The Retrospective Muse: Pathways through Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

By Froma I. Zeitlin and Simon Goldhill

The Retrospective Muse showcases the celebrated work of Froma I. Zeitlin. Over many decades, Zeitlin's innovative studies have changed the field of classics. Her instantly recognizable work brings together anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and an acute literary sensibility to open ancient texts and ideas to new forms of understanding. A selection of her luminous essays on topics still timely today are collected for the first time in a volume that shows the full range and flair of her remarkable intellect. Together, these illuminating analyses show why Zeitlin's work on ancient Greek culture has had an enduring impact on scholars around the world, not just in classics but across multiple fields. From Homer to the Greek novel, from religion to erotics, from myth and ritual to theatrical performance, she expounds on some of the most important works of ancient writing and some of modernity's most significant critical questions. Zeitlin's writing still sheds light on the durable aspects of classics as a discipline, and this book encapsulates her achievement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501772979

Book preview

THE RETROSPECTIVE MUSE

Pathways through Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

FROMA I. ZEITLIN

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

In vivid memory of those dear colleagues

and friends, who inspired and cherished me

throughout the years, now sadly gone.

Jean-Pierre Vernant: 1914-2007

Charles Segal: 1936-2002

Jack Winkler: 1943-1990

François Lissarrague: 1947-2021

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword: A Fromatic Journey by Simon Goldhill

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART 1: EROTICS, MYTH, GENDER

1. Eros Tyrannos

2. Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth

3. Religion and Erotics in the Ancient Novel

4. Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius

PART II: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DIVINE

5. Apollo and Dionysus: Starting from Birth

6. Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter

7. Sacrifices Holy and Unholy in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris

PART III: URBAN MYTHOGRAPHIES: CITIES ON STAGE

8. Staging Dionysus Between Thebes and Athens

9. Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy in Argos

10. Troy and Tragedy: The Conscience of Hellas

11. Aristophanes: The Performance of Utopia in the Ecclesiazousae

PART IV: RECEPTION: LATER ECHOES

12. Radical Theater: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69

References

Index of Ancient Passages

Index of Subjects

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword: A Fromatic Journey

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART 1: EROTICS, MYTH, GENDER

1. Eros Tyrannos

2. Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth

3. Religion and Erotics in the Ancient Novel

4. Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius

PART II: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DIVINE

5. Apollo and Dionysus: Starting from Birth

6. Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter

7. Sacrifices Holy and Unholy in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris

PART III: URBAN MYTHOGRAPHIES: CITIES ON STAGE

8. Staging Dionysus Between Thebes and Athens

9. Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy in Argos

10. Troy and Tragedy: The Conscience of Hellas

11. Aristophanes: The Performance of Utopia in the Ecclesiazousae

PART IV: RECEPTION: LATER ECHOES

12. Radical Theater: Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69

References

Index of Ancient Passages

Index of Subjects

Series Page

Copyright

Guide

Cover

Title

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword: A Fromatic Journey

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Start of Content

References

Index of Ancient Passages

Index of Subjects

Series Page

Copyright

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1. Locrian Ajax raping Cassandra. Tondo of an Attic red-figure cup, ca. 440–430 BC. Kodros Painter

Figure 2.2. Maenad resisting Satyr. Tondo: Attic red-figure kylix, ca. 480 BC. From Vulci. Hieron, signed (potter); Macron (painter)

Figure 2.3. Heracles fighting Nessos (centaur), who holds Deianira aloft. Black figure vase, Munich 1428

Figure 2.4. Ganymede tries to resist Zeus. Attic red figured kylix. Attributed to the Penthesilea Painter. About 475–425 BC

Figure 12.1. A partial view of the seating area on and below the scaffolding for Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 (New York, 1968)

Figure 12.2. Studio photograph by Max Waldman of the Birth Ritual [or Death Ritual] scene in Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 (1968)

FOREWORD

A FROMATIC JOURNEY

Simon Goldhill

It is not often that you can date the beginning of a long friendship to a precise day and time. But I know that I first encountered Froma Zeitlin in person at 5:00 p.m. on the 14th of May 1981, now over 40 years ago. I had already read her seminal paper "The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Myth-Making in the Oresteia."¹ This article is one of the truly revolutionary pieces on Aeschylus. I was at that time finishing my PhD, which became my first book, Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia, and her superb analysis of how the play’s politics of gender interact with mythic models and with the detailed language of the play made Froma’s article an inspirational piece for me, as for many others—and made Froma herself something of a myth in my imagination. It was advertised that she would be giving a paper in London—it was, in fact, her first ever paper in Europe—so, of course, I came down from Cambridge to London to hear it. It was a characteristically high-octane intellectual performance—the adjective fromatic had not yet been coined—and, totally engaged, I asked a couple of questions, and, after the discussion finished, Froma came up to me and said in her now instantly recognisable throaty voice and quizzical stare: You. Who are you? You were the only person who understood my paper. Let’s go and have dinner and talk. Well, I was an ambitious young man, but a man of principle too. Tottenham Hotspur were playing in the FA cup final replay that night, so instead of going off with the brilliant professor whose work I so admired, I sat in a seedy pub on my own and watched the famous Rikki Villa goal.² Which is why I know the date, precisely.

