Professional Documents
Culture Documents
GARY S. MELTZER
cambridge university press
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To my beloved Jill, Emily, and Rebecca
v
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments page ix
Note on the Use of Greek xi
Introduction 1
Epilogue 223
Works Cited 229
General Index 241
Greek Citation Index 256
English Citation Index 260
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written during the enjoyable years I spent teaching at
Eckerd College, a lively, friendly, and intellectually engaged campus. I
owe a debt of gratitude to Dean Lloyd Chapin, who approved grants
that supported my research and took an active and informed interest
in my work. I am pleased to think that this book will be displayed in
his office alongside those written by other Eckerd authors. Among my
colleagues at the College I would like to thank Jewel Spears Brooker,
Howard Carter, and Carolyn Johnston for the confidence they placed
in my scholarly endeavors.
I am grateful to Eckerd College for granting me a hexennial leave
that allowed me to complete a draft of the entire manuscript. I was
fortunate to have spent two months of my leave as a visiting scholar at
the American Academy in Rome, a wonderful setting for research. As
I brought the manuscript through its final phase, the Core Human-
ities program at Villanova University provided me a stimulating and
congenial place to teach and discuss matters of common interest.
I would like to thank many others who helped bring this book to
fruition, including friends and colleagues who encouraged and inspired
me in its early stages: Curtis Breight, Lillian Doherty, Carol Gould,
Jim Lesher, and Tara Wallace. I benefited from helpful comments and
bibliographic suggestions offered by Karen Bassi, Tim Beal, David
Corey, Elizabeth Fisher, Jim Goetsch, Valerie Lester, Nancy Rabi-
nowitz, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, David Schindler, Froma Zeitlin,
and John Ziolkowski. I also benefited from the sharp-eyed editorial and
technical assistance offered by Susan Barnes, Natalie Bicknell, Brian
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
x
NOTE ON THE USE OF GREEK
xi
INTRODUCTION
1
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
2
Although Euripides first competed in the Athenian tragic festival, the City Dionysia, in
455 b.c., his first extant drama, the Alcestis, wasn’t produced until almost twenty years
later (438 b.c.); the last was the Bacchae (405 b.c.), staged after the playwright’s death in
407/406 b.c.
3
The Greek text for the Phoenician Women passages runs as follows:
,
!"#$
2
INTRODUCTION
3
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
5
Robin Waterfield, trans., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 211.
6
W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 182.
For a positive interpretation of Protagoras’ boast, see Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and
Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication, ed.
Thomas W. Benson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 110–
11, who points out that the “weaker” cause need not carry pejorative connotations:
Protagoras might be claiming to be able to help the weaker but just cause prevail over
the stronger but unjust one.
4
INTRODUCTION
Eteocles then gives the theoretical underpinning for his own claim
to justice by arguing that “nothing is like or equal among men / except
names – and names are not facts.” In rebutting Polyneices’ claim that
the “facts” of the case are plain to all, Eteocles draws a sophistic dis-
tinction between “facts” and “names.”7 The so-called facts trumpeted
by Polyneices are not grounded in reality; they are merely “names”
or words (signifiers) whose meaning (signified) differs for different
people. Far from being self-evident, the meaning of such terms as the
“beautiful” and the “wise” (or the “true” and the “just”) is subject to
dispute.
The debate between brothers, therefore, reveals several layers of
conflict; they disagree not only about the meaning of individual words
but also about the very possibility of arriving at clear, shared mean-
ings for words. Underlying these differences is a disagreement about
how language works and how meaning is made. Whereas Polynei-
ces assumes that the gods both define and dispense truth and justice,
Eteocles claims that meaning is constructed by human beings in the
political arena, through the “two-sided strife” of argument, debate,
philosophical discussion, and so on.8 Eteocles maintains, therefore, that
the so-called word of truth merely conveys his brother’s self-interest,
which is no more transcendent than his own position. For Eteocles,
language is an instrument that is inextricably linked to politics and
history.
The clash between the single, clear “word of truth” and the “two-
sided strife of debate” enacts the central agon of Euripidean drama: the
controversy over the phonocentric tradition that dominates the history
of Western philosophy from Plato to Saussure, according to Jacques
Derrida. This tradition is grounded in a “metaphysics of presence,”
which Derrida defines as a “system in which the central signified, the
7
Gorgias makes this distinction the third tenet of his treatise On Nature (or On What Is
Not): “The spoken word is our means of communication, but the spoken word is not
the same as substantial things and things with being. Therefore, it is not the case that
we communicate things with being to our neighbours; what we communicate is the
spoken word, which is different from these entities.” Translated by Waterfield, The First
Philosophers, p. 235.
8
The Greek phrase I translate as “the two-sided strife of debate” (
. . . ", 500)
is ambiguous, referring not just to debate but to any form of verbal contention.
5
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
9
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), p. 280. In this passage Derrida is actually defining this metaphysics by its
opposite, so I have removed the term “never” from his formulation.
10
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 20, 12.
11
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. and ed. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 22.
12
See Jacques Derrida, “The Pharmacy of Plato,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
13
Unless otherwise noted, translations of Plato come from Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters. Bollingen Series 71
6
INTRODUCTION
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). The Greek text is Plato, Opera, vol. 2,
ed. John Burnet. Rpt. 1941 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1901).
14
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289.
15
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 109–10.
16
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289.
17
For Derrida’s definition of the “metaphysics of presence” as the “exigent, powerful,
systematic, and irrepressible desire” for a “meaning . . . thinkable and possible outside of
all signifiers,” see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 49, 73. Elsewhere, in Writing
and Difference, p. 279, Derrida argues that this metaphysics involves “the determination
of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related
to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable
7
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
presence . . .” “Difference” as used by Derrida means the dispersal, deferral, and absence,
which, as the necessary conditions of both meaning and presence, negate the possibility
of any originary meaning or presence. For a fuller discussion of this broader concept of
differance, versus Saussure’s “difference,” see Of Grammatology, pp. 62–5.
18
On the movement from mythical to early logical thought, see Marcel Detienne, The
Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1996),
pp. 125–6: “Man no longer lived in an ambivalent world in which ‘contraries’ were
complementary and oppositions were ambiguous. He was now cast into a dualist world
with clear-cut oppositions.” Although I think Detienne somewhat overstates the case
for this historical shift, his analysis captures well the brothers’ diametrically opposed
positions.
19
In “Die Sinnekrise bei Euripides,” in Tradition und Geist: Gesammelte Essays zur Dichtung,
ed. Carl Becker (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1960), Karl Reinhardt argues
that the crisis of meaning dramatized in Euripides reflects the sophistic revolution of his
period.
8
INTRODUCTION
20
For this shift, see two books by Eric A. Havelock: The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its
Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Preface to Plato
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). I borrow the terms “song culture”
and “book culture” from John Herington, Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek
Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 3–4.
21
Two examples will suffice. In the Iliad Hector rebukes Poulydamas for interpreting a
bird-sign as a warning to the Trojans not to press their attack against the Greek ships
(12.231–50); Hector’s interpretation is later proven to be tragically wrong. In Herodotus’
Histories, the Athenians ask for a second oracular response from the Delphic priestess
when the first seems to foretell doom for their city-state at the hands of the Persians.
A controversy erupts over the proper interpretation of this second oracle (the famous
“wooden wall” oracle). After a vigorous debate, Themistocles’ interpretation finally
prevails (7.139–44).
9
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
22
Eric Havelock’s notion that a “literate revolution” occurred in fifth-century Greece,
although provocative, has been criticized not only for relying too heavily on an over-
simplified concept of literacy but also for creating a false dichotomy between orality and
literacy. See Andrew Ford, “From Letters to Literature: Reading the ‘Song Culture’ in
Classical Greece,” in Harvey Yunis, ed., Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in
Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 16, 21.
For a criticism of Havelock’s view, expressed in The Literate Revolution in Greece, that
writing initiated a revolutionary advance in abstract or rational thought in fifth-century
Athens, see Deborah Tarn Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in
Ancient Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Steiner argues that “writ-
ing is not a discovery that inevitably heralds in a new rational, skeptical, and objective
approach,” asserting that in the earliest references to writing in the literary and archaeo-
logical record, it retains the enigmatic character and ritualistic powers of nonalphabetic
signs (p. 5).
23
Waterfield, The First Philosophers, p. 285, sees an “undeniable” influence of Protagoras
on the anonymous sophistic treatise called Double Arguments (or Contrasting Arguments).
But he finds “truer repositories of his influence” in the debates dramatized in Euripides
and reported in Thucydides (p. 285, n. 2). In “The First Humanists,” Proceedings of the
Classical Association 65 (1988): 19, W. K. C. Guthrie asserts that Protagoras replaced the
criterion of truth with “a pragmatic one of advantage and disadvantage.”
10
INTRODUCTION
24
For a discussion of some of the difficulties interpreting Thucydidean speeches, which
the author himself acknowledges are not a verbatim account but an attempt to capture
the gist of what the original speakers said (1.22.1), see Harvey Yunis, “Writing for
Reading: Thucydides, Plato, and the Emergence of the Critical Reader,” in Harvey
Yunis, ed., Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture, pp. 201–4.
25
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951),
p. 189, cites the prosecutions of impiety that took place about 432 b.c. as evidence of
the strong Athenian backlash against the enlightenment.
26
8 %9 " / :( ,(%(#, /
%( *; < 8 < /
; (8=, >( ? / . ; 8 . . . (Frogs 971–5). Both Greek and
English versions of Aristophanes’ play are taken from Benjamin Bickley Rogers, trans.,
Aristophanes, In Three Volumes, vol. 2: The Peace, The Birds, The Frogs. The Loeb Classical
Library, ed. G. P. Goold. Rpt. 1979 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Aristophanes’ caricature of Euripides doubtless plays on prevailing negative stereotypes
about the playwright, who, with only five first prizes in the tragic competition, was rela-
tively unpopular during his lifetime. Aristophanes’ description of him as a logic-chopper
who employs “twists / And turns, and pleas and counterpleas” ()
%) ;
%() ; ("), 775; cf. ("8 957) recalls Polyneices’ reference to Eteocles’
“shifting, intricate interpretations” (
. . . !"#, 470).
11
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
A little earlier in the play, Euripides vaunts his ability to pick apart
his verses (860–4), a penchant that will come to be associated with
the Athenian theatergoers’ love of the subtleties of book-learning
(1109–14). Aeschylus, by contrast, represents the simple martial values
of the generation of Athenians who defeated the Persians at the Battle
of Marathon in 490 b.c. One detects in this contrast between the two
playwrights a nostalgia for a simpler, more virtuous age, one more
given to action than to ruminating and questioning.27
Euripides’ sustained, self-conscious examination of myth, of
rhetoric, and even of drama itself does distinguish him from his pre-
decessors and contributes to his widespread reputation as an icono-
clast.28 This reputation is evident at the very beginning of the contest
in the Frogs, when Euripides insists on praying to “private gods” of his
own (891), a reference to the skepticism about the nature and exis-
tence of the gods that pervades Euripidean drama. Elsewhere in the
play Aeschylus condemns Euripides not only for courting popularity
with lowlifes (771–6) but also for inspiring the citizens with a love of
debate and haranguing (1069–73). Euripides counters by boasting that
he is “democratic” (952) for giving significant parts to such female
27
Aristophanes’ portrait of an effete book culture, though exaggerated for comic effect,
does reflect a historical development that occurred in fifth-century Athens. The greater
availability of texts in the classical period shifted the focus from poetry’s role in cultivating
virtue to a focus on its aesthetic and formal qualities, according to Ford, “From Letters
to Literature,” pp. 19–20. For the view that “. . . Euripidean tragedy is not just a new
kind of writing, but reflects a new kind of reading,” see Ruth Scodel, “Euripides and
Apatê,” in Cabinet of the Muses, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1990), p. 85.
28
G. M. A. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1941), describes Euripides
as “the poet of a new age” who “shocked his contemporaries profoundly” (p. 6) and
as “a rebel and an innovator” (p. 26). Cf. similar descriptions of the playwright by
Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. 1 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 352; T. B. L. Webster, “Euripides: Traditionalist
and Innovator,” The Poetic Tradition: Essays on Greek, Latin, and English Poetry, ed. Don
Cameron Allen and Henry T. Rowell. The Percy Graeme Turnbull Memorial Lectures on
Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 39; and Stephen G.
Daitz, “Concepts of Freedom and Slavery in Euripides’ Hecuba,” Hermes 99 (1971):
226. For more recent examples, see Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 161, and D. J. Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists:
Some Dramatic Treatments of Philosophical Ideas (London: Duckworth, 1998), p. 9.
12
INTRODUCTION
29
Detienne, The Masters of Truth, p. 66; also see Friedrich Solmsen, “The ‘Gift’ of Speech
in Homer and Hesiod,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 85 (1954): 4–5.
30
Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989), p. 69. Ober argues that before the reforms of Solon in 594 b.c., the status of the
lower classes was equivalent to that of “foreign-born slaves” and that the poor “had no
forum for political action” (p. 60). My claim about the impact of the sophists must be
qualified by the fact that they generally charged fees for their teachings.
31
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 238–9.
13
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
32
Ibid., p. 239.
33
See, for example, the servant in the Helen who says, “. . . I do not have the name of
liberty / but have the heart.” . . . *
:", / 8 (730–1).
The old man in the Ion expresses a similar sentiment: “. . . A slave bears only this /
Disgrace: the name. In every other way / An honest slave is equal to the free.” @ %#"
:
( ,(: 8", / $ &
# ) *
8" / 3
, 2( *(
/ < (854–6). In the fourth century b.c. Aristotle conveys the
conventional view that some people are suited to be slaves by nature (Politics 1254a15–17).
See Aristotle, In Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. 21: Politics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb
Classical Library. Rpt. 1990 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932).
34
Grube, The Drama of Euripides, p. 30, asserts that all three of the great tragic playwrights
“consciously desired to convey a message to their contemporaries.”
35
Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists, p. 12, rightly points out that the playwright’s dra-
matic exploitation of sophistic material does not mean that he himself advocated such
views. Mary R. Lefkowitz, “‘Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides’ Dramas,” Classical
Quarterly n. s. 39.1 (1989): 72, makes a similar point about Euripides’ supposed skep-
ticism and disbelief in the gods. For a discussion of the ancient biographical traditions
that impute those views to Euripides, see another article by Lefkowitz, “Was Euripides
an Atheist?” Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, 3d series no. 5 (1987): 149–66.
14
INTRODUCTION
the skeptical comments certain characters make about the gods nec-
essarily mean that the plays themselves promote iconoclastic views.36
Indeed, the use of the new modes of thought obscures a fundamental
conservatism lying at the heart of Euripidean drama.
Although the stereotyping of Euripides as a radical innovator contin-
ues to strongly influence modern studies,37 a small but growing group
of contemporary critics does detect a conservative bent in his body of
work. Allan rightly criticizes the scholarly tendency to follow Aristo-
phanes’ lead in branding Euripides as a corrupt sophist. He argues
instead that “. . . Euripides, like Thucydides, is in fact morally conser-
vative in an important respect; that is, his works presuppose morality
not amorality.” The playwright’s “readiness even to challenge the new
thinking itself” is part of this conservatism.38
Lefkowitz also finds a conservative strain in Euripides, arguing that
his drama inculcates a traditional “lesson,” one conveyed by other
religious rituals as well: “. . . to do honour to the gods, and, in the
36
For a survey of the critical tendency to assume that Euripides’ plays subvert or challenge
traditional religious views, see Lefkowitz, “‘Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides’ Dra-
mas,” p. 71, n. 4. For a debunking of the stereotype of the sophists themselves as a group
of radical freethinkers, see William Allan, “Euripides and the Sophists: Society and the
Theatre of War,” in Martin Cropp, Kevin Lee, and David Sansone, eds., Euripides and
Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century. Illinois Classical Studies 24–5 (Champaign: Stipes
Publishing, 2000), pp. 148–9.
37
Zeitlin refers to the common critical perception of Euripidean drama as “[i]ronic, deca-
dent, ‘modern,’ even ‘post-modern’” in “The Closet of Masks: Role-Playing and Myth-
Making in the Orestes of Euripides,” Ramus 9.1 (1980): 51. A great many studies done
within the past few decades share this perception. See, for example, R. P. Winnington-
Ingram, “Euripides: Poiêtês Sophos,” Arethusa 2.2 (1969): 127–42; Helene Foley, Ritual
Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jacqueline
de Romilly, La Modernité d’Euripide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986); Ann
Norris Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1987); and Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Com-
memoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1993).
For a sense of the controversy that Euripides still generates, in spite of the prevailing
view of him as a radical innovator, see Ann Michelini, “Euripides: Conformist, Deviant,
Neo-Conservative?” Arion 5.1 (1997): 208–22.
38
Allan, “Euripides and the Sophists,” p. 155, n. 38. Similarly nuanced in its approach is
Foley’s discussion of the “increasingly futile” appeals to traditional morality in Euripidean
drama and the susceptibility of these appeals to “sophistic challenge.” See Helene P. Foley,
Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), pp. 290–1.
15
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
39
Lefkowitz, “‘Impiety’ and ‘Atheism’ in Euripides’ Dramas,” pp. 75, 72. Lefkowitz’s
article serves as a healthy corrective to stereotypical views about the radical nature of
Euripidean drama. But it is difficult to draw a univocal moral from plays with such
poignant depiction of human suffering at the hands of the gods, who are criticized so
pointedly.
40
David Kovacs, The Heroic Muse: Studies in the Hippolytus and Hecuba of Euripides
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), ix–x, 118. Notable among the small
number of studies predating Kovacs’ that detect a conservative ethos in Euripides are
those of Arrowsmith, Pucci, and Whitman. In Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Clouds,
The Birds, Lysistrata, The Frogs (New York: New American Library, 1984), trans. William
Arrowsmith et al., p. 161, Arrowsmith sees in the drama of both Aeschylus and Euripides
a conservative “attempt to harmonize mythology and morality.” In The Violence of Pity
in Euripides’ Medea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), Pietro Pucci detects in the
play (and in Euripidean drama generally) a conservative impulse to restore a lost sense of
mastery and presence. In Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), Cedric H. Whitman likewise finds in Euripides an attempt to
recreate a lost wholeness.
16
INTRODUCTION
41
4 " %&" "A, " 8" / #
( ,
(5 "1.
(Phoenician Women, 524–5)
42
Grube, The Drama of Euripides, p. 9.
43
Foley, Female Acts, p. 291, sees in the play’s concern with the abuse of power a reflection
of its immediate historical context: “Phoenissae was produced in circa 409, shortly after
17
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
the oligarchic revolution of 411 in which the disrespect of the oligarchs for traditional
nomoi and their perversion of public power for private ends were notorious.”
44
" * 1$ (Phoenician Women 1494). So runs Antigone’s direct address to her
brother.
18
INTRODUCTION
45
Friedrich Solmsen, Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1975), p. 76, asserts that utopian yearnings are a characteristic
feature of the Greek enlightenment.
46
In his wish Theseus in effect transfers to human discourse the revelatory power tradition-
ally attributed to divine speech. All three of these examples of nostalgia in characters’
speeches will subsequently be analyzed in greater detail. For another instance of the
yearning for a clear means of judging human character, see Euripides’ Electra 373–9.
47
For a study of these plays, which typically feature intricate plots and narrow escapes
from disaster, see Anne Pippin Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed
Reversal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
19
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
the Ion, which portrays Ion’s reunion with his long-lost mother, but not
a return home from abroad.) Read against the historical background
of a vicious civil war, these plots suggest a desire to restore the former
glory of an Athens victorious over the mighty Persians, united with
other Greek city-states against a barbarian foe.
The tragedies of Euripides present a particular problem of generic
classification for the modern reader, because the structure and tone of
their plots vary so widely. The extent to which the protagonists succeed
in fulfilling their nostalgic yearning accounts for much of the striking
contrast presented by the dramas under study. Far from realizing his
wish for a voice that could transcend duplicity, Theseus commits a
catastrophic error in judgment by unjustly condemning his son in the
Hippolytus (428 b.c.); by contrast, the heroine of the Helen (412 b.c.)
realizes her longing to restore her reputation and reunite with her
husband, accounting for the play’s happy ending. The denouement of
both dramas may well reflect the historical context in which they were
produced. Theseus’ error echoes the fear of betrayal and lack of trust,
even among family members, so prevalent in the Peloponnesian War,
whereas Helen’s rescue represents an escapist retreat from the painful
realities of that war.
Whether it finds expression as a resonant motif in individual
speeches, as an element of the plot, or as a pervasive mood, nostalgia
provides an important thematic and dramatic focus in the four plays
under study in this book. Although the yearning for a return home
(nostos) serves as an important structural element in the two later plays,
the Ion and the Helen, it also serves as a central, organizing theme in the
two earlier ones, the Hippolytus and the Hecuba. The nostos plot pat-
tern and the yearnings that accompany it appear in most of Euripides’
extant dramas.48
One may well ask why Euripidean characters would turn to the
mythic gods in their longing for a “just voice” and “word of truth.”
48
In “Fantasies of Return in Greek Tragedy and Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University
of California at Berkeley, 2005), Tyson Hausdoerffer suggests that the Andromache
(ca. 424 b.c.), in which Neoptolemus returns home, but as a corpse, presents a bitterly
ironic variation on the nostos plot (pp. 189–92). Hausdoerffer points out the presence of
the theme of return and nostos subplot in a range of other extant dramas of Euripides,
including Hecuba, Trojan Women, Alcestis, Hippolytus, Electra, and Orestes – not to mention
many of the fragmentary plays (pp. 68–9).
20
INTRODUCTION
Homer, Hesiod, and other early Greek poets present gods who are
often cruel, violent, petty, and deceptive. Indeed, the corpus of Euripi-
des contains many sharp condemnations of the arbitrary, cruel nature
of divine justice. However, the plays also dramatize the real dangers
posed by the loss of traditional beliefs – a fact that has not been properly
appreciated. Polyneices’ self-evident “word of truth” evokes an ideal-
ized “metaphysics of presence” that provided a strong ethical frame-
work for the denizens of a culture that, even in Euripides’ day, still
called on the gods “to witness and defend all sworn transactions” such
as oaths and entreaties.49 Although the intellectual elite may have ques-
tioned the existence of the gods, most Athenians continued to believe
in them and in their ability to transmit their will to mortals through a
voice or other sign.
A passage from the Apology of Xenophon, an author born about a
half century later than Euripides, illustrates that these beliefs persisted
into the fourth century b.c. Accused of impiety, Socrates denies that he
worships strange new gods of his own instead of the gods worshipped in
the city-state. He maintains that the voice of his guardian spirit, which
he alone can hear, is just another example of a religious phenomenon
widely familiar to his culture:
49
Deborah Boedeker, “Euripides’ Medea and the Vanity of BCDCE,” Classical Philology
86 (1991): 97.
50
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;
; "( 5:
, ; , >( " *%1 , L # ;
8%( ; M( (Xenophon, Apology 12.1–13.4). Both the English and the
21
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Greek versions of Xenophon’s Apology come from Xenophon, Anabasis Books IV–VII;
Symposium and Apology, trans. O. J. Todd, vol. 3 of 3. Loeb Classical Library, ed. T. E.
Page. Rpt. 1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922).
51
Detienne, The Masters of Truth, p. 39, speaks of this as the “true, deep meaning” of poetic
truth in the archaic age. For a critique of Detienne’s views on the connection between
truth and memory, see Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood
and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics, Michigan Monographs in Classical Antiquity (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 17–22. Pratt cites examples from archaic
poetry in which “the presence of memory may be entirely irrelevant to the speaking
of alêtheia” (p. 18), insofar as alêtheia “excludes not only forgetfulness but also inven-
tion, falsehood, fiction, intentional omission, insincerity, equivocation – anything that
might prevent the hearer’s perceiving accurately the subject matter under discussion . . .”
(p. 21).
The connection between truth and memory is nonetheless relevant to Polyneices’
claim to possess a divinely sanctioned “word of truth,” since his claim is based on the
gods having witnessed the history of his quarrel with his brother.
52
Detienne, The Masters of Truth, pp. 67, 70. For an examination of the connection Deti-
enne and other critics draw between archaic poets and truth telling, see Pratt, Lying and
Poetry. Pratt argues that archaic Greek poetry shows too much appreciation for artful
lying and inventive deception to support the claim that poetry and truth are inextricably
22
INTRODUCTION
linked. Detienne’s claims for the efficacious powers of “magicoreligious speech” (p. 70)
seem somewhat overstated as well. But the contrast he draws between the mythic and
sophistic views of language and truth evinces well the collision of worlds that Euripides
dramatizes so effectively.
53
Keimpe Algra et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 222.
54
Cf. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971), p. 8.
23
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
potentially double.55 Even though the gods knew the reality behind
appearances and could choose to share this knowledge with privileged
mortals, either directly or indirectly, the “truth” they dispensed always
had the potential of slipping into falsehood. As Detienne points out,
truth and falsehood were not polar opposites in archaic Greek thought
but were complementary.56 Perhaps the most famous example of this
doubleness is Apollo’s oracle, which always accurately foretold the
future, but only if an interpreter could correctly decipher its riddling,
ambiguous language.
The mythic tradition offers us many other examples besides Apollo’s
oracle to illustrate the duplicitous or misleading nature of divine speech
and signs. One could cite the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon
in Homer’s Iliad (2.1–36); the voice of Hesiod’s Muses, who “know
how to speak many falsehoods that resemble the truth”57 (perhaps the
prototype of the sophistic boast of being able to make the worse cause
appear to be the better); and the ever-present possibility of misreading
or failing to heed divine signs, oracles, and omens in epic and tragedy.
Furthermore, the gods often disguised themselves to test, trap, seduce,
or destroy mortals.58
55
The “two urns,” the one of blessings, the other of evils, from which Zeus dispenses
“gifts” to people is a case in point (see the parable told by Achilles in the Iliad 24.525–33).
56
For Detienne, The Masters of Truth, pp. 132–3, Polyneices’ notion that the truth is clear
and self-consistent reflects not mythological thought but an early stage of philosoph-
ical thought that defines truth in a more abstract and logical way. In fact, Detienne
argues that Polyneices’ concept resembles the views of the pre-Socratic philosopher
Parmenides and a certain “philosophicoreligious” sect of sixth-century b.c. thinkers.
Detienne’s argument is cogent if Polyneices’ concept is considered in the abstract, out
of its dramatic context. But, considered within that context, Polyneices’ “word of truth”
serves metaphorically to reflect a mythological worldview in which traditional forms of
speech such as oaths still held currency.
57
Hesiod, Theogony 27. The fuller context of the quotation reads: “We know how to
speak many falsehoods that resemble the truth, but we also know how to utter the truth,
when we wish” (my translation). The entire Greek quotation runs as follows: “4
=:
&
8% *:(
, / 4 , N’ *8
,
8 %":((”
(Theogony 27–8).
58
One thinks, for example, of the myths in which Zeus appears to Europa, Leda, and
Danaë in disguise; one also thinks of Homer. Athena’s deception of Hector is a climactic
moment in the Iliad (22.226–305), and at the beginning of the Odyssey the same goddess
visits Odysseus’ estate disguised as a mortal (1.96–324). Cf. the description, also in the
24
INTRODUCTION
Odyssey, of the gods who visit cities in disguise in order to see which men are law-abiding
and which are not (17.483–7).
59
George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1963), p. 36.
60
Jennifer Wise, Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), p. 26.
25
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
In the context of a culture that was still primarily oral, both the pre-
Socratic philosophers (ca. seventh to fifth century b.c.) and the sophists
(fifth century b.c.) challenged traditional views of the truth. Some of
the most important pre-Socratic philosophers to have questioned the
mythic explanations of the cosmos offered by Homer and Hesiod used
poetic language to convey their views. Anaximander, for example, who
posited the “infinite” as the source of the cosmos, reportedly used a
poetic style to write his book on nature sometime in the first half of the
sixth century b.c.61 The later sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes
used “the language of poetry” to call into question the portrayal of the
gods’ immoral conduct found in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod.62
The fragments of Heraclitus’ book that come down to us (ca. 500 b.c.)
use paradoxes and poetic figures to describe the divine logos that he
considers to be the origin and ordering principle of the cosmos.63
The fifth-century thinker Parmenides used epic meter to record his
claim to have been divinely inspired (as did Hesiod), but unlike him,
described the cosmos as an abstraction, Being, whose essential nature
could be apprehended only by logic.64
Just as many pre-Socratic philosophers relied on the poetic medium
favored by the “song culture” to convey their iconoclastic views, so the
sophists introduced their new technology of argumentation through
“public performances of their skills in prose,”65 competing for recog-
nition in the open-air marketplace of ideas: “They were also, like the
tragic poets and their actors, performers in a competitive culture, dis-
playing their wares at major festivals like the Olympic Games, and able
to command audiences throughout the Greek world.”66
Even though it took place in what was still a “performance culture”
at Athens,67 the intellectual revolution challenged the security and
61
John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy: The Chief Fragments
and Ancient Testimony, with Connecting Commentary (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1968),
pp. 23–4.
62
Ibid., pp. 54–5.
63
Ibid., pp. 94–9.
64
Ibid., pp. 114–17.
65
Yunis, Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture, p. 4.
66
Allan, “Euripides and the Sophists,” p. 146.
67
For the notion that classical Athens was a “performance culture,” see Simon Goldhill and
Robin Osborne, eds., Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
26
INTRODUCTION
68
Antigone 455 (my translation).
69
“What were you thinking of, overweening Euripides, when you hoped to press myth,
then in its last agony, into your service? It died under your violent hands . . . And even
as myth, music too died under your hands . . . And because you had deserted Dionysos,
you were in turn deserted by Apollo. Though you . . . burnished a sophistic dialectic for
the speeches of your heroes, they have only counterfeit passions and speak counterfeit
27
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
speeches.” With this rhapsodic fervor, Nietzsche condemns Euripides in The Birth of
Tragedy. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), p. 69. For an account of the pervasive
influence of Nietzsche’s negative judgment, see A. Henrichs, “The Last of the
Detractors: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Condemnation of Euripides,” Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Studies 27 (1986): 369–97. In “The Closet of Masks,” p. 51, Zeitlin refers
to Euripidean drama as evincing a “self-conscious awareness of a tradition which has
reached the end of its organic development.”
70
N. T. Croally, Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy. Cambridge
Classical Studies, ed. M. F. Burnyeat et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. 66, speaks of the “dismay at the proliferation of new languages” registered by
Thucydides, Aristophanes, and other writers of Euripides’ period.
28
INTRODUCTION
71
Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1998), p. 258.
72
Ibid., p. 10.
29
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
73
In describing the positions of opposing camps in the ancient and modern culture wars,
I do not mean to deny the existence of a much wider spectrum of political views, either
in Euripides’ day or our own; I only seek to emphasize the fact that political rhetoric
does become polarized in times of crisis.
30
INTRODUCTION
74
In “Condemnation without Absolutes,” New York Times, October 15, 2001, p. A23,
Stanley Fish plays the role of a modern-day Eteocles to President Bush’s Polyneices,
arguing against the possibility “of justifying our response to the attacks [of September 11]
in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies. Invoking
the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our cause wouldn’t be effective anyway
because our adversaries lay claim to the same language. (No one declares himself to be
an apostle of injustice.)” This dilemma has become particularly acute in the wake of the
prisoner abuse scandals that came to light in the spring of 2004.
