Images of Authority: Papers Presented to Joyce Reynolds on the Occasion of her 70th Birthday

A collection of twelve essays by female scholars published in 1989 in honour of Joyce Reynolds. Topics range across Greek and Roman archaeology, history, literature, philosophy and reception, all bound by a focus on 'authority'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701222

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WOMEN, MARRIAGE AND DEATH IN THE DRAMA OF RENAISSANCE CRETE

1. An overview

In raising some preliminary questions related to the presentation and representation of women, marriage and death in the drama of Renaissance Crete, my aim is not to attempt an exhaustive analysis, nor to uncover ‘realities’, but rather to introduce three plays to a non-specialised readership from new perspectives, and to indicate how they deal in their own ways with conflicts that are both particular to Crete and of potentially wider relevance.¹ I shall also infer that the exclusion of Cretan drama from the acknowledged literary canon of the European Renaissance is due not to aesthetic criteria, but to Eurocentrist tendencies to prioritise western ‘masterworks’. What happens when Renaissance literature moves from the centre to the margins? Cretan dramatists, although composing for noble patrons and educated bourgeois audiences (S. Alexiou 1952, 351–422; Bancroft-Marcus 1983, 47–76), drew also from their own traditions and experiences in adapting Italian models. This makes their works distinctively fresh and less artificial than many of their Italian counterparts. A large number enjoyed wide diffusion in popular printed chapbook form throughout the Greek-speaking world after the Fall of Crete during the period of Ottoman rule, although by that time they had fallen into disfavour with the intellectual elite (S. Alexiou 1980, (ρ′-ρι′). Cretan drama did not become part of the Greek literary canon until the 1880s, when the demoticist quest for a national’ language was taking over from adherents of καθαρεύουσα (purist Greek) as the established medium for literary expression (Tziovas 1986, 213–28). Today, Cretan drama is celebrated as a major stage in the demoticist canon, as a vital link between Byzantine and modern literature, and as a monument of ‘national literature’; but its wider significance as forged from the margins, as a blend from interacting cultures of East and West, has passed largely unrecognised. If it owed some inspiration to popular culture, as can be shown (M. Alexiou in Holton (ed.), forthcoming), it also passed back into folklore in the form of folk reworkings of literary texts as popular drama, public verse declamations, sung performances and wondertales (A. Politis 1982; Puchner 1982; M. Alexiou 1985). Condemned by most critics as unworthy of scholarly attention, this unusual Nachleben has an important bearing on the social aspects of literary reception and transmission in a culture where poetry has always played a prominent public role, and where oral traditions have remained vibrant. In this way, Cretan drama can provide a good starting-point for the study of interaction between orality and literacy on the interstices of East and West.

My task is not easy. Perhaps that is the major reason why I am honoured to contribute the present paper to Joyce Reynolds’ Festschrift on the occasion of her seventieth year. She taught me, in the best Newnham classical tradition, to pay attention to detail, to have respect for texts, and to pass on one’s learning to the next generation. If I have departed from classical antiquity in my research and studies, her own careful work in important fields considered marginal by some has proved inspirational for me.

Very few histories of the Renaissance acknowledge the existence of poetry and drama produced on the island of Crete during the period of Venetian rule (1204–1669), and there are virtually no readable translations.² The lack of acceptable translations is a symptom, rather than the cause, of their neglect by European scholars. Greek scholars too have unwittingly contributed to the marginalisation of Cretan literature by over-emphasising its ‘national’ character. Fortunately, there are signs of change: a new edition of the plays of George Chortatsis, with parallel Greek text and English translation, will shortly be published, as will a collection of historical and literary studies on the Cretan Renaissance.³

