Catharsis Delenda Est
E(i)ditorial — July 2018
According to (a somewhat oversimplified reading of) Aristotle’s Poetics, the purpose of the genre of tragedy is catharsis (“purification” or “cleansing”). Watching a tragedy can take you on the emotional journey of experiencing pity and fear, and then enjoying the resolution of those emotions (δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν, Poetics 1449b).
The chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon sings that we learn from suffering (pathei mathos). Tragedy allows us to experience suffering — and, hopefully, obtain the resulting wisdom — without actually having to suffer for it. Sitting in the audience, you can feel the therapeutic sensation of making progress toward understanding powerful, painful emotions. At best, this understanding can help you challenge those emotions more productively. Or at least move on with your life.
I’ve never found Aristotle’s theory of catharsis especially convincing; like many people, I usually find that watching something sad leaves me feeling weighed down by sadness, not cleansed of it. But recently, as I was reading Euripides’ Trojan Women, I found myself questioning whether catharsis might be not only elusive but also undesirable. Or, even worse, undeserved. What have I done to earn the purification of these emotions?
Trojan Women takes place in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Troy. The men of Troy’s royal family are all dead. Only the women remain, and offstage, the victorious Greek generals are deciding who will get to bring which woman home with him as the spoils of war. Onstage, the Trojan matriarch Hecuba and the chorus wait to find out their fates, along with the fates of Hecuba’s daughters Polyxena and Cassandra and daughters-in-law Helen and Andromache.
As a play about the trauma of war and imperialism, Trojan Women remains deeply relevant in our time. But it feels especially relevant in this particular moment, when the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy has left children torn from their families with no immediate hope of reunion. Multiple reunification deadlines have passed, and yet more than 700 children are still separated from their parents; worse still, stories have begun to proliferate about the abuse children are suffering in detention centers and the lasting trauma that the reunified families continue to experience.
I turned to Trojan Women because the news reminded me of it. Others might turn to Euripides hoping that the words of a great poet will help them better understand the scope of this tragedy, but I don’t think I had any real hope that the text would help me make emotional sense of my rage and helplessness about family separation. I never expected catharsis, so I wasn’t disappointed when it failed to materialize. Instead it led me to wonder: what if catharsis itself is just another way in which tragedy works as a tool of imperialism and oppression?
The chorus of Trojan Women is composed of the widows and daughters of Troy’s dead men. They are resigned to their future of being enslaved by the Greeks, but have hope that they will be able to escape from the violence and devastation they have recently experienced and find new homes and kind treatment. The only one of them who will see anything like a happy ending is Helen. Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena is sacrificed to the dead Achilles; her other daughter, Cassandra, is violently raped by Ajax. And these are only the atrocities that take place before the play starts. Once the prologue begins, the situation deteriorates further.
Cassandra, we learn, has been specially selected by Agamemnon as his prize. Because she can see the future, she tells her mother and the chorus that almost as soon as she and Agamemnon arrive home, they will be butchered by his wife Clytemnestra. Andromache is appalled to learn that she will be the property of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, who killed her husband Hector and then desecrated his body. Hecuba encourages her to be as accommodating and pleasant as possible to her new master so he will allow her to continue to raise her and Hector’s son, Astyanax (702).
But then comes the cruelest news of all: the Greek army, persuaded by Odysseus, has voted to kill Astyanax by throwing him off the walls. The Greek herald Talthybius tells Andromache that fighting against this decision is futile: “Don’t resist: be noble in disaster. / You have no power here, just realize that, / You can’t do anything” (trans. Wilson). Astyanax is led offstage.
After a brief interlude for a scene in which Menelaus watches as Hecuba and Helen debate Helen’s culpability in the Trojan War, Talthybius returns to bring Astyanax’s corpse to Hecuba for burial. Andromache has already departed with Neoptolemus. The play ends with Hecuba telling the Chorus to march offstage and begin their lives as enslaved people.
Aristotle famously called Euripides the “most tragic” (tragikotatos) of his tragedians, and I’ve always thought that plays like Trojan Women are why: the sheer volume of pain that he forces his characters (and, through them, his audience) to experience.
Although Trojan Women is never easy to read, it is particularly painful to read now, because it is a play about the pain mothers feel when their children are taken away from them. Hecuba, still reeling from the deaths of her sons and husband, is devastated when she learns of the death of her daughter Polyxena and seems at first almost unable to comprehend the loss of her grandson Astyanax. Only at the end of the play does she exhibit a grim kind of understanding that it was Astyanax’s very youth that made him such a potent symbol for the Trojans — and such a threat to the Greeks. Children represent hope for the future, and the Greek army’s choice to be violently cruel to a child is the ultimate proof that they have lost touch with their humanity. The parallels with between the play and the tragedy unfolding at our border are irresistible.
I first read Trojan Women as an undergraduate, and it was one of the two plays I wrote about in my senior thesis. That thesis then became the writing sample for my graduate school applications, which means that this play was part of an argument I made for why I wanted to be a professional classical scholar. And, reading it recently, for a moment I recaptured that sensation of understanding why great literature is important: it has a capacity to reach across millennia and speak meaningfully to the human condition in a very different time and place. This, I thought, is why Euripides is still read and performed more than two thousand years later.
If only it were that easy.
Trojan Women was first performed in 415 BCE. It’s one of a minority of Greek tragedies that can be dated precisely. Because of its date and content, many scholars think that it is Euripides’ response to the defeat of the island of Melos in 416. Melos had attempted to stay neutral during the Peloponnesian War in spite of Athens’ demands that it pay tribute. The Athenians laid siege to the city, executed its adult men, and enslaved its women and children.
