BMCR 2008.10.24, N.J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent. Moral Inheritance

N.J. Sewell-Rutter, Guilt by Descent. Moral Inheritance and Decision
Making in Greek Tragedy. Oxford Classical Monographs.  Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007.  Pp. xiii, 202.  ISBN
978-0-19-922733-4.  $90.00.

Reviewed by Enrico Medda, Dipartimento di Filologia Classica,
Universita\ di Pisa ([email protected])
Word count:  2974 words
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The subject and method of N. J. Sewell-Rutter's (hereafter S.-R.) study
(based on the author's D. Phil. thesis, submitted in 2004 at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford) are clearly stated in the Introduction. The
primary focus of the book is the complex intertwining of supernatural
and human causation in Greek tragedy, and particularly a group of
tragedies (the Labdacid and Pelopid plays above all) whose characters
act under the influence of a moral inheritance received from earlier
generations. This process involves concepts that are familiar to
readers of tragic texts, like inherited guilt, ancestral curses, the
Erinyes and other daemonic powers. Despite a long tradition of
studies,[[1]] the discussion about these topics still suffers from a
certain looseness of terminology, which often results in some degree of
confusion. The aim of the author is to clarify the nature and working
of each of these causal determinants and to understand how they
cooperate with human motivations in the process of decision-making,
which the author, at the end of his enquiry, describes as "the
essential link between the awful happening and the mortal act" (p.
171).

The volume consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion;
it is completed by a list of bibliographic references, a useful index
locorum and a general index. The standard of production is very high;
misprints are almost absent.[[2]]

Chapter 1 has an introductory function. In order to show that tragic
theology is not an isolated creation, S.-R. chooses the stories of
Croesus and Cyrus in Herodotus' book I as an example of how a
contemporary author describes human actions as the product of four
interacting forces: the retributive  principle, fate, the sins of the
fathers, and the uncertainty and mutability of human life. S.-R.'s main
point is that Herodotus' handling of the divine level of causation
often resembles the tragedians' use of it. None of these causal
determinants prevails in fact over the other; each one of them tends to
become prominent at particular moments of the story (the ancestral
guilt of Gyges, for example, is mentioned at I 34, but only at I 91,
after calamity has befallen Croesus, does the oracle recall it as the
cause of the king's ruin). Moreover, in this multiply determined
process the acknowledgement of the action exerted by the gods does not
obscure the human level of responsibility, so that the 'amoral'
perspective of inherited guilt coexists with the 'moral' idea of
punishment for one's own errors.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4, which represent the core of the book, are
dedicated respectively to inherited guilt, curses and Erinyes. The
three sections are constructed along the same lines: first a survey of
what is known from ancient sources about these concepts in archaic and
late archaic culture, then an analysis of how they work in Aeschylus'
Seven against Thebes and Oresteia and in Euripides' Phoenissae. The
choice to segment the discussion of each tragedy among the three
chapters (and also ch. 6) has the unwelcome consequence of frequent
cross-references and summaries of previous conclusions, but on the
whole the reader can easily gather the general picture.

The discussion of inherited guilt in chapter 2 brings out two relevant
features of this concept in tragedy. (a) In Aeschylus and Euripides
this is only one of a multiplicity of causal determinants, no one of
which must be privileged in interpreting a play. In the Agamemnon, for
example, at least four supernatural elements related to the family of
the Atreidae (the death of Thyestes' children, the Erinyes, the daemon
of the family, the curse laid on the house by Thyestes) concur to lead
the king to death. I heartily agree with S.-R. in thinking that,
instead of asking which is the most important, we should pay attention
to the way Aeschylus recalls each of them at different stages of the
play, in order to construct a crescendo. (b) The percolation of
inherited guilt from one generation to another is not presented in
tragedy as an amoral process that condemns an innocent to ruin only for
the sins of his fathers. The inheritance received by Eteocles in the
Septem, for example, consists not in a passive burden of guilt, but in
a blighted disposition to choose crime that assimilates the king to his
father. When Eteocles at 653ff. suddenly becomes conscious of his being
the inheritor of a blighted past, he does not try to fight against
Oedipus' legacy, but appropriates it, so that from now on his decisions
as defender of the city are determined also by his inherited desire to
destroy his brother and are made in a "morbidly heightened emotional
state" (p. 31). The mechanism of appropriation of inherited guilt is
valid for both brothers in the Phoenissae, but Euripides' treatment of
the motive in this play is more complex and ramified than Aeschylus'.
S.-R. shows how, instead of focusing on the influence of moral
inheritance on an individual, Euripides pursues a multi-directional
approach. He explores the tendency of the family to destroy itself
through strife of its members as a part of an unceasing sequence of
trangressions that involves all the descendants of the Spartoi. The
whole polis is tainted from the time of its foundation, and hereditary
guilt is a pervasive concept which articulates and informs the tragedy.


