have come upon him in this foreign land, tossed out here with you two, wearing such clothes 76 Theseus’ similarly staunch response to Heracles in Euripides’ play of that name (1399–1402) is not only parallel in orientation but also evidence of Athenian ideological investment in his saving of heroes; cf. Chapter 3 (4c) for the details.

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on which the unkind dirt has settled as old as the old man, infecting his breast, and on his eyeless head his uncombed hair leaps about in the breeze. ὃν ξένης ἐπὶ χθονὸς σὺν σφῷν ἐφηύρηκ’ ἐνθάδ’ ἐκβεβλημένον ἐσθῆτι σὺν τοιᾷδε, τῆς ὁ δυσφιλὴς γέρων γέροντι συγκατῴκηκεν πίνος πλευρὰν μαραίνων, κρατὶ δ’ ὀμματοστερεῖ κόμη δι’ αὔρας ἀκτένιστος ᾄσσεται. Polyneices’ portrait of his father, late as it comes in the action, adds another layer of aesthetic response and information to the accumulated effect of this special body. The details of appearance he offers may at first glance seem to be in keeping with the Colonus elders’ horrified but formally marked recoil early on in the action (δεινὸς μὲν ὁρᾶν, δεινὸς δὲ κλύειν, 141), or with Theseus’ restrained characterization of his outfit and “heart-rending face” (σκευή τε γάρ σε καὶ τὸ δύστηνον κάρα, 555).77 But in fact they resemble more the account that Creon gives of Oedipus’ reduced circumstances when he first enters Colonus: “I see you ill-fated and a stranger, always a beggar moving sightlessly with one prop [i.e., Antigone]” (ὁρῶν σε τὸν δύστηνον ὄντα μὲν ξένον, / ἀεὶ δ’ ἀλήτην κἀπὶ προσπόλου μιᾶς / βιοστερῆ χωροῦντα, 745–47). This Theban viewing seems quite distinct from that of the Athenians; like the emphasis on touch here and at the end of the Tyrannos play, it performs a function opposite to the distancing and elevated viewing of tragic bodies as abject, terrifying, and extreme. Creon and Polyneices encourage a different kind of gaze, a more intimate and homely one that emphasizes the old man’s human prosthesis, the tattered clothes, the fluttering hair, the film of dust. Oedipus will have none of this. As Polyneices seeks to draw near him verbally and physically, he rejects any notion that he is to be looked upon or reacted to as if he were any regular old body. He stands in silence and then turns his back on his son; and when he finally does speak it is in fury and insult. He blames Polyneices for the very guise he had lamented (i.e., the foul clothes, the ancient dirt, 1354–57), so that, metatheatrically and aesthetically speaking, he attributes the more humble aspects of his visible persona to his son's actions. (It is as if he said: “You turned me into a bodily container unworthy of my status as tragic hero.”) Violently rebuffing Polyneices’ attempts at tearful reconciliation, Oedipus states first that he has only given his son an audience to please his host. He then calls an evil demon down on him and finally “spits” him from himself, fatherless (σὺ δ’ ἔρρ’ ἀπόπτυστός τε κἀπάτωρ ἐμοῦ, 1383). It is a terrible exchange, and as the verbal contest of highest intensity, it furnishes an appropriately shocking contrast to Oedipus’ portentous exit from the stage and from life. Why does Oedipus break with his relatively palliative style in this violent manner, here so late in the drama and so far down the path of his fate? Sarah Nooter associates 77

Jebb’s translation of τὸ δύστηνον κάρα (1899).

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this brutal tone with Oedipus’ increasing verbal authority. On her account, it is of a piece with his steady turn to prophetic, commanding, and ominous speech, speech that is closely connected to the gods and then finally uttered by one about to enter the divine realm himself.78 It would, from my perspective, also conform with the mysterious object that Oedipus’ body has been throughout this play, since at this late stage he is undergoing a final transformation from abject and piteous to, quite literally, sublime (i.e., near heavenly). Even in the ensuing messenger speech, and even as it disappears, Oedipus’ body sustains its uniquely stunning character. All of these body proxies or shadow selves expose how the lifelike—including statues, specters, and other types of eerie doubles—may disrupt firm distinctions between presence and absence, living and dead, human and creature, an unsettling apprehension of life’s edges that ancient and modern thinkers have sometimes characterized as sublime. Although Aristotle may not have much to say about tragic transport (psychogogia), the allure of spectral presences in Greek tragedy is, like the sublime itself, both aesthetically and ethically troubling. How, for instance, ought one to assess the moral worth of Admetus, whose cowardice in the face of death is rewarded by the return of his selfsacrificing wife, or a convincing double thereof, from the underworld? And what about Helen? If the dominant tradition surrounding her character depicts her as ethically compromised and opposite to the Helen in Euripides’ play of that name, what are we to make of her phantom? The mimetic and ontological instability of such creatures renders these and similar questions obscure. Erupting out of the weird mechanics of tragic figuration, these bodies and their proxies enliven a sense of the human as unnatural and elusive.

78

Nooter (2012: chapter 5).

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The child in her birdgrief the bird in her childreftgravecry howling Anne Carson, Antigonick As the Prologue to this study suggests, modernist and post-modern bodily surfaces, bodies in extremis, and post-bodies anticipate, develop in concert with, or revise Artaud’s conceptions of the “theater of the viscera” and the “body without organs.” These expansive notions of what bodies may be or become often take cues from Greek tragedy, as Artaud’s own essays and notes suggest. He was developing his ideas during the early and middle part of the twentieth century, when modernist novelists and poets such as Virginia Woolf and Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) were thinking with and reinventing Greek tragedy, often in response to the horrors of wartime violence, and in the 1920s the influenza pandemic as well. This confluence suggests that radical ideas and expressions were converging around the human body during this period. Many modernist artists in other mediums shared their fascination with the genre, including perhaps most influentially Martha Graham in dance and Jean Anouilh in drama. At the other end of this chronology, post-modern writers and performance artists tested the boundaries of what the body can be and do in and out of language (as well as what these do to each other), sometimes refracting tragic images through the challenging lenses of feminism and AID S activism. Provocateurs such as Carolee Schneeman, Karen Finley, and David Wojnarowicz—just to name a few central players—took on the devastations of the patriarchy and the oppressions of the political right wing by putting their bodies on the edges not only of the socially acceptable but also of the humanly conceivable. In recent decades Anne Carson’s daring innovations at the intersections of Greek poetry and the post-modern have excited and infuriated classicists into confronting, among other things, the deep strangeness of tragic embodiment and experience.1 Meanwhile, the twentieth century also witnessed the increasing influence of and broadening interest in phenomenological perspectives on human understanding and experience, from Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s innovating attentions to the sensory and experiential, to Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Jacques Derrida’s invigorating of their perspectives. Further, Donna Haraway’s radical reinvention of an embodied,

1

E.g., Carson (2006, 2012, 2015).

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feminist phenomenology that featured the cyborg as a means of and dominant metaphor for this new fashioning (1991) anticipated by decades feminist post-humanist studies such as those of Elizabeth Grosz (2008) and Jane Bennett (2010). Thus during the latter half of the century some pivotal theorists and performance artists, sometimes with widely divergent motivations, came to view bodies as strange objects or materials and as convergent (in one way or another) with the stuff of the world. Most central to this study, of course, is the fact that these post-bodies re-inhabit and revise contemporary understandings of tragic envisioning and enactment at the edges of the human. Since I cannot take up all of these thinkers and artists in so short a span, I want to focus in on two moments in works by female artists that re-inhabit two specific tragic perspectives: H. D.’s engagements with Helen and Clytemnestra in Helen in Egypt and Carolee Schneeman’s Dionysian Meat Joy, which implicitly reverses the tragedy of Pentheus’ dismemberment. While H. D. wrote mostly poetry and experimental fiction and Schneeman was originally a painter who became best known for her films and performance art, they share interests in bodily surfaces and other human edges, as well as feminist perspectives on art and its conventional practices.2 Both repeatedly draw attention to the many ways in which the embodied lives of women pose challenges to their agency and voices, even as they make very different art out of the dilemmas and tragedies of these enduring inequities. The modernist novelist and poet H. D. read widely in Greek myth and literature and like Virginia Woolf was influenced by the works of Jane Harrison.3 As HER mione, the title of her early experiment with autobiography suggests, she was both a frustrated feminist and a Hellenizing poet; much of her work revolves around adapting Greek myths and tragedies.4 One of the more striking examples of her quiet fury at the misogyny driving male-generated myths about women, and in particular about female beauty, centers on Helen: All Greece hates the still eyes in the white face, the lustre of olives where she stands and the white hands.

2 While H. D. did make films at a point in her artistic career, this was not her dominant medium, although some scholars have noted the cinematic quality of her written work as well, especially in Helen in Egypt (e.g. Mandel [1983]). See also MacDonald on Schneeman as a film artist; he compares her Fuses to “a kind of natural excretion, like the husk of a cicada” (1980: 28). 3 See esp. Anderson (2008). 4 Also note that H. D. chose as her autobiographical title HER mione, suggesting a daughterly (and troubled) attitude toward what Helen may represent in misogynistic myth-making (e.g., destructive beauty, seduction).

