BMCR 2025.01.33

Praise and blame in Greek tragedy

, Praise and blame in Greek tragedy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Pp. 264. ISBN 9781350410497.

Preview

 

Kate Cook’s monograph weaves together three complementary approaches. In the 1970s Marcel Detienne[1] and Gregory Nagy[2] drew attention to the role of archaic poetry in allocating praise and blame, kleos and oneidos, with the former bestowing lasting fame and the latter oblivion.[3] Subsequently John Herington[4] and Laura Swift [5] studied the traces of archaic song genres in fifth-century tragedy, while Albert Henrichs[6] emphasized tragedy’s self-reflexive, metapoetic strain. Cook explores tragedy’s discourse of praise and blame via six case studies drawn from Sophocles and Euripides. Although her title suggests a general study of the social norms reflected in the plays, in practice Cook is primarily concerned with how praise and blame in tragedy interact with the poetic tradition.

The introduction sketches the evaluative function of earlier Greek poetry and emphasizes that tragedy, as a multivocal genre, has room for “competing discourses of praise and blame” (p. 3): judgments of excellence or deficiency made by one character do not go unexamined but are subject to reinforcement, modification, questioning, or rejection from others. Female characters in particular are apt to challenge conventional assessments and promote their own gendered discourse on kleos and oneidos, a pattern Cook examines in detail in the last three chapters of the study. The presentation is clear and trenchant, though I would have liked to see more discussion of the potential for blame to generate not oblivion, but rather negative kleos, as when Agamemnon in the underworld claims that as a result of her crimes Clytemnestra “has showered shame both on herself and on women yet to come” (Od. 11.434-35). I also would have liked to see not just citation but also discussion of Pericles’ consciously paradoxical statement (Thuc. 2.45. 2) that to be least spoken of (literally, to have the least kleos) among men, whether in praise or blame, constitutes great glory for women.

Chapter 1 takes up Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Cook describes how the promise of future praise and threat of future blame convince Neoptolemus initially to inveigle Philoctetes into yielding up his bow, but ultimately to restore it. She differentiates astutely between Neoptolemus’ rival councilors, Odysseus and Philoctetes: despite the similarities of their appeals (both, for instance, lay stress on Neoptolemus’s paternal heritage), Odysseus relies on sophistic arguments while Philoctetes appeals to older, traditional criteria. Cook’s conclusion notes the irony of Neoptolemus’ final choice to associate himself with Philoctetes and the archaic literary tradition, for that tradition represents Neoptolemus at Troy not as a hero but as a war criminal.

Ch. 2 concerns Sophocles’ Ajax. Cook links the play to archaic poetry by focusing on Ajax’s traditional status as the “best of the Achaeans, after Achilles,” an assessment that should have resulted in his automatically inheriting the title of first best after Achilles’ death, with the concomitant bestowal of Achilles’ arms. Odysseus was awarded the weapons instead, however, and this miscarriage of justice produced the catastrophes that unfold in Sophocles’ tragedy. Cook focuses on Ajax’s failure to impose his preferred evaluation of “the best” on the Greek community, whether his enemies or his supporters, but her discussion seems to blur the chronology of the events that Sophocles focuses on in the play. Ajax “experiences thwarting” (p.44) that is, he is denied the kleos he desires— after Achilles is dead but before his attempted massacre of the Greek commanders, a period that lies outside the scope of the play. Once Ajax recovers his sanity in the aftermath of his unsuccessful assault, he recognizes that his reputation has been destroyed through his own actions: no longer either the first or second best of the Achaeans, he has fallen so far that death appears the only solution to his troubles. Cook contests (pp. 44 and 67) the widespread critical view that when Odysseus insists at the end of the play that Ajax is “the best of the Achaeans… except for Achilles” (Aj. 1440-41), he rehabilitates the hero. But surely this reinstatement of Ajax’s prior kleos is decisive, even if it stamps him as second-best, for it secures Ajax an honorable burial and emanates from the very warrior who usurped his position to begin with.

