Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and His Fellow Tragedians: In Honour of Alexander F Garvie

322 Pages·2006·2.162 MB·English

by  Douglas Cairns, Vayos Liapis

DionysalexanDros
Essays on Aeschylus and his fellow tragedians
in honour of
Alexander F. Garvie
Editors
Douglas Cairns
and

Vayos Liapis
Contributors
Jean Bollack, Douglas Cairns, Vittorio Citti,
Christopher Collard, Elizabeth Craik, P.E. Easterling,
Malcolm Heath, Martin Hose, Pierre Judet de La Combe,
Vayos Liapis, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, A.J. Podlecki,
David B. Robinson, Scott Scullion, Alan H. Sommerstein,
Oliver Taplin, Martin West
The Classical Press of Wales
First published in 2006 by
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© 2006 The contributors
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CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction Douglas Cairns and Vayos Liapis ix
A.F. Garvie: List of publications xv
1. Aeschylus’ Persai – the entry of tragedy into the celebration 1
culture of the 470s?
Oliver Taplin (Magdalen College, Oxford)
2. Aἰσχύλος μεγαλοφωνότατος 11
A.J. Podlecki (University of British Columbia)
3. King and Demos in Aeschylus 31
Martin West (All Souls College, Oxford)
4. Nineteen notes on Aeschylus, Agamemnon 41
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Christ Church, Oxford)
5. Tragic persons in pieces, in fragments at first, and lastly 49
in Choephori 211
Christopher Collard (The Queen’s College, Oxford)
6. Some remarks on methods of critics and editors of Aeschylus 63
from the 17th to the 19th century
Vittorio Citti (Università degli Studi di Trento)
7. Prometheus Bound: drama and enactment 79
Jean Bollack (Université de Lille III)
8. Vaticinium post eventum and the position of the Supplices in 91
the Danaid Trilogy
Martin Hose (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich)
v
Contents
9. Virtue and vicissitude: the paradoxes of the Ajax 99
Douglas Cairns (University of Edinburgh)
10. The death of Oedipus and what happened next 133
P.E. Easterling (Newnham College, Cambridge)
11. Stars and heroines in Euripides’ Helen (Helen 375–85) 151
David B. Robinson (University of Edinburgh)
12. An instance of Euripidean ‘modernism’: Orestes 1–3 173
Pierre Judet de La Combe (Université de Lille III)
13. The opening of Euripides’ Archelaus 185
Scott Scullion (Worcester College, Oxford)
14. Ghosts, wand’ring here and there: Orestes the revenant in Athens 201
Vayos Liapis (Université de Montréal)
15. Rape and consent in Athenian tragedy 233
Alan H. Sommerstein (University of Nottingham)
16. The ‘social function’ of tragedy: clarifications and questions 253
Malcolm Heath (University of Leeds)
17. Tragedy as treatment: medical analogies in Aristotle’s Poetics 283
Elizabeth Craik (University of St Andrews)
Index rerum 301
Index locorum 305
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors would like to thank Dr Anton Powell and Mr Ernest Buckley for
seeing this volume through to publication with consideration and efficiency,
and Ms Catherine Émond for all her hard work on the Index Locorum. As
for so much else, we are grateful to the honorand for his collaboration in
producing the introduction and the list of publications.
DLC Edinburgh
VL Montréal
February 2006
vii
INTRODUCTION
Alex Garvie retired in 1999 after a career which spanned 39 years in the
Departments of Greek and Classics in the University of Glasgow and saw
him rise from Assistant Lecturer in 1960 to Professor of Classics in 1998.
His seventieth birthday in 2004 was the occasion for the editors, both former
pupils, to assemble in his honour this collection of essays by a selection of
those who share our admiration for Alex’s scholarship and our affection and
gratitude for his warmth, humanity, and dedication as friend, collaborator,
and teacher. Our title (after Cratinus) reflects how inextricably twined are
the name of Alex Garvie and his principal field of study, the Dionysiac genre
of Greek tragedy, in the international community of classicists.