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The poem, entitled simply “Helen,” begins like this and ends with an ominous vision that is also shaded with tragic materials: “Greece . . . could love indeed the maid, / only if she were laid, / white ash amid funereal cypresses.”5 In her extended meditation on Helen’s afterlife entitled Helen in Egypt, H. D. has Helen pause in her wander through the underworld of Egypt to contemplate her sister’s fate—that murky story sitting at the intersection of “shadow and substance” (5.3–6). She deems Clytemnestra both Nemesis and Nepenthe, the one for her murderous act and the “righteous” response it catalyzed, the other for the retelling of Clytemnestra’s dark tale that Helen then offers, in which Clytemnestra is a lover of flowers, adorning her hair and her daughter’s with “weeds” for a wedding. This is, of course, no wedding but rather a sacrifice: the slaughter of Iphigenia, the sacrifice that drove Clytemnestra to her own murderous plotting and doom. In H. D.’s spare, “imagist” mode, the mortal sister trails the shadow of flowers through this other story, her double or triple naming6 clustering with the red rose that is Clytemnestra’s (deep-dyed, bloody) flower (6.5). Helen’s “shadow sister” ultimately receives her due from the Fates who “have woven royal purple for her bed” and “un-crowned her unhappy head” (7.7). Like so many other images in H. D.’s poem, this is a resonant final resting place, in the end operating not so much as metonymy for a counter-narrative as a feminist rematerializing that elevates Clytemnestra’s murderous plying of tapestries to serve as fitting draperies for a place of honor and rest. No such resolution can be found in the tragic setting, of course, but this re-visioning of Clytemnestra’s story presses on the affective ambiguities that hover around her physical inhabitations, sustaining the materializing that Virginia Woolf also found so compelling, of Clytemnestra’s forceful and vibrant embodiment by means of lavish, ominous, and deep-colored coverings and extensions.7 Across the tragedies and on into these modern receptions, Clytemnestra’s bodily surfaces and stuffs reveal the nature of her menace, and the menace to her as well: the imperialist violence necessary to secure the wealthy raiment, steeped in rich dyes that recall blood; and conversely, the fragilities, porosities, and folds of the human envelope, which no amount of plush enwrapping can protect. Carolee Schneeman once described her awakening to feminist rage at what artistic traditions had done to the female form—and thus to women’s lived experiences and selfconceptions—as a sudden recognition of the fracture between the artistic idealization of that form and the “stinking” reality of actual female bodies. Paraphrasing Anaïs Nin, she writes that she realized then that she would have to be “a spy in the house of art,” an infiltrating and upending presence that disrupted conventional art practices and aesthetics.8 By the 1990s, when the New York art world finally deigned to recognize her 5

The poem was originally published in the collection Heliodora (1924 [1982: 48]). Helen adds Astarte, the Greek name for Ishtar, Near-Eastern goddess of fertility and love, at a point. 7 See Worman (2019: 54–57) on Woolf ’s attentiveness to Clytemnestra’s intensities and materials. On the tapestries in the Agamemnon see again Wohl (1998: 86–89, 104–05); Mueller (2016: 48–64). 8 Schneeman (1991: 28); the phrase plays on Nin’s book, A Spy in the House of Love (1954), which chronicles the sexual adventures of Sabina, a female protagonist seeking freedom from conventional restraints. 6

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in a small retrospective, she had written extensively on such themes, including her growing recognition of her debts to ancient mythic images such as the Minoan snake priestesses and the Dionysian potentialities of theatrical expression, as well as to Artaud and Simone de Beauvoir. In keeping with insights from such theorists as Haraway, Grosz, and Judith Butler on the gendering of embodiment, Schneeman regards performance art itself as inherently female in its centering of art-working and experiencing on the body, in its feeling out of the margins between the body and materials, and in, as she puts it, “the way the body carries form and meaning into ephemeral space and actual time.”9 While this may sound like it verges on essentialism, Schneeman is not wrong in her understanding of the ways in which the female body has been situated as the paradigmatically physical object and material in western mind–body hierarchies.10 If this seems like a heavy-handed way into a consideration of Schneeman’s piece, Meat Joy aims at something rather different: an insouciant, expansive sensing of the edges of the human. Originally produced and performed in the early 1960s, it is an exploration of what Schneeman herself described as Dionysian, as “an erotic rite to enliven my guilty culture,” and as “a celebration of the flesh as material.”11 In concert with other artists treading the margins of conventional theater as well as of what critics and the public took to be acceptable as art, she created a group movement piece that intertwined near-naked human bodies and included fondling, attaching, and rolling around with pieces of raw meat and fish. Subject like many of her works to obscenity laws and furious male critics, the original performances were threatened with police intervention and misogynistic violence. In the episode most revealing of the visceral fear and anger that Schneeman’s bodily adventuring provoked, during a Paris performance of the work a man rushed onto the stage and forced the artist up against a wall in an apparent attempt to strangle her. While some women in the audience came to her rescue, the gesture itself may not have been life-threatening but it was clearly (if unintentionally) metonymic, with Schneeman’s throat as the part for the whole, namely the horror of women expressing themselves through their voices and bodies on a public stage.12 If the piece now looks relatively tame, it does feature assemblages that other more mainstream film artists like Quentin Tarantino favor, especially of humans and / as meat and sometimes grossly humorous mergings of textures and prostheses. At one point, for instance, a man affixes the ass-end of a raw chicken, with legs attached, to his genital pouch, while a woman writhes on the floor, a raw fish slithering along her torso while she shudders and bucks. The darkly humorous and distinctly skin-crawling effects of such contact and extension achieves what Ahmed might recognize as a very tactile form of surfacing, with bodily recoil producing extrusions of an often laughable grossness. The

9

Schneeman (1991: 31). Cf. Butler (1993); also Irigaray ([1974] 1985), Miller (2005). See further in the Prologue. 11 Schneeman (1979); Schneeman (1991: 29). 12 Schneeman reports the incident in the later review of her work (1991: 31). 10

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bodily plying in Meat Joy soon turns more fully to the skin and to its malleable surfaces, which are painted, rubbed, rolled into wads of paper, such that they and their attachments fold and fan out, accordion-like or kaleidoscopic. From this angle the action of the piece appears to treat the erotic charge of nearly nude bodies in close assemblages as simple sensual experiences and pleasures, such that the wearing of small fur pieces would merely be in keeping with the animal–human play. But from another angle that may not be so much opposite as adjacent, Meat Joy also reverses the tragic trajectory of the Bacchae, in that it celebrates flesh, skin, and fur as contiguous materials and gestures toward the potentialities of its dissolution as a body without organs. That is to say, its aim may well be analogous to what Artaud was hoping for in his theater of the viscera: the releasing of the human body from its confines, an exploding of its capacities. Thus might the “splashing about in the membrane” discussed in Chapter 3 make way for a “living” theater that would be, in his words, “as localized and as precise as the circulation of the blood in the arteries.”13 Euripides’ most violently sacrificial play would then emerge as the deepest kind of theater, as pressing the limits of the human to see what might lie in some violent/ecstatic beyond. Schneeman’s piece explores the possibility that a similarly dismantling approach to bodily confines reveals human–animal edges as intimately enfolded, as contiguous and continuous with each other and with other materials. Such continuities recall Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about human bodies being “caught in the fabric of the world” and thereby occupying a much more grounded and interconnected existence than humanist traditions would have us think.14 From this vantage Meat Joy feels like a kind of upended bodily dismantling (sparagmos), such that its re-visioning of Pentheus in pieces is not so much tragic as a provocative exploration of what flesh can be and do. Its outrageous juxtapositions and extensions offer a challenge to audiences, shoving bodies up against each other and highlighting abject stickiness and prostheses to encourage apprehension of the body as raw material, as “moving freely in the realms of the uncontrollable and suppressed,” as Schneeman herself puts it. This is the bloodand-guts form that would escape the misogynistic legacies that underwrite what she terms “the obscene body/politic,” legacies that foster censoring of such works as pornographic.15 While these two examples from the range of feminist re-workings of tragic embodiment can hardly be said to be representative in any broad sense, they each capture something distinctive about its core operations. H. D.’s cinematic texturing enlivens what we could think of as surface materials and colorations, from Helen’s white face, which like Euripides’ Helen invokes “classical” statues and ghosts, to Clytemnestra’s vibrant bodily draperies, extensions, and tactilities. Schneeman’s work, like other tragedies such as the

13

Artaud ([1938] 1958: 92); also Derrida ([1967] 1978). See again Merleau-Ponty (1964: 163). 15 Schneeman (1991: 31); the latter phrase is the title of the article. 14

