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Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Onassis Series in Classical Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 296. $35.00/£22.50. ISBN: 978-0-199-79627-4.

Reviewed by Michael Shaw, University of Kansas

The title of this book, as befits its interest in the slipperiness of words, uses the word “language” in two senses, as “philology” and as “langue.” The first section contains literary studies, while the second part is concerned with theory, German idealism in particular, but also feminist studies and what Goldhill refers to as the new “orthodoxy.” Somewhat confusingly, the first section’s readings all support this new orthodoxy to a degree. In his “coda,” Goldhill reveals that he wavers between rejecting German Idealism outright and using it for his own purposes.

In his opening chapter, “Undoing: Lusis and the Analysis of Irony,” based in part on his 2009 article in TAPA (much of this book consists of reworked earlier essays), Goldhill looks at Sophoclean examples of the Greek word “release,” in all of which he finds a second ironic sense. This irony creates “edgy, flickering uncertainty” (36) that undercuts the audience’s confidence, unlike conventional Sophoclean irony. One example is Electra’s use of λυτήριον in lines 1489–90, where she urges Orestes to kill Aegisthus immediately, “for this is the only release for me.” She means that she will no longer have to endure seeing him, but it is possible (though not all agree) that the audience will realize there is no “release” in this story. The chapter concludes with several examples of other words that possess this flickering irony.

The third chapter, “Line by Line,” is concerned with stichomythia. In the exchange of Creon and Haemon (Antigone, 726–64), Goldhill observes “the twists of reason into extremism” (58–63). This seems to support the new orthodoxy, but Goldhill’s language reveals a complex view of character: “even if Haemon may seem … to have the moral high ground, his position is also veined with a self-destructive and self-defeating extremism” (63).

In his fourth and fifth chapters, “Choreography” and “The Chorus in Action,” Goldhill examines lyric versus iambic lines in specific contexts, and concludes that the chorus is “more complex and nuanced … and far more dramatically involved than many generalizations about the chorus have allowed …” (131). This is convincingly demonstrated by a discussion of several passages in the Philoctetes.

In the book’s second section Goldhill is mainly concerned with German Idealism, which “takes tragedy from the sphere of literary genre and establishes it as a means to comprehend the self as a political, psychological and religious subject” (149). This has led to simplistic views of “tragedy” itself and of the nature of the chorus. The political plays, such as Suppliants and Herakleidai of Euripides, are not “tragic” in their terms and so have been overlooked. (Hegel’s early interest in Eumenides, observed by Steiner, Antigones [1984], esp. 25–8, is ignored here.)

In his seventh chapter, “Generalizing about the Chorus,” Goldhill states that Schlegel first describes the chorus as the “ideal spectator,” and that little is said by idealist philosophers about “any specific chorus.” (179) Nietzsche and Wagner’s view of music is also limiting; it emphasizes the enthusiastic and leaves no room for the use of lyric in deliberation. Goldhill concludes with accounts of performances of Reinhardt and others where the chorus embodies this enthusiasm to the detriment of its dramatic role.

In his eighth chapter, Goldhill shows that in nineteenth-century England there was “a remarkably uniform picture of Sophocles and his Electra” as being pious, which comes from “the German idealism of Schlegel” (216–7). Then he considers the “dark” reading, in which the Sophoclean hero is extreme and self-destructive, which began with Rohde’s Psyche in the 1890s and was popularized by Hoffmannstahl’s insane Electra of 1903. Sheppard in a 1927 article was one of the first scholars to reflect this view. By the 1960s there was no consensus concerning the two readings but “by the end of the twentieth century … the so-called ‘dark’ reading … has become orthodoxy” (225).

In his final chapter, “Coda: Reading with or without Hegel,” Goldhill clarifies his view of his antithesis between German idealism and the new orthodoxy: “I want to keep both trajectories—the trajectory of value and the trajectory of historical self-consciousness, the trajectory of the general and of the specific—in play, not least because I think it represents most accurately the state of contemporary criticism” (261–2). That is, he does not want to refute German Idealism. Rather, he wants to keep idealist views from obscuring other aspects of tragedy, such as uncertainty, complexity, and verbal play.

Goldhill sometimes criticizes Hegel as one of the German Idealists, but at other times approves of him and even seems to be influenced by him. For instance, consider this passage: “the power and subtlety of this self awareness within tragedy” (has been overlooked), “the dynamic between generalization and the messy, specific, self-interested turmoil of human activity.” Goldhill here is talking about the dialectical structure of the real world, a key Hegelian concept. The Hegelian connection reveals itself in Goldhill’s vocabulary: “self awareness,” “dynamic,” and “activity,” and “self-interested.”

Goldhill’s critical discussion of the historical and philosophical origin of several key concepts of Sophoclean tragedy is of great interest. His presentation of the relationship of ethics and tragedy is somewhat thin, however, and it is in ethics that philosophy concerns itself with the conflict of the ideal and the real and with the self in dialogue with itself. He makes no reference to Steiner’s emphasis on the importance of Hegel’s ethics, especially the Phenomenology, or to contemporary literature on ethics and literature, such as Nussbaum’s linking of ethics and tragedy (although Fragility of Goodness [1986] is in his bibliography, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature [1990] is not, nor is Gill’s Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue [1996]).

