Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama by Judith Fletcher

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 187 and in detail. But these are also matters that have little directly to do with the announced topic of her book, and which might better have been treated in footnotes or even separate publications, rather than being allowed to take over the discussion here to no obvious immediate purpose and little clear argumentative effect. At the same time, Corbel-Morana tends to leap disconcertingly from matters of detail to grand conclusions about poetics in particular. Among her boldest claims, for example, is that the frog-chorus of Frogs represents in explicitly allegorical fashion poets associated with the contemporary “new” dithyramb; Dionysus’ ability to shout his frog-rivals down thus prefigures Aeschylus’ triumph over Euripides later in the play, and presumably Aristophanes’ own intention of winning the contest at the Lenaea festival. As the author herself concedes, “one can certainly choose not to read the passage this way” (247), and not much of a case is made for doing so, or indeed for accepting many of the book’s larger claims about how animals function in the comedies to construct political and poetic realities. Corbel-Morana does nonetheless effectively bring out the fact that Aristophanes and the other comic poets seem to have felt that the inability of animals to speak for themselves made it interesting to try to talk through and for them. This book is a further, modern step in that project, and readers will welcome its fresh perspectives and detailed treatment of individual problems, even if they remain unpersuaded by some of its overarching claims. University of Freiburg/ S. Douglas Olson University of Minnesota Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama. By Judith Fletcher. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 277. Judith Fletcher's book, Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama, is another important contribution to recent scholarship on oaths in the ancient Greek world. Fletcher’s breadth is astonishing: in this slim volume on a seemingly narrow topic she deals in depth with several tragedies from all three tragedians, the sole surviving satyr play, and two of Aristophanes’ comedies, while also incorporating dramatic fragments and other fifthand fourth-century texts into her discussion. She moves her previous work on the oath here into a framework of speech acts based on the work of J. L. Austin and John Searle, examining oaths alongside oracles, prayers, prophecies, and curses as demonstrations of “illocutionary prowess.”1 Applying speech-act theory to fifth-century Athens, Fletcher sees these speech acts as a force for the expression of the socio-political power held by adult citizen males. The dramatic performance of oaths would particularly resonate with an Athenian audience, surrounded by oath-bound institutions and acculturated to the quotidian use of oaths, and would create specific audience expectation of consequences for the characters that speak them. The first chapter explores the intersection of issues of gender, power, polity, and piety in speech acts in the Oresteia. Seeing the trilogy (and later the Phoenissae) as a history of a family’s speech acts, Fletcher takes the understood narrative arc of the plays, which moves from a blood-feud system to the Athenian civic homicide court, and applies it 1 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words2 (Cambridge 1975); J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge 1969); id., Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge 1979). 188 PHOENIX to oaths, as the “oath evolves from an instrument of vengeance to one of formal law” (39). This evolution parallels other transformations: the relegation of women outside of that formal institution (manifest in Clytaemnestra’s “misuse” of an oath in attempting to secure divine support and in Cassandra’s inability to obtain an oath from the chorus of Argive men), the transformation of the Furies into the Erinyes (curses into blessings), and Orestes’ own development not only into an adult male with the political ability to build alliances (the oath of Argos), but also a hero-cult figure, with elements of the Erinyes’ power. Chapter Two examines what this formalisation of speech act means in the Philoctetes and the Trachiniae; while both plays take place outside...