Interpreting Greek Tragedy

Front matter

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INTERPRETING GREEK TRAGEDY

Charles Segal

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations

I GREEK TRAGEDY: MYTH AND STRUCTURE

1. Greek Tragedy and Society: A Structuralist Perspective

Preface

The essays collected in this volume were published over a period of some twenty years. They reflect some of the changes in the modes and concerns of the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period, from the New Critical approach of the essay on Euripides’ Hippolytus to the increasing concern with myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and language and writing in the recent pieces. They illustrate, I believe, the contention that the manyfaceted poetic dramas created by the geniuses of Greek culture at its apogee are, and will probably remain, open to many different modes of interpretation.

That these dramas cannot be circumscribed by a single interpretive discourse may disturb positivistically minded scholars who would like to have one final meaning for each surviving play, but it augurs well for the survival of these works into whatever uncertain future awaits our descendants. These are complex meditations on mortality, on the inevitability of our confrontation with death, suffering, and the unpredictable in human life, on the force of the passions and the irrational behind our actions, on justice and retribution, and on the question of what larger power, if any, is responsible for the shape that our world and our lives take. They will, we may expect, continue to intrigue, attract, disturb, puzzle, and in their own mysterious way help us make sense of the strange and precarious thing that life often seems to be.

The essays were chosen to illustrate particular methodologies and to present Greek tragedy in a perspective that would interest the

Preface general reader as well as the classical specialist. The arrangement is by topic rather than by date of publication, proceeding from the more general to the more particular and then back to the general. I begin with three recent pieces, all concerned with tragedy in relation to myth and language. There follow two essays on Sophocles and four on Euripides. In some cases the pairing of essays on the same play (as with the Hippolytus and the Bacchae) shows how a shift in one’s critical viewpoint and terminology may illuminate quite different facets of the same work. Essays 10 and 11 are paired because each in a different way explores the partial dependence of the tragic effect on our basic sense of physicality, on our consciousness of the mortal vulnerability of our bodies. The final essay, though not directly concerned with drama, I have included because it articulates some of the problems and assumptions underlying the interpretation of literature now. It thus places the study of the tragic drama of the Greeks in the larger framework of the humanities in general.

In selecting these pieces, I have tried to avoid overlap with my other books on ancient drama and to present material that could stand on its own. Although the temptation to revise, add, subtract, and annotate was strong, I have resisted the temptation and let these pieces, with some excisions and additions noted below, stand as published. The collection, I felt, should indicate the shifting critical stances, developments, and varied points of view that one student of these works has experienced over many years rather than the imposed uniformity of a single moment.

The changes from the original form of publication are as follows. From the first essay, “Greek Tragedy and Society,” I have deleted a few pages discussing Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae to avoid overlap with material in part III of this book. For the same reason I have deleted a few sentences of essay 8. To the third essay, “Greek Tragedy: Writing, Truth, and the Representation of the Self,” I have added a paragraph on the Oedipus Tyrannus and incorporated (in revised form) three pages on the Iphigeneia in Tauris from another essay that is absent from this volume. Considerations of space and scale made it necessary to abbreviate the long essay on Euripides’ Helen, with accompanying changes in the notes. The footnotes to essay 6, “The Tragedy of the Hippolytus,” have been slightly curtailed. In a few cases the notes have been slightly recast for the sake of

Preface uniformity of reference. There are also minor stylistic revisions throughout. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

In looking back at work done over so many years, I am made aware of how much I owe to former teachers and to friends and colleagues. I cannot render all those thanks here, but they are nonetheless deeply felt. I also express my gratitude to the students with whom I have read and discussed these plays, both in Greek and in English, over the last quarter century. Their intense questioning of what these works had to say to them about the meaning of life often taught me as much as I taught them. I renew, with pleasure, the expressions of thanks in the individual essays. I warmly thank my colleagues in classics and in comparative literature at Brown University for many years of friendship, encouragement, and advice. I am sensible of the great debt of gratitude that I owe to numerous other friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, and in some cases on the other side of the Pacific, who discussed these works with me, generously sent copies of publications, and gave me the benefit of their insight, acumen, and learning.

Fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities provided the leisure and freedom in which many of these essays were developed and written. I thank all of these institutions for their trust and support. The task of typing and retyping the manuscripts over the years was undertaken with ever-cheerful efficiency by Frances Eisenhauer and Ruthann Whitten. Mrs. Whitten also retyped the notes for several of the essays. Karen Bassi helped with editorial details. Two anonymous readers of Cornell University Press provided helpful advice about selecting the essays. Bernhard Kendler of the Press, who conceived and encouraged this project, displayed exemplary patience toward my changing views of what to include. The staff of the Press, as in the past, proved courteously and efficiently helpful at all stages of production. In particular, I thank Roger Haydon, whose incisive copy editing consistently improved the readability of the text.

My dedication expresses my gratitude for all that I, like so many others, have learned about Greek drama from Bernard Knox and for

Preface his broader, if less tangible, contributions to the classics in his quarter century as director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in

Washington.

CHARLES SEGAL Providence, Rhode Island

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume originally appeared in the publications listed below. I am grateful to the editors, journals, and publishers for permission to reprint them here.

1. “Griechische Tragödie und Gesellschaft,” in Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur, vol. 1, 1200 BC—600 AD (Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1981) L 198—217 and 546-47. Reprinted by permission of Propylaen Verlag and Ullstein Verlag.

2. “Greek Myth as a Semiotic and Structural System and the Problem of Tragedy,” Arethusa 16 (1983) 173-98.

3. “Greek Tragedy: Writing, Truth, and the Representation of the Self,” Mnemai: Classical Studies in Memory of Karl K. Hulley, ed. Harold J. Evjen (Scholars Press, Chico, Calif. 1984) 41-67. In addition, I have incorporated pages 149-51, in revised form, from ‘‘Tragédie, oralité, écriture,” Poétique 50 (1982) 131-54.

4. “Visual Symbolism and Visual Effects in Sophocles,” Classical World 74 (1980/81) 124-42.

5. “Sophocles’ Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone,” Arion 3, no. 2 (1964) 46-66.

6. “The Tragedy of the Hippolytus: The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 70 (1965) 117-69. Copyright © 1965 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.

7. “The Two Worlds of Euripides’ Helen,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 102 (1971) 553—614.

8. “Pentheus and Hippolytus on the Couch and on the Grid: Psy-

Acknowledgments choanalytic and Structuralist Readings of Greek Tragedy,” Classical World 72 (1978/79) 129-48.

9. ‘‘Euripides’ Bacchae: The Language of the Self and the Language of the Mysteries,” Die wilde Seele, Festschrift for George Devereux, ed. Hans Peter Dürr (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt forthcoming).

10. “Boundary Violation and the Landscape of the Self in Senecan, Tragedy,” Antike und Abendland 29 (1983) 172-87. Reprinted by permission of Antike und Abendland and Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

11. “Tragedy, Corporeality, and the Texture of Language: Matricide in the Three Electra Plays,” Classical World 79 (1985—86) 7-23.

12. “Literature and Interpretation: Conventions, History, and Universals,’’ Classical and Modern Literature 5, no. 2 (Winter 1985) 71-85.

Abbreviations

AC L’Antiquité Classique

AJP American Journal of Philology

C&M Classica et Mediaevalia

CJ Classical Journal

CP Classical Philology

CQ Classical Quarterly

CR Classical Review

CW Classical World

D, Diehl Ernest Diehl, ed., Anthologia Lyrica Graeca (Leipzig 1925)

D-K Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin 1952), 3 vols.

GER Greece and Rome

GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology

ICS Illinois Classical Studies

Jacoby Felix Jacoby, ed., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin 1923—30 and Leiden 1940- )

JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies

K Theodor Koch, ed., Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (Leipzig 1880-88)

Lobel-Page Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, eds., Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford 1955)

MH Museum Helveticum

Nauck Augustus Nauck, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 2d ed. (Leipzig 1889), with Supplement, ed. B. Snell (Hildesheim 1964)

Page, PMG D. L. Page, ed., Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford 1962)

PCPS Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society

PP La Parola del Passato

QUCC Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica

Abbreviations

SB Berlin Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philosophisch-historische Klasse

TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association

YCS Yale Classical Studies

Greek and Roman authors are cited from the Oxford Classical Texts where available. Abbreviations follow standard usage. The following list is provided for the nonclassicist.

