Visualising Tragic Recognition

16 Pages·2016·0.5 MB·English

Thursday 14 April
Visualising Tragic Recognition: Plots, Plays, and Family (Re)unions
Pelasgus' Cognitive Awareness
Generic Expectations and the Interpretation of Attic Tragedy
‘Remember to what sort of man you give this favour’: Memories of Sophocles’ Ajax
“I” and “Not I”: Silence and Cognition in Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Friday 15 April
Prospective Attribution and Persuasion
Neuroscience and the Paradox of Tragedy
The Limits of Subjunctive Reality: Athenian Audience and Its Emotional Response
The Pity of Sight: Euripides Hekabe
The Implication Game: Mind-Reading in Sophocles’ Dialogues
Reading the Mind of Ajax
Perspective-taking, Empathy and Deliberation in Greek Tragedy. A Rhetorical and Political
Approach
Seeing the Invisible: Interior Spaces, the ‘Unseen’, and the Erinyes in The Oresteia
Before the [Mind’s] Eye: Reading vs. Seeing Greek Tragedy

Saturday 16 April
Tragedy and Dreaming
The Limitations of Children’s Thinking
Engaging the Audience: Demonstratives and Conceptual Metaphors of Space in Greek Drama
Feeling Words: Gustatory Metaphors in Seven Against Thebes
Deliberating Through Metaphor: the Dilemma of Pelasgus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants
Seeing Dolphins on the Tragic Stage

Visualising Tragic Recognition: Plots, Plays, and Family (Re)unions

Edith Hall – King’s College London

This paper asks whether scenes related to Greek tragedy on 5th- and 4th- century painted pottery can
illuminate the representation of mental processes, especially anagnorisis, in performance. The
study grows out of my previous examination of all the 14+ surviving vase-paintings related to
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, the majority of which centre on the famous recognition through the
letter, warmly praised by Aristotle, which Iphigenia is painted as being in the process of handing to
Pylades. This means that the viewer of the vase is to understand that while the two Greek men have
‘recognised’ Iphigenia, she has not yet ‘recognised’ them. But she is about to. The vase thus could be
understood as prompting its viewer into recollecting the whole complex of emotions, along with
their psychic and physiological manifestations, stimulated in the process of watching an effective
tragic anagnorisis, with associated peripeteia, taking place between close kin.
The vase-painters seem to have discovered by trial and error, or sensed intuitively, that this
moment of radical movement from false belief to true knowledge, which in the IT case is
accompanied by a movement from despair to joy rather than vice versa, was appropriate as a visual
equivalent of this particular, very popular repertoire tragedy. But the scene succeeds in
transcending the temporal limitations of static images by dynamically arresting the ‘action’ at a
moment when only two of the three principal characters in view have made the transition: both the
previous desperate state of mind of the Greek men and the imminent new state of delight in
Iphigenia are encoded in the scene.
A preliminary survey of the whole body of vase-paintings
identified by Trendall, Webster, Green and Taplin etc. as firmly
relatable to particular known tragedies reveals that anagnorisis is one
of the most popular pottery scene-types: Orestes’ recognition of his
sister Electra (also at the moment prior to her recognition of him) is
also the subject of what has been held hitherto to be an
unaccountably large number of surviving vases proportionate to
those related to other tragic scenes.
The several further examples include the rare Oedipus
Tyrannus vase (Syracuse “Paolo Orsi” 6657) which seems to show
Jocasta reacting with horror and veiling herself as she hears the
Corinthian shepherd. His
narrative confirms the full
truth to her, while Oedipus is
not yet in possession of knowledge of his own identity as
her son. By April 2016 I will also have identified other
examples of scenes depicting cognitive transformations,
and/or several characters with different commands of the
truth of the situation depicted together; I would possibly
also discuss some in which messenger speeches prompt
other types of recognition (e.g. in Hippolytus).
The vases decorated with such paintings were
almost all found in south Italian tombs. Without reprising
the entire scholarly controversy about the relationship
between their role as grave goods and the scenes they
depict, the paper will close with an attempt to relate the
emotions experienced during tragic anagnorisis with the
management of collective emotions during funeral rituals performed by close relatives for their
deceased kin.

