Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis

Page duBois

The chorus of Euripides' Medea, first performed in the fifth century BCE in Athens, responds to the central character Medea's plans to poison her rival with a famous example of the rhetorical topos of adynaton, "the impossible." Women, notorious for deceit, have always been victims of ill-fame, but now it is men, like Jason, the barbarian Medea's Greek husband, whose pledges cannot be trusted. The chorus exults:

Flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers,
And let the world's great order be reversed. ¹

I want to use Euripides' image of the backward flowing of rivers to stand for the ahistoricism of much classical scholarship on ancient drama. Classical scholars and students of ancient theatre have for centuries, since the earliest work on Greek literary and philosophical texts in the early Renaissance, interpreted fifth-century tragedy through the lens of Aristotle's prescriptions on tragedy in the Poetics, written in the fourth century BCE. My argument will be that we should read Greek tragedy within its historical moment, that we should read the works of Aristotle within their historical moment, and that to use the one to exhaust the meaning of the other is to ignore historical specificity and the radical differences between one moment of ancient history and another. It is only the remoteness of antiquity that allows such blurring of distinctions, while scholarly work on most recent periods would consider a temporal gap of a century significant for interpretation.

It is of course possible to exaggerate the chasm between the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE, to claim that they are absolutely distinct moments in human history, utterly disjunctive and lacking in continuity. Without making such a methodological claim, which I believe is insupportable, I want to argue that the hundred years that separate Euripides from Aristotle do matter. In the interval between the first production of Euripides' Medea and the work of Aristotle on the making of tragedies, Athens had been defeated in the Peloponnesian War, which lasted from about 431 BCE to 404 BCE. [End Page 19] The radical democracy of mid-century Athens was condemned, at least in theory, by such eminent aristocratic thinkers as Plato, whose dialogues were composed in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat. After its victory, Sparta held hegemony over Athens, and the oligarchic thirty, their rule imposed by the Spartans, briefly dominated the city, confiscating property and killing enemies. In the fourth century, Thebes and Athens rose against Sparta, and other powers vied for domination. The northern kingdom of Macedonia, marginally Greek, rose as a power, and its king Philip gained control of the Greek states. His son Alexander, known afterwards as "the Great," was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle, who had left the city of Athens. To this striking list of punctual events and political trends must be added the fact that the social and economic relations among the Greeks changed significantly in this period as well. And the genres and cultural practices of the Athenians were transformed; the Old Comedy of Aristophanes gave way to his Middle Comedy, and then to New Comedy, based not on political satire, confrontation, and obscenity but on domestic and romantic themes. The great tragedians' dramas were not equalled in the performances of the fourth century. To read fifth-century tragedy, one of the most significant cultural artifacts of classical Athenian democracy, through Aristotle, a fourth-century philosopher from a distant city, is to make the river of time flow backward; it is to misrecognize the fact that Aristotle is himself engaging in significant cultural discursive work, choosing not to write dramas about Oedipus but to write about dramas about Oedipus--to write about katharsis.

In his book Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker has shown how the notions of pollution and contamination change for the Greeks over time, how in religious and medical discourses the necessity of cleansing, of catharsis, transforms itself in the course of the centuries between Homer and the classical age. ² E. R. Dodds argued in The Greeks and the Irrational that there was a gathering sense of guilt and doom in the classical age; with the invention of democracy came a repudiation of the political and social institutions of the aristocratic past and a sense that citizens of the democracy were betraying their ancestors. Hence, Dodds argues, there is an increasing emphasis on pollution and guilt, a turn away from the shame culture of the Homeric age. ³ Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown that tragedy is a social text, a place where the city makes itself into a theatre, seeking to reconcile the citizens of the radical new democracy with the inherited aristocratic personae of myth and legend and epic. In the very form of tragedy, where the collective chorus, resembling the anonymous citizens of the city, speaks the archaic, elevated language of aristocratic lyric poetry, the characters, high figures from the Greeks' past, speak in the more everyday language of the city itself. ⁴ Tragedy is one of the products of a cultural transformation, of a transition from aristocratic rule and aristocratic genres to a radical democracy, a new site, making theatre of ritual, a place where the cultural thematics of the radical political experiment that is democracy are made visible. [End Page 20]

We can read various Greek tragedies as meditations on miasma, pollution, and the necessity for cleansing or katharsis, all of which have their connections with the dangers, religious and political, of an untried political system that abandons the old ways of governance by aristocrats and imagines each citizen as the equal of every other. The theme of catharsis is unmistakable, of course, in the Oedipus Rex. The city of Thebes is contaminated by a terrible plague, as we learn in the early lines of the play, as the priest addresses Oedipus:

