Time and again the line of argument in my discussion has approached the question of sexuality, and has been forced to restrain itself. In the Oresteia, I argued, the relations between the sexes are an essential dynamic of the trilogy and any discussion of language, politics, imagery in that work is forced always to reconsider its siting in a sexual discourse. I attempted to show further that in any description of how the Greek city might try to delimit itself the polarized realms of a male world and female world were an essential, if difficult, marking of that not entirely physical topography. With regard to those primary words of human relations in the family and city, philos and ekhthros, the sexual was explicitly interwoven in the semantic range – and dislocations – of such terms. In this chapter, I wish to focus on this topic of sexuality, which is so important to Greek tragedy, and after I have looked at some of the complex problems involved in approaching this subject, I shall be considering in particular Euripides’ Hippolytus.

The Bacchae is a particularly fitting work with which to end my study of Greek tragedy. Not only is it one of the latest extant plays – Euripides’ final masterpiece – but also the dense texture of image and theme in this extraordinary drama recalls so many of the ideas I have explored in the previous chapters. It is a text concerned with a man and a city and relations with the divine (embodied in the disguised Dionysus), and the work has often been read as a fundamentally religious statement, either in terms of a defence of Dionysus (justified divine vengeance); or an attack on the malicious element of destruction and disorder in Dionysiac or similar cult attitudes; or in terms of a recognition and demonstration of the necessary place of the irrational in man.1 As Foley has recently written, ‘the text undeniably raises questions about the nature of divinity and reflects the precariousness of social and political life in late fifth-century Athens’.2

In the first chapter, at several points I referred to the difficulties of the term dikē in the Oresteia. In this chapter, I intend to consider in more depth the notions surrounding this word and its cognates in the trilogy. This discussion is important for several reasons. First, after my investigation of the exchange of language with its focus on the process of interpretation and understanding, it is interesting to attempt to follow through the shifts and plays of meaning through which a word passes in the clashes of persuasive rhetoric and deceitful manipulation. I discussed language’s role in the ordering of social relations and language as the means and matter of social transgression. How does a prime term of social order, dikē, relate to this discussion? Secondly, the concept of dikē, few would disagree, is a major concern in the Oresteia. This concern has formed the basis for many literary critics’ readings of the trilogy. As well as investigating the various influential views put forward on this topic, it is important to see in what ways the focus on language changes our appreciation of this debate. This leads to my third reason: the different critics’ attempts at interpreting the Oresteia in the light of this set of terms will offer an important insight into a major problem of reading Greek tragedy. For, as I argued in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 1, the Oresteia’s tragic critique of the exchange of language as social process is highly relevant to the institutions and attitudes of literary criticism; and the history of the interpretation of the notion of dikē will offer an understanding of the way the play’s problematic view of interpretation and comprehension is all too applicable to the reading of the play itself.

‘Reading a poem’, writes Geoffrey Hartman, ‘is like walking on silence – on volcanic silence. We feel the historical ground; the buried life of words.’1 This sense of uncertain depth, uncertain soundings, is nowhere more evident than in Greek tragedy’s relation to the tradition of earlier writings. Although a relatively small proportion of the stories of the three major tragedians appear to have been drawn directly from the Homeric poems, and although the poetic language of tragedy does not reflect constant and close dependence on Homeric usage (as do some other genres),2 it is none the less impossible to understand Greek tragedy without a consideration of the way Homer and Hesiod resound and echo through these texts at a variety of levels and in a variety of important ways. I have already mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5 the complex dialectic between past and present that is enacted by the plays performed before the city but set in the heroic past,3 and in Chapter 1 I discussed the specific democratic rewriting of the Hesiodic injunction not to give crooked judgement in the Oresteia’s depiction of the establishment of the lawcourt. In this chapter, I intend to discuss in as much detail as space permits the relations of the texts of Greek tragedy to the tradition in and against which they are written and must be read. Aeschylus is said to have claimed his works were ‘slices from the banquets of Homer’4 (though whether this means left-overs or choice pieces is less than clear) and, ‘Sophocles might have taken for himself the Aeschylean claim.’5 Euripides, too, is impossible to understand without some sense of the heroic tradition and the place of Homer in more than a literary context. It is on the varying attitudes to and uses of the past, and on the literary tradition, particularly of Homer, in and against which the plays of the tragic corpus are formed, that this chapter will focus.

