Conclusion. The Tears of Pity

Tragedy often forced Athens to confront itself. Athenian tragedy examines the policies, actions, belief structures, and values of its citizens. It does so, however, only for the duration of the performance. In the end, for all that examination and after all the suffering, these same policies, actions, belief structures, and values are often only reaffirmed for the spectators. In this way only then, might Euripides be called a “pacifist,” in that he challenged the Athenians to witness and consider the suffering that they were not only in the process of inflicting on others but also might one day experience themselves. Ultimately, though, no tragedy could have affected the course of the Peloponnesian War, and no tragedy did. Edith Hamilton found Euripides to {163|164} be a visionary precisely because no one took the message that she assumed Euripides was trying to send: “In that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power, and then—nothing happened.” [1]

We might make a similar observation about the practice of enslaving captives of war. Joseph Vogt observes of slaves in Euripidean tragedy: “Real slaves, even if they are noble according to their possibilities, never reach the full stature of individuals; nobles on the other hand retain their freedom in captivity, for they are incapable of lowering themselves. Both sides often speak about the fate of slavery, but no one suggests that slavery ought not exist.” [2] Tragedy questions and confronts the fundamental institutions of humankind, but it is not designed to preach or dictate policy. [3]

In this book I have argued that the captive woman’s lament, particularly as it is employed in the Trojan War plays of Euripides, was a particularly effective vehicle with which to explore and even challenge wartime ideologies. But I submit that the lament in tragedy is effective for such an examination because, as Nicole Loraux has emphasized most recently, it is so affective on both a personal and collective level. [4] Though it is often infused with modern rhetoric, tragedy is not a political debate in the assembly; it is an emotional experience undergone in common by the citizens of Athens within the city’s religious space. [5] The act of viewing tragedy as a notional totality of the citizen body is a necessarily civic event, but I agree with Loraux that there is a deeply emotional dimension as well that has been underemphasized in recent years in favor of the intellectual and political. [6]

The essential emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and fear, the rousing of which produces a kind of purification (katharsis), [7] and {164|165} at various points in this book I have suggested links between the captive woman’s lament and both of these emotions. Gorgias too, a closer witness to the fifth century than Aristotle, noted the powerful emotional effects that speech can have on its hearers. When Gorgias speaks about poetry in the extract I have quoted above, he singles out three emotions that I would argue are central to tragic rhetoric (in both its spoken and sung forms): “fearful shuddering and tearful pity and longing (pothos) that delights in mourning.” As I bring my study to a conclusion, I propose to explore these three emotions and their relationship to the captive woman’s lament in Greek tragedy.

Gorgias’ comment is perhaps our earliest indication outside of the dramas themselves that the emotion of pity is fundamentally linked to tears (poludakrus). [8] Pity is the emotion that makes one cry. [9] Pity, however, can only be felt for people and events that are a few steps removed from the spectator. Aristotle explains that pity may be felt for the misfortunes of an acquaintance, but if the events are too closely connected to the individual, that person experiences fear. [10] The essential difference is that the misfortunes of an acquaintance are a representation of one’s own potential suffering and elicit pity, whereas one’s own suffering brings about the fear that makes one shudder. And so, following Aristotle’s lead, we might say that the otherness of the Trojan women is part of what enables them to elicit tears of pity from a Greek audience. [11] Like other heroes of the tragic stage, they are removed physically, geographically, and chronologically from their Athenian audience. They are also captive slaves and foreign women, and perhaps this increased distanced likewise serves an emotional purpose in the complex system of {165|166} tragic meaning. The distance inherent in any Trojan War drama seems to have contributed to this dynamic of pity and tears. [12]

But the distance between the world of heroes in the there and then and the world of the audience in the here and now was bridged by the tragic chorus, who maintained a physical connection to the audience (via their location in the orchestra) and mediated between the two worlds. [13] And this chorus could consist of captive women, who like the tragic protagonists, sang laments, and unlike the protagonists, were non-professional Athenian youths. This crucial element, taken together with the contemporary resonance of many tragedies, but especially the Trojan War tragedies, leads me to suggest that the captive woman’s lament was also an effective tool for eliciting fear. [14] The fate of the Trojans could be the Athenians’, and that same fate certainly was inflicted by the Athenians on others. The plight of the captive woman was very near indeed in the latter portion of the fifth century BC.

I have also argued that Gorgias’ third emotion, pothos philopenthês, longing that delights in mourning, is an essential feature of tragedy, and perhaps even, pace Aristotle, the defining emotion of the Trojan War tragedies. [15] The pothos that the captive woman’s lament inspires is a complex one. The captive woman longs for her husband, sons, father, city, and freedom. The women around her likewise lament those same entities. The Athenian audience on the other hand, longs for the dead heroes of the remote past who died before Troy, or perhaps for the dead youth who have died in battle far more recently, or perhaps they long simply for the release through tears that the theater provides—or perhaps all at the same time. The pothos of tragedy can be erotic, spiritual, or patriotic, but above all it is full of grief.

And it is this emotion of tearful longing that universalizes the experiences of Greeks, Trojans, Athenians, and Barbarians in connection with war. I have argued that the institution of tragedy provided a space for the Athenians in which barriers between Greek and Barbarian, male and female, and citizen and slave could be tested and temporarily blurred. In this same space the sufferings of their own enemies and defeated victims could be explored, a {166|167} possibility that I have found to be extraordinary and that points to an appreciation of shared humanity. [16] When we consider as a point of comparison the representation in the media of the recent (2003) and on-going conflict in Iraq, the difference is striking. Americans now have access to news at all times of the day and night on television and on the World Wide Web, with the result that we are bombarded with images of war. The human dimension is central to this media coverage, but it is almost invariably the American (or European) human interest that is the focus. Every American soldier that is taken prisoner, killed, or even wounded is extensively profiled, their picture displayed reverently and their family interviewed. Rarely does the face of an Iraqi soldier or bereaved loved one make it to the television screen.

But if we turn back to the ancient world, we find that this appreciation on the part of the Athenians may not be so extraordinary after all. On a pithos dated to around 675 BC from the island of Mykonos, one of the very earliest surviving representations of the fall of Troy in art, a series of panels shows the Trojan women taken captive and their children slain before their eyes. [17] The creator of that pithos, like Euripides, knew what war was, and depicted it with perfect clarity. As is in keeping with the dynamics of myth and an oral tradition that far predates the Athenian institution of tragedy, already in 675 the experiences of the Trojan women were iconic and emblematic of wartime suffering. Concern for the victims of war, as exemplified by the Trojan women, is one of the many continuities that unite the epic and tragic poetic traditions. The significance of the Trojan War and the lessons taught by it changed with each new era of history, and yet the emotional dynamic, as evoked by the captive woman’s lament, remained remarkably constant. {167|}