‘‘It is in the exercise of language that a human being is constituted as a subject’’ (Benveniste 1966, 259). The importance of this idea to the study of women’s speech in tragedy is evident. It is perennially startling that a culture that prescribed the invisibility and silence of women produced, and indeed promoted to the highest cultural status, a genre in which women are portrayed as supremely articulate. The parts they take in the traditional stories that form the basis of the tragedies do not necessarily require much elaboration. But because they are given such an extraordinary range of voices, endowed with remarkable power and (emotional) authenticity, the female characters of tragedy resist simple relegation, and constitute a provocatively vocal and persistently eloquent Other.1 To investigate the nature of the female subject in tragedy, it becomes vital to study the language of female characters.2
This all-important female speech has been studied in a variety of ways, as McClure has summarized (2001, 6-11). The most promising are a sociolinguistic approach, which seeks to relate speech to social roles and conditions, suitably adapted in the light of what is known about ancient views of language and in view of the stylization of the tragic genre, and the approach (most favored by McClure in her 1999 book) through the study of verbal genres and their manipulation by the poets. The two are not incompatible and may profitably be combined. Of course there are methodological pitfalls: what, for example, is the relationship between the speech of ancient Athenian women and female characters in Attic tragedy, if any? There does seem to have been a relationship, if a complex one, between the speech of tragic male characters and that of Athenian men: at least, some modes of speech are convincingly identified as colloquial (because they occur frequently in comedy or Platonic dialogue, in texts which do seem to aim to reproduce a recognizable diction: see Stevens 1976, for example). The iambic trimeter, the meter of the spoken parts of tragedy, is identified by Aristotle as that closest to everyday speech (Poetics 1449a24-27, cf. 1459a12). But if the diction of tragedy occasionally ‘‘zooms’’ its hearers into everyday speech (for the concept of zooming see Sourvinou-Inwood, chapter 18 in this volume), its high style cannot be said to approximate it as a general rule. The same
Must apply to female characters, only more so, since women’s voices were intended to be rarely heard, at least outside (though see now Blok 2001, 95-116).
It is nonetheless reassuring that we have some evidence that female speech was perceived as having special linguistic characteristics of its own: for example, Plato identifies linguistic conservatism as a female tendency (Cratylus 418b-c), and Aristotle certainly regards some types of speech as appropriate or inappropriate to women (though this refers more to verbal genres than to linguistic features proper: see Poetics 1454a22-24 and 31, where he seems to be saying that Euripides’ Melanippe makes inappropriate use of rhetoric). So a dramatist might have wanted in some sense to make a character sound female, even ifa female tragic character did not sound much (or at all) like an Athenian woman. More importantly, there is ancient evidence for the view that language and subjectivity were linked in the minds of the Greeks: Gera, in her recent examination of ancient Greek views on the development and purpose of language, traces the important idea that ‘‘the possession of speech...is often thought to entail the capacity for rational thinking as well’’ (2003, 182). It may be possible to argue, based on this widespread ancient concept, that the articulate Greek women of tragedy, just by speaking, can be seen to lay claim to full subjectivity, even if that claim is often subsequently challenged or denied.
So although there is, clearly, a potential danger of anachronism and of cultural inappropriateness in applying some criteria to the female speech in the tragic texts, the approach still seems worth pursuing. It is very hard, and probably impossible, to identify any particular linguistic criterion that always and invariably seems to suggest a female character. One might be tempted to argue paradoxically that silence is the linguistic preserve of the tragic woman - that in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, Jocasta leaves the stage without a word after her realization, whereas Oedipus cries out that all has become clear to him as he recognizes his fate - but there are always counterexamples. We do not know enough about Aeschylus’ famous lost play Myrmidons to know the quality of Achilles’ silence, but that he was silent for a long time was the most celebrated feature of that play and perhaps of Phrygians too (Aristophanes, Frogs 911-13, with Dover 1993a on 911-12; Taplin 1972; and now Michelakis 2002, 37-39). Sociolinguists working on modern languages, and particularly those who study ‘‘the linguistic means by which men dominate women in interaction’’ (Tannen 1994, 20-21), have also discovered that broad generalizations tend to fail, and have evolved methodological strategies to deal with this: as Tannen (1994, 21) has shown, ‘‘linguistic strategies are potentially ambiguous (they could ‘mean’ either power or solidarity) and polysemous (they could ‘mean’ both).’’ So silence (in fiction or in life) can be dominated or used as a means of control; interruption can betoken a lack of interest in what the interlocutor says, or a boundless enthusiasm for it. In an analogous way, I believe that when looking at tragedy it is necessary to take each play as a separate entity and accept that a technique used in one play to create a female character might not work in the same way in another play, with a different set of circumstances and a different linguistic atmosphere, a different word-world. This might seem rather convenient, but it is surely a necessary move: all characterization operates by placing the descriptors it uses to create a persona in a particular context and playing off the character created by those descriptors against his or her setting. The character is unintelligible out of context and the context is nothing without the character. It will be clear that while I agree with Griffith (2001, 136) that ‘‘no neatly defined portrait of‘woman’ emerges (from this play [Antigone], or from any other - or from Greek tragedy overall),” I do believe that, despite the inevitable circularity of looking for difference in women’s speech, the search can still be a fruitful exercise. But every play needs a different set of tests. There is no alternative to taking each drama individually on its own terms.