For a conservative declaration of the need for “moral clarity,” see William J. Bennett,
Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
32
1
1
Translations of Homer’s epic come from The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Latti-
more (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
33
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
of Odysseus and his wife seems to satisfy not only their shared desire
for his return but also the reader’s desire to see good rewarded and evil
punished (in the form of the slaughter of the suitors who have taken
over Odysseus’ estate in his absence).2
People suffering from homesickness inevitably romanticize the
virtues of home, and, in Odysseus’ case, the allure of home is cer-
tainly enhanced by the wide variety of obstacles and dangers he must
overcome to arrive there, including a long sea voyage complete with
storms and shipwrecks, as well as encounters with cannibalistic tribes,
one-eyed monsters, and temptresses mortal and divine. Nor are his
troubles over once he finally reaches his destination, because he must
contend with a horde of young nobles who have taken over his estate
and are besieging his wife.
When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, has his first private audience
with his wife Penelope, he compares her to a beneficent king whose
just rule ensures happiness and prosperity for all under his reign:
2
Aristotle considers tragic playwrights who employ this double structure to be guilty of
pandering to their audience, since the pleasure it offers is more appropriate for comedy
than for tragedy (Poetics 1453a30–39). For references to the Greek text, see Aristotle, De
Arte Poetica Liber (Poetics), ed. Rudolf Kassel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
34
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
3
See William G. Thalmann, The Swineherd and the Bow: Representations of Class in the
Odyssey. Myth and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 283, and passim.
For a treatment of the “gender-specific assumptions operating in this myth of return and
recognition,” see Karen Bassi, Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient
Greece (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 121–2.
4
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 292. The loss of what Derrida calls the dream
of “full presence, the reassuring foundation” and the concomitant yearning to recover
“the absent origin” form a pervasive theme in Euripidean drama.
35
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
him – reciting the catalogue of ships and warriors that went to Troy
from Greece:
5
The Greek text for Iliad 2.484–93 runs as follows:
O P( , Q( C
: 1 (—
+ %&" *(, #"(8 , 4(8 #,
J 3
8 I : 8 4—
R J%' S) ; " /(.
T 0 *%9 A( 7A,
4 8 3 %
)((, 8 3 (' I,
6 "", #
8 /" *,
, 6 C
# Q(, S ,%'
%8", ( 2( + O E
/
$
"T N ) *"8 # " #(.
Translations of the Iliad come from Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Iliad of Homer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). The Greek text is Homer, Opera, vol. 1
(Iliad 1–12), ed. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen, 5 vols. 3d ed. Rpt. 1978 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1902).
6
In Acting Like Men, pp. 53–5, Karen Bassi speaks of “the Muses’ eternal and infinite pres-
ence” as guaranteeing their omniscience in this passage, which reflects a “logocentric
36
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
way for mortals to attain truth is through the gift of divine inspiration
or insight.7
In the Iliadic passage, the distinction between the speech of gods
and that of mortals stems from the contrast between divine and
human knowledge. The Muses’ voice, reflecting their direct, first-
hand knowledge of events, is originary; by contrast, the poet’s voice is
derivative, based as it is on the mere “rumour” of events. The passage
reminds us of the opposition drawn by Polyneices between the “word
of truth,” an unfaltering, transcendent word that perfectly captures
reality, and the “unjust argument,” a necessarily fallible human voice
that is irremediably divorced from truth.
Like Homer, the archaic poet Hesiod conveys the view that justice
is a divine gift and is transmitted through the voice of the gods or their
privileged human agents.8 In the Works and Days Hesiod speaks of
the voice of Justice that “cries out” against the “false proclamations”
of wrongdoers, who “twist the courses of justice” (256–62).9 This
pairing of voices, the one identified clearly as the voice of Justice and
the other as the voice of injustice, directly recalls Polyneices’ assertion.
ideal rooted in nostalgia and disenchantment.” Even Pratt, Lying and Poetry, p. 15, who
is at pains to challenge Detienne’s identification of the archaic poet as a “master of
truth,” concedes that this passage apparently equates poetic narrative with divine reve-
lation. Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 116, refers to Odysseus’ praise for the ability of the bard
Demodocus to sing with seeming first-hand knowledge of events long past (Odyssey
8.487–91).
7
The archaic belief that only the gods know truth is underlined by Chester G. Starr,
“Ideas of Truth in Early Greece,” La Parola del Passato 23 (1968): 351. In Conventions of
Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), pp. 148–9, William G. Thalmann speaks of the unbridgeable gap between divine
and human speech that results from the discrepancy in knowledge possessed by gods and
by mortals.
8
Eric A. Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in
Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 135, 213. Whereas references
to justice in early Greek literature use the metaphor of the voice, in an increasingly literate
age these references tend to appeal more to the eye: for this notion, see Jesper Svenbro,
Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993), pp. 114–16, 160.
9
Translations of Hesiod come from The Works and Days, Theogony, The Shield of Heracles,
trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978). The Greek
text of Hesiod is Theogonia, Opera et Dies; Scutum, ed. Friedrich Solmsen. Rpt. 1983
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
37
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
It also recalls Theseus’ wish that men should have a second, truthful
voice that could rebut their ordinary, deceptive voice. In Hesiod, the
“just voice” is clearly the voice of a goddess, the personification of
justice. In Homer, too, “A ‘justice,’ singular or plural (dikê, dikai), is
something spoken aloud.”10
The metaphysical traits that Polyneices associates with the divine
voice of truth – its plenitude, robustness, and self-sufficiency – also
find precedent in early Greek epic. According to the proem of Hesiod’s
Theogony, the Muses, the “mistresses of words” (28), “breathed a voice”
into the poet (29–32),11 a voice later described as “harmonious” and
unfaltering (39–40), as it is in the Iliadic passage. The Muses’ voice
transfers to the poet their own “power to sing the story of things / of
the future, and things past” (31–2), a power that validates the truth of
the poet’s song. Hesiod’s Muses also bestow their own harmonious,
sweet speech on nobles, allowing them to settle even great disputes
(81–7) – perhaps the prototypical example of a voice that “makes its
own case.” The Muses are capable of transferring the ethical qualities
of their discourse to men, allowing nobles to judge “with straight
decisions” and issue “unfaltering” declarations (86).12
Hesiod’s Works and Days tells us that Justice, the daughter of Zeus,
curses those nobles who render “crooked” judgments and decisions
(219, 221) and who “twist her in dealing” (224). If she is hurt by slan-
der, Justice tells her father Zeus of men’s “wicked purpose,” ensuring
the punishment of those who “twist the course of justice aslant” (260,
262). Hesiod also refers to the gods’ awareness of men’s “crooked deci-
sions” (251), aided by “thirty thousand immortal spirits” who report
to them. Conversely, though, Justice blesses those who “issue straight
decisions” (225). The Hesiodic metaphor of straight and crooked
10
Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice, p. 135.
11
*8 ( 8 6 / 8( . . . (Theogony, 31–2). So the narrator describes receiv-
ing the breath of divine inspiration.
12
The supposed truthfulness and straightness of the Muses’ voice in these references must
be qualified by the claim they make earlier “to speak many falsehoods that resemble
the truth” (Theogony 27; my translation). As Pratt points out, the longer passage from
which this quotation is drawn (Theogony 22–35) is “riddled with notorious interpretive
problems” (see Lying and Poetry, p. 107, n. 12, for a partial bibliography). For Pratt,
Hesiod’s description of the double-edged nature of the Muses’ speech “suggests a riddle
that reveals . . . the nature of poetry, its dual character, its peculiar status with regard to
truth” (p. 110).
38
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
speech anticipates the contrast that Polyneices draws between his own
direct, plain speech and the indirect, shifting speech of his brother.
As Pucci argues: “The truthful mythos of Polyneices, therefore, pre-
supposes the distinctions already made by Hesiod between a straight,
unerring discourse mirroring things as they are and a crooked, false
logos, deviating from things.”13
One finds in later archaic poetry other examples of the triumph of a
voice of truth over a devious voice whose injustice is made apparent to
all. The Athenian lawgiver and poet Solon, writing in the sixth century
b.c., employs the same metaphor of straightness when he speaks of
“fitting justice straight.”14 And in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,
the newly born god declares that his mission is to “declare to men the
unfailing will of Zeus” (132).15 The Greek for “unfailing” (nêmertea,
132) in the phrase “unfailing will,” which can also be translated as
“unerring,” also evokes the metaphor of straightness. The same Greek
phrase recurs in the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, in which Apollo
promises to dispense unfailing knowledge of the future to mortals from
his oracle (252).16
Apollo’s ability to reproduce reality through his spoken discourse is
again evident in Pindar’s Olympian Ode 8. Seeing a vision of a snake
rearing up on a rampart, alongside two others who die, Apollo trans-
lates the vision into “plain word[s]” (46) that convey the will of Zeus:
“Hero, Pergamos shall be taken where your hands have wrought.
So speaks to me this vision sent
by Kronos’ deep-thundering son, even Zeus.” (42–4)17
13
Pietro Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1980), p. 80.
14
For a comment on Solon’s use of the metaphor of straightness, see Havelock, The Greek
Concept of Justice, p. 253. Translations of Pindar come from Richmond Lattimore, trans.,
The Odes of Pindar, 2d ed. 1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). The
Greek text comes from Pindari Carmina, cum Fragmentis, ed. C. M. Bowra (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1935).
15
["A(] "1 ( S "8 5
A (Homeric Hymn to Delı́an Apollo, 132).
Both the Greek and English texts of the Homeric Hymns come from Hugh G. Evelyn-
White, trans., Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica. The Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
16
The etymology of the Greek for “unfailing” or “unerring” (negative plus the verb
"#) implies the straight path of an arrow or spear to its mark.
17
“K8"% ; , U", " *"%(
($ / V *; #(
8%
W" / 3 5"%: S'$” (Olympian Ode 8.42–4).
39
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Here, Hesiod sets forth the idealistic notion that justice and truth can
be attained through right argument and honest oaths, and that people
18
' 3 & : / =8 %( . . . (Olympian Ode 6.66–7).
40
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
19
Hesiod’s optimistic vision, which nostalgically evokes a kind of Golden Age, must be
understood in the context of the moralistic aims of his poem. This passage once more
reinforces the idea that the strain of nostalgia found in Euripides can be traced back to
the beginnings of Greek literature.
20
As translated by David Grene in Aeschylus 2. Four Tragedies: The Suppliant Maidens, The
Persians, Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed.
David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).
41
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
21
The translation of Sophocles, by Robert Fitzgerald, comes from Sophocles 1. Three
Tragedies: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, in The Complete Greek Tragedies,
ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954).
22
Cf. Pucci, The Violence of Pity, p. 80, and Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 50. For the identity of truth and
justice in Plato’s Socrates, see Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice, p. 310.
23
F. D. Harvey, “Literacy in the Athenian Democracy,” Revue des Etudes Grecques 79.2
(1966): 588.
24
Deborah Boedeker, “Euripides’ Medea and the Vanity of BCDCE,” Classical Philology
86 (1991): 97. For an account of how the “song culture” still prevailed in classical Athens,
even as growing literacy changed the way that culture was viewed and transmitted, see
Ford, “From Letters to Literature.”
Most scholars agree with Harvey, “Literacy in the Athenian Democracy,” pp. 588,
603, that Athenian society was organized around the spoken word. But they disagree
about the extent of literacy that prevailed in classical Athens. Against the view that
literacy was widespread taken by Harvey (p. 628) and Havelock, The Literate Revolution
in Greece, see Ford, “From Letters to Literature,” pp. 24–5, and William V. Harris, Ancient
Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), who both believe that the
archaeological and literary evidence fails to support such a conclusion. For Harris, the
marked increase in the public use of written documents in the period does not necessarily
translate into evidence of widespread literacy (pp. 65, 114): he estimates that only about
5–10 percent of the citizenry of Attica was literate (p. 114). The controversy stems in
42
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
large part from the difficulty of defining precisely what is meant by the term “literacy.”
Even in late-fourth-century Athens, the majority of the population may have been able
to read and write only proper names, according to Harris (p. 114, passim).
25
Cf. Wise, Dionysus Writes, p. 26.
26
Ibid., p. 26.
27
H. D. Rankin, Sophists, Socratics and Cynics (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983), p. 92.
43
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Eteocles’ claim that men construct their own meaning recalls the
Protagorean dictum that “[o]f all things the measure is man.”28 Accord-
ing to this dictum, which epitomizes the philosophy of the Greek
enlightenment, human beings become the makers and “measure” of
language, values, and reality itself. Protagoras’ radical skepticism and
subjectivity emerge clearly from Farrar’s interpretation of his dictum:
“We may never know what the cosmos is like; the reality to which
we do have access is our personal experience. This is suggested by
the emphasis of Protagoras’ formulation: man is the measure and the
measure of all things.”29
The deconstruction of the divine voice of truth gave the sophists the
freedom both to challenge traditional hierarchies and to validate newly
emerging views of truth. Eteocles’ claim that verbal strife is inevitable
and irresolvable recalls the Protagorean aphorism mentioned earlier:
“[T]here are two contradictory arguments about everything.”30 Pro-
tagoras’ assertion, which “sounds a keynote for much fifth-century
discussion” in ancient Athenian culture, represents a dramatic realign-
ment of “the criteria of truth, probability and proof.”31
Although critics such as Plato’s Socrates attacked the sophistic
fondness for double arguments as inherently immoral, proponents
28
‘ # "# 8" *(; " , . . . ’ The Greek comes from Hermann
Diels and Walther Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, griechisch und deutsch,
vol. 2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1935), p. 263 (DK 80B1). Translated by Robinson, An Intro-
duction to Early Greek Philosophy, p. 245, who notes that Protagoras’ aphorism was report-
edly the opening line of his book, On Truth.
29
Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical
Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 48. Corey also underlines the
dramatic scope of Protagoras’ “most memorable lines”: “The all-encompassing quality is
particularly pronounced in the Greek, where the first word of the man-measure fragment
is not ‘man,’ but ‘everything’ (pantôn) – thus Protagoras’ book began: Of all things, the
measure (in some vague yet intriguing sense) is man (in an unspecified sense).” See David
D. Corey, “The Sophist Protagoras in Plato’s Theaetetus,” paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D. C. (Septem-
ber 3, 2005), p. 3.
30
Translated by Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers, p. 211. This idea finds a close
parallel in a fragment of a Euripidean drama, Antiope: “If one were clever at speaking,
one could develop a contest of double arguments on every topic.” *
"#% (()
'% / %) , ,
8% 4 (' (my translation).
See fragment 189 in Augustus Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1964), p. 416–7.
31
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 230–1.
44
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
32
Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1954), pp. 233–4.
33
Guthrie, “The First Humanists,” p. 20.
34
Barbara E. Goff, The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence, and Language in Euripides’
Hippolytus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 79.
45
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
In setting out the aims and purpose of his history, Thucydides also
expresses confidence in the power of deliberation and rational assess-
ment of data. He announces a new, critical concept of historical truth
that is based on the “plainest” evidence and leads to “reasonably accu-
rate” conclusions (1.21). This evidence is superior to “that of the
poets . . . or of the prose chronicles,” which may be more pleasing
to hear but which cannot be tested or cross-questioned (anekselenkta,
1.21), a hermeneutic principle insisted on by Eteocles. In discussing
his methodology for reporting live speech, Thucydides adopts a new
form of truth – the sophistic criterion of probability or likelihood –
to replace the certainty conveyed by the living word of truth:
I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches
which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the
same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible
to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers
say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation. (1.22)
35
Bassi, Acting Like Men, p. 88.
46
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
The “clear view” of the patterns of human events that Thucydides promises
his critical reader (1.22.4) is not clear or transparent in any simple sense. . . . It
is, rather, a multifaceted glimpse into the multiplicity of events attained by
the reader; therein, for Thucydides, lies its utility.
36
Harvey Yunis, “Writing for Reading: Thucydides, Plato, and the Emergence of the
Critical Reader,” in Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture, p. 204.
37
Guthrie, The Sophists, pp. 178–9.
38
Guthrie, “The First Humanists,” p. 21.
47
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
. . . there is, [the rhetoricians] maintain, absolutely no need for the budding
orator to concern himself with the truth about what is just or good conduct,
nor indeed about who are just and good men whether by nature or education.
In the law courts nobody cares a rap for the truth about these matters, but
only about what is plausible. (272d–e)
But the truth that Socrates argues for also represents a break from the
mythological “word of truth” in favor of a new hermeneutic mode
that employs “two-sided verbal strife”: the philosophical dialectic. Like
Thucydides, Plato expresses a great deal of confidence in the capacity
of human reason to reach accurate conclusions by weighing contra-
dictory claims and evidence. As Goldhill argues, the ability to render
a rational account of a subject, as well as to give a clear, consistent
definition of universal terms, is “for Plato too an essential part of
knowledge.”39
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates expresses full confidence in the eventual
triumph of the word of truth in the dialectical exchange of voices:
it is “impossible” for the truth to be bested in argument, because
“[t]he truth is never refuted” (473b).40 This confident assertion implies
that the “word of truth” is capable of making its own case without
needing help from any external source. A “single truth, a single idea
of the good” seems to emerge from Plato’s dialogues, as a result of his
“attempt to create for his own fiction the clear moral center and unitary
voice that he finds lacking in less discriminating artists,” according to
Pratt.41
39
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, p. 230.
40
%&"
3 8 *
8% (Gorgias 473b10–11). For the Greek text, see Plato,
Opera, vol. 3, ed. John Burnet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899).
41
Pratt, Lying and Poetry, p. 155. Pratt’s claim that “the figure of Socrates dominate[s] all
other speakers” in Plato’s works (p. 155) is a generalization that could well be contested,
however, given the widely disparate roles played by Socrates in the early versus the late
dialogues.
48
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
The texts of Thucydides and Plato therefore posit the victory of the
new logos of reason and analysis over the old muthos of story and myth.
The confidence they put in their methodologies for attaining truth –
or a reasonable approximation of it – rivals the confidence Polyneices
puts in his transcendent “word of truth.”
The triumph of reason, logic, and probability, seen as both liberating
and progressive by some, represented a dangerous, anarchic state of
affairs for others. The “realignment of the criteria of truth, probability,
and proof ” produced greater anxiety along with greater confidence in
man and in “rational progress.”42 If “two-sided verbal strife” can be
used to argue both for and against the same proposition, without regard
to the justice of the matter, what common ground of morality remains?
Guthrie describes the practical consequences of the sophists’ teaching
on courtroom tactics: “Since there was no absolute or universal truth,
no one needed to consider, before attempting to make an individual, a
jury or a state change its mind, whether or not he would be persuading
them of a truer state of affairs.”43
Critics of the Greek enlightenment expressed concern that sophistic
modes of argument could be used to overthrow established values, “to
reverse the normal order of things.”44 Because the use of “double
arguments” necessarily involves the speaker in a play of “difference
and contradiction,”45 the “word of truth” no longer stands alone as
an irrefutable voice of authority; it no longer makes its own case. If
the absence of a transcendent voice of authority means that men have
in common only the names of things, could not each individual – or
group – define truth and justice in a self-serving way?
An argument made by the sophist Gorgias in On Nature draws the
same sharp distinction between words and things made by Eteocles:
“We do not, therefore, indicate existing things to our fellow men but
words, which are different from real things.”46 Gorgias elaborates on
42
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 201–2. According to Havelock, The Greek Concept
of Justice, p. 320, the upheaval in civic roles that occurred in the increasingly literate polis
contributed to this anxiety.
43
Guthrie, “The First Humanists,” p. 19.
44
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, p. 232.
45
Ibid., p. 231.
46
Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy, p. 298.
49
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
47
, 3 N / & )
'% 6
A ) "% "# %8(
:( [;] "#, " 0 4 "( ? ) ,"8$ * 6 3
L . . . The Greek is found in Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 2, pp. 302–3 (DK 82B11a). Passage from Gorgias’ Palamedes translated by Guthrie,
“The First Humanists,” p. 22.
48
This and subsequent passages from On Truth are taken from Robinson, An Introduction
to Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 250–1.
50
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
to obey the laws of nature than to obey the laws of the city, since
disobeying the laws of nature, which are in force at all times, is an
unmitigated evil, whereas disobeying the laws of the city injures a
man only if he happens to be caught. The laws of nature come to
represent a higher truth than the laws of the city: “Justice falls down
in a heap of fallacies: only nature is beneficial.”49 Antiphon succeeds
not only in deconstructing the traditional concept of justice but also
in elevating the concept of personal advantage to the status of a moral
“good.” His line of argument recalls Eteocles’ praise of tyranny as a
“good” and his convenient rationalization of injustice: “If one must
do a wrong, it’s best to do it / pursuing power – otherwise let’s have
virtue.”
Anxiety about the destructive impact of such “shifting, intricate
interpretations,” along with a yearning for a simple voice that could
transcend them, finds expression in other contemporary texts from
Euripides’ era. The agon between the Old and New Education in
Aristophanes’ Clouds (428 b.c.), Thucydides’ account of civil war on
Corcyra (427 b.c), and Plato’s myth of the origin of writing in the
Phaedrus (early fourth century)50 serve as illustrative examples. These
texts, representing the genres of comedy, history, and philosophy,
all convey anxiety about the prevalent new modes of argument and
debate. All of them stage, directly or indirectly, an agon between a
living, spoken, and originary “word of truth” or “just voice” and an
“unjust argument” that is derivative, duplicitous, and dependent on
rhetoric or writing to make its case.
As in Euripides’ Phoenician Women, the “unjust voice” or argu-
ment is portrayed as something new or added onto the originary
voice – a supplement to it, in Derridean terms. In fact, Derrida’s
description of the opposition drawn in the Phaedrus between spoken
and written discourse characterizes well the oppositions drawn in the
other texts under discussion: the “word of truth” is “natural, living,
49
Rankin, Sophists, Socratics and Cynics, p. 85.
50
The date of the dialogue is uncertain, but probably falls “fairly late in the middle
period,” sometime after the Republic, according to W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato, The Man
and His Dialogues. Earlier Period. Vol. 4 of A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 396.
51
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
51
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 149.
52
See, for example, the parabasis of the Clouds (518–62), in which the chorus leader,
serving as a mouthpiece for the poet, claims that his comedies deserve first place in the
dramatic competition because they are novel and ingenious (545–8).
53
In Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966), Charles H. Kahn argues that Plato “develop[ed]
the Socratic dialogue as a major literary form” (xv) and created the “‘realistic’ historical
dialogue” (p. 35). Plato clearly revolutionized the form of the philosophical dialogue. As
Kahn states, “He was the only Socratic writer to utilize the dialogue form as the device
for presenting a full-scale philosophical world view” (xiv).
52
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
the agon between these opposing worldviews plays out in each of the
three texts under examination.
Aristophanes’ comedy, the Clouds, presents Socrates as the archety-
pal sophist who instructs pupils in the art of making the worse cause
prevail over the better. His star pupil in the play is a young man who
wishes to learn to argue his way out of large gambling debts. The
most dramatic demonstration of Socrates’ pedagogical method comes
in his staging of a contest between “Right Logic” (or “Just Argu-
ment”) and “Wrong Logic” (or “Unjust Argument”) in which each
side uses its strongest arguments to refute the other.54 Wrong Logic
promises to refute Right Logic “[b]y original thought” (896), whereas
Right Logic promises to “smash” Wrong Logic’s lies “[b]y speaking
the Truth” (898–9), which is “[w]ith the Gods in the air” (903). The
eventual triumph of the New Education through the use of specious
logic represents a dramatic, caricatured version of the “deconstruc-
tion” of justice performed by Antiphon.
Like Polyneices, who argues on behalf of traditional concepts of
morality, “Right Logic” in the Clouds argues on behalf of the education
offered “in Athens of yore / When Honour and Truth were in fashion
with youth and Sobriety bloomed on our shore” (961–2).55 Right
Logic’s praise of a “manly old air all simple and bare” (969) and of
“Modesty, simple and true” (995) recalls Polyneices’ emphasis on the
directness, clarity, and simplicity of the self-evident “word of truth”
he is espousing. The emphasis on the simplicity of traditional music, as
opposed to the “intricate twistings” of the new music (970), parallels
the opposition Polyneices draws between the “single and plain” word
of truth and the “shifting, intricate” nature of the unjust argument.
Wrong Logic, denying that there ever “was Justice or Truth” (900–
1), cleverly points out the inconsistencies in Right Logic’s argument:
if the gods mete out justice, how did Zeus escape punishment for
imprisoning his father (904–6)? In the scene’s culminating debate,
54
Translation of The Clouds is by Benjamin Bickley Rogers, Aristophanes, In Three Volumes,
vol. I: The Acharnians, The Clouds, The Knights, The Wasps. The Loeb Classical Library,
ed. G. P. Goold. Rpt. 1982 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924).
55
[
8G 6 " ] X 8, / 2 *%9 &
8% ?
; ("(: '( (Clouds 961–2).
53
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
56
Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy, p. 267: “God is stronger than man
in might and wisdom and every other respect. If, then, we are to posit Fate or God as
the reason, we must absolve Helen of her ill-repute.” Gorgias also defends Helen by
arguing that if she had been persuaded by Paris to elope with him, she would similarly
be exempt from blame, because persuasion has godlike powers.
57
In his edition of the play, Aristophanes: Clouds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 227,
n. on 1084, K. J. Dover points out that the term ": " is employed in the lines
that follow “as a general term of abuse . . . implying enlargement of the anus by habitual
subjection to anal coitus.”
58
The link between what Zeitlin calls “sophistic and erotic persuasion” is also found in
Gorgias’ Encomium on Helen, of course. For the “overlapping” of these forms of per-
suasion in Euripides’ Hecuba, see Froma I. Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe and the Somatics
of Dionysiac Drama,” Ramus 20 (1991): 77. Cf. Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman:
Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.
131, for a discussion of this link in the Hippolytus.
54
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
59
For a discussion of the connection between Euripides and book learning, and for the
tradition that portrays him “as a lifelong book collector,” see Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ,
pp. 210–12.
60
Bassi, Acting Like Men, p. 50. Bassi argues that “the valorization of the hoplite warrior
is part of the nostalgic enterprise of Athenian self-representation,” mentioning the
“idealized warrior” described by “Aeschylus” in the Frogs (pp. 214–15).
55
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
morals that would overtake the “whole of the Hellenic world” (3.82).
In fact other cities, hearing of what had happened elsewhere, indulged
in “still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elab-
oration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in
revenge” (3.82). These excessive actions, which transgressed the nor-
mal boundaries of civilized behavior, also corrupted normal linguistic
usage:
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual
meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was
now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member;
to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a
coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly
character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was
totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man,
and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-
defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and
anyone who objected to them became a suspect. (3.82)61
61
; 6 , G( ) 7# * & "% A
56
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
For Thucydides, the internecine civil wars that broke out in various
city-states caused a widespread corruption of morals:
As a result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character
throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which
is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality
and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically
hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. (3.83)64
The notion that human nature is fixed and invariable conflicts with
his wistful remark that a “simple way of looking at things” existed in
the past but exists no more.
64
L -( ,8 8( " & & (#( ZP
A
< %1 < ( * ;
T A%$ (Thucydides, History 3.83.1–2).
65
A point suggested to me by an anonymous referee.
57
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
58
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
68
. . . # ("8 * "'Y, "
59
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
70
Cf. Herington, Poetry into Drama, p. 123, who argues that “the early Attic tragedians
were, and were thought to be, the heirs of the entire preceding poetic tradition, so far
as verse technique was concerned.” But Herington also sees Attic tragedy as “mark[ing]
an end,” because it culminates a long tradition of poetic competitions dating back to
the eighth century b.c. (p. 9). Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice, p. 277, argues that
the language of tragedy – particularly its use of predication – shows increasing reliance
on the written word. In Dionysus Writes, p. 227, Jennifer Wise sees tragedy as reflecting
both the end of one tradition and the beginning of another.
71
Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1986), pp. 105–6; see Segal, p. 80, n. 15, for a bibliography on the question of
literacy in classical Athens.
72
Ibid., p. 79. Cf. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece, p. 116, who makes a
similar argument about the power of voice to evoke presence.
73
Cf. Rocco, Tragedy and Enlightenment, p. 166. Of course, Plato used the fact that tragedy
is a representational art as one of the arguments for censoring it in his ideal state (Republic
10.595a, 602b, 606e–607a, and passim).
60
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
74
Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, pp. 80–1.
75
For the connection between “writing and emotional interiority” in an oral culture,
see Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, p. 81. For the importance of writing and letters
in Euripidean drama and the playwright’s legendary connection with books, see Wise,
Dionysus Writes, pp. 13, 157, and 196–8.
76
For a discussion of the tradition that Euripides had his own private library, see Knox,
“Books and Readers,” p. 9.
77
Cf. Frogs 1155–7, when Euripides criticizes Aeschylus for repeating himself – perhaps an
implicit criticism of Aeschylus’ reliance on the formulaic high diction of epic as against
Euripides’ own use of conversational language (1056–8).
78
Froma I. Zeitlin. “The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in the
Hippolytus,” in Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Peter Burian
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), p. 84.
61
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
79
See Ann L. T. Bergren, “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,” Arethusa
16 (1983): 82, and passim.
80
Ibid., p. 78.
62
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
For Pucci, the portrait of the first woman is closely associated with
rhetoric: Pandora is at once “the ‘figure’ of the origin and the origin
of the ‘figure.’”82
Euripides inherits the tradition that associates women with rhetoric
and difference, with duplicity and artifice. But he does not uncritically
accept the misogynistic elements of this tradition. Instead, he uses
women’s traditional association with “double speaking” to expose and
explore contemporary anxieties about sophistry and other aspects of
the intellectual revolution.83 Indeed, female characters in Euripidean
drama express a sophisticated awareness of – and anxiety about – the
role of rhetoric in the polis, the potential duplicity of language, and
the problem of difference. Euripides’ female protagonists, and even
some minor characters such as the nurse in Hippolytus, are eloquent,
81
Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry, p. 100.
82
Ibid.
83
In Spoken Like a Woman, p. 7, Laura McClure makes a similar assertion about the female
characters in the Greek dramas she is investigating (including Euripides’ Hippolytus): that
they make a comment about the role and status of persuasion in the Athenian democracy.
I would take issue with the conclusion arrived at by some otherwise perceptive feminist
critics that Euripides’ dramas inevitably end up reinforcing patriarchal agendas; see, for
example, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993). I would argue instead that they
can serve to call those agendas into question, at least in part. As Foley, Female Acts, p. 15,
argues, women’s voices in tragedy “bring into the forefront neglected or marginalized
political and social concerns.”
63
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
64
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
the fact that she leaves this note attached to her body also suggests a
link between women’s speech, their bodies, and the potential duplic-
ity of rhetoric or writing. Like Pandora’s, Phaedra’s body becomes a
complex and double signifier that evokes Polyneices’ description of
rhetoric as shifting and intricate. The analogy between rhetoric, writ-
ing, and women’s bodies finds expression in the pervasive metaphor in
Greek culture that describes a woman’s body as “tablet folded up on
itself, the papyrus that must be unfolded to be deciphered.”85 Phae-
dra’s duplicity seems to confirm Hippolytus’ judgment of women as a
“coin which men find counterfeit” (616). But the play’s sympathetic
characterization of Phaedra’s struggle, as well as its depiction of The-
seus and Hippolytus as “double speakers” in their own right, does not
allow the audience to condemn her alone as “counterfeit.”
Although capable of employing duplicity themselves, Euripides’
female characters also effectively criticize the duplicity of men and
gods. Medea, for example, delivers a diatribe against Jason’s duplicity
that attests to the loss of character, the loss of faith in the old gods, and
the crisis of meaning in the period in which Euripides was writing.
