Los versos 990-1008 de Suplicantes de Eurípides constituyen un verdadero locus desperatus: allí Evadne se presenta sobre la escena y expresa en versos líricos los sentimientos previos a su suicidio final. Ni la métrica sin responsio del pasaje, ni el texto evidentemente corrupto, ni la gramática inadecuada ayudan a comprender el sentido del pasaje. Tan así es que la mayoría de los editores ha renunciado a tratar de comprender el sentido de sus palabras. Sin embargo, creemos que la adecuada interpretación (...) de la metáfora utilizada por la esposa de Capaneo ayudará a la comprensión del pasaje: se trata de un priamel que se constituye en patético recordatorio del día de la boda por parte de una mujer que está a punto de suicidarse sobre la tumba de su esposo ya muerto. El fuego del rayo que mató a Capaneo, así como el fuego de la pira en donde arde ahora su cadáver (y en la que ella misma se arrojará muy pronto), le suscitan una serie de recuerdos de días mejores, vinculados todos ellos con el fuego y con la luz. La mención del carro del sol y de la luna, que constituye una metáfora casi cristalizada en la literatura griega, permite desarrollar de manera novedosa otra metáfora: las muchachas que, también ellas, cabalgan sobre la oscuridad portando sus antorchas. Evadne destaca la alegría que reinó el día de su boda, para que sea más agudo el contraste con el momento presente. The verses 990-1008 of Euripides’ Suppliants are a locus desperatus: Evadne there appears on the scene and expresses feelings in lyrical verse before his final suicide. Neither the passage’s metric without Responsio, or text clearly corrupt or improper grammar help make sense of the passage. So much so that most publishers have given up trying to understand the meaning of his words. However, we believe that the proper interpretation of the metaphor used by the wife of Capaneus help the understanding of the passage: it is one that constitutes priamel poignant reminder of the wedding day by a woman who is about to suicide on the grave of her husband already dead. The fire of lightning that killed Capaneus and fire burning pyre where his body is now (and which will throw herself very soon), will raise a number of memories of better days, all linked with the fire and light. The mention of the chariot of the sun and moon, which is a metaphor almost crystallized in Greek literature, enables a new way to develop another metaphor: the girls that they too ride on the dark carrying torches. Evadne highlights the joy that reigned on the day of her wedding, to be sharper contrast with the present moment. (shrink)

The main theme of Euripides’ Bacchae is Dionysus’ divinity and its recognition by the Thebans. The birth of Dionysus is a key point in the myth to determine that he is a god, consequently the playwright makes several of his characters mention it from different points of view. There are two versions clearly in conflict: on the one hand, Dionysus and his worshippers defend that he is a son of Zeus and, therefore, a god who must be venerated. On the (...) other hand, Pentheus, assuming his aunts’ view, thinks that his aunt Semele, who is Dionysus’ mother, lied when she stated that she had conceived a son of Zeus, in order to conceal a love affair with a mere mortal. Therefore, in the king’s opinion Dionysus is not a god but a mere human being. In addition, there are two characters, Cadmus and Tiresias, whose attitudes with regard to this matter are not so clear and have led scholars to interpret them in opposite ways. In this paper I am analyzing the passages of Bacchae on Dionysus’ birth, with special emphasis on those where Euripides shows or refers to Cadmus’ and Tiresias’ opinions, since my aim is to try to clarify, as far as possible, which stand the playwright made those two characters adopt regarding to Dionysus’ divinity. (shrink)

How are we to understand what happens to Oedipus? What or who is the cause of the terrible deeds—predicted by oracles to both Laius and Oedipus—that he has already committed before the play begins and that are revealed in its course? The purpose of the present essay, whose title alludes to a well-known article by E.R. Dodds, is to draw attention to aspects of the play that have been ignored or explained away. To give them their due it will be (...) necessary to take issue with two views of Dodds (one of which he owes to Wilamowitz) that I regard as mistaken. To argue against an article that is more than fifty years old might be thought a pointless exhumation, but Dodds's highly influential formulations, I will argue, have caused what Sophocles wrote to be either overlooked or misconstrued and are still causing misunderstanding in the second decade of the present century. It is time these views were examined critically. (shrink)

Nuestro objetivo es exponer un esquema compositivo de Suplicantes que logre aprehender su particular técnica estructural, frente a la pauta fija aristotélica. El enfoque pondera el trabajo de Taplin sobre la puesta en escena trágica esquilea, que revolucionó los estudios performativos al demostrar el uso dramático de los movimientos de entrada y salida de los personajes. Dada la singularidad de Suplicantes en cuanto al protagonismo coral y el predominio lírico, sostenemos que el análisis de su estructura impone reformular la propuesta (...) de Taplin y considerar las odas corales como parte sustancial de los actos. (shrink)

Certain Greek texts depict Helen in a manner that connects her elusive body with the elusive maneuvers of the persuasive story. Her too-mobile body signals in these texts the obscurity of agency in the seduction scene and serves as a device for tracking the dynamics of desire. In so doing this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation. Although the female figure in traditional texts is always the object of male representation, in this study I examine a (...) set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created. What emerges in the fifth century as a rhetorical technique begins in Book 3 of the Iliad as a narrative strategy that uses Helen's cloaked and disappearing body to catalyze plot, and develops in Sappho's fr. 16 into a logic of desire shaped by the movement of Helen's and other bodies in the visual field. Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, transforms these depictions of Helen into an argument that is structured by Helen's body, an argument that Helen herself employs in Euripides' Troades, where her own body serves as the anatomy of her argument. These texts all associate Helen's body with a type of persuasive narrative that repeatedly invokes the field of vision, describing physical presence in terms that aim at attracting the eye. At the same time this verbal portraiture disrupts the audience's perspective by depicting bodies as cloaked, mobile, and/or half seen, and by obscuring distinctions between desirer and desired, viewer and viewed. As both subject and object in this viewing process, Helen's body comes to be associated with the double vision of seduction and the distracting power of persuasive images, which seduce the mind's eye while eluding the mind's grasp. (shrink)

This article aims at analysing Aristotle’s poetic conception of catharsis to assess whether it may be of help in enlightening the particular didactic challenges involved when training medical students to cope morally with complex or tragic situations of medical decision-making. A further aim of this investigation is to show that Aristotle’s criteria for distinguishing between history and tragedy may be employed to reshape authentic stories of sickness into tragic stories of sickness. Furthermore, the didactic potentials of tragic stories of sickness (...) will be tried out. The ultimate aim is to investigate whether the possibilities of developing a therapeutic conception of medical ethics researched in a previous article on catharsis and moral therapy in Plato may be strengthened through the hermeneutics of the Aristotelian conception of tragic catharsis. (shrink)

This article seeks to contest the frequently repeated assertion that anger poses the greatest threat to transitional societies moving from authoritarianism to democracy. Against suggestions that victims of past injustices should forswear their `negative emotions' lest they spark a renewed cycle of violence, it argues that it is important to recognize the moral legitimacy of their anger. While anger is notoriously vulnerable to excess and needs to be moderated in reference to shared norms of reasonableness, it represents an appropriate response (...) to wilful harm and needs to be afforded a central role in any conception of justice. (shrink)