Jeanette Smith

27 April 2016

Giving the Lie: Women’s Work in Classical Greek Tragedy

          Ancient Greek societies were oriented around the rule of powerful men, so it comes as no surprise that to read Greek tragedy is to read the stories of these men. With the emergence of democracy and its political city/state (polis), the family and the women who continued and nurtured it became disenfranchised from political life, relegated to the sphere of the oikos (household). The political atmosphere offered women few opportunities to act as individuals outside of the confines of the home. This separateness between men and women in Greek society and the problems it created are manifested in many of the classical Greek tragedies.  Arlene Saxonhouse, in her article “From Tragedy to Hierarchy and Back Again: Women in Greek Political Thought,” claims that “The closeting of the women in the home did not shut out their existence from the consciousness of the male poets or from the male citizens for whom they wrote” (404).

          What purpose did the Greek poets have in “uncloseting” women in their tragedies?  Christina Elliott Sorum in her article “The Family in Sophocles' Antigone and Electra” states that “An element of the appeal in these stories, as Aristotle recognized, resides in the perpetual human concern for the stability and continuity of the family” (201). Since women were the keepers of the oikos, their presence was crucial as vehicles for expressing the concerns felt by their societies. One of the most important concerns was the promotion of the polis above the oikos and the gender divide it created.

            Saxonhouse confirms this concept when she posits that “In their diverse roles throughout the corpus of Greek literature, women give the lie to the male’s dangerous and tragic love of his own imagined potency, creativity, and intellect, and reveal the potential limits of the masculine political perspectives that we have inherited from the Greeks” (416). Although the male characters are often obstinate when given “the lie” by women in these plays, the Greek writers nevertheless allowed this gendered discourse to take place within their texts, offering some of the most memorable moments in literature. Saxonhouse proposes that when a male protagonist’s lies are uncovered, something important happens: “For the Greeks, it is women...who cause men to know themselves” (405). I would argue that this does not always happen, despite valiant efforts by the women.

          In her book, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, Froma Zeitlin, like Saxonhouse, acknowledges the important role of women in the Greek plays. She argues that the female characters’ voices are not only meant to be heard, but they also are meant to spur the male characters to a new course of action and perhaps even a change of heart. She claims that a female character’s “demands impinge upon men’s claims to knowledge, power, freedom, and self-sufficiency” but she adds that it is not “for women’s gaining some greater entitlement or privilege for herself and not even of revising notions of what femininity might be or mean. Women as individuals or chorus may give their names as titles to plays [as in Antigone]; female characters may occupy the center stage and leave a far more indelible emotional impression on their spectators than their male counterparts. But functionally women are not an end in themselves, and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama” (347).  Her argument is that women are included in Greek plays to bring a closer examination of the male characters. She goes on to suggest that “it is the male characters who, because they have been forced to have their misdeeds exposed, achieve a greater personal transformation in the plays than their female counterparts” (347).  This, I believe, does not marginalize women in the plays but offers them a critical opportunity to tell the male characters what they must hear.

          It is a man’s world in Greek plays as the focus is mainly on the male political leaders who venture “into the outside world to pursue manly accomplishments in war and politics” (Zeitlin 354).  When these heroes return home from their adventures, they enter once again into the world of the women they leave behind. According to Zeitlin, “Men find out in tragedy that they are likely to enter that interior domain mostly at their peril” (354).   Zeitlin also reminds us that these reunions may sometimes prove fatal for the men “When men suffer or die ...the female is typically the cause” (352).  This concept is demonstrated by Aeschylus in the Oresteia trilogy.  

           In the first play in the Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon, the hero returns home triumphantly after many years at war. During his time away, he must make a difficult decision between two elements of society that are having a war of their own—the polis and the oikos.  Like many male characters in Greek plays, Agamemnon chooses politics over the family. This is made manifest when he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods in order to protect the lives of his troops during a storm at sea: “So Agamemnon steeled his heart to make his own daughter the sacrifice” (261-2). While some may argue that Agamemnon makes the best choice in a difficult situation, the fact that Aeschylus uses the phrase “steeled his heart” is, I believe, significant. The implication is that the prioritizing of civic duty over family creates a hardening of the heart.  