This quotation from Plato’s depiction of Protagoras provides an excellent introduction to the range of problems involved in discussing the sophists, to whom I have often referred in this book as a major factor in understanding fifth-century thought and drama. In Chapter 6 I discussed the conception of the poet having privileged access to truth and forming the education of the citizens. I argued that one of the reasons for Plato’s extended hostility towards poets and poetry was the sense of philosophy’s rival claims to be a master of truth, a conflict which is still being worked through. One of the commonest adjectives used to describe this special poetic knowledge and the people who demonstrate it is sophos, which is the root of the term ‘sophist’ and ‘philosopher’, and which is often translated ‘wise’, ‘clever’, ‘intelligent’. The possessor of any special skill or knowledge from carpentry to rhetoric could deserve the title ‘sophos’.

I have a copy of the Oxford Classical Text of Sophocles where one spread of pages is permanently discoloured into a dull yellow because it was left open for many days in the sun. I was working intently on the so-called deception speech in the Ajax and the book sat for hours open on my desk by the large windows of my college apartment through the summer. To see these pages now reminds me of the famous, grim lines of Macbeth, ‘My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf …’ There is inevitably for me a certain melancholic sense of the passing of time to reflect back to that summer more than thirty-five years ago, when I was writing Reading Greek Tragedy, still in my untenured twenties; but, unlike Macbeth, I can at least look back without a crippling sense of horror, and forward still with hope, not least thanks to the intellectual community of scholars in Cambridge and across the world with whom I have had the privilege of continuing to discuss Greek tragedy over the intervening decades.

In Chapters 4 and 5, I considered how the tragic texts reflected and disputed the ways in which an individual was placed in society, first in terms of family relations and civic ties as expressed through the vocabulary of philos and ekhthros and secondly in terms of the differences between the sexes. These two chapters were placed between a more general examination of the implications for the tragic texts of the contemporary ideology and structures of the city, and, in Chapter 6, an enquiry into the ways in which the Homeric poems provide an important textual background to the workings of Attic drama. In this chapter, I intend to follow this extensive discussion of what might be called the ‘notion of the self’ with an investigation of the related and important topics of ‘character’ and ‘mind’ which have been brought to the fore in recent critical exchanges not only in classical studies, where the tragic texts have long been the objects of a vigorous debate1 concerning the term ‘character’, but also in modern researches in the philosophy of language, particularly in theories of reading and criticism, where the usefulness and implications for the reading of fiction of the term ‘character’ and the notions of the ‘self’, the ‘subject’ have been the focus of considerable interest.2

Throughout the fifth century, Athens provided a focal point for the discussion, dissemination and development of the ideas that make up what has been called the fifth-century enlightenment. Travelling sophists, rhapsodes and teachers and artists of all sorts gravitated to Athens, whose self- proclaimed hegemony was cultural as well as political, and whose society offered the most extensive opportunities for intellectual pursuits. ‘To sum up’ says Pericles in Thucydides,1 ‘I declare our city is an education to Greece’ – a paradigm and a school – and throughout Thucydides’ history the Athenians are explicitly distinguished by their allies and enemies alike for their intellectual originality and precociousness.2 For Herodotus, it is a commonplace that the Athenians are renowned for their intelligence;3 Athens is the prytaneion, the ‘council-chamber’, of the wisdom of Greece4 – the meeting-place for ideas and debate.

In the last two chapters I have considered first how a series of terms concerned with civic order and relations within the city is placed at risk in the tragic arena, and secondly, in more general terms, how the city itself constitutes a specific ideology as well as a specific social organization. Now in this chapter I am going to investigate a particularly important system of ideas concerned with relations between people in the city and family, a system which is especially difficult for the modern reader to determine, namely, the notions constituting and surrounding the adjectives philos and ekhthros. I have left these terms untranslated as yet because part of the problem for the modern reader is the extensive semantic range of these and related terms, not just in the way that words in different languages are rarely coextensive in connotation, but also in the way that the force and direction of usage in this case are so varied. In much the same manner as one can say in English ‘Shoshana loves ice-cream’ and ‘Juliet loves Romeo’ to imply with the same word quite a different force and direction of emotion, so philos is a common term of address between the characters of a Platonic dialogue, where it is often translated ‘my dear fellow’ and the like, but at the same time philos is also used in the Oresteia to indicate the emotional relationship between Clytemnestra and her adulterer, Aegisthus, which Orestes despises and puts as a cause of her necessary death when he cries ‘Die then, and sleep beside him, since he is the man you love (philein) | and he whom you should have loved (philein) got only your hate’ (Cho. 906–7).

