Agamemnon at Aulis: imaginative identification, tragedy, and the margins of ethics1

Sophie-Grace Chappell, The Open University

He saw them all ahead in the edge of the timber watching him and he said,“¡Arre caballo! Go on, horse!” and felt his big horse’s chest surging with thesteepening of the slope and saw the gray neck stretching and the gray earsahead and he reached and patted the wet gray neck, and he looked back at thebridge and saw the bright flash from the heavy, squat, mud-colored tankthere on the road and then he did not hear any whish but only a bangingacrid smelling clang like a boiler being ripped apart and he was under thegray horse and the gray horse was kicking and he was trying to pull out fromunder the weight.He could move all right. He could move toward the right. But his left legstayed perfectly flat under the horse as he moved to the right. It was asthough there was a new joint in it; not the hip joint but another one thatwent sideways like a hinge. Then he knew what it was all right and just thenthe gray horse knee-ed himself up and Robert Jordan’s right leg, that hadkicked the stirrup loose just as it should, slipped clear over the saddleand came down beside him and he felt with his two hands of his thigh bonewhere the left leg lay flat against the ground and his hands both felt thesharp bone and where it pressed against the skin.(Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls (Penguin, 1941), Ch.43, pp.433-4)

Sophie, with an inanity poised on her tongue and choked with fear, was aboutto attempt a reply when the doctor said, ‘You may keep one of yourchildren.’‘Bitte?’ said Sophie. ‘You may keep one of your children,’ he repeated. ‘The other one will haveto go. Which one will you keep?’‘You mean, I have to choose?’ ‘You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege—a choice.’Her thought processes dwindled, crumpled. Then she felt her legs crumple. ‘Ican’t choose! I can’t choose!’ she began to scream... The doctor was awareof unwanted attention. ‘Shut up!’ he ordered. ‘Hurry up now and choose.Choose, goddamn it, or I’ll send both of them over there. Quick!’(William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (London: Corgi, 1983), p.641)

1 For help and comments I am grateful to Carol Atack, Lesley Brown, ElizabethCooke, Gail Fine, Alison Garnham, Terence Irwin, Chris Lord, Katherine O’Rourke,Anthony Price, Jenny Saul, Alan Sommerstein, Jonathan Way, and Graham White;also to other members (whose names I didn’t get) of audiences at Chigwell Schoolin September 2014, and at the Institute of Philosophy in London and the AncientPhilosophy Seminar in Oxford in February 2015.DISCLAIMER: At least some of this essay is classical scholarship. I am not aprofessional classical scholar, let alone a professional Aeschylus specialist. Iam always happy to read more, and to take advice, from those who know more thanme, about what more I should read. But I have not, as yet, read even one-hundredth of what has been written by the specialists on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.Veniam imploro.

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I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the sameweapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed andcooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, dowe not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we notdie? (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1)

I

There are the mistakes that moral philosophy has to make; andthere are the mistakes that moral philosophy doesn’t have to makeat all, but goes right ahead and makes anyway. Some mistakes inmoral philosophy arise necessarily, in virtue of the kind ofenterprise that it is, or at any rate is generally taken to be.Other mistakes are contingent features of moral philosophy as wehappen to do it, which might happily be eliminated, were we simplyto pursue our enterprise differently.

It can feel more comfortable to talk about the contingent mistakesthan the necessary ones, since identifying them has less radicalimplications. It implies the possibility of mere reform, withoutall the clamour, inconvenience, and carpet-cleaning of an actualrevolution. In this paper I can offer only a modicum of non-revolutionary comfort, because the mistake I discuss here is notentirely a contingent mistake; though not entirely a necessary oneeither. Not entirely contingent, because it arises from intrinsictendencies deep in the nature of moral philosophy as it hasusually been practised ever since Socrates. But not entirelynecessary, because some philosophers have seen the problems thatresult from giving way to these tendencies, and have had someideas about how to push back against them. The tendencies exert apressure towards the mistake I have in mind; but we can resist thatpressure. Resistance is what I do here.

II

The mistake that I have in mind is moral philosophy’s neglect, onthe whole, of an extremely simple question that is absolutelycentral to intuitive or commonsense ethics. Namely: “What is itlike to be another person?”

If any question deserves to be called the question of ethics, then

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I think this one is a strong contender. I’d say that in fact nosingle question does deserve that title, and that a lot of moralphilosophy’s most glaring and decisive mistakes have comeprecisely from trying to build ethics around some single question.(The “curse of the definite article” again: Knowing What To Do pp.2ff.) Still, our intuitive ethical thinking undeniably gives acentral and vital role to asking what it is like to be anotherperson, and to doing what we can to answer that question. This isone of the reasons why ethics is (or should be) so closely alliedto the philosophy of mind: philosophy of mind shapes our vision ofwhat it is to be human, and our vision of what it is to be humanis where we begin in ethics. (Of course there is a reflectively-equilibrating move in the other direction as well.)2

One of the main concerns of ethics, as ordinary good people do it,is the activity that we may call imaginative identification:understanding, getting a feel for, learning vicariously andfictively to inhabit not only my own point of view, but otherpeople’s points of view too. “You don’t know what it was like, youweren’t there”, we say, and “It’s easy to say that when you’re notin my shoes”, and “Try and see it from her point of view”, and“You’re right from your side. I’m right from mine”,3 and “How wouldyou like it if I did that to you?”. I would say (though othercommentators have, implicitly, disagreed: see below) that theGolden Rule propounded by Jesus in Matthew 7.12 (and elsewhere byConfucius, Rabbi Hillel, and many other moral teachers) is aboutthe same thing: about imagining what it would be like to besomeone else, and thinking what I would want and not want tohappen to me if I were that other person.

Without imaginative identification, something crucial will be missing fromour ethics. If ethics were just about doing the right things—aboutproducing the right outputs, whether that means actions or statesof affairs, or both, or something other than either—then it wouldstill be arguable that imaginative identification was anindispensable means to the end of producing these outputs. Butethics is at the very least about doing the right things for the rightreasons. Without that there cannot, for instance, be any virtues.

2 I say more about this relation in a paper that partly overlaps this one:Sophie-Grace Chappell, “From metaphysics to ethics via philosophy of mind: threeroutes”, forthcoming in B.Colburn, ed., Methods of Ethics (Proceedings of the AristotelianSociety Virtual Issue).3 Bob Dylan, “One too many mornings”, on The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964, and HardRain, 1976.

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And in a whole galaxy of utterly familiar real-life cases(commiserating with someone, accepting an excuse, placating anangry child, anticipating someone else’s nervousness, getting ajoke, grasping the point of an anecdote or a poem, soothing astressed rabbit4...), doing the right thing for the right reason(s)is impossible—not just instrumentally but constitutivelyimpossible—for anyone who does not go via imaginativeidentification.

Further, we should take seriously a possibility that Iris Murdochhas often written about—the possibility that ethics is not evenabout doing the right things for the right reasons, so much asabout seeing things aright: about vision and imagination.

Is there not also a good constructive imagination which playsan important part in our life? Imagining is doing, it is asort of personal exploring... This activity is, moreover,usually and often inevitably, an activity of evaluation. Weevaluate not only by intentions, decisions, choices… butalso, and largely, by the constant quiet work of attentionand imagination. The image here is not so much that of a bodymoving... but rather of a sort of seeping of colour, or thesetting up of a magnetic field... We are obscure to ourselvesbecause the world we see already contains our values and wemay not be aware of the slow delicate processes ofimagination and will which have put those values there. (IrisMurdoch, “The darkness of practical reason”, Existentialists andMystics 1998: 199-200)

If Murdoch is right here—and I think she is—then one consequenceis that imaginative identification is not just a necessary corollary ofwhat ethics is really about; since for the most part the scope ofethics is other people, imaginative identification is itself whatethics is really about. And then there can no more be a genuinelygood person who does not have at least some proficiency inimaginative identification than there can be a genuinelycomprehending language-user who/which is merely a Chinese room.

4 Any pet-owner knows perfectly well that imaginative identification with non-human animals happens all the time. Plenty of non-pet-owners know it too. Plentyof classic books have been written about this: Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water,Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf, Jane Goodall’s My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees,T.H.White’s The Goshawk, and many others. If philosophers find that thisphenomenon does not fit their theories, I suggest they question their theories,not the phenomenon.

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For just as genuinely comprehending language-use is not just aboutgetting the answers right, but about inhabiting the language thatone uses, so genuine goodness is not just about getting theanswers right (not even for the right reasons), but aboutinhabiting goodness. It is not just about acting in accordancewith the virtues, it is about living them. To recycle a famousline of Aristotle’s: if we are interested in doing ethics, notjust theôrias heneka, but hin’ agathoi ginômetha—not just as intellectualsight-seeing,5 but so as to become good people—then we simplycannot avoid engaging with the phenomenon of imaginativeidentification. We simply have to try to make sense of it.

III

One striking fact about imaginative identification is how goodliterature is at doing it. To illustrate this I refer the readerback, without further commentary, to the three quotations at thehead of this paper.

Another striking fact is how bad moral philosophy, as standardlyand normally practised, is at either doing imaginativeidentification, or even at accommodating the doing of it withinits theoretical structures. Are there contemporary moralphilosophers who are centrally concerned with the question “Whatis it like to be someone else?”? There are, but nowhere nearenough of them. Even implicit, never mind explicit, deployments ofthe notion of imaginative identification remain, on the whole, atthe margins of ethics.

This is not, for instance, what contemporary sentimentalists orempathy theorists such as Michael Slote6 are mainly thinking about.Their main interest is the thesis in moral psychology that moralresponses can be reductively analysed as feelings, and the thesisin metaethics that “true” moral beliefs can be reductivelyanalysed as appropriate moral responses.

Nor is it, in anything more than a superficial sense, what Golden-Rule theorists like Richard Hare and (I suppose) Peter Singer aredoing. When they talk about “(not) doing what you would (not) want5 NE 2.2, 1103b27. If you think this is a bit of a wild translation of theôriasheneka, consult LSJ s.v. theôria.6 Michael Slote, Moral Sentimentalism (OUP 2010); A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind (OUP2014).

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others to do to you”, their focus—unfortunately—is on the wants,not on the people who have the wants.7 They use the Golden Rule notas I have suggested it should be used, as a prompt to imaginativeidentification with other people, but rather as a heuristic thatgenerates an impersonal shopping-list of wants or preferences tobe quantified, and quantified over, in their moral equations. Andperhaps the same comment applies to the Tim Scanlon of What We OweTo Each Other.

Nor is the question “What is it like to be somebody else?” acentral one for Kant or his contemporary followers. Perhaps aninterest in this question might be inferred from Kant’s talk ofmoral agents as “ends in themselves”—but if so, Kant hardly spellsthis out. And Kant is openly contemptuous of the Golden Rule, the“trivial quod tibi non vis fieri” as he calls it (Groundwork, Footnote 68),that Hare and others have made so central to their moral thinking.The Golden Rule, he says there, does not “contain the ground” ofany duty: the fact that you would not like it “if someone did that toyou” is never, or hardly ever, the reason why they should not dothat to you. (If they shouldn’t.)

Nor, again, is this question really what Stephen Darwall isexploring.8 To put it briefly, his admirable body of work on thesecond-person standpoint is concerned with the fact that there areother people who are also standpoints on the world; not, or notprincipally or directly, with what it is like to be some other personwho is also a standpoint on the world.

Is this question central for Thomas Nagel, who famously poses thequestion “What is it like to be a bat?”? Is Nagel, perhaps, atleast equally interested in the question “What is it like to besomeone else?”? I am not sure. Though Nagel makes many of theconceptual connections surrounding this one, it doesn’t seem obviousthat Nagel makes this one. It is not clear, for Nagel, that thepossibility of altruism rests on the possibility of engaging with,almost entering, another person’s mind. To the contrary, the

7 Anthony Price, to whom thanks, cautions that this may be a little unfair toHare. Moral Thinking, after all, has a chapter entitled “Another's Sorrows”; and onp.95 of that book we read: “If we do know what it is like to be the other personin that situation, we shall be (correctly) imagining having those experiencesand preferences, in the sense of knowing or representing to ourselves what itwould be like to have them.” All admitted. Still, I stick to my guns aboutpreference-agglomeration being the main focus of Hare’s and Singer’s theories.8 Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Harvard UP 2009).

