Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin

PE R F O R M A N C E , I C O N O G R A PH Y, R E C E P T I O N

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PERFORMANCE, ICONOGRAPHY, RECEPTION Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin

Edited by M A RT I N R EV E R M A N N and PE T E R W I L S O N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–923221–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction

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PA RT I . PE R F O R M A N C E : E X P LO R AT I O N S 1. Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens Helene P. Foley

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2. Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama Ian Ruffell

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3. Greek Middlebrow Drama (Something to do with Aphrodite?) Mark Griffith

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4. Costing the Dionysia Peter Wilson

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5. Nothing to Do with Demeter? Something to Do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West Barbara Kowalzig

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PA RT I I . PE R F O R M A N C E : E PI C 6. The Odyssey as Performance Poetry Oswyn Murray

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7. Performance and Rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod Adrian Kelly

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8. Performing the Will of Zeus: The ∆ι βουλ and the Scope of Early Greek Epic William Allan

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PA RT I I I . PE R F O R M A N C E : T R AG E DY 9. Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides Pat Easterling 10. Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Chronotopes, and the ‘Aetiological Mode’ Martin Revermann

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11. Star Choruses: Eleusis, Orphism, and New Musical Imagery and Dance Eric Csapo

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12. The Last Word: Ritual, Power, and Performance in Euripides’ Hiketides Athena Kavoulaki

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13. Intimate Relations: Children, Childbearing, and Parentage on the Euripidean Stage Froma I. Zeitlin

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14. Character and Characterization in Greek Tragedy Bernd Seidensticker

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PA RT I V. PE R F O R M A N C E : C O M E DY 15. Scenes at the Door in Aristophanic Comedy Peter Brown

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16. The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy David Wiles

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PA RT V. PE R F O R M A N C E : I C O N O G R A PH Y 17. Putting Performance into Focus Robin Osborne

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18. The Greek Gem: A Token of Recognition Alfonso Moreno

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19. Image and Representation in the Pottery of Magna Graecia François Lissarrague

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PA RT V I . PE R F O R M A N C E : R E C E P T I O N 20. Wagner’s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism Simon Goldhill

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21. Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi Germany––the Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936 Erika Fischer-Lichte

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22. Can the Odyssey Ever be Tragic? Historical Perspectives on the Theatrical Realization of Greek Epic Edith Hall

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Contents

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23. An Oedipus for Our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos Fiona Macintosh

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List of Oliver Taplin’s Publications

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Index Locorum General Index

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List of Illustrations 5.1

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The Eschilo d’Oro, conferred on Oliver Taplin by 2006. The silver medal, struck by the goldsmiths D’Arte’ Midolo, shows the great theatre of Syracuse from of the terrace above, where also one or several gods temples.

INDA in ‘Creazioni the corner had their

The recently unearthed stone theatre at Kyrene in Libya, situated between the long-known Thesmophorion (to the right of the picture) and a new temple complex perhaps also part of the sanctuary of Demeter, visible in the background. Bell krater by the Oreithyia Painter, c.470 bc, from Akragas, showing Demeter sending Triptolemos to distribute the art of agriculture to the world. The vase belongs to a group linked to the Greek and Athenian performance world.

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16.1

Chous in St Petersburg. Drawing by Gayna Wiles.

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Calyx krater in Syracuse. Drawing by Gayna Wiles.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc. Christchurch New Zealand, University of Canterbury, Logie Collection 41/57 (Paralip. 134 31bis). Courtesy of University of Canterbury.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc. British Museum B182 (ABV 306.42). © Copyright of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc. Munich 1387 (J 590) (ABV 304.7). Courtesy of Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to Painter of Munich 1410, c.530 bc. Munich 1411 (J 330) (ABV 311.2). Courtesy of Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, c.530 bc. Berlin 1697 (ABV 297.17); picture after T. Panofka, Parodien und Karikaturen auf Werken der klassischen Kunst (Berlin, 1851), Pl. 1.4.

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Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, c.530 bc. Berlin 1697 (ABV 297.17); picture after T. Panofka, Parodien und Karikaturen auf Werken der klassischen Kunst (Berlin, 1851), Pl. 1.5.

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List of Illustrations Red-figure krater attributed to the Niobid Painter c.460 bc. British Museum GR 1856.12–31.1 (ARV 601.23); picture after JHS 10 (1890), Pls. 11–12. 17.8 Black-figure lekythos attributed to the Theseus Painter, c.510 bc. Palermo, Banco di Sicilia. Drawing courtesy of François Lissarrague. 17.9 Red-figure chous, name vase of the Group of the Perseus Dance (ARV 1215.1). Picture after REG 49 (1936), fig. 31 (drawing by M. Gilliéron). 17.10 Red-figure aryballos, name vase of the Clinic Painter (ARV 813.96). Picture after Perrot and Chipiez, Histoire de l’Art de l’Antiquité, 10.661. 18.1 (a) Odysseus and Eurycleia (cornelian, 2nd or 3rd quarter of 1st cent. bc). © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (IX B 705); (b–c) Odysseus and Argos: (b) gold ring, late 5th cent. bc, from Tarentum; (c) agate scarab, Etruscan, early 4th cent. bc. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (S9). 18.2 (a) Herakles, Acheloös, and Deianeira (plasma scarab, 6th cent. bc). © The Trustees of the British Museum; (b) the death of Ajax (steatite, 2nd half of 7th cent. bc, from Perachora).The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1942 (42.11.13). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; (c) Hephaestus and Prometheus (cornelian scarab, c.400 bc), Odessa; (d) Oedipus and the Sphinx (cornelian scarab, Etruscan, 4th cent. bc). © The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1936.5); (e) the death of Ajax (scarab, early 4th cent. bc). © Bibliothèque nationale de France (Cabinet des Médailles 1820 bis); (f) Orestes slays Clytemnestra (silver ring, early 4th cent. bc, from Kerasa), Jannina. 18.3 (a–d) Telephos and the hind: (a) chalcedony, c.480 bc. © Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich (A 1474); (b) chalcedony, c.450 bc, Providence, Rhode Island School of Design. © Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (25.097). Museum Appropriation Fund; (c) iron ring, mid-4th cent. bc, Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum. © The J. Paul Getty Museum (81.Al.17), Gift of Mireille Thîlot; (d) 4th cent. bc, lost; (e) Philoctetes and Odysseus (sard, late 3rd/early 2nd cent. bc). © (2008) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (13.237); (f) Philoctetes (chalcedony scaraboid (Archaic shape), late 5th cent. bc). © Numismatic Museum, Athens (NM 885). 18.4 (a) Electra at the grave of Agamemnon (bronze ring, c.425– 400 bc, from Skillous), Olympia, Museum, (b) Electra mourning (gold ring, 4th cent. bc), ex-Sotheby’s; (c–d) Electra and Orestes at Agamemnon’s grave: (c) sardonyx ringstone, 1st half of 3rd cent. bc. © Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich; (d) volute krater, Lucanian red figure, c.350–340 bc. © Museo Nazionale, Naples (inv. n. 82338).

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List of Illustrations (a) Maenad holding a head (gold ring, late 5th cent. bc, from Syria). © Bibliothèque nationale de France (de Luynes 521); (b) maenad holding a head/mask (black jasper scaraboid, mid-4th cent. bc, from Greece. © The Trustees of the British Museum; (c) actor and mask (gold ring, late 4th cent. bc, from Greece), Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum. © The J. Paul Getty Museum (85.AM.276); (d) Pan with mask (Cornelian ringstone, 1st cent. bc), London, Ionides Collection; (e) Etruscan mutilation (makhalismos) (banded agate scarab, Etruscan, early 4th cent. bc), Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum. © The J. Paul Getty Museum (L87.AN.114).

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(a–d) Masks: (a–b) cornelian scarabs, c.500 bc, Copenhagen, Thorvaldsen Museum; (c) bronze ring, late 5th/first half 4th cent. bc. © Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich (A2531); (d) cornelian, 1st cent. bc. © The State Hermitage Museum, St, Petersburg; (e–h) the mask motif on the Elephantine Papyri; (e) seal impression of Polycrates of Arcadia (Pap. II); (f) seal impression of Epinikos of Chalcis (Pap. III); (g) seal impression of Rhodokles of Aigina (Pap. IV); (h) seal impression of Euphronios (Pap. X); (i) sealed Elephantine Papyrus II, Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum; (e–i) © Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

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Apulian bell krater, New York 63.21.5; Tarporley Painter.

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Campanian oenochoe, London F 233.

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Aryballesque lekythos, London G21; Branicki Painter.

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Lucanian calyx krater, Paris BnF 422; Dolon Painter. Side a: the Judgement of Paris.

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Lucanian calyx krater, Paris BnF 422; Dolon Painter. Side b: Odysseus questioning Teiresias.

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A contemporary sketch of Wagner conducting a rehearsal of the Ring.

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Franz Betz as Wotan in the first production of the Ring, 1876.

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Hoffmann’s design for Act 1 of Götterdämmerung (1876).

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Neumann’s set for Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, Leipzig 1878.

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Hoffmann’s design for the Rhinemaidens.

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The Rhinemaidens in the first performance at Bayreuth, 1876.

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A contemporary drawing of the Rhinemaidens from the first performance at Bayreuth, 1876.

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Hitler celebrated at Bayreuth, 1934.

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A poster from the first performance of the Ring at Bayreuth after the Second World War.

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List of Illustrations

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20.10 Wotan (Hans Hotter) and Brünnhilde (Martha Mödl) from Wieland Wagner’s Ring.

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20.11. The awakening scene from Siegfried, in Wieland Wagner’s Ring.

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20.12 The walkways from Wieland Wagner’s set for the Ring.

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Agamemnon: Cassandra (Maria Koppenhöfer), Clytaimnestra (Hermine Körner), Agamemnon (Friedrich Kayssler). Archives of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

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The Libation Bearers: Orestes (Hannsgeorg Laubenthal) swears on Agamemnon’s tomb. Archives of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

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Athene (Hilde Weissner) in front of her statue. Archives of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

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Programme cover design for Oliver Taplin’s The Wanderings of Odysseus (1992), incorporating an engraving ‘Odysseus escapes Polyphemus’, after Fuseli, in Francis du Roveray, Illustrations to Homer’s Odyssey (1806).

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Penelope in Nicholas Rowe’s Ulysses. Engraving by J. Thornthwaite of Mrs Hunter (published 1778). Reproduced by courtesy of APGRD.

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Ulysses at sea with his crew. Illustration, by Charles Buchel, on the cover of the original programme for Stephen Phillips’s verse drama Ulysses (1902). Reproduced by courtesy of APGRD.

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Programme design for David Farr’s The Odyssey at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2006).

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Set for the 1926 Abbey Theatre production of Yeats’s King Oedipus, from Theatre Arts Monthly, March 1927, 216 (image held by APGRD, and reproduced courtesy of APGRD).

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Laurence Olivier as Oedipus in the Old Vic Company production at the New Theatre, 1945 (photo: John Vickers).

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Douglas Campbell as Oedipus with chorus in the film of the Stratford (Ontario) Festival production, dir. Tyrone Guthrie, 1957.

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List of Contributors William Allan is McConnell Laing Fellow and Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature at University College, Oxford. His publications include The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy (Oxford, 2000), Euripides: The Children of Heracles (Warminster, 2001), Euripides: Medea (London, 2002), Euripides: Helen (Cambridge, 2008), and several articles on Homeric poetry and tragedy. He was mentored by Oliver during a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship, which he held in Oxford from 1999 to 2001. Peter Brown is a Lecturer in Classics at Oxford University, a Fellow of Trinity College, and a Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. He has published extensively on both Greek and Roman Comedy. Eric Csapo is Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney. In addition to a wide range of articles on Greek literature and culture, he is the author of The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor, 1995, with W. Slater) and Theories of Mythology (Malden, Mass., 2005), as well as the editor of The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama (Cambridge, 2007, with M. Miller). Pat Easterling was Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1994 until her retirement in 2001. Before that she taught in Manchester, Cambridge, and London (UCL). Her main field of research is Greek literature, particularly tragedy. She also studies ancient scholarship and the survival and reception of Greek texts. She is a general editor of Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics and is currently writing on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus for the series. Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and director of the newly established Institute of Advanced Studies on the Intersection of Theatre Cultures since the 20th Century. She has served as president of the German Society of Theatre Studies as well as of the International Federation of Theatre Research. Among her numerous publications, many available in English, are The Semiotics of Theatre (German: Tübingen, 1983; English: Bloomington, 1992), The Dramatic Touch of Difference. Theatre, Own and Foreign (Tübingen, 1990), History of European Drama and Theatre (German: Tübingen, 1990; English: London, 2002), The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (Iowa 1997), Theatre, Sacrifice,

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Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London, 2005), The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics (German: Frankfurt, 2004; English: 2008). Currently she is working on a history of modern performances of Greek tragedies in Germany as well as on a phenomenology of intercultural performances of Greek tragedies. Helene P. Foley is Professor of Classics, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of books and articles on Greek epic and drama, on women and gender in antiquity, and on modern performance and adaptation of Greek drama. Her books include Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY, 1985), The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Princeton, 1994), and Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton and Oxford, 2001). Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King’s College. He has published very widely on all aspects of Greek literature and its reception. His most recent books are Who Needs Greek? (Cambridge, 2002), The Temple of Jerusalem (London, 2004), and How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago and London, 2007). Mark Griffith is Klio Distinguished Professor of Classics and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (Cambridge, 1977) and of a commentary on Sophocles’ Antigone (Cambridge, 1999), as well as numerous articles on Greek poetry, especially tragedy and satyr play. Edith Hall, after holding posts at the universities of Cambridge, Reading, Oxford, and Durham, took up a joint chair in Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2006, where she is also Director of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome. With Oliver Taplin she founded the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford in 1996, and has collaborated with him closely on all its activities, including the editorial on two of the Archive’s published books. She is also Chairman of the Gilbert Murray Trust. Her own books include Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford, 1989), Greek Tragedy and the British Stage (Oxford, 2005, with Fiona Macintosh), The Theatrical Cast of Athens (Oxford, 2006), and The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London, 2008). Athena Kavoulaki is Lecturer in Classics in the Department of Greek Philology at the University of Crete. Her research interests and publications focus on Greek drama, Greek ritual, performance and poetics, Greek language, and cultural history. She is currently working on a study of mythico-ritual patterns in early Greek poetry and is involved in a group project on the reception of Thucydides in Modern Greece.

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Adrian Kelly is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick, and a Forschungsstipendiat of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He read for his DPhil at Oxford University under the supervision of Oliver Taplin from 1998 to 2002, and stood in for him, however inadequately, at Magdalen College from 2003 to 2004 whilst Oliver was on research leave. He is the author of A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer, Iliad VIII (Oxford, 2007) and Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (London, 2008), as well as several articles on Homeric, Hesiodic, and early Greek lyric poetry. He is currently working on a commentary on Iliad XXIII. Barbara Kowalzig is Lecturer in Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an associate of the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris. She is the author of Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece (Oxford, 2007) and has published various articles on Greek religion, music, and drama. Her current project, Gods around the Pond, seeks to integrate Greek religion and economic patterns of the ancient Mediterranean. François Lissarrague is the Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and a member of the Centre Louis Gernet (Paris). His publications include The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (Princeton, 1990) and numerous articles on Greek art, especially vase iconography. Fiona Macintosh is Senior Research Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama and a member of St Cross College, University of Oxford. Her publications include Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork, 1994) and, with Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford, 2005). She has co-edited numerous volumes including Medea in Performance 1500–2000 (Oxford, 2000), Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford, 2004), and Agamemnon in Performance 458bc to ad2004 (Oxford, 2005). She is currently completing Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus: A Production History for Cambridge University Press. Alfonso Moreno is Andrew and Randall Crawley Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Magdalen College Oxford. His work on Greek social history and material culture includes, most recently, Feeding the Democracy: The Athenian Grain Supply in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries bc (Oxford, 2007). Oswyn Murray is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and was Tutor in Ancient History from 1968 to 2004. He has edited two books on the history of

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the symposion: Sympotica (Oxford, 1990) and In Vino Veritas (London, 1995), and is preparing a collection of his essays on the same subject. Robin Osborne, Professor of Ancient History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was Oliver Taplin’s colleague when Fellow in Ancient History at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1986–89. He publishes widely in the fields of Greek history, archaeology, and art. Martin Revermann is Associate Professor of Classics and Theatre Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (Oxford, 2006) and of various articles on Greek drama, epic, and theatre theory. Ian Ruffell is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow. His research interests focus mainly on Greek drama, particularly comedy. He has also published on Roman satire and popular invective. In 2007 he provided the literal translation for the version of the Bacchae by David Greig and the National Theatre of Scotland which opened the Edinburgh International Festival. Bernd Seidensticker is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Die Gesprächsverdichtung in den Tragödien Senecas (Heidelberg, 1969), Palintonos Harmonia. Komische Elemente in der griechischen Tragödie (Göttingen, 1979), ‘Erinnern wird sich wohl noch mancher an uns . . .’: Studien zur Antikerezeption nach 1945 (Bamberg, 2003); Über das Vergnügen an tragischen Gegenständen, Studien zum antiken Drama (Leipzig and Munich, 2005) and editor of numerous collections of essays on the reception of classical antiquity in modern literature and thought. David Wiles is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he teaches in the department of Drama. His most recent books are A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge, 2003) and Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2007). A study of New Comedy masks was published in 1991 as The Masks of Menander (Cambridge). He is currently working on theatre and citizenship from antiquity to the French revolution. Peter Wilson is William Ritchie Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Athenian Institution of the ‘Khoregia’: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge, 2000), in addition to various articles on Greek literature and culture. He is the editor of The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies (Oxford, 2007); Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousike’ in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford, 2004, with

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P. Murray); and Drama III: Studies in Honour of Kevin Lee (London, 2006, with J. Davidson and F. Muecke). Froma Zeitlin is Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She has worked on Greek literature, especially Athenian drama, throughout her career. Her books include Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (Rome, 1982), Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago, 1996), and the two co-edited volumes Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context and Before Sexuality: Structures of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (both Princeton, 1990).

Introduction This book is, above all, a gift for a man who has given us so much. On August 2nd 2008 Oliver Taplin will turn sixty-five. And soon after, he will retire from the University in which he has worked since 1968 and which he entered as an undergraduate as a Foundation Scholar of Corpus Christi College in 1962. We offer him this volume in celebration of more than four decades of achievement. Scholar, tutor, advocate and disseminator of classical antiquity in the public domain: Oliver Taplin is a multi-faceted personality with a unique presence and exceptional charisma, an unmistakable voice that, for decades, has made itself heard––always clearly, fairly, and eloquently––in various walks of life. This is a gift from scholars to Taplin the scholar, though we hope that something of the charismatic personality that makes him so much more than a scholar is palpable throughout in this offering. Our first admission, then, must be one of inadequacy: no imaginable, and practicable, format could cover more than a fraction of his diverse work and manifold achievements. Our second is an apology: we could easily have filled three volumes this size with more willing contributors from all around the world, and to them we apologize. But as well as being a tribute to this remarkable man this book will, it is hoped, also stand in its own right as a substantial and unified contribution to the field of Greek literature, in its broadest possible definition. And for that too we have Oliver to thank. For the structure and subject matter of the volume are modelled on the powerful thematic unity that characterizes the areas of research to which he has made such seminal contributions. Performance is the key term, and a connecting thread in all of Taplin’s work–– appropriately so, for the man rightly dubbed ‘the father of performance studies in Classics’. * The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (1977) has proved the single most influential work of anglophone scholarship on Greek drama in the three decades since its appearance. It was followed soon after by Greek Tragedy in Action (1978), a book that was designed for, and that reached, an extremely wide audience.

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Introduction

It exemplified the principles of Stagecraft in a readily accessible form, and extended them to all three of the canonical classical tragedians. The effect was to free Greek tragedy from the strictures of the scholar’s study and return it to the stage, and it was felt at all levels, from the most advanced level of academic research internationally to that of the generalist reader and school student. Perhaps most remarkable, given that Stagecraft is a specialized work of academic analysis, is that its impact was also felt on the public stage––quite literally, for the work directly informed the planning and design of a number of illustrious contemporary productions of Greek drama in the British theatre. Taplin’s simple but monumental insight––that classical tragedy and comedy as we now possess them are scripts designed for a very real live performance under the alien conditions of ancient Greek open-air, communal theatre––informs, in one way or another, all the contributions to this volume. And the articulation of the chapters reflects the way in which Taplin went on to develop the ideas and methodology that underpin Stagecraft for fruitful application to other absolutely central areas of Greek culture and its afterlife: Homeric epic, the iconography of the theatre, and the reception of Greek literature in subsequent eras. Three Parts of the book (I. Performance: Explorations, III. Performance: Tragedy, and IV. Performance: Comedy) thus deal directly with Greek drama. The first of these is a series of explorations that cross a number of fields of Taplin’s expertise. Here, the first three of the contributors explore the boundaries of dramatic genre, a subject to which Taplin has also made one of the most influential contributions. His 1986 article––‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’––presented the case, with characteristic verve and eloquence, for the generic definition of these two difficult siblings, tragedy and comedy, through mutual opposition. In our volume Foley, Ruffell, and Griffith continue the dialogue which that article initiated. Taplin demonstrated the constructive strength of the generic differences between tragedy and comedy, the way that some of their most characteristic habits of performance distinguished one from the other: comedy, for instance, revelling in repeated and self-conscious reference to its own conventions and the mechanics of its performance; tragedy keeping itself at an aloof distance from such self-consciousness as to its status as a performance. Foley closely examines the dynamics of cross-generic appropriation between tragedy and her ugly sibling. Generic self-assertion emerges as one pivotal, though far from exclusive, function of paratragedy within Aristophanic comedy, investing it with the artistically elevated and morally authoritative status of trygedy (a coinage the conceptual importance of which had already been highlighted by Taplin in a pithy and influential note

Introduction

3

published in 1983). As for tragedy’s appropriation of comedy––that is, for us, mainly the use of comic techniques such as distancing and metatheatrical awareness in late Euripides––Foley makes the case for regarding this important phenomenon not as something which undermines the tragic experience but, on the contrary, as something which preserves, protects, and defines it in a changing life environment characterized by arbitrariness and general loss of orientation. Ruffell proposes to fine-tune the emphasis on polar oppositions so central to Taplin’s argument, this time from the vantage point of how audiences process information in the context of the comic and tragic theatrical event respectively. Cognition and emotion, Ruffell argues, are not diametrically opposed, but are bound to occur in tandem, especially in comedy where jokes and laughter are crucial, and particularly foregrounded, elements of audience engagement. Taking a generically broader and chronologically longer perspective, Griffith traces how and where the influential, basically bipolar conceptualization of classical drama––long seen as constituted completely and exclusively by the two forms of tragedy and comedy––breaks down or is simply inadequate to the richness of ancient dramatic culture. He looks both before and after the period of classical drama: to epic, for instance, with its strong strand of romance that fits neither the comic nor the tragic model, a strand that also figures prominently in the third and (until recently) neglected dramatic type of the satyr play. Griffith’s wide-ranging study complicates the over-dichotomized approach to ancient drama and allows him to trace a ‘middle’ way, between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ of tragedy and comedy, that surfaces across all ages of the Greek theatrical tradition, and beyond. Much of Taplin’s research is characterized by an emphatically pragmatic and materialist quality: an interest in the fabric of costume, mask, and stage; how performance works in practice; how empty space and ordinary physical objects are transformed by comic genius and tragic eloquence. This solidly materialist strand has influenced Wilson’s earlier work on the economics of the Greek theatre, on where the money came from to buy the costumes and pay the players. Here he continues that work by attempting for the first time to ‘cost’ a major Athenian theatrical festival in its entirety. The results substantiate the claims made in some ancient sources that the Athenians devoted vast resources to their theatre, though not the generally negative assessment that comes with those claims, to the effect that this was money that could have been better spent elsewhere. The last of these ‘explorations’ follows Taplin’s move away from Athens, the self-styled metropolis of drama, west to the Greek cities of Sicily and South Italy. In 1999 Taplin was one of a small group of scholars paying serious

4

Introduction

attention to the performance of tragedy outside Athens and Attica. He not only showed that tragedy was exported from Athens much earlier and to more places than had hitherto been supposed; he also made the case that Athens ‘spread the word’ through performance––that is, that the export of tragedy was part of a cultural politics and helped transmit Athenian social and political values across the Hellenized (and Hellenizing) world. This has proven another very rich seam in Taplin’s research, and the fresh eyes he brought to the subject, combined with new archaeological discoveries, continue to make it a very exciting area. In the context of his own work, this study of drama outside Athens forms a logical bridge to the major field of research which his two most recent books have opened up: the extent to which vase paintings, themselves one of Athens’ most successful exports, reflect an interest in, as well as active exportation and subsequent local adaptation of, Athenian theatre. The comic material was treated in the influential Comic Angels and Other Approaches to Greek Tragedy Through Vase-Paintings (1993); the tragic in Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Paintings of the Fourth Century (2007), which has just been published as we write. Kowalzig lends the eye of an historian of religion to the ensemble of evidence––literary, iconographic and archaeological––for the performance of drama in the Greek west, especially in the great city states of Sicily. Here Demeter and her daughter seem to have been the more usual recipients and patrons of drama, and Kowalzig tries to identify the factors––political, religious, and economic––that may lie behind this. * Taplin is one of the very few scholars indeed who have made major contributions to the two areas of Greek literature most thoroughly traversed by centuries of classical scholarship: tragedy and Homeric epic. One of the most intriguing challenges of his stimulating and incisive book on Homer’s Iliad – Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (1992)––is its call to consider afresh the performability of that vast epic, and the practical conditions under which it may in fact have been performed. In ‘II. Performance: Epic’ Kelly and Murray continue this debate in complementary discussions that focus on the Odyssey rather than the Iliad. Murray takes up for that epic the very question Taplin had posed for the Iliad: what, on the available evidence, are the conditions of its performance? Taplin envisaged the Iliad at a large, inter-regional Panhellenic festival, spread over some three consecutive days of more or less continuous performance. Murray by contrast makes the case for the Odyssey as an epic designed for the entirely new and extremely intimate performance venue of the orientalizing

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5

symposium, and he proposes that the whole poem may have served as the entertainment for some forty such consecutive occasions. As so often in Greek culture, changes in performance practice mirror, and sometimes mould, changing historical, social, cultural, and political structures. Kelly is concerned rather with the representation of poetic performance within the heroic world of the epic, a subject on which Taplin has written eloquently in his contribution to his own edited Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (2000) (‘The Springs of the Muses: Homer and Related Poetry’). Kelly brings into sharp relief a paradox at the heart of the depiction of Odysseus in the epic. The hero is famously presented with the characteristics of a singer, himself apparently master of the narrative for a number of books that recount his travels from Troy; and yet this image is set at risk by the way that, in the second half of the poem, the tales this Odysseus-bard tells are all demonstrably false. Kelly suggests that a ‘Hesiodic’ paradigm comes competitively into play in this latter phase, and helps to resolve the apparent paradox. For, according to the Hesiodic model of poetic authority, personal experience and character are valued as authenticating rather than seen as undermining. This is in opposition to the more distanced method of Homeric bards, and of Homer himself, who systematically edit themselves out of the poetic process. Kelly may have unearthed the submerged traces of an antagonism in epic poetics that reflects genuine differences of performance style among those earliest of all Greek performers. Finally, Allan looks at the opening of the Iliad performance and argues that the point of the ‘will of Zeus’, debated since antiquity, is threefold: to underline the authority of the bard who, through the Muses, has access to Zeus’ all-comprehensive schemes; to embed the Iliadic narrative within the whole pool of heroic storytelling; and, in theological terms, to assert and substantiate Zeus’ superior power. * The tragedies of Aeschylus were the rich terrain upon which Taplin launched the performance studies ‘revolution’ in Classics in 1977, and he has returned to the poet on several occasions since. Note, for instance, his characteristically open-minded reappraisal of his earlier views on tragic metatheatre in the 1993 article on the ‘aetiology’ of tragedy in the Oresteia, and the illuminating perspective he has recently opened on the Persians as a composition that stakes the claims for tragedy in an implicit contest among genres for the title of the premier celebratory form for Greek military victory over the Persians in the 470s (the topic of generic mapping and self-definition is a key theme of Taplin’s thinking on drama). But it has been equally important for Taplin to take his Aeschylean expertise into a wider world: hence, for instance, the

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introduction to a new Japanese translation published in Tokyo in 1990, programme notes for a number of contemporary performances and adaptations, and above all the advice he has given some of the most celebrated poets, performers, and directors of the day. A dog-eared copy of Stagecraft was knocking around the floor of the rehearsal room for Peter Hall’s celebrated and influential production of the Oresteia at the National Theatre in 1981! In ‘III. Performance: Tragedy’ Easterling and Revermann enter into dialogue with Taplin’s seminal work on Aeschylus, while Csapo, Kavoulaki, and Zeitlin focus their attention on Euripides. Easterling combines close study of poetic language with a consideration of performance issues (a combination all too rare) in an analysis of how the Furies are presented in the Oresteia. The fruitful upshot of this combined approach is to advance our understanding of a central interpretative issue in the final play of the trilogy: do the Furies really change? Sensitivity to the performative dimension of the question allows us to see, for instance, how hints of the power and youthfulness of the young men dancing under the dark robes of the aged female Furies in the Eumenides––all the more apparent in performance––will have reinforced the claims made in the linguistic register that these are, paradoxically, youthful deities, in addition to being primordially ancient ones. Revermann studies the Eumenides as a test case for the cultural poetics of time and space. The play lends itself to this type of inquiry particularly well, because in this respect (as in others) it is significantly unlike all other preserved tragedy. A detailed analysis of how spatio-temporal categories are deployed (including in the presentation of the choral persona) suggests that the play consistently embeds the action within the past and the future, and achieves this by juxtaposing different conceptualizations of time and space. Such use of ‘composite time’ and ‘composite space’ results in a ‘composite reality’ which invests the play with a special ontological status. The vision of Athens as a functional democracy therefore becomes ‘transtemporal’ in that it is something which is, has been, and will be. Such use of chronotopes (= the relationship between time and space) is unique in preserved drama, and, Revermann argues, closely connected to the play’s functioning as a sustained aetiology. The ‘aetiological mode’ is used to magnify and authenticate the play’s vision. Finally, the question ‘why aetiology?’ is confronted, and the dramatic ‘aetiological mode’ is contrasted with the non-dramatic one. In his contribution Csapo examines the images of the ‘chorus of stars’, which is particularly prominent in late, especially late Euripidean, tragedy. Building on his earlier work which argued that there is a late fifth-century Dionysian revival which crucially informs, among other phenomena, New Music and through it tragic song (both choral and monodic), Csapo analyses in detail the occurrences of ‘star choruses’ in tragedy as well as the

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7

roots of ‘cosmic dance’ in Pythagorean and Orphic thought. The paper is part of a fundamental reassessment of cultural and religious politics in late fifth-century Athens: contrary to received opinion the late Euripides emerges not as the radically questioning sophist but as a prime exponent of a movement which seeks to restore the primordial Dionysian element, in both formal and material terms, to the performative arts. Kavoulaki examines how a play which is normally considered to be particularly Athenian, Euripides’ Hiketides, becomes universalist through the use of ritual frames. Focusing especially on the chorus, Kavoulaki demonstrates how ritual, both invoked and enacted, moves the play synchronically beyond its immediate Athenian context and diachronically into the present of the audience. It is above all the unified closural processional movement which articulates a beneficial and potentially transformative experience for the participating community, a phenomenon similar to, yet interestingly different from, the closure of the Oresteia. The important, but comparatively neglected, topic of children in Euripidean drama is taken up in Zeitlin’s contribution. She persuasively demonstrates that the onstage presence of children is motivated by far more intricate dynamics than a sheer increase of pathos. In particular, children often serve as foils which throw into relief the complexities, and contradictions, of their parents. This becomes especially transparent in the figures of Creusa, Hecuba, and Medea who embody the ambivalence associated in the Greek cultural imaginary with women in general: here one and the same female is both beneficially nurturant and perilously destructive, a paradox which underlies many representations of women in tragedy. Zeitlin, however, resists tendencies to establish a linear connection between the increasing prominence of children on the Attic stage and the dire realities of war-torn Athens towards the end of the fifth century. Instead, she draws attention to how emotionality itself becomes a more and more valid, and powerful, means of dramatic expression. Finally, in his paper on characterization in tragedy Seidensticker reminds us that the formal features and conventions of this highly stylized art form–– many of them thoroughly performative in nature––are far from being at odds with the possibility of nuanced individualized characterization and the enactment of interiority. * From the very start, comedy exerted a profound influence on Taplin’s thinking about tragedy, even if the influence may be less obvious initially and is often one of polar opposition. Fundamental observations on comedy are woven into the fabric of the Stagecraft book of 1977. Taplin’s second article,

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a meticulous and groundbreaking analysis of silence in tragedy and its particular association with Aeschylus, takes as its starting point Aristophanes’ lampooning of Aeschylean gravitas in Frogs. The above-mentioned note on trygedy (1983) has far-reaching implications for the self-conceptualization of (Aristophanic) comedy, and in some important ways paves the way for the landmark macroscopic comparison of tragedy and comedy (published in 1986) which, as we noted earlier, continues to stimulate fruitful debate, not least in the present volume, more than twenty years on. The most clearly flagged connections with comedy, however, were established via a (then) unconventional route, which is part of the reason why this specific area of Taplin’s oeuvre is one of particularly innovative thinking. Iconography, of minor importance in Taplin’s earlier work, caught his sustained attention in the mid-80s when he and Eric Csapo were the first to connect a freshly published South Italian vase from the early fourth century, the ‘Würzburg Telephus’, with a specific scene from Attic comedy, Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria, which was first performed in Athens in 411. This crucial piece of new evidence gave a different level of credence and material underpinning to a thesis advanced by T.B.L. Webster in 1948 which postulated that at least some theatre iconography produced in South Italy was not inspired by local tradition but, indeed, by Attic drama. With this new key domino in play, Taplin redefined the game board, combining the ‘literary’ and the ‘contextual’ perspective. Not only does Comic Angels (1993) show the honorand’s characteristically keen eye for detail and articulate fairness in presenting and weighing evidence. More than that, the monograph has reshaped scholars’ perception not just of comedy but of Attic drama in general. How and why did drama travel? How are meanings affected by recontextualization? How Athenian and how Panhellenic is this mobile art form? How do iconography and performance interact, and are there genre-specific dynamics? How do comic and tragic iconography relate to each other? Last but certainly not least, Comic Angels bears the true hallmark of a groundbreaking work in that it initiates a paradigm change by posing more questions––and fascinating ones at that––than it answers. The contributions on comedy in the present volume pick up on Taplin’s interests from two angles. Brown’s detailed analysis of doorkeeper scenes in Aristophanes is a classic instantiation of methods prevalent in Taplin’s early work, while iconography and its contribution towards reconstructing the visual dimension of comedy loom large in Wiles’s wide-ranging observations on masks in Old Comedy. But all the authors in the subsequent section ‘V. Performance: Iconography’ also engage with Taplin’s work in the area, notably tragedy-related iconography which is the focus of Taplin’s most recent monograph Pots and Plays (2007).

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Osborne approaches theatre iconography from the perspective of the historian of material culture, engaging in a refreshing and stimulating way with questions that are of central importance to Pots and Plays. Rather than, as is usually done, comparing theatre-related pots with each other, Osborne shifts the focus by situating these paintings within individual painters’ whole repertories of iconographic choices. This change of perspective enables him to look at familiar questions from novel angles. Thus the near absence of dramatic scenes on Athenian red-figure pots is explained as a deliberate choice of painters (and, ultimately, viewers) to keep the field of reference imaginatively fluid rather than historically manifest. Art is ‘good to think with’, and is used as a vehicle for offering paradigms (often in the form of fantastic displacements). Similarly, the presence of theatre-related iconography on South Italian and Sicilian pots is the product of deliberate choice by some local schools at different times, motivated by the desire to challenge and engage the viewer who is now forced to create contexts of interpretation. Moreno introduces a body of material and visual evidence for theatrical culture that is almost entirely unknown outside specialist circles: gems and finger rings used as seals that bear imagery of theatrical inspiration. These relatively cheap and plentiful objects provide a sizeable body of evidence for the way in which artists other than vase painters responded to their society’s experience of and persistent interest in theatre. Moreno builds on Taplin’s central insight that dramatic artists were fundamentally visual artists, to ask whether these gems and finger rings have a similar relationship to drama as that which Taplin has demonstrated for vases. One of the intriguing characteristics of this evidence highlighted by Moreno is its affinity, through function, with a key theme of drama, that of recognition. In his contribution Lissarrague picks up on Taplin’s attentiveness to the visual markers or ‘signals’ in vase imagery through which the painter is interacting with another visual artist, the poet. Like Taplin, Lissarrague rejects the notion that the iconographic register is simply an illustration of the theatrical, but neither does he insist on its complete autonomy from other artistic media. In a close examination of several vases, Lissarrague suggests ways in which we may expand the repertory of these signals of iconographic interaction, looking for instance at the deployment of masks and mirrors. * ‘Each age can turn to it [i.e. Ancient Greece] to reflect its own priorities, its own preoccupations, and find guidance in the particular things that they are searching for enlightenment in. What we have, then, is not one huge monument that always looks the same wherever you look at it from and from

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Introduction

whatever time you look at it, but something shifting . . . Each age will perceive it differently, each age will derive different things from it.’ When Taplin said this in an interview during the first sequence of the TV series ‘Greek Fire’ (aired in Britain in 1990, and subsequently in a number of other countries), a series for which he was acting as the principal consultant, reception studies in Classics was not the enormous industry that it has turned into by the beginning of the twenty-first century. The cultural relevance of ancient Greece, and of ancient culture in general, has been of never-ceasing interest and concern to Taplin (not least reflected in his lifelong affection for, and profound knowledge of, the modern country, its people, and their language). That and how Greece matters is a persistent theme especially in his non-academic writings (a very important part of his work which, as mentioned above, is not represented in the present volume). Taplin is, without question, one of the scholars who have been thinking not just longest but also hardest about issues to do with reception. And because of his energetic and committed policy of ‘outreach’––be it with schools, theatre practitioners, or on TV––he, of all people, has arguably invested most into the cause as an individual. The depth and scope of this engagement with the question of relevance is reflected in the quality of Taplin’s published academic work in this area. He has, in fact, been a leading pioneer in this growth area of classical studies that crosses numerous borders of time and discipline, expands the traditional boundaries of the subject and, very often, is especially sensitive to the active role played by classical drama at critical moments in the wider political and cultural stories of particularly significant periods and places in the modern, pre- and postmodern worlds. He was a central figure in the introduction of the field to the undergraduate syllabus at the University of Oxford, through the creation of a joint degree in Classics and English which has since become acknowledged as the best-integrated course of its kind in the world. In 1996 he also became the joint founder and co-director, with Edith Hall, of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (the APGRD) at the University of Oxford. This highly successful and productive research enterprise––truly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary in outlook–– has in its relatively short life generated an impressive number of volumes of research and organized numerous conferences, lectures, and other events, as well as amassing the most important collection of evidence relating to the reperformance of classical drama since the Renaissance. In addition to which we should note his role as joint founder of the European Network for the Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama; his various translations and adaptations of classical literature for publication and performance; collaborations with major contemporary poets and other artists working

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within––and sometimes against––the (broadly conceived) classical tradition; and, most recently, his role in bringing leading international performance artists to the University of Oxford through the Onassis Programme for the Performance of Greek Drama. Goldhill, the first contributor in the final part of the volume: ‘VI. Performance: Reception’, treats an extremely difficult chapter in the history of the modern uses of Hellenism: the hitherto largely ignored connection between Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his famous, obsessive, Hellenism, focused as it was so intently on Aeschylean tragedy. Built around a close performance analysis of two productions of the Ring in Bayreuth–– the first under the direction of Richard Wagner in 1876, the second by his grandson Wieland in 1951––Goldhill shows how the change of performance styles masks a chilling attempt to depoliticize and denazify Bayreuth by ‘Hellenizing’ the later production, involving in the process the authority of one of Germany’s leading academic Hellenists in support. But he also shows that one reason the anti-Semitism of Wagner senior has been masked in the reception of his Ring is the fact of the original production’s lack of overt association with Hellenism. Yet that Hellenism was central to his theatrical ideals, as it was also integral to his trenchant nationalism. The appropriation of Greek theatre by the Nazis is the topic of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s contribution. Her analysis focuses on Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Not only does she demonstrate how this production could be taken to mirror the Nazis’ perception of Germany rising from the defeat of World War I through the ‘humiliation’ of the Versailles Treaty and the failed Weimar Republic to the ‘redemption’ by the National Socialist movement. More than that, FischerLichte breaks new ground by exploring the neglected link between Greek drama and the so-called Thingspiel movement which, in venues that deliberately echoed Greek theatre architecture, dramatized events of (mostly) recent German history on a monumental scale (often with hundreds, even thousands, of performers). Honouring Taplin’s considerable record of achievement in the area, the section, and the volume, is concluded by contributions from two of Taplin’s closest collaborators at the APGRD, Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh. Hall concentrates on an intriguing facet of the rich cultural history of the Odyssey: its appropriations in dramatic format, notably tragedy (a topic which chimes excellently with a current project of Taplin’s, a dramatic rendering of the Iliad in the format of a trilogy). Starting with the sombre reading of the Odyssey by Horkheimer and Adorno in the apocalyptic final years of World War II, Hall embarks on a journey spanning twenty-five centuries, from Aeschylus to Walcott and Mnouchkine. She discusses the inherent theatricality of the

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epic (particularly manifest in the figures of the protagonist, Proteus, and, not least, Athena) and explores the appropriation of Odyssey material, and the presentation of its (non-Athenian) hero as the archetypal survivor, in the three dramatic genres of fifth-century Athens and (far) beyond. Hall continually stresses the inherently untragic nature of the hero who invariably prevails and does not kill kin. Darker readings of this success story are the preserve of modernity (especially under Freudian influence) and require radical changes to the epic and the psyche of its hero. Macintosh examines a topic of particular significance for Taplin’s current work, that of translation. By carefully tracing and contextualizing the genesis and stage (or screen) history of Yeats’s translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus Macintosh leads us right into core of this play’s fascinating history of performance reception in the twentieth century. Yeats’s Oedipus, she argues, is a prime catalyst for the creation of the Modernist Oedipus, conceptualized either along the lines of Freudianism or those of the Cambridge ritualists. That said, the translation outlasts these Modernist appropriations because of its universalist features (notably the suppression of a Theban context) and the sheer craftsmanship and spellbinding power of its minimalist approach to rendering Sophoclean language. Macintosh’s profound and far-reaching observations on the continued inspirational power of Sophoclean drama provide a fitting closure to this volume, looking both into the past and into the future of the honorand’s work. Sophocles was the subject of Taplin’s first article in 1971 (on the Philoctetes, a play he has always particularly valued). This playwright has also been a preferred lecture topic throughout the honorand’s long and highly successful teaching career. And currently he is preparing a translation of all Sophoclean plays for the Oxford World’s Classics series. This translation, to be sure, will be everything that has characterized the honorand’s voice for all these years: empathetic, deep, creative, eloquent, and distinct.

Part I Performance: Explorations

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1 Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens Helene P. Foley

Oliver Taplin has argued that during the fifth-century heyday of Attic tragedy and Old Comedy, the period from around 440 to 415 bce, the two genres ‘to a considerable degree’ helped ‘to define each other by their opposition and their reluctance to overlap.’1 Tragedy from the beginning contained comic elements that often served to enhance tragic tension, and comedy parodied and borrowed from serious literature, including tragedy. But comedy more persistently invited laughter and tragedy, pity for suffering. Most importantly, Taplin argues, the two genres maintained a different relation to the world of the audience. Tragedy eschewed metatheatre and direct address to the audience, while comedy revelled in it. The comic parabasis even allowed a poet to illuminate and defend his own art. Tragedy largely avoided topical allusions after Aeschylus’ Persians and Eumenides, whereas comedy pointed repeatedly to contemporary social and political reality. Tragedy could use disguise, but did not flaunt its duplicity and transparency. It (though not the satyr plays performed with it) maintained a high level of decorum and refused to display physical violence. Its masks were blank and its costumes discreetly covered the body. Comedy, with its ugly masks, padded costumes, exaggerated sexual organs, and sexual and scatological jokes, rejoiced in indignities. Comedy revelled in props, whereas tragedy used them with restraint. Comedy’s choruses during this period tended to be more active, and, at least initially, oppositional. Tragedy’s gods were inhuman and distant, comedy’s all too human. Though tragedy could end with a positive reversal, comedy’s endings, which brought a much more loosely structured drama to a close, were largely more celebratory and less open and ambiguous.2

1

Taplin, (1986) 164. See also Taplin (1996), with reply by Gredley (1996). Recent scholarship, too extensive to cite here, has increasingly emphasized the open and ambiguous endings of both genres. 2

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Although one might want to qualify in various ways the generic differences that Taplin identified, especially towards the end of this period (or before it began), other scholars have not in the general sense challenged his broader generalizations. Nevertheless, few would currently disagree that the last quarter of the fifth century3 begins to mark a period of cross-generic responsiveness. During the Peloponnesian War comedy was apparently performed at the City Dionysia directly after three tragedies and a satyr play by one poet, a structure that may have encouraged comedy to engage more directly with the other genre (and vice versa).4 From 425 bce, Aristophanes’ extant comedies Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs (and to a much lesser extent Peace) all make Euripides and his plays a central issue, but other lost plays, such as Aristophanes’ Phoenissae and a number toward the end of the century by Strattis, may have been burlesques of an entire tragedy.5 Comedy begins very gradually to back off from abusive political satire and become less pointedly topical and aggressively sexual, although ad hominem attacks continued to define the genre as late as Menander’s contemporary Timocles.6 Instead, the ever popular mythological burlesque flourished and expanded,7 thereby leaving open a continued dialogue with tragedy and satyr play. At least some comic plots began to consolidate a trend, perhaps inaugurated as early as Crates, to imitate tragedy by becoming tighter and less episodic (Arist., Poet. 1449b5–9). Domestic themes emerged as early as the comedies of Crates, Phrynichus, and Cratinus, but precisely how Menander’s bourgeois comedy, which borrowed rapes, exposed infants, climactic recognitions, and fortunate reversals, as well as adapted related themes and even scenes from tragedy (see, even in Antiquity, Satyrus, Life of Euripides, P Oxy. 1176.10, fr. 39 vi), emerged in so dominant a role remains uncertain.8 The increasing internationalism of Greek drama (which began as early as Aeschylus), a growing book trade, and a decreasing tolerance for political abuse even in democratic Athens may all have played a role in establishing a preference for

3 A partial exception is Wright (2005). I would date the shift as least as early as 425, our first extant example of comic paratragedy in Aristophanes’ Acharnians. 4 Bowie (2000), 321 suggests that comedies based on myth invited comedy into the same Panhellenic sphere as tragedy and satyr play. 5 Bowie (2000). 6 Csapo (2000), 119–20. 7 See especially Arnott (1972), Nesselrath (1990 and 1995), Bowie (2000), Csapo (2000), 118. Among others, Porter (1999–2000) and Sommerstein (1992) 14 discuss Menander’s use of Euripides. 8 Henderson (1995), 183, Csapo (2000), 118–19, Lowe (2000), 268 f. Csapo in particular stresses a gradual change in which themes and styles present from the fifth century gradually gave way to a different set of dominant styles by the end of the fourth.

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a more ethical style of comedy that exploited increasingly typical characters and plots.9 On the other side, tragedy, satyr play, and when it became part of the dramatic festivals, comedy, apparently shared some plots and themes from the start that offered potential for intergeneric overlap. Aeschylus’ plays contained not only comic relief from low-life characters like the Nurse of Libation Bearers, but, as both C. J. Herington and Alan Sommerstein have argued, language and other dramatic features, most demonstrably in Eumenides, that it shared with comedy.10 As early as 438, Euripides’ Alcestis experimented with a mix of tragedy and satyr play. Both comic paratragedy and Aeschylean revivals may have encouraged Euripides to dabble in increasingly selfconscious allusions to earlier tragedy (Euripides’ most pointed allusions to earlier tragedy that we can identify respond to Aeschylus, perhaps in part because the earlier poet’s ‘canonical’ drama treated generic boundaries less strictly), to make indirect comments on dramatic form, and to include scenes that could arguably be said to aim at laughter, shocking juxtapositions of absurdity with the serious, or even mockery, rather than the enhancement of tragic tension, pity, fear, or suffering. In this paper, I take for granted that a loosening of generic boundaries occurred in late fifth-century Athens. Tragedy survived, satyr play gradually disappeared, and comedy slowly evolved into something different; even if we cannot locate all the stages of these dramatic transitions, it would be counterintuitive to deny their historical reality. Instead, I want, following up on Taplin, to attempt a brief synthesis that highlights and examines developments that may have set in motion increased generic interplay in the last quarter of the fifth century.

A R I S TO PH A N E S A N D T R AG E DY Aristophanes’ career offers unusually explicit evidence for following these developments. Exploitation of Euripides became a signature theme for Aristophanes, even in the eyes of his fellow comic poets. A fragment of Cratinus explicitly mocked Aristophanes for his habit of imitating Euripides: ‘Who are you, some clever spectator might ask? An overly refined, epigrammatical (idea-coining), euripidaristophanizer.’ (τ δ σ; κοµψ τι ροιτο θεατ . | πολεπτολγο, γνωµοδικτη, εριπιδαριστοφανζων fr. 307 K, 9 10

See, with further bibliography, Csapo (2000), 125–33. Herington (1963) and Sommerstein (1992).

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342 K-A).11 Yes, Aristophanes admits in a fragment preserved in a scholion to Plato (488 K-A, 471 K, schol. Areth. [B] Pl., Ap. 19c; Plut. Quomodo adul. 30d) which comments that the comic poet mocked but imitated the tragedian: ‘I use his terseness/compactness/well-roundedness of style (lit., the terseness of his mouth), but I make minds less pedestrian (α#γοραου, see Eur. frag. 1114K) than his.’ (χρ%µαι γα`ρ ατο& το& στµατο τ' στρογγλ(, | το) νο& δ’ α#γοραου *ττον + ’κε,νο ποι%.) This last remark, coming from a comic poet, declares a remarkable stylistic warfare, since, generically speaking, comedy was more amenable to the agoraion than tragedy. Both quotes offer a potential explanation for Aristophanes’ developing an in the end historically critical (for comedy) penchant for tragedy;12 in so far as we know, parody of epic and other archaic Greek poetry predominated until the 420s and Aristophanes was very likely one of the first to shift his focus to the rival genre, and probably the first to do so obsessively.13 Above all in his parabases, but in Acharnians and Wasps also through his characters, Aristophanes constructs in his first five extant plays a poetic biography that apparently bears some relation to historical reality. We know which of these plays won and when, and the poet’s references to success and failure are real. These early plays uniquely offer artistic and other motives and justifications for Aristophanes’ dramatic agendas that no longer appear either in the poet’s voice in his later plays, or in our other comic fragments to the same degree.14 Comic competition makes a repeated appearance in the parabases of Aristophanes’ and other old comedies (and sometimes elsewhere in the plays): positive claims to novelty, subtle technique and laborious artistry, and good pacing are balanced against critical remarks about

11 With Kock, Kassel-Austin, and others, I assume a full stop after θεατ . Otherwise, as Ruffell (2002), 160 (followed by Revermann (2006a), 102, n. 9) suggests, the spectator is the euripidaristophanizer. This seems less likely, given the pervasive self-consciousness of comic poets about poetic borrowing and collaboration. 12 Lowe (2000), 267 suggests that the ‘rivalry with tragedy is what prompts the final step in comedy’s invention of fiction’ towards the end of the fifth century, with its flowering of paratragedy. He sees paratragedy as fatal to Old Comedy (268–9). 13 See esp. Silk (1993), 477 and (2000), 310, Bowie (2000), 327, and Lowe (2000), 268, Revermann (2006a), 71 and 101–6. Epicharmus and perhaps Cratinus’ Eumenides, Phrynichus’ Tragedians and Muses, and Hermippus’ Agamemnon may have offered early examples. Only Aristophanes and later Strattis seem to have focused so strongly on tragedy in the fifth century. Revermann (2006a), 104 suggests that tragedy offered Aristophanes a greater source of selfaffirmation; Cratinus’ paramythical comedy was more wide-ranging. Bowie suggests that Thesmophoriazusae of 411 provoked the increase in comedies focused on tragedy. 14 Sifakis (1971), Hubbard (1991), Sommerstein (1992). Hubbard, p. 156, argues that once Cleon is removed and Aristophanes’ poetic identity is established he can abandon his early autobiographical parabatic style. Dobrov (1995a) suggests that mythological plays no longer needed the poet’s voice in the same way as the political ones.

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plagiarism, hackneyed jokes, and slapdash vulgarity.15 In what remains to us, Aristophanes alone offers extravagant self-praise for his own value to the polis, defends himself against the demagogue Cleon’s (apparently literal) attacks for his political abuse, and pointedly explores his intellectual ambitions for his own oeuvre.16 Tragedy seems to have played an increasingly central and varied role in this agenda. What I want to examine more closely is how and why. In the parabasis of Knights, Aristophanes contrasted the unsubtle (but by implication forceful) flood of Cratinus’ iambic and Archilochean-inspired satire (525–30) with the artistry of the dry Crates, whose (sometimes overly) subtle and less appreciated ideas (537–9) perhaps derived originally (see Aristotle above) from Sicilian comedy. Aristophanes himself explicitly struggled to create a comedy/comic style somewhere in between these two. The second Clouds parabasis expresses his disappointment with the intelligent (σοφο, 525, δεξιο 520, 526) members of his audience for not appreciating his most intellectual (σοφτατ’ 522) and laboriously worked comedy to date. He here characterizes his own plays as clever (δεξια´), full of new (καινα´) ideas––original, if plagiarized, though crudely, by others (547–59). He compares himself to a virgin who had exposed his poetic child since he was still unmarried (a typically tragic plot device) and an Electra who sought recognition from the audience just as the heroine recognized her brother’s hair (530–2).17 Here as so often elsewhere, he borrows from tragedy to underline his claim to comic subtlety, but recognizes he cannot succeed through subtlety alone. After the failure of Clouds, Aristophanes’ comedy claims to please his fickle, if potentially receptive, audience with a mixture. As he describes the plot of Wasps: ‘No, what we’ve got is just a little story, but one that makes sense. Not more intellectual than you are yourselves, but cleverer than vulgar low comedy’ (64–6).18 By the time of Frogs, however, he introduces the tragic contest between Aeschylus and Euripides with the claim that his audience has a positive taste for sophisticated ideas (1109–18): If what you’re frightened of is that there may be some slow-wittedness 15

Sifakis (1971). Sommerstein (1992) stresses Aristophanes’ apparent originality in these respects. Sifakis (1971) 63, 66 notes some reluctance toward self-praise in the comic fragments. Self-mockery is also an element in parabases. 17 Revermann (2006a), 226–35 argues for a strong paratragic colouring in the final scene of Clouds. Even here, tragic modes help to articulate, perhaps better than in the first version of Clouds, Aristophanes’ dramaturgy. 18 Both translations are from Sommerstein’s editions. See further Sommerstein (1992), 26 and (1996), 255–6 and Revermann (2006b), esp. 119–20 on the Frogs passages about the audience. 16

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Helene P. Foley in the audience, so they may not understand the subtle things you say, don’t be apprehensive, because things aren’t like that anymore. . . . every one of them has a book and understands intellectual ideas.

