“Look At It Carefully Now”: Athenian Tragedy And The “Talking Cure”

Introduction

In Euripides’ plays Bacchae and Heracles, an individual in a state of madness commits horrific violence and must first be brought back to sanity, then enabled to confront what has happened, and finally begin to come to terms with it. In the Bacchae, Cadmus uses a series of questions and answers to bring his daughter Agave to the realisation that she is holding her own son’s severed head in her hands.

Agave: What is wrong? What causes your pain?

Cadmus: First, look into the heavens.

Agave: As you wish! What should I look at?

Cadmus: Does the sky seem different to you?

Agave: It is brighter and clearer than before!

Cadmus: Is there still a disturbance in your soul?

Agave: I don’t understand…but in some way I feel better. Something has changed within me…

Cadmus: If you can hear me, would you please answer my questions clearly?

Agave: Father, I cannot remember what we said before…

Cadmus: Into whose household did you marry?

Agave: You gave me to earthborn Echion.

Cadmus: Who was the child born to you both?

Agave: Why, Pentheus, of course.

Cadmus: And what do you have in your hands?

Agave: The head of a lion! The huntresses said it was a lion’s head!

Cadmus: Look at it carefully now. It is easy to look for a second.

Agave: What is this? What am I carrying?

Cadmus: Have another look. Think again.

Agave: [realizes it is Pentheus’ head] I see horror and misery!

Cadmus: Surely it doesn’t seem like a lion any more.

Agave: No. My boy. My Pentheus! Who killed him? How did this head reach my hands? (Euripides, Bacchae, 1264–1284: Mills et al., 2016).

In Euripides’ (1938) Heracles, Heracles is driven to madness by his divine enemy Hera. In the throes of madness, he uses his famous bow to shoot his wife and three children, killing them. His madness leaves him spontaneously, and he does not have to be talked out of it; but he does not remember what he has done, and it takes the determined intervention of his father, through another, much longer set of questions and answers, for him to be given sufficient information to come to a full understanding of what has happened. Like Cadmus, Amphitryon emphasizes to his child that it is important for him to look at what he has done as a way of coming to terms with the new reality of his life.

Heracles: Father, why do you weep and veil your eyes, standing far from your beloved son?

Amphitryon: My child! Mine still, for all your misery.

Heracles: Why, what is there so sad in my case that you weep?

Amphitryon: What might make any of the gods weep, if he were to learn it.

Heracles: A bold assertion, but you are not yet explaining what has happened.

Amphitryon: Your own eyes see it, if by this time you are restored to your senses.

Heracles: Fill in your sketch if any change awaits my life.

Amphitryon: I will explain, if you are no longer mad as a fiend of hell.

Heracles: What suspicions these dark hints of yours again excite!

Amphitryon: I am still doubtful whether you are in your sober senses.

Heracles: I have no recollection of being mad.

Amphitryon: Am I to loosen my son, old friends, or what shall I do?

Heracles: Loose me, yes, and say who bound me; for I feel shame at this.

Amphitryon: Rest content with what you know of your woes; the rest forego.

Heracles: No. For is silence sufficient to learn what I wish?

Amphitryon: O Zeus, do you behold these deeds proceeding from the throne of Hera?

Heracles: What! have I suffered something from her enmity?

Amphitryon: A truce with the goddess! Attend to your own troubles.

Heracles: I am undone; you will tell me some mischance.

Amphitryon: See here the corpses of your children.

Heracles: O horror! what sight is here?!

Amphitryon: My son, you have waged unnatural war against your children.

Heracles: What do you mean? Who killed them?

Amphitryon: You and your bow and some god, whoever is to blame.

Heracles: What are you saying? What have I done? Speak, father, you messenger of evil!

Amphitryon: You were insane; it is a sad explanation you are asking.

Heracles: And did I kill my wife also?

Amphitryon: Your own unaided arm has done all this.

Heracles: Alas! A cloud of mourning wraps me round.

Amphitryon: For this reason I lament your fate.