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Oresteia trilogy, Women of Trachis, and Bacchae, aims more at exposing and unfolding the body, at turning it inside out or outside in and so testing its limits and surface possibilities. Both artists envision the type of distillations and intensities that Anne Carson’s work also exposes as Greek tragedy’s singular aesthetic, as when the “childreftgravecry” telescopes the already concentrated image of Antigone screeching over the “empty nest” that is her brother’s uncovered corpse. The primary contention of this study is that such intensities center around bodies and their dynamic attachments, including the materialities of covers and clothing, bodily contact and proximities, sonic resonances and tonalities, and figurative additions or annexing. This raucous crowding together of sensations anticipates what Artaud hails as an “intensive mobilization of objects, gestures, and signs,” combined effects that foster a sense of dramatic language as itself having an unfolding material presence.16 What I have termed the materiality of signs then takes on palpable qualities, as may be the case even in reported actions. Let us take one more look at some familiar materials, bodily and otherwise, by way of illustration. In Women of Trachis when Deianira expresses her horror at witnessing the sun dissolving the woolen tuft anointed with her “love potion,” its fiery effects surface not only as chemical change but also as linguistic proliferation. The flaming sun, the heating wool, its withering into the earth and crumbling like sawdust, the congealing fizz that has a sheen like wine: the sheer proliferation invigorates sensation, and neither in one unifying direction nor from the same domain (e.g., woodcutting, wine-making). This proliferation impinges too on the onstage action that follows, both when Hyllus describes Heracles’ sweating and melting in the sun and when the hero himself displays the effects of the poison in terms that offer up his ravaged body as material evidence and figurative elaboration. He is not only “enflamed by the bane’s spasm” (ἐθαλψέ μ᾽ἄτης σπασμός, 1082), but also “unfastened and torn to shreds” (ἄναρθρος καὶ κατερρακωμένος) (1103). His language crafts another set of representational disintegrations to parallel that of the wool, as the detailing of its unraveling achieves a different assemblage, a Frankenstein-like mash-up of sizzling bolts and bits. As with the wool scene, the materialities of the metaphors evoke other domains, in this case carpentry and haberdashery as well as more general kindling. The plying of materials in this play does not, of course, offer a very sanguine portrayal of female agency and as such calls out for revisions like that of H. D.’s poem “Eurydice” (1917), in which the title character repudiates Orpheus for his arrogance, or Schneeman’s “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which she extrudes and reads a text that speaks back to her critics. While H. D.’s Eurydice laments the loss of flowers above the earth, that “bright surface of gold crocuses” among others, she ends on a fierce note: “before I am lost, / hell must open like a red rose  / for the dead to pass.”17 I would avoid any essentialist

16 17

Artaud ([1938] 1958: 87). H. D. ([1957] 1988: 40).

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conclusions about such materializing and about embodied gestures as uniquely female, and yet the aesthetic schemes of the dominant tragedies do pivot around the fear that such ferocious voices may rise up and shake the scene. Tragedy’s most intense characters are not only female but they are similarly fierce in their inhabitations, cantilevered as they are over the gaps that the dramas open up between human bodies and the creaturely, the us and the it, the living/feeling/being and its underside, shadow, or fold.

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272

INDEX LOCORUM

Aeschylus Agamemnon 228–48, 186 414–26, 218, 231 868–73, 174 910, 174 1065–67, 134 1096–97, 177 1109, 177 1115–16, 210 1116, 177 1119–20, 211 1120, 177 1120–24, 211 1125–28, 210 1133–35, 210 1140–45, 178 1146–49, 178 1164–66, 211 1178–79, 178 1181–83, 178 1186–93, 178, 211 1194–97, 178 1199–1200, 178 1203–13, 178 1214–22, 179 1223–36, 179 1232–36, 211 1233, 98 1258–63, 179 1264–72, 179 1273–74, 179 1277–78, 179 1292–94, 179 1305–11, 180 1316, 180 1326, 180 1375–76, 133, 175n. 16 1382, 111 1382–84, 133 1390–92, 133 1404–06, 66 1492, 175n. 16 1580–81, 97 1611, 175n. 16 Eumenides 41–43, 67

52, 99 54, 157, 214 55–56, 99 98, 216 101–05, 216 102, 67 103, 98 106–08, 216 112, 175n. 16 114–16, 216 117–29, 214 147, 175n. 16 237, 67 253, 215 258–59, 215 264–66, 215 299–305, 215 306, 175n. 16, 215 316–20, 215 352, 99 404, 215 592, 67 1028, 99 Libation Bearers 98, 213 249, 98 332–39, 213 363–71, 213 375–76, 213 394–96, 213 421–22, 213 431, 213 444–49, 213 463, 213 500, 212 530–33, 211 543–50, 211 551, 211 557, 175n. 16 889, 176, 212 896–98, 214 897–98, 212 924, 212 928, 212 972, 97 978, 97 980, 97–98

982, 98 983–85, 98 987, 98 994, 98 997–1000, 98 1009, 174 1010–11, 174 1012–13, 174 1014, 174 1015, 174 1024, 25, 175 1047, 175 1049–50, 175 1053–54, 175 1054–55, 67 1232–33, 212 Persians 115, 117n. 68 659–62, 217 Prometheus Bound 15, 33 19–34, 33 43–45, 34 54–59, 34 64–69, 34 71–76, 34 554, 36 566–70, 35 574–75, 36 578–82, 36 583–84, 35 585, 36n. 31 588, 36 597–600, 36 739–40, 36 742, 37 848–49, 37 851–52, 37 877, 37 879–880, 37 885–86, 37 Seven Against Thebes 434, 125 642–48, 125 Suppliant Women 15–18, 78 20, 78

273

Index Locorum 70–76, 117 111–12, 118 119, 118n. 71 120–21, 117 129–30, 118 131–32, 117 134–35, 118 154–61, 117 191–203, 118 234–37, 118 277–90, 118 313, 79 328–29, 222 335, 119 346, 119 350–53, 222 354–55, 119 359–80, 119 423–32, 222 457–65, 223 575–79, 79 588–89, 79 592, 79 656–57, 117 719–20, 119 756, 79 762–63, 79 789, 79 798, 119 820, 119 826–27, 79 839, 79, 119 895–96, 119 904, 79, 119 909, 119 Aristotle De Anima 2.11.422b19–23, 62n. 6 Generation of Animals 737a, 7n. 22 743b9–15, 14n. 47 Poetics 1448b10–12, 11, 24, 207 1449b24–25, 57, 241 1450a33–35, 12, 208 1450b17, 12, 208 1450b32–51a5, 12 1450b34, 12 1450b38, 12 1452a4–6, 12 1453b5, 12n. 39, 208n. 7 1453b12, 24n. 74 1457b32–33, 152n. 50 Rhetoric 1405a13–14, 94n. 4

274

Empedocles fr. B126, 94n. 4 Euripides Alcestis 236–37, 44 252, 44 254–55, 44 267, 44 269–62, 44 279, 44 304–08, 231 348–52, 231 353–56, 231 375–76, 44 385–88, 44 390–95, 44 1020, 231 1024, 231 1028–29, 231 1042–44, 231 1046, 231 1049–54, 232 1055–60, 232 1062–63, 232 1087, 232 1097, 232 1102, 232 1113, 232 1114–17, 232 1126, 232 Andromache 91–93, 193 103–08, 193 109–12, 121 109–16, 193 147, 106 155, 106, 122, 224 157–60, 122, 194 164–67, 122, 224 170–74, 194 173–76, 122, 194 177, 122 192–204, 104 205–06, 194 222–25, 194 246, 224 257–59, 122, 224 260, 224 267–68, 224–25 326–28, 123 334–37, 225 374–77, 123, 225 402, 123 411–18, 80 412, 123

425, 80, 123 429, 80 433–34, 123, 225 494–95, 194 501–03, 80 501–05, 225 529–30, 123 533–34, 225 537–38, 225 555–56, 80 572–73, 123 573–74, 80 577–87, 80 597–99, 195 629–30, 195 710–11, 195 715–16, 80 718–23, 195 719–20, 80 757–65, 195 826–27, 106 830–31, 106, 123 832–35, 107 841–44, 107 854–57, 107 859–60, 107, 123 894–95, 226 923–25, 226 978, 226 998, 226 Bacchae 99–114, 100 221–26, 101 228–32, 101 241, 101 337–40, 100 343, 82 343–44, 100–01 347–50, 101 353–56, 101 437–41, 101–02 443–47, 101 453–59, 102 493–495, 102 511–14, 83, 102 537–44, 103 616–21, 103 680–711, 103 731–50, 103 733, 82 736–42, 82 740–42, 159 745, 82 746–50, 159 811–15, 104 828–36, 103

Index Locorum 858, 82 867–69, 103 914–16, 104 925–38, 104 941–44, 104 949–58, 104 950, 83 966–70, 83, 104–05 973, 83 1078, 159 1088, 159 1109–10, 83 1114–19, 83 1125–27, 159 1128, 83 1129–33, 159 1134–36, 160 1135–36, 83 1139–41, 83 1139–43, 160 1206–07, 83 1219–20, 160 1237, 83 1244–45, 83 1280–86, 83 Children of Heracles 43, 201 48, 201 63, 201 69–73, 201 75–76, 201 167, 149, 202 219, 202 224–28, 202 270–71, 202 307–08, 202 344–47, 202 440–41, 202 528–29, 202 560–61, 202 577–87, 202 588–92, 154n. 56 602–04, 203 695–99, 203 703, 203 729, 203 854–58, 203 859–61, 203 Electra 10, 70 17, 70 28, 70 175–89, 182 190–92, 182 220–23, 182 220–27, 70

