At one point in the closing scene of the Agamemnon, Aegisthus meets the challenge of force by the... more At one point in the closing scene of the Agamemnon, Aegisthus meets the challenge of force by the chorus of Argive elders with a counter-threat (1652) :* axxa Kayw J/v wrpoKowros oVK avalvofatL aavaev. "Well then, I too have sword in hand and do not shrink from death." The elders see a happy omen in these words and formally accept it: Sexo/eCvotS A`ycts Oavetv e-' 7r TV Xl7V 8' capovt4eea. "You speak of your death. So be it. We accept the outcome."' Had this last line, through one or another of the many vicissitudes of scribal transmission, slipped from the text, or had Aeschylus himself not even written it, one is sorely tempted to wonder how many of the poet's commentators would have found anything particularly ominous (or even ironic) in Aegisthus' OvK avatvo/aca Oavelv. Dreams are another matter. We tend to be sensitive enough to their prophetic import in Greek literature, * References to the text of the Oresteia follow Gilbert Murray, Aeschyli septem quae supersunt tragoediae (corrected second ed., Oxford, 1957). 1 The critical dispute over the distribution of these lines need hardly concern us here. The point made remains the same whoever utters the ominous words or accepts them. MSS re in 1653 is problematical. We should, with Lobel, probably read ye. 1 JOHN J. PERADOTTO. so that, for example, few readers will not have long anticipated Orestes' interpretation of his mother's dream at Choephoroi, 540 if. But when it comes to the possibility of ominous language, it has been the practice of philologists for the most part to maintain a conservative silence before anything that is not so clearly labelled as Ag., 1652 f.2 For a further example, one not so clearly labelled, we might ask how many commentators have found anything ominous in the closing lines of the parodos of the Agamemnon (255-7): OEtl 70rT a?YXLtO'OV 'AeVgaI yatas povowo/povpov (pKoS. Are we safe in seeing in them, with Meautis, a good omen for Clytemnestra: "la reponse des dieux a ses preoccupations secretes, un veritable KXh?J8v, qui intensifia dans son coeur la joie criminelle et monstrueuse qu'avait eveillee en elle la nouvelle de la prise de Troie "? 3 What we are dealing with here is cledonomancy,4 an important if not so well-known form of divination practiced in antiquity. A KXr78Uv in this sense is an apparently casual utterance heard by a man when he is deeply preoccupied with some plan, project, or hope, and understood by him as an omen of the outcome of his preoccupation. It was felt that such an utterance might have the power of bringing about an effect, "not indeed irrespective of its meaning, but other than the meaning or intention of the person who carelessly uttered it" (Halliday), or, from another p-oint of view, that a god makes of the speaker an instrument for presaging the future, much as he might use an inspired prophet or bird in flight (Bouche-Leclercq). So Odysseus sees a good omen (xa~tpv 8e KXEre8ovS) in the banal and casual remark of one of the suitors (Od., XVIII, 112 f.): "Stranger, may Zeus 2 See note 14, below. 3 Georges Meautis, Eschyle et la trilogie (Paris, 1936), p. 147. 4The literature on the subject is limited. The fullest treatment appears in A.
Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 1992
Our starting point is the story of how Themistocles tried, at first without success, to convince ... more Our starting point is the story of how Themistocles tried, at first without success, to convince his fellow Athenians that victory against the Persians lay in sea power. In Plutarch's life (10.1), we are told that he lost hope of bringing them over by rational arguments (&AvOpcoivoit Xoyiagoi?), and resorted to signs from heaven and prophecies (arlgeixc 8ugo6vux wi c xpqtoFo), "contriving machinery as someone would in performing a tragedy" (&$)airp ?V tpoycp&a Flxvi v " pa). The statesman, frustrated by the failure of rational discourse, finds success in theatrical smoke and mirrors, Themistocles probably not the first and certainly not the last. The story illustrates the power of non-rational over rational representation and uses theater as its most apt metaphor. I invite you to imagine, if you will, a sophist-someone like Critias or Gorgias or even, perhaps, Protagoras or Socrates-sitting in the theater of Dionysus during a not altogether dissimilar representation: the enactment of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. Imagine his sense of futility in the face of this powerful anti-sophist statement. Imagine his frustration at lacking the chance to respond in a social context equally inclusive, equally compelling. I should like to take that frustrated sophist's part today, respectfully disregarding, for the while, the many other valid ways there may be to read Oedipus Tyrannus. I shall, of course, be adding a particular contemporary perspective. That is inevitable. But in this case it is also deliberate. Deliberate, for two reasons. First, because when I reflect on the particular contemporary perspective I am least uncomfortable with, and look for something like it in the age of Sophocles, I find myself sitting with that frustrated sophist in the theater of Dionysus. And second, because that play is of course still read, still held in highest esteem in the courts of aesthetic judgment, still firmly fixed in the canon of those texts we wish the well-schooled to have read, and that, not as historical museum piece merely, but because it still delivers a message we think it valuable to hear.
