No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
III. The Plays: General Considerations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
On the level of purely subjective response there is no inherently incorrect or unjustifiable approach to the interpretation of character within the plays: the modern reader, like the ancient audience, is free to interpret according to individual experience or personal prejudice, and like all great writers Aeschylus has injected sufficient ambiguity into his creations to appeal to a wide spectrum of potential response. Of more objective concern on the other hand is the response Aeschylus aimed to produce, and the degree of importance he attached to the creation of character within the actual plays. In recent times the once popular exaltation of character, which viewed the figures on the stage as rounded and consistent wholes, has given way to a more Aristotelian assertion of economy in character portrayal, and its function of giving credibility to the more important element of plot. Thus Lucas states ‘most of the figures in Aeschylean tragedy are presented with the minimum of characterization; they are what the plot requires them to be and no more’. The earlier view, however, continues to be advanced, often in the more extreme guise of psychoanalysis, but while one cannot deny the useful insights the method sometimes produces, the exaggerated and wholly unrealistic claims advanced for it have proven totally counter-productive. At the opposite extreme is the insistence that portrayal of character lies totally at the mercy of transient dramatic necessity, making any quest for consistency doomed to failure from the start. It is a view that was first propounded for Sophocles by Tycho Wilamowitz and later applied to Aeschylus by Roger Dawe. Certainly in terms of logic Dawe’s proposition is hard to fault, and its very forthright expression serves as a welcome touchstone for others, but as P. E. Easterling observes, dramatic necessity is in many respects a sterile criterion of literary judgement. Somewhat similar in its final result if not in approach is the importance at times attributed to the divine factor in determining the actions of characters - the onset of Ate or an unspecified daimon that leads a man like Agamemnon to his doom. Again we cannot deny a role for the divine in the action of the plays, but to emphasize it to the exclusion of intelligibility in human terms risks negating belief that the characters portrayed are human beings at all rather than playthings of the gods.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986
References
Notes
1. Op. cit. (1959), pp. llOf.; cf. Lloyd-Jones (1964), 370f.; Garvie (1969), p. 132: ‘Aeschylus is not concerned with character for its own sake’; Taplin (1977), pp. 93,312; Rosenmeyer (1982), pp. 211ff.
2. Op. cit. (1963). Somewhat milder is Rosenmeyer’s observation (op. cit., pp. 221ff.) that the Agamemnon seen and the Agamemnon heard about are different, thus enabling Aeschylus to alter his standing within the trilogy depending on the requirements of the moment.
3. ‘Presentation of Character in Aeschylus’, G&R20 (1973), 3-19. Despite the concentration upon the so-called carpet scene in Agamemnon this is one of the most eminently sensible treatments of character portrayal in recent years. See further Gould, J., ‘Dramatic Character and “Human Intelligibility” in Greek Tragedy’, PCPhS 204 (1978), 43–67 Google Scholar.
4. Lloyd-Jones, H., ‘The Guilt of Agamemnon’, CQ 12 (1962), 191f CrossRefGoogle Scholar. = Segal (1983), pp. 62f.
5. Rosenmeyer (1982), pp. 216ff.
6. Op. cit. (1961), pp. 103f.
7. Thus it is the chorus that induces the Nurse to alter her message in Choephoroe, that sets in train Eteocles’ march to destruction in Septem, and prosecutes Orestes in Eumenides.
8. The best treatment of epirrhematic scenes continues to be Peretti, A., Epirrema e Tragedia: Studio sul dramma attico arcaico (Florence, 1939)Google Scholar. For epirrhematic scenes providing emotional response to events before the intervention of a more dramatically significant second character see Persae 256ff., 694ff.
9. The opposite process, song from an actor, trimeters from the chorus leader, can be seen at Agamemnon 1072ff., a complex scene in which the chorus is drawn into the emotion of Cassandra; cf. Fraenkel (1950), vol. Ill, p. 539.
10. Dale, Cf.A.M., ‘The Chorus in the Action of Greek Tragedy’, in Classical Drama and its Influence: Essays Presented to H. D. F. Kitto (London, 1965), pp. 15-27Google Scholar.
11. Op. cit. (1982), pp. 149ff. The starting point for any study of the odes remains Kranz, W., Stasimon: Untersuchungen zur Form und Gehalt der griechischen Tragödie (Berlin, 1933)Google Scholar; Rode, cf.J., Untersuchungen zur Form des aischyleischen Chorliedes (Diss. Tübingen, 1966)Google Scholar.
12. Pope, M., ‘Merciful Heavens? A Question in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon’, JHS 94 (1974), 112 Google Scholar; Smith, cf.O.L., ‘Once Again: The Guilt of Agamemnon’, Eranos 71 (1973), 1ffGoogle Scholar. Compare Gagarin’s argument (1976), p. 52, on the illogicality of regarding Darius in Persae as the mouthpiece of the poet.
13. Even the much vaunted and much discussed ‘learning through suffering’ of the Hymn to Zeus may be seen as essentially little more than a piece of such traditional wisdom.
14. Cf. Pope (1974), 112.
15. Winnington-Ingram (1983), p. 155; Rosenmeyer (1982), pp. 277ff.
16. Rosenmeyer (1982), pp. 262ff.; Smith, cf.O.L., ‘The Father’s Curse - Some Thoughts on the Seven Against Thebes ’, C& M 30 (1969), 42f Google Scholar., who asserts the impossibility of determining Aeschylus' own religious views.
17. Brown, Cf.A.L., ‘The Erinyes in the Oresteia: Real Life, the Supernatural, and the Stage’, JHS 103 (1983), 32f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith (1973), 8ff.
18. ‘Zeus in Aeschylus’, JHS 76 (1956), 55-67; cf. Denniston & Page (1957), pp. xivf.
19. Op. cit. (1982), p. 274; Golden, cf.L., ‘Zeus Whoever He Is ...’, TAPhA 92 (1961), 156-67Google Scholar.
20. Poiesis: Structure and Thought (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 38ff.
21. The same might be said of the Heliades fr. 105 (Mette): ‘Zeus is air; Zeus is earth; Zeus is heaven; Zeus is everything and whatever transcends them’. The objection to accepting the fragment at face value on the grounds that we lack its context has been adequately exploded by Kitto (1966), pp. 55f.; Herington, cf.C.J., ‘Aeschylus: The Last Phase’, Arion 4 (1965), 398ff Google Scholar. = Segal (1983), pp. 134f. See further Ch. VI below.
22. The dangers of trilogy-reconstruction are immediately apparent from any reading of Mette’s exercise in hypothesis and imagination, Der verlorene Aischylos (Berlin, 1963). For more considered studies see Podlecki, A. J., ‘Reconstructing an Aeschylean Trilogy’, BICS 22 (1975), 1–19 Google Scholar; Garvie (1969), pp. 163ff., 183ff.
23. Thomson, G., Aeschylus, The Prometheus Bound (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 6ff.Google Scholar; cf. Winnington-Ingram (1983), pp. 175-97; Gantz, T. N., ‘Divine Guilt in Aischylos’, CQ 31 (1981), 27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24. Op. cit. (1983), p. 1.
25. Lloyd-Jones, H., The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 84f.Google Scholar; cf. nn. 16 and 21 above.
26. On the important role of the ‘demonic’ see Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), pp. 40ff.Google Scholar; Rosenmeyer (1982), pp. 272f.
27. See further Winnington-Ingram (1983), pp. 132-53.
28. Cf. Winnington-Ingram (1983), pp. 158ff.
29. Lebeck (1971), p. 134.