But it is also characteristic of Froma that things did not stop there. She offered to read the first chapter of my thesis, and shortly afterwards, I visited Froma in her house opposite Central Park to discuss Aeschylus—Laura Slatkin and Marilyn Arthur came by too—and five hours later, I stumbled out into the sunlight, and a friendship had taken shape. Froma—she loves to remind me—encouraged my wife to marry me: my future wife, it turned out, had been best friends with Froma’s daughter at school. And I spent many weeks living at Froma’s house in Princeton when, much later, I was a visiting professor there. Yet the point of this story is not to establish my bona fides to write this foreword, nor simply to reminisce fondly. This opening story of a friendship reveals immediately one of the key aspects of Froma’s intellectual life that is in evidence in every chapter of this book. I will call it intellectual generosity. It is a generosity that goes in two directions. First, she collects, nourishes, and inspires a large group of friends and colleagues. She bestows her knowledge and critical flair freely, bringing out the best in others by her interventions and by setting standards of argument and scholarship. She not only introduces people to new ideas and to new friends, but does so with an irresistible gusto. As I found out, age and status are no bar to being picked up and brought into the magic circle. It is, alas, a quality all too rarely in evidence in academia, but for Froma it is a way of life—and a splendid one. But, secondly, she is generous in her openness to new ideas and new people. Classics is not alone in encouraging disciplinary specialization. But Froma is exemplary in how she broadens horizons rather than narrowing a focus. While we can still read commentaries on Greek tragedy that unreflectively rehearse nineteenth-century thinking on language and meaning, to read a Zeitlin article is to be faced by a glittering range of explorative discourses, expertly researched and mobilized: a new and colorful map of comprehension.

The Dynamics of Misogyny piece is paradigmatic. First, it brings to the fore an incisive and politically poised feminist scholarship, which has remained a flagship contribution for many younger scholars. In contrast to Kate Millett or Simone de Beauvoir, who had lambasted the Oresteia for its patriarchal closure—Apollo defends Orestes’ killing of his mother, after all, by declaring the true parent to be the father—Froma’s analysis seeks to understand the play’s rhetoric from within, not in order to diminish the purposiveness of its gender politics, but to locate its specificity within an Athenian cultural milieu.³ What could it actually mean to deny that a mother is a parent? How could such a sentence be put in the mouth of the authoritative oracular god? In order to explore these questions, she opens a perspective on the play’s utilization of a mythic repertoire, a set of cultural stories that are mobilized and manipulated to construct a framework of public language. In this, Froma brought to bear her wide reading in anthropology. Anthropology and classics have a long symbiotic history—it was not by chance that Lévi-Strauss made Oedipus his much contested test-case for structural analysis⁴—but in the 1970s and 1980s this interface was particularly productive.⁵ The French school of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Nicole Loraux were dominant figures, and unlike many of her American colleagues, Froma was attuned to this group of outstanding classicists early, and became intimately connected with it.⁶ Nowadays, it has become standard to understand myth and its divine figures, along with ritual, especially sacrificial ritual, through the models developed in these decades. But Froma’s piece was one of the first to show how a Greek tragedy, a major literary, cultural production, could be fruitfully understood both as drawing on myth’s expressive power in the cultural imaginary, and also as significantly redrafting this power to new purposes within the fifth-century city. This combination of a sophisticated feminist theorization and an anthropologically informed analysis enabled Froma to situate the Oresteia’s gender politics within a cultural history with a richness and insight that changed the scholarly community’s understanding of Aeschylus’ masterpiece.

Dynamics of Misogyny was not Froma’s first contribution to Aeschylean scholarship (nor her last). Back in 1965, she had published "The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia," another article that has robustly stood the test of time.⁷ This piece looks at the language of sacrificial ritual in the trilogy, and shows how pervasive and intricately expressive this language is, especially to communicate the transgressive horror of Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon. Ritual has remained a lode-stone for Froma’s engagement with antiquity. In anticipation of what became a major vector of later scholarly analysis, especially in Paris, Froma recognized that sacrifice was a normative system, integral to the ideological ordering of society, and thus was being manipulated by Aeschylus in a dazzling series of puns and other transgressive imaginations to express the social corruption of violence within society, especially violence committed by a woman against her royal husband. What has given this article its longevity is also a telling marker of Froma’s scholarship. Her understanding of the material working of the language (in this case, dramatic language, displayed before the city in performance) brings together close philological reading with the widest framework of social thought. The article both reveals in detail how the language of this densest of literary plays works, and demonstrates what the social force of such writing is. The philology is illuminated by the anthropology, the anthropological thinking by the linguistic richness and detail. This movement between detailed philological analysis and broad cultural significance has become a trademark of Froma’s writing.

