1 Introduction: Doing the Psychology of the Ancient World through Scholia
1.1 Two Initial Examples
The prologue of Euripides’ Medea centres around a discussion of Medea’s misfortunes between two unnamed slaves: Medea’s nurse and the tutor to her children. When asked by the tutor why she is outside the house by herself, leaving Medea alone (49–52), the nurse explains that she is there because a ‘desire came over me to tell my mistress’ misfortunes to heaven and earth’ (57–58). A scholiast—a commentator in antiquity whose notes have been preserved in the margins of our manuscripts—found this justification particularly persuasive:
Euripides has well represented (
καλῶς … μεμίμηται ) those who find themselves in very dire circumstances (τοὺς ἐν μεγάλαις δυστυχίαις ἐξεταζομένους ), and who dare not tell anyone about their misfortunes, either because of fear of their masters, or because of some need arising from the circumstances. For such people, because they cannot stay silent about the events and are afraid to tell them to people, relate (διηγοῦνται ) them to the heaven or sun or earth or other gods. (Σ (= Scholiast on) Eur. Med. 57)1
Another nurse’s behaviour, in another play by Euripides, was felt to be equally convincing. In the Hippolytus, Phaedra’s nurse explains (433–436) that she found her mistress’ confession—Phaedra is in love—worrying at first but later decided that it is unproblematic. The accompanying scholion deems this change of heart entirely plausible:
He has well represented (
καλῶς ἐμιμήσατο ) the fickleness of old women (τῶν γραῶν τὸ παλίμβολον ): they’re excessively afraid and overbold (ὑπερφοβοῦνται … καὶ θρασύνονται ) in the face of misfortune. (Σ Eur. Hipp. 433)
These two initial examples neatly demonstrate an explanatory model that is employed frequently in the ancient scholia on Greek tragedy, and more specifically those dealing with questions of characterization. The behaviour of characters (leading characters as much as anonymous minor figures) is compared to behaviour that one might come across in real life. We may observe the references in our two examples to the key concept of mimêsis (μίμησις, ‘imitation’ or ‘representation’), in the cognate verb forms memimêtai and emimêsato. What the examples further show is that such characterization is deemed ‘well done’ if it correlates to the typical behaviour of certain identifiable groups (‘those who find themselves in dire circumstances’ and ‘old women’, respectively).2 It is because of these features, as René Nünlist has observed, that such comments traverse the space between literary criticism and social psychology:
In their interpretations, [ancient commentators] repeatedly apply extra- textual criteria such as typically human behaviour in general. Notes of this type can therefore be said to transcend the domain of actual literary criticism … towards more general areas such as psychology and ethics. (Nünlist 2009: 256)
1.2 Scholia Psychology
The scholia, then, often double as exercises in folk psychology, and as such they seem to offer a particularly fruitful avenue for exploring the social psychology of the ancient world. There are various directions in which one might conceivably take such an enterprise. First, and by all accounts least promisingly, one could use the scholia as evidence for real-world psychological phenomena in antiquity, particularly certain group differences. From the Hippolytus-scholion, for instance, we could infer—we shouldn’t, but we could—that old women in antiquity really were, as a group, more likely to display anxiety and impulsiveness under stressful conditions.
Secondly, and much more securely, scholia of this kind can be taken as evidence of certain folk-psychological stereotypes that were available to interpreters in antiquity.3 Without ourselves accepting as fact that older women in the classical and/or Hellenistic period(s) were above-averagely fickle, we can safely infer from the Hippolytus-scholion that (a good number of) people believed that this was the case. In fact, the psychological ‘archaeology’ that is required to uncover such stereotypes is, in the case of these scholia, unusually straightforward (although we should still be careful to generalize too much on their basis about what ‘the ancients’ believed): the scholiasts are fully explicit about assigning certain traits to certain categories of people.
A third approach—the one that will be central to my own investigation— is less interested in the content of the explanatory models displayed by the scholia, and more in their nature, that is to say, in the folk-psychological strategies that we see at work: what kind of explanations do ancient commentators use to elucidate the behaviour of literary characters? Do they really think mainly in terms of categories? If so, to what kind of categories do their explanations pertain?
