A twenty-first-century consumer of Greek drama necessarily lacks an ancient audience's perspective, so when it comes to something as foreign to modern sensibilities as oath swearing, scholarship might be expected to understate or ignore it. But when considered in the context of the theatre of Dionysus and a polis in which public speech was regularly powerful and performative, dramatic oaths offer a unique window. F. has seized the opportunity, producing a multifaceted study that attempts to peer through that window and inform literary analysis with context and sophistication.Footnote 1 Inherent to dramatic oaths, she demonstrates, are a multitude of larger concerns relevant to an ancient audience – politics, religion, cosmology, gender and even poetics. Playwrights' manipulations of oaths and oath-scenes, accordingly, add both nuance and structure to their dramas.
In the introduction, F. discusses speech-act theory, argues that the oath functions as a significant literary device as far back as the Iliad and outlines their conventional features in inscriptions and literature alike: following an invitation or offer to swear, there comes an invocation of the divine, a verb of swearing and the vow itself. Also essential to an oath is its antithesis, namely a self-curse (activated by perjury), which typically invites the destruction of the swearer's own family line. The inclusion of non-literary oaths in determining the normative practice establishes the framework for the contextualising analyses that comprise the bulk of the volume. With the exception of studies of individual Aristophanic comedies (Chapters 5, 7 and 8), the chapters are devoted to groups of tragedies whose manipulations of the norms of oath-swearing invite comparison in one form or another. Although half of these chapters include or consist of revisions of previously published material, much labour has been expended to bring them together into a unified study.
As any successful contextualising argument must, F.'s interpretations are grounded, where possible, in the realities of classical Athens. Thus, the oaths of the youths in Philoctetes and Trachiniae are interpreted in light of the ephebic oath, a motif which applies as well to Clouds, Hippolytus and Phoenissae. The Oresteia portrays Orestes as an ephebe but emphasises other institutionalised oaths as well: there are multiple references to a sworn alliance with Argos in the Eumenides, and the establishment of the Areopagus introduces elements of the dikastic oath. F. is similarly sensitive to matters of divine authority, whether in the form of the numerous oracles with which dramatic oaths cohere (e.g. Trachiniae, Philoctetes, Choephori) or the retribution prompted by perjury (passim). The repeated attention drawn to the destruction of one's family line as the self-curse attending an oath has particular weight: Medea's brutal revenge on Jason, for example, appears in this light an appropriate punishment for the forsworn wedding vows she holds against him.Footnote 2
Beyond Euripides (where deviations predictably abound), in Theban plays more generally the oath motif reveals perversions of both a political and religious sort (e.g. O.T., Antigone). The same goes for Aristophanic comedy, where the women in Lysistrata not only take control over their bodies via their extraordinary oath, but (just as boldly) over the social and physical world around them as well. In gauging how provocative an ancient audience might have found such deviations, the analysis regularly pushes the boundaries of theoretical interpretation. Thus, in Thesmophoriazusae, Euripides' repeated attempts to abide his oath to rescue Inlaw (269–76) dramatise the metapoetic struggle of Euripidean tragedy to surmount the comedy's female-authored script. Because of the study's focus on oaths and performance – that is, oaths as illocutionary acts – such concerns are by no means tangential.
This is a good book whose insights far exceed my summary. The attempt to push the contextual and theoretical boundaries of literary analysis is to its credit; the recurring focus on gender as well as on the threat and consequences of perjury is consistently excellent. Yet its success will depend, to some extent, upon the individual reader. This critic was surprised at how frequently the analysis of a particular play's oath(s) reinforced or harmonised with the interpretative status quo. On the one hand, the harmony is often convincing: the failures and perversions of female figures in the Oresteia vis-à-vis oaths, for example, add further depth to the trilogy's gender dynamics (the analysis of emerging political and judicial institutions in the Eumenides is similarly compelling). But it can disappoint, too: the idea that Thebes serves as Other for tragedy, in particular, is now rather tired, and nearly over-determines the discussion of the plays that are set there. Chapter by chapter, critics may disagree on whether a given argument about the oath motif bolsters established interpretations or is, alternatively, merely put to their service: circularity of argument is a risk.
When the analysis does break new ground, the case for the importance of the oaths is at times overstated. The plots of Phoenissae and Medea, for example, are reduced to a series of oaths, oracles and curses (the former play prompts a very speculative discussion of Oenomaus and Chrysippus as possible companions, pp. 135–9). Some of the oaths discussed are suspect: it is argued that the gods have sworn an oath validating Orestes' matricide (on the basis of Ag. 1290, a line that editors transpose or – even worse – delete), and the sacrifice of Aeschylus' Iphigenia is said to have been occasioned by one or more vows or curses (pp. 40–4). That ‘Hippolytus' fate is sealed by his recurrent verbal carelessness’ (p. 191) is an overstatement in the midst of an otherwise compelling treatment of the play. It is understandable that the study would emphasise the object of its pursuit, but the tendency towards reductionism is troubling.
Other concerns are less serious. Theoretical sophistication and jargon occasionally overemphasise to the point of obfuscation: how oaths are bound up with the speaking of names and the threat of catastrophe (I.T. and Hippolytus) as well as in the writing of bodies and texts alike (Thesmophoriazusae and Lysistrata) is more than once unclear. The discussion of Thesmophoriazusae provides an example of this tendency at its worst:
In a certain sense the oath functions as a dramatic script that is performed by actors, the person asking for the oath and the person swearing it. Thesmophoriazusae is about the powers of textuality, not simply writing as an ossified remnant of living speech, but the contextualized performance of scripts. As a formulaic speech act the oath is both signifier and generator of a rich and expansive intertext (p. 209).
Similarly, thesis statements and other assertions establishing individual arguments (e.g. pp. 17, 35) tend to be more opaque than the arguments themselves (i.e. p. 47). And while the consistent attention to perjury and its consequences is excellent, it is unclear why, when the mere threat of perjury is fatal in the case of Hippolytus (p. 191), there are no consequences at all for the weakening of female resolve in Lysistrata (p. 236).
Notwithstanding such reservations, the interpretations laid out are consistently stimulating, and the study admirably succeeds in setting dramatics oaths in their ancient contexts.