           Michael Zelenak in Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy states that “Aeschylus and his audiences would have had little doubt about the importance of [the] military” (61). Civic duty had become the most important aspect of Greek society, and the primacy of the home was diminishing.  It is clear that “Agamemnon chooses the values of the male over the female” (Zelenak 61). Literary critics have argued about the validity of his choice, causing us to ask the question:  Is Agamemnon a villain or a victim?  For Zelenak, “the guilt of Agamemnon will be never be definitively resolved since Aeschylus portrays him as both blameless and guilty” (61). The play is named after him, yet Zelenak claims that Agamemnon’s character “is one of the thinnest and most tenuous pieces of characterization in all Greek tragedy; his eighty-two lines in the surviving tragedy are barely enough for a good messenger speech. This ambiguity—I am almost tempted to say absence of characterization—imaginatively deflects any guilt away from him. Agamemnon emerges essentially a victim of unfortunate circumstances” (62). Agamemnon will surely continue to foster controversy, and his wife, Clytemnestra, is no less controversial.

          In contrast to Agamemnon, Zelenak says that there is no ambiguity about his wife Clytemnestra’s character.  While it is true that, in the play, she appears “closeted” in her female domain, Aeschylus does not keep her voice closeted. She broadcasts her opinions forcefully, and the Chorus tells her: “You speak wisely, like a prudent man” (424). Clytemnestra remains an unsympathetic character in many ways because of her male-like boldness throughout the play, but despite this, she plays an important role as the giver of Agamemnon’s “lies.”

          Clytemnestra’s function in the play is to expose her husband who has brought home a mistress, Cassandra, and murdered their daughter. She refuses to allow his deeds to go unpunished and plots his death. When Agamemnon enters the feminine domain of the home, he dies. While we may recoil at the murder of Agamemnon, we also recoil at the murder of Iphigenia. According to Mary Lefkowitz in her book Women in Greek Myth, “Clytemnestra uses the sacrifice of Iphigenia as a justification for killing her husband, but she also blames the citizens of Argos for not protesting against his act” (153). After the murder, she proclaims:

          He sacrificed
          his own child, that dear girl I bore in pain,

          to charm the winds from Thrace—and didn't care.
          To him she was a beast for slaughter.
          He had flocks of them—his farms were full.

          Shouldn't you have banished him from Argos                            
          in punishment for that polluting crime? 

                                                           (1674-80).                   

          Although we do not hear Clytemnestra’s rebuke to Agamemnon, the audience can assume that she does not hesitate to “give the lie” to him before she ends his life.  Zeitlin states that “It was her [Clytemnestra’s] championship of the priority of blood ties that led her first to slay the male to avenge her daughter’s death” (103).  To be the champion of family blood ties belonged to Agamemnon. When he fails in his family duty, Clytemnestra tries taking his place, but “in doing so elevates the stature of Orestes” (Zeitlin 175) who later kills her to revenge his father.  Still, the importance of Clytemnestra cannot be overlooked.  Without her voice, Agamemnon’s “polluting” of the family would not have been exposed.

          Clytemnestra’s voice reappears in The Eumenides. Even after her death, she continues to   “give the lie” but this time to Orestes at his trial.  She garners support from the female Furies, but is unsuccessful in proving her case. Catherine A. Holland in “After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought” claims that “under the combined ministrations of Apollo’s defense and Athena’s justice, women are transformed into something like internal strangers, strangers within the House, and likewise, within the City” (1119). The realm of Greek politics was beginning to reach into the home, and women were being rendered more powerless than before. The Furies try to defend the “strict matrilineal interpretations as blood-kinship, insisting that the father is not a blood-kinsman and thus not a true parent” (Zelenak 69), but Apollo wins with his defense of the patriarchal polis. Clytemnestra’s defense is heard but not heeded because she is a woman with no political power. It is interesting that Athena, although female, is not a true champion of the oikos since she has no family connections. Athena states that “No mother gave me birth—that's why / in everything but marriage I support / the man with all my heart, a true child / of my father Zeus. Thus, that woman's [Clytemnestra] death / I won't consider more significant” (936-41). In the end, the female Athena sides with the male Apollo against Clytemnestra. Still, Athena wisely “cautions the citizens that male arrogance or gender hubris will lead to destruction and chaos” (Zelenak 70). She states that “For all his boasting, his [man’s] destruction comes / dread silent anger crushing him to dust (1161-2).

