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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2012

Simon Goldhill
Simon Goldhill
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

There have been few issues in the contemporary analysis of Greek tragedy as hotly debated as what I shall call ‘civic ideology and the problem of difference’. By this I mean a nexus of interrelated questions concerning the political import of tragedy both for the fifth-century Athenians and for subsequent generations: how does the festival of the Great Dionysia—its rituals and dramatic performances—relate to the dominant ideological structures of democracy? How should critical or contestatory discourse be located within the dramatic festival and within the polis? How should the texts of tragedy be related to the society in which they were produced—and to the societies in which they are still being read and performed? The problem is not merely essential to our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but is also intimately connected to the history and theory of democracy and its discontents. To what degree can democracy respond to criticism and what space can it allow, in theory and in practice, for alternative viewpoints or opposition? In its most aggressive form, such questioning of the exclusions and repressions of democracy is sometimes articulated as a challenge as to whether the costs of (ancient) democracy outweigh its benefits.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 120 , November 2000 , pp. 34 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2000

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References

1 See, for this general argument, Ober, J., Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton 1999)Google Scholar; Yunis, H., Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca 1996)Google Scholar; Farrar, C., The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boeghold, A. and Scafuro, A. (eds.), Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology (Baltimore 1994)Google Scholar; Euben, P., Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture and Political Theory (Princeton 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, V., Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Law-Suits 420–320 B.C. (Princeton 1994)Google Scholar; Cohen, D., Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See on the exclusion of women in the context of tragedy, e.g., N. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women; Case, S.-E., Feminism and Theatre (New York 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on slaves, de Ste. Croix, G.E.M, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London 1981)Google Scholar remains fundamental.

3 Goldhill, S., ‘The Great Dionysia and civic ideology’, JHS 107 (1987) 58–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted with corrections in Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F. (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton 1990)Google Scholar. The following in particular will be discussed: Goff, B., ‘History, tragedy, theory’, in Goff, B. (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama (Austin 1995)Google Scholar; Gellrich, M., ‘Interpreting Greek tragedy: history, theory and the new Philology’, in Goff, B. (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama (Austin 1995)Google Scholar; Pelling, C., ‘Conclusion’, in Pelling, C. (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford 1997)Google Scholar; Friedrich, R., ‘Everything to do with Dionysus? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the tragic’, in Silk, M. (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford 1996)Google Scholar; Seaford, R., Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford 1994)Google Scholar; Griffith, M., ‘Brilliant dynasts: power and politics in the Oresteia’, CA 15 (1995) 63–129Google Scholar; Griffin, J., ‘The social function of Greek tragedy’, CQ 48 (1998) 39–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Goldhill, S., ‘Literary history without literature: reading practices in the ancient world’, Sub-Stance 88 (1999) 57–90Google Scholar.

5 A mainstream whose sources would include Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P., Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1972)Google Scholar; Meier, C., Die politische Kunst der griechischen Tragödie (Munich 1988)Google Scholar; Meier, C., Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen (Frankfurt am Main 1980)Google Scholar; Loraux, N., Les Enfants d'Athéna (Paris 1981)Google Scholar; current fellow swimmers would include, amongst many others, Cartledge, P., ‘“Deep plays”: theatre as process in Greek civic life’, in Easterling, P. E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1997)Google Scholar (and the other contributors to that volume); Gregory, J., Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians (Ann Arbor 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Croally, N., Euripidean Polemic (Cambridge 1994)Google Scholar; Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F. (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton 1990)Google Scholar; Sommerstein, A.H., Halliwell, S., Henderson, J., and Zimmerman, B. (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari 1993)Google Scholar; Euben, P., The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton 1990)Google Scholar; Rose, P., Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth (Ithaca 1992)Google Scholar; the works cited in n.3 above; and most recently Goldhill, S. and Osborne, R. (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge 1999)Google Scholar. It is noted as a mainstream or orthodoxy by many critics, including those cited in n.3 above.

6 For one partial account of this development see Goldhill, S., ‘Modern critical approaches to Greek tragedy’, in Easterling, P. E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1997)Google Scholar. The urn joke is lifted from Eagleton, T., Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford 1983) 48Google Scholar.

7 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).

8 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).

9 For the connections in Aristotle between ‘emotion’ and ethics and politics, see the essays collected in Rorty, A. (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (Princeton 1992)Google Scholar, especially the contributions of Halliwell, Nussbaum, Nehemas and Lear; Halliwell, S., Aristotle's Poetics (Chapel Hill 1986)Google Scholar; Belfiore, E., Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gellrich, M., Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, in general, Fortenbaugh, W., Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and Ethics (London 1975)Google Scholar. Griffin (n.3), for example, alludes to none of this work, and Heath, M., The Poetics of Greek Tragedy (London 1987)Google Scholar (see below) has almost no discussion of the ethical and political implications of Aristotle's theorizing on emotion.