Aeschyl. Aeschylus

Ag. Agamemnon Cho. Choephoroe, Libation Bearers Eum. Eumenides Pers. Persians PV Prometheus Bound Sept. Seven against Thebes Ar. Aristophanes Lys. Lysistrata Thesm. Thesmophoriazusae Eur. Euripides Alc. Alcestis Ba. Bacchae Cyc. Cyclops El. Electra Hec. Hecuba Hel. Helen HF Heracles, Heracles Mad Hipp. Hippolytus IA Iphigeneia in Aulis IT Iphigeneia in Tauris Med. Medea Or. Orestes Phoen. Phoenissae, Phoenician Women Tro. Troades, Trojan Women Hom. Homer h. Cer. Homeric Hymn to Demeter h. Ven. Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

Il.

Od.

Seneca Ag.

HF HO Med.

Oed.

Pha.

Phoen.

Thy.

Soph.

Antig.

El.

OC OT Phil.

Trach.

Abbreviations

Iliad Odyssey

Agamemnon Hercules Furens Hercules Oetaeus Medea Oedipus Phaedra Phoenissae Thyestes Sophocles Antigone Electra Oedipus Coloneus Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Rex Philoctetes Trachiniae, Trachinian Women l/

CHAPTER I A Structuralist Perspective

Over the past two or three decades, students of Greek tragedy have shown an increasing concern with conceptual patterns, with structures of thought, action, and language. A greater circumspection about the nature of character in ancient drama has lessened the tendency to view the plays in terms of psychological realism. Earlier in the century the Cambridge School of Harrison, Murray, and Cornford stimulated interest in the social and ritual structures reflected in the plays and pointed students to underlying patterns rather than to surface literalism. At about the same time Freud and Jung were setting the foundation for the recovery of underlying patterns of a different nature. From the 1930s on, especially in Germany, scholars devoted special attention to tragedy’s formal and dramatic structure: dialogue and monologue, the patterning of the odes, the messenger’s speech, patterns of intrigue and deception.

In America the New Criticism of the fifties focused on patterns latent in the poetic language of the plays. Such studies as R. F. Goheen’s of the Antigone and Bernard Knox’s of the Oedipus Tyrannus tried to discern the relation between the poetic texture and the intellectual armature of the work.! Repeated images, clustered about certain characters or the attitudes embodied by those characters, could

1. R. F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone (Princeton 1951); B. M. W. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New Haven 1957).

help articulate the main concerns of the play and relate them to patterns of language and action.

Anthropologically or psychologically oriented scholars, among them Dodds, Adkins, Vernant, Gouldner, and Slater, have also viewed Greek tragedy as the battleground for conflicting value systems and latent tensions within society.2 J.-P. Vernant especially, concerned with the question of how the social order deals with the antinomies that it contains, has stressed tragedy as the field of the problematical where the familiar institutions are called into question and the moral vocabulary, no longer adequate, becomes ambiguous or self-contradictory.

Society, from this approach, appears not a crystalline, coherent entity inherited by each of its members but rather an ongoing process of constructing, abandoning, and readjusting systems of analogies and interlocking relations. Interaction and continuous development of individual institutions in their relations to one another rather than the unity of a centralized entity emerges as the dominant subject for scrutiny. This view of the ancient Greek city stresses, in the words of A. Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys, “the study of relations of complementarity or conflict between the behavioral norms associated with different contexts of interaction.”’3

The structuralist’s position has some similarities to that of the sociologist. “Reality” has its existence in its relation to the mental, social, and linguistic constructions of the thinking subject. The social system resembles the literary work in being viewed, as Roland Barthes would say, in the present rather than the perfective tense. Social man is not a being secure in the given nexus of familial, ritual, and political ties that hold his life together but rather a being continually engaged in creating that nexus.4

The structuralist emphasis falls not so much upon the dominant, ideal values at the surface of the culture as on the subsurface tensions within the system, the dynamic pulls that the culture has to allow,

2. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951); A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford 1960); J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal- Naquet, Mythe et tragédie (Paris 1972); Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato (New York and London 1965); Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston 1968).

3. A Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys, “The Social Structure of the Ancient City,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 43 (1974) 366.

4. See Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” in R. and F. DeGeorge, eds., The Structuralists from Marx to Lévi-Strauss (Garden City, N. Y. 1972) 153.

resist, and contain in order to exist. The achievement of classical Athens, then, appears less the crystallization of a marmoreal harmony than the open equilibrium between competing values and unresolvable polarities.

