University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Departmental Papers (Classical Studies) Classical Studies at Penn 2014 Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative Sheila Murnaghan University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers Part of the Classics Commons Recommended Citation (OVERRIDE) “Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative,” in Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and James Robson, eds. Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, London: Routledge, 2014: 260-277. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/85 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Naming Names, Telling Tales: Sexual Secrets and Greek Narrative Abstract As Creusa finds the courage to reveal her long-concealed union with Apollo, Euripides aligns the powerful narrative at the heart of his Ion with the disclosure of a sexual secret. Such disclosures make good stories, interesting in part for their sexual content, but even more, I suggest, for the circumstances that lead to their telling. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot, narratives engage us in the desires of their characters, which we follow through a trajectory of frustration and fulfillment, propelled by a corresponding passion for knowledge. Among the strongest of those desires, more powerful even than erotic longing or material ambition, is the wish to tell one’s own story, “the more nearly absolute desire to be heard, recognized, listened to” (Brooks 1984: 53), so that narratives often include an account of their own origin in a character’s quest for recognition.