Why Athens?: A Reappraisal of Tragic Politics 9780199562329, 0199562326

Citation preview

Contents

OX.FORD UN IVERS I TY PRESS

Great Clarendon Str1..--ct, Oxford ox2 6vP Oxford Unh•crsity Pre&; is.a dcpartmrn1 of the Uniwrsity of Oxford. It furthers. the University's objective of excellence in res.earch, scholars.hip, and education b)' publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es.Salaam Hoflg Kong Karachi Kuala.Lumpur Madrid M,dbournc Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Sh,mghai Taipei Toronlo

Contributors A bbreviations

IX

Xl

Introduction

I

Mark Griffith and D. M. Carter

With offices. in

PART I: CONTEXT

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Gu.He-malaHungary Jt.ily Japi1nPoland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford UniversityPress in the UK and in certain other countries Publis.hedin the United States bv Oxford Uniwndtv Pr(".!i:S Jnc., New York '

1. The glue of democracy? Tragedy,structure, and finance Peter Wiison

19

2. Plato) drama, and rhetoric D. Atf. Carter

45

3. Nothing to do with Athens? Tragedians at the courts of tyrants

69

'

.(·, Oxford University Press. 2(}] t

The moral rights of the author havc lx-en asserted Database right Oxford Univers.ity Press (maker)

first published 2011

Anne Duncan Response by Richard Seaford

85

All rights rc-scn·cd. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

.stored in a retrieval system, or trnnsmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford UniversityPress, or as expresslypermitted by fow, or under terms agreed with the appropriate rcprographks rights organization. Enquiries tonccrning reproduction out.side the scope of the above should be .sentto the Right.sDepartment,

Oxford University Press. at the address aboveYou must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Librnry of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available

PART 11: DISCOURSE 4. Athenian tragedy as democratic discourse

95

Peter Burian 5. Euripidean eubouliaand the problem of 'tragic politics'

119

Jon Hesk 6. 'Possessing an unbridled tongue': Frank speech and speaking back in Euripides' Orestes

145

Elton TE. Barker Response by Malcolm Heath

163

T)llc.s.tt by SPl Publisher S to the same audience member. [This would al.s.omean that if the poet was supposed to be a ~teacher; of his fellow-citizens (as was and is quite widely believed: see 7 below), the 'lesson' that he imparted was probably not simple or straightforward.} 4. The audiences for these plays were BOTH ( a) relatively A,d)p{ ci..•. J but describes this 1neasure as a public decision (ifrf}cpo~ Aeva-r"fJpa8~1-tou•.• 11-6pov)'a vote for deatht, 'execution by public stoning), Aesch. Sept. 198-9t tr. Sommerstein). While neither of these last two motifs ( persuasion, voting) would have been out of place in other Greek poleis,they had special i1nportance to the workings of the Athenian democracy. Perhaps it is time to ask the question in a different way.Tragedy,whether or not it was an Athenian invention, and whether or not its institution at Athens came under tyranny, flourished and developed under the Athenian democracy.22 It became a distinctively Athenian cultural product and its shop window, the City Dionysia, was, on n1ost measures and in n1ost years~ the biggest Athenian festival in the calendar. Therefore, if a conversation about democracy is not to be found play after play, we may need to find other ways to think about tragedy s relationship with the city that nurtured and hosted it. If tragedy was to be the product of one Greek city and none of the others, Why Athens? The fourteen chapters and six responses in this volume attetnpt in different ways to answer this question. Eleven of the chapters are based on

10

3. THE PURPOSE AND SHAPE OF THIS BOOK (CARTER)

The immediate context of this book is a number of (unconnected) articles that assert the political relevance of tragedy to the classical Greek polis in general. 1\' These articles tend consciously to react against more narrowly democratic' readings (in Mark Griffith's tern1s~12(b) as a corrective to rather too 1nuch 12(a)); and they perhaps reflect a more general scholarly reaction against excessive Athenocentrism and an enhanced interest in different types of Greek political organization. 20 On this kind of reading the default 1

