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What we must Believe in Greek Tragedy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

David Konstan
David Konstan*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

All drama, indeed all literature, shows people acting on the basis of beliefs and values. We take those values for granted when we watch a play, and observe how the characters negotiate their way within the world as it appears to them. I wish to call attention to some underlying moral and psychological assumptions to which we implicitly assent as a condition for appreciating the story in a couple of Greek tragedies. For sometimes those assumptions are just what the play is really getting across.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1999

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Footnotes

1.

This paper is a slightly revised version of a talk originally presented at Colgate University in memory of John Rexine.

References

2. Sententiae Mono. 1.452; cf. Sententiae e codicibus Byzantinis 647, Sententiae e papyris 2.16, for slight variations in the wording.

3. , 697.

4. Quoted in The Herald of Zimbabwe 29 July 1993, 3.

5. See my article, ‘Oedipus and his Parents: The Biological Family from Sophocles to Dryden’, Scholia 3 (1994), 2-22Google Scholar, where I broached the idea that blood kinship versus adoption is the central theme of the play. The treatment and arguments in the present paper, however, are entirely new.

6. Voltaire, , Oeuvres complètes vol. 2, ed. Louis Moland (Paris 1883), 21-24Google Scholar; cf. Mueller, Martin, Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy 1550-1800 (Toronto 1980) 109-11Google Scholar. For variations in dramatic treatments of the Oedipus legend, culminating in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Edipo re, see Kirby, John T., Secret of the Muses Retold: Classical Influences on Italian Authors of the Twentieth Century (Chicago 2000), 1-29Google Scholar.

7. Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (Austin TX 1999Google Scholar).

8. Herodotus, who is said to have been a friend of Sophocles and to have inspired several passages in his tragedies, reports a belief of the Persians as follows: ‘The Persians maintain that never yet did any one kill his own father or mother; but in all such cases they are quite sure that, if matters were sifted to the bottom, it would be found that the child was either a changeling or else the fruit of adultery; for it is not likely they say that the real father should perish by the hands of his child’ (1.138; tr. Rawlinson, George, The History of Herodotus, ed. E.H. Blakeney [London 1910]Google Scholar). The issue of biological versus foster parentage was plainly in the air.

9. On the meaning of the chorus’s wish, see Jebb, Sir Richard, The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles: Edited with Introduction and Notes, 4th ed. (Cambridge 1966 [orig. 1912]) ad 902Google Scholar. Gould, Contra Thomas, Oedipus the King by Sophocles: A Translation with Commentary (Englewood Cliffs 1970Google Scholar), 111 ad 902, the chorus cannot be hoping for ‘some tricky but harmless interpretation’ of the prophecy, which, as Oedipus and Jocasta both conclude, would expose the oracle as vain (964-72, 977-83).

10. Honea, Sion M., ‘Old Wine in New Bottles: The Humanities Curriculum in Professional Education’, CW 92 (1998-99), 540Google Scholar.

11. That the Furies also protect a father’s rights is indicated by Eum. 513f., where they explicitly state that, under the new dispensation, they will no longer afford protection to fathers or mothers.

12. Aeschylus: The Oresteia (New York 1977Google Scholar).

13. ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978), 149fGoogle Scholar.

14. Indeed, ‘lyssa’ may be cognate with ‘lykos’; see Lincoln, Bruce, ‘Homeric lussa: “Wolfish Rage”’, IF 80 (1975), 98-105Google Scholar.