Oracular Communication and Concepts of Language in Sophocles by Amy Nicole Pistone A

269 Pages·2017·2.27 MB·English

by  Amy Pistone

When the Gods Speak: Oracular Communication and Concepts of Language in Sophocles
by
Amy Nicole Pistone
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Classical Studies)
in the University of Michigan
2017
Doctoral Committee:
Professor Ruth Scodel, Chair
Professor Sara Ahbel-Rappe
Professor Richard Janko
Associate Professor Ezra Keshet
Amy Nicole Pistone
[email protected]
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2822-7154
© Amy Nicole Pistone 2017
For my mom, who taught me to love literature before I could read it on my own,
and my dad, who taught me that a challenge builds character.
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Acknowledgments
I am sure that I will not adequately thank everyone who contributed to my completing this project,
and I apologize in advance for that. The list is long indeed.
First, I owe my committee a great deal, and my chair above all. Ruth Scodel gave me the room to
explore my own ideas and the support to help make something of them. I needed to spin my wheels
a bit before I started making any progress on my dissertation, and she allowed me space to spin and
then also helped set me on a productive path. For that I am deeply grateful, and for the wealth of
knowledge she has shared with me while still allowing my research to be my own. She has taught
me a great deal about how to be a scholar and an instructor, as well as a colleague, and I will take
those lessons with me.
I also owe a great debt to my committee members—Richard Janko, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, and Ezra
Keshet—all of whom have helped refine my ideas and pointed me toward useful scholarship to
develop my research. Their support and encouragement has also been extremely valuable to me.
Celia Schultz and Donald Sells and Benjamin Fortson have also helped me along the way, and their
willingness to answer all my ad hoc questions and requests (often for letters for things, with less lead
time than I should have given them) is something I appreciate very much. Michelle Biggs and
Molly Cravens have also made everything around this process run as smoothly as possible, and this
would not have been completed or submitted without their support, both practical and moral.
Naturally, I am also extremely thankful to the Department of Classical Studies and Rackham
Graduate School for the funding they have provided me.
I have been fortunate to have wonderful peers and colleagues as well: in particular, my cohort (the
Third Triumvirate) of Nick Geller and Jacqui Stimson, as well as Tiggy McLaughlin, and Tim
Hart. They have made me a better scholar and have kept me grounded during this graduate school
process. I hope that I have given them a portion of what they have given me. Clara Bosak-
Schroeder, Matt Newman, and Evan and Ellen Lee have also helped me a great deal, as well as
Rebecca Kennedy, who has been both a friend and mentor to me.
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Finally, I would like to thank my friends outside my department for keeping me grounded and
giving me perspective. In particular, my running group, PR Fitness, has given me an outlet and
support and a great deal of my productivity has been due to regular long runs with them. I
appreciate all that you have given me.
Of course, I owe so much to my family. My parents have encouraged me to pursue my academic
dreams, even if they don’t always understand the details of what I work on or why I work on it.
Their love and encouragement means everything, as does my brother’s. Finally, I cannot thank my
partner, Mike, enough for loving me and putting up with me through all the highs and lows of
graduate school and for asking if I needed anything when I was cursing at my laptop of a pile of
books who weren’t cooperating.
To everyone I mentioned and those I forgot, know that I appreciate all of your help along the way.
Thank you for your help in making my scholarship and my academic life better and, it goes without
saying, any faults that remain are entirely my own.