10 Heath (n.9).

11 Quotations from Heath (n.9) 3.

12 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.

13 Griffin (n.3) 55.

14 For the briefest selection of relevant work, each with further bibliography, see Nussbaum, M., ‘Tragedy and self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on fear and pity’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10 (1992)Google Scholar, a longer version of Nussbaum (n.9); Brunschwig, J. and Nussbaum, M. (eds.), Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nussbaum, M., The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton 1994)Google Scholar; Gosling, J. and Taylor, C., The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, P., The Body and Society (New York 1988)Google Scholar; Summers, D., The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge 1987)Google Scholar; Foucault, M., History of Sexuality (3 vols, London and New York 1978–1986)Google Scholar; Porter, R. and Roberts, M.M. (eds.), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke and London 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘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?]; Mullan, J., Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford 1988)Google Scholar; Gay, P., Pleasure Wars (London 1998)Google Scholar: ‘Unstable perceptions of pleasure governed the dissensions that plagued Victorian middle-class culture’ (106). Pleasure may not have ‘the epistemic dignity’ of happiness (Barthes, R., The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Miller, R. (New York 1976) 57Google Scholar), but it is hard to see what Griffin means by denying it a history.

15 Griffin (n.3) 47.

16 See P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Performance and Representation of Mousike in the Classical Athenian Polis (Oxford forthcoming).

17 For a claim for the ‘quasi-religious’ nature of football, see Armstrong, G. and Giolianotti, R., Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football (Oxford 1997) 10–11Google Scholar (instantiated in articles on ‘cult’, and ‘worship’); and for a most evocative account of the ‘war’ in the stands, see Buford, B., Among the Thugs (London 1991)Google Scholar.

18 See (amid a rapidly growing and often rather stolidly sociological bibliography) Guttmann, A., From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sport (New York 1978)Google Scholar; Hargreaves, J., Sport, Power and Culture (Cambridge 1986)Google Scholar; Holt, R., Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar; MacClancy, J. (ed.), Sport, Identity and Ethnicity (Oxford 1996)Google Scholar; G. Armstrong and R. Gioloanotti (eds.), Football, Culture and Identity; Williams, J., Cricket and England: A Cultural and Social History of the Interwar Years (London 1999)Google Scholar; Brown, A., Fanatics! Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (London 1998)Google Scholar; Dunning, E., Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization (London 1999)Google Scholar.

19 Griffin (n.3) 47.

20 Griffin (n.3) 50 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 and 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.

21 Griffin (n.3) 47 with n.26, where he cites the counter-case of Connor, W., ‘City Dionysia and Athenian democracy’, C&M 40 (1989) 7–32Google Scholar, and the general scepticism about the evidence for the early years of tragedy which is sounded by West, M. L., CQ 39 (1989) 251–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 On which see now Taplin (n.7). See also Easterling, P., ‘Euripides outside Athens: a speculative note’, ICS 19 (1994) 73–80Google Scholar, and ‘From repertoire to canon’, in P. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (n.5).

23 Griffin (n.3) 48.

24 Griffin (n.3) 48, 49, 50.

25 My favourite account of this is James', C.L.R. famous autobiographical essays, Beyond a Boundary (London 1963)Google Scholar. Further, less evocative bibliography in Williams (n.18).

26 Griffin (n.3) 49.

27 Griffin (n.3) 49. Plato's Menexenus and its reception would be interesting to read here.

28 Pelling (n.3) 235.

29 For the particular connection between intellectual enquiry and democracy, see Lloyd, G., The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley 1987)Google Scholar.

30 See E. Hall, ‘Is there a polis in Aristotle's Poetics?’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3).

31 Griffin (n.3) 60.

32 See, e.g., Halperin, D., ‘Plato and the erotics of narrativity’, in Klagge, J. and Smith, N. (eds.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, supplementary volume (1992)Google Scholar; Nussbaum, M., The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge 1986)Google Scholar; S. von Reden and S. Goldhill, ‘Plato and the performance of dialogue’, in Goldhill and Osborne (n.5); and for the later period, Nussbaum, M., The Therapy of Desire (Princeton 1994)Google Scholar, and the works cited in n.14.

33 See I. Lada, ‘Emotion and meaning in tragic performance’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3) and ‘“Empathetic understanding”: emotion and cognition in classical dramatic audience-response’, in PCPS 39 (1993) 94–140Google Scholar; and Nussbaum, ‘Tragedy and self-sufficiency’ (n.14).