           Sophocles’ Antigone  offers more conflicts between the family and the state as we see Creon, the political leader, and Oedipus’s daughter, Antigone, collide in a war of wills. According to Zelenak, “The Antigone is an impressive example of a structure based upon an important Greek  philosophical concept—unity through conflict...as they [Creon and Antigone] are swept up in a swirling maelstrom of antithesis: male / female, state / family, old / young, public / private” (76-7).

          Before we experience Antigone’s clash with Creon, we see her in Oedipus at Colonus as a dutiful daughter whose commitment to the family is evident as she protects and cares for her aging father. It becomes clear in Oedipus at Colonus that Oedipus is more concerned with his pride than with his family. When he arrives at Colonus, the Chorus asks him, “Say of what stock you come, what man's son?” Oedipus has trouble acknowledging his family connections and answers, “Ah me, my daughter, now we are undone!” (199 -200).  In addition, he appears hypocritical in regards to his love of family when he admonishes his rival brother-in-law Creon for ignoring his commitment to family: “These ties of kindred were by thee ignored” (785). Yet Oedipus ignores his kindred ties as well. For instance, he refuses to forgive his son Polyneices, ignoring Antigone’s pleads for family unity. Oedipus declares, “No! Me they [Polyneices and Eteocles] ne'er shall win for an ally” (448). Antigone tries again by asking him to “Yet heed a maiden's moan” (227) because “Thou art his father—you cannot repay/In kind a son's most impious outrages / O listen to him” (1344). The burden of holding the family together appears to have fallen on Antigone—a burden that was Oedipus’s to carry.

           Antigone’s commitment to the family is apparent when she makes an appeal to the Chorus at Colonus: “Hear us, O hear / By all that ye hold dear / Wife, children, homestead, hearth and God!” (235-7). At the end of the play, after Oedipus’s death, Antigone makes a bold decision to return home to Thebes to heal old family wounds:

          Then let us go
          Back to Thebes, if yet we may   

          To heal this mortal feud and stay             

          The self-wrought doom
          That drives our brothers to their tomb.

                                      (1914-18).

          In Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, it is not a single female character but an entire chorus of Theban maiden who “give the lie” to a man. In the play, the female chorus pleads with Eteocles to avoid a war with his brother, Polyneices, over the throne of Thebes. In his misogynist reply, Eteocles shouts, “You intolerable things! I ask you, is this best way to save the city? Does it hearten our army here besieged, when you fall before the images of the gods that guard the city and shout and shriek—behavior that moderate people despise? May I never share my home with the female race” (181). The words of the Chorus have no power over him since he believes that, “It is the man's duty to offer victims and sacrifices to the gods when they test their enemy; your duty is to be silent and to remain inside the house” (230). His pride and inability to hearken to the Chorus is what leads to the eventual death of both him and his brother Polyneices. Saxonhouse claims that “The male on the Greek stage who tries to live without acknowledging the female and the diversity she reveals encounters tragedy” (Saxonhouse 405). This is true in The Seven Against Thebes . It will also be true in Antigone.

