Reading Greek Tragedy

Stimulating and intelligent combination of general critical principles relevant to Greek tragedy, specific readings, and cultural context, influenced both by structuralist anthropology and post/deconstructuralist literary criticism. The main lesson of the book is that Greek tragedies are not simple fables with unambiguous morals, but complex and ambivalent discussions, admitting various interpretations. Particularly strong was the discussion of the Oresteia in the first two chapters, the first of which focussed on the "rhetoric of appropriation" in the trilogy - how language is a battleground, not something simply given.

I’m writing my thesis on Greek tragedy and this will certainly be a great help! My issue is that Goldhill seems frequently to neglect furthering his arguments and insights in favor of repetitively analyzing a few select plays. I don’t agree with everything put forward and found that after the first three chapters it becomes fairly obvious that if you want to get the meat from this book, it’s best to skim through the dry overanalysis.

Enjoyed the first two essays a lot, but it got pretty dry and technical and repetitive after that.

This book aims to apply cutting edge, post-structuralist theory to the study of Greek tragedy and the principal result of this is an unhelpful emphasis on the ambivalence of tragic textuality. He claims this ambivalence is related to the cognitive flux of the fifth century, plausible but also an easy way to cut the process of interpretation short with only simplistic results. Theory does provide Goldhill with the apparatus to convincingly 'deconstruct' the totalizing scholarship of the likes of Kitto (c.f. the lengthy and insightful critique of Kitto's reading of the Orestaia in chapter 2) but I would argue that he could have come up with his principal argumentative coup here, the so-called 'rhetoric of appropriation,' without post-structuralist theory. His point is that characters often use terms like 'dike' ('justice') or 'philos' ('loved one/friend/relative') or 'sophrosune' (an ethic that avoids divine displeasure and crisis) within the context of their own beliefs and aims (so when Antigone talks of 'dike,' its meaning is kinda determined by her obsession with burying her brother and wider ethical beliefs driving that obsession). In this way, we can safely dismiss the sort of philological investigations that looks for an absolute meaning of these terms (and then fix a totalizing reading of the play's didactic message), so the Orestaia is not necessarily or absolutely a dramatization of the development of law as Kitto thinks. From this position, Goldhill is not man enough to tackle the nature of tragic didacticism from anything but an oblique angle. This is a real shame because it's surely a central factor in tragedy in some way (Goldhill concedes this himself a couple of times in passing) and is very relevant to Goldhill's sense of tragic ambivalence; surely the fact that gnomic statements that are meant to have universal moral significance are made by all characters and chorus means that this ambivalence has to qualified. Greeks probably saw tragedy as didactic (c.f. Aeschylus on his Septem in the Frogs and 4th century oratory) but they would have recognized the fact that ethics and moral terminology differed in different characters. Maybe the issue of didacticism is very intractable (many other critics skirt it by taking a formalist attitude to gnomic statements) but it is a factor in basically all fifth century literature and I think attempts could be made to take it head-on.

The later chapters of the book are the best particularly those chapters on character in tragedy and on Sophism. The Sophism chapter makes a case (I don't know how derivative it was) that the Sophists were philosophers first and rhetoricians second and that their beliefs about persuasion weren't cynical but part of a complex scepticism; this was an area I desperately needed some account of and this seemed to be a very cogent and interesting take. Character in tragedy has long interested me and Goldhill makes a very good case that the weirdness in the way character is treated can be explained by a lack of psychological knowledge in comparison to us (perhaps a good beginning for further scrutiny for me). The work ends with a strong criticism of stagecraft scholarship like Taplin's which is obviously inimical to the textual focus of post-structuralist criticism and Goldhill argues for a non-absolute sense of the text's performativity convincingly (I think I still have to check Taplin out though). The chapter on generic transgression didn't do much with the weirdest Euripidean plays (Helen, Alcestis, etc.) but was a tour-de-force of explanatory depth and a demonstration of Goldhill's scholarly brilliance. This book was generally really valuable for its focus on the recent critical history of Greek tragedy but it also more generally gave me a grounding in tragedy and I would recommend it. It was a shame that weirder plays like the Helen, the Philoctetes or the Oedipus at Colonus weren't treated. You can't get much more typical than the Antigone and the Agamemnon/Choephori as tragedy goes (the principal objects of analysis for no explicit reason) but maybe this was a appropriate for a general guide like this one.

If you are someone who has read Greek tragedy on your own and enjoyed it, then this book may be for you. It is almost impossible for someone without a solid grounding in Greek culture, history, mythology, and philosophy to fully grasp the tragedies. Goldhill's literary criticism of the tragedies is revelatory. He opens up the tragedies to reveal layer upon layer of subtext. His discussion of the use of language in The Oresteia is near-breathtaking and this book will make one see the masterworks of Greek tragedy in a completely different light.

Goldhill's argument is that Greek Tragedy dramatizes slippages between language and meaning. These slippages occur for many reasons, including lies, misinterpretations, different definitions due to social position, a character's lack of moderation, shift in meaning across time, etc. It can get very exciting if even gods disagree on the definition of a concept such as justice. Differing definitions of justice, sexuality, family structure represent fundamental tensions in society, and these plays express these tensions, publicly, at a festival that is also a fundamental part of the civic structure of Athens. The first chapter, with an extended analysis of a messenger scene at the beginning of the Oreisteia, is particularly effective. Then it gets pretty repetitive. I did like how Goldhill ends by clarifying that there is no answer to these tensions since there is no definitive version of each play. Each staging is itself an act of interpretation with a different meaning.

For me, Greek Tragedy becomes more compelling the more I learn about it.

Goldhill provides a deep and sophisticated analysis of many themes that may not be apparent to a non-academic like myself. For example, he discusses the difference between η οικια και η πολις, home & city and what that meant for men and women in 5th Century BCE Athens. He relates in directly to Creon and Antigone in Sophocles Antigone doing likewise with φιλος και εχθρος - friend & enemy. I appreciated his discussion of how the interpretation of the Hero changed from Homeric to classical periods.

Certainly there were portions of the book that rode with Ηλιος well above my mortal understanding, but the great bulk of the work is clear, thought provoking and adds to any rereading of any Greek Tragedy.