Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy (review)

Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor David Sider, Department of Classics, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Room 503, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: david.sider@nyu.edu.

The thesis of Barker’s Entering the Agon is that the Homeric epics provide alternative ways of understanding the role of dissent in public life that are then taken up by authors of history and tragedy:

The Iliad, Thucydides, and Sophocles’ Ajax all privilege an understanding in which characters, or the author, take a stand in the arena of debate to challenge the dominant figures, ideals, or discourses of their time. On the other hand, the Odyssey, Herodotus, and Euripides’ Hecuba expose that ideal of open contest and fruitful dissent as a fiction (23).

The book is thus essentially a rhetorical study of how public debates are represented in literature, and will be of interest to advanced students of epic, history, and tragedy. Specifically, Barker argues that the Iliad portrays the assembly, in its early stages of development, as a means of managing dissent. Thus, despite their many failures, assemblies play a central role in the life of the political community. Sure to prove controversial is the further claim that Diomedes is able to declare the assembly the place where it is themis to dissent (Il. 9.32–33) because of Achilles’ precedent in book 1. (Cf. in this context Il. 15.283–284.) That is to say, Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon allows dissent to be “gradually institutionalized” in the course of the poem (66).

In comparison with the Iliad, assemblies are less prominent in the Odyssey, which marginalizes and suppresses dissent. Barker explains these features by arguing that both epics portray Odysseus as devaluing the role of the assembly in promoting social cohesion and that of dissent in addressing crises. The assembly’s failure leads directly to the armed conflict that Athene prevents Achilles from resorting to in Iliad 1. What I missed in Barker’s analysis was an ideological explanation of Odyssean assemblies in the poem’s endorsement of the principle of strong rule.

Herodotus likewise presents debate as largely ineffectual. Greek debates thus often misfire and fail to resolve crises. The “despotic” Persians debate as often as the Greeks, so that the polarization of Greek and Persian is not as clear-cut as sometimes maintained. Yet, in contrast to Homer, Herodotus’ editorial comments and occasional refusal to provide closed readings challenge readers to dissent from authority and to view reading itself as part of political life.

Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides provides accurate representations of debate. By incorporating alternative views into the narrative, Thucydides investigates failures in the decision-making process and foregrounds the act of interpretation in a way that is potentially destabilizing. He uses debates to educate readers about political decision-making by refusing, for the most part, to authorize any one interpretation so that they must decide for themselves. In his few narrative interventions, Thucydides emerges as a figure of dissent, and challenges his audience to become one as well.

Tragedy explores the aftermath of dissent in a developed polis where dissent is fully institutionalized. Thus, in Sophocles’ Ajax, the judgment of arms is eliminated and the play focuses on the consequences of Ajax’s retaliation. Nevertheless, the value of dissent is dramatized by Teucer’s defiance of the Atreids, who in Menelaus’ speech come off as Spartan autocrats, intolerant of dissent, while Teucer upholds dissent as a democratic ideal. The volte-face of the chorus, who ask Odysseus to mediate the dispute, invites acceptance of divergent outlooks in the community. The chorus thus evolve from a laos wholly dependent on their ruler to a “quasi-civic body” (321) capable of real agency.

In Hecuba, Euripides adopts an Odyssean strategy for thematizing dissent, with the crucial difference that Hecuba occupies a position in Greek society opposite to Odysseus’ as king (though...