Alex was born in Edinburgh in 1934 and received his secondary education
at George Watson’s College. It was here, in the second form, that he first
encountered ancient Greek, when the classics master, John Penman, one
day announced that a select band of pupils, including Alex, would be giving
up science and beginning Greek. Whether they wanted to do so or not was
irrelevant, and in those simpler days parents were not consulted in such
matters. Alex did what he was told, and has never regretted it. He recalls,
‘Even by the standards of the late 1940s Penman’s teaching methods were
probably old-fashioned, but enormously effective – lots of unison chanting
of declensions and principal parts, with the right hand indicating the accents
(different gestures signified the acute and the circumflex), and with the left
hand reserved for the iota subscript.’ Alex then entered the University of
Edinburgh, from which he graduated with first-class Honours in Classics in
1955. A particular influence at this stage was the then newly arrived Professor
of Greek, A.J. Beattie. It was Beattie, too, who first introduced Alex to foreign
travel in general and modern Greece in particular, when he led a party of four
classics students on a three-week tour of that country in 1953.
At Beattie’s suggestion, Alex applied for and won a scholarship to Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge. Before he could take it up, however, his
academic career was interrupted by two years’ National Service in Germany
and Cyprus. The army taught him two things: to type and to speak modern
Greek, both essential skills for his role as an interpreter during his period
on Cyprus. These were, to say the least, turbulent times on the island, but
Alex looks back with fondness on the filoxenia which persisted despite
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the hostilities. His army days over, he went up to Cambridge in 1957. For
the first two years he lived in college; but in the third he had the unique
privilege of lodging with Mrs Frances Cornford, widow of F.M. Cornford
and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. As was normal for Scottish graduates
in those days, he took a second first degree, achieving firsts in both parts of
the Classical Tripos. As a graduate, he could in fact have by-passed Part I, but
after National Service it seemed a good idea to brush up on the fundamentals,
and a powerful incentive was the promise of money to go to Greece or Italy
if one got a first. His college supervisors were H.T. Deas and G.T. Griffith.
Alex greatly admired the former for his learning, as well as for the endless
trouble he took with the supervision of his students. Griffith he remembers
as a distinguished historian and a kind, courteous, and patient teacher.
According to Alex, Griffith ‘remarked to me early on that “some people are
natural historians”, and it was clear to me from the context that I was not one
of that happy band. But he never held it against me.’
As a Cambridge undergraduate, Alex had been inspired and enthused by
D.L. Page’s lectures on Greek textual criticism, which were based on Aeschylus’
Persae. It was Page who suggested that Alex embark on PhD research on the
dating of the Suppliants. Page himself was his supervisor, a source of invalu-
able critical guidance and much-needed moral support, both then and later.
This research would later bear fruit as Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and trilogy
(Cambridge, 1969). But Alex never formally completed his PhD, since he had
already secured employment as Assistant Lecturer in Greek at the University
of Glasgow in 1960, one of the first appointments made by the new Professor
of Greek, A.W. Gomme’s successor, D.J. Allan.
Alex was to remain at Glasgow for the rest of his career, inspiring genera-
tions of undergraduates with his lectures on Greek epic, lyric, and tragedy.
Students soon recognized him as a teacher with a rare combination of love
for his subject and concern for his students. Simultaneously, they would learn
that behind his apparently austere, Scottish Presbyterian demeanour was
a man with a mischievous sense of humour, a master storyteller who made
every lecture a voyage of discovery and left audiences in rapt anticipation of
the next, thrilling instalment. At the higher levels, in the Honours class of
Greek, students were introduced to the full riches and rigours of his scholar-
ship. His typed handouts on Aeschylus’ Suppliants – and this was in the days
before word-processing and photocopiers, long before handouts became the
must-have accessory that they are today – gave a line-by-line commentary and
full bibliography on every significant interpretative issue in the play. These
notes were well on their way to becoming a full scholarly commentary; but
this was also in the days before it became obligatory for one’s every academic
thought to result in publication.
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Introduction
Graduate students were rare at Glasgow for most of Alex’s career, but those
who were fortunate enough to be supervised by him will never forget the expe-
rience. Like many good supervisors, Alex is a formidable critic of undeveloped
ideas and a meticulous diorthōtēs of sloppiness and error, but always encour-
aging and never merely negative. Where he saw quality, he would encourage
its publication, and he generously acknowledged his students’ influence in his
own published works. Most characteristic of his supervision, however, was his
appetite for debate: hours could pass in discussion of issues both great and
small, as arguments on both sides were refined and reformulated, always to the
benefit of the student, and sometimes, one would like to believe, even to Alex’s
own – though he is a tenacious and vigorous debater, and he does not give in
easily. All of these discussions would be conducted over tea and biscuits from
Alex’s private supply and characterized by the lingering aroma of pipe smoke.