At the Aestimatio site as a pdf:

• Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World

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Wolfgang de Melo, editor and translator, Plautus, vol. I: Amphitryon; The Comedy of Asses; The Pot of Gold; The Two Bacchises; The Captives. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. cxxxiii + 628. Hardcover, $24.00/£15.95. ISBN 978-0-674-99653-3.

Wolfgang de Melo, editor and translator, Plautus, vol. II: Casina; The Casket Comedy; Curculio; Epidicus; The Two Menaechmuses. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 562. Hardcover, $24.00/£15.95. ISBN 978-0-674-99678-6.

Wolfgang de Melo, editor and translator, Plautus, vol. III: The Merchant; The Braggart Soldier; The Ghost; The Persian. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 569. Hardcover, $24.00/£15.95. ISBN 978-0-674-99682-3.

Wolfgang de Melo, editor and translator, Plautus, vol. IV: The Little Carthaginian; Pseudolus; The Rope. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 571. Hardcover, $24.00/£15.95. ISBN 978-0-674-99986-2.

Reviewed by Timothy J. Moore, Washington University in St. Louis (tmoore).

The Loebs of Plautus by Paul Nixon (Cambridge, MA, 1916–38) have served us well for many years but are showing their age. Wolfgang de Melo’s new Loebs (one volume remains after those reviewed here) are therefore most welcome. De Melo has not only provided a worthy updated successor to Nixon, but he has gone well beyond his predecessor in many ways to produce a work that will be of considerable value both to students and to scholars.

As befits the Loeb format, de Melo’s aims in terms of textual criticism are limited: he does not produce a full apparatus criticus. Unlike Nixon, however, who for the most part simply reproduced Friedrich Leo’s text (Berlin, 1895–6), de Melo has clearly thought long and hard about Plautus’ text, both incorporating the work of contemporary editors and doing some emending of his own. The result is a text that, while by no means definitive, is superior to previous full-corpus texts of Plautus, including Wallace Lindsay’s OCT (Oxford, 1904–5). Particularly notable are de Melo’s work on the lacunose Cistellaria (this benefits much from de Melo’s consultation with Walter Stockert, who has recently completed a critical text of the play [Urbino, 2009]), and on the Punic passages of Poenulus, described in a long appendix to that play. Inevitably, of course, there is room for disagreement. In spite of the authority of Roberto Danese (Asinaria [Urbino, 2004]), I remain skeptical that Diabolus and not Argyrippus delivers Asinaria 127ff. Nor do I find de Melo’s transposition of Menaechmi 72–6 to earlier in the prologue persuasive (adopted from Adrian Gratwick’s Menaechmi [Cambridge,
1993]).

Most readers will probably turn to these volumes for the translation as much as for the Latin text. Here again de Melo is decidedly superior to Nixon, much of whose translation now seems painfully archaic. De Melo’s English versions, appropriately, are generally quite literal. As is often the case with such close translations, they sometimes sound stilted: they will not serve well as texts for performance, and students seeking a “feel” for Plautus’ exuberant Latin would do better to turn to translations that are less exact but more lively. They will, however, prove an excellent guide for those seeking greater understanding of the Latin.

De Melo also does a better job than Nixon at annotating his translations. Obscure passages and places where Latin puns cannot be recreated literally are usually well explained with notes on points of Roman culture, history, Latin semantics, and other areas. De Melo has a good eye not only for items that might give students difficulty, but also for areas where some additional information will make our understanding richer. He notes, for example, that when Daemones invites Gripus to dinner at the end of Rudens, he suggests that the slave has been freed, even though Daemones does not explicitly manumit him.

Where de Melo differs most from Nixon is in his introductory material. He begins his first volume with a 121-page introduction that includes discussions of Plautus’ life, the history of ancient comedy (including Plautus’ Greek and Italian sources and questions of adaptation), themes and characteristics of Plautine comedy, Plautus’ language and meter, questions of performance, the history of Plautus’ text, and (very briefly) Plautus’ influence. Some areas here could be improved. De Melo is to my mind overly skeptical regarding native Italian influence on Plautus; and while he covers well the iambic senarius and the trochaic septenarius, other meters, most notably the very important iambic septenarius, get short shrift. De Melo’s claim that Terence’s characters, because they are sympathetic, are unrealistic, seems unnecessarily cynical. De Melo perhaps spends more time on the intricacies of Plautus’ Latin than is necessary in this context. All in all, though, de Melo’s ambitious opening is an excellent introduction to the plays. Particularly praiseworthy are de Melo’s clear account of the manuscript tradition and his extensive bibliography.

De Melo also offers, in contrast to Nixon, introductions to individual plays. Each includes a synopsis of the play and discussion of the Greek original and the date of the play’s original performance. These discussions are inevitably somewhat speculative, but de Melo is consistently cautious and forthright about his assumptions. De Melo generally avoids aesthetic judgments and broader questions of literary criticism in these introductions. When he does judge the plays, he sometimes seems a bit out of touch with current critical work, as when he concludes that Persa is “unpleasant” and Asinaria “less than edifying.” Each introduction ends with a brief bibliography that includes editions, commentaries and other secondary scholarship. These feature, admirably, works in French, German, and Italian as well as English, but they seem rather idiosyncratic, sometimes including discussions of minor points and ignoring important studies of whole plays.

