ABSTRACT
Like many of its brothers in ambiguity, ‘the Black Hunter’ has a double birthday. Rather the ‘Black Hunter’ was, if not the first attempt to use structural analysis in the classical field, the first endeavour, as far as the author knows, by a Greek historian, to use specifically, if critically, Levi-Straussian concepts to understand somes features of ancient Greek society. To use a French rhetorical figure, the ‘Black Hunter’ is like Johnny’s knife. In a footnote to the original ‘Black Hunter’, the author announced that he was going to analyse Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and most specially the figure of Neoptolemos, in the light of his hypotesis. In a famous scene, Pentheus disguises himself as a woman, regressing to the status of ephebe, and goes to the mountain as a scout to spy on the women, a true Black Hunter, if anyone was, but hunted himself and killed.