Pelasgus' Cognitive Awareness

Rosie Wyles – University of Kent

This paper proposes to explore the potential of a cognitive approach to enhance our understanding
of the 'reading' of costume in ancient performances of tragedy. Following the path-breaking work
of Colleen Chaston (Tragic Props and Cognitive Function, Brill, 2010), I will make a case for extending
the approach (which relies on Kaufmann for its theoretical starting point) to include costume. The
tragic texts themselves legitimize such an approach, as I will hope to show through the example of
King Pelasgus' initial exchange with the Chorus in Aeschylus' Suppliants (234-326). In this exchange,
Pelasgus reflects on the roles of the verbal and visual in processing the information presented by
the costumes of the Chorus and in problem-solving the puzzle which they present. His words
implicitly invite the audience to reflect on the cognitive processes inherent to the experience of
watching, and making sense of, theatre's distinctive combination of the visual and verbal (and its
particular application to the construction of meaning for costume). The encounter between
Pelasgus and the Chorus is programmatic for the play and, arguably, for tragedy as a genre. Within
the play, it offers an important key for understanding the later manipulation of these processes by
the Chorus in their attempt to shift the symbolic meaning of their costumes and threaten an
alternative plotline (455-67). At the same time, the (relatively) early date of Suppliants, c. 463 BC,
endows this example with a significance reaching beyond the play itself since, in terms of
performance history, it sets an important precedent for the self-conscious reflection on the
cognitive processes involved in understanding costume. It is my suggestion that subsequent tragic
productions could exploit this precedent and the cognitive 'awareness' which it had embedded in
the audience. Taking a cognitive approach to the analysis of this scene should, therefore, reveal the
complex subtext to the exchange and unfold its wider significance for understanding tragedy.

Generic Expectations and the Interpretation of Attic Tragedy

Seth L. Schein – University of California, Davis

In this paper I consider the ways in which certain late fifth-century Attic tragedies fulfill,
disappoint, and problematiize the generic expectations of ancient and modern audiences and
readers, challenging them to engage with defamiliarized and highly marked characters and
dramatic action and to achieve interpretive, ethical, and political clarity in the face of complex and
often contradictory generic features that render these dramas “difficult.” Such engagement can
leave audiences and readers divided in their loyalties and ethical judgments and invite them to
rethink not only the world of the plays, with its unexpected versions of traditional characters and
mythology, but also the world in which they themselves live and make moral and political choices.
In my paper I focus mainly on how generic complexity and ethical ambiguity help to
challenge interpretation and generate meaning in Sophokles’ Philoktetes and Euripides’ Alkestis,
Orestes, and Iphigeneia in Aulis. In order to clarify what is distinctive about the ways in which these
plays generate meaning by fulfilling, disappointing, and problematizing generic expectations, I
briefly compare and contrast them to Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” with particular attention to
Troilus and Cressida. In both groups of plays, the characters themselves sometimes indicate a kind of
self-awareness of “who” and “what” they are (or are supposed to be) and of the expectations that
an audience might have of them, and an interpretive focus on generic complexity leads to a better
understanding of how the plays invite audiences and readers to make sense not only of this
complexity, but of the concomitant clash of values linked to the combination, or at least the
juxtaposition, of different generic features.