1.3 Ancient and Modern Literary Criticism on Typification
This third approach is pertinent to my concerns because it allows us to circle right back to questions of literary criticism. It is a commonplace in modern criticism on Greek tragedy to say that the tragedians were, in contrast to modern playwrights, on the whole less concerned with creating strongly individualized characters, but rather dealt in figures that could readily be assimilated to certain recognizable types. The article on ‘Character and Characterization’ in The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy, for instance, puts it as follows:
Sense of individuality … is what we feel as generally less important in the Greek dramatic personae … tragedy reflects a view of humanity that privileges paradigmatic action and external output to individual, inward psychological processes. (Thumiger 2013: 2)
Similarly, a chapter on Euripidean drama in a companion volume asserts that ‘Euripides is more concerned … to illuminate aspects of human nature than to delineate specific individuals’, and that ‘it seems more fruitful to discuss … characters in terms of classes … than in terms of individuals.’4
Ancient literary criticism is relevant here because modern critics see such a view of Greek tragic characterization reflected in the work of their predecessors in Greek antiquity—and indeed more generally in ancient thought about character and personality (the key Greek term is êthos,
Such Sophoclean characters as Electra or Philoctetes carry great dramatic conviction, because their individuality has been worked out in the details of the text; but the individuality that is thus worked out is not in itself detailed or subtly nuanced: it consists rather of a few basic traits, clearly and consistently delineated. Commentary on êthos in the scholia is in keeping with this; the commentators think in generic terms, not focussing on the individual as the possessor of a complex of personal traits that uniquely defines his or her individuality, but on the behaviour typical of or appropriate to a class to which the individual can be assigned. (Heath 1987: 119)
Ancient literary criticism in general indeed appears to offer ample basis for this view: it regularly demonstrates an approach to literary character in categorical rather than individual terms. Thus, of the four (apparently prescriptive) guidelines for tragic characterization that Aristotle famously sets out in his Poetics—that characters be good, that they be appropriate, likeness of character, and consistency of character—two are explicitly framed around ‘classes’ (genê,
[On goodness:] Characterisation will arise … where speech or action exhibits the nature of an ethical choice; and the character will be good when the choice is good. But this depends on each class of person (estin de en hekastôi genei): there can be a good woman and good slave, even though perhaps the former is an inferior type, and the latter a wholly base one. … [On appropriateness:] it is possible to have a woman manly in character, but it is not appropriate for a woman to be so manly or clever. (Arist. Po. 15, 1454a16–27, tr. Halliwell)6
And again, in his Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses how the ‘propriety’ (to prepon,
One can express character … when the suitable indication goes with the relevant class and disposition (hekastôi genei kai hexei). By ‘class’ (genos) here I mean, for example, determination by age (for instance, child, man, or old man), sex (man or woman) or nationality (Lacedaemonian or Thessalian), while I confine ‘dispositions’ (hexeis) to those that make us say that in his life a man has such and such a character; … a rustic and an educated man would not use the same terms or in the same way.’ (Arist. Rh. 3.7, 1408a25–32, tr. Russell, slightly adapted)7
The tendency, then, seems clear enough.8 Yet to my mind most modern discussions have too readily treated ancient criticism in monolithic terms, ignoring crucial differences between the scholia and other texts. It will be my contention that the scholia in particular offer a much more complex picture, and do not in any straightforward way support the idea that tragic characterization worked predominantly through typification.9 One important first observation, in this regard, concerns a difference of scope: whereas Aristotle’s comments about characterization and style are themselves generic, and might thus be expected to deal in generalities,10 the scholia are by their very nature intended to elucidate the behaviour of individual characters in individual moments of individual plays. As we will see presently, the explanations that such moments elicit are much less often related to character types than is sometimes thought.
1.4 Person and Situation
If we return to the two examples with which I opened this chapter and examine them more closely, a vital difference appears between two kinds of generalization employed. The scholion on the opening scene of Medea relates the behaviour of the Nurse to that of ‘those who find themselves in dire circumstances, and who dare not tell anyone about their misfortunes’; the Hippolytus-scholion speaks of ‘the fickleness of old women’. Only the latter is a generalization about a class of people (specifically, as often in the scholia, women); the former, by contrast, generalizes about people in a certain kind of situation. The difference is apparent from the form used to express the two categories in the commentators’ original Greek: whereas the Hippolytus-scholion speaks about a characteristic of a category denoted by a noun (the Greek has the generic article, tôn graôn, ‘of old women’), the Medea-comment takes the form of a sequence of substantivized participles (
It is instructive to cast this difference in the terms of modern attribution theory, that is, the study in psychology of ways in which humans explain their own and other behaviour. Traditional—if by no means unchallenged, as we will see—models of attribution tend to distinguish between dispositional attributions, which assign causes of behaviour to internal factors of the person (personality traits, motives, beliefs, etc.), and situational attributions, which seek causes for behaviour in external factors in the environment or situation.11 Dispositional attributions and situational attributions appeal to different kinds of knowledge structures on the part of the observer: in the case of the former, the observer pinpoints the causes of the behaviour in her/his (schematic) knowledge about personality traits, whether they are those of an individual (i.e. person schemas), or those typical of a group (i.e. stereotypes); in the latter the observer rather associates the causes with his/her knowledge about the normal sequence of events in certain kinds of situations (i.e. scripts) and the role-based behaviour of agents in such events.12 Thus, the distinction between individual and type need not come into play with situational attributions at all. When the scholiast comments on ‘those who find themselves in dire circumstances’ to explain the behaviour of the nurse in Medea, the explanation does not rely on knowledge about nurses (or women, slaves, etc.) in general or about this nurse in particular. By extension, we learn nothing from this scholion about whether ancient critics tended to think in terms of individuals or personality types. This particular scholion—and many like it—in fact offers evidence of neither way of thinking.