          In Antigone, we see Antigone home again in Thebes. After the death of her brothers, she transforms from the dutiful daughter to the determined family leader.  She confronts her remaining male family member, Creon, the leader of Thebes, in an act of civil disobedience, demanding the right to give her brother Polyneices a proper burial.  Zelenak states that with the new polis, the once lavishly mourned funerals were being replaced with “public civic spectacles, organized and financed by the state” (73). Antigone “champions the god’s unwritten and unfailing rules—an obvious contrast for one of democratic Athens’ greatest achievement, written law as visible to all” (Zelenak 80). This is what leads her to her impasse with Creon, the champion of the written law.

           Creon clearly has a fatal flaw in Antigone—hubris.  He sees himself as the laudable executor of the new political polices, answerable to no one, especially a woman. He proclaims that “if she [Antigone] gets her way and goes unpunished, then she’s the man here, not me” (548-9). He professes that the measure of a man is the way he rules over others: “It’s impossible/to really know a man, to know his soul/his mind and will, before one witnesses/ his skill in governing and making laws” (198-201). Creon’s governing skills may not be questionable, but his priorities are. It is clear that he lacks the heart of Antigone: “My nature is to love. I cannot hate” (598).  Lefkowitz states that “Antigone had the moral sensibility to see that Creon’s order is counter to another established custom, the obligation of the family...to bury and then worship the remains of their deceased members” (140). Sophocles allows Antigone to give Creon “the lie,”  reminding him that the family should always come before man’s laws.  

          Antigone’s decision to confront Creon is an act of courage and defiance, but as Lefkowitz claims, “Ancient women could certainly be shown as courageous, but they could not be truly independent” (139). This can be said of both Clytemnestra and Antigone.  Greek playwrights understood that when a woman steps into the political arena ruled by men, it will not end well for them. In the case of Antigone, her society condemns her because she doesn’t know her place as a female, so at the end of the play, she, like Clytemnestra dies. In Feminist Readings of Antigone, Catherine A. Holland, in her chapter “After Antigone,” states that Antigone’s dilemma is a situation where “neither the womanliness of inaction advised by Ismene and demanded by Creon, nor the ‘unwomanliness’ of public action offer any means of escape from tragedy” for her (39).

          Contrasting sharply with Antigone is her sister Ismene . She accept her societal role and insists to Antigone that “We must remember that by birth we’re women / and, as such, we shouldn’t fight with men / Since those who rule are much more powerful / we must obey in this and in events / which bring us even harsher agonies” (77-81). Even though she is devoted to her sister, she is still subservient to the patriarchal political system; therefore, unlike Antigone, she is allowed to live at the end of the play.  Zelenak agrees that there is a contrast between the sisters and claims that “a correct sign of the female [Ismene]—a meek, suffering victim—is often placed next to the inverted sign [Antigone]” (75).

           Even the Chorus condemns Antigone’s insubordination to Creon’s laws :  “Surely they’ve not brought you here / because you’ve disobeyed the royal laws / because they’ve caught you acting foolishly?”(429-31). Zelenak suggests that “The chorus is certainly not there to commiserate with or for Antigone or to present her case to the audience. Indeed the chorus stubbornly sides with Creon until almost the bitter end. Even as Antigone goes to face her death, they lecture her: ‘Breach of authority cannot be tolerated by one in whom authority resides. Your self-willed temper has destroyed you’” (81).

          Antigone’s breach of authority is a critical moment in the play. When questioned by Creon about why she is disobeying his edicts regarding Polyneices, Antigone replies, "I did not think/ anything which you proclaimed strong enough/to let a mortal override the gods / and their unwritten and unchanging laws  / They’re not just for today or yesterday / but exist forever” (510-15). Creon considers the pleas of Antigone but, like Oedipus, his pride will not let him grant her request:  “No. She may be my sister’s child / closer to me by blood / than anyone belonging to my house / who worships Zeus Herkeios in my home / but she’ll not escape my harshest punishment”  (550-4).

