The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.

The first part of this book looks at Pater’s contribution to English studies and literary criticism within a number of broader contexts. Kenneth Daley provides initial orientation for the reader. He compares Pater’s Appreciations with the writings of other critics in the period, stressing how the volume asserts the centrality of the ‘romantic’ tradition in English literature, and contributes influentially to late nineteenth-century literary historiography and the tradition of the English critical essay. Appreciations may not have enjoyed the succès de scandale of The Renaissance, but it was widely disseminated and admired, with six editions and thirteen other reprintings up to 1927.

‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.

Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

I have tried particularly in the previous chapter to show how the connection between the sophists and tragedy is not to be seen as a matter of the regrettable influence on poetry of a rhetoric of tricks or an improper intellectualism, but rather as an important indication of the radical tensions that draw together sophistic and tragic questions about man’s place in the order of things. In this chapter, I am going to consider a further major area of innovativeness in tragic theatre that has proved instrumental in the evaluation and appreciation particularly of Euripides’ œuvre, namely, the poet’s self-conscious marking and manipulation of the conventions of the genre of tragedy. For Euripides’ innovativeness is developed not merely in the new material of his plots, the experimental use of lyric, or his ‘deglamorization’ of myth, but also in his tragedies’ self-reflexive sense of theatre as theatre.

Like so many modern philosophers, literary critics and novelists – heirs to ancient questions – fifth-century b.c. writers show an ‘intense interest in the limits and possibilities of language’.1 This interest connects numerous writers across numerous genres and disciplines. In the texts of philosophy, the concern with language not only gives rise to the development of linguistic study itself, but also is reflected in the prime place of logos, dialectic, rhetoric – the role of language itself – in the development of philosophical systems from Heraclitus to Aristotle. Modern occidental philosophy, for all its historical turns, is still working through Aristotelian linguistic categories and distinctions. It is the fifth century too that offers the first formal studies in rhetoric, the teaching and practice of which dominated education for two thousand years and more, and has recently been the focus of much of the most iconoclastic modern philosophical and literary criticism.2

If we wish to understand the force and direction of Greek tragedy, it is impossible not to bring into consideration the city of Athens, which gave rise to the institution of the tragic festivals and which, as we saw in the previous chapter, can be regarded as offering specific conditioning to its dramas. I do not mean by this to take for granted any simple relation between a society and the texts produced in it, nor do I wish to add my name to the roll call of those who have seen in the order of the polis one of the greatest glories of Greece. Rather, in this chapter I intend to develop briefly some sense of the ideology of the polis and a view of its structure: naturally, I shall not be attempting a full description of its institutions or of its history, two topics to which many words have been dedicated,1 nor am I attempting to define in full the term polis, a word whose transliteration covers a multitude of insufficient translations.2 Rather, within the terms of this book I shall be attempting to investigate some ways in which the structure of civic ideology may relate to the dramatic festivals and the sorts of transgressions enacted in tragedy and comedy. For even if the relations between the social conditions of production and the texts themselves remain obscure and difficult, it does not follow that the texts can simply be read divorced from any sense or investigation of those conditions.

Time and again the line of argument in my discussion has approached the question of sexuality, and has been forced to restrain itself. In the Oresteia, I argued, the relations between the sexes are an essential dynamic of the trilogy and any discussion of language, politics, imagery in that work is forced always to reconsider its siting in a sexual discourse. I attempted to show further that in any description of how the Greek city might try to delimit itself the polarized realms of a male world and female world were an essential, if difficult, marking of that not entirely physical topography. With regard to those primary words of human relations in the family and city, philos and ekhthros, the sexual was explicitly interwoven in the semantic range – and dislocations – of such terms. In this chapter, I wish to focus on this topic of sexuality, which is so important to Greek tragedy, and after I have looked at some of the complex problems involved in approaching this subject, I shall be considering in particular Euripides’ Hippolytus.

