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IV. Humans and Animals
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IV Humans and Animals If the structure of the Persae, describing one side of the agon of the Persian Wars, evokes that of the early classical metopes, it is not surprising, since the literary and artistic texts share a notion of difference based on the polarization of kinds. In this chapter I will look at another such polarity, the human/animal doublet, the second of the terms by which Thales defined himself. The problem is altered, in that the criterion of difference is no longer separation, the geographical particularity of Greeks and barbarians, as it was in Aeschylus' early work. A text like the Trachiniae, the focus of this chapter, treats the problematic of differentiation not as definition through oppositions, but centers rather on the central figure in the polis, the human subject, the man who exchanges women within the city. The polis is the terrain of his existence, and he acts out his life within its circumference, keeping his enemies, animals as well as barbarians, the alien and the monstrous , at bay outside the circle of exchange. Those who date the Trachiniae to the 440s are convincing, although others question judgements based on purely stylistic features, or supposed references to other tragedies.1 If indeed the Trachiniae was produced in the same decades as the Parthenon sculptures, these works share a concern with community, with the limits within which social life can occur. After the Greeks' victory over the Persians, the Athenians in particular enjoyed prosperity and stability which led to Athens' dominance in the Aegean under the guidance of Pericles. The greatest tragedies, the high classical temples, reveal the Athenians' vivid imagination, their rich intellectual life, and the tensions which arose in a restricted community attempting to assert power over others. The problematic articulated by the Trachiniae is analogous to that enacted on the Parthenon, where the city engages in its ritual 95 96 CENTAURS AND AMAZONS continuously, eternally, within the colonnade, while the metopes represent enemies at the boundaries, fixed in opposition and held there in the archaic past through the martial courage of the Greek youths. Like Centaurs and Amazoris, the barbarians are held outside the circle of ritual represented in the Panathenaia. The bestial , violent, chaotic figures of myth are made analogous to the enemies, recently defeated, who held the center of the stage in Aeschylus' tragedy. Here they are exiled, placed on the outside to define the farthest boundaries within which the city inscribes itself. The very process of tragedy comes to center on man within the city, elaborating his relations to other men like him. The gods become distant figures. The Trachiniae focuses on man, on the marital exchange which founds culture, on the necessity for endogamy among citizens. It is different from the Persae in that the enemy is no longer represented as far distant, separate in its isolation from the other. In the Trachiniae the bestial threatens to intervene into the most central institution founding the city, the orderly exchange of women through marriage.2 The pattern of reasoning has altered, although it still proceeds through polarity and analogy; analysis has shifted from a catalogue of self/other to a focus on the self, on the Greek human male, centered on himself in interaction with those like him. The other is now relegated to the edge of culture. The articulation of po/is culture, of social relations within, has become necessary and requires the expulsion of the different-barbarian and animal. There are other tragedies which touch on animal-human difference-the Bacchae, for example, displays the ways in which men and women, and gods, can take on the aspects of animals. A Bacchante likens herself to a fawn, Dionysos is a bull in the eyes of Pentheus. Yet the Trachiniae is an especially enlightening text for the problem with which I am concerned here, since it considers not only the bestial qualities of man, but those very mediate beings discussed above, the Centaurs. One of the absent yet significant characters of the drama is the Centaur Nessos. The issue of animal/human boundaries, in the form of metamorphosis, is introduced in the first speech of the Trachiniae, as Deianeira fearfully recounts her sexual history: [34.201.173.244] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:20 GMT) Humans and Animals "While I still lived in Pleuron, with Oeneus my father, I conceived an agonizing fear of marriage. No other Aetolian woman ever felt such fear, for my suitor was the river...