Greek Tragedy and the Historian

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Greek Tragedy and the Historian

EDITED BY

Christopher Pelling

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Greek Tragedy and the Historian

This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard design in order to ensure its continuing availability

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Jacket illustration: actor and mask, 1832, Martin Von Wagner Museum, Universitat Wuzburg. (Photo: K. Oehrlein)

Preface

It was a hot summer afternoon in 1970. I was being interviewed for an award in ancient history, after writing a long-extraordinarily long, given the nature of the subject-essay on fifth-century Boeotian politics. One of the interviewers was A. N. Sherwin-White: he asked, 'Might there be another type of source which you've neglected?'-more than a hint of nonne there. He meant, of course, tragedy; and the next question was, 'What are the difficulties of using tragedy as evidence?' Whatever I said could easily be decoded as 'Search me'; but it remains a good question twenty-five years later, and various approaches to answering it are offered by the contributors to this volume. Those twenty-five years have turned it into a different, and even better, question. 1 One development has been a gathering awareness of the centrality of tragedy to Athenian polis-experience: tragedy was no mere diversion, but a focal part of being a citizen. Another has been a shift of interest from author to audience, with critics less concerned to use the plays to reconstruct the religious or political views of Sophocles, but more ready to explore how they might illuminate the mentality of those who heard them: in other words, any light tends to be shed on 15,000 minds rather than on one. A third development has made the approach more difficult and delicate, the readiness to regard tragedy as a problematizing and exploratory genre, one which gives the audiences as many moral challenges as moral answers; generalizations about 'what the audience thought' about issues can easily seem facile and flat, as we increasingly posit an audience sensitive to moral complexities, and ready to question and test its own assumptions. Unsurprisingly, this is not the first collection stimulated by these developments; particularly useful and influential have been Nothing to do with Dionysos?, edited by Winkler and Zeitlin in I990, and Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, edited by Sommerstein, Halliwell, Henderson, and Zimmermann in I993. Now we also have History, Tragedy, Theory, edited by Goff in I995, which appeared too recently for any of the contributors to take it into account. If there is anything distinctive about the present volume's emphasis, it is captured by the title of the 1992 Oxford seminar series on which it is based: 'Tragedy and the historian: methods and pitfalls'. That series was given for ancient historians rather than literary critics, though in the hope that it might do something to I For some thought-provoking reflections on these shifts in critical tendency, see now Taplin (1995).

VI

Preface

bond the two groups. Contributors were encouraged to dwell, not merely on the value of historical approaches for illuminating the plays, but also on the methodological difficulties of using them as a historical 'source' -or better, for 'source' may carry misleading implications, of drawing whatever illumination they might offer to a historian of fifth-century Attic society. The editorial process was greatly eased by my tenure of a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and I am most grateful to the Trust for their support. I also thank Simon Goldhill, Judith Mossman, and Oliver Taplin for very helpful advice, and Hilary O'Shea for her unfailing support. The contributors have collaborated with good humour and harmony. Among them, a special word is due to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. She and I were College colleagues at the time, and jointly ran the original seminar series; and I have constantly benefited from her scholarship and insight during the editing, and indeed during five years of convivial comradeship. C.B.R.P. Uni'versity College, Oxford January 1996

Contents

List of Plates Abbreviations Contributors I.

x Xl

Aeschylus' Persae and History CHRISTOPHER PELLING

2.

IX

I

Constructing the Heroic P. E. EASTERUNG

21

3. Tragic Filters for History: Euripides' Supplices and Sophocles'

Philoctetes A. M. BOWIE

39

4. The Theatre Audience, the Demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus ALAN H. SOMMERSTEIN

5. Leading th,; Tragic Khoros: Tragic Prestige in the Democratic City PETER WILSON

81

6. The Place and Status of Foreigners in Athenian Tragedy PIERRE VIDAL-NAQUET

109

7. Between P.: ~EA>':rjvwv O'TpaTOS

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390

ou

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7Tciv;' EKEiv' i:1TEcPAEYEV'

Ev8vs OE

KW7T7JS

po8uioos ~VVEJLf3oAil

395

9 This aspect is prominent enough to discourage speculation based on 8. 76. I) the Persians setting sail 'at midnight'. This is the climax of the secretive preparations, and midnight is the most appropriate time. Scholars take this too literally: cf. Hammond (1956), 43 n.41 and 52; Lazenby (1988), 171. Burn (1984: 450 and 452 n. 3) is more cautious. 10 Cf. Kakridis (1975), 153 n.27, and on the prisoner of war tradition Frost (1980), 143-4. Herodotus' OlKETTJS 8i Kat 1Tat8aywyos . . _ TWV B£l.ttU'TOKAEOS 1Tai8wv, 8. 75- I, conceivably implies that Sicinnus was a slave (though his later citizenship at Thespiae (ibid.) is hard to reconcile with that); once again Aeschylus could not accommodate that version in a play where the free/slave antithesis is also strong Ccf. especially 402-5). 11 Cf. Vidal-Naquet (I986a), ch. 512 Sicinnus' mission belongs straightforwardly in the night in Herodotus' account, as an act of deception (by it Themistocles deceives both Greeks and Xerxes), and as one which follows on and frustrates the nervous Greek discussions.

Christopher Pelling

4

€7TUtaaV aA/-L7Jv !3puxLOV €.K K€A€vfLa'TO~. Bows BE 1TavTeS" ~aav €'Kq,avEfS" i8efv' TO 8€~LOV fl-Ev 7TPW'TOV €V'T(lK'TwS" K€par; 7jyeiTo KOUfLt.p, BeVT€pOV 8' 0 7HiS' O'TOAOS €1T€~€XWP€t, Kat 1TapiJv OJ.LOV KAV€LV 7ToAA1}v {JOr/V· {(~Q 7Taioer; ~EAA:rlvwv, l'T€ €Aev(}epOVTE 1Ta'Tpi~/, €AEU8epOUTe

400

OE

1Taioas yvvaiKas 8€wv T€ 1TQTpcfJWV EO.." 8r}KUS 'T€ 7TPOYovwv· VUV v7TEP 7TctVTWV ciywv. "

Then all night long the captains kept their cre\vs patrolling in the fairway, up and down, and night wore on, and still the Grecian fleet had made no move to slip out stealthily, but when the white horses of day at last came over the earth, lovely to see first from the Greeks a sound of voices rose, -voices of men singing; and loud and strong rang back again out of the island rocks Echo; and fear fell on our eastern host. Something was wrong. These were no men in flight, these Greeks who sang the awful Paian then, but going out with valiant hearts to war. Then trumpets over there set all on fire, and the sea foamed, as oars together swinging beat on the salt surface in ordered time, and quickly, clear before us, there they were! The right wing first, in ordered line ahead, led forth, and after it the whole array came following on; and now was to be heard a mighty shouting: 'On, sons of the Greeks! Set free your country, set your children free, your wives, the temples of your fathers' gods and ancient tombs; now they are all at stake.'

39 0

395

400

(382-405, trans. A. R. Burn)

Thus at 398 Aeschylus has the Greek ships 'quickly' becoming 'clear before us' as day breaks: (Jow~ OE: 7TaVT€S ~aav13 €K4>av€i~ iO€fv. Some have taken this to demonstrate that the Greek ships were moored out of sight, and various reconstructions have them coming out from behind one obscuring promontory or another: that is claimed as an 'essential point' by Hammond (1956: 46 and n. 50).14 Yet surely this is all part of the picture of the spreading dawn, and there is no reason why the ships should not already be there in Aeschylus' portrayal, Or, perhaps better, nuav; West (1990b), 84. C( Goodwin (1906: 78), 'a most important point', quoted approvingly by Pritchett (1959), 25 8; Broadhead (1960),333-4; Kierdorf(I966), 69; G. Roux (1974),76,82-3; Burn (19 84), 45 6-7; Morrison-Coates (1986), 59. 13 14

Aeschylus' Persae and History

5

moving forward quickly out of the gloom, terrifying as the rays spread over them. 15 It may be the light, rather than the movement, which brings them into sight. Notice that marvellously orchestrated move from sound (the first thing that took the Persians by surprise, 388); through the arresting 395, aQ.A1TLY~ 0' durfj 7TQ.VT' EKELV' €7T€cPAEY€V, 'set on fire', a striking phrase which picks up c/>A€ywv ('burning') of the sunlight at 364; then finally to sight, with this €K~aVEis {SELV (,clear to see'). That is virtually a ring with Et)(PEyyijS {OELV (387), 'bright to see', of the day-break which makes it all possible. Once again, it all fits too well; the day is the Greeks' time, and they are there and ready to seize it. Once again, too, it is incompatible with Herodotus, who has the Greeks put to sea some time after day-break, once Themistocles has had time to encourage them (83);16 and once again any inferences about historicity would be most precarious. (3) Finally, the following dusk. ¢uytj 8~ dKOOP.WS 1Taoa vauS' TJP€OO€TO, OaaL1T€p ~oav {Jap{Japov OTpaTEvp.aTOS. TOt WOTE 8vvvovs 1] Ttv'lxBvwv {3oAov dyaiot KW7TWV 8pavp..ao{v T' EPEI.7T{WV €7TatOV €PpaXt'ov, ot/Lwyij 8' OJ-Loti

o·

KWKvp..aoLv KaTEiXE 7TEAay{av €WS

nAa,

K€AQ.LvDv VUKTOS ofLfL' dc/>EiAETO.

And flight broke out, all order lost; and all our eastern ships rowed hard to get away. But they-as men gaff tunnies or some shoal of fish-with broken oars and bits of wreckage smote and split heads; and shrieks and lamentations spread with their doleful sound over the sea till night came down, and darkness hid the sight. [lit. 'the black eye of night']

(422-8, trans. A. R. Burn)

So the killing and the wailing continue until the black eye of night hides the sight (428)-a most paradoxical phrase, for OJ-Lfta, 'eye', would normally connote visibility and clarity, not darkness. Yet the paradox is suggestive, with this 'eye' pointing to the rescuing, lightening elements: night this time comes as a welcome relief to the Persians. They had seized it as their element twenty-four hours earlier, but it is all so different now. Sound-words are again important 15 Thus Wheeler (1902: 137-8), arguing that the Greeks were previously concealed by 'the gray of twilight'; cf. Lazenby (1993), 184. Pritchett (1959: 258 n. 59) thinks that this thesis depends on a particular identification of the phases of the moon: that implies too literalist a view of Aeschylus' historical fidelity. 16 Night, as we have seen (above, p. 2-3), is the time for Greek irresolution in Herodotus, and it would not have fitted to have their decisive activity begin before dawn; Themistocles' encouragement, elegantly restrained as it is (83. 1-2), changes the tone ready for the activity of daytime.

Christopher Pelling

6

in this bravura description: here the sound is that of the shrieks and lamentations at 427, which the ~eye of night' takes away. Thus the interplay of sound and light is felt at dusk just as at dawn, and another ring is complete. And can \ve infer that the fighting really lasted all day?l7 That is certainly Aeschylus' picture, but again it all fits too well,18 and the historian should not feel comfortable. Of course, the light-dark contrast is not limited to this passage. There is an interesting reprise of several aspects at the river Strymon (495-507), where again the sunlight comes to the Greeks' help, melting the river as the fugitive Persians cross. That, perhaps understandably, is not a passage which historians have taken very seriously;19 but it is just as insecure to base any historical conclusions on our three earlier cases, where light and darkness have played an equally suggestive role. Immediately we assume that there were some licences and freedoms for the poet, it is very likely that such elaboration lay within their limits, and the ~artistic' rather than 'historical' explanation of the details is adequate. Some may here object: literary texts are polysemic, and different approaches are possible; why should the details not be both historical and dramatically effective? We can allow Thucydides his large-scale effects-contrasts and comparisons of Pericles and Cleen, say, or Pericles and Alcibiades-without denying that these were historical people and historical events. Why should not Aeschylus be doing the same here, exploiting things which were historically accurate rather than fabricating? Is not that distinction between 'literary' and 'historical' approaches too slick? There is some force in that, and we can certainly not infer that any of these things are false. Take Sicinnus, for instance, and the timing of his mission. As we saw, it could just as well be that Herodotus has delayed him, for his own purposes. All we can say is that, if either author is falsifying, we should not be surprised or indignant. But, for the historian, 'we cannot be sure that this is false' is surely not enough. That does not provide secure 'evidence" any more than a war-film gives evidence for the facts it adopts and remoulds. As soon as the strong possibility is raised that these might be elaborating fabrjcations, they move to the doubtful end of our sliding scale, and we must abandon them. Let us move on to the second polarity, that of land and sea. The Persians are a natural land power. That is underlined by the recurrent 'TO~O- and i1T1TOlanguage, compounds with 'bows' and 'horses', in the sonorous register of their names. 20 It is also reflected in the notion of 'yoking' the Hellespont, so emphasized early in the play (70-1) and underlined by the recurrence of the yoking \\lith e.g. Hignett (1963), 231; G. Roux (I974), 87 and 89; and Lazenby (1993),195. We should also bear in mind (as Judith Mossman reminds me) that 'fighting all day' is a familiar epic pattern: cf. II. 2. 385,11. 279,17.384,18.209,18.453, 19.168. 19 Cf. Broadhead (1960), 138; Hignett (1963), 268. 20 TO~- 26, 30, 55. 86; later 147, 278, 556, 926; cf. Hall (1989), 85-6. [7T1T-: 26, 29, 32 , 97; later 126, 302, 996. 17

IH


7

image: 21 the Persians' natural ploy is to link two continents, and to do so by turning the sea into land. Here we should observe the similarity but also the contrast with Herodotus. In Herodotus the point is Xerxes' more elaborate confrontation of the facts of nature, as he tries both to turn the sea into land (the l-Iellespont) and the land into sea (Athos);22 in Aeschylus it is the Hellespont, not Athas, which matters, as Xerxes rashly tries to extend his authority, natural and established on land, over the recalcitrant sea, and link the two land masses ,vhich nature had divided. In the parodos thoughts of the sea provoke unease and disquiet in the chorus's minds, and they are quite right. 23 It is then something of an irony that they stress the hoplite power of Athens at the famous passage 235-45: that is one of several ways in which their view is slightly offkey.24 Now the sea battle duly destroys them. Their distinctive bowmanship is no use (278); finally they are indeed like fish out of water (424-8), killed by the sea implements they are so ill adapted to employ. In the main battle we clearly see the maritime ineptness of the Persians, and t.his may explain Aeschylus' distinctive treatment of the cramping 'narrows'. lierodotus, famously, emphasizes the topography of the straits, and the consequent 'cramping' of the battle in such a narrow theatre. 25 But in Aeschylus (4 13) the cramping is largely a result of the Persian ships fouling one another, part of the disorder and confusion which the poet is emphasizing, and it does not look as if the confined space is playing a significant part the Greek ships have room to cruise around the outside (417- 18).26 It is in fact the familiar contrast of lumbering landsmen outmanceuvred by the natural seamen, and the (ireeks are able to perform a version of the surrounding tactics Xerxes originally planned for the Persians (368).27 Nor has there been any question of 21 Hellespont: 70- 2, 13 1, 722. 736~ cf. 744-50,798-9. More generally: the yoking of Greece, 50 and the extended image in Atossa's dream at 181-99, esp. 191 and 196; the yoke of domination which this catastrophe undermines,s 94; the yokings of marriage partners which are destroyed, 137 and 54 2 . Cf. Fowler (1967), 3-10; Anderson (1972), I 67 -8; Taplin ( I 977), 78; Pad uano (19 78)~ 469~ 80-1, 99; Goldhill (19 88 ),19 1 ; Fisher (199 2 ), 257· 22 Cf. Pelling (199 1 ), 136-9, esp. 138 n. 73 for the comparison with Aeschylus; for Aeschylus' reasons for concentrating on Athos, Kitto (1966: 101-2). 23 Cf. 93- 1 00 (whether that is correctly placed after 89-92 as in the manuscripts, or after 10714 with O. Miiller); I 15- 18 in any case continues the unease; 13-19 similarly follows thoughts of the Hellespont. Cf. Hall (1989), 85, and more generally Anderson (1972), 171-2; lvleier (1993), 64, 67,73-5· 24 This is not to deny the continuing importance of hop lite fighting to Athenian ideology, and the appropriateness of a contrast with the Persian bow (Goldhill (I988: 190». There is still a tension between the expectations of both queen and chorus and the reality which swiftly emerges; just as the queen's Persian mind~set assumes that numbers and wealth must be the key to Athenian Inilitary strength, so the chorus can only correct her with assumptions drawn from the past, especially from the hoplite fighting at Marathon (cf. 244). The sequel, with ships rather than hoplites playing the decisive role) is not anticipated, and it is bad method to introduce a supplement along the lines of 'naves babent satis validas' (Page, tentatively) in the presumed lacuna after 235. 25 8. 6ofj, a more successful re-enactment of the strategy of Thermopylae and Artemisium (7. "(75-6, 21 I. 2). 26 Doubted by Lazenby (1988: 182-3; I993: 192). 27 This reversal, noticed by Lazenby (1988: 175), may explain Aeschylus' choice of language at

8

Christopher Pelling

drawing the ships into the narrows: there is no backing water, we have simply seen the Greek ships advance, a quite different picture from that of Herodotus. That of course suits Aeschylus' stress on the inspirational fight for freedom (402-5), and indeed on the early morning fright of the Persians (39I) and confidence of the Greeks (394): he wants to have the Greeks advance proudly and alarmingly, just as Herodotus wants the picture of wily Themistoclean deceit. But again one cannot possibly tell which picture is the more likely to be historical: one could also say that Herodotus' picture of the cramping narrows suits his leading themes, as the land and sea themselves, the brute geographical facts of Greece, conspire to defeat the advancing Persians.28 Each author again has the version which suits his wider presentation, Persian maritime clumsiness in Aeschylus, hostility of terrain in Herodotus; and it is again hard to tell which, if either, is true. This land-and-sea theme is relevant if we turn to the problem of the island of Psyttaleia,29 and the part it played in the conflict. Aeschylus makes a good deal of this phase (447-64), and also differs from Herodotus on the composition of the Greek force. Herodotus 8.95 makes it a separate detachment of infantry, whereas Aeschylus has a force who don hoplite armour after finishing their duties in the naval battle (456-7): 'the men were marines'.30 Again, much is made of this in the modern discussions, especially by those who stress that Aristides (unnamed by Aeschylus, just as Themistocles is unnamed) was in command on Psyttaleia: could this be some contribution, scholars wonder, to political controversy in 472? (Though if it were, it is hard to see exactly what sort of contribution it might be: pro-Aristides and pro-hoplite, because Aeschylus plays up Psyttaleia, or pro-Themistocles and pro-navy, because he stresses it as an appendage to the main battle achieved by a marine force?)31 This all seems misconceived. Aeschylus' presentation ofPsyttaleia suits what we have already seen. This is not a separate and distinct hoplite engagement, but the Athenian sailors come from the sea to surround the Persian nobles, who 368. Scholars have often found that initial 'circling) plan bemusing: cf. e.g. Goodwin (1882-3),248; Broadhead (1960), 329; Marg (1962), 116-17; G. Roux (1974), 63-4; Lazenby (1988), 171 and (1993),174-5· 28 Pelling (199 1 ), 13 6-9. Herodotus' emphasis on the narrows was canonical by the time of Thucydides I. 74. 3, but that could be due to Herodotus' authority; cf. Hornblower (1991: 119; 1992: 146), rightly stressing that' Thucydides expects his audience to be familiar with the Herodotean analysis. 29 The question of the island's identification does not affect the points made here. On this cf. esp. Wallace (1969). 30 Fornara (19 66 ),5 2 : cf. esp. Broadhead (1960),331-2; Hignett (1963), 237- 8; Lazenby (1993), 195· 31 Hignett (19 6 3: 23 8), Salanitro (1965), Burn (1984: 467), and Masaracchia (1977: 194) all have Aeschylus glorifying Aristides or the hoplites; Fornara (1966) thinks that this action was fictional, that the original purpose of the fabrication was pro-hoplite, and that Aeschylus' version presents a less tendentious modification (52 n. 7, cf. Loraux (1986a), 161). Melchinger (1979: 19) sees the play as striving to be even-handed to both Themistoc1es and Aristides. Podlecki (1966: 24-5), Kitto (1966: 89-90), and Said (I993b) have some sensible remarks.


9

are now as helpless as their maritime counterparts were 40 lines earlier: they are surrounded, just as the ships were in the strait (KVKAOUVTO at 458, c( KUKA4J 7TEPL~ €8€LVOV at 418). This anticipates the wider truth that 'the sea catastrophe destroyed the land power' (728),32 and here we see this in a vivid and immediate sense: the land engagement re-enacts the sea equivalent, but the sea starts it all. The Persians are finally defeated at their own game, even falling to the bowmanship which should have been their strength, as they fall 'victims to the bowstring', TO~tK~~ ••• a?TO (JWJLLYYOS (460-1).33 One can see why Aeschylus makes so much of this: these are the Persian nobles who die, something which will bring the suffering especially close to home to the chorus and the queen, and that is especially appropriate at the end of the account: it is evocative, too, to have the Persians so outclassed at their own game-but only at the end, and only because the sea battle has gone the way it has. It is therefore most fitting to have the marines come from the sea and the naval battle. That captures in concrete terms how the sphere of the sea has come to impinge ·on that of the land, and to do so with decisive influence. As for history, it would be odd ifPsyttaleia played no role at all, or at least any such radical suspicion should belong at the other end of our 'sliding scale'; but, as for the details, who can possibly tell?

POLITICS

The search for historical evidence has so far proved elusive. Will matters prove easier if we shift forward from 480 to the play's production date of 472, and ask if it casts any light on the political exchanges of its own day? We might again begin from the presentation ofPodlecki, who conveniently brings several arguments together. 34 Themistocles was in trouble by 472: this is not the place to discuss the tangled problems of chronology, but it does seem that 47 I/O became canonical for something, either the ostracism or the exile. 35 The play is therefore (says Podlecki) to be seen as a gesture of support for the victor of Salamis,36 encouraged by its choregos the young Pericles. Podlecki goes on to tie this into an elaborate scheme of a conflict of historical ideologies: which battle mattered more, Marathon or Salamis? Cimon and the conservatives made a lot of Marathon, the hoplite victory, and tried to play down the 'democrats" victory of Salamis, the victory of the (Jpav[7TJ~ A€W~, the 'ordinary rowing-bench people'. This ideological battle of the battles is 32

C£ Kierdorf (19 66), 71; Said (1993 b) brings out the importance of the land-and-sea theme

here. 33 Cf. Said (1993b), 68. Fornara (1966: 52 n. 7) thinks that these bows reflect Aeschylus' modification of the conservatives' hoplite Tendenz; Goldhill (1988: 190 n. 16) claims that the bows were probably used by allies, not Athenians. Both views are possible, neither is necessary. 34 Podlecki (196 6), 8-26, followed by Loraux (I986a), 161 and (largely) by Euben (1986a). 35 Gomme (195 6), 400-1; Cawkwell (1970),47; Frost (1980), 189-90. 36 Cf. Dodds (1973),49 n I - (1960), 22 n. I.

10

Christopher Pelling

certainly something that we can trace in Plato (Laws 4. 706b-c)-though there is evidently a question whether Plato is good evidence for views almost a hundred years earlier. That, claims Podlecki, is why so little is made of lV\arathon, and indeed Plataea, in Persae. That also affects (again according to Podlecki) the way the Ionians are treated in the play: their presence on Xerxes' side tends to be played down, and Podlecki associates this with Themistocles' repeated attempts to win them over from Xerxes' cause. There is some disentangling to be done here. Some of our earlier principles can be extended to this as well: when a theme or motif can be explained perfectly well in dramatic terms, then we have to be very careful in assuming a political aspect. The playing down of Marathon and Plataea,37 for instance, looks much more like the continuation of the land-and-sea theme, with Xerxes meddling with a medium which is not his own; and there are further reasons in each case. With Marathon, we should remember the way in which Aeschylus elaborates the contrast between the prudent leadership of Darius and the rashness of Xerxes;38 too much remembrance of Darius' own failed Greek adventure would blur that contrast. As for Plataea (8 r6-22), there are good dramatic reasons for a single rather than double climax: 39 we might compare the battles of Actium and Alexandria in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, where Actium is decidedly underplayed and Alexandria climactic. And the Ionians? On any view Aeschylus is developing a strong and evocative contrast afEast and West, the natural slaves and the natural free. Readers may differ on how far he qualifies and deconstructs that firm distinction of the Greek and the Other; but it is hard to doubt that the distinction is at least initially a strong one, and the presence of the Ionians on the Persian side would be an uncomfortable blurring. Nor can we be sure that Pericles' role as choregos has anything to do with the play's emphases. It is rash to assume that choregoi dictated plays' political texturing;40 it is rasher still, and assumes an over-simple patterning of Athenian politics, to think that the young Pericles would have thought it desirable or prudent to support Themistocles in 472. • We might still be left with the simple point that Themistocles was in trouble in 472, and this can fit into the ideological battle of the battles. But here again scepticism is called for. It is partly that Themistocles is not named. That is probably to be explained in the terms outlined by Goldhill,41 with civic ideology Not that Plataea is as inconspicuous as all that: cf. Kitto (1966), 83, 102-4. Esp. at 555-7,653-7, and 854-907; Darius' own critical tone is in accord with this, e.g. 71925, 744-5 0 , and 78 1. Cf pp. 14-15 below. 39 Cf. Lattimore (1958), 30- I n. 4; Kierdorf (1966), 71. ~o Cf. Rosenbloom (1993), 169 n. 32. Even ifThemistocles was himself choregos for Phrynichus' Phoenissae in 476 (cf. Pluto Them. 5. 5, but the inference is anything but certain), we know nothing of that play's political texture: cf. Roisman (1988). ~l (1988), 192 -3; cf. also Euben (1986a), 366-7. There may also be a point about dramatic verisimilitude: the Persian messenger cannot know in detail what happened on the Greek side. Still, had Aeschylus wished to make a Persian know something ofThemistocles, he could have done so (most 37 }R


I I

requiring this to be a victory of the polis rather than of any named individual; but that is a point not merely about Aeschylus' composition but also about the play's reception, for the audience are not primed to take this as a comment on anyone leading individual rather than the city as a whole. And even without naming, Aeschylus could have done more to draw attention to the distinctively Themistoclean parts of the story of 480: the building of a fleet in the first place;42 the role in preventing fragmentation; the recurrent wiliness, not just in the first Sicinnus message; and, above all, the fighting in the narrows. If this is a way of making an audience dwell on the soterial crafts of the great individual, it is surely a very odd way.43 And this ideological 'battle of the battles'? The evidence for this does not amount to much. It does look as if Cimon was making a good deal of Marathon: 44 that is hardly surprising, given that he was son of the victor Miltiades, and there is no reason to tie it into a wider ideological construct. A good deal of the evidence for this 'battle of the battles' comes from art, and specifically Pausanias' description of the Stoa Poikile (I. 15), built (it would seem) around 460.45 Pausanias lists its four scenes: a battle between Athenian infantry and Spartans in Argive Oenae; Theseus fighting against the Amazons; a scene from the Trojan War, concentrating on Cassandra and her abductor Aias; and the battle of Marathon. There is a problem anyway for those who explain the choice of scenes in terms of Cimonian, pro-hoplite ideology. It is natural to relate Oenoe to a battle in the late 460s or 45os,46 following the famed alliance with Argos in 462- I, and in that case this should be a great democratic success. One is then forced into the reconstruction of Loraux, with democrats appropriating an artistic creation which was originally Cimonian and conservative, and incorporating a recent triumph of their own;47 and the best evidence for this 'battle of the battles' turns out to be something which does not quite fit. Salamis' absence from the Stoa is indeed noticeable, but there obviously in his account of the first Sicinnus message, 355-60, where the dviJp . .. "E>..A7Jv must of course be Sicinnus rather than Themistocles: above, p. 3). 41 True, the mention of the silver-mines at 240 might recall Themistocles' role in the building of the fleet (c( Hdt. 7. 144), even though the passage is silent about the navy (cf n.24 above): so Broadhead (1960), 92. But, as Goldhill (1988) stresses, all the emphasis there falls on the Athenian collective, not on any leading individual: c( esp. line 242. -13 For a different view, Sommerstein (below), pp. 69, 73. 44 Cf. esp. Amandry (19 60 ). -45 For recently discovered remains, supporting the traditional date, cf. Shear (I984), 5- 19; for full discussion (not all of it cogent), Castriota (1992), esp. 76-89, 127-33. 46 Cf. especially Meiggs (1972), 96-7 and 469-72; Andrewes (197S); and, briefly, Badian (19 88), 3 11 - 1 2 = (1993), 97-9. Francis-Vickers (I98 Sa , 19 85b), followed by Castriota (199 2 ), 78-9 and 260-1, argue that this 'Cenoe' was in fact the village near Marathon, and this represented a second Marathon-scene, misinterpreted by Pausanias. Jeffery (1965) also believed that Pausanias misreported the battle, which she took to belong to the mythical past. Stier (1934) took the battle to be Oenophyta; Pausanias' specification of 'Argive' Oenoe will then, once again) be an error. On all these views our only evidence has to be explained away as mistaken, and that is methodologically dissatisfying. 47 Loraux (19 86a ), 61-4 and 372 nn. 281-2, largely following Meiggs (1972), 96, 469-72.

