Civic ideology and the problem of difference: The politics of Aeschylean tragedy, once again

Journal of Hellenic Studies

Volumn 120, Issue , 2000, Pages 34-56

  Goldhill, Simon ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949973582     PISSN: 00754269     EISSN: 20414099     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/632480     Document Type: Article

References (187)

1. See, for this general argument, J. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton 1999)
2. H. Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca 1996)
3. C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge 1988)
4. A. Boeghold and A. Scafuro (eds.), Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology (Baltimore 1994)
5. P. Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture and Political Theory (Princeton 1997)
6. V. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Law-Suits 420–320 B.C. (Princeton 1994)
7. D. Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1991).
8. See on the exclusion of women in the context of tragedy, e.g., N. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women
9. S.-E. Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York 1988)
10. on slaves, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London 1981) remains fundamental.
11. S. Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and civic ideology’, JHS 107 (1987) 58–76
12. reprinted with corrections in J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton 1990).
13. The following in particular will be discussed: B. Goff, ‘History, tragedy, theory’, in B. Goff (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama (Austin 1995)
14. M. Gellrich, ‘Interpreting Greek tragedy: history, theory and the new Philology’, in B. Goff (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama (Austin 1995)
15. C. Pelling,‘Conclusion’, in C. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford 1997)
16. R. Friedrich, ‘Everything to do with Dionysus? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the tragic’, in M. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford 1996)
17. R. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford 1994)
18. M. Griffith,‘Brilliant dynasts: power and politics in the Oresteia’, CA 15 (1995) 63–129
19. J. Griffin, ‘The social function of Greek tragedy’, CQ 48 (1998) 39–61.
20. See S. Goldhill, ‘Literary history without literature: reading practices in the ancient world’, Sub-Stance 88 (1999)57–90.
21. A mainstream whose sources would include J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Gréce ancienne (Paris 1972)
22. C. Meier, Die politische Kunst der griechischen Tragödie (Munich 1988)
23. C. Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (Frankfurt am Main 1980)
24. N. Loraux, Les Enfants d'Athéna (Paris 1981)
25. current fellow swimmers would include, amongst many others, P. Cartledge, ‘“Deep plays”: theatre as process in Greek civic life’, in P. E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1997) (and the other contributors to that volume)
26. J. Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor 1991)
27. N. Croally, Euripidean Polemic (Cambridge 1994)
28. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton 1990)
29. A.H. Sommerstein, S. Halliwell, J. Henderson, and B. Zimmerman (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari 1993)
30. P. Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton 1990)
31. P. Rose, Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth (Ithaca 1992)
32. the works cited in n.3 above; and most recently S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge 1999). It is noted as a mainstream or orthodoxy by many critics, including those cited in n.3 above.
33. For one partial account of this development see S. Goldhill, ‘Modern critical approaches to Greek tragedy’, in P. E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1997).
34. The urn joke is lifted from T. Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford 1983) 48.
35. So Griffin (n.3) 39, with his customary humour (and sense of gender politics), places the possibility of avoiding politics/history in the far distant past: ‘The time is long gone when literary men were happy to treat literature, and tragic poetry in particular, as something which exists serenely outside time, high up in the empyrean of unchanging validity and absolute values.’ For a good account of how the generalizations of tragedy contribute to ‘universalist’ readings, see O. Taplin, ‘Spreading the word through performance’, in Goldhill and Osborne (n.5). It would be interesting—though not possible here—to trace the transition from the German Romantic fascination with the sublimity of tragic poetry to the influential view of the particularity of tragic language in Vernant (n.5).
36. This phrase is taken from Meier, Die Entstehung (n.3), who argues that tragedy is an education into politics (and not merely an education in politics).
37. For the connections in Aristotle between ‘emotion’ and ethics and politics, see the essays collected in A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton 1992), especially the contributions of Halliwell, Nussbaum, Nehemas and Lear
38. S. Halliwell, Aristotle's Poetics (Chapel Hill 1986)
39. E. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton 1992)
40. M. Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton 1988)
41. in general, W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and Ethics (London 1975).
42. Griffin (n.3), for example, alludes to none of this work, and M. Heath, The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London 1987) (see below) has almost no discussion of the ethical and political implications of Aristotle's theorizing on emotion.
43. Heath (n.9).
44. Quotations from Heath (n.9) 3.
45. Griffin (n.3) 55 n.58 indicates his broad sympathy for Heath's position, but distances himself from Heath's extreme dismissal of anything but pleasure and emotion in tragedy.
