Froma Zeitlin has published a collection of beautiful essays on ancient Greek literature that display the analytical and interpretive skills of a scholar at the height of her powers. It seems astonishing that her pathbreaking publications began sixty years ago with her canonical article on the motif of corrupted sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which, along with its postscript, changed the way scholars approached ritual and imagery in Greek tragedy and reads as freshly today as it did in the mid-1960s.[1] A monograph applying semiotic theory to Seven against Thebes, two vastly influential edited collections on sexuality and theatre, her own earlier retrospective Playing the Other and numerous articles have flowed from her pen in the meantime.[2] Nearly three decades after Playing the Other, The Retrospective Muse assembles some more of her most celebrated contributions.
The chapters in this volume are based on essays Zeitlin first published between 1982 and 2012, with one (Chapter 5) that has not been published before. But she has supplemented the previously published works with new insights, demonstrating how she continuously rethinks the issues and fine-tunes her responses in a dynamic process of creative re-reading. A powerful sense of her long life and memories is evoked by the final chapter in the volume, ‘Radical Theater: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69’ (309-33), which includes a photograph of the seating area at this landmark performance of an adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae at the Performing Garage in downtown New York in 1968. At the lower right corner, an audience member sits, her head tilted upwards in a posture of quiet curiosity; it is Zeitlin herself. Her eye-witness account of Schechner’s controversial production, which became a theatrical symbol of the sexual revolution and the political and theatrical radicalism that marked the late 1960s, is of inestimable value to theatre historians and Classical Reception Studies alike. But it also displays her trademark acuity of observation, sensitivity to the sociopolitical contexts of art, fascination with ritual, insistence on close textual reading and eloquence of writing style. It is also the perfect way to conclude a volume to which Dionysus is central, even if, as she observes in her Introduction, she only realized that after she had completed it. Other features unify the volume, too, although the texts considered are diverse generically and range in date from Hesiod to Heliodorus. There is a continuous focus on divinity and gender, but also a cohesion of attitude, of approach and sensibility. Zeitlin’s interests are multifarious, and her theoretical underpinnings and methodology eclectic, but her stance on literature, aesthetic sensibility, writerly personality and critical voice are consistent and unmistakable.
She was a chief actor in the process by which Anglophone scholarship became aware of the new approaches to ancient literature, society and thought that had been developed by French thinkers fusing structuralist and neo-Marxist methodologies, above all in the works of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Marcel Detienne, followed by Nicole Loraux and François Lissarrague. Her scrupulous edition of the English translation of Vernant’s collected essays enriched the scholarship available to students immensely.[3] But her Continental cosmopolitanism extended wider than France: two essays in this volume were originally published in Italian and German respectively, and chapter 5 is a homage and partly a response to the Dutchman Henk Versnel’s landmark 1990 essay on Euripides’ Bacchae.[4] Over the course of her long lifetime Zeitlin has known personally and befriended most of the titans of ancient Greek studies who dominated this subject-area, including Jack Winkler, Thomas Rosenmeyer and Charles Segal, and younger scholars such as Simon Goldhill, whose touching and humorous forward ‘A Fromatic Journey’ (xi-xxv) launches the volume. Zeitlin’s generous acknowledgements of the ideas of others, as she leads us down intricate pathways of thought, represent a major addition to our understanding of the history of classical scholarship over the last half century and more.
Besides the final chapter on Dionysus since 69, the chapters are divided into three sections, ‘Erotics, Myth, Gender’, ‘Encounters with the Divine’, and ‘Urban Mythographies: Cities on Stage’. The collection opens with ‘Eros Tyrannos’, a far-reaching exploration of the ancient philosophy, psychology and physiology of desire. It combines some of Zeitlin’s most luminous prose with a methodological rigour that assesses the strengths and deficiencies of discrete approaches—anthropological, psychoanalytical, Foucauldian—and the limitations of the sources. In the course of her case-studies, which range from Hera’s seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite to Euripides’ Hippolytus, Plato’s Symposium and Chariton’s novel Chaereas and Callirrhoe, she unravels the complexities of the relationship between Aphrodite and Eros and their overlapping but independent functions in narrative and motivation of plot. ‘Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth’ (57-92) is an outstanding meditation on the social construction of sexual violence that dispassionately dissects ancient metaphors for male pursuit of and aggression against females and the erasure of female subjectivity in a way that speaks louder than would overt feminist polemic. The interaction between the sacred (including mystery-cultic) and the romantic and sexual dimensions of the ancient novel is the highly original topic of ‘Religion and Erotics in the Ancient Novel’ (93-113), which concludes with a heartfelt plea, which classicists would do well to hear, for more intercultural interest from them in ancient Jewish and Christian prose fiction. ‘Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius’ (115-135) is a startlingly original reading of Leucippe and Clitophon that shows how this writer strove, within the gendered and generic constraints of the ancient romance, to evoke and highlight psychological subjectivity, emotions, fluctuations in consciousness and states of feeling in his principal actors.