If this approach is taken, the question of whether one can discern differences in the treatment of female characters in different authors becomes more, not less, complex, especially given that so much tragedy has been lost, and that in two out of three cases the plays we have are a selection made for us by people with very different preferences and priorities from our own: Sophocles, in particular, looks a far more diverse author, and perhaps one more interested in women, when the fragments are taken into account than he does from the extant plays (one of which, Philoctetes, is the only extant tragedy without a female character). One could perhaps argue that in Sophocles and Euripides an ever greater desire for naturalism (a dignified and stylized naturalism, but significant and appreciable nonetheless) is in evidence where it is not in Aeschylus, and that this results in more and more subtle ways of rendering women’s speech. But at this point in the argument, someone will mention Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, and the theory will collapse.
Christopher Pelling, in chapter 6 of this volume, discusses Clytemnestra’s superb rhetoric, her inimitable way of misleading without ever really lying; Laura McClure (1999, 70-111) her manipulation ofverbal genres; Simon Goldhill (1984, esp. 8-98) the transgressiveness of her language. I would like very briefly to discuss her short scene with Cassandra. As has often been pointed out, Cassandra is the only person not to fall under the spell of Clytemnestra’s persuasion, and the only woman she encounters - hardly a coincidence, even if one does not agree entirely with McClure’s characterization of Clytemnestra’s persuasion as erotic (1999, 93; see also Goldhill’s very interesting account of this scene [1984, 81-88], and Montiglio 2000, 213-16).
Clytemnestra tell Cassandra, ‘‘You too get yourself inside, you, Cassandra I mean; since Zeus without anger [amenitOs] has made you share with the house the lustral water, standing with many slaves by the household altar’’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1035-38). The contrast between Clytemnestra’s successful persuasion of all the other characters and Cassandra’s imperviousness to her is all the more striking because Clytemnestra is at first very much in her usual flow, inserting multiple ironies into her every line: Cassandra will indeed stand by the altar for a sacrifice very soon indeed. The position of amenitos (‘‘without anger’’) between ‘‘Zeus’’ and ‘‘the house’’ leaves it ambiguous as to whether Clytemnestra is commenting on the impassivity of Zeus’ plan or the lack of wrath in the house where she has ended up: but we know (from 155, where the chorus spoke of a ‘‘remembering, child-avenging Wrath’’) that a Meenis who shares many characteristics with Clytemnestra in fact inhabits the house. Fraenkel (1950 on 1036-38; see also Denniston and Page 1957 on 1035 ff.) comments on the inclusion of slaves in household sacrifices: ‘‘What Clytemnestra here makes appear as a special favour is in truth nothing more than the common practice of antiquity’’ - so the irony is the more vicious, especially as she then contrasts the kindness of masters who are archaioploutoi (of ancient wealth) with the unkindness of the nouveaux riches.
