Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought ed. by Douglas Cairns (review)

This volume brings together a number of papers from a 2008 conference in Edinburgh on “Tragedy and Archaic Greek Thought.” It consists of an Introduction by Douglas Cairns, three chapters on Aeschylus, four on Sophocles, and one on Euripides. In addition to the Introduction, Cairns also contributes a chapter on Oedipus Tyrannus . As he points out in the Introduction, scholarship has for the past few decades focused heavily on the context of Greek tragedy, that is, the political, ritual, social, and performative aspects of tragedy. Cairns rightly argues that the time is ripe for a reconsideration of some of the larger topics that have formed the basis of earlier scholarship, such as the function of the gods, the nature of divine and human justice, and the causes of and responsibility for human suffering. He is critical of the progressivist or developmental viewpoint that he believes still lurks behind much scholarship, despite the work of Christopher Gill and Bernard Williams, among others. Although not all the contributors directly critique this position as thoroughly as Cairns does, it is one of the common threads linking various chapters in this collection.

Most of the Introduction, however, is devoted to an extended discussion of “ Ate and archaic thought in Sophocles’ Antigone,” which could easily have been an independent essay in its own right and perhaps should have been. While Cairns does demonstrate how central archaic thought is to fifth-century tragedy, it would have been helpful for the reader to have a systematic introduction to its basic tenets and how they are understood and used by the various contributors.

Alan Sommerstein’s contribution, “ Ate in Aeschylus,” offers a very useful discussion of this important concept. He focuses on the semantic range and development of the term, identifying a process that involves a “divinity deceiving a mortal, or disrupting his mental processes, so that he commits some act of folly which then has disastrous consequences.” (3). Ate thus involves not only the divine causation and mental aberration, but also the disastrous consequences. Sommerstein then demonstrates how various poets focus on different parts of this process: Homer tends to emphasize the beginning of the process and the gods’ disruption of mortals’ mental faculties, while Aeschylus uses it primarily to refer to the disaster caused by the folly. In the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, the term refers only to “disaster” and any sense of its cause is absent.

Richard Seaford’s contribution, “Aeschylus, Herakleitos, and Pythagoreanism,” examines the Oresteia for its relationship to Presocratic thought. He builds on his earlier work, “Aeschylus and the Unity of Opposites,” where he argues that there is a shift from the Heracleitean notion of the unity of opposites found in the first two plays of the trilogy to the Pythagorean reconciliation of the final play.¹ He extends that argument here by examining the importance of the figure of three in Aeschylus and making the case that Zeus in his ability to reconcile opposing claims represents the Pythagorean mean. As is often the case with Seaford’s work, it is both a provocative and a speculative argument.

Fritz-Gregor Herrmann’s “Eteocles’ Decision in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes ” examines the central act of the play, the “shield scene,” against the backdrop of Book 6 of the Iliad and the voting scene in Eumenides . He argues that Eteocles is aware from the beginning that he may have to face his brother. He also suggests interestingly that the drawing of lots is staged in front of the audience, along the lines of the scene from the Eumenides . There is a wealth of useful background information, including a three-page footnote on decision-making that could be the basis of an independent article itself.

The next four essays concern Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, two on Oedipus at Colonus, one on Oedipus Tyrannus, and one on Antigone, which together with Cairns’ discussion of Antigone in the Introduction makes Sophocles, somewhat surprisingly, the most...