King, you yourself
have seen our city reeling like a wreck
already; it can scarcely lift its prow
out of the depths, out of the bloody surf.
A blight is on the fruitful plants of the earth,
a blight is on our women that no children
are born to them; a god that carries fire,
a deadly pestilence, is on our town,
strikes us and spares not . . . ⁵

The city itself is a body polluted by an unknown presence; it is diseased and suffering and needs relief. And it is Oedipus himself of whom the city must be cleansed. Vernant has shown, in a brilliant essay, how the expulsion of Oedipus can be illuminated by the institutions of ostracism and the pharmakos. Ostracism was the vote by the citizens to expel one of their own, who had become dangerously elevated above the rest. In the ritual of the pharmakos, the citizens picked the ugliest and basest of criminals to beat and chase from the city. Oedipus, highest and lowest of men, must be cast out because of his eminence, must be scapegoated because of his baseness. ⁶ The city itself must undergo katharsis, must be cleansed of its pollution.

Euripides' Medea offers an interesting contrast to the Oedipus Rex in this respect. As I have argued elsewhere, Medea stands for all that is other to the Greek male citizen. ⁷ She is a barbarian, compared to a beast; she is a woman who speaks of the sufferings of the Greek wife, she who can mother citizens, while never being a citizen herself. The tragedy works out an answer to the question: who will be expelled? Medea, the barbarian companion, now being discarded or replaced, Jason, her unfaithful mate, or Aigeus, who consults her as a sorceress and offers her a haven? The risk moves from one to the other in the course of the tragedy, only to settle finally on Medea, after she has cruelly destroyed Jason's new wife and killed her own and Jason's children. She leaves the city, but she survives in a most menacing form. Euripides gives a characteristically ambiguous turn to the themes of miasma and cleansing: while we recognize that Medea's acts of murder and infanticide pollute the city and while she is cast out and leaves Corinth, we see her last headed for Athens, the city of the very audience witnessing the first performance of the tragedy. Touching on the themes of pollution and cleansing as she speaks of the murder of her children, she announces: [End Page 21]

In this land of Corinth
I shall establish a holy feast and sacrifice
Each year for ever to atone for the blood guilt.
And I myself go to the land of Erechtheus
To dwell in Aegeus' house, the son of Pandion. ⁸

Medea brings her blood guilt to the city of Erechtheus, Athens. Euripides' play exhibits an incomplete catharsis, the impossibility of finally expelling woman, slave, barbarian, from within the midst of the polis, the city-state of citizens.

We can see similar impulses toward purgation at the level of the social text, for example in the case of the beautiful and glamorous aristocrat Alcibiades, friend and lover of Socrates. This charismatic figure of the fifth century is described in Thucydides and elsewhere as an irresistible and dangerous man. He, like Oedipus, is both elevated above other citizens and degraded beneath them. Socrates loves him, but he was said to have profaned the sacred Eleusinian mysteries and after being sent to Sicily as a general to lead the Athenian forces in a disastrous campaign of the Peloponnesian War, was recalled for trial for his crimes, a trial which he evaded by fleeing to the Spartans, the Athenians' enemies. The social dynamics of the Athenian polis operate in such a way that, although it is he himself who leaves the city, the city is intermittently cleansed and then re-contaminated by his presence. After various betrayals, he is called back to Athens only to betray again and to abandon the city, going over to the Persians. Alcibiades is neither literally ostracized nor literally treated as a pharmakos, a scapegoat, but the citizens cannot for long tolerate his presence among them. The effects of their ambivalence result in another sort of catharsis, exemplifying the dynamics of pollution and catharsis in the fifth century. Certain human persons are understood to be dangerous to the health of the body politic, in the historical text and on the tragic stage. There is a collective anxiety about their presence in the community, and the collective as a whole effects either a literal or a symbolic expulsion. The miasma is removed from the social body through rituals of ostracism, of the expulsion of the pharmakos, through medical practices, and through the symbolic expulsion of murderer or tyrant in tragedy. The ideology of the fifth-century democratic city of Athens requires this understanding of community; all are endangered by the presence of a polluted person among them, and the will of the whole cleanses. In the democratic state, catharsis operates in expulsion of dangerous characters and sometimes in their reintegration into the state after purification. This is a social form of discipline, one that connects the new form of the democratic state with ancient rituals of cleansing and expulsion.