Chapter 3, on Euripides’ Madness of Heracles, dovetails with the previous chapter on Ajax, since both protagonists commit violent acts under the influence of madness and both are tempted in the aftermath to commit suicide, although the outcome is different for each. The play is a felicitous choice for Cook because its choral odes are infused with metapoetic references to song and dance. Cook describes the protagonist’s duality (often related by critics to his two fathers, Amphitryon and Zeus) in terms of two distinct identities: “one as a mortal, family-focused individual, the other as the larger-than-life, glorious Heracles of the mythical labours” (p. 69). She notes that Heracles’ kleos is disputed even before he comes on stage, with his father and his wife defending the hero’s stature and his enemy Lycus doing his utmost to tear him down. When Heracles appears he rejects the labors and his resultant public glory as meaningless if he can’t defend his family— but that is not the same as demanding praise for fulfilling his private responsibilities, as Cook maintains. Her interpretation of the ending is also open to question. To be sure, Heracles’ loyal friend Theseus offers him “an ongoing life …in which he continues to live and behave according to his heroic identity,” but it isn’t the case that “his identity as father is entirely left behind” (p. 92), for by retaining his weapons—with which he carried out his labors but also murdered his family—Heracles will be constantly reminded of his crimes.

The last three chapters focus on female characters’ problematic deployment of discourses involving praise and blame. Chapter 4 examines Euripides’ Suppliant Women. When Adrastus and the Argive mothers of the seven against Thebes ask Theseus’ help in getting the bodies of their dead returned for burial, Theseus’ first instinct is to refuse. His mother, Aethra, persuades him to change his mind by arguing that he will either be praised for defending the Greek laws relating to burial, or accused of cowardice if he does not. Cook finds it anomalous that Aethra invokes praise and blame persuasively, with reference to the future rather than the past, but after all Odysseus and Philoctetes in Ajax take the same approach, which seems especially relevant to heroes like Neoptolemus and Theseus whose youthfulness is stressed in their respective plays. Cook strengthens her case for female disruptiveness, however, with her insightful accounts of the chorus’ fierce preference for war over peace, Evadne’s unsettling appropriation of heroic male topoi, and Athena’s echo of female modes of praise when she appears as a deus ex machina at the end of the play.

Chapter 5 returns to Sophocles with a study of Trachiniae. Cook argues that Deianira stands out among the other characters for her distrust of hearsay and her preference for verified or verifiable experience. Cook emphasizes that Deianira’s “resistance to spoken and heard information means that she is frequently resistant to accept praise of Heracles when it comes from other characters” (p. 127), so that even before Deianira destroys Heracles’ body with her gift of a poisoned robe, she has ruined his reputation (as established in Pindar’s and Bacchylides’ epinicians), by her reluctance to celebrate her husband or to allow the chorus to do so. As in Suppliant Women, then, female involvement in kleos has a destabilizing effect. This interpretation leaves unexplained, however, the chief puzzle of the play: why Deianira’s wariness fails her when she believes the dying claims of Nessus the centaur that he has gifted her with a love potion rather than a poison.

Chapter 6, on Medea, is the strongest in the book. Cook shows how successfully Medea flips the script of praise-and-blame discourse: she models her own kleos on a male warrior’s while deploying a gendered oneidos that depicts Jason as obsessed by sex (a trait traditionally ascribed to women that Jason tries in vain to turn back against her) and prone to feminine deception. The end of the play completes the gender reversal as Jason, now thoroughly emasculated, succumbs to emotionalism and despair while Medea remains composed. The play’s metapoetic strain complements these reversals, most notably when the chorus proposes that rivers are now flowing upwards since “everything is turned about” (Med. 411), and men rather than women are being singled out for blame. Cook’s discussion does justice to the different strands of the play and goes far to justify her conclusion that when the female characters of tragedy take control of praise-and-blame discourse, chaos and destruction result.

Cook concludes that tragedy makes a “critical contribution to a live poetic and literary question of democratic Athens, how to praise and blame” (p. 174). This metapoetic formulation understates tragedy’s vigorous engagement with contemporary, real-life issues and values, but it also imposes reasonable limits on an unwieldy topic and lays a foundation for further study.

 

Notes

[1] Les maîtres de la vérité dans la Grèce archaique, Paris 19732.

[2] The Best of the Achaeans, Baltimore and London 1979.

[3] Détienne and Nagy built on Georges Dumézil’s Servius et la Fortune: Essai sur la fonction sociale de louange et de blame et sur les éléments indo-européens du cens romain, Paris 1943.

[4] Poetry into Drama, Berkeley 1985.

[5] The Hidden Chorus, Oxford 2010.

[6] “‘Why Should I Dance’: Choral Self-referentiality in Greek Tragedy,” Arion 3 (1994) 56-111.