46. Griffin (n.3) 55.
47. For the briefest selection of relevant work, each with further bibliography, see M. Nussbaum, ‘Tragedy and self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on fear and pity’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10 (1992), a longer version of Nussbaum (n.9)
48. J. Brunschwig and M. Nussbaum (eds.), Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge 1993)
49. M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton 1994)
50. J. Gosling and C. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford 1982)
51. P. Brown, The Body and Society (New York 1988)
52. D. Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge 1987)
53. M. Foucault, History of Sexuality (3 vols, London and New York 1978–1986)
54. R. Porter and M.M. Roberts (eds.), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke and London 1996): ‘pleasure came into its own in the eighteenth century’ (1), ‘Every age, every society, it goes without saying, has its own particular form of pleasure’ [oikeie hedone?]
55. J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford 1988)
56. P. Gay, Pleasure Wars (London 1998): ‘Unstable perceptions of pleasure governed the dissensions that plagued Victorian middle-class culture’ (106).
57. Pleasure may not have ‘the epistemic dignity’ of happiness (R. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (New York 1976) 57), but it is hard to see what Griffin means by denying it a history.
58. Griffin (n.3) 47.
59. See P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Performance and Representation of Mousike in the Classical Athenian Polis (Oxford forthcoming).
60. For a claim for the ‘quasi-religious’ nature of football, see G. Armstrong and R. Giolianotti, Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football (Oxford 1997) 10–11 (instantiated in articles on ‘cult’, and ‘worship’)
61. for a most evocative account of the ‘war’ in the stands, see B. Buford, Among the Thugs (London 1991).
62. See (amid a rapidly growing and often rather stolidly sociological bibliography) A. Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sport (New York 1978)
63. J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture (Cambridge 1986)
64. R. Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford 1989)
65. J. MacClancy (ed.), Sport, Identity and Ethnicity (Oxford 1996)
66. G. Armstrong and R. Gioloanotti (eds.), Football, Culture and Identity
67. J. Williams, Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Interwar Years (London 1999)
68. A. Brown, Fanatics! Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (London 1998)
69. E. Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization (London 1999).
70. Griffin (n.3) 47.
71. Griffin (n.3) 50
72. notes solely that A. Sommerstein, ‘The theatre audience, the demos, and the Suppliants of Aeschylus’, in C. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (n.3) points out that citizens had to pay to attend the Dionysia (unlike other festivals) and so asks ‘If they had thought of the tragedies as part of the civic training of a citizen, would the city have charged, and charged quite a high price, for admission?’ This is an important but highly contested issue: first of all, the role of the theoric fund (probably a fourth-century institution), in relation to other forms of compensatory monies for citizens, is complex and needs consideration: see both Sommerstein, 70–1
73. P. Wilson, ‘Leading the tragic khoros: tragic prestige in the democratic city’, in C. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (n.3). Second, and more importantly perhaps, there is no evidence that the theatre was not widely attended: it was the largest collection of citizens in the Athenian calendar. It is far from clear—and there is certainly no explicit evidence—that the charge was designed to exclude any group of citizens, or that it did in reality exclude them.
74. Griffin (n.3) 47 with n.26, where he cites the counter-case of W. Connor, ‘City Dionysia and Athenian democracy’, C&M 40 (1989) 7–32
75. the general scepticism about the evidence for the early years of tragedy which is sounded by M. L. West, CQ 39 (1989) 251–4.
76. On which see now Taplin (n.7). See also P. Easterling, ‘Euripides outside Athens: a speculative note’, ICS 19 (1994) 73–80
77. ‘From repertoire to canon’, in P. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (n.5).
78. Griffin (n.3) 48.
79. Griffin (n.3) 48, 49, 50.
80. My favourite account of this is C.L.R. James' famous autobiographical essays, Beyond a Boundary (London 1963).
81. Further, less evocative bibliography in Williams (n.18).
82. Griffin (n.3) 49.
83. Griffin (n.3) 49. Plato's Menexenus and its reception would be interesting to read here.
84. Pelling (n.3) 235.
85. For the particular connection between intellectual enquiry and democracy, see G. Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley 1987).
86. See E. Hall, ‘Is there & polls in Aristotle's Poetics?’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3).
87. Griffin (n.3) 60.
88. See, e.g., D. Halperin, ‘Plato and the erotics of narrativity’, in J. Klagge and N. Smith (eds.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplementary volume (1992)
89. M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge 1986)
90. S. von Reden and S. Goldhill, ‘Plato and the performance of dialogue’, in Goldhill and Osborne (n.5)
91. for the later period, M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton 1994), and the works cited in n.14.