OF THE HUNDRED chapters, or histoires, that make up L’Epistre Othea, three feature the goddess Diana (Dyane). In the Queen's Manuscript copy of this work, each histoire includes a miniature; the image in the first of the three Diana stories (histoire 23) shows a goddess wearing blue and her female followers reading from open books (Figure 12). In this representation, the status of the woman in blue as goddess is determined by her position in a cloud above her followers, a position that also denotes her preceptive role and authority. As can be gleaned from the quotation in the above epigraph, which is taken from this histoire, its theme is chastity, yet the illumination represents literacy – female literacy, more precisely. Thus “a link between literacy and chastity” is unmistakably forged between the text and image in this particular histoire. In their study of the Othea, Desmond and Sheingorn have highlighted the originality of this composition, which “has no known textual or visual source,” suggesting that it must therefore have been created on Christine's instructions. The fact that there is no antecedent for this image is significant in two ways: first, it demonstrates that Christine wanted to depict female literacy in a new and more explicit manner and thus forms a further example of original imagery in her manuscripts; second, it opens up the interpretative possibilities for the goddess-figure dressed in blue.

The previous chapter featured an in-depth analysis of the ways in which, by being depicted wearing the colour blue, an authoritative stance was created for Christine, calling to mind a variety of powerful associations, including the Virgin Mary and the qualities for which she stood, such as wisdom and peace. Since it serves to empower her, I described the costume adopted by Christine in the City of Ladies Master's illuminations as a form of “power dressing,” and described the process by which it also entails the transmission of power from the Marian figure to the author.

ON BENDED KNEE, in a richly decorated room adorned with golden fleurs-de-lys on a royal blue background, Christine de Pizan presents her book to Isabeau de Bavière, the Queen of France, whose ladies-in-waiting look on. The scene is visually striking, composed of bold colours (the bright red and blue are particularly vivid) and gold leaf, the whole enclosed within a frame of delicate filigraned decorations. Such is the exquisite dedication miniature of the manuscript now known as “The Queen's Manuscript” or “Book of the Queen,” London, British Library, Harley MS 4431 (see Figure 1 ). The size of the image further underscores its significance: uniquely among the dedication miniatures found in Christine's corpus of surviving author-manuscripts, it makes use of the full two-column width of the page. The content of the image is also remarkable for its realism: not only can the women who are present in the scene be identified with some certainty, but as Sandra Hindman has shown, rather incredibly, “it also reproduces details of dress, tapestry, and furniture that correspond with descriptions in the royal accounts.” The visual presentation has a textual counterpart, of which part is cited in the above epigraph, in which Christine emphasizes her position as donor presenting her book to a noble patron, as well as her role in preparing the manuscript's content. The text mirrors details found in the image, such as Christine coming before Isabeau holding the book in her hands in a traditional author pose. Together, the text and image found at the opening of the Queen's Manuscript form a distinctive and memorable scene.

ON ITS OWN, the idea that the empowerment of women is a key theme of Christine's works is far from novel. In the above passage, taken from La Cité des dames – arguably the work in which it is most central – that aim is explicitly rendered: Dame Raison, who speaks these words to the protagonist Cristine, tells her that she is taking her protegée into a “Champ des Escriptures” from which she will actively learn of examples of good women from history. The effects of this entreaty on Cristine are almost immediate: “pour obeir a son commandement me dreçay appartement, me sentant par la vertu d’elles trop plus forte et plus legiere que devant n’estoye” (“Obeying her instructions, I jumped to my feet: thanks to the three ladies, my body felt much stronger and lighter than before”). From the mere suggestion of embarking on the enterprise that she goes on to conduct with Raison, Droiture, and Justice, Cristine is rendered physically stronger, enabling her to take on the arduous enterprise. By the end of the work, the protagonist will have also been empowered to defend women by acquiring knowledge that equips her to do so.

The topic of female empowerment may therefore not be new, but this study has demonstrated that there is more to be said about how it is achieved in Christine's works. For instance, the necessity for women to work together to achieve this goal is highlighted in the above passage, in which Raison says she will help the protagonist in terms that emphasize the physicality of their endeavour: “t’ayderay a porter hors la terre a mes propres espaules.”