Heracles: Did I dash my house to pieces in my frenzy?

Amphitryon: I know nothing but this, that you are utterly undone.

Heracles: Where did the madness seize me? where did it destroy me?

Amphitryon: When you were purifying yourself with fire at the altar. (Euripides, Heracles, 1110–1145, modified from E. P. Coleridge’s translation).

Although some scholars have speculated that such scenes in tragedy might reflect medical or psychiatric practice at Athens in the late fifth-century, a reading of medical writers’ views on the psychological dimension of medicine offers disappointingly little evidence for believing that this is so. The Hippocratic texts say almost nothing about psychotherapy and take a very material approach to treating patients. Their cures focus on diet, drugs, exercise, and surgery and almost completely exclude verbal therapy as a means of healing mental disturbances. The Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease XVII. (Hippocrates, 1923, pp. 1–19) understands that madness is a condition of the brain, but regards it as a purely physiological phenomenon caused by excessive moisture, for which the remedy is some kind of nutriment to promote dryness. Aristotle (1937) (Problemata, 953a10–953a22) diagnoses the madness of mythological heroes, such as Heracles and Ajax, as simply a product of excess black bile, and a frequently recommended treatment for madness is a drug such as hellebore: since madness is black, it is treated homeopathically with black, poisonous hellebore (Padel, 1995, p. 49). While some doctors apparently did understand the value of talking to patients about their symptoms, such psychological considerations were seen as merely means to make sure that patients trust their doctor sufficiently to do whatever he orders (Simon, 1978, pp. 217–227). ¹

There are good reasons for fifth-century medical writers’ lack of interest in verbal therapies for mental disease. In traditional popular thought, as seen in the tragic examples cited above, madness or sickness was often believed to be a visitation from the gods, or even a punishment for some crime, whether individual or ancestral. Naturally, magico-religious (and thus verbal) remedies, such as prayers, incantations, and charms, were considered an appropriate means of cure. Indeed, in popular thought, verbal cures could sometimes be extended even to maladies that we consider purely physical. Homer mentions that charms, which may also have a musical as well as verbal dimension (Provenza, 2014, pp. 299–301), are used to staunch Odysseus’ wound (Odyssey, 19.457 [Homer, 2019], cf. Iliad 15.392–15.394 [Homer Iliad, 1925]) and prayer is recommended to Polyphemus by his fellow Cyclopes as a cure for sickness (Odyssey, 9.411–9.412). Pindar (1997) (Pythian, 3.45–3.53) lists incantations, along with more conventional methods (such as drugs and surgery), as one means by which Asclepius cured the sick: such methods are also mentioned by Aeschylus in Eumenides (Aeschylus, 2009, p. 649) and Sophocles in Ajax (Sophocles, 1994, pp. 581–582). The start of the Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease (II.10–II.13; cf. 21, 26) expresses distaste for all such practices, which the author considers entirely unscientific. Verbal means of healing were also employed by certain religious cults whose methods could roughly be considered psychotherapeutic, although exact details of their working, and the dates at which these practices became common, are lacking. The cult of Trophonius at Lebadeia used ideas of forgetting and remembering to cure those who came there (Pausanias, 1935, 9.39.8), while Galen (2012) (de sanitate tuenda, 1.8: 19–21) claims that Asclepius made patients compose odes, skits, and songs to correct the disproportion of emotions in their soul. For those who believe that their mental sickness (or even a physical sickness with a psychosomatic element) is divinely caused, a visit to a religious shrine and the performance of ritual acts in those places might indeed bring relief from their symptoms.

All of these verbal “cures” originate from an older trend of essentially non-rational thought to which the pre-Socratic philosophers – and thus the medical writers, whose world view was largely aligned with theirs – were hostile. For medical practitioners, keen to distinguish their modern scientific and empirically-based practices from the superstitious remedies of popular medicine, “mere” words could not possibly have any curative effect on the body, and by extension, in their attempts to forge a new technology of medicine distinct from all layman’s remedies, on the mind either. Thus, these writers tend to distance themselves from any verbally-based types of healing.