This same play asserts with new authority (discussed below) comedy’s claim to include both the serious and the comic. Aristophanes explicitly and repeatedly aims, then, to expand the range of both his comedy and his audience, to defeat his rivals, and to establish the value of comedy to the city. Why did tragedy successfully facilitate, apparently more than anything else, this claim to growing confidence in the sophistication of both the poet’s own work and his audience? Aristophanes had successfully introduced to comedy at least one novel topic unrelated to tragedy, even if philosophical comedy failed in Clouds. He apparently created the first demogogue comedy in Knights, but then abandoned this highly successful venture to others.19 Later more general political comedies built on utopian schemes, such as Birds, Ecclesiazusae, and even Plutus, continue apace but did not expand the intellectual and creative range of Aristophanes’ comedy to the same degree as plays exploiting tragedy.20 The parabases of Knights, Clouds, Wasps, and Peace and a number of comic fragments, however, make visible a chain of direct and fierce competition concerning topics shared among contemporary comic playwrights.21 The turn to engaging more extensively with tragedy had one initial advantage: generically speaking, tragedy could not fight back explicitly and fellow comedians were no longer a direct target. At the same time, incorporating an already sophisticated, familiar, and prestigious genre offered opportunities to expand the range of comedy not only intellectually and thematically, but performatively, since it was presented in the same festal context. Note that Acharnians deployed tragedy to win first prize, whereas Clouds’ appropriation of sophistry and ‘science’, topics less immediately available to the full

19

Sommerstein (2000). Despite extensive, subtle variation in the treatment of utopian themes in Old Comedy and in Aristophanes himself––see esp. Ruffell (2000)––these plays apparently did not produce the same long term generic effects as comedies responding to tragedy, partly because the theme was established from an early date as an area of intrageneric competition. 21 See especially Heath (1990), Sidwell (1994) and (1995), Biles (2002) and Ruffell (2002); see also Halliwell (1989). There is evidence that Golden Age plays––Ruffell (2002), 141––and Hyperbolus plays directly respond to earlier versions. Ruffell, p. 162 suggests that Aristophanes abandoned demagogue comedy after Knights in response to Cratinus’ brilliant intertextual response in Pytine. 20

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range of members of his audience, apparently proved too subtle and outrageous.22 Studies of parody and paratragedy have made clear that comic ‘refunctioning of preformed literary material’23 can serve many purposes: incongruous juxtapositions, ironic inversions, repetition to create critical distance, pointed contradictions and illogicalities, satire and mockery, avoidance of censorship, subversion of hierarchy, more neutral forms of intertextuality, or examinations of the role of imitation and representation.24 Parody flourishes, Michelle Hanoosh argues, in democratic, culturally sophisticated societies.25 It has often served to transform and redefine genres and make them more selfconscious and sophisticated. Aristophanes’ extant oeuvre shows an increasing awareness of the possibilities of incorporating tragedy into comedy that also serves to collapse generic boundaries and to expand and modify comedy’s range over time. In Acharnians, as I have argued elsewhere,26 Aristophanes pretends to use tragedy above all to defend, define, and enhance the prestige and politics of comedy. The play’s protagonist, Dikaiopolis, with whom the poet explicitly identifies himself at one point (377–82),27 borrows and manipulates the role, speech, and plot of Euripides’ Telephus in order to defend himself against charges of treason because, fed up with the Athenian assembly, the comic hero has made his own separate peace with the Spartans. Once he wins over the chorus, however, the hero drops his tragic role, proclaims himself a patriot, and wins an explicitly comic victory that contrasts with the ‘tragic’ failure of his opponent, the general Lamachus, who falls victim to the lameness of Euripides’ Telephus in a mock battle described in a hilarious pseudo-tragic messenger speech. Aristophanes pronounces Dikaiopolis’ new creation a τρυγ(δα, or κωµ(δα with a Dionysiac tragic accent, that enables the poet to claim that comedy itself also (or even comedy) knows justice

22 Bremer (1993) also identifies an attempt by Aristophanes to upgrade comedy through borrowing from earlier lyric. 23 Rose (1979). 24 See especially Rose (1979), Hutcheon (1985), Goldhill (1991), and Ruffell (2002), 140. In this paper I shall with Pucci (1961) use paratragedy to refer to comic appropriation of plots, stage devices, and lines with noticeably tragic diction, and parody for caricature of tragic lines and style, even if this distinction does not correspond to ancient usage (for which, see the works cited above). 25 Hanoosh (1989). 26 Foley (1988), with earlier bibliography; see also, among others, Goldhill (1991). 27 See esp. Goldhill (1991), 191–3, 195 f., and 200 on this ‘identification’ and the ambiguous claims made for comedy through tragic borrowing.

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(499–500).28 In fact, Aristophanes’ here very limited (in both range and quantity) borrowing from tragedy consists of ‘pathos-inducing’ props that did not exist, at least in the same form, in Euripides’ original; a mangled, reduced version of Euripides’ plot; and ‘phraselets’ from one tragic speech.29 In Wasps, Aristophanes again explicitly identified himself with the strategy of his hero Bdelycleon (650–1), who cleverly cures his father of an addiction to convicting defendants in the law courts, but cannot refine him in the second half of the play, where the incorrigible old man makes a mockery of a private symposium. This play again invites the audience to read Aristophanes’ plot as contrasting two kinds of comic style. In a sense, like the comic poet Cratinus in his Pytine, whom he is probably imitating here,30 Aristophanes’ comedy, however clever, cannot and does not really want to give up on its appealing Dionysiac outrageousness in favour of greater artistic subtlety (as in Clouds), especially because his fickle audience loves the former. The two halves of Wasps, a clever intellectual scheme linked with the poet and a display of cruder comic excess, remain in a contradictory or uneasy relation to each other, however.31 Hence, in Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes once again turns to tragedy as a promising and more integrated way of having his cake and eating it too. Here tragedy still serves, as in Acharnians, to enhance comedy’s freedom of speech and inventive dramaturgy, if not its politics,32 and to fall victim to the rival genre. But it also implicates comedy and tragedy in a far deeper shared competitive game: tragic, satiric, and comic plots already shared in deploying deception, intrigue, disguise, and escape.33 Aristophanes also appropriates, probably for the first time in comedy, tragedy’s expansive treatment of women on stage along with Euripides’ signature theme of forcing male characters to learn from female experience by symbolically sharing in it (see Hippolytus, Alcestis, and Helen).34 On the one 28 Taplin (1983) suggests that among other uses of trug- terms in Aristophanes to describe comedy, at least three (Ach. 886, Nub. 296, frag. 156.9 K-A) and possibly three others (Ach. 628, Vesp. 650 and 1537) may allude to tragedy (see also frag. 347 K-A). The use of this term instead of komôidia suggests an effort to create an expanded identity for the comic genre. 29 Peace borrows Euripides’ Bellerophon as Trygaios mounts his dung beetle (his comic Pegasus) in pseudo-heroic style to fly to heaven, but this paratragedy technically breaks no new ground. 30 31 See n. 21 above. See Hubbard (1991) 114. 32 The fraught political situation in 411, the probable date of the play, no doubt discouraged overt politics. 33 See most recently Wright (2005), with his detailed discussion of Euripides’ ‘escape tragedies.’ 34 See Henderson (1996), 96–7 and (2000), 136–7 on Aristophanes’ novel women plays and Foley (1992) and Zeitlin (1996) on Euripides. Note that Lysistrata, Aristophanes hints (Lys. 1124), derives some of the wisdom she deploys to tame her over-sexed compatriots from Euripides’ Wise Melanippe (frag. 483).

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hand, this novel appropriation, as in Acharnians, highlights comedy’s licence. Euripides is on trial for misogyny and threatened with punishment by the city’s women. However ‘immoral’ the behaviour of Euripides’ heroines, the speech that Euripides’ disguised relative makes in the tragic poet’s defence to the women’s assembly exposes female iniquities such as Euripides could never even have dreamed of (466–520). Even Euripides’ turn to recent dramas featuring virtuous women, Helen and Andromeda, makes no impression on the play’s internal audiences. Euripides must promise reform (combined with a threat to reveal the truth about women if they continue to pursue him) and succeeds only by borrowing a comic device. Aristophanes himself, despite having his women offer a (pointedly contradictory) self-defence in the parabasis (785–845) and a return in lyrics to their proper festal role (947–1000, 1136–59), makes no such promise; and plays such as Lysistrata, presented in the same year, and the later Ecclesiazusae, continue to juxtapose with impunity clever heroines of the kind for which Euripides was perhaps notorious and bawdy, sexually rapacious women. Furthermore, in borrowing Euripides’ Telephus once again without explicitly saying so, Aristophanes also outrageously travesties the conventions of tragic suppliant scenes by having his suppliant sacrifice his hostage and offer its blood (wine) up for drinking. Euripides’ relative similarly misuses altar tablets in trying to misplay Euripides’ Palamedes. Finally, for those members of the audience who had seen Helen and Andromeda the previous year, Aristophanes aborts Euripides’ escape tragedies by bringing tragedy face to face with its need to establish dramatic illusion.35 Comedy achieves its goals precisely by violating these limits and making a dramatic success out of botching tragic plots, but now in a series of novel, virtuosic ways. I offer here but a few examples. According to Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (581–2), speed is a critical comic technique. Thesmophoriazusae fast-forwards Euripides’ plot in Helen from a snatch of a prologue and a collapsing of bits of a scene with Teucer (a scene almost unnecessary to Euripides’ plot) into the arrival of a ragged Menelaus that moves almost instantly to a grotesque (comic old men pretending to be tragic lovers) embrace/escape attempt. Comedy thus manages to comment on Euripides’ less than tragic, extended manipulation of a recognition/escape theme. (Euripides’ Menelaus, whose dignity is already undercut by the more sombre Teucer scene, initially resists the recognition and the escape plans. Aristophanes’ lovers are all too eager. For escape scenes in comedy, see the start of Aristophanes’ Wasps). By merging the tragedy’s priestess Theonoe 35 On parody and paratragedy in these plays, see especially Pucci (1961), Rau (1967), Zeitlin (1981), Sommerstein (1994), and Austin and Olson (2004).

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with a portress, Aristophanes’ Theonoe/Critylla becomes a blocking figure (as the portress almost comically was in the original) rather than a facilitator.36 The tragic Helen’s novel and unusual (especially if she changes her mask) device of adopting the role of a lamenting wife, with cut hair and lacerated cheeks, become the relative’s embarrassment over the crude shave necessitated by his female disguise (903). All these moves exploit not only a contrast between comic and tragic representation, but (perhaps all too) shared dramatic devices. In this play, then, comedy moves closer than before to intertwining as well as competing with tragedy. Aristophanes builds virtually an entire play on a tragic poet’s sophisticated novelties without confronting his artistic dependence on him––always a tricky problem for the comic imitator of serious genres, who implicitly acknowledges the power of the imitated text by appropriating it.37 Although comedy here celebrates its superior dramatic freedom and self-consciousness, there is in fact little parodic mockery of Euripides’ plays. If anything, comedy makes tragedy visibly serve its own less circumscribed agenda, which is far more outrageous than that of any of the tragic originals. Above all, however, it enables comedy to engage both verbally and performatively with the complex question of dramatic representation and imitation (mimêsis). This goal is enhanced by the one sophisticated verbal parody of the play, that of Agathon’s lyrics, although the theme of imitation in this scene descends rapidly into jokes about the tragedian’s gender. Once again, tragedy increases comedy’s ability to engage with more subtle, multilayered (because partly shared) questions/performance issues. As Thomas Hubbard has pointed out,38 the structure of Frogs sets up an implicit contrast between comedy and tragedy that eventually promotes the status of Aristophanes’ comedy. The play reverses the structure of Wasps to a similar, but now more complex, and in the end more integrated purpose. In the first half of the play Dionysus, god of theatre may be journeying to the underworld in order to bring back Euripides, a playwright who provokes delicious longings in him, but the action begins with the need to avoid stale comic jokes, which are promptly repeated: a typically buffoonish Dionysus, a comic animal chorus of Frogs with whom the god competes in song, and a scene in which the god and his slave are shown to be all too similar to each other. This section of the play is stereotypically comic in flavour, and makes

36 See Segal (1995), 54 on Euripides’ blocking figures and their descendants in New Comedy. Blocking figures are common in comedy. 37 See n. 24 above. 38 Hubbard (1991), 201, 218–19. He sees the play as reconciling the lower and higher purposes of comedy.

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no pretence at the kind of sophisticated, intellectual comedy that Aristophanes had claimed as a goal in the past. The second chorus of mystery initiates, however, begins to establish a new direction with their entrance song. The chorus, initiates in the ‘rites of bull-eating Cratinus’ (357), proclaim the civic value of satire performed in the ancestral rites of Dionysus, and celebrate their ability to rid the city of those who fan strife for private advantage, take bribes, unjustly collect taxes, and so forth. This chorus, making a claim reminiscent of that made for τρυγ(δα in Acharnians, will say many laughable (γ.λοια) and many serious (σπουδα,α) things while they sport and mock in a manner appropriate to Demeter’s festival (390–4). Out of this mixture of the serious and the comic, the play generates a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides that for the first time that we know of explores at length the function of tragedy (rather than, as often, comedy) in the city. Aeschylus is represented as generating martial spirit, and Euripides radical democracy, new gods, and immorality.39 As Kenneth Dover suggests, some possibly earlier comic fragments indicate an interest in the communal and artistic role of tragic poets.40 Performance at the City Dionysia probably implied for the audience a political and religious function for drama; archaic epic clearly played a role in the city’s educational system; contemporary audiences may have begun to develop their own informal standards for judging drama. Nevertheless, the discussion of both dramatic nouthesia and sophia/dexiotês/technê (admonition and poetic skill) in Frogs seems likely to have originated within the comic tradition41 and comedy, highlighting its long-proclaimed substantial role, thus draws tragedy more pointedly than before into a shared sphere (although in so far as we know from Aristophanes

39 Although Aristophanes repeatedly lays claim to a communal, didactic role for comedy, Seven Against Thebes’ ambivalent treatment of a fratricidal war and Persians’ sympathy for the enemy hardly instilled martial valour in any simple sense (even Dionysus scoffs at the claim, 1036–8); nor did Euripides’ inconclusive debates aim to teach the whole democracy to be clever speakers in the manner of a sophist. Comedy’s ‘teaching’ is in any case hard to pin down, but tragic imitation and tragic politics were never so direct. Having Dionysus finally choose between the poets over political rather than dramatic advice underlines comedy’s outrageous assimilation of one genre to the other. In addition, neither comedy nor tragedy avoided or could avoid representing immoral acts on stage––Sommerstein (1996), 250––or offered decisive conclusions to the issues the plays explored. See Dover (1993), 16 and Pucci (2007) for further discussion of this issue. 40 Dover (1993), 24–8. 41 Ruffell (2002), 161 thinks Cratinus’ Pytine offered the first ambitious exploration of the craft of comedy. As Dover (1993), 12–14, 28–31, 34–36 notes, terms such as sophos, dexios, asteios, saphês, leptos, akribês, charieis, or psychros, as well as metaphors comparing style to craft-making have a long history in comedy itself and would have been at least basically legible to the audience; in Frogs, Aristophanes takes the trouble to forewarn the audience, through Dionysus, of possible difficulties; see also Revermann (2006b) on these issues.

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and the fragments, comic poets never challenged each other as to comedy’s value to the city).42 If philosophy/sophistry had begun independently to develop forms of literary criticism of drama (rather than epic) that emerge later in Plato and Hellenistic discussions of poetic and rhetorical style, dialogue on this topic seems to have been confined to the elite, as Socrates notes specifically in Protagoras by dismissing it (at least for the early dramatic date of this dialogue) as a trivial sympotic preoccupation (Prt. 347c–348d). Protagoras’ and Prodicus’ approach to Simonides (an archaic poet in any case) suggests a rather limited level of analysis (338e–347a, the poem’s contradictions or its orthoepeia, definition) in contrast with Socrates’ more extensive and perhaps novel attack on its investigation of virtue. Such orthoepeia appears to be the only clearly sophistic concern that emerges, in the discussion of prologues (1181, /ρθτητο τ%ν 0π%ν), in Frogs.43 Before Frogs, Euripides was apparently, as I shall note below, increasingly self-conscious about the role played by elements of tragic drama such as plots, messenger speeches, levels of decorum, or concluding divine appearances. Nevertheless, although we cannot know how new Aristophanes’ (of course absurdly distorting) examination of tragic prologues, lyrics, or monody was to the general population, it seems likely that comedy played, because it could and ‘needed’ to defend and define itself, the critical public role in formulating and above all in popularizing generic aims and differences and in expanding the investigation of dramatic technê. This process was made easier by the entire audience’s familiarity with drama, music, and dance through participation in choruses and theatre attendance and by an ability to recognize the different stylistic registers offered in paratragedy.44 The new sophistication represented in what is now clear caricature of the style of Euripidean monodies,45 where Aristophanes pointedly remakes a comic version of Euripides in a much more ambitious and integrated fashion than in the earlier plays known to us 42

Sommerstein (1992), 28. As Dover (1993), 24–9 notes, comic plots involving the rescue of serious poets or poetry in order to save the city may have been more common. 43 O’Sullivan’s (1992), esp. 7–22, useful discussion of the development of common terms to analyse rhetorical and poetic style in the fifth century makes a case for sophistic (including Gorgias on language and dramatic deception) and earlier comic influence on Aristophanes. But beyond demonstrating a growing interest in language and a more pervasive concern with stylistic scale, weight, and grandeur, the evidence he offers is highly speculative. Dover (1993), 32–3 shares my scepticism about the development of a technical or sophistic terminology for literary criticism by 405. 44 See further Revermann (2006b). 45 Silk (1993), 482–90 notes the new sophistication in the Frogs’ parody of Euripides’ ‘democratic’ monodies and to a lesser extent his lyrics. He (pp. 479–91) argues that most paratragedy in comedy is not parodic, and highlights (despite occasional genuinely hybrid tragiccomic passages) the discontinuities between genres (pp. 497–504).

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(although the Agathon parody offers a gesture in this direction), suggests that this may well be the case. So does Dionysus’ remark to Euripides concerning what he calls ‘our’ prologues (1227; see also 1214), perhaps a tacit reminder that Euripidean and Aristophanean prologues often played a similar structural role in their dramas. In contrast to Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae, Frogs plays down intrageneric competition and uses tragedy to emphasize a common (if ultimately elusive) civic function for both genres and to make an implicit declaration that the ambitious artistic agenda for comedy presented in Aristophanes’ earlier parabases has been met. It seems no accident that this development in literary criticism emerges from a dialogue with tragedy. The poet now implies that comedy can, through incorporating and cross-examining more ‘serious’ and weighty genres (note that poetry is literally weighed here), itself ensure the continuity of the city’s dramatic choruses in the absence of all three canonical tragedians. In Frogs, Aristophanes also draws tragedy into a dialogue about dramatic style already established in his earlier comedies–– Aeschylean style here is a tragic version of what Aristophanes attributes to Cratinus and his own deep, if ambivalent links to the more refined dramatic style of Euripides remain visible––and thus further collapses generic boundaries. The play’s always primarily comic theatre god Dionysus thus takes the initiative in accomplishing the ‘goals’ of Attic drama by rescuing an ‘Aeschylus’ who counter-intuitively (for those familiar with his tragedy) serves an established view of comedy’s poetic role. Nevertheless, the play also pointedly and less competitively than before includes ‘tragedy’ in that process. Tragic burlesques, the missing piece in this story, no doubt created further intergeneric bonds that modified comic language and plots at this same period, although we have virtually no idea of how these increasingly popular plays related to the originals.46 It hardly seems accidental, however, that iconography on South Italian vases apparently confirms the reperformance there of three Aristophanes comedies that engaged extensively with tragedy, Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs, to say nothing of the Choregos vase, which locates a tragic Aegisthus in the midst of a comic scene.47

46

See Bowie (2000), Csapo (2000), 118, Lowe (2000), Revermann (2006a). Aristophanes’ Proagon of 422 and his second Thesmophoriazusae may have contained substantial paratragedy (Revermann, p. 170); his Phoenissae, Polyidos, and Lemnian Women, like Strattis’ Medea, Philoctetes, Phoenissae, and Troilus, may have burlesqued whole plays. 47 See Taplin (1993), 45–7 with plates 9.1, 11.4, 13.7, Csapo (2001), 29, and Revermann (2006a), 69 and n. 11.

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Euripides’ late tragedies (the earliest we have is Ion––probably before 415) gestured towards violating every one of the generic boundaries identified by Taplin. I offer a brief summary with examples here. Decorum. Far from being put off or offended by Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Euripides sometimes went in for more ragged protagonists and domestic props than earlier. Ion sings while sweeping Apollo’s temple at Delphi and warding off birds who threaten to defecate on it. In Orestes, his hero opens the play lying on a bed tended by Electra and calls attention to his matted hair and unheroic appearance. In Electra, the heroine enters in the clothes of poverty and with cut hair, carrying a jug in which she plans to fetch water for domestic use. In Helen, the ragged Menelaus is humorously rebuffed from the Egyptian king’s palace by a portress who sees no signs of nobility in him despite his claims to it. ‘Rags’ here became a Euripidean device that served scenes with elements that come close to what we might call comic, and it seems likely, since Aristophanes did not give up his jokes about Euripides’ ragged and crippled heroes (see the opening of Peace and Frogs 1063–4) that a sophisticated audience member would have seen this perseverance as a Euripidean response to comedy itself.48 Parody and metatheatre. Second, tragic poets certainly alluded, perhaps competitively, to earlier tragedies. But we don’t know of an example that could be characterized as parody until Euripides’ Electra, whose heroine pointedly refutes all the recognition tokens used in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers in the recognition scene between Orestes and Electra. The tone and purpose of this Euripidean appropriation has appropriately been much disputed,49 but it is harder to say that the exchange in Euripides’ Helen, where Menelaus warns Helen against a plan because it has become pedestrian, is not metatheatrical in a vein common in Old Comedy: Helen: Listen, if a woman can offer clever advice. Though not dead, are you willing to be called dead in speech? Menelaus: A bad omen. But if I gain by it, I’m content. Though not dead, you may say I am. 48 See Segal (1995), 50 on comic elements in this Helen scene and Hubbard (1991), 32 on comic rags. Gregory (1999–2000), 65 n. 31 remains puzzled by Euripides’ use of rags. This discussion neglects the question of language characteristic of the two genres at this period. See Willi (2002) for a useful orientation to the topic and (2003) for further elaboration. 49 See the recent discussion of Goff (1999–2000), esp. 100, with further bibliography. She notes that Electra’s mockery of Aeschylus’ tokens fails, since they are in fact signs of Orestes’ presence.

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Sophocles and Aeschylus deploy this device for Orestes, but Euripides’ Electra did not; hence the remark offers an implicit competition with other tragedians. The dialogue continues: Helen: And in addition I could win pity for you from the unholy king by cutting my hair and lamenting in female fashion. Menelaus: How could this help us? There is something a little old hat about this plot (or proposal).

Just as in comedies that reject and then reuse hackneyed jokes, Euripides then has Helen adopt this strategy anyway, to the horror of the Egyptian king, who (humorously?) worries about her defacing her beauty (and tragic mask, 1419). Messenger speeches also receive formal attention. Although Electra in Electra may or may not be playing directly on the audience’s generic expectations concerning the reporting of offstage events by messengers (759),50 in Phoenissae Euripides pointedly refuses to give the audience a (lengthy) Aeschylean shield scene. Aeschylus’ hero marshalled his troops at Thebes’ seven gates and challenged them with words before the battle. Euripides’ less heroic Eteocles has to receive Aeschylean advice from Creon and then off-handedly offers the following remark: ‘To tell you the name of each man would consume too much time with the enemy encamped at our gates’ (751–2).51 A messenger then remedies the omission in a speech reporting on the battle (1090–199). Euripides’ increasingly generic prologues become so self-conscious, at least on the part of the characters delivering them (see Electra’s prologue in Orestes), that they may have inspired Aristophanes’ own treatment of them in Frogs. In Orestes, the formerly loquacious Pylades’ silence is said by Orestes to speak for him (1592). Pylades is now a mute character, but the audience probably does not know this yet. Orestes’ remark comments on Pylades’ intervention in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, which powerfully broke his play-long silence to remind the hero of Apollo’s command to avenge his father and kill his mother. It also pointedly exploits tragedy’s three-actor convention. Ancient scholia in fact share the view that Euripides uses comic techniques in Orestes and Andromache.52 The conclusion (καταστροφ ) of Orestes is

50

See Cropp (1988) ad loc. Euripides’ Orestes is so thick with allusions to other plays that Froma Zeitlin (1980) has called it a palimpsestic text that borrows from a closet of masks. 52 See also the scholion on Orestes 1521 (I 230.12 Schwartz) and Gregory (1999–2000), 59. Knox (1970), 90 f. suggests that Euripides’ representation of gods edges toward the comic. 51

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called κωµικωτ.ρα (rather comic) in the play’s second hypothesis.53 The deus ex machina was a device meant to resolve the humanly irresolvable. When Euripides begins to have his characters question these gods, the audience inevitably becomes self-conscious about the device. Elizabeth Scharffenberger has even argued that Euripides borrows and transforms the dramaturgy of comic scenes; in her view, for example, the scene in Phoenissae where Jocasta tries and fails to reconcile her warring sons is based on the conclusion of Aristophanes’ recent Lysistrata, where the heroine reconciles the ambassadors of Athens and Sparta.54 Others have thought that the Bacchae’s (possibly comic) dressing scene was borrowed from the scene with Agathon in Thesmophoriazusae. Indeed, not only did Euripides during this period adopt to some extent the (possible) parody, humble costuming and situations more generic to comedy, but he reputedly could even offer a parabasis, perhaps more than once.55 At least, we are told by Pollux (iv. 111 Bethe, tr. Sifakis [1971], 64) that: One of the comic choral songs is also the parabasis, when the chorus comes forward and says what the poet wants to say in the theatre. This is normally done by the comic poets, and is not a tragic device, although Euripides has done it in many plays. In Danaë, to be sure, he made the chorus of women sing something extra in his own behalf, and completely forgot and had them speak as if they were men in appearance . . .56

Topicality. Finally, while the nearly satirical treatment of the popular assembly that condemns Orestes in Euripides’ Orestes is not topical, the conflicts displayed there are highly contemporary and reiterated, though differently, in comparable comic attacks on democratic institutions. (Strattis’ Anthroporaistes seems to have responded to this ‘clever’ play [frag. 1 K-A]). It may not be an accident that, at the same period that Frogs begins to merge comedy and tragedy’s agendas, Euripides’ Bacchae of 405 also incorporates ‘comic’ 53

On the mix of styles and innovation in late Euripides, see Mastronarde (1999–2000), esp. 28–36. On comic elements in Euripides, see esp. Barnes (1964), Knox (1970), Seidensticker (1982), Michelini (1987), 67, 182, Dunn (1989), Segal (1995). Zacharia (1995), 59 argues that comedy in Ion does not intensify tragedy or supply comic relief, but reinforces themes such as the search for identity and the transition to adulthood. On mutual exploration of generic boundaries between Aristophanes and Euripides, see Gibert (1999–2000), who stresses (p. 90) that Aristophanes was competing with Euripides on territory new to both genres. Goff (1999–2000), esp. 103, notes Euripides’ introduction of class issues (already present in comedy) to tragedy. 54 Scharffenberger (1995). 55 See Revermann (2006a), 279 on the fourth-century poet Astydamas’ parabasis in his satyr play Heracles. 56 The ‘forgetful’ use of the masculine gender by the female chorus in a context where Euripides is ‘adding’ words ‘on his own behalf’ does suggest that Pollux recognizes how a parabasis can operate and speaks advisedly.

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elements with an elusive fluidity and complexity that he had never demonstrated before.57 None of the above examples are new, but they interestingly demonstrate that Euripides’ appropriation of comic self-consciousness and distancing not only coincides with but very likely anticipates or inspires parallel developments in Aristophanes. Tragedy, however, cannot overtly articulate its appropriation of techniques that were or became comic. For this, a brief speculative turn to a later genre, tragicomedy, of which Euripides could be said to be the first exponent, may be illuminating. As Verna Foster, author of the most recent discussion of the genre, puts it: In the sense of a dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically new genre, tragicomedy has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds. Because tragedy and comedy themselves are so various and hard to define, tragicomedy, which can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations, is an especially slippery genre.58

Like Euripides’ escape tragedies, Renaissance tragicomedy generally makes its high-status protagonists potentially tragic figures in an ultimately beneficial universe. By contrast, modern tragicomedy (represented in authors from Ibsen to Dürrenmatt, Ionesco, Beckett, or Pinter) tends to make ordinary individuals comic figures in a tragic or opaque, indifferent universe. In the end, endurance, not acquisition of meaning, remains the characters’ only viable option. In the view of Dürrenmatt, tragedy is no longer possible in the modern world because there are no more tragic heroes, ‘only tragic events on an enormous scale perpetrated by faceless bureaucracies; tragedy presupposes individual guilt and responsibility, but these qualities have been eroded; tragedy, finally, is predicated on an audience that is already a community, and this, too, no longer exists. Comedy, unlike tragedy, does not need a preexisting order. For it typically creates form out of chaos, and comic invention can 57 See especially Seidensticker (1978) and Foley (1980). Gregory (1999–2000), 65 f. argues against humour in the Bacchae’s dressing scenes. Note that Bacchae calls attention (like comedy) to the duplicity of its costuming; moreover, its oppositional chorus is but one example of a partial return at this period to the more assertive choruses of Aeschylus. See Foley (2003) and Taplin (1996) on comic as opposed to tragic choruses. 58 Foster (2004), 11. Many fourth-century Greek comedies continued to mix tragedy and comedy, but, in contrast to twentieth-century tragicomedy, we have neither full plays nor extensive authorial comments with which to theorize the aims of these plays further.

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shape its own audience.’59 In tragicomedy, tragedy can suddenly and shockingly emerge from comedy,60 but relies on comedy’s greater flexibility to create distance by blending emotional realism with self-conscious artifice. In short, comic techniques protect tragedy from melodrama or laughable pretentiousness of style and language. Modern tragicomedy is not Euripides. At the same time, Euripides’ later drama does create increasingly ordinary, more psychologized characters in increasingly domestic worlds who end, despite increasingly mysterious divine rescues, without a clear sense of direction and responsibility beyond survival (see the end of e.g. Orestes or Bacchae). (Acting style was becoming more realistic and inclusive of differences in age, gender, ethnicity, and class.61) Euripides’ plots, as in Orestes, can even threaten to break out of the limits of traditional myth or transpire in remote foreign worlds (Helen, Iphigeneia among the Taurians). To offer two examples developing those given above, when Orestes juxtaposes Electra’s knowing, ironic prologue, a nearly comic scene in which a nervous Helen tries to get Electra to take a minuscule bit of hair as an offering to the tomb of the mother she helped murder, a chorus whose entrance must be hushed, and a literally wasted Orestes who is now living in a world where civic justice appears to be an option, Euripides is using these uneasy transitions to communicate a changed tragic vision and orient his audience to it. Similarly, although an audience might find it hard to imagine an innocent Helen capable of genuine tragic stature and even suffering (and indeed this notion remains somewhat fantastic in the world of Euripides’ Helen), a decidedly untragic, rather bumbling Menelaus who cannot even play his proper role in a recognition scene in some ways makes this novel proposal possible. Such dramatic and stylistic moves by Euripides, which were perhaps provoked by disturbing contemporary realities and a growing interest in private life,62 could be said to require new tools to preserve his drama’s horror and pathos, to defend and indirectly define (comedy had done this directly) potentially controversial generic shifts in tragic dramaturgy, or to devise new modes of creating or challenging meaning in what is represented as an increasingly arbitrary world. N. J. Lowe has argued that ‘while it is hard to demonstrate that tragedy ever needed comedy, comedy is constantly defining itself in relation to tragedy––a 59

Foster (2004), 31, summarizing Dürrenmatt (1954). See also the general study of Silk (1988) on comedy’s generic flexibility. 60 Silk (1988). 61 Csapo (2002). 62 Connor’s (1971) study of the political world is confirmed by studies of vase painting and grave monuments too extensive to mention here.

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genre that itself is rapidly evolving and rewriting its own poetics.’63 I suggest that both Bacchae and Frogs demonstrate authoritatively the value and even necessity of influence in both directions in the late fifth century. Aristophanes found through interweaving tragedy into his plays in ever more extensive and complex ways a unique intergeneric, familiar (to sub-elite as well as elite audiences), and richly performative licence not only to expand comedy intellectually but to assert nearly equal status for his own apparently ‘inferior’ genre. As in the case of modern playwrights, dramatic techniques borrowed from comedy (such as distancing, moves toward metatheatre, shifts in decorum) and prefiguring what later became comedy may have proved for Euripides, as did tragedy for Aristophanes, a much needed source of inspiration in reconfiguring tragedy for an age in transition. 63 Lowe (2000) 267. Silk (1988), esp. 28, argues that comedy can use serious literature to ‘assert its own self-sufficiency,’ even in cases of satire or parody where a form of dependency is unavoidable.

REFERENCES Arnott, W. G. (1972), ‘From Aristophanes to Menander’, G&R 19: 65–80. Austin, C. and Olson, S. D. (2004), Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae, Oxford. Barnes, H. (1964), ‘Greek Tragicomedy’, CJ 60: 125–31. Biles, Z. P. (2002), ‘Intertextual Biography in the Rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes’, AJPh 123: 169–204. Bowie, A. (2000), ‘Myth and Ritual in the Rivals of Aristophanes’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 317–40. Bremer, J. (1993), ‘Aristophanes on His Own Poetry’, in J. M. Bremer and E. W. Handley (eds.), Aristophane. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique 38 (Geneva), 125–66. Connor, W. R. (1971), The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens, Princeton. Cropp, M. J. (1988), Euripides Electra, Warminster. Csapo, E. (2000), ‘From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy’, in M. Depew and D. Obbink (eds.), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society (Cambridge, Mass.), 115–34. –––– (2001), ‘The First Artistic Representations of Theatre: Dramatic Illusion and Dramatic Performance in Attic and South Italian Art’, in Katz, Golini, and Pietropaolo (2001), 17–38. –––– (2002), ‘Kallipides on the Floor Sweepings: The Limits of Realism in Classical Acting and Performance Styles’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge. Dobrov, G. W. (1995a), ‘The Poet’s Voice in the Evolution of Dramatic Dialogism’, in Dobrov (1995b), 47–98.

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–––– (1995b) (ed.), Beyond Aristophanes: Transition and Diversity in Greek Comedy, Atlanta. Dover, K. (1993), Aristophanes Frogs, Oxford. Dunn, F. (1989), ‘Comic and Tragic License in Euripides’ Orestes’, ClAnt 8: 238–51. Dürrenmatt, F. (1954), ‘Problems of the Theater,’ tr. G. Nelhaus and adapted by S. H. Ray, in V. Sander (ed.) (1982), Plays and Essays, New York. Foley, H. P. (1980), ‘The Masque of Dionysus,’ TAPhA 110: 107–30. Revised in Foley (1985), Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca), 205–58. –––– (1988), ‘Tragedy and Politics in Aristophanes’ Acharnians’, JHS 108: 33–47. –––– (1992), ‘Anodos Dramas: Euripides’ Alcestis and Helen’, in R. Hexter and D. Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York and London), 133–60. Revised in H. P. Foley (2001), Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton), 301–32. –––– (2003), ‘Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy’, CPh 98: 1–30. Foster, V. A. (2004), The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, Aldershot. Gibert, J. (1999–2000), ‘Falling in Love With Euripides (Andromeda)’, ICS 24–25: 75–92. Goff, B. (1999–2000), ‘Try to Make it Real Compared to What? Euripides’ Electra and the Play of Genres’, ICS 24–25: 93–106. Goldhill, S. (1991), The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature, Cambridge. Gredley, B. (1996), ‘Comedy and Tragedy––Inevitable Distinctions: Response to Taplin’, in Silk (1996), 203–16. Gregory, J. (1999–2000), ‘Comic Elements in Euripides’, ICS 24–25: 59–74. Griffiths, A. (1995) (ed.), Stage Directions: Essays in Ancient Drama in Honour of E. W. Handley, London. Halliwell, F. S. (1989), ‘Authorial Collaboration in the Athenian Comic Theatre’, GRBS 30: 515–28. Hanoosh, M. (1989), Parody and Decadence. Laforgue’s Moralités légendaires, Columbus. Harvey, D and Wilkins, J. (2000) (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy, London. Heath, M. (1990), ‘Aristophanes and his Rivals’, G&R 37: 143–58. Henderson, J. (1995), ‘Beyond Aristophanes’, in Dobrov (1995b), 175–84. –––– (1996), Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women, London. –––– (2000), ‘Pherekrates and the Women of Old Comedy’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 135–50. Herington, C. J. (1963), ‘The Influence of Old Comedy on Aeschylus’ Later Trilogies’, TAPhA 94: 113–25. Hubbard, T. K. (1991), The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and the Intertextual Parabasis, Ithaca. Hutcheon, L. (1985), A Theory of Parody, New York and London. Kassel, R. and Austin, C. (1983–), Poetae Comici Graeci, Berlin. Katz, G., Golini, V. and Pietropaolo, D. (2001) (eds.), Theatre and the Visual Arts, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. Knox, B. M. W. (1970), ‘Euripidean Comedy’, in A. Cheuse and R. Koffler (eds.), The Rarer Action (New Brunswick), 68–96.

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Lowe, N. J. (2000), ‘Comic Plots and the Invention of Fiction’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 259–72. Mastronarde, D. J. (1999–2000), ‘Euripidean Tragedy and Genre: The Terminology and its Problems’, ICS 24–25: 23–40. Michelini, A. N. (1987), Euripides and the Tragic Tradition, Madison. Nesselrath, H.-G. (1990), Die attische Mittlere Komödie: ihre Stellung in der antiken Literaturkritik und Literaturgeschichte, Berlin and New York. –––– (1995), ‘Myth, Parody, and Comic Plots: The Birth of Gods and Middle Comedy’, in Dobrov (1995b), 1–28. O’Sullivan, N. (1992), Alcidamas, Aristophanes and the Beginnings of Greek Stylistic Theory, Hermes, vol. 60, Stuttgart. Porter, J. R. (1999–2000), ‘Euripides and Menander: Epitrepontes, Act IV’, ICS 24–25: 157–76. Pucci, P. (1961), Aristofane ed Euripide: ricerche metriche e stilistiche, Roma. –––– (2007), ‘Euripides and Aristophanes: What Does Tragedy Teach?’, in C. Kraus, S. Goldhill, H. Foley, and J. Elsner (eds.), Visualizing Greek Tragedy (Oxford), 105–26. Rau, P. (1967), Paratragodia, Munich. Revermann, M. (2006a), Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy, Oxford. –––– (2006b), ‘The Competence of Theatre Audiences in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Athens’, JHS 126: 99–124. Rose, M. (1979), Parody/Metafiction, London. Rosen, R. (2000), ‘Cratinus’ Pytine and the Construction of the Comic Self’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 23–39. Ruffell, I. (2000), ‘The World Turned Upside Down: Utopia and Utopianism in the Fragments of Old Comedy’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 473–506. –––– (2002), ‘A Total Write-off: Aristophanes, Cratinus, and the Rhetoric of Comic Competition’, CQ 52: 138–63. Scharffenberger, E. W. (1995), ‘A Tragic Lysistrata? Jocasta in the Reconciliation Scene of the Phoenician Women’, RhM 138: 312–36. Segal, E. (1995), ‘ “The Comic Catastrophe”: An Essay on Euripidean Comedy’, in Griffiths (1995), 46–55. Seidensticker, B. (1978), ‘Comic Elements in Euripides’ Bacchae’, AJPh 99: 303–20. –––– (1982), Palintonos Harmonia. Studien zu komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragödie, Hypomnemata 72, Göttingen. Sidwell, K. (1994), ‘Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Eupolis’, C&M 45: 71–115. –––– (1995), ‘Poetic Rivalry and the Caricature of Comic Poets: Cratinus’ Pytine and Aristophanes’ Wasps’, in Griffiths (1995), 56–80. Sifakis, G. M. (1971), Parabasis and Animal Choruses, London. Silk, M. S. (1988), ‘The Autonomy of Greek Comedy’, Comparative Criticism 10: 3–37. –––– (1993), ‘Aristophanic Paratragedy’, in Sommerstein et al. (1993), 477–504. –––– (1996) (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, Oxford. –––– (2000), ‘Aristophanes Versus the Rest: Comic Poetry in Old Comedy’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 299–316.

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Sommerstein, A. (1983), Wasps (The Comedies of Aristophanes, vol. 4), Warminster. –––– (1992), ‘Old Comedians on Old Comedy’, in B. Zimmermann (ed.), Antike Dramentheorien und ihre Rezeption, Stuttgart, 14–33. –––– (1994), Thesmophoriazusae (The Comedies of Aristophanes, vol. 8), Warminster. –––– (1996), Frogs (The Comedies of Aristophanes, vol. 9), Warminster. –––– (2000), ‘Platon, Eupolis and the “Demagogue-Comedy” ’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 437–51. –––– Halliwell, S., Henderson, J., Zimmermann, B. (1993) (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis: Papers from the Greek Drama Conference. Nottingham, 18–20 July 1990, Bari. Taplin, O. (1983), ‘Tragedy and Trugedy’, CQ 33: 331– 3. –––– (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, JHS 106: 163–74. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama Through Vase Paintings, Oxford. –––– (1996), ‘Comedy and the Tragic’, in Silk (1996), 188–202. Willi, A. (2002), The Language of Greek Comedy, Oxford. –––– (2003), The Languages of Aristophanes: Aspects of Linguistic Variation in Classical Attic Greek, Oxford. Wright, M. (2005), Euripides’ Escape-Tragedies: A Study of Helen, Andromeda and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Oxford. Zacharia, K. (1995), ‘The Marriage of Tragedy and Comedy in Euripides’ Ion’, in S. Jakel and A. Timonen (eds.), Laughter Down the Centuries (Turku), 45–62. Zeitlin, F. I. (1980), ‘The Closet of Masks: Role-Playing and Mythmaking in the Orestes of Euripides’, Ramus 9: 51–77. –––– (1981), ‘Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae’, in H. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York and London), 169–217. Revised in F. Zeitlin (1996), Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago), 375–416. –––– (1996), ‘The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in Euripides’ Hippolytus’, in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago), 219–94.

2 Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama* Ian Ruffell

One of Oliver Taplin’s most important contributions to the study of Greek comedy has been his 1986 paper, ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’. It was here that he introduced the concept of metatheatre to classical critics1 but also situated the concept within some bold and challenging hypotheses about the nature of the audience’s experience. Developing his earlier explorations of tragic dramaturgy2 and rejecting moves towards a highly self-conscious tragedy, Taplin argued for a radical difference in the reception of tragic and comic performances. Subsequent comparative work on comedy and tragedy has tended to confirm Taplin’s picture of two genres separated by a common context, with broad (if not absolute) distinctions being maintained in terms of form and performance but historicist critics stressing the common cultural context.3 In this paper, I look again at this generic comparison and suggest that while formal distinctions can be upheld, the model of audience response requires, at the least, substantial qualification. Taplin makes two main, related claims. First, comedy is bent on disruption whereas tragedy invites rapt concentration. Secondly, tragedy deals with and is attracted to the universal, comedy to the particular: * Thanks are due to Oliver Taplin for providing the inspiration and for supportive supervision from 1997 to 1999. Thanks also to Chloe Stewart of Stobhill Hospital (NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde) for help with medical references and to Costas Panayotakis for typically judicious comments. 1 Taplin (1986), cf. Taplin (1983), (1993), all with bibliography. For later work on metatheatre, see especially Slater (2002). 2 Especially Taplin (1977). 3 See on plot and character Silk (1988), (1990), Sifakis (1992), Taplin (1996), Lowe (2000), Silk (2000); on acting styles Lada (1997); on dramatic space Lowe (2006). Taplin has been more nuanced on tragic metatheatricality, but maintains a strong distinction; see Taplin (1996), Wilson and Taplin (1993). A convenient, if partisan, overview of the state of play of historicist criticism is offered by Goldhill (2000), with Rhodes (2003) an important further contribution.

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Comedy may make gestures in the direction of the universal, to the more than transient . . . But it is always pulled back by the gravitational force of the particular, to individuals and details. Comedy cannot generalise for long without falling over a heap of dung. Taplin (1986), 173

His audience is deeply involved in tragic performance, both emotionally and cognitively, with the affective dimension reinforcing or heightening the reflection on abstract issues––‘the “timeless truths” ’4 ––of the play. The disruption of comedy––and he is explicit that the overriding issue is laughter–– destroys both the affective and the cognitive engagement and reflection. Yet Taplin does not want to say that comedy is not serious. Indeed, in a second bite at the Synkrisis, he explicitly takes as axiomatic Dikaiopolis’ claim that ‘comedy, too, knows what is right’ (τ γα`ρ δκαιον ο1δε κα2 τρυγ(δα).5 If so, comedy’s claim to ethical and/or political knowledge is rooted in the smallscale and historically contingent, with minimal reflection or abstraction. This commitment to emotion and universal truths in tragedy sounds rather Aristotelian,6 but the universal and cross-cultural aspect is in strong tension with the historicizing dimension.7 Taplin talks of tragedy and comedy in general (at least before Shakespeare), even though he acknowledges that the stronger formal distinctions only hold best for the short period of c.450–c.415. If, however, we are to understand the interaction, even synthesis, of tragedy and comedy in later Euripides, in New Comedy or even in Shakespeare, then we need a model which allows for some kind of continuity, or at least non-contradiction, between tragic and comic response, including emotional response. It is my contention that both tragedy and comedy have elements of emotional engagement and abstract reflection, and that these are carried out in different but not mutually exclusive ways. The audience is involved in both genres, but if anything, more so in comedy, particularly through the additional dimension of its metatheatrical relationship with its audience. In both cases, affect is intimately linked to cognition, albeit in different aspects of the act of communication. These are large questions and the arguments are more well rehearsed on the tragic side than on the comic.8 So after a look at the process of fictional and theatrical engagement, my main emphasis will 4

Taplin (1986) 173, borrowing from Michael Silk. Aristophanes, Akharnians 500, with Taplin (1996), 188 f. 6 Even though Taplin (1996) might jib at the idea that tragedy is just about pity and fear, comedy about laughter. 7 See also his work on performance and on reception (Taplin, 1993 and 1999). 8 This starts, of course, with Aristotle. For recent work on (largely tragic) emotion, see Lada (1993), (1996). 5

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be on exploring these dimensions of comedy, borrowing from recent work on humour in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. A final section will suggest some avenues for developing further the study of affect in ancient Greek drama.

F I C T I O N / M E TAT H E AT R E Fiction is not about anything real and shall not be fought over. Louis de Bernières, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

As Taplin has demonstrated effectively, there are numerous ways in which the comic theatre of (at least) the fifth century refers to itself and its circumstances of performance in ways that tragic theatre largely did not. It is not my intention to challenge this. Rather, I am interested in the way the audience processes such self-referentiality. For this we need, above all, an account or theory of fiction and audience engagement. Without such a theory, we will have problems understanding how that engagement may be disrupted (or not). Although Taplin deliberately eschews the language of illusion, and particularly ‘breaking the illusion’, his account of tragic engagement remains illusionistic. He prefers to use a notion of ‘charm’ or ‘beguilement’, and like other scholars, explicitly nods towards Gorgias’ Helen (fr. 11 D–K), which explores fiction through deceit (α#πα´τη) and which associates poetry with wizardry and spell-casting (γοητεα and µαγεα).9 However, while Gorgias’ enigmatic text is interesting as a first stab at a theory of fiction, he is not a good guide to an average Athenian citizen’s response to fictional drama, as evidence for a historically contingent sort of fictionality or as a useful referee for modern debates about fictionality. It is important to distinguish between the reasons for an audience adopting a ‘fictive stance’ (accepting a performance/utterance as fictional) and the processing of a fictional utterance under that stance.10 Clearly, a truly illusionistic/lying account of fiction is doomed: the outcome would be the spectator who leaps on stage to rescue Desdemona becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon rather than a warning parable. Audiences only interpret fiction 9

Taplin (1986), 164; Slater (1993). On Gorgias, see de Romilly (1973) and Lada (1993), 102–5. 10 Walton (1990), 140.

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as reality if they lack a concept of fiction––whether for cultural reasons, like the endearing aliens of Galaxy Quest, or incompetence, like Prince George in Blackadder the Third––or because there have been insufficient signals that a performance is fictional, as in the famous instance of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. What those signals are is a thornier question: attempts to find general indicators of fictionality (or literariness) in either form or content have so far been unsuccessful. It is probably best to see the fictional stance as something cued by a potential range of culturally specific and limited factors, drawn from context (such as the festival or theatre), form (such as metre, language, costume, mask) and content.11 If we see fiction as a mode of communication involving two consenting parties, then the audience has a much more active, constructive role than in models that rely on illusion or beguilement or charm. It is also, I think, a very different relationship to Coleridge’s ‘suspension of disbelief’. The audience does not suspend anything––here I agree with Taplin––but actively constructs a fictional world or worlds on the basis of the fictional utterance (performance).12 The cooperative nature of the relationship between speaker/ performance and listener/audience has been described, following the work of Paul Grice on the speech acts of conversation, in terms of mutual intent and recognition. U’s utterance of S is fictive if and only if U utters S intending that the audience will 1. recognize that S means P; 2. recognize that S is intended by U to mean P; (and so) 3. recognize that U intends them (the audience) to make-believe that P; (and so) 4. make-believe that P. From the point of view of the audience, of course, U can only ever be a construct, additionally complicated by the ensemble nature of Greek theatre, and its various author(s) and producers. Indeed the audience position is itself a construct. Nonetheless, the point of active make-believe remains.13 It is also make-believe not of the performance but on the basis of the performance. I summarize this model of dramatic fiction in Figure 2.1. 11 See Currie (1990), 2–4 and, perhaps less balanced, Lamarque and Olsen (1994), 29–32 and Ronen (1994), 77–82. A useful guide to formalist and structuralist accounts of literariness, with bibliography, is Compagnon (1998), 28–50. 12 For fictional worlds, see especially Eco (1981) and (1990), Ronen (1994), Semino (1997), all with further bibliography. 13 This scheme is a modified form of that proposed by Currie (1990), 75–6, in turn largely followed by Lamarque and Olsen (1994). The universalizing nature of this has been criticized by Walton (1990), who prefers play-like make-believe using props or artefacts of various sorts.

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Fig. 2.1. A model for dramatic communication

On this model, Taplin’s account of disruption of the fictional process and of the role of audience emotion needs to be reassessed. Taplin is sceptical of Dr Johnson’s claim to be always aware of the fictional relationship, but this need not rule out the relationship of audience to performance being semi-conscious, unconscious, or simply not foregrounded. My partner and I recently spent the best part of two hours trying to hide behind each other while watching the zombie thriller Twenty-Eight Weeks Later at the cinema, and can attest to the double-think of processing fiction while being equally aware of the audience context in a very physical sense. Metatheatricality has to be seen in the context where the audience––or the audience position––always has a sketchy or ‘ghostly’ presence in the fiction.14 Two things follow, dependent on the type of metatheatricality involved. Where entities within the fiction are aware of their fictional status––by reference to themselves as characters or to the performance context or the audience (and so on)––then they are drawing attention directly to the pragmatic relationship itself. However, if the audience is actively and cooperatively construing the events as fictional, and constructing fictional worlds on that basis, then foregrounding that activity may have any number of effects (which are outside the scope of this essay), but it is not a hindrance to further fictional processing so much as opening a further channel of (meta-)communication.15 Such fictional self-awareness does, however, render

14 15

The phrase belongs to Walton (1990), 237. Compare the remarks of Bain (1977), 3–7 on Brecht’s alienation effects.

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Fig. 2.2. World construction: ‘comic’ metatheatre

the fictional world of the play logically impossible.16 Metatheatre should be taken with other comic impossibilities in plot and character: the real distinction between tragedy and comedy is in its logical status, in its coherence and causation, not its fictional status. Other types of metatheatricality––this is where most tragic metatheatricality lies––do not provide such immediate reference to the process of fictional communication or offer such violence to the internal coherence of the fictional world. In that sense, Taplin’s original intuition is right: the transvestism in the Bakkhai, for example, may reflect on all sorts of practices (and interpretations) in the actual world ––theatrical, (trans)gendered or sexual––any or all of which may include any given audience member, but that is quantitatively and qualitatively different from comic impossibility. Two different parts of the communication process are exploited: world construction (Figure 2.2) and mapping between the fictional and real worlds (Figure 2.3). This account seems to leave no place for tragic emotion. Where emotion comes in, I suggest, is in two areas unrelated to fictional status: plot and character. Emotional engagement may take many forms. Notwithstanding Antiphanes’ remarks on the predictability of the story stuff of Greek tragedy (compared to comedy),17 excitement, anticipation, and apprehension (among others) are all possible responses to tragic plots of Greek tragedies. These are perhaps most obvious in the melodrama of Ion, where the story is less well known, but also in more straightforward tragedies such as the Hippolytos or 16

What Dolezˇel (1989), 238–40 calls ‘self-voiding metafiction’.

17

Poie¯sis fr. 189.

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Fig. 2.3. World-mapping: ‘tragic’ metatheatre

Oidipous Tyrannos. It is no great double-think to experience the plot even when ‘knowing’ the outcome.18 If causation is central to plot, then that is primarily human causation. Pity and other emotional responses derive from different sorts of empathetic engagement with human characters––even where, as in Greek tragedy, characters are not fully rounded psychological entities with rich interior lives. Identification with characters whose properties are incomplete is familiar from the extra-fictional world, and no problem if we see our conception of both sorts of world as semiotically mediated.19 A further qualification of Taplin’s hypothesis has to come in the area of concentration. Here, it is clear that Taplin conflates a number of different sorts of interactions with the performance. One of his main concepts appears to be an unremittingly intense, consistent tightening of the emotional screw. This is why disruption is anathema to his model: however moved the tragic audience may be, whether by pity towards giving help, or by anger to take revenge, or whatever, it must sit quiet. Taplin (1986), 173

While this may be true of some tragedies in some parts, I doubt that this is the case either in the general or particular case. Taplin’s approach reflects the 18

Regardless of whether plot is a game: Lowe (2000); the reconciliation of character aims: Ryan (1991); or a pattern of recognition and reversal: Aristotle. 19 The trend in the 1970s to see characters as structural and/or ideological constructs––see Gould (1978) and Easterling (1973)––rather than psychological studies has given way to seeing characters more as conceptual bundles; see Easterling (1990), cf. Goldhill (1990). Lada (1993) emphasizes empathetic relationships with characters.

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conventions of contemporary UK theatregoing conventions in the circumscribed and enclosed contexts of modern theatres. It is less appropriate for a mass audience in an open-air context, which more accurately might resemble a football match or modern festival crowd. As a point of comparison, a recent performance of Othello at the rebuilt Globe Theatre in London, offered the following observations: One of the pleasures of seeing Iago at the Globe is that he is treated by the audience as a pantomime villain. They hiss at him and ‘honest Iago’ attracts laughter. (I wished someone would shout ‘He’s behind you’ and put Othello out of his misery.) But the pantomime reaction in no way weakens the play’s emotional punch. A good production of Othello should leave you shattered in a way that no other Shakespeare tragedy quite does. And this one did. Kellaway (2007)

Whether it is on the basis of theatrical space, theatrical culture, or the size and nature of its audience, the Globe has been a challenging environment for those critics used to the circumscribed spaces, audiences, and audience habits that have become the norm.20 This account also suggests that laughter need not be destructive of these other emotions as Taplin argues.21 Indeed, unless we are committed to a single insistently ratcheted emotion, then it is possible to see the range of emotional response––including laughter––as part of a complex emotional manipulation and response. Indeed, Taplin’s own account of the Ion is suggestive of just this sort of complexity, combining manipulation of expectation, complex plotting, and comic and tragic ironies in swift succession.22 Finally, Taplin’s approach to the chorus does not fit with his idea of constant emotional intensity. The chorus provide, he suggests, the impetus to a general or abstract perspective. While this may be broadly true, albeit to different extents,23 this does not lead to greater audience involvement but a step backwards and sideways. By offering the opportunity for abstract reflection and general application, and also a different position on proceedings,24 choral passages are rather closer to Brecht’s alienation effects––effects that were designed to separate his epic theatre from the involved, emotionally committed bourgeois ‘Aristotelian’ theatre of his time:

20

Today’s outdoor theatre in Greece is also much more demonstrative. Taplin (1986), 173. 22 See Taplin (1986), 165. On the Ion and irony, see Lowe (1996) and Rosenmeyer (1996). 23 From the emotionally engaged choruses of e.g. Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon or Suppliant Women, or Sophokles’ OT or Ajax, to the detachable embolima noted by Aristotle, Poetics 1456a25–32. 24 For the nature of that position, see Gould (1996) and Goldhill (1996). 21

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This dramaturgy does not make use of the ‘identification’ of the spectator with the play, . . . nor does it make the spectator the victim, so to speak, of a hypnotic experience in the theatre. In fact, it has as a purpose the ‘teaching’ of the spectator a critical attitude while he is in the theatre . . . Brecht (1964), 7825

If anything, there is an opposition between emotion and abstraction or generalization in this respect that speaks directly against Taplin’s approach to tragedy. Although some have pursued a Brecht/Aristotle opposition between comedy and tragedy,26 the abstract and generalizing aspects of Greek tragedy at least overlap with Brechtian manoeuvres. However, it would be unwise to press this––not least because of Brecht’s own doubts about seeing ancient theatre in these terms.27 Rather, we should see in Greek tragedy an interplay between emotional engagement and social, ideological, and/or ethical reflection.

