BMCR 2009.02.10, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian

Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Plague and the Athenian Imagination: Drama,
History, and the Cult of Asclepius.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge
University Press, 2008.  Pp. xiv, 209.  ISBN 9780521873451.  $99.00.

Reviewed by Aaron Kachuck, University of Cambridge ([email protected])
Word count:  2467 words
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In 1956, Bernard Knox published a seminal article on "The Date of the
Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles" (AJP 77:133-147) in which he urged 425
BC as the year of that play's production by explicating various
puzzling features of OT within a context of Athenian response to the
waves of plague after 430. Mitchell-Boyask's most recent book, Plague
and the Athenian Imagination, expands Knox's observations to a wider
array of tragedies (Euripides' Hippolytus, Heracles, Phoenissae;
Sophocles' OT, Trachiniae, Philoctetes), to a greater variety of
"political" events, and to a series of general investigations into the
valence of words for sickness (nosos, loimos) in Athenian tragedy.
Observing spikes in the frequency of words for disease in extant
tragedy around particular dates (the plague in 430, the construction of
the Athenian Asclepieion in 420, the oligarchic coup of 411) M-B
attempts to read Athenian drama against the backdrop of these events.
Though much of the work inevitably involves issues of dating, M-B's
primary goal is not strictly speaking historical but rather literary,
insofar as he attempts to revivify various phrases, scenes, characters,
and aspects of tragedy that prior to being subjected to his nose for
nosological allusions had gone unnoticed.  Most pages of this book
contain myriad original interpretative suggestions; my summary focuses
only on what I have taken to be the most central and/or exemplary
interpretive attempts.

M-B begins his book with a short chapter on references to death,
illness, and healing within Greek poetry, mostly with an eye towards
the healing powers of song.  We need not accept M-B's conjecture that
tragedians really envisioned themselves and the masks of tragedy as
actually making the dead "suddenly alive again," that Aeschylus saw
himself as the "only one who has the power to resurrect Agamemnon and
allow him to walk the earth" (12) in order to appreciate M-B's list of
points in Greek literature where singing and healing are closely tied
(14), or to fall in with this notion.  The chapter's most important
discussion, following scholars such as Ruth Padel (regarding the
general connection between medical terminology and tragedy) and Adam
Parry (vis-a\-vis the medical terminology of the Thucydidean plague
narrative), shows how we must do better than "sporadic forays" (16)
into the shared diction of tragedy and the Hippocratic corpus in order
to appreciate the actual resonance of medical references in literature.
This is, of course, what this book will attempt to do.

Chapter 3, the first of the two "Materials" chapters, explores
specifically the uses (and resonances) of the words nosos and loimos in
Greek writings. M-B argues that nosos and loimos, as words that
described painful realities, evoked powerful emotions, especially in
times of plague.  I was impressed by M-B's history of the deployment of
loimos and his discussion of the paired words loimos and polemos
(together with the pairing of nosos and polemos), but was less taken by
his assumption that loimos's relative infrequency can be used as an
indication of its taboo quality, and therefore as an active avoidance
of an especially uncomfortable word. For M-B, the infrequency of the
word means that Plato must "bring himself" to write the word four times
(24), that Demosthenes' use of the word "might have been remarkable" in
its emotional impact (Against Aristogeiton 25.80), and that we should
be impressed that Plutarch "summons up the courage to write it [loimos]
six times." (24) Though the word certainly is rare, M-B has shown not
that there was a "tendency to avoid the word loimos," (24) only that it
didn't get used very often.  M-B is on much safer ground in his
analysis of nosos in tragedy.  M-B provides two incredibly useful
tables of extant Greek tragedies, the year (often, obviously,
conjectured) of their production, and the frequency of nosos in each
play (29-30). These tables are at the core of his thesis that nosos was
on people's minds at particular historical moments (post-430, -420,
-411).  This chapter also offers, in passing, a large number of
insights into nosos in Aeschylus (at some crucial moments in the
Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound) and Aristophanes (hardly at all; maybe,
M-B suggests, because it wasn't a funny word).

