ABSTRACT
T H E B A C K G R O U N D O F A L L U SIO N W hen Pindar or Bacchylides juxtaposes a victor with a m om ent of myth, a gap is simultaneously created and closed. The past is brought to bear on the present and colors it with the more than m ortal power inherent in the figures of the poetic tradition. Thus epinician technique im itates m etaphor on a large scale: the prim ary field or tenor is the victor himself; the secondary field, the mythic narrative chosen by the poet to give m eaning to the present. Like vehicles in m etaphor, the exempla may apply in a complex variety of ways, but exempla they are. In this sense, then, epinician allusions to myth are merely an outgrowth, albeit luxuriant and exotic in the extreme, of a phenom enon present in the earliest Greek poetry - the example of the past adduced for com parison with the present. Dione tells A phrodite of Ares’ hardships; Diomedes tells Glaukos of the madness of Lycurgus; Phoenix tells Achilles of M eleager’s stubbornness; Achilles tells Priam of N iobe’s grief. G ranted, in that such examples call for explicit comparison, they are more like simile than m etaphor or allusion, for the latter two create tension by rem aining implicit. Still, ju s t as in epinician, the Homeric examples are sum m oned up to apply - at least within the narrative framework of the poems - to an im m ediate non-fictional situation.Literary allusion in Greek tragedy necessarily implies more self-conscious artifice than epinician or epic exemplum. T he secondary field is applied not to a living person (as in epinician), but to some figure already part of m ythic narrative; the interpretive comparison is suggested not by a character in the poetry, who explicitly calls on past history (as in epic), but by the author, who triggers the
allusion with echoes of earlier verse. This complex authorial move heightens some of the tense ambiguities inherent in Greek tragedy. Tragedy is part of a religious festival, part, that is, of ritual and tradition. But whereas ritual must be entirely unvarying in order to be efficacious, each tragedy is a new variation, a departure from the sum total of past poetic narrative. By alluding to earlier poetry, the poet calls attention to the creative aspect of this annual performance. The illusion that the performance is a window into the past is dispelled. Instead, allusion emphasizes convention; it reminds the audience not only that this is an artificial poetic presentation, but that it is like or unlike earlier, equally artifical narratives composed by other poets. The play requires in terpretation because it is not merely a transparent cultural artifact, an undigested celebration of the treasures of Greek mythology, but rather the creation of an individual, signed not just once, but each time the poet points to a personal choice or decision. Allusions make for some of the most obvious poetic signatures.Besides baring part of the mechanism of poetic composition, allusions may provide an index to the poets’ audience. The references to Persae and Bacchylides 17 seem to point to Athenian political pride and recall the civic side of the tragic festivals. Such allusions would only be effective if the audience recognized them, of course. And so the m aterial may suggest some generalizations about Athenian education. Poetic texts of political relevance are likely to have been learned by Athenian youth. Similarly, the general distribution of allusions may be at least partially an indication of what poetry was most popular and likely to be recognized as the vehicle of allusion. Aeschylus’ Oresteia, especially the Agamemnon and Choephori would seem to have been especially well known. The Odyssey appears altogether less often than its companion poem. As for the Iliad, Books 6 and 22 again and again provide m aterial for allusion and im itation of all sorts; no other books of the Iliad are used as frequently. G ranted, these parts of the poem have an innate them atic weight: they depict the family facing the burdens of com m unity obligation and two great heroes locked in fatal combat. Nevertheless, the passages are exploited for many purposes besides larger them atic allusions, giving the impression that Homeric texts were well thum bed at these points. O r, if it is a better model for education in this society, that these were the boys’ recitation passages that would come to mind most readily. O ther
