The Game of Death

Letters

Vol. 14 No. 12 · 25 June 1992

From Hyam Maccoby

A.D. Nuttall (LRB, 11 June) argues that Greek tragedy was non-religious, by which he appears to mean that the myths that provided its plots had lost all religious efficacy. Here he opposes the view of Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison and others that the tragedies still functioned as enactments of the sacrificial death of Dionysus. Nuttall says that Pentheus in the Bacchae cannot be intended as a Dionysus surrogate, being an opponent of Dionysus worship. Apparently Nuttall is impervious to the irony of the sceptic suffering the hallowed death that he refused to acknowledge as salvific. But such irony is not uncommon in myths: Neoptolemus, for example, having insulted Apollo in his shrine, dies a sacrificial death and becomes a tutelary spirit of the very same shrine. Such ‘guilty victim’ sacrifice must comprise one of the earliest devices for making sacrifice morally bearable (note, for example, how the animal-victim in the Bouphonia sacrifice was enticed to ‘sin’).

Nuttall uses the lack of a happy ending as an argument against the religious character of Greek tragedy, urging that if Dionysus were the inspiration, the plays would end with a resurrection. But this is to ignore the independence of each stage in the death-and-resurrection cycle: as Morton Smith has pointed out, while the mourning of the god is taking place, it would spoil the effect to say or think anything about his subsequent resurrection. Something of this emotional and dramatic dislocation can still be seen in the separation of Good Friday from Easter Sunday. The Gospel of Mark, in its original version, contained no account of the resurrection. It was a Good Friday gospel.

Nuttall’s clinching argument is: ‘Aristotle, who was there, appears not to know that Greek tragedy was religious.’ But in his Poetics Aristotle was temporarily unconcerned with the religious aspect while focusing on aesthetics. It is from Aristotle that we know that tragedy was derived from the Dionysiac dithyramb, and comedy from phallic fertility songs. His concern is not to deny this religious dimension but to show how the drama became aesthetically refined. After all, it is difficult to believe that Aristotle could totally discount the fact that the tragedies formed part of a religious festival. He does indeed use language elsewhere that suggests an awareness of a deep connection between religion and aesthetics: in writing about the mysteries, he says that ‘the initiates were not required to learn anything but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition’. This throws light on his famous saying that tragedy effects ‘a purgation’ – or purification – ‘of the emotions of terror and pity’. The initiates experienced terror and pity, and so did the audience at the tragedy; both underwent a ‘purification’ leading to a kind of rebirth. The Medieval Passion Plays provided a similar religious experience and sense of participation. The theory that tragedy originates in, and remains informed by, religious notions and rituals of sacrifice has a great deal to support it. It will hardly be shaken by Nuttall’s somewhat pedestrian argument.

Hyam Maccoby
Leo Baeck College,

Vol. 14 No. 14 · 23 July 1992

From A.D. Nuttall

In reply to Hyam Maccoby (Letters, 25 June): 1. I did not say – and do not think – that the myths which provided the plots of Greek tragedy had lost all religious force. 2. I do indeed reject the view that the tragedies we possess were ritual re-enactments of the death of Dionysus. As E.R. Dodds used to say, the essence of ritual is repeatability. The Mass, variously performed in various places, remains one thing (compare ‘When you’ve seen one ritual murder, you’ve seen the lot’). The Dionysia were clearly not a ritual of this kind: year after year, different structures were presented, often to the amazement of the spectators (yes, ‘spectators’, not ‘participants’; the Greek word which gives ‘theatre’ is a place where people watch). Indeed, the fact that both the festival and the theatre bear the name of Dionysus makes it the more striking, in my view, that the tragedies range freely over the available myths. This is odd, if you like, but not mind-numbingly odd. If I may offer an admittedly frail analogy, it is as if we had in London a St George’s Theatre and a St George’s Day Festival at which all sorts of plays were performed. Of course it is possible, by metaphor, to interpret all Greek tragedies as accounts of the death and resurrection of Dionysus, but it would be equally possible to show, by like means, that all Greek tragedies are about Heracles (or Apollo, or Orestes, or Athene …). My thought was doggedly elementary: which is the more appropriate term to apply to these texts, ‘ritual’ or ‘play’? I go for ‘play’. That said, Maccoby is right to say that Greek religious feeling is powerfully present. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is brimful of Christianity. But it isn’t a ritual.

A.D. Nuttall
New College, Oxford