To sketch in the relevant background: the island of Crete, with a past stretching back to Minoan times, was always a prize possession as commercial entrepot between East and West, conveniently situated near Egypt and the coastal cities of North Africa. Part of the Roman and Byzantine Empires until the Arab conquest in the early ninth century, she was regained by the Byzantines in 961 only to pass after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 to the Venetians, who ruled her until the Ottoman conquest of 1669. She did not become part of the Greek nation-state until 1908.⁴ Such a checkered history is not unknown in the islands of the Aegean, a veritable mosaic of linked but differing cultures and histories; but it was only on the commercially important islands of Crete and Cyprus that any considerable body of ‘literature’ emerged from around 1400. Linguistically, the Cypriot and Cretan texts are important because they show, for the first time since classical antiquity, the systematic refinement of local dialect as a literary means of expression. It is an indication of increasing literacy across a wide range of functions that on Crete all kinds of texts, from last testaments and legal documents to high tragedy, marked the break with the learned tradition of Byzantium by employing local dialect in a different graphical system – the Latin alphabet written according to the rules of Italian phonology (Bakker and van Gemert 1977; Vincent 1980, ξδ′-ο′). Drama flourished on Crete from around 1570 until the Ottoman conquest of 1669, with an extant legacy of three urban comedies, two pastoral comedies, two tragedies, and one religious play.⁵ It has been plausibly suggested that since educated men of both Cretan and Veneto-Cretan families tended to be bilingual in Greek and Italian, while their wives spoke only Cretan Greek, the need to entertain the wives of the educated nobility and bourgeoisie contributed in a very real sense to the development of a native Cretan drama alongside the more conventional but artificial exercises in Tuscan, Italian, Latin and classical Greek fostered by the (all-male) literary academics (Bancroft-Marcus 1983, 27–8).

2. Marriage and death: pastoral and tragedy

The plays I want to focus on initially are George Chortatsis’ pastoral comedy, Panoria and his tragedy, Erofili. Very little is known for certain about the author, but his texts, in common with others of the Cretan Renaissance, show close familiarity with Italian literature.

There is no known model for Chortatsis’ Panoria, but it is based on the genre of Italian pastoral tragi-comedy typified by Giambattista Guarini’s Pastor Fido.⁶ Probably composed around 1587 for performance at the villa of Chortatsis’ noble patron, Marc-Antonio Viaro, a Hellenised Venetian, on the occasion of nuptial celebrations for his sisters, its plot seems eminently appropriate: two young shepherdesses, Panoria and Athousa, are intent on refusing the advances of their love-sick swains, Gyparis and Alexis, preferring to lead a life of independence, hunting and running wild on Mount Ida. Panoria defies her father’s wish that she observe social conventions and accept the match with Gyparis. Eventually, thanks to the machinations of the elderly match-maker, and the intervention she arranges through the Priest of Aphrodite at the Nereid’s Cave, Eros shoots his dart at the rebellious girls, who instantly succumb: the play ends with a double wedding.

It is my contention that Chortatsis transforms this pretty pastoral plot in a subtle but ironic commentary on prevailing conventions of love and marriage, rather as Mozart transforms the banal misogyny of Da Ponte’s libretto for Cosi Fan Tutte into an exploration of the manipulation of female emotion. First of all, for a Cretan audience ‘Mount Ida’ is no remote, idyllic place but a familiar mountain, and therefore inhabited by Chortatsis with credible shepherds and shepherdesses, a weak father and above all by a manipulative match-maker. Appropriately, the language is a modified form of west Cretan dialect, in contrast to the predominantly east Cretan of his urban comedy, Katzourbos, with its large number of Venetian loan words, and the more elevated Cretan of his tragedy, Erofili. Throughout the play the idealised world of the four young people is ironically juxtaposed with the scheming social awareness of the father and matchmaker, much as the urban idealisation of pastoral life is undermined by the cunning artifices of the country folk. Of the young people, the women come out best. Gyparis and Alexis can do nothing but drool after the girls, threaten constantly to kill themselves (they do not), and utter love-lorn speeches in the comic parody of Petrarchan style. The notion of idyllic love is thereby subverted as successfully as in Katzourbos, where the glutton servant repeatedly undermines his master’s love-sick protestations by transposing them to a different context – food. The two girls, above all Panoria, put up a spirited and well-argued case against the conventional life of marriage, childbirth and domesticity; both give in at the end only after Eros’ darts have drugged them into submission. On the surface, the denouement is effected by the conventional Renaissance deus ex machina device of Eros and Aphrodite; but they act in collusion with the Nereids, who are drawn from local popular belief. To this day, Mount Ida (‘Psiloritis’) is the haunt of supernatural female creatures, called Niraides, who love to entice young men and women into injudicious matches. Moreover, the terms in which the high priest of Aphrodite is addressed and makes his response remind us of an Orthodox priest (IV.iv). In this way, Chortatsis succeeds in appropriating, familiarising – and deconstructing – a conventional artifice of pastoral poetry.