Aristotle uses the medical model of catharsis to recast the cultural meanings of fifth-century tragedy. The social form of discipline apparent in fifth-century practices is transformed in his discourse in the Poetics, concerning the vast spectrum of literary, social, political, and religious spectacle that is "tragedy." The focus shifts, from attention to the social group, from attention to a crucial social dynamic that produces and reproduces democracy, to a gaze at the individual. Assuming a managerial, theoretical, objective, and distant view of a crucial social phenomenon, Aristotle stands apart from it analytically. He says tragedy "represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and fear it effects relief (katharsis) to these and [End Page 22] similar emotions." ⁹ In his discussion of music in the Politics, he makes more explicit the connection between his use of catharsis and the medical model to which he refers:

any experience that occurs violently in some souls is found in all, though with different degrees of intensity--for example pity and fear for some persons are very liable to this form of emotion, and under the influence of sacred music we see these people, when they use tunes that violently arouse the soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medicinal treatment and taken a purge. ¹⁰

A form evolved within the democracy, a form that responds to the needs of a community that understands itself ideologically as a group of equals, tragedy is for Aristotle a way of managing unruly emotion. Indeed, what is most striking in the Poetics, from a historicist perspective, is Aristotle's focus on the audience and on the individual within the audience. He is concerned with the particular emotions generated in members of the audience and, with relief, expulsion of these emotions.

If, instead of using Aristotle as the definitive expert on tragedy and its effects, we contrast this discourse (the meta-tragical theory he presents here) with the cultural form from the fifth century, tragedy itself, a significant change emerges. While tragedy is a collective, poetic, ritual, and eminently democratic form, concerned with the social whole, with the dynamic interaction that is the city, the polis, Aristotle concerns himself with the management of individuals. His emphasis on the control of citizens reflects a wider social change, a move away from democracy in the fourth century. Aristotle's use of the term katharsis is an individualizing restriction of the term. He takes the social, political, ritual, literary phenomenon that is the ancient drama and focuses not on its social meaning but on its effect on individual persons. This is a psychologizing, a turn away from the collective toward internalization.

The work of Michel Foucault might illuminate this shift. Foucault's arguments on Greek culture seem to me sometimes mistaken, in that they take the austere philosophical writings of the fourth century BCE as the beginnings of Western notions of sexuality and the desiring subject, without taking account of the preceding richness of Greek archaic and classical culture, revealed in such texts as lyric poetry and tragedy, the work of Sappho, for example. ¹¹ However, in other work focused on the rise of disciplinary practices in early modern and modern European society, in particular the shift from spectacular punishment to panoptic and internalized surveillance, Foucault's work on this modern transformation illuminates the profound social change visible in the historical distance between the classical tragedians and Aristotle the theoretician. ¹² [End Page 23]

Aristotle's views on catharsis exemplify a disciplining of the social body, directing attention away from the collective toward the individual. The philosopher presents a view of theatre and catharsis from the point of view of power, administration, and management of the population. He assumes a gaze from above, looking with an almost panoptic eye at society, and inventing systems that prevent the sort of disruption that occurred with Alcibiades, the man who was over and over again expelled in an act of catharsis, then forgiven and brought back into the democratic fold. Aristotle seems to believe that tragedy should perform the role of fantasy, displacing the struggle over social power, which generates pity and fear, into the realm of art in order to maintain order.

Once we stop reversing the rivers of time, it becomes possible to see that in theorizing tragedy, the fourth-century post-Platonic philosopher Aristotle engages in cultural production radically different from the fifth-century practices of democratic contestation in tragedy. His work on catharsis analyzes tragedy as a site for the regulation of its audience's passions and emotions; what is at stake is the point of view of the manager, analyst, and theoretician of the state.

 

Page duBois teaches classics and cultural studies in the Literature Department at the University of California at San Diego. She is the author, most recently, of Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives, published by New York University Press. She is currently working on a book on ancient and American slaveries.

Notes

1. Euripides, The Medea, tran. Rex Warner, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 410-11.

2. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

3. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

4. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece, tran. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1992); see especially "The Historical Moment of Tragedy in Greece: Some of the Social and Psychological Conditions," 1-5, and "Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy," 6-27.

5. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, tran. David Greene in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Greene and Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23-29.

6. Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex," tran. Page duBois, New Literary History 9 (1976): 475-501.

7. Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Prehistory of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982).

8. Euripides, Medea, 1381-85.

9. Aristotle, Poetics, tran. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Mass. [Loeb]: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1449b.

10. Aristotle, Politics, tran. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass. [Loeb]: Harvard University Press, 1944), 1342a.

11. See Page duBois, Sappho is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), especially "Sappho in the History of Sexuality," 127-45, and "Michel Foucault, Sappho, and the Postmodern Subject," 146-62.

12. Michel Foucault, "The History of Sexuality" in Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York, Pantheon Books: 1980): "The case of the penal system convinced me that the question of power needed to be formulated not so much in terms of justice as in those of technology, of tactics and strategy, and it was this substitution for a judicial and negative grid of a technical and strategic one that I tried to effect in Discipline and Punish and then to exploit in 'The History of Sexuality'" (183).