247, 69 304–08, 183 314–18, 99 314–22, 70 333–35, 183 581–97, 71 685, 71 688, 71 693–98, 71 812, 71 819, 71 823, 71, 162 824–25, 162 826–29, 71, 162 841, 71, 72 841–43, 163 856–57, 239 862, 239 870–72, 239 887–88, 72 895–98, 239 897–99, 163 930–37, 72 945–46, 240 948–51, 240 968, 165 1000–03, 99 1006, 72 1071, 99 1107, 99 1140, 99–100 1142–43, 72 1160–61, 72 1172–73, 165 1173, 73 1179–81, 72 1206–09, 100, 165 1215, 72 1217, 72 1221–23, 99 1225, 72 1227–28, 99 1230–31, 99 1415, 71 Hecuba 30–31, 217 62–67, 189 72, 217 90–97, 189 126, 160 142–43, 189 150–53, 160, 189 206, 190 225–26, 190 240–47, 121 245–46, 121

254–57, 190 273–77, 190 275, 121 342–44, 121, 227 351–56, 227 359–66, 227 377–80, 227 398, 190 405–08, 190 409–10, 190 424, 190 438, 190 486–87, 191 487, 120 492–96, 191 496, 120 501–06, 191 518, 228 521–30, 228 534–37, 228 548–49, 228 553, 228 557–70, 120 558–61, 228 563–65, 228 566–68, 228 567–68, 160 568–70, 229 572–82, 191, 229 585–90, 191 591–92, 192 592–603, 192 604–08, 192 612, 192 733–35, 120 910–11, 120 923–27, 120 933–38, 120 1152–54, 121 Helen 18–21, 220 33–34, 220 36, 220 73, 220 74–75, 221 77, 220 256–59, 221 260, 221 260–63, 221 540–49, 221 605–06, 221 616, 221 622, 221 Heracles 445–46, 200 454–55, 200

275

Index Locorum 465–66, 128 470–71, 128 480–82, 200 485–87, 200 489, 200 494–95, 128 546, 128 548–49, 128 562–64, 128 565–68, 86 629–32, 128 631–32, 86 914–15, 86 925–30, 86 938, 86 940, 86 942, 86 1132, 86 1139, 86 1155–56, 86 1159–60, 128 1198, 129 1204–05, 129 1207–08, 86–87 1216–17, 129 1214–19, 87 1226–27, 129 1229–31, 129 1269, 127 1360–63, 200 1375, 200 1399–1402, 129 1402, 201 1403, 201 1424, 201 Hippolytus 19–22, 233 29–33, 233 54–57, 233 73–78, 233 84–86, 234 126, 48 131–39, 48–49 162–66, 49 172–75, 49 198–231, 49 243–46, 49 274–79, 50 293–96, 50 325–35, 50 777–817, 51 1252–54, 223n. 35 1344–45, 40, 157 1351–52, 40 1354–63, 41

276

1371–73, 41 1388–92, 41 1396, 41 1433, 41 1437–38, 41 Iphigenia in Aulis 632, 169 648–50, 169 679–85, 169 1115–19, 203 1148–52, 204 1164–65, 204 1171–79, 204 1191–95, 204 1216–17, 204 1226–27, 204 1245–47, 204 1236–37, 205 1559–60, 228 Iphigenia in Tauris 585–86, 76 795–99, 76 798–99, 234 834–44, 76 852–53, 76 902–06, 76 941, 76 993–95, 76 1031–41, 234 1044–47, 77, 234 1165–67, 235 1204, 235 1207, 235 1218, 235 Medea 24–30, 136 134–38, 136 140–43, 136 158–59, 137 765, 84 784–89, 84 786–89, 113 864, 84 902–07, 137 922–23, 137 939, 85 947–48, 113 978–85, 113 1032–35, 85 1038–43, 138 1070–75, 84, 138 1141–43, 114 1147–48, 114 1159–62, 114 1164–66, 114

1168–75, 114 1189, 114 1191, 114 1197–1200, 114 1203, 114 1209, 115, 149 1212–17, 115 1239, 84 1253–54, 84 1260, 84 1273–74, 84 1281–88, 84 1309, 84 1320, 85 1378–80, 85 1399–1403, 85 1411–12, 85 Orestes 34, 138 39–45, 138 81–83, 138 93, 138 128–29, 138 136–41, 47 145–49, 47 200–01, 48, 74 217–24, 47, 138–39 221–22, 74 222–35, 48 253–64, 74 271, 74 735, 139 768, 139 791–802, 139 791–806, 105 800, 47 819–22, 75, 105 825–38, 105 832–34, 75 839–41, 105 863–65, 105 1042–44, 74 1045–46, 143 1047–54, 74, 143 1204–05, 144 Phoenician Women 161–62, 185 166, 185 168–69, 185 303–05, 184 306–09, 184 313–16, 184 322–26, 184 330–35, 184 1265, 185

Index Locorum 1433–59, 65 1484–91, 185 1524–29, 187 1530–35, 65 1544, 149, 240 1547–49, 65 1562–64, 65 1567–78, 187 1645, 240 1671, 187 1672–77, 188 1693–1700, 65–66 1710–22, 66 1721, 240 1728–33, 66 1737–46, 66 1758, 66 [Rhesus] 608–609, 2n. 2 711, 139n. 21 Suppliant Women 61–62, 196 69–70, 196 78, 197 370–73, 197 531, 148 534–35, 148 544–46, 148–49 782–85, 197 794–96, 197 812–17, 197 921–22, 167 941–45, 198 944–45, 197 955–62, 198 961–62, 167 971–79, 198 990–93, 198 1001, 199 1002–03, 199 1006–07, 199 1019–1022, 1, 199 1054–57, 199 1061, 199 1125–26, 167 1130–31, 167 1139–40, 167 1154, 167 1160, 167 1163–64, 167 Trojan Women 306–07, 180 332–34, 180 341–42, 180 348–52, 180

353–58, 181 359–64, 181 424, 181 443–45, 181 453, 181 463, 181 494–97, 182 754, 147 757–59, 147 763–64, 147 775, 147 981–82, 94n. 4 1022–24, 220 1136–41, 147 1175–84, 147 1192–99, 147 1200–01, 147 1207–08, 148 1212–15, 148 1218–20, 148 1221–22, 148 1232–34, 148 Homer Iliad 3.156–58, 219 3.195–98, 10 3.226–27, 126 7.219, 126 7.220–23, 126 7.289–90, 126 7.309, 126 19.12–23, 123 Odyssey 8.174–79, 12 11.556, 126 17.454, 12 Longinus On the Sublime 1.4, 12 Pindar Isthmian 6 35–56, 126 Plato Phaedo, 87b–e, 94n. 4 Republic 439e, 11 Timaeus 44a, 5–6, 144 Sophocles Ajax

1–13, 2 10, 87 19, 126 26–27, 2 30, 88 40, 88 43, 88 50–51, 88 57, 88 69–72, 88 219–20, 88 464–65, 126 574–77, 126 661–62, 89 665, 89 818–19, 89 828, 89 915–19, 144, 162 917–19, 42 992–93, 42 1001, 42 1003–04, 42 1024, 42 1062–63, 145 1062–65, 42 1067–69, 42 1089–90, 42 1164–67, 145 1171–74, 42, 145 1175–79, 145 1180–84, 42 1211–13, 43, 145 1306, 43 1394–95, 43 1403–11, 146 1410–11, 43 1410–13, 162 Antigone 43, 90 52–57, 90 73–74, 90, 154, 238n. 67 246–47, 152 249–58, 158 255–56, 252 258, 152 410, 152 412, 152 423–24, 152 423–27, 151 429, 90 523, 153 774, 153 804, 153 825–31, 4, 153 862–65, 154

277

Index Locorum 877, 158 891, 154 896–98, 90 900–02, 90, 154 905, 154 910–18, 91 1001–03, 158 1008–10, 158 1017, 158 1021–22, 158 1068–71, 158 1167, 154 1175–77, 91n. 77 1186–89, 155 1204–05, 155 1209–14, 155 1215–17, 155 1221–25, 155 1232, 154 1238–39, 155 1240–41, 155 1251–56, 155 Electra 51–58, 140 77, 236 80–81, 236 95, 237 98–99, 237 103–09, 238 107, 237 107–112, 238 121–22, 135 137–38, 136 141, 135–36, 236 151–52, 136 155, 236 164–67, 236 166, 136 187, 136 191, 236 195, 237 198–99, 237 205–08, 237 242–43, 238 755–56, 140 758, 140 1115–16, 68, 141 1119–22, 141 1129, 68, 141 1130–33, 141 1130–48, 167 1136–43, 68 1138–42, 141, 168 1142, 144 1143–45, 141

278

1150–51, 141 1151–52, 141, 238 1158–61, 141 1165, 144 1165–67, 141, 142, 238 1165–70, 167 1168–69, 144 1171–78, 142 1179–89, 238 1207–10, 143 1216, 143, 168 1217, 143 1226, 143 1241–44, 165–66 1260–63, 68 1272, 238 1275–77, 68 1285–86, 68 1384–85, 166 1415, 166 1422–23, 166 Oedipus at Colonus 141, 56, 244 173, 56 109–10, 241 200–01, 56 266–74, 243 555, 244 567–78, 241 577, 57, 241 610–15, 242 621–22, 149, 241–42 745–47, 244 962–68, 243 1112–13, 56 1130–34, 243 1204, 243 1256–61, 243 1383, 244 1544–45, 57 1549–55, 58 1607–09, 58 1611, 58 1624–25, 58 1632–33, 58 1639, 58 1650–52, 58 Oedipus the King 139–41, 90 231, 90 266, 90 334, 52 371–73, 52 380–81, 52 387–89, 53