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message of The Possibility of Altruism tends to be that our ethicalthinking should move from the (subjective, solipsistic, self-absorbed, self-indulgent?) “personal standpoint” to the(objective, altruistic, bracingly moral?) “impersonal standpoint”at the earliest possible moment: “What is important is that we arenot solipsists, and that the rejection of solipsism involves acapacity to view ourselves and our circumstances impersonally”(p.106). Overall, then, the keynote of The Possibility of Altruism issuspicion of the subjective, not interest in it; with a kind ofKantian underlay to the suspicion.

But one (these days) rather neglected philosopher with ethicalconcerns, who also raised Nagel’s sort of question about what-it’s-like-ness, and in fact raised it some time before Nagel did,certainly does focus on the question what it’s like to be someoneelse. This is Timothy Sprigge (see The Importance of Subjectivity, ed.Leemon McHenry, (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010)). For Sprigge, ethicsbegins precisely in the recognition of other persons as having asubjectivity in the same way as I do. (As Sprigge puts it, beingan idealist: each person is not just a viewpoint on the world, but aworld.) It is only on the basis of this recognition, Spriggeargues, that we come to see the fundamental reason why benevolenceand compassion are the fundamental virtues, and why equalpromotion of the good of all such persons is the fundamental duty.

Another possible exception to the general neglect is HarryGensler; though I am not entirely clear whether, for him, the useof the imagination in ethics has the intrinsic value that I wantto accord it, or is merely an effective heuristic for locatingmoral demands. Either way, Gensler writes this:

The golden rule is best interpreted as saying: "Treat othersonly as you consent to being treated in the same situation."To apply it, you'd imagine yourself on the receiving end ofthe action in the exact place of the other person (whichincludes having the other person's likes and dislikes). Ifyou act in a given way toward another, and yet are unwillingto be treated that way in the same circumstances, then youviolate the rule… To apply the golden rule adequately, weneed knowledge and imagination. We need to know what effectour actions have on the lives of others. And we need to beable to imagine ourselves, vividly and accurately, in theother person's place on the receiving end of the action. With

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knowledge, imagination, and the golden rule, we can progressfar in our moral thinking.(http://www.harryhiker.com/goldrule.htm; see also Gensler’sEthics and the Golden Rule (New York and London: Routledge, 2013))

I don’t mean to single out for berating or belabouring any of theestimable moralists who I suspect of neglecting the question thatI want to focus on. Some of them, especially Sprigge, Nagel, andDarwall—and Kant—I am a big fan of. But there is an interestingissue, which we can raise as a completely general question,ideally non-recriminatory in tone, about why moral philosophy asnormally done has so strikingly failed to reflect the centralityto non-philosophical moral thinking of our question “What is itlike to be somebody else?”. It hasn’t, of course, completely ignoredthat question. But as I said earlier, it has apparently beensubject to a pressure to ignore that question, or at least sidelineit.

I think there are about (skhedon) six reasons why moral philosophyhas not made good sense of imaginative identification. (I don’tmean that anyone has articulated all six of them; since these arereasons for a silence, some of them may never have been clearlyexpressed at all.) Three of these reasons are to do with thenature of imaginative identification itself: I look at them in IV.And three are about the nature of moral philosophy: I discuss themin V.

IV

In itself, the notion of imaginative identification has seemedphilosophically dubious to moral philosophers, especially themajority who are also analytic philosophers, for three reasons inparticular. There is an eliminativist worry about intentionalpsychology; a Wittgensteinian one about the truth-conditions and theverification of claims about “what it’s like for someone else”;and a Leibnizian worry about the logical coherence of the very ideaof adopting someone else’s viewpoint. I take these three problemsin that order, which is also, I take it, their order ofseriousness.

The eliminativist worry about imaginative identification justnotes its deep involvement with intentional psychology. If you aredubious about intentional (or “folk”) psychology, as

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eliminativists are, then you have to be dubious about imaginativeidentification too. For imaginative identification meansidentification with others’ intentional psychology; and thispresupposes that others (and I myself) have intentionalpsychologies for me to identify with. Conversely, you might takeeliminativism’s worries about intentional psychology to be more areason to reject eliminativism than to reject imaginativeidentification. Since this latter is closer to my own attitude toeliminativism, I say no more about it here.

The Wittgensteinian worry is the question of verification, how wecan know what it is like to be someone else—how we can tellaccuracy from inaccuracy about this; and the question of truth-conditions,9 the question what it can mean to say that “with me, it isjust like how it is with you”. This is often said, by theWittgensteinian faithful, to be no more meaningful than sayingit’s five o’clock on the sun. That at any rate is a bit of an owngoal as far as I’m concerned, since I am one of those unregeneratesouls who have never seen any meaningfulness problem whatever inthe claim that it’s five o’clock on the sun. The supposed problemdoes not get off the ground, and not merely because times are notin fact defined by the sun’s position, as Wittgenstein perhapsmeant to suggest when he first propounded this misbegotten example(Philosophical Investigations I, 350). Even if times were so defined,there would still be no obvious problem about saying that, sincethe sun’s position defines that it is five o’clock everywhere elsein our spacetime vicinity, it also defines that it is five o’clockon the sun. It can after all be five o’clock inside the mechanism of agrandfather clock, or on the surface of a quartz crystal; so why not on the suntoo?10

There is a better question in the offing than the supposed problemabout meaningfulness. There is an interesting problem (it looks insome ways more like a Cartesian than a Wittgensteinian problem)about how I know that my attempts to imaginatively identify withyou are successful or unsuccessful. But note: a problem about how,not about that. Saying exactly how A can usually tell that B hasgiven an accurate and perceptive account of how things are for C,9 Verification and truth-conditions are sometimes conceptually linked, e.g. byAyer or Dummett; but not by Wittgenstein. For reminding me of theWittgensteinian worry or worries, I am grateful to David Cockburn.10 And while we’re at it, the metre rule in Paris is definitely one metre long:exactly that, and neither more nor less. If you doubt this, get a ruler and goand measure it.

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and that D has not, may be tricky and complex. But that A canusually know this, and that in general we can usually tell goodanswers to the question “What is it like to be that other person?”from bad answers, seems to me beyond doubt. Thomas Nagel agrees:

There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectlyobjective: one person can know or say of another what thequality of the other’s experience is… [though] the moredifferent from oneself the other experiencer is, the lesssuccess one can expect from this enterprise.11

It’s just a datum of our life as social beings that we can—atleast usually, at least to some extent—mind-read. Other people’sminds are not, in general, opaque to us. As Wittgenstein himselfmight have pointed out, it might even be truer to say thatpublicity is the mark of the mental than privacy.12

For my money, the Leibnizian worry is the most interesting of thethree. One way into the puzzle that drives this third worry is theordinary advisory locution “If I were you”. When I tell you what Iwould do “if I were you”, you may naturally ask how far I expectyou to take the proposed identification; since if I were literally you,then it is just trivial that I would do whatever you do in factdo. The scope of my identification with you, we may say, has to beweaker than that if we are to avoid this sort of triviality.Perhaps it will be as restricted as a game of cards; maybe all Imean to talk about when I use “if I were you” is what card I wouldplay next if I were sitting where you are now sitting, playing thebridge hand that you are now playing. In other cases, however, awider and deeper identification seems possible. I may think aboutwhat I would do, or (wider) how I would feel, if I were AnnaKarenina having just seen Vronsky’s fateful riding accident; or Imight wonder what it feels like to be Darcey Bussell, having justdanced Swan Lake to triumphant applause at Covent Garden. This kindof imagining is (as Adam Morton and others point out) central to11 Nagel, Mortal Questions p.172. Doubts about mind-reading are taken much moreseriously by John Carey, in his breezily sceptical dismissal of the very idea ofimaginative identification: Carey, What Good Are The Arts? Ch.7, pp. 213 ff., andChs.1-2, e.g. p.48: “…the inaccessibility of other people’s consciousness… makesall statements about the emotional effects of artworks suspect.” Carey’sdiscussion seems to presuppose just the false view of the mental as private thatI here resist. 12 Cp. Timothy Chappell, “What have I done?”, in Diametros special issue on intention: online at http://www.diametros.iphils.uj.edu.pl/?l=2&p=anr25&m=25&if=0&ii=40&ik=38.

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our experience of fiction. It is also, I think, central to thepractice of imaginative identification. (More about the linksbetween fiction and imaginative identification below.)

The puzzle is that, at the limit, the imaginative identificationsseem to be complete; and we might be puzzled about how they canhappen at all if they happen completely. Suppose I am not merelyimagining myself, Sophie-Grace Chappell, occupying the space orthe clothes or the name or even the body that Anna or Darcey isactually occupying. I am imagining that I, Sophie, am thatparticular woman. Does that mean: my mind in her body? Notnecessarily even that. Maybe part of what I am imagining is that Ishare Anna’s moody, melancholy psychology, or Darcey’s stoicalability to dance through the pain in her toes. Maybe part of whatI am imagining is even that I share Anna’s or Darcey’sphenomenology. But in that case, just what am I supposing when Isuppose that I am Darcey Bussell? What is added to the picture—which after all is ex hypothesi a picture of Darcey Bussell—by adding meto it? And what is the me that is so added? As Bernard Williamsputs the difficulty in his remarkable and still seriously-undervalued paper “Imagination and the self”:

[S]uppose I conceive it possible that I might have beenNapoleon—and mean by this that there might have been a worldwhich contained a Napoleon exactly the same as the Napoleonthat our world contained, except that he would have been me.What could be the difference be between the actual Napoleonand the imagined one? All I have to take to him in theimagined world is a Cartesian centre of consciousness; andthat, the real Napoleon had already. Leibniz, perhaps, madesomething like this point when he said to one who expressedthe wish that he were King of China, that all he wanted wasthat he should cease to exist and there should be a King ofChina. (Problems of the Self pp.42-3)

Now the fact that the real Napoleon already has a viewpoint on theworld does not imply, as Williams seems to suggest, either thatthere can be as it were “no room in his head” for my viewpoint onthe world. (As well? Instead?) Nor that if my viewpoint on theworld were to get into his head, then it would simply become thesame thing as his viewpoint on the world. What we need for it to bepossible that “there might have been a world which contained aNapoleon exactly the same as the Napoleon that our world

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contained, except that he would have been me” is that my viewpointon the world and Napoleon’s should be two different things; and that, inthe imagined situation, my viewpoint should replace his.

So on this conception, the answer to the question “How completecan imaginative identification be?” is apparently this: in casesof the most complete imaginative identification, when I imaginemyself as Darcey Bussell, what I do is imagine Darcey’s characterand past and location and body and psychology and mood andphenomenology with me, Sophie-Grace, not her, Darcey, as the viewpoint on the worldfrom which all of these are experienced. The limit of my imaginativeidentification is the limit of my viewpoint on the world. It ispossible, on the conception that I am exploring here, for me to goall the way to that limit without my simply becoming Darcey, in theway that Leibniz’s interlocutor, according to him, simply becamethe King of China. It is only when I go beyond that limit, when itis not merely my body or my location or my psychology etc. thatbecomes hers, but my viewpoint on the world too, that I simplymelt into her. So the intuitive conception has a very clear answerto my other question, “What is added to the picture by adding meto it?”. Its answer is, simply, that what is added is my viewpointon the world.