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Table of Contents
Dedication .................................................................................................................................. ii
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... iii
List of Appendices ..................................................................................................................... vii
Abstract .................................................................................................................................... viii
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1
Sophocles and Linguistics ............................................................................................................. 2
Gricean Maxims and Implicature .............................................................................................4
Scalar Implicature ..................................................................................................................... 10
Implicature conclusions .......................................................................................................... 14
Ambiguity ................................................................................................................................... 15
Linguistic Case Study: Orestes and Electra’s Recognition Scene (El. 1098-1230)..................... 20
Linguistic Conclusions ................................................................................................................ 26
Other Aspects of Oracles in the Ancient World .......................................................................... 28
Historical Oracles ................................................................................................................... 28
Oracles in Herodotus.............................................................................................................. 35
Other Literary Oracles ........................................................................................................... 44
Chapter 1: The Trachiniae and Tragic Misunderstandings ......................................................... 46
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 46
Pragmatic Theory ....................................................................................................................... 48
The Multiform Prophecy from Zeus.......................................................................................... 50
43-8: Deianeira's ominous δέλτος ......................................................................................... 50
76-85: Deianeira's first account ............................................................................................... 51
164-174: Deianeira's second account ...................................................................................... 54
821-830: The Chorus' account ............................................................................................... 59
568-577: Nessus' dying words ................................................................................................. 62
1159-1173: Heracles' prophecies and interpretations ............................................................ 69
Pragmatic Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 71
Conclusions ................................................................................................................................ 77
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Chapter 2: Oedipus, Tiresias, and Apollo Loxias ........................................................................ 81
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 81
The Riddle of the Sphinx ........................................................................................................... 82
Mechanics of Greek Riddles .................................................................................................. 89
Oracles and Prophecy in the Oedipus Tyrannus ......................................................................... 97
1.Oracular Instructions and the Plague ................................................................................ 98
2.Prophecies about Laius and Jocasta ................................................................................. 108
3.Tiresias: Most like the Lord Apollo .................................................................................. 130
Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 146
Chapter 3: The Other Plays and What Is Found There ............................................................. 152
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 152
The Transmission of Fate: Calchas’ Words in the Ajax ............................................................. 154
The Use and Misuse of Oracles in the Electra .......................................................................... 162
A Prophecy or a Curse? Tiresias’ Words in the Antigone ......................................................... 167
Odysseus the Sophist: Rhetoric and a Prophecy in the Philoctetes ........................................... 173
Building a Prophecy in the Oedipus at Colonus ...................................................................... 188
Lines 84-110: A New Oedipus and a New Oracle ............................................................... 189
Lines 335-420: Ismene and the New Oracles ....................................................................... 193
Oedipus, Prophecy, and Curses ........................................................................................... 198
602ff.: Oedipus Triumphant ................................................................................................ 201
Conclusions at Colonus......................................................................................................... 204
Overall Conclusions .................................................................................................................. 205
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 207
Next Steps ................................................................................................................................ 211
Appendices .............................................................................................................................. 240
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 241
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List of Appendices
Appendix A: Uses of ἢ . . . ἤ ..................................................................................................... 212
Inclusive (or Predominantly Inclusive) Uses of Or .................................................................... 213
Prayer Language ................................................................................................................... 213
Quasi-Hendiadys, Plausible Coexistence, and “Ideally Both” Uses ...................................... 217
Neither Inclusive nor Exclusive ................................................................................................ 223
“Or at Least” Uses ............................................................................................................... 223
Ambiguous Uses ................................................................................................................... 225
Exclusive Ors ............................................................................................................................ 227
Appendix B: Linguistic Terms and Concepts ............................................................................ 231
Conventional Implicatures ........................................................................................................ 231
Deeper Analysis of Implicature ................................................................................................. 231
Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Maxims of Conversation ..................................................... 232
Q- and R-based Implicature ..................................................................................................... 234
Downward Entailment .............................................................................................................. 235
Hurford's Constraint ................................................................................................................ 237
Glossary of Linguistic Terms .................................................................................................... 239

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Abstract
Oracles in Sophoclean tragedies are consistently misunderstood, not because the gods speak in
out-and-out lies, but because they communicate in a decidedly non-human mode that appears to
violate the unwritten rules of effective human conversation. I use pragmatic linguistic theory to
examine how oracles are misunderstood, since pragmatics is concerned precisely with these
unwritten rules—how context, inferences, and implications complement the basic semantic
content of language. These non-semantic elements are conspicuously absent from oracular
communication, which leads to misinterpretation. I examine how the liminality and strangeness
of oracular speech afford Sophocles the flexibility to explore the different components of
language. Oracular speech—precisely because it is not bound by the rules of “normal” speech—
offers a context in which pragmatic principles can fail and artificially constructed
miscommunications can “break” pragmatic rules. By exploring the limits of communication and
miscommunication, Sophocles illustrates exactly those guiding principles that underlie effective
communication.

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Introduction
In this project, I examine all seven of Sophocles’ surviving tragedies with a focus on the
oracles and prophetic speech—features found in all seven plays. Although scholars have pointed
out that these oracles fundamentally defy understanding, my work explains exactly how mortals fail
to understand and argues that this failure is central to Sophocles’ conception of language. This
theory of language, I argue, is a sophisticated one that engages with and resists many of the
sophistic rhetorical trends in Athens in the 5th century BCE in a way that has not been fully
appreciated by previous studies. By focusing on the specific linguistic mechanisms that generate this
oracular ambiguity, I show that oracles in Sophocles communicate in a way that seems to violate
unwritten rules that govern effective human conversation. To do this, I draw on pragmatic
linguistic theories, which study the ways language gives rise to meaning and understanding, to
examine how and why these prophecies are misunderstood.
Because pragmatic theory deals with the role that things like context, inferences, and
implications play in generating meaning and augmenting the basic semantic content of language, it
offers a very useful and promising approach to oracles—though, thus far, a sadly underutilized
one. The deceptive nature of these oracles has often been understood as either a sign of malicious
intent by the gods or some sort of failure by the mortal listeners: scholarship on these oracles has
either treated the problems with oracular language as a dramatic convenience or as a theological
issue, or they have used deconstructionist approaches to conclude that language is fundamentally
unintelligible. I instead focus on the ways these oracles show things about language—things that
are entirely separate from the gods’ intentions. I argue that these intentions are in fact inaccessible
within the context of the play, and that the language itself is much more the object of Sophocles’
interest.
Oracles present a unique opportunity for Sophocles to explore language because they are,
by their very nature, liminal and strange. This, I argue, allows Sophocles to play with language to
create artificial exceptions to pragmatic principles, where deceptive language need not be
intentional or malicious, but can arise simply from a fundamental divide between mortals and the
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