M-B's fourth chapter, on the Hippolytus), shows that, even at his most
conjectural, M-B manages to creatively elucidate points often ignored
in scholarship.  His purpose is to show that Euripides' Hippolytus)
(428 BC) hints in unnoticed ways at Athenian preoccupation with
sickness.  His argument focuses on the play's setting in Troezen, its
mention of the Rock of Asclepius, a reading of Hippolytus as an
Asclepius doublet, and the play's reference to the eiresio^ne^) which,
building on recent work on Greek religious festivals such as the
Thargelia, M-B sees as an apoptropaic of loimos)  and limos).  M-B's
challenge here is to see connections between poetry and healing in a
play that has very little language of healing or disease. The chapter's
strongest argument is the postulated connection between Hippolytus and
Asclepius, resting largely on some parallels in their stories,
Hippolytus' death near Asclepius' rock, and later legends that connect
the two.  We should also be grateful to M-B for drawing our attention
to the Rock of Asclepius, which has elicited precious few comments.  By
contrast, although M-B rightly goes beyond Barrett's cynical dismissal
of the play's location as a weak Euripidean attempt at innovation, his
own solution seems inadequate.  M-B explains the setting in Troezen
through a tenuous line of thought that bounces from Pausanias to
Herodotus to conjectures about Troezen-Athenian relations without,
however, discussing the history of these relations, for example
vis-a\-vis Thucydides' descriptions of Athenian ravaging in the Troezen
(2.56.5).  No matter; the sheer number of interesting solutions and
interpretations that M-B offers will inspire repeated readings.

In the book's fifth chapter, M-B builds directly on the work of Knox to
explore the representation of plague in the OT).  Future commentaries
on the play would do well to take note of M-B's analysis of the verb
phthiein/phtinein) throughout the play.  They would also do well to
take an especially careful look at M-B's discussion of the play's use
of nosos) to refer not only in a physical way to the populace of
Thebes, but also, by way of the plague under which Oedipus himself
suffers, to a metaphorical (but oh so real) sickness of the body
politic, a "live" metaphor which will play a central role in M-B's
later chapters.  M-B concludes by speculating on a puzzle in tragic
history: why did the play Aristotle took to be the finest of tragedies
not take the first place (according to the play's second hypothesis)?
M-B soberly acknowledges that we do not have enough evidence to know
precisely why Sophocles was beaten by Philocles, but suggests that, if
we accept Knox's dating of the play to 425, this play's "direct,
unmediated depiction...of a plague when one was ravaging Athens, or had
recently done so...scraped violently at emotional wounds that had
barely had the time to form scabs." (65-66) Though we cannot know for
certain if this is the case, it seems as good a reason as any for the
gap between the play's fifth century loss and its fourth century
apotheosis into tragic stardom.

The sixth chapter fleshes out the resonance of various features of the
Trachiniae by giving that play a production date in between 430 and
425, basing this dating on how powerfully parts of the play read when
assigned this date.  Skeptical readers might cringe at this approach's
apparent circularity (which M-B unashamedly acknowledges), but this
would be an arid criticism, and those who take a leap of faith will be
rewarded by deepened insights into the play's complexities.  After a
useful review of the problems of dating the play, M-B explores the
possibility that Strepsiades' sufferings on his philosophic couch in
Aristophanes' Clouds may parody the sufferings of Heracles on his
death-bed in the Trachiniae (71-74).  Though Dover had indicated that
Strepsiades' pains might be loosely based on tragic language, M-B seems
to be the first to explore seriously and thoroughly the connection with
reference to the Trachiniae.  M-B carefully compares the descriptions
of plague in Thucydides and the descriptions of Heracles' pains in this
play and finds them too similar to be accidental.  Focus is laid on
comparing Thucydides' descriptions of plague-struck genitals and the
emasculation of Heracles (through "chemical castration") and other
figures in tragedy.  Further, M-B attempts to show the transfer of
nosos and death from Nessus to Heracles to Deianeira as "an intuition
of contagious disease." (87) In what seems a diversion from the thesis
of the book (and of the chapter), M-B tangentially (but usefully)
explores the question of whether the play assumes Hercules' eventual
apotheosis.  The chapter concludes by positing that Heracles, in being
"unique among tragic heroes in moving from displaying a metaphorical
nosos, in the form of eros, to a real one" (97), represents a criticism
of imperial Athens, first sick with a nosos-eros for conquest, then by
the real nosos of the plague, in particular connecting this criticism
of Periclean policy with what he (together with Ehrenberg) sees as
Sophocles' discomfort with the execution of the Samian War.  I will
leave it to readers to decide how far they are willing to ascribe such
direct political criticism to Sophoclean drama.