As already hinted at, ‘classic’ theories of attribution which rely on a simple distinction between personal and situational attributions have in recent decades been significantly challenged and revised within psychology. In my final section I will assess whether more recent work on attribution theory, as well as other work on folk psychology, can shed further light on the prevalence of situational attributions in the scholia. It will be appropriate first, however, to substantiate that prevalence, by giving a fuller account of the types of explanatory strategies we find at work in the corpus.
2 The Generalizing Scholia
Both types of generalizing scholia exemplified by my initial nurse-examples— those that interpret the behaviour of characters as typical of certain classes of people and those that connect it to types of situation—are richly evidenced in the tragic scholia, but the situational explanations outnumber the personal ones by roughly two to one.13 I give below a few further representative examples from each type; most instances can fairly straightforwardly be identified by their grammatical construction (the use of a generic article with either a participle or an adjective/noun, as described above).14
2.1 Situations: (ἦθος +) Participle (‘The êthos of Those Who …’)
Euripides, Hippolytus 199: the ailing Phaedra asks for her body to be supported:
Σ Eur. Hipp. 199 ‘He has taken care to draw the êthos of those who are sick (τὸ τῶν νοσούντων ἦθος ), who obsess in every way over the care of their body. Both through language and posture, he has all but given us Phaedra herself, being carried on. …’Euripides, Hippolytus 176–186: Phaedra’s nurse complains about her lot, having to take care of her mistress:
Σ Eur. Hipp. 178 ‘The êthos is that of someone exhausted by the ills of service (τὸ ἦθος ἀπειρηκυίας τῆς θεραπείας ), leading to an utter rejection of life. That, too, is why she utters the general thought, which is characteristic of those who are in trouble (σύνηθες τοῖς δυστυχοῦσιν ).’Sophocles, Ajax 596: the chorus addresses its home country Salamis in apostrophe:
Σ Soph. Aj. 596 ‘⟨The poet⟩ has represented the êthos of those who are absent from their home country (τὸ ἦθος ἐμιμήσατο τῶν ἀφεστώτων τῆς οἰκείας ). For whenever something difficult happens they tend to invoke their fatherland.’Euripides, Phoenissae 263–268 (a rich example): Polyneices, by himself but armed with a sword, is afraid that he is walking into a trap:
Σ Eur. Ph. 267 ‘Some critics say that it is foolish ⟨for Polyneices⟩ to trust in his sword, and not yet in the truce, as if he were able to defeat so many ⟨hypothetical⟩ assailants by himself. But ⟨those critics⟩ do not recognize that, for those who go to meet some danger by necessity (οἱ μετὰ ἀνάγκης ἐπί τινα κίνδυνον ἐρχόμενοι ), it is not by all possible means that they want to look for safety, but whatever sort of it they can get at the moment. And those who travel by themselves with a dagger are not as well armed as anticipated wild animals, or robbers, but better than those who are entirely unarmed. This happened to Polyneices, too. For when he had been forced to come to a negation in Thebes, he did come, so as not to give the impression of being intractable, but expecting a trap he provided for his safety as best he could.’
In some instances the situation about which the scholiast generalizes is described not through the use of a participle, but by other means: relative clauses, the first person plural (‘we tend to …’), or explicit generalizations about how ‘people’ typically behave in certain situations:
Sophocles, Ajax 572–576: Ajax decrees that his son, and no one else, should get his weapons after his death:
Σ Soph. Aj. 572a ‘it is believable that Ajax returns constantly to the point about the weapons: he is very concerned that they do not get taken by his enemies; and it is human and entirely natural (ἀνθρώπινον δὲ καὶ μάλα φυσικόν ) to mention things that we have on our mind (περὶ ὧν ἐν νῷ ἔχομεν ) more frequently.’Euripides, Phoenissae 766–770: Eteocles, covering all his bases, says that the Thebans still need to ask an oracle for help and insight:
Σ Eur. Ph. 766: ‘People typically look down (εἰωθότες γὰρ οἱ ἄνθρωποι … καταφρονεῖν ) on the oracular art when things are going well for them (ἐν ταῖς εὐπραγίαις ), but when things are going badly (ἐν ταῖς συμφοραῖς ) they have recourse to seers.’