12

Christopher Pelling

may again be good artistic reasons. The Stoa seems to be suggesting the continuity of Athenian achievements from the heroic to the present,48 and recent hoplite battles were what were needed to echo the land fighting of the distant past; and sea battles are anyway hard to portray in successful art, at least with the sort of human detail which would have dominated the other scenes. Reasons of artistic coherence are therefore sufficient to explain the absence of Salamis from the Stoa, and of Marathon from the Persae; nothing else needs to be assumed, and we can believe that from the outset both Marathon and Salamis became Panathenian themes, themes which all Athenians would thrill to, not the stuff of partisan ideology. Perhaps we should not exclude all contemporary relevance from the Persae, but it is tempting to look in a different direction. Persia was not a dead issue: it may even be that Persian preparations for the Eurymedon campaign were already starting in the late 470s,49 and that Athenians were getting wind of them. If so, the memories of Persian aggression might certainly seem a live theme, especially when Darius warns his people against any further attacks on Greece (790-2): a sort of 'zooming', perhaps, bringing the play close to the audience's immediate concerns.50 If so, it is one which rests on the general background rather than on any allusions to specific events. It is a contemporary resonance, no more. And we should be clear how little this is really saying. It is difficult, for instance, to distinguish a clear authorial stance on the issue. Is he alerting the Athenians to the dangers, warning them and urging them to action? Many aspects might certainly seem inspirational and militaristic, appealing to the proud Athenian tradition of liberty (especially the cry of freedom as the sailors join battle, 402-5); the play does recall the elements of the Athenian character which bred success and which the Persians find so hard to understand. 51 One can understand why 'Aeschylus' in the Frogs should select Persae as a play which 'taught the Athenians always to desire victory over their enemies' (Frogs 1026-7). But in that case the several clear hints of the recent weakening of the Persian empire are more surprising:52 those would seem to minimize any threat, accentuating the decisiveness of the Greek victory eight years earlier. Nor is it easy to take the playas jingoistic, urging a further national crusade against a demoralized foe; any element of sympathy for the Persians (even for the shattered Xerxes at the end), any alertness to a universal pattern of divine punishment for hubristic aggression-such aspects tell against 48 Rather as Simonides described Plataea-another land battle-in ways which evoked the Trojan War, as we can now see from the new fragments: c( Parsons (1992),32-3; West (1993),6. 49 So Cawkwell (197 0 ), esp. 47-9; cf. Avery (1964), 173, 182-4. That assumes a dating of the Eurymedon in the first half of the 460s, but this is plausible enough: cf. recently Hornblower (1991), 153; Badian (1987),2-8 - (1993), 2-12; (1988), 292 n. 6 - (1993), 203 n. 6. 50 The cinematic analogy is drawn by Sourvinou-Inwood (1989): see also below, pp. 228-9. 51 Cf. above, n. 24. 52 Esp. at 584-97. The list of islands at 880-902 is also suggestive-islands which would be liberated soon after 480, as the audience would know. Cf. Broadhead (1960), 220 n. 2; Podlecki (1966), 17-18; Gagarin (1976), 32.


13

a recommendation to bellicosity.53 Ifwe find a contemporary resonance of this sort, we shall simply be finding a further reason why the audience should find this theme rich, engrossing, lively. Yet it would be an odd critic who ever doubted the vitality of the theme, less than a decade after the great victories \vhich were already becoming the stuff of legend, and which (at least in Plataea's case) Simonides could already describe in the tones of Homeric heroism. 54 Such a 'resonance' does not take us far. IDEOLOGY AND NATIONAL STEREOTYPES

l"here is more to say about the final scenes and their impact on the audience, as they touch wider questions of national and civic ideology, matters which the historian will find very interesting indeed. Edith HaUSS brings out the pervasiveness and subtlety of the presentation of the Persian 'Other' in this play. Persians are what the Greeks are not, and particularly what the Athenians are not, tyrannical and tyrannized, populous, wealthy) materialistic, daintily luxurious, cruel, land-based, hierarchical, insensitive to freedom: construction of Greek and construction of barbarian, as usual, closely intermesh. And, again as usual, such constructions begin by positing a simple polarity of Self and ()ther, Us and Them. Yet there is an intrinsic paradox in the presentation of a play with nothing but Persian characters. It is rare for any drama to proceed without some emotional engagement with some of its characters. 56 As characters, particularly characters responding to disaster, the figures of Persae may invite audience engagement, association, perhaps even a form of identification; yet as Persians who are strongly differentiated from Greeks, they would seem to repulse any such emotional involvement.57 To notice this duality is one thing; it is a further question how far it qualifies, even deconstructs, the strong polar differentiation of Self and Other. Here critics will vary, and the variations will be especially clear in their response to the final, shattered Xerxes. 58 Some have taken this as an exercise in Schadenfreude, with Athenians revelling in the discomfiture and humiliation of a hated enemy; Xerxes' own words AV7Tpa, xcipp..a'Ta Sll €X(Jpo[~ (,painful, but joys to our 53 Thus Melchinger (1979: 35-6, 39) had some reason for taking the playas a warning against Athenian expansionism. But that too is crude. C( Gagarin (197 6), 53; Hall (1989), 72. 54 Above, n. 48. IfSimonides died in 468/7 (Mann. Par. 73), the poem's composition cannot be long after Persae and may well be before. 55 (19 89), 56- 100• 56 Cf. esp. Heath (1987: esp. 90-8), developing the idea of a 'focus' which may shift from one character to another. Heath's category addresses emotional engagement, sympathy with one character rather than another; it should be distinguished from Genette's narratological category of 'focalization', which is more a question of cognitive engagement, viewing events through a character's eyes. Paduano (1978: esp. 20-1,27-8) represents an explicit attempt to apply Genette's categories to Persae. 51 Cf. Paduano (1978), esp. 9-13, 66-7. 58 Cf. the summaries of views at Paduano (1978), 12, 15-16, and esp. Hall (1989), 70-2. Hall herself accepts the view that Xerxes' emotionalism is extreme (pp. 83-4), but she recognizes 'a genuinely tragic pathos' (p. 100) which excludes too one-sided an interpretation.

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enemies', I034) can serve as a motto for this approach. Such critics can fairly emphasize the extremity and self-centredness of his lamentation, so different from the civic focus and restraint of Athenian public grief;59 this would not be the only tragic case where the intensity of a lament becomes expressive and thought-provoking. 60 On this view, the audience refuse to give Xerxes the sympathy which his lament might naturally invite, and the categories of Self and Other remain strong and unblurred. But it has become more fashionable to see Xerxes as eliciting some sympathy as he confronts the magnitude of his catastrophe. On this second view one might rather emphasize the formal similarities between Xerxes' cries and the lamentations of Greek private bereavement, even if it remains a crucial difference that these cries are here uttered by a male. 61 The audience would still hear cries like these in the funerals of familiar Greek life; the thought that grief is universal, that a shattered Persian is not so different from a shattered Greek, would not be far to seek. That second view comes more readily to the gentle modern sensibility, but here our own perceptual filters can easily lead us astray. It is all too easy to claim that the text will only work if the audience respond in the way we choose (talk of the 'reader inscribed in the text' is then close at hand); all too easy, too, to speak as if an audience would respond as a monolithic whole-even despite any personal experience we may have of the varying vindictiveness among the World War II generations towards their former foes. As Goldhill sensibly remarks, it is '[not] hard to imagine a variety of reactions to its performance, as critics have reacted to it so variously since'.62 Perhaps matters will be clearer if we first consider a subtle but less emotionally problematic scene, the appearance of Darius' ghost. In some ways, the distancing of Persian from Greek assumptions is here at its most acute. Darius is invoked by the chorus in a prayer with strong kletic elements. It is an open question quite what implications would be drawn from this blurring of the line between the human and the divine: would, for instance, the audience (or some of them) think of this as a possible explanation for the rashness, arrogance, and ultimate failure of Persian aggression? What is clear is that the audience would here notice the distance from normal Greek religious assumptions,63 and the differentiation of the two worlds is very strong. The 59 C£ Hall (1989),83-4; Hoist-Warhaft (1992), 130-3. On the Athenian public Epitaphios see also Conclusion, pp. 229-33 below. 60 Cf. esp. Foley (1993), and see below, pp. 230-3. 61 C£ Alexiou (1974), 13, 83-4, 134-8, IS I; Benedetto (1978), 29; Holst-Warhaft (199 2 ), 133. Hall (1989: 83-4) comments on the similarity to laments elsewhere in tragedy (cf. her pp. I 19, 13 13), and on the important difference that this one is delivered by a male: thus also Holst-Warhaft, loco cit. For the similarities with other tragic laments cf. Reiner (1938), 27-8 n. 5; for the distinction between public and private laments for war-dead cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1995), 19 1-5. 62 (1988), 19 2 ; cf. Goldhill (I 990a), I 15. 63 On Darius as divine c( Hall (1989), 89-93. Taplin (1977: I IS) remarks that 'the Persians' view of Darius as divine cannot be regarded as barbarous blasphemy or as mere oriental colour, since the audience also is obliged to accept it'. 'Accept it', yes, in the sense that the invocation works, and


IS

\vords that Darius speaks again articulate the defining Persian traits which have become familiar: at least, a preoccupation with wealth and prosperity (751-2,826,842). But we should also notice the way in which Darius' reactions to Xerxes' enterprise map closely on to natural Greek assumptions.64 Xerxes \vas a fool (EIl-WpaVEV, 719); it must have been a great daimon which made him unwise, even mad (p,ij ~pov€iv KaAws, 725); but the gods help humans along the paths they choose themselves (740-2). Xerxes w·as young, with a young rnan's rashness (744,780). It mus.t be an ailing of the mind that led him to think t.hat, mortal as he was, he could overcome the gods (749-50). Divine oracles command respect (800-2); now the remaining army will pay for their and Xerxes' hybris and 'godless thoughts' (808), especially their devastation of the (}reek temples (809- I 5). The moral will be the necessity for humans to accept the proper boundaries of their thoughts and aspirations (... ws oux tJ'tT€pCP€V fJV'Y}TOV ov-ra xpTj ~povEiv, 820). That is the cycle of hybris, ate, and destruction (821-2), presided over by Zeus (827). Nor is the unexceptionable quality of Darius' words limited to his comments on Xerxes' folly and punishment: elsewhere too he thinks like a Greek. Human life is a vulnerable affair (705-7); when he thinks of possible threats to his nation's stability, his thoughts turn immediately to u-raaLS 7TOA€L, 'dissension falling upon the city' (715, cf. 682).65 rrhere is nothing distinctively Persian there, nothing for instance to suggest that Xerxes' behaviour fitted into a wider pattern of Persian expansionism. rrhat is a clear contrast with Herodotus' presentation.66 Aeschylus' Darius is astounded that Xerxes should have 'yoked the Hellespont' (723); yet Herodotus tells us Darius himself 'yoked' the Thracian Bosporus (4.83, 85, at.), just as he went on to yoke the Danube (4. 89, 97, al.), and this is just one of the subtle ways in which Herodotus intimates the continuity between father and son-at least between their actions, if not between their characters. Yet Aeschylus' Darius stresses how different Xerxes is from ·his predecessors, especially from Darius himself (759-86): Xerxes' aggression is here seen as an aberration, not as the Persians' national game, and Darius distances himself from it. Thus, even while Darius by nature of his continued, posthumous, divine existence is distanced from Greek thoughts, there is a good deal in what he says which the audience can appropriate as their own. Both limbs of our paradox are in fact active: the audience remain utterly aware of the difference between the Greek and barbarian worlds; at th~ same time even a Persian character can Darius appears: the point is not one of cosmological efficacy. Thus far the audience enter into the thought-world of the court they see on stage. But they would not accept it in the sense of accepting this as a normal, comfortable, and ordered view of the boundary between human and divine. i\1elchinger (1979: 23) goes astray in assimilating Darius' status to that enshrined in Greek hero(;ult.

Thus, rightly, Hall (1989), 70; see Fisher (1992), 258- 63. Cf. also Vidal-Naquet, p. 114 below. 66 Cf. Kierdorf(19 66), 60-2; Paduano (1978), 25,91; Said (1981); Hall (1989),71; Rosenbloom (1993), 190 ; Meier (1993),7 2 -3. 64

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articulate responses and insights which the Greek audience can share) he can serve as their 'focus', and those responses and insights can be seen as transcending national boundaries. This may give some clues for the final scenes. Once again, Xerxes' distance from Greekness is clear: this is anything but a Greek public lament. At the same time, his cries, like Darius' words, contain elements which the audience could hardly dismiss or deride-though this time these elements are less concerned with a shared mental outlook, more with a shattering experience and an agonized suffering which transcend national limits. The play has pervasively set the Persian disaster against the background of the gods' cosmic order. 67 Xerxes overreached, he forgot his humanity, and he fell. This happened to Xerxes and Persia; there are human reasons why it did, and why it happened then. It still reflects a cosmic pattern which could afflict any human or nation at any time (one of the reasons, as we have seen, why it is difficult to interpret the playas projecting a plea for Athenian aggression against a weakened enemy). 68 Xerxes can hardly be seen as Everyman, a typical example of suffering humanity, still less as Everygreek: his qualities remain too distinctive and too distant from the audience's norms. Indeed, one effect of the differentiation of Xerxes from his predecessors is to make him even more distinctive, atypical of Persia as well as the antithesis of Greek self-knowledge and restraint. But his fate can still capture something of the human condition, and exemplify a human vulnerability which the audience can recognize as their own. Greek cities, too, had been known to indulge in catastrophic aggression; less spectacular forms of self-destructive over-confidence could recur even in personal life. In that sense his fall, even if not Xerxes as a person, can be seen as inviting audience empathy. In the terms of Aristotle's Poetics, there can be 'fear' here, fear that Xerxes' fate could provide a model for something which could happen to them. 69 What, though, of 'pity', Aristotle's linked demand of the tragic experience (Poet. 1449b27, etc.)? That is more problematic. The usual preconditions for pity are partly, but only partly, present. Greek pity often contains a large element of self-direction, with once again the feeling 'it could happen to me,:70 67 On this cf. esp. \Vinnington-Ingram (1973) "" (1983)~ 1-15, and Paduano (1978), 71-84, and on the intermeshing of human and divine strands Kitto (1966), 74-115. 68 Above, pp. 12- 13. 69 In some ways, indeed, something which had happened to them: Rosenbloom (1993: 191) observes the ways in which the Persian palhos is phrased 'in terms appropriate to the evacuation and sack of a city', something which recalls the Athenians' own experiences of 480. Here too one can imagine different audience responses, some delighting in the sight of the biter so appropriately bit, others more sensitive to the pattern of suffering humanity which, Iliad-like, links friend and foe. 70 The most familiar passages are Soph. Ajax 121-6 (below, p. 18, and cf. Parker. below, pp. 1523) and Hdt. I. 86. 6; cf also Arist. Rhel. 138SbI4-15, Soph. Trach. 296-306, Phil. 500-6, and La Rochefoucauld's definition of pity, 'c'est une habile prevoyance des malheurs ou nous pouvons tomber'; and see further E. B. Stevens (1944), 5-6,9, l\1acleod (1974), 391 n. 22 "'" (1983), 58 n. 22, Halliwell (1986), 170, 176-7, Heath (1987), 159 and n. 80, and Meier (1993), 174 on 'generalised


17

it is not surprising that 'fear' and 'pity' are so often closely linked in Greek thought. If the argument here is correct, the audience of Persae could indeed feel that "if, or at least a small-scale version of such self-inflicted, god-driven catastrophe, could happen to them. It is also commonplace to notice that the very magnitude of a person's fall can intensify the pity:71 the higher the initial pinnacle, the greater the emotive impact, and Xerxes' pinnacle had been very high. But Aristotle also points out that pity is increased when the sufferer is close to the observer in 'age, character, dispositional traits, status, or family' C-Rhet. 1386325-6), something which would be far from true here; and he also demands that pity should be reserved for those suffering undeservedly (Rhet. 2. 8, esp. 138ShI3, 1386h6; cf. Poet. 1453 a 4-5 and e.g. 1soc. 16.48). True, Aristotle nlay not here be giving an accurate reflection of rhetorical practice or popular nlorality:' several speeches do try to elicit pity for the undeserving.72 But it is evidently true that deserved suffering is less pitiable, and thus Xerxes' claim for pity is much weakened. 73 This, surely, is a case where we should not think of the audience responding monolithically. Some would put more weight on the human suffering, some on the degree to which it was deserved; some would be nlore moved by the shared vulnerability to universally active gods, some would find their bitterness and vindictiveness too great. In some minds relish would defeat pity, in some it would not. In these final scenes we therefore have tension, which would be resolved differently by different spectators. There are aspects which retain the strong polar differentiation of Self and Other; equally, there are aspects which transcend and challenge that differentiation, where a Greek audience can gaze on barbarians and recognize responses and agonies which are universal. That, it should be stressed, is not to deconstruct the polarity itself: Greek conceptualization found it unproblematic to retain a strong polarity while recognizing the existence of marginal cases, or cases which belong on both sides of the divide,74 just as here human suffering and fragility is common to both Greek and barbarian. The polarity is simultaneously challenged and aserted. And, paradoxically, those spectators whose emotions crossed the Greek-barbarian divide most completely could simultaneously feel themselves as most completely fulfilling a national stereotype: for was not pity a distinctively Athenian virtue?75 nlutuality'. I hope elsewhere to explore the interesting variations introduced by Thucydides in the l\1ytilenean debate at 3.40.3 and the MeHan dialogue at 5· 90 . Cf. Dover (1974), 197; Halliwell (1986), 172. Cf. e.g. Dem. 24. 170-1,25.76; Lys. 28. I I; Dover (1974), 198-9; Halliwell (1986), 174; on the several senses of 'deserved' and 'undeserved' tragic pity, Heath (1987), 82-6. For the more usual linkage of pity and desert cf. E. B. Stevens (1944); Dover (1974), 196-7; l\1.acleod (1977), 2456 = (1983), 121-2, ;3 Thus Lattimore's question (1958: 38) has some purchase, 'is there anything dramatic about a nlan getting so precisely what he deserved?' Cf. Paduano (1978), 87; Fisher (1992), 262. 74 C( esp. G. E. R. Lloyd (1983), 44-53, and more generally G. E. R. Lloyd (1966). I intend elsewhere to discuss the application of this principle in Herodotus and Thucydides. 75 Cf. esp. PI. Menex. 244e, Eur. Supp., esp. 187-90, and Soph. DC, esp. 1125-7; Isoc. Paneg. 112, 71

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So the national polarity survives; but that is not to deny that it is explored, and explored in ways which the audience would have found arresting. Not many, as they entered the theatre, would have foretold that there would be even a possibility of empathizing with the fate of Greece's greatest enemy; not many would have expected to enter imaginatively into a thought-world which viewed the great national triumph in a wholly different light. It remains a question how shocking and disturbing the audience would have found this, and that is a question which cannot be answered from the text alone. Some general considerations might come into play. Aeschylus knew his audience, and knew too that there were bounds to the degree of emotional shock they would accept; he knew that Phrynichus had been fined for reminding the audience of 'their own troubles' in his Fall ofMiletus (or 'the troubles of those close to them': oiKijLa KaKa., almost literally 'troubles close to home', Hdt. 6.21.2). But that does not take us far. Whatever the Persae is doing-and, like most or all tragedies, it does remind the audience of 'their own sufferings' in the sense that it points a universal pattern of human sutTering which might some day, in some form, be the spectator's own-it is not reminding them of their own suffering in anything like so direct away. The deaths of allies and kinsmen in Phrynichus' play would come much 'closer to home': that was the audience's own suffering in a more immediate sense. All we can infer here is that Aeschylus would not have written a play whose shockingness reached the point where it might alienate audience favour; but that simply rephrases the question-how far would an audience expect, even enjoy, an emotional challenge to their most cherished prejudices, at least in this privileged locus of the tragic theatre? This book will represent some attempt to explore that question of generic expectation. In this particular case, other genres may help. For the pattern we have noticed in Persae is not new: indeed, it has close analogies with the Iliad itsel£76 That poem began with people who seemed very different from one another, with the Achaean war-machine and the domesticity of Troy, the grim silence of the marching Achaeans and the excited Trojan chatter. By the end, there as here, it is the similarities rather than the differences that come to be felt as most challenging, as Achilles explores with Priam the human misery and vulnerability which they share. Elsewhere too we find such compassionate insight recurring in tragedy, notably when Sophocles' Odysseus proclaims his pity for his enemy Ajax, for he points the fragility which they share (Soph. Ajax 121-6). A half-century after Aeschylus, a related pattern will be seen in the Histories of Herodotus, where the text elaborates with such subtlety the discrimination of Greek Self and barbarian Lys. 2. 14, Dem. 24. 170-1, 25. 81, Pluto Praec. reip. ger. 799 C; E. B. Stevens (1944), 15- 19; Dover (1974), 200-1; Macleod (1975), 47-8 and (197 8), 7 2 - (19 8 3), 74-5,9 6. 76 Cf. Goldhill (1988), 191 n.35.


19

Other;77 yet the final chapters of the work explore the gathering similarities between Persian expansion and that of the new Athenian empire, and once again a national polarity is overlaid by, and interacts with, a disturbing universal pattern. There too an audience, particularly an Athenian audience, would find a thought-provoking discovery of Self in Other and Other in Self. 78 Thought-provoking, yes; but the very Iliad parallel suggests that the thoughts provoked were not so unfamiliar and shocking as all that. There are limits on how much literature can discomfit, limits on how much it can shock. In Persae, a pointed community of suffering with one's greatest enemy doubtless retained its challenging aspect; but it is an intense version of a familiar, in some ways almost a comfortable, challenge-much more comfortable (doubtle:ss) than Phrynichus' depiction of Miletus' fate. In later tragedies, we shall find national and civic ideology submitted to sterner tests than we have seen here?9 77 Cf especially Hartog (19 88); for some important qualifications and further steps see Dewald (199 0 ); Cartledge (I990a) and (1993), esp. ch. 3.

78 The phrase of Greenblatt (199 I: I 27) in the course of a most sensitive discussion of Herodotus. 79 This paper was given in St Andrews in November 1993 as well as in Oxford; my thanks to both audiences, to Edith Hall for allowing me to see proofs of her commentary (1996) in advance of publication, and also to Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Michael Comber,judith Mossman, Michael Flower, and David Kovacs for very useful comments on an earlier draft.

2

Constructing the Heroic P. E. EASTERLING

The historian looking for contemporary evidence of fifth-century Athenian mentalice might reasonably think there is something to be learned from Greek tragedy about how (if not precisely what) the playwrights and their audiences thought about the community they lived in. After all, the plays were designed for the benefit of the community, for performances at public festivals in the presence of large audiences, and they were presented on the community's initiative and behalf, with state funding, both direct and indirect, and citizen performers. So it certainly makes sense in general terms to look to the plays for some kind of refraction of the society that provided the context of production; but it is much harder to go further and attempt to read the signs in detail. Relating any kind of fiction to specific historical circumstances is difficult enough-though we do it all the time as we read modern literature-but in the case of Greek tragedy there is the special difficulty that all the surviving plays (and no doubt the overwhelming majority of lost plays) are given a heroic setting of some kind l and go to great lengths to evoke a distinctively different world from that of the original audiences. What can have been the purpose of all this imaginative effort? I begin with some discussion of how 'the heroic' is constructed and how this construction is made to work in the tragedies that have survived; I then move on to a question of more directly historical interest, which is how as modern readers we can try to trace patterns of what may have been contemporary meaning for the original audiences, recognizing that although the dramatists' general methodology may remain pretty consistent, the language and situation chosen for a particular play may have been designed-or felt-to have timespecific resonance. 2 Of course there are enormous gaps in the evidence: with virtually nothing known about the detail of particular productions the modern interpreter lacks most of the signals that would be immediately recognizable to contemporaries. But there must be some clues if we know where to look. The first point to stress is that the temporal setting is not typically an indeterminate illud tempus but a period associated through precise genealogies 1 Even Persians is distanced by its remote setting, grand language, and absence of Greek characters from the world of the Athenian spectators. 2 Cf. Loraux (1973) and Croally (1994), ch. 4, for interesting discussion of the general issues.