It is Panoria’s father, Giannoulis, and the match-maker Frosyni who most successfully undermine the ideal they preach to the young. Frosyni first comes on stage in I.iii, reminiscing on how many men she has seduced in the past. Her admission that she is still attracted by handsome young men is overheard by Gyparis, who has just confided in portentous tones his adoration of Panoria to his friend Alexis. Gyparis’ asides undermine Frosyni’s vain hopes that make-up and love philtres can hide her age; then follows a dialogue in which she promises to tame Panoria to his will – for the price of ‘a good cup of milk’. He innocently (?) undertakes to return her favour not only with milk and cheese but also with λουκάνικο κι απάκι (‘sausage and black pudding’, a figurative expression for sexual intercourse, cf. AG ἀλλᾶς), giving a vague promise of additional financial reward when she secures Panoria for him. In the next scene, she soliloquises on women’s wiles and artifices in comments which undermine, from a woman’s perspective, not only men’s idealisation of female charms, but also the play’s ostensible premise as expressed by the Goddess of Joy (Χαρά), who promised in her Prologue to the weary inhabitants of Rethymnon a welcome escape from urban cares into the ‘natural’ beauties of the countryside.

Giannoulis, Panoria’s father, first appears in II.i. A jaded old man, he soliloquises on the bliss of being a widower: his own wife was a shrew, more obstinate than his goats, cows or mares; she couldn’t be bothered to work or cook but, like all women, was always demanding sex (λουκάνικο κι απάκι) when her man was worn out. In the very next scene, he lectures his daughter, Panoria, on the beauties and duties of wifehood, as exemplified by his own wife, Panoria’s mother, whom he now declares to have been a paragon of virtue. Panoria pays little attention, but packs him off to milk the goats, after cajoling him into making nice white cheeses for the next meal, so that she and Athousa (who are off on yet another hunting expedition) can nibble at them and sing him his favourite songs. Panoria’s protestations against marriage in III.i are followed by a pious lecture from Frosyni on marital bliss and conjugal love, and how wonderful it will be to bring forth a daughter! The most boring part of it, says Panoria, leaving Frosyni alone to plot her revenge by means of magic and drugs. In III.iii, Frosyni is joined by Giannoulis. She talks him into forcing Panoria to accept the marriage: no dowry will be needed, but she hopes to get paid something for her labours. Their cynicism is accentuated by sexual innuendoes expressed indirectly – and very comically – throughout the scene by means of vegetal and animal imagery. Frosyni repels Giannoulis’ advances and mocks his professed virility, but entices him at the end of the scene into the sheep-pen so that he can ‘fill her bucket with cream’.⁷ The double-entendres are oblique enough to have passed unnoticed by polite female society in the audience, but successfully undermine the elders’ alleged values of chastity and marriage. What Frosyni and Giannoulis cannot accept is not so much Panoria’s scorn for Gyparis’ suit, but her obstinate rejection of any kind of marriage (I see no evidence, as suggested by Bancroft-Marcus 1983:31, that Panoria is ‘on the point of yielding’ in IV.iv.39–44: she merely acknowledges the fidelity of Gyparis’ suit, while reasserting her opposition to marriage in general). By the end of the play, when Eros’s darts have injected their poison into the young women’s hearts, we are in no doubt that ‘happy marriage at the end’ has been bought at the cost of the women’s wit and intellect, so tragi-comically subjugated by the deus ex machina.

