This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality (as a heroine from an aristocratic family) and marginality (as a woman and associated with other marginal social groups) of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status (both subordinate and elite) embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (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 paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality and marginality of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

Against a background of anxious evocation of Dionysiac rites, Euripides'Heraclesstages the extreme degradation of the tragic hero who, as a consequence of the hatred of a divinity, loses his heroic traits and above all his human ones in the exercise of brutal violence. By comparing Heracles in the grip of madness to a furious bull assailing its prey, the tragedian clearly shows the inexorability of the divine will and its arbitrariness, and emphasizes madness itself through images traditionally associated with the (...) bull. However, the reference to monstrosity and animals does not only involve Heracles, but also concerns the representation of Lyssa, the demon of madness sent by Hera to induce Heracles to slaughter his own family. This representation of Lyssa includes the monstrous and disturbing Gorgon and the dog, set alongside the metaphor of hunting, which in turn highlight the link between the demon and the Erinyes, those other bringers of madness. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the role of Heracles' famous body in the representation of madness and its aftermath in Euripides' Heracles. Unlike studies of Trachiniae, interpretations of Heracles have neglected the hero's body in Euripides. This reading examines the eruption of that body midway through the tragedy as a part of Heracles that is daemonic and strange, but also integral to his identity. Central to my reading is the figure of the symptom, through which madness materializes onstage. Symptoms were (...) contested sites of interpretation in the late fifth century, supporting both conventional narratives about human suffering and new stories advanced by contemporary medicine and ethics. In exploring the imaginative possibilities of these new stories, I do not privilege a “secular” over a “divine” reading. Rather I aim to offer a model of interaction between medicine and tragedy that sees the cross-breeding of worldviews as productive of innovative drama. (shrink)

This essay examines "Philoctetes" as an exercise in self-representation by looking at the self-referential and metatheatrical dimensions of the play. After suggesting an enlarged understanding of metatheater as "a particularly vigorous attempt to engage the audience at the synthetic and thematic levels of reading," I examine "Philoctetes" as a self-conscious discourse on tragedy, tragic production, and tragic experience, one which participates in a larger conversation in the late fifth century about the ethics of tragedy, including the remarks of Gorgias on (...) theatrical deception . The play points up its own constructedness in a variety of ways, most strikingly in the theatrical character of the intrigue by which Odysseus deceives Philoctetes, which provides a play within a play and a representation of texts and readers, plays and spectators. In laying bare the kinds of strategies and techniques that undergird this "intratext," "Philoctetes" offers a model of tragedy and of the tragic poet based on power, deceit, and manipulation. Yet by attributing these characteristics to the moral deficiencies of its internal creator and by demonstrating his failure to achieve his ends, "Philoctetes" rejects such a theater of sophistry. At the same time, the play considers issues of textual reception by providing in Philoctetes an audience for this internal text and a protocol of reading that suggest a more positive model of tragic response. "Philoctetes" uses this model to offer the spectator a subject position that affirms the inherent value of reading tragedy, a humanistic model of reading based upon the audience's identification with and sympathy for the tragic protagonist. Sophocles thus finds in this exercise in self-representation a way to frame critical questions on dramatic theory and to define his own dramatic practice. (shrink)

It is well-known in Western scholarship that Rousseau has been the forerunner of integral value-based pedagogies; in any case, his name stands as one of the main educationists of the West. However, the pedagogic reflections of two major philosophers of modern Europe, Kant and Hegel, have been largely overlooked, especially in the last decades. Dr. Ferrer shows in this paper that Kant and Hegel can also be regarded as forerunners of holistic value-based pedagogies. Their enlightening contributions to philosophy of education (...) and ethics, deeply complementary with Rousseau, can enrich the educational scenario of the Western world, dramatically impoverished by materialism, utilitarianism and technocracy. Before them, Plato already outlined a profound philosophy of education that can be regarded as integral and value-based; beyond contextual factors and the historical distance, Plato can still inspire Western education in a spiritual, ethical and humanistic horizon, just like Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. (shrink)