Have you ever wondered why so many heroes--from Odysseus to Tom Sawyer--journey to the underworld... more Have you ever wondered why so many heroes--from Odysseus to Tom Sawyer--journey to the underworld? Or why virgin births occur in so many stories around the world?In the first comprehensive view of mythology directed toward the general reader, Shirley Park Lowry tells why we find recurring patterns and symbols in stories that are centuries--or continents--apart. Drawing upon tales ranging from the ancient Middle East to modern North America, Lowry shows how "myths reflect and dramatize ordinary experience, illuminating our deepest and least articulated hopes, fears, and quandaries. Their extravagant plots and images are recognizable because they are the language of our own dreams."Lowry defines what myths are; why they are important; what they share with folk tales, dreams, and fantasies; how we developed a symbolic language and what such symbols as blood, milk, sunlight, and monsters mean; how heroes from Moses and Jesus to Charlemagne and Superman relate to one another; and how myths reconcile us to life's limitations.
From Ian Morris & Barry Powell (edd.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden 1997). Page numbers in re... more From Ian Morris & Barry Powell (edd.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden 1997). Page numbers in red.] [380] 'Modern' and 'theory' are notoriously imprecise terms. Before attempting to define their use in the present essay, it would be naive not to draw attention to the inevitable impermanence of any study with the word 'modern' in its title. When the present New Companion has aged as much as Wace and Stubbings' original Companion to Homer now has, what critical shifts will have taken place to render this essay passé, and will the Iliad and the Odyssey continue to float somehow intact above these sea-changes? Let me insist that any despondency engendered by this eventuality is misplaced, as I hope to show in my discussion of the postmodern condition and its unabashed distrust of the search for permanent verities. 1 Wace and Stubbings contained no chapter remotely corresponding to the present one. That volume itself had been first conceived, and some of its chapters actually written, more than twenty years before its publication in 1962. During that entire period between conception and publication what would have passed for 'contemporary theory,' at least among the community of classicists, would have been what we call New Criticism and archetypal criticism inspired [381] by Jungian psychology. But these influences would be all but overshadowed by the most important development in Homeric studies in the twentieth century. For Wace and Stubbings as for most homerists of the period, Milman Parry's investigations of Homer's work as oral poetry, slow to merit much attention or to catch hold in the United States, was now the thing to be looked at, for it seemed to offer a defensive profession the chance of taking a giant step in its aspiration to become a 'hard science' and to forswear the soft belletrism and impressionistic aestheticism that had characterized so much of its literary appreciations. Few literary analysts would be able (or perhaps even willing) to match the way in which Cedric Whitman, in Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958), blended an appreciation of Parry's findings with the sensitivity to verbal texture, symbol, image, structure, ambiguity, and irony central to the New Criticism. Despite the brilliance with which he managed this, many, if not most, homerists believed the devices designed for the interpretation of written literature simply incompatible with Parry's theory of Homer as oral 1. There have been many rich and thought-provoking literary studies of Homer with little involvement, at least little explicit involvement, in contemporary theory. Regretfully, the present study is constrained by limits of space to take little notice of them. (For twentieth-century critical trends, chiefly Parryism and reactions to it, prior to structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism and postmodernism, see James P. Holoka's masterful essay, ''Homer, Oral Poetry, And Comparative Literature: Major Trends and Controversies in Twentieth-Century Criticism" in Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung: Rückblick und Ausblick, ed. Joachim Latacz [Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1991], 456-81.) Neither shall I have much to say of studies that claim a contemporary theoretical approach but do not live up to the claim, 'theory' being in such cases no more than a fashionable overlay for more traditional critical (often New Critical) practice. Neither will I consider studies whose primary focus is narratology, the theory of oral poetry, or myth analysis, all of which involve explicit theory, but which are dealt with elsewhere in this volume. As for those scholars and works actually considered, the present essay makes no attempt to be exhaustive, but rather selective and exemplary of method, providing samples rather than full reviews of arguments which are far too complex for treatment within the limited scope of an essay such as this. Portions of the present essay are drawn from Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice (Princeton 1990).
