Rites of Passage in Ancient Greece: Literature, Religion,

Society (review)

Eric Wiley

Theatre Journal, Volume 55, Number 1, March 2003, pp. 179-180 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2003.0048

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/40425

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four individual translations that follow are out-
standing. They are conscientious with regard to the
beauty, nuance, and detail of the Greek poetic
language, but also governed by aspiration—sure to
be much appreciated by teachers, students, actors,
and directors—to attain a powerful and convincing
English rendition suitable for performance on the
modern stage or in the university classroom.
In the first translation of the collection, the Alcestis,
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz introduces us to the
earliest extant play of Euripides (438 BCE), in
which Queen Alcestis gives up her life in exchange
for that of her husband, Admetos. Rabinowitz’s
prefatory essay explores the myth, the cultural
context, and several interpretive issues applicable
to this play, and she opens the discussion of how
women are portrayed in Euripidean drama, noting
that the figure of Alcestis “establishes that pattern
as a criterion for excellence in womanhood” (93).
The second translated play, the Medea (431 BCE), is
perhaps Euripides’ most famous, or infamous,
drama to survive from the ancient world. The tale
of Medea’s sexual abandonment by Jason and her
act of filicide as retribution “offers a startling chal-
lenge to contemporary Athenian assumptions about
gender roles” (150), as Ruby Blondell asserts in her
essay. Blondell surveys the myth of Medea, her
representation as other, the relationship of her
character to the themes of marriage and the sanc-
tity of oaths, and the essential problem of Medea’s
heroism. In the third translation of the volume,
Bella Zweig presents the Helen, one of Euripides’
later plays (412 BCE), and one that puts a startling
twist on the tale of the most beautiful woman in the
world, as it describes her sojourn in Egypt during
the years of the Trojan War while the men fought
over a phantom image of her at Troy. Zweig’s
essay investigates the complex questions that
emerge from the drama through the narrative and
ritual dualities of its protagonist, Helen, whose
“character, her words and actions, speak both for
the particular social formation of women’s identity
as well as for the placement of female identity
within the general thematic issues affecting the
larger community” (219). In the final translation in
this collection, the Iphigeneia at Aulis tells the story
of the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter before
the Greeks sailed for Troy, and as Mary-Kay Gamel
reminds us, this drama was awarded one of the
rare first prizes of Euripides’ long career, although
the honor brought no satisfaction to the play-
wright, who died in Macedonia before it was pro-
duced (in 406 or 405 BCE). Gamel considers the
ambiguities of the depiction of Iphigeneia in myth
and ritual, how both the text and the performance
of the play maintain those tensions, and what
impact the drama might have had within its his-
BOOK REVIEW / 179
toric context at the end of the Peloponnesian War.
She concludes that the play “gives ample support
for regarding Iphigeneia’s sacrifice as noble action,
as an absurd waste, or as a noble action wasted on
an absurd cause” (327).
In all, these new translations present both schol-
ars and students of classical antiquity and theatre
history with a remarkable opportunity to reac-
quaint themselves with Euripides, and the editors
themselves express their wish that their readers
“will use them to open a critically and culturally
informed dialogue with an extraordinary play-
wright” (89). I highly recommend this collection to
anyone eager to encounter an innovative reading
of Euripidean drama.
MONICA SILVEIRA CYRINO
University of New Mexico
RITES OF PASSAGE IN ANCIENT GREECE:
LITERATURE, RELIGION, SOCIETY.
Bucknell Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 1. Edited
by Mark W. Padilla. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press, 1999; pp. 312. $28.00.
This volume of twelve essays, with an introduc-
tion by its editor, Mark W. Padilla, contains the
writings of classical scholars engaged in one of
their area’s liveliest dialogues, that concerning rites
of passage in ancient Greek culture. The nature and
meaning of passage rituals and myths are exam-
ined in a variety of contexts: seven essays focus on
tragedy; two on cults of Dionysus; one on Homer
and the novel; and two question the rite of passage
as a theoretical construct. The variety and gener-
ally high caliber of these essays yield an invigorat-
ing revisit to ancient Greek tragedy in its historical
and critical contexts.
The four essays in the book’s first section focus
on depictions of male rites of passage in particular
plays. Dora C. Pozzi’s “Hyllus’ Coming of Age in
Sophocles’ Trachiniae” looks at the generational
transference of authority from father to son, with
Herakles’ heroism seen yielding to a more civil
way of life for Hyllus. Robin Mitchell-Boyask’s
essay, “Euripides’ Hippolytus and the Trials of Man-
