Caratteri e Convenzioni Retorico-formali nella Tragedia Attica

Greek tragedy plays a key role in the transmission of traditional myths. Staging a myth inevitably implies forms of adaptation of figures and characters already existing as part of a common knowledge and of a shared culture. Some of the main tragic figures (as for instance Antigone) seem functionally and temperamentally determined by being part of a family, as well as of a mythical chain of events. In Greek tragedy, character, moral disposition, or nobility can be inherited. Nevertheless, the tragic fabrication of a character has been considered by some critics as a simple and temporary adaptation to the «rhetoric of the situation». Persons in tragedy would have been characterized by poets only enough to motivate what they have to do: but are they mere «creatures of the situation»? As Gregory O. Hutchinson puts it, «One should resist the popular notion that Aeschylus creates character only to make an action plausible». It seems to me that this also applies to Sophocles and Euripides. While including a short survey of the history of research, the paper aims to stress the importance of (sometimes minimal) formal rhetorical patterns – as for instance some conventional tragic forms of address that I would name ‘aggressive accusative’ –, and to show how some of them act as ‘formulae’, though cleverly modified to suggest a peculiar state of mind. Such ‘formulae’ are not connected with a particular myth but are needed to suggest a specific tone of the scene in performance. Among others, this is the case of some hints concerning Admetus’ characterization in the last dialogue between Alcestis and his husband (Euripides, Alcestis 386-392), and of Oedipus’ tendency to unwittingly use ambiguous sentences (and most likely quoting Odysseus, in Sophocles, Oedipus Rex 244). These patterns can contribute to define an attitude or a characterization within the frame of the specific mythical context, and help us to shed more light on the psychological conditions of some figures involved in the scenic action: as Richard Rutherford puts it, «The characters do not have a life apart from the text». Action, characterization, and language interact reciprocally: modern readers (and probably the ancient audience as well) cannot fully understand some weird behaviors, or changes of mind in Greek tragedy, but we can at least observe how characters speak.