I have tried particularly in the previous chapter to show how the connection between the sophists and tragedy is not to be seen as a matter of the regrettable influence on poetry of a rhetoric of tricks or an improper intellectualism, but rather as an important indication of the radical tensions that draw together sophistic and tragic questions about man’s place in the order of things. In this chapter, I am going to consider a further major area of innovativeness in tragic theatre that has proved instrumental in the evaluation and appreciation particularly of Euripides’ œuvre, namely, the poet’s self-conscious marking and manipulation of the conventions of the genre of tragedy. For Euripides’ innovativeness is developed not merely in the new material of his plots, the experimental use of lyric, or his ‘deglamorization’ of myth, but also in his tragedies’ self-reflexive sense of theatre as theatre.

Like so many modern philosophers, literary critics and novelists – heirs to ancient questions – fifth-century b.c. writers show an ‘intense interest in the limits and possibilities of language’.1 This interest connects numerous writers across numerous genres and disciplines. In the texts of philosophy, the concern with language not only gives rise to the development of linguistic study itself, but also is reflected in the prime place of logos, dialectic, rhetoric – the role of language itself – in the development of philosophical systems from Heraclitus to Aristotle. Modern occidental philosophy, for all its historical turns, is still working through Aristotelian linguistic categories and distinctions. It is the fifth century too that offers the first formal studies in rhetoric, the teaching and practice of which dominated education for two thousand years and more, and has recently been the focus of much of the most iconoclastic modern philosophical and literary criticism.2

If we wish to understand the force and direction of Greek tragedy, it is impossible not to bring into consideration the city of Athens, which gave rise to the institution of the tragic festivals and which, as we saw in the previous chapter, can be regarded as offering specific conditioning to its dramas. I do not mean by this to take for granted any simple relation between a society and the texts produced in it, nor do I wish to add my name to the roll call of those who have seen in the order of the polis one of the greatest glories of Greece. Rather, in this chapter I intend to develop briefly some sense of the ideology of the polis and a view of its structure: naturally, I shall not be attempting a full description of its institutions or of its history, two topics to which many words have been dedicated,1 nor am I attempting to define in full the term polis, a word whose transliteration covers a multitude of insufficient translations.2 Rather, within the terms of this book I shall be attempting to investigate some ways in which the structure of civic ideology may relate to the dramatic festivals and the sorts of transgressions enacted in tragedy and comedy. For even if the relations between the social conditions of production and the texts themselves remain obscure and difficult, it does not follow that the texts can simply be read divorced from any sense or investigation of those conditions.

Time and again the line of argument in my discussion has approached the question of sexuality, and has been forced to restrain itself. In the Oresteia, I argued, the relations between the sexes are an essential dynamic of the trilogy and any discussion of language, politics, imagery in that work is forced always to reconsider its siting in a sexual discourse. I attempted to show further that in any description of how the Greek city might try to delimit itself the polarized realms of a male world and female world were an essential, if difficult, marking of that not entirely physical topography. With regard to those primary words of human relations in the family and city, philos and ekhthros, the sexual was explicitly interwoven in the semantic range – and dislocations – of such terms. In this chapter, I wish to focus on this topic of sexuality, which is so important to Greek tragedy, and after I have looked at some of the complex problems involved in approaching this subject, I shall be considering in particular Euripides’ Hippolytus.

The Bacchae is a particularly fitting work with which to end my study of Greek tragedy. Not only is it one of the latest extant plays – Euripides’ final masterpiece – but also the dense texture of image and theme in this extraordinary drama recalls so many of the ideas I have explored in the previous chapters. It is a text concerned with a man and a city and relations with the divine (embodied in the disguised Dionysus), and the work has often been read as a fundamentally religious statement, either in terms of a defence of Dionysus (justified divine vengeance); or an attack on the malicious element of destruction and disorder in Dionysiac or similar cult attitudes; or in terms of a recognition and demonstration of the necessary place of the irrational in man.1 As Foley has recently written, ‘the text undeniably raises questions about the nature of divinity and reflects the precariousness of social and political life in late fifth-century Athens’.2

In the first chapter, at several points I referred to the difficulties of the term dikē in the Oresteia. In this chapter, I intend to consider in more depth the notions surrounding this word and its cognates in the trilogy. This discussion is important for several reasons. First, after my investigation of the exchange of language with its focus on the process of interpretation and understanding, it is interesting to attempt to follow through the shifts and plays of meaning through which a word passes in the clashes of persuasive rhetoric and deceitful manipulation. I discussed language’s role in the ordering of social relations and language as the means and matter of social transgression. How does a prime term of social order, dikē, relate to this discussion? Secondly, the concept of dikē, few would disagree, is a major concern in the Oresteia. This concern has formed the basis for many literary critics’ readings of the trilogy. As well as investigating the various influential views put forward on this topic, it is important to see in what ways the focus on language changes our appreciation of this debate. This leads to my third reason: the different critics’ attempts at interpreting the Oresteia in the light of this set of terms will offer an important insight into a major problem of reading Greek tragedy. For, as I argued in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 1, the Oresteia’s tragic critique of the exchange of language as social process is highly relevant to the institutions and attitudes of literary criticism; and the history of the interpretation of the notion of dikē will offer an understanding of the way the play’s problematic view of interpretation and comprehension is all too applicable to the reading of the play itself.