Williams apparently thinks that this intuitive conception of howimaginative identification works is deeply mistaken. He does notsay clearly what exactly he thinks the mistake is. But we canhazard a guess at what he might say. He might deny that Napoleon’sand my viewpoints on the world are, as I put it two paragraphsback, two different things, so that one can replace the other. Hemight deny this not on the grounds that my and Napoleon’sviewpoints are the same thing, but on the grounds that neither is athing at all. The problem with talking about individualconsciousnesses as “viewpoints on the world” is (he could say)that it suggests a false analogy with ordinary, external-worldviewpoints like, say, Chesil Beach, or the top of Magdalen CollegeTower. In that case there is a clear distinction between viewpointand occupant. Different people can go on the Beach or up theTower, and anyone who does will see what there is to be seen fromthat viewpoint, while remaining a separate person from any otherpossible occupant of the viewpoint. What someone brings to theBeach or the Tower, when she brings herself, is her body, hermemories, her abilities, her dispositions, and the rest of it; andthese are the things that make it possible to tell her from anyone

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else. But what can someone bring to Napoleon when she brings herviewpoint, and nothing but her viewpoint, to him? Trying to supposethat that is possibly transferable from me to Napoleon, and that wecan tell the difference between Napoleon’s viewpoint on the worldand my viewpoint on the world when there are no otheraccompaniments at all to these bare viewpoints, seems very closeto incoherence indeed. At this point Leibniz’s retort really doesbecome attractive.

I think this line of thought probably is what Williams has in mindin his rather telescoped discussion in “Imagination and the Self”.I agree with Williams that it puts a serious obstacle in the wayof anyone who thinks it coherent to suppose that imaginativeidentification with someone else can be complete, in the senseI’ve been exploring. The price of that supposition, apparently, isthat we will have to reify viewpoints on the world, treat them asexistents in their own right; and anyone who is not already apaid-up Cartesian is very likely to baulk at this price.

The line of thought is worth tracing out in full for at least tworeasons. First, it is intrinsically interesting. It gives onefairly clear answer, for instance, to the question what it mightmean to believe in a soul. One fairly clear answer; others arepossible. But this conception, on which the soul is the reifiedconsciousness, the viewpoint-on-the-world hypostatised, andnothing else, certainly answers to some uses that people have hadfor the concept of a soul: Descartes himself apparently amongthem.

Secondly, what we discover by tracing it out is that, in fact, thenotion of imaginative identification faces no real threat from theLeibnizian argument whatsoever. The difficulty we have developedis, at most, the point that complete imaginative identification isincoherent, or is an uncomfortably Cartesian notion, or is both.(“At most”: and maybe not even that much. Even if I cannotcoherently imagine that I become Napoleon while retaining my ownviewpoint on the world, I can certainly imagine that I becomeNapoleon.) So the difficulty is a difficulty for the notion ofcomplete imaginative identification. But then the way out of thisdifficulty has been obvious all along. All we need do is notinsist on the word complete. Imaginative identification can just bea matter of my imagining what it would be like to be you in this

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or that partial respect, or during this or that limited time-span,or whatever.

So when I imaginatively identify with you, this is what happens: Iam careful to specify exactly what things are like within myimaginative identification only up to a point. Some details arenecessarily left unspecified; for if we specified all the details ofthe imaginative-identification scenario, then that scenario wouldface awkward questions about how it can fit in to how things actuallyare. We keep the imaginative identification afloat by not pressing toohard on the details, and also by keeping things fluid: by not insistingon sticking with any one particular level of identification, butmoving back and forth between different levels. (One familiarstylistic marker in literature of this kind of moving back andforth is free indirect discourse.) In these respects imaginativeidentification with other people is, I suggest, strikinglyreminiscent of two other things we do with our minds that haveinterested philosophers: counterfactual conditionals, and fiction.In these cases too it is often true that we can only keep thediscourse going at all by deliberately being unspecific aboutcertain background details. (If you want to engage in the fictionthat Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, do not attempt tovisit him; if you want to explore the question “What if GeorgeWashington had lost and the British Government had won?”, do notget stuck on the rather basic objection that Washington didn’t lose.)The connections between the three activities, and between them andthe notions of story-telling—and pretending—that apparentlyunderlie all three, seem likely to me to run deep.

However that may be, the point for now is that neither theeliminativist, nor the Wittgensteinian, nor the Leibnizian worriesshow that the notion of imaginative identification is sohopelessly conceptually flawed that no one can use it without deepconfusion. Indeed, exploring these worries serves on the wholejust to bring out the emptiness of the supposed threat posed bythe worries. So there is no insurmountable philosophical problemabout the very idea of imaginative identification; there may bethings in the notion of imaginative identification that explain whyphilosophers have neglected that notion, but nothing in the notionjustifies this neglect.

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What about the nature of moral philosophy? What features of moralphilosophy might explain its neglect of imaginativeidentification?

V

I think moral philosophy tends to overlook the question ofimaginative identification, the question “What is it like to besomeone else?”, because of three things: its rationalism, itsimpersonality, and its moralism. The first two are features thatethical anti-theorists have often discussed already. The thirdfeature has had less of an airing. So I will focus on it here.

By its rationalism I mean, here, moral philosophy’s (and indeedphilosophy’s) familiar fixation—on the whole—with thepropositional and the cerebral, and its neglect of the affectiveand the experiential and the dispositional. So the question ofimaginative identification is taken (wrongly) to be a questionabout “mere” feelings, and (correctly) to be a question about thenature and quality of experience. It is assumed that the natureand quality of experience cannot be a matter of knowledge, or notat least of knowledge stricto dicto, and hence that there cannot beanything here that is worth trying to fit into our moral theories.

Well, it’s true that understanding the nature and quality ofsomeone else’s experience is, in significant part, not a kind ofunderstanding that is stateable as propositional knowledge. It doesnot follow that there can be no knowledge of it unlesspropositional knowledge is the only kind there is. And I haveargued elsewhere (Knowing What To Do Chapter 11) that it is not. Thereis also (at least) knowledge how, experiential knowledge, andobjectual knowledge. Among the good ways of getting hold of thesekinds of non-propositional knowledge we should certainly countdrama, novels, and other forms of narrative art.

And moral philosophy’s impersonality is its familiar quest for theabsolute conception, its attempt to move as far as it can towardsthe point of view of the universe, the view of reality “as it isanyway”, the view from nowhere. One clear case of this quest forimpersonality we have already seen: namely Thomas Nagel’ssuspicion of subjectivity in The Possibility of Altruism, and his tendency

15

there to coordinate the subjective with a series of familiarKantian oppositions in such a way as to put it on the bad side ofall of them. Note again how narrative art, unlike philosophy,typically does not so much pursue the view from nowhere as a wholevariety of views from a whole variety of somewheres—which itinvites us, vicariously, to enter into.

Finally, moral philosophy’s moralism is its instinctive rush tojudgement: its aversion to taking up any viewpoint on reality thatis, in one way or another, morally compromised. Moral philosophydoes of course engage in narrative thinking from time to time, forexample in the construction of examples or thought-experiments.But there is, pervasively, a tacit assumption that any protagonistof a narrative with whom we are supposed to engage or identify will bean innocent, a good person; and that engagement will be difficultor impossible if s/he is not. Rather as there is (or is supposedto be) a puzzle of imaginative resistance in the philosophy offiction—a puzzle about why it is possible for someone with normalhistorical beliefs to imagine fictionally that Napoleon won atWaterloo, but not possible for someone with normal moral beliefsto imagine fictionally that rape is all right—so there is a markedresistance, in the narratives that moral philosophy occasionallyentertains, to do anything that comes anywhere near identifyingwith bad characters.

Here too there is a marked contrast with narrative art. To saythat narrative art sometimes invites us to imaginatively identifywith bad people, or with morally ambiguous people, or with peoplein bad or morally ambiguous situations—this is if anything tounderstate the case. We might almost wonder what else narrative artdoes but precisely that. And if imaginative identification isindeed identification, if it involves me in making someone else’sperspective my own, albeit temporarily and fictively—then when theperspective is a truly wicked person’s, it is not hard to see whythe moralistic are worried; indeed we might almost be inclined togo moralistic ourselves.

Three Shakespearean examples will bring out this point.

First consider Shylock, as quoted at the head of the paper. As Iquoted him there, I played a little fast and loose: I did notquote the whole speech. This time, here it is:

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SALERIOWhy, I am sure, if he forfeit thou wilt not take his flesh.

What’s that good for?SHYLOCKTo bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it willfeed my revenge. He hath disgraced me and hindered me half amillion, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned mynation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mineenemies—and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jeweyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with thesame weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the samemeans, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as aChristian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickleus, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And ifyou wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in therest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong aChristian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wronga Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute—and itshall go hard but I will better the instruction.

My first, abbreviated, quotation of this speech had pathos to it;our natural response to it was that Shylock is a seriously andpersistently wronged person, a victim of racial/ religiousoppression. There is usually little moral difficulty aboutadopting the viewpoint of the oppressed. That response is notcancelled by the fuller quotation; but it is complicated. Shylock’sobsession with revenge, however understandable in hiscircumstances, has something very ugly about it. Our repugnance(and Salerio’s) at the hatred that he evinces, and the coldmurderous cruelty that he is prepared to enact, brings areservation to the compassion we feel for his social alienation.

More complicatedly still: as well as something morally ugly, thereis something aesthetically grand about the intensity of Shylock’spassion, and the bitter eloquence, and the pathos, with which hevents it. Of course there is, for The Merchant of Venice, like allShakespeare’s plays, is not a sermon; it is an entertainment. AndShylock’s bitterness, as Shakespeare depicts it, is dazzlinglyentertaining. Indeed to call it “entertaining” is to understatethe case: this is great art. Shylock’s words have a magnificenthauteur, the dignity of disdain we might call it. And the fact that

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he has that dignity serves to subvert our repugnance from theugliness of his vengefulness; it makes it possible for us to moveback towards imaginatively identifying with him. And this idea—thatthe morally ugly can be aesthetically grand, and that a mindset’sbeing aesthetically grand is a reason or at least a motivation forus to imaginatively identify with it—is one that moralistic moralphilosophers from Plato on have always found very hard to stomach.

Second example. Consider this lament:

I have lived long enough. My way of life Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,And that which should accompany old age,As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,I must not look to have, but, in their stead,Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breathWhich the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.

Touching? Affecting? Something we naturally empathise, sympathise,and identify with? Why, yes; though of course an under-informedreader might wonder why the speaker is so lonely and accursed. Asmost of my readers will no doubt have spotted already, the answeris: because the speaker is Macbeth (Macbeth 5.3.2), and he isspeaking once he has attained the kingship of Scotland andmurdered everyone who gets in his way. He is cursed and deserted,and rightly cursed and deserted, for being a bloody and oppressivetyrant. And yet this—his last lament before he dies in battle—isalso beautifully touching. Shakespeare’s achievement here, aselsewhere in this extraordinary play, is to make us feel sorry fora monster. He shows us what it is like to be, to have become, a moralmonstrosity; he makes something that is aesthetically beautifuland delightful and fascinating out of something ethicallyrepulsive. Shakespeare’s invitation to his audience to feel whatMacbeth feels, and to get aesthetic pleasure out of contemplatingthe morally despicable state of bitterness and self-pity thatMacbeth is in, is an invitation that most of us find irresistible,and reasonably too; but the moralistic may well find itunsettling.13

13 In the remarkable film Downfall (Niedergang, refs) there are moments where we aremade to feel sorry for Hitler—moments that naturally prompted intense debate inGermany. I am not of course saying that they shouldn’t have. Feeling sorry forHitler is a morally uncomfortable condition. What interests me is that it is apossible response to some art, and an appropriate one too.

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Very similar comments apply to my third Shakespearean example, asleeper who awakes from a terrible nightmare:

Give me another horse: bind up my wounds.Have mercy, Jesu!--Soft! I did but dream.O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? myself? there's none else by: Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.

This is, of course, Richard III who speaks: this is his last lamentbefore he meets his deserved end.14 No one, the moralist will say,should be sympathising with this paragon of wickedness; yet here toowhat Shakespeare does is take us right into the experience of adeeply evil man, and make something out of it that is not onlyhumanly comprehensible and identifiable-with, but also bothartistically and philosophically remarkable. (A whole paper couldbe written on the last line that I have just quoted—it seems to beone of Shakespeare’s existentialist moments; indeed a paper, ortwo, probably has been written on it. But I can’t pursue thathere.)

My charge of moralism against standard-issue moral philosophy isnot that it doesn’t or can’t “do things like these”. Theseexamples that we have been considering are distinctively artistic(and specifically dramatic) achievements. Moral philosophy is notdrama, and does not need to try to be; it would be absurd tosuggest that moral philosophy ought to attempt to mimic suchachievements. But it should be possible for moral philosophy tofind a way or ways of reflecting on such cases, of making ethicalsense of them, and of the imaginative identifications that theyinvolve; and it should be possible for moral philosophy to do thiswithout distorting the cases.

