Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

. ] ean-Pierre Vernan t

Pierre Vidal-N aquet

ZONE

BOOKS'

1990

NEW

YORK

Se.!) 'PA

© 1988 Urzone, Inc. ZONE BOOKS 611 Broadway,

3t3~

Suite 608

New York, NY 10012

-'\j4 13

All rights reserved

~98S

First Paperback Edition, Revised Fifth Printing 1996 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electroniC, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the Publisher. Chapters 1-7 originally published in France as My the et Tragidie en Grece Ancienne. © 1972 by Librarie Fran~ois Maspero. Chapters 1-7 and 13 first published in the English language by The Harvester Press Limited, Brighton, England. © 1981 by The Harvester Press Limited. Chapters 8-17 originally published in France as My the et TraBidie en Grece Ancienne Deux. © 1986 by Editions La Decouverte. Printed in the United States of America Distributed by The MIT Press, . Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vernant, Jean-Pierre. [My the et tragedie en Grece ancienne. English] Myth and tragedy / Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet: translated by Janet L1oyd. p. cm. Translatiqn of: My the et tragedie en Grece ancien ne. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-942299-19-1 (pbk.) . I. Greek drama (Tragedy)-History and criticism. 2. Mythology, Greek, in literature. I. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 1930- 11. Title. PA313I.V413 19 8 8 882 '.01 '-dCI9

87-34050 CIP

Contents

. i

Preface to Volume I Preface to Volume 11

~l

7

13

The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of the Soda/and Psychological Conditions 23

