- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum
Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- Chapter:
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- Source:
- Euripides’s Revolution under Cover
- Author(s):
Pietro Pucci
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
This chapter examines Euripides's treatment of sex as the cause of the Trojan War. The first aspect of sexuality in Euripides that strikes us is the violence with which it assails its subjects—most often women—in excessive, perverse, and sometimes destructive forms. This violence is deployed in a particular way and has particular effects: it dislocates and dispossesses the self, making it a puppet of a drive that the subject often cannot clearly diagnose or identify. Eros is one of the most insidious and piercing instantiations of otherness and can ensnare the whole of a human being. This representation of sexual drive threatens Euripides's metaphysics, which gestures toward an imagined self, which, through its sophia, is able to build a solid and sure stronghold against forces that would pierce through it. This chapter discusses the debate between Helen and Hecuba in Troades and suggests that it represents a typical metalepsis of Euripides's sophia.
Keywords: sex, Trojan War, sexuality, Euripides, eros, sexual drive, sophia, Helen, Hecuba, Troades
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Euripides’s Poetic Game and Law of Composition
- 2. Anthropomorphism
- 3. The Protection of the Self and the Role of <i>Sophia</i>
- 4. Some Connotations of <i>Sophia</i>
- 5. Polyneices’s Truth
- 6. Hecuba’s Rhetoric
- 7. Eros in Euripides’s Poetics: Sex as the Cause of the Trojan War
- 8. The Lewd Gaze of the Eye
- 9. The Power of Love: Who Is Aphrodite?
- 10. Phaedra
- 11. Hermione: The <i>Andromache</i>
- 12. Female Victims of War: The <i>Troades</i>
- 13. The Survival in Poetry
- 14. Figures of Metalepsis: The Invention of “Literature”
- 15. The Failure of Politics in Euripides’s Poetics: Politics in the <i>Suppliant Women</i>
- 16. Political Philosophy: A Universal Program of Peace and Progress
- 17. How to Deliberate a War
- 18. Democracy and Monarchy
- 19. The Battle
- 20. The Rescue of the Corpses
- 21. Return to Arms
- 22. The Polis’s Loss of Control and Authority
- 23. The Bacchants’ Gospel and the Greek City
- 24. Pentheus and Teiresias
- 25. Dionysus’s Revenge: First Round
- 26. Revenge Prepares Its Murderous Weapon
- 27. Initiation and Sacrifice
- 28. Victory and Defeat
- 29. Euripides’s Poetry
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Index Locorum