Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

Helene P. Foley

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400824731
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece.
This book examines, for example, the tragic response to legislation regulating family life that may have begun as early as the sixth century. It also draws upon contemporary studies of virtue ethics and upon feminist reconsiderations of the Western ethical tradition. Foley maintains that by viewing public issues through the lens of the family, tragedy asks whether public and private morality can operate on the same terms. Moreover, the plays use women to represent significant moral alternatives. Tragedy thus exploits, reinforces, and questions cultural clichés about women and gender in a fashion that resonates with contemporary Athenian social and political issues.

Part I

THE POLITICS OF TRAGICLAMENTATION

The naturalizing of lament obliterated the structured and highly social nature of lament, which provided a forum both for the woman lamenter to cry out against her socially designated status, and for the airing of social grievances. However, rather than being “unconnected exclamations of grief,” the laments of women articulated and negotiated the terrain of disrupted social relationships—raising within this process recriminations both against the dead and the relatives of the dead, anger at the felt abandonment of those left behind, and insecurity about the future.

(Mukta 1999: 35 on Colonial India)

READERS and viewers of Greek tragedy sometimes find their attention wandering during the often lengthy scenes of ritual lamentation in Greek tragedy. My students have almost reached the point of horrified laughter when considering the scene in Euripides’ Bacchae where Cadmus and Agave apparently lamented each part of the dismembered body of king Pentheus and reconstituted it for proper burial on stage. During these moments of distraction, we tell ourselves that although our own society is uncomfortable with lengthy and elaborate public displays of misery, we must be tolerant of a cultural difference. As readers of Aristotle’s Poetics, we believe that the pity and fear evoked by the effective tragic plot can be properly elaborated in such lamentation, even if we do not always respond fully to these scenes ourselves.

Yet tragic lamentation does not simply mimic traditional Greek death rites and thus ritualize and to some extent mitigate the horrifying and grievous deaths and cultural disasters of tragedy. A non-Western or rural Mediterranean audience, for example, might well respond differently and I believe more appropriately to the complex variety of scenes revolving around death rites and lamentation in tragedy, instinctively seeing in them a far greater range of purpose and nuance. South Africans or Palestinians, for example, would know that funerals are often political events, opportunities to foment revolution, resistance, or revenge under the cover of one of the few mass events that those in authority do not feel comfortable in suppressing altogether, even if they do their best to control them. A news story on China in the Guardian of June 6,1989,for example, reported that “mock funeral processions were held as a tactic to block the roads and launch a general strike.” Singing was forbidden at the funeral of the slain American NAACP director Medgar Evers; but the police ban could not fully silence the six thousand mourners who followed his coffin. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India the “consolidating colonial state power . . . attempted to stamp out visible signs of grief (articulated by women) . . . which sought, through this banning to have direct control over forms of community justice, vendetta, and lines of inheritance, all of which could be mediated by lament.”¹ This phenomenon was linked to the suppression of everything reminiscent of death and even in extreme (politically motivated) cases with “erasure in the social memory of the dead.”² Originally confined to an upper-caste, middle-class milieu, it evolved into a broader attempt to replace a traditional “wild” mourning, which nevertheless to this day continues to erupt among the nonelite with a certain amount of social acceptance, with women’s subdued devotional readings and singing assemblies during the period of mourning.

In this chapter, I examine some of the ways in which funerary lamentation plays an equally complex and ambivalent role in the politics of Greek tragedy.³ Our historical sources record various formal attempts from the sixth through the fourth centuries to modify burial practice and attitudes to burial practice in the city-state and, in particular, to place strict controls on the participation of Attic women in death ritual.⁴ It should not be surprising, then, that we can see political and social tensions emerging in the way that death ritual and lamentation by women are represented on the tragic stage. Let me begin with a brief review of some important aspects of the historical background and then return to tragedy.