Finally, de Melo includes schemata metrorum for all the plays. These are vastly superior to those of Lindsay’s Oxford texts. Those interested in the details of the polymetric sections will still want to turn to Cesare Questa’s T. Macci Plauti Cantica (Urbino, 1995), but de Melo’s metrical appendices should now be the standard resource for those following metrical changes throughout whole plays.

In Didaskalia 9:

• Imagining and Imaging the Chorus: A Study of the Physicality, Movement, and Composition of the Chorus in A.R.T.’s Ajax

posted with permission:

H. M. Roisman and C. A. E. Luschnig, Euripides’ Electra: A Commentary. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture. Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2011. Pp. xvii + 366. Paper, $32.95. ISBN 978-0-8061-4119-0.

Reviewed by Karelisa Hartigan, University of Florida

What a pleasure it was to see this commentary arrive on my desk. Having used the Roisman–Luschnig commentary on the Alcestis in my middle-level Greek class for years, I was delighted to see I would have another Roisman–Luschnig work for my students to use. This commentary is, as the authors say, designed for students at various levels in their reading of Greek tragedy. It provides basic information for those reading the Electra early in their Greek studies, and both review and guidance for the more advanced student. In their Introduction Roisman and Luschnig include common grammatical and literary terms, and the standard abbreviations for Greek authors and their works. They then offer basic information about the three tragedians, the myth that forms this play, and the form and conventions of Greek drama production in ancient Athens, including three line-drawings of the Greek theater. Graduate level students could use these pages for refreshers and then turn to the straightforward presentation of meter and prosody; note that metrical analyses for the odes and monody are given in Appendix I. Roisman and Luschnig conclude the Introduction with a discussion of the play’s date, presenting both sides of the issue and tentatively favoring (I myself am happy to note) a post-Sophoclean date of composition.

The Greek text is based on Murray’s 1913 edition and Diggle’s 1981 text, with readings from Cropp’s 1988 edition, as well as the earlier texts of Denniston and Paley. The Greek is printed in easy-to-read italics. I mention this benefit because it is a definite plus for all who have peered intently at the very small print of the standard Oxford texts. Some might miss the formal app. crit. at page bottom; the authors explain (24) that they have noted any substantial changes from Murray and Diggle in the Commentary.

What makes this book exceptional are the pages which follow the Greek text. The Notes and Commentary are wonderfully inclusive. Roisman and Luschnig give line-by-line information that is far more than mere notes. History, geography, and mythic references are explicated, grammar and alternate readings are noted along with scholarly debate on theme and meaning. Students who turn to these will often find a translation for the more difficult passages, guidance in translating more straightforward phrases.

Appendix 2, “Discussions,” reviews the three Electra plays. The authors do not do this in the usual Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides presentation but rather set out the material by characters and theme: Electra’s plots, Orestes’ tokens, and how the major characters are portrayed, e.g., Orestes’ purposeful return in Sophocles’ play, his hesitation in Euripides’ script. The role of the divinities in the various plays is also discussed: how Aeschylus’ Orestes is god-directed, that deities do not appear until the end in Euripides’ play. Appendix 2 concludes with a discussion of two post-classical versions of Euripides’ play. Jean Giraudoux’s Électre was staged in 1937 Paris. Here the playwright wrote his script as a sort-of detective story focused on the ambiguity of the myth itself, and in which Électre is another one of Giraudoux’s exceptional young women. Michael Cacoyannis’ created his film Elektra in 1962. Film allows all action to be seen and Cacoyannis takes full advantage of his medium, allowing the visual to largely replace the verbal.

Roisman and Luschnig’s edition is a user-friendly text, for its appendices make it possible for a reader to need to have only one book on hand. In Appendix 3 they offer an Index of Verbs in the forms and lines in which they appear in the text. Such a listing makes such a difference to the student who cannot recognize the more unusual forms of a Greek verb. Appendix 4 is a Review of Grammatical and Rhetorical constructions. Here one can find clarification of crasis, the use of the objective clause after a verb of fearing or an example of anastrophe; again, all this information is offered line by line.

Appendix 5 permits readers to leave their LSJ on the shelf: here is a very complete vocabulary of words used in the text; those appearing more than five times are printed in bold face—an obvious encouragement for the early student to learn these words. A nine page bibliography rounds out the book followed by an inclusive index that covers themes, loci, and names mentioned in the commentary.

In sum, Roisman and Luschnig’s commentary on Euripides’ Electra is a masterful work and (as I have said before) after its publication “there will be no need for another commentary [on this play] for decades.” Finally, I must report that the authors kindly let me use their book in its nascent form when I was teaching the Electra in my final graduate seminar on Greek Tragedy at the University of Florida. So I can verify that my students found this book truly useful for their reading and understanding of Euripides’ Electra.