2.2 Person Classes: (ἦθος +) Noun/Adjective (‘The êthos of a (Good/Bad/Old/Etc.) Person …’)
Euripides, Orestes 218: Electra addresses her brother affectionately:
Σ Eur. Or. 218: ‘He has represented the êthos and words of a sisterly girl (φιλαδέλφου κόρης τὸ ἦθος καὶ λόγους ἐμιμήσατο ).’Sophocles, Ajax 915–916: Tecmessa covers Ajax’s body:
Σ Soph. Aj. 916: ‘It is the êthos of a woman (ἦθος γυναικός ) not to display the body indecorously.’Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 118–122: Creon relates how a single eye-witness returned from the altercation at the crossroads; the audience knows that that eye-witness’s version of the events is false:
Σ Soph. OT 118: ‘⟨The poet⟩ has precisely described the êthos of cowards (τὸ ἦθος τῶν δειλῶν ). For they simultaneously exaggerate the events so as not to give the impression that they fled because of cowardice, and at the same time they make a mountain out of a molehill because they are in a state of delusion.’Euripides, Phoenissae 446–451: Eteocles appears onstage to engage his brother in a debate; he wastes no time at all but wants to get straight to it:
Σ Eur. Ph. 446: ‘The character has been very well crafted by the tragedian to be such as an unjust man ought to be (οἷον δεῖ εἶναι ἄδικον ἄνδρα ): he knows that he has nothing just to say so he brings forward the decision, thus avoiding the detailed reproach arising from the pleading.’
3 Individualizing Scholia
The previous section has raised substantial difficulties for the view that the scholia explain behaviour primarily by reference to classes of persons, since a majority of the adduced examples were found to categorize not by stereotypes, but rather by situation-based roles. Yet the problems for the view do not end there. In his discussion of the scholiasts’ treatment of characterization, René Nünlist (2009: 246–256)15 has shown that the generalizing scholia are only one part of the story:
Generally speaking, the characters’ behaviour is often explained in the light of commonsensical notions of psychology and typical human behaviour. … [S]uch generalisations tend to treat characters as representatives of a particular type. It should, however, be underlined that these comments … cannot be said to be typical of the entire corpus …: the extant corpus of scholia contains both comments that emphasise the typicality of characters and others that emphasise their individuality. They form two sides of the same coin. (Nünlist 2009: 252–253)
Apart from what is (as we have seen) a problematic equating of generalization per se with treating characters ‘as representatives of a particular type’, this is spot on. The scholia in fact frequently focus on the individual attributes of characters, and explain their behaviour with reference to those traits. In contrast to the scholia discussed above, these comments relate behaviour not to patterns that readers will have been familiar with from their daily lives, but to the specific characteristics of the agent. In the terms of attribution theory they constitute, like the stereotyping generalizations discussed above, dispositional explanations, but the personality traits to which behaviour is linked are in these instances not seen as typical of a wider group but described only as belonging to the individual character. Significantly, individualizing comments easily outnumber the stereotyping generalizations, although they are not as numerous in the scholia as situational generalizations.16 They are typically applied to major named characters such as Oedipus, Ajax, or Medea.
3.1 Explicit Ascriptions of Traits
Individualizing comments frequently come in the form of an explicit ascription of a trait, by way of an adjective (e.g. megalophrôn, μεγαλόφρων, ‘proud’) or noun (e.g. megalophrosunê, μεγαλοφροσύνη, ‘pride’) applied to the character’s name or to his/her êthos. Here are some examples:17
Sophocles, Ajax 356–361: Ajax asks the chorus to kill him:
Σ Soph. Aj. 360: ‘Ajax does not want to be killed because he is bitter over the loss of his weapons, but because he fears the censure of his flock. In this ⟨the poet⟩ shows the êthos and the pride (τὸ ἦθος καὶ ἡ μεγαλοφροσύνη ) of Ajax.’Sophocles, Ajax 815–820: Ajax plants his sword, taken from his mortal enemy Hector, in the hostile territory of Troy, in order to throw himself on it:
Σ Soph. Aj. 818: ‘Ajax is proud (μεγαλόφρων ) and to his dying moments hateful of the Trojans.’Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1: at the start of the play, Oedipus addresses the supplicating elders as ‘children’ (τέκνα, tekna):
Σ Soph. OT 1: ‘The êthos of Oedipus is patriotic and showing forethought for the public good (φιλόδημον καὶ προνοητικὸν τοῦ κοινῇ συμφέροντος τὸ τοῦ Οἰδίποδος ἦθος ), and the people favour him on account of the things he has done for them. It is, then, reasonable that he uses the word tekna as if he were a father.’Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 58: Oedipus again addresses the elders as ‘children’ (παῖδες, paides):
Σ Soph. OT 58: ‘The phrase ô paides is not so much used with respect to their age as it is fitted to his kindly êthos (ἁρμόζον ἐστὶ τῷ φιλοφρονουμένῳ ἤθει ), just like the phrase ô tekna at the start of the play.’