guesses can be made; Homeric similes, for example, seem to be draw n on with particular confidence. Perhaps they also figured large in the poetry lessons of palaestra and gymnasium. All such suggestions will be speculative. But A thenian citizens had been taught some Hom er as boys, and they are unlikely to have learned it all equally well. I suspect their teachers are even less likely to have filled the hours of instruction with random selections: teachers tend to teach w hat they find congenial, and, for better or worse, they tend to teach it over and over again. Thus distribution of Homeric allusions seems likely to provide some key to the use of H om er in the pedagogy of fifth-century Athens. T H E P R A C T IT IO N E R S O F A L L U SIO N
Although practised by artists, allusion was an art, a XE%vr\, and so even three tragedians as different as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides show some common tendencies. All, for example, make use of Homeric similes (see Appendix D), and each playwright, at least once in the extant works, has composed in such a way that the allusion to the simile can bear considerable interpretive weight. In Aeschylus there is the innocent Homeric joy in the m orning dew which becomes C lvtem nestra’s delight in her husband’s blood (Ag. 1390-2; II. 23.597-9). In Sophocles there is the simile of the lion and its cubs transferred from Ajax’s mom ent of great glory to the scene of his shameful suicide (Aj. 985ff.; II. 17.133-5). Euripides transform s the splendor of Hom eric battle into the squalor of N eoptolem us’ death with a pair of borrowed comparisons (Andr. 1129-41, II. 12.154-60, 21.493-6). Aeschylus drew on the first extended simile from the Odyssey (Ag. 1224-5), Euripides from the first in the Iliad (Hipp. 563-4); both men used the Homeric image of birds crying for their lost young (Od. 16.216-19; .4g. 40-54, H F 1039-41). In A ristophanes’ Frogs neither Aeschylus nor Euripides comments on this aspect of their craft, perhaps because their practices are quite similar.A nother feature found in all three tragedians is the placem ent of allusion and im itation in messenger speeches (see Appendix C). T he Homeric nature of such speeches has long been noted; it is even adduced as one explanation for the peculiarity that the syllabic augm ent may be om itted from the verb in these narratives. But the echoes are not confined to epic. These speeches bring to
GENERATIONS OF LEAVES the poetry of the play not only events which occur outside the action on stage, but words and phrases which originate outside the text of the play and enrich the interpretation of events on stage and of]'.The most pervasive tragic convention for literary allusion is the placem ent of im itation or allusion at the beginning of a strophe, antistrophe, or com parable metrical unit (see Appendix A), or - somewhat less commonly - at the end of a lyric run (Appendix B). These opening and closing positions seem to some extent to have served as triggers in and of themselves, although they obviously could be (and were) combined with other devices to effect the allusive interpretation. Sophocles seems to have been particularly fond of this device.The loss of so much of Greek tragedy may mean that the list of allusive techniques shared by all three playwrights is artificially small. Similarly, since the surviving plays form a precariously small sample from the complete output of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the list of individual differences may include distinctions which would blur or even disappear if more plays could be examined. Still, some of these apparent distinctions bear re-emphasizing. Already in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon two widely separated points in time are juxtaposed by alluding to the Homeric poems: his chorus, for example, looks back to an omen at Aulis (Ag. 108-20) which is specifically echoed by events later in the battlefield at Troy (II. 6.57-60). O r, reversing the temporal direction of the Homeric allusion, the chorus describes the fall of Troy in words which echo Sarpedon’s angrv prediction of that event (i4g. 357-61, II. 5.485-9). The technique coincides with Aeschylus’ method of tying together his own trilogy with similar internal echoes; it may well have been learned from epinician poets who, in a much shorter poetic genre, had brought the complex collection of different points in time to a dazzling perfection.1 On the one hand, this method unites Aeschylus with the other tragedians: they continue to use it, often alluding to the Oresteia itself when dealing with the House of Atreus. On the other hand, however, Aeschylus uses this technique and all the other techniques of allusion much more sparingly than either Sophocles or Euripides. The one Aeschylean exception, if it is Aeschylean, is Prometheus Bound.Sophocles’ works, by contrast, present an abundance of
