Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy

"Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy. Many scholars have treated questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation, and the questions of how these features work and how a mortal agent under the canopy of these principles can be said to decide and act are by no means new. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. He discusses in detail a wide range of tragedies and other Greek texts, paying particular attention to two closely related plays, the Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. In his final chapter Sewell-Rutter uses these perspectives to refine his focus upon the familiar question of what it is for a human character in tragedy to take a decision and to act : are these actions his or her own, and can they properly be laid to the charge of their human originator? All Greek quotations are translated, making this study thoroughly accessible to the non-specialist reader."--Résumé de l'éditeur