Chapter 3 picks up and develops M. West's recent reaction[[3]] against
the tendency to assign to inherited curses a primary role in the
interpretation of some plays even when the text does not provide
explicit indications in that direction. S.-R. resumes the debate about
the so-called 'Pisander scholion' (sch. MAB on Eur. Phoe.  1760) and
about the possibility that Euripides' Chrysippus  was part of the same
trilogy as the Phoenissae. He rightly does not regard the content of
the scholion as a reflection of an archaic source, and shares the
opinion of scholars who think that the Phoenissae probably did not
refer to the ancestral curse uttered by Pelops against Laius after the
rape of Chrysippus. The lesson S.-R. extracts at p. 74 from the case of
the Phoenissae is that we must be very cautious in reconstructing
extant tragedies from external sources, often later and of uncertain
reliability, and that we should be even more cautious in basing our
interpretation of a play on an architectural principle arbitrarily
derived from sources of that kind. Though rightly refusing to consider
ancestral curses the main causal determinant of tragic action, S.-R.
does not deny that they often have a relevant role in the plays. The
key to a better understanding must be sought in dramatic chronology,
since it is the collocation within the piece that gives to the mention
of an ancestral curse the particular effect aimed at by the author. The
dramatists were also aware of the performative potentialities of curses
uttered on stage: an interesting excursus examines the
<greek>a)rai/</greek> of Theseus against his son in the Hippolytus and
the terribly ironical curse of Oedipus against the murderer of Laius in
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, whose emotional effect is intensified by the
lack of knowledge displayed by the character who is speaking.

The discussion about the Erinyes (chapter 4) aims to demonstrate that
the main feature of these goddesses in tragedy is complexity and
multi-functionality, so that, instead of a vain attempt to construct a
unitary picture by summation of their many facets, interpreters should
look for a full appreciation of their dramatic potentialities. The name
Erinys can bring with itself at different places the idea of vengeance,
of a curse coming to its fulfillment, of familial disorder, etc.;
moreover, these goddesses are always characterized as implacable
entities who pursue the punishment of sinners. Another feature that
S.-R. regards as essential is the tendency of tragic Erinyes to obtrude
themselves suddenly in the action at moments of high drama (an example
of this kind of 'irruption' is Cassandra's scene in the Agamemnon). In
the last part of the chapter, S.-R. tackles the difficult question
posed by Aeschylus' Eumenides. In this play, the only one in which the
Erinyes are incarnate on stage, their character and behaviour seem to
be at odds with the features described above. How can we explain the
fact that the implacable powers par excellence are eventually placated
and welcomed into Athenian cult? S.-R. lists six possible responses
elaborated by scholars, to which he adds an interesting suggestion of
his own. When Aeschylus decided to bring the Erinyes onto the tragic
scene as embodied characters, he had to pay a price for the reification
of what in other plays was only a broadly suggestive concept. In order
to give them an effective stage presence, it was necessary to make a
simplifying choice among their multi-faceted attributes: this resulted
in a play which "stands far apart from what the tragedians generally
intended to accomplish in deploying an Erinys" (p. 109).

Chapter 5 is dedicated to what S.-R. calls a "crucial difference"
between Sophocles and the other two great tragedians from the point of
view of the treatment of familial disorders and their connection with
supernatural modes of causation. The analysis of the Theban plays and
the Electra  shows that Sophocles does not emphasize the divine
component of human action in the way Aeschylus did in the Oedipodeia
and in the Oresteia. Neither Antigone's nor Oedipus' decisions show any
trace of double motivation. S.-R. points out that in Sophocles'
Labdacid plays we notice "the absence of any hereditary curse on the
line that serves as the causal lynchpin of the action" (p. 129) and
that in general Sophocles' plays do not show the tendency to the
'irruption' of the Erinyes or of an ancestral curses at a climactic
point of the drama. The absence of these motives in the final scenes of
the Electra and the very limited role of the inherited curse of the
Pelopids in that play prove that the Atreid myth could be brought on
stage with a very different approach to matters of moral inheritance.

