This article explores the role of Athenian literary prizes in the development of ancient literary criticism. It examines the views of a range of critics , and identifies several recurrent themes. The discussion reveals that ideas about what was good or bad in literature were not directly affected by the award of prizes; in fact the ancient critics display what is called an “anti-prize” mentality. The article argues that this “anti-prize” mentality is not, as is often thought, a product of (...) intellectual developments in the fourth century BC. It is suggested that the devaluation of prizes is actually a contemporary, integral feature of prize-awarding culture in general. This article draws on recent approaches from cultural sociology to offer some conclusions about the way in which prizes function in popular and critical discourse. (shrink)

The uneasy relation between violence and sanctity, between oppression and culture, underlies the dramatic action of Euripides' "Ion." Ion's monody ends with his threatening to shoot the birds who would soil the temple, or in other words, to protect purity through violence and death. The earlier part of his song also shows how the forces of exclusion and domination create sacredness. Ritual silence , restricted access to the aduton, ritual chastity, even the irreversible transformation of natural gardens into laurel brooms (...) and jugs of water all suggest how violence and domination create culture out of nature. The rape of Creusa epitomizes the relation between culture and violence. Her meeting with Ion reveals the psychological cost of social oppression and portrays the imperfect interdependence between moral feelings and legal institutions. Various dramatic devices portray the divisions in Creusa's mind that the injustice has created, devices including self-address, riddling speech, self-restraint, and silence. Her reluctance to pose her bold question to the oracle, and her displacement of the story onto the person of a raped "friend," show her resentful awareness that social institutions collaborate in the oppression. Ion's disillusionment echoes her resentment more theoretically. Together their comments show how moral rules and legal institutions, though fundamentally based on personal feelings such as shame and indignation, enact these feelings only imperfectly; the resulting dissonance in turn leads to further indignation and moral reflection. Finally, the allusions to fifth-century politics in Ion's speech on Athenian politics and elsewhere suggest that democracy itself depends on political domination and imperialism. (shrink)

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet's primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father's body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic . One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse , however, is here not understood (...) to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection . By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero's burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms . This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse and also between the hero's death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero's future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb . The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced . In Sophocles' Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet's sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus. (shrink)

Intertwined with the celebration of Athenian democratic institutions, we find in the "Oresteia" another chain of interactions, in which the elite families of Argos, Phokis, Athens, and even Mount Olympos employ the traditional aristocratic relationships of xenia and hetaireia to renegotiate their own status within-and at the pinnacle of-the civic order, and thereby guarantee the renewed prosperity of their respective communities. The capture of Troy is the result of a joint venture by the Atreidai and the Olympian "family" . Although (...) Agamemnon falls victim to his own mishandling of aristocratic privilege, his son is raised by doryxenoi in Phokis , a relationship which is mirrored by that with the Olympian "allies," Hermes and Apollo. Orestes' recovery of his father's position is thus shown to depend upon a network of "guest-friends" and "sworn-comrades," reinforced by the traditional language of oaths and reciprocal loyalty. In the Eumenides, the alliance between the Olympian and Argive royal families is re-invoked as the basis both for Athena's protection of Orestes, and finally for Zeus' concern for his daughter's Athenian dependents. In contrast to this successful "networking," and the resultant benefits that trickle down to the citizens of Argos and Athens, stand the seditious oaths and perverted "comradeship" of Aigisthos and Klytaimestra; likewise, the Erinyes are unable to draw on equivalent claims of pedigree or xenia to those enjoyed by Orestes and Apollo. Like all Greek tragedies, the "Oresteia" presents the action through constantly shifting viewpoints, those of aristocrats and commoners, leaders and led, while the propriety of this hierarchy itself is never questioned. And although the action moves from monarchical Argos to an incipiently democratic Athens, paradoxically we hear less and less about "ordinary," lower-class citizens as the trilogy progresses. Thus, at the same time that the trilogy reinforces the sense of collective survival and civic values , it also suggests that these can be maintained only through the proper interventions of their traditional leaders. Aeschylus' plays were composed during a time when the Athenian democracy was still developing, and elite leadership and patronage were still taken for granted. Attic tragedy and the City Dionysia may be seen as a site of negotiation between rival ideologies within the polis, wherein a kind of "solidarity without consensus" is achieved. Written and staged by the elite under license from the demos, the dramas play out dangerous stories of royal risk-taking, crime, glory, and suffering, in such a way as to reassure the citizen audience simultaneously of their own collective invulnerability, and of the unique value of their leading families. (shrink)

Nuestro objetivo es exponer un esquema compositivo de Suplicantes que logre aprehender su particular técnica estructural, frente a la pauta fija aristotélica. El enfoque pondera el trabajo de Taplin sobre la puesta en escena trágica esquilea, que revolucionó los estudios performativos al demostrar el uso dramático de los movimientos de entrada y salida de los personajes. Dada la singularidad de Suplicantes en cuanto al protagonismo coral y el predominio lírico, sostenemos que el análisis de su estructura impone reformular la propuesta (...) de Taplin y considerar las odas corales como parte sustancial de los actos. (shrink)