So if her rhetoric is viewed one way the nurse gets it exactly right; yet she is profoundly wrong when it is viewed in another. Such a catastrophic mixture of fire and misfire is found again and again, especially when the notion of formal speech is most prominent. In Euripides’ Suppliants Theseus must strike an Athenian audience as fundamentally right in defending democracy, and the Theban herald as wrong in attacking it; and yet the herald’s picture is the one that would more often strike an uncomfortable chord in its acute pointers to contemporary realities (Collard 1975a, 211-12; Pelling 1997b, 233). In the debate in Phoenician Women (446-637) Eteo-cles is very honest about his own thoughts on tyranny: he is not going to give it up, whatever was agreed (499-525). Yet the effect is to make this formal exchange, so carefully set up by the worried Jocasta, thoroughly useless: it should be to air the rights and wrongs, yet one party refuses to play; the idea was to reconcile, yet one party wants no reconciliation; rhetoric should be to persuade, yet Eteocles’ words are likely to persuade no one; and it all does not matter anyway, with the armies poised for action. However rightly Eteocles’ speech reflects his mindset, its inappropriateness brings out the wrongness of all the dynamics of the encounter. So then do Jocasta’s platitudes (528-85), in a different way: they are far more ethically right, and yet have no purchase on the situation at all.
Matters are no less complicated in Aeschylus and Sophocles - indeed, they are often even more interestingly complicated. In the early scenes of Seven against Thebes Eteocles is surely right to stem the flood of fearful female emotion, and his language is appropriately powerful; yet he also stands up to the fears of the chorus once it is clear that it is his brother he will have to fight (686-719), and it is their case there, based though it is on emotion, that has more logos on its side. The Creon of Oedipus at Colonus pleads with Oedipus to return to Thebes, and says all sorts of things that a right-minded Theban ought to think and say (728-60); but the audience knows enough to be clear that he does not mean them at all, all is disingenuous, and Oedipus is right to reject him so magnificently. Yet a little later right and wrong are harder to disentangle, when Polynices belies expectations and says many things that sound more attractive (1252-1446). His repentance may strike the right note, and may well seem to the audience to be sincere. But it will not be enough for Oedipus: even if the audience discriminates the two sorts of appeal, he does not, and no words could be the right ones to persuade him (Buxton 1982, 137-45; cf. Easterling 1967; Blundell 1989, 241-48). As so often, a failure of rhetoric marks a terminally dysfunctional family, and once again it is the onstage listener’s mindset that is illuminated - but by the flatness of the rejection rather than, as in Phaedra’s case, by the willingness to accept.
All those cases (and many more) invite more detailed analysis, but let us take two cases, those of Sophocles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, where the mix of overwhelming rhetorical power and deeply dangerous performance is particularly interesting. In each case what makes the performance so sinister is that the speakers’ themes and images cohere so closely with other aspects of the play: the speakers may, in different ways, be saying things at odds with their own natures, but there is a deeper reality and truth which speaks through their words. There is logos there, but not as the speakers know it, or at least not in ways that they can wholly accept. If their speech has a quizzical relation to reality and to their own natures, it also has a distorted impact on those to whom they speak: communication itself is what speech is for, but is here travestied, distorted, sinister, and simply wrong.