Guilt by Descent: Moral Inheritance and Decision Making in Greek Tragedy. 
By N.J. SEWELL-RUTTER. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford and New York: 
Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 202. Cloth, $90.00. ISBN 
978–0–19–922733–4.

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CJ Online Exclusive: 2008.11.02

Greek tragedy rightly claims an authority on the question of fate and free 
will. Who better to express, for example, the limitations of human freedom 
than Oedipus? In tragedy the relationship between humans and gods so 
familiar to Homer is confronted and re-imagined. There is no longer an 
Apollo or Athena to flick away spears like flies or to pull our hair as we 
prepare to chop off our leaders’ heads. How then are we to confront the 
impasse of choice and action without a god to guide us? Do the forces of 
fate and determinism still obtain? N.J. Sewell-Rutter (hereafter S.-R.) 
sets out to address the issues of “causation, of familial interaction and 
decision-making, of mortal agency and over-determined action” in tragedy 
(p. xiii)—an admirable task since it has been quite some time since 
Lesky, Dodds, Lloyd-Jones, et. al. set the standard. As S.-R. justifiably 
claims, “the raising of questions in these fields, let alone the settling 
of them, is by no means at an end.” True indeed.

A very brief introduction (3 pages) lays out S.-R.’s methodological aims: 
to “trace the connections within and the workings of a certain 
constellation of causal determinants that operate in the corrupted and 
inward-looking oikoi of tragedy, paying particular attention to the Atreids 
and the Labdacids” (p. xii). S.-R. has chosen three motifs with which to 
examine the tragedies at hand: inherited guilt, curses and Erinyes.

Chapter 1, “Preliminary Studies: The Supernatural and Causation in 
Herodotus” (pp. 1–14), offers Herodotus as a prompt to the study of 
causation in tragedy to show that “the genre does not exist in a vacuum, 
and that tragic theology is not entirely isolated and self-sustaining” 
(p. 1). The Big Three tragedians “did not create the complex phenomenon 
of supernatural causation ex nihilo and certainly do not enjoy a monopoly 
over it” (p. 2). The story of Croesus figures prominently in the 
discourse of causation, because on him seem to converge all those dreadful 
forces: “fate, the sins of the fathers, and the uncertainty and 
mutability of human life” (p. 5). Accordingly, in the death of his son by 
the hands of Adrastus, Croesus comes to recognize the hand of god. So too 
with his expeditions against the Persian empire. For S.-R., the “twin 
concepts of what is fated and what must happen run right through 
[Herodotus’] work, and are frequently invoked to account for some 
misfortune or downfall” (p. 7). In support of this claim S.-R. adduces 
the examples of Mycerinus, Apries and Xerxes’ troubling episode with 
Artabanus’ dream. Yet S.-R. is right to argue that these hapless humans 
are not simply helpless pawns, but rather that the courses of their lives 
are “multiply determined”: “it is motivated on both human and divine 
levels, and the divine component of its motivation is not single but 
multiple” (p. 11).

Chapter 2, “Inherited Guilt” (pp. 15–48), traces intrafamilial, 
generational guilt—the sins of the father visited upon his children, as 
it were. S.-R. is particularly interested in the Labdacids, who more than 
any other blighted family seem to occupy the tragedians. “Do [Oedipus’] 
sons inherit from their forebears more than the fact of their internecine 
death? Do they inherit characteristics or propensities to this kind of 
disastrous behaviour?” (p. 16). S.-R. provides a literary background to 
these questions, showing (by reference to Homer, Hesiod and Solon) that 
“the notion of an offender bringing his family down with him when he 
falls is as early as the earliest Greek literature” (p. 19). Aeschylus’ 
Seven against Thebes has been, up to the last 20 years or so, an essential 
text to explore questions of inherited guilt and causation, and S.-R. shows 
that the “familial principle is repeatedly appealed to by both Eteocles 
and the chorus to explain the catastrophe” (p. 27). The central 
decision-scene of the play, where Eteocles sets himself at the seventh gate 
of Thebes against his brother, “brings [Eteocles] into conformity with 
his supernaturally determined doom” (p. 28). Rather like Croesus’ 
multiple motivations, “the fated quality of [Eteocles’] fall is 
reconciled with the need for a personal impetus rooted in his own deviant 
motivation” (p. 31). Euripides’ Phoenician Women, which S.-R. takes to 
be a “finely and subtly nuanced response” to Seven, gets similar 
treatment: Euripides “traces … ramifications through multiple 
interacting characters as they work out in concert the doom that they all 
share” (p. 40). All told, “in both authors, the doomed family’s 
recurrent misfortunes through the generations are mediated not simply 
through some mysterious supernatural means, but at least in part through 
the recurrence of traits and modes of behaviour, which help to create the 
recurrent patterns of doom through intelligible continuities of human 
character and action” (p. 48).