‘Remember to what sort of man you give this favour’: Memories of Sophocles’ Ajax

Lucy van Essen-Fishman – University of Oxford

By the time Sophocles’ Ajax begins, the eponymous character is no longer the great hero of the
Greek army. We first see Ajax suffering under the delusion which has been cast over him by Athena,
trying to avenge himself on those he holds responsible for his loss of status, and he comes to his
senses only to lament for his past glory. The contrast which emerges in the opening scenes between
Ajax as he has been since the contest over the arms of Achilles and Ajax as he once was colours
much of the play. This contrast, however, is never a matter of objective truth; what we learn about
Ajax’s past comes to us through a series of selective narratives, each one filtered by the memory of
the figure who delivers it.
When dramatic characters speak about their memories, both what they remember and how
they remember it can provide the audience with important insights into the mental states of the
characters in question. Memory is a deeply personal experience; while collective memory—a sense
of a shared past—can reinforce an individual’s identity as part of a larger group, individual
memories can also highlight differences between personal and collective experience (Kirk 2004,
Favorini 2008). As important as memories are for the construction of identity, however, they are
not fixed; memories are overwritten through the process of recollection, and as individuals form
and reform their memories of the past, they often unconsciously adjust those memories to take into
account their changing understanding of themselves and the world around them (Searleman and
Herrmann 1994, Casey 2000, Neisser 2009). The flexibility of memory extends to the emotional
charge attached to remembered events; depending on the emotional state in which it is
remembered, the same event can be perceived as variously happy or sad (Baddeley 1990, Singer and
Salovey 1993). As people look back on past experiences, then, the memories which they recall can
become windows into their understanding of their current circumstances.
When Sophocles’ Ajax famously forgets his traditional Homeric standing as ‘the best of the
Achaeans after Achilles’, his tendentious memory of his past glory is coloured by his current
circumstances, in which the legitimacy of his grievance against the Greek leadership depends on
the assertion that his value to the army is and always has been matchless. Other figures in the play
likewise remember Ajax as it best serves their current interests to do so: Tecmessa passes relatively
swiftly over her captivity in order to present Ajax as her sole protector, while, amongst the Greek
leadership, Agamemnon and Odysseus seem to remember very different Ajaxes in accordance with
their current views on how the fallen warrior ought to be treated. In this paper, I shall be looking at
how the memories of Ajax—both his own and those of other figures—which emerge over the course
of Sophocles’ play can help us piece together how the different characters of the tragedy
understand their respective places in world.

“I” and “Not I”: Silence and Cognition in Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Zina Giannopoulou – University of California, Irvine

In Women in Love (1920) D.H. Lawrence writes that a character who cannot still her thoughts is
“destroyed into perfect consciousness,” thereby linking consciousness with thinking sans verbal
expression. For Christopher Bollas the unspoken is as intrinsic a part of our utterance as the
enunciated (2003: 48). But silence qua the landscape of the psyche that resists representation seems
poor theatrical material if, as Jean-Louis Barrault says, the theater is interrupted silence. The uses
of silence on the Greek stage have attracted considerable scholarly attention, but interest has fallen
almost exclusively on the silences of otherwise speaking characters (Taplin 1972, Wohl 1997,
Montiglio 2000, Jäkel and Timonen 2001, Gödde 2005, Rood 2010). Discussions of silence as “the very
stance of the silent character” (Taplin 1972: 76) are few and brief (Stanley-Porter 1973, Bain 1981,
Marshall 2013). This paper examines the cognitive ramifications of tragic silence by foregrounding
Iole in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, a figure whose resolute muteness generates theatrical meaning:
although she is on stage for only part of the first episode (229-334), she is the fulcrum of the play:
she arouses Heracles’ passion, spawns Lichas’ fictions, and galvanizes Deianira into action.
As a silent figure wearing a mask, Iole is pure materiality. Her consciousness is embodied (Merleau-
Ponty 1961) and must be inferred or imagined in the absence of facial expressions and bodily
gestures. Her silence serves as the undifferentiated background or blank space against which
Deianira and Lichas converse about her. Deianira does not know who the “unfortunate girl” (307) is
and asks questions about her, while Lichas offers false and enigmatic answers. I make a twofold
argument. First, I claim that Deianira and Lichas “read” Iole’s mind in two different ways: the
ignorant Deianira engages with Iole affectively—she is all sympathy, overwhelmed by pity (298, 312)
and fear (306). By contrast, the dissimulating Lichas engages with Iole through a cognitively
mediated sympathy: he pretends not to know who she is and describes her silence as an enduring
symptom of a larger misfortune that she suffers like “pangs of labor” (325). Deianira’s affective
response makes her inquire about the girl’s past (parents, name) in an attempt to find out who Iole
is, whereas Lichas’ detached sympathy uses figural language to allude to the future and
communicate what Iole stands for. Second, I suggest that this scene is metatheatrical (Budelmann
and Easterling 2010) in a way that synthesizes Brecht’s Einfühlungs- and Verfremdungstecnik (e.g.
Willett 1964 and Woodruff 1988). In her ignorance of Iole’s identity and affective response Deianira
mirrors the spectators’ initial mental and emotional state. Lichas, however, like a director who has
a view of the whole and assigns a role to a nameless character, refers to Iole as a pregnant and
obscurely ominous figure. In so doing, he fans the spectators’ curiosity and urges them to engage
critically with what they see by thinking of the girl not (only) as a suffering human being but (also)
as a bearer of a future destruction. But since immediately after this scene Lichas will be proven a
liar (346-496), the spectators are ultimately invited to adopt a critical stance toward him, too, and to
become mindful of duplicity as an originary feature of the dramatic process. Iole’s silence
encompasses and reflects the spectators’ transition from entertaining Lichas’ detached sympathy to
doubting its validity: by being silent Iole both acquiesces to his lies and resists them; she both is and
is not who he says she is.

