American Journal of Philology

Readers of the author’s earlier In and Out of the Mind will not be surprised at the assumptions and style of this book. The author’s great gift lies in her ability to make the reader feel the power of language, especially poetic language. So, for example, the author unforgettably points out how, in tragedy, the wandering mind inhabits the literally wandering bodies of Io or Orestes, and her treatment of the prefixes of madness-language—ek, para—is a genuinely new contribution. On the other hand, much of the argument is often predictable; anyone who has already absorbed her basic “take” on Greek views of daemonic and mental activity can guess what she is going to say about particular passages (she footnotes herself a great deal, and repeats herself within the book). Anyone familiar with the extensive literature on double motivation will find some of her argument more original in rhetoric than in substance. While she cites work on the history of madness that is likely to be unfamiliar to classicists, within the field she refers mainly to a small group of scholars (Burkert, Dawe, Stinton, Stallmach, Vernant). It is an intensely personal book. Hellenists should read it; but one will not lose much by reading it quickly.

The book summarizes itself on 238: “. . . Greek tragedy represents madness as something temporary, come from outside . . . It is inner writhing, expressed externally in dancelike jerkiness. People know you are mad by how you look and move.” Madness, Padel shows, is isolating. Her stress on important differences between madness in tragedy and post-Romantic literary madness is very helpful and she makes many good observations. Greek literature does not have hidden madness; there are no normal-looking characters who turn out to be serial killers. Madness is temporary, partly, at least, because what tragedians care about is not madness itself but how its victim handles the consequences of it.

Greek representations of madness emphasize sight, as the mad either see wrongly (Ajax thinks cattle are people) or see real things people are better off not seeing, such as the Erinyes. At the same time, it is associated with darkness. Madness is at once daemonic and physical, coming from inside and out. It is related to other signs of divine anger, to pollution, and skin disease. Madness is a constant presence in tragedy, mostly defined in hyperbolic language as abnormal, foolish, or self-destructive behaviors. The Greeks are not very concerned with experiences of the soul outside the body (I’m not sure whether this is true); when the mind is “out” of its place, both mind and body wander, and a bad, daemonic presence may operate where the mind should be.

Madness can be the cause of actions with terrible consequences, or itself [End Page 485] the consequence of angering the gods. It thereby participates in the double nature of Homeric atê, a word which invokes a “damage-chain” that starts in the mind and results in disastrous action; because each use implies the whole sequence, it is sometimes hard to specify the reference (I tend to agree, but she should have read the commentaries on Il. 19.113). In tragedy, atê loses some of its richness of meaning, because, she suggests, tragedy’s business is representing the atê-sequence. Well, maybe; the tragedies that do not fit, she just does not mention. Aeschylus certainly represents the sequence and uses the word with all its ambiguous power.

The book is much engaged with approaches that I believe to be a complete waste of time. An entire chapter is devoted to proving that the direct application of psychoanalytic structures to ancient texts is inappropriate, and to defending the genuine otherness of the Greeks. I suppose this is necessary, but I wish it were not. The author also suggests that critics might profit from remembering that “most of the mad . . . are desperately unhappy” (138)—a fact that Foucault’s followers, like other romanticizers of mad insight, ignore. The...