92. See I. Lada, ‘Emotion and meaning in tragic performance’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3)
93. “‘Empathetic understanding”: emotion and cognition in classical dramatic audience-response’, in PCPS 39 (1993) 94–140
94. Nussbaum, ‘Tragedy and self-sufficiency’ (n.14).
95. See S. Goldhill, ‘Whose Antiquity? Whose Modernity? The “rainbow bridges” of exile’, Antike und Abendland (forthcoming).
96. Griffith (n.3) 63 n.3.
97. ‘The claim that one essential function of Attic tragedy is (in some sense) to explore social conflict, transression, and ambiguities, including those of civic identity itself, should by now provoke little disagreement’ Griffith (n.3) 109.
98. Griffith (n.3) 109 n. 143.
99. Griffith (n.3) 109.
100. Goff (n.3) 22.
101. Antike und Abendland
102. N. Loraux, ‘Reflections of the Greek city on unity and division’, in A. Molho, K. Raaflaub and J. Emlen (eds.), City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (Stuttgart 1991)
103. ‘La majorité, le tout et la moitié’, Le genre humain 22 (1990) 89–110
104. ‘Le lien de la division’, Le Cahier du collége international de philosophie 4 (1987) 101–24.
105. Pelling (n.3), especially 225–35.
106. Gellrich (n.3).
107. See the works cited in n.2, and, more usefully, V. Wohl, Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin 1998).
108. Friedrich (n.3)
109. R. Seaford, ‘Something to do with Dionysus—tragedy and the Dionysiac’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3)
110. ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence: the vote of Athena’, in Goff (ed.) (n.3).
111. Griffin (n.3) 60.
112. D. Kovacs, The Heroic Muse (Baltimore 1987) x. This is a particularly unreflective and unuseful category: even if one could know what an ordinary Athenian made of any drama (we have evidence almost entirely from such extraordinary fellows as Plato); even if one thought that all ordinary Athenians had similar responses (which is scarcely likely); even if one ignored the ludicrous repression of class, educational, political and social backgrounds of a mass audience—are they all ‘ordinary’?; even if one believed that audience response did not change over time and circumstance; it would still be grossly limiting to assume that only what occurred ‘naturally’ should be the object of enquiry—as if tacit knowledge, unexpressed assumptions and unrecognized prejudices were not also of interest and relevance.
113. For an account of the earlier rituals of the festival and the development of the festival, see C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Something to do with Athens: tragedy and ritual’, in R. Osborne and S. Hornblower (eds.), Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis (Oxford 1994). Her views there are largely complementary to mine here, especially in her sense of the repeated manipulation of ‘the symbolic distance between the world of tragedy and the world of the audience’ (290).
114. A problem discussed with bibliography (pp. 33–5) with regard to the cultural politics of the Panathenaia by V. Wohl, ‘$’; hegemony and democracy at the Panathenaia’, C&M 47 (1996) 25–88.
115. The discussion of the cultural politics of the Panathenaia has been well discussed by the contributors to J. Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polls (Princeton 1992).
116. Plutarch's sense of ambitious striving at the Great Dionysia is easy to parallel from classical sources: see P. Wilson, Choregia (Cambridge 2000).
117. See P. Wilson, ‘Demosthenes 21 (Against Meidias): democratic abuse’, PCPS 37 (1991) 164–95
118. J. Ober, ‘Power and oratory in democratic Athens: Demosthenes 2, Against Meidias’, in I. Worthington (ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London and New York 1994).
119. See Wilson (n.50) Choregia.
120. Forthcoming books are expected from S. von Reden and R. Seaford (see already R. Seaford, ‘Tragic money’, JHS 118 (1998) 119–39).
121. At the time of submitting this article, L. Kurke, Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold (Princeton 1999)
122. had not yet been published in England. T. Figueira, The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the A thenian Empire (Philadelphia 1998) is not concerned particularly with such symbolic display, however.
123. See Seaford (n.53) 124–31.
124. See S. Goldhill, ‘The audience of Athenian tragedy’, in RE. Easterling (ed.) (n.5)
125. ‘Theatre in the history of vision’, in K. Rutter and B. Sparkes (eds.), Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh forthcoming).
126. Exemplary are K. Dover, ‘The political aspects of Aeschylus’ Eumenides’, JHS 11 (1957) 230–7
127. E. Dodds, ‘Morals and politics in the Oresteia’, PCPS 6 (1960) 19–31
128. both well criticized by C. Macleod, ‘Politics and the Oresteia’, JHS 102 (1982) 124–44
129. material also surveyed by A. Bowie, ‘Religion and politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, CQ 43 (1993) 10–31.