Prospective Attribution and Persuasion

Ruth Scodel – University of Michigan

Greek tragedy is full of statements made by characters about their own dispositions and those of
other characters. These are typically in close relation to an action already performed or an action
proposed, so they amount to attributions of motive: X did this because X has or had a particular
disposition (e.g. the choral comment on Antigone at Ant. 471-2). Sometimes characters even
imagine the attributions of others, as Admetus does at Alc. 954-7. Tragedy’s propensity to such
attributions is not surprising. Tragedy depicts characters who make momentous choices and it
moralizes about these choices, and especially since tragedies are short, they need to convey
possible interpretations of their characters’ actions efficiently (these interpretations are not, of
course, always complete or accurate). Particularly typical of tragedy is the all-or-nothing
formulation. Hippolytus notoriously divides the human world into two groups, ὅσοις διδακτὸν
μηδὲν ἀλλ’ ἐν τῆι φύσει / τὸ σωφρονεῖν εἴληχεν ἐς τὰ πάντ’ ἀεί and the κακοί (Hipp. 79-81). This
implies a very simple attribution strategy. Antigone tells Ismene that her response to Antigone’s
request will show whether she is εὐγενής or ἐσθλῶν κακή (Ant. 37-8). One could indeed define this
habit as a particularly tragic cognitive bias, though it is perhaps not so much as bias as a conscious
if perverse premise for making attributions—the belief that a single decision or action offers an
adequate guide for a full evaluation of a person. This premise in turn often rests on the assumption
that basic moral character is inherent, physis. The tragedies themselves often critique precisely
these assumptions, and the tragedians evidently thought it worth critiquing (which suggests that
they believed that real people were prone to think this way). In the tragic world, a single decision
or action often determines the narrative of a human life, but it does not define the person.
Closely linked to the tendency of tragic characters to make global attributions is the
tendency of some tragic characters to expect a very high level of consistency in themselves and
others. Because globalizing attributions provide such complete definitions of the self, expectations
of consistency constrain the characters’ further choices. This paper will briefly look at two plays
that show the extremes of tragedy’s treatment of this problem, considering how Creon in Antigone
is trapped by his own self-attributions, and examining the relative absence of attributions in the
latter part of Orestes and the low cognitive consistency of the main characters.
Neuroscience and the Paradox of Tragedy

Jussi Nybom – King’s College London

Why do we watch tragedy, and why is it enjoyable? The purpose of my PhD is to explore the factors
in Greek tragedy which appeal to us, using neuroscientific and psychological research findings, and
this presentation would focus on the most central aspect of interest: why watching something that
should cause pain feels enjoyable. The paradox of tragedy could be expressed as follows: people in
general avoid painful experiences, yet pursue the experience of the putatively painful art-form of
tragedy. The standard explanation for this paradox is that people do not actually feel pain from
tragedy (Smuts, 2009), or that the pain is somehow overpowered by the pleasure (e.g. Carroll, 1990).
I argue that the first explanation is simply not true, and that the latter would leave open the
question of why people wouldn’t prefer to experience exclusively art that only produces pleasure
and no pain, such as comedy. The main thrust of my argument is the proposal that, contrary to the
standard views, that we can explain the paradox in a different way by accepting that people do not,
in fact, always want to avoid pain. This leads into the argument that people enjoy tragedy precisely
because it produces pain; here I make use of recent findings on how many, if not most, people will
rather hurt themselves than be left alone with nothing but their own thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014).
I conclude with a brief exploration of the elements of Greek tragedy that most produce pleasure
and pain, and why, again using scientific terms.

