How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations, monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system (presocratic philosophy) and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods (in tragedy). Seaford argues that an important precondition for this monetisation was the Greek practice of animal sacrifice, as represented in Homeric Epic, which describes a premonetary world on the point of producing money. This book combines social history, economic anthropology, numismatics and the close reading of literary, inscriptional, and philosophical texts. Questioning the origins and shaping force of Greek philosophy, this is a major book with wide appeal.

Wedding ritual in tragedy tends to be subverted. In explaining and arguing for this generalisation I hope also to shed new light on some of the passages deployed.My starting point is the actual wedding ceremony. How did the Athenians of the classical period imagine that it was celebrated? Our evidence derives largely from contemporary drama and vase-painting. The picture presented by this evidence coheres very well in certain respects with that derived from other periods and places: Sappho, Catullus' imitation of the Greek, the lexicographers, and so on. For example, one important element that is found in the Attic and the non-Attic evidence alike is the ambiguity, for the bride, of the transition. The abrupt passage to her new life contains both negative and positive elements. On the one hand it is like the yoking of an animal or the plucking of a flower. It means isolation, separation from her friends and parents. It is an occasion of resentment and anxiety, comparable to death.

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In Kreon's famous edict in Sophokles' Antigone the punishment for attending to the dead Polyneikes is death by public stoning (36). In the event,at the climax of his bitter argument with his son Haimon, who is betrothed to Antigone, Kreon threatens to have Antigone killed in front of Haimon's eyes (760–1). But when Haimon then angrily departs, Kreon orders Antigone to be imprisoned in a deserted place, underground in the rock, with a little food (773–5). Various motives have been suggested for this change of penalty, e.g. that the city may not want to cooperate in the stoning of Antigone. But the main factor must be the aptness of imprisonment underground for the specific case of Antigone. As Kreon himself ironically puts it, ‘there she can ask Hades to save her from death, Hades who is the only god she reveres’ (777–8). Imprisonment underground, in what is described as a tomb, suits the crime of one who has seemed too devoted to Hades, and produces the complementary inversions described by Teiresias (1068–71): the dead Polyneikes is above the earth, while the living Antigone is below, in a tomb.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Hellenic Studies. Abstract: The idea of the 'unity of opposites' allows one to see important connections between phenomena normally treated separately: verbal style, ritual, tragic action and cosmology. The stylistic figure of Satzparallelismus in lamentation and mystic ritual expresses the unity of opposites (particularly of life and death) as oxymora. Both rituals were factors in the genesis of tragedy, and continued to influence the style and action of mature tragedy. The author advances new readings of various passages of the Oresteia, which is seen to advocate the replacement of a Herakleitean model of the unity of opposites with a Pythagorean model of their reconciliation. THIS is an essay in the interconnectedness of phenomena generally considered separately: verbal style, ritual, tragic action and cosmology. Their interconnectedness will emerge from the idea of the unity of opposites in each of them. I begin with the use of the stylistic figure I call antithetical Satzparallelismus in the ritual lament (? 1), and in mystic ritualin which it passes into expression (as oxymoron) of the unity of opposites, notably of life and death. Both these rituals, I have argued elsewhere, were factors in the genesis of Athenian tragedy, ' and I argue here that their synthesized influence is felt both in tragic verbal style and in the form of tragic action (?2). The synthesis is deployed in Aeschylus' Oresteia to express, in lamentation, the cycle of revenge as a unity of opposites (?3). Various puzzling passages of the Oresteia can only be understood as expressing the need to differentiate the unity of opposites if escape from the cycle is to be achieved (?4). This escape comes, in the Eumenides, only after the emphatic differentiation of chthonic and Olympian deities, and the replacement of a Herakleitean model of the unity of opposites by a Pythagorean model of their reconciliation (?5).1. LAMENTATION I start with an example of the stylistic figure that I will call, after Norden,2 Satzparallelismus. I define it, rather more narrowly than Norden, as the juxtaposition of sentences (which may be as short as a single word) that are distinct in content but resemble each other inform,3 usually without connecting words and at most with gh•v ... 8&.4 Its effect is a solemn staccato. The sentences generally describe (or prescribe) actions, and are often constituted by their content as an antitheticalpair. The phenomenon is especially frequent in, although certainly not confined to,5 two forms of ritual utterancethe lament,6 and formulae used in mystic ritual (...