           William Robert in “Antigone’s Nature” says that Antigone is not ‘a sort of young anarchist’ who ‘wants to destroy civil order’ out of a suicidal pathos (or pathology), for ‘Antigone wants neither disorder nor death’.  Her revolution aims not for disorder but for respect for... a different order—one that remembers and respects gods, maternal ancestry, burial rites, and cosmic order” (426).  He goes on to ask, “Why does Antigone continue to fascinate? She resists. She resists domination or incorporation, categorization or explanation. She resists, for example, civil law by disregarding Creon's edict forbidding Polyneices' burial. She also resists traditional lines of genealogy as a child of incest” (413). Antigone’s resistance is her way of “giving the lie” to Creon.  “Antigone as a woman says no to men's power struggles, men's conflicts over who will be king, the endless escalation over who will be superior, and at any cost has a substance and that this substance must be respected” (Robert 415). The tragedy of the play is that her substance does not appear to be respected.  If Creon respects her, he is too proud to admit it. He deals with her by condemning her to death:  "Then go down to the dead. If you must love/love them. No woman’s going to govern me / no, no—not while I’m still alive” (599-601). It is when he discovers the suicide of his son that we wonder if he finally understands Antigone.  Carrying his dead son, Haemon, in his arms, Creon laments:

          Aaiii—mistakes made by a foolish mind,
          cruel mistakes that bring on death.
          You see us here, all in one family—
          the killer and the killed.
          Oh the profanity of what I planned.                                             

                                      (1406-10).

          While Antigone’s act of civil disobedience is a pivotal moment in the play, Zelenak states that “Sophocles withholds audience sympathy from Antigone by isolating and distancing her character while gradually and relentlessly foregrounding Creon’s character and privileging this tragic discourse and perspective” (74). He also points out that “No one thinks to ask what has happened to Antigone’s body. Antigone does not simply die – she is erased. Fittingly, the play ends with the chorus lamenting Creon’s horrible and terrifying fate” ( 82). But I would add that without Antigone, Creon’s pride would have gone unchallenged. In addition, Zeitlin would remind us that Antigone is responsible for causing the sorrow of Creon. For without her giving of the lie, Creon’s would not have suffered the death of both his wife and son.

          In Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone tells her father, “If time can teach, I need not to be told” (22). In the case of Oedipus and Creon, age did not bring wisdom. Saxonhouse states that “Women brought the male hero back to where we might call a variable, empirical reality; their presence suggested that there was something other than the abstract city that the men had created, and for which they fought” (404). In the Greek plays, the women did not need to be told what was important. The classical Greek poets understood that it was the men who needed to be reminded. Clytemnestra, the female Furies, the Chorus, and Antigone—all “gave the lie” about the dangers of elevating the state, and themselves, over the family. Although most of the time it remains uncertain if the men truly listened to these women, it is certain that the Greek tragic poets knew that women played a crucial role in their plays as they tried to turn men’s hearts toward home.  

                                                Works Cited

Aeschylus. Seven Against Thebes. Trans. H. W. Smyth. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/Tragedy/SevenXThebes.htm

Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Ian Johnston. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/Tragedy/Agamemnon.htm.

Holland, Catherine A. “After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought.” American Journal of Political Science, 42. 4 (1998): 1108-1132. JSTOR.

Lefkowitz, Mary. Women in Greek Myth. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1986. Print.

Robert, William. “Antigone’s Nature.”  Hypatia, 25. 2 (2010):  412–436.  JSTOR.

Saxonhouse, Arlene W. “From Tragedy to Hierarchy and Back Again: Women in Greek Political Thought.”  The American Political Science Review, 80.2 (1986):  403-418. JSTOR.

Saxonhouse, Arlene W. “Men, Women, War, and Politics: Family and Polis in Aristophanes and        Euripides.” Political Theory 8.1 (1980): 65–81. JSTOR.

Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. Ian Johnston. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/Tragedy/Antigone.htm.

Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus.  Trans. Francis Storr. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/Tragedy/OedipusColonus.htm

Sorum, Christina Elliott. “The Family in Sophocles' "Antigone" and "Electra"”. The Classical World 75.4 (1982): 201–211. JSTOR.

Zeitlin, Froma I. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Zelenak, Michael. Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy. NY: Peter Lang Pub. 1998. Print.