This paper argues that Aeschylus' Eumenides presents a coherent geography that, when associated with the play's judicial proceedings, forms the basis of an imperial ideology. The geography of Eumenides constitutes a form of mapping, and mapping is associated with imperial power. The significance of this mapping becomes clear when linked to fifth-century Athens' growing judicial imperialism. The creation of the court in Eumenides, in the view of most scholars, refers only to Ephialtes' reforms of 462 BC. But in the larger (...) context, Athenian courts in the mid-fifth century are a form of imperial control. When geographically specific jurisdiction combines with new courts, it supports and even creates a developing imperial ideology. Moreover, the figure of Athena and the role she gives the Athenian jury emphasizes a passionate pro-Athenian nationalism, a nationalism that the text connects to Athens' geographic and judicial superiority. This imperial ideology did not spring from Aeschylus' imagination fully formed; it reflects a trend in Athens of promoting her own cultural superiority. This sense of cultural superiority in fact disguises the realities of Athens' developing power and increasingly harsh subjection of her former allies. (shrink)

Williams’ discussion of dilemmas in his classic paper “Ethical consistency” famously focuses on an example that has not bothered commentators on and respondents to Williams as much as it should have bothered them: the example of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ play. In this paper I try to pick apart what Williams wants to say from what is really going on in the text that he unfortunately chooses for his example. I compare with Williams’ discussion of Agamemnon four other commentators on this (...) crucial passage in Aeschylus’ play: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle—and Bernard Williams’ Greats tutor Eduard Fraenkel, whose epochal Corpus Christi seminars on the play Williams attended (along with Iris Murdoch, Hugh Lloyd Jones, and other rising stars of the time). I shall argue that these commentators led Williams astray. They are surprisingly prone to the same flaws of rationalism, impersonality, and moralism in making sense of Aeschylus’ extraordinarily subtle and brilliant depiction of Agamemnon; and Williams’ discussion inherits these flaws. This is an obviously ironic fact, especially given that a very fruitful reading of the passage—one that I think makes much better sense of what Aeschylus actually says—points a deeply Williamsian moral. It takes Agamemnon at Aulis as a study of a key step in the corruption of a character, a study that gets its power and its horror from its ability to show us how that process looks _from Agamemnon’s own viewpoint._. (shrink)

The notion of “inherited guilt,” or ancestral fault, has played a prominent role in scholarship on ancient Greek religion and literature. Although it corresponds to no clearly circumscribed ancient concept, it has acquired something of a self-evident value in philological research. Shaped by centuries of ideological involvement with the Greek material, and by the apparently equivalent Judeo-Christian notions of corporate responsibility and original sin, the term “inherited guilt” imposes a heavy baggage of assumptions and resonances on the material it is (...) meant to describe and translate. Rather than abandoning “inherited guilt” altogether, or simply deconstructing it away, as some scholars have suggested in recent years, a new perspective grounded in a detailed understanding of its tradition is needed to make sense of the abundant and complex material at hand. A thorough engagement with the religiously charged tradition of scholarship is one of the keys to a fruitful redefinition of Greek ancestral fault. The present paper proposes to revisit the seminal discussions of the two contemporary scholars who pioneered the modern professional study of Greek religion: C.A. Lobeck and K.O. Müller. (shrink)

How does the afterlife affect ethical and political considerations in this life when a culture has no unified religious dogma? This article focuses on the afterlife as an uncertain “elsewhere” invoked to rethink political imperatives in specific Ancient Greek literary and philosophical texts. First, it uncovers the political implications of radically divergent notions of the afterlife in both Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Antigone—from nothingness, to continuation in a society of souls below, to ethical judgment by a divinity—significant examples of which (...) have been neglected. It then follows out the almost congruent diversity of afterlife notions in Plato’s Apology and Phaedo. By examining how Socrates uses “unbelief” concerning the afterlife to interrogate ethics and politics, this article gives a fresh perspective on the structure of debate in the Phaedo. The very emphasis on “unbelief,” however, demonstrates that the dialogue itself may not present Socratic views as definitive. (shrink)