Medea uses the metaphor of the counterfeit coin to indict Jason for
his betrayal of her:
Medea’s wish for a sign that would have allowed her to detect Jason’s
scheming character echoes Theseus’ wish in the Hippolytus. Jason’s
85
Page duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 130.
86
The Greek text for Medea 516–19 runs as follows:
] ^, 6 "( 3 _ 5
/ <
A" "1 ( ` ( (,
") 2Y "6 8,
; "6" * 8 (1;
For the Greek text of the Medea, see Euripidis Fabulae, vol. 1, ed. Gilbert Murray. Rpt.
1974 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
65
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
failure to honor his word epitomizes the felt loss of respect for divinely
sanctioned speech and morality in Euripides’ contemporary culture.
Medea’s indictment of the gods for their failure to provide a “sure
method” of distinguishing “pure” from “counterfeit” character signals
the wider loss of faith in the gods. Boedeker has argued persuasively
that Jason’s breaking of oaths and pledges he made to Medea violates the
“universe of human expectations for trust and open communication”
expected in an oral culture.87
Medea’s yearning represents an ironic critique of tradition in that
she assigns to Jason the traditional female role of telling “falsehoods
that resemble the truth” (Hesiod, Theogony 27). Portraying herself as a
victim of Jason’s treacherous “double speaking,” she assumes the tradi-
tional male role of heroic avenger of injustice. The chorus’ critique of
Jason turns into a condemnation of the tradition of misogyny in Greek
poetry that unfairly portrays women as deceptive and untrustworthy.
The chorus sings:
87
Boedeker, “Euripides’ Medea,” pp. 97, 112. For the belief in the importance of oaths,
see Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice, pp. 213, 219.
88
The Greek text for Medea 410–20 runs as follows:
) F") "( %,
; ; # #
("8.
"#( 3 '
5
, )
8 ( ""$
& *&
5& ("8=( -$
" & %Y %8$
8 (8
# % aG.
66
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
voice” for themselves and assign the “unjust voice” to men. Creusa
and the chorus in Euripides’ Ion will issue a similar critique of a male-
dominated poetic tradition.
The questions these female characters raise, directly or indirectly,
have important political ramifications in the Athenian polis, especially
in the context of the crisis of values taking place in the Peloponnesian
War. In an era in which oaths are violated and the laws of gods are not
respected, how can the truth of someone’s character, his trustworthi-
ness, be ascertained? Are the tools of the young democracy – the tools
of logic and double arguments, trials, and cross-examination – helpful
or harmful in uncovering truth? How acute is the danger posed by
the newfound ability to argue a shameful cause well? Are traditional
sources of authority about the role and status of men and women still
a reliable guide to human conduct and character?
Their use not only of “semiotic power” but also of artifice and illu-
sion allies Euripides’ female characters with epistemological inquiry –
and with the workings of drama itself. A late play of Euripides, the
Helen, presents an intriguing mix of political, philosophical, and liter-
ary variations on the theme of the search for a lost voice of truth. In
a radical revision of tradition, Euripides presents Helen of Troy not as
the adulteress whose betrayal of Menelaus caused the Trojan War, but
as a victim of the gods’ duplicity and men’s false rumors. According to
Euripides, Hera created a phantom double of Helen who betrayed her
husband by going to Troy, while the real Helen was spirited away to
Egypt by Hermes. When Menelaus comes to Egypt on his way home
from Troy, Helen is faced with the problem of convincing him that
she, and not her phantom double, is the authentic Helen. For Euripi-
des’ Helen, the poetic tradition of Homer is not a voice of sacred truth
but a duplicitous voice of vile slander. The suspense of the play ini-
tially hinges, therefore, on the question of how Helen can refute her
duplicitous double, who personifies the worse cause triumphing over
the better. As the play unfolds, the question assumes a self-referentially
theatrical dimension: How can the playwright refute his duplicitous
double, the Greek poetic tradition that offers a very different account
of Helen?
In the Helen and the other plays under investigation here, the
female body takes on a pivotal role in the Euripidean investigation
67
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
89
Cf. Karen Bassi, “Tradition, Invention, and Recognition in Euripides’ Helen,” conference
paper, American Philological Association Annual Meeting (1989) 2. For a discussion of
the complex, self-referential treatment of Helen’s beauty in Euripides’ Trojan Women, see
Nancy Worman, The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2002), pp. 125–33.
90
Although the feminist slant of these questions may seem anachronistic, I would maintain
that the plays invite the audience to ask them, even if Euripides’ age was far less inclined
than our own to explore their implications.
68
THE “JUST VOICE” AND “WORD OF TRUTH”
91
The Bacchae represents a notable exception to this assertion.
70
2
1
Laura McClure, Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 157.
71
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
2
The Greek text for Hippolytus 925–31 runs as follows:
, " 5"( )
A"
(8 ( ; #%( "),
2(
A *( 2 6
,
((# & # "1 ,
6 3 6 2 *:%,
X J "( *G
8%
" , 0 \ 1.
The Greek text used is that of W. S. Barrett, ed., Euripides: Hippolytos (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1964), except that iota subscripts will be used. When not otherwise
noted (as here), translations are, with minor modifications, by David Grene in Euripides
1. Four Tragedies: Alcestis, The Medea, The Heracleidae, Hippolytus, in The Complete Greek
Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1955).
3
Cf. Richard Garner, Law and Society in Classical Athens (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1987), p. 102, who argues that “the agon between Theseus and Hippolytus explicitly
takes the court form of accusation and defense with all the appropriate vocabulary and
commonplaces of argumentation.” Cf. the similar point made by Charles Segal, “Signs,
72
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
Magic, and Letters in Euripides’ Hippolytus,” in Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter
and Daniel Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 426. The scene is replete with legal
references. Theseus, who had yearned for a “sure token” (or “proof ”) of character, argues
that Phaedra’s corpse so clearly “convicts” Hippolytus (943–5) that no speech can provide
his “acquittal” (960–1). Hippolytus expresses the wish that Phaedra were alive to serve
as a witness of his innocence (1022–4), but Theseus considers the dead Phaedra to be
the “surest of witnesses” against him (972). Although the chorus tells Hippolytus that
he has “rebutted the charge” by his oath (1036–7), he fails to convince his father; as a
result, he calls on the House of Theseus to “witness” his innocence (1074–5). Theseus,
however, counters that the house, a “voiceless” witness, “convicts” him of the crime
(1076–7).
Legal allusions, hardly confined to this central “trial scene,” also frame the drama as a
whole. At the beginning of the drama, Aphrodite claims that she will “punish Hippolytus
this day” (21–2), but at the end, Artemis finds him to be innocent and “just” (1298–9,
1307–8). She accuses Theseus of breaking of “nature’s laws” (1286–9) and finds him
proven “at fault” (1320–22), although his ignorance “acquits” him (1334–5). Though
falsely convicted of the crime, Hippolytus frees his father of guilt in his error (1449).
Early on, Phaedra refers to her fear of a “circle of condemning witnesses” (403–4) and
of the nurse’s “plead[ing] the cause of wrong so well” (505–6).
4
McClure, Spoken Like A Woman, p. 157.
5
The tradition is succinctly summarized by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “Assumptions
and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles’ Antigone,” Journal of Hellenic Studies
109 (1989): 142: “ . . . the direct intervention of the gods through prophecy and other
sign-revelation is the ultimate religious authority, the only source of religious authority
transcending the polis discourse.” According to Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 88, manteia,
“were it attainable, would function exactly like the second, truthful voice of Theseus’
fantasy; it would be a touchstone to identify and correct the enigmas of human speech.”
The drama, however, leaves the precise referent of the “just voice” unclear. The argument
73
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
puts his faith not in the voice of mythic truth – the voice of the prophet,
the oracle, the pledge – but in the new, “two-sided” modes of inquiry,
the process of deliberation and rational inquiry that were so important
to the political and intellectual life of late-fifth-century Athens.6 The
wish that men had a second, “just voice” reflects a loss of belief in
a divine voice that could, if interpreted correctly, definitively sepa-
rate truth from falsehood for mortals. Theseus’ anxiety about being
betrayed by a false friend takes on particular poignancy when set in
the play’s contemporary context, the early years of a civil war beset by
treachery, foresworn oaths, and sophistic rationalizations of immoral
conduct. Theseus’ longing dramatizes the dilemmas of a postmythic
age that turns to logic and rhetoric instead of oracles and oaths as a
means of discerning a man’s true character.
We have seen how in Euripides’ age, doubt about the old mythic
truths grew as the intellectual revolution and the Peloponnesian War
undermined faith in traditional values. Both in the world of the Hip-
polytus and on the stage of historical action, tangled networks of
alliances, complex webs of deceit, and reciprocal charges of injustice
make the “just argument” hard to identify. In the texts of Thucydides
and Euripides alike, actual or threatened violations of decency and cus-
tom subvert claims to have attained a simple voice of justice. Instead,
lofty-sounding ideals too often provide convenient rationalizations for
selfish passions and a lust for revenge.
made by Herbert Musurillo, “The Problem of Lying and Deceit and the Two Voices
of Euripides’ Hippolytus 925–31,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 104
(1974): 236–8, that the “just voice” refers to the ventriloquized voice of a fifth-century
cult of seers seems far-fetched.
For a fuller account of the privileged status of the divine voice in early Greek poetry,
cf. also Thalmann, Conventions of Form and Thought, pp. 147–9. Thalmann argues that
in the Hesiodic view, for example, human language “will always contain an element of
error or deception” (pp. 148–9) in contrast with the divine language of the Muses, which
is considered to be “stable and coherent and beyond the limits of ordinary experience”
(p. 147). Cf. also Pietro Pucci, “The Language of the Muses,” in Classical Mythology
in Twentieth-Century Thought and Literature, ed. Wendell M. Aycock and Theodore M.
Klein. Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech
University 11, 1980), p. 181, who claims that the divinely inspired poet produces a “pure,
inner ‘signified’ (meaning, idea, etc.) that seems to share nothing with the established
contingent and external aspects of language.”
6
This shift in modes of inquiry may be parallel to the movements from orality to literacy
and from poetry to prose described in Havelock, Preface to Plato.
74
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
7
Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 136, 126, who claims that “[m]isreading is an essential
dynamic of the Hippolytus,” also speaks of the “doubleness and uncertainty” of language
in the drama. Cf. also Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, p. 81, who argues that Euripidean
drama self-consciously calls attention to the problem of “representing, realizing, and
verifying” the interior realm of mythical characters.
8
Goff, The Noose of Words, pp. 73, 128–9; cf. other references to the “second, truthful
voice” at pp. 44–7.
9
Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” pp. 84–5.
10
In his commentary on lines 925–7, Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytos, p. 340, cites similar
passages at Medea 516ff. and Heracles 655ff. Cf. also discussion of these passages by Goff,
The Noose of Words, pp. 44–5.
75
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
11
Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 83.
12
Cf. Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 46, who argues that the second voice simultaneously
“achieve[s] a unity with reality” and “institute[s] a split in the speaking subject.”
76
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
most reliable means of attaining truth in the political and legal arenas;
but, at the same time, we remain aware of how easily the truth can be
distorted and manipulated for selfish or partisan ends.
The pervasiveness of the play’s concern with law, debate, and
sophistry invites examination of the role of rhetoric and debate in
fifth-century Athens.13 Like Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Hippolytus
is deeply concerned with the “nature, justice, and power of rhetoric,”14
asking the following questions in mythic guise: How much faith should
be put in persuasion and debate? Can debate provide a “sure token”
pointing toward justice and right action, or is every attempt at persua-
sion inevitably bound up with sophistry and deception? In the absence
of a divine or prophetic voice that speaks clearly to those knowing how
to interpret it, is there such a thing as a dispassionate voice of justice?
If there were, could it prevail over an unjust but persuasive voice?15
The ending of the play seems to resolve these vexing questions
by assigning the “just voice” to Hippolytus by divine proclamation.
Artemis, identifying Theseus and herself as the “chief sufferers” (1337),
reveals to him the “just heart” of Hippolytus (1298–9): he justly
kept the oath that he swore, since he reverenced the gods (1307–9).16
Artemis correspondingly finds Theseus at fault for consulting neither
“oaths / nor voice of oracles” (1321–2).17
13
For references to debate and rhetoric, see lines 291–2, 388–90, 486–9, and 971, among
other passages mentioned in this chapter.
14
Josiah Ober and Barry Strauss, “Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athe-
nian Democracy,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context,
ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
p. 259.
15
Cf. Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 79, who puts the last question in the context of Athenian
democracy, which, she holds, must to some extent believe that “debate and deliberation
do issue in correct and rational action, and that the logos that ‘wins’ is in some sense the
right one.” In this light it is intriguing to consider whether the just and unjust voice
might correspond to the better and worse argument of Protagoras’ Antilogoi (which could
also be translated as “just” and “unjust”). For discussion of this sophistic technique as it
applies to the nurse’s “seduction” of Phaedra, also see Goff, p. 53.
16
Cf. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, “Female Speech and Female Sexuality: Euripides’ Hip-
polytos as Model,” Helios n.s. 13.2 (1986): 178, who claims that Artemis’ truthful procla-
mation at the end of the play represents the fulfillment of Theseus’ wish for a “just
voice.” Cf. also Segal, “Signs, Magic, and Letters,” p. 426, who calls Artemis’ appear-
ance a “pendant” to the “trial-like scene” between Hippolytus and Theseus.
17
. . . ( # b . . . (Hippolytus 1321).
77
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
18
McClure, Spoken Like a Woman, p. 157.
19
Rabinowitz, “Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” p. 136.
20
Bergren, “Language and the Female,” p. 82.
21
Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 72, 78.
78
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
22
The importance of this description (("' Y . . . "Y [161–2]) was shown to me
by Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 68.
79
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
23
The Greek text for Hippolytus 380–4 runs as follows:
& "A( * (#( ; %%1(,
* , F 3 "% L ,
F J6 "8 ;
; 5,
"
8( ; (
A, " ', . . .
80
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
24
In addition to Hesiod’s description of Pandora, one thinks of the misogynistic portrayal of
women in the lyric poet Semonides, discussed by Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction
of the Athenians, pp. 65–6. Although the Greek makes clear that Phaedra is speaking
about human nature, and not only about the nature of women, “her generalizations are,
for all their generality, conceived with her own circumstances and character in mind,”
according to Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytos, p. 229, n. on 381–5.
25
Rabinowitz, “Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” p. 130, argues that Phaedra’s attitude
about female speech, which reflects traditional patriarchal values, mirrors Hippolytus’.
Phaedra’s phrase, “sweet curse” (" ', 384), recalls the description of Pandora
in Hesiod’s Theogony as a “beautiful evil” (
', 585).
26
The Greek text for Hippolytus 385–7 runs as follows:
,1 $ ((; ,(, J 3 A,
J 4$ ,
" / (6
0 : ?( %"#.
27
McClure, Spoken Like a Woman, p. 131.
28
Ibid., p. 131.
29
McClure, Spoken Like a Woman, p. 131, argues that Phaedra’s allusion to spelling “rein-
forces the link between . . . writing and the deceptive rhetoric of the sophists in the
agon.”
81
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
The tongue here serves as an emblem of the ordinary voice that will
be decried by Theseus. Through her silence Phaedra seeks to control
the difference that she abhors in her own and women’s nature – and
in language. For if language – and women – are by their very nature
duplicitous and uncontrollable, a woman intent on remaining virtuous
ought not to speak of a forbidden passion. Indeed, enforced silence and
interiority for women are the antidotes to the corrupting influence of
30
In his commentary, Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytos, p. 230, n. on 385–6, argues that the
pejorative sense of the term is “indecisiveness” or “lack of resolution.” For an alternative
definition of the term as a “euphemistic metonymy for ",” see E. M. Craik, “cESd
in Euripides’ Hippolytos 373–430: Review and Interpretation,” Journal of Hellenic Studies
113 (1993): 45.
31
The Greek text for Hippolytus 393–7 runs as follows:
\"G# 3 N
* , (%- A ; ": '(.
%
1(( < %&" 3 (', e " 3
"A ") * (,
6 + +
( 8 #.
82
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
32
The phrase, which I have quoted before, belongs to Bergren, “Language and the
Female,” p. 78. For the issues of women’s silence and confinement, cf. Rabinowitz,
“Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” pp. 127–33; Goff, The Noose of Words, pp. 1–20;
and Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in
Greek Drama,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context,
ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
pp. 76–8.
33
(" )( "(#, as Phaedra expresses her prior resolution. On
the parallels that could be drawn between Hippolytus and Phaedra in this connection,
see Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, pp. 71–2.
34
2 %&" ,("& ( *(
( ,< / / #" 'G % I
#
(Hippolytus 411–12).
35
. . . %%6 ;< (Hippolytus 418).
36
The same Greek word for “rafter” appears in both passages (8"; 418, 768).
83
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
She urges Phaedra to give in to her passion for her stepson. In making
her case the nurse draws on a host of sophistic arguments, some of
which recall Gorgias’ Encomium on Helen: it is not only futile but also
destructive and hubristic to resist the will of the gods, who furnish
many examples of illicit loves (437–43; 467–76).38 The nurse’s “better
argument” (292) and “second thoughts” (436) epitomize the ordinary,
scheming voice derided by Theseus.
The ensuing exchange between Phaedra and the nurse evinces dif-
fering interpretations of what is “beyond thought or reason” (eksô
logou, 437), a phrase that can also be translated as “beyond argument.”
Indeed, the play’s wider investigation concerns the proper use and
scope of rhetoric, questions that are also debated in contemporary
political discourse. We see in Thucydides’ Mytilenean Debate, which
is again discussed at the end of this chapter, a concern with whether
any position, once taken, should be considered “beyond argument.”
The Athenian polis was obsessed as much as we are today with debating
both sides of every question.
Phaedra goes on to accuse the nurse of indulging in speech that
threatens the welfare of both homes and cities:
37
F :" " (1". / %&" "(( 3 G
'% /
8 . . . (Hippolytus 436–8).
38
For an analysis of Gorgias’ line of argument, see Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of
the Athenians, pp. 68–9.
84
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
that one should speak, but those that have the power
to save their hearer’s honorable name. (486–9)39
39
The Greek text for Hippolytus 486–9 runs as follows:
( , F
;
'%.
%#" & ( f(; " & "6
8%,
*G 2
6 %A(.
40
McClure, Spoken Like a Woman, p. 131, points out the irony in the fact that the principal
exponents of sophistry in the play are “socially marginal figures like women and slaves”
who would generally not even be literate, much less trained in rhetoric.
41
A point suggested to me by an anonymous referee.
42
Y("& H
8%<
) . . . (Hippolytus 505). So Phaedra accuses the nurse.
85
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
causes Phaedra’s demise but her own prior susceptibility to “the cause
of wrong.”
Won over by the nurse’s arguments, Phaedra herself employs
sophistry to good effect. In fact she claims that her scheme to incrim-
inate Hippolytus will “profit” her (sumphoras, 716), a clear allusion
to the sophistic principle of advantage. The drama comes full circle:
although she initially maintains that her hope lies in silence, and asks the
nurse to keep quiet about her secret (520), Phaedra exploits the poten-
tial of the signifier for duplicity by “speaking” through surrogates –
first through the nurse, then through her letter, and ultimately through
the sign of her own body.43 Having abandoned her ideals of truth
and honor, Phaedra seeks to preserve only the appearance of these
ideals by exploiting the power traditionally assigned women of telling
“falsehoods that resemble the truth.”44
Her compromised silence in all of these instances reflects the dou-
ble nature of her desire, which at once demands and forbids ver-
bal expression. Zeitlin points out that Phaedra’s language reflects the
ambivalent state of her soul: “[T]he secret of Aphrodite, . . . in arous-
ing simultaneous desire for its fulfillment and its repression, necessarily
recodes language into the double entendre.”45 Phaedra’s transferred
speech, which allows her to maintain her silence and give voice to
her desire at the same time, reveals her as the archetypal “double
speaker.” Equivocating on her own pledge to keep silent, she allows
the nurse to name the object of her forbidden love – Hippolytus –
and thus can maintain that she did not divulge her secret (350–2). In a
similar fashion Phaedra permits the nurse to approach Hippolytus on
her behalf, even though she condemns her later for doing so (520–4;
685–7).
43
Phaedra’s letter is “tellingly” attached to her body, according to Sheila Murnaghan,
“Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1.2 (1988): 36. Cf. also
duBois, Sowing the Body, p. 130, on the pervasive metaphor in ancient Greek culture of
woman’s body as a “tablet folded up on itself, the papyrus that must be unfolded to be
deciphered,” a provocative analogy for my reading of this episode.
44
Whereas Phaedra puts her deceptiveness to work in order to preserve the mere appear-
ance of marital fidelity, both Helen (in the Helen) and Creusa (in the Ion) work in their
husbands’ actual interests.
45
Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 85.
86
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
46
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 166.
47
Hippolytus’ silence also conveys two different meanings: whereas for Artemis it serves
as a definitive sign of his righteousness, for Theseus it clearly signifies his guilt and
corruption. For analyses of the complex interplay of speech and silence in the play, see
Bernard M. W. Knox, “The Hippolytus of Euripides,” in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in
Criticism, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper and Row, 1983); Goff, The Noose of Words,
pp. 1–26; and Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 125–6.
87
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
mirrors Phaedra’s wish for univocacy of language. All three of the play’s
main characters – Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Theseus – thus express a
yearning to avoid or transcend ambiguity and deception.
In fact, the quality Hippolytus stresses most about women
is the discrepancy between their attractive appearance and their
vile nature,48 recalling the chorus’ metaphor of woman as an
“unhappy . . . compound.” According to Hippolytus, the bride’s father
“enriches his heart’s jewel / with dear adornment, beauty heaped
on vileness. / With lovely clothes the poor wretch tricks her out /
spending the wealth that underprops his house” (631–5). Outraged by
the nurse’s proposition on Phaedra’s behalf, Hippolytus would deny
women any interlocutors except “voiceless beasts” (646). If Theseus,
in his utopian fantasy, seeks to add a voice to eliminate the problem of
difference, Hippolytus in his seeks to subtract one. The play as a whole
“forges a link between sexuality and speech, chastity and silence” for
women, a link that reflects contemporary cultural prejudices.49
If Phaedra is punished for speaking her passion, Hippolytus is pun-
ished for not speaking his chastity, because he allows the nurse to bind
him to an oath with silence (657–8). He is thus at a disadvantage in
defending himself when Phaedra dies and leaves a note incriminat-
ing him: “I know the truth and dare not tell the truth” (1091). His
father refuses to believe Hippolytus, even when he swears an oath of
innocence by Zeus:
48
This discrepancy recalls the stark contrast between exterior and interior drawn in Hes-
iod’s description of Pandora in the Works and Days (60–82).
49
Rabinowitz, “Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” p. 132 (here referring only to
Phaedra). In building her argument (p. 130), she cites “the famous Periclean motto –
that the best fame a woman can hope for is not to be spoken of among men (Thuc. 2.46).”
One can also find in the literature of the period a warning to men against indulging in
too much fondness for speech: see Cleon’s speech in Thucydides 3.38.5–7 (discussed at
the end of this chapter), as well as the speech of “Right Logic” in Aristophanes’ Clouds
(discussed in the first chapter), in which a love of rhetoric is connected with effeminacy
and a preference for action with manly virtue.
88
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
50
The Greek text for Hippolytus 1022–7 runs as follows:
51
*("'( ( (", / J
) *"1 (Hip-
polytus 1034–5).
52
Goff, The Noose of Words, pp. 26, 100, points out the irony of Theseus’ own reliance on
“voiceless witnesses” and of his assignment to Phaedra’s letter the status of the second
truthful voice. Cf. also Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, p. 100, writing about the play’s
concern with the “dichotomies of visible and invisible, inner and outer purity, tongue
and heart”: “The silent speaking of Phaedra’s written tablets . . . proves to be more per-
suasive than the spoken utterances of face-to-face confrontation between Theseus and
89
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Hippolytus.” Hippolytus finally comes to the realization that his father would not believe
him even if he were in fact to break his oath of silence (1060–4), an oath he threatened
to break soon after taking it (612).
90
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
Both father and son fail to recognize versions of the truth other than the
one to which each clings so obstinately. Focusing solely on the incon-
sistencies they perceive in each other, they are blind to the divided
nature of their own being. Theseus has himself, of course, already
practiced a form of “self-worship” in finding Hippolytus guilty before
even giving him a chance to defend himself.
Paradoxically, as Goff suggests, Theseus’ curse may represent the
“just voice” for which he was yearning, insofar as it seems to tran-
scend difference by representing a perfect accord between “word and
world,” between signifier and signified.53 This interpretation is sup-
ported by Theseus’ own reference to Phaedra’s body as “refuting”
Hippolytus (kakselenchetai, 944) and Poseidon’s stroke as helping to
“convict” him (elenksô, 1267). For the words “refute” and “convict”
he uses forms of the same verb (elenchô) that he used to describe how
the just voice would refute the scheming voice (eksêlencheto, 930). The
irony is strengthened by Artemis’ use of that same verb twice at the
end of the play: first, when she points out that Phaedra commit-
ted suicide and wrote the incriminating letter precisely in order to
avoid being convicted of the crime through cross-examination (eis
elenchon mê pesêi, 1310); and second, when she condemns Theseus
for not having tested (ouk êlenksas, 1322) his son against the tradi-
tional hermeneutic devices of the “pledge” and the “voice of ora-
cles” (1321), as Hippolytus had requested earlier in quite similar terms
(oude . . . elenksas, 1055–6). Artemis thus turns Theseus’ own words
about the lack of a touchstone, of a sure method of cross-examination,
against him.54
For Vernant, tragic irony “may consist in showing how . . . the hero
finds himself literally ‘taken at his word’”; the hero’s discourse is shown
to possess oracular power insofar as it brings him the “bitter experience
53
Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 75. However, the decree of exile (893–8) Theseus adds to
his prayer to Poseidon (887–90) may reflect a certain skepticism about the efficacy of
his curse.
54
The play’s emphasis on refutation and cross-examination (
%) must remind us of
the importance of these new modes of inquiry in the discursive practice of the period,
including speeches and questioning in the courts, debate in the assembly, and the Socratic
use of dialectic.
91
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
55
Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus
Rex,” in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper
and Row, 1983), p. 190.
56
One of the ironies highlighted by this encounter is that there is no way for the characters
of the drama (or for the audience) to know for certain the truth of the claims of chastity
made by Hippolytus – a point for which I am grateful to Ann Michelini.
57
Cf. the distrust of rhetoric Theseus expresses to Hippolytus at 960–1 and 971–2. Also
cf. Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 17, who notes that despite the awareness of “the fragility
of human understanding” he demonstrates in his exclamation about the second truthful
voice, Theseus all too quickly condemns his son as a hypocrite.
58
=8( :
' (; / ; "& ( (Hippolytus 1288–9).
So runs Artemis’ direct address, as translated by Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytos, p. 397, in
his note to these lines.
59
J %
)(( 71 , J 3 "6 1 (Hippolytus 612).
92
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
her name; her understated boast in the first line of the play that she is
“not nameless” (kouk anônumos; my translation) turns out to be more
than a rhetorical trope. When, in the first episode, Hippolytus’ servant
asks him to reconsider his silence toward the goddess (99), he gives a
sophistic reply – namely, that he does worship her, but from a distance
(102). This is only the first equivocation of a character who vaunts his
righteousness (sôphrosunê) and unequivocal honesty.
“Double speaking” is not confined to the human sphere of action
in the play. The absence of direct dialogue between Phaedra and Hip-
polytus is mirrored on the divine plane by the failure of their patron
goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis, respectively, to confront each other.
Like the human actors, the goddesses are concerned not only with
being well heard by their audience but also with being well heard of –
with preserving their reputation (kleos).60 Aphrodite opens the play
with three references to her name: she says what she is called, claims
that she is called great by men, and describes herself as “not name-
less” (1–2, my translation). The action of the play may be read as a
displaced divine logos, the enactment of Aphrodite’s promise to avenge
Hippolytus’ disdain of her (21–2). Aphrodite implies that the “script”
she sketches out in the prologue has already somehow been inscribed
in the human actors (22–8): she says that there is no need for her to
toil much, since she has already “prepared the way” (prokopsas[a], 23) –
an instance of proleptically destructive discourse that is later replicated
in both Phaedra’s letter and Theseus’ curse.61
At the end of the play, when Artemis first appears, she demands to
be both heard and heeded (1283–5). Her vow not to let Aphrodite’s
machinations go unpunished provides not only a critical gloss on
Aphrodite’s script but also a countervailing revenge plot of a drama
60
Cf. the series of references in the Greek text to
8 (or its cognates) at 47, 405, 423,
489, 687, 717, 1028, and 1299.
61
Words function as weapons throughout the play. Just as naming Aphrodite as an object
of worship seems to be a sacrilegious act for Hippolytus, so naming Hippolytus as the
object of Phaedra’s love seems to be somehow tantamount to realizing that love – for
Phaedra, the nurse, and Hippolytus. The mere mention of Hippolytus’ name by the
nurse first “kill[s]” Phaedra (311) and then, the nurse herself (353). The chorus follows
suit by calling Phaedra “dead” (368). When the nurse changes course and relays Phaedra’s
love to Hippolytus, he recoils from her words as a pollution of which he would like to
be cleansed (653–4).
93
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
62
Cf. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1982), p. 327, who sees in Artemis’ vow at the end of the play “presumably
the makings of another tragic suffering.”
63
Goff, The Noose of Words, pp. 87, 89, 102.
64
Knox, “The Hippolytus of Euripides,” p. 331.
65
Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, p. 78.
66
Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 110.
94
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
Still in his last agony the same unshaken certainty of his own perfection: his
blindness to the defects of his narrow puritanism stays with him to the end,
and lets him see in his fate nothing but blind irrational injustice.68
67
Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 84, points out that it is only through Phaedra
that Hippolytus comes to recognize that ("(: “indeed has a double meaning,”
one for him and another for her. Cf. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 133–4, who
argues that Hippolytus lays claim to general “soundness of mind,” not just chastity or
virginity, when he asserts that no one is more (1" than he (995).
68
See the note on lines 1364–7 in Barrett, Euripides: Hippolytos, p. 403.
69
Cf. Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 85, who argues that Phaedra’s illicit desire
“organizes the entire play around the notions of hiding and revealing, speech and silence.”
Zeitlin offers an eloquent interpretation of the “recognition of verbal paradox” that both
Hippolytus and Phaedra share (p. 83). These two characters are also united in their belief
that it is more honorable to keep silent about their secret than to divulge it (cf. 393–4,
656), and yet both equivocate in this regard. Cf. also Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy,
p. 125. For a parallel between Theseus and Hippolytus, see Harry C. Avery, “My Tongue
Swore, but My Mind Is Unsworn,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 99
(1968): 27, who argues that Hippolytus’ lament about women, in which he labels them
as counterfeit (616–17), resembles Theseus’ call for a clear, outward indication of men’s
character. For an account of the motif of dissimulation as it applies to both Phaedra and
Hippolytus, see Charles Segal, “Confusion and Concealment in Euripides’ Hippolytus:
Vision, Hope, and Tragic Knowledge,” Mêtis 3 (1988): 263–82.
95
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
70
Zeitlin, “The Power of Aphrodite,” p. 84.
71
Charles Segal, “Shame and Purity in Euripides’ Hippolytus,” Hermes 98 (1970): 278,
points out Euripides’ keen awareness of the “ambiguous, ‘protean’ quality of the moral
terms which most strongly guide our conduct.”