3.2 Consistency
Another way in which the scholia reveal a focus on characteristics of individuals is by their repeated interest in consistency of characterization: characters’ behaviour is then judged to be in line with (or, sometimes, at odds with) their other actions in the play.18 Such comments are often combined with explicit trait ascriptions:
Euripides, Orestes 99: Electra attacks Helen rather bluntly:
Σ Eur. Or. 99: ‘The êthos of Electra is in no way inconsistent (οὐδαμῶς ἀνώμαλον (anômalon)τὸ τῆς Ἠλέκτρας ἦθος ).’Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 287–289: Oedipus reveals that he has already sent for Tiresias:
Σ Soph. OT 287: ‘Here too (κἀνταῦθα ), he has maintained the provident nature of his êthos (τὸ κηδεμονικὸν τοῦ ἤθους ).Euripides, Orestes 482: Menelaus defends his talking to Orestes on the basis that he is ‘the son of a father dear to me’:
Σ Eur. Or. 482: ‘⟨The poet⟩ again (πάλιν ) shows the man’s base êthos (τὸ κακόηθες τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ), in that he calls his brother dear to him.’19
3.3 Ancient and Modern Vignettes
Summing up the types of scholia we have seen so far: behaviour is variously attributed to the individual personality traits of the character, to stereotypical traits of a class to which the character can be ascribed, or they are seen as typical for the particular situation that the character is in. Individualizing scholia occur with considerably greater frequency than stereotyping scholia, although in turn they are handily outnumbered by the situational explanations.
A first inevitable conclusion is that, as a whole, this material offers little support to the notion that the scholiasts interpreted the characters exclusively or even predominantly as representatives of certain classes of person. In spite of the stereotyping precepts that emerge from ancient theoretical treatises on tragic poetics and rhetorical technique (particularly, Aristotle’s), in actual practice, the Hellenistic commentators were fully capable of producing highly individualized interpretations of the characters.20 Read together, such comments can even amount to ‘character vignettes’ that would not look out of place in the work of a modern (or rather, perhaps, mid-20th-century) commentator: we have seen, for instance, the scholia describe Oedipus in Oedipus Tyrannus as ‘patriotic and showing forethought for the public good’ (1), someone who is favoured by his people (1), and ‘kindly’ (58); later they add that he is ‘intelligent’ (112) and someone possessed of ‘urgency’ (287, 300). It is striking how much of this we see replicated in perhaps the most memorable character sketch of Oedipus produced by modern scholarship, that of Bernard Knox (1998 [1957]: 29):
Such is the character of Oedipus: he is a great man, a man of experience and swift courageous action, who yet acts only after careful deliberation, illuminated by an analytic and demanding intelligence. His action by its consistent success generates a great self-confidence, but it is always directed to the common good. He is an absolute ruler who loves and is loved by his people, but is conscious of the jealousy his success arouses and suspicious of conspiracy in high places. He is capable of terrible, apparently ungovernable anger, but only under great provocation, and he can, though grudgingly and with difficulty, subdue his anger when he sees himself isolated from his people.21
Still, the relative prominence of situational explanations may give rise to the idea that the psychological strategies employed by the scholiasts are at least qualitatively different (even if along slightly different lines than scholars have previously maintained) from modern ones. In the next (and last) section I hope to qualify this idea, taking my cue from more recent developments in the psychology of attribution and other approaches to folk psychology.
4 Causes, Reasons, Explanations, and the Value of the Scholia for the Study of Characterization
4.1 Reason Explanations and the Business of the Scholia
Long before the scholiast elaborated on the nurse’s behaviour in Euripides’ Medea, the nurse herself did so in the play. We may recall that the lines to which the scholiast’s comment is keyed contain the nurse’s own justification for her being outside—a ‘desire came over me’ (
Modes of explanation (shaded boxes) for unintentional and intentional behaviour (Malle 2022: 105)
The tragic scholia align with Malle’s model remarkably well: a majority of the scholiasts’ explanations of behaviour and speeches23 is in fact phrased in terms of reasons, specifically with reference to a mental state (belief, desire, evaluation). Here is a small assortment of examples:24
Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 673–675: Creon speaks harshly to Oedipus:
Σ Soph. OT 673: ‘Creon still persists in his free speech because he knows (ἐπιστάμενος ) that he has done nothing wrong.’Euripides, Medea 899–900: Medea is distressed by the secret prospect of killing her children:
Σ Eur. Med. 899: ‘From this it is clear that she does not proceed to the murder according to a predefined plan (κατὰ προαίρεσιν ) … but because she is very eager (διὰ τὸ προτεθυμῆσθαι ) to avenge herself against Jason.’Euripides, Phoenissae 1310–1312: Creon arrives and wonders whether he should ‘mourn myself or my city with tears’:
Σ Eur. Phoen. 1310: ‘So as to seem to be patriotic (ἵνα δόξῃ φιλόπολις ) and not to make his speech only about his son, Creon says “For whom should I start my laments, for my son or the city?” And yet he knows full well (καίτοι εἰδώς ) that the city survives because of the death of his son.’