Such a view gives us a tragedy that reflects the anxieties rather than the confident verities of its audience. Robert Browning’s Balaustion may have found “those Greek qualities of goodness and beauty” in “that strangest, saddest, sweetest song” of Euripides, but recent critics find themselves attuned more to the disonances, contradictions, and harsh archaic residues that the tragic poet’s reworking of myth heaves back to the surface.

The rationality of the form of Greek tragedy only sets off the irrationality that it reveals just below the surface of myth, cult, and other social forms. Literary critics influenced by both the Freudians and the Frazerians have increasingly probed for these latent, often darker, meanings which bear promise of revealing the hidden patterns and unquestioned assumptions of the society or the knowledge that the conscious mind is unwilling or unable to face. In this way the darker side of Greek civilization, as expressed in its creation of tragedy, has enabled modern man in his turn to confront the darker side of existence and explore what lies beneath the surface of his own highly rationalized, desacralized, excessively technologized culture.

From Nietzsche onward, Greek tragedy has appeared to hold the key to that darker vision of existence, the irrational and the violent in man and the world. Tragedy’s rediscovery and popularity since World War II have filled a need for that vision in modern life, a need for an alternative to the Judaeo-Christian view of a world order based on divine benignity and love.

II

Because it approaches myth as a system of tensions and oppositions, the methodology of Claude Lévi-Strauss is especially suited to explore the conflictual aspect of tragedy. For Lévi-Strauss, mythic thought operates in terms of bipolar oppositions. The function of myth is to mediate fundamental contradictions in human existence, man’s relation to man in society and to nature in the external world. Recognizing that our perception and representation of experience are structured by coded patterns of language, gesture, ritual, and so on, structuralism provides a frame in which we can formulate precisely and thoroughly the interrelation between the political, the linguistic, the religious, the psychological—all the many levels of dramatic action.

In a structuralist analysis the details of kinship, dress, architecture, eating, and ritual are not merely isolated data or Realien but elements of a structured message, a “code.” Each code expressed in its own terms—the “languages” of ritual, kinship, diet—a microcosm of the social order. In the analysis of a myth or a literary work it is not the surface details in themselves which are important but the relational patterns, the configurations, of these details in the various codes, the “analogy of functions” rather than the “analogy of substances.”

Whereas the New Criticism tends to isolate a work in a cultural vacuum and to limit itself to the internal coherence of verbal structures, structuralism seeks to relate the value structures of the society to the aesthetic structures of the literary work. Its concern, however, is not so much with the internal logic and coherence of the codes per se as with the cognitive patterns of the culture which they imply and the correspondence between the semantic structures of the literary work and the social structures of the culture as a whole.

When we turn from structures of society to structures of literary texts, however, we encounter a fundamental difficulty. The literary work imposes a secondary structure of language and meanings upon the given structures of the society. Unavoidably, it uses the codes that constitute the mental patterns of the society; and it could be analyzed, at one level, solely in terms of those accepted, normative codes. But at the same time it deliberately manipulates, distorts, or otherwise transforms those patterns in the special self-conscious structures—linguistic, psychological, societal—superimposed by its own internal, aesthetic coherence. To put it differently, the work of literature overlays the codified contiguity of signifiant and signifié with a new internal coding wherein the relationships between sound and sense, between overt and latent meaning, between literal and figurative significance of words, change from the familiar (that is, the precoded) to the unexpected, the novel, and the striking.

Tragedy’s relation to the expression of the social order encoded in myths is particularly complex. As part of a public festival, a ritual in honor of the god Dionysus, tragedy validates the social order. It demonstrates the dangers of excess, impiety, or overconfidence within a coherent system of symbols representative of the divine, political, and social order. The presence of the gods, the palace of the king, the altars and shrines, the oracles, the house create a microcosm of the totality of that order. At the same time the violence of the action, the radical questioning of justice both human and divine, the searching explorations of the failure or the betrayal of public and private morality take us outside that order. In the magical circle of the orchestra the normal coherence that distinguishes and balances good and evil, love and hate, kin and stranger breaks down. The world order is stretched to its limits; its intelligibility is suspended.