With this already developed set of interests in anthropology, the dynamics of gender, and drama, it is perhaps no surprise that Froma’s work moved towards the politics of identity. Since Froma was also one of the first women, and first Jewish women, to be tenured in an Ivy League Classics Department, there is no doubt a personal history to her scholarly polemics: all scholarship is situated, but especially discussion of the self and its politics. Her first collection of essays, published in 1996, was entitled Playing the Other: Essays on Gender and Society in Ancient Greek Literature, a title taken from another seminal article on drama, a piece which arrestingly captures this fascination with how an understanding of the self is formed, recognized, questioned and challenged. In Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama, Froma offers nothing less than a general theory of Greek tragedy.⁸ She notes first of all that the plays we have are almost all not set in Athens. With the exception of Eumenides, the last play of the Oresteia trilogy—itself set in the far distant past—no other tragedy has Athens as its mise en scène, although it is common for comedies to be set in the city. For tragedy, Thebes is the paradigmatic other of Athens, a city where transgressions of normativity allow us to see the order of Athens, otherwise. What is more, no tragedy is set in the here and now. The closest exception to this rule is again Aeschylus, his Persae, a play that is set a few years earlier, during the Persian invasion of Greece—although the drama is set in Persia. Again, comedy, by contrast, is relentlessly present. Nor, indeed, do we usually get speaking characters on stage who are Athenians. No Athenian speaks in the Eumenides, even when the play is staged there. Theseus, king of Athens, does appear and speak, both disastrously in Hippolytus and more nobly when the plays get closer to the city, as in Oedipus at Colonus.⁹ But Theseus is a king from long ago, before the democracy, although suborned to democracy’s narrative. Once more, comedy in its turn revels in the Athenian man on the street for its heroes and villains. In short, tragedy is enacted at the scene of the other—other places, other times, other people. And it is enacted by people who play characters other than themselves. How, then, can tragedy prove so personally exposing and so engaging as to make its audiences cry, reflect, despair, hope...? How can Oedipus from Thebes—a man who killed his father and married his mother—be offered as a paradigm for all mankind, an idea that Freud most notably adopted? Or as Shakespeare—who knew well—put it: ‘What’s Hecuba to him that he should weep?’. Both actors and audiences share in this strange drama of the other. In Froma’s hands, this tension between the otherness of the scene of tragedy and the personal feelings it evokes becomes the guiding principle of how tragedy works. For her, it is necessary that tragedy’s horrors come from elsewhere; it is a way of getting past the internal censor that would turn our eyes and heads away from scenes that would be too impossible to manage if too closely located in our own lives. And yet, insidiously, powerfully, emotionally, the plays turn out to implicate the audience in self-reflection—to move, to provoke, to engage an audience through and in the drama of the other. And Froma went on to investigate how particular plays do indeed reveal how the self becomes the subject of the drama of the other.

Two Euripidean plays in particular provided the canvas for this analysis of the self, Hippolytus and Ion. Froma’s work on Hippolytus focuses on the precarious self of the young man, Hippolytus, his attempt to construct a model of ‘self-control’ [sophrosune] for himself, and his destructive interaction with his step-mother, Phaedra, whose desire for him is so disruptive to her own sense of moral self.¹⁰ Hippolytus, who strives to alienate himself from the force of sexual desire, is undone by Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual desire, who is insulted by his arrogant chastity, and thus, as a punishment, makes Phaedra passionately want her step-son (which leads to his downfall). Indeed, Hippolytus, as the etymology of his name suggests, is literally undone, pulled apart by his own horses, the horses he exercises after his hunting expedition in the wild. Phaedra, for her part, is a dustropos harmonia, a discordant harmony, as the chorus call women in general (Hippolytus 161). She begins the play wildly calling to go to the wild—to go hunting in the hills, a place where only the men are expected go—but then gives a rational and controlled account of how she has decided to starve herself to death rather than act on the desire the goddess has sent. She is desperate to maintain her self-control. When her nurse, however, reveals Phaedra’s desire to Hippolytus, he rants against women, cursing the whole race of females, and threatens to tell his father, her husband. Phaedra, ashamed, kills herself—chastity intact—but leaves a letter accusing Hippolytus of raping her, a charge that leads to his father cursing him, a curse that leads directly to his death—but he goes to his death preserving his silence about Phaedra’s desire. For Froma, this drama created a wonderfully complex exploration of the failing hopes of self-control, riven by sexual desire. Hippolytus wants chastity, and maintains his honorable silence even unto death—but his pursuit of chastity is marked out as arrogant and misplaced, as is his violent dismissal of all women. In his anger and his youthful self-regard he is far from the self-control he promotes as his own virtue. Phaedra who struggles desperately and vainly against the goddess-sent desire, nonetheless ends up fulfilling the negative female stereotype of destructive deceit in the false letter she writes. The very language of self-control is divided against itself: as Hippolytus sums up the conflict, internal and external, that is destroying him, Self-control she had in deed, although not self-controlled: I that have self-control used it to my ruin (Hippolytus 1034-5). The young man at the juncture of adulthood is a figure whose time of transition sets the values of adulthood at stake; the woman who is a victim of desire struggles not just with controlling desire, but also with locating its very source: how much is it an internal longing, how much an external pressure from a goddess? What is set at stake for the audience is both the whence of desire and the potential for self-control: the violence that desire stimulates—both the disruptive violence to the self and the violence against others—is displayed to the city as an integral but uncontrollable part of human society.