The address is ‘‘perhaps not very polite,’’ ‘‘rather near to the limits of good manners’’ (Fraenkel 1950 on 1035), so there is a slightly impatient tone, but the references to the wealth of the house recall her earlier speech to Agamemnon (95874), and Clytemnestra’s use of the consolatory example of Heracles as slave in 104041, a rhetorical commonplace (see, for example, Sophocles, Antigone 944-87), perhaps recalls the method she used on Agamemnon in the tapestry-scene, introducing Priam as a (specious) example on which to model himself (935). Heracles is also a specious example in relation to Cassandra: though he did undergo sexual humiliation during his servitude to Omphale (in some versions dressing as a woman), the whole experience was always temporary, and inflicted as a punishment for misconduct (see OCD s. v. Omphale, and Loraux 1995, 116-39); Cassandra is innocent, not merely humiliated but violated, and would be facing a lifetime of slavery if she were not about to be murdered by Clytemnestra. But the difference in Clytemnestra’s opponent is becoming apparent: Cassandra does not respond to this or any other gambit. As Clytemnestra loses her temper, she also seems to lose her grasp of the realities of language: in fact, Cassandra panics her into a linguistic Colemanball,3 underlining her frustration at her sudden inability to communicate. Cassandra’s silence, therefore, is not the silence of helplessness, but the silence of power - the power which knowledge gives her. For all that both Clytemnestra and the chorus interpret her lack of speech as making her like a wild animal (on this tendency in Greek thought see Gera 2003, 182-212), it is she who stands, paradoxically, in the position of strength. Eventually she will do as Clytemnestra says and go into the house where the sacrifice is waiting (1056-57); but when she does it will be - uniquely - on her own terms, in full knowledge of what awaits her, undeceived by Clytemnestra’s double meanings. So although (as others have pointed out: see, e. g., Wohl 1998,113) she is figured in many ways very like Iphigenia (each, for example, is hauntingly compared to a picture: Agamemnon 242, 1328-29), there is a contrast between them too. Iphigenia, gagged and so deprived of speech, can only communicate silently, as a picture does; Cassandra, initially silent, becomes wonderfully eloquent, giving the house a voice, narrating story after story - until she exits and her picture is wiped out. She is never referred to after the end of the play, and her death is not mentioned as being avenged by Orestes. So Cassandra’s silence, and her speech, both acquire meaning from the text which surrounds them.
A useful comparison may be made with another prisoner of war: Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax. Tecmessa comes out of Ajax’s tent to describe the horror of Ajax’s madness (significantly, she does so after asking, ‘‘how shall I tell the unspeakable tale?’’ - which sets the tone for the concentration on speech acts which will follow) and the ‘‘double sorrow’’ of his realization of it. As she relates the beginning of his insanity (284-87), her ready and detailed narration recalls the way in which Deianira in Women of Trachis inclines to narrative and story-telling (on which see Kraus 1991). Her description of Ajax’s brusque and stereotypically masculine response (so Segal 1981, 109, 133-38; and see Aristophanes, Lysistrata 507-20) when she queries his departure in the middle of the night is ironic in the light of her function in the play so far, which has been, and will continue to be, one of reporting and verbal interpretation, as well as those very female verbal genres, consolation and lamentation. His proverbial rebuke of her speech, enjoining silence onto her, applies only to the immediate context; indeed, by 312 he is threatening her if she does not speak to him and tell him what has happened. It is in fact primarily in terms of his speech acts that Tecmessa reports his madness and recovery from it, moving from his crazed volubility in his madness (represented both directly in 91-117 and in Tecmes-sa’s description at 301-6) to silence (311), to threats (312), to groaning, which he previously regarded as unworthy of a hero (instead of his usual inarticulate animal cries - 322), and back to quieter lamentation (325). Segal (1981, 133-38) has noted Ajax’s progression from these reported generic expressions of grief and pain to the double-edged eloquence of the Deception Speech. From our point of view it is particularly interesting that Tecmessa concentrates so carefully on the noises Ajax makes: she, unlike Clytemnestra in the presence of Cassandra, really wants to be able to interpret Ajax, to understand and communicate with him, but is hampered in constructing interpretations of Ajax by the limited material he gives her.
This contrasts with the opening scene and the first choral ode, where there is more concentration on what Ajax does than on what he says, and it is the voices ofhis enemies that are foregrounded: Odysseus addresses Athena as a voice (14); she tells him to proclaim Ajax’s madness (67), and later warns him to control his speech (127-30). The chorus then concentrates on the malignant force of rumor (142, 148, 155-56, 166, 167-68) and calls upon Ajax to appear to inflict silence on his enemies (169-71). They address and personify the rumor at 173-74; beg Zeus and Apollo to avert it at 187; and return to it again at 188-92 and 198-99. Tecmessa’s purpose in her explanatory narrative is ultimately to allow the chorus’s words to do their utmost in helping him (330), but not even her own words will ultimately do much good. But her attempts at interpretation do not only characterize Ajax as inaccessible and delineate the violence of his moods, they also characterize her as a gentle mediator and as one who, despite everything, genuinely cares for Ajax and is affected by what will happen to him. One might dare to say that it also makes her sound very female as she continually struggles to find the best possible response to her focus of care, Ajax. At the same time, her interaction with the male chorus, a cooperative and mutually respectful relationship, must characterize Ajax as representing an extreme of masculinity.