The Limits of Subjunctive Reality: Athenian Audience and Its Emotional Response

Hanna Gołąb – Princeton University

This paper aims at describing the (in)effectiveness of a mental construct known generally as
double-scope blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) or, when referring to any type of
performance, subjunctive reality (McConachie 2011). Both those terms can be understood as a type
of conceptual mixture of two inputs: the actor and the character of drama’s protagonist. It is the
ability that allows performers to separate their defined selves and enter into a performed role, and
leave it whenever needed. Thanks to the same faculty, the audience is capable of recognizing this
change and of telling apart different personae during the performance, even if they are played by
the same actor. In Aristophanic comedy paradoxical blends of two or more real and unreal
identities are often consciously used to achieve a comic effect. However, our sources also relate
several incidents, which might suggest that Athenian audience could have temporarily lost its
ability to recognize the staged (‘unreal’ for the lack of a better word) component in the blended
image. The most notorious reaction to events acted out on the stage is the anecdote from Vita
Aeschyli mentioning fainting children and women miscarrying their babies at the sight of Furies in
the Eumenides. Even if we decide not to trust its veracity (as most scholars do), other sources attest
to a certain uneasiness with which the audience viewed Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus and Euripides’
Hippolytus Veiled. I shall examine two explanations of this phenomenon. One suggests that the
subjunctive reality encompasses not only the performers, but also onlookers at all times. The other
examines the power of emotions in occasional blurring of a usually present conceptual division
between reality and a staged performance.
The Pity of Sight: Euripides Hekabe

Barbara Goff – University of Reading

The great advances in work on Greek tragedy over the past few decades have concentrated on those
areas in which the Athenians adopt norms very different from those of the contemporary west; by
focussing on areas such as gender, politics, and ritual, critics and readers have developed some
important and abiding insights. At roughly the same time performances of Greek tragedy have
increased in number throughout many societies, suggesting that tragedy moves audiences in ways
that do not need the same sort of historicising exegesis. Vernant and Vidal-Naquet in Myth and
Tragedy claimed that the historical specificity of Greek tragedy was exactly the reason for its
emotional reach, but currently commentators are exploring the possibilities of the cognitive turn to
discuss the ways that tragedy transmits its effects.
Euripides’ Hekabe may be an interesting text with which to measure the new approaches. By
the 420s, the putative date of the play, tragedy had developed more than enough self-consciousness
to meditate effectively on its own workings, especially on its generation of emotional response.
Throughout Hekabe, characters seem to assume that emotions will be sympathetically moved in
fairly straightforward ways; Hekabe’s laments will move others to tears, and pity is provoked by the
sight of pitiable objects. Sight in particular is made significant in various and sometimes complex
ways; these include the appeal to pictorial sensibility in Polyxena’s death and Hekabe’s
supplication, the exchange and non-exchange of gazes between Hekabe and her Greek
interlocutors, and the appearance of Polydorus’ ghost and the non-appearance of Achilles. Yet
alongside appeals to a direct and vivid system of emotional transmission, the play shows numerous
characters able to resist pity, and Odysseus in particular elaborates a different and competing
system of sympathy. The external audience is invited both to be moved and to adjudicate among
models of emotion.

