Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality

Notes

149 n o t e s introduction: tragedy, the city, and its dead 1. “By its very nature, tragedy entails an opposition of two discourses, an agōn logōn” (Nicole Loraux, L’invention d’Athènes: Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la “cité classique” [Paris: Payot, 1981], p. 217). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Although an English translation of L’invention d’Athènes exists, it is based on a second, abridged edition, which does not contain many of the passages I cite, and so I have not used it (see The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Zone Books, 2006]). See also Simon Goldhill, Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 16–17. 2. Loraux, Invention, p. 290. 3. See Jonathan Strauss, Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 63–73. 4. Sarah C. Humphreys, The Family, Women, and Death: Comparative Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 101, 82. For a good overall history of burial practices from the protogeometric (eleventh–tenth centuries) through the Hellenistic periods, see Donna C. Kurtz and John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971). For a descriptive inventory of Greek bronze-age burial sites see Carla M. Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995). 5. Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 109. In a sustained analysis (pp. 130–34), Humphreys contests many of Morris’s arguments, but her criticism focuses on the composition of the burial groups under study. Humphreys is attempting to refute the nineteenth-century Hellenist Fustel de Coulanges’s thesis that a prepolitical society organized around familial veneration (including the graves of the dead) gave way to the political state, so this aspect of Morris’s analysis is important to her. She does not, however, contest 150 Notes to pages 4–5 the two points important to us—the exclusion of the dead from inhabited spaces and the democratization of burial practices (p. 130). And although she does complain that Morris’s sample groups are small, she also acknowledges that this problem affects all archaeologically based studies on death in ancient Attica and Greece. 6. Morris, Burial and Ancient Society, p. 11. This dating for the origin of the polis is widely accepted. See, for example, Siegfried Froriep, Frühzeit der Städte: Entstehung und Entwicklung im Abendland bis zum Ende der Antike (Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1989), p. 92. Jean-Pierre Vernant speaks of “the most archaic forms of the city, at the end of the 8th century” (L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne [Paris: Gallimard, 1989], p. 218). 7. Morris, Burial and Ancient Society, pp. 205, 210. 8. See Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens 22.1–2, trans. F. G. Kenyon, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 2354–55, and Jérôme Carcopino, L’ostracisme athénien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), pp. 15–30. 9. Humphreys, Family, Women, and Death, p. 157. 10. On this period of restraint and democratization, see Kurtz and Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, pp. 89, 106, 124–25; Humphreys, Family, Women, and Death, pp. 102, 104, 105; and John H. Oakley, Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 215, 226. On sumptuary laws concerning funerals and tombs, see Josh Beer, Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), p. 68; Humphreys, Family, Women, and Death, pp. 85, 86, 118, 121; Sarah B. Pomeroy, Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 100–105; and Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), chaps. 3, 7. 11. Aeschylus’s birth date is traditionally given as 524/5, but Richmond Lattimore has convincingly argued for 513 or 512 (Introduction to Aeschylus I: Oresteia, trans. Richmond Lattimore, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], pp. 1–2). It should be noted that 535 b.c.e. is the probable date for the beginning of the tragic...