Chortatsis’ pastoral comedy succeeds in passing as a celebration of marriage and in breaking the conventions: he had to please his patron in order to get paid, but at the same time he playfully underscores the artificiality of the exercise. The Prologue, spoken by the Goddess Χαρά (Joy), promises relief from urban toils. The play offers instead a humorous deconstruction of the idealisation of love and marriage, and of the innocence and purity of rural Arcadia. In the Dedication, the author indicates his own state of penury if Panoria is not well received with gifts and money by his patron. Addressing Panoria as his elder daughter, he begs her to approach his patron boldly, and not to feel humiliated because she is a mere shepherdess, while her younger sister, Erofili, is of royal birth, for she will reap marriage in the end (χαρά), whereas Erofili will reap death (Χάρος) (Dedication 53–4). In this way he spells out the similarity of theme in both plays – woman as object and currency of exchange in marriage and death. His two daughters, Panoria and Erofili, will bring him, as author and father, fame and money. Chortatsis must have been working on both tragedy and comedy at the same time. There is a further and more immediate irony in the juxtaposition of the Dedication’s promise to dress up Panoria and send her to seek her (and the author’s) fortune in the town with his patron, and the Prologue’s promise to afford care-worn Rethymniots an idyllic escape to a mountain paradise.

Erofili was probably performed in 1588. Loosely based on Giraldi’s tragedy Orbecche (1541), it tells the story of secret love and marriage between Erofili, daughter of King Filogonos of Memphis in Egypt, and Panaretos, who has been brought up as an orphan since childhood in Filogonos’ palace alongside Erofili, ‘as though brother and sister’ (I.i. 150–2, cf. IV.ii), but has proved his worth and virtue by becoming Filogonos’ bravest soldier and trusted general. Half way through the play (III.iii), the Ghost of Filogonos’ elder brother intervenes to inform the audience – somewhat like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father – that he has been murdered by Filogonos, and is now determined to exact vengeance on his next-of-kin by extinguishing the family line. Sure enough, Filogonos soon discovers the secret union between his daughter and his favourite, and his fury knows no bounds. He watches in psychopathic glee as he has Panaretos hacked into pieces with a dagger in the palace dungeon, having first cut out his tongue in order to deny him the luxury of lamenting his fate with dignity. This charming event is narrated by a Messenger to the Chorus of Women. Then the King pretends to Erofili that he has forgiven all, and offers as proof a conciliatory wedding-gift: a silver bowl from which she is bidden to remove the cover only to find the dismembered head, hands and heart of Panaretos, together with the blood-stained dagger. In the next scene, after a long and elaborate lament over Panaretos’ remains, Erofili stabs herself with the dagger that dismembered Panaretos. In the final scene the Chorus of Women, seeing Filogonos unrepentant for his act, rush on him and kill him, probably stabbing him with the same dagger. The Ghost of his murdered brother drags him down to Hell. The play’s prologue is spoken by Χάρος ( = Death), while the five acts are interspersed with four interludes, adapted from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.