In the following scene it is not only the text in which Ajax and Tecmessa operate that endows their speech with meaning, but also the Homeric text against which they are written. As Segal points out (1981, 134): ‘‘Homer’s Hector and Andromache ... can hear and move one another; Ajax and Tecmessa, like Heracles and Deianira, speak different languages.’’ It is most important that in this version of the scene between Hector and Andromache in the Iliad (6.390-502) Tecmessa is forced into playing both characters: she echoes both the speech in which the loving Hector foreshadows Andromache’s fate and Andromache’s words in which she reminds Hector that he is all she has left (Iliad 6.447-65 and Ajax 496-505; Iliad 6.429-32 and Ajax 514-17; see Bers 1997, 50-51, and de Jong 1987). Tecmessa’s performance at least provokes pity from the chorus, if not from Ajax, but when Ajax comes to play Hector in the scene with Eurysaces, it proves a travesty. The Homeric scene ends with premature lamentation for Hector: Ajax closes the Sophoclean version down by brusquely rejecting lamentation with another masculine generalization (580, cf. 586). But like his last such comment, this one fails in its effect, this time even in its immediate context. His final metaphor (‘‘The wise physician does not chant incantations over a wound that calls for surgery,’’ 581-82) is complicated, not least because it is so concisely expressed. On the surface it contrasts magical chanting (used to stop bleeding at Odyssey 19.457 and elsewhere) with surgery. But because the word he uses for incantation is also commonly applied to erotic magic and hence to a particular type of (usually female) persuasion, and because the audience will inevitably see his reference to cutting as pointing to his suicide, it also contrasts Tecmessa’s words with his own impulse to action. But his effort to have the last word is temporarily frustrated by the chorus’s and Tecmessa’s forcing him into stichomythia (one-line exchanges) and then into antilabe (part-line exchanges).
When Ajax reemerges and speaks the Deception Speech, he describes his new attitude by saying (in a literal translation), ‘‘I was made female in respect of my mouth at this woman’s hands’’ (651-52). Zeitlin (1990a, 82, also 72-73) has said of this: ‘‘[Ajax] in his madness has not acted the part of the hero.... Thus the deceptive speech makes sense as a feminine strategy enlisted in the service of restoring an unequivocal manliness he can only achieve...by dying the manly death - heroically and publically onstage - yet in the woman’s way.’’ The phrasing suggests that it is only in words that Ajax has changed, that his mode of outward communication rather than his attitude is different. But it is the gentler tone of these lines rather than their deceptive aspect that Ajax might see as feminized: in Ajax deception is in fact most associated with Odysseus rather than with women. Some would also dispute Zeitlin’s contention that suicide is a feminine death, and indeed one that Greek society condemned (see de Romilly 2003). The rhetoric of this speech is off-key in a number of ways, as Pelling has shown (see chapter 6 in this volume).
We might conversely ask whether there are any implications for Tecmessa in the fact that she is forced to adopt two Homeric roles, one male, one female. Tecmessa is not a transgressive female character like Clytemnestra, who adopts male language in order to get her way;4 she may not keep quiet for very long despite Ajax’s orders, but she does go inside when he tells her to, she laments for him and covers up his corpse, and in every respect her behavior is aimed at securing what is best for him. Rather, her adoption of a dual role in this scene is forced on her by (and of course simultaneously serves to delineate) the comparative unconcern of Ajax. This is underlined by the fact that when she plays Andromache and describes the ruin of her home and family at 515-17, it becomes clear that where Andromache speaks of Achilles killing her father and brothers, it was actually Ajax who ravaged Tecmessa’s home (though her parents were killed in some other way, like Andromache’s mother). It fits well that Tecmessa the interpreter of Ajax should also have to supply her own sympathy and interest. Tecmessa thus emerges as a strong focus of the important theme of language in this play, whose own language conveys a character defined by its relation to Ajax as distinctively female, and contributes a voice against which to judge Ajax’s.