I think these things are indeed possible, and have sometimes evenbeen actual. But my point here is that they are not very common.Of course some philosophers have written about evil (one thinks atonce of Mary Midgley, Jonathan Glover, and Hannah Arendt). Still,14 Richard III 5.3.176-182. The speech, as written by the Shakespeare of about1592, goes on for another 24 lines. An older Shakespeare, I suspect, would havedeleted most of those lines, which (in my view) are too close to “telling” asopposed to “showing”, and would have contented himself with little more than themarvellous compactness of the dense and mysterious lines that I quote here.

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most moral philosophy makes no attempt at all to get “under theskin” of atrocities, or of monsters like Macbeth and Richard III—to parallel, in its own way, what Shakespeare does with them. Mostmoral philosophers, I suspect, would be deeply worried by the veryidea of attempting to imaginatively identify with people asclearly and profoundly wicked as Macbeth or Richard. They havelittle to say except that these characters are wicked, or evil,which often looks like little more than a way of keeping them atarm’s length. And when moral philosophers do approach atrocitiesand monsters, the results are often distorted by, at least, thethree factors about moral philosophy that I have mentioned above—rationalism, impersonality, moralism. These factors and othershave limited the range of imaginative identifications that areavailable to moral philosophy, particularly as compared withnarrative art; indeed they have made it very difficult to seeimaginative identification as a central part of moral philosophyat all. The result has been to make moral philosophy shallower,less humane, and less interesting.

VI

Rationalism, impersonality, and moralism are very old factors inmoral philosophy; pretty well as old as moral philosophy itself,if you assume, as seems reasonable, that moral philosophy beganwith Socrates son of Sophroniscus. All of them are visibly in playin Plato’s famous discussion of art in Republic II-III. The dramaticor epic narrative art that Plato’s character Socrates discussesthere is, strikingly, drawn almost entirely from just two sources:one of them is Homer, and the other is Aeschylus. With bothauthors Socrates is vigilant against the danger that he mightcontaminate himself and his hearers with exactly that unwholesomeenthusiasm for, and fascination with, bad people and their baddeeds that might very well be contracted by an avid reader ofRichard III or Macbeth, such as myself. Plato’s Socrates studiouslyrestricts himself to talking about the effects on the soul ofvarious snippets of drama and epic that he alludes to, withoutever allowing his allusions to develop any dramatic momentum oftheir own, or turn into an Ion-like rhapsodic performance that (asit were) parasitically colonises space within his own larger work.(For contrast, notice how this is exactly what happens when thePlayer King in Hamlet is put to reciting from an imaginary Hecuba,which, very clearly, is meant to be a play that the young

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Shakespeare himself might have written: Hamlet 2.2.)

The assumptions underlying Plato’s discussion are explicitly andavowedly rationalistic, impersonalising, and moralistic.Aristotle’s discussions of dramatic art are, as we might expect,less vitiated by such assumptions. In particular his maindiscussion, in the Poetics, while not quite describable as a victoryfor common sense and realism, certainly represents some veryimportant kinds of escape from Socratic and Platonic moralism. Insharp contrast to the decidedly Soviet austerity of Republic II-III,where nothing is allowed but the depiction of stern virtue(insofar as any depiction is allowed at all), Aristotle saysexplicitly (Poetics 1452b35-1453a27) that the protagonist of theideal tragedy is not—heaven forbid—a villain; but not especiallyvirtuous either. He is ὁ μήτε ἀ ρετ ῇ διαφέρων  κα ὶ   δικαιοσύν ῃ μήτε  δι ὰ  κακίαν  κα ὶ  μοχθηρίαν μεταβάλλων ε ἰ ς τ ὴ ν  δυστυχίανἀ λλ ὰ  δι ̓  ἁ μαρτίαν  τινά, τ ῶ ν  ἐ ν  μεγάλ ῃ  δόξ ῃ  ὄ ντων κα ὶ ε ὐ τυχί ᾳ : “someone who is not specially distinguished for virtue orjustice, and who does not fall into misfortune through wickednessand vice, but because of some mistake he makes; and he should beone of those who live in great honour and good fortune” (1453a10-12). This is patently an improvement on the stern-virtue view ofnarrative art; it is at least a denial that the most important andworthwhile art must always be concerned, as extreme moralism fromPlato to the Taliban has constantly insisted, only with heroicvirtue.

However, Aristotle’s analysis of Attic tragedy is, and isobviously, wildly over-schematic, and over-schematic in a way thatmatters for my purposes here. Aristotle’s analysis is alsoobviously inadequate to anything more than a small selection ofthe matter that it is supposed to apply to. It is strange that thephilosopher whose approach to drama can often seem unnervinglyreminiscent of his approach to shellfish (“Find as many differentkinds of specimen as you can, and then look for somegeneralisations that cover them all”) should also be thephilosopher who at times seems to think that the only business oftragedy is always and everywhere to aspire to the condition ofOedipus Rex. And why Aristotle thinks that the natural place tostart is with the decidedly Sellars-and-Yeatman15 premiss that the15 W.C.Sellar and R.J.Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, comprising allthe parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates. London:Methuen. Published in 1930, and still one of the funniest books in the Englishlanguage.

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possibilities to consider are that tragedy might be about eitherGood Men or Bad Men, who either move from Good Things to BadThings or from Bad Things to Good Things—and that eliminatingthree of these permutations and passing over the fourth in silenceentitles him to move straight to his own view, that tragedy isabout Morally Middling Men (who, we may add, have to bearistocrats16) moving from Good Things to Bad Things—heaven onlyknows. How does Antigone fit into this scheme? Is she a MorallyMiddling Man? How does Aeschylus’ Eumenides fit into it, orSophocles’ Philoctetes? If we pretend for a moment that we acceptAristotle’s way of talking, then why, on that way of talking,aren’t these both plays where a Good Man moves from Bad Things toGood Things, and so plain counter-examples to his theory? Thereare even Greek plays which were surely known to Aristotle wherethe protagonist not only fails to meet with disaster but is not,heaven help us, an aristocrat at all, at least not ostensibly:Euripides’ Ion stars a temple slave (as he is when the play starts)for whom pretty much everything turns out well.

It is hard not to hear something schematic and moralistic, too, inAristotle’s famous proposal that the protagonist succumbs to theplay’s “reversal” μήτε δι ὰ  κακίαν  κα ὶ  μοχθηρίαν μεταβάλλων  ε ἰ ς τ ὴ ν  δυστυχίαν  ἀ λλ ὰ   δι ̓  ἁ μαρτίαν  τινά (“he does not fall intomisfortune through wickedness and vice, but because of somemistake he makes”). Despite the New-Testament sense of the wordἁμαρτία this is not, of course, a theory of tragedy as caused bysin. (There can be no such thing as a tragedy caused (simply andsolely) by sin (as such), as is amply clear from the failure ofParadise Lost to count as a tragedy. The reasons why not areinteresting; but that’s another paper.) What it is, is a theory oftragedy where the disaster is caused by the protagonist’s FatalFlaw. (Equally familiarly: the Fatal Flaw is very often hubris,pride that oversteps.) And I say this is moralistic, because itmoves us back towards the idea that the protagonist, in order tobe someone with whom we can imaginatively identify, must be—really—morally good: must be a good person, if only he, or she, did not havethat one crucial weakness.

The trouble here too is that nearly all actual drama simply does16 We should bear this requirement in mind when assessing Aristotle’s remark thattragedy is about those who are better than us, comedy about those who are worse.This I think is not evidence of moralism. What Aristotle means, I take it, isthat tragedy is about our betters, in the old-fashioned sense; the comparisonsbeing made here are social, not moral.

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not fit Aristotle’s pattern. And it is not just notoriouslyformally-wayward dramas like Shakespeare’s plays that fail to fitAristotle’s pattern; most classic Attic drama does not fit iteither. Maybe not even Aristotle’s own pet example, Oedipus Tyrannus,fits it, not at any rate if we translate ἁμαρτία as “fatal flaw”.It is not a character-flaw that brings Oedipus down; and there issomething wrong about calling it a mistake, too. The closest conceptto Aristotle’s ἁμαρτία that is actually there in Aeschylus andSophocles is the Homeric concept of ἄτη, “ruinous delusion”. Butthese are two utterly different concepts, the difference lyingabove all in their theological presuppositions: ἄτη cannot existat all unless there are gods like the pagan Greeks’, whereasἁμαρτία presupposes no particular theology whatever. In tone and incontent ἄτη is as far from ἁμαρτία as mortal sin is from inappropriatebehaviour.

This lack of fit is worth describing as a trouble, because, ofcourse, of Aristotle’s enormous influence. In my own case, Iremember hearing at school how a proper tragedy was supposed to beabout a hero destroyed by his Fatal Flaw, and seeing how thatmight (might) fit the case of Othello or Mark Anthony, butscratching my head over the question what Macbeth’s Fatal Flaw wassupposed to be, or how I was meant to see him as even beginning asa morally middling man when, fairly patently, Shakespeare makeshim a corrupt figure from the very start—albeit at first a secretlycorrupt one, the real state of whose soul is only evident to thoseof dangerously special, perhaps feminine, perceptiveness, such asthe witches and his wife.

Another schematic thing that I was also told at school is thefamiliar doctrine that tragedy is all about value-conflict. Thisidea is not, so far as I can see, in the Poetics. It does seem,inchoately, to be part of what troubles Plato about his society’stheology and drama in the Republic and Euthyphro. But I suspect thatit was really neither Plato nor Aristotle but Hegel who made thevalue-conflict view of tragedy canonical, when he took up Plato’sapproach—or rather took it up into his own approach—in his famousreading of Sophocles’ Antigone.17

Is tragedy, or drama, all about value-conflict? The doctrine looksvulnerable to a false-or-trivial dilemma. Dramas involve action—in

17 I have written about Hegel on the Antigone in “Socrates and Antigone: two waysnot to be martyred”, online at academia.edu/sophiegrace.

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classical Greek this is an analytic truth—and dramaticallyinteresting action needs to have something more to it than theKim-Il-Sung-esque “The enlightened utilitarian conceived his planto promote utility, and then enacted it”. (It is not the least ofall possible objections to utilitarianism that it is so boring.) Butif a drama could be made even of that bland and banal scenario,the drama would be all about the resistances that the enlightenedutilitarian encountered. A good drama, like any good story, has abeginning, a muddle, and an end;18 it opposes protagonists andantagonists. And muddles and dramatic oppositions, by definition,involve forces that pull against each other. In this sense it isjust trivial that drama involves value-conflict. In any strongersense—for example the sense that Hegel had in mind, where Antigoneand Creon, for instance, are mere tokens in a game of Aufhebung,bearing the labels Family Values and Civic Values respectively—thenotion is surely false. Antigone certainly has values; but she isherself, not a value. And in any case Antigone understandssomething of both family and civic values, whereas Creon, for allhis bluster, understands neither.

VII

One famous instance of how profoundly Aristotle’s formulaicaccount has influenced our thinking about tragedy, is a case wherehis influence has been more explicitly moralistic; or rather,perhaps, where his moralistic influence has combined with othermoralistic influences such as Hegel’s, in a way that I think hasseriously misled even gifted modern commentators who are generallyspeaking as far away from moralism as it is possible to be. Thisis the story of Agamemnon at Aulis. In the last two sections ofthis paper I shall consider the story, and some philosophicalengagements (or refusals to engage) with it: first Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle, in this section; then Bernard Williams,Eduard Fraenkel, and Martha Nussbaum, in section VIII. Apart fromany other reason for being interested in the case of Agamemnon atAulis, I think Aeschylus’ masterly treatment of this story servesto remind us just how long imaginative identification has beencentral to narrative art; and just how good narrative art can beat it.