But a more general idea that words could heal mental pain was deeply ingrained in Greek thought. Already, the late eighth- or early seventh-century, poet Hesiod (2018) states that poetry, in particular, could have psychologically beneficial effects in healing sorrow, if not specific psychological maladies (Theogony, 98–103), while the power of poetry and storytelling to “bewitch” and affect audiences emotionally – and even psychologically – was commonly acknowledged from an early date (Halliwell, 2002, pp. 21, 50–53; cf. Halliwell, 2011, pp. 6–9). One might even argue that we find a form of verbal and musical psychotherapy in Iliad 9.185–9.189, where Achilles sings songs of heroes, accompanied on the lyre, as a way of taming his emotions (Provenza, 2014, p. 307, citing Aelian, Varia Historia, 14.23).

Some fifth- and earlier fourth-century writers seem to hold an intermediate position between older beliefs in the active power of words on mind and body and a more modern approach. While they commonly share a materialist, relatively secular outlook with professional medical writers, they agree that human minds can be affected by more than drugs or diet. Plutarch (1936) (Lives of the Ten Orators, 833 c-d) notes that Antiphon (whether the orator or sophist is unknown) composed a manual for the avoidance of troubles, on the analogy of the treatment of the sick by doctors and advertised in Corinth that he could cure those in trouble by means of speech (Wallace, 1998, pp. 216–217). The fifth-century musicologist Damon of Oa studied the effects of music on behaviour and character, and it is thought that Pericles was influenced by his theories of the social and political utility of music (Wallace, 1998, p. 218). The Pythagoreans also believed in the healing power of music, subdivided into songs, incantations, and charms, apparently referencing older verbal remedies for sicknesses, to cure both mental and bodily ills (Porphyry, 1920, Vita Pythagorae, 30, 33; Iamblichus, 1989, de vita Pythagorea, 114). The sophist Gorgias makes a direct analogy between the effects of drugs on the body and words, arguing in his Encomium of Helen (Gorgias, 2012) that speech (logos) is such a powerful master that Helen cannot be blamed for adultery because, in effect, she was borne away to Troy by force through the sheer power of words: words have tremendous power, both to stimulate emotions (8) and even create bodily changes, such as shuddering and tears (9); moreover, the power of the word is analogous to medicine and the word works like a drug over the body (12–14). Here, words and medicine are explicitly linked, although Gorgias stops short of claiming that words actually have the literal power of drugs: the link is metaphorical only. A comparable analogy is made by Aristotle (1932) (Politics, 1341b32–1342a16), for whom the violent effects of music on the soul resemble those of purging drugs on the body. ² For Plato, also, body and mind or soul are connected and he argues that some verbal elements can affect both: in the Republic (Plato, 2013) (403c-d), we are told that a well-trained mind, formed through the right songs and stories, will have beneficial bodily effects, while in Charmides, a Thracian claims that Greek medicine is too specifically focussed on curing individual parts of the body, advocating instead a more holistic approach which could promote the health of mind necessary for bodily health while including verbal cures:

The physicians of Greece […] neglected the whole … For all that was good and evil, he said, in the body and in man altogether was sprung from the soul, and flowed along from thence as it did from the head into the eyes. Wherefore that part was to be treated first and foremost, if all was to be well with the head and the rest of the body. And the treatment of the soul… is by means of certain charms and these charms are words of the right sort: by the use of such words is temperance engendered in our souls, and as soon as it is engendered and present we may easily secure health to the head and to the rest of the body also. (Plato, 1927, Charmides, 156d–157a)

Tragic psychotherapy?