Froma’s reading of Hippolytus has become firmly canonical. It also establishes themes of research that run throughout her work: the transitional narrative of the young man or young woman; the precarity of the self; the representation and self-representation of the female characters of literature; the place of erotics in fiction. Her study of Euripides’ Ion, "Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides’ Ion," adds another fascination, however.¹¹ The design of the self is again concerned with a young man who is struggling to find his identity; in this case—with a profound Euripidean irony—the public identity with which Ion is invested by the end of the play is marked by the lies with which it is veined: his father will not know that it was actually a god who had sired Ion. The play also turns on a moving self-representation of a woman who has been the victim of a violent desire. For all the acts of bitter revelation, the secret of this play remains in place, for some of the play’s characters, at least. As Froma notes of herself, she loves to tease out the mysteries of a text, its hidden lineaments of expressivity. In the Ion, however, the play also dramatizes a hermeneutic riddle in a way which fired her love of uncovering a text’s hidden patterns of signification. The chorus enters and excitedly describes the images on the doors of the temple at Delphi, and the play’s dramatic turning point takes place in a tent in Delphi whose decorations are described at length in the play.¹² How do these decorations speak to the play’s question of Ion’s identity? How do the artistic images fuel the imaging or imagining of the self? Her article on Ion teases out the connections between Ion’s identity and the images with which the play surrounds his search for who he is. Froma’s only monograph—her métier is the long article—is an exploration of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, the central scene of which is the description of the seven shields of the enemies of Thebes, in language which is replete with mythic, symbolic imaging.¹³ She describes this book as the embodiment of her passion to hunt out meaning, to search out, like Oedipus perhaps, the hidden ties of sense and significance.

The treatment of the ecphrasis of the tent in Ion led Froma towards much further work on the representation of works of art in tragedy, summed up incisively in The Artful Eye: Vision, Ecphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre—and gave the spur to the Festschrift published in her honor, Visualizing the Tragic in 2007.¹⁴ It also turned her gaze towards the Greek novel, where coming of age, erotics, and the dynamics of gender were also dominant narrative concerns, along with a self-conscious focus on the aesthetics of narrative and artistic representation—as Froma discussed in her Sather lectures on the Greek novel (the Sathers are the most distinguished series of lectures a classicist can be asked to deliver). So, in "Gardens of Desire in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe: Nature, Art and Imitation, Froma again explored the connections between aesthetics and identity—how the loving descriptions of pastoral scenes in Longus’ funny and sophisticatedly erotic novel contribute to the narrative of the sexual coming of age of the hero and heroine of the story.¹⁵ Typically, this detailed work broadened into a wider discussion of visual culture, through the paradigmatic test-case of Homer, and how this father of Greek literature became a figure of the imaginary from the Hellenistic era into late antiquity. Theater is, of course, the place for looking and creates by definition a spectacular culture, which the playwrights understood and worked with and through (despite Aristotle’s sniffiness about such visual elements of drama). But in empire culture, the sense of spectacle informs culture differently and in a more diffuse way, and Homer provides a text-case for seeing how cultural value emerges from patterns of representation and strategies of viewing. In Visions and Revisions of Homer," Froma set out to trace the different ways Homer—the very idea of Homer—could be imag(in)ed—an analysis of the construction of the classical tradition, or classical reception in action.¹⁶

It is not simply a matter of fair disclosure to acknowledge that I edited the volumes in which The Artful Eye and Visions and Revisions of Homer appeared, nor a defense of an account of Froma’s work that must inevitably be partial, in all senses. Her commitments to friendships and intellectual exchange are lasting, and our discussions have continued since that first encounter across continents and decades with increasing intensity, disagreement, debate, and surprise. As we talk, topics swerve into each other, with sparks emerging from the clash. People as much as ideas drive her stories, and her kvetches (the Yiddish word is a crucial description of how to express one’s complaints against the world) are readily collapsed into a disruptive laugh or a return to another anecdote. Above all, I have seen how devoted Froma’s friends of all generations are to her. I hope I speak for all of them here.¹⁷

This foreword is partial partly because it is focused on Froma’s classical work, or at least one narrative through it. She has also spent many years researching and teaching about the Shoah, and generations of students in particular have filled her courses at Princeton, where her analysis of the films and books of this era are filled with a deep historical knowledge. Here too, the connection between aesthetics and the politics of identity—and its mediation through narrative and artistic form—is painfully salient. Playing the other is too weak an expression for the process by which Jews were forced into the role of the other, dehumanized, demonized, and violently destroyed as the other. Yet if there is one theme that links Froma’s work on the Holocaust and tragedy, it would be the strange and violent process by which the self is formulated against a sense of the other, and represents this process to itself. Froma’s motivating spirit as a critic is to see things otherwise.

Playing the Other was published nigh on twenty-five years ago and constituted a retrospect of Froma’s work up until 1996. Over twenty-five years on, it is timely to take a second look backwards now, now that Froma, fifty-seven years after that first Oresteia article, still cuts an intellectual dash as a classicist, a feminist, a literary critic, and a teacher. This collection, like Playing the Other, shows her extraordinarily agile and fertile mind at work on a set of major contemporary topics, with originality and scholarly flair. And it is telling how much the essays gain by being collected in juxtaposition with each other—and, I hope, by being viewed in response to the narrative of Froma’s life-work that I have been tracing.