72
In “Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” Rabinowitz’s focus on the lethal, carnal nature
of female language in Hippolytus (pp. 134, 137) implies that the play leaves male speech
untainted, an implication with which I would disagree. Goff, The Noose of Words, p. 129,
however, takes too optimistic a view when she argues that language is perhaps redeemed
at the end of the play through the brides’ song that Artemis declares is to be sung in
honor of Hippolytus (1423–30). For Goff, this song provides a “vision . . . of a language
that can transform and transcend what otherwise is the recalcitrance of desire, of violence
and of language itself ”; on this point I would agree instead with both Segal, Dionysiac
Poetics, pp. 326–7, and Rabinowitz, “Female Speech and Female Sexuality,” p. 137, for
whom this supposedly commemorative ritual is highly ironic. Whereas Goff argues that
Phaedra takes voice through the brides (p. 127), Rabinowitz maintains that Phaedra does
not achieve the status of subject in the song, even though she is “hailed as object” (p.
136).
96
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
97
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they
remain fixed, than with good laws that are constantly being altered, that lack
of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the
kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule states are
better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the
sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws . . . and who, as a result,
very often bring ruin on their country. (3.37)
Cleon goes on to attack the citizens’ gullibility, which for him results
from their fondness for elaborate displays of specious rhetoric:
Any novelty in an argument deceives you at once, but when the argument is
tried and proved you become unwilling to follow it; you look with suspicion
on what is normal and are the slaves of every paradox that comes your way. The
chief wish of each one of you is to be able to make a speech himself . . . You are
simply victims of your own pleasure in listening, and are more like an audience
sitting at the feet of a professional lecturer than a parliament discussing matters
of state. (3.38)
98
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
Later on, Cleon will again warn of the dangers of letting “pleasures
of the ear” guide public policy: yielding to the pleasure of hearing
clever arguments and emotional appeals is inimical to the interests
of the Athenian empire, since it can lead to growing “soft” in the
face of danger (3.40). Cleon sounds suspiciously like Phaedra, who
chastises the nurse for speaking “words ringing delight in the ear”
instead of those that “save their hearer’s honorable name” (486–9).
Both Cleon and Phaedra associate the destructive effects of sophistry
with the specifically female traits of seductiveness and duplicity. Pre-
sumably neither Cleon nor the “man in the street” whose common
sense he praises would be seduced “to the opposite opinion,” to use
Phaedra’s language (390–1).
Elaborating on his argument, Cleon characterizes the “other kind”
of citizens, the kind who respect established laws, as “unbiased judges,
and not people taking part in some kind of a competition” (3.37).
These people should be a model for politicians, who, like the rest of
the populace, tend to be “carried away by mere cleverness” (3.37).
Cleon’s division of the citizenry into two distinct groups, one direct,
honest, and just, and the other immoral, devious, and sophistic, recalls
Theseus’ two voices – and Phaedra’s two meanings of “shame.” Like
these two characters, Cleon turns to the security of old truths that
seem to be uncontaminated by the new sophistic thinking.
Far from being neutral, Cleon’s presentation of the common people
as “unbiased judges” reflects his own perceived sense of justice – in
this case, a form of justice that serves Athenian imperial interests. Like
Theseus’ exclamation, Cleon’s speech is a carefully crafted piece of
rhetoric that lays claim to being beyond rhetoric – in a similar way,
perhaps, to politicians’ claims today to be putting the national inter-
est above narrowly partisan agendas. Perhaps we share a fundamental
Athenian ambivalence about rhetoric in that we can accept its use in
public speeches only if it effaces itself.75
75
See Ober and Strauss, “Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athenian
Democracy,” p. 250, on this ambivalence: “When a well-known politician stood up
to speak in Assembly or in a law court, his audience was eager to be entertained and
instructed, but might distrust him if he were to reveal too obviously the extent of his
skill.”
99
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
. . . terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and
in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by
the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was
the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment . . . (3.82)
76
In chapter four of her book, Goff, The Noose of Words, has a good discussion fitting the
problem of language in the play into a wider cultural and political context. She traces the
loss of faith in language inscribed in Thucydides’ History, from the optimism of Pericles’
Funeral Oration, in which Pericles voices the belief that there is no “incompatibility
between words and deeds,” to the “pervasive anxiety about rhetoric and language” in
the Mytilenean Debate and in the account of civil war at Corcyra (pp. 79–80).
100
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
Phaedra, who struggles with her passion but in the end proves incapable
of controlling it, exemplifies the moral that Thucydides expresses here.
Indeed, in these key passages, Thucydides voices concerns parallel to
those evinced by the Hippolytus: how can reason and civilized forms
of discourse prevail against the force of the passions? The longing
he expresses for a bygone “simplicity” or “singleness of heart” (both
77
N. T. Croally, Euripidean Polemic, p. 65.
78
. . . ; ) ' "A(( J " :(, , ; "& T '
, (8 *A
( "6 3 7"% N(, "(( 3 ,
3 ":$ %&" 0
( "( "(
6 ", * 6 5
# ( ,(T I (Thucydides,
History 3.84. 2–3). Although editors doubt the authenticity of this passage, it does
reinforce several key themes announced earlier in Thucydides’ account of the civil war
at Corcyra.
101
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
The play suggests that mythic forms of truth and justice cannot be
reconciled with the analytic, rational forms of truth and justice pur-
sued in the democratic polis. Indeed, the Hippolytus casts doubt on
whether such aristocratic virtues as moderation, chastity, and good-
ness of heart can prevail over passion in a tumultuous period of Greek
history – particularly in a democracy wedded to the tools of “double
speaking.”80
The texts of both Euripides and Thucydides betray nostalgia for a
pre-sophistic age when values, voice, and meaning – as yet undecon-
structed – were presumably simple, single, and at one with themselves.
79
C. A. E. Luschnig, Time Holds the Mirror: A Study of Knowledge in Euripides’ Hippolytus,
vol. 102, Mnemosyne: Bibliotheca Classica Batava (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 46–7.
80
The bleak ending of the Hippolytus undercuts Gregory’s argument, in Euripides and the
Instruction of the Athenians, p. 54, that the drama serves to reconcile aristocratic and
democratic notions of the virtue of moderation.
102
THE “JUST VOICE” AS PARADIGMATIC METAPHOR IN THE HIPPOLYTUS
103
3
1
Katherine Callen King, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 259, n. 90.
2
According to Charles Segal, “The Problem of the Gods in Euripides’ Hecuba,” Materiali
e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 22 (1989): 14, the play asks “what Gunther Zuntz
calls ‘the desperate question which is at the heart of all of Euripides’ works; the question:
how is man to live in a godless world?’” For Kovacs, The Heroic Muse, p. 84, the Trojan
women are “survivors of a vanished world” over which the gods no longer hold watch.
For William Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus: The Case of the Hekabe,” Classical
Antiquity 12.1 (1993): 136, the Trojan War seems meaningless in the context of the
nihilistic world of the play.
104
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
3
R. G. A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), p. 180.
105
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Hecuba’s wish that her arms, hair, and feet could take voice to
supplicate Agamemnon has been called “astonishingly grotesque” and
“strange and desperate.”5 The striking nature of the image only rein-
forces its thematic importance, epitomizing the drama’s search for a
voice of justice that would be heeded in a world dominated by brute
force and the pursuit of self-interest. The gods who enforce justice and
punish wrongdoing, who uphold the laws of hospitality and the rights
of the suppliant, are often invoked but do not appear or act in this
play.6 The strong prey on the weak and innocent without any regard
for justice – and worse, defend barbaric deeds as just. A network of
4
The Greek text for Hecuba 836–45 runs as follows:
4 %8 '%% * 5"(
; "(; ; '( ; ) 5#(
H S#
8( H ) ,
X #’
" < () %#
’, * (A
'%.
] 8( ’, ] 8%( h P
( #,
, "#( " < "(5:
"', , ; 8 *(,
’ 2.
*(
%&" " < < ’ + "
; T T "- ) .
Translation of the play is by William Arrowsmith in Euripides 3. Four Tragedies: Hecuba,
Andromache, The Trojan Women, Ion, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene
and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). The Greek text
is Euripidis Fabulae: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, Heraclidae, Hippolytus, Andromacha, Hecuba,
vol. 1, ed. Gilbert Murray. Rpt. 1974 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).
5
Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, p. 152; Froma I. Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe
and the Somatics of Dionysiac Drama,” Ramus 20 (1991): 78. Gregory, citing parallels
in other Greek texts to Hecuba’s fantasy about the limbs of her body taking voice,
suggests that the audience would have considered it “as powerful rather than bizarre.” See
Justina Gregory, Euripides: Hecuba. Introduction, Text, and Commentary. American Philological
Association Textbook Series no. 14, ed. Ruth Scodel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), p. 144,
n. on 834–40. But the extended series of incongruous metaphors in the passage creates a
jarring and disturbing impression, in my view; at any rate, the passage could have struck
the contemporary audience as both powerful and bizarre.
6
One exception may be the gods of the underworld, who Polydorus implies granted
his request to be buried by his mother (49–51); but this instance of apparent divine
intervention is not itself portrayed in the play and is mentioned only briefly. Polydorus’
later reference to some god’s being responsible for Hecuba’s downfall seems merely
rhetorical (58–9).
106
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
7
So Thrasymachus defines it in Plato’s Republic (338c). Agamemnon and Odysseus exem-
plify this definition of justice, according to both Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of
the Athenians, p. 102, and C. A. E. Luschnig, “Euripides’ Hecabe: The Time Is Out of
Joint,” Classical Journal 71 (1976): 230.
8
Ernst L. Abrahamson, “Euripides’ Tragedy of Hecuba,” Transactions of the American
Philological Association 83 (1952): 121.
9
(’ (, & & 8". / a" ’ ’ !8" & ) "$
(Hecuba 689–90). So runs the fuller context of Hecuba’s lament.
10
Vicenzo Di Benedetto, Euripide: Teatro e Società (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1971), p. 138.
11
Abrahamson, “Euripides’ Tragedy of Hecuba,” p. 121.
12
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), p. 62. Scarry is speaking in general terms of the mechanisms
by which the machinery of war seeks to undermine this “incontestable reality,” but her
107
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
analysis is equally compelling when applied to the wartime setting of Euripides’ drama.
For a fuller account of these mechanisms, see pp. 60–81, 124–33, and passim.
13
Cf. Croally, Euripidean Polemic, p. 53.
14
In the words of Shakespeare’s King Lear 3.4.106–8.
15
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 81.
108
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
16
Cf. Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 140, who speaks of the emphasis placed
by the play on “the male violence against women that characterizes the Trojan and all
wars.”
17
Nancy Worman, “The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts,” Classical Antiq-
uity 16.1 (1997): 187. Worman is speaking of a scene in Euripides’ Trojan Women, but
the Hecuba conveys a similar concern.
18
Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 159, n. 82.
19
3 '
. . . 5 #(
. . . (3.82.2). Cf. Croally, Euripidean Polemic, pp. 43,
46, who applies Thucydides’ dictum to Euripides’ Trojan Women.
109
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
20
Cf. Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 153, and J. K. Davies, Democracy and
Classical Greece, 2d ed., 1978 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107.
21
Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow, pp. 189–90.
22
Ibid., p. 210.
23
On 424 b.c. as the probable date of the play, see Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,”
p. 159, and Malcolm Heath, “‘Jure Principem Locum Tenet’: Euripides’ Hecuba,” Bulletin
of the Institute of Classical Studies 34 (1987): 40–1.
24
The full sentence from which the quotations are drawn runs as follows: “So revolu-
tions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the
knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extrav-
agances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing
power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.” *((M8 N & ) '
,
; & *("M# :( ) "%8
T * 8" 6 + "5
6
( & ) ’ * "A( "A( ; ) ")
Y. (Thucydides, History 3.82.3–4)
110
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
25
The title of C. A. E. Luschnig’s article, “Euripides’ Hecabe: The Time Is Out of Joint,”
reflects this sense well. Cf. also Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, p. 180,
who argues that the play’s “violations of taste and literary decorum” mirror the shame-
ful actions it portrays, and Max Pohlenz, Die Griechische Tragödie (Leipzig and Berlin:
Teubner, 1930), p. 296, who argues that the emotional impact of the long war may have
driven the playwright to transgress conventional artistic boundaries.
26
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 83.
111
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
27
In Democracy and Classical Greece, p. 107, Davies argues that the motifs emphasized in
the Melian Dialogue, “the relationship between power and justice, and the role of
‘necessity,’” were “central preoccupations of Athenian intellectuals.” In Wild Justice:
A Study of Euripides’ Hecuba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 94, Judith
Mossman considers the analysis of the status of rhetoric as a “vital intellectual theme”
of the play.
28
The play’s commonly accepted dating to about 424 b.c. would put it just a few years
following events at Plataea (427 b.c.) and less than a decade before the Melian Dialogue
(415 b.c.). I am not suggesting that there was any direct or specific influence of either
author’s text on the other – only that they shared certain pervasive concerns and preoccu-
pations. Other parallels suggest themselves: In “Golden Armor and Servile Robes: Hero-
ism and Metamorphosis in Hecuba of Euripides,” American Journal of Philology (1990):
305, Charles Segal argues that the play dramatizes the “moral disintegration” outlined
in Thucydides’ account of civil war at Corcyra (3.82–3).
29
As argued by King, Achilles, p. 259, n. 90. In Euripide et la Guerre du Péloponnèse (Paris: C.
Klincksieck, 1951), pp. 152–3, Édouard Delebecque argues that the support of the two
Athenians for the sacrifice of Polyxena (123–7) alludes to recent instances of Athenian
brutality, such as the slaughter of prisoners of war from Aegina that took place in 424 b.c.
(mentioned in Thucydides 4.57).
112
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
put to death and its women were enslaved (3.68). As we have seen,
a similar fate awaited the inhabitants of the island of Melos, a colony
of Sparta that had remained neutral in the Peloponnesian War. Melos
refused to give up its neutrality and side with Athens. Athens, wish-
ing to make an example of Melos to other islanders who resisted
its hegemony, put to death its young men and sold its women and
children into slavery (5.116). The brutal reduction of Melos took
place in 416/415 b.c., some eight or nine years after the Hecuba was
produced.
In Thucydides’ account, both the Plataeans and the Melians turn
to dialogue in an attempt to dissuade their more powerful opponents
from acts of violence. In these dialogues both peoples appeal to a
higher law of justice, but their appeals fail to prevent the threatened
violence. Thucydides presents the aggressors in these conflicts – the
Thebans and the Athenians – as motivated by a need for revenge, but
cloaking the violence they commit under self-serving definitions of
justice. Both dialogues present motifs and themes that figure impor-
tantly in Euripides’ play: the failure of rhetoric to forestall violence
and the abuse of rhetoric in rationalizing it; the difficulty of arriving
at a consensus about the meaning of justice in time of war; and, finally,
the lack of respect for any transcendent value of justice.
Just as Thucydides, in implicit protest against pernicious forms of
“double speaking,” expresses a longing for the “simple way of looking
at things” (3.83) and for a straightforward “simple-mindedness” (3.82),
so Hecuba expresses a longing for a mythical time in which men
would universally heed, and the gods enforce, the righteous plea of
the suppliant. In wishing for additional voices that would compensate
for the inadequacy of her ordinary one, Hecuba demands recognition
from a captor who would deny her rightful claim. Her limbs cry out
to reclaim a lost power of voice and touch to speak on behalf of the
prisoner of war, the refugee, and other powerless victims of brutality.30
Hecuba’s plea, which metaphorically transforms her body from a
mute object into a speaking subject, culminates a series of attempts by
30
As Detienne, The Masters of Truth, p. 70, points out, the act of supplication is not
merely verbal but also physical, “leaving the body to speak through a kind of polysemic
prostration.” For Detienne, the gesture of the suppliant is filled with “religious power.”
113
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
31
Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, p. 180.
32
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hecabe,” p. 56, likewise argues that the play represents “a case study
or experiment in the extremes of human behavior.”
33
Cf. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 119, and Gordon M. Kirkwood, “Hecuba and
Nomos,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 78 (1947): 66.
114
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
115
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
36
Cf. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 107, on the structure of the play as “chiastic,” insofar
as it interweaves the stories of the fates of brother and sister. Segal, “Golden Armor and
Servile Robes,” p. 312, speaks of the motif of burial as linking the two siblings.
37
Luschnig, “Euripides’ Hecabe: The Time Is Out of Joint,” pp. 227–8, argues that the
two ghosts serve to link the sacrifice of Polyxena with the revenge taken on Polymestor,
since the preparation of Polyxena’s body for burial leads to the discovery of Polydorus’
body.
116
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
38
Cf. Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 74, who describes Hecuba’s bond to her daughter
as “symbiotic.”
39
Cf. the way in which Oedipus’ daughters “are repeatedly alluded to as extensions of
his body” in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, commented on by Murnaghan, “Body and
Voice in Greek Tragedy,” p. 39.
117
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
(132–3) who convinced the Greeks that the “honor of Achilles” far
outweighed the life of “one slave.”40
Early in the play, then, both Achilles and Odysseus display the neg-
ative side of their essential heroic characteristics in Homer’s epics: the
description of Achilles’ ghost as bestial stresses the inhuman nature of
his need for revenge, a need that proved so destructive to the Greeks
in his lifetime; the chorus’ description of Odysseus as a hypocrite and
a demagogue recasts this epic hero famous for his cunning as a corrupt
politician of Euripides’ own era.41 These negative portrayals of both
heroes predispose the audience against the Greek decision to sacrifice
Polyxena.
Polyxena’s likening of herself to a frightened lamb about to be
butchered (205–10) only increases the audience’s sense of Greek
40
Echoing the chorus’ judgment, Segal, “The Problem of the Gods,” p. 12, maintains
that Odysseus is Machiavellian; James C. Hogan, “Thucydides 3.52–68 and Euripides’
Hecuba,” Phoenix 26.3 (1972): 248, describes him as der kalte Politiker. Gregory, Euripi-
des and the Instruction of the Athenians, p. 102, sees both Odysseus and Agamemnon
as acting in a self-interested way. I disagree with critics such as Arthur W. H. Adkins
(“Basic Greek Values in Euripides’ Hecuba and Hercules Furens,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 16
[1966]: 193–219), who defend the conduct of Odysseus and Agamemnon as consistent
with traditional Greek values. To be sure, Odysseus does attempt to rationalize the sacri-
fice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena to Achilles’ ghost: he argues that the greatest heroes
deserve exceptional honors, to encourage warriors to fight on behalf of their people
(309–21). But his apparently magnanimous appeal to the ideal of honor is undercut by
his own narrow-minded refusal to honor his debt to Hecuba. Furthermore, the portrayal
of Achilles’ ghost as bloodthirsty throws into question the nature of the “honor” that
Odysseus defends. For more on the negative treatment of Agamemnon’s and Odysseus’
roles in the sacrifice, see King, Achilles, pp. 91–4, and Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschy-
lus,” pp. 136–48.
Citing the Plataean dialogue in Thucydides as support, Hogan, “Thucydides 3.52–
68 and Euripides’ Hecuba,” p. 249, argues that Hecuba’s appeal to Odysseus for mercy
would have carried weight with the contemporary Athenian audience. Adkins’ point in
“Basic Greek Values,” p. 204, that Agamemnon understandably owes Polymestor some
loyalty because he is a guest-friend (xenos) of the Greeks is, I believe, undermined by
the portrait of Polymestor as monstrous and of Agamemnon as weak-willed and fearful
(853–64).
41
King, Achilles, p. 91–4, argues that the play subverts such attempts at political sophistry
and expediency. Segal, “Golden Armor and Servile Robes,” p. 304, argues that the
defining heroic qualities of both Odysseus and Achilles in Homer take on pejorative
meaning in the Hecuba: “ . . . we see Achilles’ singleness of purpose transmuted into the
inexorability of a bloodthirsty ghost and Odysseus’ resilient adaptability turned into
treacherous shiftiness and lying.”
118
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
42
Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, p. 173, points out that Hecuba’s description of
the vote of the Greek assembly to execute Polyxena (195–6) “reflects the usage of the
Athenian democratic polis.” The vengeance on the island of Mytilene approved by the
Athenian assembly (427 b.c.), although not enacted, was a harbinger of cruelties to
come.
43
Cf. the justification of the Athenian empire offered by its representative at the debate
at Sparta (432 b.c.) recorded by Thucydides: “It has always been a rule that the weak
should be subject to the strong . . . ” (1.76).
119
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
44
For further explanation of these modes of argument, see Guthrie, The Sophists, pp. 21–2,
48, and 169. On Odysseus’ rejection of the argument from charis, see Buxton, Persuasion
in Greek Tragedy, pp. 174–6.
120
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
Hecuba to save his life, and she complied. The fact that Hecuba granted
Odysseus’ request entitles her to expect that he will return the favor in
her present circumstances – an assumption implicit in Hecuba’s “just
demand for payment of your debt of life” (273). Thus, her “brief ques-
tion” presupposes that Odysseus, in acknowledging the Greek law of
reciprocity (charis), will also acknowledge the justice of her claim on
him.
At the time of his capture Odysseus was, like Hecuba, pitiful, weak,
a slave at the mercy of his captors:45
Do you remember once
how you came to Troy, a spy, in beggar’s disguise,
smeared with filth, in rags, and tears of blood
were streaming down your beard? (239–41)
45
Contrast Homer’s account of Odysseus’ spying mission, in which Helen, not Hecuba,
recognizes him and lets him go (Odyssey 4.250–8).
121
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
46
Mossman, Wild Justice, p. 55, asserts that Hecuba clearly makes this gesture here.
47
U= *, X A,
< "/; ( %" "( "$/#
( ) ) ) *%9 / #" ’ ) 6 . . . (Hecuba, 273–6).
122
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
actions – a warning that the Melians give the Athenians much more
directly:
. . . in our view it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle
that is to the general good of all men – namely, that in the case of all who
fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and
that such people should be allowed to use and to profit by arguments that fall
short of a mathematical accuracy. And this is a principle which affects you as
much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible
vengeance and would be an example to the world. (5.90)
The Melians thus strengthen their appeal to justice by warning that the
fall of Athens would bring retribution in its wake.48 Understandably,
Hecuba is much more deferential in her dialogue with Odysseus, but
she is referring to the same universal “principle” as are the Melians.
In urging Odysseus to dissuade the troops from sacrificing her
daughter, Hecuba argues that his status and reputation carry more
weight than his actual words:
Even if your arguments were weak,
if you faltered or forgot your words, it would not matter.
Of themselves that power, that prestige you have
would guarantee success, swelling in your words,
and borrowing from what you are a resonance and force
denied to less important men. (293–5)
48
Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, pp. 85–6, argues that the play con-
veys an implicit warning against Athenian imperialism. For a discussion of the warning
conveyed in Thucydides that the weak will band together to defeat the stronger, impe-
rialistic power, see Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans.
Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 174.
49
Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, pp. 155, 157, argues the play demonstrates that
success in rhetoric stems not from ethics but from politics. Croally, Euripidean Polemic,
pp. 33–4, argues that before Plato, “discourses were judged not so much on the basis
of their reflection of the truth, but on the basis of their power, their persuasiveness.”
Aristotle acknowledges the important role played by a speaker’s character in influencing
the persuasiveness of his argument (Rhetoric 1377b20–1378a19). For the Greek text of
Aristotle, see Aristotelis Ars Rhetorica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
123
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
(Iliad 9.318–20)
50
James L. Kastely, “Violence and Rhetoric in Euripides’s Hecuba,” Proceedings of the Mod-
ern Language Association 108.5 (1993): 1037, refers to Hecuba’s heroic opposition to a
“bureaucracy” and its “banal evil.” Cf. the phrase coined by Hannah Arendt, “the
banality of evil,” which aptly describes the world of the play. Arendt is referring to the
manner in which Nazi war criminals sought to rationalize their participation in geno-
cide. See her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking,
1964). Cf. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, p. 175, who refers to Odysseus’ “Shy-
lockian subtlety,” and King, Achilles, pp. 91–4, who agrees with Hecuba’s description of
Odysseus as sophistic. Even Heath, “‘Jure Principem Locum Tenet,’” p. 66, who asserts
that Odysseus makes a “strong case” for the sacrifice of Polyxena, criticizes his “cynical
evasion of his obligation to Hecuba.”
124
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
Hecuba’s exhortation of her daughter to use “every skill that pity has, /
every voice” anticipates her own wish that her limbs could implore
51
Adkins, “Basic Greek Values,” p. 200.
52
Hogan, “Thucydides 3.52–68 and Euripides’ Hecuba,” p. 246, asserts that “there is
something abstract, remote” about Odysseus’ principles, which are “removed from
the dramatic scene.” That scene depicts the fate of a human being “who is to die for a
dubious public advantage” (p. 255). Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 138, n. 28,
points out that Odysseus’ argument leads to “the killing of a helpless and innocent girl,”
and argues that the Athenian audience would not in any case have believed in human
sacrifice.
53
( :M #( >(’ ' (' / %%& F( . . . (Hecuba 337–8).
125
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Polyxena goes on to assert that she, who was held “almost a goddess”
at Troy, has no wish to live a life of a slave, with all of the degradation
that it entails (355–66).
She goes on to plead with her mother to help her avoid such a life:
“ . . . help me to die, now, / before I live disgraced” (374–5), lines that
recall the heroic ethos of Ajax, who declares: “Let a man nobly live
or nobly die / If he is a nobleman . . . ” (Sophocles, Ajax 479–80).56
Indeed, Polyxena’s resolve reflects her adoption of the ethos of the
warrior-hero.57
54
For another appeal in which nature takes voice to plead on the suppliant’s behalf, see
Iphigenia’s lament to her father in Iphigenia in Aulis:
If I had the tongue of Orpheus
So that I could charm with song the stones to
Leap and follow me, or if my words could
Quite beguile anyone I wished – I’d use
My magic now. (1211–15; trans. Charles R. Walker)
, 3 C"8 I, ] #",
'%,
* #Y(’i >(
" 8",
'%( j *5
',
*’ 0 /
$ (1211–14)
For the Greek text see Euripidis Fabulae, vol. 3., ed. Gilbert Murray.
55
Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy, p. 174.
56
Translation is by John Moore in Sophocles 2. Four Tragedies: Ajax, The Women of Trachis,
Electra, Philoctetes, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
57
Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 147, Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction,
p. 96, and Mossman, Wild Justice, pp. 160–1, all make this argument.
126
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
Nobility of birth
is a stamp and seal, conspicuous and sharp.
But true nobility allied to birth
is a greatness and a glory. (378–81)58
58
"6" ( * 5" / *(
) %8(, ; M " /
% b ( G (Hecuba, 379–81).
59
Commenting on these lines in The Violence of Pity, p. 207, n. 32, Pietro Pucci writes,
“Nobility therefore shines, is naturally conspicuous, just as Polyneices’ truthful logos is
by nature simple, direct, and therefore, we assume, unmistakable.” For the longing for
such a clear stamp, cf. Medea’s wish for a “mark engraved upon men’s bodies” by which
to discern their character (Medea 516–19); also cf. Hippolytus’ reference to women as
“counterfeit” coin (Hippolytus 616) or the old man’s reference to the possible misreading
of Orestes’ character as a “false” coin (Electra 550).
60
The word Hecuba uses for “giving way” (
:, 438) is used frequently in Homer to
describe the death of warriors whose limbs “give way” or “loosen” beneath them. The
word Lattimore translates as “buried” in the phrase “her head buried [G%
8, <
487] in her robes” literally means “shut or coop up, hem in, enclose,” but has clear
metaphorical associations with death.
127
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
61
Cf. Hecuba’s outcry in the Trojan Women 884–8.
62
In “Euripides’ Hecuba,” American Journal of Philology 82.1 (1961): 19, D. J. Conacher
specifically compares Polyxena with Ajax.
63
Iphigenia utters a similar sentiment as she submits to a similar fate in Iphigenia in Aulis:
“I shall die – I am resolved – And having fixed my mind I want to die / Well and
gloriously . . . ” (1375–6). The accounts of the sacrifice given by the chorus (1520–31)
and the messenger (1540–1613) omit the discordant elements in the Hecuba.
64
The reference to a statue (%#
, 560) looks ahead to Hecuba’s appeal to
Agamemnon that he view her sympathetically, from the perspective of an artist: “Be
like a painter. Stand back, see me in perspective, / see me whole . . . ” (808–9). The
passage also raises a philosophical question: can a victim or a slave rise above his or her
circumstances to attain inner freedom? This motif recurs when Hecuba tells Agamemnon
later on in the play, “But since your fears make you defer / to the mob, let a slave set
128
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
to Talthybius’ account, her gesture elicits praise from the Greeks for
her nobility and courage (577–80); the messenger himself praises her
mother as “the one most blessed in her children / and also the unhap-
piest.”65 The messenger’s account thus conveys a certain nostalgia for
a lost nobility and heroism.
Yet Talthybius’ description of Polyxena’s baring her breast introduces
a sexual element at odds with the traditional dictates of female modesty:
“Strike, captain.
Here is my breast. Will you stab me there?
Or in the neck? Here is my throat, bared
for your blow.”
Torn between pity and duty,
Achilles’ son stood hesitating, and then
slashed her throat with the edge of his sword. The blood
gushed out, and she fell, dying, to the ground,
but even as she dropped, managed to fall somehow
with grace, modestly hiding what should be hidden
from men’s eyes. (562–70)
you free / from what you fear” (868–9). In Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia accepts her own
sacrificial death to ensure Greek freedom (1400–1).
65
The account has some parallels with Solon’s story of Cleobis and Biton, exemplars of
male heroic courage, who win similar praise for their exploits for themselves and their
mother (Herodotus, Histories 1.31–3). Their deed – harnessing themselves to an ox-cart
to convey their mother to a temple – won praise from an admiring crowd, which both
praised their strength and counted their mother fortunate in her sons. Struck dead by
the gods at the peak of their glory, they were further honored by having statues made of
them. In telling their story, Solon suggests that Cleobis and Biton attained the highest
form of happiness possible for mortals. See Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de
Selincourt (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
66
Traditionally critics have adopted the romanticizing heroic perspective advanced by
Talthybius. For example, F. W. King, ed. Euripides’ Hecuba (London: G. Bell and Sons,
1938), p. 84, n. on 573–80, calls the soldiers’ admiration for Polyxena’s courage “perhaps
the most human and pathetic touch in this vividly beautiful and imaginative narrative.”
In “Concepts of Freedom and Slavery in Euripides’ Hecuba,” Hermes 99 (1971): 222,
Stephen G. Daitz finds in Polyxena a love of freedom that contrasts with her mother’s
willingness to accept slavery in order to achieve her ends; cf. also Conacher, “Euripides’
129
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Hecuba,” p. 23, who accuses Hecuba of “pander[ing] to them with her daughter’s honor.”
More recent critics offer more skeptical reactions. In “Hecuba and Tragedy,” Antichthon
14 (1980): 33, G. H. Gellie finds “gratuitous particularity” in the account of Polyxena’s
death, and argues that her “aristocratic but artless idealism” fails to heighten the tragic
effect of the drama. Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 143, argues that Polyxena’s
gesture of self-exposure transforms her into a “depersonalized erotic object by and for
the male gaze.” For Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 60, Polyxena becomes an “object of
sadistic, murderous desire; the adulation given her is only a form of fetishism.”
67
Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 147.
68
Michelini, Euripides, pp. 179–80, makes a similar point: she argues that the play’s violation
of aesthetic norms runs parallel with the violation of ethical norms that it portrays; she also
argues that the play paradoxically derives beauty from its unifying treatment of shameful
elements.