This aroma (DLC can confirm) never quite left Alex’s office, despite the
efforts of those who sought to make it fit for the occupation of a non-smoking
successor. That successor remained, until his own departure, comforted and
inspired by this Proustian reminder of a great teacher’s presence.
Aside from his teaching, Alex had a full and busy career in departmental
and faculty administration at Glasgow, serving (among many other duties)
not only as Head of Classics, but also as Admissions Officer for the Faculty
of Arts. He also spent three separate periods as a Visiting Professor in
North America (as Gillespie Professor at the College of Wooster, Ohio, at
the Ohio State University, and at the University of Guelph, Ontario). The
international community of classicists will remember his six years as editor of
Classical Review, to be followed by seventeen years’ service, first as secretary,
then as chairman of the Classical Association Journals Board.
It is, however, as a researcher, and in particular as the author of one
seminal monograph and a series of learned and authoritative commentaries,
that Alex has made his greatest contribution to the international classics
community. The foremost quality of all Alex’s publications, whatever their
form, is the primacy of interpretation. Though insistent, both in his teaching
and in his published works, on such traditional methods of scholarship as
textual criticism and metrics, he has similarly impressed on his students and
exemplified in his own writings the conviction that the aim of all scholarly
methods is the understanding of the text. A recurrent observation in reviews
of his publications is the excellence of their literary analysis, a product of his
deep and manifest belief that the interpretation of classical literature matters
because understanding the life and thought of other civilizations enlarges the
life and thought of our own.
Alex made his entry on the academic scene not, as often happens, with
a whimper but with a bang. His monograph on Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and
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Douglas Cairns and Vayos Liapis
trilogy (CUP 1969) marshalled a vast array of arguments (on language and
style, the role of the Chorus, and possible reflections of the contemporary
historical milieu) to demonstrate that the re-dating of the Supplices to the
460s (the result of the discovery of a didascalic notice on a scrap of papyrus)
should not have sent the shockwaves it did throughout the scholarly world.
To quote from Alex’s own preface (p. vi), this masterly work sought ‘to use
the papyrus as a starting-point for a re-examination of the evidence for the
traditional view that the style and structure of the Supplices are archaic and
immature’, and considered ‘whether that view may not to a large extent be
based upon the preconceived notion that the play is early’. Preconceived
notions, especially in the guise of textbook wisdom, are notoriously hard to
eradicate, but Alex adroitly showed that the Supplices in fact ‘fits very well
among the surviving plays of Aeschylus’ maturity’. Its apparently archaic
traits are perfectly at home in a play of the 460s and can be explained by
internal, artistic criteria. The book is rounded off by a dauntingly learned and
judicious, if ultimately agnostic, discussion of Aeschylus’ lost Danaid trilogy;
here, the evidence for earlier treatments of the myth is minutely scrutinized,
and possibilities for reconstruction are thoroughly explored. Alex’s first book
was deservedly hailed by critics as a solid and important piece of work, and
has been essential reading on the Supplices ever since.
It is, however, the full-scale commentary on Aeschylus’ Choephori
(Clarendon Press, 1986) that undoubtedly constitutes Alex’s magnum
opus. Based on D.L. Page’s Oxford text, the 300-page commentary displays
the qualities that one had by that time come to associate with Alex’s work:
an uncanny feeling for the intricacies of Aeschylean idiom, an enviable
competence in a large variety of topics (from religion and ethics to stagecraft
and metrics), and a wonderful talent for conveying tremendous amounts
of specialist information in concise and crystal-clear style. Not the least
of the volume’s attractions is the 50-page, tersely written, and densely
argued Introduction. Its section on the pre-Aeschylean mythic tradition
concerning Agamemnon’s murder and Orestes’ revenge is a classic in its
own right, an exemplary survey encompassing both literary and pictorial
evidence. A section on the Choephori itself explores its function within
the trilogy, sets the parameters for the appreciation of Orestes’ tragedy, and
offers a typically learned and sensitive literary evaluation. The Introduction
culminates in an outstanding section on stagecraft and an account of the
textual transmission. Naturally, this book makes considerable demands on
even the most seasoned student of Greek drama, and no casual reader will
have the stamina to venture into the wide gamut of disciplines over which
the author displays such command on almost every page. However, the work
most assuredly repays close study, and is an indispensable vademecum for any
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