Chapter 6 is articulated in three sections. The first gives a general
picture of the concept of <greek>moi=ra</greek> in tragedy and
clarifies the reasons of the limited role played by fate in the
architecture of tragic plays. The second tackles the decisive question
of freedom vs. <greek>a)na/gkh</greek> in tragic decision-making. After
a 'philosophical' excursus which explores the possibility to conciliate
at least partially the conflicting instances of determinism and free
will, S.-R. discusses again at length Eteocles' decision in the Septem.
He convincingly argues that no significant problematization of freedom
and responsibility may be found in the play: Eteocles' decision is a
process by which the king himself constructs the necessity that brings
him to ruin by recognizing and appropriating his cursed past, which
becomes part of his personal motivation to fratricide. This process is
unique in tragic theatre and makes Eteocles' decision different from
those of Agamemnon or of Orestes in the Oresteia, who are pressed by an
explicit divine order expressed in the form of an oracle or of a teras:
"no one, man or god, is telling Eteocles to meet his brother. . .
Eteocles is both self-motivated and untouched by doubt" (p. 161). The
last section of the chapter refines the perception of the uniqueness of
Eteocles' decision by contrasting it to a later treatment of the myth
(again Euripides' Phoenissae) and to a play of Sophocles (the Ajax)
where the state of mind of the central character is of primary
relevance.

S.-R.'s study is on the whole stimulating and successful in trying to
look at well known topics from a new point of view, and it has the
merit of calling attention again to a subject that had been left out in
the critical work on tragedy during the last decades of the twentieth
century. The author's approach to the texts is sound and his arguments
lucidly developed. The main strength of the book is represented by the
vivid consciousness of the connection between the conceptual burden of
the plays and their dramatic and emotional aspects. S.-R. makes his
readers alert to the danger of looking at tragedy primarily as a
vehicle of ethical and religious ideas, and regards the concepts
relating to guilt by descent not as absolute principles governing a
'tragic' vision of human life, but as a moldable stuff that the
dramatists bend to their particular projects. The treatment of the
dramatic exploitation of these motives is surely the most interesting
contribution of the book (whose best results may be found in chapters
2, 3, 4 and in the second section of chapter 6) and could sometimes
have been privileged at the expense of general discussions which are
not particularly new (for example, the ten pages dedicated to the
defixiones, which play a very limited role in tragedy, or the section
on fate in ch. 6). The discussion of the Septem is very fruitful:
S.-R.'s interpretation of the decision-making process is stimulating,
and his 'unitarian' reading of the character of Eteocles is well argued
(I am, however, persuaded that character-drawing is not Aeschylus'
primary focus here: what really matters is the sudden change in the
atmosphere of the drama caused by the new knowledge acquired by the
king at 653ff.). As for the the Erinyes in the Eumenides, in my opinion
the relevance of the Athenian cult of the Semnai has been a little
underestimated by S.-R. The presence of this cult in the city is the
starting point for Aeschylus' ambitious political-religious and
dramatic project, whose keystone is the idea that there will be 'a
great profit for these citizens from these terrible faces' (Eum.
990-91); in other words, fear must have a primary relevance in the life
of the city in order to ensure a future of justice and prosperity. The
aetiological placation of the Erinyes was an unavoidable part of this
project, but the poet did not at all intend to weaken the terrible
nature of the goddesses. On the contrary, he transforms the elsewhere
'irrupting' deities into a fearful presence firmly embedded in civic
life and into a terrible scenic reality that talks directly to the
spectators' hearts and minds (the theatrical dimension is clearly
alluded to at 990 by the words <greek>fobera\ pro/sopa</greek>; see
Sommerstein's note ad loc.).

On the other hand, a rather perplexing feature of the volume is
represented by the author's parsimony in referring to previous studies
relating to the same issues, even when they have made points that are
relevant to his discussion. The final list of references shows several
surprising omissions. For example, among the 'classic' treatments of
the topics faced by the author, one would have expected a mention of N.
G. L. Hammond, 'Personal Freedom and its Limitations in the
Oresteia',[[4]] whose discussion begins with the assertion that we
cannot properly judge the relevance of the curse motive in the
Agamemnon without paying due attention to dramatic evolution. It is
particularly regrettable that S.-R. neither took into account in his
discussion nor mentioned in the bibliography two contributions
dedicated to the very topic of his book: T. N. Gantz's article
'Inherited Guilt in Aeschylus',[[5]] whose ideas about the Oresteia and
the Septem are partially coincident with some of S.-R.'s conclusions,
and S. Foellinger's detailed study Genosdependenzen. Studien zur Arbeit
am mythos bei Aischylos, Goettingen 2003. S-R.'s discussion of the
Agamemnon  would have greatly profited from the confrontation with one
of the latest and profoundest writings of S. Timpanaro, the article
'Antinomie nell'Agamennone di Eschilo';[[6]] nor is it easy to
understand why V. Di Benedetto's penetrating analysis of the
relationship between the complex of fearful ideas relating to the
Erinyes and the new role that Aeschylus assigns to fear in Athenian
society[[7]] did not deserve any attention. A mention of D. J
Mastronarde's 'Euripidean Tragedy and Theology'[[8]] would also have
been welcome in the bibliography, and the item concerning A. Rivier
should have included his 'Remarques sur le <<ne/cessaire>> et la
<<ne/cessite/>> chez Eschyle'.[[9]]