So tragedy, while affirming the interrelatedness of all parts of the human and divine order, also has the peculiarity of calling into question the normative codes themselves. Both in language and in its enacted narrative, tragedy effects a violent derangement of the codes, a deliberate destructuring of the familiar patterns of order. In tragedy, as to some degree in all literature, the “message” of the specific text not only brings to life something that was not in the code but can threaten to destroy the code itself.

The parallels between strained diction, violent metaphors, perverted rituals, and inverted sexual roles in the Oresteia show the violence done to the linguistic, ritual, and familiar codes. The Oedipus Tyrannus develops an elaborate correspondence between the confusion of language in the riddles of the Sphinx and in the oracles of the gods (the two polar forms of utterance have a disconcerting unity), the social inversions of king and scapegoat, the ritual inversions of pollution and purification, and the domestic confusion of father and husband, father and brother, wife and mother. Here, as in the Oresteia, the linguistic, political, ritual, and familial codes are all involved simultaneously in the unstable situation from which tragic suffering arises. Confused intermingling, inversions, troubling identifications replace reassuring demarcation or differentiation. The original structures are suspended, forcing the mind to reach beyond those structures in the painful search for other principles of order or in the even more painful admission that there are no principles of order. Here men must face the chaos that their mental structures— social, linguistic, political, sexual, spatial—deliberately shut out.

Greek Tragedy: Myth and Structure Ill

A Greek tragedy is a special kind of mythical narration. We cannot approach it exactly as Lévi-Strauss approaches a given myth, reconstructing an underlying pattern by comparing the corresponding terms (“‘mythemes’’) in a large number of variants.5 The structuralist analysis of the coding processes of language can trace the relation between aesthetic patterns and patterns of order in the society as a whole. The literary critic, on the other hand, is concerned not with the core structure of the myth as revealed and realized in its variants but with the particular variant that is the literary work.

To take a specific example, to which we shall return later, Sophocles’ Trachiniae uses a system of analogies based on an underlying opposition of god and beast, civilization and savagery. The play opens with Deianeira anxious about the long absence of Heracles, her husband. She laments the cares of her life and tells how the monstrous river-god, Achelous, and Heracles fought to win her hand, a battle described in a later choral ode (497-530). A messenger announces Heracles’ return. Deianeira sees the young and beautiful Iole in the entourage and soon learns that Iole is destined for Heracles’ bed. At first calm and forgiving, she later returns to the stage resolved to try a love charm given to her in another violent wooing, the attempted rape long ago by the Centaur Nessus. Fatally wounded by Heracles’. arrow, poisoned with the Hydra’s venom, Nessus instructed Deianeira to save the blood clotted around his wound. All these years she has kept it stored in the inner chambers of the house. Now she anoints a robe with it and sends it to Heracles for his sacrificial celebration at Cape Cenaeum, across the water from Trachis. Her son Hyllus arrives soon after with the news of the robe’s effect: Heracles, in the midst of slaughtering bulls at the sacrificial fires, was suddenly seized by terrible agony, and he is now coming to Trachis to exact vengeance from Deinaeira. Realizing what she has done, she exits in silence; soon her suicide in the bedchamber is described. Ferocious in his pain, Heracles arrives, ready to kill De-

5. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), in DeGeorge and DeGeorge (note 4) 169-94; The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. J. and D. Weightman (New York 1970); and subsequent volumes of Mythologiques.

ianeira with his own hands. When he learns the details of the poison and hears the name of Nessus, he realizes that he is doomed in accordance with an old oracle from Zeus. He forces the reluctant Hyllus to marry lole and makes him promise to take him to Mount Oeta where he is to be burned on a funeral pyre. In a last speech he checks his cries of pain with heroic endurance and exits with son and followers for Oeta. Hyllus (or the chorus) closes the play with a lament about the remoteness and indifference of the gods.