Moreover, for each of the types I described in the previous sections (situational, stereotyping, and individualizing), many of the examples combine a causal explanation with a discussion of more immediately antecedent reasons.25 In such instances we can see particularly clearly the chain that Malle identifies as running from ‘causal histories of reasons’, through reasons in the form of mental states, and to intention (see figure 1):26
Euripides, Medea 820–823: Medea, a foreigner, successfully extracts a promise of silence from the chorus of Corinthian women:
Σ Eur. Med. 823: ‘We should in no way be surprised that, although they ought, as Corinthian women, to take the side of Creon, they choose to keep her secret. For being free women they give preference to whatever occurs to them to be just.’ [The reason for the chorus’ secrecy, their belief that Medea is on the right side, is associated with their status as free women.]Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 93: Oedipus declares that a proclamation should be made to the entire population:
Σ Soph. OT 93.: ‘In accordance with his regal êthos (ἀξίως τοῦ βασιλικοῦ ἤθους ) he orders a public proclamation, since he suspects nothing concerning himself (μηδὲν ὑποπτεύων περὶ ἑαυτοῦ ) and thinks (οἴεται ) that he is favoured by the gods.’ [Oedipus’s lack of suspicion and his misguided belief that he has the gods on his side, the reasons for his request for a public declaration, are connected with his kingly êthos.]
4.2 The Nature of the Scholia
The fact that the scholia—and indeed the play texts themselves—so closely mirror what Malle’s research has shown to be the bread and butter of everyday behaviour explanations not only further problematizes the notion that the ancient Greeks employed fundamentally different psychological models in staging and interpreting tragic characters than ‘we’ do, it also invites us to consider various foundational questions about the nature of the scholia and their value for the study of tragic characterization.
A few words, then, on the nature of the material. Although I have above liberally applied the term ‘behaviour explanation’ to describe what the scholiasts ‘do’ with their notes, explanation is certainly not the only mode of communication that we see the ancient critics adopt vis-à-vis their audiences.27 In the scholia, including many of the ones cited in this chapter, we variously see the critics praise the poets for their character portrayal, defend them against criticisms deemed unjust, and conversely, criticize their failings. It is likely, moreover, that the repeated discussion of behaviour and words as ‘appropriate’ or ‘fitting’ to certain characters reflects the degree to which the scholiasts thought of the play texts as models of rhetorical or poetic composition, and of their own works as guides for emulating those models.28 The commentaries from which the scholia derive were, in short, vehicles of aesthetic evaluation and instruction as much as elucidation. Still, in spite of this variety of aims, the fact that discussions of character behaviour are framed for the most part around reasons suggests that we may not be too far off if we take explanation to be the critics’ core business: the plays, widely read but perhaps not always immediately understood, posed fairly immediate questions (‘why is the chorus keeping Medea’s secret?’) that needed answering first. Of course, explanation and other aims need not be seen as mutually exclusive:29 by helping their readers understand the texts, the critics also allowed their readers to evaluate and emulate them.
Against this background, it becomes clear that an attempt to extract a coherent theory of character and characterization from the scholia is by necessity a fraught enterprise. The ancient critics talk about êthos regularly, certainly, but they do so in the context of a wider project for which êthos is not necessarily the organizing principle. In many instances, the critics’ simple explanations of the goings-on in a play elicit discussion of the relevant character’s underlying traits and dispositions: in at least as many other instances they do not. And because reason explanations tend to refer to transient mental states (beliefs, desires), they often have no immediate bearing on questions of ‘long-term’ characterization. In the terms of attribution theory, reason explanations—particularly those not combined with causal histories—need not be accompanied by a ‘correspondent inference’ about the agent’s dispositional traits.