130. The most extensive, though now very dated, general account along these lines remains A. Podlecki, The Political Background to Aeschylean Tragedy (Michigan 1966).
131. See also for interesting developments and precedents: G. Cerri, Il linguagio politico nel Prometeo di Eschilio (Rome 1975)
132. D. Lanza, Il tiranno e il suo pubblico (Turin 1977)
133. V. di Benedetto, L'ideologia del potere e la tragedia greca (Turin 1978)
134. P. Euben (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley 1986)
135. E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian; Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford 1989)
136. A. Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago 1992).
137. C. Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy, trans A. Webber (Cambridge 1993) 115.
138. Meier (n.58) 134.
139. The version in The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. D. McLintock (Cambridge 1990) 121–2, is more developed, but equally closely focused on the specific political issue of conflict and resolution.
140. Meier (n.58) 135.
141. The version in The Greek Discovery of Politics
142. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (n.59) 98.
143. The Greek Discovery of Politics
144. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (n.59) 98.
145. The Greek Discovery of Politics
146. So, the argument of J. Griffin, ‘Sophocles and the democratic city’, in J. Griffin (ed.), Sophocles Revisited (Oxford 1999), (a discussion further to Griffin (n.3), which came out too late to be fully integrated into this article) depends on a very narrowly conceived sense of politics, especially when, for example, he denies any political point to Sophocles' Electra.
147. Sophocles' play is indeed significantly different in its narrative focus from the Oresteia, not least for its lack of an explicit polis frame. However, one possible political significance of its representation of (the psychology of) revenge for the polis is strikingly revealed by the modern example adduced by E. Hall (‘Sophocles’ Electra in Britain’, 261–2) in the same volume.
148. Fiona Shaw (in F. Dunn (ed.), Sophocles' “Electra ” in Performance (Stuttgart 1996)) recalls how when she performed in Deborah Warner's production of Electra in Northern Ireland, the audience refused to leave the theatre without a discussion of the play's implications—which I take to be a paradigm of a political response to drama. The shattering emotions of the play may truly speak to a city experienced in stasis— and thus play a role in the paideusis of the citizen.
149. See F. Zeitlin, ‘The dynamic of misogyny in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978) 149–84
150. Bowie (n.56)
151. Wohl (n.45)
152. N. Rabinowitz, ‘Tragedy and the politics of containment’, in A. Richlin (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford 1992)
153. S. Pembroke, ‘Women in charge: the function of alternatives in early Greek tradition and the ancient idea of matriarchy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967) 1–35
154. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986) chs. 1–2
155. and—years ahead of its time—R. Winnington-Ingram, ‘Clytemnestra and the vote of Athena’, JHS 88 (1949) 130–47
156. revis(it)ed in Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge 1983).
157. Griffith (n.3)
158. Seaford (n.3).
159. Griffith (n.3) 110.
160. Seaford (n.3) 342.
161. Griffith (n.3) 107.
162. See J. Haubold, Homer's People (Cambridge 2000) with bibliography of earlier discussions.
163. Griffith (n.3) 83.
164. Griffith (n.3) 68.
165. See, e.g., P. Millett, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge 1991)
166. A. Wallace-Hadrill, Patronage in Ancient Society (London 1989)
167. S. von Reden, Exchange in Ancient Greece (London 1995)
168. for a different and more convincing take on the dynamics of mass/élite relations, see J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton 1989).
169. Seaford, ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ (n.46), 203.
170. ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ 208.
171. See Goldhill (n.68) 147–54.
172. Griffith (n.3) 104. I will return to the issue of hero-cult below.
173. ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ 106.
174. A. Sommerstein, Aeschylus: Eumenides (Cambridge 1989) ad loc.
175. P. Burian, ‘Zeus $ $ and some triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, AJP 107 (1986) 332–42
176. D.Clay, ‘Aeschylus’ Trigeron Muthos’, Hermes 97 (1969) 1–9.
177. Sommerstein (n.82) ad loc.
178. I have discussed the un-Aristotelian nature of Aeschylean ‘action’ in S. Goldhill, ‘Character and action, representation and reading: Greek tragedy and its critics’, in C. Pelling (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford 1990).
179. See Sommerstein (n.82) ad 767
180. Griffith (n.3) 104 n.l31
181. Macleod (n.56) 126.
182. J. Wilkins, Euripides Heracleidae (Oxford 1993) ad 1026–1028.
183. I have discussed this elsewhere in S. Goldhill (n.68) 33–56
184. Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Cambridge 1992), both with further bibliography.
185. Seaford, ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ (n.46), 208
186. see also Seaford (n.3) 363–7.
187. Seaford (n.3) 366 n. 134.