The four general sections do strikingly capture elements of Froma’s intellectual project that I have been outlining so far. The earliest essay indeed comes from 1986 (the latest from 2016). Rather than add a summary of any or all of these chapters—always the least engaging part of any conventional introduction or foreword—I would rather contextualize their questions and impact (I am certain Froma would prefer engagement to mere repetition). The first section, Erotics, Myth and Gender, three mainstays of her work, puts together a general discussion of how desire is represented across different genres in archaic and classical Greece, with a discussion of rape, and an introduction to the interface of religion and erotics in the ancient novel. It is dismaying to think how necessary it still is to insist on the need to historicize contemporary comprehensions of desire and sexuality, still riven as they are across the world by violent essentialism, self-righteous claims of universal truth, and aggressive dismissals of difference. Yet necessary it is. The purchase of any introduction to ancient sexuality is precisely to remind us of the otherness of the past, not to construct teleologically a Utopian fantasy of lost freedoms or a triumphalist narrative of progress, but to allow the self-reflection that such otherness can and should provide. This is true even when it comes to rape. It might seem that sexual violence towards women has no history, in that it is a constant misery of patriarchal societies. Yet even with rape, there are both intricate stories of representation to be developed and complex ethical matters to articulate.¹⁸ The role of rape in classical literature—Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Roman comedy provide vivid test-cases—has become a polemical topic within the academy especially in pedagogic institutional frameworks.¹⁹ It is typical that Froma’s essay on rape, the earliest in this collection, was already laying the groundwork for understanding ancient discourses of sexual violence, and, without losing an affective or ethical perspective, set out to understand such discourses first on their own terms. It is also provocative to put religion and desire together when discussing the ancient novel. Many recent critics have questioned whether religion is too distorting a category to apply to ancient societies.²⁰ Yet Eros is a god, Aphrodite a goddess, and how divinities as external forces relate not just to psychology but to narrative strategies is basic to the self-understanding of erotics in the Greek culture of the Roman empire. What is more, ancient Christians read these novels (with an awkward mix of self-righteous blinkers and guilty pleasure), and the narratives of desire that fuel Christian theology owe a good deal to Greek erotic narratives. The history of sexuality in the West goes hand in hand with the history of Christianity, and the sexual narratives of the Greek novels play a fascinating role in this history.²¹ In short, sexual ethics also requires the history of sexuality, if, as we should, we hope to see the dynamics of gender in society looking otherwise. Froma’s work makes a significant contribution to this compelling arena.

The second section is called Encounters with the Divine, and consists of three essays, each offered originally in a Festschrift to one of Froma’s circle of European friends, Hank Versnel, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Philippe Bourgeaud (and offer testimony to her central place in the highest level of European scholarship). The essays are focused on Apollo, Dionysus, Artemis, and Demeter and on how we can understand cult, both in practice and in representation—again a theme that has been present in Froma’s work from the beginning. One of the hardest topics to broach in the study of antiquity is religion. As I have just indicated, many scholars have tried to resist the term altogether, and Froma wisely in these essays focuses on cult. But it remains especially difficult to escape from the deep-seated assumptions not just of monotheism, but also, when faced by rites, of Protestantism’s aggression towards ritualism. Yet sacrifice was the most common ceremony of antiquity, and cultic practice is pervasive in the city, and, indeed definitional of civic participation in the Greece of antiquity. The first essay of this section looks at the birth narratives of Apollo and Dionysus: a limit case of coming of age stories, at one level, and a study of the fascination with origins, at another. The second, an essay that has been widely influential, compares cultic models of Dionysus and Demeter to understand how the role of women is conceptualized in the polis. The third looks at Euripides’ play Iphigeneia at Tauris, a play which revolves around cultic practice and its relation to Greekness and foreignness. Consequently, what we have in this section—and this is the value of putting these essays together—is a combined view of mythic narratives, cult practice, and a drama about cultic practices, which together constitute the rich discourse of civic engagement with the divine. It also puts women at the heart of this story, and recognizes how drama, as a cultural product, is part of a culture’s self-understanding—a self-understanding in process. A history of religion, if we are to use such vocabulary (‘encounters with the divine’ will do), requires such a multi-dimensional perspective, but rarely gets it with the sophistication Froma brings to bear.

