Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis

The chorus of Euripides' Medea, first performed in the fifth century BCE in Athens, responds to the central character Medea's plans to poison her rival with a famous example of the rhetorical topos of adynaton, "the impossible." Women, notorious for deceit, have always been victims of ill-fame, but now it is men, like Jason, the barbarian Medea's Greek husband, whose pledges cannot be trusted. The chorus exults:

Flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers,
And let the world's great order be reversed. ¹

I want to use Euripides' image of the backward flowing of rivers to stand for the ahistoricism of much classical scholarship on ancient drama. Classical scholars and students of ancient theatre have for centuries, since the earliest work on Greek literary and philosophical texts in the early Renaissance, interpreted fifth-century tragedy through the lens of Aristotle's prescriptions on tragedy in the Poetics, written in the fourth century BCE. My argument will be that we should read Greek tragedy within its historical moment, that we should read the works of Aristotle within their historical moment, and that to use the one to exhaust the meaning of the other is to ignore historical specificity and the radical differences between one moment of ancient history and another. It is only the remoteness of antiquity that allows such blurring of distinctions, while scholarly work on most recent periods would consider a temporal gap of a century significant for interpretation.

It is of course possible to exaggerate the chasm between the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE, to claim that they are absolutely distinct moments in human history, utterly disjunctive and lacking in continuity. Without making such a methodological claim, which I believe is insupportable, I want to argue that the hundred years that separate Euripides from Aristotle do matter. In the interval between the first production of Euripides' Medea and the work of Aristotle on the making of tragedies, Athens had been defeated in the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from about 431 BCE to 404 BCE. The radical democracy of mid-century Athens was condemned, at least in theory, by such eminent aristocratic thinkers as Plato, whose dialogues were composed in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat. After its victory, Sparta held hegemony over Athens, and the oligarchic thirty, their rule imposed by the Spartans, briefly dominated the city, confiscating property and killing enemies. In the fourth century, Thebes and Athens rose against Sparta, and other powers vied for domination. The northern kingdom of Macedonia, marginally Greek, rose as a power, and its king Philip gained control of the Greek states. His son Alexander, known afterwards as "the Great," was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle, who had left the city of Athens. To this striking list of punctual events and political trends must be added the fact that the social and economic relations among the Greeks changed significantly in this period as well. And the genres and cultural practices of the Athenians were transformed; the Old Comedy of Aristophanes gave way to his Middle Comedy, and then to New Comedy, based not on political satire, confrontation, and obscenity but on domestic and romantic themes. The great tragedians' dramas were not equalled in the performances of the fourth century. To read fifth-century tragedy, one of the most significant cultural artifacts of classical Athenian democracy, through Aristotle, a fourth-century philosopher from a distant city, is to make the river of time flow backward; it is to misrecognize the fact that Aristotle is himself engaging in significant cultural discursive work, choosing not to write dramas about Oedipus but to write about dramas about Oedipus--to write about katharsis.

In his book Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker has shown how the notions of pollution and contamination change for the Greeks over time, how in religious and medical discourses the necessity of cleansing, of catharsis, transforms itself in the course of the centuries between Homer and the...