Ritual Irony

Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides

Helene P. Foley

• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501740640
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

Ritual Irony is a critical study of four problematic later plays of Euripides: the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Phoenissae, the Heracles, and the Bacchae.

Examining Euripides' representation of sacrificial ritual against the background of late fifth-century Athens, Helene P. Foley shows that each of these plays confronts directly the difficulty of making an archaic poetic tradition relevant to a democratic society. She explores the important mediating role played by choral poetry and ritual in the plays, asserting that Euripides' sacrificial metaphors and ritual performances link an anachronistic mythic ideal with a world dominated by "chance" or an incomprehensible divinity.
Foley utilizes the ideas and methodology of contemporary literary theory and symbolic anthropology, addressing issues central to the emerging dialogue between the two fields. Her conclusions have important implications for the study of Greek tragedy as a whole and for our understanding of Euripides' tragic irony, his conception of religion, and the role of his choral odes.

Assuming no specialized knowledge, Ritual Irony is aimed at all readers of Euripidean tragedy. It will prove particularly valuable to students and scholars of classics, comparative literature, and symbolic anthropology.

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Drama and Sacrifice

Euripidean scholarship has been grappling for centuries with the supposed structural imperfections of his dramas, the supposed irrelevance of his choral odes, and the supposed rationality, not to say irreverence, of Euripides himself. Aristotle complains that Euripides’ 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 for 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 Euripides 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 few first prizes even in his own time. According to the philosopher Nietzsche, Euripides destroyed tragedy.

The plot of the Heracles, for example, veers so abruptly and unexpectedly that the initial scenes seem to lose organic relation to what follows. Similarly, the mad Heracles of the peripety little resembles the pious father who rescues his family from the tyrant Lycus and a corrupt Thebes in the opening suppliant action. Neither Heracles matches the superhuman culture hero celebrated in the choral odes. In the final scenes the hero’s rejection of suicidal despair implicitly denies the repellent and vengeful anthropomorphic Olympians that the audience has just witnessed onstage in the peripety. The play thus concludes by turning directly against its own mythical tradition.

Yet the puzzling discontinuities that characterize Euripidean tragedy should be seen not as the result of inconsistency or as mere polemics, but as a serious and thoughtful response to poetic, social, and intellectual tensions within Attic culture. On the one hand, the poet confronts the corrupting effects of continual war between Athens and Sparta, the excesses of contemporary democracy, and the collapse of traditional social and religious values. On the other hand, he faces the disparity between the myths on which he bases his plots and the values of the society to which he adapts them.1 A poetic tradition peopled by self-assertive and often explosive kings, queens, and aristocratic warriors hardly suits the ideology of an egalitarian democracy in which the state circumscribes and subordinates the interests of the family and the extraordinary individual. The apparent opposition between “rational” prose argument and the “irrationalities” of myth, poetry, and ritual posed difficulties for all Attic tragedians. Yet the gap is wider for Euripides than it was for Aeschylus, and he brings the dialectic between the unpredictability of events and the pattern asserted by myth and ritual closer to the surface of his work. At the same time, Euripides presents drama at a religious festival honoring the god Dionysus, and he is sharply conscious that the performance of tragedy is itself a kind of ritual. Hence he must in some sense remain true to this ritual setting for his own art in the face of the sophistic reaction to myth and to the arbitrary, vengeful, petty, and even comic Olympians inherited from the epic tradition.

This book will explore the questions raised by Athens and Dionysus for Euripides’ poetics and theater through a critical study of four problematic late plays: the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Phoenissae, the Heracles, and the Bacchae. By concentrating largely on the overt theology of the plays, critics of Euripides have often made a simplistic equation between the religious views of Euripides and those of the contemporary Sophists. As a result, current interpretations of Euripides’ plays tend to the bleakly ironic. By emphasizing the ways in which the plays are built on or around ritual and confirm religious practice (if not traditional Olympian theology), the book offers a modified view of Euripidean irony. Furthermore, the lyric and ritual aspects of Euripides’ late dramas operate in close harmony and more strategically than earlier interpreters have thought. The odes of each of these plays, far from being merely decorative and nonfunctional, form a continuous song cycle that gains significance precisely from its studied contrast with or disconcerting relation to the action. Ritual, by serving in these plays to link odes and action, the mythical and the secular, past and present, ultimately enables the poet to claim for drama and its archaic poetic tradition a continuing relevance to a democratic society.

Typically, Euripides’ characters and the world of the action of his plays seem resistant to the higher realities and irrationalities of myth and ritual. Euripidean prologues, for example, are apt to include the protagonist’s questioning of his own myths. Helen doubts that she was born from an egg (Helen 17–21). In such plays as the Orestes the plot threatens to depart its myth altogether, requiring the intervention of a god on the machine to reassert tradition. The Euripidean chorus persists in drawing on tradition, celebrating gods and myths in a manner reminiscent of the poet’s epic and lyric predecessors. Yet these typical remarks made by the chorus of the Electra succinctly express their difficulty in upholding this role; myths, they argue, even if mere fictions, are nevertheless necessary for men (737–46):

So it is said. But I have little belief in the tale that the golden sun left its hot quarter and, to chastise mortals, changed its course for a man’s misfortune. Terrible myths are a gain for men and for the worship of the gods. Forgetting these things, you, the sister of noble brothers, kill your husband.

Some characters, such as Iphigenia in the Iphigenia in Aulis or Menoeceus in the Phoenissae, make a voluntary choice to act in conformity with divine oracles and a poetic ideal expressed in the choral odes and thus to return a wavering action to its myth. Such actions are invariably undertaken through ritual and through sacrifice.

