Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (review)

In Aristophanes' Frogs, Euripides congratulates himself for having brought "everyday life" (oikeia pragmata) into the theater by portraying women as well as men. But Aeschylus vilifies his opponent for staging only women like Phaedra and Sthenoboia, driven to destroy themselves and those they desire. For many feminists, this debate encapsulates the good and bad news of Greek tragedy: women may hold the stage, but only to confirm men's worst fears about them. Aeschylus must defeat Euripides, of course, to answer Aristophanes' desperate summons for a tragic playwright to save the city. The Frogs denies that a tragedy of passion—or a tragic woman—can teach Athenian men anything, and this is a denial that tragic criticism has too often repeated. It is this blindness that Foley's new book seeks to cure, in depicting Greek tragic women as ethical actors. Foley's deeply historical work defines the highly circumscribed yet still critical moral role that women played in Greek society in matters of death, marriage, and family. Inhabiting these spheres of action on stage, female characters make significant ethical choices that would have reverberated throughout Athenian public culture. As Foley brilliantly demonstrates, these women's conflicts and choices reveal the ethical tensions in male culture: tragic women had indeed much to teach the city.