Dissertation committee:
1. Γιόση Μαρία, Καθηγήτρια, Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ
2. Λεντάκης Βασίλειος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ
3. Βερτουδάκης Βασίλειος, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ
4. Παπαθωμάς Αμφιλόχιος, Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, ΕΚΠΑ
5. Κωνσταντάκος Ιωάννης, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, ΕΚΠΑ
6. Χριστόπουλος Μενέλαος, Καθηγητής, Φιλολογία, Πανεπιστήμιο Πατρών
7. Στεφανής Αθανάσιος, Ερευνητής, Ακαδημία Αθηνών
Summary:
The archaeology of loneliness. The isolation of the sophoclean tragic hero between ethos and mythos.
The present study focuses on the notion of loneliness of the sophoclean tragic hero, as an element of his ethos and as a leit motiv of his myth, as the latter is handled by the poet. It has been already stressed that the sophoclean tragic hero acts alone, he is differentiated or excluded from his social environment and has the strong impression that he is abandoned even by gods. Nevertheless, there has been no extended analysis of the self-consciousness of the hero’s isolation, of the factors that provoke this situation and the sentiments that they entail, of the ways the hero faces his solitude or even chooses to intensify it. In the recent years, many essays on the inner world and the emotions of the ancient Greeks have been written, but the feeling of loneliness is totally absent, as it is in general prescribed as an emotion of the post-industrial era of the 20th century. The question is, though, how can a feeling or an inner state that is considered to be inherent in the human condition be absent from people of antiquity? We must also keep in mind that even the science of psychology focused on this sentiment only few years ago, although the symptoms of stress, anxiety or depression were analysed thoroughly. In this dissertation, all versions of the loneliness of the central tragic figures in the extant sophoclean dramas will be analysed by deploying terms of psychology, sociology, philosophy, but mainly focusing on the language of the heroes and the organisation of the mythological material by the poet. The sophoclean hero finds himself in situations of deliberate or imposed alienation (illness, madness, loss of social status, exile, mourning, lovesickness, old age), ready to act alone (solitary attack, solitary burial, solitary suicide) and confront the terrible consequences alone. The term “archaeology of loneliness” has been used because the origins of a so common feeling nowadays and an intrinsic element of the human condition will be researched herein. The nature and the civilization, the mortality and the eternity, the familiar and the uncanny, the sacred and the miasma, the ill and the healthy, the conventional and the different, the norm and the excess, the male and the female, the Self and the Other, the youth and the old age, the person and the society are the constant divisions that the human has to confront, doomed to feel alone because of his uniqueness. The tragic hero is always liminal, on the edge, and that' s why he is the most appropriate embodiment of all these contradictions and through his figure we can deal with the terror vacui, although behind the empty eyes and the open mouth of the mask there is nothing else but a human who is addressing us, so as to share the primordial and inevitable loneliness.