Yet more prisoners of war will help us make some further points. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, we find perhaps the greatest variety of female characters in any single play. Trojan Women is rarely treated as a problem play, and yet in many respects it is remarkably difficult to fit into many schemas that seek to formulate a definition for tragedy. So, for example, Rivier says of it (1944, 175): ‘‘There is nothing tragic about this play, even though it abounds in bloodshed and tears, since tragedy stems from reflections on the origin of misfortune, not on the mere perception of its physical effects.’’ Its structure encourages the reader (or audience) to compare the succession of women with whom Hecuba interacts to one another; and as the action of the play happens mostly off-stage (or indeed before the play begins), the criteria for comparison are very largely conveyed by their contrasting modes of speech. The male characters of the play, apart from Astyanax, are Greek, not Trojan, and this intensifies the feeling that the women exist in a rather separate world from men. Talthybius goes to and fro; Menelaus judges the agOn; but neither of them has much at stake, since neither is aware of the doom hanging over the Greeks which is determined in the prologue. It is hard indeed to feel that, compared with the onstage direct presentation of the women and their concerns, ‘‘the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male’’ (Zeitlin 1990a, 68) - either the Greeks or even Astyanax, so much more important for his potential and for his symbolic value than for his present persona. The important things are said by women in this play, because they are felt by them. And Euripides is careful to make what they say appropriate to female characters and a female chorus, avoiding showing people in an extreme situation all sounding the same (a phenomenon discussed by Silk 1996b and Mossman 2001, 376). This play is about the death of a city, and the city is usually primarily a male concern; but in this play the city is shown through the minds of the Trojan women as the frame for the oikos (household), conceived of less as a state than as a collection of families (see 198-206, for example). Although Astyanax becomes almost symbolic of the future of the city, he is simultaneously (perhaps primarily) a vulnerable family member for Hecuba. Of course cities and oikoi have a common characteristic: when there are no men in them they are conceived of as empty (see Thucydides 7.77.7 and Lysias 7.41), and of course the women’s feelings about the fall of the city overlap with what those of male non-combatants might be (had the Greeks left any of them alive). It is a question of emphasis, but the emphasis is on that which an Athenian audience might expect to be of most importance to women: the family.
How then does Euripides differentiate this multiplicity of female voices? It is not hard in Ajax to discern a contrast between the male voice of Ajax and the female voice of Tecmessa; but how are Cassandra and Andromache and Helen and Hecuba individualized? I think it is possible to see that each of the major female characters has her own peculiar voice; it is also possible to see each voice as connecting with and relating to the others and performing an intellectual function within the play. It has been rightly pointed out (e. g., by Croally 1994, 84-97, esp. 86-90; see also Scodel 1998, esp. 145-54) that each of the characters is profoundly concerned with marriage in one way or another: Cassandra sings a perverted marriage-hymn; Hecuba reflects bitterly on the marriages which should have been made for her daughters but which will never be; Andromache is troubled by the new ‘‘marriage’’ she must contract and what her conduct in it should be; Helen’s ruptured marriage to Menelaus is to be resumed, and her perverted marriage to Paris has caused all the trouble. This is important, and obviously contributes to the female atmosphere of the play. As important for their individuality, though, is the way in which the characters express this concern.
Hecuba is the focus around which the action revolves; as one might expect of a character who bears the weight of the tragedy, it is she who is the great poet and orator of the play. This would surely be true of a male protagonist as well; but it might still be legitimate to look for ways in which her gender is expressed as part of her individuality. First, solo and antiphonal lamentation, the most obvious female speech genre (since it was, and is, perceived as a function of women in life as well as in fiction: see McClure 1999, 40-47; Alexiou 1974; and on this play, Gregory 1991, esp. 160-62 and 176-78), marks her as the non-combatant female survivor of the sack of a city. But in her other utterances a distinctive view of what has happened to her emerges. For one thing, she is the character in the play who most consistently questions the gods and the accepted order of the universe: not surprisingly, this tends to make her the character who uses the most abstract language. She also, though, has the widest range of different tones and roles: mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, captive, queen, victim, accuser. Hecuba is the only character (apart from the chorus) to report conversations with others: she renders in direct speech conversations she had with Helen and recalls how Astyanax would chatter away to her (see Bers 1997, 100-101). More fundamentally, she has been described as inconsistent, especially with regard to advising Andromache to buckle down and carry on as a concubine and telling Helen she should have killed herself if her position was genuinely that of a captive bride (see Waterfield 1982). It could be argued that this multiplicity of voice is most characteristic of a female protagonist (changeability being a female characteristic from early Greek poetry on: see Semonides fr. 7.27-42 West, where he compares one of his female character types to the sea). Clytemnestra and Medea are obvious examples of sinister multivocal female protagonists. Although some female leads are not (or not in the same way: Deianira, for example), it is hard to think of a male protagonist who is: Ajax, for example, maintains his own voice even in the Deception Speech. Even Odysseus (in Ajax and other plays) is less changeable.