The third section, Urban Mythographies: Cities on Stage, returns to one of the most influential aspects of her work, namely, the way in which the city of Athens represents itself and other cities, and represents itself through other cities, especially on stage in the theater—epitomized by the very widely cited Thebes, Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama.²² How a city represents itself to itself is fundamental to the lived experience of the urban fabric. Paris in the late nineteenth century, after Hausmann’s redesign of the city’s street structure, was obsessively represented, in painting after painting, in novel after novel, operas, travel literature, poetry—and later in photography and film. So too was Victorian London, which is still referred to as Dickens’s London. These representations of the city fill the imaginary and become part of how the city is inhabited.²³ It is not at all times and all places where such representations become so insistent and instrumental in civic self-understanding. But democratic Athens was certainly one such time and place. Whether you think of the Stoa Poikile, the colonnade that lined one side of the agora and was covered in images of the city’s battles,²⁴ or the Parthenon, with its sculpted narratives of the triumph of civilization over transgressive violence²⁵; or the comedies that staged the city from heaven down to the gutter up; or the orators who talked incessantly of what the city wanted, thought, and knew; the nature of the polis of Athens was a source of continuous debate, insistence, laughter, demand—in public and in private. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics are theorizations of the civic that emerge from such a milieu. The collection of essays in this section of Froma’s book together represent four ways in which the city becomes part of Athenian thinking and Athenian self-representation. The first essay contrasts Dionysus in Thebes and Athens, looking at the role of the divine in the construction of festival culture by which a city defined its calendar and its self-definitional pattern of festivals. The second contrasts the representation of Thebes and Argos, male and female on the Athenian tragic stage. The third looks at the representation of the destruction of Troy—the great city of the East—and how Athens becomes implicated in the (imperial) violence of urbicide. The fourth and final chapter turns to comedy, and the fantasy of a perfect city as enacted and mocked in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, where the Athenian Assembly is taken over by women in disguise and a program of forced sexual activity ends the play in chaotic celebration of license. As with the previous section of the book, the combination of chapters produces much more than the sum of its parts. We can see how the city’s self-image is mediated through the representation of the divine, the dynamics of gender, the narratives of war and the barbarian East, the imaginative projections of other cities, and of Athens made other by comic inversion. Cities on stage reveals the multiple and interlocking structures of discourse by which the civic is imagined, projected, celebrated, explored, and deplored.

The final section of the book is named Reception: Later Echoes, reduced, alas, to a single chapter due to limitations of space.²⁶ So we end with Dionysus in 69, which takes us back to Euripides, now on the modern stage, and Richard Schechner’s highly eroticized production, emblematic of the 1960s in its turn to the Bacchae to explore sexual desire, violence, the lure of the irrational, and political upheaval.

It has for me been a pleasure to be allowed the opportunity here to look back over more than forty years of my relationship with Froma through more than forty years of her scholarship, and to recall the arguments and questions we shared as she wrote this remarkable body of work. It is only fitting that a second volume of essays should now have been produced, which will allow a new generation of scholars to appreciate the fertility and agility of her thinking and to see how the essays together produce a collection with incremental impact as they echo against each other and enrich each other. In contrast to so many articles that are published, these essays have stood the test of time: they are still salient, provocative, incisive, and stimulating. What more could a reader want—or a scholar hope for?

References

Barton, C., and D. Boyarin. 2016. Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. Fordham.

Bourke, J. 2008. Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present. London.

Boyarin, D. 2018. Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. New Brunswick.

Brownmiller, S. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York.

Calame, C., and P. Vidal-Naquet. 1990. Thésée et l’imaginaire athénien: légende et culte en Grècce antique. Lausanne.

Castriota, D. 1992. Myth, Ethos and Actuality: Official Art in Fifth-century Athens. Madison, WI.

Cooper, K. 1999. The Virgin and the Bride: Idealised Womanhood in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA.

de Beauvoir, S. 1972. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. Harmondsworth.

duBois, P. 1982. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the History of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor.

Euben, P., ed. 1986. Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Berkeley.

Gaca, K. 2003. The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity. Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Gloyn, E. 2013. "Reading Rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Test-Case Lesson." CW 106:676-81.

Goff, B. 1988. "Euripides’ Ion 1132-65: the Tent." PCPS 34:42-54.

Goldhill, S. 1984. Language, Sexuality, Narrative: the Oresteia. Cambridge.

Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge.

Goldhill, S., ed. 2001. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Coming of Empire. Cambridge.

Goldhill, S., ed. 2020. Being Urban: Community, Conflict and Belonging in the Middle East. London.

Goldhill, S. 2020a. Preposterous Poetics: The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity Cambridge.

Goldhill, S. 2020b. What is a Good City. In Goldhill (ed.) 2020:1-34.

Goldhill, S., and R. Osborne, eds. 1994. Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture. Cambridge.

Halperin, D., J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin, eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton.

Humphreys, S. 1978. Anthropology and the Greeks. London.

Kraus, C., S. Goldhill, H. Foley, and J. Elsner, eds. 1997. Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature. Oxford.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Trans. C. Jacobson, and B. Schoepf. New York.

Millett, K. 1971. Sexual Politics. New York.

Nongbri, B. 2013. Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven.

Omitowoju, R. 2002. Rape and the Politics of Consent in Classical Athens. Cambridge.

Osborne, R. 1986. ‘The Viewing and Obscuring of the Parthenon Frieze’. JHS 107:98-105.

Segal, C. 1965. "The Tragedy of the Hippolytus: The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 70:117-69.

Segal, C. 1970. "Shame and Purity in Euripides’ Hippolytus." Hermes 98:278-99.

Tomaselli, S. 1986. Rape and Historical and Cultural Enquiry. London.

Whitmarsh, T. 2018. Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford.

Winkler, J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Desire in Ancient Greece. New York and London.

Zeitlin, F. 1965. "The Motif of the Corrupted Sacrifice in Aeschylus’ Oresteia." TAPA 96:463-503.

Zeitlin, F. 1978. "The Dynamics of Misogyny in the Oresteia: Myth and Myth-Making in the Oresteia." Arethusa 11:149-84.

Zeitlin, F. 1982. Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. Rome.

Zeitlin, F. 1985a. Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality and the Feminine in Greek Drama. Representations 11:63-94. Reprinted in Zeitlin 1996:341-74.