hood (The Ephebia?),” argues that the title
character’s passage from adolescence to adult citi-
zenship is achieved in effect after his death, re-
minding Athenian audiences that the failure to
mature socially is a real possibility and that, were
such failure to become widespread (as was popu-
larly feared in the United States during the late
180 / Book Review
1960s), the consequences for the city-state would
prove disastrous. In “Euripides’s Ion: Generational
Passage and Civic Myth” Charles Segal offers a
close reading of the play’s rites of passage, en-
hanced by an astute analysis of the tripartite tem-
porality of tragic drama (the eternal, the cyclical,
and the urgent). Rituals are shown to activate
perceptions of the past, present, and future in both
individuals and social groups. For example, the
ritual myths of Athens’s founding are reworked by
Euripides so as to engender in the audience per-
sonal identification with birth and social criticism
of civic history. Barbara Goff’s essay, “The Violence
of Community: Ritual in the Iphigeneia in Tauris,”
sees rites of passage as indicators of—and as
Euripides’ unsettling response to—the war-time
anxiety of the Athenians, and rites created by Athena
at the end of the play “do not celebrate a trium-
phant city but rather seek to construct one” (121).
Part Two features three essays on female rites of
passage in Greek tragedy. Phyllis B. Katz’s “Io in
the Prometheus Bound: A Coming of Age Paradigm
for the Athenian Community” draws on contem-
porary medical literature to argue that Io exhibits
pre-marital anxiety symptoms that seem to have
been fairly common among Athenian girls. Will-
iam Blake Tyrrell’s “Antigone’s Unnoticed Rite of
Passage” ingeniously takes Antigone’s thoughts on
how marriage and motherhood would have af-
fected her decision-making as the view of one who
has (hypothetically) completed the pertinent rites
of passage. He situates her position in the context
of changes in contemporary laws governing
funerary rites. Bella Zweig’s “Euripides’ Helen and
Female Rites of Passage” sees an affirmation of
traditional religious values in Euripides’ play, es-
pecially in its emphasis “on specific women’s rites
of transition, and on the reconciliation of female
divinities” (172).
Part Three has two essays that concern Dionysian
cults. Jan N. Bremmer’s “Transvestite Dionysos”
offers an illuminating review of evidence linking
adolescence and cross-dressing in ancient Greek
myths and rituals and identifies a stronger mytho-
logical basis to Dionysus’ description in Euripides’
Bacchae than has generally been recognized. Greta L.
Ham’s essay, “The Choes and Anthesteria Recon-
sidered: Male Maturation Rites and the Pelopon-
nesian Wars,” discerns in the boyhood-themed
iconography on Athenian cups dating from the last
quarter of the fifth century not escapist fantasy but
a “cultic response to the decimation of the popula-
tion through war and plague” (202).
Part Four consists wholly of Ken Dowden’s es-
say “Fluctuating Meanings: ‘Passage Rites’ in Ritual,
Myth, Odyssey, and the Greek Romance,” in which
he scrutinizes the use of the terms “myth” and
“ritual” in literary criticism and across academic
disciplines. His attention turns, in the latter half of
the essay, to epic poetry and the novel, but the
thoroughness and clarity of his discussion make it
valuable as a general orientation to the literary
study of rites of passage.
The volume concludes with two theoretical es-
says. David D. Leitao’s “Solon on the Beach: Some
Pragmatic Functions of the Limen in Initiatory Myth
and Ritual” questions the emphasis that literary
critics have placed on the liminal aspects of van
Gennep’s three-stage model of rites de passage, ar-
guing that narrative elements in extant accounts of
ancient Greek initiatory rites, such as those involv-
ing transvestism and trickery, actually represent
the stages of separation and integration. Claude
Calame’s essay, “Indigenous and Modern Perspec-
tives on Tribal Initiation Rites: Education Accord-
ing to Plato,” translated by Adam A. Leff, looks at
the increasingly self-conscious use of the rites of
passage model, beginning with its earliest appear-
ance in academic discourse (van Gennep is the
founding hero), where behind the nascent, univer-
salizing tendency in its usage, abstract concept-
ualization is at play rather than the empirical study
of other cultures. This leads to an “anthropology of
the self” (288), which Calame compares to the
pedagogical idealism in Plato’s Laws. This is a
brilliant, intellectual ride, after which, as the saying
goes, you can’t remember where you parked the
car.
Throughout the volume, endnotes are meticu-
lous and rich in information on disputed points of
discussion. Classicists are the grand masters of
marginal notation, and much of the excitement lies
here. For a general readership, the editor and
authors have exercised good judgment on where to
draw the line with linguistic commentary; the
Greekless reader will not feel left out too often, and
finer points are frequently made accessible. Useful
orientations to the book’s field of inquiry are found
in the essays of Goff, Dowden, and Calame; this
would explain the editor’s laconic introduction to
the volume.
ERIC WILEY
University of Texas–Pan American