As its title suggests, Michael Davis’ Electras consists in a reading of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and as well the two Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides, dedicating one chapter to each. It is not intended as a scholarly book (indeed, it barely engages with any contemporary scholarship) but rather approaches the plays as contributing to a liberal education in the sense of potentially liberating us from the “darkness” of certain contemporary conventional opinions (2). Davis suggests that the tragedies do this by inviting us to reflect on the duality of “man and woman, husband and wife,” and on the unity of the human that somehow underlies this duality (1-2, 4). It is no accident that Davis uses Genesis 1:27 as the epigraph for his book, and frequently returns to it. He sees a contemporary unwillingness to listen to the lessons of the tragedians, but insists that to dismiss their reflections on the tension between male and female as antiquated or morally objectionable is to risk “losing their profound thoughts about our humanity—their philosophical anthropology” (4). In this philosophical approach to tragedy, Davis continues on the path set by much of his previous work, especially his subtle and penetrating essays on Euripides’ Helen and Iphigenia among the Taurians found in his book, The Soul of the Greeks. He also avowedly follows the example of his teacher and friend Seth Benardete, who died in 2001 and to whose memory this book is dedicated (i). Davis goes so far as to claim that his reading of the Libation Bearers (Chapter 1) is intended as no more than an elaboration of Benardete’s own scattered remarks on the play, without “diverging from the line of argument he has indicated” (ibid., 6 n. 9). His reading of Sophocles’ Electra is also based on seminar notes and discussions with his mentor. Only his third chapter, on Euripides, presents an interpretation “in some sense altogether my own.” This book, dedicated as it is to the theme of matricide, is best understood as an expression of love, and of filial piety.
Tragedy thrives on ambivalence, ambiguity, even paradox. Accordingly, Davis begins each chapter by identifying what he takes to be “puzzles” presented by the plays in question. For Davis, “perhaps the greatest” puzzle of the Libation Bearers is that Electra disappears less than halfway through the play and that the play itself is not simply called Electra (9). Leaving aside the fact that the titles of the extant tragedies cannot with any confidence be considered original, it is only in light of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ treatments that this would be a puzzle for Aeschylus, who (if we are to trust the traditional titles) is principally concerned with Orestes. All the same, Electra is central to the first half of the play, and Davis interprets the whole play as embodying the tension between “inner truths” and their “outer manifestations” which never wholly capture, or even falsify, them (11, 54, passim). Thus, the tension between inward suffering and conventional mourning, motive and act, or even justice as the principles of right versus justice a retribution. He then identifies this polarity with the “tension between the male principle, meaning as such without particulars, the father, what is fully in the open and intelligible, the city and nomos—namely what is possible to put into logos; and the female principle, particularity, the family, the mother, the chthonic or ancestral gods—what can be seen and not said, knowledge as immediate—namely pathos” (53). The male principle consciously or unconsciously suppresses the female, not recognizing its dependence on it. Electra (the female principle) is therefore “the true subject” of the play, which “can only be hers if it does not bear her name” (54).
It is not at all clear that this antithesis does justice to the details of the play. On the basis of lines 135-8, Davis considers that Orestes’s decision to kill Aegisthus and his mother rests not on the oracle or Apollo or a desire for justice, but rather the “selfish motives” of recovering his property (14). But this questionable reading is later replaced the strange suggestion, that in killing Clytemnestra, Orestes is not principally motivated either by selfishness or the desire to avenge his father, but the “need to kill the mother” (21, original italics). And “[t]o kill what the mother stands for is to kill what makes oneself possible as a unity…. So is the ‘mother’ sanity?” (26). Davis never addresses the incongruity of identifying Clytemnestra (a most atypical mother, to say the least) with the “mother as such.” More generally, it is to be questioned whether the interpretation presented here not only risks subsuming the particularity of the tragedy—all tragedy in some sense deals with limit situations—under the grand generalization of male and female principles, but also of subjecting it to the “darkness” of the nearly contemporary doctrines. It is much easier here to detect the philosophical anthropology of Freud than of Aeschylus.[1]
While Electra disappears halfway through the Libation Bearers, Sophocles delays her recognition scene with Orestes until two-thirds of the way into the play, which allows her to “emerge as in some way the paradigm of human suffering” or pathos, while “Orestes proves to be the paradigm of action” (55). Once again, we have the archetypical male and female, but the one-sidedness of both is recognized, for “[h]uman beings are always both agents and patients and so never simply either” (48). This penetrating observation, unfortunately, is not explicitly developed. Action and passion naturally raise the problem of justice, which is central to the myth, but for Davis a “just action” is problematic, “for it requires that one have a motive to act in a way that is neutral” (55). A conception of justice as neutrality might be a conclusion of the Oresteia as a whole, it is telling that Davis has to cite Immanuel Kant in order to support it (100, n. 99). Certainly, neither the conventional Greek conception of justice as “helping friends and harming enemies,” nor those conceptions developed by Plato, Aristotle and their successors, require any sacrifice of self-interest (well understood).[2] It is not that personal vengeance is in itself unjust, but that its politically destabilizing consequences necessitate the impartiality of the court system. Davis cites Cato the Elder to the effect that a Roman man could kill his wife with impunity if he caught her in adultery.[3] But Cato can hardly mean that “[t]o kill … immediately, ‘in the heat of passion,’ suggests that one’s motive is pure” (92); rather, the idea is that it is pardonable to give in to passion in such extraordinary circumstances. It is not a question of pure motives, but of excusable anger. Davis is right to see the problem of justice in the plays as essentially connected temporality (70, 117), for “what atonement is there for blood spilt on the ground?” (Lib. 48). But in order to truly address this question, Davis would have to turn back to Aeschylus in order to study the Oresteia as a whole, especially in its political dimension.