The Implication Game: Mind-Reading in Sophocles’ Dialogues

Marco Catrambone – Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

The structural feature of Greek tragedy known as stichomythia is simply the most rigid form within a
wider range of different dialogic patterns, all of which were productively exploited by the three
major tragedians. In the study of tragic stichomythia, attention has been paid almost exclusively to
its formal arrangement, to content classifications, or to the aesthetic (in)felicities in a number of its
realizations on stage. While all these approaches have provided the methodological foundations for
the study of the sub-genre, the sequential, line-by-line mechanism of message-construction by
which tragic dialogue imposes on the audience, and the ways in which the individual dramatis
personae are ‘shaped’ through repeated verbal interactions have not been blessed with the attention
they surely deserve.
Pragmatics of speech acts, conversational analysis, politeness theory, and the field of
(socio)linguistics in its broader definition do offer powerful critical tools to assess the countless
niceties and the immense complexity of tragic dialogue. In particular, the difference between ‘what
is said’, i.e. the literal content of any given utterance, and ‘what is meant’, i.e. its actual meaning in
the context, is one that has been fruitfully exploited by linguistics studies, but one that still remains
at the margins of scholarly debates on tragic dialogue. The gap between the two is bridged by the
notion of ‘implicature’, a kind of non-logical inference which ideally allows the recipient of a
certain message to decode its particular implication.
Tragic stichomythia, especially the less constrained version of it as offered by Sophocles, is
marked by the explicit endeavours of its participants to achieve greatest efficiency in
communication, i.e. to make sure they are well understanding what is really meant by the
respective interlocutors. According to the theorization of Paul Grice, this means that some version
of what he calls the Cooperative Principle (CP) is actually working. Far from representing the norm
of conversation, CP simply provides a set of default assumptions underlying the actual workings of
the dialogic exchange. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that all sorts of conversations constantly skirt,
flout or explicitly violate the CP.
In Sophocles’ stichomythia, it is precisely at those places of the dialogue in which some
elusion of CP is detectable that the process of mind-reading is most explicitly activated. To be sure,
it is the failure or the inadequacy of mind-reading that is recurrently displayed in such situations.
Time and again, the addressee explicitly communicates her/his difficulty to grasp the full
implication of what has been said/meant. Far from being the sign of the mannered artificiality of
stichomythia, the occurrences of such impasses do in fact emphasize the genuinely conversational
nature of tragic dialogue. Even more importantly, however, they produce a wide range of different
effects on the audience as well as on the modern reader, shaping their response to the dramatic
performance seen in its unfolding moment by moment
I shall discuss a sample of passages, taken from different plays of Sophocles, in which the
flouting of CP results in the addressee being caught in the process of (often failed) inference
described above. In most cases the inabilities displayed by the recipients in decoding implications
do not depend on intrinsic shortcomings to be assumed at mental/psychological level, but on the
specific gaps of (fore-)knowledge between the interlocutors artfully created from time to time by
the playwright.
A further question reasonably arises as to what relation should we postulate between the
linguistic violations of CP and the characterization of their utterers at the level of their (dramatic)
intentions. In the wake of the influential study by P. Brown and S.C. Levinson (1978/1987), I would
argue that in most cases the violations of CP are oriented to face-work and politeness (i.e. off-
record), that is, they provide gentler (and, I shall argue, , theatrically plausible) transitions towards
and/or replacements for the explicit communication of dangerous face-threatening acts, including
requests, announcement of bad news, expression of out-of-control emotions, and so forth.
The recognition-stichomythia between Electra and Orestes in Electra is well-suited to the
purpose of explaining the relevance of mental implication to any attempt of ‘mind-reading’ in
tragic dialogue. The first part of the confrontation, up to Orestes’ request of having the urn
returned by Electra, is shaped in such a way that Orestes’ multiple allusions to his own distress
come to be gradually and unexpectedly understood by Electra as expressions of piety for her own
condition. This in turn determines that Electra is now willing to disclose the hardships of her past
life to the stranger. The burden of dialogic constraints that characterizes the verbal exchange and
the fact that it stretches over several dozens of lines are signalled by the frequent violations of the
CP by the two interlocutors. The otherwise problematic lengthiness (for Sophocles’ standards) of
the dialogue, for which different explanations have been advanced, becomes very much plausible if
all these violations of the CP are put in relation to (1) the socially problematic dynamics of any
encounter between a woman and a man alien to her oikos, (2) Orestes’ need to ‘enter Electra’s mind’
in order to replace the symbolic representation of his dead self, whose ashes Electra thinks she is
holding in her hands, with the revived image of his living self.

