The very notion of anthropological knowledge has been problematized in postmodern discourses. The flaws of postmodernism cannot be discussed here (for a critique see, e. g., Sokal and Bricmont 1999), except insofar as they impinge directly on the study of tragedy; but in any case, I hope that the validity of the anthropological insights that are implicated in this discussion will become clear - except perhaps in the eyes of those who believe that we cannot have access to any truth whatsoever. See a discussion of the different anthropologies and their greater or lesser self-reflexivity, and the notion of anthropological knowledge, in Adam et al. 1990a, 9-17; Borel 1990, 21-69; Kilani 1990, 71-109.
I discuss these two tragedies more fully in Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 25-30 (Euripides’ Erechtheus) and Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 234-46 (Aeschylus’ Eumenides).
See on this mytheme in and before Aeschylus: Sommerstein 1989, 2-6; cf. 13-17 on the Areopagus itself.
On the Hyacinthids see Kearns 1989, 59-63, 201-2; Larson 1995, 20, 101-6 passim. On the heroization and immortality of the Athenian war dead and the epitaph for the men who died in the battle of Potidaea cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 1995, 194.
On Poseidon Erechtheus see Parker 1987,202,204; cf. Parker 1996,290-93; Kearns 1989, 113-15. On the Erechtheum see now Hurwit 1999,200-209, 316 n. 13 with bibliography. However, Ferrari (2002, 11-35) argues that the cult of Athena Polias had continued to be housed in the archaic temple which, on this argument, had continued functioning as the temple of Athena Polias, having been reconstituted as a monument in a scarred form, and had remained standing into the Roman period. This, of course, does not affect the present argument, since the Erechtheum was, in any case, being built next to the archaic temple.
World History
