Reviewed by: Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State Sheila Murnaghan Seaford, Richard. Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xx + 455 pp. Cloth, $75.00. In his stellar commentary on Euripides’ Cyclops, and in a string of impressive and suggestive articles, Richard Seaford has already established himself as our era’s leading expert on a question that is both perennial and currently pressing: what does tragedy have to do with Dionysus? Whatever that question meant to the ancients who first raised it in the form of the proverbial complaint “ouden pros ton Dionuson,” to us it expresses a felt need to contextualize tragedy, to overcome our habits of reading the surviving plays solely as self-contained literary texts. Our starting point for this inquiry must be the setting of tragedy’s original performance in the Great Dionysia, and a fully satisfying answer must address the character of the Dionysia as simultaneously religious and political, a ritual in honor of a god that was also a self-conscious expression of the Athenian polis. In a study that is explicitly framed as a historicist counter to the prevailing literary (or as Seaford has it “formalist”) approaches to tragedy, Seaford here excavates that junction of religion and politics, locating the origins—and thus the essence—of tragedy in a weaving together of several rituals, all of which promoted the emerging city-state. The core of Seaford’s argument, and the central contribution of his study, is in this resolutely ritualist theory of the origins of tragedy. Drawing on a deep and detailed knowledge of Greek religion, and building on his own previous demonstrations of the pervasiveness of ritual themes in the extant plays, Seaford argues that tragic drama was created through the making public of rites of initiation into the Dionysian mysteries; these rites were originally the secret practices of the all-female thiasos but were converted into tragedy through their public revelation and their enactment by male performers. The plots of tragedy dramatized the aetiological myths that grounded Dionysian cult, such as the myth of Pentheus, but also other rituals, especially hero-cult, that similarly fostered the creation of the polis. For Seaford, the defining feature of the polis is the transcendence of the autonomous household in the creation of a larger and cohesive civic identity. Dionysus is, above all, the deity who presides over that process, and this accounts for his central role in tragedy. Dionysus is a foreigner without internal allegiances; he traverses the space between the city’s margins and its center, thereby defining the city’s shared territory; and he draws women out of the household into his thiasos, thereby countering the possessiveness and exclusivity of the individual household. But the creation of trans-familial social cohesion is also key to the non-Dionysian myths and rituals incorporated into tragedy. Hero-cult, for [End Page 316] example, transforms the divisive private funeral into a unifying experience of general lamentation that leads to benefits for the whole community. Many of tragedy’s non-Dionysian myths, especially those of the Theban cycle, rehearse the destruction of the introverted royal family with positive results, usually through the foundation of a cult, for the community as a whole. This last point is among the most breathtaking in the book, and it helps to solve one of the main mysteries surrounding tragedy, which is why the polis would sponsor a form of art dedicated to representing terrifying, irremediable disasters. What makes this theory so compelling is the way Seaford manages to avoid a reductive identification of tragedy with any one ritual while finding a consistent thread among the many rituals that converge to shape the genre. He argues persuasively for seeing the suffering heroes of tragedy as reflecting simultaneously the cult hero, whose universal lamentation binds a community together; the scapegoat, whose expulsion also reinforces community; the initiate, whose isolation and confusion precede his reintegration into society; and the grasping monarch, whose downfall frees up the circulation of women and goods. He is able to find unforced connections between what have often seemed like irreconcilable clues to tragedy’s origins...