invention. In the Ajax , the great series of allusions to the H ector and Ajax of the Iliad constantly reinforces the themes Sophocles has introduced by more direct means. Moreoever, the allusions are arranged to build to a shock of recognition at the transform ation of a powerful to a powerless Ajax. A Homeric simile is reapplied: the raging lion that was the epic Ajax is now a useless corpse; the lion cub of Sophocles’ plav, Eurysakes, is left without defense (Aj. 985fT., II. 17. 133-5). In Electra, Sophocles experiments with expanding a borrowed image; the funerary urns mentioned in Aeschylus1 Agamemnon and Choephori are alluded to and then used as a major element for the scene between Electra and Orestes. The Trachiniae depends on a com bination of Homeric and Aeschylean allusions. The most notable is perhaps H yllus’ simile which echoes a m etaphor of Aeschylus’ Orestes. Both tenor and vehicle in the Sophoclean lines have more relevance than Hyllus can know; the im portance is com pounded by H eracles’ subsequent repetition of the image; and the Aeschylean echoes serve to underline Sophocles’ extended parallel which contrasts and compares Deianeira and Heracles with Clytem nestra and Agamemnon. Alluding to a simile or m etaphor, as Hyllus does, necessarily multiplies the possibilities for applying vehicle to tenor or secondary field to prim ary, since there are two of each instead of one. In Antigone Sophocles developed this possibility to the fullest by making a whole set of exempla in the fourth stasimon, m eant to illum inate A ntigone’s situation, allude to another set of exempla in the Iliad, used for com parison to A phrodite’s misfortune.Sophocles’ complex variety of allusions are set in apparently intentionally varied larger frameworks. The Antigone concentrates allusions in the choral sections, especially at the openings of the stasima. Trachiniae, by contrast, sends the audience to other texts with echoes triggered in elaborate iambic speeches. In Ajax Homeric parallels are suggested and then program m atically developed with further allusions. In Philoctetes the epic m aterial is hinted at and then dropped from the verbal texture of the play.The surviving tragedies encourage the impression that Euripides adm ired and im itated Sophocles’ allusive creativity. This is different from the m atter of his allusions to Sophoclean plays themselves. For example, Sophocles’ use of the Homeric Hector seems to have influenced Euripides’ use of the Iliad in Alcestis just a few years later. Similarly, when Euripides was modeling Cyclops on
Odvs.sey 9 and making his allusions to the Homeric material, he consulted and reproduced some of the Sophoclean treatm ent of that episode in the Trachiniae. The Hercules Furens may also be following the Trachiniae at one level in its concern with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. And, although this must remain speculative, it seems that Euripides, in his Electra, followed Sophocles' Electra in the m atter of some verbal echoes from Aeschylus, especially with the words ayX dio |ia and dyXata.Euripides had his own uses for allusion as well. W hat have often been seen as criticisms of Aeschylus are generally devices for creating suspension and surprise in plotting, especially in Electra and Phoenician Women. And Euripides’ talent for making the familiar seem strange found a convenient support in allusion to earlier dram atic treatm ents of myth: this technique becomes almost the basis for the presentation of Orestes. Finally, Euripides seems to have had a special fondness for using epinician poetry in his plays. There are small Bacchylidean references sprinkled throughout his works, and the allusions to and imitations of Pindar and Bacchylides in Alcestis and Hercules Furens are central to their plays. T H E ANA TO M Y O F A LLU SIO N R EC O N SID ER ED
The art of allusion in classical Athens is very different from that practised in Alexandria. It is less precious, less focused on rare words and obscure variation, more likely to suggest a substantive interpretive response which enriches the play in which the allusion has been placed.2 But the cerebral dem ands of the Alexandrian librarians are nonetheless present, and to the initial anatom ical analysis of allusion offered above in C hapter 1 certain details and complexities can now be added.For all the similarity between m etaphor and allusion, the interpretive integration of an allusion to another text is a far more complicated process. The initial stages most resemble those involved in metaphor: a gap is perceived, the vehicle identified, and tenor and vehicle are connected through some relatively direct similarity. If Euripides’ Admetus calls to Alcestis as Achilles did to Patroclus in the Iliad, we see that Alcestis and Patroclus are alike because both died for men they loved. But this is only the beginning of the solution, for the gap bridged in poetic allusion is always one between two texts. Thus the complexity of both tenor
