THE PALLADION

During the course, we read Mark Griffith’s valuable edition of the Greek text (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, 1999) aiming at a deep and proper understanding of the song itself. We carefully pondered the extremely difficult choices involved in rendering Sophocles’ poetry – verbatim or more freely, literally or orally – in English. In short, we encountered severe philological and hermeneutical questions: the very problems that have always vexed the interpretation of this ode.

Perhaps the hardest problem arose right at the beginning: should we render the “deinos” man simply as “wonderful”, “strange”, or “dangerous”, or should we opt for more neutral English terms like “extraordinary”, “awe-inspiring”, or “terrific”? An extremely difficult choice, determining the interpretation of the whole song!

Beyond such lexical problems, we confronted more complex difficulties arising from grammatical ambiguities, which in some cases also point to alternative interpretations. Thus, at the end of the second strophe, where we read about human domination of the natural world, the Greek verb form (hypagageto, 351, aorist indicative middle voice third singular form of hypagô: “to lead under [the yoke]”), allows for a translation in the present simple: “the clever man [regularly, each day] … leads under the yoke the shaggy-necked horse and the untiring bull of the mountains”. But it is equally possible to read the predicate as referring to the past, describing a bygone stage and a crucial point in the evolution of mankind, when prehistoric man domesticated wild animals like the horse and the bull, and gradually subjugated a substantial part of the animal world. In this way, a grammatical problem leads to a broader interpretative dilemma concerning the song as a whole: should we follow Martin Heidegger in reading it from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, as a description of the unchanging human nature and the human condition, or Werner Jaeger, who sees here a parallel to the classical Greek descriptions of the evolution of the human race?

Another set of intertwined philological and interpretative dilemmas arose when we reached the fourth stanza, which opens with a highly abstract and somewhat vague combination of Greek words that seem to name, in a single stroke, all the uniquely human skills and achievements mentioned earlier: sophon ti to mêchanoen technas: literally, “a clever something, the skillful kind of craft” (365–366). “Though this be madness, there is method in it” – so we managed to puzzle it out. In Dávid’s translation the phrase becomes the “resourceful power of invention”, in Gergely’s “this cunning thing, inventiveness, a craft that is sublime”, while in Éva’s Hungarian version we read about “his technology / successful beyond expectation” (“várakozáson felül / teljesítő technológiája”).

As so often, however, my most frustrating thoughts arose in the form of a typical esprit d’escalier just after the course had ended. While reviewing, correcting and editing the translations above, I stumbled upon a seemingly prosaic philological problem in line 368, in the sentence which seems to offer the chorus’ final verdict on the rise and fall of man.

The sentence consists of two distinct parts. The first defines the conditions under which someone can be considered a good citizen: namely, if he follows the laws. The second defines the opposite case, in which “not right” (mê kalon) conduct, formulated in quite abstract terms, yet also anchored to a very specific point in the dramatic plot, the burial of Polyneices, results from a kind of “daring”, “boldness”, “audacity” or “recklessness” (tolma). This motif of a “brave act” leading to evil consequences seems to connect the generalizing, even proverbial statement of the chorus to the events unfolding on the stage and to Antigone’s courageous deed, or possibly to Creon’s recklessly overreaching conduct (his edict concerning Polyneices’ corpse, which offends both divine and human order).

Now, in this sentence – strangely enough, at least to me – Griffith’s authoritative edition, like most modern texts of the play, prefers an emendation by Johann Jacob Reiske (1716–1774) to the transmitted manuscript text. Accordingly, in class we read here the participle γεραίρων: “honouring”, which allows for a fairly clear-cut interpretation of the first half of the sentence: “while he [man] honors the laws (nomous) of the land and the divine order (dikê) protected by oaths, he [man] is a real gem of his city (hypsipolis)…”. (Compare also the two English translations above.) This statement stands in sharp contrast to the clause which immediately follows: “…but someone in whom, as a result of daring, what is not right is present, he is no true citizen (apolis)” (see all three translations). The contrast between hypsipolis (“peerless citizen”) and apolis (“non-citizen”) is underscored with particular force by both word order and metre.

If we follow this reading, the Ode arrives at an unproblematic verdict: anthrôpos, brave, powerful, self-educated and inventive as he has been – or, in a more conceptual interpretation: as he “is” as such – will be honored by the community if, and only if, he respects human and divine laws; he will fail as soon as he yields to temptation and goes astray. Thus, the song first proclaims the exceptional (awe-inspiring, wonderful, terrific, etc.) traits of man (strophe 1–3), then reveals his moral ambiguity (strophe 4). Skills, knowledge and (political) power can be fruitful if, and only if, their possessor employs them in an appropriate, divinely sanctioned way; but they become harmful, destructive, and even contemptible if he turns away from his gods and his community and goes wrong.

This reading is, in my view, as emended texts so often are, flawless but somewhat flat. Moreover, in this interpretation the song does not add much to the dramatic effect: the elders merely comment on and generalize the events at hand, reflecting them from an external, moralizing point of view.

By contrast, the text preserved in most of the manuscripts – exceptions being only two not especially notable branches of the copyist tradition labelled P and S in Roger Dawe’s Teubner edition – offers an alternative that is equally comprehensible but far more intriguing. The verb παρείρω (παρα- + εἴρω, literally “to thread or weave in / into / to something”) is quite rare, commonly used in oratorical contexts, and its meaning here is somewhat more difficult to determine. The Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek Lexicon many decades ago marked the phrase as unintelligible in this locus: “νόμους παρείρων is corrupt in S. Ant. 368 (lyr.)”. Yet, as so often in classical philology, there are advocates also of the manuscript reading. And in my opinion, this time they are absolutely right.

Lewis Campbell (Sophocles, edited with English Notes and Introductions by L. Campbell, 1879, vol. 1) adds the following note to the Greek words νόμους παρείρων χθονός (p. 491, quoted here without the Greek references):