410–14, 53 417–21, 53 821, 90 996, 90 1071–75, 151 1241–44, 151 1260, 9 1260–70, 151 1265, 9 1268–74, 161 1275–79, 161 1278–79, 9 1280–81, 161 1287–89, 9 1295–97, 53 1303–06, 54, 161 1331–35, 90 1334–35, 54 1371–77, 30n. 10, 54 1386–90, 55 1396, 14, 55 1398–1401, 149, 241 1400, 90 1400–01, 55 1410–14, 55 1424–28, 134 1464–65, 55 1466–70, 64 1469–70, 55 1480–81, 64 Philoctetes 7, 163 11, 163 38–39, 163 144, 164 147, 164 182–90, 164 208–09, 164 213–14, 164 218, 164 263–66, 46n. 53 667, 45 669, 45 674–75, 45 690–91, 164 730–826, 164 745, 45, 163 747–48, 45, 163 761–66, 45 791–95, 46 813–14, 46 822, 164 824–25, 164 889–91, 45n. 50, 46n. 54, 163 946–47, 164

Index Locorum 957–58, 164 1003, 46 Women of Trachis 531–35, 150 534, 82 536–40, 108–09, 110 539–40, 81 556, 109, 149, 150 557–58, 109 559–68, 81 564–68, 109 578–79, 109 580, 109 603, 82 603–13, 109 608–09, 150 685–92, 109–10 691–92, 149

697–704, 110 758, 110 764, 110 767–69, 110 774, 110 777–82, 110 786–92, 110 813–14, 110 831–40, 109 891–98, 82 915–22, 110–11 923–26, 82 924–26, 111 930–39, 111 931–32, 82 957–58, 37 961, 37 998–1003, 38

1015–16, 38 1018–25, 31 1028–35, 38 1050–52, 111 1052, 111 1053–55, 111 1062, 38 1066–67, 38 1069, 38 1071–72, 39 1071–75, 111 1075–80, 39 1082, 252 1089–90, 39, 62 1089–1102, 112 1103, 39, 252 1107–08, 39

279

280

GENERAL INDEX

abjection 11n. 35, 14, 207 and Aegisthus’ corpse 72, 239 and Heracles 38n. 36, 39n. 39 and necrophilia 209 and Oedipus 14, 56–58, 135, 161, 240–41, 245 and Orestes 139 and Philoctetes 163 and Polyneices’ corpse 158–59, 158n. 67 and tragic bodies 8, 25, 29, 32, 51, 156, 209, 244 See also Kristeva, J. Achilles in Iliad 123, 143, 152n. 48 in Iphigenia in Aulis 75, 228 Admetus 44, 143, 219, 230–32, 245 Aegisthus in Agamemnon 97, 133n. 6, 175n. 16 in Electra (Euripides’) 5, 14, 69–73, 85, 99, 160, 162–63, 166, 183, 239–40 in Electra (Sophocles’) 67, 236 in Libation Bearers 97, 175n. 16 See also body parts, corpses Aeschylus 15–16, 29, 94, 117, 168, 171–72, 205, 209, 235 Agamemnon 14, 24, 66, 96–98, 107n. 39, 133–35, 173–80, 186, 210–12, 216, 218–19, 231 Eumenides 23–24, 66, 75n. 41, 77, 94, 97–99, 149, 157, 175n. 16, 210, 214–17, 222, 234 Libation Bearers 5, 14, 17, 21–23, 67, 72, 93–94, 96–99, 107n. 37, 117n. 68, 130, 140n. 23, 146, 173–77, 182n. 28, 210–14, 216 Oresteia 1, 15, 18, 21, 66–67, 94, 96, 98, 133–34, 139n. 21, 172–73, 175, 208–10, 215–16, 226, 236, 239, 252 Persians 116–17, 117n. 68, 146, 149, 209, 217 Prometheus Bound 7n. 25, 15, 28–29, 32–37, 40, 46 Seven Against Thebes 51, 64–65, 90n. 76, 123–25, 166n. 82, 184, 184n. 34 Suppliant Women 22, 37, 63, 77–79, 115–19, 209, 222–24 aesthetics 8, 8n. 29, 27, 30, 220, 249 and Helen 219–21 and politics 5, 19, 24–25, 122, 194, 201n. 81, 206 and the sublime 57n. 80, 208 and Virginia Woolf 16, 168 in avant-garde fashion 23n. 71

in tragedy 1–15, 17–19, 21, 23–25, 28–32, 55, 57–59, 91, 93, 112, 114, 124–25, 135, 148, 157, 159, 162, 168, 170–71, 187–88, 190–92, 196–200, 209, 223–24, 228–30, 238, 240, 244–45, 252–53 of Aeschylus 205 of Attic comedy 10 of Euripides 65, 69, 171–73, 184–85, 205–06, 227, 231 of Homeric epic 10 of Sophocles 171–72, 171n. 9 Romantic 227n. 45 Agamemnon in Agamemnon 66, 96–97, 111, 133, 174 in Ajax 17, 31, 43 in Iliad 124 in Iphigenia in Aulis 23, 75–76, 169–171, 203–204 See also corpses affect 1–8, 58, 124, 135, 156 and abjection 14, 32, 207–09 and assemblages 170, 189–91 and Euripides 205–06 and horror 53–54, 166 and intimacy 51, 105, 183, 200 and mourning 138, 141–42, 196–98 and pain 13, 35 and pleasure 69 and proximity 19–23, 27–29, 45–49, 63–67, 165 and tableaux 170 and the dead 146–47, 167, 188, 199 “ectoaffect” 137, 157 Ahmed, S. 14, 101, 104, 111n. 47, 135, 139, 194, 250 aisthēsis 6, 8n. 29, 27n. 4, 33, 58, 187, 221 Ajax 2–3, 13, 18, 28–30, 32, 43n. 46, 45, 47–48, 77, 85, 87–89, 94, 112n. 50, 238 and shield 43, 88n. 72, 94, 123, 125–27 See also body parts, corpses Alcestis 14, 24, 28, 32, 43–44, 143, 230–32 Andromache in Andromache 23, 63n. 12, 77, 79–80, 106–07, 121–23, 129, 135n. 10, 153, 192–95, 224–26 in Trojan Women 138, 146–47, 149 animals deer 5 dogs 2, 4, 5, 67, 98, 100, 175, 179, 212–15

281

General Index feasting on corpses 17, 145–46, 157–59 humans as 7, 24, 79, 97, 105, 119, 160, 179, 183, 187, 189, 191, 208–09, 251 lions 80, 103, 160, 179, 187, 211n. 9 slaughter of 87–88 “vile” 11 Anouilh, J. 247 Antigone 15, 18, 28, 199n. 76, 227n. 45, 235 in Antigone 4–5, 22, 80n. 53, 90–91, 132, 141, 150, 150–58, 161, 239, 238n. 67, 252 in Oedipus at Colonus 56, 58, 79, 242–44 in Phoenician Women 52, 65–66, 96, 107n. 37, 140n. 23, 173, 177, 183–88, 199n. 75, 240 Aphrodite 2n. 2, 10, 134 in Agamemnon 218–19 in Hippolytus 40, 232–34 Aristotle 24–25, 62n. 6 and catharsis 12, 12n. 39 and touch 62n. 6 and tragic aesthetics 24–25 on female embodiment 7n. 22 on flesh and skin 14n. 47 Poetics 2n. 4, 11–12, 24–25, 53n. 66, 57, 68, 152, 207–08, 221n. 30, 241 Artaud, A. 15–16, 131–32, 157, 162, 168, 247, 250–52 Artemis in Electra (Sophocles’) 165 in Hippolytus 7, 40–41, 42n. 42, 45n. 50, 49, 232–33 in Iphigenia in Aulis 5 in Iphigenia in Tauris 75, 230, 234 assemblages 1, 18, 21, 23–24, 57, 96, 107n. 39, 121, 250–52 in Aeschylus 173-77, 179-80 in Euripides 170–73, 176–77, 180, 183, 186, 188, 192–193, 195, 200–01, 203–06, 224 See also Deleuze and Guattari Athena 3n. 6 in Ajax 2–4, 7, 87–88 in Eumenides 67, 99, 214–15, 234 in Rhesus 2n. 2 in Suppliant Women (Euripides’) 198 Atreus, House of 18, 20, 63, 66–67, 73, 75, 77, 80, 132–33, 174, 176–77, 181, 210 aulos 36 Barthes, R. 1n. 1, 39n. 39, 183n. 31 Benjamin, W. 20n. 64 Bennett, J. 22, 23n. 70, 94n. 3, 131, 142, 231, 248 Benthien, C. 95, 116, 132 bodily excretions 88, 132, 156 blood 9, 42, 84, 88, 105, 108–10, 112, 114–15, 129–30, 133–34, 155–57, 160–62, 164–66, 178–79, 190, 197, 211, 214–15, 241 crust 47, 138–39, 183