In barest outline, the story is that Agamemnon and the Greek army

18 A doctrine that can be found in the Poetics, if we conjoin 1450b3 and 1455b11.24

are in their transport ships at Aulis, between the island ofEuboea and the Boeotian mainland of Greece, awaiting a favourablewind to set sail to Troy and begin their war of vengeance againstParis, Priam, and their people for the abduction of Helen. But thegoddess Artemis is angry, and sends adverse winds (antipnoous,Ag.148): and the priest Calchas announces that only a humansacrifice will end her anger, change the winds, and make thearmy’s departure possible. King Agamemnon, with his brotherMenelaus one of the two leaders of the Greek army, must sacrificehis daughter Iphigeneia, who has already been brought to Aulis fora possible marriage to Achilles. He hesitates; but then he killsher. (For something better than barest outline, see the Appendixto this paper, which gives a parallel text of Agamemnon lines 104-253, in the Greek and in my English translation. My Englishversion of the whole play, and indeed of the rest of the Oresteia,is online at https://open.academia.edu/Sophiegrace .)

What Plato made of this story of Aeschylus’, we do not strictlyspeaking know. Despite his extensive reference to Aeschylus inRepublic II-III, as noted above, he never explicitly mentions thecase of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. (In the whole of the Republic in fact,and so far as I know elsewhere in his works, Plato barely refersat all to any of the various Agamemnons in the Greek literarycanon, though he does mention Palamedes’ comic Agamemnon at Republic522d, and (presumably)19 Homer’s at 620b.) But it is not hard toguess what Plato might have thought of Aeschylus’ tale—if we leaveaside Plato’s obvious emotional undertow of ambivalence aboutdrama, an undertow that surfaces most clearly in the apparentlytemporary recantation of the Phaedrus.20 At least in the severe moodof his mature philosophy, Plato, like Socrates before him, musthave seen the tale as a blasphemous, obscene farrago of voodoo andbutchery. So we may surmise; though in truth we have no solidevidence, because Plato, as I noted above, has little or nothing tosay about such stories. Evidently for him and for Socrates, thebest philosophical response to them is to pass over them in (whatI take to be a disdainful) silence. The nearest either of themgets to a direct response to such tragic material is, as Nussbaumpoints out (Fragility p.25), the Euthyphro.

What Aristotle made of Agamemnon at Aulis is something about which19 Paul Shorey, Loeb Republic volume 2 p.515, footnote c, thinks that the eagleinto which the afterlife Agamemnon is transformed at 620b alludes to Agamemnon114 ff. As often with Shorey, the conjecture seems less than compelling.20 On which see Nussbaum’s fine paper in Fragility.

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we have no direct evidence either. But we do have one small wispof indirect evidence, namely NE 3.1, 1110a26:21

ἔνια δ᾽ ἴσως οὐκ ἔστιν ἀναγκασθῆναι, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον ἀποθανετέονπαθόντι τὰ δεινότατα: καὶ γὰρ τὸν Εὐριπίδου Ἀλκμαίωνα γελοῖαφαίνεται τὰ ἀναγκάσαντα μητροκτονῆσαι.

But some acts, perhaps, we cannot be forced to do, and oughtrather to prefer to them death accompanied by the worstpossible sufferings; thus, for instance, the things that“forced” Euripides’ Alcmaeon to kill his mother seemridiculous.

We no longer have the play of Euripides’ to which Aristotle refershere; moreover Euripides wrote a number of plays called Alcmaeon,one of them, it seems, deliberately comic. But in the best-knownversion of the myth in question, what “forces” Alcmaeon to killhis mother Eriphyle is the threats of his dead father. Eriphyletricks her husband Amphiaraus into going into a battle in whichshe knows he will be killed; Amphiaraus then appears to Alcmaeonin a dream and tells him to avenge his death by killing Eriphyle.What Amphiaraus threatens Alcmaeon with is this: he tells him thatthe cost of not killing her is that horrible torments will bevisited on Alcmaeon for his impiety in not avenging his father. SoAlcmaeon does kill her—and the cost of doing so turns out to bethat he is pursued by the Erinyes for his impiety in killing hismother. More than one element in this narrative ought to soundpretty familiar to anyone who knows Aeschylus’ Choêphoroi.

The inference seems clear. Aristotle would think (or possiblyAristotle thinks: maybe this is what he was getting at, when he issuesthis obiter dictum on Alcmaeon) that the threats that drive Orestesinto avenging his father are equally γελοῖα. (Even if Aristotle’sevident reverence for Aeschylus makes him less willing to use theword “ridiculous” of him than of his bugbear Euripides.)

Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, then, all exemplify one obviousway for moralism to respond to Agamemnon at Aulis. This is simplyto refuse to go along with the whole story, to reject the wholething as horrible, irreligious, and bizarre. Alternatively,21 There is also Aristotle’s remark, Poetics 1461a15-16, that the question whethersomething done in a drama was done “kalws e me kalws” depends, inter alia, onwhether it was done to avert a greater evil or achieve a greater good. Banalmoralism is not, unfortunately, altogether outside Aristotle’s rhetorical range.

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moralistic readers can try to sanitise the story, to make it safefor moralism. And this, I will now argue, is what—perhapssurprisingly, and perhaps not entirely consciously—all three ofFraenkel, Williams, and Nussbaum do.

VIII

Bernard Williams discusses Agamemnon at Aulis twice in hispublished works: in “Ethical consistency” (in his collection MoralLuck, Cambridge UP 1973), and in his 1993 book Shame and Necessity,pp132-135. At the point in “Ethical consistency” where Williamscomes out with the example of Agamemnon, his concern is toillustrate his claim that the demands of ethical reality—incontrast with those of, say, scientific reality—can pull usirreconcilably in different directions at once. That is whatWilliams means by “tragic cases”. He writes as follows:

One peculiarity of tragic cases is that the notion of ‘actingfor the best’ may very well lose its content. Agamemnon at Aulismay have said “may it be well” [εὖ γὰρ εἴη, Agamemnon 217] buthe is neither convinced nor convincing. The agonies that a manwill experience after acting in full consciousness of such asituation are not to be traced to a persistent doubt that he maynot have chosen the better thing but, for instance, to a clearconviction that he has not done the better thing because therewas no better thing to be done. It may on the other hand even bethe case that by some not utterly irrational criteria of ‘thebetter thing’, he is convinced that he did do the better thing:rational men no doubt pointed out to Agamemnon hisresponsibilities as a commander, the many people involved, theconsiderations of honour and so forth. If he accepted all thisand acted accordingly: it would seem a glib moralist who said,as some sort of criticism, that he must be irrational to lieawake at night having killed his daughter. And he lies awake,not because of a doubt, but because of a certainty. Some may saythat the mythology of Agamemnon and his choice are nothing tous, because we do not move in a world in which irrational godsorder men to kill their own children. But there is no need ofirrational gods to give rise to tragic situations. (BernardWilliams, Problems of the Self (CUP 1973) p.173)

The claim that Williams wants to make is that there can be “tragic

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situations” in which either “there is no better thing to be done”—all the available options are appalling. Or else there is a betterthing than all the other options, but that better thing is a worseone too: better though it is, in some salient way it is alsoparticularly appalling. Given that this is Williams’ claim, hischoice of Agamemnon as an illustration of it has struck me as aweird choice from the moment I first read it as an undergraduate.A real tragic case, a real dilemmatic choice between two demandsthat pull an agent apart, has to be a choice between two realdemands; if one of the demands is just not really there at all,then the whole dilemma collapses. But from a modern point of view(come to that: from a Platonic or Aristotelian point of view), onetempting thing to say about Agamemnon is that his choice isstructured by two demands neither of which is real. If Agamemnonimagines—a modern might say—that he is under any kind ofobligation to sail off to Troy, kill or rape and enslave theTrojans, and burn their city to the ground, then he is just wrong.So one of the pressures that sets up his supposed dilemma simplydisappears. But again—the modern might add—if Agamemnon imaginesthat, in order to fulfil that obligation, he is under the furtherobligation that Calchas announces to him, to kill Iphigeneia inorder to appease Artemis, then again he is just wrong. So theregoes the other pressure too. It is tempting to conclude thatWilliams’ example is indeed just weird, and weirdly unconvincing,because it is a “moral” conflict structured by two demands both ofwhich we might reasonably consider entirely illusory. Though evenif they are not illusory, neither of these demands is obviouslyrecognisable as a moral demand at all.

Of this objection Williams is uncomfortably aware, as comes out atthe close of his brief discussion of Agamemnon at Aulis. “There isno need of irrational gods to give rise to tragic situations,” hesays. But the natural retort to that is: “So why make your primeexample of a tragic situation one that does involve irrationalgods?”22

At any rate at the level of biography, there seems to be a fairlyclear answer to this question. As an undergraduate at Balliol,Williams was a pupil of Eduard Fraenkel, the great Aeschylusscholar from Corpus. Here then is Fraenkel on Agamemnon at Aulis,22 Why not talk instead about, for instance, Sophie’s choice? That particularcase was not available when Williams wrote “Ethical consistency”, as Styron’sbook was not published till 1979. But plenty of cases like it were. Or Williamscould have contrived his own, as he did with “Jim and the Indians”.

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in his magisterial two-volume edition Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Oxford:Clarendon, 1950, volume 1, pp.98-99):

In the narrative of the chorus the climax is reached with themonologue of Agamemnon (206 ff.) and the comments attached toit (218 ff.). The king is faced with the alternative of twodeadly evils. Whichever course he takes is bound to lead himto unbearable hamartia. After a violent struggle he resolves tosacrifice his daughter, fully aware that what he is doing isan unpardonable sin and will have to be atoned for. His fatalstep puts him under the yoke of compulsion; there can be noway back; on and on he must go, and the end, he knows as wellas the Elders, will be utter ruin. Aeschylus, by usingunmistakable language (220-221 and ff., τόθεν τὸ παντότολμον φρονεῖν μετέγνω…) makes it clear that all theevil that is to befall Agamemnon has its first origin in hisown voluntary decision… [this is a] tragic conflict…[Aeschylus wanted] a moral dilemma… to be the fountain-head ofAgamemnon’s fate.

And again on p.121, Fraenkel adds:

It is in merciless terms that Agamemnon describes, andimplicitly condemns, what he is going to do. And yet he cannotavoid doing it.

Just as Williams (1929-2003) was a pupil of Fraenkel (1888-1970),so Fraenkel was a pupil of Franz Bücheler (1837-1908) andBücheler in turn a pupil of Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876). We canalmost establish an academic lineage back to Hegel himself (1770-1831); but not quite, since so far as I know,23 there was never aformal pupil-teacher connection between Ritschl and Hegel. (Thoughentertainingly enough, there is a connection with FriedrichNietzsche (1844-1900), who was also a pupil of Ritschl’s. SoWilliams turns out to be to be Nietzsche’s great-grand-nephewacademically speaking, and perhaps in other ways too.)

But of course there is no need to find a direct connection withHegel in order to be able to say what I think is plainly trueanyway: as Fraenkel imagines him Agamemnon is already a Hegelianhero, caught through no fault of his own between two

23 Not that I’ve looked very hard (nor intend to). This information is all fromWikipedia.

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irreconcilable ethical imperatives. So he equally is as Williamsimagines him. And both with Williams and with Fraenkel, “imagines”is the right word. Fraenkel pictures an Agamemnon facing a“violent struggle”, a choice between “deadly evils” for either ofwhich there will be a terrible price; Williams pictures a man inagonies who lies awake at night because of what he chose, andthought, rightly or wrongly, that he had no choice but to choose.

So my objection to Fraenkel’s and Williams’ readings of Agamemnonat Aulis cannot be that they eschew imaginative identification—asan Aristotle or Plato or Socrates might, reacting to Aeschylus’story by simply refusing, or finding themselves unable, to engagewith it at all for moral reasons. To the contrary, both Fraenkeland Williams give us, albeit en passant, rich and interestingimaginative descriptions of how they see Agamemnon’s plight aslooking from Agamemnon’s own perspective. My objection is ratherthat their imaginative identifications presuppose a misreading ofAeschylus. And theirs is a moralistic misreading, which quietlytakes it first that the point about Agamemnon is that he is thesubject of a moral dilemma in something like the schematic sensethat Hegel meant, and secondly that, as subject of a Hegeliandilemma, Agamemnon must in some sense be an innocent. He may befaced with no blame-free alternatives; but he is not to blame thatthat is his predicament. However he chooses at Aulis he will be atfault, because he is caught; yet it is not his fault that he is thuscaught. At this second-order level, Agamemnon is an innocent. Sowe are still at liberty to see him through the lens of the otherschematism, Aristotle’s, and to think of Agamemnon, though perhapsas no saint, still as essentially a good man, a suitable hero fora great tragedy. (And so, indeed, Fraenkel explicitly accordsAgamemnon the crucial Aristotelian honorific—he calls him amegalopsychos: Fraenkel 1950, II: 119, ad 202 ff.)