4.3 Reading Minds, Reading Situations
Insofar as their default mode of explanation seems to pertain to short-term mental states, and longer-term dispositions come in only by extension, it could be felt that the scholia are better analysed within the cognitive psychology framework of ‘mindreading’ (a.k.a. ‘Theory of Mind’—a topic that has attracted much interest in recent work on Greek tragedy)30 than in the social psychology framework of attribution. As one scholar working on mindreading describes the difference in approach between the two traditions, attribution theorists have typically studied how people make ‘inferences about traits and beliefs that are enduring characteristics of people’, and how they ‘make such inferences on the basis of scant behavioural evidence’, whereas ‘research on mindreading has typically studied beliefs and desires that are short-term characteristics of an agent and are normatively warranted’ (Apperly 2011: 87–88). It remains interesting, however, to explore when, why, and how the ancient critics link short-term states to long-term traits, so we may in fact best be served by an approach which combines attribution and mindreading: it is a fortunate circumstance that the two disciplines, which were long devoid of mutual interest, have at last begun to interact.31
One point on which mindreading and attribution may usefully inform each other is precisely the fact that beliefs and desires are usually, as Apperly describes them, ‘normatively warranted’. This refers to the fact that we tend to apply our knowledge of the social world (social scripts and schemas) in drawing inferences about mental states.32 Beliefs and desires do not exist in a vacuum: they have (as Malle’s model formulates it), ‘histories’, and because the line from history to mental state follows predictable paths, we are able to follow it in both directions when we reason about the minds of others: we can infer what they must be like and/or what situation they must be in from what we know about their thoughts or feelings (attribution) and we can infer what someone else must be thinking or feeling on the basis of what others like them and/or in a similar situation think or feel (mindreading).
It is along these lines, finally, that the high frequency of situational generalizations in the scholia may be contextualized. The point of portraying the actions of tragic characters as typical of someone in such-and-such a situation is not to demonstrate how neatly the characters map onto particular types, that is, not to conform to a broader view of character and personality that deals mainly in generalities. Rather, the critics use this strategy to make the characters’ words and deeds—which must often have been enigmatic to contemporary readers—comprehensible, to make their minds accessible, by situating them in frameworks that are familiar to their readers from their own daily lives.
5 Conclusion
If this chapter’s survey of explanatory strategies in the tragic scholia has shown anything, it is that those strategies are diverse. Within that diversity, however, certain trends can be identified: discussions of behaviour tend to include an indication of the characters’ reasons (beliefs, desires); comments can also connect behaviour to (in descending order of frequency) situational generalizations, individual traits of the character, and/or the stereotypical traits of certain classes of person; such explanations are often combined with reason explanations, although they also occur independently. These patterns suggest that the view of (tragic) literary characterization that we find expressed in ancient theoretical treatises, which sees character primarily as associated with types, is somewhat alien to the actual practice of the commentators. They also suggest that their primary interest was making the characters’ words and deeds comprehensible to their readers, by connecting the behaviour to their everyday lived experience.
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Translations of scholia throughout this article are my own, based on the text editions used by the online TLG.
The explanations are formulated entirely in generic terms, with the groups referred to by way of a generic article (
To be clear, in spite of my use of general phrases such as ‘interpreters in antiquity’ and ‘ancient commentators’, my focus is in fact on a fairly narrow subset. The relevant comments about characterization in the tragic scholia come exclusively from the scholia vetera (‘old notes’, dating back to the Hellenistic period, as opposed to scholia recentiora, ‘more recent notes’, which come from the Byzantine period), and as such they can be traced back almost entirely to a handful of commentators working in the library of Alexandria roughly between the third and first centuries BCE (accordingly, they postdate the playwrights themselves by at least a few centuries). The precise origins of the scholia vetera vary between Aeschylean, Sophoclean and Euripidean scholia. For brief discussions of the nature and origin of the (tragic) scholia, see e.g. Dickey 2007: 3–17, 31–38; Nünlist 2009: 7–19; also pp. 81–84 below. For a fuller account see the relevant chapters in Montanari et al. 2015.
Gregory 2005: 261.
For the meaning of this term, which I translate loosely (and not unproblematically) as ‘character’ in this chapter, see e.g. Nünlist 2009: 254–256, with further references.
For discussion of this passage in relation to Aristotle’s theory of êthos more generally, see e.g. Halliwell 1998: ch. 5.
Hexis (
Other relevant passages include Arist. Rh. 2.12–17, 1388b31–1391b6 (a lengthy discussion of the typical traits of the young, old, powerful, etc.), Pl. Ion 540b (Ion knows, through his rhapsodic skill, ‘what is appropriate for a man to say, for a woman, for a slave, for a free person, for a subject and for a ruler’), Plut. Mor. 853C–D (Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander; Aristophanes ‘does not give to each kind its fitting and appropriate use’ of words), and Theophrastus’ Characters (thirty type-sketches).