At one point in the closing scene of the Agamemnon, Aegisthus meets the challenge of force by the... more At one point in the closing scene of the Agamemnon, Aegisthus meets the challenge of force by the chorus of Argive elders with a counter-threat (1652) :* axxa Kayw J/v wrpoKowros oVK avalvofatL aavaev. "Well then, I too have sword in hand and do not shrink from death." The elders see a happy omen in these words and formally accept it: Sexo/eCvotS A`ycts Oavetv e-' 7r TV Xl7V 8' capovt4eea. "You speak of your death. So be it. We accept the outcome."' Had this last line, through one or another of the many vicissitudes of scribal transmission, slipped from the text, or had Aeschylus himself not even written it, one is sorely tempted to wonder how many of the poet's commentators would have found anything particularly ominous (or even ironic) in Aegisthus' OvK avatvo/aca Oavelv. Dreams are another matter. We tend to be sensitive enough to their prophetic import in Greek literature, * References to the text of the Oresteia follow Gilbert Murray, Aeschyli septem quae supersunt tragoediae (corrected second ed., Oxford, 1957). 1 The critical dispute over the distribution of these lines need hardly concern us here. The point made remains the same whoever utters the ominous words or accepts them. MSS re in 1653 is problematical. We should, with Lobel, probably read ye. 1 JOHN J. PERADOTTO. so that, for example, few readers will not have long anticipated Orestes' interpretation of his mother's dream at Choephoroi, 540 if. But when it comes to the possibility of ominous language, it has been the practice of philologists for the most part to maintain a conservative silence before anything that is not so clearly labelled as Ag., 1652 f.2 For a further example, one not so clearly labelled, we might ask how many commentators have found anything ominous in the closing lines of the parodos of the Agamemnon (255-7): OEtl 70rT a?YXLtO'OV 'AeVgaI yatas povowo/povpov (pKoS. Are we safe in seeing in them, with Meautis, a good omen for Clytemnestra: "la reponse des dieux a ses preoccupations secretes, un veritable KXh?J8v, qui intensifia dans son coeur la joie criminelle et monstrueuse qu'avait eveillee en elle la nouvelle de la prise de Troie "? 3 What we are dealing with here is cledonomancy,4 an important if not so well-known form of divination practiced in antiquity. A KXr78Uv in this sense is an apparently casual utterance heard by a man when he is deeply preoccupied with some plan, project, or hope, and understood by him as an omen of the outcome of his preoccupation. It was felt that such an utterance might have the power of bringing about an effect, "not indeed irrespective of its meaning, but other than the meaning or intention of the person who carelessly uttered it" (Halliday), or, from another p-oint of view, that a god makes of the speaker an instrument for presaging the future, much as he might use an inspired prophet or bird in flight (Bouche-Leclercq). So Odysseus sees a good omen (xa~tpv 8e KXEre8ovS) in the banal and casual remark of one of the suitors (Od., XVIII, 112 f.): "Stranger, may Zeus 2 See note 14, below. 3 Georges Meautis, Eschyle et la trilogie (Paris, 1936), p. 147. 4The literature on the subject is limited. The fullest treatment appears in A.
Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 1992
Our starting point is the story of how Themistocles tried, at first without success, to convince ... more Our starting point is the story of how Themistocles tried, at first without success, to convince his fellow Athenians that victory against the Persians lay in sea power. In Plutarch's life (10.1), we are told that he lost hope of bringing them over by rational arguments (&AvOpcoivoit Xoyiagoi?), and resorted to signs from heaven and prophecies (arlgeixc 8ugo6vux wi c xpqtoFo), "contriving machinery as someone would in performing a tragedy" (&$)airp ?V tpoycp&a Flxvi v " pa). The statesman, frustrated by the failure of rational discourse, finds success in theatrical smoke and mirrors, Themistocles probably not the first and certainly not the last. The story illustrates the power of non-rational over rational representation and uses theater as its most apt metaphor. I invite you to imagine, if you will, a sophist-someone like Critias or Gorgias or even, perhaps, Protagoras or Socrates-sitting in the theater of Dionysus during a not altogether dissimilar representation: the enactment of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. Imagine his sense of futility in the face of this powerful anti-sophist statement. Imagine his frustration at lacking the chance to respond in a social context equally inclusive, equally compelling. I should like to take that frustrated sophist's part today, respectfully disregarding, for the while, the many other valid ways there may be to read Oedipus Tyrannus. I shall, of course, be adding a particular contemporary perspective. That is inevitable. But in this case it is also deliberate. Deliberate, for two reasons. First, because when I reflect on the particular contemporary perspective I am least uncomfortable with, and look for something like it in the age of Sophocles, I find myself sitting with that frustrated sophist in the theater of Dionysus. And second, because that play is of course still read, still held in highest esteem in the courts of aesthetic judgment, still firmly fixed in the canon of those texts we wish the well-schooled to have read, and that, not as historical museum piece merely, but because it still delivers a message we think it valuable to hear.