C O M I C E M OT I O N A N D C O G N I T I O N I’d like to take you now on wings of song, as it were, and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives. Tom Lehrer

Taplin’s account of audience engagement can be modified further if we turn to the cognitive and affective dimensions of humour. I am going to approach this issue here through consideration of what happens when audiences are unable to process fiction, both humorous and non-humorous. Drawing upon studies of autistic spectrum conditions, we can see that cognitive and affective deficits in relation to fiction and humour are related, but also that they work in slightly different ways in each case. I shall also go on to suggest that Taplin’s universal/particular distinction is an inadequate explanation of both the content and processing of comedy. The main symptom of autism is an impairment in verbal and/or nonverbal communication, one part of an underlying severe difficulty in 25 For convenient summaries of the differences between ‘epic’ and ‘Aristotelian’ theatre, see Brecht (1964) 23 and 37. 26 Going back at least to Sifakis (1971). 27 See especially ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ §§ 43–4; see Brecht (1964), 192. He does, however, claim a distant kinship between ancient theatre (and Shakespeare) and his own practices in contrast to the ‘Aristotelian’ mainstream of his own day. For un-Brechtian elements of Greek theatre, see Lada (1993) and (1996).

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understanding, interacting with, and coping with the social environment.28 Asperger Syndrome is a related condition, part of the spectrum of autistic conditions, where development of verbal communication is unaffected, but similar social and cognitive problems are exhibited. ‘High-functioning autism’ (HFA) and Asperger Syndrome (AS) are often studied together, particularly in adults, and show similar patterns of response.29 There has been considerable interest in discovering the underlying cognitive and neurological causes of this continuum of disorders. This research has fascinating insights for those interested in the processes used in watching comic fiction. As well as considerable impairment in appreciating, understanding, and practising humour, subjects have also shown serious problems in processing even simple stories correctly.30 Although there is ongoing dispute over a single mechanism that underlies this condition, there is agreement that a major contributing factor is a weakness in or lack of ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM), that is an inability to understand or infer other people’s mental states, including their emotions.31 Children with autism show significant weakness in both first-order ToM––understanding others’ emotional states––and second-order ToM––understanding other peoples’ beliefs about others’ emotional states. Recently, this has been elaborated as a particularly extreme position on an empathetic-systematizing spectrum.32 While the principal concern may be social interaction, tests for first- and second-order ToM have most often involved simple fictional and dramatic scenarios, with dolls or similar.33 More sophisticated tests have been developed for HFA/AS adults, who are able to pass second-order ToM tests.34 These include more complex (but from a literary point of view still minimal) narratives, involving non-literal utterances––irony, sarcasm, double-bluff, persuasion, white lie, joke and so on––or social embarrassment. HFA/AS adults are significantly less able to process these correctly.35 28

This summary is taken from Baron-Cohen et al. (1985), 38. e.g. Happé (1994), Baron-Cohen et al. (1997), Heavey et al. (2000), Emerich et al. (2003), Lyons and Fitzgerald (2004). 30 For discussion of truth in fiction in possible-worlds terms, see Lewis (1978), Eco (1981) and (1990), and Ronen (1994). 31 Baron-Cohen et al. (1985), Baron-Cohen (1995). 32 For both the empathetic-systematizing theory and the related extreme male brain theory, see Lawson et al. (2004), with bibliography. 33 Thus the original ToM experiment by Baron-Cohen et al. (1985). 34 This is expected at the age of six, so is not good evidence for an intact or complex theory of mind; see Baron-Cohen et al. (1997), 813. 35 Happé (1994), Jolliffe and Baron-Cohen (1999), Heavey et al. (2000) and Kaland et al. (2005). Other recent ToM tests focus on body language; see Baron-Cohen et al. (1997) and Golan et al. (2006). 29

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The importance of the ‘Theory of Mind’ account of autism––emotional detachment and the inability to put oneself in another’s shoes (accurately)–– is that it shows how much cognition and affect are interrelated. The emphasis in these studies on mental states and intentions of characters is particularly interesting, and meshes well with literary studies which parse the plots in terms of the propositional (belief, knowledge, etc.) worlds of characters:36 Anecdotally, many of our subjects with autism or Asperger Syndrome have told us that going to the movies is, for them, often a frustrating experience, a waste of their time. This is because the social action proceeds rapidly, and they find it hard to work out why a character did or said something (their intentions or motives), who knows what and who doesn’t, and why the audience laughs at particular points in the film. It just happens all too fast. Baron-Cohen et al. (1997), 820

The same weakness in Theory of Mind, which prevents effective engagement with fiction, is also shown when processing figural language in general and humour in particular.37 Studies have shown a strong preference for nonverbal and slapstick humour, forms less advanced in developmental terms,38 and particular problems with the conceptual reconfiguring required with more abstract (verbal) humour.39 While other factors may be involved, problems in processing narrative humour are correlated closely with poor performance in ToM tests.40 This weakness points to humour involving both emotion (empathy) and cognition, as well as leading to an emotional and physiological response stemming from the cognitive disjunction. Some support for this can be found from brain-imaging research. Humour and other activity associated with ToM are associated with the right-frontal lobe, responsible for the integration of affective and cognitive dimensions.41 Right hemisphere-damaged patients have been shown to have problems in humour appreciation.42 A further study has indicated a more complex story, with different neural networks including parts of the left hemisphere (responsible for language processing) being activated for different types of humour. The authors identify a further system specifically for the affective dimension and argue that this illustrates the

36

See especially Eco (1981), Ryan (1991), Semino (1997), Werth (1999). For which there is more explicit bibliography than on fiction itself. See especially Lyons and Fitzgerald (2004), with the addition of Emerich et al. (2003); Martin and McDonald (2004). 38 St. James and Tager-Flusberg (1994). The standard work on humour and development is McGhee (1979). 39 40 Emerich et al. (2003), with bibliography. Martin and McDonald (2004). 41 42 See Lyons and Fitzgerald (2004), 523 for bibliography. Brownell et al. (2000). 37

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distinction between being able to understand or analyse a joke formally on the one hand and actually ‘getting’ the joke on the other.43 If we can say, then, that humour has both an affective and cognitive dimension, then this would seem to suggest that comic audiences are certainly involved and engaged in a performance. Both genres involve rapid and complex hypotheses about others’ intentions. However, for most narrative comedy, especially Aristophanes, audiences are parsing not jokes by realistic characters, but rather comic causation, which encompasses characterization itself. In some instances it is possible to see characters making jokes within the fictional world, as in Lysistrata, where the ithyphallic Kinesias is looking to reach his wife through Lysistrata as gatekeeper/pimp. Both his desperate response and even perhaps Lysistrata’s own suggestive remark are jokes. At least, Kinesias does not appear to have any great expectation of a firm outcome to his offer and the tip is ultimately of the monetary kind. Λυ. Κι.

τ ο4ν; δσει τ µοι; γωγ. ‹σοι› ν6 τν ∆# +ν βολ7 γε σ. χω δ το&θ# · 8περ ο4ν χω, δδωµ σου

Lys. Ki.

Hey! Will you give me something? Damn right I will, by Zeus, if you’re up for it. But I have this: all I have I give you. Aristophanes, Lysistrata 861–3

More often than not, the joke is because of the situation, or from the inappropriate or otherwise unintentionally comic utterance of a character, as here, where Strepsiades is getting to grips with cartography: Μα. Στ.

α#λλ’ 9 Λακεδαµων πο& ’στν;

8που ’στν; ατη. < 0γγ) 9µ%ν. το&το µεταφροντζετε. τατην α=φ’ 9µ%ν α#παγαγε,ν πρρω πα´νυ.

Alright, but where’s Sparta? Stud. Where is it? Over there. Strep. How near it is to us! Think on this one again and take it away from us––a lot further away. Aristophanes, Clouds 214–16

In other cases, it may be difficult to decide quite how a joke is focalized, as in this example––does Dionysos’ explanation to Herakles about tragic desire represent sibling banter or a metatextual joke about the comic Herakles? 43

Goel and Dolan (2001).

Audience and Emotion = Ηρ. ∆ι.

πο, τι, ?δελφδιον; οκ χω φρα´σαι. 8µω γε µ.ντοι σοι δι# α@νιγµ%ν 0ρ%. Aδη ποτ# 0πεθµησα 0ξαφνη τνου;

Her. Di.

What sort of [desire], little brother?

49

I don’t know how to put it. But all the same I’ll tell you through a comparison. Have you at any time ever suddenly felt a desire for lentil soup? Aristophanes, Frogs 60–2

If, however, identifying humour involves Theory of Mind, then the last two cases (at least) pose the question: whose mind? We appear to need an author, rising from his coffin. Happily, as with the act of fictional communication, we can comfort ourselves with our vampiric author as an audience construct or position, not a real entity. Either way, the precise nature of comic involvement in Aristophanes will vary according to context and be particularly associated with conceptual and figural humour, where conceptual shifts need to be accounted for. The more straightforward physical humour of the pratfall and slapstick falls outside of this account, if they do not have a conceptual and/or figural dimension––although in Aristophanes as with much narrative comedy that will be the exception rather than the rule. Tracking an audience’s emotional engagement becomes an important criterion for assessing audience response in comedy, just as much as in tragedy. As well as individual response, the collective and social dimension to the experience of laughter is also important, from elementary tickling upwards.44 The social dimension is twofold. On the one hand, there is the relatively passive side of the transaction. It has been often noted that laughter is more likely to result if you are in an audience of laughing people. More specifically, Robert Provine has studied the phenomenon of contagious laughter in a number of contexts, including TV comedy audiences.45 From this point of view, comedy has the potential to be a much more cohesive experience than tragedy. Both, to be sure, are collective experiences in the Fifth Century, but the potential for a coherent audience response is more plausible in comedy owing to the social and public dimension of laughter.46 On the other hand, the role of laughter in everyday humorous transactions tends to reside with the producer rather than the audience, and is used as

44 Provine (2000), 23–53. The importance of the social dimension for autistic children has been noted by Reddy et al. (2002). 45 Provine (1992) and (2000), 129–151. 46 Segal (1996) argues for the collective and social nature of emotional response to tragedy.

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a kind of social glue between the two.47 Comic performance tends to be anomalous in this respect (as others), but there are some types of comic performance whose practice reflects this use of laughter, as cue for and link with the audience. Modern stand-up comedy is one, where both direct audience engagement and the laughing performer are well known. Aristophanes is another: α#λλ# οχ οB τ# εCµι α#ποσοβDσαι τν γ.λων, Eρ%ν λεοντDν 0π2 κροκωτ' κειµ.νην. I just can’t choke down the tears of laughter seeing a lion-skin over a saffron robe. Aristophanes, Frogs 45–6

As Taplin himself has noted, such metatheatrical laughter makes its way into late Euripides, particularly the Kadmos and Teiresias scene from the Bakkhai.48 For Aristophanic metatheatre, however, the connection to the practice of humour is both more thoroughgoing and more fundamental. As we have seen, the metatheatrical transactions in Aristophanes are located at a different level to those of tragedy––at the level of the fictional transaction itself––and do far more conceptual violence (or require more conceptual work, depending on one’s point of view). The social dimension of humour also reinforces the point that metatheatre in Aristophanes is an act of complicity, even solidarity, rather than an act of alienation. Even rebukes of the audience in Aristophanes require their engagement.49

U N I V E R S A L A N D PA RT I C U L A R Who’s that, then? Dunno. Must be a king. Why? He hasn’t got shit all over him. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

With food, frocks, and faeces perhaps comedy is, after all, overwhelmingly particular, leaving the realm of the universal to tragedy. Just as, however, tragedy draws general implications from specific events and characters, so too the often lowly stuff of comedy is trading in broader concepts and categories. 47 49

Provine (2000). e.g. Akh. 633–42.

48

Especially 248–51, cf. Taplin (1986), 163 and (1996).

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Before turning to these, it is not, however, a facetious point to note that food, excrement, and other bodily phenomena are perhaps the most universal to the human experience.50 Dress is not far behind, even though its contingent expression is highly culturally specific. We cannot simply substitute ‘universal’ for ‘high’ and ‘particular’ for ‘low’. Nor is ‘falling over a pile of dung’ antithetical to broader concerns. What, then, of the suggestion that comedy is not interested in a sustained manner in generalized issues and generalizing? Is comedy interested in specific piles of dung or dung in a broader sense? Is it interested in politicians rather than politics, in specific moral choices rather than morality? It would be difficult to suggest seriously that Akharnians does not have a fairly consistent focus on war and peace (not simply Dikaiopolis’ peace), that Knights is not exploiting the relationship of politicians to the people (not simply Paphlagon), that Wasps is not, at least for the first thousand lines, fairly consistently examining the practices of the law courts, that Frogs does not have the most sustained treatment of tragedy before Plato, or that Ekklesiazousai does not deal with a hatful of ‘big issues’. On the other hand, at least in the earlier plays it could be said to be Athenian politics, not politics in general, that is at stake. We do not, as Taplin observes, have the ‘step back’ of the chorus, which explicitly broadens out the situation on stage. There is a sort of distancing through being in a peculiarly twisted version of the here-and-now and both comic and tragic worlds are constructed out of the audience’s own world experience, but the comic world nonetheless remains much more recognizable as a twisted version of the Athenian here-and-now. Even so, the low or historically contingent or particular humour of Aristophanes still demands the manipulation of abstract and general concepts, requiring a great deal of cognitive work which is linked through work across the comic episodes. In the passages from the previous section, we can see that all require a degree of abstraction and are not restricted to the immediate, concrete and particular. Indeed, the jokes tend to operate at the ‘basic level’ of categories.51 The banter of Dionysos and Herakles requires the juggling not of specific manifestations of these gods, but the general case and (the sub-categories of) the generic cases. The confusion of kroko¯tos and club requires a basic-level understanding of the iconography of both gods, not specific representations. In Dionysos’ soup comparison, the obvious juggling involves different sorts of desire, as well as the juxtaposition of soup and drama. Likewise, to get the joke about Strepsiades’ failure to appreciate the niceties of cartography requires some appreciation of the category of map, in particular its relationship to physical geography. 50

See especially Bakhtin (1984).

51

See Lakoff (1987), 31–57 for discussion.

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In Lysistrata, part of the point here is that Kinesias will not go through with the offer: the joke plays off Lysistrata as guard (Lys. 849), pimp or d o orkeeper and Lysistrata as Athenian citizen wife, with all the attendant codes and prohibitions. The whole scene, as indeed much of the plot of the play, plays on the basic category of marriage and its associations of (amongst other things) fidelity, no matter how implausible this would be in the circumstances. The interplay of marriage on the one hand and sexual desire is clear from Kinesias’ short soliloquy while Lysistrata fetches his wife. Exploring loneliness and the various expectations of marriage, he reduces it to sexual frustration: ‘for I’m stiff ’ (στυκα γα´ρ, Lys. 869). While these examples have involved varying degrees of abstraction and some of the big issues (the gods, gender, sexuality), none of them has touched upon perhaps the most controversial comic issue, namely politics. In Aristophanes’ treatment of politics there is of course explicit reflection on characters’ and the city’s immediate problems, but the underlying categories, processes and potential application are much more general. A good example comes from the Akharnians, where Dikaiopolis challenges Lamakhos’ credibility. Λα. ∆ι.

0χειροτνησαν γα´ρ µε.

κκκυγ. γε τρε,.

Lam. Of course! They voted for me. Dik. Yes: three cuckoos. Aristophanes, Akharnians 598

‘Three cuckoos’ is apparently an expression of derision about quantity and significance of the electorate rather than their mental competence alone.52 Leaving aside the purely historical debate as to Lamakhos’ precise circumstances in 425, we can see that the cognitive moves are actually quite complex. As a response to claims of authority, the response seems to go beyond a claim simply of elected status being irrelevant. It also challenges us to work out why. One option is simply that there is a difference between an election and a mandate, whether in terms of turnout or the percentage-share of the vote, or the extent of the majority. Another is a tension between demo cracy and morality: that a democratic mandate does not obviate moral obligations. The latter is perhaps more contextually appropriate given that the self-serving and morally dubious actions of the people’s representatives is a major theme, 52 For emptiness, see Dunbar (1995) on Birds 891, who, however, suggests that ‘foolish’ is the sense in this passage. Olson ad loc. suggests that both quantity and foolishness are at stake. The best parallel for ‘foolish’ is Plato Comicus fr. 65.3, where that sense is made doubly specific through adjectives. For more on cuckoos, see Dunbar on Birds 504 and 505.

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but their mandate is also at stake. Both are related to broader concerns in the play, as well as the main plot element of the Akharnians, the quest for a personal peace. Both, too, are concepts which are familiar and pressing today. These abstract reflections and processes need to be extremely rapid to get the joke: Lamakhos was not elected by invasive birds but by the Athenians; why are the Athenians like three cuckoos? How is quantity related to legitimacy?––and so on. The extent to which these steps are fully conscious or well-developed or well-articulated reflections may be open to question––I certainly do not want to suggest that the Single Transferable Vote was a hot topic among the Athenian audience––but the collision of these issues with the claims of representative democracy is being explored here in a way that, while mediated through the practicalities of Athenian politics, is dealing with both concepts and categories (that is, abstracted) in a way that can be applicable in a number of contexts, including our own (that is, universal), and in a way that tragedy, by virtue of its very distancing, is unable to do. It seems clear that comedy of the Aristophanic sort is engaged in abstract and general conceptual work and that this takes place across a range of subjects (even if they are not always particularly high). Rather than taking place through reflections by a character or the chorus on the events on stage, this takes place through the cognitive processing required through the joke. In some respects, this argument is similar to the one advanced by Eco, that comedy assumes cultural norms while tragedy makes them explicit,53 but we are not only dealing with norms. It is the implied work involved in explaining the surprising or implausible that is at the heart of this sort of humour. While comedy may, from a historical perspective, be trading up from less cognitively sophisticated humour,54 that historical development lies in the past, perhaps even before the beginning of Kratinos’ career.55 The distinction between tragedy and comedy that Taplin draws in later fifth-century drama between the universal and particular, abstract and concrete reflects the way that those two genres relate the general and the specific. For tragedy, there is explicit reflection on temporally and spatially distanced character and situation. For comedy, there is implicit manipulation of general concepts through representations that are more immediately familiar, but ones that are skewed out of kilter. As with the genres’ respective forms of emotional engagement these are different but not mutually exclusive. Tragedy sets empathy with individual experiences in the context of abstract reflections. Comedy, too, can offer abstract analysis and discussion, but its real power comes from its audience’s emotional involvement in and pay-off from 53 55

Eco (1987). Ruffell (2002).

54

Silk (1980) argues for a similar trajectory in comic lyric.

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the process of humour, which at the same time exploits and manipulates categories, including those that are more explicitly presented elsewhere.

E M OT I O N A N D I D E O LO G Y Vultan: What is this? Zarkov: Humanity. Vultan: Madness! Flash Gordon

In both genres, then, emotion and meaning, including a degree of abstraction, are intertwined in a complex relationship. While absolute divisions are unwise––clearly comedy can exploit non-comic modes of involvement with character too56 ––the dominant interface between emotion and cognition remains different in each genre and allows for different sorts of manipulations of the audience and/or audience response. As with metatheatre, comic audiences are emotionally and cognitively oriented much more towards the immediate and present act of fictional and humorous communication and the implicit exploitation of categories and concepts; tragic audiences are engaged with the experience of individual characters in a temporally and theatrically distanced context, mapped explicitly on to a more general canvas. Both audiences, too, have collective experiences, but in comedy the collective nature of audience response is more explicitly foregrounded on both sides of the spectator/performer divide.57 We must, though, distinguish between experience of being part of a collective and interpretation as a collective (even though those may overlap). If there is an empathetic-systematizing spectrum of response, then a variety of specific tragic and comic experiences will be built into the collective experience. Performance and other audience members’ response may each provide directions for emotional and cognitive travel, but within those the precise paths and length of travel will be individual. Where emotional functions of fifth-century drama are particularly interesting is in their dialogue with ideology. Here, I do not want to suggest that emotion is antithetical to ideology.58 Rather, emotional responses of varying kinds help us to avoid some of the problems associated with structural or 56

See especially Silk (1987). So, on different grounds, Slater (1999). See also the comments of Easterling (1996), 173–4 on the tragic cues for individual response. 58 As Griffin (1998) is in danger of doing. 57

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hegemonic understanding of ideology, particularly those of resistance and change.59 Is it ever possible to think outside of the ideological box? If not, how is it possible to effect social change? One response to this problem might be to see ideology in a more pluralist fashion, as an interplay of overlapping groups, interests, and associated ideologies.60 Another might be to see a liberatory role to emotional identification or understanding, shattering ideological constraints, through the exploration of others’ experience or the construction of meaning through the juxtaposition and collision of categories. Indeed, Theory of Mind can be seen to be a precondition for the construction of the kinds of social interactions out of which ideologies emerge. If this is right, emotional response presents a powerful and non-logical force in addition to more coherent and logical reflection, discussion or analysis. To be sure, the anti-logical power of emotion can be harnessed easily enough to a collective response that reinforces and deepens ideological structures, but the fictional processes involved in both tragic and comic drama can, at best, have the potential to explore beyond the shackles of ideology or convention. This is not to reintroduce transhistorical universals by the back door, but to suggest that fiction, ritual and ideology are all dependent on certain evolved processes and brain functions. Even the most historically minded critic needs to build in the affective dimension to their analysis. As Oliver Taplin has shown, we cannot afford to leave the audience out of our interpretation of drama.

REFERENCES Bain, D. (1977), Actors and Audience, Oxford. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984), Rabelais and his World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington (first Russian edition 1965). Baron-Cohen, S. (1995), Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, Boston, Mass. –––– Leslie, A. M., and Frith, U. (1985), ‘Does the Autistic Child Have a “Theory of Mind”?’, Cognition 21: 37–46. –––– Jolliffe, T., Mortimore, C., and Robertson, M. (1997), ‘Another Advanced Test of Theory of Mind: Evidence from Very High Functioning Adults with Autism or Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 38: 813–22. Brecht, B. (1964), Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett, London. Brownell, H., Griffin, R., Winner, E., Friedman, O., and Happé, F. G. E. (2000), ‘Cerebral Lateralization and Theory of Mind’, in S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, 59

Thus utopia is a (perhaps unconvincing) way for Ricoeur (1985) to evade that bind, cf. Ruffell (2000), 481. 60 Laclau and Mouffe (2001).

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and D. J. Cohen (eds.), Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2nd edn. (Oxford), 306–33. Compagnon, A. (1998), Le Démon de la théorie. Littérature et sens commun, Paris. Currie, G. (1990), The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge. Dolezˇel, L. (1989), ‘Possible Worlds and Literary Fictions’, in Sture Allén (ed.), Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65 (Berlin/ New York), 221–42. Dunbar, N. V. (1995) (ed.), Aristophanes: Birds, Oxford. Easterling, P. E. (1973), ‘Presentation of Character in Aeschylus’, G&R 20: 3–19. –––– (1990), ‘Constructing Character in Greek Tragedy’, in Pelling (1990), 83–99. –––– (1996), ‘Weeping, Witnessing and the Tragic Audience: Response to Segal’, in Silk (1996), 173–81. Eco, U. (1981), The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, London. –––– (1987), Travels in Hyperreality, London. –––– (1990), The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington. Emerich, D. M., Creaghead, N. A., Grethe, S. M., Murray, D., and Grasha, C. (2003), ‘The Comprehension of Humorous Materials by Adolescents with HighFunctioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 33: 253–7. Goel, V., and Dolan, R. J. (2001), ‘The Functional Anatomy of Humor: Segregating Cognitive and Affective Components’, Nature Neuroscience 4: 237 f. Golan, O., Baron-Cohen, S., and Hill, J. (2006), ‘The Cambridge Mindreading (CAM) Face-Voice Battery: Testing Complex Emotion Recognition in Adults with and without Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 36: 169–83. Goldhill, S. (1990), ‘Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics’, in Pelling (1990), 100–27. –––– (1996), ‘Collectivity and Otherness––the Authority of the Tragic Chorus: Response to Gould’, in Silk (1996), 244–56. –––– (2000), ‘Civic Ideology and the Problem of Difference: The Politics of Aeschylean Tragedy, Once again’, JHS 120: 34–56. Gould, J. (1978), ‘Dramatic Character and “Human Intelligibility”’, PCPhS 24: 43–67. –––– (1996), ‘Tragedy and Collective Experience’, in Silk (1996), 217–43. Griffin, J. (1998), ‘The Social Function of Attic Tragedy’, CQ 48: 39–61. Happé, F. G. E. (1994), ‘An Advanced Test of Theory of Mind: Understanding of Story Characters’ Thoughts and Feelings by Able Autistic, Mentally Handicapped, and Normal Children and Adults’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24: 129–54. Heavey, L., Phillips, W., Baron-Cohen, S., and Rutter, M. (2000), ‘The Awkward Moments Test: A Naturalistic Measure of Social Understanding in Autism’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 30: 225–36. Jolliffe, T., and Baron-Cohen, S. (1999), ‘The Strange Stories Test: A Replication with High-Functioning Adults with Autism or Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 29: 395–406.

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Kaland, N., Møller-Nielsen, A., Smith, L., Mortensen, E. L., Callesen, K., and Gottlieb, D. (2005), ‘The Strange Stories Test: A Replication Study of Children and Adolescents with Asperger Syndrome’, European Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 14: 73–82. Kellaway, K. (2007), ‘A Desdemona to Die For’, The Observer, April 27, 19. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed., London. Lada, I. (1993), ‘ “Empathetic Understanding”: Emotion and Cognition in Classical Dramatic Audience-Response’, PCPhS 39: 94–140. –––– (1996), ‘Emotion and Meaning on the Athenian Tragic Stage’, in Silk (1996), 397–413. –––– (1997), ‘Estrangement or Reincarnation? Performers and Performance on the Classical Athenian Stage’, Arion 5: 66–107. Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago/London. Lamarque, P. and Olsen, S. H. (1994), Truth, Fiction and Literature, Oxford. Lawson, J., Baron-Cohen, S., and Wheelwright, S. (2004), ‘Empathising and Systemising in Adults with and without Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34: 300–10. Lewis, D. K. (1978), ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 37–46. Lowe, N. J. (1996), ‘Tragic and Homeric Ironies’, in Silk (1996), 520–33. –––– (2000), The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, Cambridge. –––– (2006), ‘Aristophanic Spacecraft’, in L. Kozak and J. Rich (eds.), Playing Around Aristophanes (Oxford), 46–64. Lyons, V. and Fitzgerald, M. (2004), ‘Humor in Autism and Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34: 521–31. McGhee, P. (1979), Humor: its Origin and Development, San Francisco. Martin, I., and McDonald, S. (2004), ‘An Exploration of Causes of Non-Literal Language Problems in Individuals with Asperger Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 34: 311–28. Olson, S. D. (2002) (ed.), Aristophanes: Acharnians, Oxford. Pelling, C. B. R. (1990) (ed.), Characterisation and Individuality in Greek Literature, Oxford. Provine, R. R. (1992), ‘Contagious Laughter: Laughter is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughs and Smiles’, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 30: 1–4. –––– (2000), Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, London. Reddy, V., Williams, E., and Vaughan, A. (2002), ‘Sharing Humour and Laughter in Autism and Down’s Syndrome’, British Jounal of Psychology 93: 219–42. Rhodes, P. J. (2003), ‘Nothing to Do with Democracy: Athenian Drama and the Polis’, JHS 123: 104–19. Ricoeur, P. (1985), Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York/Chichester. Romilly, J. de (1973), ‘Gorgias et le pouvoir de la poésie’, JHS 93: 55–63. Ronen, R. (1994), Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge. Rosenmeyer, T. G. (1996), ‘Ironies in Serious Drama’, in Silk (1996), 497–519.

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Ruffell, I. A. (2000), ‘The World Turned Upside Down: Utopia and Utopianism in the Fragments of Old Comedy’, in Wilkins and Harvey (2000), 473–506. –––– (2002), ‘A Total Write-Off: Aristophanes, Cratinus and the Rhetoric of Comic Competition’, CQ 52: 138–63. Ryan, M.-L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington. Segal, C. P. (1996), ‘Catharsis, Audience and Closure in Greek Tragedy’, in Silk (1996), 149–72. Semino, E. (1997), Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts, London. Sifakis, G. M. (1971), Parabasis and Animal Choruses: A Contribution to the History of Attic Comedy, London. –––– (1992), ‘The Structure of Aristophanic Comedy’, JHS 112: 123–42. Silk, M. S. (1980), ‘Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet’, in Jeffrey J. Henderson, (ed.), Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation, Yale Classical Studies 26 (New Haven/London), 99–151. –––– (1987), ‘Pathos in Aristophanes’, BICS 34: 78–111. –––– (1988), ‘The Autonomy of Comedy’, Comparative Criticism 10: 3–37. –––– (1990), ‘The People of Aristophanes’, in Pelling (1990), 150–73. –––– (1996) (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, Oxford. –––– (2000), Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford. Slater, N. W. (1993), ‘Space, Character and α#πα´τη: Transformation and Transvaluation in the Acharnians’, in A. Sommerstein, S. Halliwell, B. Zimmermann, and J. Henderson (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis: Papers from the Greek Drama Conference, Nottingham, 18–20 July, 1990 (Bari), 397–415. –––– (1999), ‘Making the Aristophanic Audience’, AJPh 120: 351–68. –––– (2002), Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes, Philadelphia. St. James, P. J. and Tager-Flusberg, H. (1994), ‘An Observational Study of Humor in Autism and Down Syndrome’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 24: 603–17. Taplin, O. P. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford. –––– (1983), ‘Tragedy and Trugedy’, CQ 33: 331–3. –––– (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, JHS 106: 163–74. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Attic Drama Through VasePainting, Oxford. –––– (1996), ‘Comedy and the Tragic’, in Silk (1996), 188–202. –––– (1999), ‘Spreading the Word Through Performance’, in S. D. Goldhill and R. G. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge), 33–57. Walton, K. L. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, Mass. Werth, P. N. (1999), Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, Harlow. Wilkins, J. and Harvey, D. (2000) (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy, London. Wilson, P. J. and Taplin, O. P. (1993), ‘The “Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39: 169–80.

3 Greek Middlebrow Drama (Something to do with Aphrodite?) Mark Griffith

1 . I N T RO D U C T I O N : T R AG E DY A N D C O M E DY ( J U S T T H E S E T WO ? ) As Aristotle remarks early in the Poetics (4, 1449a15), tragedy found ‘its own true nature’ in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, i.e. in Athens during the mid fifth century bce. He insists too that there has always been a sharp and inescapable distinction between tragedy and comedy, between ‘good, serious, high’ subjects and objects of representation and ‘bad, shameful, low’ ones (σπουδα,οι vs φα&λοι, α@σχρο: Poet. 2, 1448a1–18, etc.). This distinction is rooted in the conviction that some people and actions just are lower-class and worse while others are higher-class and better;1 and it can be traced back to the formal and ethical discrepancies that Greek critics noted between epic on the one hand, and iambus on the other (e.g. Poet. 4, 1448b34–49a6). Likewise the reactions provoked in audiences and readers were supposed to be distinctly different: ‘pity and fear’, ‘tears and sympathy’ in the one case, ‘laughter’ and ‘mockery’ in the other; and they were not supposed to be mixed.2 All Greek and Latin literary genres, indeed, like those of most of Renaissance Europe during its various classicizing phases, were based on this assumption of distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’, and the different levels of seriousness expected of each.3 Nowhere was this distinction more consistently maintained, it is usually argued, than in the theatre. Oliver Taplin has shown how closely and 1

On these notions in Aristotle, as well as the difficulties of reconstructing his general views on comedy, see Lucas (1968) ad locc., Halliwell (1986), 158–62, 266–76. 2 As Cicero puts it: Et in tragoedia comicum vitiosum est et in comoedia turpe tragicum (De opt. gen. orat. 1). See below, text to n. 58, on Demetrius and ‘playful tragedy’. 3 See e.g. Guthke (1966), 3–22, Hirst (1984), 7–17. For ‘tragicomedy’, kômôidotragôidia, and hilarotragôidia, see further text to and n. 63 below.

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symbiotically Athenian tragedy and Old Comedy complemented and played off one another throughout the fifth century, and how distinctively each of these two genres was received and appreciated in subsequent centuries.4 But it is worth pausing to consider just how arbitrary––and in some respects how inadequate––Aristotle’s binary distinction really is, as an account of Greek drama and of the ‘natural’ propensities of theatrical performance, whether ancient or modern, western or eastern. For while it is self-evidently true that the competitions in drama at the City Dionysia and other festivals were regularly divided into these two distinct categories, tragôidia and kômôidia, it is also apparent (as we shall see) that each of these categories was both quite capacious and also subject to changing definitions and conventions. Whatever the Athenian performance categories (and Aristotle) might suggest, there really were not just two types or ‘natures’ of drama in existence during these centuries: the variety of formal and thematic possibilities seems to have been much greater, even if no separate labels for most of them were assigned.5 Tragôidia as such (we are told) was invented in Athens by Thespis c.535 bce, under the regime of the Pisistratids (or else perhaps c.510 bce to celebrate the new Cleisthenic democracy).6 It was thus a form of drama specifically designed to be a component of a particular festival and a specific social-political scene. Likewise ‘Old’ kômôidiai first came into existence (at least, were first institutionalized) in Athens during the 480s for this same festival––and in some sense to complement the tragôidiai. But both of these dramatic forms, with their rather elaborate rules and conventions, had been preceded by other performance modes, some of which apparently continued to offer alternative possibilities for the wider world of dramatic and literary production, from the Classical and Hellenistic eras into Roman and Byzantine times. The best known of these ‘alternatives’ of course is satyr play, a major dramatic form in its own right that was closely associated in Athens with tragedy, yet was quite distinct in its conventions and mood from either tragedy or comedy. Satyr drama flourished in Athens throughout the fifth and fourth century; but it had existed elsewhere before its introduction into Athens, and satyr plays continued to be popular in many parts of the Greek world for several centuries longer.7 Yet notoriously satyr drama is almost 4

Taplin (1993); also (1983) and (1986), including reference to the end of Plato’s Symposium. From a very different angle, see too Silk (2000), 42–97 (ch. 2 ‘Comedy and tragedy’). 5 For analysis of the wide range of plot types and levels of seriousness found within Athenian tragedy, even while the decorum of ‘high style’ is consistently maintained, see Mastronarde (2000), to which this essay of mine is much indebted; also n. 63 below. 6 7 For the latter theory, see Connor (1989). See below, pp. 73–9.

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completely ignored by Aristotle,8 as it was until recently by most modern scholars of the ancient theatre, so much more comfortable have they been with a simple binary opposition of ‘high’ vs ‘low’, ‘serious’ vs ‘comic’, with occasional focus on (mainly Euripidean) experiments with ‘tragicomedy’ or ‘melodrama’ or ‘drama of mixed reversal’ or ‘ironic tragedy’, as if these were a late and, as it were, slightly decadent development out of a purer and more naive original tradition.9 But I think that a good case can be made that, even among the more ‘serious’ (non-‘comic’) plays that were conventionally labelled ‘tragedies’, quite a variety of mythologically- and historically-based plays existed (what I shall generally be calling ‘romantic dramas’), some of which may not have resembled at all closely the surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Euripides. Likewise, ‘comedy’ was hardly a single, uniform category of drama either. The comic performance traditions of (e.g.) Syracuse, Megara, and Tarentum all appear to have produced dramas that were significantly different from those of Athens (which itself was famous for at least two, and perhaps three, quite different kinds of kômôidia);10 and several of these comic traditions apparently continued to be influential throughout the Greek world for centuries. If, then, we remove from our eyes the critical blinkers (or Aristotelian bifocals) that have conditioned us to think that (i) tragedy and comedy exist naturally and essentially as the two basic, proper, and best forms of drama (even of ‘world view’), while other dramatic subforms function only as parodies, offshoots, degenerations, etc. of the two ‘original’ masterforms, and (ii) that ‘drama’ as such was really invented in Athens during the fifth century bce, then we may come to appreciate better what a wide range of dramatic enactments and choral impersonations could be found all over Greece. Along with this modification in outlook may come a recognition that the proper audience response to theatre was (is) not necessarily supposed to be EITHER ‘pity and fear’ (for high, serious tragedy) OR ‘laughter and mockery’ (for low, 8

Aristotle mentions satyr drama only briefly, in connection with the origins of tragedy (Poet. 4, 1449a20); see pp. 73–5 below and Cozzoli (2003), 268–9. For modern discussion of satyr drama, see esp. Seaford (1984), KPS (1999), Kaimio et al. (2001), Voelke (2001), Griffith (2002), Cozzoli (2003). Taplin (1986) reminds us of the existence of this third, ‘middle’ form between tragedy and comedy, though this is not emphasized in his synkrisis. Horace (Art of Poetry) and Demetrius (On Style), however, along with several other ancient critics, see satyr drama as a third genre of almost equal prominence; see text to and n. 56 below. 9 Many twentieth-century critics have focused on Euripides as a pioneer of a new kind of tragedy or ‘tragicomedy’: e.g. Burnett (1971), Knox (1979), 250–74, Seidensticker (1982), Foley (1985), Gibert (2000). 10 In the case of Athenian ‘Old, Middle, and New’ Comedy, there is vigorous recent debate about the validity of thus separately and sequentially categorizing them. Many of the elements traditionally described as belonging to ‘Middle’ Comedy are found already in several plays of the ‘Old’ (fifth-century) period: see Csapo (2000), Nesselrath (2000), Sidwell (2000).

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gross comedy, or burlesque).11 Other responses and feelings may be legitimate too, such as local or patriotic pride, wonder, comfort, erotic desire, religious awe, and joy––to say nothing of pleasantly and confusingly ‘mixed feelings’ too. That is to say, maintaining the sharp dichotomy and separation of ‘high’ tragedy from ‘low’ comedy, while it may sometimes be critically helpful as a way to think about different types of theatrical and aesthetic effects (and while it may have produced an interesting symbiosis of its own, especially through the works of Aristotle and his Renaissance followers)––just as it was a necessary practical mechanism by which the Athenians could organize their festival competitions––is often hopelessly reductive and constricting. As a pair these two ‘types’ do not begin to exhaust, or even exemplify in any adequate way, the possibilities of dramatic experience; and certainly they do not do justice to the chronological, generic, and geographical variety of the ancient Greek theatrical traditions. We might speculate for a moment. What if the Athenians had not instituted those two distinct festival competitions when and as they did? Perhaps the simplistic critical binary of high vs low, tragedy vs comedy, might never have taken over. Or if Athenian culture and paideia (abetted by the Artists of Dionysus) had not become so Panhellenically dominant from the late fifth century onward, perhaps Plato’s and Aristotle’s definitions and categories might not have prevailed so completely with posterity.12 As we look around at other theatre traditions worldwide, we can immediately observe that they 11 For the sake of completeness, I should also specify another possibility: ‘tragicomedy’, i.e. a subgenre combining tragic and comic elements in such a way as to produce a peculiar and distinctive mixture of these two sets of reactions. Tragicomedy has intermittently attracted intensive interest and discussion, but is not really my topic in this chapter. For good discussion of the term in relation to Euripides’ plays, see Seidensticker (1982), Mastronarde (2000), 29–30, 35–6. The earliest occurrence of the term (tragicomoedia) is found in the Prologue to Plautus’ Amphitryo (tongue-in-cheek, from Mercury), though fifth- and fourth-century plays by Alcaeus and Anaxandrides were apparently referred to as (entitled?) komôidotragôidia (see LSJ s.v., and PCG 2, pp. 9–10). On Giambattista Guarini’s Compendio della poesia Tragicomica (1601) and the 17th c. Italian and French fascination with (self-styled) tragicomedies, see e.g. Zardini Lana (1991); and in general Guthke (1966), Hirst (1984), Foster (2004). In the modern era, it is said: ‘Tragicomedy has established itself in the twentieth century as the dominant dramatic form’ Hirst (1984), xi; or even, ‘The tragicomic is the basic pattern of human experience . . . Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modern times replaced tragedy itself [sic] as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds’: Foster (2004), 9, 10. But in the present essay, I am concerned with ‘middlebrow’ or ‘romantic’ drama, not with tragicomedy––nor with hilarotragôidia, a form of tragic burlesque supposedly invented by Rhinthon of Syracuse; see below, text to n. 63. 12 Another way of putting this: did the ubiquitous symbolic pair of theatre masks, one tragic, one comic, along with the parallel opposition of the ‘laughing’ philosopher (Democritus) vs the ‘crying’ philosopher (Heraclitus), come into existence as a result specifically of the dominance of Athenian theatre culture and its attendant iconography? For discussion of a threefold division of dramatic types and scenes, see below, text to n. 60 (Boscoreale).

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have not generally divided their plays neatly into ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms; or if they have, they have allowed a wider range of subjects and emotions (especially romantic love) into their ‘high’ forms than we normally assign to Greek tragedy. But the familiar model (and surviving manuscript texts) of the great Athenian tragic triumvirate and their great comic opposite numbers (Aristophanes and Menander) is hard to escape: they have for so long been the dominant paradigm. So I should like in this essay to take a look at some of the other dimensions and constituents of the history of Greek drama–– especially that nebulous area between tragedy and comedy that I am calling ‘middlebrow’ drama.

2 . N O N - AT H E N I A N P R E D E C E S S O R S ( A N D S U C C E S S O R S ) TO AT H E N I A N T R AG E DY A N D C O M E DY While Homer (of course) was always to be regarded as the true origin of both tragedy and comedy, there were two quite different ways in which this derivation could be traced. Either (as Aristotle suggests) the Iliad and Odyssey represented the high, serious forerunners of tragedy, while the mock-heroic Margites set the tone for the lower, grosser forms that culminated in dramatic comedy;13 or, on a different trajectory, the Iliad could be viewed as essentially ‘tragic’, while the Odyssey, with its romance elements and –- especially––its happy ending, could be seen as anticipating Euripides, New Comedy, and even the prose novel.14 To add to the confusion, Aristotle’s account of the post-Homeric development of tragic mimêsis posits at least two additional ‘beginnings’ for Athenian tragôidia: one ‘from those leading off the dithyramb’ (Poet. 4.1449a10) and another ‘from the satyric’ (4.1449a20). Likewise in the case of kômôidia he acknowledges that Dorian accounts of its origins are at variance with Attic ones, while he also refers to the quite

13

Poet. 4, 1448b30; see Lucas (1968) ad loc.; also Cooper (1947), Janko (1984). On the Iliad as ‘tragedy’, see e.g. Rutherford (1982); on the Odyssey as ‘comedy’, see e.g. Longinus 9.15, where it is especially the elements of characterization and subheroic behaviour (êthikôs biologoumena) that are noted; and on ancient and Byzantine scholiastic discussions of comic elements in the surviving tragedies, sometimes with reference to the Odyssey, and occasionally with confusing reference also to satyr drama, see Meijering (1987), 212–19. See too Richards (1900a). The plays that are described in the scholia as being ‘rather comic’ (kômikôteron) or as containing inappropriately comic scenes or characters are Eur. Andromache, Hecuba (!), Alcestis, and Orestes, along with Soph. Electra (!––for its chariot race, recognition scene, and happy(?) ending). Ioannis Tzetzes was particularly interested in the problems of such mixing of genres. 14

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separate (and very early) contributions of the Sicilians Epicharmus and Phormis (4,1448a29–48b3, cf. 5,1449b5–7). Nor is Aristotle alone in such muddle-headedness or over-schematization (combining too many theoretical and historical ‘origins’). Across the board, references in the ancient Greek tradition to ‘tragic choruses’, ‘tragedies’, and ‘tragedians’ show up frequently in contexts that seem to have little to do with the Athenian-derived art-form that we are familiar with. It is small wonder that tragoudô, tragoúdi evolved in due course into the standard Modern Greek words for ‘sing’ and ‘song’––while the term drama was often used as early as Late Antique and Byzantine times to refer to a verse or prose novel that had nothing to do with Dionysus or theatrical performance at all.15 Several of the early poets who are described in the ancient sources as being ‘tragedians’ have little or nothing to do with Athens.16 In Bruno Snell’s compilation of fragments from the ‘minor tragedians’ (i.e. all the known writers of tragedies from Greek antiquity except the big three), fourteen of the first twenty-two listed (covering the period c.535–430 bce) are definitely Athenians. Eight of these fourteen belong to the three great families: Aeschylus (5) and his two sons Euphorion (12) and Euaion (13); Sophocles (10) and his son Iophon (22); Euripides and his father and son, all named Euripides (16, 17, 18). Two more are the famous father-son pair Phrynichus (3) and Polyphrasmon (7).17 The other four tragic poets of this early era whose names have survived and who certainly, or probably, were Athenian-born, are Thespis (1); Choerilus (2); Mesatus (11); and Carcinus (21).18 Two more are of completely unknown origin: Euetes (6) and -ippus (8 = ?Nothippus?). From other cities we find: Pratinas (4) and his son Aristias (9) from Phleious; Aristarchus (14) from Tegea; Neophron (15) from Sicyon; Ion (19) of Chios; Achaeus (20) of Eretria––and maybe Carcinus (21), if he is from Acragas as 15 For tragoúdi, see Sifakis (1967), 122 with further references. For the evolving use of the term drama, see Richards (1900b); and for application of this term to Byzantine novels (many of which in the 11th and 12th c. were written in verse), see H. Gärtner art. ‘Roman’ Kleiner Pauly (1972), 1451, Marini (1991), Beaton (2003), Roilos (2005), 38–9, 105, 199, with further references. The novel was variously referred to in the classical era as logos, muthos, apologos, ainos, diêgêma, diêgêsis, historia, drama, plasma. For self-reference within the Greek novels to their own ‘theatricality’, see Walden (1894), Ruiz-Montero (2003), 35–6; also below. 16 In what follows, I shall largely be following the references collected in Snell (1971): each tragedian’s assigned TrGF number will be given in parentheses. For discussion of pre-tragic, proto-tragic, and early tragic poets, and remarks on the non-Athenian origins of several of them, see esp. Lesky (1983), Herington (1985). 17 On the tendency for tragic playwriting (like most forms of expertise) to run in families, see Sutton (1987), Easterling (1997), 216, Scodel (2001). In the fourth century one of the most successful tragedians was Astydamas, another descendant of Aeschylus. 18 The Suda states that Carcinus was from Acragas (see below); but most modern scholars regard him as Athenian.

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the Suda states: a total of six or seven, most of them quite famous. But this is not the whole picture. Among the listings in TrGF vol. 1, mostly tucked away near the end, are several additional early poets and culture figures who were cited by one or more ancient authorities as being ‘tragedians’, but whom Snell himself (like most modern historians of tragedy) regarded as not legitimately belonging in that category––hence listed as poetae falsi vel maxime dubii. The list is impressive and interesting: it includes Arion of Methymna/Corinth (227), who, mythical or fantastic though his status is (hardly more so, however, than that of Thespis), must loom large in any hypothetical history of dithyramb and tragedy; and we find also such names as Epigenes of Sicyon (239), Minos/Minon (247) and Auleas (231) of Crete, Simonides of Ceos (263), Pindar of Thebes (260), and Empedocles of Acragas (50).19 In each of these cases, it may readily be conceded that the poet in question probably never composed a drama which fifth-century Athenians, or Aristotle in the fourth century, if they ever saw or read it, would call a true tragôidia. An Athenian archon might not ‘grant a chorus’ to any of them. On the other hand, it is quite likely that several of them did at one time or another compose and direct performances on mythical or historical/topical subjects at a festival or the court of a prominent elite, in a mode that involved a chorus and a ‘leader’ (0ξα´ρχων or χοραγ), and perhaps also an ‘actor/answerer/ interpreter’ (ποκριτ ), whether or not any kind of mimetic acting out of scenes, dialogues, and actions took place. Surely none of these poems/dramas (what should we label such performances?) involved the requisite combination of regular alternations of spoken and sung passages, a costumed aulêtês, masks, entrances and exits, etc., that would qualify them as (true) tragôidiai. Perhaps we might call them ‘choral dramatic lyric’ or ‘mimetic lyric’––but such terms did not exist in the Greek classificatory system: only ‘dithyramb’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘comedy’.20 To later authorities, however, such texts or performances apparently resembled ‘tragedy’, at least in some broad sense, closely enough to be so classified. Other ‘tragic poets’ from outside Athens existed whose names are not recorded at all. We may wonder, for example, who were the authors of the ‘tragic choruses’ that were being performed annually in Sicyon during the early sixth century (Hdt. 5. 67–8), first in honour of Adrastus and later

19

Distinguished non-Athenian tragic poets from later eras include Theodectes of Phaleris, Callimachus of Cyrene (234), Aratus of Soli, and Apollonius of Rhodes (224), along with others of the Pleiad tragedians. 20 I will return below to further discussion of satyr play: but in any case there is no likelihood at all that any of the above-mentioned ‘dubious or false tragedians’ were composing Athenianstyle satyr dramas.

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for Dionysus. Epigenes of Sicyon is said by the Suda (s.v. Thespis) to have been ‘the first tragic poet’ (TrGF 1. 1 [Thespis] T 1. 2–3; cf. T 18); but no verses of his survive and he is relegated by Snell to the obscurity of the dubii (239). The fragmentary remains of Stesichorus (e.g. Geryoneis frs. S7–87, or Thebaid fr. 222A, both containing vigorous dialogue, pathos, and violent action)21 or Bacchylides’ ‘dithyramb’ about Theseus (18), with its alternating stanzas from chorus and solo character voice, may give us an idea of the possibilities of such a lyric medium. On a different front, what kinds of contemporary performance should we imagine that the Homeric bards and their audiences envisaged when they described (in hexameters) Demodocus singing the amusing, erotic––and by no means low-comic––story of Ares and Aphrodite, to the accompaniment of dancing boys and girls (Od. 8)? By fifthcentury Athenian standards, none of these performances came close to providing the requisite combination of spoken actors’ lines and sung choral interludes––so these too were, by definition, not tragôidiai. But some of them at least would fit quite comfortably into most modern definitions of ‘drama’ (better than, e.g., several of the plays of Samuel Beckett or many medieval Mystery Plays). The standard account of the ‘history’ or ‘development’ of Greek tragedy, based partly on Aristotle’s Poetics, partly on the surviving texts of the three great tragedians, and partly on didascalic evidence concerning dates and conditions of performance––but also conditioned, perhaps, by modern assumptions about the organic rise, flowering, and decadence of artistic movements––describes the following sequence: first, several non-dramatic antecedents (choruses, narratives, improvisations); then Thespis (‘small’ plots, just one actor?); next Phrynichus (heavily choral? not much action, dialogue, or individual acting); and so to Aeschylus (introducer of the second actor; architect of the connected trilogy; ‘creator of tragedy’ and father of Western drama); Sophocles then refines and perfects the form; Euripides begins to experiment with it (mixing forms––tragicomedy, romantic tragedy, tragedy substituting for satyr play; etc.),22 and thus we enter the decadent period that persists throughout the rest of antiquity, until the glorious recuperation of true tragedy in the Elizabethan Age. It is this history of supposed evolution from original naiveté and simplicity into mature complexity and (over-ripe?) mixing of genres that has also led many modern scholars to conclude that Pratinas’ celebrated lyrics (TrGF 1 4 F 3 = PMG 21 See too text to n. 72 below, for Stesichorus’ poem about Daphnis (fr. 279 Campbell) as a possible precursor of both satyr drama and Theocritean pastoral. 22 See above for references; but Mastronarde (2000) is rightly more circumspect about the ‘generic’ fluidity of Greek tragedy.

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708), apparently sung by a satyr chorus dissatisfied with recent musical innovations, must have been composed, not by the famous early fifth-century satyr play expert Pratinas, but by someone else of the same name influenced by the New Music of Timotheus and Philoxenus.23 But even the Athenian tragedians during the fifth century could vary their style of drama considerably. Not all of their plays fit Aristotle’s idea of what a tragedy should ideally be. Apart from Phrynichus’ famous historical plays (Capture of Miletus, Phoenician Women) and Aeschylus’ Persians,24 we know of Aeschylus’ Aetna, designed to celebrate the founding by Hieron of a new Sicilian city and––unlike standard Athenian plays performed in the Theatre of Dionysus––involving several changes of scene.25 Back in Athens, later in the fifth century, Agathon composed at least one tragedy (Antheus) on a made-up subject with non-mythical names of characters;26 and Chaeremon’s Centaur was apparently composed in an unusual style of ‘mixed’ metres.27 Intriguing too is Philoxenus of Cytherea’s Cyclops or Galateia (PMG 819 = TrGF 1 257 T): both its title and the surviving fragment are suggestive of satyr drama or pastoral romance. Philoxenus (late fifth century–early fourth century) was mainly known as a dithyrambic poet and expert in the New Music; but this

23

For recent discussion, see Zimmermann (1986), Csapo (2004), 213–14 (both favouring a late fifth-century date and a non-dramatic dithyrambic context), D’Alessio (2005) arguing for a satyr play (and presumably the original Pratinas as its author). For discussion of the Hellenistic revival of interest in Pratinas and the lêma Pratineion (‘spirit of Pratinas’), see Nicolucci (2003), Fantuzzi (2007). 24 On which see now Taplin (2006), suggesting that Aeschylus produced this play as part of a widespread burst of post-war celebratory performances that were being generated both in Athens and elsewhere. On the Gyges-tragedy (which most scholars now attribute to a post-fifth century date), see below. 25 TrGF 3 (ed. S. Radt) F 6–11 (pp. 126–30); also Life of Aeschylus 9. 26 Ar. Poet. 9, 1451b21 = TrGF 1. 39 F 2a. Aristotle remarks that this play ‘delights’ (euphrainei) its audiences as much as any myth-based tragedy; see the next n. 27 TrGF 1 71 F 9a–11. Aristotle describes this as a ‘mixed rhapsôidia made up from all kinds of metres’ (Poet. 1, 1447b21–3; 24, 1460a2–3); but Athenaeus (13, 608E) calls it a ‘polymetric drama’, and the Suda likewise lists it as a drama. For a full recent discussion and attempt at reconstruction of the play’s contents, see Morelli (2003). Mixed-media dramas of this kind were said in antiquity (sometimes with disapproval) to contain especially ‘sweet, pleasurable’ qualities, and they often seem also to involve pastoral themes. (Actually, the Suda states that Chaeremon was a ‘comic playwright’ (TrGF 1 71 T 1): this may simply be a mistake, since the titles of the plays that are listed there (eight, including Centaur) all sound tragic or satyric. It is worth noting, however, that several other ‘tragedians’ too are occasionally listed as comic poets, e.g. Aristias: maybe it was not always obvious what was a ‘comedy’ and what was not? The term ‘comedy’, like ‘tragedy’, could be quite elastic, cf. Richards [1900a] and n. 11 above.) A didascalic inscription referring to a victorious actor, especially remarkable for his boxing skills, seems to suggest a more tragic mode for Chaeremon’s dramas, however: ‘At Dodona, in Euripides’ Archelaus and Chaeremon’s Achilles’ (TrGF DID B 1.12–13 = IG V 2, 118, c.275– 220 bce = Csapo and Slater § 163). See further Collard (1970), Morelli (2003).

