The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy

Conclusion: The Tears of Pity

        —gorgias, Encomium of Helen 8–9 Speech is a great power, which by means of the smallest and most invisible form effects the most divine works: it has the power to stop fear and take away grief and create joy and increase pity . . . I both consider and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and longing that delights in mourning come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes the soul experiences a suffering, through words, of its own. Tragedy often forced Athens to confront itself. Athenian tragedy examines the policies, actions, belief structures, and values of its citizens. It does so, however, only for the duration of the performance. In the end, for all that examination and after all the suffering, these same policies, actions, belief structures, and values are often only reaffirmed for the spectators. In this way only then might Euripides be called a “pacifist,” in that he challenged the Athenians to witness and consider the suffering that they were not only in the process of inflicting on others but also might one day experience themselves . Ultimately, though, no tragedy could have affected the course of the Peloponnesian War, and no tragedy did. Edith Hamilton found Euripides to conclusion the tears of pity Due.indb 163 Due.indb 163 10/6/05 12:25:51 PM 10/6/05 12:25:51 PM 164 the captive woman’s lament be a visionary precisely because no one took the message that she assumed Euripides was trying to send: “In that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power, and then—nothing happened.”1 We might make a similar observation about the practice of enslaving captives of war. Joseph Vogt observes of slaves in Euripidean tragedy: “Real slaves, even if they are noble according to their possibilities, never reach the full stature of individuals; nobles on the other hand retain their freedom in captivity, for they are incapable of lowering themselves. Both sides often speak about the fate of slavery, but no one suggests that slavery ought not exist.”2 Tragedy questions and confronts the fundamental institutions of humankind, but it is not designed to preach or dictate policy.3 In this book I have argued that the captive woman’s lament, particularly as it is employed in the Trojan War plays of Euripides, was a particularly effective vehicle with which to explore and even challenge wartime ideologies . I submit that the lament in tragedy is effective for such an examination because, as Nicole Loraux has emphasized most recently, it is so affective on both a personal and collective level.4 Though it is often infused with contemporary rhetoric, tragedy is not a political debate in the assembly; it is an emotional experience undergone in common by the citizens of Athens within the city’s religious space.5 The act of viewing tragedy as a notional totality of the citizen body is a necessarily civic event, but I agree with Loraux that there is a deeply emotional dimension as well that has been underemphasized in recent years in favor of the intellectual and the political.6 The essential emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and fear, the rousing of which produces a kind of purification (katharsis),7 and 1. Hamilton 1971, 1. 2. Vogt 1975, 21. 3. In saying this I do not mean to deny the profound educational and civic importance that tragedy was accorded by the Athenians themselves, on which see, e.g., Dué 2003 with further bibliography and ancient testimony there. 4. In Plato’s Republic Socrates argues that tragedy and comedy cannot be admitted into the ideal state because in the context of the theater people allow themselves to react emotionally (either with grief or laughter) to things to which in their individual daily lives they ordinarily would not allow themselves to react. The theater encourages the abandonment of self-restraint, and the spectator is too easily overwhelmed by the collective emotions produced by the shared experience of viewing; see Plato, Republic 605c6–606d. 5. Loraux 2002. 6. An important exception to this trend is Segal 1993; see also Stanford 1983. 7. On katharsis, see chapter 2, note 8. Due.indb 164 Due.indb 164 10/6/05 12:25:51 PM 10/6/05 12:25:51 PM [3.145.206.169...