Chapter 3, “Curses” (pp. 49–77), commences with a long discussion 
parsing defixiones and curses (49–59), the principal difference being 
that the former is a “much more private” invocation of the gods to harm 
someone, whereas the latter require public pronouncement (and for this 
reason lend themselves well to tragedy’s “moments of high drama”). I 
am not sure I credit S.-R.’s claim that curses “sort better with the 
exalted dignity of tragedy than does the more humble, quotidian, and 
secretive defixio” (p. 59), especially when the evidence he adduces to 
demonstrate “the genre’s sense of its own dignity” is Aristophanes’ 
Frogs. Euripides’ Hippolytus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and 
Aeschylus’ Oresteia are used to illustrate the prevalence and power of 
curses in tragedy, but the discussion elides a great deal of difference and 
complexity among the individual plays. For example, are the (frankly, 
vague) similarities drawn between the curses of Theseus and Oedipus (p. 69) 
enough to assert that the same or a similar type of supernatural causation 
obtains between the two? Surely the terrifying description of Poseidon’s 
bull arising from the sea and the arrival of the goddess Artemis go farther 
to suggest supernatural causation than the fuzzy warning Oedipus receives 
to “cast out the pollution in the city”. [[1]] S.-R. asks a telling 
question: “If we find it tempting to read inherited curses into 
tragedies, we would do well to ask ourselves why we feel we need them. Are 
they supposed to provide a more satisfying sense of unity? Or a better 
explanation for the suffering portrayed? Or a more comforting picture of 
justice? Perhaps [our] attempt … reveals as much about what we desire to 
find in the action of a tragedy” (p. 67, my emphasis). Ironically, S.-R. 
does not explore the consequences of this insight for his own project.

Chapter 4, “Erinyes” (pp. 78–109), opens much like the previous one 
with a discussion of the origin, functions and powers of the Erinyes. While 
S.-R. concludes from divergent sources that “to describe and delimit them 
is not easy,” he concedes that “in their various aspects they preserve 
and enforce Dikē in its broad sense of ‘the order of things’” (p. 
90). Along with inherited guilt and curses, the Erinyes are a component of 
the matrix of causal determinants that “work” against protagonists like 
Eteocles. S.-R. might fruitfully have distinguished between the Erinyes as 
they literally appear in Aeschylus’ Eumenides and their figurative 
appearance in Seven and Phoenician Women. He claims, for example, that in 
Seven “the prominence of Erinyes in the climactic ‘decision’-scene is 
undeniable” (p. 83). They certainly play a prominent role in Eteocles’ 
dramatic cri de coeur following the revelation that Polynices is stationed 
behind the seventh gate, but they are not there physically. (The same is 
true in Phoenician Women.)

Chapter 5, “Irruption and Insight? The Intangible Burden of the 
Supernatural in Sophocles’ Labdacid Plays and Electra” (pp. 110–35), 
is a strange beast, opening with an unnecessary discussion of Sophocles’ 
status among the “pietists” and “hero-worshippers” and his 
evolutionary position between an archaic Aeschylus and a cynical Euripides. 
The principal problem with S.-R.’s methodology in this chapter is that it 
is negative: he proves not that inherited guilt, curses and Erinyes figure 
prominently in these plays, but that they do not. For example: Antigone 
“does not in any significant sense rely on any curse in the family or 
even on any taint of ancestral guilt” (p. 115); “We are not, I contend, 
left with the sense that inherited guilt or some curse is the crucial 
fact—or even a crucial fact—that is needed to explain or account for 
the events of [Antigone] and the decisions taken” (p. 120); “If there 
is an irruption of any kind in the OT, the truth that obtrudes itself is 
not that a supernatural cause has ever been at work behind and within the 
action…. The irruption of the OT is a great insight, the illumination of 
a terrible fact, not the revealing of an Erinys that has walked hitherto 
unseen in the mist” (p. 129); and so on. S.-R. concludes the chapter as 
follows: “[C]urses, Erinyes, and taints of inherited guilt simply do not 
operate in the same way in [Sophocles]” (p. 134). He might have saved 
himself (and his readers) a great deal of time if he had included this 
point in his introduction.

