NOTES

Many thanks to Angus Bowie, Pat Easterling, Simon Goldhill, and Justina Gregory for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

1  I have discussed these questions elsewhere (Croally 1994, esp. 17-46), but some reviewers (Marshall 1995, Sansone 1995) were not convinced. That, along with a recent attempt to deny that tragedy had an educative function (Griffin 1998), has persuaded me to lay out the evidence again.

2  For a provocative article, which argues that ‘‘context’’ as used by Vernant et al. tends to limit the meaning of a text in a way analogous to the way invocations of the author (or authorial intention) limited meaning in earlier philological criticism, see Gellrich 1995. For a trenchant and perhaps surprising view of why we need authors (or context, perhaps), precisely so that we can limit meaning, see Foucault 1979.

3  Plato is wrong to say that there is no reflection about moral agency in tragedy. Medea, for instance, frequently considers the moral status and consequences of her intended actions. For an excellent dicussion of this issue of moral agency in tragedy (and epic), see Williams 1993.

4  For criticism of my use of es meson, see Rhodes 2003. I believe, however, that Rhodes underestimates the extent to which the term used by Herodotus was determined by the terms of political debate in democratic Athens. Rhodes also sees ‘‘Athenian drama as reflecting the polis in general rather than the democratic polis in particular’’ (2003, 119). Yet he himself says of the institutional setting of tragedy that it is ‘‘a democratic version’’ (2003, 113). It is very difficult to overestimate the importance of democracy in the Athenians’ views of themselves and others.