The gradual rise of the city-state in Athens apparently brought with it a deliberate curtailment of death rites. In the early sixth century laws attributed to Solon reportedly inaugurated a process of restriction or reshaping of funeral rites that seems to have continued into the fifth century and beyond.⁵ Aristocratic funerals of the archaic period in Greece, as pictured in Homer or vase paintings, were grand public occasions. Lamentation, especially lamentation by women, played a prominent role at every stage: at the wake or prothesis, during the ekphora in which the body was carried by chariot to the grave site, and at the grave site itself. These lamentations often involved not only family members but hired mourners who were known for their competence in inducing grief. Archaic funerals were an occasion at which the members of aristocratic families or broader groups of kin could gather and display their wealth, power, and generosity to a wider public.

The sixth-century legislation purportedly prohibited above all, to quote Plutarch, “everything disorderly and excessive in women’s festivals, processions [exodoi] and funeral rites” (Solon 21.4,trans. Alexiou 1974).⁶ For example after the legislation the prothesis was to be held indoors or at least in the courtyard of the house. Whereas in the Iliad Hector’s body was burned after lengthy public lament on the ninth day, Solon apparently restricted the prothesis to one day and stipulated that the ekphora take place in silence and before dawn. The laws restricted the worth of gifts that could be carried to the tomb and buried with the corpse. Lamentation was permitted at the tomb, but participation, at least on the part of the women, was now limited to close kin (no remoter than first cousins once removed or second cousins). No women under age sixty, other than close relations, could enter the chamber of the deceased or follow the procession to the tomb. Solon, says Plutarch, “forbade laceration of cheeks, singing of set dirges [ pepoi

mena] and lamentation at other people’s tombs” (21.4,trans. Alexiou 1974). At the ekphora, women were to keep behind the men. Laws from other Greek city-states—we cannot be sure about Athens—also banned the tearing of women’s clothes, the wailing for the corpse at turns in the road, the lamenting for those long dead.

Scholars have speculated that the funerary legislation initially reflected an attempt to curb the power of the aristocracy in Athens and continued at a later period for another set of reasons.⁷ Alternatively, Aubrey Cannon suggests that it may be in the interest of those in power to maintain symbolic distinctions among statuses by restraining funerary display once it has been imitated by the lower classes.⁸ The privatizing of funerals for individuals and the specific restriction of female participation in death rituals may in any case have served to foster the interests of the state and public unity over those of the family.

Furthermore, funerary rituals may well have provided opportunities for rival aristocratic kin groups to make public displays of emotion that fostered vendettas or consolidated private rather than public interests.⁹ Modern anthropological studies in the Mediterranean and elsewhere have documented an intimate relation between lamentation and vendetta.¹⁰ Thus it may be significant that Plutarch in his life of Solon (12) implies a link between the sixth-century legislation and a feud between the followers of Megacles and Cylon.¹¹ Megacles had massacred Cylon and his fellow conspirators at one of the city’s most sacred altars after they had failed in an attempted coup d’etat. The city underwent a military defeat from the Megarians, and seers interpreted various portents as indications of pollution in need of expiation. Solon interposed between the two factions and persuaded the men polluted by the killing of Cylon to submit to a jury trial.¹² After the guilty parties in the family of Megacles were banished, the Athenians summoned Epimenides from Crete to recommend reforms; these reforms included the curtailment of the “barbaric” funerary practices of women. Women may have been targeted for their dominant role in lament, for a loyalty to the household (especially the natal household) that was unmitigated by the compensating civic and military roles offered to men, and because of growing disapproval of public displays of grief by men.¹³ (Alternatively, women’s growing religious functions in the classical polis, including carefully controlled lamentation at public funerals, replaced their more disruptive roles in private burial ritual.) In any case, it is difficult to believe that tragedy would have invented its myths of female lamentation generating vendetta if the practice had not existed in historical memory.¹⁴ Because the state did not extensively interfere with family life except where its own interests were at stake, I think we can assume that funerals were potentially a serious challenge to civic harmony.

Yet, although private death rituals were restricted, new forms of public funerary ritual gradually took their place. As Aristotle puts it (Politics 6.2.1319b 24–25), in extreme democracies “the private rites of families should be restricted and converted into public ones.”¹⁵ At state funerals for the war dead, who were praised and buried collectively, public mourning was permitted, although in a controlled form. In the sixth century tyrants in many Greek cities (we have no certain evidence about Athens) encouraged the establishment of hero cults that gradually replaced aristocratic clan cults or threw them open to a larger public.¹⁶ These cul...