From this rather complicated action emerges a symmetrical relation between Nessus, the beast-man, and Heracles, the man who stands in a special proximity to the gods. Structurally, the success of Nessus’ revenge and the deaths of Heracles and Deianeira can be described as a series of failed mediations between the poles of bestiality and divinity. Heracles acts out the anomalous role of a beastgod insofar as he, the son of Zeus, repeats the violence of the Centaur. Sacrifice in the ritual code, marriage in the sexual code, the safe interior of the house in the spatial and familial codes—all are isomorphic expressions of this basic failure of mediation, the destruction of the mean where civilization is possible. Normal communication between man and god is destroyed, and with it collapse the hierarchical relation between beast, man, and god, the equilibrium between the violent sexual instincts which links man with beast, and the coherent social and cosmic order that links man with gods. The triumph of the “beast”? Nessus through his poisoned blood, a specious love charm that reaches back to the destructive monstrosity of the Hydra, the resultant perversion of the sacrificial rite into the killing of the god-man by the beast-man, and the destruction of the house and marriage are not only elements in a causal sequence but also simultaneous manifestations of an underlying structure—or rather, the disintegration of structure. Achelous and Hydra, for example, are agents within a causal series that culminates in Heracles’ death, but they are also forces ever present in the action, existing simultaneously with and parallel to Nessus and the bestial aspect of Heracles.

Sacrifice, which plays a central role in this and other tragedies, is the mediating vehicle within the system of relations and communications that link gods and men. Sacrifice validates the world order by affirming the hierarchical relation of god-man-beast. The immortal gods receive the airy smoke that mounts from the durable bones

Mortal men sustain themselves with the roasted meat of the perishable flesh. The human celebrant who offers the victim to the gods is as far above the beast as he is below the god who receives the offering.® The ritual stylization of killing during the sacrifice and the roasting of the flesh to be consumed by the celebrants after the sacrifice separate the structured world of “culture” from the savagery of wild “nature.” By establishing a system of conjunctions and disjunctions, sacrifice makes manifest the implicit logic of the world order. It separates gods from men and men from beasts, but it also opens a way of access from men to gods. In tragedy that system of logical relations is confused or overthrown, sometimes to be recreated on a new basis. The centrality of sacrifice as a symbolic expression of system explains, in part, why sacrifice and its distortions or perversions play such an important role in tragedy: one thinks of the stories of Thyestes, Iphigeneia at Taurus and at Aulis, Medea, Ajax—all recurrent subjects of tragedy and all characterized by perverted sacrifice. 7

Kingship, like sacrifice, is not merely a one-dimensional social category, political in the case of kingship, religious in the case of sacrifice. In tragedy, as in early Greek myth and literature more generally, the king occupies the symbolic point where the human and the divine, the natural and supernatural worlds intersect. His sufferings represent the efforts of the society to maintain those relations with the cosmic order on which its physical and spiritual life depends. In the Oresteia, by illustration, Aeschylus takes great pains to establish the spatial coordinates of this kingship. The point at which the king suffers and dies is a point of crossing between elemental opposites: sea and fire (Ag. 281ff., 6sof., 958), winter and summer (966-72), upper and lower limits (cf. hyper-, hypo-, “above,” “below,” in Ag. 786), divine honor and bestial degradation. It is not just the suffering of Agamemnon as an individual which moves us but the cosmic, religious, and social vibrations in the drastic reversal and fearful collapse of polarities that define both the ordered structure of the society and the natural and supernatural order. Hence Agamemnon’s walk-

6. For this view of sacrifice see M. Detienne, J.-P. Vernant, et al., La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris 1979); M. Detienne, Les jardins d’Adonis (Paris 1972); and J.- P. Vernant, Mythe et société en Gréce ancienne (Paris 1974).

7. See Walter Burkert, “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual,” GRBS 7 (1966) 87-121; also his Homo Necans (1972; Berkeley and Los Angeles 1983).

ing on the carpet is not merely an act of individual pride which provokes the “envy” of gods and men (cf. Ag. 921-25, 947) but a terrifying confusion of boundaries in the figure who is charged with the sacred task of linking human and divine, making visible in his mortal person the numinous order of the gods.

The Greek tragic hero, then, is not a “character” quite as the hero of a modern fiction is a character, an individual with a three-dimensional, idiosyncratic personality. He is, rather, both an individual caught in a moral conflict and a symbolic element within a complex socioreligious structure. He carries the linear flow of the action and is a constellation of patterns present simultaneously in all parts of the action. Alongside the individualized personalities of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Oedipus, or Euripides’ Pentheus, that is to say, stands the role of sacral kingship; and in that role each of these figures concentrates in himself the crisis in relations between the human, natural, and supernatural worlds which forms the starting point for the tragic action.