But, as I say, Williams and his teacher Fraenkel make thesemoralistic assumptions quietly. For a clear and precise diagnosis anddiscussion of the assumptions, it will help if there is someonewho turns up the volume a bit: someone who gives them a moreexplicit defence. And there is, namely Martha Nussbaum (Fragilitypp.33-35):

No personal guilt of Agamemnon’s has led him into this tragicpredicament. The expedition was commanded by Zeus (Ag.55-62)to avenge the violation of a crime against hospitality…

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Agamemnon is fighting in a just cause, and a cause that hecould not desert without the most serious impiety… Agamemnon’sdilemma comes upon him as he is piously executing Zeus’scommand… If Agamemnon does not fulfil Artemis’s condition,everyone, including Iphigeneia, will die. He will also beabandoning the expedition and, therefore, violating thecommand of Zeus… Both courses involve him in guilt... [up tothis point Agamemnon, like Abraham, is] a good and… innocentman.

Small touches on the tiller can add up to send the ship ofexegesis way off-course. There seems little or nothing wrong withNussbaum’s saying, for instance, that Agamemnon is not personallyto blame for the tragic predicament he finds himself in. Yetcumulatively, the moves she makes here are enough to get her tothe conclusion that Agamemnon at Aulis can seriously be comparedwith Abraham at Mount Moriah. I suppose this conclusion nicelybrings us back, via a Kierkegaardian byway, to Hegel. Yet theconclusion, I submit, is wildly wrong. How did we get so swiftly ontothese rocks?

Part of the problem is that Nussbaum, like Fraenkel and Williams,seems intent (whether consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know)on seeing Agamemnon as in a Hegelian dilemma. This leads her likethem to overstress the Agamemnon-is-innocent claim. In a sense, Isuppose, that claim is technically correct: we are given no reasonby Aeschylus to think that it is Agamemnon’s fault that he facesthe choice he does face at Aulis, and it is true, as Williamspoints out at Shame and Necessity p.132 (here too following Fraenkel),that Aeschylus suppresses accounts of a precursor-offence onAgamemnon’s part that he could have used. Be that as it may,Agamemnon’s innocence is very far from being what Aeschylusemphasises. In Aeschylus’ own text no one ever insists onAgamemnon’s innocence except Agamemnon himself. And anyone inAeschylus’s audience would have been aware of the picture ofAgamemnon that derives from Homer and others, as a brutal,overbearing, bullying warlord. Moreover, what we have in theAgamemnon up to the point of Agamemnon’s crucial deliberating (andself-exculpating) speech, 206-217, is a picture of Agamemnon andMenelaus not as innocents, but as twin and inseparable forces ofnature: dogs of war, pitiless eagles, bent irrevocably andremorselessly on a war of vengeance. (See e.g. 108 ff., 122 ff.)And what we have in the rest of the Agamemnon is not in any way

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about Agamemnon as an innocent. It is about Agamemnon as a warlord,an agent of terrible destruction—and it is about Agamemnon as soblinded by his own ἄτη that he cannot see what the Watchman,Calchas, Cassandra—and Clytaemestra—can all see: his coming doom.

For Agamemnon’s ἄτη see e.g. the Watchman at 34-39:

And may it be my master, when he comes,will clasp this hand with his love-hallowed hand.There's more, but I won’t say it. The saying goes:“My tongue's become where the trampling oxen stand.”You could ask the house. If this house had a mouth,this house would speak. I mean my words just so.They’re dark to those in the dark: not to those in the know.

Or Calchas at 146-156:

“And I invoke the healer, Paian, to persuade herto raise no lingering anti-windsthat pin the fleet in port,to demand no second sacrifice,lawless, not to feast on, 150cogenerate with blood-feud sets man and wife at ill.

For a god-wrath is lurking there,fearful, resilient,a homemaker whose smile's a trapa child-avenging mind.”So did Calchas prophesy,amid the usual blessings,fateful words upon the march,to the kings; and still…

Or Clytaemestra in the justly famous speech of 958 ff:

There is the sea. What sun could burn it up?From cold dark depths I'll fetch your bright red stain;your life-warm dye will drench your kingly robes…

For Agamemnon as warlord and agent of destruction—and also, by the end of thispassage, as doomed to destruction—see e.g. 420 ff.:

Hidden sorrow reveals itself in dreaming, antistrophe 2 420delusion appears as delight in the emptied heart:delusion, since at first light his wife's seemingskips from his sleep-sight, unreachably apart. And the empty ache at each army-family's hearthis hidden too, behind eyes dried fresh from streaming 430for the dear-faced husbands whom this war returns as faceless ash in funerary urns.

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A refiner’s fire is Ares’; and he makes, strophe 3from the counterpoise of spears in his furnace Troy,a weeping soot that floats in heavy flakes 440which, shipped in parcels home, cremates all joy.Love rocks in anguish over it, commemoratesthe fall-, the glory-sign of each dead boy.Love breathes a question hidden from the State: 450“He died to get Menelaus back his toy?”Not even the sign of an urn returns to some:their conqueror rots enclosed in the land he won.

The people's murmur's heavy with their blame; antistrophe 3what Menelaus has cost them is their curse. I sense a black night comes. For all these slain

460sum to a fate-debt the all-seeing gods rehearse; who pushes Justice aside from his path of gain, the slow Furies drag him down through luck reversedinto helpless dark. The highest-daring fameattracts Zeus' jealous lightning; not averts. 470Enough just to live on, not to draw envy, for me,neither captor of cities nor captured and slave to be.

Agamemnon is on an irreversible path to inexorable ruin: no imagecould tell us that more plainly than the purple woven way thatClytaemestra lays out for him on his return to her. (One of thefirst visual coups de théâtre known to us in the history of theatre;and still, perhaps, the greatest of them all.) But if we mustspeak naïvely of him as a figure who stands for something, it ishardly hapless innocence: in the Agamemnon there are no innocentcharacters, except the two women who get killed. He is the sackerof Troy and the rapist and enslaver of Cassandra. What he ‘standsfor’, I propose, is violation. And indeed, if there is one thing thatthe whole play is about, then violation is what the Agamemnon isabout. The key contrast that drives the whole action is thecontrast so apparent in the chorus from which I have just quoted,the contrast between peace—good rule, security, civilisation,home, family, philia—and, well, war. It is the contrast between thewell-governed house and the disordered one with which the Watchmanbegins the play. It is the contrast between everything humans canbuild, and the nothing that is left when they choose, as Agamemnondoes, to tear it all apart. The pregnant hare too is a beautifullychosen image of this contrast. Helpless, soft, fugitive, she teemswith life—until the eagles, those emblems of death, seize her anddisembowel her. If the huntress Artemis is angry it is,apparently, at the unfairness of this contest; and Agamemnon

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against Iphigeneia too is no contest.

The Agamemnon is about violation; and it is about Agamemnon as theagent of violation. To see his cause as just and pious, asNussbaum suggests, is wildly out of line with what Aeschylus’ textactually tells us about him. It is not, for instance, true to saywith Nussbaum, appealing to Ag.55-62, that “the expedition wascommanded by Zeus”;24 not at any rate if that is meant to suggestthat we should picture Agamemnon as someone “piously executingZeus’s command”. True, Aeschylus does write (60-62) “Thus mightyZeus the guest-friend (xenios) sent (pempei) the sons of Atreusagainst Paris”. But first, this is as consistent with saying thatZeus Xenios explicitly commands Agamemnon and Menelaus to makeholy war on Troy as it is with saying that those warlords invoke ZeusXenios as their patron, by which I mean their propaganda pretext,for a war they choose to make because Menelaus has been insulted.The text is fully consistent with either reading; and the first ispolitically naïve.25

And secondly, we should read on:

Thus Zeus almighty sent the sons of Atreus, 60Zeus guest-protector set them on Paris,sent in pursuit of a multi-manned woman:sent with them death-bouts and leaden-limbed strugglings,sent strength of youths' knees snapped in the dust,sent with them spear-shafts smashed in the onset,sent these for Greeks and for Trojans alike.

That's how things stand. The Fates know no escape-clause.Nor secret sacrifice, extra libation,nor private gifts of quiet pleading tears 70can bend their spite, their wrath wears out the years.

24 And where Nussbaum gets the notion that if Agamemnon “does not fulfilArtemis’s condition, everyone, including Iphigeneia, will die”, I have no idea.Aulis (modern Paralia Avlidos) to Argos is about fifty miles. If they get reallyhungry, they can always just go home.25 And after all, at Ag.125 even the eagles who eat the pregnant hare are ‘thesenders of the force’, pompous archas. Should we take this the natural way, asmeaning merely “portents that set the expedition on its way”? Or are they tooproclaiming a holy war, issuing a command that binds Agamemnon on pain of “themost serious impiety”? For Zeus xenios again, see 362, towards the beginning of the obviouslypropagandistic and triumphalistic choral ode W Zeu basileu kai Nyx philia.

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The Chorus do not, it seems to me, share Nussbaum’s faithfulconfidence in the justice of Agamemnon’s war, even if that war hasthe patronage of a most powerful divinity behind it. What they seeis, first, a war of terrible suffering and destruction, andsecondly a war that is πολυάνορος ἀμφὶ γυναικὸς: all for the sake of oneloose woman (62). For the Chorus throughout the play there is arecurring question about whether the whole war can possibly beworth it at all, given—excuse their misogyny—that it is only aboutone girl: we have already considered line 451, and compare the Chorusat 681-781. The war/peace contrast comes back here in modulatedform: as the contrast between the individual and private injurythat Menelaus suffers from Paris, and the public and universalcalamity whereby he and Agamemnon avenge it.

In the Agamemnon the Trojan War is not a just war; it is just awar. Just a war, without the moralism, but with everything that warmeans; which is, above all, injustice. And Agamemnon is not a justwarrior; he is just a warrior—a man of blood and havoc, and aviolator. The Chorus get this: from one end of the play to theother, it is what they sing about. And we get it too; unless weare taught not to get it, by readers of the play who are bent onseeing Agamemnon as a Kierkegaardian or Hegelian hero.

What the first chorus of Aeschylus’ play tells us, and tells usquite explicitly, is that one key step—perhaps the key step—in theprocess that makes Agamemnon into a violator is the sacrifice ofIphigeneia. That is the crucial point about the narrative ofAgamemnon at Aulis: not primarily that he is in a dilemma—thoughno doubt he is, of a sort—but how he responds to that dilemma; notprimarily his self-excusing speech τί τῶνδ᾽ ἄνευ κακῶν—though thatis important too—but what comes next. Which is this (Ag. 218-221):

ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἀνάγκας ἔδυ λέπαδνον φρενὸς πνέων δυσσεβῆ τροπαίαν 220ἄναγνον ἀνίερον, τόθεν τὸ παντότολμον φρονεῖν μετέγνω. 

Literally: “When he put on the yoke-strap of necessity, breathing26

26 Pne-root words for breathing, air, breath, wind are important in the firstchorus of the Agamemnon: katapneiei “breathes inspiration” 105, antipnoous “against-blowing” 147, the marvellously onomatopoeic empaiois tychaisi sympnewn “blowingtogether with the fortunes that hit him” 187, pnoiai “winds” 192, phrenos pnewndyssebe tropaian “breathing an unholy changefulness of mind” 219. There is alsopausanemou “wind-stopping” at 214, and pneontwn meizon e dikaiws “puffing themselves

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an impious, unholy, unsanctified change of mind, then he came torecognise the thinking of all-daring.” Or as I have put it inverse:

So with relief he gave it Necessity’s name. strophe 5

Once necked in his yoke, though, we smelt off him something unclean,something desanctified, something set free to defile;

220new look in his face that said All is permitted for me.

