The language of tragedy: rhetoric and communication
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The language of tragedy: rhetoric and communication SIMON GOLDHILL P. E. Easterling (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Already, in the classical polis, 'the tragic' has become synonymous with a certain grandeur of expression, high-flown periphrasis and even heroic posturing. Tragedy is - and was perceived to be - made up of a particular register of language: there is a style and vocabulary proper to the genre. (p127)
So how is the language of tragedy to be characterised? There are several types of answer that can be given to this question.
The first type of answer that can be developed is a formal one.
One basic articulation of tragedy is the difference between scenes and choral odes.
The scenes are conventionally divided into rheseis and stichomythia. (p127)
Often the formal exchange of rheseis breaks down into violent argument in stichomythia, and such a scene is known as an agon (plural agones), 'contest'.
Both rhesis and stichomythia are almost invariably written in the iambic metre, (p127)
and in Attic (p127) dialect, that is, in the tongue of its audience, although, as we will see, with much heightening of expression. (p128)
The choral odes, generally termed stasima (singular: stasimon), are strikingly different.
First, they are sung by a group, not spoken by an individual, and they are accompanied by music and dancing.
The language of the choral odes is not merely dense, heightened lyric poetry, but also is largely in a version - far from thorough-going - of Doric dialect.
Doric is traditionally used for choral lyric throughout Greece (even in Attic speaking regions like Athens). But it remains hard to judge exactly what the effect of such elements of Doric dialect would have been on an Athenian audience. Perhaps the Doric tones add to a Panhellenic grandeur of tragedy. (p128)
I want to trace here four elements that make particularly important (p128) contributions to the verbal texture of tragedy. (p129)
The first is the tradition of literary language, and pre-eminently Homer. (p129)
Its depiction of a heroic society, with its elaborate forms of address, intricate rituals, and extensive interactions with the divine, provides a privileged - and grand - vocabulary for key areas of tragic action.
Homeric language also includes words, as well as grammatical and syntactical forms, that were already archaic and obscure to fifth-century audiences.
The willing adoption and adaptation of the epic timbre of Homer is central to the force of tragic language.
The archaic grandeur of Homeric language resounds throughout Greek tragedy. (p129)
Tragedy re-presents the tales of the Homeric, heroic past for the polis of the present: the way in which epic language constantly informs tragic language is integral to this process of rewriting, and this backward glance is a key element in the grandeur and heroic distance of tragic language. (p130)
A second area that provides a major influence on the language of tragedy is ritual and the world of religion. (p130)
There are many other rituals which lend both vocabulary and a structure of action to the narrative of tragedy. (p131)
A third major influence on the language of tragedy is the world of the democratic lawcourt and Assembly. (p132)
If the Homeric texts turn tragedy towards the heroic past, the constant use of the language of contemporary institutions sites tragedy integrally within the polis. (p133)
The fourth element, closely related to the third, is one which is more and more influential throughout the fifth century in all aspects of Athenian life, namely, the new interest in the formal training and analysis of speech-making - the art of rhetoric. (p133)
The language of tragedy reflects this awareness, and, particularly in Euripides' plays, the influence of the formal training in rhetoric is strongly marked. (p134)
The full integration of formal rhetorical argumentation into tragic language is especially evident in the agon, and many examples could be chosen from Sophocles and Euripides in particular. (p135)
Tragic drama and sophistic writing repeatedly turn to similar concerns and vocabulary: the relation of men and gods, of men and men in the city, of norm, transgression, punishment.
That some sophists wrote tragedies and that tragedians manipulate sophistic rhetoric is not a casual overlap of interest. It testifies to the active, public debate about man, language and the polis in democratic Athens.
Tragedy's use - and often critical exploration - of rhetoric in action is an integral part of its engagement with the public life of the contemporary city.
Tragic language, then, combines contemporary tropes and vocabulary of the public institutions of the city with elements of heroic grandeur which stem both from the epic poetry of the past and the sacral splendour of religious rite. (p135)
Indeed, the exploration of the political and mythic discourses of the city is one of the fundamental recurrent thematic focuses of tragedy, and it is with the thematic interest in how language is used that I will be concerned for the rest of this chapter. (p136)
I will begin with a well-known and highly influential general argument about the specificity of tragedy's view of language, developed most influentially by the French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant.
The ambiguity or polysemy of central terms of the city's language is brought out by the way terms are used by different characters in such different and competing ways.
Indeed, it is an essential function of tragedy to display to its audience the polyvalence of words and the often destructive misunderstandings produced between the figures of the drama: 'the tragic message, when understood, is precisely that there are zones of opacity and incommunicability in the words that men exchange'.(p136)
Aeschylus' Oresteia had more influence on other Greek writers than any other tragic work, and its treatment of language as a theme is significantly echoed by both Sophocles and Euripides. (p137)
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