American Journal of Philology

Recent years have seen a resurgent interest in folklore studies in classics. This timely book by Marc Huys, who has published extensively on Euripides, deftly combines folkloric and philological approaches. Huys’ purpose, as stated in his preface, is to contribute to the interpretation of Euripides’ tragedies from a folklore point of view. “I start from a tale-pattern as it has been defined in folk-lore and compare this narrative sequence of motifs . . . with Euripides’ dramatization” (11). The tale-pattern in question, made clear from the lengthy but explicit title of the book, is that of the hero exposed at birth, and Huys conducts [End Page 137]an investigation into Euripides’ literary handling of the motifs that make up this pattern.

The book falls into two parts. In Part 1, Huys, aiming his book at an audience of classicists, takes pains to explain his folkloric methodology. He carefully defines his understanding of the “tale-pattern of the hero who was exposed at birth” and the motifs that constitute it, along with a brief history of the tale-pattern in literature before Euripides. He includes a succinct survey of previous scholarship on the subject of “hero biographies,” noting, among others, the works by Rank, Raglan, Propp, Campbell, and Binder. Oddly, as Huys points out, the tale-pattern was not recognized as an independent tale-type in the Aarne-Thompson collection ( The Types of the Folktale), though Thompson’s Motif-Indexlists many related motifs (S 300–78). One of the more important discussions in Part 1 contrasts how folkloric and classical studies have dealt with this tale-pattern: in folkloric studies, the e=kuesiq, or child-exposure, is recognized as central to the pattern, while the ½nagnÃrisiq, most often the focus of literary classical scholarship, is deemed an incidental element, implicit in the e=kuesiq . On pages 40–41 Huys sets forth his outline of the tale-pattern and its main motifs, with the exposure itself as the focus. He devises a tripartite scheme, based on Thompson, that includes the antecedents to the exposure, the exposure itself, and the survival of the child. Each category is further divided into sub-motifs: the exposure, for example, includes sub-motifs concerning “the person exposing the child,” “the place where the child is abandoned,” and “the object in which the child is exposed.” Several charts in the Appendixes represent most of these motifs and their variants and serve as useful aids to the discussion.

In Part 2 Huys analyzes each of the motifs in his tripartite scheme, including their general features and their transformation in Euripides’ dramatization. In discussing the general features, Huys takes a wide-ranging view, surveying the many previous interpretations of the motifs both in Greek texts and in comparative material. He explains, for example, what connections (if any) these fictionalized, legendary accounts of exposure have with what we know historically about infant exposure in antiquity, and how e=kuesiq might have been related to the ritual expulsion of the farmak¿q. Huys also discusses how various psychological approaches have interpreted the tale-pattern: the Freudian approach has viewed child abandonment in myth as a fantasy representing the father’s aggression towards his son; Jungian analysis sees the e=kuesiq as a temporary threat of the unconscious to the development of the conscious. (Huys remains diplomatically neutral about the efficacy of such approaches.) After analyzing each motif, Huys also discusses its influence on New Comedy. He remarks that in New Comedy elements of the tale-pattern are usually depicted much more realistically, including, for example, the exposure of unwanted girl-children and exposure for economic reasons. Concerning the rescue of the foundling child, however, he makes a crucial connection: “Euripides, in his preference for rescuers and foster-fathers from the lower classes . . . paved the way for New Comedy, where [End Page...