P. E. Easterling

22

preserved in epic poetry with the Trojan War and the events of the preceding and succeeding generations, with what happened at Thebes from its founding to the time of the Epigonoi, with the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts or the exploits of Heracles and Theseus. Some stories are set even further back in time, like the tales of Cadmus, 10, or Creusa and Ion, and when the action takes place among gods, as in the story of Zeus punishing Prometheus, there is a sense of a still more remote era. But these are not free-floating stories: they have credentials in epic poetry, and they deal in named persons and places which more often than not have a life and tradition of their own. 3 So the heroic world of tragedy is designed to be identifiable, however indeterminate many of its details, and however freely a dramatist could reshape or redefine the tradition. 4 Identifiability, it seems, brings advantages. One obvious benefit of a setting elsewhere, whether in time or space, is the convenient creation of distance, which helps avoid the danger of immediate political repercussions; but if distance were all that mattered it would be just as effective to use an anonymous and unlocalized 'once upon a time', whereas here the specific echoing of the language, characters, and stories of epic-and lyricpoetry is taken to quite elaborate lengths of allusiveness and opens up multiple ironic possibilities. There must have been several reasons why the formula was felt to be attractive. Since all earlier Greek poetry had used specific examples from the past to articulate its ideas there was the advantage of using a familiar logic, and the fact that the Homeric poems in particular make nostalgic backward references must have been important, too. For Homer's audiences the glamorous world of godlike men and women in a rich and beautiful material setting was already past and ready to be charged with paradigmatic significance;5 in the fifth century these images of 'miserable mortals' at their most civilized, brilliant, and extravagant (and in close touch with the gods) were evidently felt to be as appropriate to tragedy as to art and cult, which accorded the heroes remarkable prominence and prestige. As Herington has suggested,6 audiences in the early days of drama must have felt a special stimulus in actually 'meeting' the heroes as living and breathing beings rather than hearing them sung about or seeing their images in sculpture and painting. Along with names and situations the tragedians could appropriate glamour. This certainly seems to be one of the functions of the distinctive idiom spoken by tragic characters, which casts a special sheen over what they say and do . .3

Even minor characters, if named at all, usually have 'non-fictional' names, like Lichas in Tra-

chiniae; cf. Hes. fro 25. 22 M-W. 4 A striking example of reshaping is Sophocles' Philocteles, set in Lemnos, which, contrary to all tradition and to the way the story was told by Aeschylus and Euripides, is made into a desert island, with important implications for the political interpretation of the play; cf n. 47 below. S The most famous example of such paradeigmata is perhaps Achilles' reminder to Priam of the story of Niobe at II. 24.601-20. C£ W'illcock (1964). 6 (198 5), 133-5 0 •

Constructing the Heroic Surprisingly, such refined and artificial language does not seem to be at odds with tragedy's preoccupation with situations of extreme violence, horror, and danger; it may even have been felt to be the defining aspect of the genre, as the pervasive use of paratragic language in comedy certainly suggests. 7 It is striking that so little notice has been taken of the idiom of tragedy by interpreters interested in the ideology of Attic drama. The fact that the playwrights took so much trouble to develop a special vocabulary and characteristic patterns of word order and syntax-heavily coloured by epic, it is true, but certainly not just a pastiche of Homer-must surely tell us something about the way in which they and their audiences viewed the genre. If we also take into account tragedy's avoidance of vulgar or trivial language and subject-matter and its well-known concern to keep out overt anachronisms the conclusion is inescapable: getting the heroic ambience right was a serious matter, even in plays where the emphasis was on the radically unheroic behaviour of the characters. In Euripides' Orestes, for example, the dignified atmosphere is subverted in all kinds of ways, but not without using the traditional idiom and style of tragedy, and indeed there are places in the play where newly created heroicseeming expressions add to the ironic effect without sounding exactly like parody.9 lv\ark Griffith 10 has recently made a fascinating attempt to account for the persistence of heroic plots and characters in Attic tragedy, offering a persuasively political analysis of the social groupings that find their place in the plays, particularly the aristocratic family networks, typified by the relationship of Orestes and Pylades in the Oresteia, that seem to evoke the world of the participants in the festivals-choregoi, poets, musicians-whose wealth and education enabled them to exert enormous influence on these democratic occasions. Contrasted with the elite (whose role is one of leadership, risk, and selfsacrifice, often, indeed, represented through stories of 'out-of-control tyrants and doomed dynastic families') are the 'lower-class' groups, which are represented sometimes favourably, sometimes not, despite the fact that the plays were designed for performance before mass audiences and should certainly be understood as expressing civic ideology.l1 What interests Griffith is the complex relationships between these groups: he writes of 'mutual mystification by elite and mass, in which the old stories are told in terms that make the best available sense (given the traditions of mythical narrative and the public context of the Theater) to an author and audience both of whom continue to take for granted the inequalities and privileges to which they are accustomed ... and neither elite nor demos probably realizes to what extent they are collaborating in the affirmation of social hierarchy and inequality.'12 It is an attractive idea that by drawing attention to the interaction of the 7

9 11

See GoldhilI (1991),201-22, and Silk (1993) on paratragedy. 8 Cf. Easterling (I 985). Cf. Willink (1986), pp.lii-liv. 10 Griffith (I995). Cf. Wilson '8 paper, Ch. 5 below. 12 Griffith (1995), I I 1-12; cf. 64.

P. E. Easterling

24

different social groupings the dramatists were able to offer something for everyone in the audience and a chance to promote 'solidarity without consensus':13 there is certain evidence, after all, that success in the dramatic competition was seen as the decision of the community, even if it was made indirectly through the judges on the community's behalf, and the winning plays must have been capable of appealing across the \vhole social range. It helps us to understand the importance of the role of choregoi) and it offers an interesting approach to the dynamics of the festivals. But it is surely too limiting a view of the heroes and the heroic setting. Griffith is quite right to stress the oddity of this tradition ('Given that tragedy reached its acme under the new democratic system of which the Athenians were so proud, the persistence throughout the fifth and fourth centuries of these elite-oriented plots is indeed quite remarkable'14), but there are several complicating factors that need to be taken-.into account. From Homeric poetry onwards it had been well understood by audiences that the heroes could serve as paradigms for anyone to identify with-the evidence of 'low' genres like iambic poetry illustrates how variously the heroic figures could be appropriated, and there is also the point made long ago by Gernet 15 that the Athenian citizens could easily see themselves as a group of 'best people'. It is interesting that choruses) \\lho might seem to function as the perfect analogue for the audience, are often referred to in terms suggesting their elite status, and when the Corinthian women of Medea reflect on the ancient good fortune of the 'Erechtheidae' (824-5) they mean all the Athenians, not just the descendants of Erechtheus. 16 2. The fact that the heroes were a familiar part of life in terms of art and cult must have some bearing on the way in which Athenians of the fifth century looked at the past In choosing to put on a play about Ajax, for example, a dramatist at least had the option of implicating the events of the story with the contemporary experience of worshippers of Ajax and his family in Attica. The 'meaning' that could be elicited from stories of this sort was thus exceptionally fluid. 17 3. Most important for my present purpose is the special idiom used in. the texts of tragedy to evoke the place and time in which its stories are set. This more than anything must have been what enabled audiences to project them1.

Griffith (1995) I 14. 14 Ibid. I J 4. (1968), 333-43 - Gernet (193 8). 16 Cf. Aesch. Sept. 30 3, where both people and city are called Kadmogenes. In Soph. El. Electra calls the women 'offspring of noble parents' (YEvt€8ACl YEvvaiwv, 129) and later 'women of the city' (7TOAin8E!)) I 277)- At OC 728 Creon flatteringly calls the old men of Colon us 'well-born inhabitants of this land'; cf.I348, where Oedipus addresses them as demouchoi. Cf. Ant. 842-3, 937-40, and 1183, where there is some imprecision over who exactly is being addressed, but the general point remains valid. RosIer (I993b: 91-3) offers an interesting reading of the passages in Ant., which would be helped by the notion of 'heroic vagueness'. 17 On Ajax see now Henrichs (1993b) with earlier bibliography. 13

15

Constructing the Heroic

25

selves collectively into a shared imaginative world which was firmly linked with both past and present but strictly represented neither and could be constantly redefined. What I want to suggest is that the use of this special idiom was important as a means of helping audiences to define 18 themselves. The plays they watched were distinctively Attic in dialect and style, close enough to contemporary speech to be easily accessible to them, but also identifiable, through their manifold links with epic and lyric poetry, as part of a large, rich, and extremely selfconscious tradition with a strong Panhellenic pedigree. So tragedy could claim to be the true inheritor of epic, and to have discernible links, too, with the choral traditions of the wider Greek world, at the same time as being a truly Athenian invention. 19 The tragedians' habit of using an admixture of epic language, and of making pointed allusion to epic sources while avoiding epic formulas and epic dialect, may be paralleled by the gesture towards literary Doric that they make in the choral odes. In neither case is it a matter of imitation or pastiche; tragedy can be said to stand clear of its predecessors as well as in a sense to appropriate them. This complex relationship with the literature of the past is best understood, perhaps, in the context of a bid for cultural hegemony. When allied and foreign ambassadors) businessmen, and visitors saw performances at the City Dionysia they may have been implicitly encouraged to view the plays as the modern equivalent of the greatest literature of the past and therefore of great interest and importance to the whole Greek-speaking world. Then there is the huge advantage of 'heroic vagueness' in making it possible for plays to be understood (to take over Griffith's point) as offering something for everyone in the audience. The fact that political, legal, and social issues are dealt with in language carefully integrated into the heroic setting enables problematic questions to be addressed without overt divisiveness and thus to be open from the start to different interpretations. What it does not mean is that hard questions are avoided or made comfortable because expressed in these glamorous and dignified terms. One or two examples will perhaps make the point clearer. Ajax offers a neat illustration of the way 'heroic vagueness' is used both to gloss over an issue and to make it prominent within the same play. This is the matter of the status of a concubine and her child: Tecmessa and Eurysaces, Teucer and his mother. Much is made in this play of the theme of Teemessa's total dependence upon Ajax. She was born a Phrygian princess, daughter of rich Teleutas, but now she is a slave: Ajax made her his captive when he destroyed her city (210-12; 48790). Her dignity is established by the Chorus when they first greet her; OE AEX0S" Sovp,aAwTov (]TEp~as ciV€XEL ()ovp,os Aias (212), which ]ebb translates as 'to thee, his spear-won bride, bold Ajax hath borne a constant love', rightly bringIng out the rather grand style of lechos dourialoton as a synonym for 18

Cf. Meier (1993), 44-5 0 .

19

Cf. Herington (1985); Nagy (1990), esp. 40 4-5.

26

P. E. Easterling

'concubine'. (A more 'workaday' and specific term like pallake would give a quite different impression.)20 Tecmessa's speech of appeal to Ajax (485-524) echoes the most dignified of epic models, Andromache's speech to Hector in the Iliad (6.407-39). Ajax, moreover, has no wife waiting for him at home: everything combines to make the audience take Tecmessa very seriously, and one is not supposed to find oneself wondering about the legal status of the child Eurysaces. 21 But later in the play the question of bastardy is given great prominence in relation to Teucer, who fears rejection by Telamon if he returns home without Ajax and is offensively abused by Agamemnon for having a barbarian mother (1228, 1259-63). So the play can have it both ways: in 'fact' (presumably) there was no difference in status between Tecmessa and the captive Resione, concubine of Telamon and mother ofTeucer, herself a Phrygian princess and daughter of Laomedon, no less (1301-3), but this analogy is not drawn, and emphasis is laid instead on Telamon's Greek wife Eriboia (566-70). The vagueness of the language relating to the heroic setting thus allows the dramatist freedom from distracting socio-Iegal considerations in places where they are inappropriate; but it is worth noting that the play does have a point to make out of the matter of origins. The status of Tecmessa and the status of Teucer's mother are dramatically linked in that both relate to the fundamental theme of friends and enemies. Ajax has started behaving like an enemy to people who should be his friends;22 kills himself with the sword of his enemy Hector; recognizes at last the possibility of change from friend to enemy, enemy to friend. And this theme is strengthened by reminders that Tecmessa is a Phrygian captive, Teucer's mother was a Phrygian captive, and ironically even Agamemnon is descended from the 'Phrygian' Pelops (1292). A similar point can be made about Antigone. The questions that have exercised critics for so long-the status of Creon's decree and its relation to contemporary Greek, especially Athenian, practice in the case of traitors 23 have tended to obscure the fact that the action takes place in an essentially fictive world in which 'real-life' considerations may be set aside with comparative ease, helped by the judicious use of 'heroic vagueness'. In this case the effect depends less on the use of particular words than on the avoidance of any precise and specific account of Creon's decree. Creon is presented as a legitimate monarch, perfectly within his rights to issue a decree denying burial to the traitor Polyneices, but at the same time his action is revealed to be profoundly shocking and problematic. This is partly because refusal of burial in itself raises difficult questions, such as how far the punishment of the dead should be allowed to go-the same issue as is confronted in Ajax, in a spirit which owes something to Iliad 24-but the 20 21

22

23

Cf. Segal (1994) on the status of Iole in Trach. Cf. Winnington-Ingram (1980), 30 n. 57. Cf. Blundell (1989), ch. 3. See e.g. Cerri (1982).


27

problem is made even more acute here because no mention is made of the possibility of throwing the body out beyond the boundaries ofTheban territory and so avoiding the danger of pollution that an unburied corpse would bring on the city. When epic poetry deals with the idea of exposing a corpse to the ravages of dogs and birds, as a way of subjecting the dead enemy to an extreme form of outrage,24 the language sometimes implies 'throwing out' as a preliminary to such exposure, as at Odyssey 3. 258 f£ where Nestor describes what Aegisthus would have suffered if Menelaus had come back to punish him for the murder of Agamemnon: 'The dogs and birds would have devoured him as he lay on the plain far from the cit), (hekas asteos)' .25 One might have expected 'throwing out' to be specified in Creon's decree in Antigone, as it is in the versions given at SeiDen against Thebes 1013-30 and at Phoenissae 1630. But in fact the details are left extremely vague (although much is made of the motif of exposure to dogs and birds 26 ); nothing is said by Antigone or Creon when they cite the decree, and when indications of locality are given they add very little. At 41 1 the Guard describes himself and his companions who were set to watch over the corpse as 'sitting on the brow of the hill'; at I I Ie the place of exposure is 'in view' from where the speaker, Creon, stands talking to the Elders; at 1 197 the corpse lies 'at the furthest/highest point of the plain'. The most specific detail comes at 1203 f£: when the corpse of Polyneices is duly buried the Messenger speaks of the 'high mound of native earth' (roJ.Lf3 ov opOoKpavov oiKEias x8ovos) that is raised to him. We are forced to infer (if we think about it) that the corpse of Polyneices has not been thrown out; but as Hester has rightly emphasized,27 no one in Antigone is allowed to suggest the simple removal of the body beyond the Theban boundaries as a means of reducing the danger of pollution (an action which in 'real life' could even have opened up the possibility that the corpse might be rescued and discreetly buried, as was supposed to have happened in the case ofThemistocles, Thuc. I. 138). The issue is simply never brought to the surface: the confrontation between Creon and Antigone can thus be portrayed in the purest and starkest terms possible, which do not exactly match any situation that we know of from the fifth century.28 On the other hand, the nearby presence of the unburied, decomposing corpse casts a disturbing shadow over the play, and Cerri may perhaps be right to suggest that there is some reflection Cf. Vernant (19 82),68. This is related to the common idea of the shame attached to dying far away from one's philoi; cf e.g. Ii. 19.421-2, 22. 88-9, 508, 24. 21 I, and for discussion Segal (1971). 26 Ant. 29-3 0 , 20 5-6, 697- 8, 1016-22, 1198; cf. 1040-1 and 1080-3. 27 (197 1 ),20-I. 28 Despite Cerri's claim (1982: 127) that the specific contents of Creon's decree find parallels in the institutions and events of the 5th century. Leaving a corpse unburied on the plain cannot be precisely equated with throwing the corpse of a traitor into the barathron: the ritual significance of the two actions must surely be different. 24 25

P. E. Easter ling here of contemporary unease and controversy over the proper way to deal with dead offenders. 29 At all events, the debate is not allowed to turn on points of legality; and the play makes no attempt to suggest ho",' the initial problem could have ,been avoided or solved. Still less does it dramatize any straightforward conflict, for example between city and family loyalties or between state and individual, although it has often been read as if it did. The vagueness of the language relating to the setting helps to make possible a more ambiguous, elusive, and suggestive treatment of an issue so vast that Antigone has had limitless repercussions in European culture: Steiner sums it up as 'the discourse on man and society'.3o The success of this technique is clear from the very many different adaptations and imitations of Antigone which audiences have had no trouble in relating to their current situations: the emblematic nature of the conflict between Creon and Antigone makes itself felt with absolute directness, and the only problem for critics is the precise resonance of the denial of burial for the original audience. IMAGES OF THE COMMUNITY

It will be clear from the argument so far that 'heroic vagueness' is liable to make it exceptionally difficult for us to trace patterns of contemporary meaning in these plays set in heroic times. 'fhe more conscious we are of this point, and the more we are attracted by Griffith's principle of 'something for everyone', the more willing we should be to accept that right from the start the plays will have been open to very diverse political readings. 31 So it is futile to look for univocal 'messages', and the best one can hope to do is to catch something of the flavour of contemporary debates by comparing variables within different plays. One way of trying to do this is to take a couple of sample plays composed at around the same period and look for the different models they offer of such fundamental structures as the community itself. We can start from the simple observation that epic poetry was familiar with the notions of a king addressing the demos and of consultations among a privileged group of leaders like the Greek chieftains at Troy, but there are a great many possible variations that can be played on this model, and we need to take note also of the following:

(i) the presence or absence of citizens; (ii) the civic institutions that are implicit or explicit (assemblies, trials, etc.) and the terms used for social and political ideas; (iii) the physical features of the setting, e.g. famous landmarks or sacred places associated with a particular polis; (1982), 123, 12 9. 30 (1984), 108. WTould everyone in the original audience have reacted in the same way to the 'heroically vague' use of monarchia at Ant. I 163~ for example? 29 31

Constructing the Heroic (iv) the divine ambience in which the events take place; (v) intertextual reference to other plays. (It would certainly be wrong to imagine the plays functioning in a vacuum, sealed off from political and artistic interaction with other works.) Two plays close to one another in date are Eurpides' Orestes (408) and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, which was presumably composed fairly soon before the death of Sophocles in c.406, though not staged until 401. Both give prominence to civic communities, but in contrasting ways that offer food for thought.

Orestes, set at Argos soon after the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, is a play about a community'S decision-making. Everything, it seems, depends on what the sovereign assembly of Argive citizens will decide is to happen to Orestes and Electra as killers of the city's rulers. In the event the vote is in favour of their execution, but Apollo's intervention turns the whole situation around: now Orestes is to succeed to the throne of Argos (after a year of exile and then acquittal at Athens, 1643-52) and Electra is to marry their friend and fellow conspirator Pylades, who is destined to have a prosperous future (1658-9). Most tellingly, Apollo will 'set to rights' Orestes' relations with the city (1664-5). So the old order is paradoxically reasserted; but critics from antiquity onwards have been disinclined to read the playas a simple endorsement of traditional values, political or mora1. 32 The sense of paradox, even absurdity, at the end is strongly brought out by the contrast between the violence of the conspirators-the firing of the palace and the intended murder of Hermione-and Apollo's 'pacific' commands (it was Apollo, after all, who told Orestes to kill Clytemnestra and Agamemnon). (i) Beginning with the citizens of Argos, we should ask where they are to be found in the action of the play, and how they are described. They are certainly not represented by the Chorus, who as Electra's friends speak and sing only of the family (by contrast with the women of the Euripidean Electra, who have more to say about the community at large, e.g. at El. 699 ff.). Only one example of an ordinary citizen appears on stage, the 'honest countryman' who gives an account of the crucial meeting and vote in the Assembly (866-956). Otherwise the citizens are an off-stage group on whose decision hangs the future of the main characters. There is insistent emphasis on the voting process, and there are plenty of favourable terms like polis, astoi, leas,33 used of the sovereign people, but these good images are counterbalanced by references to factions (represented by Oeax, the aggrieved brother of the murdered Palamedes, 43 1-3; Aegisthus' party, who are hostile to Orestes and currently wield most power, 32 See de RomiUy (1972); Zeitlin (1980); Euben (1986b); Willink (1986); West (1987); Hall (1993)· 33 Polis and politai: 49, 427,431,436,437,73°,756; aSloi: 442 (if genuine), 536,746; leas: 846.

P. E. Easterling

30

435-8, 889-94; and an unscrupulous speaker suborned by Tyndareos to argue for a penalty of public stoning, 902-1634). Two passages in the scene between Orestes and ~1enelaus are particularly telling: Orestes' remark at 444-6 (later confirmed by Pylades at 760-2) that all escape routes from the city are blocked by armed men, and Menelaus' words at 69 6-7 01 : DTav ydp ~f3g. OijILos edt; opyr,v 1TEUWV, OJLOLOV werrE 7TVP KaTaafiiaat Aciflpov· EL ~avxws itS' avrov EViEivOVTL fL€V XaAWV V1TEiKOt, KatpOV EVAa{3ovp.EVOS, raws EK1TVEVGEL'· OTav dVij 1TVOcit;, nlXOts" ath·ov Pq.o{wS' Buov 8€A€Lt;·

o·

av av

o·

For when the people turns angry and is rampant, it is like having a raging fire to put out. But if one gently slackens oneself and gives way so long as it strains, taking care with one's timing, it may wen blow itself out, and when it abates, you may easily get all you want from it. (trans. M. L. West, 1987)

There is thus a strong sense that the real power is in the hands of an unseen, indeterminate populace which at a whim can decide what is to happen to the characters who appeal for the audience's sympathy; but it matters greatly who says what about the people. The speaker of lines 696-701 is Menelaus, a very equivocal figure in the pl ay 35 whose subsequent action confirms the suspicion expressed by Orestes and Pylades that he is not to be trusted (7 I 8-24, 736-54). Unfavourable judgements like his on the people's arbitrariness thus need to be treated with care: Menelaus implies at 700- I that he knows how to get the people to do what he wants, but in the end he does not even turn up at the Assembly (1058-9). And in the account of the debate itself the most serious criticisms are directed at manipulative speakers (e.g. Talthybius, who goes in for dichomutha (,double talk'), 887-97) and the man who is suborned by Tyndareos, 902-17) rather than at the voters themselves. 36 It is worth adding that the word ochlos, which could carry pejorative meaning,37 is used rather neutrally at 871 and 885, as at 612, leaving the audience the option of understanding it either more or less favourably. (ii) The account, of the assembly vividly evokes the cross-currents of feeling and the vested interests that motivate the speeches; but it is important to 34 The scholia on 9 0 3 and 9 0 4 discuss the possibility that this last speaker was meant to be recognized as Cleophon. Cf. West (1987) on 772. 35 Note that he is king of Sparta; cf. the remarks of Menelaus at Ajax 1071-90 and the unfavourable response he gets there (esp. I 102). West (1987) is surely wrong to cite Wedd here with approval: 'This passage doubtless gives the results of Euripides' own observation of the Athenian democracy.' 36 Cf. the interesting exchange between Orestes and Pylades at 772-3: (Orestes) 'The many (hoi polloi) are formidable when they have bad leaders.' (Pylades) 'But whenever they find good ones, they make good decisions.' The deletion of these verses proposed by Willink (1986) is unconvincing; see ~'est (1987) ad loco 37 Cf. e.g. Hec. 607.


31

remember that the newsbringer himself is not immune from bias: his sketch of himself as a poor but loyal countryman (866-70) is very like that of the highminded farmer he describes at 917 ff., who argues that Orestes deserves to be crowned at public expense for having avenged his father and killed a wicked woman. Everything said by Orestes and Electra suggests that this is too simple a view of what they have done, and the farmer is in some ways as extreme as Tyndareos and the would-be stoners. From the speaker's point of view there is also a positive image of an aristocrat, that of the noble (anax) Diomedes, who piously recommends a penalty of exile (898-900). This more moderate position is what Tyndareos initially argued for. Tyndareos, however, has been so incensed by Orestes that he has carried out his threat to overwhelm the Assembly with his plea for a public stoning ('I will go to the convocation of the Argives (EKKATrrov ;4PYE{WV oX'\ov) and drive (€7TL(]€{aw) the city, willing and unwilling, against you and your sister', 612-14). His arguments, so fully presented to Orestes, are not elaborated in the account of the assembly, but 9 14- 16 and 944-5 give a strong impression of how a fanatical speaker (or his spokesman) can sway popular feeling. Yet there is no unequivocal condemnation of the people as such. All this suggests that we should be sensitive to the vantage point 38 from which the different speakers offer views on the people (and on the elite), and that there is no unambiguous position from which the audience is invited to see the events of the play. This complex impression is certainly helped by 'heroic vagueness', as in the use of ochlos, and by the way in which metaphor is made to link the opposing positions. The word E7TLGELW, as Willink explains on 255-6, is used of shaking the reins of a chariot-team: the idea of driving the people furiously, willing and unwilling at the same time (if that is the correct meaning of EKovaav oux €KOVaav 39 ) is comparable, in that it evokes a driver and a chariot-team, to what Menelaus implies at 698-9 when he talks of 'slackening' when the people 'strains'. Thus even if this attitude to controlling the people is put in question in the case of Menelaus, in the case of Tyndareos it is shown to have real power. The fact that €7TLG€iw is first used in the play by Orestes, when he begs his dead mother not to drive the Furies against him (255-6), is also relevant: in both contexts there is a sense of terrifying power unleashed, and there is dramatic point in the linking of these irrational forces. The language of civic procedure is insistent in the play, as the stress on voting, and the use of the appropriate terminology for the conduct of the debate in the assembly, make clear.40 There is no suggestion that decisions have been arrived at by any hut constitutionally correct means, although the description of the assembly puts so much weight on the 'hidden agenda' of the various speakers. -Alongside this analysis of personal and factional motivation there is 38

39 40

Cf. Griffith (1995),7 2 - 81 . Cf. Willink (1986) on 613-14; West (1987) on 61 3. Voting: 46-5°,440,756,846-8,857,975, 1013, 1328; procedure: 884-8.

P. E. Easterling

32

also compelling political argument: Tyndareos' points about the importance of law at 49 I -525 make a very strong case against Orestes and Apollo, and conversely the cheerful way in which Pylades treats loyalty to friends as more important than ordinary moral sanctions (I085-1 I52) shows how difficult it 1S to arrive at a fair judgement of the conduct of the three conspirators. The arg"Cments can be set out either way, but the decisions remain desperately problematic. 41 There is a similar effect in Hecuba and Phoenissae: when Hecuba pleads with Odysseus42 in terms of the gratitude he owes her for having saved his life at Troy he answers with arguments that are patently immoral but have overwhelming force, just as it is clear in Phoenissae that Jocasta's admirable views on homonoia will have no effect on her warring sons:B (iii) What is particularly disturbing about the presentation of Argos is the fact that apart from the description of the place of assembly itself (see below) the city as a physical setting is almost uncannily featureless: none of its monuments, sacred places, or presiding deities is mentioned,44 and the only visual image relating to it is of roads blocked by armed men, who hem in Orestes ~nd Electra and later Pylades as well (444-6, 760-2). Outside the city the most important landmark is Clytemnestra's tomb, the focus of the plot to capture Hermione and the focus on a symbolic level of many of the play's problematic relationships. The opening lines evoke not the civic context but the fearful picture of Tantalus hovering in mid-air in perpetual terror. Tantaius and the tainted history of his descendants will recur as a significant thread in the play's complex network of causes and events, but the city, which could be an eve:1 more crucially important presence, is not treated so vividly. This is in striking contrast with the Argos of Aeschylus' Suppliants, for instance, in which shrines, altars, and landmarks abound, and with them goes a strong sense of the divine beings that are part of the lives of the citizens. 4) (iv) As for divine presences in Orestes, there is a frightening sense of the closeness of the Furies and all they stand for, while Apollo plays the part almost of impresario-highly ironic and self-conscious, and more or less detached from the community of Argos and its well-being. In the Euripidean Electra, by contrast, the ritual life of the community, particularly the festival ofHera,4 6 is of great importance for an understanding of the action of the play. The absence of association with the sacred places and the cults of Argos may make Orestes more 'free-floating' and easier to apply paradigmatically to any place, any time, but it may also convey an uneasy sense of a void where the city ought to be. 47 41 It is interesting that the ancient hypothesis saw Pylades as the one virtuous character ('apart from Pylades all of them were bad'). In a recent production of Orestes at the Gate Theatre in London (1995) Tyndareos' arguments commanded very serious attention; it was not difficult for the audience to relate the debate to contemporary events in Bosnia.

42

Hec.27 2 -33I.

H

Said (1993 a: 172-4) discusses the geographical details. Esp. 188-90,212-22,242,493-6,954-61,1018-29. See Zeitlin (1970); c( Foley (1985), 43-5; Easterling (1988), 101-8.

45 46

43

Phoen. 528- 6 37.