If Hecuba sounds slightly different in every scene, as I believe she does, that must be at least partly to do with the differing nature of her interlocutors. I have noted elsewhere (Mossman 2001) that women may argue differently in the presence of men from the way they do when in a single-sex group: in Trojan Women, however, this cannot be argued, as I did for Electra, by studying the numbers of general reflections, as there are remarkably few of those in the play as a whole, and there does not seem to be much, or indeed any, correlation between the presence of men and the predominance of sententiousness, as there was in Electra. This is an example of what I said above about every play constituting its own word-world. The general principle, however, does seem to me to hold good in the scene between Hecuba and Helen in the presence of Menelaus, in that both attempt to manipulate him; but the presence of Talthybius makes much less difference to them: he is the go-between with the male world of the Greeks and as such is accepted and does not modify their speech as Menelaus can be seen to do.
What of the female characters? It might have been expected that Cassandra, not Hecuba, should have been the one most given to abstract thought and expressions, but in fact the most disconcerting thing about Cassandra is her determination to take literally what most would see as metaphors and act out the logical consequences of them, to insist that her future liaison with Agamemnon is a marriage and to celebrate it accordingly; to take what she knows about the future and see herself as literally sacking Agamemnon’s house in return (359), and to view the disaster which will befall the Greeks as a victory for the Trojans, which should therefore be celebrated. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the Aeschylean Cassandra, whose metaphors cluster densely, but whose conduct remains consonant with the nature of her situation and the world around her; and it has the effect of making her even more disconcerting to the other characters, and even to the audience, who might be taken aback by her extreme application of logic even though they know she is right. (Croally 1994, 230, has a different comparison with the Aeschylean Clytemnestra.)
The effect is heightened by minimizing the number of actually metaphorical expressions she uses: in all of 353-405 the only metaphors which could be described as ‘‘live’’ are antiporthesO (‘‘I shall sack [Agamemnon’s house] in turn,’’ 359), which she turns out to mean literally, and her use of stephanos, ‘‘crown,’’ at 401, a term suggested by the comparison (almost a competition) she is drawing between the Greeks and Troy. In her response to Talthybius she introduces one figurative comparison which cannot be connected to her obsessions, marriage and victory, when she says that Odysseus will one day think the Trojans’ troubles like gold when compared with his own (432). At 444 she calls her description of his wanderings ‘‘hurling words like javelins,’’ which, again, does not connect with her literalized metaphors; but when in the next line she says her marriage to Agamemnon will take place in the house of Hades she may almost mean this literally (445). The same may be true when she calls herself one of the three Furies (457) and when she envisages herself victorious in Hades and claims again that she will sack the house of Atreus (46061). For the audience these expressions both emphasize the strangeness of Cassandra (especially in the light of the intertextuality with Aeschylus) and simultaneously invest what she says with a very strong air of plain truth; for Hecuba and Talthybius they make her seem demented. It is important that Hecuba responds to Cassandra’s marriage-hymn with a reproachful address to Hephaestus (343-45); this will contrast with Hecuba’s later, less conventional addresses to the gods (see Croally 1994, 79-81).
When Cassandra has left the stage, Hecuba’s speech highlights how little she has been able to inspire belief: the keynote of this speech is the contrast of present woe and future uncertainty with past happiness, underlined linguistically by Hecuba’s persistent use of polyptoton, as she uses the same verb in different tenses and voices (see 468, 487-88, 499; she also uses different parts of the same adjective at 496). Intentionally simple though the diction of this great speech is, Hecuba is more inclined to ‘‘live’’ metaphors than Cassandra (cf. 469, 496-97, and 508-9). At 489 the imagery ofthe cornerstone metaphor seems especially appropriate since Hecuba is relating the troubles of her house.