V·~ Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Trag~dy

v~

Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy

V·~

Oedipus Without the Complex

29

49

85

Ambiguity and Reversal: On the EnigmatiC Structure of Oedipus Rex 1 13

.vn ...,.E/

Hunting and Sacrifice in Aeschylus' Oresteia

VII

Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Ephebeia

VVIII IX

The God of Tragic Fiction

~~~i~~~:~f

1111111111111111 III

414827'

16 1

18 1

Features of the Mask in Ancient Greece

14 1

189

'Yrant: From Oedipus to Periander

207

249

XIII

The Shields of the

XIV

Oedipus in Athens

XV

XVI XVI I

Heroe~

273

30 1

Oedipus Between Two Cities: An Essay on Oedipus at Colonus 329 Oedipus in Vicenza and in Paris

36 1

The Masked Dion)'sus of Euripides' Bacchae Notes

415

Subject Index .

507

Index of Textual References

523

38 1

Preface to Volume I:::

This volume contains seven studies published in France and elsewhere. We have collected them together because they all belong to a research project on which we have been collaborating over the years and that owesits inspiration to the teaching of Louis Gemet. 1 What exactly do we mean by Myth and Tragedy? Tragedies are - not, of course, myths. It can on the contrary be claimed that the tragic genre 'only emerges at the end of the sixth century, at the moment when the language of myth ceases to have a hold on the political realities of the city. The tragic universe lies between two worlds, for at this date myth was seen as belonging both to a past age - but one still present in men's minds - and to the new values developed so rapidly by the city-state of Pisistratos, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Pericles. One of the original features of tragedy, indeed the very mainspring of its action, is this dual relationship with myth. In the tragic conflict the hero, the king, and the tyrant certainly still appear committed to the heroic and mythical. tradition, but the solution to the drama escapes them. It is never provided by the hero on his own; it always expresses the triumph of the collective values imposed by the new democratic city-state. In these circumstances, what does the task of the analyst ~'Myth

and Tragedy in Ancient Greece was originally published in France as two

volumes. The first volume was comprised of chapters 1-7,.and the second volume of chapters 8-17.

7

~

\h~

MYTH AND TRAGEDY

involve? Most of the studies collected in this book are the product of what is generally known as structural analysis. However, it would be quite mistaken to confuse this type of reading with the decoding of !11yths in the strict sense of that term. The methods of interpretation may be related but the purpose of the study is quite different. To be sure, the decoding of a myth first traces the articulations of the discourse - whether it be oral or written but its fundamental purpose is to break down the mythological account so as to pick out the primary elements in it and then set these beside those to be found in other versions of the same myth or in different collections of legends. The story initially considered, far from being complete in itself or constituting a single whole, instead, in each of its episodes, opens out on to all the other texts that employ the same code system. And it is the keys to this system that must be discovered. In this way, for the student of myth, all myths, whether rich or poor, belong to the same level and are of equal value from a heuristic point of view. No single one has the right to be given preference over the others and the only reason for the interpreter to single it 'out is that, for reasons of convenience, he has chosen it as the mqdel or reference point to be used in his inquiry. Greek tragedies such as we have undertaken to study in these articles are quite different. They are written works, literary productions that were created at a particular time and in a particular place, and there is, strictly speaking, no parallel for anyone of them. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is not one version among others of the myth of Oedipus. The inquiry can only be fruitful if it takes into consideration, first and foremost, the meaning and intention of the drama that was acted in Athens in about 420 B.C. But what do we mean by meaning and intention? It goes without saying that our aim is not to discover what was going on in Sophocles' head as he wrote his play. The playwright left us no personal reflections nor any diary; had he done so they would have represented no .more than supplementary sources of evidence that we should have had to submit to critical appraisal like any others. The intention 8

PREFACE TO VOLUME I.

we refer to is expressed through the work itself,in its structure,· its internal organization, and we have no way of reaching back from the work to its author. Similarly, although fully aware of the profoundly historical character of the Greek tragedies, we do not seek to explore the historical background, in the narrow sense· of the word, of each play. An admirable book has been written, retracing the history of Athens through the work of Euripides,2 but it is extremely doubtful whether a similar undertaking could - - - - - - - - , - - - - - - -_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _b_e_jJlstified for Aesch:xlus and Sophocles; such attemets that have been made in this direction do not seem to us to be convinCing. It is certainly legithnafe to believe that the epidemic described at the beginning of Oedipus Rex owes someth~ng to the plague Athens suffered in 430, but at the same time one may point out that Sophocles h~d read the Iliad, which also contains a description of an epidemic that threatened an entire community. All things considered, the illumination that such a method can shed upon a work does not amount to very much. In fact, our analyses operate at very different levels. They stem both from the sociology of literature and from what one might call a historical anthropology. We do not claim to explain tragedy by reducing it to a number of social conditions. We attempt to grasp it in all its dimensions, as a phenomenon that is indissolubly social, aesthetic, and psychological. The problem does not consist in reducing one of these aspects to another but in understanding how they hinge together and combine to constitute a unique human achievement, a single invention to which there are three historical -' virtues of the hero of ancient times. For the protagonists of the drama the meter of the passages of dialogue is, on the contrary, close to that ofp'~ose. Even as the setting a~d the mask confer ilpon the tragic protagonist the magnified dimensions of one of . the exceptional beings that are the object of a cult in the city, the language used brings him closer to the ordinary man. 6 And even as he lives his legendary adventure this closeness makes him, as it were, the contemporary of the public, so that the t~nsion that we have noted between past and present, between the ~(;ad of myth and that of the city, is to be found again within each protagonist. At one moment the same tragic character appears projected into a far distant mythical past, the hero of another age, imbued with a daunting religious power and embodying all the excesses of the ancient king of legend. At the next, he seems to speak, think, live in the very same age as the city, like a "b9urgeois citizen".of Athens amid his fellows. So it is- misguided to inquire into the greater or lesser unity ,of character· of the tragic protagonists, as some modern critics do. Accordingto Wilamowiti, the character of Eteocles in the· Seven' against, Thebes· does not seem drawn with a firm ·hand; 'his behavior at the end of the play is not really. compatible. with the portrait indicated ·earlier on. For Mazon, on the contrary;" this same Eteocles- ' is one of the finest figures in the Greek theater; he· embodies the, 34

TENSIONS AND AMBIGUITIES IN GREEK TRAGEDY

very type of the doomed hero with perfect coherence. Such a debate would only make sense given a drama of the modern type, constructed around the psychological unity of its protagonists. But Aeschylus' tragedy is not centered upon one particular character, in all the complexity of his inner life. The real protagonist of the Seven is the city, that is to say the values, modes of thought, and attitudes that it commands and that Eteocles, at the head ofThebes, represents so long as the name of his brother, - - - - - - - - - - - - -________e.ol~nices, is not wonounced before him. Fo~ as soon as he hears Polynices mentioned he is given over to another world rejected by that of the po]is: He becomes once again the Labdacid of leg-end, the man of the noble gene, the great royal families of the past that are weighed down by ancestral defilement and curses. Faced with the emotive religious fervor of the women of Thebes and . the warrior impiety of the men of Argos, he embodies all the vir. tues of moderation, reflection, and self-control that go to make up the statesman. But when he abandons himself to a hatred for his brother that altogether "possesses" him he suddenly flings himself toward catastrophe. The murderous madness that henceforth ·characterizes hi~)thos is not simply a ·human emotion; iLis.a daemonic power in every waybeyondhi}Tl. Itenvelops him in the dark cloud of ate,penetrating him as a god takes possession of whomever he has decided to bring low, from within, in a form of mania, a ]ussa, a delirium that breeds criminal acts oLhubris. The madness of Eteocles is present within him, but that does not prevent it also appearing as extraneous-and exterior to him. It is identified with the malignant power of defilement that, once engendered by ancient crimes, is transmitted from one generation to the next right down the Labdacid line. The destructive frenzy that grips the leader ofThebes is none other than the miasma that is never purified-, the Eriny'es of the race, now lodged within him as a result of the ara· or curse that Oedipus lays uEQIl-his sons. Mania, ]ussa, ate, ara, miasma, Erinys...,. all these noun;refer in the last analysis to one and the same mythi-

c~ctor!.-~~iE~!~:.-~!l-Ip!-n_§!~~~~ife~El~;;·~n~!E~.g~!~~!~< ... _ .' 35

MYTH AND TRAGEDY

different moments, both within a man's soul and outside him. It - - . - . . - . .. - - . - ..... ~~.~-.".-.- .. '...

'"

.''''

.~ ..............' .. ' ...... - j - : .......-........ ~'.~ .......................~ .....~.-.- ... ~

i~."~ .. P.?~~_~,,.()!._T.}s_fo!.~~!1:~ .~~~.t._~~:?~e.~~~.(!,~. ~?:.~~r..:?~~,rirri~~l

~~L~~e ~~L~elfJ.,~_,Ip...2~~ dista~~!2!.eced:~;;.~!s...Psycnorogf~ cal motivations, its·consequences, the deruement it brings in its. ~k;-';;(fth~p;~i~h~~~t'that'E};y:2n ~tore for the guilty on~ a':l~.. ~.~l.~,~~,.~_~~~!!~.~~ . .J!!..Qr.~~J