[See opposite page for n. 47]


33

(v) If there is anything to evoke a sense of the traditions, values, or bonds that

hold the community together in Orestes it must be found in the description of the off-stage assembly-place, which seems designed to have intertextual reSona:1ce: · I saw a cro\vd coming and taking seats on the hilltop where men say L:anaus, standing trial against Aegyptus, first assembled the people for a joint sitting' (871-3). Whether this evokes the trial in Aeschylus' lost Danaids or a play by Phrynichus on the same story,48 one point of the allusion may be to mark the difference between the 'good old days' of early tragedy and early democracy on the one hand, and the degenerate present on the other, when popular decision-making is at the mercy of faction and demagoguery. Mention of Danaus perhaps also recalls the Argive assembly (reported by Danaus) in Aeschylus' Suppliants, where Pelasgus, who has insisted on the importance of the king's consulting the people, is rewarded by a unanimous vote in favour of his motion to support the Danaids (605-24). But so idealized 49 a picture of democracy, as we have seen, finds no place in Orestes. If we read its logic on these lines \ve can perhaps account for why a playas seerr:.ingly lacking in 'polis-consciousness' as Orestes became immensely popl~lar-a staple of the tragic repertoire after Euripides' time and an enduring classjc for readers in late antiquity and the Byzantine period. Perhaps its ~mcdernity' in terms of ironic detachment, and its capacity to heighten political a\V8.reness through cynical and sometimes witty deconstruction of illusory ideals, enabled it to offer an appropriate sort of image of the community for the troubled Athenians of 408 Be but did not compel either the contemporary audience, or any later spectators or readers, to identify themselves too closely with that image. And the rich range of intertextual allusions evoking earlier drama could appeal to a different kind of 'audience solidarity', the sense of a shared cultural identity.50 r

This, it could be argued, is what is suggested by a closely contemporary play, Sophocles'

Philoctetcs, in which the action takes place on a desert island with no local community as in the versions of Aeschylus or Euripides. The chorus of sailors is emphatically subordinate to Neoptol-

emus, and there is no sign of an attempt to create a setting for a debate between equals. The only spokesman for the claims of the polis is Odysseus, whose representation of the situation is deeply suspect. The only inlage of a community as now existing for the persons of the play is the Greek army at Troy, with all its political strains; [he sense of the city's absence is strengthened by the nostalgic longing expressed by Philoctetes and Neoptolernus for a time when men like Achilles and Patroclus were alive (331-4o~ 410-50), and there is no reference to city gods who might help to define a community'S identity .

Cf. ~'il1ink (1986) and West (1987) ad loco See Sommerstein, pp. 75-6 below, for a different view. Cf. also Podlecki (1993),72-9, and (on the voting) Easterling (19 85), 2-3. :i0 Contrast (e.g.) Euben (I9 86b: 247): 'tragedy and city disintegrate under the relentless pressure of centrifugal forces no leader can forestall and no dramatist contain.' A close comparison could be made with the nearly contemporary Phoenissae, another play that had enormous later popularity and influence. A remarkable effect of detachment from the beleaguered city of Thebes is achieved here through the identity of the Chorus. Although the play is full of references to earlier drama, especially Sept.) A.nt., and OT, it stands in sharp contrast to all of them, with a Chorus that is sympathetic but not implicated, a group of Phoenician girls on their way from Tyre to Delphi to be .. 8 49

34

P. E. Easterling

Oedipus at Colonus is so obviously different from Orestes that a detailed comparison might seem pointless. But by looking at the play under the same headings as Orestes we can see how the use of 'heroic vagueness' is closely similar, though serving very different ends, and how this play too is designed to offer 'something for everyone'. (i) In OC the community is present in the shape of the Chorus, the old men of Colonus, who turn out to be able to speak for the whole of Athens (most memorably at 668-719) and not just for their own locality. Their role vis-a.-vis Theseus is handled with great delicacy. At 64 Oedipus asks whether the place that he and Antigone have reached is inhabited; when told by the Stranger that it is, his next question ('Do they have a ruler, or is logos [presumably the power to discuss and decide] with the people?') introduces the idea of democratic selfdetermination. The Stranger's answer ('these things are ruled by the king in the astu') is evidently not taken by Oedipus to cut out the second of his alternatives, because he goes on to imply (68) that the king uses logos as well as might (sthenos), and the idea of democratic decision-making is taken up at 78-80, when the Stranger says he will report Oedipus' arrival and message to the demotai here, not in the astu, and they will decide whether he may stay. (It is convenient that demotai can mean 'men of the deme' and 'men of the people' with equal propriety.) At 47 the Stranger had said that he dared not make Oedipus leave without the agreement of the polis; it seems that polis can be used to apply both to the community represented by the inhabitants of Colon us and to the larger community over which Theseus rules. It is this subtle indeterminacy that allows Colonus and Athens to be constrasted and merged at the same time, as critics have often noted. 51 At 292-5 the Chorus tell Oedipus that they are satisfied to delegate to Theseus the job of deciding what to do with him. So the men of Colonus are shown as responsible for collective decision-making, but of their own volition they delegate the task to the 'lords of this land'. Perhaps the use of the poetic plural anaktes makes the democratic flavour stronger; it could conceivably refer to an aristocratic group which advises the king, but there is no suggestion of a group of 'elders' elsewhere in the play. It will be Theseus who will carry responsibility and who has the physical resources to rescue Antigone and Apollo's temple servants. They combine detachment from Theban politics with a detailed know· ledge of the early history of the city: their own links with Thebes are traced to the Phoenicians' descent from Cadmus' kinsman Agenor, a link which also ties them to the Argive side as descendants of 10. The effect is complex: these Tyrians bring an exotic foreign (and probably inter· textual) element into the play and at the same time give the audience a sense that the warring cities are essentially alike, an impression also conveyed by the treatment ofPolyneices and Eteoc1es and by Jocasta's unsuccessful attempts to reconcile them. There is no coherent polis centre here, despite the elaborate references to the landmarks and the history of Thebes, and although (by contrast with Orestes) the play is full of gods we are given a sense of too many possible explanations for the meaningless strife that drives the action. In the midst of all this detail there is no emphasis on the Theban community as such or on its decision·making, only on an army at war with the Argives. 51

C£ e.g. Segal (1981), 362-408; Allison (1984); Kirkwood (1986).


35

Ismene and protect Oedipus, while the Chorus are helpless to resist Creon's violence on their own. But there is no implication that because they are old men they have no stake in the life of the community, and their witnessing of the events of the play is crucial to the understanding of what is happening to Oedipus and Athens. 52 (ii) In addition to the procedures of decision-making the play offers glimpses of other institutions and famous features of the life of the Athenians. Oedipus claims (and he has to be taken seriously) that Athens is known for its piety, fairness, and truthfulness (1 I25-7); Creon plainly gets it wrong when he claims (944-9) that the Areopagus would not allow an incestuous parricide like Oedipus to find refuge in Athens. There is also the fame of the city for its military might, particularly its cavalry and fleet, its olive production, its festivals, and above all its divinities, sanctuaries, and cults (see below). Along with the emphasis on democracy there is a certain 'aristocratic' appeal in the stress on the cavalry (particularly 707- IS and the reference to the 'knight Colonus', 59). The elite bond of xenia is evoked, too, when Theseus, having questioned Oedipus, announces his intention to receive him as a suppliant, stressing the importance of the xenia that links their two families. But the phrase he uses at 632-3 (OTa[V€Tal. 4>p(~a~ V7TEP yij~ rijao€ Kap1Tl.fLo~ aTcixv~. apoTov 1Tpo8vova~ EK OOfLWV

I am in the process of making sacrifice for the tilling of the soil; I left my palace to come to this shrine, where first the fruitful corn appears bristling over the earth.

No name is given to this festival, b~t of those of the historical period the Proerosia, held at Eleusis on 6th Pyanopsion about twelve days after the EI.eusinian Mysteries,105 is the closest in concept. 106 Again, as with political references, tragedy does not retroject into mythical time precise descriptions of the festival's institutions;107 furthermore, in the play, the Mysteries appear to be about to follow, since the Mothers have come 1TP€u{3€VJ1-ar' OU .dl]J1-TJTpOr; €S J.LvatYJpta ('not as ambassadors to Demeter's mysteries' , 173).108 The Proerosia was a festival that involved the ploughing of the Rarian Plain,109 where Triptolemus, to whom Demeter taught ploughing, had his threshing-floor and altar;110 Demeter (as Deo) was the foundress of the festival, 111 which was interpreted as ensuring successful agriculture. 112 According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, lOS On the festival, cf Deubner (1966),68 f.; Casabona (1966») 103-8, esp. 106 £; Parke (1977), 73-5; Brumfield (198 1),54-69. On the date, c( Dow-Healey (1965), 14-20; LSCG 15 f.; Mikalson (1975), 67-9; Brumfield (I98I)~ 59; IG ii2. 1363.2. Mikalson suggests it was not a state festival; if true, this would mirror the choice of setting in Eleusis not Athens; cf. however Dow-Healey (1965: 15, 17), who suggest it was in the state calendar because of the prorrhesis made in Athens. 106 Cf. Krummen (1993), 203-8. The relationship between the play and the offerings of firstfruits at Eleusis instituted around this time is problematic given the uncertain date of IG i3. 78 - ML 73: 422 is possible but very uncertain. Note that strictly the corn was collected for the Mysteries not the Proerosia, as some claim; cf. ML 73.24-6, K£A£VETO SE Kai ko ht£po4>aVTES Kai [0]

Oat86Xos fL v UTE pi 0 t S d,1Tapx£u8at TOS' hiAA£vaS' TO Kap1TO KaTa Ta 7TaTpta Kai TEV f.LavTEiav TEv Ei' LfEAtPOV). None the less, the myth of the foundation of the Proerosia acted as the justification for the

Athenian claim to the aparchai of the harvest (Dow-Healey (1965), 17). 107 The description of the Choes day of the Anthesteria in Eur. IT 947-60 is not exactly the same as the 5th-cent. custom (for which, cf. esp. Burkert (1983), 216-26). 108 Cf. 47 0 where the Herald orders Theseus to expel Adrastus AvaavTa UEfLvd uTEp.f.LaTWV fLuaTiJpl.a (for the interpretation of this line, c£ Diggle (1994), 61 n. I I). 109 Plut MOT. 144a. On sacred ploughings, cf.Jameson (195 1). 110 Paus. I. 38. 6; cf. Marm. Par. 13. III :l: Ar. Pluto 10 54. 112 Eur. Supp. 28 f.; Suda S.V. npoTJPoaiaL. On the agricultural aspects of Proerosia and Mysteries, cf. IG i3. 78. 44-6, [roi]s Sf TaVTa 1TOtOUL 1ToAAa dya8d ivaL Kat EVKap1Tiav Kat

54

A. M. Bowie

Demeter went to this Rarian Plain after she had regained Persephone and there met Rhea who told her of Zeus' agreement that she should have Persephone for two-thirds of the year; the sterile plain burst into fruitfulness as the goddess abandoned her wrath. 113 The scene of the play is before the temple of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis (I-3, 33),114 and the myth of the Eleusinian Mysteries has obvious point in a play about Mothers seeking the return of the bodies of their children. I IS Aspects of Eleusis, its Mysteries, and mythology are referred to at a number of points. In her search for Persephone, Demeter dressed herself in mourning black,116 and the Mothers are similarly attired (7T€1TAWf.1-a T~ ou 8€WpLKa, 'not in festive robes', 97). Demeter disguised herself as an old woman and sat beneath an olive tree: l1 ? the Mothers are old and wear olive garlands (258 f.). Demeter turns to the daughters of the king and becomes a servant of the queen, the Mothers turn to the mother of the king. The altar where we find Aethra was built by Celeus after the revelation of what Demeter was doing to Demophon;118 it was here that Demeter herself sat for a year longing for her daughter. 119 Adrastus calls Demeter the 'fire-bearing goddess' (260), referring to the torches carried in her search.120 Theseus places his army at the famous well called Callichoron (392; cf. 619), where Demeter rested. 121 Above it she commanded her temple to be built,122 and here 'the Eleusinian women first set up a dance and sang in honour of the goddess'.123 Mothers and Demeter are thus in comparable positions. The problem of the war-dead is refracted not only through the myth of the Seven who were buried at Eleusis but also through the myth of Eleusis' great festival. The Athenian dead are thus figured not only as the heroic Seven but also as Persephone, 1TO Av K np 17 {a [v, ho{]nvfS' av [/-L] ( dOtKOOt Burkert (1987), 20.

~8€va{os

J..UOE

T€V

7TOAtv

TEV

;48Eva{ov fLEOE TO (h6;

113 H. Hom. Dem. 450-9. Burkert (1983: 292) suggests that at the Mysteries ~the crowd perhaps flocked to the field called Rharion', comparing Hermesianax 7.17 on Antiope, 'the mythic model for the priestess of Demeter', brought from Hades by Iv\usaeus: fj TE 7TOAUV fLVUTllCHV 'EA£VU[VO~ 1Tapa

7Ti~av

I €VaUfLOv KpvrPiwv igEq,0PEL AOY{WV I ~PdptOV 0pYELwva vOfLi.p

tOLQ1TOt1TVVovaa.

On the topography of Eleusis, cf. Richardson (1974), 326-30. 115 C( Krummen (1993: 205), 'it is a time of sterility, an idea to which the constant images of childlessness and infertility seem to refer.' ll6 H. Hom. Dem. 42,183,302-7,319,360,442. 117 Ibid. 100-2; the olive is sacred to Demeter (Richardson (1974), 182). liS H. Hom. Dem. 270-2,297 f. (cf. Richardson (1974), on 270). At 63-5, the Mothers say ouiwS' OUX, U7T' dvdyKa~ O€ . .. EJ.L0AOV • .• 8€wv 8vfLEAas' lX0P.f.V 0' EvoLKa. Why they are acting ou{ws oUX is disputed (cf. Collard (197Sa), 124); the most obvious solution lies in the disruption of Aethra's rites. The prohibition on making suppliancies at the Eleusinium in Athens during the Mysteries (c£ Andoc. 1.116), may also have provided a filter. 119 H. Hom. Dem. 302-7. 120 Ibid. 47 f.; cf. Richardson (1974), 165-7. 121 Cf. Callim. Hymn. 6.15, fro 61 I (with Pfeiffer (1949), ad loc.); Nicander, Ther. 486; Apollod. I. 5. 1; in H. Hom. Dem. 99 it is the well Parthenion, but this may be the same as Callichoron (cf. Richardson (1974), 3 26- 8). 122 H. Hom. Dem. 27 2 . 123 Paus. I. 38. 6. 114

Tragic Filters for History

ss

whose return inaugurated the state of the world as it now is: 'there is no victory over death. . .. Life has gained the dimension of death, but this means that death contains a dimension of life.' 124 Theseus has referred to the inevitability of the return to earth of the dead (531 f£), but this myth also promises a future in the form of children, either like the war-orphans who had paraded in the theatre before the plays,125 or like the Sons of the Seven, the Epigonoi, who come on stage at the end of the play and who will in future exact vengeance on the Thebans for the deaths of their fathers. The play thus presents the catastrophe at Delium in terms not only of punishment for failure to observe correct behaviour towards the gods, but also of the need after that punishment to put the dead where they belong. It contrasts the unwisdom and misery of war with the national glory that it can bring. It displays powerful emotion, but has Theseus prevent the excessive display of that emotion. Finally, the events at Delium are refracted through two myths, one of which casts the dead as heroic figures and gives them what amounts to a second grand funeral, while at the same time highlighting unfortunate parallels and significant differences between myth and history. The other offers some hope for the future, though even this will involve more conflict. The play closes on a religious note. Theseus sends Adrastus and the Chorus on their way with the request to remember the things Athens has done for them, of which Zeus and the Olympians are witness (1165 fI). Athena, however, appears on the scene to insist that this memory must be corroborated by an oath, sworn over pieces of sacrificial animals: 126 the description stands for the performance of the act. The sacrificial knife is to be buried at Eleusis to act as a deterrent to any Argive attack on Athens. 127 The uncertainty over the play's date means its relationship with the actual treaty of July 420 must remain unclear, and what might have been a useful test case for the question of tragedy's treatment of contemporary events is unavailable to US. 128 However, this scene provides an ending that is symbolic in important ways. Krummen suggests that the (presumed) continued existence of the tripod in Delphi stands as a reminder of the splendour of Athens' military and moral leadership. 129 We 124 Burkert (1983), 26I. Cf. Krummen (1993: 205 f.) on how the agricultural metaphors in the play support the idea that the cycle of crops and the cycle of war are homologous. 125 Cf. Aeschin. 3. 1 54; and Krummen (1993: 207) on possible connections between Eleusis and ephebes. 126 C( Burkert (1983), 25 0 -4. 127 Cf. Stengel (19 20: 16 f.) for burial of important implements. 128 Many have felt the force of Zuntz's ideas (deployed for purposes of dating) that the Argives are not represented in the way one might expect for a people who had signed a treaty of friendship, and that the treaty is a 'wholly one-sided obligation such as in reality could only be dictated to a completely vanquished enemy' «1955: 75); though cf. Diller (1960),23 2 ; fG i3. 83 and Thuc. 5.47, 82. 5 for the historical treaty). Tragic treaties and agreements do, however, emphasize the benefits to Athens: cf. Aesch. Eum. 767-74; Soph. DC 1518-34, Eur. Held. 1030-44. 129 (1993), 201.

A. M. Bowie may add that the friendship of Athenian Theseus and Theban Heracles offers a mediation between the two cities that have clashed over bodies in mythical and contemporary history. The gift of the tripod to Apollo not only fulfils Heracles' request to Theseus, but also constitutes an offering to the god whose temple was at the centre of the events and conflicts at Delium.

PHILOCTETES

Philoctetes was produced at the Great Dionysia in

two years after Alcibiades had been recalled, at a time when turmoil at home was made worse by reverses abroad.131 Alcibiades was seen as the sole hope of salvation, not least because of the Persian aid he promised to bring with him. He was elected strat.egos by the fleet and, after Thrasybulus' defeats of Spartan forces at Cynossema and Abydus, led them to a spectacular victory at Cyzicus in May 410.132 Further successes were to follow. He was elected strategos for 408/7, and at the Plynteria of 408 he returned in triumph to an unlimited command. 133 Unfortunately, the Plynteria was not an auspicious day on which to arrive, and his career had not long to run. 134 Prima facie, a play about the return of one seen as the salvation of his former comrades could reasonably be read as in some way allegorical of Alcibiades' return. However, no such possibility is referred to in the ancient commentators, and first occurs with Lebeau in I770' Scholars have divided on whether the play has any historical reference. Wilamowitz firmly opposed the idea 135 and Jebb agreed,136 but recently political reference has been more readily countenanced.137 The subtlest treatment is that of Rose,138 whose main interest is in Sophocles' analysis of Athenian society in terms of the different Sophistic social theories. He does, however, argue against references to specific historical events: 'what could be further from the grim isolation and utterly uncompromising integrity imparted to the dramatic character of Sophocles' Philoctetes than the truly amazing array of manipulations and tergiversations of Alcibiades' whole career - especially between 413 and 41o?'139 We have however already seen with Supplices that differences between the mythical and contemporary events do not preclude their being considered as reflective one of the other. It is always a central problem of intertextual reading to decide at what point the differences between two or more 'texts' so outweigh the similarities that they cannot legitimately be related together, but in this 409,130

Second A'lIumenl. 131 Thuc. 8.81. 132 Xen. Hell. I. I. I I ff. Ibid. 1. 4- 1 I ff. 134 Plut. Ale. 34. 1. 13~ 'Kein Vers weist aus dem Drama heraus aufirgend etwas in der Gegenwart des Dichters ... Ein gelungenes, zeitloses Kunstwerk': (1917),316 f., quoted by Calder (197 1), 153. 136 ( 18 9 8), p. xli. 137 e.g. by Calder (1971); Jameson (1956); Craik (1980). l38 (199 2 ),266-33°, esp. 32 7-3 0 . 139 Rose (1992), 32 9. 130 133

Tragic Filters for History

57

case, differences in career and temperament between the two men do coexist with notable similarities beside that of the offer of salvation. 140 Both have an almost Achillean self-regard and insistence that they get what they think are their deserts. Thucydides first introduces Alcibiades as especially ambitious (q,polJ')7fLaTL cPLAoVLKWV, 5. 43. 2) and angered because he was insufficiently valued, both at Athens because of his youth, and at Sparta despite his plans for the revival of the Spartan proxenia which had lapsed in his grandfather's time. Once alienated from Athens, he wasted no time in supporting her enemies. Philoctetes has a similar concern for reputation,141 and will not countenance any help for the Greeks who abandoned him on Lemnos; twice he even curses to a fate similar to his own those most responsible for his suffering. Alcibiades' influence rested not a little on his extraordinary physical toughness which allowed him to put up with a lifestyle of anomalous excess,142 and Philoctetes has survived ten years of appalling torment. 143 More significantly perhaps, there is a religious aspect to each case, involving the slight to one or more deities. Alcibiades was accused of involvement in the Hermocopidae episode 144 and of profaning the Mysteries by enacting them at a banquet in his house. 145 Philoctetes transgressed onto Chryse's sacred ground and was punished by her snake, as Neoptolemus explains and interprets (191200):

ov8€v TOVTWV 8avp.aoTov €!-,oi. 8Eia yap, Ei7TEP Kayw TL q,povw, Kat Tn 7Ta8fJp.4T4 KEivo. 1TpOS avrov rrj~ WJ.LOc/>pOVOS XpVOTJ~ E7TEPT},

a 7TOVEf otxa K1]OEP.6vwv, OUK £a9~ WS ou DEWV TOV ILEAE71],

Kai VVV TOV

JLiJ 1TpOTEPOV 'TOVS- E1Ti

TEivat

Tpoig.

ora OEWV dl-uIX71 Ta {JEAT],

-rrpiv 80' EP7KOt xpovos, c/J AEYETat xpfJval (1~~ V1TO TroVOE 8aJLTjvat.

None of these things surprises me~ They come from the gods, if I understand aright, and these sufferings have beset him because of cruel Chryse. What he now suffers far from friends inust result from some god's care that he should not draw his divine, invincible bow against Troy before the time comes when it is said it must be destroyed by him. 1"0 On this motifin the play, cf. 109 (Odysseus on the imponance of TO ow87jval.), 31 1,488,4946, 528 f., 919 f., 1391, 1395 f. 1470 f. (Avery (1965), with 296 f. 'Appendix on the Theme of Salva· tion'). On 'safety' as a political leitmotif at this time, do Bieler (195 I). 1"1 Cf. 254 ff., 1348 ff. also 575,654 (Avery (1965),296 n. I). 1"2 Thuc.6. 15. 4, 'nj~ Kf1Ta TO awp.a TTo.pavop.tas ES rr)v 8tatTUv. 10 A ship was sent in each case: the Greeks to bring Philoctetes to Troy willingly; the Athenians 'to order Alcibiades to return to make his defence in Athens but not actually to arrest him' (Thuc. 6. 61. 5). 1.... Cf. Osborne (19 8 5). I"S Cf. Andoc. I. 11-33 (with MacDowell (1962) ad loc.); Pluto Ale. 22..3; on their significance, cf. Parker (1983), 168-70.

A. M. Bowie The prophecy of Helenus, recounted by the Emporus, also points to divine planning (610- 13): O~

07) rei

T'

ciAA' aVTO[Ul

1Tavr' '-(}E01TtUEV

Kat Ta7Ti Tpo[q. 7TEPYUf..L' W~

7TEPUOLEV, El J.i:i]

OU fLYJ

1TOTE

rovo£ 7TE{aaVTE)' A6y~

ayolvro v'ljoov Tijao'

e1}va/-LEVOS' Egavopa7Tooi'eo(}Ul, 7Tpuip.EVOS yvVutKa TWV alXJLaAwviov ig avTIjS' 7T'E1TOi1}TQt, OS' ToaOVTWL 7TapavofLwTEpWS' Atyta(Jou YEYOVEV, WOT' EK TWV iX8{OiWV ciAA~AOtS' 7T€fPVKE, Kal iWV oiKEtOTaTWV V1TapXEL aUTwL Tel EoxaTu TOVS' /-LEv

TWV

7TE7ToL1}KEvaL TaUS DtEA6eiv.

EK

DE

TfiVT77S'

7TE1Tov(JEvaL.

[§ 23]

ligLOV

oE

riJv

T6Af-Lal l aVTov aacPEoTEpOV iTt

yap 1TULOO1ToLEiTaL rij) yvvat.KOS, ijv ciVT' EAEvBEpas SOVA1}V

KaTEaTTJcrE~ KaL ~S' 'TOV 1TaTEpa Kat TOVS' 7rpooijKOVTUS a7TEKTELVE, Kat

wS'

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viov EX8pOV EaVTWL Kat 'TiJt 7ToAEt. 1TOlTjOELE· TooaVTatS' civciYKaLS KaTEiATJ7T'TaL fLLOEiv. ciAA' VfLEis EV fLEV TaiS' TpaYWlO iaLS TOlaUTa (h::WPOVVTES' OELva VO/-Li{ETE, YLYVO/-,Eva 0' EV rijl 7ToAEt. OpWVTES OUOEV cPPOVTt'ETE. KatTOt EKetva fLEV OUK €7TtOTQO(JE 1TOTPOV OUTW YEyiv'Y/TaL ~ 7TE7TAaOTUt U7TO TWV 7TOl1]TWV' TaVTa OE oae/)(ns

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This piece of eloquence from the hand of a faceless oligarch-'pseudoAndokides'-writing 'Against Alkibiades' vividly represents the dynamic working of the khoregia in Athenian society, a dynamism operating on a base of conflict and contestation. The legal control which the polis exercised over its Dionysian khoroi here collides with a licence arrogated in this public and highly visual civic space by Alkibiades as khoregos. His khoregia itself becomes a performance whose symbolic meaning is not lost on this author: prestige, power, and the dynamic deployment of wealth are all very clearly at stake. The theatre becomes the place for the dramatic, symbolic enactment of social tensions: of Alkibiades' 'lust for tyranny',3 of the agonistic relations between the pre-eminent 'Big Men' of Athenian public life and between these and their audience of the demos. This account of Alkibiades' performance construes it as a symbolic trampling underfoot of democracy-a demonstration of his own confident sense of his [Andokides] 4. 2 0-3. See §§ 16,24, and 27 of this speech and cf. Thuc. 6. IS, 6. 28. 2, 6.53; on the lineage of the topos of the 4l us t for tyranny' see McGlew (1993), 30-2, 81-2. 2

3

Leading the Tragic Khoros superiority over the judges of the festival competition, selected by a carefully controlled process to represent the ten phylai of Attike;4 over the laws of the city; and over the demos itself Alkibiades manipulates in his own interests the law of 'civic purity' which debarred foreigners from participation in Dionysian khoroP-here specifically the ten fifty-strong dithyrambic khoroi of boys, icons of the precious rising generation of future citizens. His assault on fellow khoregos Taureas-or rather, to translate this inherently conflictual term more faithfully, his 'anti-khoregos' (avTl.xoP1'Jy6s) Taureas-at first causes his audience to side with Taureas and despise Alkibiades, an emotional response which is translated directly from the men to their khoroi (see the waTE ... clause in § 20); but this, according to 'pseudo-Andokides', gives way to a seduced mass response of mesmerized admiration for public transgression. And it is this compliance of the demos, displaced only momentarily onto the judges of the competition (§ 2I), which is construed as the enabling condition for Alkibiades' tyrannical transgression of the social order. The double depiction of Alkibiades in this passage as both transgressive khoregos and tragic transgressor is eloquent indeed, and the close juxtaposition of these two images seems hardly fortuitous. While the notion of tragedy deployed here is clearly a polemical and tendentious one,. it demonstrates at a minimum one way in which tragedy could be interpreted by those who themselves participated in its performance regularly as spectators, khoreutai, and, in this case at least, as khoregos. 6 .: See Pickard-Cambridge (1988),95-9; Pope (I986). ~ On the legal situation see A1acDowell (1985); what Alkibiades is actually alleged here to have done in relation to Taureas is obscure (§ 20): KfAfVOVTOS' DE Tot; VOJLOU Tf interest about attitudes to khoreia, at whatever stage that took place. Wankel (1976: 1162) writes: 'Nach €TEAOUfL7JV steht in aUen Hss, auger S noch die Antithese EXOPEVES, €yw o' €xop.,zyovv. Bei den Rhetoren findet sie sich nur bei Hermog. Meth. p. 43 I, 2oR. (codex Vc) und danach bei Greg. Cor. vii p. 1257, 8W. (vgl. die uErklarung" p. 1258, 18-26). Es ist otTensichtlich eine Interpolation. Das \Vortspiel ist albern, und der Gegensatz zwischen xopniuv (des Kultdieners Aisch.? Vgl. €7TOP)(OVfLEVOS § 260) und xopTJYEiv (§ 257) ergibt keine Pointe im Sinn der Reihe.' Aesthetic judgements as to the quality of the wordwplay are bound to have a subjective component; while the point of the ,:ontrast will, I hope, be clear from my larger argument.