There is no doubt, then, that while the purely scientific, medical tradition of Euripides’ day rejected any verbal cures for mental disturbance, the power of words (sometimes combined with music) on the mind in various different ways was long acknowledged in popular thought, even by some intellectuals, and older and newer ways of thinking coexist with one another. For example, Phaedra’s Nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus (Euripides, 1995) (477) encourages her to seek a cure for her passion for her stepson through “incantations, and words that charm”. The incantations the Nurse mentions might recall the older, magico-religious strain of thought discussed above, but the “words that charm” are ambiguous between this older strain and a contemporary emphasis on the power of words to persuade.

Even so, it is clearly problematic to elide “the power of words on the mind” with “psychotherapy”, in fifth-century tragedy as Simon (1978) and Devereux (1970) do, because of the central importance of persuasion in Athenian public culture. The Athenians were fascinated by the concept of persuasion and its powers (Buxton, 1982; Mills, 1997, pp. 60–61, 70–71, 80–81, 90–91, 106–107), and according to Pausanias (1.22.3), Persuasion (peitho) had its own religious cult. Persuasion permeated public life because of the importance of the concept of debate among equals in defining the essence of the Athenian democracy (cf., Euripides, 1998, Suppliants, pp. 438–439), and its centrality in Athens is reflected in its pervasive presence in the plots of many Athenian tragedies.

In Euripides’ Heracles, after he has been shown what he has done to his family, Heracles is determined to kill himself. His friend Theseus arrives and, after an extended dialogue between them, in which Theseus attempts to show Heracles all the reasons why he is not morally culpable for his actions, Heracles eventually agrees to live on and come to Athens with him. Simon (1978) argues that Heracles is cured of his suicidal thoughts through the “therapy of philia” (friendship, p. 136), but it seems impossible to make any clear distinction here between an approach resembling that used by modern psychotherapists and the simple process of persuasion, which had so many applications in fifth-century Athens.

But the process by which Cadmus talks Agave out of madness and an ecstatic unreality, in his attempt to enter into Agave’s state of mind and bring her away from delusion and back to a new appreciation of reality, does seem qualitatively different from persuasive speech more generally. There is arguably nothing quite like this scene in extant Greek tragedy. Was it, then, just a unique creation of Euripides’ brilliant originality as a playwright? Perhaps, but the genre of tragedy is more psychologically interactive with its audience in various dimensions than any other Greek literary genre.

In both drama and psychoanalysis, the patient and theatre-goer have to draw on and expand the ability to empathise with other human beings (Simon, 1978, pp. 78–79, 141–144). Both therapy and the theatre offer enhanced awareness of the tragic dimension of human life, and tragedy by its nature presents its audience with other human beings in times of intense crisis: if an audience does not empathize with the character on stage, arguably, the tragedy has failed. Additionally, tragedy offers the possibility of multiple identifications with the various plights of these characters. Griffith (1995, pp. 72–75) even suggests that the plays gave their audiences the opportunity to abandon their personal identities through the events unfolding, such that any spectator can imagine him or herself briefly as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, or others. Aristotle (1995) (Poetics, 1455a29–1455a34), working from the tragedian’s perspective, states that the most convincing effect comes from those who project themselves into the emotional states of their characters, and if this is true for the tragedians themselves, one can assume that if spectators are to get the most out of the play, they, too, must try to experience the emotions of, or identify with, the different characters. ³