The scene with Andromache is particularly interesting in this context. For one thing, there is a surprising amount of tension between Hecuba and Andromache, which emerges after the antiphonal lament they share. Hecuba has been totally supportive and protective of her daughter, and there were some indications in Cassandra’s madness of concern for Hecuba, notably her eagerness to show that Hecuba would not after all be a slave to Odysseus (427-30). But the dynamic is different with Andromache. She quite abruptly insists that Polyxena is better off dead, and specifically better off than herself, rejecting Hecuba’s ‘‘while there’s life, there’s hope.’’ A scholion on 634 is so wrong-headed it actually says something very interesting: ‘‘he is not aiming at the underlying characters. For now Andromache philosophizes along the same lines as Cassandra did before.’’ But the two characters are in fact totally different. Cassandra, as we have seen, didn’t really philosophize at all; Andromache’s first speech, though, is full of moral reflection, albeit of a different type from Hecuba’s.
Here, rather than in relation to the male characters, it may be interesting to consider the proportion of general reflection in the speeches of the three female characters we have encountered so far. Cassandra has 3 lines of general reflection in 353-405 (3/50, omitting 383-85, or 6 percent) and 2.5 lines in 424-61 as we have it, though there is a lacuna after 434 (2.5/38, or 6.57 percent; this includes the lines in trochaic tetrameters). Andromache in 634-83 gives by far the most sententious speech in this play: she has 11.5 lines out of 48 (deleting 634-35), or 23.9 percent. This is evidently because she is struggling to work out a moral position for herself in the midst of chaos: she speaks no generalizations at all in 740-79 in her response to Talthybius’ announcement that the Greeks have decided to kill Astyanax. That would seem to hold the key to why using the same criteria for interpreting speech characteristics does not necessarily work in different plays: here the women are in such extreme circumstances that the kind of social constraints which dictate Electra’s use of general reflections are no longer valid: why should Andromache now care what Talthybius thinks or modify her speech in any way? Ironically, as she describes her attitude to her first marriage (643-58), she does so insistently in terms of speech and speech acts (compare Tecmessa), and the control over her speech which she exerted is the essence of her virtue: ‘‘I aimed at high repute,’ she explains [toxeusasa in 643 is a common metaphor for speaking as well as aiming at something: see Aeschylus, Suppliants 446; Euripides, Hecuba 603]; ‘‘whether blame already attaches to women or not...I put aside my longing for the very thing that brings the most scandal, namely staying outside, and I stayed in the house. [Contrast Andromache in Iliad 6, who is, of course, not in the house at all, and see Croally 1994, 90 n. 43.]
1 didn't let into my house the clever talk of women but I was content with having in my own mind a sound teacher from my own resources. I kept before my husband a quiet tongue and a tranquil look.... Report of this reached the Greek camp’’ (trans. Barlow 1986; my italics). In keeping with this is her comparison of herself and Hector to yokemates who have been parted (669-72): if a dumb animal is unhappy in such circumstances, how much more so will be an articulate human being, who has taken so much care over her speech? (See Gera 2003, 182-212.) The total despair and frustration which makes her tell Talthybius to take Astyanax away and eat his flesh if he likes is very different from her earlier ‘‘philosophizing.''
A similar point could be made about Hecuba’s speeches (taking only the long speeches for reasons of space): Hecuba's first speech (for which no men are present) has a generalization ratio of 4.5/45, or 10 percent. At 686-708 (again, no men are present unless you count Astyanax) she speaks none as such (686-94 are an extended metaphor rather than a general reflection). Interestingly, in the agon, where one often finds general reflections clustering and Menelaus is judging the contest, Helen (on the attack) speaks none, and Hecuba, attacking back, in all of 969-1032 speaks only
2 generalizing lines out of 64 (3.125 percent), though she has an impressive and ominous general remark at 1051. Burying Astyanax at 1156-1206, again, with no men present, she reverts to a similar proportion as in her first speech: 5.5/50, or 11 percent; but when she tries to rush toward the fire that is consuming Troy, generalization is obviously going to be lacking: her own specific suffering is naturally what she cries aloud, Talthybius or no Talthybius (1272-83).
Andromache is seeking the best line of conduct for herself in this new, chaotic universe; as such she speculates more than Cassandra, who is sure even of the new order and her place in it. Andromache indeed also uses more metaphors; but she does not query its nature, as Hecuba does. Andromache in cursing Helen makes use of abstractions, calling her the daughter not of Zeus, but of Avenging Curse, of Envy, of Murder and Death (766-71); but Hecuba questions the nature of Zeus himself, in a famous and arresting passage before the agOn with Helen (884-88). Only Hecuba, the character who most consistently speculates about the gods (Croally 1994, 70-84), could meaningfully have said this (in this play), and only she could take on Helen directly and on her own terms. The agOn has been much studied (see, e. g., Lee 1976, Barlow 1986 ad loc, Lloyd 1984 and 1992, and Meridor 2000), and space will not permit a full analysis here; but a few brief points should be made.
