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Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides

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Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides RITUAL IRONY RITUAL IRONY POETRY AND SACRIFICE IN EURIPIDES Helene P. Foley Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication Copyright © 1985 by Cornell University First paperback printing 2019 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8014-1692-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4062-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4063-3 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-5017-4064-0 (epub/mobi) Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Jacket illustration: Sacrifice of Polyxena on an Attic Amphora, 550 B.C. Used by permission of the British Museum. To R. M. P. and D. K. F. Contents Preface 9 Abbreviations 13 I. Drama and Sacrifice 17 2. The Ip higenia in Aulis 65 3. The Phoenissae 106 4. The Heracles 147 5. The Bacchae 205 Bibliography 259 Index 275 Preface Euripides, last of the three great Attic tragedians, captured fo r the sophisticated audience of his late plays the demise of a great empire and of an extraordinary genre. Although tragedy survived into the fo urth century, Athens' enjoyment of self-criticism and iconoclasm in its theatrical fe stivals did not. Philosophy soon chal­ lenged the intellectual role of drama in the city. Comedy, inspired by Euripides, survived by adapting itself to a growing taste fo r bourgeois realism and the drama of private life. Tragedy limped on, often in the fo rm of revivals of Euripides. The poet's art am­ biguously reflects the complexities of a long transitional period. Clearly, then, the critic of tragedy, and especially of Euripides, cannot afford to read that poet's texts out of their social, political, and religious context or the circumstances of their dramatic pro­ duction. These circumstances are hard to recapture. Euripides' characters speak the language of Thucydides or the Sophists, and the plays' metaphors and plot patterns reflect actual ritual perfor­ mance. Yet attempts to specify the political implications of drama have rarely remained true to a reading of the plays as a whole. In this book I undertake the equally slippery task of exploring the representation of ritual in Euripides' tragedy. I hope the result will not only be valuable to scholars and students of tragedy but also contribute to the expanding dialogue between classics and anthro­ pology. In order to make the text accessible to those who do not read Preface Greek, I have translated all quotations and have transliterated the Greek wherever possible, indicating omega (long 0) and eta (long e) with a macron (0 and e). In transliterating Greek names I have used the most fa miliar version. All translations aim to be as literal as possible and are my own except where noted otherwise. I have confined consideration of technical problems to the notes and ap­ pendixes, aiming only to make the reader aware of their existence and nature and to summarize current critical opinion. The Greek text is cited fr om the Oxford Classical Text of Gilbert Murray, Euripides Fabulae, 3 vols. 2d ed. (Oxford 1 913), with deviations indicated in the notes. This book is a remote descendant of my dissertation (Harvard 1975), and I remain grateful to my advisers, J. H. Finley, Jr., and Cedric Whitman, fo r their sense of style and their generous sup­ port of a dissertation topic distant in certain respects fr om their own preoccupations. Christian Wolff, whose work and teaching on Euripides shaped my interest in this topic, offered pertinent criticism of the dissertation and of early drafts of this book. Michelle and Renato Rosaldo and Bridget O'Laughlin helped me to venture beyond my training as a classicist into anthropology, and Carolyn Dewald served as a stimulating listener during the initial stages of the book. Ann Bergren, Rachel Kitzinger, Piero Pucci, Froma Zeitlin, and my colleagues Helen Bacon and Lydia Lenaghan provided challenging and incisive commentary on ear­ lier versions. Leonard Muellner and an anonymous referee gave me invaluable readings fo r Cornell University Press, and Ann Hawthorne served as a thoughtful copyeditor. Rick Griffithsdem­ onstrated stamina as a critic through all stages of the book. I am also grateful fo r opportunities to test this material on discerning audiences at Princeton, Stanford, the University of Victoria, B.C. , the University of Southern California, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Haverford. Through Stanford University and Barnard College I received two Mellon grants that aided in the completion of this manuscript. Chapters 2 and 5 incorporate in revised fo rm material published in Arethusa 15 (1982): 159-80 and Transactions and Pro­ ceedings