Peter Wilson citizens were needed each year to serve in the choral contests. 61 A substantial percentage of the citizen body was thus effectively under the pay of private individuals in this way for a few months at least every year. Without making an extended detour through the debate concerning the nature of the ancient Greek economy, it is important to stress the degree to which the leitourgic system is only fully comprehensible as an element in a socially embedded economy where prestige is a more desirable goal than the simple accumulation of wealth, or at the very least is a crucial adjunct to it. In the rest of this chapter, I shall look briefly at the role of competition and prestige and focus on what distinguishes tragic choral leadership and the prestige that goes with it from other forms. For the khoregia is very much more intelligible by the terms of an economy of prestige than it is in the accountancy of a strictly market economy. The classic signposts of Greek notions of prestige are all present-a fiercely contested 'zero-sum' competition under the gaze of a wider audience, an obsession with victory and its memorialization, with time, with kleos and all its trappings. In the first place, among the many different kinds of khoregia, the tragic khoregia evidently occupied a high position on a scale of prestige. Its relative rarity ensured its value: whereas at the Great Dionysia (clearly the most prestigious of Athenian festivals involving choral agones) there were twenty dithyrambic khoregiai each year and roughly a hundred festivalleitourgiai of all kinds, there were only three for tragedy at the Great Dionysia. According to the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia the second duty of the eponymous arkhon after coming into office was the appointment of three of the very richest men from among all the Athenians as tragic khoregoi for the Great Dionysia, following only his formal proclamation that all men shall retain their possessions and powers until the end of his office.62 Thus the first practical task of the leading civic officer was to appoint the three wealthiest Athenians liable for the'duty as impresarios for the tragic dramas which were still a full eleven months away_ Moreover, the tragic khoregia at the Great Dionysia is the only one of which it can be said with any confidence that its principle of selection was never restricted to any subgroup of the Athenian citizenry: Aristotle writes with clear emphasis that the tragic khoregoi were chosen 'from all the Athenians'. The twenty dithyrambic khoregoi of the Great Dionysia were officially identified with their phylai and even the comic khoregoi came at some point in the fourth century at least to be nominated by the phyiai, though it is unclear whether 61 The figure of 1,165 is based on: 20 dithyrambic khoroi x 50 (of which half, being 1Ta.CSes, should properly be called 4future citizens'); 5 comic khoroi x 24; 3 tragic/satyric khoroi x 15. The evidence of Arist. Pol. I 276bl-9 that comic and tragic khoroi could be composed of the same men does not alter this point. Aristotle's remark lacks any firm context. What is interesting about it is that the heterogeneous type and homogeneous composition of dramatic khoroi are used as an analogue for a polis. 62 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56. 2 -3.

Leading the Tragic Khoros

97

they thereby were felt in any sense to represent them. 63 The tragic khoregos remained entirely untouched by any such affiliations. Furthermore, from some time quite early in the fifth century tragedy was clearly perceived in and beyond Attike as the Athenian poetic performance par excellence. It rapidly came to occupy a privileged place in the range of cultural representations that helped to constitute Athenian polis-society; it was, in Humphreys's phrase, 'the main symbolic form of classical Athens.'64 Whereas many, indeed most, dithyrambic poets were of non-Athenian birth,6S the reverse is true of tragedians. 66 And in the programme of the festival and its official memorialization of victors, tragedy occupied the final, climactic position. 67 A further important indication of the great value attached to tragedy by the city itself, and to the agones of the Great Dionysia in general, is to be found in the institution of the theorikon, which I wish to discuss briefly at this point. This will also provide a counterbalance to my primary focus on the material contributions of individuals to the performance of tragedy, since it is an instance of the enabling contribution of the collective polis itsel(68 Our sources for the theorikon are even more fragmentary and of uncertain interpretation than those for the khoregia. However, it is none the less clear that there are problems with the current interpretations of such evidence as there is. 69 In the standard English-language treatment of the subject,70 there is a conspicuous silence concerning the possible significance of the very fact that during the period of classical Attic drama, a fee to attend the agones of the Great Dionysia was charged at all. Pickard-Cambridge's treatment of the subject begins: 'The only explicit evidence about the cost of a seat is ... '71- an d 63 In logistical terms, five comic khoregoi are more easily distributed across the ten phylai (cf. the situation at the Thargelia, where five khoregoi represented ten phylai) than are three tragic performances. Needless to say, this is in itself no sufficient explanation of why the tragic khoregoi remained outside any affiliation with the phylai. 64 (19 8 3), 18. 65 Herington (1985: 94 and n. 74) can find three Athenian dithyrambic poets at most; cf. Plut. Mor. 348b-c; [Pl.] Minos 321a. 66 TrGF i lists c. 10 5th-cent. tragedians of non-Athenian origins. 67 The so-called Fasli or Victors' List: IG ii/iii~. 2318, erected C.346; best seen with supplements known from other sources in Mette (1977: 1-42). For the debate about the order of events in the agonistic part of the festival see Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 101-7, 361; Luppe (1972); Mastromarco (1975). 68 The theorikon plus leitourgic contributions do not exhaust the elements of the economic base of tragedy. Considerable funds must have been forthcoming from the treasury for many other aspects of the festival as a whole-the actors' pay, the poets' remuneration, sacrificial animals, and so on. The hestiasis needs to be added here as a further leitourgia operating in conjunction with this and other festivals: see Schmitt-Pantel (1992), esp. 117-43, 179-208. Another leitourgia, or quasileitourgia, connected to the Great Dionysia is that of the ten ETTtfLEA:rrro.i, whose main concern was the procession (TT0J..L7T7]). These were originally selected by the people, but at some point after the middle of the 4th cent., were appointed by their phylai: thus [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56. 4; c[ Rhodes (198 I), 627-8. 69 See now also Sommerstein in the present volume (Ch. 4), for a rather different interpretation. 70 Pickard-Cambridge (19 88), 26 5- 8 ,27 0 . 71 Ibid. (19 88 ), 26 5.

Peter Wilson he shows no awareness that the fact that there was a charge to enter the festival at all may itself be surprising and worthy of analysis. Yet this surely is the earliest known instance of a charge being made in the Greek world to enter a festiva1. 72 However~ the fact that that charge seems to coincide with the birth of western dramatic production should not be allowed to mislead us. PickardCambridge's starting-point is surely another instance of the unthinking transfer of a familiar, but anachronistic mentality to the ancient Greek context: an ~spect of modern theatre-practice based on entrepreneurial notions of recouping financial outlays and making profits. 73 I would argue that it is vital to consider the motivations for the institution of the entrance fee at the same time as one analyses the theorikon. There seems in fact to be an essential connection, if not a complete iden!:ity,74 between the two; between the fee charged to enter the festival agones and the money distributed for this purpose. They are both covered by the term f}EwPLKOV (sc. apyvpLoV): '(money) for a spectacle'. The analogy with the EKKATjuLauTLKov, SLKauTLKov, and {3ovAEVTLKOV points in this direction, with its implied emphasis on participation in civic institutions. 75 Furthermore, all the money which was paid to enter the festival seems to have returned ultimately to the polis, in that it was kept by the apXLTEKTWV, the person to whom the polis leased the theatre and who was responsible for its upkeep?6 Under this aspect, the theorikon can be seen as the city's way of assuring the quality of the material conditions for the performance of its drama at the same time as inviting itself to attend. One explanation for the theorikon given by Libanios and repeated in various guises by ancient and modern writers links its institution to a democratic desire not to see the poor disadvantaged: 77 this of course in general presupposes that the fee to enter pre-dates the issuing of theorika, a fact which as I have suggested is at the very least open to doubt. However, as Buchanan notes, those writing on the Greek theatre accept this 'aid for the poor' interpretation as 72 77zeorika were issued for the Panathenaia: IDem.] 44. 37; cf. Hsch. S.v. 8EWptKd XPr,fLQTa. There seems to be no evidence that an entrance-fee was charged at the Panathenaia. Whitehead presumes that there must have been an entrance fee for the Rural Dionysia, while pointing out that we know of no local equivalent to the theoric distributions of the Great Dionysia. His argument rests mainly on the evidence that exists for theatre lessees at the rural theatres, as at Peiraieus (IG ii2. I 176), from which he derives a principle of entrepreneurship; cf IG ii/iiil. 1206 and PickardCambridge (1988), So; Whitehead (1986), 222. 73 This attitude is widely assumed in discussions of the lheorikon: C.g. Buchanan (1962),86 and, in extreme form, Walton (1977), (1980), ch. 3. 74 There is limited evidence to suggest that theoric distribution may-at some period-have exceeded the amount required to be paid over to enter the theatre, perhaps in order to cover 'private expenses' (thUS Ulpian on Dem. I. I: El~ ioiav TP0cPYJV), 75 Libanios, writing the hypothesis (§ 4) to Demosthenes' First Olynlhiac, links the institution of the entrance fee with that of the lheorikon. 76 C£ [Arist.] Alh. Pol. 47. 2; Photo and Suda S.V. eEWpl,KOV Kai BEWptKTJ; de Ste Croix (1964), 191. 77 Libanios, hypoth. (§ 4) Oem. 1: iva ot JLTJ OOKWOlV oi 7T£V71TES niH aVllAWjLan AU7TEia8at £K TaU 871fLoaiov ),afL{3d.vEtV €KaCTTOV £To.X87} TOV~ Suo d{3oAou~. J


99

fact. 78 It would seem, however, to represent a type of democratic idealization (not necessarily with a positive evaluation) common in our sources, and often repeated unquestioningly by modern writers. 79 It is assumed that there is operating here a charitable ethic of relief for the poor which is in fact more at home in a later era. Some time ago Bolkestein pointed out the strong contrast between the essentially ci~'ic nature of assistance in antiquity and the Christian notion of charity for the poor: in antiquity, the citizens as such were the beneficiaries of any assistance, redistribution, and so on.80 The phrase ascribed by Plutarch to Demades is appropriated as the catch-cry of the 'democratic' view of the theorikon: Demades was said to have called the theorika the 'glue of the democracy'-KoAAav ... nj~ 01J,uoKpaTia~-though to what aspect of its history he was allegedly referring is notoriously unclear. 81 There is a very strong tendency for modern writers to discuss the theorikon as a democratic, egalitarian means of enabling the poorer citizens to enjoy the cultural riches of the polis. Thus Webster writes of it, together with the khoregia, as 'institutions which made for the spread of culture' (from the rich to the masses).82 Not surprisingly, an institution with such potential for claims to egalitarianism was at some stage ascribed to Perikles. Plutarch is our earliest source here, where the inflection is hardly positive, and he describes it as a political measure to please the demos in an attempt to counter Kimon's lavish dispensing of his private wealth. 83 Yet this line of debate still leaves uninterrogated the reasons why the lheo,ikon was necessary-namely, why a charge was introduced to enter in the first place. 84 The fact is that the theorikon was available to all Athenian citizens, irrespective of wealth, and that rich people could declare without any apparent embarrassment that they had drawn it. In fact, Demosthenes goes so far as to say (10. 3885): 'All the well-to-do go to receive their share of this, and rightly so' (o[ yap EV1TOPOL

7TaVTES

EpxovTaL P.E(}i.gOVT€S TOVTOV, Kat KaAws- 7TOtOVOLV).

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(I962), 52. Cf. Meier (1990 ), 88. !iO Bolkestein (1939). Nicolet (1976: 253) further notes that when special distributions of corn were made in Athens in the 5th and 4th cents., there is no indication that the poor were favoured: 'La participation it la distribution. au contraire, etait hautement affirmee comme la preuve d'un privilege, Ie statut de citoyen.' 81 Pluto Mot. 101 lb. S2 (1973), 48; WTebster finds himself in the company of Grote (1846-56), 8. 123: 'we shall be satisfied that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard of the Athenian multitude, must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons.' 83 Pluto Per. 9.2-3: TOl.iTOLS 6 n£ptKAijs KaTa07Jpo:YWYOV/LEVOS Tpl1TETat 7TpOS n}v nov S"1J.Looiwv StaVOfL'1v, OUJ.LfJoVA€VOaVTOS fl1.hwL .dafLwvioov TOU "Oa8fv, WS itpto'To'TEAT}s la'Top"1K£" Kai Taxv 78

79

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Photo S.v. 8£WpIKd. 84 Polacco (1983: 8) adduces the highly practical reason of the need to keep order in entry to the theatre. However, this can hardly be an exhaustive explanation of the phenomenon in itself, and of the particular form it took. 85 Cf. Dem. 44. 37.

Peter Wilson

100

other words, the amount of money which the city might hope to have accrued from entrance fees must always have been quite low; given that the great majority of theatre-goers must have been citizens, that majority could always have had its entrance fee supplied by the polis. Here I think is where the point behind the theorikon is to be found, although I recognize that my argument too must remain one possible interpretation of our very inadequate evidence. The sources give no indication that it was ever a problem to fill the theatre-indeed, the opposite is true. 86 At the same time there was evidently a desire to control the composition of the audience, although here too the evidence is rather indirect and slender.87 Those who would be liable to pay the entrance fee are the various minority groups about whose presence in the audience it is notoriously difficult to speak with confidence: metoikoi, foreigners, perhaps slaves and women. And so the theorikon thereby neatly inscribes the principle of 'civic membership' in yet another-and highly significant-field.88 Whatever the restrictions may have been, entrance to the Great Dionysia was certainly not restricted in principle only to citizens. However, the theorikon was evidently another mechanism of pointed exclusion, of subsidizing civic participation in an event of international renown where relations between the Athenian polis and its 'Others' were very much at stake. Drawing one's theorikon through the deme mechanisms 89 on days when the standard civic /-LLu8ocpopal were not forthcoming was another form of participation, of affirming one's position in the polis. The theorikon was not a cultural dole, but another means of redistributing the city's surplus to the citizens through a civic institution, and it is well described by Humphreys as 'a ritual symbol rather than a key element in the Athenian economy'.90 Returning, however, to the fundamental role played by individuals in the material base of dramatic production, I want to consider the particular form of prestige that may have attached to tragic 'choral leadership' for that tiny subgroup of citizens who were able to perform it. 91 One important feature differentiating the tragic from the dithyrambic khoregia is that the latter was undertaken on behalf of one's phyie, and the competition between the ten dithyrambic khoroi was clearly in part at least designed to foster a healthy R6 I do not think that Pluto Mar. 122d can be regarded as evidence that the thearikan was needed to assure full audiences: 1TAEiovS' av rOOtS' (Kfi 8faTciS, 01TOU 8EwptKOV Tt yff.!ETat TO[S ouvwtJOtY,

W07TEp ~8'1jv'10t. 87 e.g. Dem. 18. 28: in the heated arguments between Demosthenes and Aiskhines over the treatment of the Macedonian ambassadors, Demosthenes defends his resolution to grant them what was presumably pJ oedria. The fact that the point could have been sensitive is illuminating. 88 An analogous institution to the theorikon, almost its converse, is the metoikion, the flat-rate poll-tax on metoikoi which, as Finley (1981: 90) notes, by its very existence marked the free non~ citizen off from the citizen, and was more significant for its psychological effect than its financial burden. 89 Whitehead (19 86: 10) argues that theon'ka were distributed not merely by demes but actually at meetings of deme assemblies, to demesmen presenting themselves in person. 90 (19 83), 30 . 91 On any calculation, this represents less than 1% of the citizen body. 4


101

rivalry within the citizen body between these subdivisions of the democratic) post -Kleisthenic system. In the case of tragedy, however, the khoregos is acting as no one else's representative, and has only the poet to vie with for the store of available kleos. In fact, it is clear from inscribed memorials that the khoregos is often in a position to subsume even the poet's glory into his own. In such private dedications-set up, of course, at the expense of the khoregos, not the polisthe name of the khoregos is frequently set above that of the poet, and, where it is included, often also above that of the current arkhon. 92 The practice was sufficiently common to provide the basis for the joke in Theophrastos' caricature of the aneleutheros: 'The illiberal man is the sort of person who to commemorate a victory at tragedy sets up to Dionysos a headband made of wood and puts only his own name on it.,93 The 'illiberal' man excludes any mention of the other personnel responsible for the victory from its most lasting memorial. By this behaviour, mean in itself-wood compromising a future that marble might have secured-the generosity of public-spiritedness is pushed aside by a selfish demand for solely individualistic self-advertisement. It is important to recognize to what extent the victory of a tragic competition belonged, or at least could be regarded as belonging, to its khoregos as much as, or indeed more than, to its poet. We are really quite ill-informed as to the criteria on which the judges were supposed to award the prize, and the point seems to be that in different contexts the victory could be appropriated by those who had some claim on it, a fact well illustrated by variations in dedicatory practice.94 In an economy of prestige the central 'commodity'-prestige itself-is fundamentally elusive and unquantifiable. After all-unlike wealth-it is conferred by others. It needs to be reasserted constantly, since it is something which by definition comes into existence in the regard of others. 95 The evidence relating to the khoregia illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. Indeed, since its sphere of operation is the theatron-the place in the city for the gaze-it is a privileged example indeed. 96 Emphasis is laid in our sources on the brilliance of 92 See Themistokles' tragic pinax described by Pluto Them. 5.5; many inscriptions, e.g.IG ii/iiP. 3090, 3091, omit mention of the arkhon altogether, and where his name is present (often in a smaller script) it seems to be for little more than administrative' purposes. 93 Thphr. Char. 22. 1-2. 94 For a (virtually unique) example of an arkhon-the Basileus, so the competition must have been at the Lenaia-seeking to maximize symbolic capital from dramatic victories which took place under his office, see the unusual herm of Onesippos, SEG xxxii. 239; Edmonson (1982). It is, I think, significant that in this inscription it is the comic khoregos who is identified as the (metic) trader-Sosikrates XClAKo7TwA7]s-while the tragic khoregos is identified further only by his patronymic. Given the marked elite prejudice against those involved in commercial activity, this imbalance may be regarded as further evidence that there was a hierarchy of prestige at least in certain contexts among the various khoregiai. 95 See Leppert-Lincoln (19 89) for a theoretical introduction; on the Greek material see as a selection Gouldner (1965), esp. 41-132; Petre (1969); Winkler (I990b) esp. 47; Vernant (1991), esp. 107; Goldhill (199 I), ch. 2. 96 In terms of this prestige conferred by being seen the khoregia is thus also rather more 4

102

Peter Wilson

the costume of both khoros and khoregos, and the khoregos is evidently often keen to associate himself closely with his khoros. It is as though he, as much as his khoros, had an important part to play in the performance. It was he, after all, who was responsible to an important degree for the visual aspects of the tragic performance itself-in particular of course for the costuming of the most dominating physical presence on the stage, and perhaps also for other ~visual effects'Y7 Two recurrent keywords are Aaf.L7Tp6TT)~98 and 8avJ.Lci~w, both referring to the 'brilliantly' visual nature of the khoregia and the position of the khoregos in the view of a vast audience.99 Thus the references to the gold garlands and robes which Demosthenes was having made by a silversmith not only for his khoros but also, apparently, for his own 'performance' as khoregos. 10o Similarly a fragment of the fourth-century comic poet Antiphanes describes an Athenian plousios riddled with anxieties over the precariousness of his wealth who, when chosen as khoregos, furnishes his khoros with gold robes and wore rags himself. 101 Athenaios provides a fascinating account of the kind of behaviour to be expected of Alkibiades in the pompe of the Great Dionysia: 'Whenever he was khoregos, taking part in the procession, he entered the theatre in a purple robe and was admired (€8aV/-Ld.'ETO) not only by men but also by women.' 102 Moreover, in the theatrical context purple is a colour preeminently associated with tragedy. In the lVikomakhaian Ethics Aristotle illustrates the behaviour of the banausos by describing him as the type who, when khoregos for comedy, 'brings on purple in the parodos, like the Megarians' .103 Sifakis is surely right in arguing that this purple is that of thefor comedy-excessively lavish costume of the khoros, representing a vulgar and inappropriate expenditure characteristic of the banausos. One can well imagine that Alkibiades' entrances to the theatre in purple may well have been preludes to tragic performances. 104 In order to be truly brilliant a khoregia had to be victorious, for victory was attractive than the other most prominent leitourgia, the llicrarkhia. ~Iloreover, the l1ierarklzia, through its association with the navy, a crucial base of demotic power, may have had something of a "populist' character which the khoregia, firmly related to cultural practices of a non-democratic past, clearly did not share. \), See Arist. Poet. I453bI -8 with Taplin (1977), 477-9~ under the rubric of 1Tapaxopr,Yl"Jp. a may have come additional khoroi, extras without speaking parts, etc. Cf. Blume (197 8), 33-4. 98 e.g. Thuc. 6. 16. 3, 5; Antiphon I. /3. 12; Dem. 2 I. 159, 45· 78; Lykourgos I. 139; Arist. Elv I 122b23, II 23a20. 99 On Aap.7Tp6TTJ~ as something sought after in the political tield see Rahe (1984), 282; Carter (19 86 ),13,24- 5; Cozzo (199 1), 61-2. 100 Dem. 21. 16, 22. However, MacDowell (1990: 245-6) regards the most important piece of evidence for this 'an imaginative composition made in a later age'. 101 Antiphanes fro 202 K-A. Cf. Isokrates 7· 54. 101 Athenaios 12. 534c. 103 Arist. Elv 1123319-24. 104 Sifakis (197 1). Cf. the comic fragment of Philemon (105 K-A): Tn S' apyupwfLaT' eaTiv ~ TE TToprPupa, Eis TOV~ TpaywLoov~ Eu6ET', aUK Els TOV Plov. Also Pollux 4. I 16. With these transgressive uses of purple cloth one might compare the tragic locus classicus of iv 1Top¢upiSt ElUlfVat, Agamemnon in Aesch. Ag.


I03

the ultimate guarantee of prestige in an arena where one's gains corresponded exactly to the losses of one's peers. 105 One could cite the poor record of one's forensic opponent in competitive leitourgiai as evidence of a contemptuous attitude towards the democracy, as the speaker in Isaias 5 does when quoting Dikaiogenes' fourth place in a dithyrambic competition and a last place in tragedy and the pyrrhic dance.106 Yet to whatever extent success as a dramatic khoregos might have been open to construal in the appropriate context (when on trial before the demos, in particular) as an indication of one's adhesion to the dominant ideology of the polis, the occasion and circumstances of the khoregia itself very clearly provided a possible context for the garnering of a highly individualistic and personal form of glory. Competition among khoregoi was often acrimonious. It seems that disputes among them were so routine and expected that their settlement became a matter of institutional control. 107 There is also the evidence of curselike 'binding spells' inscribed on small lead tablets, dating from the fifth and fourth centuries, and directed against rival khoregoi and khoroi. It has been convincingly argued that these were employed before, not after, the event as 'pre-emptive strikes' against formidable opponents rather than as measures of vengeful spite. 108 Two Attic lead discs show binding curses against men described as oLSaaKaAoL and U1TOOtOaUKaAOL.; one of these identifies the men as 'those who are with Theagenes', and Faraone plausibly suggests that this Theagenes was the khoregos. If so, the khoregos emerges once again as the focalizing figure of the performing ensemble, the one who is perceived as responsible for the potential victory and thus the individual who is the target of attack-most probably, of course, from his rival khoregoi. The motive force of this competition was "AOTLj.Lia, 'love of honour' and the related c/>C.AOVtKia, 'love of victory'. As the passage of pseudo-Andokides with which I began demonstrates, "ovLKia could degenerate in the theatre, as it so regularly does in our manuscripts,109 into 4>LAOV€tKia, 'love of strife'. In conclusion I shall consider an epigram which has made its way into the manuscript tradition of the Palatine Anthology l10 although it seems virtually certain to be an example of a dedicatory inscription designed to commemorate See Osborne (1993) on the importance of competition in Athenian festivals more generally. Isaios 5. 36. 107 [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.4. 108 Faraone (1991); see also Gager (1992),47, 7 6-7. 109 Examples of manuscript 'confusion' of ¢LAov(£)LK- terms are legion: e.g. Thuc. 5. 43, I I I; Lys. 3.4°,22.8,33.4; Xen. Hell. 6.3. 16; Dem. 20. 144; PI. Rep. 545a, 550b; Arist. Pol. I 306bI; see further LSJ S.v. cPLAOVLKOS 2; cf. Aesch. Ag. 1378 with Fraenkel (1950), 646. My thanks to Chris Pelling for showing me his work on Pluto Philopoimen where the distinction, or its lack, between these terms continues to be an important issue. 110 Anlh. Pal. 13. 28. The origins of book 13 of the Anthology are particularly obscure: see Buffiere (1970), 4-10. lOS

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Often indeed the Seasons of the Dionysia have shouted for joy among khoroi of the Akamantid phyle at the ivy-bearing dithyrambs, and with headbands of finest roses have shadowed the shiny hair of skilled singers, who have set up this tripod for themselves as witness to their Bakkhic prizes. Antigenes trained these men; and Argive Ariston fostered their sweet voice well, blowing a sweet strain on his pure, Dorian aulos. Hipponikos son of Strouthon was khoregos of their honey-voiced cyclical khoros, borne in the chariot of the Kharites, who set a glorious name and bright victory on men by the grace of the violet-garlanded goddesses, the Muses.

The strategies of prestige at work in this epigram are clear: one needs in the first place to re-create imaginatively something of its original physical setting; for doubtless this epigram is in itself only the disembodied literary remnant of a more elaborate monumental complex by which its commissioner intended to express himself. This evidently incorporated a tripod (c( 5 TOVOE Tp {7TOO a ) or tripods won by the khoregos and his phyle. As the meticulous study of Amandry has shown, the prize tripods awarded to victorious khoregoi in men's dithyramb were of formidable proportions: his calculations suggest a height in the region of five metres. II3 Lines 5-6 seem to state quite plainly that it was the members of the khoros itselfwho set up the tripod (and hence the monument as a whole). Some accept this at face value, but while not ruling out the possibility 111 A phyle which (on the extremely scanty evidence) seems to have enjoyed some considerable success in the dithyrambic competitions: see Mette (1977\ 239 S.V. ;4KafLav'Tis. To which add the evidence of ceramic: a fragment of an amphora (c.4 70-460), ARV 2 p. 1581, 20, shows on the top step of a three-tiered plinth supporting a tripod the formula which was current in khoregic dedications engraved on stone: i4Ku.udv'T(s EJ·iKa t)..EaTQ7IJ' Similarly, famous choral songs in Medea and Oedipus at Colonus stress the gods' love for Athens and Colonus respectively, the latter containing also an assurance of Zeus' protection of the land. In Persae we hear (from an enemy) that 'the gods protect the city of goddess Pallas', in Heraclidae that Athenian arms cannot lose since 'Pallas will not endure to be defeated (VLKWfLEV7J)'; this latter claim is, as it were, a logical truth, since she was worshipped at Athena under the title 'Victory'. Euripides' Supplices ends with the rousing statement of Theseus that 'Queen Athena, I shall obey your advice. You set me straight so that I do not err. I ask only that you guide me. For if you show favour to the city we shall live in safety from now on. '27 In none of these cases is the cheerful claim devalued by the context or the subsequent development of the plot. Here tragic and civic theology converge. Elsewhere, their concerns may be so different that it is simply not necessary to confront the two genres. The relation that is at issue in oratory is that of the gods, collectively, with the city of Athens. The issue in tragedy is very commonly that between the gods or an individual god and an individual or individual household, not the city. To take an extreme instance, the case of divine malevolence so drastically dramatized in Heracles is Hera's revenge against Heracles, not against the city of Thebes; the problem of theodicy posed by Andromache is the treatment of Neoptolemus by Apollo; and so on. Where in tragedy it is stressed that the gods involved are gods 'of the city', there these civic gods tend to stand by the city concerned. The model case here is Seven against Thebes, a play which contains the remarkable expression 8EOi 7ToAi'TaL, formally perhaps 'gods of the city' but surely also by suggestion 'citizen gods' (253). The play opens with Thebes under siege, and this worst of all crises in the life of a city is presented very much in terms of the ties of mutual 27 Aesch. Eum. 868-9,996-1002 (cf. 916-21); Eur. Med. 824-45; Soph. DC 668-719; Aesch. PeTS. 347; Eur. Held. 35 2 ; Supp. 1227-31: cf. Soph. El. 707; Eur. Hipp. 974. For other flattering references to Athens see Eur. Ion 29-30,589 £, Ereehlheus fr. 50.5-13 Austin, Held. 69 (all endorsing the myth of autochthony) and e.g. Soph. Ajax, 861, Eur. IT 1088, Hipp. 1094, Tro. 207-8, 796 ff. (the myth of the first olive).