282

froth 108–110, 114–15, 139 menstruation 165 milk 211–12 ooze 139, 158, 164 sweat 2, 87–88, 103, 110, 147–48, 156, 158, 252 tears 20, 79, 88, 110–11, 114, 118, 121, 132, 135–37, 137n. 20, 153, 156, 161, 164, 169–70, 178, 180, 184, 193, 198, 200, 204, 213, 225, 228, 236 body parts breast (maternal) 63, 100, 103, 105, 134, 147, 165, 167, 173, 184–85, 187, 189–90, 193–95, 195n. 63, 200, 203–04, 211–12, 214, 228–29 eyes 9, 29, 37, 44, 47–48, 54, 65, 74, 86–91, 105, 114, 118, 128–29, 137–39, 151, 157, 160–61, 218–19, 228 foot 45, 53, 65–66, 89, 163–64 nose (Ajax’s) 161–62 spine (Aegisthus’) 72, 162–63 See also hands Brinkema, E. 6, 17n. 54, 135, 137, 137n. 20 Butler, J. 9n. 30, 153, 250 Carson, A. 247, 252 Cassandra in Agamemnon 14, 28–29, 66, 96, 97n. 12, 111, 113, 134, 175–80, 210–12 in Trojan Women 180–182 clothing, See coverings, dress Clytemnestra 28, 77, 81, 107n. 37, 176 and murderous tapestries 1, 17, 21, 94, 96–99, 108, 133, 172–75, 249 in Agamemnon 1, 66, 67, 96, 133–35, 174, 175n. 16, 210–11 in Electra (Euripides’) 69–70, 72–73, 99–100, 105, 165, 172, 239–40 in Electra (Sophocles’) 67, 68n. 24, 140, 166, 236, 238 in Eumenides 24, 67, 75n. 41, 98, 149, 176, 214–17 in Helen in Egypt (H.D.) 248–49, 251 in Iphigenia in Aulis 75, 203–05 in Libation Bearers 5, 14, 22, 67n. 22, 97–98, 107n. 37, 175n. 16, 176, 211–12 in Oresteia 15, 70, 175, 209 in Orestes 138 See also corpses, ghosts comedy 10 Compton–Engle, G. 10 containers 18, 20–22, 37, 61, 94, 113n. 53, 127, 131–33, 135n. 10, 140, 157, 162 coffin 22, 61, 124n. 85, 140, 143–44, 167 female body as 112, 132, 149–50, 165 husk 131, 133–35 leaky 132, 162, 187

General Index nest 151–53, 156 shield as coffin 146–48 tomb 4, 42–43, 90–91, 131–32, 136, 140–46, 148–50, 153–56, 154n. 56, 168 urn 22–23, 61, 63, 67–68, 131–32, 140n. 23, 140–44, 166–68, 204n. 85, 238 violated 155–56 corpses 17n. 56, 22, 24–25, 168, 180, 207–09 Aegisthus’ 70, 72, 97, 163, 175, 239–40 Agamemnon’s 34n. 26, 66, 97, 111, 133–34, 133n. 6, 174, 175n. 16 Ajax’s 17, 31, 42–43, 51, 89, 144–46, 161–62 and abjection 11n. 35 and desire to view 11, 14, 207 and gender 14 Antigone’s 155 as toy/plaything 8, 70, 163, 163n. 75, 239–40 Astyanax’s 146, 148 Cassandra’s vision of in Agamemnon 176–77 in Trojan Women 180–81 Clytemnestra’s 22, 67, 97–99, 134, 165, 175 coverings/dress for 127–28 Electra as (in Sophocles) 235–38 eroticization of 155, 170, 173n.12, 187, 209, 239–40 in Hecuba 189–92, 229 in Phoenician Women 65, 185–87 in Suppliant Women (Euripides’) 148, 167, 197–99 living 164 Oedipus as 135, 149 Orestes as 138 Pentheus’ 14, 100 Phaedra’s 51, 51n. 61 Polydorus’ 120, 189, 191 Polyneices’ 17, 22, 45n. 50, 90, 152, 154, 156–59, 196, 252 See also necrophilia costume in comedy 10 in tragedy 4, 93, 100, 102–04, 130, 170, 185, 199 Spartan 107n. 37 See also coverings, dress coverings 93–95, 129–30, 157, 172–73 Deianira’s robe 108–12 Hermione’s adornment 94, 96, 106–07, 130 lion skin 108, 124, 126–28 Medea’s gifts 112–15 Orestes’ cloak in Electra (Euripides’) 99–100 in Oresteia 93–94, 96–99, 130 Pentheus’ drag 94, 96, 100–05, 130 racialized 115–19, 129 shield as in Ajax 125–27 in Seven Against Thebes 124–25

skin as 93–95, 94n. 4 slavish 95, 119–23, 129 De Beauvoir, S. 16, 250 Deianira 28, 35, 37–38, 77, 81–82, 108–13, 149–51, 252 deinos (“terrible, stunning”) 9, 54, 227 De Lauretis, T. 5 Deleuze, G. 17, 17n. 54, 19n. 62, 95 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 23, 63, 171–72, 206 demas (“form, body”) 135, 241–42 versus sōma (“body”) 204n. 86 Denniston, J. D. 67n. 22, 72n. 35, 147n. 39, 170 derma (“skin”) 21 as encrusted flesh 14n. 47 See also flesh, skin Derrida, J. 8, 16n. 51, 17, 20, 22n. 69, 24, 61–63, 131–32, 167, 207, 238, 247 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 47 disease 13, 13n. 43, 38, 45–46, 105, 138–40, 163 metaphorical 101, 139 disgust 14, 29n. 9, 101, 104, 111, 111n. 47, 135, 162, 194, 207, 209 See also Ahmed, S. dress 1, 5, 65, 93, 189, 195 and undress 96, 107, 171–73, 176–80, 184–86, 205 foreign 116–19, 129 funereal 127–29 slavish 119–23, 129, 193, 236 See also coverings duBois, P. 6, 119–20, 123 Eagleton, T. 8n. 29, 25, 27n. 4, 208n. 6 Easterling, P. 6 Edmunds, L. 56 eidōlon (“specter, phantom”) 217n. 20, 219–20, 242 Electra 18, 20, 28, 235 in Electra (Euripides’) 22, 61, 63, 69–73, 96, 99, 162–63, 165, 172, 182–83, 226, 239–40 in Electra (Sophocles’),15, 61, 24, 63, 67–69, 135–36, 140–44, 153, 161, 165–68, 209, 235–39 in Libation Bearers 67, 176, 210–14 in Orestes 46–48, 73–75, 105–06, 128, 138–39, 143–44 embodiment and gods 7 and knowledge 7–8, 13, 19, 25, 27, 29, 32 edges of human 2, 6–9, 13–16, 20–25, 32, 41, 51, 69, 93–94, 108–09, 115, 127, 131, 133, 135, 141, 156–57, 164, 170, 177, 182–83, 205, 207–09, 212, 230, 235–36, 247–51 female 5, 7, 14, 24, 132, 205–206, 250, 252–253 heroic 30n. 13, 208n. 7 in comedy 10 in tragedy 1–4, 6–10, 13, 23, 132, 168, 253

283

General Index male vs. female 14–15, 28, 132 post-human 7–8, 21–23, 248 racialized 7, 115–19, 129 slavish 107, 116, 119–23, 129, 193, 224–25, 227, 236 Empedocles 94n. 4 Erinyes, see Furies Euripides 16, 69, 94, 209, 230, 235 Alcestis 43–44, 51, 209, 219, 222, 230–32 and female embodiment 15, 28–29, 170–72, 176, 188, 205–06 Andromache 3n. 6, 23, 63, 78–82, 94, 96, 106–07, 116, 121–23, 135n. 10, 173, 176, 188, 192–95, 209, 219, 222, 224–26, 233 and skin 21n. 65 Bacchae 17, 81–83, 96, 100–05, 116, 130, 138, 146, 147n. 39, 159–60, 239, 251–52 Children of Heracles 77n. 47, 79, 115n. 56, 149, 154n. 56, 173, 199, 201–03 Electra 3n. 6, 5, 14, 61, 69–73, 96, 99–100, 133, 160, 162–63, 165, 170, 172–73, 176, 182–83, 209, 226, 239–40 Hecuba 6n. 18, 15, 78–79, 96, 107n. 37, 116, 120–22, 160, 173, 176, 188–92, 209, 217, 219, 222, 226–30 Helen 116, 146, 209, 216, 217n. 20, 219–22, 231, 251 Heracles 85–87, 124, 127–29, 170, 173, 199–201 Hippolytus 11, 14–15, 28, 40–41, 46, 48–51, 222, 230, 232–34 Ion 3n. 6 Iphigenia in Aulis 23, 75, 169–70, 173, 199, 203–05, 219 Iphigenia in Tauris 5n. 13, 63, 75–77, 116, 230, 234–35 Medea 28, 81, 83–85, 112–116, 136–38, 149, 160 Orestes 18, 22, 46–48, 61, 63, 73–75, 76n. 45, 105, 116, 120n. 76, 133, 138–40, 143, 219 Phoenician Women 14, 18, 33, 51–52, 57n. 79, 63–66, 96, 107n. 37, 140n. 23, 149, 173, 177, 184–88, 235, 240–41 [Rhesus] 2n. 2, 3n. 6, 31n. 17, 47n. 56, 139n. 21, 144n. 30, 227n. 65 Suppliant Women 1, 148–49, 165, 167–68, 195–99 Trojan Women 3n. 6, 15, 94n. 4, 107n. 37, 124n. 85, 138, 146n. 38, 146–149, 173, 176, 180–82, 219–20, 226 Eurydice in Antigone 110n. 45, 155–56 in H. D. 252 flesh and abjection 14 and Meat Joy 250-51 and Merleau-Ponty (“flesh of the world”) 17n. 54, 95, 174 as cloak 94n. 4, 108, 127