1 "'

There is also a shared tendem.-y,at least in the way I present these readings hen.\ towards the one-to-one mapping of the text onto history. Of course, it is possible to avoid such suspicious and Alcibiades. precision: see e.g. Bowie ( 1997) on Sophocles' Pltilortt'tt~s 1 ,,, Rhodes (2003); Carter (2004t1}; l-lcndcrsnn (2007}. On the exchange between Rhodes (2003) and Goldhill ( 1987/1990), (2000), sec in this volume Duncan (pp. 76-8) and Hurian (pp. 95-7). In my own work I have tried not to close the door on democracy in tragedy, citing the variety of pos .... ible audience responses and concluding that 'in the analysis of many plays ... relevance to the Athenian democracy can simultaneously be assumed and dismissed'. Carter (2007), 140, 20 Probably the most significant evidence of this growing interest is the Copenhagen Polis Polt·is,ed. Hansen and Nielsen (2004). Other recent Centre's Inventoryof Archaic,md Cli1s.~ical

11

1

1

work includes Brock and Hodkinson (2000), Vlassopoulos (2007fl), and a proliferation of work on area.ssuch as Sparta and Macedon. We also have reminders from Samons (200 I) and Rhodes (2005) that many of the ideals commonly associated with democratic Athens-freedom, accountability-were ilppli,abk across a variety of Creek poleis. 21 Cf. Taplin {1999), 52. 22 On the murky origins of the festival: West ( L989): cf. Scullion (2002,1}, Heath (this volume), 163-4. Connor ( 1989) argues for the institution of tragic performances at the Dionysia after the end of tyranny: comraRhodes (2003), 106-7.

Mark Griffith and D. M. Carter

Introduction

papers presented at a conference I organized at the University of Reading on 10-11 September 2007, two glorious late summer days when the shadows stretched across the cricket pitches and the discussion went on even longer than that. The three other chapters are by me and Eleanor OKetl (who was at the conference) and Peter Burian (who was not). The chapters are arranged in threes or pairs so as to examine six different aspects of the question stated above. Each set of chapters is followed by a short response. These responses are intended both to give shape to the current volume and to give some sense of the discussion that went on at the conference (all the respondents but one, Tony Podlecki, were there). I list the six themes and summarize the responses now. Firstt we provide some context and anticipate themes addressed later in the volume. Peter Wilson re-exan1ines social and economic aspects of the Athenian dramatic festivals) giving plenty of new reasons to connect I believe, no good evidence for the existence of formal contests between

choruses anywhere in the Greek world before the appearance, around the turn 2

Pucci ( 2 007) t I 07. The later work of Loraux ( e:sp. 2002) is important here too. A number of insights from this deserve a more prominent place in current debate: her insistence- on the significance of the spatial differentiation of both theatre and Pnyx from the agornin Athens; and, more generally, her remarks on the importance of what :she terms the 'anti-political• in tragedy-exemplified, for instance, a prnpos the Peni,ms, by the way in whkh ·in the cries of the defeated enemy, tragedy taught [the Athenians] to recognize :something that touched them above i1nd beyond their identity as Athenians': Loraux (2002), 48. Another very helpful recent contribution _tothe 200people. Had they used the sort of dimensions found in other theatres, that would be only around 2>100.That capacity was of such overriding concern suggests that some financial motivation played a part. 52 A third interpretation also has its attractions: the monies received in this auction went directly to the deme authorities as a lump sum up-front The khoregia thus consisted n1erely of this purchase, while the actual business of 1nanaging the production and deploying the money on the necessary items

36

[ 0],rn{

stoich. 23

1 TO'i" ~1vcrm1r{()o ~1J[µ..apxa~

Kat]

E1it1PYJ¢{ 'Mi-ro[)) loofEv 0opt-] ,dot