69
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 108, speaks of the “slippage” between the bodies as evinc-
ing both parallels and contrasts based on the gender roles of the two: “the fate of one
leads to mourning, the other to vengeance.”
130
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
I am a slave, I know,
and slaves are weak. But the gods are strong, and over them
there stands some absolute, some moral order
or principle of law more final still.
Upon this moral law the world depends;
through it the gods exist; by it we live,
defining good and evil. (798–801)70
In the vision of the cosmic order advanced by Hecuba, even the pow-
erful gods adhere to a higher law (Nomos, 800), exercising their power
in the service of justice. She is doubtless referring to the gods’ tra-
ditional role in protecting the rights of the suppliant, sanctioning
the laws of hospitality, enforcing oaths, and so on.71 The Melians
appeal to this traditional role of the gods in their dialogue with the
70
The Greek text for Hecuba 798–801 runs as follows:
J 3 N
( 4($
71
Cf. Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 83, who also refers to the traditions governing treat-
ment of the weak and care of the dead. Hecuba will later insist on the importance of the
congruence of word and deed (1187–91). Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athe-
nians, asserts that Hecuba defends the traditions of “fellowship, guest-friendship, burial”
(p. 111). She further argues that Hecuba’s story enacts a “kind of Oresteia in reverse:
private vendetta comes into play after an appeal to institutionalized justice has failed”
(p. 108). For a fuller treatment of the parallels (and contrasts) between Aeschylus and
Euripides, see Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus.”
131
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
72
See Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow, p. 197, for a discussion of the concepts of
universal law that won wide acceptance in the fifth century b.c.
73
Arrowsmith is taking poetic license when he speaks of Nomos (800) as an absolute upon
which “the world depends” and through which “the gods exist”; his translation of the
term as “some . . . principle of law” is closer to the Greek. In this sense nomos could refer
to the “traditional belief in the existence of the gods and in the universality of standards
of justice,” as argued by Gregory, Euripides: Hecuba, p. 139, n. on lines 798–801. In the
dramatic context, this reference would include the gods’ traditional protection of the
laws governing hospitality and supplication.
In The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 400, Martha C. Nussbaum’s translation of nomos
as “convention” would undercut the force of Hecuba’s own argument, which attempts
to persuade Agamemnon to follow a moral imperative. If nomos were something as
contingent or relative as “convention,” how could it be something “strong” that is set
over the gods themselves? It must be conceded, however, that the exact meaning of nomos
in this passage is unclear.
74
Segal, “The Problem of the Gods,” p. 13.
75
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 83.
76
Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow, p. 202.
132
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
77
The Greek text for Hecuba 814–19 runs as follows:
;
3 A
X "6 # ; :,
K9 3 6 :"" "1 '
8 -
* 8
( #M
(T ' #, R’ /
. 5:
%# ’ ;
78
Cf. Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, p. 150.
79
'% #( 8% *(, _ ("# (1 ; (# ' "%
$ : %&" ; '5 ( ;
:
; "& *"%#((
;
* GA(. . . . N ,
: ; 6 ZP
8 L /
0 8 N( >( " , 5A" 5 J" #(. %&" *G
133
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
3 , #%
,9 aG 3 N, 6 3 : 6 6
(Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 2, pp. 290–1 [DK 82B11] ). This
passage from Gorgias’ Encomium on Helen is translated by Robinson, An Introduction to
Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 267–8.
80
Hecuba uses the same Greek word for “queen” (:"[], 816) to describe persuasion
that she used to describe herself only seven lines earlier (809). In his note on this line,
King, Euripides’ Hecuba, p. 92, argues that “[t]he failure of her plea for Justice has taught
[Hecuba] that Persuasion, not abstract Law, is the ruler of men.” Buxton, Persuasion in
Greek Tragedy, p. 182, comments that the “connection between the power of peitho and
the moral authority of the persuader” is almost entirely missing in the play. Hecuba’s
description of rhetoric as “the only queen of men” evokes the sophists’ claim for the
centrality of rhetoric in the Athenian democracy. Cf. the description of the powers
of rhetoric in the passage from the Encomium on Helen just quoted. Also cf. Gorgias’
description of rhetoric as a master art that embraces all others in Plato’s Gorgias (456a).
In The Heroic Muse, Kovacs makes the argument that the play marks the passing of
an era.
134
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
81
Ruth Scodel, “The Captive’s Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripides’ Hecuba and
Troades,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 144–5.
82
See Scodel, “The Captive’s Dilemma,” p. 1, n. 1, for a partial list. Kirkwood, “Hecuba and
Nomos,” 66, states that Hecuba’s use of persuasion here is “repulsive” and “entirely devoid
of moral content,” while Conacher, “Euripides’ Hecuba,” p. 23, asserts that Hecuba’s
moral decline may be traced out through her use (and abuse) of rhetoric, particularly in
“pandering . . . with her daughter’s honour.” Contrast Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 77,
who argues that Hecuba’s appeal demonstrates the close connection between “sophistic
and erotic persuasion” (without making a pejorative judgment about her).
83
Scodel, “The Captive’s Dilemma,” p. 145, is speaking of Hecuba’s status in the Trojan
Women, but the argument holds equally well here.
135
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
84
Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 140.
85
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 83.
86
Michelini, Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, p. 153.
87
The phrase Arrowsmith translates “by some magic” would be more literally translated
“by the craft of Daedalus” (S#
8(, 838).
88
For other examples of the power of rhetorical inventiveness in the play, cf. Odysseus’
reference to the “inventions of many arguments” (
)
%) +"A’, 250) that
he used to save his own life, and Hecuba’s plea that Polyxena use “every skill that pity
has, every voice” ( #( . . . %%&, 337–8) and “all sorts of arguments” (
'%, 840) to save hers.
136
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
89
Kastely, “Violence and Rhetoric,” p. 1042.
90
Hecuba’s wish for such a voice recalls Theseus’ wish that men had a second, just voice
that would be set over their ordinary, deceptive voice (Hippolytus 925–31) – although his
wish reflects a need to distinguish truth from falsehood, not to promote the justice of a
plea that he is making.
91
Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 78.
92
The Greek text for Hecuba 841–5 runs as follows:
] 8( ’, ] 8%( h P
( #,
, "#( " < "(5:
"', , ; 8 *(,
’ 2.
*(
%&" " < < ’ + "
; T T "- ) .
137
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
93
This antithesis is even more apparent in the Greek, which opposes adjectives for
“instantly” (T, 862) and “slow” (5"T, 863).
94
Cf. Adkins, “Basic Greek Values,” p. 204, who argues that if Polymestor had been
acting on behalf of Greek interests in killing his guest-friend Polydorus, Agamemnon
would have condoned the murder. Also cf. Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the
Athenians, p. 102, who argues that Agamemnon’s sense of self-interest is stronger than his
sense of justice, and Kirkwood, “Hecuba and Nomos,” pp. 66–8, who makes a similar
argument.
138
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
95
In Anxiety Veiled, pp. 121–2, Rabinowitz points out that Hecuba reassures Polymestor
that he has nothing to fear, since there are only women inside the tent.
96
Because Hecuba draws on a whole range of arguments in her dialogue with Agamem-
non, one cannot say with certainty which one finally convinces him; perhaps it is the
cumulative effect of all of them. Indeed, in the passage under examination, Hecuba does
express a wish for a “thousand tongues” (or, more literally, “all sorts of arguments”). But
I do detect a softening in Agamemnon’s position in the speech he makes after hearing
Hecuba’s climactic plea (850–63).
139
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
assures him that she still considers him a friend, but in words that
contain ironic double meanings:
She then asks Polymestor to bring his sons along with him, in case
something should prevent him from retrieving the gold (1006). More
chilling still is her suggestion that Polymestor, once he learns where
the treasure is hidden, should take his children where he left her son
(1023). As they enter the tent, the chorus describes the imminent
punishment of Polymestor as just retribution for his crimes: “Justice
and the gods / exact the loan at last” (1030). The audience learns what
form this justice takes when Hecuba announces a little later that she
has blinded Polymestor and killed his sons.
When Agamemnon reappears, he commiserates with the plight of
Polymestor, who threatens to tear Hecuba “limb from limb” (1128).
Attempting to calm him down, Agamemnon offers to judge a case in
which Polymestor will play the role of the plaintiff:
The trial scene that ensues, one of the most bizarre in Greek tragedy,
follows the typical sequence prescribed by an Athenian law court: first
Polymestor (the plaintiff) presents his case, then Hecuba (the defen-
dant) presents hers, followed by the judge’s decision.97 Agamemnon’s
opening proclamation alludes to two ideals of both ancient and con-
temporary democracy: first, that the hearing of testimony from oppos-
ing sides by an impartial judge can produce a fair and just outcome,
and second, that such a process promotes the civilized aim of settling
disputes peacefully. Agamemnon’s pride in the supposed superiority of
97
For the argument that the speeches used in Euripidean trial scenes reflect actual practice
in Athenian law courts, see C. Collard, “Formal Debates in Euripides’ Drama,” Greece
& Rome (2d ser.) 22.1 (1975): 63.
140
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
To obtain their revenge, Hecuba and the Trojan women exploit the
traditional female concern with the indoor occupations of weaving,
child care, and hospitality.99 The chorus’ movement from one extreme
of stereotypical female behavior – modesty, passivity, and domesticity –
to the other – vengefulness and cunning – parallels Hecuba’s own vac-
illation between these extremes. By exploiting their own perceived
weakness, Hecuba and the chorus demonstrate a certain affinity with
rhetoric, which, as Gorgias describes it, is powerful without seeming to
be. The chorus’ claim to have acted justly wins a measure of the audi-
ence’s sympathy, both because of the heinous nature of Polymestor’s
crime and because of the transparent hypocrisy of his defense of it.
Having learned of Polymestor’s guilt in the prologue, the audience
would rightly dismiss his claim to have killed Polydorus out of con-
cern about the threat he posed to the Greeks.
98
When he refers to Polymestor’s “inhuman savagery,” Agamemnon uses the Greek term
5#"5" (1129), which connotes a trait belonging to foreigners – showing ethno-
centric pride in his own civilization.
99
In “Golden Armor,” pp. 314–15, Segal argues that the robes from which the women
pull their daggers connote traditional feminine values of modesty and obedience; Rabi-
nowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 122, asserts that the women “exaggerate their femininity” and
exploit their “supposed motherliness” to extract their revenge. A character in
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a dialogue on estate management, describes a woman’s god-
given nature as properly suited to indoor tasks and concerns (7.22). See Xenophon,
Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant. Loeb Classical Library. Rpt. 1965
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923).
141
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
This trial scene provides yet another forum for Hecuba’s rhetorical
skills. In rebutting Polymestor’s argument, she associates him with the
sophists of Euripides’ own era:
100
The Greek text for Hecuba 1187–94 runs as follows:
l%#, "1 ( *"
) "%# 6 %
)(( ,(:
8$
’ : & 8
I (,
) ’ 1
’$ *GA
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142
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
101
Cf. Buxton, “Persuasion in Greek Tragedy,” p. 184; Thucydides presents the Theban
argument itself as sophistic because it unfairly deprives the Plataeans of their right to
defend themselves (History 3.67).
143
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
144
THE BODY’S CRY FOR JUSTICE IN THE HECUBA
102
Critics are divided about the effect of the prophecy that depicts Hecuba’s transformation
into a “a dog, a bitch with glowing eyes” (1265). Most critics take this transformation as
a sign of her moral degradation, but some disagree. For a list of critics in both camps,
see Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 90, n. 39. I disagree with the view of Ra’anana
Meridor, “Hecuba’s Revenge: Some Observations on Euripides’ Hecuba,” American
Journal of Philology 99 (1978): 35, that Polymestor’s punishment is “appropriate” and
“positive.” Even if one were to accept that such a gruesome act could be justified, is
the revenge Hecuba takes on Polymestor’s children also justified? I would side instead
with those who, like Zeitlin (p. 85), Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow, p. 186,
and Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 153, posit a moral equivalence between
Hecuba and Polymestor. As Kastely, “Violence and Rhetoric in Euripides’s Hecuba,”
p. 1046, argues, Polymestor does succeed in avenging himself on Hecuba through
his prophecy. Although Hecuba tries to make light of his remarks, his prediction of
her imminent transmogrification and death would have been given credence by the
audience, because he accurately predicts the deaths of both Agamemnon and Cassandra.
The pattern of the play’s imagery concerning body and voice also confirms a negative
reading of Hecuba’s transformation, I would argue.
103
Citing the lack of any “conciliatory gesture” or hint of a hopeful future at the end of the
play, Zeitlin, “Euripides’ Hekabe,” p. 57, calls it “the least consoling of Euripides’ dra-
mas”; Thalmann, “Euripides and Aeschylus,” p. 155, likewise finds a lack of resolution
in the play, insofar as it traces out “a circle of ultimately pointless violence.”
145
4
146
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
the archetypal voice of truth in the ancient Greek world marks both
the dramatic and the metaphysical crisis of the play. His doubt is well
founded: in order to secure Ion’s inheritance, Apollo, who is his true
father, has apparently issued a false oracle deeming Xuthus to be his
father.3 Ion’s mother, Creusa, who earlier attacked Apollo as cruel and
unjust, now defends him, arguing that if Apollo had acknowledged
his paternity of Ion, Ion “would have lost / All hope of heritage or
father’s name” (1541–2). But Ion, unconvinced by his mother’s theory,
insists on consulting the oracle once more to clear up the confusion.
Before he can do so, however, Athena appears and confirms Creusa’s
explanation. Apollo indeed made a gift of Ion to Xuthus in order to
secure his son’s political advantage; the god’s justice was only delayed,
3
Even though the question of the veracity of the oracle is finally left unresolved, the
play as a whole suggests that Apollo has indeed issued a false oracle. Supporting this
reading is Hermes’ assertion in the prologue that Apollo will give his own biological
son ( 8, 70) to Xuthus (69–71), an assertion supported by Xuthus’ account
of the oracle he received ( 8, 536). See Anne Pippin Burnett, “Human
Resistance and Divine Persuasion in Euripides’ Ion,” Classical Philology 57 (1962): 91;
cf. Owen, Euripides’ Ion, who refers to Apollo’s “false oracle” (xix) and who maintains
that “Delphi has lied to Xuthus” (xxxiv). Creusa suggests that Apollo lied about
his paternity in order to facilitate Ion’s adoption by Xuthus (1534–6). According to
Owen, p. 176 (n. on line 1535), Apollo could not have been named as Ion’s real father,
as the contemporary practice of adoption required, because Creusa’s earlier silence
about Apollo’s paternity and her attempt to kill Ion would have been quite difficult to
explain.
Owen does allow, however, that the oracle could have been ambiguously worded
so as to suggest “that either Xuthus or Apollo was Ion’s father”: “Euripides probably
imagined that there would have been some such ambiguous oracle, a trick to secure the
god’s immediate purpose, but by which he could declare that he had not departed from
veracity” (xx). But what of Hermes’ assertion in the prologue? Hermes is not the most
reliable source of information, insofar as he is the god of “equivocal communication,”
as pointed out by Nicole Loraux, “Kreousa the Autochthon: A Study of Euripides’
Ion,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its
Social Context (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 171. This association is
only reinforced by the fact that Hermes makes a false statement in the prologue, “the
only example in Greek Tragedy where something is definitely announced in a prologue
as going to happen, which does not” (Owen, Euripides’ Ion, xix, n. 1): Hermes says that
Creusa will not learn of the oracle’s declaration of Ion as Apollo’s son until she is back
in Athens (69–73), whereas she learns of it in Delphi. As for the account of the content
of the oracle that Xuthus gives to Ion, we have no other outside corroboration of it
than from Hermes, who has been shown to be unreliable. Nor does Athena directly
address Ion’s question in the epilogue. Ultimately, the question of the veracity of the
oracle is superseded by the question of the god’s benevolence: is Apollo guiding events
to a happy conclusion for Creusa and Ion or not?
147
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
4
Bernard Knox, “Euripidean Comedy,” in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Arguing against the origin of tragi-
comedy in the modern era, Bernd Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia: Studien zu komischen
Elementen in der griechischen Tragödie. Hypomnemata 72: Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu
ihrem Nachleben (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1982), p. 247, asserts: “Die
Geschichte der ‘synthetischen Tragikomödie’ beginnt nicht erst in der Romantik oder
bei Shakespeare und Molière, sondern mit Euripides.”
5
A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, “A New Aspect of the Evolution of the
Trimeter in Euripides,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 111 (1981): 43–
64, place the play between the performances of the Trojan Women (415 b.c.) and the Helen
(412 b.c.) on metrical grounds.
6
Christian Wolff, “The Design and Myth in Euripides’ Ion,” Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 69 (1965): 174, argues that the play expresses a certain nostalgia for the city’s
noble past, “a nostalgia which may well be imagined in the years after Sicily.”
148
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
7
Cf. Stanley E. Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology in Euripides’
Ion,” Classical Antiquity 15.2 (1996): 309.
8
For examples of attempts to manipulate oracles, see the story of Themistocles’ success-
ful reinterpretation of a Delphic pronouncement (from Herodotus’ Histories 7.139–44,
149
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Thus the oracle embodies both sides of the debate between Polyneices
and Eteocles: on the one hand, the oracular voice of Apollo is a “single
and plain” voice of truth that evinces the “metaphysics of presence”;
on the other hand, the riddling, ambiguous nature of the oracle means
that it depends on “shifting, intricate interpretations” for its truth to
be revealed. Let us examine the metaphysical assumptions implicit in
both of these perspectives before proceeding to an analysis of the text.
The oracle of Apollo serves as a transparent medium of the god’s
voice, conveying infallible knowledge of both the present and the
future, as Hermes says in the prologue of the play (5–7). Hermes’ asser-
tion that Apollo “gives [humnôdei, 6; literally “sings”] / His prophecies
to men (6–7)” implies that the god conveys his meaning through the
voice without any slippage or distortion. Hermes’ reference to the ora-
cle as the “earth’s mid-center” or “navel” (omphalon, 5) recalls another
key assumption of phonocentrism. In Derridean terms, the divine
word serves as a center and origin that grounds a culture’s whole sys-
tem of speech, values, and meaning. This center admits of no absence
or difference from itself. As Derrida states, “all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an
invariable presence.”9
referred to earlier) and the story of Alexander the Great’s intimidation of the Delphic
priestess in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (14.4).
9
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 279. Although Derrida is referring to the Western
philosophical tradition beginning with Plato, I am arguing that the Delphic oracle
also exemplifies Derrida’s views about the center. Although the oracle is notoriously
ambiguous and prone to misinterpretation, an underlying faith in its ultimate truth-
fulness pervades Greek literature and history. Lisa Maurizio, “Delphic Oracles as Oral
Performances: Authenticity and Historical Evidence,” Classical Antiquity 16.2 (1997):
312, surveying ancient accounts of the outcome of Delphic predictions, reports that
“[o]f the six hundred or so oracles attributed to Delphi, all are fulfilled, that is, none
are represented as forgeries or as inaccurate predictions.” At the same time, Maur-
izio argues for a more critical weighing of the evidence that recognizes that these
oracles are really “religious testimonia”; as such, they reflect a very different world-
view and sense of truth than modern scholars typically espouse. Euripides’ drama criti-
cally examines the metaphysical assumptions of this ancient belief-system in a way that
is remarkable in a pre-Platonic text, especially one that is not philosophical per se.
Delphi also exemplifies Mircea Eliade’s conception of the mythological axis mundi.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), pp. 36–7, speaks of “the image of a universal
pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth,” and argues
that such a pillar “can be only at the very center of the universe, for the whole of the
150
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
habitable world extends around it.” The axis of this spiritual center is “located ‘in the
middle,’ at the ‘navel of the earth.’” Confirming the notion that Delphi functions as
an axis mundi in the play is the view of Anne Pippin Burnett, trans. and ed., Ion: By
Euripides. Greek Drama Series (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 135: Delphi was
called the navel of the earth not only because it was considered the earth’s center but also
because it served as a “magical connective orifice linking the surface of the earth to the
earth goddess Ge.” Delphi’s location at the navel of the earth accounts for its function
as a “metaphorical birthplace for cities, legal codes, and civic institutions,” according to
Carol Dougherty, “Democratic Contradictions and the Synoptic Illusion of Euripides’
Ion,” in Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick, eds., Dêmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies,
Ancient and Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 263.
10
G, [ ' *( * S
,
8% ":
& (.
The Greek is from Diels and Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1 (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1934), p. 172 (DK 22B93). Translated by Robinson, An Introduction to Early
Greek Philosophy, p. 96.
151
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
the oracle’s voice is at the same time, or so it is said, the author of the
hero, Ion himself.”11 Her metaphor is apt; the play questions Apollo’s
authority on both of these counts. At stake in both of these questions
is the status of Apollo and his divine word as the transcendent, fully
present, self-identical center of an entire system of metaphysics. For
most of its action the Ion subverts this phonocentric belief.
One recognizes in the play’s critique of divine truth and justice the
rational skepticism of Euripides’ own age. The play questions the logic
of worshipping deities who violate the very standards of justice they
set for the human race. In criticizing Apollo and the other gods as
unjust, Ion and Creusa are holding them accountable to a new code
that the Olympians rarely follow. Of course, the attempt to subject the
mythic gods to rational or moral examination is anachronistic.
The play’s attempt to reach a self-consistent definition of divine
justice by “cross-examining” Apollo, the gods, and the whole mythic
tradition bears some resemblance to the movement of a Socratic dia-
logue.12 This examination of the veracity of myth and story culminates
at the end of the drama in the questioning of the veracity of the oracle
itself. Ultimately, in asking “Is Ion merely being called Apollo’s son,
or is he in fact Apollo’s son?” the play tests the contradictions between
name and reality, name and being,13 and eventually myth and reason.
The oracular word of Apollo becomes the last in a series of stories
to be tested against the touchstone of rational inquiry: is it just an
unproven or unprovable story, like the myth of Athenian autochthony
or the other improbable myths alluded to in the play?14 What grounds
are there for believing in an oracle whose patron or intermediary may
be issuing self-serving or contradictory responses? Creusa’s complaint
that Apollo is a rapist who let his own child die causes even his own
dedicated votary to question him (429–52). But the critique of Apollo’s
word and character extends beyond the god to the institution of the
11
Froma I. Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides’ Ion,”
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 35 (1989): 145.
12
Ion will use the verb for “cross-examine” ( G8
%8, 367), cognate to elenchos, when he
exhorts Creusa not to put the oracle to the test (367).
13
The opposition between onoma and pragma is a favorite Euripidean motif. See Friedrich
Solmsen, “CkCQc and KmcDQc in Euripides’ Helen,” Classical Review 48 (1934):
119–21.
14
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 187.
152
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
oracle itself. The play’s early scenes suggest that the sacredness and
purity of Delphi rely on violence and the suppression of the female.15
Significantly, the drama reduces the female presence at Delphi,
which originally belonged to the earth goddess Ge, to the voice of a
priestess “speaking Apollo’s words and acting as his surrogate.” The
center of the earth is thus not gender-neutral, but associated initially
with the earth goddess, whom the myths tell us Apollo displaced.16
Creusa’s reference to Apollo’s seat at “the temple at earth’s center”
(910) reminds us of this act of displacement. Just as the navel (ompha-
los) marks the absence of the mother, so the temple marks the absence
of the original deity whom Apollo replaced. The play of absence and
presence, as it applies to the roles of both Creusa and Apollo, will be
an important motif throughout the drama.
Delphi’s location at the center of the earth (the omphalos) associates
the oracle directly with the female’s ability to procreate – and indirectly
with her “semiotic power” – because the mother in a prescientific age
is the only possible source of sure knowledge of the father’s identity.
Thus the female has a double connection to the transcendental signi-
fied represented by the “center,” as either the sure guarantor or the
potential fabricator of her offspring’s paternity (or perhaps both). The
Ion presents us with a god who has appropriated the female’s traditional
power, dating back to Pandora, over duplicitous, mediated speech.
Indeed, the accusation that Apollo is lying is closely related to the
accusation that he is hiding behind the oracle or other intermediaries
that he uses to speak on his behalf. Ion urges Creusa not to ask the
oracle about a shameful “secret [Apollo] wants to hide” (365, 367), and
Athena’s speech in the epilogue supports the suspicion that Apollo still
has something to hide: he refuses to appear “lest he should be blamed
for what / Has happened in the past” (1558–9). The fact that Apollo’s
voice is invariably mediated introduces the possibility that others may
15
Cf. Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology,” p. 299, on the battle of
Olympians and Giants.
16
See Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 195. Cf. the domestication of the powers of the
chthonic deities, the Erinyes or Furies, by Athena (working in conjunction with Apollo),
at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. But there, the transformation of the vengeful god-
desses into beneficent ones is accomplished through peaceful, not violent, means –
through Athena’s powers of persuasion.
153
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
be not only covering up for him but also misrepresenting his word for
purposes of their own.
To dramatize this potential, Euripides constructs a long series of
substitute speakers and signs that purportedly replace Apollo’s voice
or convey his will. The series of potentially duplicitous substitutes for
Apollo begins in the prologue with the appearance of Hermes and
ends in the epilogue with the appearance of Athena, both of whom
tell us they are serving as Apollo’s agents. But in between we also
have several other characters who purport to be speaking or acting for
Apollo or interpreting his will, including his Pythian priestess, Xuthus,
and Creusa. Ion’s suspicion that Creusa is lying about Apollo’s paternity
leads him to insist on consulting the oracle himself at the end of the
play.17 Ion’s uncertainty about the identity of his father widens into a
radical skepticism about the possibility of humans obtaining any certain
knowledge. To follow the plot is to follow the trace of a bewildering
series of replacements for Apollo’s original voice and presence.
This series of replacements reminds us that the word of Apollo is
always necessarily mediated. The oracle functions as a kind of litur-
gical supplement,18 partaking of the paradoxical double nature of the
supplement, as described by Derrida. On the one hand, the oracu-
lar “word of truth” is supposedly a repetition without difference of
Apollo’s voice or inner meaning, reflecting the oracle’s supernatu-
ral power to embody the nature of reality (assuming, of course, it is
interpreted correctly). In this way the supplement serves as a sign of
presence, plenitude, and identity. But Apollo’s “word of truth” is also
subject to slippage, distortion, and deceit, either voluntary or involun-
tary, on the part of the god and his intermediaries or interpreters. As
with the poetic voice of heroic fame (kleos), the fact that Apollo’s voice
is mediated introduces at least the theoretical possibility that his mean-
ing or intent will be somehow distorted or diluted. The same oracular
word that guarantees meaning and presence may also mark the defer-
ral, loss, or displacement of meaning and presence. The attempts made
17
One finds similar skepticism about claims of divine parentage elsewhere in Euripides.
For example, in the Bacchae Semele’s sisters claim that she has concocted the story that
Dionysus is her lover to escape the shame of having an illegitimate child (25–31).
18
A point suggested to me by Tim Beal.
154
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
19
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 185, who speaks of the play’s “demonstration of
the limits of human knowledge.”
20
Cf. Burnett, “Human Resistance and Divine Persuasion,” p. 101, on the play as a “prov-
idential comedy” and similar comments in Felix Martin Wasserman, “Divine Violence
and Providence in Euripides’ Ion,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 71
(1940): 601, who also argues that the audience feels “Apollo’s presence” throughout the
play.
155
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
to claim, as Dougherty does, that “[t]he entire plot of the Ion is pre-
sented in oracular terms – set at Delphi, framed by the absent presence
of Apollo.”21
Apollo’s invariable presence flickers behind the play of opposites, of
secrecy and exposure, of presence and absence, of truth and falsehood,
that pervades the whole drama. The false oracle issued by Apollo leads
to the false recognition scene between Ion and Xuthus, which in turn
incites Creusa to plot against Ion. Presumably, Apollo saves Ion by
sending the dove to drink the poison Creusa intended for him,22 and
he similarly saves Creusa from Ion by inspiring the Pythian priestess
to bring the tokens left in Ion’s cradle. Hermes, Athena, the Pythian
priestess, and other agents of Apollo underscore the nature of the oracle
as a cryptic “writing” to be decoded, a veil that has to be pierced to
attain the god’s true, originary voice.
Like the consultant of an oracle, the spectator of the drama has to
decipher the ambiguous meaning of individual events in its intricate
plot (even while knowing the eventual outcome in advance, thanks to
Hermes). The happy ending brings the audience in on a secret still kept
from Xuthus – the true identity of Ion’s father. The ending confirms
that Ion is not only the son of a god but also the founder of a dynasty
that will culminate in the Athenian empire of Euripides’ own day. The
pleasure the original audience would have taken in finally discovering
an oracular message so propitious for Athens’ hegemony provides an
escape from the difficult conditions under which the play was first
produced. The rest of this chapter outlines the general contours of
this apparent progression from anxiety to confidence, from absence to
presence, from ambiguity to clarity, even while pointing out factors
that potentially disrupt this movement.23
Let us begin with Hermes’ speech in the prologue, which presents
Apollo’s conduct much more positively than does Creusa’s subsequent
description of it. In Hermes’ version, Apollo did compel “Creusa /
To take him as her lover” (10–11), but afterwards, took steps to protect
21
Dougherty, “Democratic Contradictions,” p. 264.
22
Cf. Burnett, Ion: By Euripides, pp. 10–11.
23
Cf. Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity,” p. 181, who maintains that the drama “exemplifies
the ways in which Athens represents itself as ‘escaping’” a tragic outcome.
156
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
her and her child: he apparently saw to it that Creusa’s father was
ignorant of her pregnancy (15), instructed Hermes to rescue the child
and transport him to Delphi (29–36), and arranged for his upbringing
there (47–8). Hermes also tells us that Apollo will ensure the fame and
prosperity of his child and his whole lineage.
Hermes’ emphasis on the motif of Apollo’s benevolence announces
an important theme, that of the inherent limitation of human knowl-
edge. The characters in the drama are necessarily ignorant about vital
information that Hermes imparts to the audience. This information,
including Ion’s true parentage, his history, and his destined fame as a
“founder of ancient cities” (74–6), foreshadows the happy ending, one
that restores Athenians’ pride in their city-state – another manifestation
of the play’s nostalgic bent.
It is appropriate that Hermes begins a play that is obsessed with
questions of origins by recounting his own genealogy. He tells us that
he is the grandson of Atlas, “who wears on back of bronze the ancient /
Abode of gods in heaven” (1–2). The reference to Atlas’ being forced
by the Olympians to carry the sky on his shoulders alludes to the war
between the Olympians and the Titans that will serve as an impor-
tant motif throughout the play. The chorus members will describe
scenes from this war that they see depicted on Apollo’s temple at
Delphi; Creusa will also indirectly refer to it when she recounts how
Athena gave Erichthonius “[t]wo drops” of the blood of the Gorgon
she vanquished in this battle (1003). In the mistaken belief that Ion
is threatening to displace a potential heir of her own from Athens’
throne, Creusa will later ask the old man to use one of these drops
to poison Ion’s wine. But her fears about Ion are unfounded: Apollo,
a representative of the new Olympian order, will ultimately favor the
“earthborn” line of Athens of which Creusa is a descendant.24
24
Vincent J. Rosivach, “Earthborns and Olympians: The Parodos of the Ion,” Classical
Quarterly n. s. 27 (1977): 294, sees in Creusa’s resistance to Apollo a chthonic rebellion
against Olympian rule, and regards Ion himself as a blend of Olympian and chthonic
elements. Loraux, “Kreousa the Autochthon,” p. 191, also sees Ion as a kind of hybrid,
mediating between two opposed theories of generation, birth from a single parent and
birth from two. Hermes does refer to Creusa’s ancestor, Erichthonius, as a “son of Earth”
(22).