The prospect of these kinds of identification was a particular source of anxiety to Plato. From Republic 393c, 395c–396d, it emerges that he believes that any poetry in direct speech (by which he means much of Homeric epic or drama proper, making little distinction between them as both are forms of mimesis; see Republic 605c 607a, with Halliwell, 2002, p. 77) “involves those who experience it – whether as actor, reader, or hearer – in a process of imaginative identification” (Halliwell, 1988, p. 6). Dramatic poetry can cause the mind to “orientate itself to, and position itself ‘inside’, the viewpoint of the speaker” (Halliwell, 2002, p. 53) and therefore such poetry can cause potential harm to performers and audience alike if what they are identifying with is harmful. In Rep. 604e–605a, Plato claims that this sort of poetry dangerously stimulates the non-rational, emotional parts of the soul. Plato is especially concerned about the seductive dangers of these processes of identification for actors in poetic performance who are playing the part of the traditional heroes, whose “special prestige and weight in the ideals and value systems of the culture” may cause their impersonators to experience “an especially powerful pull of psychological-cum-ethical attraction and assimilation. It is not difficult to see how this combination of factors might convert the externals of poetic performance into an act of internalization inside the performer’s mind” (Halliwell, 2002, p. 75, cf. 112). But Republic 605d3–605d4 (cf. Ion, [Plato, 1925, pp. 535c–535e]) claims that audiences no less than actors are vulnerable to such influences (Halliwell, 2002, pp. 77–78). In particular, Plato (Rep. 387c–387d, 388a–388d; cf. 605d) is concerned for the Guardians in his audience, in case they begin to identify too closely with tragic heroes whom they observe and hear, so that they are led to emulate their wailings and other unseemly actions.

But the process of identification, both in tragedy and therapy, requires the assurance of some kind of safe space. It has become commonplace to characterise Greek dramatic poetry as an arena in which the city of Athens could look at itself, as it were, from a safe distance, so as to bring certain tensions endemic to Athenian society into the open to prevent them from festering and harming it (Goldhill, 1990, pp. 115–129; Longo, 1990, pp.18–19; Simon, 1978, p. 140).

Tragedy appears to work best for its audience when there is some sort of gap between the circumstances of the tragedy and of the audience. An audience must care about the characters on stage, but also needs distance to appreciate the play as a play. In fact, the importance of distance for aesthetic appreciation is already understood by the author of the Odyssey, in which stories of the Trojan War are simply too close for some characters to enjoy, even from the mouth of a superlative bard (Peponi, 2012, pp. 33–42). If the gap is too great, the audience will be disengaged; if it is too small, they cannot focus properly on the play, by being caused excessive psychological distress (Halliwell, 1986, pp. 178–179). ⁴ The early poet Phrynichus found this out, to his detriment, after the Athenians imposed a huge fine on him for “reminding them of their own troubles” in portraying a recent historical event – the capture of Miletus – that hit too close to home (Herodotus, 1922, 6.21.2). Thereafter, with the exception of Aeschylus’ Persians, a story dramatising the suffering of Athens’ safely defeated enemies, tragedy avoids contemporary events and instead features the figures of Greek mythology, who were portrayed in many ways as though they were contemporary people. People could consider others’ troubles, which resembled their own experiences to some degree, though not entirely. However, because they were rooted in a bygone world, they could be, as Lee puts it, safely “left hanging on the mythical, other-worldly pegs provided by the play’s structure” (Lee, 1999, p. 82). And while in theory anyone can be a victim of tragic suffering, the sufferings that the characters of tragedy typically undergo are so much more intense than those which the spectators are likely to have experienced that, again, a little distance is interposed between stage action and audience realities. The Greek of tragedy – the language of the audience, yet a highly poetic form of it – also combines distance and closeness, as does the highly stylized nature of tragedy as an art form, enabling a kind of psychological comfort zone for its audience through distance. ⁵ The theatre of Dionysus in Athens held perhaps as many as 17,000 spectators: the sheer physical distance between many of the spectators and the actors would provide a degree of emotional distance between them as well (Scheff, 1979, pp. 137–139). The predominance and power of the gods in tragedy may also provide comfort and reassurance to an audience, in explaining suffering such that the world seems less chaotic and unknowable, even if the gods themselves are not benign. It is also significant that tragedy is so often set in a city other than Athens. The tragedies that do engage with Athenian action typically portray an idealised version of the city, which helps others but remains itself fundamentally outside the tragedy. Thus, Athenian spectators can engage with others’ grief while keeping a sense of their own city’s power and success. Even drama’s patron god connects the psychological and the theatrical. Dionysus is both god of madness and of theatre, and madness is sometimes expressed in theatrical metaphors (Aeschylus, 2009,Choephoroi, 1024–1025; cf., Plato, 1904, Phaedrus, 244e). Temples of the healing god Asclepius are frequently positioned close to theatres in the ancient world, at Athens and also slightly later sites at Epidaurus or Pergamum.