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was apparently a drama, not a dithyramb, and scholia to Aristophanes’ Wealth describe him as a τραγικ and τραγ(δοδιδα´σκαλο.28 Euripides, while visiting the royal court in Macedonia, produced a drama in honour of King Archelaus (TrGF 5 (13) F 228–64); and the biographical tradition reports that he and the king had some disagreement as to whether such a play, with a happy ending, should be called a ‘tragedy’. (Euripides was determined that there should be a happy ending, in order to ‘please’–– χαριζµενο––his host.) Whatever the local and personal relevance of this play at the time, it was certainly reperformed in later centuries and locations.29 In the mid fourth century, Theodectes’ play Mausolus was performed as part of the funeral commemoration for that great man (TrGF 1 72 T6, 7). Like Mausolus himself, Theodectes was a Lycian (from Phaselis), but he had become a successful tragedian and rhetorician in fourth-century Athens (admired by Aristotle, among others). Unfortunately, we know little about the play, other than that it was described both as a tragoedia and a laus (‘encomium’), which was defeated by Theopompus’ prose eulogy in a prize competition.30 Theodectes’ Mausolus must presumably have been one of the models for the Italian/Roman fabula praetexta, i.e. plays based on recent events and the careers of prominent local dignitaries: examples (mostly lost) are Naevius’ Clastidium, celebrating the victory of Marcellus in 222 bce, Ennius’ Ambracia (c.189 bce), and Pacuvius’ Paulus, celebrating the battle of Pydna of 168 bce; also, of course, from a later era we have ps.-Seneca’s remarkable Octavia. There was nothing quite like this performed in Athens during the heyday of tragedy in the fifth century (though Phrynichus’ Phoenissae and Aeschylus’ Persians are in some respects comparable); but such historical-eulogistic plays appear nonetheless to have been a well-known component of the Greco-Roman tradition(s) of ‘tragic drama’ in its broader configurations.

28

Schol. Ar. Plutus 290, and Suda s.v. (see Snell’s Testimonia ad loc.); on Philoxenus, see too Csapo (2004), etc. We should recall that several breakthrough musical inventions were attributed by the Greeks to rustic contexts: e.g. the lyre (staged, e.g., in Sophocles’ satyric Trackers), the syrinx, and the first reeds for the auloi. Satyric and pastoral themes seem in general to have been especially conducive to (new) musical experiments. 29 See Kannicht TrGF 5 (13) iia = Diomedes, Ars gramm. 3, 9, 3; also Kovacs (1994), Letters of Eur. 5, and Hanink (2007). For the reperformance, see e.g. Csapo and Slater (1995), 200 § 163, Kannicht ad loc. 30 Aulus Gellius says that there was a certamen laudibus eius dicundis . . . at which Theopompus (another former student of Isocrates) defeated Theodectes and other rivals; and he goes on to state: exstat nunc quoque Theodecti tragoedia quae inscribitur Mausolus . . . (10.18.5). Some scholars have interpreted his testimony to mean that Theodectes competed with a prose eulogy and only later composed this tragedy. In either case, the existence of a tragedy on the subject of the recently deceased king is not in question.

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In the Hellenistic and Roman eras, the range of performance venues and styles expanded still further, even while simultaneously the normative effects of Athenian cultural dominance (including the Artists of Dionysus as performers, and the schoolrooms as Panhellenic purveyors of Attic ‘literature’ and style) continued to maintain a strong habit of binary thinking concerning tragedy vs comedy. This is not the place to attempt a thorough survey of all the later types of play composed during these eras, nor of all the different venues and conditions to suit which the ‘old’ tragedies and comedies must often have been adapted when they were revived or recited by individuals or groups of actors. But a short sketch may be helpful, as a reminder that the competitions in tragedy and comedy at the Theatre of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens represented just one of many places, and two of many occasions, at which ‘drama’ was experienced in ancient Greece.31 Two of the longest samples of post-fifth-century Greek tragedy that survive are the so-called Gyges drama (TrGF 2 Adespota F 664) and Ezekiel’s Exagôgê (Exodus). The former consists of some fifty lines of iambic trimeters (sixteen of them almost perfectly preserved), composed in correct and rather stylish tragic idiom and presenting a sequence of scenes that involve the wife of Candaules and Gyges.32 It thus covers the same famous episode that is narrated in book 1 of Herodotus’ Histories, though with important differences. Modern literary/cultural critics tend to fall into two camps when discussing Herodotus. Some emphasize his ‘tragic’ world view (tyrants crashing to ruin, divine warnings, a moral purpose comparable to that of Sophocles and Aeschylus, etc.); others see him as a ‘comic’, offbeat precursor of the novel (travel, exotic locations, adventures, miracles, sex, and incongruous mixtures of solemn and crudely down-to-earth behaviours): both currents seem to flow simultaneously, side by side and intermingled in his text.33 The Gyges story, which may be based on a folk tale, clearly did not originate with Herodotus; it seems to have been already in the Greek world–– as it became again in the Renaissance––common property to many narrators (and illustrators), representing several different genres. The trajectory of the 31

In what follows, I am following for the most part the excellent discussions and presentation of evidence in Sifakis (1967), Jones (1991), Taplin (1993), Csapo and Slater (1995), Easterling (1997). 32 The papyrus (POxy. 2382) was first published in 1949. The play has been variously assigned to a wide range of dates, from the early fifth century (by e.g. E. Lobel, D. L. Page, B. Snell) to the mid-Hellenistic era (by e.g. K. Latte, A. Lesky, and most others); see Kannicht-Snell ad loc. On the dramatic technique and relation to Herodotus, see esp. Travis (2000), Porter (forthcoming). 33 For a tragic Herodotus, see e.g. Stahl (1968), Chiasson (2003); for a comic or folkloric histôr, see Porter (forthcoming) with further references. For ‘mixed’ interpretation, see e.g. Dewald (1987), Pelling (2006).

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story fits squarely into what we should call ‘romance’, rather than tragedy, involving as it does sexual desire, deception, (re)marriage, even (in some versions) a ring of invisibility and return from the land of the dead. The link here between ‘drama’ (theatrical tragedy) and ‘drama’ (the novel) seems particularly close.34 As for Ezekiel’s Exagôgê (TrGF 1. 128), these are by far the longest segments of post-fifth-century tragedy to have survived to us in quotation ––almost 300 lines, in about a dozen separate but largely continuous passages.35 This drama on the story of Moses and the Exodus does not contain much dialogue in the surviving quotations, as mostly individual characters are narrating what they have seen or heard, or God is enunciating instructions; but we do have short passages of verbal interaction between Sepphora and ?Moses (60–5), between Sepphora and her suitor Choum (or Chous) (66–7), between Raguel and Moses (83–9), and between God and Moses (112–31). No lyrics are included in the quotations, and it is unclear whether or not there was a chorus in the play: but the numerous changes in both temporal and geographical setting during the course of the play make it likely that there was not.36 Certainly it was a drama containing much ‘romance’ material: exotic locations and descriptions, a courtship rivalry and marriage, a divinely sent dream and epiphany/voice, a miraculous rescue. There is nothing that is ‘tragic’ in the Aristotelian or modern sense––no unity of action, no peripeteia, no anagnôrisis, little discernable interest in êthos or even pathos (apart from wonder and awe): no catastrophe for the main character. Clearly this is not a comedy, however, and the play’s diction, metre, and tone stay generally close to those of classical tragedy and satyr drama. Whether the play was intended to be performed, recited, or read, we should surely regard it as a ‘romance drama’, akin in some respects to the (prose) Alexander Romance and Life of Apollonius of Tyre, and predecessor in turn to some of those Byzantine medieval verse narratives that we call ‘novels’ but they themselves termed ‘dramas’––as well as the tragic pastiche Christus Patiens and Christus Gaudens.37 In the case of plays that were originally composed for performance at Athens in the Theatre of Dionysus during the sixth or fifth century bce and 34 On the Gyges theme in ancient and modern literature and art, see esp. van Zyl Smit (1998), Laird (2001); also Porter (forthcoming). On the first publication of the Gyges papyrus, one scholar even argued that it came, not from a tragedy, but from a novel: Cantarella (1952). 35 The author is identified by Eusebius (presumably following his source, Alexander Polyhistor) as ‘Ezekiêlos in his tragedy . . .’; some of the lines are also quoted by Clement of Alexandria as coming from ‘Ezekiêlos, the composer of the Jewish tragedies, in the drama that is entitled Exagôgê . . .’ See esp. Holladay (1983), Jacobson (1983), Gruen (2002), 124–5. 36 Jacobson (1983), 31–3; cf. Sifakis (1967), 122–4, Taplin (1976). 37 See above, text to n. 28 and below, text to nn. 69–70. On Byzantine romances, see Beaton (2003), Roilos (2005), pp. 67–8.

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subsequently reperformed (as ‘old tragedies’) elsewhere, it is impossible to know how similar the musical and choreographical elements can have been to those of their first production. But it seems highly unlikely that (e.g.) the melodies and dance steps of Aeschylus or Pratinas were preserved into the fourth century––or that anyone would even have wished to perform or watch/listen to such songs had they been preserved.38 The evidence from the Hellenistic era is scanty, but sufficient to show that sometimes quite small choruses (six or seven, even three) might be employed in addition to one or more Artists of Dionysus (and sometimes a specified aulete too). In some contexts tragedies seem to have been performed with no chorus at all; but in others it appears that large and well-rewarded choruses were integral to the production.39 The existence of a raised stage would obviously make a difference; and so would the availability (or not) of suitably skilled dancersingers to work with the professional actors, with or without a designated chorodidaskalos to train them. Standard accounts of the evolution of tragedy from the fourth century into the Hellenistic era and beyond40 mention the rise of the actors, the practice of excerpting and adapting fifth-century originals (already ‘classics’), and the proliferation of venues for performance. Once actors had their own individual repertoires and did not have to rely on the poets chosen for a particular dramatic festival . . . there was plenty of scope for change and development . . . By the time of Caligula . . . there is no doubt that ‘performing a tragedy’ typically meant solo performance either by a singer (cantor) or by a dancer (saltator, pantomimus) . . . Once the performance of the pantomime could be described as ‘tragedy’, a crucial artistic move had been made, since this was an essentially balletic and musical performance . . . The common elements between this and traditional tragic drama might be no more than the mythological story and perhaps some features of verbal style.41 38 The evidence of Aristophanes’ Frogs suggests that Aeschylus’ music and choreography were already regarded as quaint by then. The major, ongoing innovations in melodies, vocal techniques, and aulos-capabilities known as the New Music became quite mainstream by the fourth century, with the result that most earlier forms of musical performance probably became obsolete: see Barker (1984–1989), West (1990), Csapo (2004). In any case, techniques for preserving melodies or choreography through textual annotation were still very primitive. 39 Sifakis (1967), Csapo and Slater (1995) § 165A, 165B; etc.; cf. too Stefanis (1988), Wilson (2000), Aneziri (2001) for the activities of chorêgoi and Artists of Dionysus around the Mediterranean world. 40 See esp. Sifakis (1967), Stefanis (1988), Easterling (1997), Dearden (1999), Revermann (1999/2000), Allan (2001), Easterling and Hall (2002), Martina (2003). 41 Easterling (1997), 220–1, referring to Suetonius, Caligula 57 and providing further references, including Jones (1991). Plutarch (Quaest. Conv. 9.15.748) offers corroboration of Easterling’s last sentence: ‘Dance (Fρχησι) has suffered especially from bad public taste (κακοµουσα) . . . and now rules over the stunned and mindless theatres (0µπλ κτων [or

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But spoken dialogue (e.g. Electra’s grief over the urn containing her brother’s supposed ashes, or Orestes’ madness) and sensational visual effects produced by theatre machinery were also much appreciated, and no less intimately associated with the notion of what ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ were all about. Thus one of Plutarch’s convivial aesthetes remarks in passing (Quaest. Conv. 4.2, 665E): It is time, as in a comedy (kathaper en kômôidiai) to hoist the stage machinery (mêchanas) and introduce some thunderclaps (brontas) . . .

What kind of ‘comedy’, in the strict sense, this might be is hard to imagine: New Comedy does not generally include thunderbolts or other sensational stage effects. Perhaps the term is used loosely for other kinds of drama in general (like the Comédie Française)?42 Not all of these departures from ‘traditional tragedy’ were new, of course –– indeed, the impulse to replicate Athenian practice through the organization of the Artists and their deployment of Athenian-style conventions in festivals elsewhere, may in some respects have imposed greater uniformity of theatrical performance style and expectation than had previously existed. (That is to say, ‘traditional tragic drama’ may have become ‘traditional’ only in the late fifth century.) Long before the Hellenistic era, there had been other theatres outside Athens. Some dated back even to the sixth century––and some may even have been bigger and better than the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.43 Performers from Sicyon and Phleious, or Syracuse and Acragas, might thus have had more, not less, to work with than their Athenian counterparts in the early fifth century. Certainly, Athenian music had small claim to distinction or originality: all the best modes and melodies (and probably dance steps too) were apparently imported, whether from other parts of Greece or from Anatolia and Thrace, to judge from the terms used to 0µπληκτικ%ν, MSS] κα2 α#νο των κρατε, θεα´τρων)’. But elsewhere in the same dialogue (7.8, 711E–712E), theatrical performances of rather different kinds are discussed in terms of their suitability for dinner parties: ‘Tragedy is not at all appropriate, as it is too solemn and elevated . . .’(711E); more acceptable is solo dancing such as the ‘Bathylleion . . . that presents a dance interpretation (πρχηµα) of a Pan or Satyr revelling with Eros (σ)ν H Ερωτι κωµα´ζοντο)’. Less desirable, because hard to stage (δυσχορ γητον), are the ‘mimes they call hypotheses’ (712E), which are clearly non-comic––though also quite untragic––dramatic performances that combine story, elaborate visual effects, and some kind of verbal enactment: middlebrow indeed. 42

See Richards (1900a). On Syracuse (perhaps the first circular, rather than rectangular, theatre of all) and its theatrical traditions, see Moretti (1993), Aneziri (2001), with further references on the Artists of Dionysus and musical contests there and elsewhere. Other large theatres existed from an early date e.g. at Argos and Acragas. Unfortunately we know nothing about the performance space(s) at Sicyon or Phleious; but see Nicolucci (2003), 327–8 on Sicyon’s artistic traditions, and ibid. 336–9 for Pratinas’ Hellenistic Nachleben. 43

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describe them by contemporary and near-contemporary music critics and from internal references within the surviving lyrics of tragedy and satyr drama themselves.44

3 . S AT Y R D R A M A ( A N D I TS ‘ C H A R M S ’ ) –– S E PA R AT E AND IN BETWEEN Of course, by far our best-attested and most critically discussed form of ‘middlebrow’ dramatic entertainment, neither tragedy nor comedy––though distinctly closer to tragedy in most of its elements––was satyr play.45 This too was not an Athenian invention. Pratinas of Phleious (a town close to Sicyon and to Corinth) first introduced satyr dramas to Athens around 500 bce, whereupon they were quickly instituted as an integral part of the annual festival. Pratinas himself was credited with thirty-two satyr dramas out of a total of fifty plays in all (yet only one Athenian victory in the tragedy competition); his son Aristias was also successful in the same idiom, as well as composing successful tragedies. Of the four other playwrights whose satyr plays were especially highly regarded in fifth-century Athens, two were Athenians (Aeschylus and Sophocles) while the two others were outsiders: Ion of Chios and Achaeus of Eretria. A remarkably large number of fairly substantial fragments of these four playwrights’ satyr dramas have survived, both in quotation and in papyrus finds, compared with the fragments of their tragedies.46 (The situation is very different for Euripides.) Like tragedies, satyr dramas involved mythical-heroic subject matter and characters; and in the fifth-century Athenian festival competitions the same cast of actors and chorus performed the satyr drama to conclude each tragedian’s tetralogy. (The conventions changed repeatedly in the fourth century.) The themes and mood of the plots often included several ‘romantic’ elements eschewed by tragedy, however: pastoral settings, ogres, adventures and miraculous escapes, necromancy and resurrections from the dead, dinners, symposia, musical and athletic competitions, and successful erotic 44 The music of fifth-century Athenian drama (before the arrival of the New Music) was thus generally characterized as ‘Dorian’, ‘Aeolian’, ‘Lydian’, ‘Phrygian’, ‘Carian’, etc.; there is no ‘Attic’ strain or specifically ‘Ionian’ style of singing ever mentioned; see Barker (1984–1989), West (1990), Griffith (forthcoming b). (Furthermore, the best auloi players performing in late fifth-century Athens were Thebans.) 45 See in general Seaford (1984), Seidensticker (1979), KPS (1999), Kaimio (2001), Voelke (2001), Griffith (2002), (2005a), (2005b), Harrison (2005). 46 For the satyr dramas of Ion and Achaeus, see KPS (1999), 480–525; also TrGF 1, 95–128.

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encounters (meetings, falling in love, courtship) often ending in matrimony.47 The language and style (diction, metres, costumes) employed by the main characters were almost identical to those of tragedy––far removed from the gross linguistic and visual conventions of Old Comedy––and it is often hard to tell whether a passage of dialogue quoted out of context by an ancient source comes from a satyr play or tragedy. Of the several substantial quotations from Sophocles’ satyr dramas that are preserved, quite a few contain erotic/sympotic content and descriptions of the positive effects of love;48 and it is notable that Ion’s and Achaeus’ satyr dramas about Heracles’ affair with Omphale were particularly favoured for quotation.49 Striking too is the large number of papyri containing satyr dramas that have emerged from Egypt over the last century or so: in addition to several substantial pieces of Aeschylean satyr drama (Theoroi, Dikyoulkoi, Prometheus) we have a very large chunk of Sophocles’ Trackers (Ichneutai: based on the story narrated in the––archetypically middlebrow––Homeric Hymn to Hermes), little pieces of his Inachus (the story of Zeus’ pursuit of Io and her transformation into a cow), and substantial (but badly damaged) fragments of at least six additional satyr dramas by unknown authors.50 Euripides was less acclaimed, it seems, for his satyr plays; but two medieval manuscripts contain the entire Cyclops, and other bits and pieces survive in quotation.51 Especially tantalizing are the surviving quotations (and ? papyrus fragment) of Sisyphus, a satyr drama composed either by Euripides or by Critias, containing a remarkable account of the ‘invention’ of religion as a

47 Seaford (1984), 33–44, KPS (1999), 28–32, Griffith (2002), (2005b). It is worth noting that many of these thematic elements seem also to have been present in the Sicilian comedies of Epicharmus––and perhaps also in some fifth-century Attic comedies closer to the spirit of so-called Middle Comedy than to that of the surviving plays of Aristophanes: see Csapo (2000), Sidwell (2000). In Epicharmus’ case, the following titles (from PCG vol. 1) might suggest themes close to the spirit of satyr drama: Bousiris, Hêbês Gamos, Heracles, Kyklops, Logos kai Logina, Mousai, Odysseus, Persai, Pyrrha and Prometheus, Sirens, Sphinx, Thearoi, Trôes, Choreutai, Cheiron. See further Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén (1996), Kerkhof (2001). 48 See Griffith (2005b) for fuller discussion both of vocabulary and of romantic elements. 49 Of the twenty plays by Achaeus whose titles are attested, eight are definitely or probably satyric: Athla (or Athloi), Aithon, Alcmeon, Hephaestus, Iris, Linos, Moirai, and Omphale. 53 lines (or part-lines) survive from Omphale, amounting to well over half the total number of lines preserved from all Achaeus’ plays. From Ion, 23 lines survive from his satyric Omphale; another 15 survive from his Phoenix, which may also have been a satyr drama––or else some kind of ‘mixed’ drama of the middling type. No other play of his is nearly so well represented. See further KPS (1999), 480–525. 50 TrGF vol. 2 (Adespota) F 646a, 655, 656, 675, 679a and b, 681; cf. KPS (1999), 624–42. Titles of possible satyr plays by anonymous authors listed by Kannicht-Snell include: Amymone, Argo, Atlas, Hermes, Helios, Heracles, Hephaestus, Iris, Io, Mathetai, Perseus, Persephone, Prometheus (bis), Sphinx, Telephus, Triptolemus, Philoctetes, Phorcides. 51 KPS (1999), 403–78, Pechstein (1998).

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system of social repression and law enforcement (TrGF 1 43 F 19). Scraps of Peirithous (likewise ascribed both to Euripides and Critias) also survive in quotation and on papyrus, in which Heracles arrives at the Underworld to attempt the extrication of his friend’s friend from imprisonment there (43 F 1–14). Euripides also experimented with at least one quasi-satyric composition in which many of the conventions of satyr play were observed, but no satyr chorus appeared (Alcestis)––a rather different phenomenon from tragedies that end happily and/or include ‘comic’ elements mixed into the tragic ones (though these are also present in Alcestis).52 The rules for the performance of satyr plays and tragedies at the Athenian City Dionysia did not remain hard and fast, but shifted repeatedly. Between 535 and c.500, only tragedies were performed there (and we know virtually nothing about their plot, style, or flavour). Then, from c.500 until some time in the (early?) fourth century, tragedians apparently competed with three tragedies (sometimes connected, as usually in Aeschylus’ case; but more often not) and a satyr play. Thus every ‘tragedian’ was also necessarily a satyr dramatist (though, as we have seen, not every major satyr dramatist necessarily competed often with tragedies––e.g. Pratinas and Aristias). During the fourth century a separate satyr play was performed first, and then the tragedies––perhaps by different authors. Later still, a boom in satyr play production occurred, and competitions involved sets of three satyr plays at once. Thus fashions changed, with interest in satyr plays waxing and waning.53 But in general, the popularity of satyr drama never died;54 and during the Hellenistic period it clearly experienced quite a boom outside of Athens, including some innovative experiments in the genre.55 This was doubtless the reason for the remarkable prominence assigned to this topic in Horace’s

52 See Slater (2005), and above; further Meijering (1987), Gibert (2000), Mastronarde (2000); also below, on tragicomedy and on Euripides’ ‘middling’ style. For another approach to the intermingling of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary and cultural elements, see e.g. Andreassi (1997). 53 Sifakis (1967), 91–4, 116–18, 124–6, KPS (1999), 10–12, Martina (2003). 54 In Greek schools, once the standardized curriculum of ‘classics’ had been instituted (i.e. by the late fourth century, it appears), satyr plays as such do not seem to have been designated as required reading. But all the plays (or selected passages) seem usually to have been organized into one combined alphabetical order for each author, with satyr plays included among the tragedies; and, as is clear from the number of quotations that survive from anthologies, grammarians, Athenaeus, etc., satyr plays were still copied and read, at least by enthusiasts of the theatre (especially, to judge from the papyri, in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt: perhaps there was a liking there for the more ‘romantically’ tinged plays, in an era when the novel was also becoming increasingly popular). 55 See KPS (1999), 566–642, Di Marco (2003), Nicolucci (2003), and esp. Cozzoli (2003) on Sositheus’ Daphnis, Pretagostini (2003) on Python’s Agên.

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De arte poetica (220–50): here the recommended style and diction are characterized as ‘midway’ between those of tragedy and of comedy (243 de medio), avoiding crudity and colloquialism, and making careful use of ‘texture and combination’ of words (242 series iuncturaque), such as are appropriate for one (Silenus) who is ‘a guardian and attendant of the god whom he raised and cared for’ (239 custos famulusque dei Silenus alumni).56 The genre as a whole, as Horace describes it, involves ‘modifying serious things with/into play(fulness)’ (226 vertere seria ludo)––clearly not burlesque or outright mockery of the high characters and heroic stories,57 but rather a light, playful shifting of mood and tone. A similar commentary is supplied by Demetrius, a critic of (probably) the third century bce, in his work On Style (Peri hermeneias), which is designed primarily to advise orators how to modify their prose style for appropriate effect in different kinds of speech and in different contexts. In his lengthy discussion (128–89) of the ‘elegant style’ (γλαφυρ χαρακτ ρ)––otherwise known as the ‘middle style’, between the ‘grand’ and the ‘plain’––he identifies ‘charm’ (χα´ρι) as the quality most to be desired, while also going to some lengths to explore and explain the relationship between ‘humour’ (τ γελο,ον) and ‘charm’ (χα´ρι). It is in this context that his often quoted remarks occur on the inherent incompatibility between tragedy and laughter (168–9), including his statement that satyr drama is in effect ‘playful tragedy’ (τραγ(δαν παζουσαν). This is often interpreted to mean that satyr plays are full of humour and ridiculous antics. But this is not Demetrius’ point. Rather, he is pointing out that satyr dramas involve much of the same subject matter and style as tragedies, yet include larger amounts of both ‘charm’ and ‘humour’––even while remaining quite different from the low and ridiculous manner of comedy. Satyr drama seems in fact to be in some respects among his favoured representatives of the ‘elegant style’ of poetry: for even though it is Sappho’s poetry that he cites and quotes most frequently with approval (along with Xenophon and Homer’s Odyssey) as exemplary of the ‘charm’ of the elegant style (129–30, 132, 140–3, 146, 148, 162–3, 166), we may note that the features singled out by Demetrius include ‘gardens dedicated to the 56 Sifakis (1967); but KPS (1999), 11–12 cite with approval Seaford (1984) for his conclusion that satyr drama faded from prominence during the Roman period and that the Romans themselves lacked the appropriate religious spirit. See Brink (1971) ad locc., however, for extended discussion of Horace’s knowledge of Greek satyr drama and his interest in a ‘middle’ style of dramatic composition, distinct from tragedy and comedy; and see text to n. 60 below for the Boscoreale murals, which give satyr drama plenty of space. On Hellenistic trends in the appreciation of the satyr play and its (real or imagined) history, see also Fantuzzi (2007). 57 Modern scholarship on satyr drama has tended to emphasize perhaps too strongly the notion of satyr drama as a burlesque inversion or parody of tragedy, and its general grossness and comic quality: see instead KPS (1999), Kaimio (2001), Griffith (2002), (2005b).

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Nymphs, bridal songs, loves . . .’ (132; again 163). It is only when he begins to try to distinguish between ‘the charming’ (τ εIχαρι) and ‘the ridiculous’ (τ γελο,ον) that he cites, first, the contrasting lyric styles of Sappho in her higher and lower types of poetry, and then the differences of aim and tone between tragedy, comedy, and satyr drama.58 Demetrius’ main distinction here is between tragedy (charming, serious, pleasurable) and comedy (mocking, laughable, gross), and on the inappropriateness of introducing mocking laughter into contexts where charm and pleasure are desired. But he phrases this as a distinction (168) between the ‘charming [speaker/writer]’ (εχα´ριτο) and the ‘laughter-making [one]’ (γελωτοποι%ν), even as he goes on to observe that some contexts do allow for laughter (but not ‘mockery’) when it is combined with charm (γ.λωτο κα2 χαρτων)––mentioning here both satyr play and comedy as examples–– whereas other contexts do not: so ‘tragedy welcomes charm (χα´ριτα) in many contexts, but laughter is an enemy of tragedy. For nobody could think of a tragedy that is being playful (τραγ(δαν παζουσαν), since he will be writing a satyr drama rather than a tragedy (σα´τυρον γρα´ψει α#ντ2 τραγ(δα).’ Apparently, then, a charm-filled drama that is close to tragedy, while being somewhat more playful and laughter-full––without being mocking or prosaic, like a comedy (or a boisterous wedding song)––is a satyr play; and this genre would thus seem to correspond quite well to Sappho’s ‘love affairs, spring and halcyon’. In any case, like Horace, Demetrius is explicit in indicating both that satyr drama represents an important tertium quid between tragedy and comedy, and that it is in its own right a prime representative of the ‘charming’ middle style’.59 The same point comes across in the visual realm. The famous Boscoreale wall paintings that show the backdrop for, respectively, tragedy, comedy, and satyr play, are only intelligible if all three forms of drama are recognized as having their own distinctive subject matter, iconography, and imagined settings;60 and this is explicitly confirmed for us by Vitruvius: ‘there are three

58

Demetrius seems to vacillate between identifying two or three distinct levels or types of expression: thus for Sappho he characterizes one major distinction, between ‘beautiful’ and ‘laughable’ subjects, but also implies a further minor distinction between (i) ‘beauty’ itself (περ2 κα´λλου) and (ii) love affairs, spring, and the halcyon (περ2 0ρτων κα2 αρο κα2 περ2 α#λκυνο); both of these are contrasted with the style in which she ‘mocks’ (σκπτει) the bridegroom in a wedding song, a style that he even compares to that of prose (διαλ.γεσθαι . . . χορ διαλεκτικ). 59 As Johanna Hanink reminds me, Euripides was credited by several ancient critics with a ‘middling’ style as well: e.g. Life § 5 in Kovacs (1994). 60 The paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York (New York, 1953); illustrated and discussed e.g. in Bieber (1961), 124–5 with figs. 471–4.

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types of scene decoration . . .’.61 We may therefore be confident that this tripartite distinction was mainstream––no less well established in the popular imagination than Aristotle’s binary opposition of ‘high tragedy’ and ‘low comedy’. From an earlier period, the Pronomos Vase provides a useful perspective on several of these issues. Painted in Athens in the late fifth century, and soon (perhaps expressly?) exported to South Italy for funerary display, this large and impressive volute crater contains scenes of Dionysian and theatrical celebration that combine elements of both tragic and satyric performance.62 The central presence of Dionysus and Ariadne on both the front and the back of the Vase highlights the ‘romantic’ flavour; and the blending of urban theatrical setting (on the obverse) with rural images of nymphs and satyrs playing in the wild (on the reverse) suggests the fluid and transformative power of Dionysian performance and spectatorship. Tragic-satyric celebration here is a source of joy, desire, union, blessedness, and even ecstasy, not ‘pity and fear’ or ‘laughter, mockery’.63 It is interesting too to speculate what exactly Plato intends in the Laws, when he has his Athenian Stranger recommend that ‘Bacchic choruses’ should be available for his Cretan citizens to perform, even as these citizens are generally to be barred from participating in tragedy or comedy.64 Tragic actors may, it is recommended, periodically visit Magnesia, and may occasionally be allowed to demonstrate their superb vocal and histrionic expertise in (carefully censored) plays there (Laws 7, 817a–c). Comedies, which are intrinsically demeaning and shameful to perform, will be assigned to slaves and foreigners: the citizens will merely watch and appreciate the grossness of the performers (816c–e). But the third category of Dionysusoriented dance performances that is mentioned, rather vaguely and circumspectly (bakkheia, 815 c–d), apparently has to take place outside the city 61 Vitruvius, De architectura 5.6.9: genera autem sunt scaenarum tria . . . etc. This seems good enough evidence that the Romans were not impervious to satyrs and their associations. 62 See Griffith (forthcoming a), and other contributions to Taplin and Wrigley (forthcoming). The Vase is Naples, Museo Nazionale 3240 inv. no. 81673 (ARV 1336, 1). For good illustrations of the entire Vase (rather than just the scene of Pronomos and choreuts) see Bieber (1961), 10– 11, Taplin and Wrigley (forthcoming). 63 A winged figure labelled HIMEROS (‘Desire’) is depicted on the obverse in conjunction with a theatrically costumed figure of (probably) Aphrodite, sitting next to the couch on which Dionysus and Ariadne are reclining. It is interesting to note that at Syracuse there was (at least during the Hellenistic era) a guild of Artists for Cheerful Aphrodite (Technitai peri tên Hilaran Aphroditên), separate from the Artists of Dionysus: see L. Moretti (1963), 41–3, and Aneziri (2001), who suggests that they were performers of mimes, perhaps phlyax plays (or hilarotragediae) of the type developed by Rhinthon of Tarentum. 64 Cf. Griffith (forthcoming b), and other papers on musical performance in the Laws, in Peponi (forthcoming).

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boundaries. These ‘Bacchic choruses’, some of which represent ‘Nymphs and Pans and Silenes and Satyrs, drunk’, while others are concerned with ‘purifications and initiations (περ2 καθαρµο τε κα2 τελετα´)’, are not banned but allowed by the rather reluctant-sounding Athenian to remain, since these activities are to be counted ‘neither as warlike nor as peaceful’ (χωρ2 µ ν πολεµικο&, χωρ2 δ ε@ρηνικο& θ.ντα), so that ‘this whole kind of dance is indeed not really political [music] at all’ (οκ στι πολιτικν το&το τD /ρχ σεω τ γ.νο . . .): consequently he is prepared to ‘leave it alone and let it lie there as it is’.65 The new city, to be founded on the very island on which Dionysus was first united with Ariadne and on which baby Zeus was entertained by the dancing Kouretes and nymphs, will apparently not be able to flourish without such pastoral-romantic forms of choral entertainment––not tragic, not comic, but ‘Bacchic’––and while no satyr choruses are mentioned as such or even implied, these performances would seem to involve many of the elements of satyr drama. Overall, in the restaging (or reading, or reciting at dinner parties) of ‘old’ satyr plays in the fourth century and later, we may wonder whether the original choral songs and dances were retained, or whether new satyric ‘interludes’ may often have been substituted. Likewise, we can only speculate as to how the satyr choruses (and/or characters––Silenus? Pan?) were costumed and conducted themselves in Hellenistic performances. In any case, it seems likely that the peculiarly Athenian type of satyr choreuts, with their distinctive childish-slavish relationship to that particular citizen audience, may have been merged into a more generic spirit of Dionysian and Aphrodisiac/Erotic enthusiasm.66 But this can be no more than speculation.

4 . M I D D L E B ROW A N D RO M A N T I C D R A M A –– F RO M T R AG E DY TO T H E N OV E L 6 7 By the time of Plutarch, Chariton, and other Greek writers of the Imperial period, terms such as ‘tragic’, ‘comic’, ‘theatrical’, and ‘dramatic’ were 65 Some editors and interpreters have taken this sentence to mean that these Bacchic choruses will in fact be banned. But see Griffith (forthcoming b). 66 For suggestions concerning the psychological engagement of the Athenian audience with the satyr chorus during the fifth century see Hall (2006), Griffith (2005a). Of course in the Athenian theatre satyrs could also make up the chorus of comedies as well as of satyr plays: see Storey (2005). 67 Foster (2004) states (rather arbitrarily, in my opinion) that ‘romantic tragedy’ is a quite separate category both from ‘ironic tragicomedy’ and (true) ‘tragicomedy’, and she thus excludes plays like Eur. IT, Ion, Helen from her consideration of predecessors to Shakespearean

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routinely used in senses that had little to do with Aristotle’s specialized definitions or fifth-century Athenian performance conventions. Thus, as we saw, Plutarch’s after-dinner conversationalists may describe sensational stage effects as typical of ‘comedy’, while Chariton’s novel, whose action begins with an Assembly held in the Theatre at Syracuse (1.1.11–12), includes an ‘actor of Love’ (ποκριτ6ν ρωτο, 1.4.1) who has been hired by the ‘producer of the drama’ (δηµιουργ το& δρα´µατο, 1.4.2) to tell Chaireas a false story about Callirhoe’s infidelity; and the novel culminates in an emotional courtroom ‘scene’ worthy of the finest playwright: What dramatist (ποιητ6 0π2 σκηνD) ever brought on such an unexpected and sensational turnaround of the plot (παρα´δοξον µ&θον)? You would have thought you were present in a theatre (0ν θεα´τρ() full of innumerable emotions (µυρων παθ%ν)–– everything: tears, joy, amazement, pity, disbelief, prayers! (5.8.2–3)

Later we also find reference made to ‘this whole drama’ (8λον τ δρα˜µα το&το), referring to Callirhoe’s action-packed life (6.3.6).68 Few of these episodes would seem at home in an Athenian tragedy. Nor are they really characteristic of Menandrian comedy either, since his plays do not usually contain death plots, kings falling in love, or divinities miraculously rescuing their favourites in the way that Chariton’s novel does. (Still less do they put one in mind of farce, phlyax, mime, or Old Comedy, with their grotesque masks, padded costumes, phalli, slave beatings, cooks, and obscene language.) The ‘drama’ seems rather to be that of an adventure romance,69 full of (what Demetrius would call) ‘charm’ and permeated with the spirit of Aphrodite/Eros. The same is equally true of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, a pastoral love romance set on the island of Lesbos and full of allusions both to Sappho and to Theocritean bucolic. The presiding genii of the novel are Pan and the Nymphs (Prologue; 1.4; 1.7–8; 2.24–34; 4.39; etc.), and there is even a scene in which the hero and heroine act out the story of Pan and Syrinx in words and dance (2.37). The resemblances to satyr drama in overall tone and

and modern tragicomedy. (She also never mentions at all The Merchant of Venice.) Since I myself am arguing that no clear distinction was generally maintained in antiquity between all these different forms or modes of drama, I have no stake in arguing about these differences. But ‘romantic tragedy’ will do pretty well for me as an alternative category to ‘middlebrow tragedy’. 68

For further discussion of ‘theatrical’ terminology and metaphors in the Greek novelists, see above, and e.g. Woronoff (1990) and Couraud-Lalanne (1998), though the latter tends to focus mainly on the notion of ritual, esp. rites of passage. 69 One might think possibly of a pantomime: but that would hardly present the same spectacle of several different ‘actors’ exhibiting such different emotions on stage at the same moment.

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plot structure are obvious and pervasive.70 Yet virtually no literary historians or critics of the prose romances ever seem to consider the possibility that satyr drama and other subtragic stage performances may have been prime sources of the Greek novel. We possess only little bits of Sositheus’ Daphnis or Lityerses (TrGF 1 99); but to judge from the remarks of scholiasts to Theocritus and Virgil71 this satyr drama seems to have been exactly the kind of play that may have inspired the ‘theatrical’ impulse in the Greek prose romances: a handsome young man travels to a remote country to find his beloved girlfriend (actually, a nymph) who has been abducted by pirates, and rescues her from a king, Lityerses, a cruel ogre who daily employs harvesters and then decapitates them (while singing!), until Heracles arrives to deal with him. Most critics have thought that the ‘bucolic’ content (Daphnis, harvesters) of this play is the result of the influence of Theocritus’ new pastoral Idylls, and perhaps of Callimachus too; but as we have seen, pastoral settings, travel, adventure, and devoted romantic love had long been staples of satyr drama. Indeed, earlier still (back in the sixth century) the South Italian poet Stesichorus was credited with ‘founding this type of lyric poetry’: he had composed songs commemorating the seduction of Daphnis by the nymph Thaleia, their love pact, Daphnis’ breaking of the pact through marriage to someone else, and the resulting romantic torments of all concerned.72 Greek audiences did not have to wait for Theocritus’ Daphnis or Polyphemus to enjoy the dramatic ‘sweetness, desire, charm’ and mixed, bittersweet emotions of such narratives (Id. 1.1–3, 7, 61, 133–5; 11.3–4, 80–1).73 Nor did the prose novelists have far to look in seeking ‘theatrical’ elements for their romantic narratives: they had only to glance at their walls and vases––and visit their theatres––to see innumerable representations of such dramatic and emotional adventures.74 70 See Griffith (2005b); also text to n. 58 above on Demetrius and the ‘middle/charming style’. 71 Schol. Theocr. 8 arg., 8. 93a; Servius on Virgil, Eclogues 8. 68. On Sositheus’ play, see now Cozzoli (2003). 72 Aelian, VH 10.18 τD τοιατη µελοποια πα´ρξασθαι = Stesichorus fr. 279 (fr. 102 in PMGF); cf. Diodorus 4.84.2–4. We may note that Theocritus connects his Daphnis with Stesichorus’ place of origin, Himera (Id. 7. 74–5). 73 See further Carson (1986), 77–97, 111–16. 74 In this context, one may mention also the later Byzantine regulations and performance practices concerning ‘religious’ drama and representation. In contrast to the Latin/Frankish West, where enactments of sacred scenes were approved and much appreciated by congregations/audiences, Byzantium frowned on the idea of actors impersonating saints, let alone Jesus and God the Father. Yet their iconographic tradition already provided a commonly recognized mimetic realm in which the biblical stories could be represented, while verbal art was channelled, not into scripts for dramatic recital, but into rhetorical displays (sermons and readings) that could bring those pictures to life and tell their stories with true dramatic flavour. As Maguire (2003), 217 observes: ‘It can be said that the rhetoric of images in Byzantium took

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Apart from the heated debates and fads surrounding the term ‘tragicomedy’ in Western Europe during the seventeenth century, most working playwrights (and many composers of operas too) over the years have shown a cheerful disregard for the supposed distinctness of these two forms and for the purity and unmitigated seriousness of Aristotelian/Ciceronian tragedy. At the age of sixteen, in a Jansenist school at Versailles, Jean Racine was surreptitiously lent by a friend a copy of Amyot’s translation of Heliodorus, and thus picked up some of the finer points of his tragic art––points that he would never have discovered by rereading Aristotle, or even Euripides and Seneca.75 In an earlier generation (to pick examples almost at random, but with an eye to their classical Greek antecedents), John Pickering’s 1567 adaptation of the Oresteia, an ‘Interlude’ entitled Horestes, combines cute love duets between Egistus and Clytemnestra (based on contemporary pop songs) and a ubiquitously interfering character of Vyce (a cross between a Fool and a Medieval moral personification) with all the ethical anxieties and political intrigue endemic to Orestes’ mythic actions. The confidently ‘romantic’ tone––as to the (guaranteed) eventual outcome––does not undercut the moments of extreme pathos and adventure.76 In the world of opera, Handel’s delightful and pathetic Acis and Galatea reminds its audience not only of Theocritean pastoral but also of the epic/tragic world of heroes and romantic adventure. Or in the modern era, the recent Bollywood movie, Lagaan combines an engaging and delicately presented love triangle (based ultimately on the story of Krishna, Radha, and Rukmini) with an imagined moment in the Indian anti-imperialist movement of the 1890s, and culminates in a highly dramatic contest on whose outcome everything depends––a village cricket match.77 Sudden surprises, twists of fortune, spectacle, humour, music, and dance . . . and above all, heart-wrenching scenes of desire and mutually reciprocated the place that liturgical plays occupied in the west; that is, both forms of narrative introduced visual drama into the liturgy.’ Likewise in the classical period, visual culture (wall-painting, vase-painting, relief sculpture, etc.) must have played just as significant a role in maintaining popular awareness of ‘tragedy’ and myth-based ‘drama’ as the reading of texts or recital of dramatic passages in a purely verbal medium. 75 Hägg (1980), 246–52, citing the recollections published by Racine’s son, Louis, Mémoires sur la vie de Jean Racine (1747). 76 The full title of the work (whose musical score survives) is A Newe Enterlude of Vice conteyninge, the History of Horestes with the cruell reuengment of his Fathers death, vpon his one naturall Mother. See further Brewer (1982). 77 Full title: Lagaan: Once upon a time in India, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker (2001). It is listed in movie-categorizing guides as ‘drama; musical; romance; sport.’

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(or thwarted) love: these are the ingredients that theatregoers the world over have generally expected and that playwrights and actors have usually provided. The Greeks did not eschew these elements of drama, despite the impression we might gather from Aristotle’s sketch of the ‘nature’ of tragedy and of comedy. Middlebrow dramas of this romantic kind existed, even if, like the novel, they were largely omitted from highbrow critical discourse. And here and there they have resurfaced among our surviving texts (especially the ones rescued from Egypt); or we can trace their presence behind other related romance-types, such as pastoral and the novel. As Oliver Taplin has reminded us, we (like the ancient Greeks themselves) have long been accustomed to the two archetypes of theatrical mask––‘one grimacing, one grinning . . .’ so that ‘. . . any spectator waking up in mid-play would immediately have known from the masks alone whether it was tragedy or comedy’. Yet there were in fact scores of different character types, ages, hairstyles, and other characteristics that maskmakers built and the actors performed. Furthermore, as Taplin also observes in that same context, ‘the tragic mask is, in fact, rather blank and expressionless . . . waiting to take its “expression” from the events of the play.’78 Tragedy (like comedy) could indeed be a very capacious performance mode, and the spirit of Aphrodite and Eros (as well as Pan) could often combine with that of Dionysus to produce adventures and happy endings that did not have to reinforce the intrinsic difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ human beings, but might instead promote the capacity of all to enjoy the inclusive ‘charms’ of middlebrow entertainment.79

REFERENCES Allan, W. (2001), ‘Euripides in Megale Hellas’, G&R 48: 67–86. Andreassi, M. (1997), ‘Osmosis and Contiguity between “Low” and “High” Literature: Moicheutria and Apuleius’, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 8: 1–22. Aneziri, S. (2001), ‘A Different Guild of Artists’, Archaiognosia 11: 47–55. Barker, A. (1984–1989), Greek Musical Writings, 2 vols., Oxford. Beaton, R. (2003), ‘The Byzantine Revival of the Ancient Novel’, in Schmeling (2003), 713–33. Bieber, M. (1961), History of the Greek and Roman Theater, 2nd ed., Princeton. 78 Taplin (1996), 189. He goes on to observe that ‘the predominant characteristic of the earlier comic mask . . . is clearly not merriment, but ugliness’. 79 My thanks to Johanna Hanink, Leslie Kurke, Martin Revermann, and Peter Wilson for their helpful comments and corrections.

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Brewer, D. S. (1982) (ed.), Three Tudor Classical Interludes, Totowa, NJ. Brink, C. O. (1971) (ed.), Horace on Poetry: The Ars Poetica, Cambridge. Burnett, A. P. (1971), Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed Reversal, Oxford. Cantarella, R. (1952), ‘Il frammento di Ossirinco su Gige’, Dioniso 15: 3–31. Carson, A. (1986), Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton. Chiasson, C. C. (2003), ‘Herodotus’ Use of Attic Tragedy in the Lydian Logos’, CA 22: 5–36. Collard, C. (1970), ‘On the Tragedian Chaeremon’, JHS 90: 22–34. Connor, W. R. (1989), ‘City Dionysia and Athenian Democracy’, C&M 40: 7–32. Cooper, L. (1947), Aristotle on the Art of Poetry: An Amplified Version with Supplementary Illustrations, Ithaca. Couraud-Lalanne, S. (1998), ‘Théatricalité et dramatisation rituelle dans le roman grec’, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel, 9: 1–16. Cozzoli, A.-T. (2003), ‘Sositeo e il nuovo dramma satiresco’, in Martina (2003), 265–91. Csapo, E. (2000), ‘From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy’, in M. Depew and D. Obbink (2000), 115–33. –––– (2004), ‘The Politics of the New Music’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousike¯” in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford), 207–48. –––– and Slater, W. J. (1995) (eds.), The Context of Ancient Drama, Ann Arbor. D’Alessio, G.-B.(2007), ‘+ν @δο: ecce satyri (Pratina, 708 PMG = 4 fr. 3 TrGF). Alcune considerazioni sull’uso della deissi nei testi lirici e teatrali’, in F. Perusino and M. Colantonio (eds.), Dalla lirica corale alla poesia drammatica, Pisa 2007, 95–128. Dearden, C. (1999), ‘Plays for Export’, Phoenix 53: 222–48. Depew, M. and Obbink, D. (2000) (eds), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society, Cambridge, Mass. Dewald, C. (1987), ‘Narrative Surface and Authorial Voice in Herodotus’ Histories’, Arethusa 20: 147–70. Di Marco, M. (2003), ‘Poetica e metateatro in un dramma satiresco d’ età ellenistica’, in Martina (2003), 41–74. Easterling, P. E. (1997), ‘From Repertoire to Canon’, in P. E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge), 211–27. –––– and Hall, E. (2002) (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge. Fantuzzi, M. (2007), ‘Hellenistic Epigram and the Theater’, in P. Bing and P. Bruss (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram: 477–96. Foley, H. P. (1985), Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Ithaca. Foster, V. A. (2004), The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy: Studies in European Cultural Transition, vol. 18, Aldershot. Gärtner, T. (1972), Art. ‘Roman’, Der kleine Pauly: 1451. Gibert, J. (2000), ‘Euripides in Love’, ICS 24–25: 1–17. Griffith, M. (2002), ‘Slaves of Dionysos: Satyrs, Audience, and the Ends of the Oresteia, CA 21: 195–258.

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–––– (2005a), ‘Satyrs, Citizens, and Self-Presentation’, in Harrison (2005), 161–99. –––– (2005b), ‘Sophocles’ Satyr-Plays and the Language of Romance’, in I. J. F. De Jong and A. Rijksbaron (eds.), Sophocles and the Greek Language, Mnemosyne Supplement 269 (Leiden), 51–72. –––– (forthcoming a), ‘Satyr-Play and Tragedy, Face-to-Face’, in Taplin and Wrigley (forthcoming). –––– (forthcoming b), ‘Cretan Harmonies and Universal Morals: Early Music and Migrations of Wisdom in Plato’s Laws’, in E. Peponi (ed.), The Culture of Mousikê in Plato’s Laws. Gruen, E. (2002), Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks, Cambridge, Mass. Guthke, K. S. (1966), Modern Tragicomedy, New York. Hägg, T. (1980), Eros und Tyche: Der Roman in der antiken Welt, Mainz. Hall, E. (1998), ‘Ithyphallic Males Behaving Badly, or, Satyr Drama as Gendered Tragic Ending’, in M. Wyke (ed.), Parchments of Gender (Oxford), 13–37. –––– (2006), The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society, Oxford. Halliwell, S. (1986), Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapel Hill. Hanink, J. (2007), ‘Classical Tragedians and the Hellenistic Imagination: From Athenian Idols to Wandering Poets’. M. Phil. Thesis, Cambridge. Harrison, G. W. M. (2005) (ed.), Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, Swansea. Harvey, D. and J. Wilkins (2000) (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy, London. Herington, C. J. (1985), Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Berkeley. Hirst, D. L. (1984), Tragicomedy, London. Holladay, C. R. (1983) (ed.), Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, vol. 2, Chico. Jacobson, H. (1983), The Exagoge of Ezekiel, Cambridge. Janko, R. (1984), Aristotle On Comedy, Berkeley. Jones, C. P. (1991), ‘Dinner Theatre’, in W. J. Slater (ed.), Dining in a Classical Context (Ann Arbor), 185–98. Kaimio, M. et al. (2001), ‘Metatheatricality in the Greek Satyr-Play’, Arctos 35: 35–78. Kannicht, R. (2004) (ed.), Tragicorum Graccorum fragmenta, vol. 5 (2 parts), Euripides, Göttingen. Kerkhof, R. (2001), Dorische Posse, Munich. Knox, B. M. W. (1979), Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater, Baltimore. Kovacs, D. (1994), Euripidea, Mnemosyne Supplement 132, Leiden. KPS (1999) = Krumeich, R., Pechstein, N., and Seidensticker, B. (eds.), Das griechische Satyrspiel, Darmstadt. Laird, A. (2001). ‘Ring the Changes on Gyges: Philosophy and the Formation of Fiction in Plato’s Republic’, JHS 121: 12–29. Lesky, A. (1983), Greek Tragic Poetry, New Haven. Lucas, D. W. (1968) (ed.), Aristotle Poetics, Oxford. Ma, J. (2007), ‘A Horse from Teos: Epigraphical Notes on the Ionian-Hellespontine Association of Dionysiac Artists’, in Wilson (2007), 215–45.

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Maguire, H. (2003), ‘Art and Eloquence in Byzantium’ in E. Jeffreys (ed.), Rhetoric in Byzantium (Aldershot). Marini, N. (1991), ‘Drama: possibile denominazione per il romanzo greco d’amore’, SIFC (3) 9: 232–43. Martina, A. (2003) (ed.), Teatro greco postclassico e teatro latino: teorie e prassi drammatica, Rome. Mastronarde, D. J. (2000), ‘Euripidean Tragedy and Genre: The Terminology and its Problems’, ICS 24–25: 23–39. Meijering, R. (1987), Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia, Groningen. Morelli, G. (2003), ‘Per la ricostruzione del Centauro di Cheremone’, in Martina (2003), 11–27. Moretti, J.-Ch. (1993), ‘Les débuts de l’architecture théâtrale en Sicile et en Italie Méridionale’, Topoi 3: 72–100. Moretti, L. (1963), ‘I technitai di Siracusa’, RFil 91: 38–45. Most, G. W. (2000), ‘Generating Genres: The Idea of the Tragic’, in Depew and Obbink (2000), 15–34. Nesselrath, H.-G. (2000), ‘Eupolis and the Periodization of Athenian Comedy’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 233–46. Nicolucci, V. (2003), ‘Il dramma satiresco alla corte di Attalo I’, in Martina (2003), 325–42. Pechstein, N. (1998), Euripides Satyrographos, Stuttgart. Pelling, C. P. (2006), ‘Educating Croesus: Talking and Learning in Herodotus’ Lydian Logos’, CA 25: 141–77. Porter, J. (forthcoming), ‘Gyges, or the Adulterer malgré lui’, CA. Pretagostini, R. (2003), ‘La representazione dell’Agên e la nuova drammaturgia’, in Martina (2003), 161–75. Revermann, M. (1999/2000), ‘Euripides, Tragedy and Macedon: Some Conditions of Reception’, in M. Cropp, K. Lee, and D. Sansone (eds.), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century, ICS 24/25: 451–67. Richards, H. (1900a), ‘On the Use of the Words τραγ(δ and κωµ(δ’, CR 14: 201–14. –––– (1900b), ‘On the Word drama’, CR 14: 388–93. Roberts, W. Rhys (1902) (ed.), Demetrius On Style, Cambridge. Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén, L. (1996) (ed.), Epicarmo de Siracusa: Testimonios y Fragmentos, Oviedo. Roilos, P. (2005), Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel, Washington, DC. Ruiz-Montero, C. (2003), ‘The Rise of the Greek Novel’, in Schmeling (2003), 29–85. Rutherford, R. B. (1982), ‘Tragic Form and Feeling in the Iliad’, JHS 102: 145–60. Schmeling, G. (2003) (ed.), The Novel in the Ancient World, [1996, rev.], Leiden. Scodel, R. (2001), ‘The Poet’s Career, the Rise of Tragedy, and Athenian Cultural Hegemony’, in D. Papenfuss and V. Stocks (eds.), Gab es das griechische Wunder? (Mainz), 215–25. Seaford, R. (1984) (ed.), Euripides Cyclops, Oxford.

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Seidensticker, B. (1979), ‘Das Satyrspiel’, in G. A. Seeck (ed.), Das griechische Drama (Darmstadt), 204–57. –––– (1982), Palintonos harmonia: Studien zu komischen Elementen in der griechischen Tragödie, Göttingen. –––– (1989) (ed.), Das Satyrspiel, Darmstadt. Sidwell, K. (2000), ‘From Old to Middle to New? Aristotle’s Poetics and the History of Athenian Comedy’, in Harvey and Wilkins (2000), 247–58. Sifakis, G. M. (1967), Studies in the History of Hellenistic Drama, London. Silk, M. S. (2000), Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford. Slater, N. W. (2005), ‘Nothing to Do with Satyrs? Alcestis and the Concept of Prosatyric Drama’, in Harrison (2005), 83–101. Snell, B. (1971) (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, vol. 1, Göttingen. Stahl, H.-P. (1968), ‘Herodots Gyges-Tragödie’, Hermes 96: 385–400. Stefanis, I. (1988), Dionusiakoi technitai, Heraclion. Storey, I. (2005), ‘But Comedy has Satyrs Too’, in Harrison (2005), 201–18. Sutton, D. F. (1980), The Greek Satyr Play, Meisenheim. –––– (1987), ‘The Theatrical Families of Athens’, AJP 108: 9–26. Taplin, O. (1976), ‘XOPOU and the Structure of Post-Classical Tragedy’, LCM 1: 47–50. –––– (1983), ‘Tragedy and Trugedy’, CQ 33: 331–4. –––– (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, JHS 106: 163–74. –––– (1991), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Tragedy through VasePaintings, Oxford. –––– (1996), ‘Comedy and the Tragic’, in M. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford),188–202. –––– (2006), ‘Aeschylus’ Persai––the Entry of Tragedy into the Celebratory Culture of the 470s?’, in D. Cairns and V. Liapis (eds.), Dionysalexandros (Swansea), 1–10. –––– and Wrigley, A. (forthcoming) (eds), Pronomos: His Vase and Its World, Oxford. Travis, R. (2000), ‘The Spectation of Gyges in P. Oxy. 2382 and Herodotus Book 1’, CA 19: 330–59. Van Zyl Smit, B. (1998), ‘The Story of Candaules, his Wife, and Gyges’, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 9: 205–28. Voelke, P. (2001), Un théâtre de la marge : aspects figuratifs et configurationnels du drame satyrique dans l’Athènes classique, Bari. Walden, J. W. H. (1894), ‘Stage-Terms in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika’, HSCPh 5: 1–43. West, M. L. (1990), Ancient Greek Music, Oxford. Wilson, P. (2000), The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia, Cambridge. –––– (2007) (ed.), Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies, Oxford. Woronoff, M. (1990), ‘Theatrical Awareness as a Deliberate Technique in the Aithiopika’, in J. Tatum and G. M. Vernazza (eds.), The Ancient Novel: Classical Paradigms and Modern Perspectives (Hanover), 33. Zardini Lana, G. (1991), La Tragicommedia, Fasano di Puglia. Zimmermann, B. (1986), ‘Überlegungen zum sogenannten Pratinas-fragment’, MH 43: 145–54.