Davis’ acute sensitivity to ambivalence and irony is most at home with Euripides, for “[a]ll Euripidean tragedy is about tragedy” (132). Compared to Aeschylus and Sophocles, it is the “dominance of the agency of Electra” that “make[s] Euripides’ version stand out” (119). His play is concerned with the male and female in light of the distinction of nomos and phusis, asking “[w]hat happens when the natural relation between male and female is systematized by convention [sc., the institution of marriage]” (122). This dynamic is illustrated by Electra’s unwilling marriage to the humble but eminently decent autourgos, not a “peasant” (141) but an impoverished hidalgo of ancient stock (Eur. El. 35-8). While he is not of royal line and so conventionally unworthy of marrying a princess, does not the very decency of his treatment of her show his natural worthiness? Davis notes the subtle hypocrisy of Orestes’ praise of natural nobility and its “conventional rejection of conventionality,” which recognizes that nobility of character is not always inherited, but never questions the nobility of Orestes himself (129). According to Davis, this tendency to uphold nomos even in its supposed questioning, or the “totalizing of nomos,” is the central theme of the play, and “the mother [representing nature] stands as the final obstacle to be overcome” (141). Although Davis deftly shows the complexity of her character (144-5), he argues that “[i]n the end, Clytemnestra only stands for the mother” (146). He never accounts for the fact that she had put a price on her son’s head, a detail unique to Euripides.[4] His skeptical reading of the motives of Orestes and Electra ably confirms Castor’s words (1244) that they have not acted with justice, but his tendency to all but exonerate Clytemnestra (and Aegisthus) make it hard to understand the first half of the same line, namely that she “has got what she justly deserved” (141-4, cf. 79). He nevertheless recognizes at the conclusion of this chapter the tragic non-identity of who we are with what we do (146). He concludes with the enigmatically suggestive comment that “marriage is at its more natural when, while seeking to wed nature and convention, it acknowledges that by nature, it can do so only conventionally” (147).
In his brief Conclusion, and a manner befitting a study of tragedy, Davis leaves the reader not with any solution but with the fresh formulation of a problem. If the tragedies under consideration here reflect on the problematic unity of the male and female in the human being, and so also on nature and convention, then how is any of us, in some sense both natural and conventional at once, a true unity? “We are conventional by nature,” Davis writes, but this only means that “[w]e are born to be inauthentic. This would alienate us from ourselves were it not the case that to be a self is by nature to be alienated” (152). In finding at the heart of tragedy the problem of unity of the human, Davis has succeeded in recovering some small part of the “wisdom of the ancients.”[5]
Notes
[1] The specter of Freud reappears in the chapter on Sophocles (83-4, and esp. 89, where Davis insinuates that Clytemnnestra’s words at 766-8 might betray an incestuous attraction to her son).
[2] Electra invokes the friend/enemy distinction at 977-89; cf. Ajax 678-82, Antigone 641-7. For a nuanced discussion of this question, one should consult the “Conclusion” of Ruby Blondell’s Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 260-73.
[3] In Aulus Gellius x.23. It would have been more appropriate to cite Lysias i, On the Murder of Eratosthenes, for at issue here is the justice of killing the adulterer Aegisthus (which, at least for Aeschylus (Lib. 990), is self-evident).
[4] Eur. El. 32-3. See Denniston ad loc.
[5] The volume is attractively presented, and typographical errors are relatively few. Those I caught are: p. 14 n. 17, “dmōmai” (for dmōiai); 18 “214-23” for “215-23”; 31, “Alythaea” for “Althaea”; 38, “tektonta” for “tekonta”; 46, “Clytemnestra’ s”; 69, “aiein” for “aien”; 123 n. 117, “Alcestes” for “Alcestis”; 144 n. 144 “Ajax” for “Ajax.” There are frequent problems with line numbers, both in accuracy (44 n. 44, “94-39” for “94-139”; 125, “112-12” for “112-212”) and conventions (41, “1005-006”; 64 “100-01”; 111, “1288-383”). More serious are the numerous errors in translation, which, if they rarely affect the argument, nevertheless produce a jarring text. I mention only the most serious (given Davis’ concern throughout with the nomos/physis distinction): 116 confuses the φύσῃ of Soph. El. 1463 with φύσει, resulting in the meaningless “obtain mind by nature.”