The play has been variously interpreted – as a typical Renaissance tragedy of blood and horror, as a tragic but static love-story, as an imitation of Giraldi’s Orbecche without depth of character or dramatic tension. What most critics have missed to date is its subtle and lyrical exploration of the tragic dimensions of love and death. Point-counterpoint, it presents the two opposing worlds of Filogonos and Erofili.⁸ As Filogonos tells us in II.1i, he has hitherto loved his daughter too passionately and possessively to want to relinquish her to another man, but concerns of state now dictate that he arrange her marriage to one of the Persian princes with whose kingdom Egypt is currently at war. He thereby sacrifices her interests in order to secure his kingdom. He is not moved by Erofili’s arguments later in the play about Panaretos’ bravery in battle on his behalf, nor even by Panaretos’ delayed revelation that he is of royal blood, the son of King Thrasymachos, Filogonos’ closest ally in the past and victim of their common foes, the Persian kings, to one of whom Filogonos now intends to marry his daughter. Despite his protestations of devotion to his daughter (II.i) and respect for noble blood (IV.iv.224–33), Filogonos is driven by αποκοτιά (daring, or the will to power), to whom he pays tribute in III.v. Αποκοτιά, a keynote theme-word throughout the play, shifts ambivalently from positive to negative, depending on the gender of speaker and addressee. Whereas Filogonis is driven by crass materialist and political considerations, Erofili affirms that true nobility is shown by spirit and action, not by wealth or birth, arguing her case with courage, consistency and intelligence (IV.iv.224–33).

The opposition between the male and female worlds mirrors that of Crete and the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century. Bancroft-Marcus, in an extensively documented paper, has demonstrated that the mythical setting of the play in ancient Memphis (before its fall to the Persians in 525 BC, when Cambyses, son of Cyrus the Great, conquered Egypt) parallels the position of Crete during the Turco-Persian wars (1578–90) which followed the Veneto-Turkish war of 1570–3. Memphis, she argues, is a symbol of past glory, but suggests also Crete’s vulnerability to the rival claims of Venice and the Ottoman Empire (Charos’ Prologue). Further, she points out that the name of Memphis’ ruler may be associated indirectly with the Ottoman Turk, for Chortatsis’ ‘Filogonos’ replaces the name of ‘Sulmone’ (= Suleiman) in Giraldi’s Orbecche. Finally, reference is made in the play to the custom of ensuring succession to the throne by executing rival brothers (III.iii.277–82). This was no mere literary topos in the sixteenth century (despite the parallel functions of the ghosts in Erofili and Hamlet, mentioned above). Suleiman the Magnificent had executed his two elder sons in 1553 and 1561, so that his favourite son, Selim, could reign. Murad III, in 1573, executed his own brothers to ensure an untroubled reign. If the play was first conceived in the 1570s, it is hard to believe that Chortatsis did not have these events in mind. At the end of his reign (1595), Murad III executed no less than 19 of his sons to ensure the succession of his favourite, Mehmed III. His numerous concubines – the boys’ mothers – were made to look on, lamenting their destiny. Since the Erofili was revised in the same year (1595) for production in Iraklion, it is hard not to see an oblique reference to these events in the closing words of the Chorus of Women (Bancroft-Marcus 1984):

Ω, όσα κακορρίζικους, πόσα λωλούς να κράζου

τυχαίνει κείνους, απού ’δω κάτω στη γη λογιάζου,

πως είναι καλορρίζικοι, κι εις τ’ άστρα πως πετούσι

για πλούτος, δόξες και τιμές, απού σ’ αυτούς θωρούσι

γιατί όλες οι καλομοιριές του κόσμου και τα πλούτη

μια μόν’ ασκιά’ ναι στη ζωή την πρικαμένη τούτη,

μια φουσκαλίδα του νερού, μια λάβρα, που τελειώνει

τόσα γοργά, όσο πλια ψηλά τσι λόχες τσι σηκώνει

(V.vi.667–74)

O how ill-fated, how crazed must be called

those men, who down here on earth think

that they are well-fated, that to the stars they fly

for wealth, glories, honours people see in them;

because all the good fortunes of the world and its riches

are but a single shadow in this embittered life,

just a water-bubble, a seething fire, pricked

as swiftly as more highly the tongues of flame are licked.