Gods Cruel and Kind obligation and benefit that link a city to its gods. Eteocles reminds them that the safety of the city is a matter of 'common interese, since it is a 'prosperous city that honours the gods' (76-7). A chorus of young Theban women then runs to a precinct of all the gods and makes desperate appeal. The gods are urged to 'remember public offerings' and show that they are 'city-loving' (r 76-7); they are begged to 'hold protection over' the city (2 r 4), and asked what better city they could hope to find (304) (for 'it is said that the gods of a captured city depart', 2 r 7- r 8). Epithets such as 7TOAtOaOvxoS', 'city-holding', are repeatedly applied to them, and the descent of the Thebans from Ares and Aphrodite is stressed (r 35-44). But of course the relation that receives such emphasis in this play does not in the end break down. Indeed it is crucial to the whole dramatic balance of the second half of the play that the death of the brothers, tragic though it is, is the means by which the city is saved. 28 As in the Oresteia, so here the great counterbalance to the affiiction of a household is the welfare of a city. Of all the many instances of apparent divine cruelty and injustice that are commonly discussed by critics of tragedy, only one concerns the relation of gods to a city. We will leave aside for the moment this one-admittedly most important-exception, Euripides' Troades. It may be objected that this distinction between the relation of gods to individuals and to cities is too sharp: a power that can be cruel and arbitrary to one can be so likewise to many. The objection has force, but the issue of the gods' relations with individuals is much too large to be confronted here. 29 One point, however, can be made. In many cases where the tragic gods appear harsh, they are none the less acting in accordance with principles that were wholly accepted in civic theology. The harshness of the tragic gods is normally associated, if in complex ways, with considerations of justice; they are punishers and avengers, not forces of arbitrary cruelty. More randomly malicious modes or motives of divine action-'envy' of human prosperity,30 28 See e.g. 71, 764-5, 815-17, with Winnington-Ingram (1983), 16-54; on the Oresteia, Meier (1990 ), 90 - 1; Macleod (1982) = (1983), 20-40; this approach is central to Seaford (1994), e.g. 344-62 . 29 Such a discussion would need to consider, in particular, questions of time-scale (Cadmus in Bacchae, for instance, is promised long-term compensation for immediate suffering) and the contrasting perspectives ofmeo and gods. For one study in these terms see Sourvinou-Inwood, Ch. 9 in this volume. 30 Divine envy is mentioned in Hdt. 1. 32. I, 3. 40.2, 7. 100.2, 7. 46. 4, and Pindar, Isth. 7· 39, Pyth. 10.20 (some, however, see these as a 'moralized' divine resentment). It is explicitly rejected in Aesch. Ag. 750-62 (cf. Eum. 532-8) and by implication through the contrast of Pers. 362 and 808IS (see Winnington-Ingram (1973) - (1983), I-IS); vast prosperity is still, however briefly, seen as dangerous in Ag. 1005-13, Sept. 768-71 (cf. Ag. 468-70 on good repute). In Sophocles I find only the textually problematic Ant. 613-14, where the chorus perhaps (but if so, perhaps misguidedly) treats great prosperity as dangerous; Soph. El. 1466 in Aegisthus' mouth proves nothing, and may be corrupt (BEOU for q,96vou Nauck). The old doctrine seems to creep back in Euripides, though mostly without great emphasis: the 4>B6vos 8«iJv in Eur. Supp. 348 and fA 1097 is a justified resent~ ment, but in Or. 974-5, in Electra's mouth, sounds like envy; cf. Eur. Hee. 58, Polydorus' ghost to Hecuba, dVTLu7JKwaas Si UE I q,8EiplL Of.WV TLS 'T7js 7TapOtO' EV7Tpagias, and the precautionary

Robert Parker 'trick-devising deceit' ,31 ensnaring of the innocent 32 -though often mentioned in tragedy, are seldom endorsed. But the possibility of divine revenge, often ferocious, was of course one of an Athenian's basic theological presumptions outside the theatre. This was not perhaps a side of the divine nature that was much stressed in morale-boosting political speeches; but it was taken for granted when, for instance, orators discussed the future prospects of their impious adversaries at law and other opponents. Ate too, the madness sent by the gods in punishment of a crime, was not a condition to which tragic heroes alone were subject: many Athenians suffered from it, at least according to their political enemies. 33 The contrast between tragedy and oratory lies in the way in which the two genres treat the theme of divine revenge, not in the belief itself. In public speech, the world is divided into the good-the speaker and his audience-and the impious, the speaker's opponent and people like him. For them no suffering could be too bad. But in tragedy a victim of divine punishment very seldom seems merely to have got what he or she deserved. The madness of Sophocles' A;ax, for instance, is due to 'the wrath of sacred Athena', provoked as the prophet Calchas reveals by his own arrogant boast that he could secure glory even without divine aid (756-77). In the prologue, Athena displays A;ax in his madness to Odysseus, invites him to revel, as she herself does, gloatingly, in an enemy's downfall, and draws a conclusion of simple piety: 'Seeing this, never yourself utter any arrogant word against the gods ... the gods love the moderate, and hate the bad' (127-33). Odysseus, however, reacts to Ajax not as a terrible warning of the consequences of arrogance, but as an example of the pitiable weakness of all mortals: '1 pity him, enemy though he is, because he is bound to a terrible ruin ... I see that all of us who are alive are nothing but phantoms or empty shadows' (121-6). Athena's interpretation is not wrong, nor is she criticized for it;34 but she reacts as a goddess, Odysseus with the formula in Ale. 1135. For enlightened thinkers, 'phlhonos stands outside the divine chorus' (PI. Phaedr. 247a7, c( Tim. 2gel-3): the great exception in tragedy is the portrayal of Hera in Eur. Her. 31 It is mentioned in Aesch. Pers. 93, cf. Ag. 273, 478, Soph. Ant. I 2 17, but shown in action only in [Eur.] Rhes. 637 ff. 32 The famous lines of Aeschylus' Niobe (fr. 154a 15-16 Radt), according to which god 'plants a fault in mortals, when he wishes utterly to destroy a house" referred in context to the punishment of a guilty house, a point notoriously ignored by the indignant Plato who cites them (Rep. 380a): cf. Theog. 151-2, and the works cited by Radt in his note on Aesch.loc. cit., also Fraenkel (194 2 ), 239. 33 See references in Parker (1983), 16 n. 73; c( Ober-Strauss (1990) on the use of 'tragic paradigms' by the opponents of Andocides cited in Andoc. Myst. 29, 113-14: they suppose that the orators are directly influenced by tragedy. Richard Rutherford reminds me of the explicit allusions to tragedy or tragic myth in Andoc. 1. 129, Antiphon 1. 17 (cf. Knox (1979), 22-3), Dem. 21. 149though opponents could ridicule such TpaycpSia or bombast (LS] S.v. TpaycpS€w II, TpaycpBia II. 2). 34 Gill (1990: 21) speaks of Athena's 'crude moralizing about Ajax's lack of "self-control'''; Heath (1987: 171) and Blundell (1989: 62) argue that her real concern is with divine privilege rather than human morality. But note her valid stress on the instability of human life (131-2), and Winnington-Ingram's strong argument (1980: Ch.2) that Ajax's character is indeed flawed by a megalomanic pride: Ajax is a victim of himself, only secondarily of Athena.

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sympathy of an enlightened man, in a way that very pointedly underlines the different values (products of their different situations) of immortals and mortals. It is with the man that we, mortals ourselves, must inevitably identify, even if we simultaneously accept the justice of Athena's words. This scene of divine vengeance has recently acquired two partners, from papyri that are convincingly ascribed to Sophocles. 35 In one, Athena reacts with furious anger to the rape of Cassandra by Locrian Ajax; and here it is doubtful whether any sympathy for her victim would have been in place. But it is impossible not to be horrified by a scene in which Apollo eggs on his sister to shoot Niobe's helpless, cowering daughters: 'Do you see that one hiding inside in terror, cowering secretly by herself in the store-room among the jars? Fire an arrow at her quickly, before she manages to hide!' In Bacchae and Hippolytus, Euripides goes further in treating the victims of divine revenge pathetically; and a note not merely of awed pity but of pained protest makes itself heard. Already in Aeschylus (though the issue bears' no central dramatic weight) the doomed Cassandra must earn all the audience's pity when she asks her divine lover Apollo, whom she has admittedly wronged, why he has forsaken her.36 A similar contrast can be drawn between the treatment of delayed divine punishment in the two genres. For Solon, it is part of the justice of the gods that they punish the innocent descendants of guilty ancestors: such delayed punishment is not a problem but the solution to a problem, and the world would be a less fair place without it. This is still the view ofLycurgus, that other touchstone of civic religious attitudes, in the fourth century.37 The position in tragedy is much more complicated, in a variety of ways. On the one hand, ancestral guilt is seldom seen as a simple and sufficient explanation of any character's misfortune;38 and delayed divine punishment occurs by way of normal patterns of human motivation, not as a bolt from the blue. In Seven against Thebes, the burden of the past is indeed upon Eteocles and Polyneices, but it works through their own free decision to engage in unnatural single combat with a brother;39 while in the Oresteia, Aegisthus' finally satisfied passion for revenge against Agamemnon, the son of his father's enemy, is the human correlate, and vehicle, of the 'late vengeance of the gods'. To this extent, Aeschylus implicitly mitigates the harsh Solonian doctrine of the punishment of 'the innocent' by Fr. IOC Radt CAias Lokros); fro 44Ia Radt (Niobe). Ag. 1269-76: c( Reinhardt (1949), 10 3. 37 Solon fro 13.25-32; Lycurg. Leoer. 79; for a famous protest see Theog. 731-42 (cf. Eur. fro 980); and c£ in general the works cited in Parker (1983), 186, 198-201. 38 Rosenmeyer (1955: 250) goes only a little too far in saying: 'the divine curse which bangs over a house is not the cause of its catastrophe; it is the tragic vehicle which allows the spectator to become wholly absorbed in the disaster.' 39 Gantz (1982) plays down the importance of the idea too much, because he treats inherited and personal guilt (which he rightly also detects) as mutually exclusive (for similar scepticism see Gagarin (1976), 62-4): cf. Garvie (1986), p. xxviii; also Daube (1938), 159, 166-78 (who notes that the element of personal guilt is more clearly worked out among the Atreids than the Labdacids ). 35

36

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'the gods' (as Plutarch was later to do explicitly, in his treatise on the theme 40 ). On the other hand, he portrays with hideous actuality the plight of those who belong to a polluted house, whose acts freely performed in the present turn out to be co-determined by the curse of the past. A famous chorus in Sophocles' Antigone goes even further in portraying the Labdacid house as one in which not so much guilt as suffering is endemic over the generations. (Antigone, in fact, is perhaps the closest that the Attic stage offers to an innocent victim born of an unlucky stock. But even she has inherited a dangerous temperament from her father which has contributed to her downfalL 41 ) Thus here again the tragedian invites a response in terms of horrified fellow-feeling to the mortals upon whom the divine justice is worked out. A great divide separates such tragic portrayals from the easy moralism of oratory and, one must suppose, conventional piety. But it is the same belief in divine vengeance that is being handled in such strikingly different ways. Before turning back to oratory, we should pause over the exception already noted, the extreme instance of a portrayal in tragedy of divine hostility to a community. What is presented in Troades is nothing less than ultimate disaster, the sack of a city. In the prologue we are shown the city's divine patron, Poseidon, leaving, in a terrible actualization of the grim saying that 'the gods depart when a city is taken':42 'for when evil desolation overtakes a city, religion sickens, and the gods no longer wish to be worshipped' (26-7). The Trojan survivors stress, again and again, that they have been betrayed by the gods, that the bonds they hoped to have established (through sacrifice, and even, this being the world of myth, through marriage) have simply been ruptured. 43 It was on evidences of just the kind that are here shown to be illusory that the Athenians' faith in the gods' love for Athens was founded. The Trojan women's complaints are unjustified only to the extent that Poseidon is not in fact indifferent but helplessly regrets the city's fate; this he ascribes not to the justice of Zeus but to the hatred of Hera and, above all, of Athena, which is nowhere in the play given any further justification. 'Farewell, once prosperous city with your finely wrought walls. You would still have stood firm on your foundations, had not Pallas the daughter of Zeus destroyed you.' The play's desolate atmosphere is only intensified by the revelation (also contained in the .;0 Pluto Ser. num. 'l)ind. 2 I, s62e-563b. On Aeschylus' relation to Solon cf. Reinhardt (1949: 1517), who says, ~Aischylos reigt die Lucken auf, die die Solonische Theodizee verdeckte.' 41 Soph. Ant. 582-603, on which see Easterling (1978), 142; cf. II. 1-6, 49-57, 856-66, and for Antigone's temperament 471-2; also OC 367-70,964-5, 1299. Note that the chorus who sing this do see Antigone as guilty: a one· sided but not completely mistaken view (cf. Lloyd-Jones (1983b), 117; Sourvinou·lnwood (1989), 139-40). For ancestral guilt in Euripides see references in Parker (1983: 199 n. 53), adding Supp. 835-6, 1078; for discussion see Said (1978: 223-35), who argues that the presentation in Euripides criticizes and undercuts this form of explanation. 42 Aesch. Sept. 218: cf. Hutchinson (1985) ad loc., Pelling (1988) on Plut. Ant. 75.4, Diod. 13· 59. 2, and Soph. fro 452. 43 469-7 1,536 with 560-1, 597,612-13,696,775-6,821.-58,1060-80,1242, 1280-1,128792; cf. Eur. Andr. 1009-27 (contrast 1251-2), and Yunis (1988), 81-7.

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prologue) that Athena has now turned against the Greeks because of their impieties committed during the sack, and \vill bring them to grief during the journey home. Whatever the content of the two previous plays in the quasitrilogy which Troades concludes, it is hard to believe that any theological justification offered there for the Trojans' fate could have withstood the tide of pathos that sweeps through the final play:~4 Troades does, it seems, defy civic optimism with a shocking force. Of course, the city \vhich the love of the gods failed to defend was not Athens, but the spectator would have been complacent indeed who did not feel that it might have been. We revert to the other pole of the antithesis. Can it be shown that civic theology was less optimistic than the blandest formulations make it appear? The surviving texts scarcely suggest it. No text directly raises the possibility that the gods might turn against Athens, nor even that they had done so at particular periods in the past. Could an Athenian have envisaged an equivalent to Tacitus' 'deum ira in rem romanam'45 as a principle of historical explanation? It would certainly have been more normal to see the downfall of (as it might be) Critias as a mark of the gods' favour than to see his reign as an expression of their wrath. The closest we come to the idea of gods working against Athens' interest is when specific defeats or failures are ascribed to divine opposition-and even here in rather veiled terms. 'You lost your heroic souls in battle, not through the might of the enemy, but one of the demigods came against you ... to your hurt ... and has made the fulfilment of oracles certain for all men to heed in future': that is not an extract from a tragedy, but a public epitaph set up for the dead at (probably) the battle of Coronea in 447/6. Similarly, on the victims of the Sicilian disaster: 'These men won eight victories against the Syracusans, while the favour of the gods was equal on both sides.' And in funeral speeches Athenian defeats are laid at the door of a daimon or luck or fate: Isocrates even goes. so far as to speak of the gods' 'carelessness' or 'indifference' (cifL€AEta ).46 There is, however, a good reason why it is precisely in funerary speeches and epitaphs that the Solonian rule of 'don't blame the gods' is violated: in these contexts, it is obviously unthinkable to apply Solon's alternative 'blame the men'. The partial lapse from civic optimism is as contextually determined as that optimism itself normally is. And even here, there is a tendency to identify the hostile force very vaguely as daimon or tyche, not 'the gods' and still less a Cf. de Romilly (196 I), 122 n. 2; lvleridor (1984), 2 I I; but contrast Lefkowitz (1989), 79-80. Annals 4. I and elsewhere. 'A striking and ominous phrase, but no confession of a creed', says Syme (1958: 521); in truth, Romans like other peoples preferred to be reassured of divine favour, even it seems, strikingly for our argument, in tragedies (Plaut. Amph. 41-4, to which Peter Wiseman drew my attention). 46 CEG i, no. 5 "" IG i3. 1163; 'Euripides' ap. Pluto Nic. 17.4 = Page (1981), 156; Isoc. Panath. 186-7. Funerary speeches: Dem. 60. 19,21,23; Lys. 2.58 ('the fault of the commander or the will of the gods'); cf. Dem. r8. 192-3, and Loraux (1981), 140; and from earlier, Hdt. 5. 87- 2. 44

45

Robert Parker particular named Olympian. The whole of De most henes' De corona is a defence of a policy that failed. Responsibility for the failure has to be diverted from the man Demosthenes, but it is put on a quite unspecified 'the god' or an impersonal 'fortune' rather than on any malevolent povver:P Another possibility ¥/as perhaps to acknowledge past divine hostility in order to stress that it had come to an end: some may wish, hO\\TeVer, to disallo\\' the only instance, coming as it does in a speech ascribed by Thucydides to Nicias, a figure he handles in the tragic mode. For what it is \vorth, Thucydides has Nicias assure his men late in the Sicilian campaign (very pathetically, given the outcome): 'The enemy have enjoyed good fortune enough, and if our expedition here was resented by any of the gods, we have been punished enough by now ... we can reasonably hope to be more kindly treated now by the gods (for we deserve pity from them by now rather than resentment).,48 Of course, very few public speeches survive, and we can be quite certain that others were made which had occasionally to acknowledge that all was not well in relations between the gods and the city. According to Thucydides, for instance, the Athenians decided in 421 to restore the Delians to Delos, 'mindful of the misfortunes they (the Athenians) had suffered in battle'. They suspected, therefore, that Apollo's displeasure had been in part responsible for their military difficulties. In the time of the plague too they had feared Apollo's hostility and had performed numerous fruitless supplications. 49 We can only guess at the tone adopted by speakers in the Assembly on such occasions: seers, possibly, allowed themselves a more threatening note than did politicians. But it is surely likely that the disfavour of a god was only acknowledged (perhaps euphemistically, perhaps with stress that other gods remained friendly) as a preliminary to proposing a means of bringing that god round. We have failed, therefore, to discover a 'further voice' beneath the surface optimism of civic speech. The tone of all these passages is quite different from that of tragedy at its most plaintive and accusatory, or pathetic: in so far as divine opposition is mentioned at all, the gods are an explanation or excuse, not an object of blame. The reproachfulness and bitterness often shown by tragic characters was apparently a note that it was simply not acceptable to raise in political speech. Thucydides makes Pericles say of the plague with unenquiring resignation, 'We must accept what comes from the gods (Ta DaLft0VLa) as inevit-

able'.50 We have also failed, therefore', to bring tragic and civic theology into complete harmony: a notable difference of tone, at least, remains. 'What then did the Athenians really think?' The enlightened reader will not .p Dem. 18. 192-5, 200, 207-8, 245, 303, 306-]: cf. i\1ikalson (1983), 59-60. Alcibiades on his return to Athens in 408 blamed his misfortunes not, except mildly, on the Athenians but on athou Tl~ roXTJ 7TovTJpd Kai ~80VEPO~ oaip.wv, according to Plut. Ale. 33.2. 48 7. 77. 3-4. 49 Thuc. 5. 32 . 1, 2.47· 4, 2. 54· 4. 50 2.64. 2.

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expect an actual answer to such a question: as if all Athenians thought the same, or any Athenian thought the same on all occasions, or indeed could think with dogmatic clarity about such an issue on any specific occasion. The best that can be done is to indicate the special biases of the different genres, the factors that cause them to differ in so far as they do. The first point to be made about oratory is that it is by definition public speech; and all public speech even in the freest society in the world is censored speech, governed by elaborate communal codes of possibilities that may and may not be publicly acknowledged. The gods do not exist, the gods are indifferent to mortal affairs, the gods are indifferent to justice: these are three propositions about the divine that were certainly thinkable in fifth-century Athens, but were certainly not speakable in a civic context. One way in which we know that they were thinkable is that such propositions are occasionally mentioned-though not, it must be allowed, endorsed-in tragedy. It is characteristic that in the very first surviving tragedy we find a casual allusion to practical atheists, people who hold that, whether the gods exist or not, their grip on human affairs is so uncertain that in practice they can be safely ignored; and there are several further references in tragedy to various sceptical attitudes, of a kind which no competent public orator would have dreamt of mentioning without elaborate expressions of pious horror. 51 It is possible in fact to reverse the terms of the common opposition between oratory, supposedly real, and tragedy, supposedly unreal: tragedy, it can be argued, imitates the more immediate, uncensored play of emotion, and reveals the private realities behind oratory's public fa~ade.52 To take a small but clear example: the possibility that daytime action might be influenced by dreams is all but ignored by oratory,53 abundantly attested by almost every other kind of source, and by tragedy most of all. Then there is the compulsory optimism which is so conspicuous a characteristic of political speech. No one who aspires to leadership can allow that a situation is, quite simply, desperate. The recent British Chancellor who declared, at the end of a chaotic and humiliating day wh.ich had seen the devaluation of sterling in reversal of his own policy, that he was 'still singing in his bath' was striving-a little clumsily, perhaps-to strike the obligatory nil desperandum note. To turn from Mr Lamont to the sublime, the more Demosthenes abuses the Athenian people and reminds them that the situation is dire, the more careful he is to insist that it is not hopeless. Scandalously though Philip has been allowed to advance, he can still be checked, if the Athenians will only make an effort at last. The argument from the goodwill of the gods is for Demosthenes 51 Aesch. Pef3. 497-8: cf. e.g. Aesch. Ag. 369-72; Eur. IT 476-7,570-5, Hec. 488-9I, Supp. 549-55· Cf. Veyne's ingenious detection (1988: 31-2) of popular atheism in Ar. Knights 32. 52 Cf. Carey (1994), 175 on the 'coyness' of oratorical language. 53 The public consultation of Amphiaraus (Hyperid. Euxen. 14-17) is a special case. Demos· thenes' appeal to a dream, a most unusual tactic, is ridiculed by Aeschines (3.77, 219)-who, how· ever, allows some significance to the dream of a priestess (2. 10). It is only from Aristophanes' mockery (Knights 809, 1°90-1) that we know that Cleon too adduced dreams.

Robert Parker part of this strategy of reassurance, of insistence that at the deepest level grounds for hope still remain. One might compare the appeal to 'the basic health of the British economy' sotnetimes made by its erratic stewards during the recent recession. The real culprit, they often insisted, was the global recession: the luck of Athens, which in itself is good, has been a victim of the evil luck afflicting the \vhole of mankind, says Demosthenes. 54 Finally, we must stress the contrast between \vhat might be called the theological opacity of oratory and the transparency of tragedy. Oratory never invites the listeners to believe that they can gaze at Olympus and penetrate the counsels of the gods. The claims it makes about divine motivation are almost invariably vague and general; they concern 'the gods', not named individuals, and it would have been inconceivable for an orator to pretend, for instance, to describe a clash of will between Poseidon and Athena. 55 But insight of just that kind into the workings of Olympus was claimed by tragedy, in various ways and at various levels, most obviously by actually bringing gods on the stage. Oratory in consequence knows too little about details of the divine will for speculation about hard cases of divine justice to have any point. The tragedians know a lot about Olympus-Sophocles least, but even he something-and issues of theodicy acquire a corresponding urgency. If critics of Greek tragedy constantly find themselves discussing the justice or injustice of the gods, this is not because they import anachronistic theological preoccupations, or not merely so: the plays themselves raise these issues with a notable insistence. Indeed one might almost advance as a defining characteristic of Greek tragedy that it is a genre in which the characters assume that divine justice is or ought to be visible in all the circumstances of life. Hundreds of passages, in the mouths of otherwise most diverse characters, voice such an expectation. The strangeness of this presentation has perhaps scarcely been appreciated sufficiently. 'We have committed no crime against the gods for which you should die', complains Admetus to his doomed wife Alcestis. 56 But untimely death was a commonplace occurrence in Athens, and as far as we know was normally accepted with resignation. The characters of tragedy reject the mute and necessary stoicism of actual living and insist on the need for explanations. 57 'To think of the gods' care for men is a great relief for me from pain. Deep within me I have hopes of understanding; but when I look around at what men do and how they fare I cannot understand', sing the chorus in Hippolytus (1 102-6), in what could be a kind of motto for the whole of tragedy. This characteristic of the genre is doubtless connected with the plays' mythological setting, in a time when men and gods were still close and their dealings 18.253. C( lviikalson (1983), 66-73. 56 Eur. Ale. 245-6. 57 ~ot invariably, certainly: ciTdp Tt TaUTa; Oft and also to get out of the impasse of culturally determined abstraction, we need to concentrate on all aspects of practised cult, including those that can be reconstructed through the consideration of the archaeological evidence. 14 Let us leave aside entirely statements in texts that make clear that each divinity was perceived as one across his or her different cults,15 and also the very existence of hymns such as the Homeric hymns or Kallimachos' hymns, that indicate the same perception; for in those cases a determined sceptic could 14 lViikalson has neglected the archaeological evidence-both in lviikalson (1991) and in the earlier work (1983) on which his comparisons with tragedy were based. 15 C[ e.g. Xen. Symp. 8.9. (In my view this statement is not contradicted by Xen. Anab. 7. 8.4-6 , for the point there surely is not that Zeus Meilichios is a separate god, but that one should not neglect any aspect of the god's persona.)