Have you ever wondered why so many heroes--from Odysseus to Tom Sawyer--journey to the underworld... more Have you ever wondered why so many heroes--from Odysseus to Tom Sawyer--journey to the underworld? Or why virgin births occur in so many stories around the world?In the first comprehensive view of mythology directed toward the general reader, Shirley Park Lowry tells why we find recurring patterns and symbols in stories that are centuries--or continents--apart. Drawing upon tales ranging from the ancient Middle East to modern North America, Lowry shows how "myths reflect and dramatize ordinary experience, illuminating our deepest and least articulated hopes, fears, and quandaries. Their extravagant plots and images are recognizable because they are the language of our own dreams."Lowry defines what myths are; why they are important; what they share with folk tales, dreams, and fantasies; how we developed a symbolic language and what such symbols as blood, milk, sunlight, and monsters mean; how heroes from Moses and Jesus to Charlemagne and Superman relate to one another; and how myths reconcile us to life's limitations.
From Ian Morris & Barry Powell (edd.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden 1997). Page numbers in re... more From Ian Morris & Barry Powell (edd.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden 1997). Page numbers in red.] [380] 'Modern' and 'theory' are notoriously imprecise terms. Before attempting to define their use in the present essay, it would be naive not to draw attention to the inevitable impermanence of any study with the word 'modern' in its title. When the present New Companion has aged as much as Wace and Stubbings' original Companion to Homer now has, what critical shifts will have taken place to render this essay passé, and will the Iliad and the Odyssey continue to float somehow intact above these sea-changes? Let me insist that any despondency engendered by this eventuality is misplaced, as I hope to show in my discussion of the postmodern condition and its unabashed distrust of the search for permanent verities. 1 Wace and Stubbings contained no chapter remotely corresponding to the present one. That volume itself had been first conceived, and some of its chapters actually written, more than twenty years before its publication in 1962. During that entire period between conception and publication what would have passed for 'contemporary theory,' at least among the community of classicists, would have been what we call New Criticism and archetypal criticism inspired [381] by Jungian psychology. But these influences would be all but overshadowed by the most important development in Homeric studies in the twentieth century. For Wace and Stubbings as for most homerists of the period, Milman Parry's investigations of Homer's work as oral poetry, slow to merit much attention or to catch hold in the United States, was now the thing to be looked at, for it seemed to offer a defensive profession the chance of taking a giant step in its aspiration to become a 'hard science' and to forswear the soft belletrism and impressionistic aestheticism that had characterized so much of its literary appreciations. Few literary analysts would be able (or perhaps even willing) to match the way in which Cedric Whitman, in Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958), blended an appreciation of Parry's findings with the sensitivity to verbal texture, symbol, image, structure, ambiguity, and irony central to the New Criticism. Despite the brilliance with which he managed this, many, if not most, homerists believed the devices designed for the interpretation of written literature simply incompatible with Parry's theory of Homer as oral 1. There have been many rich and thought-provoking literary studies of Homer with little involvement, at least little explicit involvement, in contemporary theory. Regretfully, the present study is constrained by limits of space to take little notice of them. (For twentieth-century critical trends, chiefly Parryism and reactions to it, prior to structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism and postmodernism, see James P. Holoka's masterful essay, ''Homer, Oral Poetry, And Comparative Literature: Major Trends and Controversies in Twentieth-Century Criticism" in Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung: Rückblick und Ausblick, ed. Joachim Latacz [Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1991], 456-81.) Neither shall I have much to say of studies that claim a contemporary theoretical approach but do not live up to the claim, 'theory' being in such cases no more than a fashionable overlay for more traditional critical (often New Critical) practice. Neither will I consider studies whose primary focus is narratology, the theory of oral poetry, or myth analysis, all of which involve explicit theory, but which are dealt with elsewhere in this volume. As for those scholars and works actually considered, the present essay makes no attempt to be exhaustive, but rather selective and exemplary of method, providing samples rather than full reviews of arguments which are far too complex for treatment within the limited scope of an essay such as this. Portions of the present essay are drawn from Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice (Princeton 1990).
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