oj the American Philological Association 110 (1980) : 107-33, respectively. I thank these journals fo r their kind permission to use [10] Preface this material. Most of all, I am indebted to the inspiration of my fa ther, Robert M. Peet, and to my husband, Duncan Foley, fo r everything from insightful readings and emotional and logistical support to assistance in using a word processor. HELENE P. FOLEY New York City [ II] Abbreviations ABV J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-figure Vase-painters, Oxford 1956 AC L'Antiquite Classique AJ A American Journal of Archaeology AJ P American Journal of Philology ARV2 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, 2d ed., Oxford 1963 CJ Classical Journal CP Classical Philology CQ Classical Quarterly CR Classical Review CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity CW Classical World Daremberg-Saglio C. v. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des an­ tiquites grecques et romaines d'apres les textes et les monu­ ments, IO vols., Paris 1877-1919 DK H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vor­ sokratiker, 3 vols., 6th ed., Berlin 1952 Frisk H. Frisk, Griechische etymologische Worterbuch, 3 vols., Heidelberg 1960-72 GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology ICS Illinois Classical Studies IG Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies K T. Kock, ed., Comicorum Atticorum Fragme/1ta, 3 vols., Utrecht 1976 [ I3] Abbreviations Kinkel G. Kinkel, ed., Ep icorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Leipzig 1877 LEC Les Etudes Classiques LP E. Lobel and D. Page, eds., Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, Oxford 1955 LS] Liddell, Scott, Jones, and McKenzie, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford 1940 and supp. 1968 MB Musee Beige. Revue de philologie classique Mette H. J. Mette, ed., Die Fragmente den Tragodien des Aischylos, Berlin 1959 MH Museum Helveticum MLN Modern Language Notes N A. Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 2d ed., Leipzig 1889; supp. ed. B. Snell, Hildesheim 1964 NJbb Neue ]ahrbiicherfor Philo logie und Paedagogik, 183 I -97; Neue ]ahrbiicher for klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur und for Paedagogik, 1897-1924 PCPhS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association POxy B. P. Grenfell et aI., eds., The Oxyrynchus Papyri, London 1898-1981 R Stefan S. Radt, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. 4, Gottingen 1977 REA Revue des Etudes Anciennes REG Revue des Etudes Grecques RSC Rivista di Studi Classici S B. Snell, ed., Pindarus, 2 vols., Leipzig 1964 SBA W Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschafien, Philosophie-Historie Klasse, Munich SMSR Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association W M. L. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci, 2 vols., Oxford 1971-72 Wehrli F. Wehrli, ed., Die Schule des Aristoteles, 10 vols., Basel 1944-49 WS Wiener Studien YCS Yale Classical Studies RITUAL IRONY Drama and Sacrifice Euripidean scholarship has been grappling fo r centuries with the supposed structural imperfections of his dramas, the supposed ir­ relevance of his choral odes, and the supposed rationality, not to say irreverence, of Euripides himself. Aristotle complains that Eu­ ripides' inadequate plots ignore the necessary and the probable and require the intervention of a deus ex machina to straighten them out. He hints that Euripides' choruses had begun to approach the decorative interludes that they became in later tragedy. The poet's characters are inconsistent, changing their minds fo r no apparent reason, and his stylized debates seem more rhetorical than true to character. Sophocles reportedly said that he made men as they ought to be, Euripides as they are. Aristophanes implies that Eu­ ripides undermined the dignity of tragedy and contributed to the moral decline of Athens. The poet's sophistic and iconoclastic attacks on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and his soul­ destroying irony won him fe w first prizes even in his own time. According to the philosopher Nietzsche, Euripides destroyed tragedy. The plot of the Heracles, fo r example, veers so abruptly and unexpectedly that the initial scenes seem to lose organic relation to what fo llows. Similarly, the mad Heracles of the peripety little resembles the pious fa ther who rescues his fa mily from the tyrant Lycus and a corrupt Thebes in the opening suppliant action. Nei­ ther Heracles matches the superhuman culture hero celebrated in [ 1 71 Ritual Irony the choral odes. In the final scenes the hero's rejection of suicidal despair implicitly denies the repellent and vengeful anthropomor­ phic Olympians that the audience has just witnessed onstage in the peripety.
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