Zeitlin, F. 1985b. "The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in Euripides’ Hippolytus." In Directions in Euripidean Criticism, ed. P. Burian, 52-111. Durham. Reprinted in Zeitlin 1996:219-84.

Zeitlin, F. 1986a. Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth, In Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, 122-51.

Zeitlin, F. 1986b. Thebes, Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama. In Euben 1986:101-41.

Zeitlin, F. 1989. "Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides’ Ion." PCPS 35:144-97.

Zeitlin, F. 1990a. On Ravishing Urns: Keats in His Tradition. In Rape and Representation, ed. L. Higgins & B. Silver, 278-302;

Zeitlin, F. 1990b. "The Poetics of Eros: Nature, Art, and Imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe." In Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlin 1990:417–64.

Zeitlin, F., ed. 1991. Jean-Pierre Vernant: Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Princeton.

Zeitlin, F. 1994. The Artful Eye: Vision, Ecphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre. In Goldhill and Osborne 1994:138-96.

Zeitlin, F. 1996. Playing the Other: Essays on Gender and Society in Ancient Greek Literature. Chicago.

Zeitlin, F. 2001. Visions and Revisions of Homer. In Goldhill (ed.) 2001:195-268.

Zeitlin, F. 2016. Romancing the Classics: The Hellenic Standard and its Vicissitudes under the Empire. AncNarr 13:37-65.

Zeitlin, F. 2020. Return to the Land of the Sun: in Homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007). Arion 27.3:145-76.

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¹Zeitlin 1978.

²https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS86N47DK-8 (accessed October 1, 2022) – probably the first time such a reference has been footnoted in a classical article.

³Millett 1971; De Beauvoir 1972.

⁴Lévi-Strauss 1963:206-31.

⁵Humphreys 1978 is paradigmatic.

⁶See Zeitlin’s introduction to Zeitlin (ed.) 1991:3-26.

⁷Zeitlin 1965.

⁸Zeitlin 1985b.

⁹Calame and Vidal-Naquet 1990.

¹⁰ Zeitlin 1985, written in debate with and dedicated to Charlie Segal: Segal 1965, 1970.

¹¹ Zeitlin 1989.

¹² Goff 1988.

¹³ Zeitlin 1982.

¹⁴ Zeitlin 1994; Kraus, Goldhill, Foley, Elsner (eds.) 1997.

¹⁵ Zeitlin 1990, in dialogue with Winkler 1990, and then, in turn, with Goldhill 1995.

¹⁶ Zeitlin 2001.

¹⁷ In these brief footnotes it is good to mention (however invidiously) from among her friends, Charlie Segal, J-P. Vernant, Jack Winkler, Helene Foley, Laura Slatkin, Jas Elsner, Chris Kraus, Danny Boyarin, Page duBois, Tim Whitmarsh, Claude Calame: small testimony to a larger intellectual circle.

¹⁸ Omitowoju 2002 is exemplary; see also from a large bibliography specifically on the history, Brownmiller 1975; Tomaselli 1986; Bourke 2008.

¹⁹ Gloyn 2013 is a useful introduction and bibliography.

²⁰ Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016; also Boyarin 2018; Goldhill 2020a:149-93.

²¹ Goldhill 1995; Cooper 1999; Gaca 2003; Whitmarsh 2018.

²² Zeitlin 1986.

²³ See Goldhill 2020b.

²⁴ Castriota 1992.

²⁵ Osborne 1986; duBois 1982.

²⁶ Omitted are 1990: On Ravishing Urns: Keats in His Tradition, 2016: Romancing the Classics, and 2020: Return to the Land of the Sun: in Homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007). See below for full bibliographical citations.

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner, and Laura Slatkin

It is an honor to be publishing Froma Zeitlin’s The Retrospective Muse: Pathways through Ancient Greek Literature and Culture in the Myth and Poetics II Series. This collection in itself exemplifies the scope the series aims to sustain—in its range (moving across Homeric epic, tragedy, comedy, and the ancient novel) and methodological dynamism (drawing on anthropology, gender studies, history of religion, and, of course, philology). As Simon Goldhill elucidates in his Foreword, Froma Zeitlin’s work has been transformative for classicists, and for humanists more broadly.

The Retrospective Muse may be seen as a companion, and a kind of sequel, to her earlier collection of canonical essays, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (1995), whose influence continues to reverberate in scholarship and in twenty-first century seminars. The Retrospective Muse represents a further distillation and a reconfiguration of Zeitlin’s powerful inquiries into gender, cult, the city, and erotics: among several landmark essays featured here are Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter (1982) and Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth (1986). And here as well we have Zeitlin’s seminal work on the role of the visual, which aligns with her own status as a visionary: one who has illuminated, from a feminist perspective, the workings of ritual, spectator-ship, cult, and visuality. The collection as a whole—which Goldhill expands upon more fully in the Foreword—offers a new assemblage of Zeitlin’s projects over several decades: it brings into focus her astonishing contributions and will win her new readers as well as galvanizing and inspiring those who have admired her work over the years.