4 Costing the Dionysia Peter Wilson*

The Athenians were making a great mistake in wasting their energies on amusements, that is to say, in lavishing on the theatre what would pay for great fleets and support armies in the field. For if we tally up the cost of each tragedy, the Athenian people will be seen to have spent more on productions of Bakkhai, Phoinissai, Oidipous and Antigone, and the woes of Medea and Elektra, than they spent in fighting for their supremacy and for their liberty against the barbarians. Plutarch, Moralia 348f–349a

How much money did the Athenians spend on their dramatic festivals? The Dramatic Festivals of Athens has nothing to say on the matter. And that is not for want of evidence or argument. In this chapter I aim to build a full profile for the cost of a classical City Dionysia, at around 415 bc, on the basis of that evidence, which is both contemporary and direct (consisting largely of inscriptions and the texts of public oratory); and indirect or comparative (in the sense that it relates to other Athenian festivals, other places in Greece, and other periods than the classical.) No systematic attempt to draft an account of the income and expenditure of a Dionysia has ever been undertaken. Since their first publication (in the ’20s, ’40s and ’50s) the books of Pickard-Cambridge have been the authoritative works of reference on which the entire field’s ‘hard’ knowledge of the theatre rests, but that very authority has also acted as an impediment to such a study.1 For the approach of Pickard-Cambridge is fundamentally antiquarian. It shows no awareness of the importance of economics, nor any real interest in social history. His preferred object of study is classical theatre as a * This paper has benefited greatly from the comments of Eric Csapo, Robin Osborne, and William Slater. 1 Dithyramb, Tragedy, Comedy was first published in 1927 (2nd ed. rev. T. Webster 1962); The Theatre of Dionysus at Athens in 1946; The Dramatic Festivals of Athens posthumously in 1953 (2nd ed. rev. J. Gould and D. Lewis 1968; with addenda, 1988).

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High Art form, a realm of aesthetic and intellectual concern entirely disassociated from the worldly business of material needs. In modern scholarship, when we go back to the comfortably bourgeois attitudes of August Böckh or of the banker George Grote, we find a real interest in the financing of drama, in addition to the last serious attempt to cost the global expenditure on all festivals by the Athenians.2 In fact, Böckh’s Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener (first edition 1817, second edition 1851, third edition with notes by M. Fränkel 1886) remains the most comprehensive treatment of its subject. Its remarks on the Dionysia are now out of date, but we would do well to recover some of its animating spirit of pragmatic liberalism in order better to understand the economic dimensions of classical drama.3 This scholarship had remarkably little impact on mainstream study of the classical theatre, whose vast bibliography shows only sporadic interest in the business of its finances. Among the handbooks, Baldry (1971), 33 deserves mention as something of a pioneer: he reckoned a contribution by the polis of some five talants, with six more from private funding, an extremely conservative estimate. Walton (1977), cf. (2007), did not attempt a costing as such, but was the first to dwell at any length on the relevant issues, and to propose the existence of a classical theatrical economy with profit as one of its most important motives. In an age like the present, in which costing and commodifying culture have been taken to new extremes, the question posed by Plutarch seems timely once again. Moreover, the lack of a serious financial study of classical theatrical production that draws on all the available evidence persists. In 1995, Csapo and Slater treated financial matters in detail unparalleled for a sourcebook of the ancient theatre. Their estimate of a Dionysia with some six talants spent by the polis and up to nineteen by khoregoi is the best current assessment.4 In my own treatment of the private funding of drama through the khoregia, I opted somewhat loosely for a global cost of ‘tens of talants’.5 It is my aim here to make the case for an ‘expensive’ classical Dionysia more fully.6 Dramatic festivals are unusually complex, and costly. As William Slater has 2

Grote (1846–1856) viii. 125–6. Böckh did not try to cost the Dionysia itself––for his comments on its funding, see esp. Böckh (1886) I: 266–7––but estimated Athenian expenditure of 25 to 30 talants on all festivals annually: see Böckh (1886) I: bk. 2, ch. 13; bk. 3, ch. 21; bk. 3, ch. 22. For a flavour of his pragmatic liberalism, see e.g. Böckh (1886) I: 536 on the advantages of the ‘personalized’ liturgy system. 4 5 Csapo and Slater (1995), 141. Wilson (2000), 12. 6 Kallet (1998) offers a valuable survey of ancient and modern analyses of Athenian public income and expenditure, but does not attempt a new assessment of the cost of the Dionysia. See also Scodel (2001) for a good preliminary discussion of the relationship between the Panhellenism and the economics of tragedy as a genre. 3

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recently put it, ‘[o]f all competition types, save perhaps the later professional chorus, a drama performance has especially high front-end costs; and so must seek to guarantee its return on investment.’7 A range of funding models could respond to both these characteristics. One is large-scale, central funding. The Great Panathenaia is the exemplar here, for the athlothetai regularly received sums in the region of ten talants to administer the festival, while private contributions formed a relatively insignificant component of the overall budget.8 A theatrical festival in fourth-century Kyrene appears to operate on this model, with some 20,000 dr. allocated for prizes, salaries, perhaps even stage machinery.9 A second model that was to become increasingly popular in the Hellenistic period is the privately supplied endowment fund. A major benefaction is invested and has its income protected for the specific purpose of financing theatre––as in third-century Kerkyra, where detailed instructions record how 120 mn. (12,000 dr.) given by a generous husband and wife are to be invested and managed so as to fund drama at the Dionysia. The original sum must first be grown until it reaches 180 mn. (18,000 dr.––in Korinthian silver), which is then to be lent out at interest for one year, at which point the city will engage Artists and celebrate the Dionysia, and every second year thereafter. This last stipulation gives the distinct impression that the two-yearly cycle has been determined by entirely financial considerations.10 The model at work in the City Dionysia is distinctively different from these: this is a spectacular example of collaborative funding on a grand scale between 7

Slater (2007), 34. 415/14: the Hellenotamiai borrowed 9 talants from the Treasurers of Athena to give to the athlothetai to administer the Panathenaia (M–L 77 ad loc.: the Lesser festival of 415; Davison (1958), 32; Shear (2001), 456–7: advance payment for the Great festival of 414/13); perhaps only one of four disbursements in the course of the year: IG I3 370, ll. 66–7. On the unusual use of the term ‘we borrowed’ 0δανεσα[µεν]: Lewis (1959), 246; Thompson (1979), 150–1. 410: over 6 talants for the Great festival: IG I3 375, ll. 5–7. 406: up to 15 talants: IG I3 378, fr. c. 14 with Meritt (1987), 176. In 335/4 the city puts the Lesser festival on a more secure financial footing, possibly on the basis of an endowment fund that drew on a combination of protected rental and tax revenues: IG II2 334, of 335/4 + SEG 18, 13; Agora 19 L7 (A, B 41–50); Sosin (2002); cf. SEG 52, 92. Financial crises may not have been uncommon, especially given its occurrence early in the year. The background to Dem. 24.26–9 suggests as much for (probably) 354/3. Like the Panathenaia model are the musical contests established by the city of Eretria for its festival of Artemis c.340: IG XII, 9 189. A budget of just 1,000 dr. is set, but the city spends more than this on the prizes alone (ll. 5–6 with Rhodes and Osborne (2003), 365); supplementary financing of the sacrifices by regional associations (khoroi: Knoepfler (1997) ): these provide an ox (ll. 26–7) and co-provide other victims (ll. 27–8). 9 SEG 9, 13. Stage machinery?: l. 13 with Ceccarelli and Milanezi (2007), 190–1. It is however likely that further funds were forthcoming here: for instance, to support the choruses. 10 IG IX, 1 694, before 229. See Dareste-Hausoullier-Reinach (1904), 118–20. Cf. the collective subscription model in late fourth- or early third-century Epidauros: the theatre (its construction?) was funded by over 1,000 individuals who gave in support of the cult of Dionysos: Sear (2006), 15. 8

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the public purse and the private sector. That this model was developed to meet the special challenges presented by large-scale competitions in drama and dithyramb in a democratic polity is suggested by its appearance from as early as 450 at the local Dionysia in Ikarion, and in many other places thereafter.11 My procedure will be to start with the public and move on to the private side, though the distinction between the two is not easy to maintain.

1 . T H E P U B L I C S E C TO R Though its mechanisms are difficult to trace in detail, and subject to change over time, there is no doubt that substantial funds from central sources did support the classical Dionysia: infrastructure, sacrificial beasts, the subvention of attendance by the citizenry in the age of the theôrikon; performers’ prizes, pay, and processional equipment.12

i. Theatron and theorika The material infrastructure of the theatre of Dionysos was the responsibility of the polis. The space occupied by the theatre had probably always been treated simply as an extension of the modest sanctuary of Dionysos under the southern flank of the Akropolis. Though not always described as part of the sanctuary proper (the ∆ιονσιον), the theatre was nonetheless treated as an appendage of it.13 11 Ikarion: the deme had a special treasury ‘of Dionysos’, separate from its secular treasury, sufficiently buoyant to carry over some 4,000–5,000 dr. across a number of years: IG I3 253, ll. 2, 6, 12–13, 16–17, 23; cf. SEG 22, 117, ll. 5–6. If the difference in annual carry-over between the treasury of Dionysos and the secular treasury reflects relative expenditure, the amount spent on Dionysos was roughly a sixth of the deme’s entire secular budget. And the festival also received private funds from khoregoi: IG I3 254, c.430. Recent discussion of the extent to which demes followed the urban exemplar in organizing their Dionysia: Jones (2004), 155–7. That demes were keen to maximize theatrical expenditure is shown by a fragmentary decree from Thorikos c.400 which stipulates that the choice of khoregoi should be confined to those willing to ‘give most’: SEG 34, 107 = Thorikos 13, no. 75, ll. 5–6 with Wilson (2007b). The fact that, at least by the late fifth century, a number of wealthier demes spent lavishly on their Dionysia will have further spurred the city authorities on to make a greater show. 12 Capps (1943), 9 boldly restored δ[ηµοτελε,], ‘at public expense’ qualifying ‘tragôidoi’, ‘tragic performances’ in the heading of the Fasti (IG II2 2318); cf. Dem. 21.53; Thuc. 2.15.2; [Dem.] ag. Neaira 86, 87; Aiskhin. In Tim. 21, 183; In Ktes. 176; Theopomp. FGrH 115 fr. 104 l. 7, fr. 344 l. 25; Theophr. fr. 103; Bekker, Anecd. 1.240.28–30. Even if correct, the adjective need not imply full central funding and could reflect an attitude to khoregic finance as ‘public’ money. 13 Moretti (1999/2000), 380. I shall use the terms ‘pre-Lykourgan’ and ‘Lykourgan’, although the major redevelopment of the theatre began under the leadership of Euboulos: Faraguna (1992), 259.

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The first crucial, and neglected, point is that the Athenians charged admission to enter the theatre, perhaps from quite early days,14 and on a per diem basis. The radical novelty of this decision to charge money to (in effect) participate in a religious festival should not be missed.15 The fees known from theatres in Attic demes in the fourth century and from outside Attike in the third are surely modelled on the urban practice.16 This innovation in Greek festival culture makes it abundantly clear that financial considerations were fundamental from the early days of the classical Athenian Dionysia. As Eric Csapo has put it: ‘From the beginning theatre had at least a modest impulse to expand into the mass-entertainment industry that it became by the end of the Classical period.’17 Csapo has in fact revolutionized our understanding of the importance of the ‘box office’ to the financial management of the festival.18 As he shows, for the long pre-Lykourgan period of the theatre’s history, the theatron was rebuilt each year from wood. This task was not undertaken directly by the polis, but contracted out on lease to men known as theatropôlai or theatrônai––important if almost invisible entrepreneurs of the early theatre.19 They probably made a handsome profit, recouping the cost of the lease and more by being permitted to take the entrance charges from theatregoers. A very rough calculation would place takings at a Dionysia in the region of just over one and a half talants (9,000 dr.) This is based on the assumption that the charge of two obols per day for attendance20 was levied for each of the five days of agônes, and paid by some 5,500 spectators.21 One reason for suggesting that entrance charges existed from an early date is the very need to cover the cost of constructing and disassembling the theatre. 14

Thus Böckh (1828), 219–20. Sommerstein (1997); Wilson (1997). A possible parallel to be considered are the charges made on initiates at Eleusis, which date back to at least the early fifth century: cf. esp. IG I3 6 = Clinton 19; see Clinton (1974), 10–13; Clinton (1980). These may to some extent have served to acclimatize Athenians––as well as the many non-Athenians who came to Eleusis––to the idea of having to pay for a special religious experience. In the fourth century, the cost of initiation for an individual was around 15 dr. (IG II21672–3 = Clinton 177, of 329–328). 16 Peiraieus from c.330: Agora 19 (1991) L13, ll. 9–11; Akharnai by the late fourth century: IG II21206, ll. 4–12; the Euboian cities of Khalkis, Eretria, Karystos, and Oreos in the 290s: Le Guen (2001) I, TE 1, ll. 54–7. The solvency of the Ikarian Dionysia (n. 11 above) is consistent with the probability that the Ikarians already from the mid fifth century charged entrance fees. Cf. Jones (2004), 142. 17 18 Csapo (2004), 54. Csapo (2007). 19 On the assumption that the practice known from the Dionysia in fourth-century Peiraieus (and probably Akharnai: IG II21206 with Csapo (2007), 94–5 and Papazarkadas (2007), 167–9) was modelled on, or paralleled by, practice in the city. It is also consistent with the archaeological record, on which see Goette in Wilson (2007c) at 116–21. 20 Dem. De cor. 28. 21 For this low figure: Csapo (2007), 97. The amount for takings is in fact 92 mn. = 1 talant, 32 mn. 15

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This arrangement meant that the polis was saved the considerable upfront cost and trouble of building the theatre seating each year, or of investing heavily in a permanent theatre. It also meant that it secured, upfront, a sizeable cash income through the lease paid to it by the theatropôlai; but that it relinquished maximizing the profit by opting for a lease system. Whether the polis made a net profit or loss from this arrangement will depend on two factors: the value of the lease and the existence of theoric distributions. As to the first, estimates can be only hypothetical. The well-preserved lease for the theatre at Peiraieus in 324/3 cost 3,000 dr. The corporation of four men who won it on tender increased that sum, through the good services of one Theaios, by ten per cent out of civic zeal (and doubtless the wish to be favoured for the next lease contributed to their zeal).22 The urban lease will not have been less expensive. Assuming roughly comparable ratios of lease cost to takings in the City as in Peiraieus, we end up with somewhere in the region of 5,000 dr. At our test date of 415 bc, the city may therefore be estimated to have takings of c.5,000 dr. from the lease, while the holders of it had around 9,000 dr. from which to cover their costs and enrich themselves.23 The picture changes radically from the city’s side if it distributed theoric money. With the stone Lykourgan theatre, the need to rebuild the seating periodically had been eliminated and with it, the need for a leasing arrangement. At this moment, an arkhitektôn (not an ‘architect’ but something like a Clerk of Public Works24) appears as an official who doubtless had charge of the maintenance of the new theatre. After the initial outlay, the recurring annual costs would be minimal by comparison with the days of the wooden theatre. And yet the entrance charges continued. The theatre thus became a source of significant income to the city. A very crude calculation might place annual takings in the region of nearly three and a half talants (or 20,000 dr., assuming: two obols per day attendance for five days for c.12,000 spectators = 3 talants, 20 mn.) Its seating capacity was at least double that of its predecessor, and all of this money was now retained by the polis. The cost of its magnificent petrification may have been recouped in well under a decade and in any Agora 19 (1991) L13 = SEG 33, 143 = IG II2 1176 + Hesperia 29 (1960) 1 no. 1 (SEG 19, 117) + Hesperia 32 (1963) 12 no. 10 (SEG 21, 521). Csapo (2007) for full analysis and some new supplements. The ten per cent increase may indicate that this lease was already a renewal, for just such an increase is known from renewed leases at Delos: Osborne (1988), 297. Perhaps then Theaios was acting as one of the ‘assessors’, epitimêtai who are to be elected each time the theatre changes hands: ll. 23–4. The talk of civic zeal (philotimia) as the motivating factor could easily be little more than euergetic rhetoric. 23 An important unknown variable is the term of the lease. [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 47.4 implies that ten years is the norm for a temenos in Attike, but longer and shorter terms are known. That of the Peiraieus lease is not preserved: Csapo (2007), 113–14. 24 Csapo (2007), 108–13. 22

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case drew on private benefactions.25 In the late classical and early Hellenistic period the Athenians looked to their theatrical heritage for financial, as well as cultural, comfort. What of the stage building itself, along with its associated machinery and equipment? Demosthenes describes the area near the stage known as the paraskênia as public property,26 and all the relevant theatrical sites and structures must have fallen in that category. These will have been the responsibility of the Arkhon, and it was surely he who engaged the services of the various carpenters, painters, stage hands, and other functionaries known to have maintained them for and operated them during the contests.27 To return to a significant form of expenditure to be set against the income from the lease: namely theoric distributions made to citizens present in the city to support their participation in the festival.28 What was clearly another major element of the financial make-up of the festival is a morass of uncertainty and confusion.29 If regular distributions were made in the fifth century––that is, if we trust the tradition that ascribes their institution to Perikles30 ––the net profit to the city will have been diminished, probably to vanishing point.31 I suspect that such distributions as were made in the earlier period were the result of one-off decrees, in response to an unexpected It is a mystery that the planning, financing, and execution of this large and disruptive building project have left minimal traces in our sources. A rough approximation of its cost might be attainable by drawing on the evidence for the construction of the theatre on Delos: see esp. Vallois (1944), 231–4. 26 Dem. 21.17 with MacDowell (1990), 282; Theophr. Laws fr. 16 S-M = 658 ST. The paraskênia are also known as eisodoi: Didymos p. 312S. 27 Including: workers for routine maintenance (no Athenian evidence, but cf. e.g. IG XI, 2 199A, ll. 94 ff., from Delos, 274); the mêkhanopoios who operated the stage machinery (see below); a skênopoios: Comic adesp. fr. 806 PCG.; [Psellus] On Tragedy ch. 1, perhaps drawing on Theophrastos’ Poetics (Browning (1963), 72); a skênographos: Diog. Laert. 2.1.25. Scene-painting, if tailored to each production, was probably a matter for khoregoi; if architecturally decorative, probably a matter for the skênopoios (the latter arrangement attested in third-century Delos and elsewhere: Moretti (1997) ). 28 The requirement of current residence, or at least presence, in Athens: Hyp. Ag. Arkhestides fr. 47. 29 Buchanan (1962); Ruschenbusch (1979); Rhodes (1985), 105–8, 235–40; PickardCambridge (1988), 266–8; Faraguna (1992), 189–91; Csapo and Slater (1995), 287–9, 293–7; Sommerstein (1997); Wilson (1997). 30 Ulp. on Dem. 1.1 9; Perikles: Plut. Per. 9.1–3; cf. Σ Aiskhin. 3.24. Early 440s: Fornara and Samons (1991), 72; Jacoby FGrH 328 (Philokhoros) F33 Atthis bk 3, and commentary ad loc. Sceptical: Faraguna (1992), 187–94 with earlier bibliography. Philokhoros suggests that distributions of a drachma (for the whole festival?; for the three days of tragedies?: Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 267) were made in an ‘earlier’ period––but earlier to what? Book 3 of the Atthis covered a period that ended in 449. 31 The putative 5,000 dr. from the lease will have covered distributions for c.3,000 spectators. We can only guess how many claimed them. Dem. 4.38 asserts the ideological importance of doing so on the part of the rich; see Harris (1996). 25

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surplus, that individual politicians managed to author in their own names.32 Some regularization may have been introduced early in the fourth century.33 And as the century progressed, distributions seem to have been made with increased regularity, but probably never achieved that of dikastic or ekklesiastic pay.34 The real surprise is the appearance, by a date around the middle of the 350s, of the formal Theoric Fund, with its board of treasurers wielding huge financial and administrative powers, as a core, central treasury of polis revenues that, for a period before 339, received all the state’s surplus revenue and disbursed resources to a wide array of public works.35 Somehow, the festival––and specifically, the theatrical––resources of Athens had become intimately identified with a new and powerful monetary fund of the city. The decade in which the great new stone theatre was conceived and initiated is the decade of the rise and ascendancy of this powerful new Theoric Fund. When ready, the new supply of income from the Lykourgan theatre fed the Theoric Fund, and this perhaps explains a long-standing mystery: the use of the name ‘Theoric’ for a fund that was directed to matters far beyond the theatrical. De Ste Croix looked to the populist appeal of the theatrical subsidies as the reason for retaining the name.36 But perhaps the explanation is rather that the fund for disbursing theatre money had suddenly become a fund for the income of significant sums of theatre money.37 I calculated that the city might earn some 20,000 dr. from takings at a Dionysia under the new conditions. The price of entry probably rose in the later fourth century, at which point this could easily have reached 10 talants (60,000 dr.)38 32 Thus also Faraguna (1992), 189. I am slightly less inclined to give credence to the Periklean tradition than I was in 1997. The silence of the ‘Old Oligarch’ is significant; that of comedy less so, especially since no comedies survive from the 440s–430s; cf. the later comic reference in Theophilos fr. 12 K-A (the Pipelover). Theophilos competed at the Dionysia in 329. 33 In legislation authored by Agyrrhios in 395/4 ?: Harpok. s.v. θεωρικα´; cf. Suda s.v. δραχµ6 χαλαζ%σα; Zenob. Prov. 3.27. 34 The term τ6ν πεντεδραχµαν in Hyp. Ag. Demosthenes 26 (323 bc) has an air of long-term, colloquial familiarity. The similarity in names between theôrikon and ekklêsiastikon, dikastikon, bouleutikon should not be taken to imply too much about similarity of institutional support. The theôrikon is never described as a misthos. At other festivals: Panathenaia: Hesykh. s.v. θεωρικα` χρ µατα; Dem. Ag. Leokhares (44) 37; Khoes?: Plut. Mor. 818f. 35 Aiskhin. 3.25. The Theoric Fund may originally (and into the 340s) have been administered by a single officer: Rhodes (1985). 36 De Ste Croix (1964), 192. 37 An alternative possibility is that the Theoric Fund was so named because one of its initial purposes was to accumulate funds to finance the new theatron (cf. n. 25 above). This would fit better chronologically but there is no good evidence to support the idea. 38 Distributions rose to 5 dr. (see n. 34), whether per diem or for a whole festival is unclear. Assuming the latter, and assuming also that the amount of theoric distribution was equivalent to the charge to enter (there are indications that the distribution was larger than the entrance charge: Ulp. on Dem. 1.1), 12,000 entrance fees would generate 10 talants. In the former scenario, 25 dr. per person per Dionysia would generate the huge sum of 50 talants. In both cases the majority of this sum may have been offset by theoric distributions.

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It was probably Euboulos rather than Lykourgos who first recognized the economic potential of the new theatre, and acted upon it. For the works began under his leadership, and an important intervention in theoric distribution at a Dionysia was ascribed to him by a contemporary.39 He may have identified the imminent existence of a significant annual income arising from the completion of the stone theatre whose building he had set in train. For there is a compelling logic in connecting the more formal introduction of theoric distributions with the disappearance of the cost to the polis of rebuilding the theatre, and thus the appearance of a new supply of cash from the takings. Whether there was a causal relation or not, the reduction or disappearance of necessary expenditure by the polis on the theatron will have helped to cross-fund extensive theoric distributions in this period ––a period, moreover, when the percentage of non-Athenian spectators at the Dionysia is likely to have been fairly high.40 In the days of the Lykourgan theatre, even assuming fairly extensive theoric distributions, a profit from takings of around one talant will have accrued to the city––a handsome sum to crossfund other elements of the festival, or plough back into the Theoric Fund.41 At our target date of c.415, I think it likely that the city received income from a leasing arrangement while the leaseholders took the additional profit from entrance fees. And it is probable that this was a year without theoric distributions, given the financial pressures experienced in the Peloponnesian War.

ii. Feast The provision of meat for the great feast at the City Dionysia was one of the ‘big ticket’ items of expenditure that fell to the city. The Athenian demos had a reputation for lavish expense on public sacrifice,42 a reputation borne out by accounts that record the sale of skins from sacrifices made by the polis at major festivals.43 The scale of public sacrifice at the Dionysia and Panathenaia was perhaps unparalleled in Greek society. There were few if any other Philinos ag. the Statues of Sophokles and Euripides, ap. Harpok. s.v. θεωρικα´. The provision of a more secure basis to theoric distributions will have had the effect, and perhaps the aim, of protecting Athenian participation in their own theatre at such a time. To this extent I hold by my argument in Wilson (1997) that theoric distributions were designed to secure the participation of citizens qua citizens in their theatre, in marked contrast to the many paying non-Athenians in the audience. 41 Assuming that around three-quarters of the audience were Athenian citizens, and that a minority (say 5 per cent) of these did not bother to claim. 42 Cf. esp. [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.9; Theopomp. FGrH 115 F213. 43 The dermatikon accounts: IG II2 1496, 334/3–331/0. See esp. Rosivach (1994). 39 40

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occasions on which some fifteen or more thousand people were collectively fed. Allocation of central funds by the polis is the most likely method for the financing of these feasts. The fact that the City Dionysia was listed in the dermatikon accounts suggests as much.44 Other sacrifices were by contrast generally funded through rental income from resources owned by the relevant cult. A third method of funding––individual benefaction––is also relevant to the Dionysia (see below on hestiatores). For it seems that during the five days of the Dionysia there was more than one occasion for mass sacrificial feasting. How many oxen were needed for the great feast in which the procession culminated at the Dionysia? And how much would they have cost the public purse? Isokrates (7.29) probably exaggerates with talk of three hundred oxen. But two hundred will not be far from the mark. In 375/4, for instance, one hundred and nine oxen were purchased for the sacred Athenian mission to Delos, where the number of participants must have been less than half those attending an Urban Dionysia.45 The best item of evidence is the entry for the City Dionysia of 334/3 in the dermatikon accounts.46 But moving from the figure given there for the sale of skins––something over 808 dr.––to the actual number of animals killed is notoriously difficult, and has generated estimates from 81 to 240 beasts, with a leading authority, Michael Jameson, arriving at 106.47 My inclination to the higher end of these estimates is encouraged both by the uncertainty of the original total and the consideration that ‘[t]he hides may not reflect the actual numbers sacrificed.’48 The assumption that the type of beast in question is an ox is probably safe––less certain but possible, that they were uncastrated bulls.49 The cost of animals for sacrifice varied enormously over time and with all the vagaries of availability to which the ancient world was subject.50 Figures for the cost of oxen budgeted in classical Athenian sources show an average of 44 Rosivach (1994), 54–5 argues that the festivals in the dermatikon accounts formed a category known to Isokrates (7, Areop. 29) as the ‘additional festivals’, contrasted with ‘the ancestral festivals.’ The latter are funded α#π µισθωµα´των, by contrast with the ‘additional festivals’, which should therefore be otherwise funded than by rental: Rosivach (1994), 55: ‘presumably by direct allocations from the general budget’. But Isokrates says of these additional festivals: αB Kστασ τι προσεη, which may point to liturgy. Papazarkadas (2004), 61–4 offers an important critique of Rosivach’s position, arguing that it is impossible in practice clearly to delineate the categories of ‘customary’ and ‘ancestral’ sacrifices, and moreover that it was probably so for the Athenians themselves. 45 46 IG II2 1635, ll. 35–6. IG II2 1496, ll. 80–1. 47 81: Rosivach (1994), 69; 240: Ferguson (1948), 134 n. 46; 106: Jameson (1988), 109. 48 Csapo and Slater (1995), 113. 49 A bull ‘worthy of the god’ was sacrificed during the pompê by the ephebes in the second century: IG II2 1006, l. 12. 50 Schapps (1991).

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just over 72 dr.51 The highest reliable figure––100 dr.––is that for a prize ox at the Panathenaia.52 Two hundred oxen at 72 dr. each produce a total of 14,400 dr., or 2 talants, 24 mn. Of this some perhaps twelve mnai were returned to the public purse through the subsequent sale of the hides. That still leaves an outlay for the city of over two talants. Slaughter on such a scale required the labour of at least one professional butcher. This was budgeted––as the mageirikon––along with hiring expenses for the procession, the adornment of the great altar and other incidental costs for the festival and its pannykhis (doubtless firewood) to a total of 50 dr. for the Little Panathenaia c.335.53 At the Dionysia of 415, the city probably shared these costs with those who privately funded the procession, the epimelêtai. The financial as opposed to the culinary beneficiaries of this large public expenditure were probably a small number of wealthy owners who could afford to raise beasts in large herds.54 So, just as the decision to contract out the management of the theatre benefited wealthy entrepreneurs, so too did the provision of meat on this grand scale.55 Beasts were brought to process and die at the Dionysia by colonists and, probably, also by allies during the period of empire, and thus at the date that interests us. These would be in addition to my (notional) two hundred oxen provided for itself by the demos, and have supplied the more populous fifth-century city, and perhaps some of the allies themselves.56 With all this barbecued meat came a need for bread. I suggest below that this was provided by the managers of the procession, the epimelêtai.

iii. Procession For most of the classical period the costs associated with the great procession (pompê) of the City Dionysia were borne by private individuals, the ten ‘overseers’ epimelêtai elected by the demos, in collaboration with the Eponymous Arkhon who was general overseer of the procession: ‘they used to make the financial outlays on the pompê from their own resources’.57 Some time 51

Rosivach (1994), 95–6. IG II2 2311, ll. 71–81; cf. the anomalous figure of 400 dr. in IG II2 1672. 53 54 IG II2 334, ll. 27–31. Rosivach (1994), 106. 55 Civic officials called boonai bought the victims and sold their hides. The idea that they contributed extra funds as liturgists (Hiller von Gaertringen (1897) ) is refuted by Rosivach (1994), 109. A recently published late Hellenistic decree from Bargylia (Zimmermann (2000) ) shows how complex the financial and administrative arrangements for festival boutrophia could be. 56 Rhodes and Osborne (2003), 403. 57 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.4. On the pompê: Pickard-Cambridge (1988); Spineto (2005), 217–30, 61–3. Epimelêtai: Wilson (2000), 24–5; Wilson and Csapo (forthcoming). 52

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around 340–335 the demos became a major contributor. A sum of 10,000 dr. was budgeted for this end, distributed to the ten epimelêtai, now allotted by the tribes. This is a significant sum, and was perhaps even so supplemented by wealthy and ambitious epimelêtai, for it is clear that the preparation of the pompê was always a prestige office, close in character to the liturgies. This significant financial contribution falls to the private sector at the date of c.415, and so the issues it raises will be discussed below. We might however ask here whether there were any core items relating to the procession provided by the polis itself. Ritual paraphernalia in the form of gold and silver vessels carried in procession, and jewelry worn by the kanêphoros, seems ordinarily to have been provided by the city. At Thucydides 2.13.4 Perikles includes, in his encouraging inventory of the wealth totalling 6,000 talants that remained on the Akropolis in 431, ‘all the sacred equipment [made of gold and silver] used for the processions and the contests’ (8σα Lερα` σκεη περ τε τα` ποµπα` κα2 το) α#γ%να). The same is true in the period immediately after 402, when according to Philokhoros, ‘the Athenians used processional equipment fashioned out of the property of the Thirty.’ And we know that generous provision was made for κσµο κανηφορικ from central coffers in Lykourgos’ day.58 Our ignorance of the ritual paraphernalia of the Dionysian pompê is a great impediment here, but it apparently included an enormous phallus pole, and perhaps a wagon to carry it; small portable phalloi made ‘at public expense’ (though cheap, since often made of figwood); others conveyed across the seas by colonists, and perhaps also allies, of Athens;59 perhaps even ivy garlands for general use, like those manufactured for all to wear at their Dionysia by the city of Eretria––free to citizens (though intended for recycling); available to rent for foreigners.60 How much does a phallos cost? The accounts for the Delian Dionysia are 58 Philokhoros on the use of the property of the Thirty: FGrH 328 F181 with Fornara and Yates (2007). Lykourgos’ provision of state κσµο κανηφορικ: Plut. Mor. 852b; Paus. 1.29.16; IG II2 333 fr. c.10; 1496 + Hesperia 9, 37 with Faraguna (1992), 371–7. 59 Phalloi: their presence guaranteed by the requirement on colonists to ‘lead a phallos to the Dionysia’: IG I3 46, ll. 15–17, c.445; SEG 31, 67, cf. SEG 45, 47, ll. 2–6, 372 with Dreher (1995), 109–54; Σ Ar. Nub. 386; probably extended to allies, since they were required to bring a cow and panoply to the Great Panathenaia and ‘to walk [in] the procession [just like colon]i[sts]’ from 425/4: IG I3 71, ll. 55–8. Cf. Plut. De Cupid. Divit. 527d; further argument in favour: Krentz (1993). A large ‘state’ phallos pole, and phalloi made both privately and at public expense: Σ Ar. Akh. 243a. Fig wood: Suda s.v. φαλλο; Hesykh. s.v. Thyonidas; proverbially cheap: Zen. 3.44; meant to be burnt: cf. Dio Khrys. 33.63.6. Csapo (1997) on rituals of phallos-bearing. Eric Csapo makes the interesting suggestion to me that the requirement to bring a phallos may be shorthand for a phallos-pole plus a chorus of phallos-bearers to hymn and dance with it, adding considerably more to the spectacle and also expense. 60 IG XII 9 192, 236; cf. SEG 40, 758: a one-off event under special circumstances. Jacottet (1990); Lewis (1990). No evidence for Athens, but a number of practices in Eretrian festivals were evidently modelled on those of their festival-mad neighbour.

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informative, particularly since they may reflect practices introduced by the Athenians from home.61 They detail expenses for the production of a multicoloured bird with a huge phallus head, and a wagon (φαλλαγωγε,ον or αMµαξα) to transport it.62 They list the cost of wood, wax, nails, and pigments (indicating a multicoloured phallos.)63 That Dionysos was honoured with a large phallos borne on a wagon at his Athenian festival has been argued by Guettel Cole, citing a highly fragmentary decree of 278/7 (IG II2 673) that has something to do with the conduct of a phallic procession (τD φαλλαγ[ω|γα], ll. 7–8) through the city and that may refer later to the vehicle which carried it as a ‘four-wheeled wagon’ [αMµαξαν τ]ετρα´κυκλον (l. 18).64 A state phallus wagon for the classical Dionysia is thus a possibility, but hardly proven.65 The state phallus pole, like those from the colonies, could certainly have been borne in the procession without the aid of a wagon.

iv. Performers: prizes and pay Poets and patrons Through the City Dionysia, the Athenian polis became a poetic commissioner on an entirely unparalleled scale. In doing so it was wresting the role of patron from tyrants, kings, and aristocratic families, a struggle that was far from conclusive, as the examples of Hieron, Alexander I, and Arkhelaos show. This ambition was extremely costly. The City Dionysia required, with unprecedented regularity, some twenty-eight poets, as many expert pipers, and around twenty-four actors; not to mention twelve hundred-odd choreuts and scores of trainers and other support staff. The city devolved some of these expenses to its khoregoi (especially the costuming, maintenance, training, and pay of the choreuts.) Nonetheless, the remuneration of the most high-profile figures of the theatre fell to the city. It is likely that Arkhons reached deep into their own pockets, as well as drawing on considerable state funds. This remuneration took the form of prizes (athla) and pay (misthos), and it 61

Frickenhaus (1912), 74. Bruneau (1970), 314–17. The material dates from the fourth and third centuries. 63 The most expensive item was the wooden pole, between 30 and 60 dr.: Guettel Cole (1993), 30–1. 64 Guettel Cole (1993), 28. She cites the wrong number of IG II2. 65 It is not clear to which festival(s) IG II2 673 refers. The reference to [ep]imelêtai in l. 17 is insufficient to tie it to the City Dionysia, as Nilsson (1951), 209 wished. What relation if any such a wagon may have had to the ship cart upon which the god sailed uncannily into the city at (one of?) his festivals is also unclear; see Spineto (2005), 91–5. If at the City Dionysia, this should be during the preliminary arrival of Dionysos ‘from Eleutherai’, the eisagôgê: Robertson (1985), 292. 62

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is difficult to know whether and just how the Athenians distinguished between prizes and pay for the various performers at the Dionysia.66 Comparison with the Panathenaia is of some help, if we acknowledge the marked difference in character between those mousikoi agônes and the choral and dramatic agônes of the Dionysia.67 The solo68 performers at the Panathenaia could simply turn up and play, and may have had a repertory that could be reused with limited alteration from one city to the next. Poets by contrast had to compose works which fitted the fluid Athenian theatrical and political scene effectively, and they and their teams had to train on site for extended periods. However, an important lesson of the Panathenaic evidence is that prizes can be both symbolically honorific and extremely lucrative: the firstplaced kitharôidos at the Panathenaia received both a solid gold ‘olive’ crown worth 1,000 dr., and a further cool 500 dr. in cash. In other words, prizes may be a form of pay, however disguised.69 Few musicians are likely not to have realized the monetary value of their prize crowns. The Panathenaia also shows that placement in the contest was an effective way of scaling the reward of competitors. The Athenians are very unlikely to have rewarded the poets of their main symbolic and cultural form less well than they did the kitharôidoi competing at the Panathenaia.70 We have no doubt about the nature of two prizes: the great bronze tripods for the winners in dithyramb, though just who was their ‘official’ recipient––tribe, khoregos, chorus, or poet––is not entirely clear. These were substantial objects. The one for the men’s contest stood nearly five metres high; that for the boys’, around three metres.71 The Arkhon arranged for their manufacture and we can with some confidence estimate their cost at over 500 dr. each, perhaps a good deal more.72 Victorious khoregoi for

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Bremer (1991) is the only serious treatment of the question of poets’ pay. IG II2 2311, c.335 with Shear (2003); [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 60.3. 68 Or duet, in the case of aulodes and synauletes. 69 Cf. Slater (2007), 37–40. Shear (2001), 352, 360 shows the prizes for musicians at the Panathenaia changed from (probably) olive oil (before c.430) to gold crowns (first places) and money (some time between c.430 and 402/1). The same forces––including increased professionalism––are likely to have had much the same effect on the rewards given to poets and actors at the Dionysia in this period. 70 We may also compare the prizes instituted by Lykourgos for winners in a choral contest at the Peiraieus Dionysia. These are significant sums––for the choruses themselves? or their poets?––1,000 dr. for first prize, 800 for second, 600 for third: Plut. Mor. 842a with Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 90; Wilson (2000), 267. 71 Amandry (1976), 27; Wilson (2000), 206–9. 72 Prize tripods for choruses (probably only two) on Delos under Athenian control in 377/6 cost at least 1,000 dr. (a lacuna hides the full total), including payment to their maker: IG II2 1635aA, ll. 33–9. These may have been considerably smaller than the tripod for men’s dithyramb at the Dionysia: Wilson (2007a), 176. 67

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dithyramb received a crown, and it is as good as certain that so too did those in drama.73 In fact, this practice entirely characteristic of Greek contests was very probably also extended to poets and actors, perhaps choreuts and pipers.74 It is difficult to go further than this. A bull is associated with dithyramb in a variety of sources, and while Pickard-Cambridge was correct to insist that none of these ‘refers directly to Athens’,75 it is fairly certain that the two winning tribal teams were awarded a bull to be sacrificed at their victory celebrations.76 An ox awarded for a choral victory at the fourth-century Panathenaia cost 100 dr. I shall reckon a cost of 80 dr. for these prize beasts, a little more than the 72 determined above as a likely ‘average’ price. We should thus set another 160 dr. to the expenditure of the city. There are some indications that a goat was the victorious tragic poet’s prize; a basket of figs, the comic––though wine is another comic possibility.77 A goat would cost around 11 drachmas.78 Dried figs would be a negligible expense. At this point our evidence fades to near invisibility and unanswerable questions multiply. We can be confident that each performance category was ranked.79 That may imply the further complication of scaled prizes. And if prizes were scaled, they would as I have suggested perhaps be indistinguishable from µισθο, ‘payment’. One reason for suggesting that the dramatic misthoi were awarded in this way is the connection made in a gloss of Hesykhios between the misthos and the prize for comedy. The passage is garbled, but the relation seems clear: s.v. µισθ· τ παθλον τ%ν κωµικ%ν κα2 τν α#µφορ.α. µµισθοι δ π.ντε Oσαν. ‘Misthos: the prize of the comedians,80 in 73 It has been assumed on the basis of Plut. Mor. 348d that khoregoi for drama were also awarded tripods, but this is extremely unlikely: Wilson (2000), 236–44. 74 Dem. 21.55, cf. 63 distinguishes crowns that all choruses and khoregoi wear during the festival from the victor’s prize. Cf. Aristid. On Rhetoric 2: crowns for tragedians; Alkiphr. Ep. 4.18.10: for comedians. 75 Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 78; a contradictory view in Pickard-Cambridge (1962), 36. 76 Suda s.v. Ταυροφα´γον; Σ Ar. Frogs 357; Tzetz. Comm. in Ar. Frogs 357; Simon. epig. 27 (P); iconography: Froning (1971) on vases; Goette (2007) on khoregic monuments. The winning chorus in pyrrhikhê at the Panathenaia won an ox: IG II2 2311, ll. 71–6. 77 Prize goat for tragedy: Marm. Par., FGrH 239 A39 = TGrF 1 Thespis T2, with Connor (1989); the Calendar frieze from the Little Metropolitan Church has a goat being led by an actor under the month Elaphebolion: Simon (1983), 6–7, 102, Pl. 1–3. In the Marathonian Tetrapolis a goat was sacrificed on the first day of the City Dionysia, Elaphebolion 10: IG II2 1358 col. 2, ll. 17–18. Cf. Burkert (1966). Wicker basket of figs and a metrêtês of wine as prize for comedy (supposedly c.582–561): Marm. Par., FGrH 239 A39 = Susarion PCG test. 1; Plut. De Cupid. Divit. 527d. Cf. below further on wine. 78 Rosivach (1994), 98. 79 Dithyramb: Plut. Symp. Probl. 1.10; drama: Didaskaliai, IG II2 2219–23. 80 κωµικ can be used of actors (Alexis fr. 98.13 PCG) as well as poets, but less frequently, and the reference here seems to be to poets.

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addition to the amphora. Five were in receipt of misthoi’. In the only serious treatment of the question of poets’ pay, Bremer writes that παθλον here ‘can hardly mean the winner of the agôn (there could be only one, of course); it must refer to the five comic poets’.81 Bremer is surely right to understand this gloss as a reference to the fact that all five competing comic poets received pay (misthos). But he cannot be quite right in saying that the epathlon does not refer to the winner. The point is that the payment of all five poets––including the first place––was an essential part of the prize they received. It follows as likely, though this gloss does not state as much, that that payment was graded according to placement in the agôn.82 The reference to ‘the amphora’ here is obscure. But the familiar container and measure of wine is at home in the context of comic victory, and I assume that it is introduced here by a disjunctive κα: that is to say, the misthos was ‘in addition to’, ‘as well as’ the amphora. If each comic poet did receive an amphora of wine, that will have cost somewhere in the region of 60 dr.83 There can little doubt that all twenty-eight poets who were granted a chorus at each Dionysia did receive misthoi––as financial remuneration. Its level was a matter for public debate and decree, and the Council played a role in its allocation.84 The evidence comes from comedy and its commentators, and we hear nothing explicit about the pay of tragic poets. This is probably an accident of survival, and perhaps also of tragedy’s generic ‘muteness’ about itself.85 The poets of dithyramb were in a somewhat different position from their dramatic counterparts. The vast majority were non-Athenian, by contrast with dramatic poets. It is clear that remuneration was an important part of the draw to come to Athens––along with fame and optimum conditions for performance. We should also expect them to have been maintained while 81

Bremer (1991), 55. Another possibility, suggested to me by William Slater, is to understand παθλον as ‘extra prize’, rather than simply ‘prize’, a sense that appears in various Hellenistic and later documents, including the new Hadrianic letters to the Dionysiac Tekhnitai at Alexandria Troas: Petzl and Schwertheim (2006); cf. I. Olymp. 56 (SEG 37, 356), IG IX 1, 128, l. 13. If the word was deliberately chosen with this meaning, the intention may have been to describe the pay as an ‘extra award’, something separate from and additional to the ‘basic’ prize, reported in ‘the amphora’. The wine was the ‘basic’ prize for comedy, the misthos additional to it. On this interpretation, Hesykhios indicates that all five comic competitors received the ‘extra award’ of payment. Whether they also all received the wine is unclear. Strict logic might suggest it––an ‘extra’ prize presuming the basic prize already––but it is probably wrong to insist on that. 83 Cost of wine: Gallo (1997), 23; Lambert (2002), 398. 84 Ar. Ran. 367–8, ΣΣ Ran. 367, Vesp. 660 ff., Pax 697, Ekkl. 102. Council: Σ Ran. 367. 85 Griffith (1995); Wilson (2000), 65. If the social ‘elevation’ of tragedy plays a role, it probably touches appearances only and not material reward. The socio-economic origins of tragic and comic poets seem indistinguishable, and such considerations are not relevant to pay of this sort: see below. 82

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residing in Athens for the period of training––and that might be anything up to three or four months. One drachma a day is probably a minimum in 415.86 But this part of their remuneration probably fell to their khoregos, with whom they may have resided, rather than to the polis.87 We have little indication of the sums involved. Nor do we know whether the pay was given as a one-off payment when poets ‘received’ their chorus, or delivered as a regular salary. If all contenders were remunerated according to their place, the money––or some of it––must have come at the end, when the verdict was known. The limited evidence for poetic payment elsewhere in Greece offers some insight. Bremer used this in an attempt to answer the question of how much tragic poets were paid: ‘at least one talant’ for a tragic tetralogy was his answer.88 Pindar was given––as a special ‘gift’ (dôrea) of the Athenian people–– 10,000 dr. for a dithyramb.89 This brings us very close to the world of Dionysiac poetic remuneration, even if this was a particularly lavish reward granted after the event.90 His Nemean 5 was said to have cost the family of Pytheas 3,000 dr.91 The epic poet Khoirilos of Samos was reported to receive 400 dr. a day from Arkhelaos.92 Some of these sums may be inflated by the reverential awe (or horror) of later generations. But on the other hand we do need to counter the tendency of many critics ancient and modern to discount the economic relations that underwrote ancient poetics and the services it performed for the mighty of the world, be they kings, tyrants, families, or city states.93 And an intriguing item of ‘hard’ epigraphic evidence not cited by Bremer, from third-century Hermupolis Magna in Egypt, offers something of 86 In Eretria c.340 provision was made for sitêresion of one dr. per day for the visiting musicians (an absolute minimum of 14), for up to three days before the contest: IG XII 9 189, ll. 21–4. These travelling professionals may not have needed long periods of rehearsal in each city. They quite possibly performed the same material in each of the four cities in that contract. 87 Didaskaloi in residence with khoregos while training: Wilson (2000), 82–6, 117–19, 125. Some visiting melic poets were given dining rights in the Prytaneion: ΣΣ Ar. Ran. 585, Nub. 332a, 335b, presumably a special and rare reward rather than regular upkeep. 88 Bremer (1991), 56; cf. Gzella (1971). 89 Isok. Antid. 166; Pind. fr. 76 (M); Ar. Eq. 1329; ΣΣ Akh. 637, Nub. 299; cf. Paus. 1.8.4; Vita 1.1.16. 90 The combination of cash and proxeny (Isok. Antid. 166) has an air of plausibility. Chaniotis (1988), 347–8 envisages the existence in Isokrates’ Athens of the relevant honorific decree. 91 Σ Pind. III, p. 89 Drach., a story generated out of the opening of the song. Shocked at the sum requested by Pindar, the family were tossing up between a bronze statue and an epinikion. Given that a bronze statue could cost half a talant, the comparison may be realistic even if the story is a fiction (and even in the fiction, the family chose to pay for the poem): Yvonneau (2003), 111; cf. Bremer (1991), 52. 92 Ath. 8, 345d; cf. Plut. Lys. 18.7–8. Bernardini (2004), 46 accepts the basic veracity of this payment. 93 Svenbro (1976); Gentili (1988); Kurke (1991).

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a supportive control: a short iambic funerary epigram records its own cost of 8,373 silver drachmas, with a further 2,720 for its monumental setting on a column.94 Bremer’s calculations do not seem unreasonable. This component of the festival budget will be enormous: a conservative estimate will place it somewhere in the region of 33,600 dr.––over five talants.95 The diachronic dimension is vital here, since a major engine for an increase in the fees commanded by actors, and probably of poets, was the spread of theatre outside urban Athens. Already by 415, this can only have put pressure on the authorities to remunerate them well at the city festival. The highly unsympathetic evidence of Plato suggests that tragic poets could win the highest money and honour from tyrants; but next best was a democracy.96 Plato’s words imply what is in any case plausible for other reasons: namely, that ideological factors acted as a brake on the extent to which democracies paid their poets, but that democracies were nonetheless a place where tragic poets flourished economically, as well as poetically. The fact that most poets who performed at the Dionysia of whom we know anything much appear to have been of the leisured class tells us little of direct relevance to this question. Pindar, Bakkhylides, and Simonides were doubtless of the leisured elite; as too was Athenian Solon, who nonetheless in the early sixth century promulgates a view of poetry as a craft from which to earn a living.97

94 GV 1, 1176 = IMEGR 125, SEG 8, 624. In the second century an Ephesian poet of tragedy and satyr play named Zotion was given, among other awards, 70 dr. by a decree of the Koroneians. See Pappadakis (1927); Chaniotis (1988), 346. The scale and precise nature of the performance for which he was honoured is unclear, but it included material relating to the civic and religious traditions of Koroneia and is unlikely to have been a full-scale drama. Slater and Schachter promise a new discussion, following the rediscovery of the stone. 95 Based on: three tragic misthoi at 5,000 dr. for first place (under Bremer’s talant), 4,000 for second, 3,000 for third; five comic misthoi at 2,000, 1,600, 1,200, 1,000, and 800 dr.; twenty dithyrambic misthoi at 750 dr. each. If the prizes awarded at the Peiraieus Dionysia were for poets in choral contests (see above n. 70), my proposed figures seem in line with them. Comparison with sums expended on Panathenaic prizes also shows that these figures are entirely reasonable. Some 8 talants were required to cover the prizes for a Great festival in the early fourth century, made up of: over five and a half talants worth of olive oil for the athletes and equestrians (at least 2,100 amphorae of olive oil (Shear (2003), 102), each containing around 11 khoes (Bentz (1998), esp. 31–40, 200–1), producing c.1,958 metrêtai, and assuming an ‘average’ price of around 17 dr. per metrêtês (Pritchett (1956), 184; Golden (1998), 165). The total thus calculated is 5 talants, 3,286 dr. Around a talant for the amphorae that contained them: how much each Panathenaic amphora cost the city is little more than guesswork, but 1 dr. is perhaps a plausible approximation (Sparkes (1996), 140–5). To which an absolute minimum of 7,000 dr. for the musical and tribal prizes needs to be added: Shear (2003). My thanks to David Pritchard for helpful discussion of these matters. We might also compare the 7 talants spent by an individual Athenian agonothete in c.215: IG II2 834, ll. 4–5. 96 97 Resp. 568c; Lakh. 183b. Fr. 13.51–2 W.

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Actors By 415, the protagonist was on the whole clearly differentiated from the poet.98 A prize for best tragic protagonist at the Dionysia existed (from 449), though not for comedy (until some time after 320).99 The existence of a contest in tragic acting separate from that of the tragedies themselves may mean that the three protagonists were distributed (by the Arkhon) across all three productions, as was certainly the case in the fourth century. But no definitive evidence can place this before c.340. That arrangement will have marked a break in the old networking system that dominated theatrical practice in the fifth century, when the leading practitioners of dramatic poetry and acting were drawn from a number of family-based groups who in effect decided who was to act in whose work.100 What our tragic actor won in 415 we cannot say. But the prize is certain to have been financially attractive: rather closer in value to the overall prize for the first-place kitharôidos at the Panathenaia (1,500 dr.) than to the poet’s proverbial ivy crown. It is fairly safe to assume that in 415 the Arkhon hired three protagonists for tragedy and five for comedy and gave them state support for a period prior to the festival;101 and that second and third actors were hired in turn by the protagonists.102 Csapo has made a strong case to the effect that the development of a self-sustaining theatrical economy existed much earlier than is normally assumed, by the last quarter of the fifth century.103 As soon as actors became a commodity in limited supply and significant demand, the city must have taken steps to ensure that their services were secured for the City Dionysia (and we know the trouble they had in doing so in the age of the theatreloving Alexander.) The offering of further prizes and special honours should be understood in this light.104 By the later fourth century the Athenians had to pay large sums, some of them in advance, and contract to ensure that they secured the best actors.105 In this age, stars could command huge sums, perhaps as much as half a talant a day.106 98

Possible examples of poet-actors from in and after the 440s: i. Herakleides (active 440s), tragic actor and poet? Stephanis no. 1074; Wilhelm (1906), 62; cf. Ghiron-Bistagne (1976), 132, 146–7. ii. [Me]nekrates (active 430s), tragic didaskalos and actor? Stephanis no. 1651; Wilhelm (1906), 21; Ghiron-Bistagne (1976), 132. iii. Nausikrates (mid fourth century), comic actor and poet? Stephanis no. 1773; Ghiron-Bistagne (1976), 344. 99 100 Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 124–5. Sutton (1987); Csapo (2004), 54. 101 Csapo and Slater (1995), 229–30. 102 103 Dem. 18.262; Strattis, Anthroporestes fr. 1 PCG; cf. Dem. 19.200. Csapo (2004). 104 See Lambert (forthcoming) and cf. e.g. the (?) actor awarded a gold crown, status as proxenos and euergetês in Agora 16, 79, of 332/1. 105 Plut. Alex. 29; cf. Aiskhin. On the False Embassy 19 with ΣΣ; Poll. IV 88. 106 Plut. Ten Orators 848b; Gell. 11.9; Dio Khrys. Or. 66.11; Csapo (2004), 56–7. Lucian, Ikaromenippos 29––a tragic actor described as ‘an absurd little creature hired for the contest at 7 dr.’––is hardly evidence for the classical Dionysia.