I do not believe that this complex and deeply lyrical tragedy need be interpreted only on the level of an allegory of historical events, however prominent the symbolism of Egypt may have been in this and other works of the Cretan Renaissance (Bancroft-Marcus 1984). Other perspectives remain to be explored, particularly the psychological perception of gender and generational conflicts and differences. It is not a ‘love play’. Despite (or because of?) the tragic ending, the play celebrates the power of woman’s voice and mind, as well as the integrity of her body, even after death, in contrast to male fragmentation, mutilation and dismemberment. The closest personal relationship portrayed is that between Erofili and Nena, her Nurse, who has known of her marriage from the start, followed by that between Erofili and the Chorus. Despite their initial disapproval of her ‘filial error’, they remain staunch to her throughout her confrontation with her father. They alone remain active to the end, and it is precisely Filogonos’ scorn for them as ‘weeping women’ (V.iii.603–6) that causes his downfall. While Erofili grows in intellectual and moral stature, as evidenced throughout by the imagery consistently employed, Panaretos lives in a constant state of vacillation, brave in war but unsure in his personal relationships and with a fragile sense of self. The play opens as he agonises throughout almost two scenes before he can bring himself to confide the secret of his marriage to his friend Karpoforos, the only character who knows the truth about his royal birth. Panaretos has more scenes to himself than any other character in the play (four), but in each he expresses the same doubts and forebodings about Erofili’s faith. The lovers are together in no more than two scenes: about half way through (III.ii), when Erofili responds to his morose self-absorption and threats of suicide with candour and confidence; and at the end (V.iv), as she pieces together, in her long and beautiful lament, the dismembered parts of Panaretos’ body, hacked to pieces by Filogonos’ guards. She then decisively commits the suicide Panaretos has so often threatened, by penetrating her own body with the knife that her father used to penetrate her mutilated lover, and which will soon be used by the women of the Chorus to penetrate the body of Filogonos, already trampled underfoot. Meanwhile, the body of Erofili, intact and beautiful, remains on stage to speak its own (silent and other) presence, not least through the fine laments – traditionally sung by women – performed over her by Nena and Chorus.⁹ As with the generational conflict between Lear and Cordelia, the end can only be death: the woman is defined by her relation to the man, whether father or husband, as an object of exchange. But Erofili is allowed a tragic triumph in transcending spatial and temporal limitations by choosing the manner of her death. If Chortatsis’ Erofili signifies on one level the fate of Crete, her beautiful dead body exercises the same fascination for author, actors and audience as Euripides’ Alkestis or Shakespeare’s Juliet, Desdemona and Cordelia, or even John Ford’s Annabella in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. In many ways Erofili presages Jacobean drama in its transgression of the norm, although the focus remains on the poetry rather than on the spectacle of female death.¹⁰

3. Homo necans or Ανθρωπος Θυσιάζων?

In my comments on the third play, The Sacrifice of Abraham (Η Θυσία του Αβραάμ), I shall concentrate mainly on sources, to argue a rather different point regarding the diversity of the cultural heritage of Cretan literature and its potential contribution towards a fuller understanding of Greek sacrifices. Walter Burkert, in his learned and richly illustrated book Homo Necans: the anthropology of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and myth (1972, tr. 1983), begins from the premise:

It is increasingly difficult to separate Mediterranean, Near Eastern and Eurasian elements [sc. in ancient Greek sacrificial rituals], and to distinguish Greek from pre-Greek. The structures are perhaps too basic to follow ethnic distinctions.

(xxiv:emphases mine).

