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Formal Debates in Euripides' Drama1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

C. Collard
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Extract

The prime dramatic character of Greek tragedy is agonistic. Its myths for the most part show men struggling toward some goal, in conflict with one another, or against some force of circumstance or destiny, which is often personified in a god. Tragedy is at the same time a dramatic form restricted severely by theatrical conditions. The number of its speaking actors is held to three. It avoids the staging of any physical action like an assault or battle, let alone catastrophe, or death—for whatever reasons of narrative tradition, aesthetic convention, or simple impracticability. Despite certain ritual or symbolic aids to representation such as music, dance, and gesture, it is in consequence a drama of extreme, sometimes exclusive, verbal concentration. Exposition, development, climax, resolution, action and reaction—all movement occurs in the narrow room of at most three stage persons at any one time debating to confirm or change their attitudes or intentions—often, with a single character so placed debating within himself, in monologue or soliloquy, or in relief or opposition to another voice. My subject here is this last mise-en-scène: the deliberate working up of the ordinary exchange between characters into the opposition of one character to one or two others in a formal debate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , April 1975 , pp. 58 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1975

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References

page 58 note 2 Dioniso xliii (1969), 247–75Google Scholar, a supplement to her analytical study L'ΑΓΩΝ dans la Tragédie grecque (Paris, 1945 1, 19682), esp. 11–37.Google Scholar

page 59 note 1 Since Tietze, F.'s important corrective to older views of Euripidean rhetoric (Die euripideischen Reden und ihre Bedeutung, Breslau, 1933)Google Scholar, I would name: Dale, A. M., Euripides: Alcestis (Oxford, 1954), xxvii–xxixGoogle Scholar (cf. Collected Papers, Cambridge, 1969, 151 f., 274 f.)Google Scholar; Clemen, W., English Tragedy before Shakespeare (London, 1961), 45–7Google Scholar (original German edition, Heidelberg, 1955); Strohm, H., Euripides: Interpretations zur dramatischen Form (München, 1957), 3–49Google Scholar (the richest and most sympathetic study of the agon, to which this paper is more widely in great debt than the particular acknowledgements may suggest); Stinton, T. C. W., Euripides and the Judgement of Paris (London, 1965), 38 f.Google Scholar For other literature on the Euripidean formal debate see: Schwinge, E. R., Die Verwendung der Stichomythie bei Euripides (Heidelberg, 1968), 33Google Scholar n. 1 (‘symmetry’); Lesky, A., Die tragische Dichtung der Hettenen 2 (Göttingen, 1972) 507Google Scholar n. 4 (dissertations), and my Euripides: Supplices (Groningen, 1975)Google Scholar, commentary on vv. 87–263: C (general).

page 59 note 2 Debates in Sophocles, perhaps for these very qualities, have had little separate discussion, but see Webster, T. B. L., An Introduction to Sophocles 2 (London, 1969), 148–55Google Scholar, and Long, A. A., Language and Thought in Sophocles (London, 1968), 155–60Google Scholar; both note other literature.

page 60 note 1 It was the major achievement of Tietze, (p. 59 n. 1)Google Scholar and Duchemin, (p. 58 n. 2)Google Scholar to insist on the irregularity, rather than the regularity, of formal debates.

page 61 note 1 491 πρὸς τόνδε σοφίας τίς ἀν ἀγὼν ἥκοι πέρι; Porson: πρὀς τόνδ' ἀγών τις σοφίας ἥκει πέρι codd. Dramatic context and the logic of the argument (cf. below, p. 70) bar Bothe's ἀσοφίας and it must be struck from Murray's OCT.

page 62 note 1 On the order of speakers in formal debates see Schlesinger, A. C., CPh xxxii (1937), 69 f.Google Scholar, and, e.g., Dale, A. M.'s commentary on Alc. 697.Google Scholar

page 62 note 2 Strohm, (p. 59 n. 1), 44f.Google Scholar

page 62 note 3 Strohm, , 46 f.Google Scholar

page 62 note 4 Strohm, , 16ff.Google Scholar; cf. Gould, J., FHS xciii (1973), 89 n. 76, etc.Google Scholar

page 63 note 1 For these technical devices see Duchemin, , L'ΑГΩΝ (p. 58 n. 2), 167–216.Google Scholar

page 63 note 2 For the reference see p. 59 n. 1.

page 64 note 1 The interpretation of this scene is made hard by major textual uncertainty: see Zuntz, G., The Political Plays of Euripides 2 (Manchester, 1963), 125 ff.Google Scholar, and CQ xli (1947), 48 ff.Google Scholar

page 64 note 2 For the distribution of 961–74 between Alcmena and her servant (Barnes, Tyr-whitt) see Zuntz, Political Plays, loc. cit.

page 65 note 1 Cf. Duchemin, , L'ΑГΩΝ, 76 and 121.Google Scholar

page 67 note 1 For the affinities cf. Duchemin, , L'ΑГΩΝ, 122.Google Scholar

page 67 note 2 43–42 are an interpolation: Fraenkel, E., Zu den Phoinissen des Euripides (SB Bayer. Akad. Phil.-hist. Kl. 1963/1971), 25 f.Google Scholar

page 68 note 1 The sensitive appreciation of the episode by Winnington-Ingram, R. P., Euripides and Dionysus (Cambridge, 1948), 40–58Google Scholar, recognizes the real but deftly concealed formality of argument; for the long speeches see 45–53.

page 69 note 1 For the structure of these two speeches, and of the episode as a whole, see Ludwig, W., Saphenia (Tübingen, 1954), 43–50 and 100–4.Google Scholar

page 69 note 2 See Duchemin, , L'ΑГΩΝ, 76–8 and 121.Google Scholar

page 69 note 3 Cf. Duchemin, , L'ΑГΩΝ, 118Google Scholar; Ludwig, (n. 1 above), 48 ff.Google Scholar; Lesky, (p. 59 n. 1), 419 f.Google Scholar

page 70 note 1 Cf. p. 61 n. 1.