In this seventh chapter, M-B attempts to show a relationship between
the cult of Asclepius (especially the construction of the Asclepieion)
and Attic drama, despite the fact, as he acknowledges, that Asclepius
himself only directly appears as a character in Aristophanes' Wealth.
(105) For M-B, the location of the Asclepieion directly next to the
Theater of Dionysus springs from "deeper associations among drama,
healing and the Athenian polis." (107) He attempts to illuminate these
associations by discussing similarities between the myths of Dionysus
and Asclepius (with a helpful chart on p. 108), tying the two gods
through their potential connections with the Mysteries (109), assorted
testimonia that connect Asclepius with song and performance (110), the
purported (but, as M-B acknowledges with a nod to Mary Lefkowitz,
likely entirely fallacious) connection between Sophocles and the
priesthood of Asclepius (112), the (highly conjectural) seating of the
priests of Asclepius and of the Muses in the layout of the Prohedria
(114), and the close proximity of Asclepieion complexes and theaters in
other Greek cities such as Messenia, Pergamon, Corinth, and, most
importantly, Epidaurus (117-119).  The book's two subsequent chapters
will seek to show how the conceptual, architectural, administrative,
and mythical proximity of the Theater and the Asclepieion plays out in
drama produced after 420.

The eighth chapter is largely a matter of finding or bringing out
allusions to Asclepius and to his temple in two Euripidean plays, the
Phoenissae and the Heracles, that do not mention him or his temple. In
the Phoenissae, there is no plague at Thebes but there is a "bounty of
medical vocabulary," (130) and M-B subjects the play's paeans (songs of
victory/healing) and paeans more generally to a close analysis in order
to unearth such references.  This section also contains an interesting
analysis of the word me^chane^ as used in the sense of "cure".  In the
Heracles, M-B analyzes the relationship between Heracles, sick with
madness, and the body politic, sick with stasis. (123) Specifically,
the purging of the royal household in Euripides is necessary for the
purging of the city, an idea that will be more fully developed
vis-a\-vis its connection to ostracism in the ninth chapter.  And
though this chapter is quite clearly an exercise in "following the
image trail" as a route for a broader interpretation of the text, M-B
does not advocate any ingenious code (a\ la Verrall) by which the
work's puzzles might reductively be solved, but rather seeks to give
voice to a series of nosological resonances that build throughout the
play.

The book's ninth chapter, an expanded version of an article in TAPA 137
(2007), details how Sophocles' Philoctetes uses the language of disease
and health, and what M-B sees as allusions towards the Asclepieion
itself, to explore Athens' responses to the aristocratic stasis of 411.
After briefly discussing Sophocles' decision to empty Lemnos of its
inhabitants, M-B presents his thesis that this play, like the OT, is as
much about Athens as about Lemnos.  He then goes on to show how
references to Asclepius and healing may be read into the play's text in
several ways: (a) a connection between Athena Polias/Hygieia and the
Asclepius cult; (b) a suggestion (after Oliver Taplin and David Wiles)
that Heracles' evocations of Asclepius might have included a stage
motion towards the Asclepieion, and (c) a sense that the language of
ostracism is not unconnected to the language of medical purge.  The
chapter ends by recommending that the Philoctetes, produced in 409, be
read in the context of the law that required every Athenian to take an
oath not to overthrow the democracy, and to do so by the 409 Dionysia
Festival (Andocides 1.97-98).  In particular, M-B calls attention to
the use of verbs of swearing, and explains how this context colors
issues of disease and expulsion in the play.

Regarding the atrocities potentially committed by Athenians at Samos,
M-B says that "There is no evidence, but there is certainly much room
for reasonably informed speculation." (99) This could as easily be said
about much of this work's wide-ranging, impressive, and often
convincing and fruitful speculations regarding a number of tragedies.
In writing this book, M-B had to put aside two fundamental evidential
difficulties.  The first, dating: we don't know the dates of many of
the plays discussed, but M-B takes the plays to be responding to
sickness, assigns them dates where this will work, then uses material
from the play to show how this works.  The second, paucity of sources:
M-B's historical reading of the history of nosos rests on the study of
the word's frequency and its spikes at certain historic points, but we
don't have nearly enough plays for this to be statistically
significant.  These are two leaps that M-B (and just about every person
who writes about tragedy) takes, but most readers will be convinced
that these are leaps worth taking.  M-B has certainly succeeded here in
his project to elucidate the "resonance of the drama in the experience
of the original Athenian audience" (182). This is clearly a book that
could only be written by a seasoned scholar who has spent a great deal
of time with Greek tragedy.  Its observations are so wide-ranging and
comprehensive, the connections it draws so ingenious and unexpected,
that they could only be the product of long engagement with these
texts. Even if they ultimately decide not to side with M-B on many of
his particular readings, students of tragedy, ancient medicine, and
Athenian social and religious history will undoubtedly benefit from
this creative and original book.