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Decision and Responsibility in the Tragedy of Aeschylus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Albin Lesky
Albin Lesky
Affiliation:
Vienna
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Extract

In the paper that I read to the Third International Congress of Classical Studies in London in 1959 I tried to delimit the sphere of human reflexion and freedom of decision, as opposed to the sphere of divine intervention, in Homeric poetry. The conclusion I reached was that there was a mutual and often indissoluble fusion of these two spheres. In trying here to say something about the significance of personal decision in the dramas of Aeschylus, I am in fact continuing my inquiry in a different literary genre. But the problems are basically the same: in both cases the question is what significance the poet ascribes to the personal decisions of the human agent within the frame-work of a basically God-governed ‘Welt-bild’, how the limitations upon his freedom are defined, and what degree of responsibility is thus entailed.

I began the previous paper with my thanks to Bruno Snell, who was the first to clarify these problems of free human action with which we are faced in epic poetry, and I must now begin by thanking him again. Professor Snell, in his book Aischjlos und das Handeln im Drama, which appeared in 1928, emphatically placed the personal decision of the human agent in the centre of his interpretation of Aeschylus; he even went so far as to regard a decision based on free choice as the most important element in the development of a genuinely tragic conflict. I cannot enter upon the history of these problems; however, I should like to emphasise the importance of the question and the interest it has recently aroused in scholarly discussion.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 86 , November 1966 , pp. 78 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1966

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References

1 Cf. ‘Göttliche und menschliche Motivation im homerischen Epos’ in Sitzb. Heidelberger Akad. Phil. hist. Kl. (1961) 4.

2 i Prolegomena and Text; ii–iii Commentary. Oxford 1950.

3 Oxford 1957.

4 Etudes de Lettres vi (1963) 73–112 (Bull. de la Fac. des Lettres Lausanne).

5 Aeschylus, , Agamemnon xix.Google Scholar

6 Proc. of the Cambr. Philol. Soc. clxxxvi (1960) 27.

7 Form and Meaning in Drama (London 1956) 4.

8 Aeschylus, , Agamemnon xxvii.Google Scholar

9 Op. cit. 85. On all these questions, cf. also Lloyd-Jones, H., ‘The Guilt of Agamemnon’, CQ lvi (1962) 187 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; his interpretation corresponds in many cases with that developed here and in Hermes lxvi (1931) 190.

10 Sitzb. Akad. Wien. Phil. hist. Kl. ccxxi/3 (1943).

11 P. 101.

12 This article was delivered to the Joint Meeting of Greek and Roman Societies at Cambridge in August 1965. The author wishes to thank Prof. R. P. Winnington-Ingram and Mr. F. H. Sandbach most warmly for their help with the English of the text.