ABSTRACT
Woolf's Greek aesthetic neither 'male' nor strictly 'female' but the product of synthesis resonates in her self-confessed unwillingness to be pinned down, whether culturally, politically, or textually. It is possible to trace this unwillingness to her relationship with the Greeks. Logos stands for the clarity, rationality and restraint of the classical Greek impulse, whose main enunciator is the 'male' philological approach of nineteenth-century Britain. It may be detected in the Platonic idealities, in the clear-cut lines of Hellenic sculpture, in the Socratic insistence on reason and 'truth', and in the relentless association of classical Greece with all that is best in human socio-cultural and political endeavours. Although the sociological emphasis of Greek tragedy, as theorised by Harrison in Themis, has paved new ways in the reception of classical Greek drama, modern scholarship, as Simon Goldhill argues, has discredited the approach of the Cambridge Ritualist School and its one-sided emphasis on the importance of ritual.