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conceivably claim-however unconvincingly-that they do not represent popular religion. The following arguments still build up a cumulative case suggesting that there \vas indeed a perception of (for example) a goddess Athena, of \vhom the individual cultic personae \vere perceived to be simply manifestations, each putting the emphasis on certain particular aspects of the goddess, and thus also putting the emphasis on her catering for certain particular needs; that there \vas a semantic field ~ Athena' and that its individual manifestations were perceived through the filters of the main traits of that semantic field, of which the goddess's Panhellenic personality was a strong component. First, if Mikalson!s thesis were right, it would not have been possible for Greek deities to have had a common iconographical type, a Bild'Z)orstellung common to their different cults, to have been represented through the same basic iconographical schemata in their different cults ·and on images not connected with particular cults) such as on vases for the symposium. Yet this is in fact the case. The common Bildvorstellung both articulated and crystallized the fundamental aspects of the dominant traits of each divinity; for example, Artemis as a young girl with bow and arrow, with or without a deer. This does not, of course, mean that the Greeks thought this is what the gods looked like always, that they did not take other forms. On the contrary, the notion that the gods could change shape, and they could even assume the form of animals, is an important part of Greek religious perceptions. To take just two examples, Zeus Meilichios could be represented in the form of a snake, and Dionysos was also invoked as a bull in cult. This zoomorphism or part-zoomorphism is one way of expressing the otherness of the gods, their distancing from human bodies. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic, or partly zoomorphic, forms coexisted for the same deities at the same time. They stressed different aspects of the divine personality. The fact that the gods could change shape is correlative with the fact that they were not perceived to be equivalent to their bodies in their human or any other form; they were not perceived to be constrained by their bodies. Their human bodies, in their superhuman version of the human, were the preferred form; but the fact that those bodies could take different forms, including non-human, was part of the superhuman nature of their humanlooking bodies. 16 This is why the notion 17 that the fact that Zeus Ktesios is very different in both appearance and function from Olympian Zeus suggests that he was perceived as a different god is wrong. IS Furthermore, whether or not Zeus Ktesios was also represented in human form, certainly Zeus MeilichiosI 9 16 On divine bodies and divine representations cf. Frontisi-Ducroux (I986b), 193-21 I; Loraux (1986b), 335-54; Vern ant (19 86 ), 19-45· 17 Mikalson (1991), 4. 18 The notion that Zeus Ktesios and Zeus Meilichios are different from the Olympian Zeus is not, of course, new (c£ e.g. Harrison (1922), 17-22,642). 19 On Zeus Ktesios and Zeus l\1eilichios c( Nilsson (1967), 403-6, 411-14. On Zeus l\1eilichios cf. also Jameson-Jordan-Kotansky (1993),81-103; cf. also 132-6.

Tragedy and Religion was represented either as a snake or as a male seated human figure,20 a version of the schema used for Zeus in his other cults, and this invalidates further the belief that the snake form of Zeus Ktesios shows that Greeks thought of him as a different divinity. Secondly, on Mikalson's system it would be difficult to make sense of the fact that there is a core aspect of a divinity that includes genealogy as well as Bildvorstellung, and which consistently appears in the different cults. For, to take an example, how could cultic hymns, which were inscribed in sanctuaries so that their cultic identity cannot be doubted, refer to Apollo, the son of Leto and Zeus, as, for instance, Aristonoos' Paean to Apollo at DelphFl does, if each Apollo was perceived as a different divinity? Thirdly, it would also be difficult, on that hypothesis, to make sense of the fact that cultic regulations prescribing the performance of certain rites can use the deity's name alone with no epithet Of, in the same regulation, refer to some deities by name alone and to others by name and epithet. 22 It is not relevant to our argument that the context would have made clear to the ancient reader which particular cult, and thus which particular persona of the deity, was involved. 23 What is important is that this pattern of naming the recipient deity is correlative with a perception (and thus indicates that the parameters of selection that shaped the choices of those who wrote the regulations included the assumption) that, for example, Athena, was one deity, with her different cults stressing particular aspects of her nexus of f~nctions. This is especially evident, I submit, in documents such as IG ii2. 33424 where th~ formulations clearly indicate a perception of Athena as one deity with different cults. Side A speaks of arrangements pertaining to the use of revenues from the territory referred to as Nea to be used for the celebrations of the Less~r Panathenaia 01TWS QV nil. ~ 87)vut 1J 8voCa W S KaA;\loT [1] ~l. n ul!a8Tjva{otS Tois 1-'] t.KPO(S eso that the sacrifice to Athena should be as glorious as possible at the Lesser Panathenaia'). On B are prescribed specific sacrifices to be performed at the Lesser Panathenaia, to Athena Hygieia, Athena Polias, 3;nd Athena Nike; the formulations are: on 11. B 9-10, Duo (}ua[as n]v T€ Tijt.] :407!VQL rrjl. I'Yyt.€lal. Kat Tijv EV Tau up [Xalwt VEWL 8VOfLE]V7]V Ka8a7TEp TTpOTEpOV ('two sacrifices, one to Athena 20 It has also been suggested that certain stones may be aniconic representations of this god (cf. esp. Jameson-Jordan-Kotansky (1993), 100- 1). 21 Colin (19 0 9- 1 3), no. 191. To be precise) this particular paean speaks of Apollo as the agalma of Leto and Zeus, an articulation which takes for granted knowlec;lge of the parentage of ~the' god Apollo. 22 Cf. e.g. LSCG 21 A 4-5 'to Apollo', 'to Hermes'; LSCG 2 A 9-10, prescribing a sacrifice to Athena at the Plynteria. For an example of variation between name and name and epithet c( e.g. LCSG 4: sacrifices are prescribed to 'Hermes Enagonios' on I. 3, 'Poseidon' and 'Artemis' on 1.4. 23 Thus in LSCG 4 the Eleusini:an context makes clear that the cults of Poseidon and Artemis involved were those of Poseidon Pater and of Artemis Propylaia; ~nd in LSCG ~ A 9-10, which prescribes a sacrifice to Athena at the Plynte~ia, the context makes c;lear that the cult of Athena involved is that of Athena Polias. Of course, in some c;ases it is impossible to ten whether this is indeed the case (cf. e.g. LSCG 146.3 (to Hera a~d Deme~er). 24 LSCG 33; cf. Deubner (1966), 25-6; P~rke (1977), 47-9.

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Hygieia and one carried out in the Old Temple as before'); on 11. I9-22, €iT'i TWt f3WfLWL n]~ :A8"7v6.~ T£i.H ft€]yaAWL., JLiuv DE E1Tt rij~ N{KTJ~ ..• Ka'i (JvaaJ)T€~ n] [t :AO.."vdt TijL] IlOALciYLa ... app1'jTa (the 'unspekable sacrifices') referred to human sacrifice would have been formulated. Thus the Tauric Artemis is distanced from the Greek cult of Artemis; but what is distanced is her cultic persona among the Taurians and the ways in which she is perceived by the barbarian Other. It is in this way that the Tauric Artemis is a different Artemis from the Greek. But in the most important sense she is the same goddess as the Greek Artemis and would have been so perceived by the audience, since she is the same person whom they had first perceived as the Attic Artemis. Consequently, they would not have seen her as a different goddess, but as a different aspect of the same goddess pertaining to this barbarian land. The savage Artemis was 'the same person' as the goddess Artemis worshipped by the audience, perceived and worshipped differently, savagely, by the Taurians, at a double distance from the audience's own world, in the heroic past and in another, savage, land. At 22 I -8 Iphigeneia contrasts the cultic acts that she would have been performing as a normal parthenos in her homeland-celebrating Hera with song and dance and weaving the image of Athena in the Titanomachy (both activities especially appropriate to parthenoi)-to her present situation in complex interactive process of meaning creation and reaction that did not necessarily involve this zooming and distancing registering at the conscious level, but contributed to the process through which the audience made sense of the tragedy. 39 Cf. on this Platnauer (1938: 63-4 ad loc.) and esp. Diggle (I994: 28-33), who excises 38-9 and reads EOP'TiJS ..• KarapxojLat, '1 consecrate the festival ... , while the infamous sacrifices are the care of others inside the temple' (p. 31).

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which, in this barbarian land, she is performing a horrific cultic role in the course of human sacrifices to Artemis-whom she does not name. The worship of Hera at Argos is, of course, the obvious cuI tic service for the daughter of the king of Argos to be performing. The reference to \veaving the image of Athena in the Titanomachy inevitably evoked for the Athenian audience the weaving of the peplos of Athena to be presented at the Panathenaia by the Ergastinai and the Arrhephoroi,40 and this, I suggest, would have zoomed what would have been Iphigeneia's normal fate to the reality of the Athenian audience whose own virgin daughters wove Athena's peplos as Arrhephoroi and, especially and more relevantly to Iphigeneia's age group, as Ergastinai.41 Here, then, the Tauric cult of Artemis is not only distanced from, but also contrasted to, cultie {Jreek normality and especially the cultic normality of the Athenian audience. Because the normal Greek cults mentioned do not include one of Artemis, i\rtemis is here implicitly aligned with her Tauric cult, though this is somewhat played down in so far as she is not mentioned by name here. As we shall see, this alignment is unstable and will change in the course of the play. Further sustained references to impending human sacrifice increase the distancing, but the distance between the Taurians and the Greeks of the heroic past is closed again by the references to Iphigeneia's sacrifice at 338-9 and especially, in Iphigeneia's own mouth, at 357-77. This leads on to a most important passage (380-9 I), in which Iphigeneia starts by reproaching Artemis for rejoicing in human sacrifices and ends by speculating that the human sacrifices offered to Artemis by the Taurians were not something that Artemis really wanted, but what the Taurians, who were ciVOPW1TOKTDVOL ('humankilling'), thought she wanted because they ascribed to her their own inclinations.42 This attempt to make sense of what appear objectionable practices from the viewpoint of a relatively enlightened worshipper, and the solution which consists in the view that people project their own cultural norms onto the gods, though not new in Greek thought, had a deep resonance in a religion which acknowledged the ultimate unknowability of the divine world. Here, as elsewhere, the exploration of the problem takes place at a distance, in the world of the barbaric Other that has been contrasted to the Self But the distance is transparently deceptive, and this is made virtually explicit through the fact that Iphigeneia intertwines this speculation concerning the ascription by the Taurians of their own inclinations to Artemis with the expression of disbelief ~o

On the weaving of Athena's peplos cf. Barber (1992), 112-16; Ridgway (1992), 123-4. The fact that it is the Titanomachy rather than the Gigantomachy (as in the peplos offered to Athena at the Panathenaia) that Iphigeneia would have been weaving marks the fact that what is at issue is zooming, not identification; the double distancing, non-Athenian and of the heroic age, is not elided, simply diminished. 42 This passage is now discussed by WoItT (1992: 3°9-12), who sees it as Iphigeneia's 'effort to regenerate the goddess Artemis' which is 'incomplete and compromised' (p. 312). What 1 am suggesting is that the audience, making sense of this passage through perceptual filters shaped by their particular relgious and cultural assumptions, would see it as an exploration that might well be right. 41

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that the gods would have eaten a child's flesh at the banquet offered them by Tantalos. This presentation of the human sacrifice as not desired by Artemis but reflecting the barbarity of the Taurians frames the subsequent references to, and preparations for, the impending human sacrifice, and thus distances the goddess Artemis from this particular cult, without of course eliminating the connection-especially since the audience may have found Iphigeneia's speculation convincing but had no \vay of kno\ving \vhether it was right. At 977-86 Orestes repeats the oracle given him by Apollo that in order to be free of his madness he must steal the statue of Artemis that had fallen from the sky and set it up in Athens. Iphigeneia then asks how can she elude Artemis in order to achieve this; in other words, she assumes that Artemis will not wish her statue to be taken from Tauris; but Orestes reasons that if this stealing of the statue was displeasing to Artemis, why would Apollo have told him to take it to Athens? At 1082-8 Iphigeneia invokes Artemis as the goddess who saved her from her father's killing hand and asks her to save her again together with Orestes and Pylades. She thus puts the responsibility for the human sacrifice entirely onto Agamemnon who took the decision to carry it out, while the fact that it had been Artemis who had requested it is elided, and Artemis is only credited with Iphigeneia's salvation; all the guilt has drifted to the father and all the credit for the salvation to the goddess. This is the way Iphigeneia apportions the blame for her sacrifice elsewhere in the play too, though not in as strikingly expressed and contrastive a manner as here. Thus the savagery associated with the cult of Artemis in Greece is played down. The play then zooms Artemis to her Greek cultic persona at 1097-1 lOS with the chorus's expression of longing for an Artemis firmly placed in the Delian cultic context;·B then a distancing is effected again at I I 12- I 6, where the chorus refer to Artemis' Taurian cult. At 1435 Athena appears and addresses first Thoas and then Orestes and Iphigeneia:~4 At 1439-41 she says that Orestes came to take the sacred statue to her, Athena's, land. At 1449-67 she orders Orestes to take the statue and set it up and found a sanctuary at Halai where Artemis shall be worshipped as Tauropolos; at her festival, as a compensation for Orestes' escape from slaughter, the sword shall be held to a man's throat and blood spilled, for form's sake and so that the goddess may receive her due honours.~5 Iphigeneia is to become the kleidouchos priestess of Artemis Brauronia and will die and be buried in the sanctuary, and receive the dedication of the clothes of women who die in childbirth. In Greek religious terms this means that Iphigeneia will be heroized and receive cult; this in turn implies-what was in any case, to the Athenian audience, ritual knowledge pertaining to the important cult of Cf. Platnauer (1938), 15 2 -3 on the "arious references. This part of the play has been recently discussed by \'Colff (1992), 312-24, 330-1 (with extensive bibliography). 45 Cf. also on this rite and associated perceptions Graf(I979), 33-41; Lloyd-Jones (1983a), 967 = (1990 a), 320- 2; Hughes (1991), 81. 43

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Artemis Brauronia-that Iphigeneia was to be the founder of this cult of Artemis Brauronia, according to the schema 'heroic figure founds a cult'. This segment of Athena's speech, then, zooms the world of the play very strongly to the world of the audience, to the cult of Artemis Tauropolos at Halai Araphenides and of Artemis Brauronia at Brauron, that is, to the particular cult and persona of the goddess to which she had first been zoomed at the beginning of the play. This segment of Athena's speech performs an important function pertaining to the present, representing these two cults as founded by heroic figures at the behest of the poliad goddess of the city, Athena. It is Athena rather than Artemis herself who orders the foundation of these cults, because in this way Athena, the poliad divinity of Athens, is shown as sanctioning, and participating in, the foundation of the two cults. And this is a representation of a strong anchoring of these cults in the mythical past. This co-operative role of Athena is further stressed in Athena's last words, 1488-9, when she says that she will go with Orestes to keep safe her sister's statue. In these circumstances, we may conclude that Artemis in /phigeneia in Tauris \\rould have been perceived by the Athenian audience as a representation of the goddess Artemis worshipped in Athens, with a special focus on her cult and persona of Brauronia and Tauropolos. Her Tauric cult and the persona of Artemis implicated in that cult are intimately connected with her Attic cult both in the assumptions of the audience and through the strong activations and zoomings of the play. Thus, though that Tauric cult and persona are indeed a construct, the Athenian audience would not have perceived it as a 'literary' construct of little or no relevance to their own cultic reality, as Mikalson thinks, but as an exploratory construct, through which aspects of their cult are articulated, problematized, and explored. Among other perceptions articulated in this exploration are that the spilling of blood is a milder form of a savage custom of human sacrifice, which in another time and place had been thought appropriate for Artemis; that the foundation of this milder rite and of the cult of Artemis l'auropolos, which is presented as an acculturated version of the Tauric cult, was ordered by Athena; that the present Athenian cult and perceptions of Artemis are a superior version of those in the barbarian Other and also in certain respects of those in the heroic past. In these perceptions is articulated the notion that the Attic cult of Artemis Tauropolos includes aspects that are not unrelated to savage rites, in myth negatively distanced to the Other, rites which express the dark side of Artemis and of Greek divinities in general.

Euripides' Hippolytos Artemis in the Hippolytos 46 is first presented in the prologue through Aphrodite's words, who says47 that Hippolytos worships and honours Artemis whom 46 This does not, of course, purport to be a reading of the Hippolylos, or indeed of the role of Artemis and Aphrodite in the Hippolytos. I am only trying to set out the main parameters for the 47 At 15-16; C( 17-19. perception of these deities in the play by the 5th~cent. audience.

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood he considers the greatest of divinities. Aphrodite refers to Artemis as cl>oi{3ov D~ dDEA4>iJv ~;4PT€J.LtV, JLOS' KOp7JV (,Phoebus' sister Artemis, daughter of 'Zeus', 15), thus evoking the invocation forms and zooming Artemis towards cultic reality, as well as placing her in the divine hierarchy and family; whether or not Barrett is right that on Aphrodite's lips the words take on a tone of contempt,48 they have the effect of evoking Artemis as a recipient of cult in the audience's everyday reality. Then Aphrodite refers to Artemis as parthenos and presents her as associating with Hippolytos in hunting in the woods. This of course is the most fundamental core aspect of Artemis' persona, the virgin huntress roaming the woods, a familiar figure from cultic iconography-and this, I suggest, had the effect of sustaining the zooming to the audience's cultic reality. At the end of her speech Aphrodite announces that Hippolytos is coming with a 1TPOO'7TOAwv . . . KWjLOS ('band of attendants') who shout forth hymns honouring Artemis. They enter after she has left, and Hippolytos urges them to follow him, singing of the daughter of Zeus, ovpaviav ~~PTEp..LV (,heavenly Artemis'), 'in whose care we are' (58-60). This last statement corresponds to the audience's cultic reality, in that they are ephebes and hunters, a group who is indeed in the special care of Artemis. Since, to my knowledge, Artemis did not have the cult title ourania, while the cult of Aphrodite Ourania was an important Athenian cult, I submit that, though of course all Olympian divinities were ovpavLoL, 'heavenly', in this context Hippolytos' use of Aphrodite's cult title ovpavia to refer to Artemis would have registered with the audience as illustrating his unbalanced privileging of Artemis at the expense of Aphrodite that Aphrodite had just spoken of. In the parodos (141 ff.) the chorus asks whether Phaedra is ailing because she is possessed by Pan or Hekate or the Korybantes or the Mountain Mother, or (145-7) whether she is 'wasting from some fault concerning Diktynna of the wild things', for neglecting to offer a bloodless offering. 'For she ranges over the Mere and across the dry land of the open sea [that is, a sand-bar], amid the wet eddies of the brine.' Diktynna is a Cretan goddess who is often perceived as a persona of Artemis in her function of goddess of the wild. The references to the Mere and the sand-bar zoom this Diktynna to the Troezenian cult of ArteII}is, since the Mere is a lagoon behind the sea-shore north ofTroezen, on the shore of which there was a sanctuary of Artemis Saronia. 49 This reference, then, both zoomed the Artemis of the world of the play to real-life cult and also reinforced the aspect of Artemis' persona in the play that involved her association with wild things and wild places. But in 166-9, in the epodos of the same ode, a different function of Artemis is articulated, Artemis as protector of women in childbirth, €VAOXOV, oupaviav . .. ';4pTEJ.LLV: the use of the description ovpav{av here would have been perceived to have been different from Hippolytos' use earlier because the adjective is here separated from the name, so that it does not unavoidably function as an epithet-and also because here the 964), I 57 on I 5. Cf. on all this Barrett

48 (I 49

(I 964:

190- I on 148-50), whose translation I am also using here.


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context is neutral rather than charged with an Artemis v. Aphrodite contrast as the earlier one was. It is possible that for the Athenian audience this function of Artemis as protector of women in childbirth may have evoked more generally her role as protector of women, the most important cult of which in Athens was that of Artemis Brauronia-which was also associated with hunting and wild animals. At 7 I 3-14 when the chorus swear an oath to Phaedra they do so by Artemis, to whom they refer as aEJ.1.vTJv 'ApTE/-LtV, Lhos KOp7JV ('august Artemis, daughter of Zeus'), thus, I suggest, evoking the goddess as a whole; and this choice may again have brought to the fore in the eyes of the audience Artemis' role as a women's goddess. 50 At 1283 Artemis appears above the house and speaks to Theseus, revealing to him the truth about Hippolytos and Phaedra. In I424-5 she promises Hippolytos that she will give him TLJ.LG.S J.lEyiaTas ('the greatest honours') in the polis of Troezen; that a cult will be instituted to him, in which the Troezenian girls ""ill cut their hair before they marry, and dedicate it to Hippolytos; there will also be mourning rites for him, and songs sung by parthenoi. 51 This announcenlent of the institution of a cult to Hippolytos zooms the world of the play to the world of the audience in two ways: it zooms it by evoking in an indirect way the Athenian cult of Hippolytos,52 which was different from the one described in the play; and it zooms it directly, to the cult of Troezen which was not Athenian, but was a real present-day cult.53 In my view, in considering the nature of Artemis and Aphrodite in Hippo(ytos, the only question that has any meaning is 'how did the fifth-century audience make sense of them?'; unless one wishes to construct modern, culturally determined readings,54 it is necessary to attempt to reconstruct the ways in which the ancient audience did this through filters shaped by their assumptions about Aphrodite and Artemis and divine beings and religion in generaL55 I do not have the space here to go through the presentation of Aphrodite in the [iippolytos 56 in detail, to reconstruct the ways in which the ancient audience would have constructed her. But it is surely not controversial to state that she is On Artemis as a women's goddess in this passage cf. also Zeitlin (1985), 69-70. Cf. Barrett (1964),412-13 on 1423-30. The institution of this rite and its place and meanings in the HippalylOs are now discussed in detail by Goff (1990), I 13-29. 52 On the Athenian cult of Hippolytus cf. Kearns (1989), 173; Aleshire (1989),22 and n. 4. For the association of Hippolytos with Aphrodite in Athenian cult c( esp. Pirenne-Delforge (1994), 40-6. 53 Cf. Barrett (1964), 3-4. 54 Valid though they may be in their own place, if the tragedy is read as a floating text. Luschnig (1988: 93-1 I I, cf. also 75-90), for example, discusses very interestingly the ways in which human knowledge and divine revelation operate in the Hippalytos, and also the ways in which the audience's knowledge affects their perception of the characters, but constructs the audience as a timeless 'we', and thus does not relate the discussion to ancient perceptions. )5 The diversity of the audience does not alter the fact that there were common parameters of determination of their knowledge and assumptions. 56 For a subtle and penetrating analysis of the workings of Aphrodite in the Hippo/YIas cf. Zeitlin (1985), 58-64 and passim. 50

51

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood presented as the goddess of erotic love with all the associated powers and functions;5 7 and that this aspect of Aphrodite is her most important, strikingly central aspect~ both in her local cultic personalities and in her Panhellenic persona. 58 In order to try to reconstruct the ways in \vhich the ancient audience perceived the deities in this tragedy \ve also need to deploy a particular type of configuration of assumptions which I call schemata:59 these are particular models of organizing experience \vhich structure myths, collective representations, and texts-such as the 'patricide' schema, which structures all myths involving patricide-and are themselves structured. by, and thus express, the society'S beliefs, realities, collective representations, and ideologies, its cultural assumptions. Among the schemata-the deployment, manipulation, and interaction of \vhich directed in the main lines the audience's perception and reception of the tragedy-the following have a direct bearing on our attempt to reconstruct the ways in which the ancient audience made sense of the deities in the Hippolytos. 6o One, 'neglect of the worship of a particular deity by a comtnunity or an individual is a serious transgression that brings punishment'. Two, "Eros as destructive fLavia'. A third schemathat the deity most directly offended by a human transgression acts most directly to inflict punishment, but acts on behalf of the divine and cosmic order-is explored through the rivalry between Aphrodite and Artemis, through the creation of a version of ~neglect of a deity' in which the neglect is 'balanced' by an over-privileging of another deity, whom the transgressor sees as antithetical to the neglected one, which also brings into play the concept of philia between deity and morta1. 61 This over-privileging has its ovvn dynamic and brings into play here the 'failed ephebeia' schema,62 which helps articulate more clearly the consequences of the neglect of one deity and his/her sphere of responsibility. I shall return to this exploration below. 57 On the presentation and imagery of eros in the HippolylOs cf. also Pade! (I992), 1 22~ for eros in the Hippolytos, and in Greek collecti\'e representations in general and its location in the realm of Aphrodite, cf Goff (1990), 28-38. 58 For a study of the different cults of Aphrodite, in Athens and elsewhere, cf. now PirenneDelforge (1994). 5l) On schemata cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 247 and 246-61 pasi11l~ Sourvinou-Inwood (19 89), 136-7, 14S~ c( also Sourvinou-Inwood (1979),8-18. 60 These schemata are very different from Goff's paradigmatic narrati\'es (1990: 37-9, 59-60), which are 'culturally shared narrative models that already assume certain kinds of response in others', which have a stereotypical quality, and in which characters in the Hippo/ytos inscribe themselves; schemata are articulated by a society's representations, are flexible through the generation of different versions and interactions with other schemata, and their dynamic articulation helps direct the main lines of the audience's perception and reception. 61 Though, of course, there are strict limits to this philia: Hippolytos cannot see Artemis, a fact that stresses the distance between mortal and immortal. On Hippolytos' inability to see Artemis cf. also Segal (1988a), 58; (1988b), 268-9. 62 On 4failed ephebeia' in the Hippolyeas cf. Vidal-Naquet (I986a)~ 118-20; on this ~failed ephebeia' and the associated "father-son hostility' schema in a version which ends in disaster cf. Sourvinou-Inwood (199 1), 250-9.