The Bacchae is a particularly fitting work with which to end my study of Greek tragedy. Not only is it one of the latest extant plays – Euripides’ final masterpiece – but also the dense texture of image and theme in this extraordinary drama recalls so many of the ideas I have explored in the previous chapters. It is a text concerned with a man and a city and relations with the divine (embodied in the disguised Dionysus), and the work has often been read as a fundamentally religious statement, either in terms of a defence of Dionysus (justified divine vengeance); or an attack on the malicious element of destruction and disorder in Dionysiac or similar cult attitudes; or in terms of a recognition and demonstration of the necessary place of the irrational in man.1 As Foley has recently written, ‘the text undeniably raises questions about the nature of divinity and reflects the precariousness of social and political life in late fifth-century Athens’.2

In the first chapter, at several points I referred to the difficulties of the term dikē in the Oresteia. In this chapter, I intend to consider in more depth the notions surrounding this word and its cognates in the trilogy. This discussion is important for several reasons. First, after my investigation of the exchange of language with its focus on the process of interpretation and understanding, it is interesting to attempt to follow through the shifts and plays of meaning through which a word passes in the clashes of persuasive rhetoric and deceitful manipulation. I discussed language’s role in the ordering of social relations and language as the means and matter of social transgression. How does a prime term of social order, dikē, relate to this discussion? Secondly, the concept of dikē, few would disagree, is a major concern in the Oresteia. This concern has formed the basis for many literary critics’ readings of the trilogy. As well as investigating the various influential views put forward on this topic, it is important to see in what ways the focus on language changes our appreciation of this debate. This leads to my third reason: the different critics’ attempts at interpreting the Oresteia in the light of this set of terms will offer an important insight into a major problem of reading Greek tragedy. For, as I argued in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 1, the Oresteia’s tragic critique of the exchange of language as social process is highly relevant to the institutions and attitudes of literary criticism; and the history of the interpretation of the notion of dikē will offer an understanding of the way the play’s problematic view of interpretation and comprehension is all too applicable to the reading of the play itself.

‘Reading a poem’, writes Geoffrey Hartman, ‘is like walking on silence – on volcanic silence. We feel the historical ground; the buried life of words.’1 This sense of uncertain depth, uncertain soundings, is nowhere more evident than in Greek tragedy’s relation to the tradition of earlier writings. Although a relatively small proportion of the stories of the three major tragedians appear to have been drawn directly from the Homeric poems, and although the poetic language of tragedy does not reflect constant and close dependence on Homeric usage (as do some other genres),2 it is none the less impossible to understand Greek tragedy without a consideration of the way Homer and Hesiod resound and echo through these texts at a variety of levels and in a variety of important ways. I have already mentioned in Chapters 4 and 5 the complex dialectic between past and present that is enacted by the plays performed before the city but set in the heroic past,3 and in Chapter 1 I discussed the specific democratic rewriting of the Hesiodic injunction not to give crooked judgement in the Oresteia’s depiction of the establishment of the lawcourt. In this chapter, I intend to discuss in as much detail as space permits the relations of the texts of Greek tragedy to the tradition in and against which they are written and must be read. Aeschylus is said to have claimed his works were ‘slices from the banquets of Homer’4 (though whether this means left-overs or choice pieces is less than clear) and, ‘Sophocles might have taken for himself the Aeschylean claim.’5 Euripides, too, is impossible to understand without some sense of the heroic tradition and the place of Homer in more than a literary context. It is on the varying attitudes to and uses of the past, and on the literary tradition, particularly of Homer, in and against which the plays of the tragic corpus are formed, that this chapter will focus.

This quotation from Plato’s depiction of Protagoras provides an excellent introduction to the range of problems involved in discussing the sophists, to whom I have often referred in this book as a major factor in understanding fifth-century thought and drama. In Chapter 6 I discussed the conception of the poet having privileged access to truth and forming the education of the citizens. I argued that one of the reasons for Plato’s extended hostility towards poets and poetry was the sense of philosophy’s rival claims to be a master of truth, a conflict which is still being worked through. One of the commonest adjectives used to describe this special poetic knowledge and the people who demonstrate it is sophos, which is the root of the term ‘sophist’ and ‘philosopher’, and which is often translated ‘wise’, ‘clever’, ‘intelligent’. The possessor of any special skill or knowledge from carpentry to rhetoric could deserve the title ‘sophos’.