Such a view of tragic characterization is, in my view, also not supported by what we find in the plays in actual practice. It goes beyond the scope of this paper to attempt a demonstration of this point, but I may refer to some discussion in van Emde Boas 2018a, 2018b.
For the ‘somewhat abstract and generalised’ style and purpose of the Poetics, see e.g. Halliwell 1998: 162 (also 1998: 34–35 on the specific issues raised by Po. 15 in this regard). It is true that in the treatise Aristotle offers specific examples of characters that violate his precepts (Menelaus as an example of needlessly bad character; Odysseus and Melanippe as characters who behave indecorously). Yet Aristotle does not make explicit how these characters violate type-driven expectations.
The distinction is conventionally traced back to Heider 1958.
For fuller accounts of the knowledge structures involved attribution, see e.g. Read and Miller 2005; Malle 2004: 144–145.
This estimate is based on the material gathered under the header
Some further examples (in addition to those given in full below) of situational explanations:
See also his treatment of this topic in Nünlist 2015, 716–717 (and index s.v. ‘characters/ characterisation’).
For the basis for this claim, see n. 13.
Some additional examples: Aesch. PV 177, Ag. 841, Sept. 107; Eur. Med. 296, 922, 538, 1046, Phoen. 446, 909, 1083, Tro. 630; Soph. Aj. 112, 766, 1047, 1184, Ant. 69, 82, 423, El. 469, 975, 1240, OT 93, 312.
On such scholia see also Nünlist 2009: 249–252 and 2015: 721–722. Consistency (τὸ ὀμαλόν, to homalon) is another one of Aristotle’s criteria for good characterization in the Poetics (15, 1454a26, cf. p. 69 above). In modern psychology, particularly in Kelley’s influential covariation model of attribution (1967), consistency is one of the three variables on whose basis attributions are made; it is closely linked with dispositional attributions.
At Menelaus’ first appearance in the play, the scholiast had already commented (
So, similarly, Nünlist 2015: 717: ‘Hellenistic critics … explored the characters’ individuality and subjectivity, two notions which are often strikingly absent from ancient discussions, esp[ecially] the Poetics’. Theory and practice will of course not have operated independently: for discussion of the influence of Aristotelian poetics on the (Homeric) scholia, see Schironi 2009.
Knox was, of course, fully aware of the material in the ancient scholia (he refers to ancient commentary regularly; see his index s.v. ‘scholiast’).
See e.g. Malle 2004, 2011. Malle’s theories are applied to Greek tragedy by Scodel 2023.
By ‘explanations of speeches’ I am not referring to the very frequent type of scholion in which the words of a character are paraphrased in plainer language. Such scholia answer, as it were, the question ‘What does [what character X is saying] mean?’ (they are often marked by
A further selection from two plays:
For such combinations, see Malle 2004: 104–109.
See also many of the examples already given above, e.g.
See also Heath 1987: 116 n. 45, Nünlist 2009: 249–252, and (more generally) Nünlist 2015: 707–709 and Hunter 2015 (on Homer).
See Nünlist 2009: 248 on the progymnasmata (ancient rhetorical exercises), with further references.
One of the key strengths of Malle’s research is his sensitivity to ‘the why and when’ of naturally occurring behaviour explanations (2004: ch. 3) and their role in communication, especially with regards to impression management (2004: ch. 6).
See Budelmann and Easterling 2010 and many of the contributions in Budelmann and Sluiter 2023. For surveys of the psychology of mindreading and the main approaches within it, see Apperly 2011; Marraffa https://www.iep.utm.edu/theomind/#H3; Lavelle 2022; from a very different angle, see also Gallagher 2005: ch. 5, 2020: part II.
Malle (2004: 29) laments that ‘the literature on behavior explanations … has had little contact with the rapidly growing literature on theory of mind’; similarly, from the cognitive psychology side, Apperly (2011: 87) calls the ‘lack of interaction’ between work on attribution and work on mindreading ‘truly surprising’. Malle’s own work represents one of the fullest attempts at integrating the approaches (see also e.g. Epley and Waytz 2010); it is notable that mindreading plays a significant role in recent handbook chapters on attribution (e.g. Reeder 2013), and that recent introductions to mindreading adopt broader definitions (e.g. Lavelle 2022; Westra 2022), including, in one case, ‘character traits’ (Lavelle 2022: 17).
For the importance of social scripts and schemas in mindreading, see Apperly 2011: 116–117, 129–132. They take on even greater significance in the work of Daniel Hutto (Hutto 2008, cf. also Gallagher and Hutto 2008), whose ‘Narrative Practice Hypothesis’ suggests that we understand others by fitting their behaviour into familiar narrative patterns (such a model seems to align with the interpretative strategies in the scholia quite well, particularly with the situational generalizations).