Missing in the prologue (and in the play as a whole) is any reference to the goddess
Earth as the original prophetic voice at Delphi, or to Apollo’s having supplanted her in
157
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
The Apollo of Ion is able to foresee, and so in a sense to control, the massive
shapes that loom in the future; the coming history of the Aegean lands is
under his eye. And he can, on the other hand, shape the least detail of a
personal destiny . . . The temple doves and the mortal Pythia move in perfect
consonance with his will, and yet what we see on this stage is a mixing of
events Apollo had intended with others that he had evidently never for a
moment foreseen.27
that role. Cf. Burnett, Ion: By Euripides, pp. 132, 135, who refers to Ge as the original
occupant of the shrine at Delphi and to Euripides’ account of the conflict between Ge
and Apollo in Iphigenia in Tauris, 1234–82: after Ge disputed Apollo’s new role as god of
prophecy, Zeus himself ensured that Apollo’s voice alone would convey true prophecy
to men. Cf. also 1259–82; there, the chorus tells of Earth’s wish to save the oracle for
her daughter, Themis, and of Apollo’s appeal to Zeus to grant it to him instead. An
account in Aeschylus omits mention of any conflict between the powers of earth and
sky by referring to Apollo’s having received his seat at Delphi as a gift from Phoebe,
who herself inherited it from Themis (Eumenides 1–8).
25
n5 +Y 5" / # b ; 8
158
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
Later, they excitedly ask Ion if Apollo’s temple “[r]eally contains the
world’s center” (223). The chorus’ naive faith in the gods and heroes is
reflected in their taking the artistic representations of them as reality.29
The entire scene is in a sense a comment on the power of traditional
28
Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology,” p. 316, speaks of both the
idyllic portrait of Delphi and its darker associations in concluding that the play at once
“idealizes and undercuts the sanctity” of Apollo’s shrine.
29
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” pp. 172, 179, who argues that the play is structured
around repetitions and doublings, mentions that Athena is first seen as a sculpture at
Apollo’s temple and is later seen as a character.
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EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
representations of the gods, both in art and in story. And yet the cho-
rus’ need to confirm the “story” they have heard about Delphi (225)
raises broader questions that pervade the play as a whole: What is the
true nature of the gods, and which traditional representations of them
are true? How does one distinguish between representation and reality,
imitation and original? This skepticism about myth thus reflects the
play’s wider, epistemological inquiry into the basis of human knowl-
edge and the nature of truth.30
The chorus’ naive belief in Apollo contrasts vividly with the harsh
criticism of him voiced by Creusa in the next scene. While the chorus
expresses awe upon seeing the temple, Creusa reacts to the same sight
by bursting into tears (241–3). She explains her reaction to a puzzled
Ion:
. . . when I saw this temple,
I measured an old memory again,
My mind elsewhere, though I stand here. (249–51)
30
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” on the play’s investigation of the truth of myth
and story, and the multiple perspectives that arise from this investigation. Cf. Zeitlin,
“Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self,” 165, who argues that the play’s explo-
rations of “epistemological concerns about truth and illusion, the fictive and the real”
are sharpened by its focus on the veracity of Apollo’s oracle.
160
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
31
Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology,” pp. 308, 304, argues that
Creusa’s fabrication of a friend reveals her “divided mind” and reflects her shame,
dramatizing the psychological effects of “social oppression.”
32
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": 7
:; (Ion 252–4).
33
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7
(#; (Ion 442–3).
161
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
34
J%: %&" ' 'G < "1 ' () & + :(
%, [ 0 ",< "$ (History 5.105.2).
35
Thucydides describes the divisive effect of civil war on families: “Family relations were
a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to
any extreme for any reason whatever” (5.82). It is true that Ion and Creusa concoct
their plots against each other in ignorance of the fact that they are related (and the plots
are not successful). Nonetheless, for the play’s contemporary audience, the threatened
violence between relatives would doubtless have triggered emotional associations with
the civil war. A plot depicting strife between family members that almost erupts into
violence becomes for Aristotle the best plot for arousing the tragic emotions (Poetics
1454a4–9).
162
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
role they will both play at the end of the drama as surrogate speakers
(or interpreters) for Apollo.
When Creusa invents a “friend – who says – she lay with Phoe-
bus” (338), she is constructing a narrative with affinities both to her
own story and to Ion’s. For this imaginary friend, like Athena and
the Pythia, is a mother in name only, not in fact. The ways in which
Creusa’s and Ion’s narratives overlap provide clues to their real relation-
ship that only the audience can appreciate. (Creusa and Ion do glimpse
the affinity of their tales in their exchange at 359–60.) Creusa’s creation
of her own fictional narrative again raises the question of the veracity
of story that pervades the play.36
The ironies of the scene are compounded by the fact that both
Creusa and Ion construct mother figures for themselves, Creusa in the
form of her imaginary friend and Ion in the form of the Pythia, whom
he thinks of as his mother (321). To further complicate matters, Creusa’s
friend, “[t]he absent woman whose complaints are here” (385), and
the “unhappy mother” she imagines misses Ion (360), are one and the
same person: Creusa herself. For if Creusa has fabricated an absent
friend whom she is representing at Delphi, this third character, whom
she refers to as Ion’s “unhappy mother,” is, without her knowing it,
herself – a phantom self, an imitation at two removes from herself, of
which she is as unaware as Ion is of his true mother. In saying that her
“friend” suffered the loss of her child just as Ion’s mother did (330),
Creusa unknowingly refers to herself by a double displacement.
The play’s simultaneous search for the one “true” mother, father,
and oracle involves distinguishing the original from a dizzying array
of substitutions and imitations. In Euripides’ multilayered “nonrecog-
nition” scene, Creusa’s allusion to a fictive friend cannot but remind
the audience that the “original” mother is herself an imitation, an
actor playing Creusa on the stage. Her metatheatrical reference to her
own status as an imitation suggests the difficulty (or impossibility, as
I will argue later) of separating original from imitation. The chain of
substitutions multiplies itself, both in this scene and throughout the
36
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 187.
163
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
play: Ion has a whole series of surrogate mothers (and fathers) to whom
he refers during the course of the action.37
Like Creusa, Ion has a shadow narrative of who he is; unlike her, he
is ignorant of his own parentage. After identifying himself as “Apollo’s
slave” (309), he tells her he has no idea of how he came to Delphi:
“I only know that I am called Apollo’s” (311, my emphasis).38 Ion’s
statement evokes the same antithesis of word versus fact, of name
versus reality, that was evoked by Creusa’s fabrication of a friend. The
ambiguity in Ion’s statement – being called “Apollo’s” could mean
being Apollo’s offspring as well as his slave – foreshadows Athena’s
pronouncement that Ion is in reality born “of Apollo” but will not
be called his son. Ion’s assertion thus serves as another oracular sign of
both his true identity and his promised destiny.
The reverence toward the god and his shrine that Ion expresses in
his monody rapidly gives way to criticism when he hears more details
about Apollo’s mistreatment of Creusa’s unnamed “friend.”39 How-
ever, Ion does refuse Creusa’s request to consult the oracle about the
child’s whereabouts. When she persists, citing the fact that “oracles are
open to all Greeks” (366), Ion counters by saying that posing such a
question might provoke the god’s wrath by exposing his culpability:
“Convicted of evil . . . Apollo would justly take vengeance on / His
prophet” (370–2). Here Ion seems to contradict his earlier condem-
nation of the god as unjust (355).
Ion’s shifting views of divine justice again reveal the contradictions
in the traditional Greek portrait of the gods as both transpersonal prin-
ciples of justice and arbitrary, self-interested beings. In urging Creusa
37
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 173, and Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and
Designs of the Self,” p. 171, who recounts “the range of reproductive strategies” alluded
to in the play.
38
I
6 a$ BG
A (Ion 311). Owen, Euripides’ Ion, p. 95, n. on 311,
mentions the fact that because Ion is a slave, he has no legal name of his own until
Xuthus gives him one.
39
It is intriguing that Creusa’s account of her imaginary friend’s encounter with Apollo
is much less damning of the god than the account of her own experience that she later
relates to the chorus. Whereas Creusa tells Ion that her friend “lay with Phoebus” (338),
she later tells the chorus of women that Apollo “cruelly forced her” (900). Perhaps she
is represented as playing to her audience in both cases. See Burnett, “Human Resistance
and Divine Persuasion,” pp. 90–1, for an analysis of the play’s various presentations of
Creusa’s encounter with Apollo.
164
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
not to force Apollo to answer her question, Ion asks her not to “cross-
examine” the god ([e]kselenche, 367; my translation). His use of the term
calls to mind the method of “cross-examination” (elenchos) employed
in the Socratic method. It is as if Ion is asking Creusa not to criticize the
god from the contemporary perspective of the Greek enlightenment.
Unable to persuade Ion to help her, Creusa, noticing the arrival
of her husband Xuthus, asks Ion to keep her story about her friend
confidential. Xuthus, unaware of this child’s existence, has come to
Delphi to seek a “promise / Of children from Apollo’s house” (423–
4). Xuthus’ belief that an oracular promise of children will indeed
be fulfilled exemplifies the phonocentric assumption that the divine
voice is capable of guaranteeing reality.40 Later on, the chorus will
echo Xuthus’ appeal by calling for “a clear response / Of the blessing
of children” (470–1).41 The chorus’ praise of children as a sign of “joy
overflowing” (476) anticipates the exuberance of the ending, when
the couple’s wish for a child is granted – along with a promise of his
beginning a great dynasty.
When Xuthus and Creusa leave the scene, Ion is left to ruminate
further on the justice of Apollo’s actions:
I must confront
Apollo with his wrongs. To force a girl
Against her will and afterward betray!
To leave a child to die which has been born
In secret! No! Do not act thus. But since
You have the power, seek the virtuous path.
All evil men are punished by the gods.
How then can it be just for you to stand
Accused of breaking laws you have yourselves
Laid down for men? But if – here I suppose
What could not be – you gave account on earth
For wrongs which you have done to women, you,
Apollo and Poseidon and Zeus who rules
In heaven, payment of your penalties
40
Cf. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 216, who speaks of Apollo as “the transcendental
signifier” who “is the source of the seed and visions but works through women’s bodies,
his prophetess and Kreousa.”
41
. . . %8 " " / :( ["(] (Ion 470–1).
165
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
42
The Greek text for Ion 436–51 runs as follows:
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43
The intense concern with this topic is evident in the fact that dik- and related compounds
based on the root for “justice” appear five times in ten lines (442–51).
44
Owen, Euripides’ Ion, p. 102, n. on line 436.
166
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
Ion. You my father! This is fool’s talk. – How can that be? No!
Xuthus. Yes. – The story which I have to tell will make it clear.
Ion. What have you to say?
Xuthus. I am your father. You are my son.
Ion. Who has told you this?
45
Ion magnifies Apollo’s importance by grouping him with Zeus and Poseidon, members
of the older generation of the gods who are usually grouped with Hades as rulers of the
three domains of the cosmos: sky, sea, and underworld.
46
Friedrich Solmsen, “Euripides’ Ion im Vergleich mit anderen Tragödien,” Hermes 69
(1934): 401, refers to this meeting as a kind of “pseudo-recognition” scene. Ion’s initial
rejection of Xuthus as his father anticipates his initial rejection of Creusa as his mother
later on in the play (1403–4). Another parallel between the two scenes is that both
Xuthus and Creusa offer to die to prove they are Ion’s true parents (527, 1415), a comic
reversal of the parricidal theme of Oedipus the King.
167
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
This encounter puts a comic spin on the dangerous ambiguity that the
oracle has traditionally posed for those who come to consult it. Instead
of receiving a potentially deceptive but true oracle, Xuthus receives
a transparently clear but false oracle.48 At issue here are the same
47
The Greek text for Ion 528–37 runs as follows:
;
– )", b *G *.
48
Contrasts with Sophocles’ Oedipus the King are striking: Oedipus’ discovery of his true
parentage leads to the loss of his kingship and his ruin, whereas Ion’s discovery of his true
parentage leads to his future kingship and good fortune. For further comparison of the
168
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
two plays, see Knox, “Euripidean Comedy,” pp. 257–8, and Dougherty, “Democratic
Contradictions,” p. 264, who reads the happy ending of the Ion in terms of “colonial
oracles” that are successfully interpreted.
49
Burnett, Ion: By Euripides, p. 10. Burnett also points out that the pun on Ion’s name,
based as it is on the participial form of the Greek verb “to come / go,” is also appropriate
because Ion “on this day will be ‘going’ from Delphi, soon to be ‘coming’ to Athens”
(p. 72, n. on line 661).
50
Cf. the Pythian priestess’ later reference to Apollo as sharing in Ion’s fortune ( :,
1368) and Ion’s later remarks on : (1512–15).
51
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 171.
169
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
52
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, pp. 215–6.
53
Dougherty, “Democratic Contradictions,” p. 262.
170
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
Yet Creusa’s ignorance of the actions Apollo took after assaulting her
blunts the force of her accusations of the god. Reinforcing the irony
of her ignorance is the chorus’ remark that Creusa will not permit a
foreigner to rule at Athens as long as “her eyes / Still have their clarity”
(1071–2).56
Creusa’s attack on Apollo as the treacherous god of poetry provides
the backdrop for the chorus’ subsequent attack on unjust male poets,
who glorify the gods’ illicit loves (1090–1105).57 Both Creusa and the
chorus are attacking “the detachment of art,” to be sure, but they
54
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 185, speaks persuasively of “[t]he incompatibility of
‘beauty’ and ‘justice’” in a play that is concerned with the search for “an objective justice.”
Burnett, “Human Resistance and Divine Persuasion,” p. 96, mentions the “explosive
tension between Creusa’s anger and Apollo’s beauty.”
55
Cf. Burnett, Ion: By Euripides, p. 132: “Music, like prophecy, was a gracious and gratuitous
boon, . . . and the Delphic oracles were thought of as a kind of song.”
56
Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self,” pp. 146–7, refers to the concern
of the Athenians with the purity and legitimacy of their citizens and, particularly, of their
leaders.
57
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 181, suggests that in this passage, Apollo becomes a
figure for poetry itself.
171
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
58
Ibid., p. 181. Owen, Euripides’ Ion, p. 141, n. on 1090–8, points out that this passage
recalls Medea 410ff., “the first stasimon, which preceded, as here, a projected murder.”
59
; %&" , ()# / ( , ( (Ion 1277–8). In
his note on line 1277, Owen, Euripides’ Ion, p. 156, points to Euripides’ Helen 1100 as
another example of the antithesis between sôma and onoma; see the next chapter for a
reading of the use of this antithesis in the Helen.
172
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
gift of Ion that Apollo makes to Xuthus in order that Ion may have
the “name” of the father, even though his actual father is absent. The
power of naming to evoke presence and guarantee identity also fore-
shadows Creusa’s naming of the tokens to establish her maternity of
Ion. In the epilogue Athena will also draw on the power of naming
to confer divine authority on Ion’s dynasty. If later scenes demon-
strate the life-giving potential of the name, the scene under discussion
demonstrates its destructive potential.
Ion’s failure to recognize his own mother almost leads him to com-
mit violence against her, just as Menelaus’ failure to recognize his own
wife in the Helen almost leads him to abandon her. There, Menelaus,
too, unwittingly gives priority to the name over the reality, prefer-
ring the “name” of past glories to the reality of his wife’s presence. In
dwelling nostalgically on the powers of the name to evoke presence,
both Ion and Menelaus remind us that they are themselves actors, prod-
ucts of theater’s power to construct living presences from legendary
names.
Ion’s preference for the “name” of his mother also reminds us that
others have played the role of mother for Ion while his biological
mother was absent. This drama, obsessed as it is with the search for
origins, invites us to ask: What is a mother? Who is the real mother, the
biological parent or the one who does the actual work of parenting?
The same questions could apply to the father as well, since Xuthus
will end up playing the role of father in the absence of the “real”
father, Apollo. Ion’s question about the identity of his father concerns
the relative importance of nature (physis) and nurture (nomos). But
his question also has wider epistemological connotations: if we don’t
even know who our parents are, how can we know who we are, and
indeed, what certain knowledge of ourselves and the world can we
obtain?
The confrontation between Ion and Creusa at Apollo’s altar involves
an ironic reversal of roles: Creusa seeks protection at the altar of the
very god she so recently condemned, whereas Ion, who argued that
Apollo’s shrine should be immune from prosecution by Creusa, would
now deny divine protection for Apollo’s suppliant. The ultimate irony
is that both Creusa and Ion claim to be faithfully representing Apollo,
173
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
60
The Greek text for Ion 1282–90 runs as follows:
W"8( – 8 ( 6 *3
+ 8" * R a(.
O E – *(; n5Y ( * 8(Y;
W – F" () .
E – "# ;
W –
174
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
61
The Greek text for Ion 1357–60 runs as follows:
a (
"=# , ] , ; # (,
o 8
(' *5
A
5
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175
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
62
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 216.
176
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
63
Cf. the emphasis of Bergren, “Language and the Female,” on the importance of the
metaphor of weaving in the characterization of the female in archaic Greek poetry. Cf.
also Ingrid E. Holmberg, “The Sign of QpqEd,” Arethusa 30.1 (1997): 1–33, on the
link between deceptiveness and the female in Homer and Hesiod.
64
Creusa’s solution to the problem of Apollo’s denial is one solution that the privileged
spectator (or reader) of the play will recognize to be in accord with the god’s own will, as
expressed through his intermediaries. Indeed, Athena will later confirm Creusa’s notion
that Apollo “gave” Ion to Xuthus ((, 1561; cf. , 1536). But, as I will argue
later, the ending of the play paradoxically both affirms and subverts the metaphysical
assumptions upon which the very notion of a “correct” interpretation of an oracle
depends.
177
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
he was the father, but simply made a gift of Ion to Xuthus, “just as a
man / Might give a friend his son to be his heir” (1535–6).65 Under
this interpretation, Apollo has in effect made Xuthus Ion’s adoptive
father, following what Rabinowitz calls “a legal model of historical
adoption.”66 And the purpose of Apollo’s “gift” of his son, Creusa
speculates, was to secure Ion’s position at Athens: “Acknowledged
as his son” [literally, “if you were called the son of a god”], “you
would have lost / All hope of heritage or father’s name” (1541–2).67
In solving the riddle of how Ion can be the “son” of both Xuthus and
Apollo, Creusa finds the double meaning of an ambiguous term that
is often required to decode a vexing oracle.68 But her rationalization
of the god’s intent fails to convince Ion, who insists on consulting
the oracle once more to get a definitive answer to the question of his
parentage.
Ion’s question, “[D]oes Apollo tell the truth, / Or is the oracle false?”
poses the play’s culminating challenge to the traditional portrait of the
god as a truth-teller. An ironic reversal takes place: whereas earlier
Ion dissuaded Creusa from consulting the oracle, now it is Creusa
who seeks to dissuade him from doing so. But Ion persists, only to be
stopped on his way by the sudden appearance of Athena, who says that
Apollo sent her (1556). She essentially confirms Creusa’s explanation of
Apollo’s motives: the god gave Ion to Xuthus in order that Ion might
have “an established place among a noble house” (1562). When the
plans went awry and Creusa began to plot against Ion, Athena tells us
that Apollo found a “means / Of rescue” for them (1565).
In the epilogue Athena speaks and acts in place of Apollo, who
refuses to appear “lest he should be blamed” for his conduct (1558).
The dea ex machina can thus be read as the last in a series of oracular
65
; %&" 0
Y / + ( ' ' (Ion 1535–6).
66
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 213.
67
3
%', / ( %
A" ' / b
"' (Ion 1541–3).
68
The tragic denouement of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King turns on the same ambiguity about
the identity of parents (biological versus adoptive) as does the happy ending of the Ion. For
another example of an imaginative solution of an ambiguous oracle, see Themistocles’
interpretation of the “wooden wall” oracle in Herodotus’ Histories, mentioned previously
(7.142, 8.51). Creusa takes even greater liberties with the actual language of the oracle
(as reported by Xuthus) than does Themistocles.
178
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
Creusa,
Go with your son to Cecrops’ land, and then
Appoint him to the royal throne; for since
He is descended from Erechtheus, he has
The right to rule my land: and he shall be
Renowned through Greece. His sons, four branches from
One stock, shall name the country and its peoples,
Divided in their tribes, who live about my rock.
....................................
They shall live in the two broad plains of Asia
And Europe, which lie on either side the straits,
Becoming famous under this boy’s name,
Ionians. (1571–8, 1585–8)69
69
The Greek text for Ion 1571–8 and 1585–8 runs as follows:
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1", W"8(, "' "T
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179
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
As the patron goddess who gives her name to Athens (1555), Athena
offers the “clear response / Of the blessing of children” initially sought
by Xuthus and Creusa. Athena’s epilogue, replete with proper names as
well as words for naming and their cognates, demonstrates the genera-
tive power of Apollo’s originary word. In naming Ion, Apollo decreed
his destiny through his oracular word of truth. When Xuthus claims
he is bestowing on the boy the name, he is really repeating Apollo’s
actual “word of truth” as conveyed by the Pythia. This significant
name is the basis of a rebirth for the nameless slave of Apollo that
will lead to a reunion with his mother, integration into a new family,
and, eventually, the birth of an eponymous people and an empire. So
Apollo’s oracular “word of truth” gives birth to Ion, and by extension,
the people named after him, and the empire founded by the dynasty.
This empire is built on a series of repetitions that serve to replace the
originary word of Apollo.
In ordaining the proliferation of Ion’s children, who are all descen-
dants of Apollo, Athena’s “oracle” again appropriates for the male
the procreative and semiotic powers of the female. Athena, a virgin
goddess “born from the single masculine principle,”71 bears witness
to the male’s procreative power not only through her very presence
but also through the message she delivers: she pays tribute to Apollo’s
70
The Greek text for Ion 1590–4 runs as follows:
71
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 217.
180
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
power to make word into flesh. Apollo’s fecundity thus seems to more
than compensate for the difference and absence that constitute the
divine voice. We have seen references to Athena’s serving as a sur-
rogate mother to Erichthonius; now she plays a similar role for Ion.
The pairing of Apollo and Athena at the end of the play forms part
of Ion’s family romance: he, his line, and the Athenian people as a
whole are in a sense offspring of a divine coupling between Apollo and
Athena.
Athena’s jingoistic72 speech sanctions the justice of Ion’s rule (1574),
and by extension, the justice of Athens’ hegemony over the lands
colonized by his descendants. In fact, Athens’ control of the grain-rich
region around the Hellespont referred to by Athena (1585–8) proved
to be an important factor in the early years of the Peloponnesian
War.73 The epilogue’s whole series of eponymous names – Athena,
Ion, Dorus, Achaeus, Aegicores – produces an “empire of signs” that
grants divine authorization for Athenian imperialism.74 The romance
of the nameless slave’s transformation into the founder of a dynasty
runs parallel with the fairy-tale ending for Athens, which will also
enjoy a prosperous future (1605).75 As with any romance, this one
involves glossing over inconvenient realities: Athena’s speech denies
the existence of conflicts that were to occur between an expansionist
Athens and her “kindred” Ionian cities.76
Athena delivers the play’s ultimate judgment of Apollo: he “man-
aged all things well” in preserving both the long-term interest of both
Ion and Creusa (1595). Mary-Kay Gamel sees Athena as “[a] slicker
72
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 204, considers Athena’s speech to be a “colonizing ‘master
narrative,’” while Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology,” p. 316,
speaks of its “simple jingoism.”
73
Burnett, Ion: By Euripides, pp. 127–8, n. on 1585.
74
I borrow the term “empire of signs” from the translated title of a book by Roland Barthes,
L’Empire des Signes (Geneva: A. Skira, 1970). Cf. Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and
Designs of the Self,” p. 182, on the epilogue’s “veritable flood of proper names” and
Loraux, “Kreousa the Autochthon,” p. 179, on the myth of autochthony as reinforcing
the play’s imperialistic bent.
75
Delebecque, Euripide et la Guerre du Péloponnèse, p. 232, comments on the ending’s “all’s
well that ends well” quality: “ . . . tout est pour le mieux, en fin de compte, dans la
meilleure des Athènes.”
76
Hoffer, “Violence, Culture, and the Workings of Ideology,” p. 313, argues that the speech
“mystifies Athens’ imperialism.”
181
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
77
Mary-Kay Gamel, “ ‘Apollo Knows I Have No Children’: Motherhood, Scholarship,
Theater,” Arethusa 34.2 (2001): 159.
78
The stage direction preceding Ion’s speech at 1606–8 in Willetts’ translation has him
saying these lines “ironically,” but I find no evidence in the Greek for this.
182
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
and Creusa praises the oracle for having restored her son to her (1610–
11). Athena offers a pithy “moral of the story”: “The gods perhaps /
Move to action late, but in the end they show their strength” (1614–15).
In the drama’s closing song, the chorus draws an analogous moral:
79
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F 3 *(
; %#( G, /F ; , >( " :(, N "#G
(Ion 1619–22).
80
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 191, n. 12. This slant is obscured by Willett’s
anachronistic translation of *(
; (1621, meaning “noble”) as “good” and ; (1622,
meaning “base”) as “evil.”
81
This resolution of the sophistic split between nomos and physis was perhaps foreshadowed
by Ion’s claim earlier in the play that nomos and physis combined to make him a just
man for the god (643–4). Of course the revelation that Apollo is Ion’s father lends an
unexpected irony to these lines. For a comment on the “mischievous” allusion that
Euripides may be making here to the sophistic “double arguments,” see Victor Bers,
“Tragedy and Rhetoric,” in Ian Worthington, ed., Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 193, n. 23.
82
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 174.
183
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
83
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, pp. 210–15, p. 217. She also argues that the play adopts the
view, advanced by Apollo in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, that the mother is simply an incubator
of the seed (p. 210).
84
Gamel, “‘Apollo Knows I Have No Children,’” p. 174.
85
Cf. the similar structure of the Helen, in which the audience is complicit with the duping
of Theoclymenus.
86
In “Orality, Masculinity, and Greek Epic,” Arethusa 30.3 (1997): 315–40, Bassi discusses
the connection between mediated speech and deception in the Greek epic.
87
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 216.
88
Hermes of course must be added to the list of surrogate speakers for Apollo. Significantly,
both Hermes and Athena are known for their wiles.
184
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
89
Gamel, “ ‘Apollo Knows I Have No Children,’ ” p. 164, recognizes that the play presents
fatherhood as “constructed rather than transcendent,” a statement that tends to undercut
her reading of the play as an instrument of an oppressive masculinist ideology.
90
Considering the play from a rationalist perspective, one could argue that Apollo’s pater-
nity of Ion could be verified only through Creusa’s testimony (if at all). Male anxiety and
insecurity about the identity of one’s father has a long lineage in the Greek tradition.
Cf. Telemachus’ assertion that no one can ever, on his own, be sure of who his father
is (Odyssey 1.215–16).
91
Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self,” p. 147. In “Kreousa the
Autochthon,” pp. 188, 187, Loraux, who argues that “there is something suspect at
the very heart of the representations of paternity” in the play, refers to “the true father
who posed as the false one and the false one who believed himself to be the true sire.”
One wonders how persuasive or truthful the oracle’s response to Ion’s question would
have been, had it been offered. Given that the oracle had previously denied that Apollo
was Ion’s father, how would Ion know which oracular response was the definitive one,
which version of the “truth” to believe?
185
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
92
Gamel, “‘Apollo Knows I Have No Children,’” p. 161.
186
THE VOICE OF APOLLO AND THE “EMPIRE OF SIGNS” IN THE ION
93
Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled, p. 217.
94
This is of course not to deny the biological fact of paternity, but only to emphasize
the point that identifying a child’s father is problematic in a way that identifying its
mother is not. Far from banishing all doubt about Ion’s paternity, I would argue, the
play reinforces the doubt by showing that paternity is necessarily based on claims and
assumptions whose truth value is uncertain or even suspect. (Nor does the veracity of
Creusa’s claim of maternity go unchallenged in the play.)
95
Cf. Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Myths and the Origins of Cities: Reflections on the
Autochthony Theme in Euripides’ Ion,” in J. Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political
Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 256, 264, who argues that
myths of autochthony repress the violence that accompanies the founding of a city, and
that Apollo’s failure to appear at the end of the play symbolizes this repression. Cf. also
Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 187, who argues that the play is about myth and
its workings, and Loraux, “Kreousa the Autochthon,” p. 178, who argues that the play
subjects the myth of autochthony to the “test of constant questioning.”
96
Cf. Wolff, “The Design and Myth,” p. 173, on the play’s “Pirandellian” investigation of
the truth. Zeitlin, “Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self,” p. 154, argues that the
play explores “the complexities of ideological mythmaking.”
97
Cf. Pietro Pucci, “Euripides: The Monument and the Sacrifice,” Arethusa 10.1 (1977):
178, on Euripidean drama as offering a “remedy” for the violence and pathos that “the
poet vainly tries to control.”
187
5
1
K q"
8; / G " " 5"5#"$ (Helen 1603–4). All transla-
tions of the play are (with minor modifications) by Richmond Lattimore in Euripides 2,
from The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1956). The Greek text comes from A. M. Dale, ed., Euripides’
Helen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
188
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
both of her good name and of the glory of Troy. One may well imagine
the appeal of this happy ending for the contemporary audience, which
had long been embroiled in a war whose aims might have seemed as
illusory as those of Euripides’ Trojan War.2
Along the way the drama does, however, pose some vexing ques-
tions about war, questions that resonate in our own day: What are
the underlying causes of war and how legitimate are they? Do these
causes justify the terrible toll in human suffering that war exacts? How
trustworthy is the basis of heroic fame? Earlier in the play, Menelaus,
using the same phrase that Helen uses in the dramatic finale, vows not
to shame “the glory of Troy” (845, my translation). Curiously, both
of them praise the glory of the Trojan War without a trace of irony.
Yet the very premise of this play – that Paris abducted not Helen but a
phantom-copy (eidôlon) of her made by Hera – calls into question the
whole rationale of the expedition against Troy.
Throughout the play the chorus and various characters ask Helen’s
question, but with a different emphasis: where, indeed, is the glory
of Troy if Paris’ reported abduction of Helen never occurred, and
the Trojan War was fought over a phantom? For these characters,
who deplore the inanity of the war, the immortal fame of the Iliadic
warriors becomes a report as illusory as the story of Paris’ abduc-
tion of Helen.3 The phantom comes to symbolize the hollowness
2
Bernd Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia, p. 198, argues that the play’s original audience
would have drawn a parallel between Euripides’ version of the Trojan War and the Pelo-
ponnesian War. Cf. also Conacher, Euripides and the Sophists, p. 110. For an opposing
view, see W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy: The Character of Greek Poli-
tics, 800–400 b.c. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 9–10, who maintains
that the play, which he calls a “melodramatic fantasy . . . of no immediate relevance,”
reflects a desire to escape the terrible reality of the Sicilian Expedition, as does A. N.
Pippin (Burnett), “Euripides’ Helen: A Comedy of Ideas,” Classical Philology 55 (1960):
155. In Greek Tragic Poetry, trans. Matthew Dillon (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1972), p. 315, Albin Lesky takes a middle view with which I am sympathetic. Asserting
that the play’s “invective against the war (1151) is surely inseparable from the mood of
Athens in 412,” he wonders “whether Euripides did not write this colorful and imagi-
native play, complete with a happy end, precisely as an escape from the afflictions of the
time.”