Before concluding I add a few observations on points of detail.

On pp. 19-20, S.-R. writes that tragedy reserves little space for "the
hypothetical converse of inherited guilt, inherited credit" and that
"the <greek>*Di/ka</greek> that shines fort in smoky dwellings in one
passage of the Agamemnon (772 ff.) is often scarcely visible through
the pall of transgression, Erinys and curse". This is obviously right
if we look at the tragic corpus as a whole, but not in the case of the
Oresteia, where the theme of the retribution for men who live according
to Dike and refuse excessive wealth is particularly relevant to the
dramatic project, both at the level of individual life (see Ag. 378-80,
471-74, 758-62, 774-80) and of the social life of the Athenians (Eum.
526-37, 550-52, 991-95, 996-97).

On p. 65 n. 52. Mastronarde's explanation of <greek>a)ra/s</greek> at
Eur. Phoe.  1610-11 as a term referring generically to the malevolent
influence of a divine power is confirmed in my opinion by the following
sentence, introduced by an explicative <greek>ga\r</greek>: (I say
this) because 'I am not so lacking in sense that I brought this ruin to
my eyes and to the life of my sons without the prompting of some god'
(1612-14, Kovacs' translation).

On pp. 75-76. In the section dedicated to inherited curses in the
Oresteia, I miss a mention of the terrible detail of  Ag. 235-37: by
ordering his attendants to gag Iphigeneia, Agamemnon prevented her from
uttering a <greek>fqo/ggon a)rai=on oi)/kois</greek>. This ominous cry
(not necessarily an articulated curse, as Fraenkel points out) could
have given new strength to the <greek>gona\n a)rai=on</greek> (Ag.
1564) that cannot be expelled from the house of the Atreidae.

S.-R.'s book, despite some minor shortcoming, must be regarded as a
relevant contribution to the studies on tragic concepts about moral
inheritance, and will be useful both to students of Greek tragedy and
to scholars interested in broader religious and philosophic questions.


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Notes:


1.   At p. xiii n. 1 S.-R. mentions some classic treatments of problems
relating to causation, familial interaction and decision making in
tragedy: E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley 1951: A.
Lesky, 'Decision and Responsibility in the Tragedy of Aeschylus', JHS
86, 1966, 78-85 (= E. Segal, ed., Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy,
Oxford 1983, 13-23); H. Lloyd-Jones, 'The Guilt of Agamemnon', CQ 12,
1962, 187-199 (= Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy. The Academic Papers of
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford 1990, 283-299); K. J. Dover, 'Some
Neglected Aspects of Agamemnon's Dilemma',  JHS 93, 1973, 58-69 (=
Greek and the Greeks, Oxford-New York 1987, 135-150).

2.   I have noticed only: p. 2 n. 3 <greek>poih/sis</greek>; for
<greek>poi/hsis</greek> (bis); p. 62 <greek>La/ou</greek> and p. 101
<greek>La/iou</greek> for <greek>Lai+/ou</greek>; p.143
<greek>ti/mhn</greek> and <greek>ti/mh</greek> for
<greek>timh\n</greek> and <greek>timh/</greek>.

3.   M. West, 'Ancestral Curses', in Sophocles revisited. Essays
Presented to Sir H. Lloyd-Jones, edited by J. Griffin. Oxford 1999,
31-45.

4.   JHS  85, 1965, 42-55.

5.   CJ  78, 1982, 1-23.

6.   GIF  50, 1998, 131-184 (= S. Timpanaro, Contributi di Filologia
greca e latina, a cura di E. Narducci et al. Firenze 2006, 39-90).

7.   See L'ideologia del potere. Ricerche su Eschilo, Torino 1978, and
the Introduction to V. Di Benedetto et al., Eschilo. Orestea, Milano
1999 (2nd ed.) , 96-140.

8.   SemRom  5.1, 2002, 17-49.

9.   REG  81, 1968, 5-39.