In stressing the interactions between the prehistoric and ancient Aegean and Near East, Burkert belongs to a long tradition of classicists and others (e.g. Harrison 1903, Nilsson 1940, Thomson 1949, Vermeule 1979, Bernal 1986). However, his last-quoted sentence begs some crucial questions. If ‘ethnic distinctions’ are insufficient to explain comparable phenomena, do the reasons necessarily lie in their ‘basic structures’? What is meant by ‘ethnic’ and ‘basic’, and are we talking about socio-economic, cultural-linguistic or psychological structures? Burkert proceeds to analyse a substantial body of data in the light of the theory that sacrificial myths and rituals evolved from hunter-gathering societies of the palaeolithic era, and that they have their basis in the psychological and biological make-up of the human race. There is no way of proving, or disproving, such a hypothesis; attempts to explain religious practices in reductionist, universalist or archetypalist terms should be met with scepticism, because they fail to take account of cultural diversity on the one hand, and of socio-economic and historical factors on the other. It is no accident that it was Sigmund Freud who laid emphasis on the tenacity and universality of death rituals (1919), while the anthropologists Huntington and Metcalf insist that cultural diversity is nowhere so apparent as where death rituals are concerned (1979). Psychoanalysis and anthropology are at odds in emphasising, respectively, universalism and diversification. As for biology, while agreeing that ritual behaviour is physiologically based, its communicative and performative aspects cannot be ignored (Tambiah 1979); and these are culturally, socially and historically determined. However learned or seductive, attempts to explain the ‘fundamental essence’ of sacrificial rituals and human violence, such as those of Burkert, Girard (1972, tr. 1977), or Scarry (1985), fall prey to the error of interpreting ‘other’ cultures in the light of our own.

A further problem with Burkert’s thesis concerns his conclusion. ‘The modern world,’ he writes, ‘whose pride is the full emancipation of the individual, has gradually allowed the. ritual tradition to break down. At the same time, it has relegated death to the fringes of existence and thought’ (1983, 297). True enough, in general terms; but the statement assumes a unilinear development and character to ‘the modern world’, which is belied both by synchronic comparative anthropological analysis and by diachronic historical and philological studies. Taken to extremes, as is the case with Girard, this line of argument, with its emphasis on the ‘unity of all rites’, can be used to equate ‘primitive’ sacrificial cults based on war and the reciprocal murder of prisoners with nineteenth-century nationalistic myths and their concept of an ‘hereditary enemy’. Girard goes on to state:

To insist on the differences between two myths of this type is in effect to succumb to the mystique of the myths themselves, to turn away from the identical reality residing at the center of each. In both instances the basic function of foreign wars, and of the more or less spectacular rites that accompany them, is to avert the threat of internal dissension by adopting a form of violence that can be openly endorsed and fervently acted upon by all.

(1977, 280, emphases mine)

Quite so: are we then to make no distinction, and no moral judgement, between sacrificial ritual of ‘primitive’ peoples and, say, the Holocaust?

I want now to explore an alternative approach by tracing a familiar sacrifice theme through a series of remarkable but little-known texts, most of them from the eastern Mediterranean area, although by no means restricted to a single ethnic tradition, language or even religion. Since the texts range chronologically from Genesis to folk traditions of the modern era, we shall have the opportunity to test some of Burkert’s assumptions about ‘basic structures’, and to see how the same themes may be differently handled, as well as how similarities and differences can be transmitted across cultural, religious and linguistic boundaries in unexpected ways.

The story of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis (ch. 22) makes no reference to Sara: she is neither informed beforehand of the impending event, nor mentioned at the end in any homecoming. The sacrifice is negotiated throughout only between God, Abraham and Isaak, with God’s merciful reprieve in the form of a surrogate ram. It is on the basis of the Genesis version that the western tradition of mystery plays and dramas from the middle ages and the Renaissance was founded: the sacrifice is a test only of Abraham’s faith in God, and Sara’s role is either ignored, or at most included as a negative example of attempted feminine obstruction. On this western tradition deriving from Genesis, thinkers and scholars, from Kierkegaard and Freud to Girard and Scarry, have in their turn based their discussions of the theme. Our Cretan play is modelled closely on Luigi Grotto’s Lo Isach, first printed in 1586, but possibly performed as early as 1558 (Bancroft-Marcus 1978, 26), one of the first western plays to give Sara an important role, with foreknowledge of Abraham’s intention, albeit as an additional obstacle for him to overcome, and to put the emphasis at the end on Isaak’s homecoming rather than on Abraham’s blind obedience to God. Two inter-related questions arise: where did Grotto get his ideas from, and how