3
Cf. the remarks by the phantom (608–15); the servant (603, 707, 718, 749–51); the chorus
(1122–4); Theoclymenus (1220); and Helen herself (362). The phantom’s substitution for
Helen does not in itself necessarily diminish the valor of the deeds performed in the
Trojan War or the glory attained through those deeds; but that is the conclusion these
189
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
of the heroic fame (kleos) that the Iliadic warrior is willing to risk
his life to acquire.4 The drama thus undermines not only the privi-
leged status of heroic fame as a reliable “word of truth,” but also the
canonical status of Homer’s epic as a kind of truthful voice sanctioned
by the Muses. Although Helen and Menelaus still speak nostalgically
of “the glory of Troy,” it is not until the end of the play that Helen’s
authentic reputation is apparently restored and the glory of the war
regained.5
Euripides’ play thus exploits the tension inherent in the two primary
meanings of kleos – a tension that already forms a crucial problem
in Homeric poetics. As it is commonly used in Homeric epic, kleos
means “immortal fame,” authorized and legitimated by the gods; but it
can also mean mere “report” or “rumor.”6 Euripides takes this subtle
contradiction in the Homeric concept of kleos and pushes it to its
limits. Just as he has done with the eidôlon, a Homeric device that he
turns against Homer,7 Euripides subverts the Iliadic concept of kleos
by exposing – and magnifying – its inherent contradictions.
Chief among these contradictions is the notion that gaps and rifts
inevitably open up in the transmission of a hero’s reputation. Pucci
characters reach, a fact that supports a reading of the play as antiwar (perhaps in spite of
itself – see the conclusion of this chapter for a discussion of the double-edged effect of
the Greek victory over the Egyptians).
4
Achilles epitomizes the warrior’s decision to sacrifice his life in exchange for eternal
glory. Offered a choice between a long, anonymous life and a short, glorious one by his
mother, a goddess (Iliad 9.410–16), Achilles ultimately chooses to die a glorious death in
the Trojan War.
5
In Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 2001), p. 53, Matthew Gumpert argues that the problem of distinguishing
truth from falsehood is a central one in the play, and that “the role of the name will
be crucial in the representation and resolution (to the extent that one exists) of that
problem.”
6
For an examination of the interplay between these meanings in Homer, see Pietro Pucci,
“The Language of the Muses,” pp. 163–86.
7
In the Iliad, Apollo creates an eidôlon to replace the beleaguered Aeneas, whom he carries
safely out of Diomedes’ reach (5.445–53). Will Prost, The Eidôlon of Helen: Diachronic
Edition of a Myth (Ph.D. diss., The Catholic University of America, 1977), pp. 24–5,
points out that although there are many incidents in Homer in which the gods assume
mortal form to deceive the enemy, the eidôlon of Aeneas is the unique instance of a
“separate, substantial, and special creation” that is substituted by the gods for someone
else. But Homer does not exploit the ironic implications of this substitution, which is
only temporary.
190
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
8
The argument that follows is summarized from Pucci, “The Language of the Muses,”
pp. 169–79.
9
According to Pucci, “The Language of the Muses,” p. 179, Homer’s second invocation
to the Muses in the Iliad makes clear this second possible meaning of kleos as “rumor” or
“hearsay”:
10
Ibid., p. 163.
191
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
11
Simon Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 27.
12
Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth, p. 46.
13
Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 52–3, 65.
14
As argued by Solmsen, “CkCQc and KmcDQc in Euripides’ Helen,” p. 120.
15
Cf. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice, p. 27, n. 49, who in discussing the implications of the
status of the proper name in epic, mentions the concept of “dissemination” developed
by Derrida. For a full exposition of this concept, see Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination.
192
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
16
See Helene P. Foley, “Anodos Dramas: Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen,” in Innovations of
Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 144.
193
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
17
The splitting of Helen into chaste and adulterous versions, remarked upon by Foley,
“Anodos Dramas,” p. 143, may represent an attempt to control the “semiotic power”
of the female, as Bergren, “Language and the Female,” p. 82, argues is the case with
Stesichorus’ Helen.
18
Cf. A. N. Pippin (Burnett), “Euripides’ Helen: A Comedy of Ideas,” p. 157: “The plot of
the Helen shows violence frustrated and innocence triumphant”; Richmond Lattimore’s
preface to his translation of the play (p. 262): “[Euripides] contrived, through the old
idol-story, to remove that stain of dishonor which the Egyptian version had re-attached
to Helen”; and Prost, The Eidôlon of Helen, p. 196: “By having Helen carried to Egypt,
without boarding Paris’ well-benched ships, Euripides fully exonerates his heroine.”
19
Karen Bassi’s argument about the effect of Stesichorus’ use of the eidôlon holds equally
well here. See “Helen and the Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus’ Palinode,” Arethusa
26.1 (1993): 62.
20
Foley, “Anodos Dramas,” p. 144.
21
As Pietro Pucci, “The Helen and Euripides’ ‘Comic’ Art,” Colby Quarterly 33.1 (1997):
68, remarks: “It is impossible to draw a connection between this bloodthirsty Helen and
the Helen who never sailed to Troy.”
22
A point suggested to me by Victoria Pedrick.
194
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
23
Pucci, “The Helen,” pp. 44–5. Cf. Gumpert, Grafting Helen, pp. 52–3.
195
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
resist the advances of his son, Theoclymenus. Helen then tells the
story of Zeus’ transforming himself into a swan in order to seduce her
mother Leda, adding the proviso, “if that story is reliable” (ei saphês
houtos logos, 21; my translation). Helen’s skepticism about the myth
of her own birth calls to mind the play’s status as an alternative ver-
sion of her story. She goes on to register skepticism about Aphrodite’s
motives when she uses a similar phrase to “if that story is reliable” (and
in the same metrical position in the line): “ . . . Aphrodite, promis-
ing my loveliness / (if what is cursed is ever lovely) to the arms /
of Paris, won her way” (27–9).24 The phrase “if what is cursed is
ever lovely” (ei kalon to dustuches) puts quotes around the word “love-
liness” to show its ambiguity and doubleness. As Downing argues,
“Helen’s kallos [loveliness] and its effects become divided, or doubled,
between her and the eidôlon (image) . . . ”25 Bassi points out the irony
involved in the fact that Helen’s beauty, her most clearly identifying
feature in epic, becomes the means by which people are deceived
about her.26
Like the doubleness of her appearance, identity, and reputation, the
doubleness of Helen’s own rhetoric is a motif that will pervade the
play. In Helen’s account not just stories about Zeus but Zeus himself
takes on a double aspect. He brought war on Greece for two disparate
reasons – to reduce the strain of overpopulation and to increase the
fame of Achilles (38–41). According to Helen, Zeus takes a double
attitude toward her as well: although he allows her reputation to be
sullied, he does help her maintain her chastity by picking Proteus, the
“most temperate” of men, to be her guardian in Egypt (46–8). Zeus’
contradictory attitude toward Helen parallels Hera’s, who victimizes
her at the beginning of the play and helps her at the end (1005–6).
Already in the prologue, then, human reputation is portrayed as
vulnerable to the whim of duplicitous, quarreling, and arbitrary
gods.
24
3 #
, ,
(8, / W: " "(’ X l
8G" %, /
-Y (Helen 27–9).
25
Eric Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity in Euripides’ Helen,” in
Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G.
Rosenmeyer, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), p. 2.
26
Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition in Euripides’ Helen,” p. 2.
196
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
27
These lines are, however, bracketed off in Dale’s edition of the play.
28
Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity,” pp. 4–5. Downing also points
out that the name “Eido,” in addition to evoking the eidôlon, foreshadows the concern
of the second half of the play with knowledge of the divine.
197
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Helen again reveals her concern with her own image when, in
speaking with the chorus a little later, she wishes that her much-
vaunted beauty could be wiped clean “like a picture”:
29
The Greek text for Helen 262–6 runs as follows:
4’ *G
(’ X %
’ N #
4( I
5 ;
,
; & : 3 & & o
h P
*
#, & 3 6 &
(Y M >( " & & (M( .
30
See the chapter on “ ‘ . . . That Dangerous Supplement . . . ’ ” in Derrida, Of Gramma-
tology, pp. 141–64. Cf. the description of the phantom as a supplement to Helen in
Gumpert, Grafting Helen, pp. 52–4.
198
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
form of the word for image (eidos). Helen here seems to regard her
own appearance in much the same light as the phantom image of her
made by Hera.
In a sense Euripides’ play itself fulfills Helen’s wish to be remade
again as a truer likeness, if it is taken to convey a “truer” version of
Helen than Homer’s epic, which has contributed to her false repu-
tation.31 But Helen’s reference to herself as an “image” reminds the
spectator or reader that Euripides’ Helen, like Homer’s, is a fictional
character. The “original” that Helen would like to redo is, metaphor-
ically, a “picture”; insofar as original and copy are always already imi-
tative, one cannot be distinguished from the other. The difficulty of
distinguishing between original and imitation is compounded by the
fact that elsewhere in the play, Helen refers to her body as the guarantor
of her identity, in contrast to her “name” or reputation.32
In fact, the tone of Helen’s wish reminds us that Euripides’ charac-
ter, despite its striking originality, is still a remade version of Homer’s.33
The self-pitying aspect of Helen’s comment about her “evil fate” recalls
her portrait in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. As Segal maintains,
Euripides’ Helen has much in common with Homer’s, particularly her
guilt and self-consciousness.34 We recall how in Iliad 6.343–8 Helen
expresses a wish that a storm had carried her away when she was
first born. She deprecates herself in both the Iliad and the Odyssey,
calling herself “a nasty, malicious bitch” (Iliad 6.344) and “shameless”
(Odyssey 4.145).35 Helen’s wish in Euripides that she could be wiped
clean “like a picture” evokes another important characteristic of her
Iliadic portrayal: her awareness of herself as an object of artistic rep-
resentation. She seems to romanticize her role as a heroine of the
Trojan saga by saying that Zeus chose Paris and her for an evil fate,
31
Ingrid E. Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen: Most Noble and Most Chaste,” American Journal
of Philology 116 (1995): 33, asserts the “image of Helen” that spreads false information
about her “is the epic image.”
32
For relevant examples see 66–7, 588, 1099–1100.
33
Euripides of course drew inspiration for a Helen who never went to Troy from Stesi-
chorus’ Palinode. See Bassi, “Helen and the Discourse of Denial,” for a detailed inter-
pretation of the Stesichorean tradition.
34
Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, p. 233.
35
Another aspect of Homer’s Helen that Euripides’ character reflects is her invective against
Aphrodite (cf. Iliad 3.399–412 with Euripides’ Helen 1097–1100).
199
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
to be sure, but for eternal fame as well (Iliad 6.355–8). Helen’s double
attitude toward her fate in Homer – self-rebuke for causing others
so much suffering alongside with an extreme concern with her own
reputation – is replicated in Euripides’ portrait.
The ruinous duplicity traditionally assigned to Helen is also associ-
ated with her in Euripides, but only indirectly – through the figure
of the eidôlon. Using the same word (agalma) that Helen had used in
comparing herself to a “picture,” the servant reporting the disappear-
ance of the eidôlon asks if the Greeks died for a “picture of a cloud”
(nephelês agalma, 705; my translation). Also serving to link Helen, the
eidôlon, and the motif of duplicity are other disparaging references to
her as an imitation or a copy.36 The specific link between Helen and
deceptive mimicry goes back to another Homeric antecedent: in the
Odyssey, Menelaus reports that she attempted to expose the ruse of
the Trojan Horse by mimicking the voices of the wives of the Greeks
hidden inside it (4.277–9).37 Homer’s Helen also shows an ability to
recognize likenesses that reveals her to be “a master of disguise”:38 first,
when she observes that the young stranger visiting Sparta resembles
Telemachus, who it in fact is (4.141–6); and second, when she reports
that she recognized Odysseus when he entered Troy disguised as a
beggar (4.240–64).
36
Cf. Teucer’s description of the real Helen as a “deadly likeness” and a “copy” (74–5)
(which I discuss in the next paragraph of the text) and Menelaus’ reference to her striking
resemblance to his wife (559). Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity,”
p. 9, argues that the eidôlon “provides the clearest opportunity for the self-reflexive
representation of the dramatist’s own apatê within the play itself.”
37
Cf. Prost, The Eidolon of Helen, p. 42, who calls Helen an “uncanny mimic” in the
Odyssey, and Bergren, “Language and the Female,” p. 80, who refers to “Helen’s mastery
of the verbal mimêsis of truth.” Cf. also Froma I. Zeitlin, “Travesties of Gender and
Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae,” in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in
Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 409, 410, who
describes Helen in the Odyssey as a “mistress of mimesis, linked . . . to secrecy, disguise,
and deception” – traits that link her with poetry, considered as “the imitation of many
voices in the service of seduction and enchantment.” The wiles of both Homer’s and
Euripides’ Helen also link her with Odysseus himself.
38
Ann L. T. Bergren, “Helen’s ‘Good’ Drug: Odyssey IV.1–305,” in Contemporary Literary
Hermeneutics and Interpretation of Classical Texts/Herméneutique littéraire contemporaine et
interprétation des textes classiques, ed. Stephanus Kresic (Ottawa: Ottawa University Press,
1981), p. 208.
200
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
39
] , I b=; *(
") / % ,9 ', ? 1
( / #
l:. (, 2( / ZP
8, :( (Helen 72–5).
40
Cf. Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition,” p. 7.
41
The Greek text for Helen 117–22 runs as follows:
ZP
8 – I (T 6 :(; H
:
8%;
q" – >( " % (8, 3 t((, 7
").
201
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
This dialogue, which calls into question both the reliability of percep-
tion and its relationship to intellection, dramatizes a “proto-Cartesian
assault on sense experience.”42 Helen’s skepticism about the evidence
of the senses reflects the prevailing attitude of the sophists, who Guthrie
tells us doubted “the possibility of certain knowledge, on the grounds
both of the inadequacy and fallibility of our faculties and of the absence
of a stable reality to be known.” Guthrie traces the background of this
skepticism back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose inquiries into
the Urstoff of the cosmos implied that the plain man couldn’t “believe
[his] own eyes” when it came to discerning the true nature of reality –
that motion and change are illusory, for instance.43
Helen’s question, “Did you see the poor woman, or have you
only heard?” implies that personal observation is more reliable than
hearsay,44 reinforcing the contingency of kleos (kluô, “to hear,” is cog-
nate to kleos). The foundations of kleos are further undermined if an
individual’s own observation can be a mere impression (dokêsin 119,
121) sent by the gods. Of course, Teucer’s insistence that he saw Helen
being carried off just as certainly as he sees Helen in front of him
as he speaks (118) contains a dramatic irony that would surely be
picked up by the audience. Like Teucer, the audience would have
trouble “recognizing” as Helen a character who, morally speaking,
resembles Homer’s Penelope more than Homer’s Helen.45 With these
'% 8(, 6 .
P – L 6 A( (
;
q – %&" b(( ,'$ ;
"-Y.
42
Carol Gould suggested this point to me in a personal communication. Helen’s skep-
tical concern about a false impression sent by God (119) finds a parallel in Descartes’
speculation in Meditations on First Philosophy about an evil spirit that may skew our
perception.
43
Guthrie, The Sophists, pp. 47–8, 15.
44
In outlining their methodologies, Herodotus (2.123.1; 7.152.3) and Thucydides (1.22.2–
4) both privilege personal observation over mere hearsay (although both remain skeptical
even of eyewitness accounts). Cf. Heraclitus (fragment 101a), who states that “eyes are
more accurate witnesses than ears” (but contrast his fragment 107, when he asserts that
both eyes and ears are “bad witnesses,” if men lack understanding). My translation of
the Greek, which comes from Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 1: for
fragment 101a, see p. 173 (DK 22B101a) and for fragment 107, see p. 175 (DK 22B107).
45
Euripides turns Helen, the notorious adulteress, into a paragon of fidelity, a sort of
Penelope figure: “the worst of her sex” becomes “the best of wives,” as Zeitlin,
202
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
“Travesties of Gender and Genre,” p. 394, wittily remarks. Like Penelope, who held
off the suitors for so many years, Helen steadfastly resists the advances of her lecher-
ous host, Theoclymenus. Like Penelope, who implies that only Odysseus’ return can
restore her lost glory (Odyssey 18.251–5; 19.124–8), Helen depends on her husband’s
return to salvage her reputation (287–92). The amusing irony of Euripides’ casting
Helen “in der Rolle der Penelope” is mentioned by Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia,
p. 163.
46
Bergren, “Language and the Female,” p. 78.
203
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
and Menelaus. Indeed, Teucer’s mistaking of the eidôlon for the “real”
Helen, and of the “real” Helen for the eidôlon, foreshadows her
encounter with Menelaus, who incredibly enough makes the same
double mistake. The Teucer episode foreshadows the later encounter
in another way: just as Helen barely escapes death at Teucer’s hands,
so she narrowly avoids what to her will be the catastrophe of losing
her husband a second time (592, 594–6).
Helen reacts to the news of Menelaus’ death – an example of false
kleos that mirrors her own false kleos – in a typically self-conscious
way, through a monody that Burnett describes as Helen’s song to her
own Muses – the sirens and Persephone.47 In the subsequent duet
with the chorus, Helen laments the destruction caused by her – or by
her name (196–9). But the ambiguity of her description of her name
as “causing much suffering” ( poluponon, 199; my translation) neatly
reflects her own double attitude with respect to her name and her
reputation alike: poluponon can mean “enduring” as well as “causing”
much suffering.48 She refers to the suffering her name and reputation
have both caused and endured when, a little later on, she sings that
Hermes, who abducted her while she was picking flowers, made her
a cause of strife while her name suffered “a false fame and a vanity”
(248–51).
The chorus sympathizes with Helen as a victim of a “rumor . . . that
gives [her] up to barbarian lusts” and as someone who has lost her
husband (224–7). But curiously, a little later, the chorus warns her
not to believe Teucer’s report that Menelaus is dead. Their skepti-
cism is borne out when, soon thereafter, a bedraggled, shipwrecked
Menelaus appears on stage. He boasts – although he denies it is boast-
ing – of the great expedition he and Agamemnon, “two renowned
brothers,” mounted against Troy (391–6). Menelaus expects that his
famous name will help him gain access to the palace and be accorded
proper hospitality (502) – in short, that his name will “make a
47
Burnett, Catastrophe Survived, p. 77, n. 1.
48
For the meaning “enduring much suffering” (“much-suffering,” “much-laboring”), cf.
Pindar Nemean Ode 1.33, Aeschylus Suppliant Maidens 382, and Euripides Orestes 175; for
“causing much suffering” (“painful,” “toilsome”), cf. Aeschylus Persians 320, Sophocles
Philoctetes 777, and Electra 515.
204
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
Menelaus. Ah, where are all my armies now, which won such fame?
Portress. You may have been a great man there. You are not one
here.
(453–4; adapted)50
In this version neither Helen nor Menelaus has the kleos she or he
deserves. Euripides’ Helen is better than she is in Homer, but her kleos
fails to do her justice. Euripides’ Menelaus, who is worse than he is
in Homer, has nonetheless achieved kleos at Troy. If Helen’s name and
reputation have spread too widely, Menelaus’ have not spread widely
enough: the kleos that Menelaus assumes is universal apparently has
not reached as far as Egypt.
Aside from reflecting a sophistic concern with the relativity of
nomoi,51 the portress’ comment that Menelaus was great “there” but
not “here” could be read metaphorically to underline the distance
between Homer and Euripides: Menelaus was great in epic, in Homer,
but not here in drama, in Euripides. Indeed, when compared with
Homer’s character, Menelaus in Euripides’ drama is almost as unrec-
ognizable as Helen. His portrayal as a comically ineffectual figure52
49
Cf. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice, p. 27, who asserts that in epic, the use of the heroic name
“makes a difference.”
50
The Greek text for Helen 453–4 runs as follows:
Q
8 – ,$ &
& ’( (":;
D" – * ( /(, 8#.
51
Guthrie, The Sophists, p. 16, speaks of the new sophistic awareness, gained through
increased contact with other cultures in the fifth century, that “customs and standards
of behaviour which had earlier been accepted as absolute and universal, and of divine
institution, were in fact local and relative.”
52
Cf. Dale, ed., Euripides’ Helen, xi, who finds a “half-comic tone” in Menelaus’
bewilderment in Egypt. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia, 175, considers him to be
a “Karikatur eines tragischen Helden” when he first appears on stage and later, in
his confrontation with the portress, a “vollends zur komischen Figur.” Foley, “Anodos
Dramas,” p. 141, describes his reliance on his former greatness as “at some points almost
ludicrous.”
205
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
underscores the sharp discrepancy between his kleos and what we see
on stage.
Menelaus’ dismay at his rude treatment is compounded when he
hears that Helen, the daughter of Zeus, is living in Egypt (470):
54
Cf. commentary on the scene by Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’
Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 197–204, and Seidensticker,
206
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
207
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
question, “Who shall teach you better than your eyes?”56 Menelaus
responds that his vision must be either sick or deficient. Euripides
delays having Helen simply tell Menelaus about the eidôlon in order to
explore the same theme of the reliability of the senses outlined in the
scene with Teucer. In the space of twenty-four lines (557–81), there
are eleven references to vision, seeing, and objects of sight. The comic
wordplay on Helen’s name in her dialogue with Menelaus – lines 561–3
begin with Hellênis, Hellênis, Helenê57 – provides an aural analogue to
the visual confusion surrounding Helen’s true identity.58
Even after Helen finally explains the source of the confusion – that
Hera fashioned a phantom and put it in her place (582–6) – Menelaus,
preferring the copy to the original, is still not convinced that she is
the real Helen. When Menelaus, still dumbfounded, asks Helen how
56
Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition,” p. 11, finds in the line a self-referential
allusion to the process of perception by spectators in the theater.
57
The English text for Helen 561–3 runs as follows:
The corresponding Greek text for lines 561–3 runs as follows (if we accept Markland’s
suggestion for line 561, supplied from Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae 907):
<Q
8 – ZP
$
208
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
she could be in Troy and Egypt at the same time (587), she takes a
different tack: “My name [onoma] could be in many places, but not
my body [sôma]” (588).59 Helen made the same distinction between
“body” and “name” in the prologue of the play, when she contrasted
her “name of guilt in Greece” with her “body uncontaminated by
disgrace” (66–7). Through these and other references Helen suggests
that the name, like the phantom, projects a false image of her, but
one that is even more threatening because it may be dispersed more
widely. As a vehicle of deception, the eidôlon becomes a figure for the
polysemy of the signifier, both visual and linguistic.60
Threatened with the uncontrollable dispersal of her reputation, her
“name,” Helen refers to her body as the authentic ground of her
being; the body thus serves as a supplement that restores the truth
of her essential self. Yet earlier, when Helen expressed a wish that
she could be remade without her beauty, she implied that her bodily
appearance was the cause, and not the cure, of her false reputation.
The confusion over Helen’s identity reaches an absurd (and perhaps
poignant) climax. Menelaus justifies his error by referring to the hard-
ships of the war fought to recover the false Helen from the Trojans.
He tells the real Helen: “I trust my memory of great hardships [ponôn]
more than you (593).” Segal comments, “In a setting where war and
Troy are called into question, an identity defined by Troy’s fall is highly
problematical.”61 Menelaus’ willful refusal to recognize the real Helen
suggests that her beauty is not to blame for causing the war, as Helen
(262–3), the chorus (383), and the Homeric tradition all assume, but
men’s own yearning for glory.
Only the servant’s news about the disappearance of the eidôlon –
a veritable deus ex machina – finally convinces Menelaus of Helen’s
true identity. Ironically, Menelaus’ recognition of Helen coincides
with the revelation that the war was fought over a phantom.62 The
59
%8 0
209
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
63
Prost, The Eidolon of Helen, p. 202. Of course, the phantom, which speaks only through
the mouth of the messenger, does not itself appear onstage, a fact that perhaps sharpens
the irony of the misidentifications of Helen.
64
ZP
8 K#" (Helen 611).
65
[;] – / 6 '(, (Helen 35–6).
66
. . . & ?( 3 , (Helen 615).
67
") 3 N( , ,; (
A$ (Helen 270).
68
The servant describes the phantom’s speech as mocking (619–20).
69
Cf. Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity,” p. 2, who argues that Helen
“retains and attracts many of the qualities of the eidôlon, including its beauty (and even
its fiction, 262–3).”
210
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
drove you / away, where your fate was stronger (641–3).”70 Menelaus’
argument recalls the rationalization of Helen’s behavior in Gorgias’
notorious Encomium on Helen: “God is stronger than man in might
and wisdom and every other respect. If, then, we are to posit Fate or
God as the reason, we must absolve Helen of her ill-repute.”71 The
very boldness of the drama’s transformation of Helen gives it the air of
an extravagant piece like Gorgias’, undercutting its own credibility.72
“There is pleasure in hardships heard about” (665), Menelaus goes on
to tell Helen, as he encourages her to tell her story. The sufferings of
the past now become prologue to a series of plot intrigues that lead to
the happy reunion of Helen and Menelaus.73
In spite of the servant’s repeated insistence that the Trojan War was
fought “in vain,” (603, 751), “for a cloud” (706), and “for nothing”
(718), Menelaus continues to refer to it as a reliable guide to heroic
behavior in his present circumstances. Faced with the threat of discov-
ery by Theonoë, Menelaus tells Helen he would rather fight than sub-
mit meekly, which would be unworthy of Troy (808); he then swears
not to shame the “glory of Troy” (845; my translation), promising to
die defending Helen and her honor, if necessary. The Iliadic bombast
of these lines rings hollow for two reasons; first, they evince no recog-
nition of the fact that the war was fought under a mistaken belief,
and second, they are comically at odds with Menelaus’ own cowardly
behavior. Not only does he rely on sophistic distinctions to save
70
. . . * ' 3 (( ( * / "
*
: / ("& -( "((
(Helen 641–3).
71
"1 "(( ; 5 ; ( ;
211
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
face – as when he explains that although he did beg before the gates of
the palace earlier, he “did not call it so” (792) – but he also depends on
Helen’s help in dealing with Theonoë, who could expose the couple
and destroy their homecoming. A role reversal takes place: despite all
of his rhetoric about action, the man who fought on Helen’s behalf
at Troy now asks his wife to confront Theonoë: “Best for woman to
approach woman. You do this” (830). As Menelaus’ suggestion indi-
cates, the happy ending will depend on these two women’s joining
forces and deploying their feminine wiles.
Ironically, Helen (followed by Menelaus) frames her request for
help in terms of the same Greek concept of kleos that failed to impress
the portress. Whereas Helen appeals to Theonoë’s concern for her
own and her father’s kleos (940–3), Menelaus urges her not to incur
the notoriety (duskleia) of killing him (993–5). Convinced by these
appeals, Theonoë reassures the couple that she will not stain Proteus’
reputation by treating them unjustly (999). As long as she is alive, she
will preserve her father’s good name, ensuring that it will not turn to
bad (1028–9). Theonoë, who is Helen’s counterpart in many ways,74
plays her part in restoring Helen’s true kleos, just as her father’s played
his in helping Helen preserve her chastity. Indeed, Theonoë considers
that she is acting in her father’s stead (1011–12), and indirectly, as an
agent of Helen’s father, Zeus. The identity of Theonoë’s interests with
her father’s is as complete as Helen’s with her husband’s.
Theonoë proves to be an indispensable ally for Helen because of her
divine consciousness, which allows her not only to distinguish between
imitation and reality but also to make mere images seem real. Like
Hesiod’s Muses, who “know how to speak many falsehoods that resem-
ble the truth” (Theogony 27), Theonoë possesses “semiotic power.”
Helen will soon demonstrate the same power, when she successfully
employs deceit to escape from Egypt with Menelaus. Theonoë could
expose the plot but chooses to help Helen restore her true reputation.
Both Helen and Theonoë, the one a victim of the gods, the other an
exponent of the divine power of prophecy, manipulate image and illu-
sion; both do so in the service of protecting a greater truth sanctioned
74
Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy, p. 245, calls Theonoë Helen’s “purer self.”
212
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
75
Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen,” p. 37, argues that Theonoë, a figure gifted with divine
knowledge of the truth, “sanctions Helen’s deceit by herself engaging in concealment,
which only serves to uncover the truth.”
76
See comment by Dale, ed., Euripides’ Helen, p. 132, on lines 1013–16.
77
Pippin (Burnett), “Euripides’ Helen,” p. 161.
78
Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition,” p. 10.
79
Orestes employed the same trick in Aeschylus’ Libation-Bearers.
80
Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity,” p. 11, suggests that Menelaus’
empty tomb “becomes the exact counterpart” to the eidôlon.
213
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
Helen cleverly suggests that her husband play the role of a sailor who
comes to report Menelaus’ death by drowning. She then convinces
Theoclymenus to allow her to honor her dead husband, whose corpse
is missing, by holding a “burial ceremony in empty robes” (1243). This
ruse convincingly demonstrates Helen’s control of the chain of substi-
tutions that make up the signifying process. The “empty robes” mark
or hold the place of the corpse of Menelaus, which is a fiction reported
by Menelaus himself, who is playing the role of his own fellow sailor.
Helen’s tremendous “semiotic power” could be threatening were it not
put in the service of her husband.81 The death of Menelaus that is not
a death recalls the ambiguous news that Teucer brought Helen about
her brothers: “They are dead, not dead [tethnâsi kai ou tethnâsi]. There
are two logô [words / accounts / interpretations] here” (138; my tran-
slation).
Indeed, on a large scale, the drama suspends two simultaneous
accounts, two different interpretations not only of Helen’s kleos and
character but also of the Trojan War and its significance. The private
tale of the couple’s intrigues now diverges from the public tale of the
suffering caused by the Trojan War. Whereas the chorus continues
to sing of the lives lost in vain, of the widows who cut their hair
in mourning (1121–4), all for a war-prize (geras) that was not a war-
prize (1134), Helen’s grief for her “dead, not dead” husband is now
only feigned. She adds a theatrical component to her skills in verbal
deception: cutting her hair, changing into black clothing, and scratch-
ing her cheek red (1087–9), she will mimic grief as convincingly as
her husband plays dead. Even as the chorus sings of the ambiguity
of human logos – “No man’s thought / I can speak of is ever clear.
The word of god only I found unbroken” (1149–50)82 – Helen and
Menelaus take advantage of this very ambiguity to make good their
escape. In a scene full of comic irony, using ambiguous language as an
“expression of intention and power,”83 Menelaus and Helen speak in
81
Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen,” pp. 37–8, argues that Helen’s triumph results from her
“single-minded devotion to Menelaus.”
82
/ (3 * 5"$ / ) ) []
3 [" (Helen
1148–50).
83
Cf. Pippin (Burnett), “Euripides’ Helen,” p. 153.
214
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
84
See Foley, “Anodos Dramas,” for a fuller exposition of the question of the competition
between Iliadic and Odyssean forms of kleos in the play, and Gregory Nagy, The Best
of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979), for the epic background of this competition.
85
See references to him as a tyrant (817) who is guilty of hubris (785) and who wields a
“savage [5#"5"’] sword” (864).
86
Helen’s reference to these secret signs recalls Penelope’s use of the trick of the bed –
something that only she and Odysseus knew about – as a means of confirming her
husband’s identity (Odyssey 23.177–80).
215
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
87
(1 5" ' ( 8( / '( 8
"' ' (Helen
1528–9).
216
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
88
Foley, “Anodos Dramas,” p. 143, comments that Helen’s reputation “receives at the close
of the play both a divine defense and a lavish recognition from Theoklymenos.”