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These heady days of a boiling theatrical economy are beyond the limit of this study, but not as far as is usually imagined. And the sort of sums paid to comic actors at the festivals of Dionysos and Demetrios in the cities of Euboia in the very early third century may be realistic comparative material to suggest what Athens had to pay its protagonists in the late fifth and fourth centuries. The era is one of a more developed theatrical economy, but the festivals are much less prestigious than their Athenian antecedent.107 The surviving contract indicates that they received 400 dr. per performance ––and there was to be at least five days’ work on the island in this contract alone–– plus living expenses worth 9 obols a day for the five days.108 At the more modest Dionysia funded by an endowment in third-century Kerkyra, nine performers (three pipers, six actors) receive 50 mnai of Korinthian silver between them, with a daily allowance on top.109 If they were remunerated equally (unlikely), each will have received 555 dr., plus maintenance. An impressionistic estimate of the sum needed by an Arkhon to hire the eight protagonists of the City Dionysia in 415 would place it somewhere in the region of a talant (6,000 dr.)110 Who paid for actors’ costumes? The evidence suggests that in the earlier period poets were in possession of theatrical skeuê,111 which may imply they were responsible for providing it. But in the later classical period and beyond, growing specialization––including the appearance of a theatrical skeuopoios112 ––combined with the increased sumptuousness of tragic costumes implied by iconography, renders it plausible that Arkhons needed to budget specifically for this purpose. An Arkhon on Delos did precisely that in 270 bc. Or rather, he went to the trouble of specifying that he had not recorded the cost of the costumes in his accounts, because he had funded them personally himself.113 It follows that they were normally provided for

107 The value of the prizes offered to musical performers at the Athenian Panathenaia c.380 (IG II2 2311) is five to six times greater than at the Eretrian Artemisia c.340 (IG XII 9 189). 108 Le Guen (2001) I, TE 1, l. 22. See Le Guen (2001) II, 71–4. 109 IG IX 1 694, ll. 19–25. 110 On the following assumptions: three tragic protagonists performing in four plays at c.300 dr. per play; five comic protagonists performing in one play at c.300 dr. per play. This produces 5,100 dr. This makes no separate calculation for sitêresion, which will have been especially relevant to non-Athenian actors. 111 Cf. esp. ‘Euripides’ in Ar. Akh. The tragic poet Sthenelos was said to have sold his skeuê when on hard times: Σ Ar. Wasps 1312 RV. But he may have been an actor: TrGF I 32. While this sounds like a comic fabrication, a resale market came into being at some date: Poll. VII 78. 112 A σκευοποι, as maker of masks and costumes, is familiar in Aristophanes’ day: Eq. 232; Pax 762; Arist. Poet. 1450b20, cf. [Oik.] 1344a; Pl. Kriti. 70d; Poll. IV 115; cf. 2.47, 10.190. 113 IG XI 110, ll.17–18. Sifakis (1967), 40–1. Cf. Migeotte (2006), 18–20 for another example, an agonothete at the Sarapieia in Boiotia in 276.

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from the public purse. A similar situation may already have obtained in late fifth-century Athens, with some public provision for costumes that could always be replaced by personal munificence on the part of Arkhons.

Pipers Who paid the pipers? Every Dionysia needed twenty-eight of them, and although auletai were a populous tribe in the Greek world, this festival commanded the stars of the art.114 Over the course of the classical period, their status rose with the fortunes of theatrical music––some of them, like Pronomos of Thebes, becoming stars in their own right. As early as Pindar’s day, piping could be associated in myth and reality with money-making.115 In the earlier fifth century they were hired by poets. By c.350 they were allotted to their teams by the polis.116 At that stage––and this may have held from some time earlier––we may assume that they were remunerated (and presumably hired) by the Arkhon.117 Inscriptions record a few specific sums paid to festival musicians in the Hellenistic period, and these may offer a rough guide. In 179, two pipers for the Delian Apollonia received 3,000 dr., to which were added 470 dr. for upkeep (sitêresion), khorêgêmata, and the prize (nikêtêrion).118 At the same festival in 192, the pay for the piper Telemakhos was 1,500 dr., the sitêresion 130, the nikêtêrion 60, to which were added 50 dr. for the khorêgêmata and as much again as a xenion, for a total of 1,790 dr.119 At Kyrene in c.335 a piper for tragedy and dithyramb received only 420 dr.120 At the Dionysia and Demetria in the cities of Euboia in the early third century, one piper apparently received 2,400 dr. per festival.121 All this suggests that 1,000 dr. might be an appropriate figure to postulate as payment for a player at the Dionysia c.415. That would generate a total of some 28,000 dr. for all the musicians.

114 [Psellus] On Tragedy 12 with Perusino (1993), 89–90. On the income of low-level pipers: Nordquist (1994), 89. 115 Pind. fr. 157 with Seaford (2004), 307 and cf. Midas of Akragas, victor in aulêtikê at the Pythia in 490 and rich enough to commission Pindar (Pyth. 12). 116 [Plut.] De Mus. 1141d; Ath. 617b–c; Wilson (2000), 69, 336–7 nn. 85–6. 117 contra Wilson (2000), 69 where I suggested that they remained the responsibility of the khoregos. The polis apparently never awarded a prize for musicians at the Dionysia. 118 119 IDelos 442, A86 and 128. IDelos 399, A56–7; cf. Sifakis (1967), 31 n. 1. 120 121 SEG 9, 13, ll.16–17. Le Guen (2001) I, TE 1, 21.

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vi. Other expenditure All manner of other costs must have accrued to the city in funding a Dionysia, such as the services of a herald, a trumpeter,122 crowd-controllers,123 the operator of stage machinery,124 perquisites for the priest of Dionysos,125 proedria,126 equipment for the proagôn,127 and for the elaborate system of theatrical judging––including for the last a series of special water jars;128 not to mention the construction and maintenance of the wooden skênê and possibly of scenic panels, along with stage machinery and other theatre infrastructure.129 We can do little more than register another need for a healthy margin of error.

vii. Other income The case for central funding for some core elements of the Dionysia is strong. As we have seen, Rosivach has argued that this was the general character of the funding model for the Dionysia by virtue of its status as one of the ‘additional’ festivals which were not funded from rental incomes. But the sharp distinction drawn by Rosivach may not be sustainable.130 The Little Panathenaia, for instance––an ‘additional’ festival on Rosivach’s interpretation––benefited from the revenue of leased land, as well as central funds;131 and the Panathenaic stadium was leased for pasturage.132 122 Heralds for announcements: Ar. Akh. 9–11 and Σ with Olson (2002), 68–9; Lys. fr. VI 2 (G-B); Aiskhin. In Ktes. 154; Dem. De cor. 120. Trumpeter: Polyd. 4.88. 123 Rhabdoukhoi (‘staff-bearers’), not the same as the Arkhon’s ordinary hypêretai: MacDowell (1990), 396: Ar. Pax 734; Plato Com. Rhabdoukhoi; Pl. Prt. 338a with Σ; cf. Suda s.v. 124 µηχανοποι: the name for both the maker and operator (and an ordinary term for ‘engineer’): Ar. Pax 173–6; Daidalos fr. 192 PCG; Gerytades PCG fr. 160; Strattis PCG fr. 4; POxy 2742.3–19. Cf. Pl. Kra. 425d. Csapo and Slater (1995), 258, 268–74. 125 We know next to nothing about the priesthood of Dionysos Eleuthereus. Lambert (1998), 399–400 argues that he came from the genos Bakkhiadai. If so, the city may have had little or no financial responsibility for him. 126 The Arkhon provided for (? up to fifty seats of) proedria: Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 268– 9. The basic recurrent costs were presumably accounted for in the arrangements made with the theatre lessees. The purple rugs and cushions allegedly supplied by Demosthenes to the ambassadors of Philip were doubtless his own: Aiskhin. In Ktes. 76. Somewhat different is the granting of free entry to certain groups. The demesmen of Peiraieus award this to ambassadors of Kolophon: IG II2 456 fr. B, ll. 31–3, in 307/6. 127 Such as the construction of the temporary platform used before the Odeion existed; Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 67. 128 Isok. Trap. 33–4; Csapo and Slater (1995), 157–65; Wilson (2000), 98–102. 129 See above. Taplin (1977), 434–51 remains fundamental. 130 See n. 44 above. For the general principle of rental income funding cult: Didymos, apud Harpok. s.v. α#π µισθωµα´των, A196; cf. Arist. Pol. 1267b; Ath. Pol. 47.2–4; Xen. An. 5.3.7–13. 131 132 See above n. 8. IG II2 1035, l. 50.

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Domains of Dionysos? We might doubt whether a god like Dionysos, who had an ‘epidemic’ position in Athens, the status of an eternal visitor, could own property there. We do not hear of any lands that belonged to him outside the actual temenos under the Akropolis; and the fact that his image was transported from a site on the road to Eleutherai may suggest that he had no place of his own at Eleutherai itself. By contrast, we know that in Heraklea in Lucania, Dionysos owned a very substantial 368 hectares of land, divided up into smaller profitable parcels of around 6–8 ha.133 But Dionysos Eleuthereus was, in fact, a rentier god, if of a rather unusual kind. Misthôsis played a major part in funding his cult. The right to construct and sell seats at the pre-Lykourgan theatre was sold out on lease; and the very action of handing over the entrance charge on the part of every spectator was conceived of as ‘renting’ (α#ποµισθ%ν) a place.134 So in effect, the city did indeed fund the cult of Dionysos by renting out his temenos.135 What of other avenues of income? The land around the theatron proper and along the street of Tripods forms an intriguing category. Some of the khoregic monuments on Tripodes were built on the site of fifth-century private houses.136 Had these been long since destroyed or abandoned? Or––more likely––were they appropriated by the polis, or purchased by khoregoi? How, for instance, did Nikias acquire the space of nearly 200 m.2 for his monument near the western parodos of the theatre?137 If these areas were previously owned by the polis, their purchase will have provided a revenue of sorts. If they remained polis-owned, it may be that the city required some sort of ongoing rental for the land from khoregoi. But I stress that there is very little firm evidence for this in our sources and it seems more likely that the space of these dedications was effectively the property of their creators.138 A related phenomenon is the dedication of ‘liquid’ assets by khoregoi–– objects such as gold crowns of fixed value that effectively became realizable wealth of the god. We find this is in fourth-century Keos. The names of khoregoi are recorded on the walls of Apollo’s temple at Karthaia and listed as having dedicated gold crowns worth 100 dr. to the god after performances in 133

134 Uguzzoni and Ghinatti (1968). See esp. Ar. fr. 575 PCG. Csapo (2007), 89. Note Moretti’s point (1999/2000), 380 that the theatre was not always deemed to be part of the sanctuary of Dionysos, but next to it. This makes it even closer to the model of rentable sacred land. Cf. now Papazarkadas (2007), 169. 136 137 Korres (1988); (2002), 4–8. Wilson (2000), 210 (fig. 9), 226–9. 138 The little evidence: lease to an Athenian citizen of a property belonging to Zeus Olympios situated ‘by the Dionysion’, for at least 160 dr. p.a.: Agora L 6 = SEG 33, 167, l. 79, 343/2 with Walbank (1983), 118. Given that the great majority of monuments celebrated tribal victories, the relevant tribes may have played some role in the acquisition of their sites. 135

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a combination of Kean and Delian festivals. The significant sums received will have acted as a guarantee of the future celebration of the cults.139 Something comparable is known from Lykourgan Athens, the dedication by khoregoi of silver phialai.140 For a period in the last third of the fourth century (the relevant fragmentary stele is dated to 331/0), non-victorious khoregoi, certainly for dithyramb at the City Dionysia and probably for tragedy at the Lenaia,141 were required to dedicate a phiale worth 50 dr. This in effect meant making a further monetary contribution to the public purse. One final source of money are the fines paid to the treasury for the various infringements relating to the Dionysia that were a common enough occurrence to require extensive legislation––on the part of a khoregos for having introduced a foreign choreut, for instance; or of a citizen for falsely accusing a khoregos of having done the same.142 A particularly spectacular instance generated a fine of 100,000 dr.143 There was also a stringent, twelve-hundredfold fine of one talant for illegally claiming the theôrikon.144

2 . T H E P R I VAT E S E C TO R

i. Khoregoi and choruses And so to the private sector. I have written at length about this aspect of the Dionysia,145 and so will focus here on arriving at a global costing of the khoregic component, omitting discussion of the costs of the various goods and services upon which khoregoi spent their money––costumes and crowns for their chorus members, the employment of specialist trainers, managers, special diets, training rooms, and so on. . . Suffice to say, with the anonymous khoregos who delivered Antiphon’s sixth speech, that many adopted a ‘blank cheque’ approach. This man gave instructions to his deputy ‘to buy and spend money on whatever the poet or any of [the trainers/managers] told him’.146 139 e.g. IG XII 5 544A1, ll. 35 ff.; cf. SEG 16, 482. Wilson (2000), 285–6. Tragedy formed part of the Kean Dionysia in the third century at least: IG XII 5 531, ll. 8–10; 535; 536, l. 6; 538. 140 Lewis (1968); Faraguna (1992), 370–1; Summa (2003). 141 The existing document probably extended to the other performance categories; maybe to all liturgists of a single year: Lewis (1968), 376. At the deme level: SEG 43, 26A, ll. 6–8. 142 143 Dem. 21.8, 10, 175, 178–9; MacDowell (1985). Plut. Phok. 30.2–3. 144 Hyp. Ag. Demosthenes 26; cf. Din. Ag. Demosthenes 56 (both 323 bc). 145 Wilson (2000). 146 Antiph. 6.13; cf. Xen. Mem. 3.4; Eq. mag. 1.26. Although the word has no classical credentials, the thing described by the late term παραχορ γηµα––khoregic ‘extras’––doubtless did exist in the classical period: expense for things strictly beyond the main chorus of a drama, such as secondary choruses, extras in the form of mute parts, attendants, and scenic properties and effects: Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 137, 143.

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Tragic khoregoi were chosen by the Arkhon on the sole criterion of wealth: ‘the richest men from all the Athenians’.147 One other minor preliminary point: the arrangements for the private funding of the Dionysia permitted, albeit indirectly and infrequently, the inclusion of wealth of a number of non-Athenians. Plato himself was a khoregos in 365, but the money for it came from the vast resources of his friend Dion of Syracuse. Tyrannical wealth, real and imaginary, was never far away from the Attic theatre.148 Here at last we have some ‘hard’ figures, even if all manner of rhetorical pressures surround them. They all come from forensic speeches of Lysias, and from a fairly narrow period ten years either side of 400: a time of great economic difficulty for the city, during which the one certain year of synkhorêgia at the City Dionysia fell; but a time too when many members of the elite had good reason to spend lavishly of their own wealth.149 We have nine figures, and eight of these come from the mouth of a single man, the speaker of Lysias 21 who looks decidedly like a compromised oligarch trying to buy himself out of political danger. On the other hand, the comparability of the sum spent on two tragic khoregiai in Lysias 19 provides a good control against the suggestion that the figures of Lysias 21 are eccentric.150 One could argue for either inflation or deflation in these sums, whose neat, well-rounded totals do not suggest the pedantry of an accountant’s ledger: ‘with the erection of the equipment’ in Lysias 21.4 is as much detail as we get. The impulse to inflate in order to embellish one’s civic generosity will have been tempered by the fear of envy and suspicion of tyrannical aspirations. The balance of these forces is likely to produce figures not far from the truth. In any case, we should not lose sight of their single most striking feature: their huge scale. The amount spent by one khoregos on a few hours of tragedy in 410 could have bought him two thoroughbred racehorses, a good-sized house, or––more horrifyingly––five or six human beings, as skilled slaves. Table 4.1 shows all the known figures. A fortunate feature of our evidence is that every Dionysian performance category but one––the boys’ dithyramb–– is certainly represented. This makes it possible to generate a realistic model

147 [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.3. By contrast metic wealth (inadmissible at the Dionysia) was drawn on heavily to fund the Lenaia. The majority of known Lenaian khoregoi are metics: Wilson (2000), 28–30, 319–20 n. 93. Metic wealth also helped fund the great transformation of the urban theatre in the 330s. Two metics seem to have personally subsidized the new stone skênê: SEG 36, 149. 148 Plut. Arist. 1.4; Dion 17.5; Diog. Laert. 3.3; Pl. Ep. 7.347b. 149 Urban synkhorêgia in 405, tragedy and comedy only: Arist. fr. 630; otherwise strenuously avoided: Wilson (2000), 265, 379 n. 2; Csapo (2004), 59 n. 28. 150 e.g. Todd (2000), 229.

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Table 4.1. Known figures for khoregiai Tragedy

Great Dionysia

411/410

3,000 dr.

Men’s dithyramb

Thargelia

411/410

2,000 dr.

Lysias 21.1 Lysias 21.1

Pyrrhic khoros

Great Panathenaia

410/409

800 dr.

Lysias 21.1

Men’s dithyramb

Great Dionysia

410/409

5,000 dr., σ)ν τDι το& τρποδο α#ναθ.σει

Lysias 21.2

300 dr.

Kyklios khoros

Little Panathenia

409/408

Boys’ khoros

Thargelia (or Dionysia?) (Wilson (2000), 344 n.190)

404/403 (Wilson more than (2000), 91) 1,500 dr.

Lysias 21.2

Comedy

Great Dionysia

403/402

1,600 dr., σ)ν τDι τD σκευD α#ναθ.σει

Lysias 21.4

Pyrrhic khoros (ageneioi)

Little Panathenaia

(?) 402

700 dr.

Lysias 21.4

Tragedy (2 khoregiai)

??

c.394–389

5,000 dr. (for both)

Lysias 19.29, 42.

Men’s dithyramb

??

???

?X-000 dr. (not Lysias Ag. a full khoregic Theomn. fr. 8b expense) (Medda)

Lysias 21.4

Table 4.2. A model for khoregic expenditure at the Great Dionysia: (figures in bold from Table 4.1) • • • •

Tragedy: 1 × 3,500 (est. victorious), plus 2 × 3,000 total: 9,500 Comedy: 1 × 1,600 (victorious), plus 4 × 1,400 (est.) total: 7,200 Men’s dithyramb: 1 × 5,000 (victorious), plus 9 × 4,000 (est.) total: 41,000 Boys’ dithyramb: 1 × 3,000 (est. victorious), plus 9 × 2,500 (est.) total: 25,500 TOTAL : 13T, 52 mn. (83,200 dr.)

assessment of the full khoregic expenditure on choruses at our City Dionysia of c.415. To gloss the model: for tragedy, I have approximated the outlay of the second and third place at 3,000 dr. each. This is the sum cited by Lysias 21 for a tragic khoregia at the Great Dionysia of 411/10, and given the selfpromoting reflex of that individual to indicate when he won, I assume his silence here means that in this case, he did not. I have pegged the victor’s figure at 500 dr. more, i.e. 3,500; not simply in the belief––maintained by Xenophon’s Sokrates (Mem. 3.4)––that in matters choral, Money Conquers

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All, but assuming subsequent expenditure on a monument (and/or at least a big party.) The same procedure has been followed for the other categories. 1,600 dr. is a secure sum for the winning comic khoregos at the Great Dionysia of 402. 1,400 dr. seems a reasonable estimation for the four also-rans: ‘the dedication of the equipment’ mentioned by the victor cannot have been that costly a business. The expression suggests the nailing up of the actual equipment, especially the masks, used in the performance, perhaps with an inscribed or painted pinax alongside. It probably cannot denote any of the more enduring varieties of known dedicatory practice, such as a sculpture, relief, or larger architectural form.151 For men’s dithyramb, we have the large sum of 5,000 dr., and in this case it seems more appropriate to reduce the assessment for the also-rans further, since we know that the dedication of the tripod could be an extremely elaborate business. 4,000 dr. for the others seems about right. Both sums––winner and also-rans––have to be guessed for the boys’ category. The only good guide is a figure of ‘more than 1,500 dr.’ for a boys’ chorus, probably at the Thargelia, and in either of the dark years 404 or 403. A scholion on Demosthenes (20.28) commented, on the subject of khoregic funding, that ‘at the Great Dionysia there was greater expenditure [than at the Thargelia.]’ This encourages me to set the ‘also-ran’ figure for the nine boys’ choruses at the Dionysia at 2,500 dr., with the winner at 3,000 dr. On this basis, somewhere between 10 and 15 talants for khoregic expense at the Dionysia of c.415 seems a reasonably secure range.

ii. Epimelêtai We saw above that in 415 the Athenian demos elected ten rich men, one from each tribe, to help the Arkhon organize and fund the great procession. The duty stands between an administrative office and a liturgy, a complex combination of practical and prestigious tasks: the first include preparing the physical route itself, its good order and cleanliness;152 possibly also the 151

On these see Wilson (2000); Goette (2007); Csapo (forthcoming). Epimelêtai: Wilson (2000), 24–5. Cost of cleaning the streets and purifying the theatre before Dionysia in third-century Delos: Bruneau (1970), 295–329. Preparations for the pompê of the Peiraieus Dionysia from the ordinary funds of the agoranomoi: IG II2 380, ll. 13–17, 19–23. The very different matter of the ritual purification of the theatre before the performances began may have been in the care of the epimelêtai. The piglets used for the purpose cost around four dr. each. Suda s.v. καθα´ρσιον; Poll. VIII 104; Schapps (1991), 208. This may be what is called prothumata in the Athenian accounts for the festival of Apollo on Delos in the period 377–373: ε@ τα` προθµατα τD KορτD, IG II2 1165, l. 37. 152

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construction of roadside seating for viewers;153 maintaining discipline among its live participants, including the competing choruses as they reached the theatre, may have been within their remit too.154 One of their more glamorous duties may have been to provide the jewellery and fine clothes for the young girl at the head of the procession––though such κσµο κανηφορικ certainly came from central coffers in Lykourgos’ day, and it probably also did in other periods.155 But in 415 other duties may have gone to make kanêphoria a kind of super-elite liturgy that fell to one or all of the epimelêtai, or to the Arkhon.156 Another is the choruses that honoured the Twelve Gods in the agora at a staging-point along the processional route––though it is more likely that these were made up of the choruses due to perform in the coming days (or some of them).157 Any private citizens who chose to participate in the pompê contributed financially to the event by whatever expense they outlaid for their costume. Many doubtless had special robes, phalloi and satyr masks made;158 as well as supplying themselves liberally with alcohol.159 Presumably this is also true of those who held a representative, ritual office associated with different groups of the wider Attic community, like the metic skaphêphoroi or ‘tray carriers’, bearing trays full of honeycomb––described as ‘the metics’ liturgy’ in some sources.160 One likely exception is the obeliaphoroi, ‘loaf carriers’. These bore metal spits with huge loaves of bread (obeliai) in the procession, to be cooked on their arrival in the sanctuary. The duty cannot be associated with any particular social group, and I suggest that their equipping––especially the provision of the large quantities of bread needed at the sacrifice––fell to the epimelêtai.161 Some 10,000 dr. is a safe approximation for the outlay of the ten epimelêtai of 415, as this is what the city provided for the purpose in later years. 153 Known for the Panathenaiac way: Camp (1986), 45–6; and physically possible at least on the broader stretches of the Dionysian route: parts of Tripodes were c.6–7.5 m. wide: Korres (2002), 5. 154 Dem. 21.17; Suda s.v. 0πιµελητα; IG II2 354, ll. 15–19, 328/7; IG II2 896, ll. 37–8, 186/5. 155 156 See above text to and n. 58. Kanêphoria as liturgy: Wilson (2000), 317 n. 66. 157 Xen. Eq. mag. 3.2; Wilson (2000), 98. Cf. the way that all the performers in the forthcoming musical agônes are required to participate in a prosodion at the preliminary sacrifice at the festival of Artemis in Eretria: IG XII 9 189, ll. 12–14. 158 Dem. 19.287 with ΣΣ and ad Dem. 21.180; Aiskhin. 2.151; Frontisi-Ducroux (1992): satyr mask; Aiskhin. 1.43 with Fisher (2001), 177. 159 Suda, Anecdota Graeca, Et. Mag. s.v. α#σκοφορε,ν. Demetr. FGrH 228 F5; Theophr. Laws fr. 6b (S-M). 160 Bekker, Anecd. 1.280.1, 1.304.27–9; cf. Lys. 12.20; Dem. 20.18; Hesykh. s.v. σκαφηφροι. Ammonius, De adfinium vocabulorum differentia 247 s.v. @σοτελ6 κα2 µ.τοικο. 161 Poll. VI 75; Ath. 3, 111b; Phot. s.v. /βελα αHρτο; Pickard-Cambridge (1988), 61; 213 (iconography).

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iii. Hestiatores More private money came from the hestiatores, the ten liturgists who provided for tribal banquets during the Dionysia. Some think that the meat came from the polis provision of sacrificial beasts, while the hestiatores provided and arranged all else. But I suspect that the tribal feasts these men funded–– perhaps on the day of the dithyrambic agônes?––were different from the main sacrificial meal after the procession, and so further beasts were needed.162

3 . OT H E R C O N T R I BU TO R S The guardian in Lysias 32 offered a lamb on behalf of himself and his wards ‘for the Dionysia’ (Against Diogeiton 21), and fraudulently charged the cost to the wards. A Rural Dionysia is perhaps most likely, but the notice raises the possibility that individuals may have ‘sent’ animals to sacrifice in the Dionysian pompê in the city on behalf of their own oikos. A number of other corporate bodies need to be registered as material contributors. One is the demes. Some demes sent representative groups of members to the great urban event, with material support for sacrifices on behalf of the deme (and just possibly, in one case, wine for a local trainer they took with them).163 There was doubtless a degree of keeping up appearances before their peers at such central gatherings. However small such contributions may have been, their aggregated total is another component in the complex picture of the festival’s financing. The Kleisthenic tribes were fundamental constituencies through which the Dionysia was organized and its events contested. Their contribution thus consisted of the choral ponos of their performing men and boys, on top of the financial and other material commitments of their hestiatôr, epimelêtês and two khoregoi. When the tribes chose to honour their khoregoi who had been victorious at the Dionysia with crowns of some value––at least 500 dr. in one case in 326/5––the corporate bodies were thus contributing in an indirect way to the festival economy, broadly conceived.164 162 Hestiatores: Schmitt-Pantel (1992), 126–31; Wilson (2000), 24. Perhaps it was the hestiatores who provided the bread––and wine?––for the main sacrifice. 163 Decree of Plotheia: IG I3 258, ll. 25 ff., c.420; also mentions a kados of sweet wine ‘for the didaskalos’ (l. 38) under the rubric of ‘the other hiera’ (l. 36). When the women of Erkhia are found sacrificing to Semele and Dionysos on the 16th Elaphebolion without their men, it is likely that the men were still in the city, on this day after the Great Dionysia: Humphreys (2004), 186; cf. Mikalson (1977), 426–31. As early as 460 the urban deme Skambonidai provided its members with victims for the Panathenaia, distributed in its agora: IG I3 244A, ll. 15–21. 164 500 dr. crown: IG II2 1157; Wilson (2000), 171–2.

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Other groups less conspicuous in the historical record may have provided material support of different sorts. Certain hereditary genê possibly had a special role in the festival that brought to their office bearers some sort of financial obligation. The case has been made with some cogency by Lambert for the Bakkhiadai, arguing that this clan provided the priest of Dionysos Eleuthereus. The musical Euneidai, who supplied officers for the cult of Dionysos Melpomenos, and whose priest had a seat in the (Roman) theatre, may be another.165 Moving outside Attike, the members of the Delian League or Athenian empire are an interesting case. As I have indicated, it is possible that at the height of empire the Athenians gave their allies the honour or obligation of bringing a cow to die at the Dionysia. If so, more than two hundred bovines made their way thus to the city each year, and as many phalloi. If as seems likely they led these animals as a kind of tribute, the Athenians may well have ‘dined off ’ their allies, who thus indirectly part-funded the great sacrificial meal. A concern not to have the local price of staple foods escalate during the Dionysia when the city was full of visitors may have led to an enforced ‘bring your own’ policy. The people of Erythrai were required to bring grain to distribute to Erythraians in Athens at the Panathenaia,166 and the Dionysia, as a properly ‘international’ festival, will have seen a huge number of visitors over the course of a week or so––many indeed present for commercial purposes, for the opening of the sailing season and the Dionysia go together.167 In general, the Athenians were probably happy to see their visitors purchase what they needed from a busy market that brought taxes to city coffers and profits to its traders. The spike in demand for food, water, and shelter for a week will have created a panegyric ‘microeconomy’ familiar from such large festival gatherings, from which many Athenians and metics will have profited. Even the proverbially humble makers and sellers of festal crowns (stephanoplokai, stephanopoioi) will have done well at this time of year.168 Another of the many subgroups who will have seen business boom during the Dionysia are the potters and makers of other items for a ‘souvenir’ market. Though they are impossible to identify with any certainty, the Dionysia will have generated its souvenir ceramics, terracotta, perhaps even a trade in scripts, 165 Lambert (1998), 397. Seat in theatre: IG II2 5056 (Hadrianic); cf. Humphreys (2004), 248– 9; Parker (1996), 297–8. The genos Salaminioi provided for its members attending the Panathenaia: SEG 21, 527 = LSS 19. 166 IG I3 14, ll. 2–8, probably of 453/2. 167 Theophr. Char. 3.3 shows how τ6ν θα´λατταν 0κ ∆ιονυσων πλιµον ε1ναι was a commonplace. Its presence in the list of commonplaces uttered by the Chatterbox beside πολλο2 0πιδηµο&σι ξ.νοι is noted as significant by Diggle (2004), 201. 168 Philokh. FGrH 328 F 171: Athenian audience 0στεφανωµ.νοι 0θερουν.

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like the market for ‘pseudo-Panathenaic’ amphorae and perfumed olive-oil that grew up around Athena’s festival.169 These visitors also brought money to the theatre in a more direct fashion, in the form of payment for entry. When the theoric fund existed, Athenian citizens could have the cost of their entrance fees pre-imbursed, and so the bulk of the takings at the theatre will have come from ‘outside’. This effectively represents a subsidy––perhaps a quite substantial one––from non-Athenian sources.170 The final group whose contribution should be noted is ‘the theatrical community’. Repeat performances at the City Dionysia began early, staged by tragôidoi or komôidoi. These terms––‘tragedians’ and ‘comedians’––are a way of describing the respective acting professions; and the formal reperformances they gave to the city, presumably at their own expense, have been convincingly interpreted as an act of largesse to the Athenian demos, an assertion of the (economic) independence of the acting community from private sponsors, poets, and polis bureaucracy.171 We tend to associate acts of euergesia such as this that lay outside a formalized liturgy framework with the Hellenistic, not the classical, period. Nor should we discount the likelihood of other early instances of the kind in connection with the festival: drinks and snacks for the entire audience, for example; a special ‘one-off’, immediate repeat of a very popular single drama; offers to fund the first stone skênê, and so on. There is no good reason to disbelieve the report that the wealthy poet and friend of Sophokles, Ion of Khios, distributed the most famous product of his island home to the Athenian audience after his remarkable double victory, in both tragedy and dithyramb.172 We have ‘hard’ epigraphical 169

‘Panegyric’ microeconomies: Str. 10.5.4; Chandezon (2000). Migeotte (1997) on measures to control the price of foodstuffs during panegyreis. In Athens the agoranomoi will have been involved, perhaps also in the provision of a doctor during the festival, as at Parion: I.Ilion 3, ll. 16–18; cf. the iatros at a Kyrenean festival in SEG 9, 13 with Ceccarelli and Milanezi (2007). A policy of global ateleia from taxes and duties during a festival: e.g. in Eretria at the festival of Artemis, during the musical agôn, c.340: IG XII 9 189, ll. 32–4. Such provisions are designed to attract trade and further participants, in a way that was unnecessary with the Dionysia: see the important discussion of different market types in de Ligt and de Neeve (1988). ‘Souvenirs’: ‘Panathenaikon’, perfumed olive oil, and miniature pseudo-Panathenaic amphorae: Plin. NH 13.2.6; Ath. 15.688f; Shear (2001), 432–51. 170 Metics––present in very large numbers in the urban centre––will have been another group whose entrance fees subsidized the Great Dionysia. 171 Csapo (2004), 69; some central funds, or at least infrastructure support, may also have been forthcoming: Wilson (2000), 23. In 386 tragôidoi donate an ‘old tragedy’ IG II2 2318, ll. 202–3; an old comedy in 339: IG II2 2318, ll. 316–18. These became regular annual events from 341 for tragedy: IG II2 2320; and from 311 for comedy: IG II2 2323a. 172 Ath. 1.3f; 10.436f, cf. 426e; Ael. VH 2.41; Σ RVAld Ar. Pax 835; cf. TrGF 1, 19 T3. The action of Herodes Atticus in distributing wine for citizens and foreigners at the Athenian Dionysia thus fits into a recognized tradition: Philostr. VS 549.

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evidence for a comic poet, Philippides, doing exactly the same over a century later when agonothete––though sadly the word describing just what it was he distributed ‘to all the Athenians during all the [agônes]’––wine? food? money?––is lost.173

C O N C LU S I O N The bottom line of my very soft income and expenditure account, produced for the test year of 415 gives us, for the polis, net expense of some 13 talants, 13 mn. (79,300 dr.); and for the private sector, 15 talants, 39 mn. (93,900 dr.)––somewhere in the region of 30 talants (180,000 dr.) in total. The comparandum for Athenian theatrical expenditure that automatically came to mind for ancient observers is the military sphere. Demosthenes claimed that more was spent on a Dionysia than on any military expedition.174 Such assertions are routinely dismissed as extravagant rhetorical exaggeration by modern scholars, perhaps with some justification. But we need to finesse that response. Exaggerated they may be, but the margin is everything. The siege of an enemy city, or of a recalcitrant friend, could last years and cost some 1,200 or 2,000 talants.175 A more ‘ordinary’, yet still very significant operation would come in at around a tenth that sum.176 The money spent on a single Dionysia could have maintained some dozen triremes at sea for a year, and was equivalent to as much as five per cent of annual public expenditure on military activity at the height of the Athenian empire.177 My costing depends on numerous hypotheses and uncertain variables. I hope however to have demonstrated that ancient claims about Athenian expenditure on their theatre are fully justified. The scale and structure of the Great Dionysia were uniquely ambitious among Greek cultural festivals. This encouraged innovative strategies for its funding, which drew on a very wide range of interested parties––central polis funds, the economic elite of the city, most of the major corporate divisions of Athenian society, and numerous individual visitors from far-flung places who ‘rented’ a seat from the god in an innovative take on a traditional model. Enormous sums of money play a prominent role in the classical Dionysia in one further, very striking manner. The annual receipt of the tributary 173 IG II2 657, ll. 40–2. Wilson (2000), 275, 383 n. 51. More regular provision of wine to the audience, at the entrance and exit of the choruses, is implied by Philokh. FGrH 328 F 171. 174 175 176 Dem. 4.35. IG I3363; Thuc. 2.70.2, cf. 2.20.2. Cf. Dem. 19.84. 177 Kallet (1998), 46.

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wealth of the Delian League and Athenian empire was integrated into the preliminary rituals of the festival. From 453, with the transfer of the League Treasury from Delos to Athens, the very act of delivering the silver bullion in the orkhêstra of the theatre had become a key element of the Dionysia.178 Some five hundred or more men filed into the orkhêstra, each carrying a talant of silver in a hydria or leather bag.179 In one sense this enforced a form of theoric participation at the festival from the city’s allies, the hard economic basis of which was highlighted rather than elided by the highly performative nature of the deposition before the gathered theatrical audience. But it also meant that the city’s coffers were flush after the festival, and this is likely in turn to have developed an association in Athenian attitudes between the Dionysia and Athenian public economic strength, promoting a sense of grand Dionysiac––almost Golden Age––abundance in the citizenry.180 Although the silver was not intended for Dionysos, the fact that it appeared from across the seas during his festival, brought by phallos-bearing delegates, nonetheless tied the military and economic power of the city to this special period of Dionysos’ presence.181 At one level, the simple fact of this timetabling may have encouraged lavish expenditure on the festival by a city that felt it ‘knew not how to be poor’. This very direct involvement of imperial tribute in the festival prompts an important question: how heavily, if at all, did the Athenian theatre depend on this wealth of empire? The question cannot be discussed in any detail here, but it is important to stress that this association of the festival with economic largesse was not confined to the period of empire. We have no certain example 178 Main sources: Isok. Peace 82; Σ Ar. Akh. 504 (incl. Eupolis fr. 254 PCG); cf. Ar. Eq. 313; see Spineto (2005), 271–7. The MSS and papyri of Isokrates are divided between πρων and φρων. Matthieu (1960) and most recently Mandilaras (2003) read πρων which, as Spineto (2005), 272 notes, makes of the theatre a space of hyper-public accounting of state finances. However φρων is consistent with the evidence of comedy for the display of tribute in the theatre and Raubitschek (1941) long ago settled the question in favour of φρων. 179 Raubitschek (1941), 359, drawing on the visual evidence of a relief-carving on the stele of 426/5 (EM 6595, IG I3 68, Lawton (1995): Cat. 1) recording a decree that relates to the collection of tribute. He argues that Kleon authored the relevant decree about the theatrical display in c.428–426, so the practice may only date from that time. If we are to take literally Isokrates’ use of the term µισθωτο of the people who carried the tribute into the theatre we may need to add their hiring to the cost of the festival. 180 City’s coffers flush after the Dionysia: e.g. Nikias receives 100 talants soon after the festival in 425: IG I3 369 with Wade-Gery (1930), 38. The payment of annual rentals to the city ordinarily fell due in the ninth prytany, roughly a month later. The Periklean image of Athens as a city into which all the goods of the world flow freely (Thuc. 2.38) comes with a distinctively Dionysian guise in Hermippos fr. 63 PCG (late 430s/early 420s): Dionysos captain of a merchant ship leading all manner of goods from all corners of the world to a prosperous city of consumers. See Le Guen (2007), 275–8 on the way the Golden Age, prosperity-bringing associations of a specifically theatrical Dionysos were deployed in the Hellenistic period. 181 Goldhill (1987).

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of the failure to appoint a Dionysian khoregos in any period,182 let alone of the failure to hold the Dionysia.183 In conclusion I shall simply take an impressionistic glance at how the picture differs when one takes the empire out of the equation––that is, at two other sounding-points, before and after empire. In 490, the most striking difference will have been the lower scale of public expenditure: nothing on comedy; no fees paid to musicians, nor any prizes for actors. And with very little of the ‘market forces’ that dominated later theatre, we may assume that the remuneration given to the protagonists of tragedy was lower, perhaps too that for the poets of tragedy and dithyramb. In sum, public expenditure may have been around half that estimated for 415. On the private side, the official absence of comedy will probably have had little impact on spending––the ‘volunteers’ mentioned by Aristotle being, in effect, khoregoi avant la lettre.184 And in this period khoregoi of all performance types had to carry the cost of the musicians that was later borne by the city. In other words, we see what is still very heavy investment in their Dionysia by the Athenians, with a rather greater relative contribution from the private sector––an arrangement consistent with the political complexion of the democracy at that time. At a minimum, it can hardly be said that imperial wealth was the necessary material stimulus to the establishment of a dramatic festival with Panhellenic pretensions. In the Lykourgan period, when tributary income was a distant memory, the picture becomes more complex. There now existed a more fully autonomous theatrical economy, with its own star system, that radically modified the very structures of the poetic and performance economy of all Greece forever. In broad terms, this is a time of substantially increased income to the city from the new stone theatre, and from the financial strategies set in place by Euboulos and Lykourgos, which included attracting major donations in coin and kind from new sources, notably rich foreigners. But it is also a time of lavish public expenditure, and it is likely that any new recurrent income will have been redeployed on theoric subventions, on adding to the grandeur of the procession, and to keep the top professionals returning to the festival where it all began. What is more, the acting community was not simply a drain on the public purse, but also a source of theatrical benefaction in its own right: much if not all of the costs associated with the many repeat performances of drama were gifted by them. At the same time, the economic base of private sector funding was expanded, perhaps significantly, for at around 335, the exemption from fiscal assessment of Attic mining properties was removed, so introducing a large amount of new wealth into the liturgical net.185 And, as we have 182 184

Wilson (2000), 54, 332 n. 18. 0θελοντα: Arist. Poet. 1449b2.

183 185

cf. [Arist.] Oik. 2.2.6. SEG 43, 46; Stanley (1993).

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seen, the obligatory dedication of phialai by unsuccessful liturgists in the same period is another means of drawing more ‘private’ money across to the ‘public’ side. Theatre thus more than survived the withdrawal of imperial wealth from Athens. This was the age of its greatest material prosperity, when it had become a commodity in demand all over Greece.

REFERENCES Amandry, P. (1976), ‘Trépieds d’Athènes: I. Dionysies’, BCH 100: 15–93. Andreau, J., Briant, P., Descat, R. (1997) (eds.), Économie antique. Prix et formation des prix dans les economies antiques (Entretiens d’archéologie et d’histoire), Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. Baldry, H. (1971), The Greek Tragic Theatre, London and Toronto. Bekker, I. (1816–1821), Anecdota Graeca, Berlin (reprinted 1965). Bentz, M. (1998), Panathenäische Preisamphoren: eine athenische Vasengattung und ihre Funktion vom 6.–4. Jahrhundert v. Chr., Basel. Bernardini, P. (2004), ‘Etnografia e storia nell’epos di Cherilo di Samo’, in E. Cavallini (ed.), Samo: Storia, Letteratura, Scienza, AION fil.-lett. Quaderni 8, (Pisa/Rome), 31–50. Böckh, A. (1828), The Public Economy of Athens: in Four Books; to which is added, a Dissertation on the Silver-mines of Laurion, translation of the 1817 German edition of Böckh (1886) by G. Lewis, London. –––– (1886), Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener, 3rd ed. with notes by M. Fränkel, 2 vols., Berlin. Bremer, J. (1991), ‘Poets and their Patrons’, in H. Hofmann and A. Harder (eds.), Fragmenta Dramatica (Göttingen), 39–60. Browning, R. (1963), ‘A Byzantine Treatise on Tragedy’, in L. Varcl, R. Willetts (eds.), Geras: Studies Presented to George Thomson on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday (Prague), 67–81. Bruneau, P. (1970), Recherches sur les cultes de Délos à l’époque hellénistique et à l’époque impériale, Paris. Buchanan, J. (1962), Theorika: A Study of Monetary Distributions to the Athenian Citizenry during the Fifth and Fourth Centuries b.c., New York. Burkert, W. (1966), ‘Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual’, GRBS 7: 87–121. Camp, J. (1986), The Athenian Agora, London. Capps, E. (1943), ‘Greek Inscriptions: A New Fragment of the List of Victors at the City Dionysia’, Hesperia 12: 1–11. Ceccarelli, P. and Milanezi, S. (2007), ‘Dithyramb, Tragedy––and Cyrene’, in P. Wilson (2007c), 185–214. Chandezon, C. (2000), ‘Foires et panégyries dans le monde grec classique et hellénistique’, REG 113: 70–100. Chaniotis, A. (1988), Historie und Historiker in den griechischen Inschriften, Stuttgart.

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Clinton, K. (1974), The Sacred Officials of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Philadelphia. –––– (1980), ‘A Law in the City Eleusinion concerning the Mysteries’, Hesperia 49: 258–88. Connor, W. (1989), ‘City Dionysia and Athenian Democracy’, C&M 40: 7–32. Csapo, E. (1997), ‘Riding the Phallus for Dionysus: Iconology, Ritual and Gender De/ Construction’, Phoenix 51: 253–95. –––– (2004), ‘Some Social and Economic Conditions Behind the Rise of the Acting Profession in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries bc’, in Hugoniot, Hurlet, and Milanezi (2004), 53–76. –––– (2007), ‘The Men who Built the Theatres: Theatropolai, theatronai and Arkhitektones’, in Wilson (2007c), 87–115. –––– (forthcoming), ‘The Pronomos Vase and Choregic Dedications’, in Pronomos: His Vase and its World, in Taplin and Wrigley (forthcoming). –––– and Slater, W. (1995), The Context of Ancient Drama, Michigan. Dareste, R., Hausoullier, B., Reinach, T. (1904), Recueil des inscriptions juridiques grecques: Texte, traduction, commentaire, vol. 2, Paris. Davison, J. (1958), ‘Notes on the Panathenaea’, JHS 78: 23–42. de Ligt, L. and de Neeve, P. (1988), ‘Ancient Periodic Markets: Festivals and Fairs’, Athenaeum 76: 391–416. de Ste Croix, G. (1964), review of Buchanan (1962), CR 14: 190–2. Diggle, J. (2004), Theophrastus: Characters, Cambridge. Dreher, M. (1995), Hegemon und Symmachoi: Untersuchungen zum Zweiten athenischen Seebund, Berlin and New York. Faraguna, M. (1992), Atene nell’età di Alessandro, Rome. Ferguson, W. (1948), ‘Demetrius Poliorcetes and the Hellenic League’, Hesperia 17: 112–36. Fisher, N. (2001), Aeschines: Against Timarchos , Oxford. Fornara, C. and Samons, L. (1991), Athens from Cleisthenes to Pericles, Berkeley. Fornara, C. and Yates, D. (2007), ‘FGrHist 328 (Philochorus) F 181’, GRBS 47: 31–37. Frickenhaus, A. (1912), ‘Der Schiffskarren des Dionysos in Athen’, JDAI 27: 61–79. Froning, H. (1971), Dithyrambos und Vasenmalerei in Athen, Würzburg. Frontisi-Ducroux, F. (1992), ‘Un scandale a Athènes: faire le comos sans masque’, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 18: 245–56. Gallo, L. (1997), ‘I prezzi nelle stele attiche: un’indagine campione’, in Andreau, Briant, Descat (1997), 21–32. Gentili, B. (1988), Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece : From Homer to the Fifth Century, translated from the Italian original (1985), with an introduction, by A. Cole, Baltimore/London. Ghiron-Bistagne, P. (1976), Recherches sur les acteurs dans la Grèce antique, Paris. Goette, H. (2007), ‘Choregic Monuments and the Athenian Democracy’, in Wilson (2007c), 122–49. Golden, M. (1998), Sport and Society in Ancient Greece, Cambridge. Goldhill, S. (1987), ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, JHS 107: 58–76.

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Griffith, M. (1995), ‘Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia’, CA 14: 62–129. Grote, G. (1846–1856), A History of Greece, London. Guettel Cole, S. (1993), ‘Procession and Celebration at the Dionysia’, in R. Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World (Ann Arbor), 25–38. Gzella, S. (1971), ‘Problem of the Fee in Greek Choral Lyric’, Eos 59: 189–202. Harris, E. (1996), ‘Demosthenes and the Theoric Fund’, in R. Wallace and E. Harris (eds.), Transitions to Empire (Norman, Ok. and London), 57–76. Hiller von Gaertringen, F. (1897), ‘Βο%ναι’, RE 3. coll. 716–17. Hugoniot, C., Hurlet, F., and Milanezi, S. (2004) (eds.), Le Statut de l’acteur dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine, Tours. Humphreys, S. (2004), The Strangeness of Gods: Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion, Oxford. Jacottet, A. (1990), ‘Le lierre de la liberté’, ZPE 90: 150–6. Jameson, M. (1988), ‘Sacrifice and Animal Husbandry in Classical Greece’, in C. Whittaker (ed.), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity. PCPS Suppl. 14 (Cambridge), 87–119. Johnston, A. (1987), ‘IG II2 2311 and the Number of Panathenaic Amphorae’, BSA 82: 125–9. Jones, N. (2004), Rural Athens under the Democracy, Philadelphia. Kallet, L. (1998), ‘Accounting for Culture in Fifth-Century Athens’, in D. Boedeker and K. Raaflaub (eds.), Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (Cambridge, Mass.), 43–58. Knoepfler, D. (1997), ‘Le territoire d’Erétrie at l’organisation politique de la cité (dêmoi, choroi, phylai) in M. Hansen (ed.), The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community. Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre vol. 4 (Copenhagen), 352–449. Korres, M. (1988), ‘Περκλειο Ωδεο και τα πλησον χορηγικα´ µνηµεα’, Α∆ 35: B1:14–18. –––– (2002), ‘Α # θηναικ πολεοδροµα––Α # ρχαο οικιστικ χρα. Α # ξα ορατν µαρτυρων’, in H. Goette (ed.), Ancient Roads in Greece (Hamburg), 1–31. Krentz, P. (1993), ‘Athens’ Allies and the phallophoria,’ AHB 7: 12–16. Kurke, L. (1991), The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, Ithaca/ London. Lambert, S. (1998), ‘The Attic genos Bakchiadai and the City Dionysia’, Historia 47: 394–403. –––– (2002), ‘The Sacrificial Calendar of Athens’, ABSA 97: 353–99. –––– (forthcoming), ‘Polis and Theatre in Lykourgan Athens: The Honorific Decrees’. Lawton, C. (1995), Attic Document Reliefs, Oxford. Le Guen, B. (1997) (ed.), De la scène aux gradins: théâtre et représentations dramatiques après Alexandre le grand, Pallas 47. –––– (2001), Les associations de Technites dionysiaques à l’époque hellénistique, 2 vols., Nancy.

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–––– (2007), ‘Kraton, Son of Zotichos: Artists’ Associations and Monarchic Power in the Hellenistic Period’, in Wilson (2007c), 246–78. Lewis, D. (1959), ‘Law on the Lesser Panathenaia’, Hesperia 28: 239–47. –––– (1968), ‘Dedications of phialai at Athens’, Hesperia 37: 368–80. Lewis, N. (1990), ‘The “Ivy of Liberty” Inscription’, GRBS 31: 197–202. MacDowell, D. (1985), ‘Athenian Laws about Choruses’, Symposion 1982: 65–77. –––– (1990), Demosthenes ‘Against Meidias’ (Oration 21), Oxford. Mandilaras, B. (2003), Isocrates: Opera Omnia, Munich/Leipzig. Martina, A. (2003) (ed.), Teatro greco postclassico e teatro latino: teorie e prassi drammatica, Rome. Matthieu, G. (1960), Isocrate. Discours, vol. 3, Paris. Meritt, B. (1987), ‘Philokles and the Panathenaia of 406 bc’, in Φλια πη ε@ Γεργιον Ε. Μυλωνα˜ν II, Athens, 171–8. Migeotte, L. (1997), ‘Le contrôle des prix dans les cités grecques’, in Andreau, Briant, Descat (1997), 33–52. –––– (2006), ‘Le financement des concours dans la Béotie hellénistique’, The Ancient World 37: 14–25. Mikalson, J. (1977), ‘Religion in the Attic Demes’, AJP 98: 424–35. Moretti, J.-C. (1997), ‘Formes et destinations du proskènion dans les théâtres hellénistiques de Grèce’, in Le Guen (1997), 13–39. –––– (1999/2000), ‘The Theater of the Sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus in Late Fifth-Century Athens’, ICS 24–25: 377–98. Nilsson, M. (1951), Opuscula Selecta. Vol. 1, Lund. Nordquist, G. (1994), ‘Some Notes on Musicians in Greek Cult’, in R. Hägg (ed.), Ancient Greek Cult Practice from the Epigraphical Evidence (Stockholm), 81–93. Olson, S. (2002), Aristophanes: ‘Acharnians’, Oxford. Osborne, R. (1988), ‘Social and Economic Implications of the Leasing of Land and Property in Classical and Hellenistic Greece’, Chiron 18: 279–323. Papazarkadas, N. (2004), ‘Sacred and Public Land in Ancient Athens (circa 500–200 b.c.)’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford. –––– (2007), ‘Four Attic Deme Documents Revisited’, ZPE 159: 155–77. Pappadakis, G. (1927), ‘Τιµα2 Κορωναων πρ δραµατικν # Εφ.σιον’, EEThess: 207–21. Parker, R. (1996), Athenian Religion: A History, Oxford. Pelling, C. (1997) (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Ancient Historian, Oxford. Perusino, F. (1993), La tragedia greca. Anonimo (Michele Psello?), Urbino. Petzl, G. and Schwertheim, E. (2006), Hadrian und die dionysischen Künstler: drei in Alexandria Troas neugefundene Briefe des Kaisers an die Künstler-Vereinigung, Bonn. Pickard-Cambridge, A. (1946), The Theatre of Dionysus at Athens, Oxford. –––– (1962), Dithyramb, Tragedy, Comedy, first ed. 1927; 2nd ed. rev. T. Webster, Oxford. –––– (1988), The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, first ed. 1953; 2nd ed. rev. J. Gould and D. Lewis 1968; reissued with addenda, Oxford. Pritchett, W. (1956), ‘The Attic Stelai: part II’, Hesperia 25: 178–328. Raubitschek, A. (1941), ‘Two Notes on Isocrates’, TAPhA 72: 356–64.

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Walbank, M. (1983), ‘Leases of Sacred Properties in Attica, parts 1–4’, Hesperia 52: 100–35, 177–99, 200–6, 207–31. Walton, J. (1977), ‘Financial Arrangements for the Athenian Dramatic Festivals’, Theatre Research International 2: 79–86. –––– (2007), ‘Commodity: Asking the Wrong Questions’, in M. McDonald and J. Walton (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge), 286–302. Wilhelm, A. (1906), Urkunden dramatischer Aufführungen in Athen, Vienna. Wilson, P. (1997), ‘Leading the Tragic khoros: Tragic Prestige in the Democratic City’, in Pelling (1997), 81–108. –––– (2000), The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage, Cambridge. –––– (2007a), ‘The Athenian Thargelia’, in Wilson (2007c), 150–184. –––– (2007b), ‘Choruses for Sale in Thorikos?: A Speculative Note on SEG 34, 107’, ZPE 161: 125–32. Wilson, P. (2007c) (ed.), The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies, Oxford. –––– and Csapo, E. (forthcoming) ‘The End of the Khoregia in Athens: A Forgotten Document’, Atti e Seminari delle edizioni della Scuola Normale Pisa. Yvonneau, J. (2003), ‘Une énigme pindarique: l’ouverture de la Néméenne V’, in J. Jouanna and J. Leclant (eds.), La Poésie Grecque Antique: actes du 13e colloque de la Villa Kérylos (Paris), 103–15. Zimmermann, K. (2000), ‘Späthellenistische Kultpraxis in einer karischen Kleinstadt. Eine neue lex sacra aus Bargylia’, Chiron 30: 451–85. Abbreviations GV M–L PCG TrGF I

Griechische Vers-Inschriften. Bd. 1, Grab-Epigramme, ed. W. Peek, Berlin, 1955. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C., ed. R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, rev. ed. Oxford, 1988. Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. R. Kassel and C. Austin, Berlin, 1983– . Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol.1, Didascaliae tragicae, catalogi tragicorum et tragoediarum testimonia et fragmenta tragicorum minorum, ed. B. Snell and R. Kannicht, Göttingen, 1986.

5 Nothing to Do with Demeter? Something to Do with Sicily! Theatre and Society in the Early Fifth-Century West Barbara Kowalzig*

June 2006, the end of term. Oliver was off on a weekend jaunt south, this time to Sicily. He returned highly decorated and exceptionally pleased, accompanied by the Eschilo d’Oro––the annual prize awarded by the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico (INDA) at Syracuse during the institute’s summer festival. A lavish ceremony autothen, Syracuse’s grand theatre, and the likely location where Aiskhylos’ famous Sicilian plays were performed–– no wonder Oliver was impressed! However . . . Eschilo d’Oro? A little research into the matter reveals that the prize of this extraordinary image is given to ‘personalità che si sono distinte, in Italia e negli scenari internazionali, nel campo degli studi e della prassi teatrale e della classicità greca e latina’. A silver medal showing the theatre of Syracuse from the upper left of the terrace above the cavea (Figure 5.1), it is an award that usually goes to Italians, and Oliver was the first xenos – or shall we say proxenos?––to receive this distinction. Indeed, Oliver’s work is widely perceived as fostering local theatre culture within the broader framework of an international, long-standing tradition of performance and reperformance of ancient drama. And this epikhoric performance culture is usually involved in the self-assertion of–– frequently contested––identities, traditional or newly forged, sometimes more sometimes less politicized, be they in Sicily or Modern Greece or Slovenia or South Africa: wherever ancient drama is staged, it has got something to do with the place of performance and its role in a wider world. In antiquity, praise and privileges as for a local are showered on to the poeta vagans, the foreign poet and (often) stage director whose role is as much that

* I wish to thank Al Moreno, Philomen Probert, Tim Rood, and especially Peter Wilson for their helpful assistance in writing this essay.

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Fig. 5.1. The Eschilo d’Oro, conferred on Oliver Taplin by INDA in 2006. The silver medal, struck by the goldsmiths ‘Creazioni D’Arte’ Midolo, shows the great theatre of Syracuse from the corner of the terrace above, where also one or several gods had their temples.

of a facilitator as a diplomat. So, really, Oliver had become, through this ritual, just as Aiskhylos tragicus himself, vir utique Siculus . . . !1 As it happens, reflecting on Oliver’s fancy award strikes right into the core of what, I shall argue in his honour, the performance of––particularly–– tragedy in early fifth-century Syracuse, perhaps also more broadly in Sicily and Southern Italy, was all about: local performance and reperformance of plays by travelling poets sits in the midst of the complex process of the formation of highly charged local identities in a no less dynamic Panhellenic milieu, stimulated, but not dominated, by post-Persian War Athens. And indeed, Athenian drama’s diffusion abroad is intrinsically linked to the Syracusan scene and the figure of Aiskhylos. Tragedy’s career overseas begins, round about the time when tragedy itself begins, with this towering figure of the genre repeatedly voyaging with his tragic goods to the Deinomenid court in Sicily. First, the tyrant Hieron purchased his creativity in reassembling the past of his new foundation Aitna in 476 bc, bringing together in myth the traditions of the peoples he had forcefully displaced.2 Not much later, around 472 bc, Aiskhylos, himself a stout fighter in the 1 2

Macrob. 5.19.17: ‘certainly a Sicilian’; cf. Σ Venet. Ar. Pax 73. Vit. Aesch. 9; Diod. Sic. 11.49.1–2.