The engagement of the tragedians with issues of human psychology and awareness of its powers on its audience whether for good ⁶ or potentially for ill might explain one striking feature of certain tragedies whose structures are analogous to the action of the Bacchae and Heracles. In Poetics (1450b25ff.), Aristotle states that the most important element in drama is action, and that the best tragedies have a beginning, a middle, and an end, defined as “something that naturally occurs after a preceding event…but need not be followed by anything else”. An obvious example of such an end is the kind of violent action, to which the earlier action of a tragedy often leads up as the tragedy’s climax. But in many tragedies, an apparently clear end of the action often comes several hundred lines before the actual end of the play. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the revelation to which the whole play has been leading is complete at 1185, and its last significant act is Oedipus’ self-blinding, whose results we see at 1296. The play, however, does not end for another 200 lines, which instead comprise lamentation, meditation on what has happened, discussion of its meaning in the context of the play, and hints at Oedipus’ future. In Sophocles’ Ajax, Ajax is dead by l.891, and the remaining 530 lines explore the impact of his death on those around him. The play alters considerably in tone between these two sections, as it moves from the intense emotion of Ajax’s suffering to a more intellectually engaging dispute over his fitness for burial. Through following Teucer’s disputes with the Atreidae, the audience is brought to consider events from a different perspective, no longer through participating in an outpouring of emotion, but through the more dispassionate cut and thrust of argument. The length of the period of time between the climactic act of violence and the actual end of the play has a potentially important psychological function in moving audiences down from the heights of intense emotional participation in the tragedy to the conditions of their everyday lives beyond the theatre. Tragic performances were rounded off with a satyr play, often thematically connected with the tragedies, but completely different in tone: such plays may be another manifestation of tragedians’ care to bring their audiences safely down from intense emotion to ordinary realities, this time through a crude humor.

The tragedian as therapist

So perhaps the process undergone by the traumatized characters in Euripides’ Heracles and Bacchae is a staged version of what is undergone by the audience in those tragedies, which are marked by violence and suffering within their dramatic action. If so, then these scenes should not be classified as ancient psychotherapy, but rather should be cast as analogous to the understanding of their audience’s psychology with which the ancient tragedians worked.

The theatron is a place to look at what is done. Bacchae and Heracles emphasise the importance of consistent and clear-sighted observation in returning Agave and Heracles to their normal states and bringing them to an understanding of their past and current realities. Just as they are both talked back to sanity by being urged to look upon what has happened, so the tragedians handle an audience who have participated as observers in the horror of a particular act by making them observe and hear lamentations and meditations that follow the central tragic act. By hearing and seeing these, they can be brought back from the violence that they have seen and the intensity of the emotion that it may have caused within them. The Chorus’ first response (1297) to the sight of the blinded Oedipus is: “Suffering terrible for men to see,” and repeatedly, the rest of the play emphasises that the chorus (or audience) must look intently upon Oedipus’ plight. At 1524 (whether or not these lines are genuinely Sophoclean), the chorus concludes the play by inviting the audience to “look upon” Oedipus and to consider what he was and what he became. The act of observation is important in coming to terms with violence and suffering, both for the characters in Bacchae and in Heracles and for the audiences watching them. Halliwell emphasizes that tragic suffering is “almost always witnessed and responded to within the dramatic context of tragedy, most often by the chorus. This means that suffering is not just shown in its raw state but already to some extent interpreted in the immediate environment of the events” (Halliwell, 2002, pp. 114–115). By interpreting the horrific events on stage, the chorus and other characters in the tragedy are helped in their coming to terms with them. The process off-stage, among the audience, may be analogous, as their experience of characters’ lamentation, meditation, and interpretation provide an intermediary stage between the horror of the tragic acts that they have witnessed and the reality of their lives, to which they must return after the performance.