This passage, as is characteristic of any agOn, is highly rhetorical, and in keeping with this Hecuba’s speech takes on a new and different aspect, as has often been said. This is the voice she uses that stands out most clearly from the others, and that it does so must be partly due to Helen. It is interesting to contrast Helen, the wicked wife, with Andromache, the good one: where Andromache’s speech acts were the essence of her virtue, Helen’s are rhetorical markers in an oration. Indeed, even when she is just asking Menelaus why she has been brought outside she uses a word which is also a rhetorical technical term (phroimion, ‘‘beginning,’’ 895).5 Her speech of 49 lines (deleting 918, 959-60) has a four-line preamble followed by a formal tricolon (‘‘first... second... then...’’). There are two more rhetorical narration-dividers (931, 945), and two examples of hypophora (938 and 951; hypophora is the anticipation of one’s opponents’ objections). Helen thus lays tremendous stress on the act of argument and the present speech (as opposed to the control of speech in the past). Hecuba’s speech is quite different in this regard (though of course nonetheless rhetorical for all that). In 64 lines we have a two-line preamble (969-70: ‘‘First of all I shall become an ally for the goddesses and show that this one does not speak justly’’), whose phrasing actually points not to Hecuba’s speech but to the falsity of Helen’s, and then no formal rhetorical marker (that is, no reference to this speech as a speech) until 1029. Hecuba does use the retrospective equivalent of hypophora in that she constantly interrogates what Helen has said (and indeed what she has not said: see Lloyd 1984 and also Croally 1994, 120-62; Hecuba refers to Helen’s speech at 98183, 998, and 1010); but she does so with much more apparent naturalism. In general Hecuba’s speech gives the impression of tumbling out of her in a tirade: note, for example, the way that Helen uses the interjection eihen, ‘‘well now,’’ outside the meter, creating a very strong break between 944 and 945 as she moves from one argument to another; whereas Hecuba incorporates it into her line, making only a small pause, at 998. Not all of Hecuba’s arguments are reasonable; but her anger is sincere, and shines through her rhetoric, whereas Helen’s sterile logic, as ruthless as Cassandra’s but self-serving where hers was not, is also conveyed through the conventions of language.
Why do all this? Why write a play where almost all the characters are women, indeed women in the process of suffering the most brutal type of objectifying exchange transaction possible (to borrow the type of terminology used by Wohl 1998, 59117), being transformed from free women into slaves? Can there be any reason other than that the poet wished to demonstrate that subjectivity and identity can transcend even the most dire circumstances if it can still speak? True, the poet is male (as are the actors). But just as the male actor must wear a female mask and perhaps modify his voice to sound female (see Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 167-71), so the poet can be seen to modify his voice and allow his characters to sound, if not like women, at least like tragic women, and to sound like individuals at that. And if they sound like
Individuals, it becomes much easier to see them as moral agents, as subjects, as thinking beings, much harder for the contemporary audience simply to dismiss, and much more rewarding for later audiences and readers. What would tragedy be if its women were as silent as the (unnamed, dumb) girl in Menander’s Dyskolos? In one sense the action revolves around her; but only in the sense that the action of a Hitchcock film revolves around the MacGuffin, the indeterminate object that serves only to advance the plot or motivate the main characters; this might be tolerable in a comedy, but would make for very impoverished tragedy. The silent lole in Sophocles’ Women of Trachis is the exception that proves the rule: it is, after all, Deianira’s reaction to her that dictates the movement of the tragedy as much as Heracles’. But in any case, because her silence is characterized and conjectured about by others, just as Cassandra’s is, it ceases to be dumb and takes on a communicative value, even if it is open to multiple interpretation. As Wohl puts it (1998, 56): ‘‘in the silent parthenos lies tragedy’s preservation of a fantasied space...of a female other beyond the control of the male self.’’
As it is, the interrelation of male and female speech in tragedy, in all its diversity and poetic elaboration, so problematizes the male/female self/other polarity that women become, as Croally has said (1994, 97), ‘‘the other inside.’’ In this problematization lies the greatness of the Athenian dramatists’ achievement.
World History