Agamemnon here puts on “the yoke-strap of necessity”: he chooses it,his putting it on is not something that happens to him, but anaction that he performs. In Williams’ words (S & N p.133):

[Denys Page] simply misrepresents the text. Aeschylus does notsay that Agamemnon submitted to necessity. The word ἔδυ… is astraightforward verb of action, which means (as Page himselfelsewhere translates it) “put on”, and Agamemnon is said tohave put on the harness of necessity as someone puts onarmour.

Now there is indeed, as many commentators (e.g. Nussbaum) haveseen, something paradoxical about the idea that Agamemnon hereshould freely choose not to be free. But the paradox isdeliberate, and it is Aeschylus’s paradox. The point is thatAgamemnon is rationalising. He is claiming that he must do something—killIphigeneia—that, in fact, he does not have to do at all. As indeedClytaemestra points out after she has killed him (1415-17), thereis something routine about his killing of Iphigeneia—as if she werejust another lamb27—that makes it very far from being a speciallyforced action. The routine of sacrifice is familiar, except thatit is his daughter he now kills; but Agamemnon oversteps theinhibition of that detail with horrifying ease.up more than is just” 376.27 Comparisons between killings of humans and of animals are indeed, as Nussbauminsists (pp.32 ff.), pervasive in the Agamemnon. That does not justify Nussbaumin reading κτήνη πρόσθε τὰ δημιοπληθῆ “the people-plenty of herds before [Troy]”(Ag.129) as meaning that Calchas “predicts only that the army, in laying siegeto Troy, will slaughter many herds of cattle before its walls”, and erecting anexegetical puzzle on the basis of this reading: “No significant omen merelypredicts a beef dinner”. Indeed not; which is an excellent reason for not takingCalchas’ words Nussbaum’s way. When reading poetry, it is a good idea to be ableto recognise a metaphor when you see one.

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“But isn’t Agamemnon forced to do it by Calchas’ prophecy?” Theshort answer to that, as every Athenian knew, is that if you don’tlike a prophet’s divine word, it is usually possible either toignore him, or else to get another. (Another divine word, oranother prophet: or indeed both, if necessary.) Prophecy was (andis) a political business, and Aeschylus knew it: nearly all hisreferences to Calchas are loaded with a sinister irony and withsarcastic hints of self-serving priestcraft. (Consider inparticular 249, τέχναι δὲ Κάλχαντος οὐκ ἄκραντοι. Calchas is a manof schemes, a schemer. “Another way”, when he suggests one, is“another device”, ἄλλο μῆχαρ, 199.)

Agamemnon’s choice to follow Calchas’ augury at Aulis is justthat, a choice. Perhaps Aeschylus intends us to notice thecontrast with Iliad Book 1, where Calchas again prophesies somethingdifficult for Agamemnon—and Agamemnon simply refuses to comply.Surely it is easier for Agamemnon to do what Calchas says and giveup his trophy-slave Briseis, than it is for him to do what Calchassays and kill his own daughter. Yet the Agamemnon who rebuffs theeasy command in the Iliad obeys the hard command in Aeschylus’ play.

Agamemnon, as Aeschylus portrays him, is not forced to killIphigeneia at all; he rationalises that he is forced to, but he isnot. As indeed the Chorus close-to-explicitly say (223-224):βροτοὺς θρασύνει γὰρ αἰσχρόμητις  τάλαινα παρακοπὰ πρωτοπήμων,“shamelessness of thinking makes mortals bold—wretchedinfatuation, source of primal sufferings”.

And all this goes to explain why, once Agamemnon—freely—“puts onnecessity’s yoke-strap”, the soi-disant witnesses who are the Chorusin the play immediately see a sinister and frightening change inhim. He has stepped over the edge of the moral abyss; he hasbecome someone for whom τὸ παντότολμον φρονεῖν—seeing nothing asunthinkable—has become easy and natural; he has lost all normalmoral incapacity.28 In short, he has made a decisive move from thecondition of peace towards the condition of war; which is also thecondition of the rapist or the violator.

Both Nussbaum and Williams, it seems to me, seriouslymisunderstand this change in Agamemnon. I think they misunderstandit because, bluntly, they just misread the text of Agamemnon 206-

28 Bernard Williams, “Moral incapacity”, PAS 1992.37

227.

Nussbaum (Fragility pp.35-36) is simpler to deal with, because (asWilliams in effect remarks, S&N 134) she is too plainly drivensimply by the desire to see Agamemnon in terms of the widerschematism of Fragility’s Williams-esque anti-utilitarian polemic, asmerely eliminating the ought that he does not act on. “Agamemnonseems to have assumed, first, that if he decided right, the actionchosen must be right; and second[ly], that if an action is right,it is appropriate to want it, even to be enthusiastic about it”(Fragility p.36). Here we are once more in Agamemnon-is-innocentterritory, and once more I merely remark that Aeschylus goes outof his way from one end of his play to the other to make thatterritory unavailable to us, and to get us to see Agamemnon,instead, as a violator (though certainly also a violator who ishimself violated by becoming a violator, and who can, for instance,weep at what is happening). As for Williams: in Shame and Necessity (p.134, cp. note 11, pp.208-210) Williams tells us that “it is entirely clear what happens”after the end of Agamemnon’s speech at Agamemnon 206-217: “thefather slaughters his daughter in a state of bloody rage”. Butthis is not only not entirely clear; it is not clear at all. It isnot even what happens. Lines 218-227 contain no word that means“bloody”, and only one word, παρακοπὰ, that even can mean anythinglike “rage”—though it can also mean what I translated it asmeaning a moment ago, “infatuation”. And as we have already seen,what the lines suggest overall is not that Agamemnon is somehowsuddenly carried away in a frenzy of bloodlust. Rather—and just asClytaemestra complains at 1415-17—what happens, perhaps even clearlyhappens, is that Agamemnon—once he has wiped away his tears—quitecoolly and calmly proceeds to perform what is a perfectly normalpropitiatory sacrifice in every respect except one—that it is thesacrifice of his daughter.

Anyway, what could it mean, psychologically or dramatically, forAgamemnon suddenly to drop into a rage like the one that Williamsfoists on him? And why would it happen? On Williams’ misreadingAgamemnon’s behaviour simply becomes mystifying, as Williamshimself obliquely admits: “This is not a text,” he writes (134),“that invites us very far into psychological interpretation”. Onthe contrary, it seems to me, these lines most assuredly do inviteus to interpret Agamemnon’s experience at the sacrificial altar of

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Aulis. But Aeschylus invites us to see him, not as suddenly filledwith self-induced random rage, but as undergoing, more or lesswith open eyes, an icy-calm process of corruption.

In this part of the text, the only thing that Aeschylus has anyonesay about any mental state anything like rage is that it is themisto wish for Iphigeneia’s blood orga(i) periorgô(i), “with over-passionate passion” (Ag.215-7; Agamemnon’s words). But first, asWilliams himself agrees (S&N 209), this does not have to beAgamemnon’s passion. With or without a textual conjecture thatWilliams rejects29 on the same page, it is possible to take it tobe either the army’s (as I translate it myself) or indeed no one’sin particular. Saying that a feeling is themis is different fromsaying that anyone in particular has it, or should have it.Secondly, even if it is Agamemnon’s own passion that he speaks of,a passion that you need to tell yourself it is themis to have doesnot sound like much of a passion. Certainly a “state of bloodyrage” is not something that Agamemnon will be able to whip himselfup into, simply by reflecting that it would be themis to be in thatstate.

How else could Williams read rage into this passage, as somethingthat is not merely there, but entirely clearly there? I don’tknow. Maybe he is led astray by Lloyd-Jones (in CQ 1962), whocorrectly identifies parakopa (Ag.223) with atê, then translates bothby “derangement”. But this does not get us to rage either. Atê islike English “delusion”: it can mean madness, but also blindnessor misunderstanding. Cp. Iliad 19.91, where Homer’s Agamemnon,apologising for his own atê in the quarrel with Achilles in Bk.1—which patently wasn’t madness—makes a folk-etymology with aatai,“deceives”.

But what this passage shows us, to repeat, is not so much aclassic moral dilemma in Hegel’s or Kierkegaard’s or even WilliamStyron’s sense. There is of course a dilemma of a kind beforeAgamemnon, but it is not Aeschylus’ main intention to display aninnocent man facing an impossible dilemmatic choice. It is todescribe, in detail and from the inside, the psychologicalprocesses whereby someone becomes capable of extreme andhorrifying evil. What Aeschylus shows us is how a man, who is ahusband and a father as well as a king and warrior, can be—andvery quickly—so taken over by his warmaking role as to become the

29 And Alan Sommerstein accepts: Loeb Oresteia pp.26-27.39

destroyer and enemy of everything that is involved in his familyroles. What Aeschylus is showing us, in short, is how a man canbecome a violator. In this dramatic masterpiece his achievement,as we saw with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Richard III, is to drawus psychologically even into the experience of someone who is inthe very throes of being irreversibly and irremediably corrupted.

The Agamemnon is then another case—and an outstanding one, whichis why I have spent so long on it—of the power of narrative art toget us its audience inside all sorts of “views from somewhere”:even into the head even of someone seriously evil. And much of thephilosophical commentary on it that we have had, even from suchun-moralistic philosophers as Williams and Nussbaum, has simplydisplayed the failure of ethics, as mostly done, to have anythingcorresponding to this power. Since at least the time of Aeschylusimaginative identification has been a central idea for those whowrite, perform, and enjoy the great narrative arts, such astragedy. More to the point, it has been a central idea for all ofus, as we actually live our lives, for much longer than since thetime of Aeschylus. So why the idea is currently only at themargins of philosophical ethics is a bit of a puzzle. It is also,at least for philosophical ethics, a bit of a disaster.

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Appendix: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 104-254 Greek text (Loeb, from Perseus.tufts.edu)with parallel translation by Sophie Grace Chappell

κύριός εἰμι θροεῖν ὅδιον κράτος αἴσιον ἀνδρῶν 105ἐκτελέων: 

ἔτι γὰρ θεόθεν καταπνεύει πειθὼ μολπᾶν ἀλκὰν σύμφυτος αἰών: 

ὅπως Ἀχαι- ῶν δίθρονον κράτος, Ἑλλάδος ἥβας 110ξύμφρονα ταγάν, πέμπει σὺν δορὶ καὶ χερὶ πράκτορι 

θούριος ὄρνις Τευκρίδ᾽ ἐπ᾽ αἶαν, οἰωνῶν βασιλεὺς βασιλεῦσι νε- 115ῶν ὁ κελαινός, ὅ τ᾽ ἐξόπιν ἀργᾶς, φανέντες ἴ- κταρ μελάθρων χερὸς ἐκ δοριπάλτου παμπρέπτοις ἐν ἕδραισιν, βοσκόμενοι λαγίναν, ἐρικύμονα φέρματι γένναν, 120βλαβέντα λοισθίων δρόμων. 

αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ νικάτω.

One thing I can still:sing of the omen, parting victory-omen sent to our war-lords.Though age has grown old with me,age still breathes divinely,still sends the song-strengththe wingèd words.Here's how the two-throned might of Achaia, captains of Greek cadetstwo grown to one end,were set on the spear’s way,the hand’s way of mighty deeds, by an omen—two eagles—against Troy and its land:ship-kings shown sky-kingsplain, none could miss them,right over the palace roof, one black-tailed and one white:on the well-omened sidecatching a mother-hareripping her offspring unborn intosight.

We sense the pain to come; say all come right.