‘Reading a poem’, writes Geoffrey Hartman, ‘is like walking on silence – on volcanic silence. We feel the historical ground; the buried life of words.’1 This sense of uncertain depth, uncertain soundings, is nowhere more evident than in Greek tragedy’s relation to the tradition of earlier writings. Although a relatively small proportion of the stories of the three major tragedians appear to have been drawn directly from the Homeric poems, and although the poetic language of tragedy does not reflect constant and close dependence on Homeric usage (as do some other genres),2 it is none the less impossible to understand Greek tragedy without a consideration of the way Homer and Hesiod resound and echo through these texts at a variety of levels and in a variety of important ways. I have already mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5 the complex dialectic between past and present that is enacted by the plays performed before the city but set in the heroic past,3 and in Chapter 1 I discussed the specific democratic rewriting of the Hesiodic injunction not to give crooked judgement in the Oresteia’s depiction of the establishment of the lawcourt. In this chapter, I intend to discuss in as much detail as space permits the relations of the texts of Greek tragedy to the tradition in and against which they are written and must be read. Aeschylus is said to have claimed his works were ‘slices from the banquets of Homer’4 (though whether this means left-overs or choice pieces is less than clear) and, ‘Sophocles might have taken for himself the Aeschylean claim.’5 Euripides, too, is impossible to understand without some sense of the heroic tradition and the place of Homer in more than a literary context. It is on the varying attitudes to and uses of the past, and on the literary tradition, particularly of Homer, in and against which the plays of the tragic corpus are formed, that this chapter will focus.

This quotation from Plato’s depiction of Protagoras provides an excellent introduction to the range of problems involved in discussing the sophists, to whom I have often referred in this book as a major factor in understanding fifth-century thought and drama. In Chapter 6 I discussed the conception of the poet having privileged access to truth and forming the education of the citizens. I argued that one of the reasons for Plato’s extended hostility towards poets and poetry was the sense of philosophy’s rival claims to be a master of truth, a conflict which is still being worked through. One of the commonest adjectives used to describe this special poetic knowledge and the people who demonstrate it is sophos, which is the root of the term ‘sophist’ and ‘philosopher’, and which is often translated ‘wise’, ‘clever’, ‘intelligent’. The possessor of any special skill or knowledge from carpentry to rhetoric could deserve the title ‘sophos’.

I have a copy of the Oxford Classical Text of Sophocles where one spread of pages is permanently discoloured into a dull yellow because it was left open for many days in the sun. I was working intently on the so-called deception speech in the Ajax and the book sat for hours open on my desk by the large windows of my college apartment through the summer. To see these pages now reminds me of the famous, grim lines of Macbeth, ‘My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf …’ There is inevitably for me a certain melancholic sense of the passing of time to reflect back to that summer more than thirty-five years ago, when I was writing Reading Greek Tragedy, still in my untenured twenties; but, unlike Macbeth, I can at least look back without a crippling sense of horror, and forward still with hope, not least thanks to the intellectual community of scholars in Cambridge and across the world with whom I have had the privilege of continuing to discuss Greek tragedy over the intervening decades.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I considered how the tragic texts reflected and disputed the ways in which an individual was placed in society, first in terms of family relations and civic ties as expressed through the vocabulary of philos and ekhthros and secondly in terms of the differences between the sexes. These two chapters were placed between a more general examination of the implications for the tragic texts of the contemporary ideology and structures of the city, and, in Chapter 6, an enquiry into the ways in which the Homeric poems provide an important textual background to the workings of Attic drama. In this chapter, I intend to follow this extensive discussion of what might be called the ‘notion of the self’ with an investigation of the related and important topics of ‘character’ and ‘mind’ which have been brought to the fore in recent critical exchanges not only in classical studies, where the tragic texts have long been the objects of a vigorous debate1 concerning the term ‘character’, but also in modern researches in the philosophy of language, particularly in theories of reading and criticism, where the usefulness and implications for the reading of fiction of the term ‘character’ and the notions of the ‘self’, the ‘subject’ have been the focus of considerable interest.2

Throughout the fifth century, Athens provided a focal point for the discussion, dissemination and development of the ideas that make up what has been called the fifth-century enlightenment. Travelling sophists, rhapsodes and teachers and artists of all sorts gravitated to Athens, whose self- proclaimed hegemony was cultural as well as political, and whose society offered the most extensive opportunities for intellectual pursuits. ‘To sum up’ says Pericles in Thucydides,1 ‘I declare our city is an education to Greece’ – a paradigm and a school – and throughout Thucydides’ history the Athenians are explicitly distinguished by their allies and enemies alike for their intellectual originality and precociousness.2 For Herodotus, it is a commonplace that the Athenians are renowned for their intelligence;3 Athens is the prytaneion, the ‘council-chamber’, of the wisdom of Greece4 – the meeting-place for ideas and debate.