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The Political Aspect of Aeschylus's Eumenides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

K. J. Dover
K. J. Dover
Affiliation:
University of St. Andrews
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Extract

The ransacking of Tragedy for indications of the political views of tragic poets is seldom profitable and may be disastrous. But Eumenides, like much that Aeschylus wrote, is unusual, and one of its unusual aspects is the clarity and persistence with which the hearer's attention is engaged in the political present as well as in the heroic past; one might almost say, directed away from the past and towards the present. The nature of this re-direction, and its implications, if any, for Aeschylus's own standpoint, are no new problem. My reason for discussing it once more is that not enough attention has been paid to the immediate dramatic context of the passages by which this re-direction is effected or to the relation between these passages and the language of Greek politics in general.

I. The Central Stasimon 490–565

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Editors of Aeschylus have assumed that these words cannot mean what they appear to mean: ‘Now new ordinances are overthrown, if the cause pleaded, and the injury done, by this matricide are going to prevail.’ The old laws, not the new, it is said, are in danger of overthrow, and it can only be the old laws which the Chorus defend and lament. Attempts to escape the prima facie meaning have taken the following forms:

(a) Emendation to give the sense ‘overthrow of old ordinances’ (ἕνων κ. θ., Cornford), ‘overthrow of ordained laws’ (κ. νόμων θ., Ahrens), ‘overthrow of my ordinances’ (ἐμῶν κ. θ., Weil), or ‘change to new ordinances’ (μεταστροφαὶ ν. θ., Meineke).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , November 1957 , pp. 230 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1957

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References

1 See Zuntz, G., The Political Plays of Euripides, Manchester, 1955, pp. 58 sqq. Google Scholar for destructive and effective criticism of some common assumptions about historical allusions in Tragedy.

2 Strictly speaking I should except Stanley's expansion ‘Nunc eversio novarum legum, sc. Apollinis et Minervae, juniorum deorum, si accusatio et punitio huius parricidae obtinebit’ and Potter's translation (1759, repeated later in some minor English translations) ‘Confusion on these upstart laws!’ The latter does not commend itself as a piece of translation, and the former requires us to understand ‘for otherwise …’ with πάντας ἤδη κτλ.

3 If the MSS. οὔτε γάρ in 499 is rejected and Elmsley's οὐδὲ γάρ adopted, I translate ‘we shall not punish either’. But I am not certain that οὔτε is impossible. The antithesis between ‘we, the βροτοσκόποι, shall not punish’ and ‘one man will ask another’ does not seem essentially different from the antitheses expressed by οὔτε/δέ in the examples in Denniston, , Greek Particles, p. 511 Google Scholar. If there is a difference, it lies in the size and complexity of the οὔτε member.

4 Cf. J. Seewald, Untersuchungen zu Stil und Komposition der Aischyleischen Tragödie, D.-Greifswald, 1936, pp. 25 sqq.

5 Kranz, W., Stasimon, Berlin, 1933, p. 172 Google Scholar.

6 In treating this phenomenon as unusual I am thinking of tragic choral lyric; outside Tragedy, we may find ἦ οὐχ ὁρῇς; and διαϕάδαν τί τοι λέγω; in Alcma fr. 1. 50, 56, and second person imperatives in Pindar.

7 Cf. Kranz, op. cit., p. 303.

8 Cf. Thomson, ad loc.

9 Cf. Paley and Sidgwick ad loc., and Bromig, G., De Asyndeti Natura et apud Aeschylum Usu, Diss. Göttingen, 1879, pp. 25 sqq. Google Scholar

10 ProfessorDodds, in C.Q. n.s. iii (1953), pp. 19–20 Google Scholar, offers a different interpretation of the Herodotus passage and draws from it a different conclusion on the point of κακαῑς ἐπιρροαῑσι.

11 I grant that to Aeschylus is primarily a life in which one has no ruler, cf. Professor Fraenkel's note on Ag. 883, whereas to Plato the words describe primarily the behaviour or attitude of a man who behaves as if he had no ruler, but I do not think the distinction is material for my argument.

12 Cf. Theognis 335, Solon fr. 16, and in general Kählreuter, H., Die Μεσότης bei und vor Aristoteles, Diss. Tübingen, 1911 Google Scholar.

13 Cf. Jacoby, , Fr. Gr. Hist. IIIb Supplement, Vol. i, pp. 338–9Google Scholar, Vol. ii, pp. 244–5.

14 Cf. Jacoby, ii. loc. cit.

15 Cf. Democritus frr. 250, 255; Müller, C. O., Dissertations on the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Cambridge, 1835, pp. 121–2Google Scholar; Kramer, H., Quid valeat ὁμόνοια in litteris graecis, Diss. Göttingen, 1905 Google Scholar.

16 Cf. Jacoby, vol. i, pp. 22 sqq.

17 Cf. Williams, G. W., The Curse of the Alcmaeonidae, Hermathena lxxviii–ix (1951–1952), especially lxxviii, pp. 45 Google Scholar, n. 27, 49.

18 Smertenko, p. 234.

19 On the role of tradition in Aeschylus's theology, cf. Solmsen, F., Hesiod and Aeschylus, Ithaca, 1949, p. 197 Google Scholar.

20 Cf. Athenian Tribute Lists, iii, p. 321 Google Scholar.

21 Kranz, op. cit., p. 107, ignores the intervention of 293.

22 It does not seem to me necessary to accept the inference of Herrmann, A. in Rh. Mus. lxxxvi (1937), pp. 69–70 Google Scholar from Ap. Rhod. iv. 1490 that this alternative location is pre-Herodotean and implied by Pindar's Fourth Pythian.

23 This article is a revised version of a paper read to the conference of the Hellenic and Roman Societies at Oxford in August 1955.