Reading the Mind of Ajax

Sheila Murnaghan – University of Pennsylvania

In their essay on “Reading Minds in Greek Tragedy” (Greece & Rome 57 (2010) 289-303), Felix
Budelmann and Pat Easterling show how attention to tragedy’s representation of cognition can
usefully reorient critical discussion of the genre, promoting a productive shift away from the quest
for intricate character portrayal of a kind more characteristic of modern than classical drama to an
examination of what tragedy reveals about the ways in which characters (and by analogy their
audiences) interpret other people. Budelmann and Easterling’s own case studies are followed by
the suggestion that “scenes of deception or madness” may be especially rich contexts “in which the
process of reading minds can be explored” (303).
No passage in tragedy is more difficult to read in terms of straightforward character
analysis than the notorious “Trugrede,” or “deception speech” in Sophocles’ Ajax (646-692). There
will probably never be a critical consensus about exactly what Ajax has “in mind” during this
speech, which is impossible to resolve into a set of consistent intentions. He seems equally to
announce that he will not kill himself and that he will, equally to wish to deceive his auditors and to
spare them the cruel treatment that deception entails. The concept of deception, by which the
speech is known, is inadequate to its baffling opacity. As many readers and critics have noted,
deception seems “out of character” for Ajax. Further, deception implies internal clarity and
mastery over the opposition between inner thought and outer expression, but it is hard to
construct a coherent picture of how Ajax understands himself at this point – or to conclude that he
fully controls the implications of his language, which has ritual and other religious dimensions that
he hardly seems to comprehend.
It may then be more productive to consider what we can learn from the ways in which
Ajax’s auditors make sense of this speech than to strive for a definitive interpretation of Ajax’s own
state of mind. We hear interpretations of the speech from both the chorus and Tecmessa. These
come at different points in relation to further information (the messenger’s report of Calchas’
prophecy) pointing to Ajax’s determination to die, which might be taken as clarifying the intent of
the speech in retrospect, but both are in some sense incorrect or at least insufficient; both also
employ the same intrepretive framework, a narrative that involves a change of mind or change of
heart with a stress on its implications for the speaker. The chorus’s interpetation follows
immediately on the speech and takes the form of an ecstatic song and dance responding their belief
that Ajax has just announced that he will not kill himself (693-718). They both enact and articulate
their own release from care and gloss the speech as announcing an unexpected change of mind on
Ajax’s part: εὖτέ γ᾽ ἐξ ἀέλπτων/ Αἴας μετανεγνώσθη/ θυμοῦ τ᾽ Ἀτρείδαις μεγάλων τε νεικέων.
Tecmessa’s intrepretation comes after the messenger’s report, so she concludes that the speech was
deceptive, and she also links that deception to a change of mind or heart on Ajax’s part in relation
to herself: ἔγνωκα γὰρ δὴ φωτὸς ἠπατημένη/ καὶ τῆς παλαιᾶς χάριτος ἐκβεβλημένη (807-08). And
yet Tecmessa’s interpretation is no more true to Ajax’s speech than the chorus’s obvious
misreading, since he actually begins by announcing that he feels more rather than less warmly
towards her – a situation that he himself describes as an unexpected change of mind (648-653).
Change of mind, and especially the implications of change of mind for characterization, has also
been a concern of tragic criticism. Especially notable treatments include an article by Bernard
Knox (“Second Thoughts in Greek Tragedy,” GRBS 7 (1966) 213-32), for whom change of mind is
incompatible with the nature of the Sophoclean hero, and a fuller and more nuanced exploration by
John Gibert (Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy, Göttingen 1995). This paper will suggest that, at least in
the case of Sophocles, change of mind is better understood, not as a definable phenomenon that
tragedy depicts in a way that we can hope to pin down, but as a concept through which human
characters make sense of the experiences they undergo.
In his great speech, Ajax gives voice to something that has happened between the time that
he exits at 595 proclaiming that his character will never change and his reappearance at 646; but
that – whatever it may be – occurs offstage, where tragedy locates the most unfathomable
psychological experiences, and no one’s account of Ajax’s change of mind, not even his own, really
captures it. Throughout his works, Sophocles establishes a kind of cognitive dissonance between a
divine order that has a mysterious coherence and authority and humans’ attempts to make sense of
their world. The human formulation that comes closest to capturing the divine order involves the
inevitability of change. But this is clearly a vision particular to humans with their definitive
orientation to time, since the gods are by nature unchanging. In his speech, Ajax manages to
coordinate these dissonant perspectives in his evocation of a universe governed by the unchanging
presence of change, but he and the other human characters who try to understand him can only
make sense of certain perplexing occurrences through the paradigm of unexpected change of mind.
They interpret what happens in their world by deploying this paradigm specifically in relation to
themselves, and this self-orientation is also perhaps best understood as a distinctive feature of
human sense-making rather than, as is often the case, as the character flaw of selfishness.