κεδνὸς δὲ στρατόμαντις ἰδὼν δύο λήμασι δισσοὺς Ἀτρεΐδας μαχίμους ἐδάη λαγοδαίτας πομπούς τ᾽ ἀρχάς: 125οὕτω δ᾽ εἶπε τερᾴζων: 

‘χρόνῳ μὲν ἀγρεῖ Πριάμου πόλιν ἅδε κέλευθος, πάντα δὲ πύργων κτήνη πρόσθε τὰ δημιοπληθῆ 130Μοῖρ᾽ ἀλαπάξει πρὸς τὸ βίαιον: 

οἶον μή τις ἄγα θεόθεν κνεφά- σῃ προτυπὲν στόμιον μέγα Τροίας στρατωθέν.οἴκτῳ γὰρ ἐπί- 135φθονος Ἄρτεμις ἁγνὰ πτανοῖσιν κυσὶ πατρὸς 

Then Calchas diligent, military diviner,seeing the Atreids twinned in their temper,twinned in their war-love, cast them as the eagles:these two generals were the butchers of the hare. “In time this task-force will take Priam's city,in time all Troy's people be herded there like cattleby its burning towers to be raped by their fates”—he looked at the omen, saw this meaning there.“But how to avoid nemesis,bitter gods' jealousy,shadow on the armysent to halter Troy?

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αὐτότοκον πρὸ λόχου μογερὰν πτάκα θυομένοισιν στυγεῖ δὲ δεῖπνον αἰετῶν.’ 

αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ νικάτω.

Holy Artemis is watching,she saw Zeus's winged hounds,hated their butchery:she pitied the embryos, the helpless shredded hare.”We sense pain comes; we say well allwill fare.

140‘τόσον περ εὔφρων, καλά, δρόσοισι λεπτοῖς μαλερῶν λεόντων πάντων τ᾽ ἀγρονόμων φιλομάστοις θηρῶν ὀβρικάλοισι τερπνά, τούτων αἴνει ξύμβολα κρᾶναι, 145δεξιὰ μέν, κατάμομφα δὲ φάσματα στρουθῶν. 

ἰήιον δὲ καλέω Παιᾶνα, μή τινας ἀντιπνόους Δανα- οῖς χρονίας ἐχενῇδας ἀ- 150πλοίας τεύξῃ, σπευδομένα θυσίαν ἑτέραν ἄνομόν τιν᾽, ἄδαιτον νεικέων τέκτονα σύμφυτον, οὐ δεισήνορα. μίμνει γὰρ φοβερὰ παλίνορτος 155οἰκονόμος δολία μνάμων μῆνις τεκνόποινος.’ 

τοιάδε Κάλχας ξὺν μεγάλοις ἀγαθοῖς ἀπέκλαγξεν μόρσιμ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ὀρνίθων ὁδίων οἴκοις βασιλείοις: 

τοῖς δ᾽ ὁμόφωνον 

αἴλινον αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ νικάτω.

“Artemis, so merciful to savage lions' little ones,sweet to every suckling cubwandering in the wilds,let these portents come to goodsince they fall auspicious-side,pass over the sense of dread thatwe feel lurking still.And I invoke the healer, Paian, to persuade herto raise no lingering anti-windsthat pin the fleet in port,to demand no second sacrifice,lawless, not to feast on,cogenerate with blood-feud sets man and wife at ill. For a god-wrath is lurking there,fearful, resilient,a homemaker whose smile's a trapa child-avenging mind.”

So did Calchas prophesy,amid the usual blessings,fateful words upon the march,to the kings; and still

we like him sense pain to come, say all go well, not ill.

160 Ζεύς, ὅστις ποτ᾽ ἐστίν, εἰ τόδ᾽ αὐ- τῷ φίλον κεκλημένῳ, τοῦτό νιν προσεννέπω. οὐκ ἔχω προσεικάσαι πάντ᾽ ἐπισταθμώμενος πλὴν Διός, εἰ τὸ μάταν ἀπὸ φροντίδος ἄχθος χρὴ βαλεῖν ἐτητύμως.

Zeus—whoever Zeus may be—if “Zeus” is for mortals to sing—by Zeus' name will I call to him,seeing not even everythingset in one scale counter-balanceshimset in the other; to Zeus must I singif my false-conceiving mind's to be truly freeof the empty senseless dread that

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encompasses me.οὐδ᾽ ὅστις πάροιθεν ἦν μέγας, παμμάχῳ θράσει βρύων, 170οὐδὲ λέξεται πρὶν ὤν: ὃς δ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἔφυ, τρια- κτῆρος οἴχεται τυχών. Ζῆνα δέ τις προφρόνως ἐπινίκια κλάζων 175τεύξεται φρενῶν τὸ πᾶν:

Nor whatever ci-devantgod broiling in all-warring might—I will not even mention himnor his successor slight.Zeus's forerunners are no match for him, his arm puts them to flight.The prudent mind awards Zeus victory:wisdom gives Zeus first place in piety.

τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ- σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας 180μνησιπήμων πόνος: καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ- κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βίαιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων.

For Zeus's law is first in all the world.The law is this: no wisdom without pain.Slow process of the watching soul's unsleepdistils tear-drip of threnody within;wanted or not by us, such wisdom's gained;its score, its etch, its scar in us goes deep.The grace of the gods, the brightpowers set on high,is overpowering, sharp, involuntary.

καὶ τόθ᾽ ἡγεμὼν ὁ πρέ- 185σβυς νεῶν Ἀχαιικῶν, μάντιν οὔτινα ψέγων, ἐμπαίοις τύχαισι συμπνέων, εὖτ᾽ ἀπλοίᾳ κεναγγεῖ βαρύ- νοντ᾽ Ἀχαιικὸς λεώς, 190Χαλκίδος πέραν ἔχων παλιρρόχ- θοις ἐν Αὐλίδος τόποις:

The admiral sits there with his sails all furled,his ships becalmed. No Calchas bears his blame.Nothing to do but whistle across the still deep,to watch his army watch till theystarve thin.So Agamemnon waits on Aulis' plain where the treacherous strait’s dark undersurges sweepround the pride of Greece's fleet, trapped, stationary, round a thousand hulls of seasick infantry.

πνοαὶ δ᾽ ἀπὸ Στρυμόνος μολοῦσαι κακόσχολοι νήστιδες δύσορμοι, βροτῶν ἄλαι, ναῶν τε καὶ 195πεισμάτων ἀφειδεῖς, παλιμμήκη χρόνον τιθεῖσαι τρίβῳ κατέξαινον ἄν- θος Ἀργείων: 

The ice-breath that breathes downfrom the Balkan northbreeds bad idleness, worse settings-forth.Desertions rot the men, mould rots the sails.And still the relentless north's

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ἐπεὶ δὲ καὶ πικροῦ χείματος ἄλλο μῆχαρ 200βριθύτερον πρόμοισιν μάντις ἔκλαγξεν προφέρων Ἄρτεμιν, ὥστε χθόνα βάκ- τροις ἐπικρούσαντας Ἀτρεί- δας δάκρυ μὴ κατασχεῖν:

tormenting galesnag and rub the place already rawas Argos' flower's bleached to dead white straw.

Till Calchas recalls Artemisthe eagles and the leveretstill he tells the generals there's another way.His words rush on the Atreidshis cure's worse than the weather-cursethey stamp their war-staves, hidewet eyes, howl, pray.

205ἄναξ δ᾽ ὁ πρέσβυς τότ᾽ εἶπε φωνῶν: ‘βαρεῖα μὲν κὴρ τὸ μὴ πιθέσθαι, βαρεῖα δ᾽, εἰ τέκνον δαΐ- ξω, δόμων ἄγαλμα, μιαίνων παρθενοσφάγοισιν 210ῥείθροις πατρῴους χέρας πέλας βωμοῦ: 

τί τῶνδ᾽ ἄνευ κακῶν, πῶς λιπόναυς γένωμαι ξυμμαχίας ἁμαρτών; παυσανέμου γὰρ θυσίας 215παρθενίου θ᾽ αἵματος ὀρ- γᾷ περιόργως ἐπιθυ- μεῖν θέμις. εὖ γὰρ εἴη.’

Silence. Then steps Agamemnon forth,first of the blood, the elder by his birth. “A hard thing this if our obedience fails; no less hard for a father—for a trail of a daughter’s blood—across the altar poured— tracked by my child-red hands forever more—

But tell me, what’s the ill-free course?I can’t turn deserter, a general double-crossing troops he promised a bounty-day. If virgin blood will stop the winds they're bound to want to urge herblood.May it be well. May it be well. There is no other way.”

ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἀνάγκας ἔδυ λέπαδνον φρενὸς πνέων δυσσεβῆ τροπαίαν 220ἄναγνον ἀνίερον, τόθεν τὸ παντότολμον φρονεῖν μετέγνω. βροτοὺς θρασύνει γὰρ αἰσχρόμητις τάλαινα παρακοπὰ πρωτοπήμων. ἔτλα δ᾽ οὖν 225θυτὴρ γενέσθαι θυγατρός, γυναικοποίνων πολέμων ἀρωγὰν καὶ προτέλεια ναῶν.

So with relief he gave it Necessity’s name. Once necked in his yoke, though, we smelt off him something unclean,something desanctified, somethingset free to defile;new look in his face that said All is permitted for me.Bad wisdom sets us out of reach of shame, then traps us in the oldest snares of all. So hesensed the barriers dissolve that

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kept him from killing his child,from butchering her to steel the Bride-War’s grip; he’d sacrifice her to give good speed to his ships.

λιτὰς δὲ καὶ κληδόνας πατρῴους παρ᾽ οὐδὲν αἰῶ τε παρθένειον 230ἔθεντο φιλόμαχοι βραβῆς. φράσεν δ᾽ ἀόζοις πατὴρ μετ᾽ εὐχὰν δίκαν χιμαίρας ὕπερθε βωμοῦ πέπλοισι περιπετῆ παντὶ θυμῷ προνωπῆ 235λαβεῖν ἀέρδην, στόματός τε καλλιπρῴρου φυλακᾷ κατασχεῖν φθόγγον ἀραῖον οἴκοις,

Once trapped she wept, called on her father’s name, as if Iphigeneia’s maidish screamcould move his crew of genocidophiles,his entourage of death-squads; ormove him. He said the prayers, then had them lift her frame,thin as a goat-kid’s, dress splayed in un-seem,head lolling shocked, yet still alovely child.A silken cincture gagged her palefine lipslest her last words reverse the spell for the ships,

βίᾳ χαλινῶν τ᾽ ἀναύδῳ μένει. κρόκου βαφὰς δ᾽ ἐς πέδον χέουσα 240ἔβαλλ᾽ ἕκαστον θυτήρ- ων ἀπ᾽ ὄμματος βέλει φιλοίκτῳ, πρέπουσά θ᾽ ὡς ἐν γραφαῖς, προσεννέπειν θέλουσ᾽, ἐπεὶ πολλάκις πατρὸς κατ᾽ ἀνδρῶνας εὐτραπέζους 245ἔμελψεν, ἁγνᾷ δ᾽ ἀταύρωτος αὐδᾷ πατρὸς φίλου τριτόσπονδον εὔ- ποτμον παιῶνα φίλως ἐτίμα—

lest her last words be a curse onher father's home.Her saffron satin fell from her, a streamof bright cloth flowing to the wet earth, whileher only weapon left, her dazed eyes’ gleam,shard-of-mirror-sharp, stabbed those hearts of stone.She used to sing for her father’sparties. She now seemedto fight her gag for one last song: still the childtoo young for sex, little girl onFather’s hip,who performed so sweet at the third libation’s sip.

τὰ δ᾽ ἔνθεν οὔτ᾽ εἶδον οὔτ᾽ ἐννέπω: τέχναι δὲ Κάλχαντος οὐκ ἄκραντοι. 250Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσ- ιν μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει: τὸ μέλλον δ᾽, ἐπεὶ γένοιτ᾽, ἂν κλύοις: πρὸ χαιρέτω: ἴσον δὲ τῷ προστένειν. τορὸν γὰρ ἥξει σύνορθρον αὐγαῖς. 

And then? Unseen unthinkable unknownbut Calchas does not scheme unenacted schemes.Justice weights her scales, sets you this trial:no wisdom without pain. And all you dream,your fragile futureness—best let it go,best wait until you see, not hopeunseen.

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Clarity comes with time, and it dawns meanwhile.

Q1 what it’s like to be someone vs what that person is like258

Q2 is there im id in the bits about the tyrant later in the Rep?

Username vis364258Pword W28tDsjbt

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