34 On the unnecessary restriction of the sense of the political, see the discussion of Meier below with n.67.

35 See S. Goldhill, ‘Whose Antiquity? Whose Modernity? The “rainbow bridges” of exile’, Antike und Abendland (forthcoming).

36 Griffith (n.3) 63 n.3.

37 ‘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.

38 Griffith (n.3) 109 n. 143.

39 Griffith (n.3.) 109.

40 Goff (n.3) 22.

41 Ibid.

42 Loraux, N., ‘Reflections of the Greek city on unity and division’, in Molho, A., Raaflaub, K. and Emlen, J. (eds.), City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (Stuttgart 1991)Google Scholar; ‘La majorité, le tout et la moitié’, Le genre humain 22 (1990) 89–110Google Scholar; ‘Le lien de la division’, Le Cahier du collège international de philosophie 4 (1987) 101–24Google Scholar.

43 Pelling (n.3), especially 225–35.

44 Gellrich (n.3).

45 See the works cited in n.2, and, more usefully, Wohl, V., Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin 1998)Google Scholar.

46 Friedrich (n.3); R. Seaford, ‘Something to do with Dionysus—tragedy and the Dionysiac’, in Silk (ed.) (n.3); ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence: the vote of Athena’, in Goff (ed.) (n.3).

47 Griffin (n.3) 60.

48 Kovacs, D., The Heroic Muse (Baltimore 1987) xGoogle Scholar. 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.

49 For an account of the earlier rituals of the festival and the development of the festival, see Sourvinou-Inwood, C., ‘Something to do with Athens: tragedy and ritual’, in Osborne, R. and Hornblower, S. (eds.), Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis (Oxford 1994)Google Scholar. 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).

50 A problem discussed with bibliography (pp. 33–5) with regard to the cultural politics of the Panathenaia by Wohl, V., ‘εύσεβείας ἕνεκα καὶ Φιλτιμίας hegemony and democracy at the Panathenaia’, C&M 41 (1996) 25–88Google Scholar. The discussion of the cultural politics of the Panathenaia has been well discussed by the contributors to Neils, J. (ed.), Goddess and Polis (Princeton 1992)Google Scholar. Plutarch's sense of ambitious striving at the Great Dionysia is easy to parallel from classical sources: see Wilson, P., Choregia (Cambridge 2000)Google Scholar.

51 See Wilson, P., ‘Demosthenes 21 (Against Meidias): democratic abuse’, PCPS 37 (1991) 164–95Google Scholar; Ober, J., ‘Power and oratory in democratic Athens: Demosthenes 2, Against Meidias’, in Worthington, I. (ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London and New York 1994)Google Scholar.

52 See Wilson (n.50) Choregia.

53 Forthcoming books are expected from S. von Reden and R. Seaford (see already Seaford, R., ‘Tragic money’, JHS 118 (1998) 119–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar). At the time of submitting this article, Kurke, L., Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold (Princeton 1999)Google Scholar had not yet been published in England. Figueira, T., The Power of Money: Coinage and Politics in the A thenian Empire (Philadelphia 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is not concerned particularly with such symbolic display, however.

54 See Seaford (n.53) 124–31

55 See S. Goldhill, ‘The audience of Athenian tragedy’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.) (n.5); and ‘Theatre in the history of vision’, in K. Rutter and B. Sparkes (eds.), Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh forthcoming).

56 Exemplary are Dover, K., ‘The political aspects of Aeschylus' Eumenides’, JHS 11 (1957) 230–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dodds, E., ‘Morals and politics in the Oresteia’, PCPS 6 (1960) 19–31Google Scholar; both well criticized by Macleod, C., ‘Politics and the Oresteia’, JHS 102 (1982) 124–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; material also surveyed by Bowie, A., ‘Religion and politics in Aeschylus' Oresteia’, CQ 43 (1993) 10–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most extensive, though now very dated, general account along these lines remains Podlecki, A., The Political Background to Aeschylean Tragedy (Michigan 1966)Google Scholar.

57 See also for interesting developments and precedents: Cerri, G., Il linguagio politico nel Prometeo di Eschilio (Rome 1975)Google Scholar; Lanza, D., Il tiranno e il suo pubblico (Turin 1977)Google Scholar; di Benedetto, V., L'ideologia del potere e la tragedia greca (Turin 1978)Google Scholar; Euben, P. (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley 1986)Google Scholar; Hall, E., Inventing the Barbarian; Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar; Saxonhouse, A., Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago 1992)Google Scholar.

