Volume 35, Number 7 · April 28, 1988
Attic Exits
By Bernard Knox
Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman
by Nicole Loraux, translated by Anthony Forster
Harvard University Press, 100 pp., $17.95
The Greek tragic poet was provided by the mythical traditions with a generous and varied supply of exits from this life for his female characters: Dirce dragged to her death by a bull, for example, or Jason's royal bride consumed by a poisoned robe that acts like a coating of blazing napalm. Nicole Loraux's study of violent female death in Greek tragedy ignores these and similar cases, to concentrate on women who commit suicide and virgin girls who are offered as a sacrifice. She justifies this selectivity by her claim that since death by another's hand is as frequent in tragedy for men as for women, it is in the 'suicide of wives and the sacrifice of virgins' that a distinction is made between the sexes in relation to death. Male suicide, as she points out, is rare—Ajax and Haemon the only two in our extant texts—and the sacrifice of a male virgin is a unique event: the self-immolation of Menoeceus in Euripides' Phoenissae.
Review, 2141 words
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