284

devouring/dissolution of 28–29, 108, 111, 114–15, 136, 150 jabbing/piercing of 35 of infants 177 sacrificial 158, 162 sarx (“flesh”) versus derma (“skin”) 14n. 47 sparagmos (“ripping limb from limb”) 83, 159–60 vampiric consumption of 147 See also skin fold 16–18, 17n. 54, 37, 94–95, 98, 108, 130, 173, 186, 249, 253 Foley, H. 6, 10, 116n. 63, 170n. 2 Fortier, M. 1n. 1 Furies 5, 67, 73–74, 98–99, 105, 139, 157, 178, 211, 214–17, 226 ghosts 23–24, 208–09 Achilles’ 160 Clytemnestra’s 24, 67, 75n. 41, 98, 176, 214–17 Darius’ 217 Oedipus as 240–41 Polydorus’ 189, 217 Goldhill, S. 6n. 17, 12n. 38 Graham, M. 247 Griffith, M. 155 Griffith, R. D. 6 Grosz, E. 4–5, 8, 25, 132, 248, 250 Halliwell, S. 12 hands 8, 20, 61–63, 91 Aegisthus’ 70–72, 85 Agave’s 83, 104–05, 160 Ajax’s 2–3, 64, 87–89 Andromache’s 80, 123, 195 Antigone’s 90 Clytemnestra’s 66, 72, 134 Deianira’s 81–82 Electra’s 67, 71, 176, 183 Heracles’ 39, 64, 85–87, 202–203 maenad 82, 101–03 Medea’s 77, 82–85 Oedipus’ 55–59, 64–66, 85, 89–90, 149, 241 Orestes’ 66–67, 64, 71, 76–77, 105, 163, 214–16 Prometheus’ 34 sibling 20, 63–65, 68–76, 90, 99 Zeus’ 36–37, 78–79 See also touch Haraway, D. 8, 171n. 9, 247–48, 250 Harrison, J. 6n. 17, 248 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) “Eurydice” 252 Helen in Egypt 215, 247–29 HERmione 248 Hecuba 81 in Hecuba 15, 18, 31, 120–21, 188–92, 217, 227, 229

General Index in Trojan Women 138, 146–48, 180–81, 220 Helen 10, 176, 216, 218–22, 245 and kosmos 103n. 29 in Agamemnon 24, 107n. 39, 218–19 in Andromache 192–93, 195 in H.D. 215, 248–49, 251 in Helen 15, 219–22, 245 in Iliad 126 in Iphigenia in Aulis 23, 169–71, 205 in Odyssey 2n. 2 in Orestes 46–47, 73, 138 in Trojan Women 220 untouchable 79–80 Henderson, J. 10 Heracles 7n. 25, 18, 235 in Alcestis 231–32 in Heracles 10–11, 64, 77, 85–87, 163n. 75, 170, 200, 243n. 76 in Philoctetes 3n. 6 in Women of Trachis 11, 13, 29, 31–32, 35, 37–41, 43, 45, 46n. 53, 47–48, 52, 54n. 72, 61, 64, 94, 109–11, 150–51, 156, 160, 200–01, 252 Hermione in Andromache 77, 80, 106–07, 121–23, 130, 135n. 10, 176, 192–95, 199, 224–26, 229 in Orestes 46, 73, 73n. 39, 144 Hippocratic corpus 13, 45n. 50, 79n. 51 Hippolytus 7, 11, 18, 28, 32, 40–41, 42n. 42, 43n. 46, 157, 232–34 Holmes, B. 12n. 39, 38n. 35, 208n. 7 Homer and aesthetics 10 Iliad 123–26, 219–20 Odyssey 12 Hume, D. 11–12 Hymn to Apollo 2n. 2 Io 15, 18, 28, 32–37, 40, 46, 78–79 Iphigenia in Agamemnon 186 in Iphigenia in Aulis 5, 23, 75, 79, 169–71, 203–05, 228 in Iphigenia in Tauris 5n. 13, 75–77, 234–35 Irigaray, L. 5, 7n. 22 Itys 178 Jocasta in Oedipus the King 9, 110n. 45, 150–51 in Phoenician Women 14, 62, 64–65, 177, 184–85, 187 in Seven Against Thebes 65 in Suppliant Women 196 kinaesthetics 117n. 66 Knowles, R. 1n. 1

Kristeva, J. 11n. 35, 14, 27, 29, 57, 135, 159, 161, 207, 238, 242 Lambert, C. 33n. 25, 66n. 21 Lape, S. 115 Leonard, M. 12n. 38 Leys, R. 19n. 62 Longinus 12, 208 Loraux, N. 6, 119, 228n. 48 madness 2, 29, 37, 46, 48, 74, 76, 85–86, 104, 126, 138–39, 214 Marks, L. 8n. 29, 19, 31n. 19 Medea 15, 18, 28, 35, 77, 81–86, 94, 104, 112–16, 136–38, 147, 159–60, 194 Menelaus in Agamemnon 24, 218–19, 231 in Ajax 17, 31, 42, 144 in Andromache 77, 80, 96, 106, 122–23, 195, 224–25 in Helen 221 in Orestes 46 Merleau–Ponty, M. 8, 17n. 54, 62–63, 95, 130, 247, 251 Messenger speech (diegesis) vs. mimesis/enactment 9, 93, 114, 151, 170, 227, 229 metaphor 5–6, 17, 23, 94, 108, 119, 121, 144, 152, 162, 172n. 11, 174–75, 177–78, 209–10, 216, 224, 227, 238, 248, 252 and enactment 3, 131–33, 190–91, 201 and metonymy 9, 187 and mimesis 24, 207 mimesis and female embodiment 24, 101n. 23 and pleasure 11–12, 220 onstage 9, 15, 18, 93, 104, 132, 217 tragic 161, 207, 209 mourning and melting 20, 29, 135–37, 142–43, 161, 193, 236 Electra and urn 68, 140–44, 166–68, 238 Hecuba over Astyanax 147–148 Mueller, M. 75n. 44, 123, 142, 155, 173 necrophilia 20, 22, 173, 173n. 12, 188, 192, 199, 209 Neoptolemus in Andromache 80, 106, 121, 123, 193, 225–26 in Hecuba 160, 228 in Philoctetes 31, 45–46, 56, 163–64 Nietzsche, F. 17 Niobe 4, 81n. 57, 136, 153–54, 193, 225 Noland, C. 9n. 30 Nooter, S. 244–45 nudity 8, 23, 96, 106–07, 120–23, 125–26, 130, 164, 176–88, 228n. 47, 228–30

285

General Index Oedipus 10–13, 27, 32–33, 51–52, 59, 61, 63–64, 85, 156, 235, 240 as agos (“polluted figure”) 14, 135n. 9 eyes of 9, 29, 54, 89–90, 151, 160–61 family of 1, 18, 20, 62, 74, 176 feet of 53, 65–66, 89 hands of 55–59, 64–66, 85, 89–90, 149, 241 in Oedipus at Colonus 18, 31, 48, 56–58, 61, 64, 146, 149, 183, 240–44 in Oedipus the King 9, 14, 18, 29–31, 52–55, 64, 89–90, 128, 134–35, 149–51, 160–61, 183, 207, 240 in Phoenician Women 64–66, 177, 184, 187–88, 235, 240 Odysseus 31n. 17 in Ajax 2–4, 31, 43, 87–89, 126, 146, 242n. 74 in Hecuba 121, 189–90, 227–28 in Homer 10, 12 in Philoctetes 45–46, 163 oratory 11, 31n. 17 Orestes in Andromache 226 in Electra (Euripides’) 70–73, 99–100, 162–63, 165, 182–83, 239–40 in Electra (Sophocles’) 22, 63, 68, 140–43, 166–68, 235–36, 238 in Eumenides 66–67, 77, 98, 214–16 in Iphigenia in Aulis 203–04 in Iphigenia in Tauris 75–77, 234–35 in Libation Bearers 17, 21–22, 67, 96–98, 130, 173–76, 210–14 in Orestes 46–48, 51, 61, 74, 105, 128, 138–40, 143–44 orientalism 117n. 68, 129 Padel, R. 6 pain absence of 43 female body in 15, 28–29, 32, 35–37, 48–51, 136, 172, 179 gods in 7n. 25, 33–35 hero’s body in 15, 19, 29, 30n. 13, 31, 37–38, 38n. 35, 40–42, 45–46, 48, 51–53, 110, 163–64 of looking 11–13, 53n. 66, 54–55, 83 tragic body in 9, 13–15, 18, 29, 31–32 See also Scarry, E. Patroclus 143, 152n. 48 Penelope 12, 186n. 47 Pentheus 14, 46n. 53, 81–83, 138, 157, 159–60, 248, 251 and drag 17, 94, 96, 100–04, 130 Phaedra 14–15, 18, 28, 32, 40, 46, 48–51, 223 Philoctetes 11, 13, 18, 24, 29–32, 30n. 13, 35, 38n. 37, 45–46, 51, 56, 152n. 47, 156, 163–64, 209, 235