Perspective-taking, Empathy and Deliberation in Greek Tragedy. A Rhetorical and
Political Approach

Jon Hesk - University of St Andrews

The claim that great literature, including Greek tragedy, fosters forms of ‘empathy’ and
‘perspective-taking’ which in turn stimulate ‘pro-social’ action and ethical-political enrichment has
garnered much support (e.g. Booth 1988; Nussbaum 1990, 1995, 2001; Woodruff 2005, 2008). But for
modern-day literature, the scientific evidence for that claim is rather limited and problematic (e.g.
Hakemulder 2000; Keen 2007). And, in the case of fifth-century tragedy it is hard to imagine what
sort of available evidence would satisfy the usual sceptics. After all, the dominant critical
perception of Greek tragedy is that it embodies a ‘negative anthropology’. While the experience of
watching tragedy may have been in some sense ‘cathartic’ or salutary for a classical Greek audience,
and while it is clearly the case that tragedy partly worked to re-affirm the importance and meaning
of civic religion, the fact remains that Greek tragedy consistently rehearses a picture of human
suffering as ineluctable (and mortal action and undertstanding as severely limited) in the face of
divine power and planning. This fact has made it hard for critics to parlay tragic empathy into
persuasive claims about Greek tragedy’s positive socio-political or ethical functions.
In this paper, I will attempt a fresh approach by focusing on two key features of Greek
Tragedy and its classical-era reception. First, I will examine some examples where the value or
importance of empathy and perspective-taking are explictly thematized or discussed within the
discourse of tragic characters themselves (e.g. Soph. Trach. 303-6, 441-8; Aj. 121-6; OC 560-7, 925-30,
991-6; Eur. Hec. 340f.; Suppl. 54-9, 176ff, 271ff., 476-91; IT 1401f.; Telephus frs. 709-11; Eur. fr. 951). Via
comparison with the closely-related concepts of συγγνώμη and ἐπιείκεια and their role within
Aristotle’s ethical, political and rhetorical writings, we will see that tragedy often models a positive
social, ethical and political outcome which is causally related to empathic cognition or forms of
reasoning that are grounded in ‘other-oriented’ perspective-taking. Even where empathy and
perspective-taking fail to avert disaster, tragedies often suggest ‘other possible worlds’ or
‘alternative outcomes’ in which they could have played a positive role if they had been adopted.
However, tragedy also often foregrounds the ‘rhetoricity’ of appeals to empathy and perspective-
taking. This ‘rhetoricity’ sometimes suggests that such appeals may actually obstruct the exercise
of justice or ‘pro-polis’ outcomes. Thus, I hope to bring out the ways in which tragedy thematizes
empathy and perspective-taking as problematically germane to the social and political life of the
classical city.
My second, and much briefer, area of discussion will be to present some classical evidence
for the ‘reception’ of tragedy which supports the above reading. By looking at some well-known
passages from Aristophanes’ Frogs, Plato’s Republic and Attic oratory, I will argue that specific
‘moments’ or ‘passages’ of Greek tragedy could be ‘excerpted’ and taken to be ‘enhancing’ in
relation to the political-juridical deliberative life of the city, regardless of the implications of their
wider context. This ‘cruder’ interpretive ‘reception’ of Greek tragedy is one that we are inclined to
play down or wish away. But it clearly existed and the ‘excerption’ of tragic talk about ‘other-
oriented’ cognition may well have enriched the activities and performance of audiences qua citizen-
deliberators.