Chapter 6, “Fate, Freedom, Decision Making: Eteocles and Others” (pp. 
136–71), finally addresses the implications of S.-R.’s book up to this 
point: to what extent does the “constellation of inter-related causal 
determinants” (p. xii, above) impinge upon the decisions and, 
importantly, decision-making ability of tragic characters? S.-R.’s 
ambition is “to compel us to examine the role of fate in tragedy and to 
ask whether we can justifiably think in terms of a problem of freedom” 
(p. 137). The very next sentence, employing the same negative mode as the 
previous chapter, gives up the goods immediately: “For our purposes … 
fate is remarkably, even arrestingly, peripheral.” The same question 
arises here as in the previous chapter: What is the point then? S.-R.’s 
unhelpful distinction between determinism and fate (pp. 137–9) would 
carry more weight if he had not been conflating inherited guilt, curses and 
Erinyes all under the banner of “causal determinants” throughout the 
book. Once again Eteocles plays paradigm: “No one, man or god, is telling 
Eteocles to meet his brother—far from it…. The only person who urges 
him to go forth to the fight is Eteocles himself…. Eteocles is both 
self-motivated and untouched by doubt. He is so locked in to his Labdacid 
heritage that he needs no divine monitions or human cajoling. It is thus, 
by means of this remarkable and arresting causal nexus, that his father’s 
curse proceeds…. Eteocles labours under what might be called a curiously 
voluntary compulsion” (p. 161). I include this lengthy quotation to 
illustrate just how confused and confusing S.-R.’s formulation about 
Eteocles’ agency is. Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Phoenician Women 
make an appearance, but we are ultimately told: “We have seen in this 
chapter that fate is for our purposes much less important than we might 
expect” (p. 171). This, I believe, is S.-R.’s most ambitious point, but 
he does not recognize it as a generic principle of tragedy (more below). 
Instead, he simply crosses it off the list of causal determinants.

The Conclusion (pp. 172–6) reiterates methodology and findings.

As should be clear by now, I have reservations about S.-R.’s book. Let me 
elaborate:

(1) This was clearly, and to a large extent still is, a dissertation. That 
fact is reflected in terms of both structure—the negligible introduction 
and conclusion, which offer only the barest indication of the book’s 
purpose and goals; the repeated use of sign-posting phrasing; the expansion 
and discussion of material irrelevant to the argument at hand; the 
rereading of several plays over and over—and argument. S.-R. rarely 
engages other scholars, and his bibliography seems thin given the topic at 
hand, making it difficult to discern his position vis à vis the scholarly 
community. The theoretical/philosophical underpinning of his thesis is 
somewhat old-fashioned, especially when major theoretical reassessments of 
tragedy (e.g. Eagleton, Felski, de Beistegui and Sparks [[2]]) and familial 
obligations (Föllinger [[3]]) have appeared recently.

(2) When discussing the applicability of questions about fate and freedom 
in Greek tragedy, S.-R. is over-cautious in his fear of anachronism. He 
claims (with Vernant [[4]]), for example, that the Greeks had no word for 
free will (p. 151), and thus that our modern fascination with parsing its 
presence in ancient texts risks irresponsibility. This is rather like 
saying that because the Greeks lacked umbrellas, they were not aware that 
they were getting wet when it rained. I agree for the most part with 
Vernant, though I suspect our philological rigor gets the best of us 
sometimes, especially when we insist that without a word for something it 
could not exist (here is where positivism and postmodernism curiously come 
together).

Furthermore, if we are to insist (as S.-R. does) that the question of fate 
and freedom is infected by a modern preoccupation with agency that does not 
jibe with the ancient lack of words for will, what about words for freedom? 
They are prevalent in tragedy, but S.-R. does not chase them down. In a 
way, then, by not holding himself to his own methodological principle, 
S.-R. imposes our own ideas about freedom upon the ancients.

(3) My biggest concern has to do with where we are going with the issue of 
determinism in tragedy. It is not clear to me how S.-R. differs from or 
improves upon those older studies he mentions early on. Is a 
“constellation of causal determinants” all that different from (or 
better than) “double motivation”? I do not think so. This may simply be 
a point of disagreement, but S.-R. never fully justifies his position. As 
noted at the beginning, I am pleased that S.-R. has revived the questions; 
the opinio communis has got stale. It is time for a systematic reappraisal 
of determinism, fate, free will, agency, etc. in Greek tragedy. 
Unfortunately, Guilt does not offer it, but merely reaffirms the reigning 
wisdom.

RICHARD RADER
Ohio State University

[[1]] Cf. Bruce Heiden, “Eavesdropping on Apollo: Sophocles’ Oedipus 
the King,” Literary Imagination 7 (2005): 233–57.

[[2]] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Blackwell, 
2003); Rita Felski, ed., Rethinking Tragedy (Johns Hopkins, 2008); de 
Beistegui and Sparks, eds., Philosophy and Tragedy (Routledge, 2000).

[[3]] Sabina Föllinger, Genosdependenzen: Studien zur Arbeit am Mythos bei 
Aischylos (Goettingen, 2003).
 
[[4]] “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy,” in Vernant and 
Vidal-Naquet, eds., Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Zone Books, [1972] 
1990), pp. 29–48.


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