Trustees of Boston University

"Bacchae," Ritual, and Tragedy: Concluding Remarks

Author(s): Richard Seaford
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Winter,
2002), pp. 166-168
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163863
Accessed: 03-08-2015 15:47 UTC

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Bacchae, Ritual, and Tragedy:
Concluding Remarks

RICHARD SEAFORD

XVainer Friedrich's rejoinder (Arion 9.1) to

my rejoinder is an exuberantsmokescreen. Iwill confine my
self to rejecting views that he wrongly attributes to me.
1. Nothing I have written about tragedy "suggests that
such evocation of mystic ritual and of the emotions it stirs in
the participants is the chief purpose and primary emotional

appeal of the genre" (60). This is one of three defenses that

Friedrich now makes of his earlier attribution to me of the

equally absurd view that the evocation of initiatory experi

ence was a feature of every Athenian tragedy (rather than
merely of those in which I had detected it). The other two
(mutually inconsistent) defenses are that he was being ironic,
and that itwas a reductio ad absurdum. His reductio ad ab
surdum is like saying that if some cats are black then every
cat is black. Friedrich has invented the reductio ad absur
dum absurdior.
2. His critique caused me to clarify and develop my argu
ment, and for this I am grateful. But it caused neither "alarm"
nor "certain revisions" (61). I have not abandoned "Dionysiac
pattern" for "typical pattern" (see Arion 8.2.79). Nor did I
"confess" to one-sided excess (71). Rather I predicted that I
would seem guilty of it.What I do confess is failure to do

enough to preclude the misapprehensions triggered in Fried

rich and others.
3. "Dionysos' and Seaford's ideal polis would be a polis
without oikoi" (68). No. Dionysos inspires self-destruction
in the ruling household, which destroys itself also in several

tragedies, to the benefit of the polis. By contrast, the ordinary

household and the polis are, Imaintained (92), mutually de

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 Richard Seaford 167

pendent as well as having (in certain respects) contradictory

interests. On the basis of this "basic contradiction"?a for
mula Friedrich imagines he has made me abandon (68)?
Dionysiac ritual may express a solidarity that seems to
transcend (or even perhaps threaten) ordinary households,
but in a way that ultimately integrates them into the polis.
4. Against my notion of Dionysos as polis-god Friedrich
had set the notion of Dionysos as physis-god, and now

hopefully wonders whether my failure to respond to this

point means that I regard it as "above critique, unassailable"

(68). The reason for my failure is that the complementarity
of these two undoubted aspects of Dionysos is too complex
for brief discussion (see e.g., chapters 7, 8, and 9 of my Rec
iprocity and Ritual).
5. To my statement that the Athenians "were throughout
the fifth century almost obsessed with the threat of tyranny"
he objects that it is "based not on historical but on purely lit
erary grounds" (6^). Not so: see e.g., CQ 50 (2000), 34-35.
This is consistent withthere being in fact no such threat.
6. He suggests that our views may converge on the propo
sition that what I identify as elements of a Dionysiac pattern
(notably kin killing, sometimes expressed in Dionysiac im
agery, and the eventual foundation of polis cult) are in fact
residues . . . to tragedy's origins in
"Dionysiac attesting
Dionysiac ritual" (67). Iwelcome this proposition, with the
significant qualification that I do not regard the "residues"
as mere residues. He claims that in the Oresteia the kin
killing is "neither locally nor causally nor materially con
nected" (63 )with the final foundation of the polis-cult of the
Furies. But in fact the Furies are agents of kin-killing (e.g.,
Ag. 1190, Cho. 283-84, Eum. 137-39, 267), just as in Bac
chae the god who inspires the kin-killing acquires polis cult.
As for Sophokles, I have not maintained that generally "only
one element [of the pattern] is present" (62). And even the
prophecies of cult in Euripides need not be as straightfor

wardly "marginal to the plots of the plays" as Friedrich as

sumes (64).

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i68 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Editorial Note: Rainer

Friedriche original review of Rich
ard Seaford's edition of the Bacchae appeared in Arion 7.3.
115-52. Richard Seaford's reply appeared in Arion 8.2.74-98,
followed by Friedriche riposte in Arion 9.1.57-72.

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