Greek Tragedy

GREEK TRAGEDY' Time, as the author of this book rightly observes, is more significant for tragic than for epic literature because of tragedy's emphasis on sequence, on cause and effect. Epic, to be sure, deals to some degree in sequences, but usually it is not directly or even essentially sequential; it may meander on the way. Mme. de Romilly gives a neat example of the difference by contrasting the quarrel of Jason and Medea, with its temporal-dramatic tensions derived from the one-day limit imposed by Creon's edict, with the more spacious epic quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad. ''Time shows through change; and in that respect it is obvious that tragedy deals with time." (5) Indeed, it is not until the Creeks were ready for Tragedy, with its acute and crucial observation of cause and effect, that we find the sigos of a real consciousness of time and its effects in the "time-personifications" of the fifthcentury poets. Mme. de Romilly gives an imaginative description of how this personification of time came about: "- the unsteady rhythm of events, the hopes and fears in our hearts, all this is transferred to a living but imprecise being, who becomes the cause of the events or who inspires the feeling. And this being is animated with the life of what he causes." (42) Man's sense of time (unlike his sense of other "powers" which were gradually brought from the outside to the inner world of our own consciousness) remained, in the fifth century BO, between the inner and the outer world. "Time lives side by side with us; it keeps an existence of its own that encroaches on ours and substitutes itself for us ..." (43) Mme. de Romilly offers some excellent examples (44-5) of this curious attitude to time; note, among others, Clytemnestra's vivid "the time who slept with me," Agamemnon, 894, for the period of time in which she slept. This tracing of the emerging importance of time in the mythological language and in the dramatic structure of Creek tragedy leads Mme. de Romilly to conclusions which may seem to some to go a bit beyond the evidence. "If time is what makes the difference between two successive events and yet lasts through their succession and survives them, if it extends before and after, covering all that happened, is happening and will happen, it is natural enough to see in it a superior being endowed with special powers and divine majesty - the more so in the ancient Creek world, which was by nature so full of gods and divine beings." (49-50) The author (SO-I) uses such images as Sophocles' ''Time, who sees all and hears all, finally displays all" (fragment 280N, 301 P), and Euripides' image of time showing up evil people ''by offering them a mirror as to a young virgin" (Hipp. 430) as examples of this idea of time as a divine and consciously active force; surely, however, she is in danger here of forcing the poets to take their own images too literally. So too, references to expressions in which time {