A Reconsideration of the Meaning of Sôzein

Sally MacEwen (Agnes Scott College)

Risking one's life to save people from danger or evil makes someone heroic.  The firefighters who went up into the Twin Towers were heroic.  A man who jumps into the ocean to save someone he doesn't know, even though he hasn't the skill or strength and dies, is awarded prizes and accolades.  When someone saves someone else's child, he or she tells the news reporter, "Anyone would do it" or "I know someone else would do it for my kids."  But if parents save their own children while risking death, we don't call them heroic, and the only parents who make it into the news are the ones who don't try hard enough.  So the conceptual paradigm of heroic saving is not as obvious as it might seem.  Instead, the paradigm of the act of saving to European-American culture is deeply informed by a Savior who saves everyone who is worth saving, especially if He doesn’t know them personally.  This paradigm appears even in the supposedly transcendental structuralist archetype of a hero who travels to mystical regions and returns to save benighted humans.  In other words, the European-American idea presumes someone who is able to save others is so different from humans as to be almost another species, untainted by the world, but heroes of Greek stories always know whom they are saving and never save slaves or women and children with whom they do not and will never have a relationship.  In some cultures, those considered heroes do not save anyone, but do fight for their own honor and that of their masters.  Christopher Gill, Gregory Nagy and Michael Lynn-George are some of the rare scholars who have begun with an assumption that we do understand what is characterizes heroic behavior in another culture, and yet, if that characterization is not universal, it must be understood before one can study heroes.

In Greek contexts, when sôzein-related words appear, the savior and the saved are sharply restricted by their social relations.  In the Iliad, the great warriors do not "save" each other, because that would insult them, and yet they also do not brag about saving helpless people with something like a "no man left behind" mentality.  The word is instead used when the savior or saved is impersonal, like a sword.  Warriors save others when they defend the general group, and save another warrior only when he is trapped because he is necessary for the winning of the war, or for the group’s honor.  A temple of Zeus Sôter stood near the theater of Dionysus, where the city set statues of soldiers who had saved the polis.  In Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, the concept appears mostly in the phrase, "saving the laws."  In other words, while the European-American hero saves earth-bound folk because they are weak and innocent, the Greek hero saves–or better, "preserves"–relational and institutional stability.  It does not imply that he is magical.

In that case, many instances in Greek literature need to be recast.  In particular, I will show that Oedipus is not projected as heroic during much of Sophocles' play, as sôzein-related words are actually rather rare:  the word us mostly used in the passive to mean “survive” or “be preserved,” often disas­trously.  Similarly in Euripides' Suppliants, "saving the laws" drives Theseus, not a heroic impulse to protect the innocent and defend the defenseless.  Bearing these distinctions in mind, I will also show that Antigone's heroics are neither compromised nor trivialized by her gender:  the ancient paradigm of saving makes it much more feasible for a woman to save the day.  This understanding also casts new light on the reason Socrates saved Alcibiades, as told in the Symposium.

In the ancient world; the act of saving is neither about the moral stature of the savior, nor about the innocence of those saved.  For Greeks, saving people from evil does not make one morally superior, but rather preserving mutual obligations makes the hero.  Sozein needs to be translated “preserve” or “defend,” never “save.”