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Persian Wars,3 was back, with the prize of the Athenian Dionysia for his Persai in hand––a production that had been khoregically financed by the young Perikles, as his entrée to political life. The play was reperformed to a Sicilian public, who had not long ago gained victories over their own ‘barbarians’, the Carthaginians and the Etruscans, at Himera and Kymai in 480 and 474 bc.4 Around 457–455 bc, Aiskhylos withdrew to Sicily, to die not at Syracuse, but at its grand neighbour Gela. His tomb lies there, and the playwright was considered so important that the Geloans offered him great honours, with actors and musicians turning up regularly to perform (his?) plays at something like the Aiskhyleia.5 Even these few episodes of Aiskhylos’ western adventures make it clear that tragic (re)performance outside Athens was a matter of local, south-eastern Sicilian concern, had a wider Panhellenic dimension, and, lastly, played a role in the construction of a place’s relationship to Athens. The instance is a classic one of Greek interaction of micro- and macrostoria, where despite prevailing Athenocentrism, a locality’s affairs cannot be separated from the great sweeping issues smouldering in the Greek world at large. I shall argue here that certainly in the case of Sicily, and possibly elsewhere, performance of tragedy (and perhaps drama in general) operates, as at Athens, in social contexts where local and Panhellenic identities are formulated, and these identities are fused and thoroughly interdependent. That, at least for this early period, we are mainly talking about Athenian tragedy is no coincidence, even a sine qua non in tragedy’s history: tragedy was as much the product of the particular internal developments at Athens as it was of the Athenian empire,6 and the symbiosis between the two is also what makes it work ‘abroad’. It was a medium through which the relationship between Athens and the rest of the world in a post-Persian War world was carried out. This interaction, I shall maintain, also had a serious economic dimension, aspects of which are fascinatingly retrievable from a close consideration of the social contexts in which the plays were performed, or at which they were aimed. That Athenian tragedy by the middle of the fifth century had spread widely is, above all through Oliver’s initially cautious, these days much bolder 3

Marathon, Salamis, and Plataia: Vit. Aesch. 4; 11; Marm. Par. 48. Artemision: Paus. 1.14.5; his brother Kynegeiros died at Marathon: Hdt. 6.114. 4 Vit. Aesch. 8–10; Eratosthenes of Kyrene Σ Venet. on Ar. Ran. 1028. On Perikles cf. Wilson (2000), 174–5, noting the value of the Panhellenic prestige of the genre from the young Alkmeonid’s perspective. 5 Marm. Par. 59; Vit. Aesch. 10–11; Plut. Cim. 8; De exilio 604f; Anth. Pal. 7.40; 39; Suda. s.v. Apparently a tortoise dropped on to his head: Vit. Aesch. 10; Plin. HN 10.7; Val. Max. 9.12 ext. 2; Ael. NA 7.16. A.’s Sicilian credentials have received their fair share of treatments: Guardì (1990) is excellent on the historical contextualization; Herington (1967); Griffith (1978); Culasso Gastaldi (1979); Basta Donizelli (2003). Clay (2004), 81, 127 and Wilson (2007), 356–71 on A.’s ‘cult’. 6 Hall (1989).

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studies, well on the way to becoming received opinion.7 The new perspective on Athenian tragedy’s export into new local contexts has sometimes been deemed ‘liberating’. Liberating in the sense that it frees the study of tragedy, and drama at large, from the straitjacket wrapped around tragôidia by the specifically Athenian setting, as an art form revolving around democracy, civic identity, and last but not least the mass ritual of the great Dionysia. I hope to show here that taking social contexts as a hermeneutic framework for the function of drama adds complexity, and reveals the lasting fertility of what, it is true, has sometimes become orthodoxy. Tragedy’s export from Athens means a change of viewpoint, reshuffles its theatrical geography, but the genre remains fundamentally a mass medium, concerned with developing a sense of communality, and is empowered by its ritual orchestration.8

D E M E T E R A N D D E I N O M E N I D G R A I N P OW E R Let me therefore throw in a further component from the Aiskhylean vita–– one that does not usually appear in his very short Sicilian biography, but that is nevertheless well known––his alleged close association with Demeter and Kore. Aiskhylos was from Eleusis, something frequently alluded to and a rich source of anecdotes playing on his supposed religiosity––very much a theme, of course, in Aristophanes’ Frogs.9 It has sometimes been proposed that his ‘Eleusinian’ origins made him an attractive candidate for the Western scene: for judging from the archaeology, the performance of drama in Sicily and Southern Italy was not tied to the festival of Dionysos, the god of theatre but, where such evidence is available, most (but by no means all) theatres are part of, or closely tied to, sanctuaries for Demeter and Kore. The hard evidence for this does not pre-date the early fourth and later centuries, and at Syracuse the theatre’s divine association is debated. Significant contingent sources, however, suggest that the two goddesses were keen theatai, and certainly not of Aiskhylos’ works alone. I will propose that they even hold the key to a social contextualization of tragedy in particular in economic terms.10 7

Taplin (1993); (1999); (2006); (2007); Dearden (1990); Csapo (2004); Revermann (1999– 2000); (2006), 66 ff. Pugliese Carratelli (1996) demonstrates well the contemporary cultural complexity specifically of the Greek West. 8 Easterling (1994), 80 n. 24, citing Wilson, referring to approaches originating in e.g. Loraux (1986); Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1988), taken further by Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), esp. Goldhill (1990). The most recent critique is Rhodes (2003). 9 Vit. Aesch. 1; Ael. NH 7.16. Cf. De la Genière (1995), 1016. 10 e.g. Naples, Akragas, Heloros, Monte Iato, Morgantina, ?Akrai; for Syracuse itself see below. On the archaeology see Mitens (1988); Moretti (1993); Ciancio Rossetto and Pisani Sartorio (1994); Todisco (2002). On ‘sacred drama’ in anquity now Nielsen (2002). On the new Gela curse tablet see n. 13 below.

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Demeter and Kore’s affinity to drama is of course not unprompted, since the two goddesses have a share in Greek khoreia’s earliest history: the second divine client of Arkhilokhos, the composer of the ‘first dithyramb’, was Demeter, presumably of the Parian Thesmophorion. The circular dithyramb’s prôtos heuretês was Lasos of Hermione in the Argolid, a significant centre of Demeter’s worship providing her with an epithet =Ερµινη at Syracuse. Pindar’s ‘Theban’ dithyrambs seem to integrate Demetriac and Dionysiac ritual just as does Euripides’ Bakkhai, and the same is quite possibly the case for his ‘Corinthian’ dithyramb. Sophokles’ and Aristophanes’ plays were performed at Eleusis, also featuring several khoregic inscriptions, and of course Aristophanes’ Frogs combines the chorality of the Eleusinia and the Dionysia.11 It will therefore not go against choral momentum that the greatest sponsors of the arts in fifth-century Sicily, the Deinomenid tyrants, were also patrons and under the protection of the two goddesses. The divine association holds in effect much of the mystery of western performance. Pindar famously presents Hieron as Demeter’s attendant, leaving no doubt about the (or at least one of the) divine sources of the Deinomenids’ success as lords of Sicily, and it is significant that this was expressed in choral song.12 I say here the Deinomenids, for, as will become evident, their three main protagonists Gelon, Theron, and Hieron cannot, and perhaps should not, be clearly distinguished, not only in their love of the performative arts, but also in their politico-military activity, just as the musical history of their three main bulwarks Gela, Akragas, and Syracuse cannot and should not be sundered (see below). Aiskhylos’ death at Gela, where a possible instance of khoragia has now emerged, hints at a world of vibrant chorality in south-eastern Sicily.13 How the Deinomenids came to hold a privileged relationship to the goddesses is told by Herodotus in what is, as we shall later see, a revealingly Panhellenic context and attached to the Deinomenids’ original ‘seat’ at Gela. Gelon’s ancestor, the story claims, was not Gela’s more conspicuous founder Antiphemos of Lindos on Rhodes but a certain Telines from neighbouring Arch. fr. 120; 322 W (= Heph. Ench. 53); Lasos of Hermione: Ath. 10.455c; 14.624e–f; Σ Ar. Av. 1403 etc.; Pind. Dith. ii, fr. 70b SM; fr. 346 SM (Lavecchia (1994)); Dith. iii, fr. 70c SM (Wilson (2003)); Hermione at Syracuse: Hsch. s.v.; Sophokles and Aristophanes at Eleusis: IG ii2. 3090 = PCG iii.2 test. 21. Choregic victories: IG ii2. 1186; Frogs: Lada-Richards (1999). For the overlapping associations of Dionysiac and Demetriac khoreia see Kowalzig (2007b); for dithyrambs in honour of Demeter Prauscello (forthcoming). 12 Pind. Ol. 6.93–6; Σ Pind. Ol. 6.158a, 160d; Σ Pyth. 2.27b; Pind. Pyth. 2.15–17 with Gentili (1995), 370–1; Bacch. 3.1–8. Cf. Nem. 1.13–18 for Khromios, the loyal supporter of the Deinomenids since Hippokrates. 13 Wilson (2007), on the new curse tablet from Gela, even postulates local choregic competition in honour of the khthonic goddesses. 11

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Telos. Stasis characterized Gela’s history from the beginning, and this Telines was at the head of a group of exiles banned to the city’s hinterland. Assisted solely by the ‘hiera of Demeter and Kore’, just as Athena provided divine escort for Peisistratos’ re-entry into Athens, he brought the rebel group back into the city without violence. We might anticipate that wielding the power of agriculture was persuasive enough to restore the exiles, but this successful restoration of concord came with a condition attached: that his family would in future hold the priesthood of Demeter and Kore.14 The cult at Gela was from the start associated with the bringing about of social order and civic solidarity between different parties, and perhaps also with the integration of town and countryside. Tellingly, Herodotus then goes on to tell us how Gelon qua descendant of the hierophant had made himself tyrant of Gela at around 491 bc, and not much later, following conquest and synoikism of a series of cities, had ended up at Syracuse as ‘tyrannos of Sicily’.15 The story’s narrative context is highly illuminating: when in 481 bc the Greeks, led by Athenians and Spartans, are facing the Persian king, embassies go round the Mediterranean on a head-hunting circuit and also arrive at Gelon’s court. A speech soaked in Panhellenic patriotism appeals to Gelon’s powerful position as someone ‘who holds not the least part of Greece’ whilst graciously reminding him that being offered a Hellenic identity card also comes with certain commitments. His reply is famous: ‘Men of Hellas, it is only self-interest that has made you dare to come here and ask me to join forces with you against Persia. But I asked you, some time ago, to help me take on a foreign enemy, when I was locked in combat with the Carthaginians; I urged you to avenge the murder of Dorieus the son of Anaxandridas by the Segestans; I offered to help you liberate the trading centres (0µπρια) which have proved highly advantageous and profitable to you. But did you come to help? No, not for my sake or to avenge the murder of Dorieus. For all you care, the whole of Sicily might be in foreign hands. As it happens, though, things went well for us, and our position even improved. But now it’s your turn: war has come to you, and now you think of Gelon. Still, although your treatment of me was disgraceful, I will not reciprocate. I am in fact prepared to help you by providing 200 triremes, 20,000 hoplites, and contingents, each 2,000 strong, of archers, slingers, and light-armed horsemen. I also guarantee to supply the whole Greek army with grain (siton) for the duration of the war. There is one condition, however: that I should be the supreme commander of the Greek forces against Persia. If this condition isn’t met, I won’t come myself and won’t send any troops either.’ (Hdt. 7.158 [transl. Waterfield, slightly adapted]) Hdt. 7.153; cf. Σ Pind. Pyth. 2.27b; Lindian Chronicle no. 28. Hdt. 7.154 ff; 163. For the importance of the cult in Gela Dunbabin (1948), 64–6; Luraghi (1994), 120, 122–3. Four 6th-cent. cults are monumentalized, interestingly, by the democracy; Hinz (1998), 55–69. 14 15

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The reply sketches a resourceful man not shy to counter the Greeks in their own terms, demanding for himself the highly contested position of leadership of the Greeks in return for an enormous chiffre of ships and manpower, and above all the offer of grain provisions (siton) for the whole Greek army. The much-debated passage makes clear, first, that the battle against the ‘barbarians’ has more than just a Persian facet and, secondly, that in the west (and perhaps also elsewhere) it was intimately interlinked with questions of commerce, quite possibly even the trade in grain (a convincing interpretation thinks of the emporia as the series of harbours along the southern Sicilian coast, that is to say our most theatrical zone).16 Gelon’s response contains in nuce what once unpacked must be considered a main theme in the expression of Deinomenid power: the construction of an image in which affairs of corn supply and Panhellenism are closely linked both locally and internationally, and a big factor in the Sicilians’ relationship to Athens––and for which tragedy can be seen as one of several communicative channels. That Gelon’s grain was highly relevant is shown immediately: when Gelon’s stipulation has been rebuffed not only by the land force Sparta but also by the Athenians, lords of the sea, Herodotus puts into the tyrant’s mouth a remark even in the 430s bc of stunning hindsight, picking up, I think, on those ‘provisions’ for the Greek army. It anticipates the idea of Syracuse as Athens’ alter ego and arch-rival in the later Sicilian expedition: ‘Yes, my Athenian friend,’ Gelon replied, ‘it looks as though you have the commanders––but you won’t have the men who will follow. Since you obstinately refuse to give anything away, but want it all, the sooner you leave, the better. Go home and tell your Hellas that her year has lost its spring.’ (The significance of this statement was that Gelon’s army was the most notable part of the Greek army, just as the spring is the best part of the year. He accordingly compared Hellas deprived of alliance with him to a year deprived of its spring.) (Hdt. 7.162 (transl. Waterfield/Godley, adapted))

Is it here that Athenian-Syracusan rivalry is first formulated in terms of grain power? That the Deinomenids––Hieron as much as Gelon––worked hard on their food-producing capabilities and successfully translated them into power is well known. Less well known is how they thereby carved out for themselves a pivotal position in a Panhellenic, even Pan-mediterranean context. It was quite probably their investment that turned Sicily into a perceived grain store in the minds of both ancients and moderns, fertilizing also Cicero’s Verrines, from where we normally derive the idea. Recent and not so recent research has revealed such Sicilian monoculture to be a myth: there was much more to 16

Descat (1992); cf. Consolo Langher (2000).

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Sicilian local produce than the grain. But what matters in the dynamics of ancient economies is the hyping of (in this case) grain for ideological benefit––just as in oligarchic or democratic politics certain values are stressed more than others.17 The Deinomenids’ corn-producing power and their exports of Demeter’s gift were legendary and important in the ancient imagination. Apart from the generous allowance kept for the Greeks against the Persians in 481 bc, Dionysios of Halikarnassos knows of a near-contemporary immense frumentatio of Rome, followed by a whole series not only from Sicily but also from Campania and other Italian regions.18 The Deinomenids no doubt exploited the unpredictability of the Mediterranean food cycle so well demonstrated by Kyrene’s famous fourth-century Panhellenic grain distribution. This instance is lavishly documented on a stele in Kyrene’s museum where cities from around the Greek world are listed as recipients of grain during a period of drought. Kyrene had a vast Thesmophorion, next to which recently a reportedly classical theatre has also been uncovered (Figure 5.2). Tellingly for the later argument, Hieron once, lacking the gold for a dedication at Panhellenic Delphi, paid the provider with a shipload of grain instead.19 In the context of these traditions of agricultural capital put to use in fostering for themselves a pivotal role in the wider world, Deinomenid cultivation of Demeter and Kore will hardly surprise.20 The goddesses’ next appearance on Sicily, as if alluding to the Herodotean episode with which I started, is suitably set in a Panhellenic context: the Deinomenids’ battle against their 17 Demeter, Kore, and Sicily’s fertility become indelibly linked: Diod. Sic. 5.2.3 ff (also introducing Atheno-Sicilian rivalry over who first received the art of agriculture), already in Pind. Ol. 6.94; Nem. 1.13–18; Bacch. 3.1 f. Deconstruction of the myth of Sicilian grain: Fantasia (1993) and De Angelis (2006); Gallo (1983) and Castellana (1989) on hardcore practicalities. Varied Sicilian delicate produce: Dunbabin (1948), 211–17; Habermann (1987); Fantasia (1993), 22–3 n. 48. Cf. Sophron’s Tunafisher; Hermippos PCG fr. 63; Xen. Oec. 20.27 knows of the Euxine, the Aegean, and Sicily as the grain merchants’ targets. For Sicily’s grain myth post-antiquity see McCormick (2001), 4; Fantasia (2003) on tenacious economic identities. 18 Gelon sends 50,000 medimnoi to Rome, and more comes from Italy (D.H. 7.1.3–2.1; 20.3; Liv. 2.34.3–7; Plut. Cor. 16.1). See Garnsey (1988); Fantasia (1993), 9 ff. on the reliability of the frumentationes traditions: D.H. 9.25 (474: Sicily, Campania); Liv. 4.12–13; D.H. 12.1 ff. (440: Etruria, Campania); Liv. 4.25.4 (432: Etruria, Pomptine Plain, Cumae, Sicily); 4.52.4–8 (411: Etruria, Capua, Cumae, Sicily). 19 SEG ix.2, with Horden and Purcell (2000), 71 f.; cf. Bravo (1983); Laronde (1996). For the stunning new discoveries at Kyrene see Luni (2001). 20 The political use of Demeter is often discussed: Dunbabin and Van Compernolle (1957), White (1964), Privitera (1980), De Angelis (2006), 29 ff. Hinz (1998) passim rejects the link between the Deinomenids and the spread of Demeter’s cults in Sicily, archaeologically already in the 6th cent. Cole (1994) relates it to increasing appropriation of land by the Greek apoikiai. Ciaceri’s classic studies on Demeter and Kore in Sicily, (1895) and (1911), 187–214, are still helpful.

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Fig 5.2. The recently unearthed stone theatre at Kyrene in Libya, situated between the long-known Thesmophorion (to the right of the picture) and a new temple complex perhaps also part of the sanctuary of Demeter, visible in the background.

own ‘barbarian’, fought by Gelon at Himera against the Carthaginians in 480 bc, coinciding, as Herodotus strives to tell us, with that largely Athenianowned naval victory at Salamis. Among a flurry of dedications in both Sicily and mainland Greece, temples for Demeter and Kore are built as a thankoffering for help against the ‘barbarian’ at Syracuse, and one was initiated–– intriguingly––at Aitna, a city only about to be founded, by Hieron, not Gelon. Other shrines, for example at Himera and at the Syracusan apoikia Akrai, are sometimes thought to be beneficiaries of this development, too. Gelon also forced the Carthaginians themselves to build local temples for (?) Demeter and Kore, in which the peace treaties were kept.21 It will be seen that worshipping these two goddesses meant much more than facile veneration of the divinities thought to be at the origin of Sicilian soil’s most precious good. A religious monumentalization of the Deinomenids’ local corn-producing power can be seen both to play to Panhellenic sensibilities and social values developing out 21

Diod. Sic. 11.26.2, 7. See White (1964), 266 nn. 18–20 for Himera and Akrai, archaeologically unconfirmed: Hinz (1998), 119. Cf. Gras (1990). It is not always clear to what degree Demeter and Kore are an indivisible entity, though I will treat them here as such.

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of the Persian War traditions, and to bolster the Deinomenids’ position at home in Sicily.

D E M E T E R A N D T H E S Y R AC U S A N D E M O S To start with the latter, the goddesses’ power protecting a fragile state and their insignia clamping down on upheaval and revolution become an integral part of later Syracusan history. I have already touched upon how the priesthood of Demeter and Kore at Gela comes with a tradition of reconciling the local interests between different population groups. Gelon came to rule at Syracuse by bonding with the similarly exiled gamoroi, rich landowners, whom he restored––not exactly escorted by Demeter and Kore’s hiera like his ancestor Telines, but it seems nevertheless that the return of the gamoroi also marked the return to the city of highly profitable agricultural production. Once installed, Gelon embarked on a massive synoikism and enfranchisement of a great number of the nobility of neighbouring cities––creating, one might think, an unusually highbrow citizenry. The ambiguous constitution of this Syracusan demos perhaps explains why Gelon’s memory casts him sometimes as a philodêmos, sometimes as full of contempt for the people.22 However hybrid his social policies, agriculture featured strongly, and its promotion perhaps helped to keep the community together: Plutarch recalls how he particularly took heed of farming just as befits, according to the Athenaiôn Politeia, the good tyrant. Xenophon’s Hieron, the conversation between Simonides (!) and Hieron and therefore indelibly linked to Deinomenid memory, explicitly includes an agricultural programme in the tyrant’s handbook of manners.23 The idea that tyranny and democracy become close associates rather than antipodes not least through a state’s economic restructuring is of course in principle not alien, even though western tyrants are more often thought of as careful labourers at their royal image. However, stories of the contemporary Akragantine democracy featuring an eminent individual inviting the whole city to his daughter’s wedding in a pompous pageant remind us how also at the wedding of Kleisthenes of Sikyon’s daughter the two notoriously lived side by side.24 22 Gelon’s ascent at Syracuse: Hdt. 7.154–6; Kallipolis, Naxos, Zankle, Leontinoi, and ‘many barbarian towns’ were taken; Geloans, Kamarinaians, and nobles from Megara and Euboia were resettled at Syracuse. For Syracuse’s complicated social template and resulting conflict see Berger (1992), 35 ff. Gelon and the demos: Diod. Sic. 11.23.3; 25.5; 26.4; 67.2–3 (also on Sicilian leaders) vs Hdt. 7.156.3. 23 Plut. Reg. et Imp. Apophth. 175a; Ath. Pol. 16.2–4; Xen. Hier. 9.7–8. 24 Luraghi (1994), 360 f. on images of royalty; Berger (1992), 15–16 on ‘democratic’ Akragas.

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All this is intriguing since, as is well known, Demeter’s relationship to ‘the people’ is, especially in Sicily and on the Italian peninsula, not wholly straightforward: Sicilian corn travelling to Italy in Hellenistic-style euergetism may lie at the bottom of the introduction of Ceres into Rome and the goddess’s alleged ‘plebeian’ nature, a contentious set of problems that cannot be dealt with here.25 The idea of Demeter as well as Dionysos as ‘people’s gods’–– not least because they look to things that ‘simple’ people are supposed to be concerned with, that is the production of food and wine––is as deeply rooted as it is thought to be easily dismissible: it is usually adduced that the two gods for instance at Athens existed even in the ‘aristocratic’ city, long before the presumed democratization of the Athenian festival world.26 However, the stakes in our case are a little different: the Deinomenids at Syracuse––and cities elsewhere in Sicily and Italy may prove similar––apparently invested in Demeter and Kore because these divinities lent themselves to the creation of a shared identity that cuts across social distinction and economic inequality. Whether or not the goddesses were overtly ‘populist’, they certainly gave their full support to the forging of a sense of community which revolved around the city’s agricultural productivity. It fits this picture that Demeter and Kore had in Syracuse a flurry of different festivals, staging every important episode of Kore’s rape in what seems to be the construction of an ‘agricultural’ identity.27 Her epithets at Syracuse were Σιτ and =Ιµαλ (‘abundance’), listed jointly with Α # δηφαγα, personifying voracity and starvation.28 Syracuse’s languid ten-day Thesmophoria––a festival in which both men and women participated––featured cakes of honey and sesame in the form of 0φ βαια γυναικε,α (‘female genitals’), tangibly associating female and earthen fertility as is typical elsewhere in the Greek world.29 Syracusan identity was neatly tied to the two divine powers, for these goddesses rush to Syracuse’s defence more or less at all the important moments in the city’s history, whenever the place’s 25

Cazanove (1990); Spaeth (1996); Wiseman (2000). Le Bonniec (1958) is an older study on Roman Ceres. 26 Cf. Parker (1996), 75; recently e.g. Spineto (2005), 85 and n. 264; 205–8. Ciaceri (1911), 194 insists on the ‘democratic’ character of Sicilian Demeter. 27 The Sicilian-wide Anthesphoria, where Kore passes between Sicily and Italy plucking flowers (Poll. 1.37; Str. 6.1.5); sacrifices at the source Kyane, place of the abduction (Diod. Sic. 5.4.1); the wedding festivals of the Anakalypteria and Theogamia (Poll. 1.37; Σ Pind. Ol. 6.161g); ten-day Thesmophoria (Ath. 14.647a; Diod. Sic. 5.4); the Koreia (Plut. Dion 56; Hsch. s.v. κρεια; Diod. Sic. 5.4.6). Polacco (1986) assembles the literary sources, Hinz (1998), 95–111 the material from Kyane, the city’s Thesmophorion, and several other spots; Nilsson (1906/95), esp. 354–9 on these festivals. 28 Ath. 3.109a (cf. 14.618d); 10.416c; Ael. VH 1.27. A ‘khthonian’ dimension: Ciaceri (1911), 293 and Kokalos 26–7 (1980), 683 (a 6th-cent. inscription of the ‘Great Goddesses’). 29 Herakleides ap. Ath. 14.647a. Cf. Parker (2005), ch. 13.

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constitutive values are at risk: the cohesion of the state and later its democracy, its agricultural productivity, and its relationship with the ‘barbarian’. Kore had moved herself in support of the Syracusans against the Athenians in 413 bc.30 In 396 bc Himilkon had plundered Demeter and Kore’s temples, his troops were struck by a plague, and the Greek-defending goddesses were propitiated with another shrine at Carthage.31 Timoleon arrived at Syracuse from Corinth in 345 bc in a ship named ‘Demeter and Kore’ and experienced their epiphany at sea, a theôria induced by the Corinthian priestess’s dream for this future promoter of Sicily’s potential. Agathokles sacrificed and had his troops burn their ships in the goddesses’ honour once they had safely delivered him to Cap Bon, from where he was to tackle, once again, Carthage.32 Clothed in a purple robe and with a torch thrust into his hand (as if he himself were the goddesses’ hierophant), he had been forced to swear his loyalty to the democracy by Demeter and Kore and to a bond with the Carthaginians.33 At Akragas, incidentally, Phalaris seized power at the Thesmophoria, while the city was Zeus’ wedding present for Persephone.34 Here, the popular name Concordia for the divinity of one of the temples in the Akragantine valley––themselves products of Gelon’s fabulous generosity after the battle of Himera––allows us to think of a tenuous link to Greek Homonoia, often depicted with symbols of agricultural wealth, even Demeter herself, as if it were she who fundamentally held the city together in accord.35

D E M E T E R A N D D E I N O M E N I D PA N H E L L E N I S M Demeter and Kore’s protection had thus come to embrace the cornerstones of the Syracusan state. But in bolstering their role as the goddesses’ sponsor and beneficiary, the Deinomenids also struck a very Greek chord, which is as yet largely unnoticed. For the enabling of mutually dependent democratic and 30

Tim. FGrH 566 F 102b. Diod. Sic. 14.63.1–2; 14.77.4–5. See Charles-Picard (1954), 86 ff.; Xella (1969). Diod. Sic. 20.7; Just. Epit. 22.6. 33 Diod. Sic. 19.5.4; Just. Epit. 22.2. Kallippos similarly had to abrogate conspiracy against the Syracusan tyrant (Plut. Dion 57); the women of Syracuse swore by Persephone: Σ Theocr. 15.14. 34 Polyaen. 5.1; Pind. Pyth. 12.1 ff; Σ Pind. Ol. 2.15d; Pyth. 12.3a; Nem. 1.17. Three shrines for Demeter and Kore, whose late 6th-cent. monumental elaboration was completed under the democracy, as at Gela: Hinz (1998), 70–92. 35 Cf. A. Shapiro, LIMC 5.1 (1990), 476–9 s.v. Homonoia; T. Hölscher 479–98 s.v. Concordia. See esp. LIMC s.v. Homonoia no. 5, a 4th-cent. coin from Metapontion showing a corn ear on the reverse. Concordia had a cult at Syracuse (Liv. 24.22). Cf. Ciaceri (1911), 206 f., also on Homonoia in the Dodekanese. Diod. Sic. 11.25.2–4 on Akragas’ temples built by slaves captured at the battle at Himera. 31 32

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Panhellenic self-assertion through Demeter’s power in particular is also conspicuously forged by Herodotus. The goddess of agriculture and the grain supply repeatedly enters the scene when either Panhellenism or democracy or both are directly at stake: the oracle before the battle of Salamis qualified the encounter in terms of Demeter’s sowing or harvesting; and she makes an epiphany at the battle itself in support of the seafaring Greeks. Eleusis is said to have been sacked by the Persians, while the battles of Plataia and Mykale happen in and around sanctuaries of Demeter. Herodotus takes this as the goddess’s revenge, and thinks it worth commenting on both the coincidence and the fact that no single Persian died in the sanctuary itself even though they were lying all around it. That realms of Demeter were somehow at stake in Herodotus’ Persian Wars, so much so that she featured at these three important battles (one might also add that Thermopylai was an important site for Demetrian worship), is a somewhat inevitable inference. The goddess features on at least two more occasions in Herodotus when the trade or supply in grain is directly involved.36 In favouring Demeter and Kore, the Deinomenids not only forged their island’s trademark, but clearly bought into, or even helped to forge, a set of interlinked values attached to the goddesses. If the Deinomenids, as has often been observed, aspired to a role on a competitive Panhellenic scene, they contributed as much to this competition as they tried to master it. At the same time Panhellenism was a rhetoric that very much fostered their position at home, much as it helped the ruling elites in Athens, Boiotia, or Aigina.37 Buying into the ideological ploys that Athenian drama offered was part and parcel of the project. Oliver Taplin himself has recently suggested that Aiskhylos’ Persians in Sicily staged the entry of drama into a Panhellenic commemorative culture after the Persian Wars.38 The gradual unfolding of some of the components of this early fifth-century Panhellenism allows us to take this idea further and argue that the Deinomenids, by promoting tragedy in Sicily, participated in, and stimulated, a greatly competitive commemorative culture, operative in local contexts and an immense bargaining tool in interstate relations. Performance, and not only of drama, played a significant role in orchestrating the Deinomenids’ commitment to the Greeks, not least by blurring in the 36 Hdt. 7.141; 8.65; 9.57; 62 and 65; 97; 101; 7.200 (Demeter of Anthela near Thermopylai). Aigina, Athens’ commercial rival, had a democratic tradition linked to the Thesmophorion (6.91; Kowalzig (2007a)). The Parians’ priestess of Demeter wards off Militiades’ assault on the island during his cleruchy-and-corn collecting tour of the Aegean (6.134) (note that Kore is mostly absent here). Further aspects of Demeter’s role in the Herodotus’ Persian Wars are stressed in Boedeker (2007). 37 38 Kowalzig (2007a), chs. 4 and 7. Taplin (2006).

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medium of performance the memory of individual family members’ achievements. The flurry of Panhellenic victories by the Sicilian tyrants Theron of Akragas, Gelon and Hieron of Syracuse, and their associates, barely needs mentioning, praised as they are in song by Pindar and Bakkhylides.39 It is important here to exploit the contemporaneity of drama and ‘traditional’ choral poetry in south eastern Sicily: Simonides, Pindar, and Bakkhylides as much as Aiskhylos, Phrynikhos, and local Epikharmos, they were all there and held a full share in the process of Deinomenid glorification in Panhellenic terms, so much so that even their vitae turn topical. Poets, as well as the traditions developing around them, rather carefully sought to fuse all the different feats for the Greeks into one, making the three brothers virtually indistiguishable. Suitably, Diodorus qualifies the period of Gelon’s reign as the time ‘when Pindar was at his akmê’, when one might think that Pindar’s most productive period rather fell into Hieron’s lifetime.40 The battle of Himera in 480 bc is central here. While only Gelon of Syracuse and Theron of Akragas were actually involved in the fighting there, Hieron successfully managed to hijack the triumph of this victory, persistently attaching to himself the full glory of the Deinomenids. His most extraordinary piece of forgery is juxtaposing the battle won by his brothers at Himera in 480 bc and his own victory over the Etruscans at Cumae in 474 bc, and paralleling them with the Panhellenic victories of Plataia and Salamis. Herodotus qualifies the drawing of a parallel between Himera and Salamis as ‘Sicilian’; Diodorus thinks that Himera and Thermopylai ten years earlier coincided, but the double juxtaposition is a less orthodox tradition, showing perhaps also that while Hieron might have sung loudest, he still did not lastingly coin the memory.41 After Himera, in the same vein as his temples to Demeter and Kore, Gelon dedicated a conspicuous golden tripod at Delphi and a golden Nike at the time of Xerxes’ invasion; an inscription on a base can actually be seen on Apollo’s terrace. Hieron supposedly ‘did the same’, perhaps leaving the base now standing next to Gelon’s, and, as already mentioned, paid for this in real grain-goods. Indeed, there is a tradition of Gelon dedicating several tripods on behalf of his brothers, for which Simonides supposedly produced an epigram honouring the whole set of ‘children of Deinomenes’; presumably it is from this that the tradition of his arbitrating 39 Cf. Harrell (2002); Luraghi (1994), 354–68; Hornblower (2004), 186–201. Pind. Ol. 2–3 (Theron); Ol. 1; Pyth. 1–3, Bacch. 3–5 (Hieron), and odes for various Sicilian nobles. 40 Death in Sicily is especially popular: Call. 64.4; Suda s.v. (Sim.’s grave at Akragas); Phrynikhos TrGF test. 6, Diod. Sic. 11.26.8. 41 Himera, Plataia, Kyme, Salamis: Pind. Pyth. 1.71–80; Hdt. 7.166; Diod. Sic. 11.24.1. Cf. Luraghi (1994), 362 n. 389; Deinomenid legacy: Pind. Pyth. 1.79; 58; 2.18; Bacch. 3.7; 4.13; 5.35.

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between the warring brothers and diadokhoi of Gelon’s legacy derives.42 Gelon’s commitment to the Greek cause is evident at Olympia in generous dedications in a building from around the 480s, termed ‘thêsauros of the Carthaginians’. No instance of Hieronian appropriation is known here–– other than several Olympic victories monumentalized in Pindaric odes and accompanying his own offerings for the victory at Kyme.43 Highly competitive bidding for the title of greatest devotee to the Greek cause characterized this milieu, addressed to local and international audiences at once.

PE R F O R M I N G AT S Y R AC U S E This is the highly charged context in which we have to imagine the performance of Aiskhylos’ Persians at Syracuse, composed by Athens’ most famous Marathônomakhos and in a carefully constructed euphoria over a flurry of victories gained against the barbarians of the West. Phrynikhos, whose Phoinissai on the battle of Salamis supposedly influenced the younger Aiskhylos, now came to die in Sicily, hinting that the ancients had already understood tragic travel as an exercise in competitive Panhellenism. As Oliver Taplin points out, Aiskhylos came to Sicily cross at his defeat by Simonides in a contest over the composition of an elegy for the dead at Marathon. The tradition suggests a Panhellenic escort for Athenian tragedy’s disembarkation on the island together with the poets seeking places more appreciative of their works’ commitment to the Greek cause.44 Epikharmos’ comic Persians, Bakkhai, and Trojans imply that the barbarian was rather close to the Sicilian home.45 Sicily, however, was evidently not a backwater which latched on to the Athenian fashion in order to prove to itself and to the rest of the Greek world that it was part of ‘it’. Rather, ‘it’ was a multiplicity of places, performative arenas in a competitive display of one’s devotion to the Greek cause in a 42 Luraghi (1994), 313–24; 361–8 on the fused memories. Gelon at Delphi: Diod. Sic. 11.26.7; Ath. 6.231f–32d = Phan. fr. 11 Wehrli; Gelon ‘son of Deinomenes’: IGDS 93 = ML 28. Hieron: Theop. FGrH 115 F 193; Σ Pind. Pyth. 1.152b: Gelon’s tripods for his brothers, featuring Sim. Anth. Pal. 6.214, recalled by Hieron in Bacch. 3.17 ff. Simonides’ arbitration: Σ Pind. Ol. 2.29c and d (also on the envy between the brothers) = Tim. FGrH 566 F 936. 43 Gelon dedicated a statue of Zeus and three linen breastplates at Olympia: Paus. 6.19.7. Hieron’s helmets: IGDS 94a, b; SEG xxxiii. 328 = ML 29. 44 Phrynikhos: as n. 40 above; Simonides vs Aiskhylos: Vit. Aesch. 8 (with Molyneux (1992) on the reliability of Simonidean traditions; cf. Taplin (2006)). 45 Epikharmos’ paratragedy: Revermann (2006), 71; see also Lanza (2007), 276 ff. The eponymous river Himeras featured in Aiskhylos’ Glaukos, part of the Persians’ trilogy: TrGF 32 = Σ Pind. Pyth. 1.153.

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world where Athens did not necessarily dominate the contest. The episodes revolving around the Deinomenids’ grain power imply that economic resources played a significant role in this competition, all the more if backed by the goddesses who could also employ and feed the people. If Aiskhylos travelled to Sicily with his patriotic merchandise, he travelled to a serious candidate for Panhellenic leadership, whose sponsorship of the play meant no less than sponsorship of Hellenism. Seen against this heavily loaded background, the performance of Aiskhylos’ Persians at Syracuse sets Syracuse and Athens directly against each other.46 That said, being khoregos to the Persians carried its own weight in the local Syracusan and Sicilian context of Hieronian assertion, not least in allowing the constantly self-renewing Syracusan demos to identify with something that afforded communal cohesion. If Hieron was the despot that some of the sources think he was this may be all the more important.47 Intriguingly, at Syracuse the historical nexus of popular rule and tyranny is regularly expressed in the theatre, suggesting not least how much the tyrant is in the hands of a very particular theatre critic. Dionysios I arrived in Syracuse to become tyrant at theatre time, when the demos was streaming out of the arena. A demos united in the theatre orchestrates key events in Syracusan history, from Katane’s tyrant Mamerkos’ executive trial to the carting of the blind Timoleon into the theatre to express his will to the united people. The theatre was also the locus of national assemblies under Agathokles.48 That plays at Syracuse and in Southern Italy were famously judged by the whole demos perhaps forms part of a tradition in which theatre and political evaluation are intrinsically interlinked. It is not for nothing that a certain Damokopos is reported to have been the architect of Syracuse’s notional fifth-century theatre.49 As if this were not enough, the Deinomenids’ agroikoi, Demeter’s people, also reappear. Theatre and a ‘rustic’ demos are closely linked when, in a later tradition, after the aversion of a plague in 478 bc the greges rusticorum stream into the theatre.50 And this finally brings me to what some readers might think should have stood at the beginning of this essay: but just what is the 46 Drama continued a role in competitive definitions of Hellenicity: see e.g. Metagenes’ comic Thurio-Persians (c.400 bc), with Revermann (2006), 71 f. 47 Diod. Sic. 11.67.2–4. Simonides did not like Hieron much either: Ath. 14.656c–d. 48 Diod. Sic. 13.14; Plut. Tim. 34 (Mamerkos, 343 bc); Corn. Nep. Tim. 4.2; Plut. Tim. 38 (Timoleon, before 336 bc); Just. Epit. 22.2 (Agathokles, c.317 bc). Cf. Polacco and Anti (1981), 41–4 for more literary references to the theatre. 49 Pl. Leg. 659b; Sophron ap. Eust. Od. 3.68: at the inaugurational ceremony, Damokopos is supposed to have distributed perfume (myron) ‘to his fellow citizens’ (µρον το, Kαυτο& πολται δι.νεµε), and was therefore called Myrilla. 50 Diom. Gramm. Lat. i, p. 486.

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evidence for Demeter’s role in Syracusan theatrical performance? The honest answer is that we do not know: the archaeology of the grand theatre of Syracuse is amongst the highest stakes in Sicilian archaeology.51 That said, particularly in the light of recent excavations, Demeter and Kore have by no means come out of this as bad candidates. Apollo Temenites is usually thought patron of Syracuse’s ‘theatrical’ culture; explicitly mentioned in the literary sources, however, are shrines of our very two goddesses––albeit in a text as myth-making as Cicero’s Verrines.52 Then, while we thought that what survives is uniquely the third-century theatre of Hieron II, on the large terrace above the theatre there apparently stood an archaic temple for a divinity to overlook what was perhaps the arena at the time. In the early fifth century, this temple was turned into a tomb complex, while gods moved to the side: traces of two temples on the terrace’s far right edge may be Cicero’s two shrines, placed where the Eschilo d’Oro’s panoramic snapshot is taken. Archaic activity in the area is already sensational news, and it will be interesting to see what future work reveals.53 In the mere expectation of hard-and-fast evidence as to the open question of Demeter and Kore’s activity at Syracuse’s theatre, let me, then, continue by laying out circumstancial evidence for such a ritual contextualization. The Syracusan apoikia Heloros (Eloro), significantly, had a late fourth-century theatre built in close connection with the city’s Demeter, pre-eminent since the sixth century.54 Demeter was also implicated in the locality of Aiskhylos’ other Sicilian play, The Women of Aitna. This presents a large-scale foundation myth for Hieron’s settlement of 476 bc expelling the inhabitants of Katane to Leontinoi, and taking land from the Sikels. It was here that Diodorus thinks Gelon started a temple for Demeter ‘somewhat later’ than that in Syracuse in 480 bc, and the fourth-century tragedian Karkinos places 51

Two recent monographs argue strongly for an early theatre: Polacco and Anti (1981); Polacco, Scolari, and Troiani (1989). Scepticism is expressed by almost everyone else: Moretti (1993); Isler in Ciancio Rossetto and Pisani Sartorio (1994); and Todisco (2002). 52 Cic. Verr. 4.53.119, where Apollo figures with a statue, but not with a temple; cf. Suet. Tib. 74. Thuc. 6.75.1; 7.3.3 mentions the area called Temenites. A statue of Kore is recorded at Cic. 4.57.128. Diod. Sic. 14.63.1 has a temple of Demeter and Kore outside the city, in an area later to be Neapolis (?). 53 Only short reports are published: Voza (1984–5); (1993–4), 1288–91; cf. AR (1987), 112; (1995), 67. Voza (2001) interprets traces of cut rock from the archaic period as for the foundation of a temple attributed to Apollo Temenites (citing also isolated terracotta architectural elements). The tombs are thought to be those of Gelon and his wife Demarete (Diod. Sic. 11.38.4). Polacco, Scolari, and Troiani (1989) have the two temples rising from two notional ‘podiums’ on the western end of the terrace. The ‘archaic’ trapezoidal area next to the theatre is traditionally linked to Apollo Temenites, equally unconfirmed; see Gentili (1952). 54 Todisco (2002), 171–2; Hinz (1998), 111–18. Akrai is a Syracusan apoikia with a 3rd-cent. theatre, a bouleutêrion and an important 4th-cent. cult of Demeter, though Aphrodite is another good candidate: Todisco op. cit. 167 f.; Hinz op. cit. 119.

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here elements of the myth of Demeter and Kore. No less a poet than Simonides claimed that at Aitna Hephaistos, lord of the volcano in both Pindar and Aiskhylos’ Prometheus, argued with Demeter over the city’s territory.55 Who won this battle? We cannot tell, but the Aitnaiai gave a mythical geography to the large-scale synoikism. The action took place between Aitna, Xouthia, and Leontinoi and ended up in the Temenites area of Syracuse where the theatre was located, somehow retracing the journeyings of the different settlers. The Palikoi, divine figures belonging perhaps to a Sikel tradition, turned into sons of Zeus and the nymph Thalia.56 This is good proof that Sicilian tragedy did somehow have to do with the rallying of dispersed peoples: Gelon’s initiatives for Demeter have often been linked with enforced synoikisms and bringing the many people together; Hieron’s Aitnaiai likewise seems to operate in such a context––how successfully so is another matter: he did receive heroic honours as a ktistês as he so much wished to, but shortly after his actual death the grave was desecrated.57

T H E E C O N O M I C S O F AT H E N I A N T R AG E DY Let us at the end return to Demeter and Kore’s primary prerogative, the grain, and open up the geographical perspective to suggest that something economically and culturally rather complex may accompany the spread of theatre from Athens more generally. Sophokles’ Triptolemos, produced as early as 468 bc, is key here. The Eleusinian hero famously turns Athenian, learns the art of agriculture from Demeter, and is charged with its worldwide distribution. The myth attests to Athenians forging for themselves a role in ‘civilizing’ the rest of the world through the benefit of farming. Sophokles’ fragments praise ‘fortunate Italy for its candid grain’, and have Demeter delineate an impressive Italian circuit for Triptolemos’ culture-bringing journey, to include the entire coastline from Taras to the strait (Oinotria), and up the coast of Campania and Etruria (the ‘Tyrrhenian gulf’) as far as Liguria.58 55 Diod. Sic. 11.76.3 for the appropriation of Sikel land; Karkinos TrGF 5 ap. Diod. Sic. 5.5; Sim. PMG fr. 552 (= Σ Theocr. 1.65–6). Pind. Pyth. 1.25–8; Aesch. PV 366–9. 56 Hypothesis; Aesch. Aitnaiai TrGF 6 (Palikoi). Cf. Pind. fr. 105 SM. See, comprehensively, Poli-Palladini (2001). 57 Diod. Sic.11.66.4; 76.3; Str. 6.2.3. 58 Soph. TGrF 596–617a; here 600 and 598. D.H. 1.12.2, where fr. 598 is cited, makes it clear that the entire coast of Italy is meant. Italos persuaded the Oinotrians to change from nomadic to farming life: Antioch. FGrH 555 F 5; Arist. Pol. 1329b8–22; Ps.-Skymn. 300. Cf. Vanotti (1979), 97–103.

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That these are among major grain-producing areas then and later cannot go unnoticed. Attic vases showing Triptolemos’ departure from Athens in his winged chariot appear during the sixth century, and spread widely in the West during the fifth.59 Strikingly, a significant number have been retrieved precisely from Sicilian Akragas and Gela alike. An exquisite sample (Figure 5.3) contemporary to the play, plus another piece,60 form part of a set of vases from Akragantine tombs decorated with rare mythological themes treated in contemporary tragedy and choral lyric alike, and sometimes confined to Sicily.61 Among them is the white-ground monumental kalyx krater showing Andromeda and Perseus, and graced with the graffiti Εαων καλ Α@σχλο, ‘Euaion, son of Aiskhylos, is beautiful’.62 The group tantalizingly suggests intense interaction between iconography, choral lyric, and tragedy requiring a detailed study.63 That Triptolemos should turn up twice in such company surely makes us think about the relevance of this Athenian myth in a wider western context. Quite apart from the Akragantine chefs-d’oeuvre, smaller lekythoi of the same scene also come from Gela.64 Triptolemos’ spread in the western tomb culture tends to be seen in the light of his Eleusinian origins and promises of a happy afterlife. Sophokles’ fragment confirms that in the fifth century, Triptolemos was also a hero of agriculture, who in Cicero’s time had his image placed next to that of Ceres in the grand cult of Demeter and Kore at central Sicilian Enna.65 Triptolemos’ presence in the graves––presumably of those who invested in Demeter’s gift on earth as much as in the

59

G. Schwartz, LIMC 8.1 (1997), 56–68, s.v.; cf. Schwartz (1987). Bell krater by the Oreithyia painter, c.470 bc (Palermo Mus. Reg. V 779; ARV 2 496, 5; LIMC s.v. no. 108; Veder greco no. 66); column krater, c.450 bc (Veder greco 360–1; De la Genière (1995), 1016). 61 The exhibitions Veder greco (Akragas, 1988) and Ta Attika (Gela, 2004) first assembled this material: e.g. the myth of Marpessa’s choice between Ida and Apollo (Sim. PMG 563; Bacch. Dith. 6); the injured Philoktetes (Pind. Pyth. 3 [Hieron; Plin. NH 34.59]); Boreas snatching Oreithyia (Sim. PMG 534 = Σ A.R. 1.211–15; Aesch. TrGrF 281); introduction of Hephaistos, the fire-kindler on Mt Etna (Sim. PMG 552 = Σ Theocr. 1.65–6; Aesch. PV 366–9; Pind. Pyth. 1.25–8). The Brygos Painter krater in Munich may reflect Sappho’s presence on the island (Marm. Par. FGrH 239, 36). All this is drawn from De la Genière (1995) with exact vase refs. 62 Agrigento, Mus. Naz. AG 7 (ARV 2 1017.53; Veder greco no. 73). 63 Choral lyric has not been much considered, but vases related to (themes or performances of) fifth-cent. Attic tragedy are now relatively well studied: Todisco (2002), 49–52; 53–4; the comprehensive catalogue Todisco (2003); Allan (2001); Taplin (2007). 64 Gela lekythoi: London BM E 597 (Att. rf.); BM E 595 (ARV 2 1021, 108; LIMC no. 135, c.450/445 bc). Ashm. Mus. 315 (ARV 2 229, 44, c.475/70 bc). Syracuse, Mus. Reg. 20534 (ARV 2 211, 198, c.490 bc). Note a kalyx krater from Kamarina: Syracuse, Mus. Reg. 24114 (ARV 2 1041, 1; LIMC no. 129, after 450 bc). Some of the earliest depictions are from Etruria (e.g. LIMC 60, 62, 63 (6th); 69, 81 (5th cent.) etc. 65 Cic. Verr. 4.49.110; Firm. Mat. Err. prof. rel. 7.4. See De la Genière (1988) and esp. Metzger (1965), 30 f. for ‘Eleusinian’ imagery in the West. 60

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Fig 5.3. Bell krater by the Oreithyia Painter, c.470 bc, from Akragas, showing Demeter sending Triptolemos to distribute the art of agriculture to the world. The vase belongs to a group linked to the Greek and Athenian performance world.

performative arts––calls for an alternative, perhaps complementary, explanation. Even a superficial screening of Triptolemos’ journeys westward raises a tantalizing issue, striking particularly in the light of the point laboured above, namely that Deinomenid grain power somehow had a role in tragic negotiation and affected where tragedy sailed to. For it seems that, more generally, the routes taken by Athenian tragedy and western grain at least in part coincided. Euripides’ Trojans (210–29) curiously sketches out a West represented by Sicily and the ‘land next to the Ionian sea watered by Krathis’ (i.e. around Thurioi), the landscapes in the West of the highest economic potential.66 That is not to turn drama into flat pieces of Athenian economic propaganda, formulating in myth a set of maritime communications. Rather, such poetic mapping of western resources brings out Athens’ complicated relationship to the west and stresses an important economic dimension. It used of course to be thought, on good authority, that fifth-century Athens virtually depended on the western grain supply, a view that has long been superseded, though when, where, and why the Athenians exercised an interest in the West––preparing the Sicilian catastrophe––remains contested.67 Apart from the series of alliances and the foundation of Thurioi in the 440s bc the best 66

Easterling (1994) discusses the passage. Gernet (1909), esp. 312 ff.; 315 ff., while according to Garnsey (1988), esp. 89–106 no sooner than the mid 5th century did Athens depend on imports. Moreno (2007) redresses the importance of the Black Sea grain trade. 67

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piece of evidence comes from Thucydides, claiming, on the occasion of renewed alliances with Rhegion and Leontinoi in 427 bc, that supporting ships were sent ‘ostensibly for reasons of kinship, but really they wished to prevent corn (siton) travelling to the Peloponnese’.68 This suggests a desire to be in charge of the circulation of the grain, as if in this particular wartime situation it was designed to avoid Gelon’s gift of corn materializing half a century later than offered––and going to the wrong party, the Spartans! Thalassocracy also meant control of the network of grain routes, something which is suggested in the construction of a memory that Athenians’ most ambitious naval general Themistokles, khoregos to Phrynikhos’ Phoinissai, had at his disposal a well-forged set of western connections. Already in 481 bc the Herodotean Themistokles summoned up kinship-relations with Siris, the city dominating the Siritis, the immensely fertile plain between Thurioi and Metapontion. Later tradition attributes to him daughters named ‘Italia’ and ‘Sybaris’ as well as an attempt to marry Hieron’s daughter. Athenians liked to see themselves and their leaders well linked in the western world, and we might wonder whether Themistokles’ unsuccessful suitorship at Syracuse does not curiously allude to what Herodotus had Gelon claim not long before: that, in rejecting this powerful alliance, ‘Hellas’ year has lost its spring’?69 More plays can be lined up to suggest that mythical plots were consistently set in localities of substantial economic promise. Euripides’ fragmentary Melanippe of 415 bc played at Metapontion, a major grain producer at the eastern end of the Siritis, that same Demetrian plain. The play is often seen as orchestrating Metapontion’s relationship with Athens around the time of the Sicilian expedition. At that point, Metapontion and Thurioi, located at the other end of that very plain, are singled out as particularly wavering between alliance and animosity.70 Euripides’ Aiolos was situated on the Lipari islands, a major stop-off on the shipping routes from Etruria down the Tyrrhenian coast, curiously boasting one of the finest collections of objects relating to the post-classical theatre world. Sophokles’ Kamikoi told of Minos’ ceremonial death in the Sicilian Kamikos during his pursuit of the then Athenianized Daidalos, putting a triumphant end to the Cretan thalassocracy that Athens 68 Th. 3.86.4; grain did also come from Libya and Egypt: 4.53.3. Hornblower (2002), ch. 4 for a concise account of Athenian-western relations. 69 Themistokles and the West: Hdt. 8.62 (Siris); Plut. Them. 32.2 (daughters); Th. 1.136.1; Plut. Them. 24; cf. Stesimbrotos of Thasos FGrH 107 F 3 (flight to the west). Skepsis about his journeys: Plut. Them. 24.7; Them. Ep. 20; Themistokles was khoregos for Phrynikhos’ Phoinissai: Them. 5.5. 70 On the Melanippe Desmotis cf. Giacometti (1990–1); Nafissi (1997); Thuc. 7.33.5–6; 35; 57.11.