From Xenophanes to Aristotle, Greeks began to see their view of the gods, at least as expressed in epic, as a projection of their own human forms and social needs:

For this reason all men say that the gods are governed by a king, for men themselves are either still ruled by a king, or were so in ancient times. And just as men represent the appearance of the gods as similar to their own, so also they imagine that the lives of the gods are like their own. (Politics 1252b)

Does man, then, disguise in his worship of the gods a worship of himself and his own need for order? So the poets seem to imply in many dramas in which the city itself becomes a source of salvation alternative to the gods (see, for example, Euripides’ Suppliants, Heracleidae, or Heracles). Danaus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants says to his daughters (980–83):

My children, we must pray to the Argives, sacrifice and pour libations to them as to gods Olympian, since they unhesitatingly preserved us.

Although Euripides never fully dismisses the Olympians, he apparently comes to see them in his later plays as beings indifferent to men or representative of a force equivalent to tuchē (chance; sign of divine intervention in human affairs) that may on occasion, especially when human effort plays an important subsidiary role, produce beneficial results, as in the Iphigenia in Tauris and the Helen. More frequently, however, these remote and impersonal divine forces create what appears from the human perspective to be inexplicable disorder:

Which mortal could say that, after searching to the farthest limit known to man, he has discovered what is god, what is not god, and what is in between—when he observes the dispensations of the gods rapidly leaping hither and thither and back again in ambivalent and incalculable incidents? (Helen 1137–43)

In the Helen, the prophetess and priestess Theonoe, avoiding the dilemmas posed by an unpredictable or amoral divinity, burns purifying sulphur to commune with a pneuma (breath of air) from the heavens, a supra-Olympian realm of purity that informs her decidedly human wisdom and piety (Helen 865–72). She relies for moral judgment on her own gnōmē (wisdom and judgment) and on a shrine of justice in her nature (1002–3).

Yet in the very plays in which Euripides’ characters reject the fickle and immoral Olympians, religious rituals (prayer, suppliancy, ritual offerings, and festival) and especially sacrifice continue to play a central and often surprisingly positive role. In contrast to earlier choral lyric, deaths in Attic tragedy are frequently undertaken or metaphorized as sacrifice:2 that is, they occur in a sacrificial setting and/or are described in the text as a form of thusia or sphagia.3 The action of several of Euripides’ plays turns on a sacrificial death: the Alcestis, the Medea, the Heracles, the Electra, the Iphigenia in Tauris, the Phoenissae, the Bacchae, the Iphigenia in Aulis, and the fragmentary Erechtheus. Other plays include a sacrificial death as an important element in a more complex plot: the Heracleidae, the Hecuba, the Andromache, and the fragmentary Phrixus and Cresphontes. The perverted human sacrifices of the Heracles and the Bacchae serve to define a larger social and religious crisis and ultimately to reflect the poet’s ability to reconstruct through violence a new if fragile link between myth and society. But in the Iphigenia in Aulis and the Phoenissae, in which an idealistic youth sacrifices herself or himself to resolve a cultural crisis, Euripides allows the gesture to resolve the plot and to offer a putative cure for an otherwise hopeless politics of self-interest and desire.

The poet also habitually closes his dramas with the establishment of new rituals for which the plays themselves become an aetiology.4 The Iphigenia in Tauris, for example, concludes with the establishment of a cult of Artemis at Halae, now purified of the human sacrifice that tainted it among the Taurians. Once again Euripides seems to find in ritual processes a transcendent though ironized value. The hero cult and sacrifices offered to Heracles at the close of the Heracles and the cult offered to Hippolytus at the close of the Hippolytus hardly succeed in assuaging the suffering of the heroes. Yet the offer of a cult to Heracles gives him an opportunity to choose survival despite unbearable disaster and to become a hero meaningful to a modern polis (see Chapter 4). Hippolytus’ tragic resistance to sexuality and Phaedra’s near adultery, permanently commemorated in a ritual special to unmarried girls, will, however ironically for Euripides’ characters, come to assist brides in their complex and potentially painful transition to marriage and womanhood. Medea’s violent “sacrifice” of her sons becomes rationalized in the harmless repetition of the children’s cult at Corinth. Ritual may be used to recall the past for the purpose of reordering and even predetermining the future. In the sacrificial deaths of tragedy Euripides seems to be drawing on ritual largely as metaphor and symbol while his own ambiguous art liberates itself from subordination to actual practice. But in these closing references to cult Euripides seems to wish to establish links for his art with ritual as an effective and precisely repeated performance enacted by the community rather than observed by it as audience to a tragic performance.

As the intellectual revolution transformed Greek theology, popular and deeply rooted ritual practices apparently remained relatively unchanged. And Euripides is not alone in insisting on the preservation of ritual performance while debunking theological superstructure. Plato, too, although his views of the Greek gods are both elusive and clearly not traditional, in the Laws expresses no doubt about the need for ritual and for specific ritual practices. Euripides apparently ignores possible contradictions between the maintenance of ritual and a modified view of Olympian deities. And in practice, if not in literary tradition, Greek gods may often have come close to embodying “the incalculable non-human element in phenomena” that they seem repeatedly to represent in late Euripides.5 Ritual practice does not seem to have depended on certain knowledge of who the divine recipient would be; Greeks often sacrificed, especially in times of crisis, to unnamed or vaguely named gods (theos, theoi).6 In his understanding of men’s motives for making ritual offerings to the gods, Euripides seems to approach the views expressed by early sociologists of religion such as Durkheim (here interpreted by Beidelman):

… gods are manifested through things which in themselves are subject to flux. Men then make o...

Indice dei contenuti

• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Drama and Sacrifice
• 2. The Iphigenia in Aulis
• 3. The Phoenissae
• 4. The Heracles
• 5. The Bacchae
• Bibliography
• Index