89
The Dioscuri’s phrase “for mankind hereafter” (
* 5", 1674) recalls a
similar phrase uttered by Homer’s Helen, when she claims that she and Paris suffered a
harsh fate in order to become objects of song “for men of the future” (; 7 ( /
"1 ( . . . *((8(, Iliad 6.357–8).
217
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
of heroic glory might have been all too apparent to the Athenians
watching the Helen in 412 b.c., only a year after the annihilation of
the Sicilian Expedition. Indeed, the chorus perhaps alludes to the
devastation wrought by the Peloponnesian War when it predicts that
violence will never leave the “cities [poleis] of men” if they rely on
weapons instead of words to resolve disputes (1155–60).90 The play’s
many poignant references to the tragedy of war remind us that kleos
is a signifier whose supposed transcendence is purchased at a terrible
cost in human life and suffering.91
This critique of the hollow ideals of war, however, is all but forgotten
in the midst of an ending that celebrates “a dubious victory against
unarmed barbarians.”92 Whereas the Hecuba, produced only a dozen or
so years earlier, encourages empathy for the Trojan women who were
the victims of war, the Helen reduces the Egyptian foes to subhuman
“savages” whose slaughter ensures Greek glory. This jingoistic ending
recalls the double plot of the Odyssey, in which the good triumph and
the bad are punished – the least tragic plot line for Aristotle (Poetics
1453a30–39).93
The ending provides a comic, self-consciously theatrical diversion
from the grim realities of war. Downing comments aptly that in
the Helen, Euripides probes the “illusion-inducing power of his own
work.”94 That things are not what they seem to be in the world of the
drama is confirmed by the frequent use of the formula “x = not x”
90
Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia, p. 198, considers that Euripides is making a direct
appeal to his audience in this ode – “beinahe wie in einer Komödien-Parabase.” For a
strikingly similar appeal, see Euripides’ Suppliant Women (747–50). Lesky, Greek Tragic
Poetry, p. 312, considers the second strophe of the ode to be a “vigorous protest crying
out in the maze of history against the madness of war.”
91
Cf. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice, p. 71, who argues that in Homer, “kleos is to be gained in
exchange for the stake of the hero’s life and suffering.”
92
Foley, “Anodos Dramas,” p. 144. The victory of the famous Spartan hero and his reclaimed
wife over their non-Greek enemies may have had a panhellenic appeal for the Athenian
audience, however.
93
Other Odyssean overtones of the ending include Helen’s cleverness, which recalls Pene-
lope’s, as well as Menelaus’ transformation from downtrodden beggar to triumphant lord.
Menelaus even uses Odysseus’ trick of assuming another person’s identity to give a false
report of himself. See Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen,” pp. 35, 39–40, for the argument
that Euripides creates a new “myth of female subjectivity” in granting his Helen the
power to drive the narrative action of the ending.
94
Downing, “Apatê, Agôn, and Literary Self-Reflexivity,” p. 9.
218
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
in the text: Helen’s kleos is not the kleos she deserves (270, 615); the
deeds apparently done in the Trojan War were not done (erg’ anerg’,
362); the war itself was fought over a geras that was not a geras (geras, ou
geras, 1134). The Helen seems to exemplify this formula on a large scale,
as its penetrating critique of heroic values gives way to a pleasurable
restoration of them.
The drama as a whole, however, deconstructs its nostalgic ending
by demonstrating the duplicity of heroic fame and the destructive-
ness of wars fought in pursuit of it. The drama exposes the internal
contradictions of the terms of the heroic code of the Iliad, contradic-
tions that lead to their negation.95 The play’s attempt to banish the
duplicitous element of kleos fails as surely as its attempts to exorcise
Helen’s waywardness. If Euripides presents Helen as a continual object
of men’s attempts to capture her in song as well as in war – as a figure
who is “forever abducted but never fully captured”96 – he presents
heroic kleos as an equally insecure possession, insofar as it is always
contingent on others’ “retelling” or “reports,” which themselves may
be suspect.97 False or misleading accounts may circulate for a variety
of innocent and not-so-innocent reasons, including the inherent lim-
itations of human language and perception, which petty and deceitful
gods can skew so easily.
Although the ending suggests that Menelaus is in full possession
of Helen and Helen is in full possession of her kleos, the play’s
Odyssean critique of Iliadic values counters this impression by privileg-
ing absence over presence in such Odyssean ruses as Menelaus’ playing
“the no-man and beggar.”98 Moreover, the fact that Helen’s rallying
cry, like the phantom’s parting address, is reported in a messenger
speech gives it the status of a kleos (in its sense as “hearsay”), putting it
at one remove from the immediate “reality” of the dramatic spectacle.
95
Cf. ibid., p. 3, on the play’s “almost obsessive” use of “gemination.”
96
Bergren, “Language and the Female,” p. 82.
97
The fact that the germ of Euripides’ critique of kleos is to be found in the Iliad is reinforced
by Michael Lynn-George, Epos: Word, Narrative, and the Iliad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press International, 1988), p. 271, who refers to the Iliad’s “awareness that
any such duration as aphthiton kleos [immortal glory] is dependent upon the discourse of
others.”
98
Cf. Foley, “Anodos Dramas,” p. 145.
219
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
By the time Helen asks to be shown “the glory of Troy,” the drama has
radically undermined the credibility of any act of showing, including
its own.99
Helen’s name remains double, even multiple – and potentially
duplicitous. The appearance of the Dioscuri at the end of the play
recalls the “two stories” circulating about them; like the “twinned”
Helen, the “divine Twins” have a twofold reputation. According to
Teucer, one of these stories – the one adopted by the ending of the
play – describes them (already twins, “likenesses” of each other) as
“likenesses,” imitations, like Helen: “Men say they have been made
[“likened to . . . ,” more literally] stars” (homoiôthente, 140).100 The same
Greek verb is used to describe Hera’s creation of the eidôlon (homoiôsas’,
33), the duplicitous act that caused Helen’s undeserved suffering. Like
Helen, then, the Dioscuri are fabled imitations of imitations whose
own mimetic status undermines the truth value of their address. Fur-
thermore, the dubious etymology101 they use in naming the island
after Helen points to the inevitable slippage involved in the signifying
process. Their commemoration of the status of Helen as “captive”
reminds us that she can never be fully “captive” in language; their act
of nomination undoes itself. In substituting the phantom for Helen,
Euripides calls attention both to the symbiotic relationship of his Helen
to Homer’s and to her symbolic role as an ongoing object of contention
by men, in both politics and poetics.102
99
Cf. Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition,” p. 6, who remarks that the play
implicitly asks “where and how can truth be located in what is only imitation and
doesn’t Euripides’ play itself fall under suspicion?”
100
(" (
8 #( 1. (Helen 140)
101
In commemorating Helen’s status as a “captive” of Hermes, who abducted her from
Paris, the Dioscuri play on the similarity of the name “Helen” to the Greek root hel-
(from the aorist of F"8, “to capture”), an etymological link that in her commentary
on the play Dale, ed., Euripides’ Helen, p. 168 (n. on line 1673), calls “more than
usually far-fetched.” The play on Helen’s name recalls (and may have been inspired
by) the more sinister punning in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, based on another meaning of
F"8, “to kill / destroy.” There, the chorus sings that Helen was aptly named, since
she became “a hell to ships, men, and cities” (!
8 a
" !
8- /
, 688–90).
For the Greek, see Denys Page, ed., Aeschyli: Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoedias (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1972).
102
For a discussion of Helen as a “figure upon whom can be focused the problem of
imitation itself,” see Zeitlin, “Travesties of Gender and Genre,” p. 408.
220
WHERE IS THE GLORY OF TROY? HEROIC FAME IN THE HELEN
103
Bassi, “Tradition, Invention and Recognition,” p. 8.
221
EURIPIDES AND THE POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
104
Holmberg, “Euripides’ Helen,” p. 37.
105
In Shakespeare’s reference to the power of a “poet’s pen,” from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream 5.1.16.
222
EPILOGUE
1
High-tech cultures using electronic devices that depend on print and writing develop
new forms of orality, according to Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing
of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 11. In Acting Like Men, p. 46,
Karen Bassi argues that nostalgia for orality “may well be a necessary and even predictable
feature of the proliferation of literate (including electronic) technologies.”
2
Although written in an earlier historical moment, the comparison by W. K. C. Guthrie,
“The First Humanists,” p. 22, is still apt.
223
EPILOGUE
3
I am thinking of certain computer programs used in obtaining directory assistance that
invite callers to repeat their request for information by saying, “I didn’t get that.”
4
Elissa Marder, “Blade Runner’s Moving Still,” Camera Obscura 27 (1991): 97. In interpret-
ing the film’s portrayal of androids, Marder goes on to argue that they are “[d]oubles of life
which, in their doubling and their difference from it, carve out an image of ‘humanity’
through which humans attempt to see themselves as human” (pp. 97–8).
225
EPILOGUE
5
In an op-ed piece appearing in the New York Times about a month after the September
11 attack (“Condemnation without Absolutes,” October 15, 2001; p. A23), Stanley Fish
warned against the use of “the empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe
but which all define differently.” The longing for the simple truths of an idealized oral
culture runs in parallel with a militaristic tradition that extends from Homer to the present
day, according to Karen Bassi, Acting Like Men, pp. 49–50.
6
A phrase coined by Deborah Tannen that appears in the title of her book, The Argument
Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words.
226
EPILOGUE
example, of the recent spate of films and books that paid homage to
“the greatest generation” of Americans who fought in World War II.7
Our nostalgia for simple, clear patriotic values has only become
more fervent following the attacks of September 11, as we, like the
ancient Athenians, have undertaken a war, and confront the prospect of
future wars, in order to defend our imperial interests. The description
of the “war on terror” as a conflict between good and evil, in which
other nations must choose sides, implicitly lays claim to the status of a
transcendent “word of truth” or “just voice”; by employing it, political
leaders seek to rally their constituencies around clear moral judgments
in a time of crisis.
But, as we have seen in the case of Polyneices, there are risks in
claiming that one’s position makes its own case. Such rhetoric can,
for example, be used to dismiss dissenting voices as unpatriotic and
to avoid examining the justice of one’s own position and conduct.
Although surely America has the right to defend itself against those
who perpetrated the September 11 attacks, serious debate can take
place about the best means of doing so. Clearly defining the enemy
and the objective of so unconventional a war as a “war on terror”
creates vexing moral dilemmas.8 In seeking to hold the global alliance
against terror together, for example, we may, on the grounds of fight-
ing terrorism, find ourselves supporting regimes that brutally sup-
press dissident groups. We may also find ourselves guilty of “dou-
ble speaking” in calling for new democratic governments in regimes
that oppose us while ignoring autocratic governments in regimes that
support us.9
Given that there can be no condoning of terrorist acts, there is a
danger in equating moral virtue with one’s own national interests, as
we have seen in the case of the Athenian empire. Attaining a simple,
clear, and just policy in the shifting and intricate world of Realpolitik
7
A phrase used as the title of a recent book by Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New
York: Random House, 1998).
8
In an op-ed article (“Real Battles and Empty Metaphors,” New York Times, September
10, 2001, p. A31), Susan Sontag criticizes the president’s declaration of “war” against “a
multinational, largely clandestine network of enemies” as an attempt to arrogate unlimited
military powers for his administration.
9
The point of an editorial entitled “Double Talk on Democracy,” New York Times, October
6, 2002, “Week in Review” (section 4), p. 12.
227
EPILOGUE
10
Stanley Fish, “Condemnation without Absolutes.”
11
The phrase is drawn from the title of a book on late Euripidean drama by Anne Pippin
Burnett, Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed Reversal.
12
Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 292.
228
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WORKS CITED
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238
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239
WORKS CITED
240
GENERAL INDEX
See the Citation Indexes for references to specific lines in ancient works.
241
GENERAL INDEX
aristocratic belief system (cont.) Helen, body, name, and identity in, 203,
in Thucydides, 101 207–9
Aristophanes. See also specific works Phaedra’s body as signifier in Hippolytus,
anxiety about intellectual revolution in 64–5, 86n43, 87, 89, 90, 91
Greek world and nostalgia for Boedeker, Deborah, 56, 66
traditional values expressed in, 51, “book culture.” See transformation from
52, 53–5 “song culture” to “book culture”
Euripides as portrayed by, 1, 11–13, 15, Burnett, Anne Pippin, 158, 169, 204, 213
55, 61 Bush, George, 31
Euripides’ drama epitomizing discursive Buxton, R. G. A., 105
practice of comedy of, 1
Hecuba’s arguments against sophistry Cassandra’s concubinage, Hecuba’s
and, 142–3 rhetorical use of, 134–6
Aristotle, 1, 130, 218 Cleisthenes, 13
artistic imagery Cleobis and Biton, 129n65
in Hecuba, 128n64 Cleon’s speech in Mytilenean Debate,
in Helen, 198 98–100
in Ion, 186 Clouds (Aristophanes), 51, 53–5, 142–3
Athenian empire. See also Peloponnesian commodity/object, Helen in Helen as,
War 193, 219, 220
“Golden Age,” contradiction between conservative tendencies of Euripidean
myth and reality in, 128 drama, 15–18, 69–70, 183
Ion as justification of hegemony of, 156, Corcyra, Thucydides’ account of civil war
157, 170, 181, 184 in, 51, 55–7, 83, 100–1, 110
Melos, reduction of, 17, 112, 112n28, Creusa. See Ion
113, 119, 120, 123, 131, 148, 161, criterion of probability
188 law courts, use in, 47–8
Mytilenean Debate, 84, 98–100, Thucydides’ adoption of, 46
100n76, 119 Croesus, myths of, 42
nostalgia for former glories of, 20 “culture wars,” ancient and modern, 8, 30,
Pericles’ justification of, 17 30n73, 31–2, 226
Plataea, siege of, 112, 112n28, 113, 143
politics and power valued more than debate and rhetoric. See intellectual
justice and truth in, 18, 97–103, revolution in Greek world; rhetoric
113, 119, 123 deconstruction
semiotic crisis in late fifth century, concept of difference
nostalgia emerging from, 73–5 Eteocles of Phoenician Women and, 7
Sicilian Expedition, 17, 188, 218 female characters and, 63
tyranny and brutality of, 17, 112, 117 Pandora and, 63
atopia, 110 Phaedra in Hippolytus and, 79
Atreus, myth associated with, 41–2 of divine voice of truth, 44, 149, 185
of kleos or heroic fame, 149, 217–22
Bacchae (Euripides), 206 of law in ancient and postmodern
Barrett, W. S., 95 worlds, 50–1, 53
Bassi, Karen, 46, 55, 58, 196, 201 of single, simple “word of truth,” 7, 31,
Bergren, Ann L. T., 62 32
Blade Runner (movie), 225n4 of traditional values, 70, 144
the body Delphic Oracle. See Ion
in Hecuba (See Hecuba) democracy
242
GENERAL INDEX
243
GENERAL INDEX
244
GENERAL INDEX
Theoclymenus’ obedience to, 216 “all speech” passage, 105, 109, 113–4,
in Hippolytus 136–7
“double speaking” of gods in, disembodied ghost of Polydorus,
93–4 115–16
duality of divine discourse, 78–9, disruption of natural order, Hecuba’s
93–4 body as metaphor for, 136–7
Homeric portrayal of, 132 frailty of Hecuba, 116–7, 127
in Ion, 146–50 (See also Ion) insistence on reality of body’s pain in
“just voice” of, 20–5, 38, 78 war, 107
justice of divine speech in archaic male aggression and sexuality linked,
poetry, 37–42 109, 128–30, 134–6
Phoenician Women, Polyneices’ “word of Cassandra’s concubinage, Hecuba’s
truth” in, 3–5, 20–5, 35–7 rhetorical use of, 134–6
skepticism about, 12, 196 dog, transformation of Hecuba into,
truth of divine speech in archaic poetry, 144–5, 145n102
35–7 “double speaking” in, 111
Goff, Barbara E., 75, 91, 94 female duplicity in, 139, 141, 141n99
“Golden Age” gods in (See gods)
Athenian empire, contradiction Helen compared, 188, 195
between myth and reality in, heroic values critiqued in, 118, 118n41,
128 129n66
Hesiod’s myth of, 35, 41n19 Polyxena as ironic embodiment of,
Homeric nostalgia for, 34 126–7, 128–9
Goldhill, Simon, 48 Hippolytus’ desire for simple justice
Gorgias, 5n7, 45, 49–50, 50n47, 54, 84, mirrored in, 137n90, 142
133–4, 211, 211n71 Odysseus, Hecuba’s plea to, 118–27
Gorgias, Plato, 45, 48 Peloponnesian War reflected in, 104,
Gorgon’s blood in Ion, 157, 172, 176 109, 112
Greek world. See ancient Greek world, rationalization of injustice and
Euripides’ work reflecting hypocrisy in, 106–7, 108, 117, 118,
Gregory, Justina, 79, 94 118n41, 127–39, 140, 144–5
Grene, David, 89 reciprocity, hospitality, and other
Grube, G. M. A., 17 traditional Greek customs,
Guthrie, W. K. C., 47, 49, 202 nostalgic appeal to, 121, 122, 131,
131n71
Havelock, Eric A., 9n20, 10n22, 37n8, revenge on Polymestor, 139
38n10, 42n24, 49n42, 58n67, rhetoric as used by Hecuba in, 114–15,
60n70, 74n6 123n49, 134n80, 136n88, 142–4
Hecuba (Euripides) simple justice of past, nostalgia for,
absolute moral law, nostalgia for, 131, 113–14, 142, 143
132n73, 132–3, 137, 142 Talthybius, 127–30
Achilles’ bestiality in, 109, 117, 118 as “theater of cruelty,” 107–8
Agamemnon Thucydidean parallels with concerns of,
Hecuba’s plea to, 131–9 109, 112, 113, 119–20, 122–3,
rationalization of injustice and 131–2, 143, 145
hypocrisy by, 106–7, 108, 117, trial scene in, 140–4
138–9 violence, prophecy of Polymestor
artistic images in, 128n64 predicting ongoing cycle of,
the body in 144–5, 145n102
245
GENERAL INDEX
246
GENERAL INDEX
aristocratic belief system in, 78, 79, 83, plot of, 71–3
85, 102 recent critical approaches to, 75,
body of Phaedra as signifier in, 64–5, 75n7
86n43, 87, 89, 90, 91 silence as used in, 82, 86–7, 87n47, 88,
curse as ultimate representation of “just 92, 95, 95n69
voice” in, 91 Thucydides compared, 74, 83, 84,
female characters’ association with 97–103
duplicity trial structure of, 72n3
as commentary on nature of truth, truth
64–5 double-edged nature of, 71–3, 76,
by Hippolytus, 87–8 92, 94, 102
Phaedra’s character and, 79–81 failure to recognize other forms of,
revelations undermining assumption 91
of, 96, 96n72, 97 falsehoods masquerading as, 86, 87
gods mythic truth vs. practices of
“double speaking” by, 93–4 deliberation and inquiry, 74, 102
duality of divine discourse, 73n5, opposing truths of Artemis and
78–9, 93–4 Aphrodite, 102
Hecuba mirroring desire for simple History (Thucydides). See Thucydides
justice of, 137n90, 142 homecoming (nostos), nostalgia expressed
homecoming (nostos), nostalgia as yearning for
expressed as yearning for, 20 etymology of nostalgia and, 33
implicit nostalgia, expressions of, 19 as Euripidean theme, 19, 20, 20n48
intellectual revolution in Greek world in Homer’s Odyssey, 33–5
and, 73–5, 76 Homer. See also Iliad; Odyssey
irony in, 91, 95 divine speech as truth in, 35–7
“just voice” in as divinely inspired, 25
assignment of, 77, 90 gods as represented by, 21, 24, 26
dualities set up by concept of, 76, Helen and (See Helen)
97 heroic values of (See heroic values)
house as patriarchal image of, 83–4 justice in, 38
impossibility of finding, 78, 79, moral instruction provided by, 25
95–7 nostalgia in, 33–5
paradoxical treatment of (See Stoics on, 23
“paradoxical treatment of status of subversion of heroic values in Helen,
just voice in,” this entry) 189–90, 193
as second, supplementary voice, 19, Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo (Hesiod),
72, 73–4, 114 39
as ventriloquized voice of cult of Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo (Hesiod),
seers, 73n5 39
yearning for simplicity and clarity of, hyperbolê, 110
19, 71–9, 114
paradoxical treatment of status of “just Iliad (Homer), 24, 124
voice” in, 75–9 divine speech as truth in, 35–7
by Artemis and Aphrodite, 93–4 Helen’s Helen vs. Helen of, 199
by Hippolytus, 87–93 Helen’s subversion of heroic values of,
by nurse, 80, 84–6 189–90, 193, 195, 211, 215, 219
by Phaedra, 79–87 Odyssean vs. Iliadic heroic values, 215,
by Theseus, 70, 89–92 219
247
GENERAL INDEX
image and reality, concerns about Athenian hegemony justified in, 156,
in Euripides’ Greece (See substitution 157, 170, 181, 184, 187
and surrogacy) centrality of Delphic oracle in, 150,
in postmodern world, 225, 225n4 150n9, 153
implicit nostalgia, expressions of, 19 character of Apollo, contradictions of,
intellectual revolution in Greek world. See 146n1, 149, 150–9, 164, 183–7
also rhetoric; sophistry conservative tenor of, 183
Aristophanes’ anxiety regarding, 27, 51, cradle and tokens in, 156, 175–6
52, 53–5 criticism of gods in, 146, 146n1,
Euripides as radical innovator vs. 150–67, 170–2
Euripides as conservative in distortion of meaning of justice by Ion
relationship to, 11–18 and Creusa, 175
Hecuba’s use of rhetoric reflecting, duplicitous nature of Apollo’s oracle in,
123n49, 127–8, 131–4, 134n80, 147, 147n3, 149, 150–6, 168, 177,
136–7, 142–4 183–7
Hippolytus reflecting, 73–6 escapist tendencies of, 148, 156
Ion female characters’ association with
fallibility of human knowledge and duplicity in, 67, 69, 177, 184
judgment dramatized in, 155, 157, female presence, suppression and
160, 170, 171, 175 appropriation of, 153, 170, 176,
skepticism of Euripides’ period 180, 182, 184
reflected in, 152, 160, 186 Gorgon’s blood given by Erichthonius
Socratic dialogue, elements of play to Creusa, 157, 172, 176
resembling, 152, 165 happy ending and comic elements,
language and meaning as object of study effect of, 148, 156
in, 3–5, 27 Helen compared, 148–9, 173
Phoenician Women homecoming (nostos), nostalgia
clash of worldviews in, 8–11 expressed as yearning for, 19,
Eteocles as sophist, 4–5 20
Plato’s anxiety regarding, 51, 52, 58–61 idealized view of gods and oracle
poetic language of older “song culture” expressed in, 158–9, 160
exploited by, 26 irony in, 148, 150, 160, 163, 171, 173,
political implications of, 31–2 174, 185
postmodern parallels to, 10, 223–4 (See naming, power of, 169–70, 173, 176,
also postmodern world, Euripides’ 180, 181
work reflecting) Peloponnesian War and, 148, 162,
problems and conflicts raised by 162n34, 181
Euripides’ use of, 25–7, 42–51, 69–70 phonocentric tradition, subversion of,
widespread anxiety regarding, 149, 158, 165
49–53 plot of, 146–8
Thucydides’ anxiety regarding, 51, 52, postmodern parallels, 228
55–8, 74 skepticism of Euripides’ age reflected in,
transformation from “song culture” to 152, 160, 186
“book culture” (See transformation Socratic dialogue, elements of play
from “song culture” to “book resembling, 152, 165
culture”) Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle contrasted,
Ion (Euripides), 146–50 168n48, 178n68
absence and presence as motif in (See substitution and surrogacy as motif of,
absence and presence) 154, 162–3, 179, 187
248
GENERAL INDEX
249
GENERAL INDEX
male aggression and sexuality linked in nostos. See homecoming (nostos), nostalgia
Hecuba, 109 expressed as yearning for
McClure, Laura, 73
meaning. See language and meaning object/commodity, Helen in Helen as, 193,
Medea (Euripides) 219, 220
critique of traditional Greek misogyny Odyssey (Homer)
in, 65–7 Helen
explicit nostalgia, expressions of, 19 ending recalling Odyssey, 218, 218n93
female characters’ association with Helen of Odyssey versus Helen of
duplicity as commentary on nature Helen, 199
of truth, 61, 65–7 Penelope and Helen, parallels
Melos, reduction of, and Thucydides’ between, 202, 202n45, 215n86,
Melian Dialogue, 17, 112, 112n28, 218n93
113, 119, 120, 123, 131, 148, 161, Helen’s capacity for deceptive mimicry
188 in, 200
memory and truth, perceived relationship Iliadic vs. Odyssean heroic values, 215,
between, 22, 22n51, 36 219
metaphysics of presence, 5–7, 7n17, 40, nostalgia in, 33–5
150, 169, 192 Oedipus cycle (Sophocles), 41, 178n68
modern world. See postmodern world, Olympian Odes (Pindar), 40, 41
Euripides’ work reflecting Olympians and Titans, war between, 41,
Muses, potential truthfulness/duplicity of, 157, 157n24, 159, 177
36, 38n12, 191, 212 Olympic Games, 26
muthos vs. logos. See logos vs. muthos omphalos, Delphic oracle as, 150, 150n9,
Mytilenean Debate, 84, 98–100, 100n76, 153
119 On Truth (Antiphon), 50–1
On Truth (Protagoras), 44n28
names and naming oral vs. written tradition. See phonocentric
in Helen tradition in Western philosophy
body, name, and identity, 203, 207–9 Oresteia trilogy (Aeschylus), 41–2
Helen’s name, wordplay on, 208, 217, Orestes (Euripides), criticism of gods in,
220n101 146n1
reduction of status and significance Owen, A. S., 166
of, 192–3, 197, 203
Ion, power of naming in, 169–70, 173, Palamades (Gorgias), 50n47
176, 180, 181 Pandora, 62–3, 65, 69, 153, 198
navel of world, Delphic oracle as, 150, Parmenides, 24n56, 26
150n9, 153 Peloponnesian War. See also Athenian
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 27, 27n69 empire
nostalgia Euripidean drama exploiting anxiety
in archaic texts, 33–42 about, 69
in Aristophanes, 27, 51, 52, 53–5 Hecuba reflecting issues of, 104, 109,
in contemporaries of Euripides, 52–3 112
etymology of, 33 Helen and, 189n2, 217, 221
in Euripides (See Euripides’ poetics of Hippolytus reflecting issues of, 71, 74
nostalgia) Ion and, 148, 162, 162n34, 181
in Plato, 51, 52, 58–61 Phoenician Women reflecting issues of, 9,
in Thucydides, 51, 52, 55–8 17
250
GENERAL INDEX
251
GENERAL INDEX
252
GENERAL INDEX
253
GENERAL INDEX
traditional belief (cont.) poetry in the archaic age and, 22, 22n51,
in postmodern age (See postmodern 22n52
world, Euripides’ work reflecting) postmodern nostalgia for clear and
tragedy. See theater simple truth, 226, 226n5, 228
transformation from “song culture” to
“book culture” Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 91–2
Greek tragedy as final flourishing of
song culture, 25 war. See also Peloponnesian War
historical development of, 12n27 as critiqued in Helen, 195, 209–10, 211,
literacy in Greek world and, 9, 10n22, 217–18
37n8, 42n24, 60, 74n6 Hecuba as indictment of, 104
persistence of oral culture, 42, 69 postmodern parallels with Euripides’
philosophers’ use of poetic language of concerns regarding, 26, 31–2,
song culture, 26 32n74, 226–8
Trojan Women (Euripides), Helen compared Thucydides’ critique of effects of,
to, 188, 195 17–18, 55–8
truth. See also “word of truth” weaving as motif in Ion, 177
alêtheia defined as truth/absence of Wise, Jennifer, 60n70, 61n75
forgetfulness, 22 wolf imagery in Hecuba, 117
archaic poetry and, 22n52, 35–42 “word of truth,” 3–5
debate as means of defining, concerns conflict between rhetoric/interpretation
regarding, 43 and, 4, 5, 51, 53, 57, 58–61
duplicity of gods, 24–5 critique of concept of, 7, 13
female characters’ association with deconstruction of concept of, 7, 31,
duplicity as commentary on nature 32
of, 61–9, 70 divine voice
in Helen absence of, in Hecuba, 104
Greek patriarchal truths espoused in, Delphic oracle’s supposed infallibility
216 and transcendence, 149
sense-perception, doubts about generative power of Apollo’s
reliability of, 197, 201–4, 208 originary word, 180
threats to concept of, 195 inevitable mediation of, 151, 154,
unity of word and deed, return to 185
heroic ideal of, 216 Ion’s movement from sustained
yearning for simple truth, 198, critique to restoration of faith in,
207 149
in Hippolytus (See Hippolytus) naming of Ion and, 169, 180
image and reality, concerns about in Phoenician Women, 3–5, 20–5,
in Euripides’ Greece (See substitution 35–7
and surrogacy) slippage and distortion, subject to, 185
in postmodern world, 225, 225n4 double-edged nature of simple “truth”
intellectual revolution in Greek world used by Theseus in Hippolytus, 92
affecting perception of, 42–51 eidôlon in Helen as threat to, 195
in Ion, 146–50 (See also Ion) heroic fame in Helen undermined as,
justice, equivalency with, 42 190
memory, perceived relationship to, 22, idealized age evoked by concept of, 3,
22n51 33–42, 55
paradoxical status of voice in Hippolytus reputation of Helen as lost form of, 213
and (See under Hippolytus) supposed simplicity of, 3–4, 53
254
GENERAL INDEX
255
GREEK CITATION INDEX
This index includes line references to Greek in both the original language and in transli-
terated words and phrases.
195–6, 119n42
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 250, 121, 136n88
688–90, 220n101 258, 121
Aeschylus, Eumenides 1–8, 157n24 273–6, 122n47
Aeschylus, Persians 320, 204n48 276, 122
Aeschylus, Suppliant Maidens 382, 306, 124
204n48 337, 121
Aristophanes, Clouds 337–8, 125n53
518–62, 52n52 337–8, 136n88
545–8, 52n52 379–81, 127n58
961–2, 53n55 438, 127n60
1084, 54, 54n57 487, 127n60
Aristophanes, Frogs 560, 128n64
470, 11n26 689–90, 107n9
775, 11n26 798–801, 131n70, 132n73
957, 11n26 814–19, 133n77
971–5 [971–6], 11n26 816, 115n35, 134n80
Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae (Women of 834–40, 106n5
the Thesmophoria), 907, 208n57 836–45, 106n4
Aristotle, Poetics 838, 136n87
1452a18–20,130 840, 121, 136n88
1453a29–30,1 841–5, 137n92
1453a30–9,218 862, 138n93
1454a4–9,162n35 863, 138n93
Aristotle, Politics 1254a15–17, 14n33 866, 138
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1377b20–1378a19, 1129, 141n98, 144
123n49 1187–91, 131n71
1187–94, 142n100
Euripides, Antiope, Nauck fragment 189, 1200, 143
44n30 1206–7, 144
Euripides, Hecuba 1246, 144
123–7, 112n29 Euripides, Helen
256
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257
GREEK CITATION INDEX
258
GREEK CITATION INDEX
259
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
260
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
261
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
262
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
263
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
264
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
265
ENGLISH CITATION INDEX
266