Volume 27, Number 4 · March 20, 1980
Athenian Drama, Attic Salt
By Peter Green
Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater
by Bernard Knox
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 378 pp., $20.00
Greek tragedy is a perfect subject for wild theorists. Its origins, for scholars today as for near contemporaries like Aristotle, were, and remain, shrouded in Dionysian ambiguities, mostly of a ritual nature. Fertility ceremonies, some more embarrassingly ithyphallic than others, lurk offstage. With the exception of one or two early ventures into recent history—Aeschylus's Persians, Phrynichus's Capture of Miletus—tragedy took its plots exclusively from myth. Direct propaganda, as Phrynichus found to his cost, invited political harassment, whereas a well-handled myth could put the same point across with equal or greater force, and pose a general moral at the same time. But if this practice was designed, in the first instance, to present man's tragic dilemmas sub specie aeternitatis, it has also given modern academic critics a free hand to reinterpret Attic drama through the refracting lens of their favorite disciplines.
Review, 1889 words
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