Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature Rush Rehm Michael Vickers . Sophocles and Alcibiades: Athenian Politics in Ancient Greek Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. x + 205. $45.00. This book makes a claim that, if substantiated, would force most of us to rethink completely our understanding of Greek tragedy. The claim: the notorious Athenian politician Alcibiades is a central figure in Sophocles' extant plays (all save Electra and Trachiniae), in Euripides' Bacchae and Cyclops (at least), in Plato's Gorgias, and in other literary texts (the book's subtitle). Once we grasp the near ubiquitous presence of Alcibiades in Sophocles, the playwright's work becomes "infinitely richer" (178), the reward for Vickers having worked "beyond the frontiers of traditional scholarship," undeterred by "the academic police" (177, following Heckscher). [End Page 402] Drawing on the not always reliable biographical tradition (most of it from Plutarch's Lives, dating some five hundred years after the plays in question), Vickers argues that Alcibiades—along with other fifth-century politicians, including Critias, Pericles, Themistocles, Lycurgus, and Lysander—"comes forward" (Vicker's oft-repeated phrase) through diverse dramatic characters, including Ajax, Teucer, Odysseus, Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Philoctetes, Heracles, and others. With this breakthrough, Vickers "solves" (the author again) longstanding problems on which scholars have disagreed: the reasons for Antigone's speech at Antigone 904–20; the madness, impiety, and deception of the title character in Ajax; inconsistencies in the plotting of Oedipus Tyrannus; Odysseus's trumpeting of his own immorality and Philoctetes' puzzling submission to Heracles in Philoctetes; Oedipus's rejection of his son Polyneices in Oedipus at Colonus; and so on (177). According to Vickers, Attic tragedy and comedy aimed to amuse Athenian audiences by scoring topical points against the personalities (and occasionally the policies) of prominent politicians. Genre distinctions seem to vanish, because "in essence, the writer for the Athenian stage, whether of comedies or tragedies, resembled today's political cartoonist" (11). Informed by such naive and reductionist assumptions, Vickers assures us that anecdotes and gossip, often preserved in sources dating centuries after the ostensible events, provide "enough information … to enable a reconstruction of the original significance, the first meaning [my italics, here and below], of tragedies that refer to Alcibiades" (6). Given that the name Alcibiades never occurs in extant Greek tragedy, Vickers employs a strange understanding of the term "refers to." As for "original significance," we have trouble determining what that might be for the US Constitution or Shakespeare's Hamlet. But armed with Plutarch, Vickers can unlock "the first meaning" of five of Sophocles' tragedies, and even discover that "many innovations in Greek drama can be ultimately laid at the door of Alcibiades" (80). Although often ingenious in his argument, Vickers seems to this reviewer to operate a game of interpretive inflation. The game involves the ruthless and repetitive dismissal of contrary scholarship (E. R. Dodds is faulted for the same "error" seven times, for example); the unearned assertion of true insight; a sophomoric confusion of general qualities found in many characters in tragedy (anger, licentiousness, immorality, impiety) with specific qualities associated with historical figures (particularly Alcibiades) in Plutarch; and the application of interpretive schema so broad as to allow diametrically opposed evidence to support the same conclusion. To justify his search in Greek tragedy for hidden meanings and obscure references to Alcibiades, Pericles, and other political figures, Vickers invokes Quintillian's idea of emphasis—indicating "innuendo" or "lurking meaning," not the modern sense of "emphasis" as something underlined or made obvious. No matter that Quintillian wrote over five hundred years after Sophocles, and that his hermeneutics reflect Roman literary practice rather than the habits of [End Page 403] a fifth-century audience at the City Dionysia (recall that Vickers claims to have recovered the "the original significance" and "the first meaning" of the plays he discusses). So, for example, Vickers uses Plutarch's comment on Pericles' skill with siege equipment (Life of Pericles, 27.3) to explain the many occurrences of the word mêchanê (and variants) in Antigone (17), ignoring Thucydides (Sophocles' contemporary), who attributes this skill to Athenians in general (1.102). Vickers sees emphasis—and Pericles—where others see a...