Authority without a Name

Traditional wisdom 1 is deeply embedded in Greek tragic discourse, and the gnōmai that were its usual medium of expression offered the playwrights many ways of reaching out to large and diverse audiences. They could serve as markers of the beginnings and ends of scenes, as rhetorical tools in debate, as appropriately resonant generalisations to conclude messengers’ accounts of disastrous changes of fortune, and as focal elements in the meditations of characters and choruses. 2 Their applicability to a multiplicity of contexts gave them staying power as quotations, often far beyond the survival of the plays in which they featured: in the long history of ancient ethical debate and rhetorical education, for example, memorably phrased sayings from the dramatists always had a part to play, and their presence in (e.g.) Aristotle, Plutarch, the tragic scholia and Stobaeus’ Anthology shows how many fragments of lost plays owe their survival to their gnomic content. 3