and vehicle, prim ary and secondary fields, invites a further, more metonymic or synecdochic stage of interpretation. Once the two texts are made contiguous, any num ber of elements in the extended prim ary and secondary fields may resonate or interact. This partly explains why the Stesichorean example in the introduction, the battle of Heracles and Geryon with its allusion to the battle in the Iliad , sets up a more intricate process than do the allusions of M im nerm us and Tyrtaeus examined there: the prim ary field in lyric poems is usually simpler, limited to fewer elements. In the Stesichorus fragment, as in Attic tragedy, the prim ary field is narrative, equal - or nearly so - in complexity to the narrative epic field to which it alludes.The Stesichorean fragment makes its allusion with the reuse of a Homeric simile. Since the simile itself involves a split field, the Stesichorean and Homeric texts share a formal, symmetrical complication. Somewhat paradoxically, this makes the final reading of the allusion more manageable. The very complexity of a m etaphor or simile as the tenor for an allusion provides a specificity that frames - or at least gives the impression of framing - a more clearly defined portion of the two texts involved in the poetic allusion. Interpretive energy m ust be so focused on com paring the relationships in these select sections that the prim ary and secondary fields seem more sharply defined, the way to integrate them more clearly indicated. U ltim ately such limits are illusory: there is nothing to prevent a continued interpretive expansion beyond the borrowed simile or m etaphor: they are parts of a whole text, and synecdoche begins with a complex part as well as with a simple one. Nevertheless, successful recognition of the relation betwreen two comparisons in two texts brings with it a certain sense of closure.Opposed to these elaborately specific figures are allusions which seem to direct the poetic audience in a much more nebulous way. As allusions, of course, they send one to a specific place, but when one opens the door, one finds a room at once atm ospheric and yet vast. M ost such allusions in Attic tragedy are to the Iliad. They tap into the heroic world and its associations by means of a Homeric allusion which works by calling on an identifiable passage but does this in order to draw on the epic as a whole - the least limited secondary field. For such purposes, of course, a clearly identifiable im itation will do as well as an allusion, and both may work much
the same as the ostentatious use of a Homeric formula. The world of Achilles and Hector is called up for the reader, sometimes to lend splendor to the prim ary field, sometimes, as in Andromache, to provide a backdrop against which the tragic props seem shabby and cheap. Nor are such allusions always Homeric: Euripides frequently uses Aeschylus’ Oresteia for much the same effect in Orestes.Between these allusions of greatest and least specificity lie all the rest. In some, the allusion brings a thematic or paradigm atic parallel to bear on the tenor in the prim ary text. So in Prometheus Bound Achilles is summoned from the secondary field of the Iliad as a parallel to Prometheus. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and his return to M ycenae are alluded to as an ominous model for Heracles in Trachiniae. The Homeric Patroclus becomes a double for Euripides’ Alcestis, and the contiguity of the Iliad and the Alcestis encourages further interpretation along the same lines - Admetus as Achilles. Such allusive and collusive parallels adduced by the playwrights provide incom parable commentary, as if scholiasts with perfect poetic taste and certain knowledge had incorporated their notes into the verses themselves.In another type of allusion im portant in Greek tragedy, closing the gap between the texts of tenor and vehicle results in a collapse or folding of time, the juxtaposition of two moments from what can be seen as a continuous narrative. If the early poetry which treated the tales of Thebes had survived, this type of allusion might well be even more fully represented. In the extant plays it appears most often in conjunction with tales of the Trojan W ar and the House of Atreus with the Iliad and the Oresteia generally serving as the vehicles of allusion. Even in the Oresteia Aeschylus achieves this effect - the allusive equivalent of omen and prophecy - with echoes of the Iliad; Sophocles sets the events of the Ajax in relation to the role of his hero in epic; Euripides plays fantastic chronological tricks in Iphigeneia at Aulis, prophecying past literature with eerie effects; and so on.