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The particular combination of these schemata in the Hippolytos, the complex schema ~a woman's adulterous and destructive eros for an inappropriate object as a fJ.-uv{a, the notion that a monstrous, adulterous passion can be explained as a fLav{a sent by a deity as punishment for a transgression committed against that deity and through this against the divine/cosmic order by one of the males involved', also appears in Euripides' Cretans. 63 Indeed, in HippolYlos 337-8, Phaedra compares her adulterous love for Hippolytos to that of her mother Pasiphae for the bull, and to that of her sister Ariadne, whom she calls 'Dionysos' wife', thus referring to the version of the myth in which Ariadne"s love for Theseus was adulterous. This comparison clearly aligns Phaedra with her adulterous mother and sister. In addition, the comparison of Phaedra's passion to Pasiphae's love for the bull would have activated the audience's knowledge of the latter's story, especially in the form in which it had been articulated in the Cretans, and that would have invited further comparisons and brought out the similarities and differences between the two stories. Both Pasiphae's actual adultery and her daughter's unfulfilled adulterous love are negatively polarized forms of adultery which lead to catastrophe, in the first case the birth of a monstrous son, in the second the death of a normal and good son. In both, the object of the woman's desire was supremely unsuitable, but in diametrically opposite ways: in Pasiphae's case because it was too alien, too removed, an animal; in Phaedra's case because it was too close, near incestuous, her husband's son. In both myths adultery leads to disaster, for the man and his o£kos as well as for the woman; this corresponds to the Athenian perceptions that a woman's adultery threatens the integrity of the oikos, and that a man's wife is his point of maximum vulnerability. The fact that in the Cretans it is Poseidon who sent the erotic fLavia that made Pasiphae fall in love with the bull, the fact that there is a schema 'a deity sends destructive erotic p.av{a to a woman as punishment to a man that has transgressed against him/her' shows that the notion that Aphrodite in Hippol)Jtos is the cosmic power that caused Phaedra's downfall, a principle and not a person,64 and similarly Mikalson's notion that she is a representative of a psychological force, are culturally determined readings that do not correspond to the ways in which either Euripides' composition of Hippolytos or the audience's making sense of it would have functioned, since in cases this st.ructuring schema would inevitably have come into play. If we compare this schema structuring the extant Hippo lytos , 'a deity sends destructive erotic mania to a woman as punishment to a man that has transgressed against her, and vvhen the woman's advances are rejected by the young man she accuses him of rape', to the schema structuring the plot of the first Hippolytos, 'a Cf. esp. fro 82 Austin (Pasiphae's speech). Cf. e.g. Dodds (1929), 102. It is beyond my scope here to survey opinions about the role of the gods in HippolYlos. C( a very brief recent survey in Goff (1990), 71 n. 25, and for a survey of views on Artemis ibid. 106-9. 63 6.$

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Christiane Sourvinou -Inwood

shameless woman makes advances to a young man and then takes revenge on him for rejecting her advances by accusing him of rape or attempted rape', it becomes clear that the transformation of the shameless Phaedra of the first Hippolytos into the virtuous victim of the extant play 65 can be seen as the result of, and was based on, the deployment of a version of the schema structuring the Cretans to reshape the myth of Hippolytos. The fact that the Cretans is earlier than Hippolytos is significant. 66 In Hippolytos the 'punishment fits the religious transgression' modality, \v hich is well established in Greek mythology, takes a different form from that in the Cretans, where Pasiphae fell in love with the bull that Minos had vowed, but failed, to sacrifice to Poseidon; in Hippolytos, where the deity is offended through neglect, and thus the undervaluing of her area of competence, eros, the offender is punished by means of the unleashing of eros' destructive power. The schema 'immoderate eros overtakes the person who refused eros and/or scorned Aphrodite' is not unusual in Greek my thology.67 In my view, the schema structuring the Hippolytos can be seen as the result of the interaction between the schema 'immoderate eros overtakes the person who scorns Aphrodite' and the schema in the Cretans-with the woman who had not transgressed against the gods being the vulnerable vessel that is taken over by this inappropriate eros.68 This schema, this religious representation articulated in the Cretans, is explored further in the Hippolytos through the presentation of this other myth of catastrophic eros as also resulting from a deity's revenge for transgression against her. In the context of, first, the central Greek religious notion of the ultimate unknowability of the divine world, and second, of Greek tragedy as a crucial locus of religious exploration,69 these two tragedies explore the possibility that this is how such destructive and selfdestructive eros can be explained, as a deity's revenge. However, the notion that the shameless Phaedra of the first Hippolytos was transformed into the virtuous victim of the extant play needs redefining, since such transformation was far from complete, and this has serious implications for the assessment of Aphrodite in Hippolytos. For a very important component of the version of the 'bad woman' schema deployed in the first Hippolytos, 'the scorned woman takes revenge on the innocent young man who rejected her advances', plays an important part in the construction of Phaedra, and of the plot, in the extant Hippolyeos. Phaedra presents the main motives for her actions as being the desire to protect her good name and her children's honour. 70 Modern critics privilege this explanation and perceive her accusaCf. on this Barrett (1964), 30-1; Zeitlin (1985),52-6. Cf. also Goff (199 0 ), 93-4. 67 As Zeitlin (19 85: 106-7) has pointed out, noting the difference between this modality of punishment and that in the Hippolytos. 68 Cf. also Zeitlin (1985: 107) for the manner of Hippolytos' death. 69 I develop this thesis elsewhere (see n. 6). 70 C[ 687-8 as well as 715 fr. On the concept of (UKA€La in the Hippolytos cf. Braund (1980), 184-5 with bibliography. 65

66


181

tions of Hippolytos through this central structuring filter. But a 'revenge on Hippolytos' aspect is also articulated by Phaedra, at 728-3 I, and, I submit, for the ancient audience this, in combination with a situation involving a woman who made false accusations of rape against a young man who rejected her, and \vith their knowledge of the traditional schema of the myth (especially as articulated in the first Hippo ly tos ), would have evoked the schema "the scorned woman takes revenge on the innocent young man who rejected her advances' as one of the filters through which their perception ofPhaedra would have been shaped. Thus Phaedra's false accusations in the extant Hippolytos would inevitably have coloured her with 'bad \voman' connotations in the eyes of the ancient audience. (Of course, all this makes the 'characterization' more complex and the problematization more subtle, but this is another matter.) This negative colouring of Phaedra would have been reinforced by another schema that, I suggest, came into play for the Athenian audience: the fact that Hippolytos, whom her actions destroyed, was her husband's son \vould have activated the schema 'a woman's disloyalty to her husband's oikos'-which results in catastrophe-and the related schema 'man's vulnerability to a woman's disloyal actions in the family'.il In normative Athenian ideology a woman who was disloyal to, and damaged, her husband's honour and his oikos was perceived to be a bad woman. Even before her false accusations, Phaedra's love for her husband's son-whatever the causes behind it-would have been perceived as seriously endangering her husband's honour and his oikos. The false accusations and activation of a facet of the 'bad woman' schema, focused on the destruction of her husband's son, reinforced this negativity. Thus, I suggest, the ancient audience would not have perceived Phaedra, as modern critics often do, as a wholly innocent victim; their perception, I am arguing, would have been structured by, and would thus have inevitably privileged, this negative nexus of schemata that activated \bad woman' connotations?2 Nor, I submit, would the ancient audience have assumed that she had no choice over what had happened up to that point. The notion that she had no choice is not presented as fact in the tragedy, simply as a subjectively presented possibility. Phaedra would have been perceived to have had the choice not to do anything about her love for Hippolytos, a choice which she forfeited when she revealed that love, and engaged in a discussion about it;73 in the audience's 71 I have discussed these schemata in Sourvinou-Inwood (1979), 8-13; (1990b), 409-1 I; c( also Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 254. 72 The fact that Ar. Thesm. 549-50 (on which cf. Sommerstein (1994), 190-1 ad lac.) suggests that a Euripidean Phaedra evoked the notion 'bad woman' for an Athenian audience provides some confirmation for the view that} in the eyes of its original audience, the Phaedra of the extant Hippotyros was perceived as having at the very least ~bad woman' traits. 73 Goff (199 0 : 30 -9) has discussed the intimate connection between desire and its articulation in speech in the HippolYlos. Knox (1952: 6) stressed the centrality of the choice between speech and silence in ~he representation of human choice; but his perception of human choice in this play is different from mine, for he accepts the validity of Aphrodite'S self-presentation in the prologue (cf. Knox (~952), 4 and passim)-on which cf. below. Luschnig (1988: 107) states 'Her failure to keep

182


perception, I submit, the double motivation would have come into play, the notion of the deity operating through the flaw in the human character. This entails that those critics who take Aphrodite to be a wholly cruel divinity destroying an innocent, helpless victim have taken the goddess at face value \\,hen she gives the impression in 47-50 that Phaedra had no choice; I suggest that the Athenian audience-both at this early point, because they were operating through their expectations, and eventually, when they were evaluating the operation of the divinities in the play-\vould have understood Aphrodite's "vords to be part of her own self-presentation that stressed her powers, the unstoppable power of love and so on; the audience would have perceived this to be only one part of the story, not the whole picture. 74 Or at least, they would have taken the validity of this self-presentation to be an open question. To return to our original Problenzatik, it is I hope clear that, as with Artemis in IT, the Athenian audience would have perceived the goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis articulated in the Hippolytos as a representation of the goddesses worshipped in Attic cult. I must make clear that 'representation' does not mean identity, embodiment; the distance between the 'real' deity and her representation in tragedy is set in place in the audience's perceptions by the notion of the ultimate unknowability of the transcendental world; this sets in place varying distances between human articulations and divine 'reality', the representations in ritual having much greater authority than tragic articulations in so far as they were validated by tradition?' At the other end of the scale, the gods in comedy were comic constructs, a perception constantly reinforced through the metatheatricality of the genre which drew continuous attention to its nature as comic performance. It is, of course, the Artemis worshipped by Hippolytos that is more restricted than the cultic Artemis, but this is part of the meaning-creating strategies of the play. The Athenians would have perceived the Artemis conceived and worshipped by Hippolytos as a polarization of one aspect of the goddess Artemis as she was articulated in the play-and in real-life religion. And so they would have understood Hippolytos as having a one-sided perception of silence is not a vicious failure. She is anything but the typical older woman of folktale trying to seduce the younger man.' This, in my view, takes no account of the fact that the audience's prior knowledge of the earlier version of the myth and of the earlier play and Phaedra's false accusations against Hippolytos would have acti\~ated precisely this schema and thus also brought out Phaedra's similarities as well as differences from such a woman; that this schema helped shape the filters through which the ancient audience perceived Phaedra; nor does it take into account the fact that Hippolytos was her husband's son with (as we have seen) all that this entails in terms of acti\'ation of the schema ~a woman's potential disloyalty to her husband's oikas). 74 Not unrelated to this is Luschnig's observation (1988: 53), in a different context, that deities in the HippolyLOs may give a partial, simplifying account of what the audience would have perceived as a more complex situation. 75 In complex ways, which I am exploring much further elsewhere (see n. 6), as also I am exploring the notion of gods as representations in tragedy, and the complex relationship between tragedy on the one hand and ritual and tradition on the other.

Tragedy and Religion Artemis, which is what allows him to see Artemis in opposition to Aphrodite and over-privilege the former while under-privileging the latter. Hippolytos' Artemis is a polarization resulting from the stressing of one-albeit very important-aspect of her persona and the underplaying, indeed ignoring, of another facet, her concern with the transition into adulthood and full maturity, which is a further important aspect of her Attic persona, and which, in the case of the transition of parthenoi into gynaikes, is related to her protection of childbirth. This facet of Artemis is related to Aphrodite. In the context of cult, which is a context of co-operation, Artemis' role in the transition to maturity and Aphrodite'S concern with the erotic sphere drift together and are articulated as complementary; this is, for example, exemplified by finds in a sanctuary like that of Artemis Mounichia, in which there is a significant number of figurines and scenes on vases and plastic vases that belong to the cycle of Aphrodite. 76 The potential tension involved in this type of cultic complementarity is articulated in some images that I have discussed elsewhere in which the girl's transition to marriage and womanhood is represented through the erotic pursuit and abduction of a parthenos from a sanctuary of Artemis.?? It is the same potential tension involved in this type of cultic complementarity that is activated and transformed into conflict and hostility in this context of perversion of normality, of disorder, that is created by Hippolytos' refusal to abandon the status of young huntsman, of ephebe, and embrace erotic love, the status of maturity, marriage, and reproduction, the proper order of things. It is only by restricting and polarizing Artemis that Hippolytos can over-privilege her while underprivileging Aphrodite. The facet of the goddess pertaining to the tradition into adulthood and maturity is evoked in Artemis' own speech indirectly: it is woven into the institution of Hippolytos' cult, which pertains precisely to that transition, the transition of Troezenian parthenoi into womanhood through marriage. At 1424 ff Artemis promises Hippolytos that she will give him 'the greatest honours' in the polis of Troezen; this clearly implies that the cult that will be instituted to him will be within her own cultic sphere, which of course the transition of parthenoi to womanhood through marriage was, in Athens and elsewhere-a fact which at this point would have strongly evoked for the Athenian audience the perception that Hippolytos' Artemis was only partial. The fact that this is evoked by Artemis' own words here would have deconstructed in the eyes of the Athenians Artemis' own presentation of the case, which omits Hippolytos' guilt in neglecting Aphrodite and refusing to make the proper transition, thus offending against the divine order and the proper order of things. She only mentions Aphrodite'S malice. I suggest that this would have been perceived by the Athenians as reflecting Artemis' partiality. The parameters within which this partiality would have been understood were, I suggest, 76

77

Palaiokrassa (1991), 62,68, 70, 73, 82-4, 92 n. 269, 94. Sourvinou-Inwood (199 1), 58- 143 passim.

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood first and most importantly, that in transgressions of this kind the role of the guardian of the proper order of things was perceived to have drifted entirely to the under-privileged deity, backed up by the power of the divine order represented by Zeus. Secondly, that when divinities are put on stage there is the potentiality of articulating, and focusing on, one of the possibilities contained in the notion that itj1.ai (,honours') are due to all the gods, by representing it in terms of a personal rivalry between the over-privileged and the underprivileged divinity. But this rivalry is restricted by the fact, the religious perception, that the under-privileged deity is in the right, and so her punishment of the guilty mortal cannot be hindered by the over-privileged one; this state of affairs is portrayed by Artemis in 1328-3 I as a principle of non-interference resulting from a nomos presented as being policed by Zeus, that no immortal is allowed to interfere in the plans of another. I suggest that the Athenian audience would not have understood this as a general principle of non-interference, but rather as pertaining to situations in which the deity against whom a mortal has transgressed is exacting revenge for what ultimately is an offence against the whole divine order.

GODS

IN TRAGEDY AND

IN LIVED

RELIGION:

CONCLUSIONS

In these circumstances, we may conclude that the thesis that these and the other divinities in tragedy were literary constructs, which were not perceived by the Athenians to be representations of the divinities they worshipped in cult, is mistaken; and that the relationship between the world of tragedy and the world of the polis is much more complex than such simplistic interpretations allow. The assumptions of the Athenian audience situated the world of the tragedy in a part of their own world, as a representation of a part of their world, the heroic past in which many of their religious practices were grounded, and in which men and gods walked together and communicated directly. The fact that tragic characters are in direct contact with the gods is not 'a tragic convention'.78 It was a religious reality, a religious belief, for fifth-century Athenians, that the heroes who are implicated in their cult, and who are set in place in tragedy, were in direct contact with the gods. This religious fact helped to ground and legitimate their own cults, which were founded by heroes with the help of the gods who in those days communicated with mortals both in person and through oracles not corrupted by human fallibility. This was the basic framing of the relationship between the world of the audience and that on the tragic stage. But that relationship was not static and inert. On the contrary, I have tried to show that the relationship between the world on the stage and the reality of the audience was manipulated in the course of each tragedy through a series of distancing and zooming devices that 78

As Mikalson (cf. e.g. (199 I), 205) claims.

Tragedy and Religion operated in interaction with the assumptions which the audience shared with the tragedian. In the sphere of religion one of the things the tragic discourse does is to explore the interstices of polis religion, including an articulation and exploration of problem areas. In so far as the tragic world is distanced from that of the present, tragedy explores religious questions at a 'safe', symbolic distance; in so far as it is zoomed to the present, it shows how these questions are directly relevant to this world, so that they are both explored at a safe, symbolic distance and made directly relevant. 'Exploring' must not be confused with 'criticizing'; the Hippolytos is not criticizing the gods and polis religion. The notion that it is doing so is the result of a culturally determined perception rigidly structured by a twentieth-century liberal Christian intellectual perspective. In ancient eyes, in the context of Greek religion, to which the notion of the ultimate unknowabiIity of the transcendental \vas central, the Hippolytos-among other things-articulates an exploration of the empirically observable fact that the world is a cruel place and people suffer; an exploration that suggests that, despite this, the cosmos has rules and a fundamental order, a notion that guards against the despair generated by the fear of cosmic anomy. To present a deity as cruel is not to 'criticize polis religion', since in a religion without a devil gods have a dark and dangerous as well as a benevolent side; the same gods and cults articulated the dark and dangerous side of the cosmos, which Greek religion acknowledged and articulated, as the benign and positive one. The dark, dangerous, threatening, arbitrary, side of gods is one particular articulation of the perception that the world is dangerous and man's life very precarious.79 In addition, the notion that Aphrodite is especially cruel because she destroyed Phaedra) an innocent victim who had no choice, is not a perception that would have been shared by the ancient audience. Not only is it the case, as we have seen, that it is at the very least arguable-in fact likely-that in ancient eyes Phaedra did have a choice, but also the very notions 'innocent victim since she had no choice' and 'cruel because destroying an innocent victim' are unstable cultural constructs. Let me give a simple illustration of this instability, and of the fact that 'moral' perception depends on where the 'structuring centre' of the perceived situation lies. Iraqi conscripts as well as civilians in the Gulf War, deprived of their life, or of water, food, and medicines, were one group of people who had no choice and could thus be defined as innocent victims; but it is not the case that in the West's dominant ideology and collective representations their destruction and/or suffering led to criticisms of the war; it was the price for the achievement of an aim perceived to be righteous-in fact, the very terminology used to refer to such 79 Kovacs (19 87: 75-6) is thinking along similar lines when he notes, with reference to the gods in the HippolYIOS and more generally in Greek literature, that the presentation of the world as one not designed for the satisfaction of human aspiration-a fact confirmed by experience-has a positive role to play in helping people to cope with life, given humanity's precarious condition.

186


casualties, ~collateral damage', stresses precisely this perception. In ancient eyes neglecting the TLfLYJ of a god was a very serious matter. The religion of Greek tragedy was in one inescapable way part of Athenian religion at the most basic level that cannot be ignored, however much one may argue about its implications: it was part of Athenian religion because it was set in place in the course of an important religious festival. I have argued here, and shall be arguing in much greater detail elsewhere, that tragedy was also one locus where the religious discourse of the polis was explored and elaborated; and that therefore the relationship between religion in tragedy and the practised religion of the polis was symbiotic; and also that the complex and shifting distancing between the world of the play and the world of the audience was of fundamental importance in the operation of tragedy as a discourse of exploration.

10

The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of Religious Experience in Art, Drama, and Society ROBIN OSBORNE

This book is concerned with what sort of histories can and cannot be written on the basis of the representations of tragedy. In this paper I want to look not just at the representations of maenads in tragedy but also in art, and in particular on Athenian pots, and to ask two questions: first, how do the representations on pots relate to the representations in drama? and second, can we use these representations to write a history of religious experience?l E. R. Dodds had no doubt that we could talk of a history of religious experience. He outlines what he thinks the history gfDionysian experience was in two pages of the chapter on 'The Blessings of Madness' in The Greeks and the ln~ational:

Dionysus was in the Archaic Age as much a social necessity as Apollo; each ministered in his own way to the anxieties characteristic of a guilt-culture ... Dionysus offered freedom: \Forget the difference and you will find the identity; join the f}{aao,; and you will be happy to-day.' ... The joys of Dionysus had an extremely wide range, from the simple pleasures of the country bumpkin, dancing a jig on greased wineskins, to the wj.LoS 32: 126-44 (Fr. \'ersion in l\lleiallges Pierre Le"z.,eque, iii (Besan~on and Paris, 1989),387-41 I). ~ (1995), Politics ilncienl and JJodern (Cambridge~ trans. from La Del1l0Cratie grecque ·z'ue d 'ailleurs (Paris, 1990). \'\'ALCOT, P. (1976), Greek Dnl111G in its 17zealrical and Social Context (Cardiff). \'\'ALLACE, P. \\? (1969), 'Psyttaleia and the Trophies of the Battle of Salamis', AJA 73: 293-3 0 3. \\'ALTOr-:, ]. 1\1. (1977), 'Financial Arrangements for the Athenian Dramatic Festivals', 77zeatre Research Intc171atiol1ai 2/2: 79-86. (1980), Greek Thealre Practice (\Xt'estport, ,,\iaine and London). T \X ANKEL, H. (1976), Del11oslhenes: Rede fiir Klesipholl zi'ber den Kranz (Heidelberg). \\:TEBSTER, T. B. L. (1973), A.llzenian Culture and Society (London). \"'ELTER, G. (1922), ~Die Tripodenstrasse in Athen', [L~J 47: 72-7. \'('EST, .\1. L. (1987), Euripides: Orestes (\X,'arminster). TRANKLE.

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(I990a), Aesclzyli lragoediae CUln incerti poctae Promelheo (Stuttgart), (1990b), Studies in A.eschylus (Stuttgart). (1993), ~Simonides Redivivus" Z/.JE 98: 1-14. \\?HEELER, B. I. (1902), 'Herodotus' Account of the Battle ofSalamis\ HSC]) 33: 12 7-38. \VHlTEHEAD, D. (1977), TIle Ideology of the Alhenian iVIeric (Cambridge). (1986)~ TIze Denies of . A.ttica) 508/7-ca. 250 Be (Princeton). \X.'ILAMOWITZ-~1oELLENDORF, U. VON (1887), 'Demotika der attischen l\1.etoeken\ Hennes, 22: 107-28,211-59. (1899), Der A1iilter Bittgang (Berlin; repro in \X'ilamo\vitz-l\'\oellendorf (1922), 193281). (19 13), Sappho und Simonides (Berlin). (1917), in T. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Die dra1nalisc/ze Technik des Sophoklcs (Phil. lJnl. 22; Berlin), 313-76. (1922), Grieclzische Tragoedien, 9th edn., i (Berlin). \X'Il.KINS, ]. (1990), "The Young of Athens: Religion and Society in Herak Ie ida i of Euripides', CQ 40: 3 2 9-39. (1993), Euripides: Heraclidae (Oxford). WrILLCOCK, 1\'1. M. (1964), 4lv1ythological paradeigmata in the Iliad" CQ I 4~ 14 I-54. 'X'ILLIA.=\iS, A. L. (1979), An .Approach to Congre'lle (Ne\v Haven). \XiILLINK, C. (1986), Eu.ripides: Orestes (Oxford). \XlILSON, P.]. (1991») ~Demosthenes 21 (AgainstA1eidias): Democratic Abuse" [)eI)S 3]: 164-95. (1996), 'Tragic Rhetoric: The lTse of Tragedy and the Tragic in the Fourth Century \ in ~t S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and lhe Tragic (Oxford), 3 I 0- 3 I. Vj.,' INKLER, ]. J. (199 0 a), TIle Cons train ts of Desire: 17ze A. nthropology of Sex and Gender i11 Ancient Greece (New York and London). (1990b), 'The Ephebes' Song: Tragoidia and Polis', in Winkler-Zeitlin (1990), 2062 (orig. version in Representations, I I (1985),26-62). and ZEITUN, F. I. (1990) (eds.), Nothing to do with DiollYsos? Athenian Dra111a in its Social Contexl (Princeton). \'CINNINGTON-INGRAM, R. P. (1961), 4The Danaid Trilogy', ]HS 81: 141-52 (repr. in Winnington-Ingram (19 83), 55-72). (1973), 'Zeus in Persae' ,]RS 93: 210- 19 (repr. in \~.rinnington-Ingram (1983),1--15). (1980), Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge). (1983), Studies in .Aeschylus (Cambridge). \X'OLFF, C. (1992), 'Euripides' Iphigeneia ,A.l1l0ng the Taurians: Aetiology, Ritual and l\l\yth', Class. Ant. I I: 308-34. WORTHINGTON, I. (1994) (ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rheloric in Action (London). \XiORTON, M., and STILL,]. (1990), Intertextualit),: Theories and Practices (!v1anchester). XANTHAKlS-MRAMANOS, G. (1979), 'The Influence of Rhetoric on Fourth-century Tragedy', CQ 29: 66-76 (repr. in Studies in Fourth-Centul)' Tragedy (Athens) 1980), 59-7 0 ). YUNIS, H. (1988), A New Creed: Fundamental Religious Beliefs in the . 4thenian . Polis and Euripidean Drama (Hypomnemata, 91; Gottingen). ZEITUN, F. 1. (I970), 'The Argive Festival of Hera and Euripides' Electra', TAPA 101: 645- 6 9. -

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F. 1. (1980), 'The Closet ofi\1asks: Role-playing and Myth-making in the Orestes

of Euripides' , Ranlus, 9: 5 1 -77. (1981), 'Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesnzophoriazousae\ in H. P. Foley (ed.), Reflections ofl'folnen in A.nliquit)' (New York), 169-217. (1985), 'The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in the HippolylllS', in P. Burian (ed.). Direclions in Euripidcan C'1licisnl (Durham, NC), 52- I 10 and 189-208.

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(I990a), 'Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek

Drama', in Winkler-Zeitlin (1990), 63-96 (orig. version in Representations, I I (1985), 63-94)· (1990b), 'Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama', in WinklerZeitlin (1990), 130-67 (orig. version in J. P. Euben (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political 171cory (Berkeley, 1986), 101 -41). ZUNTZ, G. (1955), The Political Plays of Euripides (l\\anchester).

Index of Passages Cited

All passages mentioned in the text are included. Passages mentioned in notes are included where their content is discussed) but not when they simply form part of a list of supporting citations. Aeschines 68 n. 28 1. 173 2. 10 1 57 n. 1 53 3· 19 89 n. 6 3·57 143-4 3· 77 IS7 n. S3 3.86 68 n. 28 3.125 68 n.28 3· 153 44 3· 2 I 9 I 57 n. 53 Aeschylus

Oresteia

23,78,110-11,149,

684 91 5 971

& n. 64 r3 Eumenides 41-2,67,74, 7S n. 7 1 ,76, 77,111-12, 21 3,216,224-5,227, 234 290(1:') 44 39 8(1:') 44

II

lSI,

78,113-14,139

131

258

13 1 13 1

281-35 0 35 1

13 1

587-614 750-62

13 1 151 n·3 0

810- 2 9 83 0 -54

13 1 13 1

110, I

484(.E) 44 53 2 - 8 15 1n·3 0 566 -9(£) 44

21 7- 18

Agamemnon

118 118

153,

86 4 74 868-9 ISO 869 I I I 884 110

890

I I I

9 18

74

1011

III

1018

III

Niobe fro 154a 15-16 Radt

152 n. 32

855-9 1 3 13 1

73, 112, 116, 21 4, 216,220,228-9,23 2 ,235 hypoth. 2 n. 4, 40

85 6 134 862 132 866-73 133 877-94 13 2

70 - 1 6 235-45 7 239-40 116 n.4 8 240 I I n.42

886 133 887-94 133 895-9 01 13 2 -3

27 8 7 347 15 0 353 if. 69 355 3

855-7

90 S

13 2

132

9 1 4- 16 10 38

133 164

I 189 110 1269-7 6 153

137 2 -3 134 137 2 -9 8 13 1 Choephoroi 77 132-5 118 560-4 117

Persae

1-19,41-3,

355-60 2, 10-1 I n. 41 362 151 n·30 36 4 5

364-7 368

2

7

376-9 2 382-4 0 5 2-5 387-8 5 391

8

Index of Passages Cited Aeschylus (onl. ) 394 8 39 8 2'-+-5 402-, 3. 8, -P:3 ! -+17-I~

37(~)

274-326 7~ 36 5-9 75 37 0 -5 75

1:2

39~-.fOT

2. -::-6

422-30

445

447-64 45 8

4H5(~) 502 -3

H 9

495-507 584-97 682

6 12

n.

52

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IS

5· 9 74 0 - 2 15 744 15 749-5 0 15 75 1 - 2 15 759- 86 15 780 15 2 n.

790-2 800-2

I.

820-2 820 IS

33 n. 50,

I 12, 126-

128-9 12 9 n. 29 IS I 135-44 lSI

1-9 76-7

r 51 129

214 151 21 7- 18 151

30 4

151 12 7- 8 653-5

656 659

128

7 19

128

12 9 n. 29

1013-20

27

32-3, 36, 67, 7 4-9~ I 10- r I, 113,115,19°,217-18.222

Supplices

152

n. 32

81 -5

I 06 n. I 26

30 9- 1 4 7 2 35 6 7 2 36 9 7 2 377- 82 7 [ n. 50 482 72 502-3 7 1 n·5 0 50 9- 12 7 2

Birds 68 n. 35 793- 6 65 Clouds 71 64 0

587-9 143-4 Ecclesiazousae 222 473-5 143-4 Frogs 68, 7 I) 79~ 134553-4

128

662-76

52 n. 32

35 67 n . 2 5 67(£) 69 n. 37

9, I 50 - r, I 5 3

ISO

I

15

Acha 111 ians

IS IS 880-92 r 2 n. 52

24 n. 16

29

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84 2

303

76

75

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62 3

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IS

181-202

33,75

4. 2 3 44.

82 7

176-7

75

60 4- 2 4

[Andocidcs]

15 15, IS J n. 30

SCplCm conlra 77zchas

75

5 1 7- 1 9

1. 113-1.+

12

808- 1 5 816-22

75 44

94 2 ff 75 957- 61 78 985 fI 76 1009-1 I 78 O)Acschylus Prometheus 78 n. 87· Andocides

70 5-7 15 7 1 5 15 7 1 9 15 7 2 3 15

72 5 7 28

r64

4H1tr.

9

4 6o - 1

2IK

75

455- 65 75

7

6

427

76 .

3H7-9I

;,9

42 4- 8

7 0 n. 74

80 9

66n.21 157 n. 53

1026-7 12 109 0 -5 144, 157 n. 53 Knights 67, 7 I Lysistrata 222

Index of Passages Cited I

190

21.

18 7-9 39 1 -7

7 8 n. 87 68 n. 35 5 I 7- I 8 68 n. 35 589-90 6R n. 35 I I 38 (1' ) 76 n. 76

222

6S

395-7 65 n. I I 549-50 181 n.72

1Fasps 7 I n. 50

1Fcalth 953(L') Aristotle

83 n. 5

L.J.9t>27

102

16

12 5- 6 1 45d'6-8 145 I b27 - 32 43-4 1453.14- 5 17 I4 6oh 35-7 145 Polilica 96 n. 61

3.1276bl-9

3· 127t'8-J 2 43 3· J28J:'4 2 - h 3 43

4· I 299 ay 5- 20

89

RhelOrica 2.138SbI4-15 16-17 2. 1386;125-6 17 2. I386h6

17

3. 1406

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