Zeitlin’s uncanny ability to combine an incisive conspectus of a large topic with telling details is exemplified in the first chapter of her second section, ‘Apollo and Dionysus: Starting from Birth’ (139-60). A bravura analytical comparison of the birth narratives of these major Olympians discloses their similarities and discrepancies, while adding significantly to our conceptual repertoire for dealing with divine aetiology. ‘Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter’ (161-88) revels in the details of festivals attended exclusively by women that allowed them rare opportunities for spending extended periods outside their homes and to indulge in ritual obscenity. Zeitlin’s particular sensitivity to the subtle tonality of Euripidean tragedy then teases out the ambivalence of the sacrificial motifs in one of her favourite plays in ‘Sacrifices Holy and Unholy in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris’ (189-206), and their interaction with the playwright’s exploration of inherited familial trauma.
The cityscapes of tragedy have prompted some of Zeitlin’s most influential scholarship. The third section of the book unpicks the special features of the four most common civic settings in our extant plays, showing how the mythic inheritance of archaic literature is modified and elaborated through alignment with fifth-century Athenian ideology. But ‘Staging Dionysus between Athens and Thebes’ (209-40) extends her project of enquiry into tragic topography, by building on her groundbreaking 1986 study of Thebes,[5] to think about Eleusis, Nemea and Eleutherae, the probable setting of Euripides’ lost Antiope. This chapter also offers fascinating insights into Ares, surely the most neglected of the Olympians in modern scholarship, despite his prominence in Theban cult. Argos is juxtaposed to Thebes in ‘Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy in Argos’ (241-55), which resonantly concludes by comparing the ritual functions of earth in the two works: the Danaid trilogy ended ‘in the beneficence of a fruitful hieros gamos of Earth and Heaven (fr. 44 Radt), the second in the allotment of earth only for burial’ (255). Zeitlin’s command of the history of and cultural responses to the Holocaust, on which she taught a celebrated course at Princeton University, lies in the mournful emotional background of her exquisite treatment of the tragic Ilium and its women in ‘Troy and Tragedy: the Conscience of Hellas’ (257-74)—the city that the chorus of Trojan Women laments ‘is now no city’, for it has perished and is no more; it ‘fades as smoke winged in the sky’ (p. 259 on lines 1291-99). It a psychological relief to move on from this profound ethical interpretation to the bawdiness of comedy’s Athenian women in ‘Aristophanes: The Performance of Utopia in Ecclesiazusae (275-306). Zeitlin palpably relishes the civic intervention and open sexuality of the female characters and chorus in this play, but her pleasure does not obscure the cogency of her claim that there lurks beneath the parameters of the plot the myth of the gynaecocratic Athens that Cecrops felt obliged to reform, because women had the vote, took part in public deliberations, and indulged in sexual intercourse quite casually without any restraints imposed by marriage. No scholar writing on this play can afford to overlook this germinal interpretation, which also has ramifications for our understanding of the Oresteia and the art of the Parthenon.
Zeitlin’s distinctive style is always elegant, lucid and accessible; I am not alone in recommending that students study her eloquence in order to improve their own. Her interest in art and culture extends far beyond classical antiquity, as the fascinating discussion of Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ with which she opens ‘Configurations of Rape’ richly exemplifies. But the volume also provides yet further evidence that gender is one of the most useful and enlightening categories of analysis for revealing the richness and complexity of ancient thought and literature. Zeitlin is one of the handful of courageous women scholars, along with Sarah B. Pomeroy and Helene Foley, who pioneered feminist approaches to the ancient world at a time when such readings often met with disparagement amongst establishment scholars: as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1980s, I was explicitly warned against reading Zeitlin’s paradigm-shifting 1978 article on the importance of the Amazonian archetype to the misogynist presentation of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia.[6] Her example as a figurehead as well as an academic author has made a massive impact on our discipline and its gender politics, and The Retrospective Muse shows that she is a gift to our whole discipline that just keeps on giving.
Notes
[1] ‘The motif of the corrupted sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 96 (1965), 463–508; ‘Postscript to sacrificial imagery in the Oresteia’ (Ag. 1235–37)’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 97 (1966), 645–53.
[2] Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1982; second edition Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, co-ed. with John J. Winkler and David M. Halperin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, co-edited with John J. Winkler (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992). Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[3] Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
[4] ‘ΕΙΣ ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΣ: The Tragic Paradox of the Bacchae’, in H.S. Versnel (ed.) Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. I (Leiden: Brill, 1990).
[5] First published as ‘Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in Peter Euben (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 101-41.
[6] First published as ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11 (1978) 149-84.