58 Meier, C., The Political Art of Greek Tragedy, trans Webber, A. (Cambridge 1993) 115Google Scholar.

59 Meier (n.58) 134. The version in The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. McLintock, D. (Cambridge 1990) 121–2Google Scholar, is more developed, but equally closely focused on the specific political issue of conflict and resolution.

60 Meier (n.58) 135.

61 Ibid.

62 Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (n.59) 98.

63 Ibid.

64 Euben (n.5) (who writes: ‘It seems to me that Aeschylus “uses” the politics of gender and sexuality to make “larger” points about “the” human condition”, p. 92) The inverted commas in this sentence do not quite take away its declarative force, I suspect.

65 Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (n.59) 98.

66 Ibid.

67 So, the argument of Griffin, J., ‘Sophocles and the democratic city’, in Griffin, J. (ed.), Sophocles Revisited (Oxford 1999)Google Scholar, (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. 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. Fiona Shaw (in Dunn, F. (ed.), Sophocles' “Electra” in Performance (Stuttgart 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar) 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.

68 See Zeitlin, F., ‘The dynamic of misogyny in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978) 149–84Google Scholar; Bowie (n.56); Wohl (n.45); Rabinowitz, N., ‘Tragedy and the politics of containment’, in Richlin, A. (ed.), Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford 1992)Google Scholar; Pembroke, S., ‘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) 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldhill, S., Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986) chs. 1-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and—years ahead of its time—Winnington-Ingram, R., ‘Clytemnestra and the vote of Athena’, JHS 88 (1949) 130–47Google Scholar, revis(it)ed in Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar.

69 Griffith (n.3); Seaford (n.3).

70 Griffith (n.3) 110.

71 Seaford (n.3) 342.

72 Griffith (n.3) 107.

73 See Haubold, J., Homer's People (Cambridge 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar with bibliography of earlier discussions.

74 Griffith (n.3) 83.

75 Griffith (n.3) 68.

76 See, e.g., Millett, P., Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wallace-Hadrill, A., Patronage in Ancient Society (London 1989)Google Scholar; von Reden, S., Exchange in Ancient Greece (London 1995)Google Scholar, and for a different and more convincing take on the dynamics of mass/élite relations, see Ober, J., Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton 1989)Google Scholar.

77 Seaford, ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ (n.46), 203.

78 Ibid. 208.

79 See Goldhill (n.68) 147–54.

80 Griffith (n.3) 104. I will return to the issue of hero-cult below.

81 Ibid. 106.

82 Sommerstein, A., Aeschylus: Eumenides (Cambridge 1989)Google Scholarad loc..

83 Burian, P., ‘Zeus Σώτηρ Τρί τος and some triads in Aeschylus' Oresteia’, AJP 107 (1986) 332–42Google Scholar; Clay, D., ‘Aeschylus' Trigeron Muthos’, Hermes 97 (1969) 1–9Google Scholar.

84 Sommerstein (n.82) ad loc.

85 I have discussed the un-Aristotelian nature of Aeschylean ‘action’ in Goldhill, S., ‘Character and action, representation and reading: Greek tragedy and its critics’, in Pelling, C. (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford 1990)Google Scholar.

86 See Sommerstein (n.82) ad 161; Griffith (n.3) 104 n.131; Macleod (n.56) 126.

87 OC. 1518 ff. for the announcement; OC 1579–1669 for the death narrative; Herac. 983 ff. for the announcement, but the lacuna after 1052 makes certainty about the representation of his death impossible.

88 Wilkins, J., Euripides Heracleidae (Oxford 1993)Google Scholarad 1026–8.

89 I have discussed this elsewhere in S. Goldhill (n.68) 33–56; Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Cambridge 1992)Google Scholar, both with further bibliography.

90 Seaford, ‘Historicizing tragic ambivalence’ (n.46), 208; see also Seaford (n.3) 363–7.

91 Seaford (n.3) 366 n. 134.

92 Since one of the readers for JHS wrongly believed that this paragraph indicated that I was claiming that all readings were equally valid, I had better be clear—once again—that I have absolutely no truck with that particular trivializing view. The issue here is how does one deal with the recognition that political discourse is inevitably read from a political perspective, even in the search for neutrality. No doubt, my own political belief that commitment and openness are not necessarily mutually exclusive values is reflected in my critical perspective on the Oresteia (as are the political positionings of other critics).

93 This article once had a different shape as the T.B.L. Webster Memorial lecture at Stanford University. I wish to record my thanks to all involved in the invitation and discussion there. Thanks, too, to the Editor (who encouraged me to remove all the jokes) and the readers of JHS. The piece is dedicated to Professor Pat Easterling, with whom I have been discussing Greek drama for many years—to my constant education and pleasure.