286

foot of 45, 163–64 See also prostheses Plato 7n. 22, 11, 24, 94n. 4, 144, 223n. 36 Platt, V. 225n. 39 poison and bodily disintegration 29, 37–38, 108–15, 136, 156–57, 252 containment of 149–50 Polydorus see corpses, ghosts Polymestor 120–21, 189 Polyneices see corpses Polyxena 78–79, 96, 120–21, 160, 188–92, 226–31 post-humanism 7n. 23, 17, 21n. 66, 248 pregnancy 194 and body as container 132, 149, 165 Procne 81, 178, 237 Prometheus 7n. 25, 28, 32–36 props in comedy 10 in tragedy 4, 8, 23–24, 102 See also prostheses prostheses 23, 29 Ajax’s sword 88–89 Bacchic 102–03 Clytemnestra’s tapestries 172 hands as 63 Heracles’ club 128 Hermione’s adornment 106, 193 humans as 173, 188, 223, 244 in Meat Joy 250–51 Philoctetes’ bow 13n. 44, 45–46, 51 suppliant 78, 117 weapons 63–64 psychoanalysis 171 Pucci, P. 6, 228n. 47 Purves, A. 19n. 59, 27 putrefaction 14, 152, 156 Rabinowitz, N. 6 Rancière, J. 24–25 Reinhardt, K. 11, 13, 54 Scarry, E. 13, 29, 34, 38n. 36, 45n. 51 Schneeman, C. 247–52 Sedgwick, E. 8, 19n. 62 Seely, S. 23n. 70, 171n. 6 Seferis, G. 16 Segal, C. 6, 141–42, 188n. 51, 208n. 7 semiotics and affect 22, 124 and materialism 1, 8, 21, 30, 32, 43n. 44, 94, 97, 124, 145n. 34, 167–68, 211, 252 and theater 1, 4–6, 8, 10–11, 21, 94 senses 2, 5–8, 13, 15, 61 See also sight, smell, sound, taste, touch

General Index shame 49, 86–87, 128–29, 221n. 29 shields 22, 43, 94–96, 108, 123–27, 138, 144, 146–48, 152, 152n. 50, 156, 184 See also containers, coverings sight 2–3, 19, 27–28, 32, 61, 159 and Oedipus 52–56, 59, 64–65, 160–61, 244 and pleasure 11–12 haptic viewing 18, 39, 63, 65, 89, 98, 125, 129, 222, 232 in Sophocles 30 painful 11–14, 24, 34, 37, 42, 51, 88, 197 prophetic 52–53, 158, 173-81 Silverman, K. 20n. 63 skin and disgust 111n. 47, 135, 194 as container 20–22, 131–32, 140, 154, 157 as covering 17, 93–95, 94n. 4, 99, 101–03, 105–06, 108, 123–24, 126–27 as husk 131, 133–35 as surface 8, 16, 18 disintegration of 28–29, 41, 108–09, 111–15, 159 racialized 78, 95–96, 115–19 sexualized 95 touching 14, 23–24, 79, 85, 193, 199, 230 vs. flesh 14n. 47, 21n. 65 wax-like 135–36 smell 3, 18, 27, 58 of Artemis 41, 45n. 50 of corpses 45n. 50, 152, 159, 179–80 of maternal blood 45n. 50, 215 of Philoctetes 29, 45n. 50, 46n. 54 Sobchack, V. 8, 19, 27, 27n. 4 sound 2–3, 5, 13–14, 27–28, 159 and body in pain 30, 30n. 13, 163–65 and Oedipus 54–56 and pleasure 68–69 bird–like 238 haptic aurality 46, 87, 164 of footfall 46–47 painful 55 Sophocles 16, 19, 29–30, 33, 94, 150, 168, 170–71, 173n. 12, 205, 209, 235 Ajax 2–4, 7, 19, 30, 42–43, 51, 64, 87–89, 94, 124–27, 144–46, 161–62, 242n. 74 Antigone 17, 22, 61n. 3, 90–91, 132, 150–59, 239 Electra 61, 67–69, 133, 135–36, 140–44, 165–67, 205, 235–39 Inachus 78n. 50, 117n. 67 Oedipus at Colonus 31, 33, 48, 52, 56–58, 64, 77, 79, 146, 149, 183, 240–45 Oedipus the King 9, 14, 30–31, 33, 52–55, 64, 89–90, 128, 134–35, 149–51, 160–61, 183, 241

Philoctetes 3n. 6, 19, 30–31, 33, 40, 45–46, 51, 163–65 Women of Trachis 11, 19, 37–41, 43n. 35, 51–52, 81–82, 94, 108–13, 149–50, 157n. 65, 160, 252 statues bodies as 7, 23–24, 189, 195, 208–09, 221–35, 245 haunting 24, 218–19 suppliant 67, 76–77, 80, 106–107, 116–17, 122, 193, 209, 214–15, 222–26 Stesichorus 216, 219 style Aeschylus’ 94 and character 12 and tragic performance 5, 17, 166n. 84 as deceptive cloaking 94n. 4 Io’s 37 Oedipus’ 53, 242, 244 sublime, the 12, 12n. 38, 25, 57n. 80, 208–09, 208n. 6, 229, 238, 242, 245 suicide Ajax’s 43, 89, 127 and Danaids 223 and Electra 238 and Heracles 128 and Hermione 106 and Philoctetes 46 Antigone’s 150, 154 Deianira’s 110, 150 Evadne’s 125n. 90 female 110n. 45, 223n. 33 Jocasta’s 9, 150–51 Phaedra’s 40, 50–51 synaesthetics 115n. 57, 136, 164 Taplin, O. 93 taste 18, 27, 58 and blood 158 Tecmessa 22, 30, 42, 88–89, 127, 144–45, 162 Teucer in Ajax 42–43, 51, 89, 127, 145–46, 162 in Helen 220–21 Thetis as dea ex machina 3n. 6, 225 as statue 63n. 12, 80, 106, 122, 135n. 10, 193, 195, 224–25, 233 touch 3, 8, 27–28, 30–32, 58 and body in pain 13–14, 18–20, 29, 32, 51 and corpses 22, 162, 187–88, 191, 198–99 and disgust 101 and hands 61–65 and Oedipus 1, 14, 27, 51–52, 55–59, 64–65, 89–90, 183–84, 243–44 and Philoctetes 45–46 and rape 35–37, 78–79, 182

287

General Index and violent heroes 85–89 and violent women 81–85 effeminizing 39n. 38, 46n. 53 kind/protective 19–22, 38, 42–43, 61–62, 64, 78–79, 89–91, 139, 146 manhandling 19–20, 38, 56, 63, 73, 77–80, 83, 190, 201 rejection of 228, 230, 234–35 sibling 47–48, 63–76, 90–91, 139 suppliant 189–90 violent 3, 31, 38, 91, 241 tragedy and AIDS activism 247 and feminist theory 5, 8, 17, 171, 247–49, 251 and materialism 1, 4–8, 16–18, 21, 30, 32, 93–94, 130–31, 168, 172, 252–53 and modernism 16–17, 247–48 and the post-human 4–8, 17, 21 and war 16, 247 as political practice 6 See also aesthetics, embodiment Vasunia, P. 117n. 67, 119 violence 9, 16, 20–21, 23, 69–70, 75–76, 81, 90–91, 97, 100, 177–78, 189–93

288

against women 37, 71, 77–81, 108n. 40, 119, 172, 190–91, 199, 224, 250 aristocratic 25 by female characters 72, 81–85, 81n. 57, 103, 107, 108n. 40 by male characters 45, 85–90, 128, 204, 212, 230 eroticized 20, 69, 71, 85, 90–91, 100, 102, 176, 194–95, 205 imperialist 249 racialized 77, 119 Williams, R. 4, 23 Wohl, V. 100, 101n. 23, 102, 119n. 72, 147n. 40, 160n. 69, 172n. 11, 173–174 Woolf, V. 6n. 17, 166n. 84, 168, 247–49 Jacob’s Room 16 Mrs Dalloway 164–65 On Not Knowing Greek 16, 136, 218, 238 Three Guineas 153 Zeitlin, F. 6, 24, 98, 124, 182n. 27, 188–89 Zeus black 78, 78n. 50, 117n. 67 in Prometheus Bound 33, 36–37 in Suppliant Women 63, 78–79, 117, 117n. 65

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292