Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:30:33.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Basic Greek Values in Euripides' Hecuba and Hercules Furens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Artheur W. H. Adkins
Artheur W. H. Adkins
Affiliation:
Exeter College, Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

To be satisfactory, a scholarly interpretation of a Greek tragedy must enable the present-day reader to see the play, so far as is possible, through the eyes of the fifth-century audience. If it does not, if it merely substitutes the predilections of a particular scholar for those of the reader, it is useless, and indeed worse than useless; for the reader unassisted by the interpretation of others may well examine the play critically for himself, while the reader with an interpretation at his elbow is likely to make every effort to fit the ideas of the tragedian into the schema provided for him. Certainly, more and more interpretations are of the kind which assist the reader; but a significant number even of the most recent throw more darkness than light on their subject by refusing to acknowledge the whole context of value and belief in terms of which the tragedians wrote, and the audience watched, these dramas. The result of such misinterpretation is frequently, as in the case of the two I shall discuss here, to present for our admiration a more high-minded and uplifting drama than the one which (say) Euripides wrote; but our concern is presumably not to achieve this end, but to understand Euripides and his audience.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , December 1966 , pp. 193 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1966

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 193 note 1 Popular Ethics in Ancient Greece (Stanford, 1962), pp. 144 ff.Google Scholar

page 195 note 1 See Merit and Responsibility, chap, viii; and for new usages of these words, some relevant to the discussion of the Hecuba chap. ix.Google Scholar

page 196 note 1 See my ‘“Friendship” and “Self-sufficiency” in Homer and Aristotle’, C.Q. N.s. xii (1963), 30 ff.Google Scholar

page 198 note 1 See Merit and Responsibility, pp. 49 ff.Google Scholar

page 198 note 2 Ibid., pp. 50 ff.

page 198 note 3 Contrast the Homeric situation, discussed in ‘“Honour” and “Punishment” in the Homeric Poems’, B.I.C.S. vii (1960), 23 ff.Google Scholar

page 199 note 1 See Merit and Responsibility, chap. x passim.Google Scholar

page 199 note 2 Always, where the point is not argued. For (argued) exceptions cf. chap, ix, pp. 176 ff.

page 199 note 3 Its deterrent power resembles that of etc., in Homer (ibid., pp. 40 ff.)

page 199 note 4 The strengdi of the obligation expressed by varies according as the action because it would be not to perform it or because it would be not to.

page 201 note 1 See Merit and Responsibility, pp. 35 f.Google Scholar

page 202 note 1 This was also suggested as a possible—disreputable—motive for Agamemnon's wishing to save Polyxena (127 ff.).

page 204 note 1 I do not claim that Athenians of this date lightly killed as a to their —or indeed that they did so at all. My point is that if any action is represented as being a to a and no divine sanctions can be effectively invoked against it, Athenian values of the period make it impossible to show that the action should not be performed (unless the agent holds that its performance would lessen his own ).

page 206 note 1 Agamemnon (1249 f.) is deciding whether Polymestor or not.

page 206 note 2 As belief in divine punishment declined and judgements in religious terms lost their efficacy, secular value-terms were gradually substituted. This debate shows some of the disadvantages of the latter in Athens.

page 206 note 3 See Merit and Responsibility, pp. 189, 259 ff.Google Scholar

page 206 note 4 901 ff. are a Euripidean generalization, meant to apply to Athens, where all the citizens are members of the same group; but here too ‘traditional’ had its part to play in practice (see Merit and Responsibility, chap, x passim). This too is really a ‘persuasive definition’.Google Scholar

page 207 note 1 The Greek will do a one wno is not his so long as the action will cause no trouble or disadvantage to himself or his group: so Agamemnon gives Hecuba the of holding Polyxena's and Polydorus' funerals at the same time (898 f.), though he would not have delayed the sailing of the fleet to do so; and even Lycus, portrayed as a complete villain, agrees to kill Amphitryon and Megara before the children, and to allow Megara to deck the children in funeral garb, H.F. 321 ff. Each of tfiese is asked for as a and granted: neither causes any trouble to Lycus.

page 208 note 1 For see Merit and Responsibility, pp. 46 ff., 165 ff., 209 ff., 304 ff.;Google Scholar for my ‘“Honour” and “Punishment” in the Homeric Poems’, B.f.C.S. vii (1960), 23 ff.;Google Scholar for ‘“Friendship” and “Self-sufficiency” in Homer and Aristotle’, C.Q. N.s. xiii (1963), 30 ff.;Google Scholar for ‘pollution’, Merit and Responsibility, chap. v.Google Scholar

page 208 note 2 See Merit and Responsibility, pp. 102 ff.Google Scholar

page 209 note 1 ‘ in Euripides' Herakles’, J.H.S. lxxxii (1962), 7–18.Google Scholar

page 209 note 2 ‘The Formal Beauty of the Hercules Furens’, C.Q. x (1916), 72 ff.Google Scholar

page 211 note 1 That there was a condition which, while not was yet not was maintained also by Simonides (5 Bergk). The qualities which characterize this condition are different in the two poets, however. (The poem is discussed in Merit and Responsibility, pp. 165 ff. and Appendix.)Google Scholar

page 212 note 1 Cf. E. Orestes 777 ff. is reckoned by the results it produces; and the security of the group required active courage in its defenders.

page 212 note 2 Cf. Plato's difficulties over the death of Socrates (Merit and Responsibility, pp. 258 ff.).Google Scholar

page 214 note 1 He wishes to administer justice, in the Herculean manner: an activity which in early Greece frequently required traditional Quiet co-operative activity (which has to be argued to be an at this period, cf. p. 199, n. 2) is not characteristic of Hercules' career as a whole.

page 215 note 1 C.Q. N.s. xiii (1963), 30 ff. See p. 196, n. 1, of this article.Google Scholar

page 215 note 2 See, for example, 305 f. of this play.

page 217 note 1 C.Q. N.S. xiii (1963), 39 ff.Google Scholar

page 217 note 2 These passages are discussed ibid. 43 f.

page 217 note 3 See Merit and Responsibility, passim, and most succinctly Simonides' (fr. 5 Bergk).Google Scholar

page 218 note 1 Cf. A. Cho. 493 ff., E. Orestes, 777 S.

page 219 note 1 1334–5 are a generalization, much less pointed than saying that Hercules is still. Euripides does not say this; for Theseus is concerned here with Hercules' past when Hercules him. In any case, it is in terms of traditional that Hercules is termed here, if at all.