Greek Tragedy: Rhetoric, Cartography, and the Death of Astyanax

At the climactic moment of Troades Talthybios enters with the corpse of Astyanax, and the Chorus exclaim provocatively that the Greeks hurled him from the towers like “a bitter throw of the discus” (diskêma pikron, 1121). Although English translations typically ignore the reference to the discus, I argue that these words are no dead metaphor but part of an intricate appropriation of athletic discourse by the tragedian.

In Euripides’ Trojan Women, the Greeks hurl the body of Hector and Andromache’s young son Astyanax from the walls of Troy to his death. Critics have noted the great pathos of Hecuba’s ensuing speech over her grandson’s corpse, as she focuses the audience’s attention on his mangled body parts. One particularly striking metaphor she uses to describe the horror of the sight before her stands out: the “extremely bold” (Barlow 1986) image of Astyanax’s blood as it “bursts out laughing” (ἐκγελᾶι 1176) from the broken bones of his shattered skull.

This paper builds on a recent discussion of map-making and early Greek prose narratives, by adding a consideration of some world-mapping narratives in Athenian tragedy. In Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative, Alex Purves observes a distinction in epic narratives between the divine worldview, which can see the whole universe at once, and the human one, which is limited. Thus the bard, about to recite the catalogue of ships, invokes the Muse; he needs the help of divine vision to outline his map of the world (Purves 36).

In terms of rhetoric, Aeschylus is often considered irrelevant. Many manuals of ancient rhetoric would agree that “disappointingly but perhaps rather predictably, the earliest tragedian, Aeschylus, does not add much to our knowledge of rhetoric” (Usher 1999, 16). Aeschylus’ work with persuasion, specifically in the Oresteia, has been very comprehensively discussed (Halliwell 1997; Buxton 1982; Kennedy 1963); moreover, there have even been some studies on specific rhetorical techniques found in Aeschylus (Navarre 1900).