Trojan Women may be about Melos in an oblique way, but the best-known text about the island is Thucydides’ famous Melian Dialogue in Book 5 of his History of the Peloponnesian War. It is a case study in just how difficult it is to change somebody’s mind. The Athenians point out their overwhelming strength and try to convince the Melians to do the pragmatic thing and pay the tribute; the Melians respond by attempting to appeal to the Athenians’ sense of piety and justice. It is this passage, perhaps more than any other, that has solidified Thucydides’ reputation as a great theorist of Realpolitik. In the dialogue’s most-quoted moment (recently discussed by Neville Morley), the Athenian emissaries tell the Melians, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.”
Although his text never really goes out of style, Thucydides had a moment in the spotlight a year ago. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone in the White House (with the exception of President Trump himself) was talking about Thucydides. Writers for Politico, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, the Washington Post, and many other publications rushed to dissect this trend: what did it mean that people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and James Mattis were talking about Thucydides, and, more specifically, the Melian Dialogue?
One year later, most of those people don’t even work for the Trump Administration anymore. And yet we seem to have progressed, predictably, from the Melian Dialogue to Trojan Women. The strong did what they could, and the weak are suffering.
When you look at the widespread horror over the Trump administration’s family separation policy, it becomes even more plausible that Euripides’ astonishingly relevant play was a response to Melos — but what kind of response, exactly? Criticism? There’s almost no evidence to support the idea that Euripides had pacifist leanings. Perhaps it was just an attempt to process the human cost of the atrocity?
You could say that Euripides gives voice to the pain of the women of Troy, and perhaps the women of Melos as well. But Euripides wasn’t Trojan or Melian. He was Greek, like the soldiers who voted to throw Astyanax off the walls of Troy; he was Athenian, like the soldiers who executed the Melian men. No matter how much he sympathized with the victims, in his political and social context he more closely resembled their victimizers.
So even if Trojan Women is really “about” Melos, it isn’t only about the trauma of war. It’s about how somebody from an imperial power can reckon with the pain and suffering inflicted by that power’s leaders. It’s about being part of a culture that has chosen to hurt others, simply because they’re weaker. So maybe it really is the perfect play for US citizens to be reading right now.
In the play’s very first choral ode, the chorus sings about their uncertainty and fear at what the future brings: will they be taken to Argos, or Phthia (187–9)? At the very least, they plead, may they not be taken to Sparta (210–3). But the dream, the best-case scenario, is to be taken to Athens, “the fortunate (eudaimon) land of Theseus.” Even in their suffering, they imagine that Athens is a place where there is some hope for a good (or at least a tolerable) life. Critics tend to see this line as pandering to Euripides’ Athenian audience, but it feels prescient now. Like Athens, the United States has become a place people hope to gain access to, the less intolerable of several intolerable circumstances. The chorus knows that suffering is inevitable, but perhaps it will be less acute there.
There are other theories for what tragedy is “for” besides Aristotle’s. One approach that focuses less on literary theory than on practical utility is that of Bryan Doerries, who has argued that tragedy is really a kind of military technology. Doerries is the director of Theater of War Productions, a nonprofit that performs readings of Greek tragedies for military and civilian audiences all over the world. In his book The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (which Johanna Hanink reviewed for this publication here), he writes, “Tragedy is an ancient military technology, a form of storytelling that evokes powerful emotions in order to erode stigmas, elicit sympathy, generate dialogue, and stir citizens to action. When you plug a tragedy into a community that is ready to receive it, the story does what it was designed to do.” Doerries has used readings of tragedies to start powerful, difficult conversations about the place of the military in our society and how to reintegrate veterans back into the community. He makes a convincing case that tragedy can help heal trauma.
But I wonder if tragedy can also work as an imperialist technology. For a brief moment, art turns our shared humanity into the focus. That kind of connection is a powerful one, and in the right circumstances it can empower a community to help those who are suffering. By sanctioning and funding art that provides a cathartic outlet for members of the citizen body who are inclined to sympathize with the victims of an atrocity, the state can allow dissidents to feel that they care about the plight of people who suffer without risking major consequences. Does empathy mean anything without action?
In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison writes about the Greek roots of empathy: “Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia — em (into) and pathos (feeling) — a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?” She writes that empathy is “always perched precariously between gift and invasion.” But she also worries that empathy can be a kind of “theft,” a way to import someone else’s pain for yourself, “a bout of hypothetical self-pity projected onto someone else.” This warning is an important one. There is a way of reading Euripides’ Trojan Women right now that is little more than self-indulgence.
I’m not as confident as I used to be that reading more Euripides will help. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I think you should read less Euripides. If you think that reading Trojan Women will mean something to you right now, then by all means, search it out. If you can’t or don’t want to read it in the original, I recommend Emily Wilson’s translation; better yet, read about and support the Syria Trojan Women project, which performs a version of Euripides’ play called “Queens of Syria” with a cast of Syrian refugees. Unfortunately, plans to bring the project to the U.S. failed when the cast were denied visas under the terms of the Trump administration’s travel ban, but the clips are well worth watching.
Read Euripides if you want, but don’t mistake reading him for making the world less of a terrible place; your personal emotional growth doesn’t mean that much. So donate to one of the organizations doing terrific work to help asylum-seekers and immigrants at the border. Vote in November. Pity and fear are appropriate responses to the horrors happening in our country right now, but until we’ve made meaningful change, we don’t deserve catharsis just yet.
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Fall 2018.