Zeitlin’s scholarship is characterized by a forensic intelligence and stylistic flair. In reading her, we encounter a dynamic, dynamizing mind, a dialectical imagination, open to negativity and negation. No surprise then that her work resists premature summation or tidy analytic closure. Showing us how ancient Greeks undertook the agon of self-knowledge through playing the other, Zeitlin has invited us to consider, rigorously, how social order is imagined and disrupted, erotics visualized and figured, the divine made newly present, how elsewheres become the grounds of reckoning with here. Zeitlin’s work combines philological rigor with disciplinary venturesomeness: she was in the forefront of those classicists who responded to the critique of the human sciences most notably pursued in late twentieth-century French intellectual culture. Among her friends and intellectual comrades were Jean-Pierre Vernant, Nicole Loraux, and François Lissarrague; like them, alongside them, she reopened philology and literary study of classical antiquity to the study of culture by way of illuminating reckonings with myth and ritual, profoundly informed by new work in anthropology; her astonishing, path-breaking attentiveness to figural complexes in Greek drama was always animated by a profound awareness of political, civic, and religious dimensions.

Even before the signal transformations of the humanities by second-wave feminism, Zeitlin assumed and brilliantly demonstrated—in such essays as "The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia (1978)—that gender was a useful category of historical analysis" (to invoke the title of historian Joan Scott’s famous essay, published in 1986). Indeed, one could not not see, after Zeitlin, how gender was an extraordinarily useful and potent category of analysis for Athenians in 5th BCE. At the same time, along with its philological and theoretical dispositions, Zeitlin’s work also manifests an acute sensitivity to historicity and historical specificity. It is as if in her work the old debate between Sartre and Levi-Strauss (let us call it, reductively, history vs. anthropology) were (if not resolved) brilliantly restaged. For in Zeitlin’s work we see how myth is itself remade, restaged, reconfigured, and re-visualized in and through specific texts and horizons of performance (ritual and/or dramatic); we are made to feel how divine reverberations and mythic templates are worked and reworked across genres and socio-political formations, not least the city. Myth and cult and tragedy and epic are, as Zeitlin shows us, their own form of reception as well as re-enactment.

For decades, in her exemplary work but also through her famously generous and generative collegiality, Zeitlin herself has been a kind of muse of scholarship and intellectual adventure. However much this volume may speak to and from a retrospective musing, it might also be called The Prospective Muse, for here, as always, Zeitlin’s work establishes new prospects for us, new horizons for animated, sometimes disturbing, always companionable and exhilarating voyaging in ancient Greek literature and culture.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many friends and colleagues who deserve recognition for their midwifery of this project. Each essay in its original form owed gratitude at the time to assorted friends, students, and critics for their perspicacity and helpful advice, but alas, are too numerous to name in the current frame of reference. Instead, let me thank especially those who encouraged this new undertaking with their initial enthusiasm as well as giving sage advice along the way. I single out Deborah Steiner and Andrew Feldherr, who urged me on from the start and endured my seemingly endless recourse to their opinions. Likewise, my colleague Joshua Billings has been a go-to source for wise counsel. Above all, special thanks to Gregory Nagy and his cohort (Leonard Muellner and Laura Slatkin) for including my work in the special series they edit for Cornell University Press. Without them, where would I have been?

I cannot resist once again addressing Simon Goldhill, who so kindly offered to write a foreword that touched on both personal and professional details. As I look back on my previous project (Playing the Other), I re-read what I wrote then about Simon, which is as relevant now as it was then:

I especially thank Simon Goldhill, an exacting critic and cherished comrade. His intellectual energy and keen perspicacity along with his willingness to engage in virtually unlimited discussion are gifts he has freely given and continues to give me. I do not take these for granted. His generosity of spirit and eagerness to share exemplify the communal rewards of what we do.

Mentor and aspiring student long ago traded places, and his quite astonishing productivity, as well as his range of topics, along with what appears to be a boundless energy, is, for my part, a loving source of pride.

I did not think when I embarked on this project that its realization would be, in fact, a quite enormous undertaking, requiring the re-submission of each essay in the exacting templates required by Cornell, when they had each had their own original format and were published at widely differing times. I have been more than fortunate in my assistant, Jael Hernández-Vásquez. Working with him has been an unexpected windfall, as it were, in acquiring a friendship that has softened the dreariness of painstaking work and has given me the added benefit of his advice and judgment beyond the technicalities.

Finally, I want to extend my gratitude to the folks at Cornell University Press and the New Alexandria Foundation, especially Bethany Wasik and Noel Spencer, for their unstinting attention to matters large and small. Thanks are also due to the excellent efforts of Meridith Murray for the Index of Subjects and Emma Curran for the Index Locorum, both of whom responded with alacrity and accuracy to the constraints of time.

Earlier versions of these essays have been previously published elsewhere. All, in one way or another, have been revised, augmented, updated, or sometimes retitled for the current volume, and all have obtained the requisite permissions.

Eros Tyrannos = Eros. 1996:1999. In I Greci: storia, cultura, arte, società. vol 1. Noi e I Greci, ed. Salvatore Settis, 369–439 (in Italian). Milan. A much abridged version, 1999, in Reflections on Erotic Desire in Archaic and Classical Greece in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter, 50–75. Ann Arbor.

Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth. 1986. In Rape, ed.