Types of tragic ending and their potential psychological effects

The relationship between the central tragic act and the subsequent passages of lamentation – which can seem somewhat static, since it focuses on what has already happened in the play, rather than moving the action on – may be vital for understanding any tragedy’s emotional impact on the audience, and in particular, the relationship between the point at which tragic violence takes place and whatever remains of the tragedy: that is, after the violence has been committed, how much of the tragedy remains to enable the audience to “look at it carefully”. Creon’s punishment in Sophocles’ Antigone is made especially intense because of the speed of the repeated blows that the gods throw at him in a very short compass. At 1257, he comes onto the stage, lamenting the death of his son Haemon, and only some 20 lines later, he learns that his wife has killed herself. Fewer than 100 lines of the play remain for Creon to lament over his son and wife and listen to the account of her death, while the audience observes his lamentation over the bodies of his family. This is simply not enough time for the audience to come back down to earth in the way that the Bacchae and the Heracles allow, and an exceptionally bleak emotional effect results from this particular relationship of violence and lamentation.

By reversing what I suggest is the normal, and psychologically reassuring, tragic structure of violence followed by lamentation or meditation, the ending of Euripides’ Medea proves especially unsettling. From the moment when she realises that her revenge on Jason and his new bride is going to succeed, as her children’s Tutor announces to her that the children have handed the poisoned dress and crown to her rival (1002–1003), so that there can be no going back on her plan, Medea laments their forthcoming death, considers what she must do, and imagines her future without them in a great and moving monologue (1019–1080). Within these lines (especially 1021–1045, 1065–1077) is the tragic lamentation and meditation on which an audience must focus visual and aural attention. But as soon as the messenger appears with the news that the children are dead and that she must immediately escape (1121–1123), there is little continuation of lamentation or meditation. After the messenger’s graphic portrayal of the effects of the poisoned crown and robe on the princess and her father (1134–1230), Medea is quite business-like, treating the infanticide as simply being necessary for her to achieve her aims (1240): she urges herself to forget that these are her children and save her mourning until later. The murder of the children follows: Jason arrives and learns what has happened, and though of course his speech includes lamentation, so much of it – like Medea’s response – is designed to exculpate himself from any responsibility for what has happened (especially 1363–1364) that the scene is not really conducive to the audience’s being able to achieve consolation by being brought back down to earth through a focus on lamentation or a clear-sighted meditation on the events.

Tragic lamentation and meditation in tragedy are closely connected with issues of responsibility: Agave, Heracles, Oedipus and Creon must come to terms with what they are (and are not) responsible for, such that the attempts of Medea and Jason to avoid all responsibility make the ending of this play distinctly unsettling. That Medea, who committed the acts of violence, seems to suffer least from it as she leaves for Athens makes any possiblity of emotional consolation very hard to find for the audience (Simon, 1988, pp. 96–101). While it is notoriously difficult to draw any conclusions about audience reaction to a play from the prize awarded it by the judges, it is intriguing that this play, so admired by moderns, received the last prize in 431 BCE.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the structures of Agave’s awakening in the Bacchae and that of Heracles in the Heracles are analogous to the process undergone by the audience of tragedy in their experience of intense violence followed by “coming down” from that violence. While there is little evidence to suggest that Cadmus’ techniques were part of ancient Athenian medicine, the scene fits into a broader Athenian understanding of the psychological power of words, and in particular the power of tragic performance. A significant part of the emotional impact of a tragedy depends on the relationship between the act of violence and where it comes in the tragedy, whether it offers the audience time to reflect and to find some consolation or, more jarringly, right at the very end so, that they have little time to “look at it carefully”. Although mental health “professionals” in Athens underrated the power of non-medical cures, tragedians, aligning themselves with more traditional understandings of the power of words on the human mind, did understand both the power and the potential dangers of seeing and hearing horrors, and could both provide appropriate “therapy” for their audiences through the structure of their plays and sometimes manipulate that structure to create rather less reassuring results.