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was in the process of taking over.71 The far-flung Iberes, inhabitants of a region little explored for its connections to the Athenian empire, were the protagonists of another Sophoklean piece. His Antenoridai involved the sons of Trojan Antenor who settled the fertile Po delta amongst the ancient Enetoi at the mouth of a major transport route. We also know of the mention in tragedy of the Elektrides, islands watching entry and exit to the river Po, a major thoroughfare for goods travelling from inland Italy and the Alps.72 Swinging to the Eastern Mediterranean, we should remember that Triptolemos’ mission also took him up into the Euxine and to the king of the Getans (TrGF 604). Aiskhylos’ Kabeiroi and certainly Sophokles’ Lemnians were set on an island that was a long-standing and important kleruchy situated on the way to the Black Sea. Both Oliver Taplin and Pat Easterling have reminded us of the importance of Thessaly, where Euripides held a proxenia, in the localizations of Greek tragedy. And finally, we do know that Macedonian cities were important way stations for ships with grain coming from the Hellespont. Euripides’ alleged proxenies and often-discussed play Arkhêlaos may appear in a different light at the Macedonian court.73 But let us not turn Triptolemos’ winged journey into a pedestrian tour de force. The arising general tendency is, I hope, clear: the close consideration of one local context to which Athenian tragedy is certain to have spread, that of Sicilian Syracuse, has opened up an array of dimensions of possible interactions carried by the tragic khoros. It is no news that tragedy was a ‘Panhellenic text designed for export to other Greek cities’ and had an imperial dimension.74 I hope to have shown in this essay that the near-contemporary performance of the first Athenian tragedies at Athens and at Syracuse defines, and refines, the parameters for this complex form of contact between Athens and the rest of the Greek world. Specifically at Syracuse, Aiskhylos’ performances are central to an intricate process of orchestrating Deinomenid power in a Sicily (just like Athens on the brink of turning to democracy) fashionably caught between Panhellenic devotion and commitment to local matters. The tyrant(s) seized the opportunity offered by the medium for the formulation of new, perhaps controversial, identities that did not see tyrant and demos in opposition. Demeter and Kore, the goddesses of Sicily’s produce, escorted a significant 71

Soph. TrGF 323–7. Calame (1996) on the Athenian takeover of Minos’ thalassocracy. Cf. Vanotti (1979); Culasso Gastaldi (1979), 51 ff. on the Elektrides (Plin. HN 37.31 f.). Athenians in the Adriatic: Vallet (1950), where they met their Aiginetan rivals: Figueira (1981), 267–70; newer reports are in MEFRA (1997), 263–415; 855–987; cf. also Anemos (2001). 73 Taplin (1999); Easterling (1994); Euripides’ proxenia: Vit. Eur. 1. On Macedon brilliantly Revermann (1999–2000). ML 65 (c.430 bc). 74 Hall (1989), esp. 160 ff. 72

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economic clout into the Deinomenid city, and seemingly into the theatre. The nexus between divine and productive power, perhaps enacted in the orchestra, but in any case the wider performance setting of Deinomenid power, supported local ambition; at the same time the divinely sheltered crops allowed the Deinomenids to pose as serious players on the Panhellenic scene, competing for leadership not just in the Persian Wars, but also thereafter. This observation gives a strong economic dimension to claims of Panhellenic supremacy, a facet of Panhellenism that does not always receive as much attention as it perhaps deserves. Or, thinking of the recent demystification of the idea of Sicily as the grain basket of the ancient world, we might claim that at the very least economic pretence was ideologically influential. The associations construed in Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars around the cult of Demeter, Panhellenic success, and rule of the demos should be taken seriously. It is for this set of reasons that the performance of Aiskhylos’ Persians at Syracuse, by no means a provincial context, assumes an important role in thrashing out the relationiship between Athens at Syracuse as much in ideological as in economic terms. Athens’ presumption to bestow Hellenicity in return for material support is brilliantly shown by Gelon’s refusal to play their game in 481 bc, but the episode also hints that local resources were a real target not easily to be had by forthright imperial Athenians. The link between Panhellenic pretence and agricultural productivity, well displayed in the case of Syracuse, leads on to a larger claim about the nature of tragedy’s and tragedians’ export from Athens. It is unlikely to be coincidence that the personnel of tragic myth, with or without the tragedies themselves, travelled so widely along the––long-standing and familiar––trading routes west, far west, north, and far north. That many localities concerned happen to be places of commercial, particularly agricultural productivity is intriguing and needs further exploration. Wherever it was actually performed, tragedy constituted a forum in which to work out in myth relations between Athens and other localities. As has often been proposed, to have ‘barbarians’ perform Athenian stagecraft, or Athenians perform the ‘barbarian’, may well serve the cultural self-assertion of non-Athenians or non-Greeks; and suggest, as in the case of the Macedonians, that they are part of that exclusive group of Greeks in a particularly Athenian formulation.75 But I hope my discussion has demonstrated that Athens’ particular formulation of Hellenism was neither widely accepted, nor without competition, nor backed by the best and most plentiful material resources. Tragedy’s spread to resourceful localities at the farthest corners of the Athenian horizon leads us to think that, whatever was 75

So e.g. Hall (1989); Revermann (1999–2000).

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conveyed in this complex and indirect form of negotiation that is performance, tragic export was a two-way process in which symbolic capital was exchanged for potentially real goods. If the Athenians ostensibly determined the language of this negotiation this indicates not so much actual Athenian economic power as the quality of the goods that they did know how to produce, and invented for this interaction, that is ‘culture’.76 In a final turn to Syracuse we may observe how effectively tragedy turned into the language of interaction between Athens and the rest of the world, even if in this city to a somewhat exceptional degree. Let me recall again that Demeter was summoned to help the Syracusans in the pivotal moment of Athenian aggression. Thucydides’ portrayal of the Sicilian expedition through the narrative patterns and values of tragedy smacks of more than a literary reflex between drama and historiography, of a relationship that had long been carried out in tragedy. And then of course, there are the extraordinary anecdotes according to which the Syracusans had their children taught by the Athenian prisoners and/or released them from capture because they could sing the songs of Euripidean drama.77 This shows well how drama was a channel for communication as much as for the exercise of Athenian-Syracusan rivalry: Athenian ‘tragic’ superiority is countered by the judging power that the Syracusans themselves behold in this post-war situation. However intensified the formulation of specifically Athenian-Syracusan power relations there was clearly also something very Sicilian about early fifth-century Athenian tragedy overseas. It is a striking coincidence that the continuous exchange of economic and ideological resources is nowhere better expressed than in the last page of the chapter revolving around the poet who stood right at the beginning of this process, the epigram on Aiskhylos’ grave, not at Syracuse, but at Gela: This mnêma covers the deceased Aiskhylos, the Athenian, Euphorion’s son, in wheatbearing Gela. His glorious courage the hallowed field of Marathon could tell, and the longhaired Mede had knowledge of it. (Vit. Aesch. 11) 76 Perhaps thus offering one explanation for why so few Athenian myths occur in tragedy as, similarly, hero-cult aetiology for non-Attic figures often squares with contested Athenian territorial aspirations; see Kowalzig (2006). 77 Satyr. Vit. Eur. fr. 39.19; Plut. Nic. 29; Euripides was sent to Syracuse as an Athenian ambassador (Arist. Rhet. 1384b16–17).

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Culasso Gastaldi, E. (1979), ‘Eschilo e l’Occidente’, in I tragici greci e l’Occidente (1979), 19–89. De Angelis, F. (2006), ‘Going Against the Grain in Sicilian Greek Economics’, G&R 53: 29–47. Dearden, C. (1990), ‘Fourth-Century Tragedy in Sicily: Athenian or Sicilian?’, in J.-P. Descoeudres (ed.), Greek Colonists and Native Populations (Oxford), 231–42. De la Genière, J. (1988), ‘Images attiques et religiosité étrusque’, in Ancient Greek and Related Pottery (Copenhagen), 161–9. –––– (1995), ‘Vases attiques à Agrigente au temps de Bacchylide et de Pindare’, CRAI: 1005–21. Descat, R. (1992), ‘Gélon et les emporia de Sicile’, Messana 13: 5–17. Dunbabin, T. J. (1948), The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 bc, Oxford. –––– and Van Compernolle, E. (1957), ‘Les Deinoménides et le culte de Déméter et Korè à Gela’, in Hommages à W. Deonna. Col. Latomus 28 (Brussels), 474–9. Easterling, P. E. (1994), ‘Euripides Outside Athens: A Speculative Note’, ICS 19: 73–80. Fantasia, U. (1993), ‘Grano siciliano in Grecia nel V e nel IV secolo’, ASNP 23: 9–31. –––– (2003), ‘Per una storia degli studi sull’agricoltura e la storia agraria della Grecia antica’, QS 57: 101–45. Figueira, T. J. (1981), Aegina: Society and Politics, Salem, NH. Gallo, L. (1983), ‘Alimentazione e classi sociali. Una nota su orzo e frumento in Grecia’, Opus 2: 449–72. Garnsey, P. (1988), Famine and Food Supply in the Greco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, Cambridge. –––– and Whittaker, C. R. (1983) (eds.), Trade and Famine in Classical Antiquity. PCPS suppl. 8, Cambridge. Gentili, B. (1995), Pindaro. Le Pitiche. With the collaboration of P. Angeli Bernardini, E. Cingano, and P. Giannini, Milan. Gentili, G. V. (1952), ‘Nuovo esempio di ‘theatron’ con gradinata rettilinea a Siracusa’, Dioniso 15: 122–30. Gernet, L. (1909), ‘L’approvisionnement d’Athènes en blé au V et au IV s.’, in M. Bloch (ed.), Mélanges d’histoire ancienne (Paris), 269–391. Giacometti, D. (1990–1), ‘Melanippe e i Neleidi a Metaponto. La versione ateniese di Euripide e quella italiota di Antioco’, AFLPer 28: 277–96. Giannelli, G. (1963), Culti e miti della Magna Grecia. Contributo alla storia piu antica delle colonie greche in Occidente. 2nd ed., Florence. Goldhill, S. (1990), ‘The Great City Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, JHS 107: 58–76, expanded version in Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), 97–129. Gras, M. (1990), ‘Gélon et les temples de Sicile après la bataille d’Himère’, AION (archeol.) 12: 59–68. Greco, E. and Lombardo, M. (2007) (eds.), Atene e l’Occidente. I grandi temi. Le premesse, i protagonisti, le forme della comunicazione e dell’interazione, i modi dell’intervento ateniese in Occidente. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Atene 25–27 maggio 2006, Athens.

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Griffith, M. (1978), ‘Aeschylus, Sicily, and Prometheus’, in R. Dawe, J. Diggle, and P. E. Easterling (eds.), Dionysiaca. Nine Studies in Greek Poetry by Former Pupils, Presented to Denys Page on his Seventieth Birthday (Cambridge), 105–39. Guardì, T. (1990), ‘L’attività teatrale nella Siracusa di Gerone I’, Dioniso 51: 25–47. Habermann, W. (1987), ‘IG I3 386/7, sizilische Häute und die athenisch-sizilischen Handelsbeziehungen im 5. Jahrh. v. Chr.’, MBAH 6: 89–113. Hall, E. (1989), Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy, Oxford. Harrell, S. (2002), ‘King or Private Citizen? Fifth-Century Sicilian Tyrants at Olympia and Delphi’, Mnemosyne 55: 439–64. Herington, C. J. (1967), ‘Aeschylus in Sicily’, JHS 87: 74–85. –––– (1985), Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition, Berkeley. Hinz, V. (1998), Der Kult von Demeter und Kore auf Sizilien und in der Magna Graecia, Wiesbaden. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2000), The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford. Hordern, J. (2004), Sophron’s Mimes, Oxford. Hornblower, S. (2002), The Greek World 478–323 b.c., 3rd ed., London. –––– (2004), Thucydides and Pindar: Historical Narrative and the World of Epinikian Poetry, Oxford. IGDS = L. Dubois (1989), Inscriptions grecques dialectales de Sicile. Contribution à l’étude du vocabulaire grec colonial, Collection de l’École Française de Rome 119, Rome. Isler, H. P. (1994), ‘Siracusa’, in Ciancio Rossetto and Pisani Sartorio (1994), 34–37. Kowalzig, B. (2006), ‘The Aetiology of Empire? Hero-Cult and Athenian Tragedy’, in J. Davidson, F. Muecke, and P. Wilson (eds.), Greek Drama iii. Studies in Honour of Kevin Lee. BICS Suppl. 87 (London), 78–98. –––– (2007a), Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece, Oxford. –––– (2007b), ‘ “And Now All the World Shall Dance” (Eur. Bacch. 114): Dionysos’ Choroi between Ritual and Drama’, in Csapo and Miller (2007), 221–51. Lada-Richards, I. (1999), Initiating Dionysus: Ritual and Theatre in Aristophanes’ Frogs, Oxford. Lanza, D. (2007), ‘Il teatro fra Atene e Siracusa’, in Greco and Lombardo (2007), 206–83. Laronde, A. (1996), ‘L’Exploitation de la chôra cyrénéenne à l’époque classique et hellénistique’, CRAI: 503–27. Lavecchia, S. (1994), ‘Il “Secondo Ditirambo” di Pindaro e i culti tebani’, SCO 44: 33–93. Le Bonniec, H. (1958), Le culte de Cérès à Rome, Rome. Loraux, N. (1986), The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Cambridge, Mass. (orig. L’Invention d’Athènes. Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la cité classique, Paris, 1981). Luni, M. (2001), ‘Le temple dorique hexastyle dans le sanctuaire découvert hors de la porte sud à Cyrène’, CRAI: 1533–55.

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Luraghi, N. (1994), Tirannidi arcaiche in Sicilia e Magna Grecia. Da Panezio di Leontini alla caduta dei Dinomenidi, Florence. McCormick, M. (2001), The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce ad 300–900, Cambridge. Mele, A. (2007), ‘Atene e la Magna Grecia’, in Greco and Lombardo (2007), 239–68. Metzger, E. (1965), Recherches sur l’imagerie athénienne, Paris. Mitens, K. (1988), Teatri greci e teatri ispirati all’architettura greca in Sicilia e nell’Italia meridionale c. 350–50 a.C. Un catalogo. (Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. Supplementa 13), Roma. Molyneux, J. H. (1992), Simonides: A Historical Study, Wauconda, Il. Moreno, A. (2007), Feeding the Democracy: The Athenian Grain-Supply in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries b.c., Oxford. Moretti, J.-C. (1993), ‘Les débuts de l’architecture théâtrale en Sicile et en Italie méridionale (V–III s.)’, Topoi 3: 72–100. Nafissi, M. (1997), ‘Atene e Metaponto: Ancora sulla “Melanippe Desmotis” e i Neleidi’, Ostraka 6: 337–57. Nielsen, I. (2002), Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama. Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity IV, Aarhus. Nilsson, M. P. (1906/95), Griechische Feste von religiöser Bedeutung (mit Ausschluß der attischen) (Leipzig, 1906). 2nd ed. (with an introduction by F. Graf), Stuttgart. Parker, R. C. T. (1996), Athenian Religion: A History, Oxford. –––– (2005), Polytheism and Society at Athens, Oxford. Polacco, L. (1986), ‘I culti di Demeter e Kore a Siracusa’, NAC 15: 21–37. –––– (1990), Il teatro antico di Siracusa II, Rimini. –––– and Anti, C. (1981), Il teatro antico di Siracusa. Monumenti dell’arte classica 1, Rimini. –––– Scolari, A. C., and Troiani, M. (1989), Il santuario di Cerere e Libera ad summam Neapolin di Siracusa, Venice. Poli-Palladini, L. (2001), ‘Some Reflections on Aeschylus’ Aetnae(ae)’, RhM 144: 287– 325. Prauscello, L. (forthcoming), ‘Demeter and Dionysos in the Sixth-Century Southern Argolid: Lasus of Hermione, Demeter Chthonia and its (Dithyrambic) Roots’. Privitera, G. A. (1980), ‘Politica religiosa dei Dinomenidi e ideologia dell’optimus rex’, in Perennitas. Studi in onore di Angelo Brelich (Rome), 393–411. Pugliese Carratelli, G. (1996) (ed.), The Western Greeks, Milan. Revermann, M. (1999–2000), ‘Euripides, Tragedy and Macedon: Some Conditions of Reception’, in M. Cropp, K. Lee, and D. Sansone (eds.), Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century. ICS 24–5: 451–67. –––– (2006), Comic Business: Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy, Oxford. Rhodes, P. (2003), ‘Nothing to Do with Democracy: Athenian Drama and the Polis’, JHS 123: 104–19. Schwartz, G. (1987), Triptolemos: Ikonographie einer Agrar- und Mysteriengottheit. Grazer Beiträge Suppl. 2, Graz.

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Spaeth, B. (1996), The Roman Goddess Ceres, Austin. Spineto, N. (2005), Dionysos a teatro: il contesto festivo del drama Greco, Rome. Talbert, R. J. A. (1974), Timoleon and the Revival of Greek Sicliy, 344–317 bc, Cambridge. Taplin, O. (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vase Painting, Oxford. –––– (1999), ‘Spreading the Word through Performance’, in S. D. Goldhill, and R. G. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge, 33–57. –––– (2006), ‘Aeschylus’ Persai : the Entry of Tragedy into the Celebration Culture of the 470s?’, in F. Garvie, D. Cairns, and V. Liapis (eds.), Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and his Fellow Tragedians in Honour of Alexander F. Garvie (Swansea), 1–10. –––– (2007), Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century b.c., Oxford and New York. Todisco, L. (2002), Teatro e spettacolo in Magna Grecia e Sicilia: testi, immagini, architettura, Milan. –––– (2003) (ed.), La ceramica figurata a soggetto tragico in Magna Grecia e Sicilia, Rome. I tragici greci e l’Occidente (1979). Introduzione di L. Braccesi, Bologna. Vallet, G. (1950), ‘Athènes et l’Adriatique’, MEFRA 62: 33–52. Vanotti, G. (1979), ‘Sofocle e l’Occidente’, in I tragici greci e l’Occidente (1979), 93–125. Veder greco : le necropoli di Agrigento : mostra internazionale, Agrigento, 2 maggio–31 luglio 1988, Rome. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Cambridge (French orig. Paris, 1972–86). Voza, G. (1984–5), ‘Attività nel territorio della Soprintendenza alle antichità di Siracusa nel quadriennio 1980–1984’, Kokalos 30–31: 657–76. –––– (1993–4), ‘Attività archeologica della Soprintendenza di Siracusa e Ragusa’, Kokalos 39–40: 1281–94. –––– (2001), ‘Nuove ricerche sul teatro greco di Siracusa’, in C. Basile and A. di Natale (eds.), La Sicilia antica nei rapporti con l’Egitto: atti del convegno internazionale, Siracusa, 17–18 settembre 1999, Quaderni del Museo del Papiro 10 (Syracuse), 207– 10. White, D. (1964), ‘Demeter’s Sicilian Cult as a Political Instrument’, GRBS 5: 261–79. Wilson, P. J. (2000), The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage, Cambridge. –––– (2003), ‘The Politics of Dance: Dithyrambic Contest and Social Order in Ancient Greece’, in D. Phillips and D. Pritchard (eds.), Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (Swansea), 163–96. –––– (2007), ‘Sicilian Choruses’, in id. (ed.), The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies (Oxford), 351–77. Winkler, J. J. and Zeitlin, F. I. (1990) (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, Princeton.

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Part II Performance: Epic

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6 The Odyssey as Performance Poetry Oswyn Murray

Twenty years ago, in 1987, Oliver Taplin and Beaty Rubens made their tour of Greece for the BBC Radio 4 programme, An Odyssey round Odysseus. I was their historical adviser, and introduced them to Emporio on Chios, Lefkandi and Eretria, Old Smyrna, the stinking open sewer under a flyover near Izmir that is all that is left of the river Meles beside (or from) which Homer was born, and other historical Homeric sites; we travelled together for a fortnight, while I acted as gooseberry to the burgeoning romance between the two lovers. In the course of this odyssey Oliver and I had many discussions about our conflicting views of Homeric performance. Oliver published his theory many years ago as Homeric Soundings (1992). Here at last is my response to our ongoing discussion, which I dedicate to Oliver and Beaty, in memory of conversations which started in the great-eighth century megaron on the top of the windy hill of Ayios Elias at Emporio on Chios, with a pair of eagles circling overhead. How did sympotic poetry begin?1 Of course some would say that it never had a beginning, that alongside the grand epic tradition or traditions there must always have existed shorter musical forms which were the precursors, or indeed fully formed examples of, the later lyric and elegiac forms that we now associate with the symposion: all that we are observing is the absence or presence of evidence for a generic form that must always have been there.2 And in a certain sense this must be true, just as it must be true that there were always more or less ritualized forms of eating and drinking. As Francis Cairns said in relation to the generic forms in literature: The genres are as old as organized societies; they are also universal. Within all human lives there are a number of important recurrent situations which, as societies develop, 1 This reflection of almost half a lifetime finds its starting point in two articles, that of my oldest sympotic friend Chico Rossi––Rossi (1983), and that of Bill Slater––Slater (1990). I have been thinking about their implications for twenty years. 2 See the lively and idiosyncratic discussions of Andrew Dalby (1998) and (2006), ch. 1.

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come to call for regular responses, both in words and in actions. Because literature, which in early society means poetry, concerns itself with these situations, it is natural that renderings and descriptions of these responses should become the staple subjectmatter of literature. Of very great importance in early societies, both on a personal and a public level, is religion, which performs many functions allotted to secular disciplines in more developed societies. Hence, among the standard responses to standard situations encapsulated in literature, a large and important group will be of a religious nature. Our classical genres are therefore in essence older than recorded Greek literature and already established in the cultural heritage of the Greeks long before the Homeric poems or their ancestors were composed. (Cairns (1972), 34)

Nevertheless there is development and change. If we define the symposion as an activity deriving from the Homeric dais, and evolving towards eastern ideas of luxury and refinement, what are the conditions that lead to those specific forms of elegiac and of lyric poetry designed for the symposion? The symposion, it seems, creates a place of performance for poetry which has in essential respects altered from any that could have existed before. The ancient world was insistent upon the distinction between the earlier seated feast of the gods and the Homeric heroes, and the reclining posture of the archaic and classical age; later they even knew that they themselves must change from a seated to a reclining position when discussing the ancient symposion (Athenaeus 11.459–60). But despite this knowledge there seems little speculation about the consequences of the changed posture for the group of participants and their forms of entertainment. The most obvious of these is of course the greater exclusivity and sense of separateness achieved with the reclining banquet. A seated banquet has no limit to the number of its participants; a reclining banquet is limited by what Birgitta Bergquist has termed the dynamics of sympotic space: the diagonal across the drinking room must not exceed the distance needed for communication along this diagonal, if everyone is to participate in the verbal games and musical activities appropriate to the symposion. Thus the sympotic group will normally be defined by the number of couches that can be fitted around the walls of an andrôn whose size is limited by its diagonal, and whose walls therefore contain a minimum of three, and normally from seven to eleven couches, up to an absolute maximum of fifteen, giving a group of up to double these numbers with two participants on each couch.3 So the size of the group and the sense of exclusiveness among the participants must change from the seated Homeric dais which has no such limitation on numbers. Given restrictions of space and expense, the entertainment will often at least initially be provided from within the group: the 3

Bergquist (1990).

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early lyric and elegiac poet is a member of the group and discourses on equal terms with the others: the professional poet of the Homeric epic whose social class is that of a dêmiourgos, different from the other participants, is more difficult to accommodate until rediscovered in the grand tyrannical symposion of the late archaic age. This last development can be seen in the shift from the personal poetry of the ‘amateur’ poet (Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus) to the generic style of the ‘professional’ (Theognis, Anacreon, Simonides, and Pindar).4 Archaic poetry takes account of this change in forms of conviviality in terms of both attention span and audience participation, as we see emerging such sympotic forms as the catena, the alternation of singers, and the performance by successive members of the group. So poetry becomes shorter and more structured, and its themes change to reflect the interests of a smaller and more exclusive group; and it also involves the audience more directly in its performance. Despite the number of theories and the confident assertions of their protagonists, one of the great unsolved mysteries of epic poetry is where and how was it performed. The length and continuity of its narrative structure have often seemed to imply a festival or competition venue, and perhaps a public performance, such as the Hymn to Apollo claims for the performance of ‘Homer’ on the island of Delos, and such as the stories about the contest of Homer and Hesiod presuppose. Certainly later there was a strong tradition that the Homeric epics had been (or at least came to be) performed in competition at a particular festival such as the Panathenaea.5 Others have looked to the great Ionian festivals such as the Anthesteria on Delos,6 or to other unspecified festival contexts. Others have tried to assert either the aristocratic or the plebeian character of the epics.7 Recognizing that there is no convincing early evidence in favour of any of these contexts, yet others have taken refuge in simple evasion: for James Redfield, ‘We should not speak of the “background” of the poems as though we could reconstruct Homeric society and then apply this reconstruction to the interpretation of the poems’; and ‘song in Homer is of two types, which we may call song-for-something and song-for-itself’;8 for Seaford the poems simply lie in a pre-political frame before the polis or in the proto-polis.9 In this respect Barbara Graziosi goes 4 Compare the distinction of Nagy (1990), 342: ‘the symposium was a last stand for non-professional performance of both monodic and choral composition.’ 5 This widely held view has recently been reasserted by Haubold (2000); but as he points out (p. xi) ‘The Great Panathenaea does not answer the question of who first heard Homer’––or indeed where. 6 Auffarth (1991). 7 Maehler (1963), 34; Dalby (1995), 279: ‘a kind of literature which is essentially a discourse among the people’. 8 9 Redfield (1975), xi, 30. Seaford (1994), 2.

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even further, when she contrasts epic with lyric, and claims that the Homeric poems deliberately offer no context of performance, in order to create a universal appeal: Archaic lyric, elegy and iambus privilege one context of performance which is then evoked whenever the poem is recited or read. Nothing of the sort can be said about the Homeric poems: there is no allusion there to an original context for which the poems were meant, nor do we find the poet addressing a privileged audience . . . it is important to note that the original context of performance (whether real or imaginary) is not contained within the Homeric poems and that this makes it very easy to separate performance from composition.10

It is not however true that ‘the Homeric poems say nothing specific about their intended audience’, nor that they ‘carefully avoid giving any clear indications.’11 As Nagy rightly points out, the problem is rather that they reveal nothing about that audience which is consistent with the structure of the poems themselves: ‘the epic poetry of Homer refers to epic poetry as a medium that was performed in the context of an evening’s feast. Yet we know that the two epic poems of Homer, by virtue of their sheer length alone, defy this context.’12 It is this problem that prevents us from specifying a common context of performance for either of the two poems. We should therefore consider them separately. The Iliad is not a selfreflective poem: nowhere do we find a poet performing an epic or even a fragment of an epic for the kings in private or in public. The poet sings the klea andrôn and regards this activity as justifying the deeds of his heroes; but nowhere does he describe the relation of his activity to the world which is the subject of his song. There is no audience except Patroclus for Achilles’ melancholy singing in his tent (9.186–94); there is no description of an epic performance on the Shield of Achilles, either in its depictions of peace or in those of war: there are popular forms of performance, the wedding song and dancing, the vintage song, but there is no aristocratic banquet or great festival. In the main story, the kings in council never seem to engage in feasting with music or other entertainment. Only once is a place of performance mentioned, obliquely––in the banquet of the gods at the end of Iliad 1. 595– 604. Here the quarrel of Zeus and Hera is settled by Hephaestus, and the gods sit feasting in the palace of Zeus; while Hephaestus acts as cupbearer, drawing nectar from the krater, moving among them to the unquenchable laughter of the gods, as the wine circulates endexia––in the proper fashion of the later symposion, from left to right; and they feast all day until sundown, while 10 12

Graziosi (2002), 46 f. Nagy (1990), 21.

11

Graziosi and Haubold (2005), 115; Graziosi (2002), 88.

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Apollo and Muses provide the music, singing alternately with sweet voice, until it is time for bed.13 The songs the Muses sing are not described, but they are surely not epic; they are ‘amoeboean’, so shorter, possibly lyric pieces. This reference to amoeboean poetic entertainment has indeed aroused disquiet among commentators as being somehow inconsistent with the normal Homeric picture of Apollo; I would add that the entire context seems to reflect an awareness of the rituals of the symposion, which could perhaps be held to support G. S. Kirk’s contention that this may be ‘a late-aoidic elaboration’. We do not therefore know what the performance context of the Iliad might have been, and we are free to imagine on the basis of the structure of the poem any occasion that might suit it. It may indeed be true (as Oliver Taplin suggested) that the structure suggests three or perhaps four great sweeps, which might have been designed for and even performed on successive days of a public festival in some early Panhellenic religious or civic event. The picture in the Odyssey is quite different, as Stephanie West points out.14 The poet is explicit; the art of the professional aoidos is central to the narrative, and the claim is made specifically again and again that the aoidos performs his epic in the banquets of the heroes––and apparently nowhere else, certainly not in any festival context. Demodocus’ performances in the palace of Alcinous are described in detail. On the first occasion he is presented as a man to whom the Muse has given the gift of song, while taking away his sight, so that he can sing the klea andrôn, and specifically the story of the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles; Odysseus himself is moved to tears (8.62–92). Later in the same book at a second banquet Odysseus asks Demodocus, who he says has surely been taught by the Muse or Apollo, to sing of how Odysseus created the wooden horse and how Troy was sacked. Demodocus begins his song as a traditional epic performance, with a formal invocation to the god, and describes the events in graphic detail; again Odysseus breaks down in tears (8.482–535). The feast and the poet are here envisaged as the centre of the heroic life. Phaeacians, we are told, delight in the feast, the dear lyre and dances, clean clothes, hot baths and bed; they are famed for seamanship, speed of foot, dancing and song (246–9). As Odysseus says to his hosts (9.5–11): There is no more delightful end than when euphrosyne rules among all the people, as the banqueters in the room listen to the singer, seated in order, the tables before them 13

Kirk (1985), 114, who describes the scene as ‘unparalleled’. Cf. West (1988), 96; given Graziosi’s long discussion of the Hymn to Apollo 165–73, I am puzzled by the absence of any discussion of this aspect of the Odyssey in Graziosi (2002), ch. 2. Dalby (1995) denies that this is a portrayal of the Homeric aoidos, because he wishes to assert that epic poetry is a poetry of the people: but he does not explain why the poet has offered this picture, or how it fits into the peasant household that he envisages. 14

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filled with meat and bread, and the servant draws the wine from the mixing bowl and pours it into each cup: that is what seems to me to be the best thing in the world.

Odysseus’ palace is no different (17.264–71): Eumaeus, this must surely be the fine house of Odysseus: it would be easy to recognize and pick out even among many. There are buildings on buildings, and the court is well fenced with a wall and cornice, and the double gates are well protected: no man could force it. And I see that many men are feasting within, for the smell of fat is there, and the lyre sounds, which the gods have made as companion of the feast.

The songs of Phemius are like those of Demodocus, freshly composed episodes from an epic ‘corpus’ imagined as covering the whole age of heroes. In book 1 he sings of the nostoi of the heroes, prefiguring of course the whole theme of the Odyssey as the return of Odysseus; again he provokes tears in Penelope (1.325–44); otherwise his songs are not described in any detail, but he is of course in the end pardoned for having performed for the suitors, as the prototype of the bard whose story is now approaching its end. And in turn (as many commentators have pointed out) Odysseus himself becomes the bard, similarly singing a fragment of the heroic corpus, as he recounts his own exploits in the palace of Alcinous over four whole books. The only other occasion of performance mentioned in the Odyssey is the lay of Ares and Aphrodite, sung in public by Demodocus, together with a dance by a chorus of young men (8.256–366). It is not clear whether these are two separate entertainments, followed by a third ball dance, or a single ‘narrative dance’; if the latter, this would surely suggest that Demodocus’ song was (like that of the Muses in the Iliad) in some sense choral rather than in epic metre. In all of these descriptions there is no suggestion that we should differentiate the singing of the actual narrative itself from the imagined performances contained within it. Two of the two examples, that of Phemius in the final banquet and that of Odysseus as epic narrator in the palace of Alcinous, indeed raise an important question about the interplay between narrative and performance: for here the figure of the narrator appears both within the narrative and as a presenter of the narrative, in the first case described, in the second performing. This ambiguity points in turn to the fact that there are indeed three levels of performance involved: the poet as actor within the narrative, the poet as narrator of parts of the narrative, and the poet who performs the Odyssey itself, and who therefore is a poet who narrates the poet narrating the (poet’s) actions. Furthermore this corresponds to the themes and structure of the Odyssey itself: the poet of the Odyssey envisages his bard and therefore himself as singing within the context of the banquet, and taking part in action much of

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which occurs in the context of the banquet, so that the action itself takes place within the banquet and is recalled in the banquet; both narrative and recollection belong there, for a high proportion of the episodes are cast as recollection within the context of the banquet, or as events taking place around the banquet. More importantly still, the entire structure of the Odyssey is also adapted to the banquet as place of performance; so that the whole poem is a celebration of the banquet in both content and structure. Thus Homer constructs his epic around an architecture which is clearly designed for performance in the banquet; the episodes, the breaks within the narration are the natural breaks that belong within the banquet context. This insistence on the rhythm of the banquet and this self-conscious attention to the setting and the performance needs of the banquet surely invite us, indeed compel us, to accept the ‘original’ intended place of performance of the Odyssey as a series of separate but doubtless consecutive banquets. For, as I demonstrate in the appendix, the narrative itself is structured as a series of ‘cantos’, in which each canto presents an episode which is suited to be told within the context of a single banquet; the poem most naturally divides into a series of some forty or so sections, each comprising roughly 200 to 400 lines, and not into larger units. These canto divisions are more natural and more obvious than the book divisions which we owe to the Alexandrian scholarly tradition, although these themselves often coincide with the episodic banquet divisions–– naturally, for the Hellenistic world still thought in sympotic terms.15 Each ‘canto’ is marked off by breaks which are both natural points of rest in the story, and also related to the banquet milieu. Thus the narrative is punctuated by dawns, arrivals, departures, sleep or rest, and other natural breaks; the scenes are set in a succession of feasts by an author whose selfconsciousness implicates the epic poet in his own narrative. This narrative, I believe, is designed for a series of performances rather than a single session: if we were to imagine a public performance, we must at least suppose a monthlong series of religious festival or public feasts.16 But the type of banquet envisaged within the poem seems more restricted than such public occasions; it takes place among aristocrats and in the megaron, a room devoted to the activity of feasting. Moreover the audience as they listen take part in the performance: the narrative, as is inevitable in such a situation, is addressed 15 Cf. Giangrande (1968), Cameron (1995), ch. III. Griffin (1987), 35 already noted: ‘the action of the Odyssey shows a definite tendency to divide into separate days, each followed by an appearance of rose-fingered Dawn, but perhaps there is also a feeling that an after-dinner song, a single book, is now over, and it is time for bed. That would be a possible way of reciting the poem: a book after dinner for twenty-four nights.’ 16 Compare the Ptolemaic Letter of Aristeas, in which the series of questions and answers on kingship (187–300) takes place over a succession of seven royal banquets.

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directly to them, and they themselves become the participants in the series of banquets conjured up before them. They too take part in a succession of feasts of more or less exotic type, they visit the Cyclops’ cave and partake in the feast as guests and as reluctant sacrificial meat, they taste Circe’s magic potion and are transformed into animals, they are shipwrecked with Odysseus and survive to be welcomed by Nausicaa and her people, the ideal Phaeacians, in a succession of banquets in which Odysseus the bard sings his own story within the narrative, as it is itself being sung to the real audience by Homer himself. And finally with a supreme artistic irony the story reaches its climax in a banquet scene, in which the audience is required to become fully engaged in the closing action. The poet-hero enters the megaron and bolts the doors, and ‘as easily as a poet skilled in the lyre strings the cord around a new peg looping the twisted sheep’s gut at both ends, so without effort he strung the great bow and with his right hand tried the string, which sounded sweetly in answer like the cry of a swallow’ (21.406–11): the poet’s lyre is transformed into the hero’s bow and he turns it on his audience; with each twang of the lyre a listener drops dead: and suddenly it is their contemporary hall that fills with night, it is their meat that drips red, as wailing and lamentation arise, and the walls and roof beams in the flickering light of the oil lamps are spattered with blood (20.345 ff.), as they try desperately to hide from the wrath of the poet-hero. And then in a final act of apology the poet returns them to reality, as he discovers himself in the form of Phemius, cowering among the overturned benches, and through Phemius pleads for their forgiveness. This is the first and most powerful scene of audience participation in the whole of western literature. ‘The end of their story is also the end of ours.’17 Why this difference between Iliad and Odyssey? Is it pure chance that the content of the Iliad is silent about the role of the poet, and that its very structure seems inconsistent with any notion that it could have been performed in whole or in part in the context of the feast; whereas the Odyssey is so insistent on locating the poet within the feast, and on dividing itself into a series of episodes, each of which is placed in relation to the feasting context? How does this relate to the changes that we must assume to have taken place in the role of the poet with the coming of the reclining symposion? The question is as much one about presentation as about actual performance. In the conclusion of her excellent book, Graziosi revives the useful distinction made by Erich Auerbach between representation and reality.18 17

Haubold (2000), 98, of the Iliad in relation to its audience. Graziosi (2002), 236–55; cf. Auerbach (1953). If I seem to be engaging too intently with the work of Graziosi, it is because I regard her book as the most interesting and subtle of all the modern studies of ‘Homer’. 18

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Here it is essentially the representation by the poet that we are concerned with: how and why did he thus represent the art of the aoidos? Of course it follows that, if this representation corresponds to the perceived structure of the poem, it has some possibility of being a representation of reality; but this is not so important, because the representation is itself the only reality that we can know. There are two possible types of response to this question, and they are by no means exclusive of each other, indeed perhaps both are correct. The first is traditional: it might be argued that there had always existed a form of epic specifically suited to the aristocratic feasting context, alongside a form perhaps designed for more public performance. Thus the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey could reflect a double tradition, of public festival and of private feasting performance; each poem would then be formally adapted to the context of performance in accordance with two separate oral epic traditions: such theories have of course been held in the past to explain the difference in ethos between the two poems;19 and there are many versions of the traditional analyst position that could be held to be compatible with such a view. I have no problem with such a picture; indeed, despite their differences, I believe that there was a substantive continuity between Homeric feast and archaic symposion.20 However on this occasion I wish to explore a more dynamic model of the development of sympotic song. Like the poet of the Odyssey, Stesichorus also envisages the feast as a place where both poem and singer are located: ‘The hero [Adrastus] addressed him thus: Alcmaon where have you risen to go, leaving the banqueters and our excellent bard?’ (Stesichorus S148: POxy. 2618.) Various scholars have indeed fixed on the figure of Stesichorus as representing a significant step in the development of different generic forms from the epic; for, despite his closeness to Homeric diction, he seems to be seeking to transform the language and stories of traditional epic for performance in a different setting: the purpose of his poetry seems to be to produce poems shorter, better articulated, and therefore more suited than the epic tradition to performance within a context of festival or citharodic contest, or 19 For instance Griffin (1980), 15, who sees the Iliad as aristocratic, the Odyssey as less so; though I feel that from a formal point of view he has inverted the natural distinction between public epic and private performances suitable for the aristocratic feast. I agree with Haubold (2000), 100: ‘With the Odyssey we enter a different world. Here, too, the people play an important role; but standing in the shadow of the more prominent “companions” (hetairoi) and “suitors” (mnesteres), they become the object of narrative scrutiny in a different way’; cf.105, ‘a shift from “people” to “companions” ’; 127, ‘the suitors and companions . . . become the Odyssean groups par excellence’. 20 Cf. Murray (1983); in this respect I have always been close to the position set out by Wecowski (2002), although I do not accept all the consequences he seeks to draw from it.

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some other social context which requires performances of shorter length, such as the symposion. He has often seemed to mark a transition or a breaking down of Homeric forms: wherever heroic epic had been previously performed, it was now seeking more varied audiences and roles.21 I believe that the author of the Odyssey, with his self-conscious reflections on the role of the poet, belongs in this period of transition. The most significant new place of performance was the symposion, in itself a direct descendant of the Homeric feast, but requiring a more fluid style of performance, a less monolithic storyline. The Odyssey belongs in a period of experimenting with new forms of poetic composition: it seeks to tell a long epic tale within the feasting context; moreover it is articulated in a form of episodic composition which enables the author to lay down and take up his story within a series of banquet or sympotic occasions. The author of the Odyssey and Stesichorus are both perhaps attempting in their different ways to adapt Homeric epic to a new context, that of the symposion. That would explain the reaction of other sympotic poets. Lyric poets often reflect on the themes appropriate to their songs; there is a strong tradition that their poems are particularly suited to the activities appropriate to the symposion, especially the drinking of wine, the pleasures of Aphrodite and the place of the Muses as entertainment in this sympotic world. Wine, women, and song, the famous triad of western conviviality finds its first explicit mention in Solon F 26: ‘These are the works that are dear to me, those of the Cyprian goddess, those of Dionysus and those of the Muses, who bring joyousness to men (euphrosynai).’ But as I have argued before, this relationship between the reclining symposion, poetry, sexual fulfilment, and wine is there long before, in our earliest sympotic evidence, Nestor’s cup: ‘I am Nestor’s cup, well made for drinking. But he who drinks from this cup, straightway the desire of Aphrodite of the lovely crown will seize him.’22 This is the positive programme of the new poets. But they also have a negative view. Sometimes they offer a contrast with other potential activities in a theme which I will designate, ‘Nicht diese Töne’, from the heart-stopping moment in Beethoven’s Ninth, before the great ode to Freude (which is of course the translation into German of euphrosyne): ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern lasst uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere!’ Thus Stesichorus appears to contrast war and feasting: ‘Muse thrusting wars aside and 21

Rossi (1983), Burkert (1987), Dalby (2006), 16 f. Murray (1994). Dalby (2006), 107–8 seriously misrepresents this evidence, in claiming that the cup discovered on Ischia is large and four-handled, and a direct attempt to replicate the cup of Nestor described by Homer: he has clearly never seen the object in question, or read the archaeological literature on its discovery. 22

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with me celebrating the weddings of the gods, the banquets of men and the festivities of the blest’ (F 210 = Aristophanes, Peace 775 ff.). And Anacreon says: ‘I do not like him who, drinking wine by the full krater, talks of strife and bloody war, but him who, mingling the shining gifts of the Muses and Aphrodite, recalls delightful euphrosyne’ (F 2 West). Xenophanes in one of the earliest and fullest set of rules for the symposion repeats this theme (F 1 West): Praise the man who in his drink displays noble thoughts, as memory and his zeal for virtue allow. It is not good to recite the battles of Titans or of Giants or of Centaurs, the inventions of former men, or the violence of faction, in which there is nothing of benefit, but it is good always to have regard for the gods.

Xenophanes’ rejection of past poetry is more moral and less hedonistic than is the case with the other poets: the sympotic poet here rejects both the works of older poets who performed songs about the heroic world and those newer sympotic poets who present current political problems, in favour of moral and religious songs. Similarly Ibycus F 282 in a long recusatio which in many respects recalls the epic world in the manner of Stesichorus, renounces epic themes in favour of praise of Polycrates, in a poem of sympotic form which is surely composed for a sympotic context. In all these different ways epic was then a contested theme in the symposion. This rejection of the traditional themes of epic poetry is part of a competitive world, in which the rivalry of poets on behalf of their style of poetry as particularly suited to the symposion is at issue. The trope implies that epic themes had indeed been adapted and presented as competition for what became more normal in the sympotic context, monodic and personal lyric, the poetry of love and pleasure. Nicht diese Töne! What does this rejection of the music of the past amount to? Who are these others so despised? Reflecting on the function of lyric poetry within the symposion and the possible rivals for attention in this context, we might most obviously point to the didactic and hortatory poetry of elegy, to poets like Theognis, Callinus, or Tyrtaeus. Is there perhaps here being played out a contrast between the poetry of the aulos and the poetry of the lyre, between a poetry that sees itself as defining a moral parameter or military purpose for the group, and one that celebrates its pleasures? But these two contrasting types of sympotic occasion were not yet rivals: it is only with the fifth-century sympotic poets that pleasure and duty came to seem to be opposed to each other in the different sympotic practices of Sparta and Athens.23 It is I 23

See Murray (1991).

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suggest Xenophanes who gives the answer: the rejected poets are not the moralizing poets of elegy, among whom Xenophanes himself belongs, but those who have attempted to adapt epic and heroic themes to the world of the symposion, and also those who, like Archilochus and Alcaeus, have sought to use sympotic poetry for the political aims of the hetaireia. In contrast the mainstream lyric poets of the symposion self-consciously proclaim themselves poets who devote their poetic skills to the pursuits of love and pleasure. Where then might the poet of the Odyssey fit into this picture? As the greatest and perhaps the last poet of the epic tradition, I suggest that he seems in his very insistence and self-consciousness to be seeking to place himself within the new world of the symposion; both groups, the old and the new poets, try to define themselves against each other: ‘singer envies singer’ in the words of Hesiod (WD 25–6). His attempt did not succeed, because he could find no successor: there is no subsequent tradition of sympotic epic. But I confess to believing that, though Homer may have lost this particular battle, his achievement in the Odyssey was to create a new form of epic, and a sympotic poetry which, in the sophistication of its narrative and the complexity of its multiple layers of performance technique, is far superior to anything offered by his contemporaries or rivals. And lest my readers imagine that this vision of a sympotic Odyssey is as solipsistic as any other vision of Homeric performance, let me assert that I am merely reviving an ancient belief: the classical world also saw the narrative of the Odyssey as taking place in the context of the symposion. The Penelope Painter is well known for his use of themes from the Odyssey: around 450 bc he represented the killing of the suitors in the way that I have presented it, as taking place within the symposion. On one side of a (sympotic) skyphos Odysseus with two female companions (Athena and Penelope?) stands by the door of the andrôn, his bow drawn to shoot; on the other side the suitors seek to defend themselves: one of them, wounded, turns in anguish, another starts up with a gesture of alarm from the couch on which they have been reclining, while a third upends a table (typical furniture of the symposion) to hide behind it.24 So too in the early fourth century, the herôon of Trysa in Lycia was covered with relief scenes (now in Vienna), many of them related to the ‘reclining banquet’ motif: one series in particular, on the inner side of the sanctuary wall, west of the south entrance, shows in a series of five scenes the killing of the suitors as a wholly sympotic episode.25 The first scene shows Penelope and servants with Eumaeus moving right towards a door. The 24

Berlin Antikenmuseen 2588. LIMC s.v. Mnesteres II nos 9 and 14. The best pictures of the Penelope Painter cup are in Boardman (1989), no. 246, and of the Trysa monument in Eichler (1950). 25

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second is modelled on the classical votive relief:26 Odysseus and Telemachus replace the worshippers who would normally appear on the left, Odysseus with his bow drawn, while the reclining figure of the hero is transformed into a suitor who starts up from the couch with hand outstretched in a gesture of alarm rather than greeting. On the third scene there are two couches and four symposiasts, one using a cushion or table to defend himself, one trying to pluck an arrow from his back, one standing and hiding behind a bed coverlet, while the fourth is apparently already dead, his cup fallen to the floor. The fourth scene is similar, with one couch and four figures, one hiding behind a cushion or table, one apparently shot in the stomach, with two standing figures, one crouching, the other (perhaps female) who seems to cringe away. On the final relief a single couch holds a man hiding behind a coverlet. These artists were not indulging in an anachronistic image of the Homeric banquet as a contemporary symposion, but reliving the experience intended by Homer himself. For the author of the Odyssey, as for these artists, the symposion is not just a simple place of performance, but an enclosed world devoted to the enactment of adventure, in which the imagination is transformed by a sense of companionship and separation from the outside: the symposion is itself an odyssey, a voyage of discovery of self as well as of the imagined geographical space of the external world. In such an atmosphere the poet’s listeners can be induced to participate in the adventures they are hearing, to perform the story in their own imaginations: it is Homer’s ability to create this dimension within the sympotic space that makes me wish to present the author of the Odyssey to you as the first and the greatest of all sympotic performers.27

APPENDIX: THE SYMPOTIC STRUCTURE OF THE ODYSSEY These divisions are merely suggestions intended to illustrate the principles on which the Odyssey has been constructed in sympotic ‘lays’; they are not definitive, nor do they necessarily correspond to actual divisions used by the poet or poets in possible performances. Canto 1: Book I: Telemachus receives his orders; the feast of the suitors at Odysseus’ palace; Telemachus sleeps (444 lines). Canto 2: Book II: The assembly on Ithaca; Telemachus departs and sails through the night (434 lines). 26

Dentzer (1982). This paper has been presented to audiences at the Universities of Salerno (2006), Tulsa (Oklahoma), and UCLA (2007): I am grateful for their often sceptical comments. 27

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Canto 3: Book III: Telemachus with Nestor; sacrifice and feast; Telemachus departs (497 lines). Canto 4: Book IV 1–346: Telemachus feasts at Menelaus’ palace (346 lines). Canto 5: Book IV 347–623: The story of the old man of the sea; the feast at Menelaus’ palace (276 lines). Canto 6: Book IV 624–847: The suitors on Ithaca plot (223 lines). Canto 7: Book V: Odysseus leaves Calypso; his shipwreck; he sleeps on the beach (493 lines). Canto 8: Book VI: Odysseus meets Nausicaa (331 lines). Canto 9: Book VII: Odysseus arrives at Alcinous’ palace as the last libations are being poured; all go to sleep (347 lines). Canto 10: Book VIII 1–234: Alcinous feasts Odysseus, who hears the lay of Demodocus on the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles (234 lines). Canto 11: Book VIII 235–586: Games and dancing; Demodocus performs in public the lay of Aphrodite and Ares; the evening feast: Demodocus sings at Odysseus’ request the sack of Troy (351 lines).

Books IX–XII: The song of Odysseus Canto 12: Book IX 1–306: The feasting of the Cyclops; night falls (306 lines). Canto 13: Book IX 307–566: The blinding of the Cyclops and the escape (259 lines). Canto 14: Book X 1–243: Circe feasts the crew (243 lines). Canto 15: Book X 244–574: Circe feasts Odysseus (330 lines). Canto 16: Book XI 1–334: Odysseus offers food in the Underworld. At 334 the song ceases, and Odysseus apologizes to his hosts, asking for bed and a safe journey––an obvious resting point in a narrative otherwise too long. The banqueters beg him to continue (334 lines). Canto 17: Book XI 335–640 + XII 1–7: The visit to the Underworld continued; return from Circe’s island to sleep on the shore (312 lines). Canto 18: Book XII 8–260: Scylla and Charybdis (258 lines). Canto 19: Book XII 261–453, XIII 1–184: the island of the Sun; Odysseus loses his crew and arrives at Calypso’s island; he finishes his story (376 lines). Canto 20: Book XIII 185–440: Return of Odysseus to Ithaca; the meeting with Athene; Odysseus disguised (265 lines). Canto 21: Book XIV 1–184?: Feast in Eumaeus’ hut (184 lines). Canto 22: Book XIV 184–533: Odysseus entertains Eumaeus at supper with his false story; Odysseus sleeps while Eumaeus keeps watch (349 lines). Canto 23: Book XV 1–300: Return of Telemachus: preparations; farewell feast with Menelaus and Helen; voyage as night falls (300 lines).

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Canto 24: Book XV 301–492: Feast of Odysseus and Eumaeus; the latter’s story lasts till dawn (191 lines). Canto 25: Book XV 493–552, XVI 1–320: Arrival of Telemachus; Odysseus and Telemachus meet, feast, and sleep (379 lines). Canto 26: Book XVI 321–481: The suitors plot; Eumaeus brings news from town; Odysseus and Telemachus eat and sleep (160 lines). Canto 27: Book XVII 1–327: Odysseus goes to town; meeting with Argos (327 lines). Canto 28: Book XVII 328–606: Insults to Odysseus (278 lines). Canto 29: Book XVIII: The beggars at the feast; the feast ends and all depart (428 lines). Canto 30: Book XIX 1–348: Odysseus talks with Penelope (348 lines). Canto 31: Book XIX 349–604: Eurycleia recognizes him; the story of the scar; Penelope retires to sleep (255 lines). Canto 32: Book XX 1–240: Preparations for the feast (240 lines). Canto 33: Book XX 241–394: The last supper begins; the poet breaks in with an authorial comment to increase suspense: wait for the next episode (390–4) (153 lines). Canto 34: Book XXI: The contest of the bow (434 lines). Canto 35: Book XXII 1–199: The slaughter begins (199 lines). Canto 36: Book XXII 200–501: Mentor-Athene appears; the slaughter continues (301 lines) Canto 37: Book XXIII: Odysseus and Penelope (372 lines). Canto 38: Book XXIV 1–202: The souls of the suitors enter Hades (202 lines). Canto 39: Book XXIV 203–548: Odysseus goes to visit Laertes; the feud is ended (345 lines).

REFERENCES Auerbach, E. (1953), Mimesis, Princeton. Auffarth, C. (1991), Der drohende Untergang: ‘Schöpfung’ in Mythos und Ritual im alten Orient und in Griechenland am Beispiel der Odyssee und des Ezechielbuches, Berlin. Bergquist, B. (1990), ‘Sympotic Space: A Functional Aspect of Greek Dining-Rooms’, in Murray (1990), 37–65. Boardman, J. (1989), Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, London. Burkert, W. (1987), ‘The Making of Homer in the 6th Century bc: Rhapsodes versus Stresichorus’ in Papers on the Amasis Painter and His World (Malibu), 43–62 (Reprinted in Douglas L. Cairns (2001) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford), 92–116).

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Cairns, F. (1972), Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry, Edinburgh. Cameron, A. (1995), Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton. Dalby, A. (1995), ‘The Iliad, the Odyssey and their Audiences’, CQ 45: 269–79. –––– (1998), ‘Homer’s Enemies’, in Fisher and van Wees (1998), 195–211. –––– (2006), Rediscovering Homer, London. Dentzer, J.-M. (1982), Le Motif du banquet couché dans le proche-orient et le monde grec du VIIe au IVe siècle avant J.-C. BEFAR 246, Rome. Eichler, F. (1950), Die Reliefs des Heroon von Gjölbaschi-Trysa, Vienna. Fisher, N. and van Wees, H. (1998) (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence, London. Giangrande, G. (1968), ‘Sympotic Literature and Epigram’, in L’Épigramme grecque. Entretiens Hardt xiv (Geneva), 91–177. Graziosi, B. (2002), Inventing Homer, Cambridge. –––– and Haubold, J. (2005), Homer: the Resonance of Epic, London. Griffin, J. (1980), Homer, Oxford. –––– (1987), Homer, The Odyssey, Cambridge. Haubold, J. (2000), Homer’s People: Epic Poetry and Social Formation, Cambridge. Kirk, G. S. (1985), The Iliad: A Commentary, vol.1, Cambridge. Maehler, H. (1963), Die Auffassung des Dichterberufs im frühen Griechentum bis zur Zeit Pindars, Göttingen. Murray, O. (1983), ‘The Symposion as Social Organisation’, in R. Hägg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the 8th Century b.c.: Tradition and Innovation (Athens/ Stockholm), 195–9. –––– (1990) (ed.), Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion, Oxford. –––– (1991), ‘War and the Symposium’, in W. J. Slater (ed.), Dining in a Classical Context (Ann Arbor), 83–104. –––– (1994), ‘Nestor’s Cup and the Origins of the Symposion’, Apoikia: scritti in onore di Giorgio Buchner, AION ns 1: 47–54. Nagy, G. (1990), Pindar’s Homer, Baltimore. Redfield, J. M. (1975), Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hektor, Chicago. Rossi, L. E. (1983), ‘Feste religiose e letteratura: Stesicoro o dell’epica alternativa’, Orpheus 4: 5–31. Seaford, R. (1994), Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State, Oxford. Slater, W. J. (1990), ‘Sympotic Ethics in the Odyssey’, in Murray (1990), 213–20. Taplin, O. (1992), Homeric Soundings, Oxford. Wecowski, M. (2002), ‘Homer and the Origins of the Symposion’, in F. Montanari (ed.), Omero tremila anni dopo, Rome. West, S. (1988), in A. Heubeck, S. West, J. B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey I , Oxford.

7 Performance and Rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod* Adrian Kelly

Among the several episodes at the end of the Odyssey to arouse the suspicious notice of scholarship,1 the ‘recapitulation’ (23.310–43) has attracted its fair share of criticism. Odysseus’ précis of his adventures to Penelope has been deemed (inter alia) unnecessary, cursory, selective, and even unique in summarizing his wanderings in oratio obliqua, for everywhere else those narratives are put into the mouth of the poem’s main character.2 Of these objections, the last is at least interesting, because it focuses on the poet’s decision to narrate Odysseus’ précis not in direct speech, but in his own, third-person voice. This article will argue that his decision should be understood within the broader context of the relationship between the poet and Odysseus.3 Seen in this light, the recapitulation can reveal much about Homer’s conception of his craft, and his attitude towards other (competing) aoidoi. * This article is offered as an inevitably inadequate return to the Prof. in Boots for his unfailing humour, support, and instruction. I would like to thank Bill Allan, Bob Cowan, Sophie Gibson, Max Kramer, Martin Revermann, Peter Wilson, and audiences in Oxford and Exeter for their assistance on this piece and its material. All translations are mine. 1 Cf. Kelly (2007a) for a recent treatment and bibliography. 2 For summary details and references, cf. Heubeck (1989) ad loc., 346–7. Aristarkhos’ athetesis of the passage (with which Σ QV ad loc. already disagrees) proves no more than its attestation, while Aristotle’s statement (Rhet. 1417a13–15) that the recapitulation consisted of 60 verses could either be evidence for a more extensive version (Heubeck), or simply imprecision; see Page (1955), 131 n. 11; cf. Erbse (1972), 175 n. 25. For criticism of the indirect speech here, cf. esp. Cauer (1921–3), 430–2; Schwartz (1924), 332; Theiler (1950), 107–8; Page (1955), 116; Kirk (1962), 249 (ambivalent); Suerbaum (1968), 170–1 and n. 42; Oswald (1993), 106–17; contra, e.g. Danek (1998), 460–1. 3 The terms ‘poet’ and ‘Homer’ are used interchangeably in this article to refer to the author of the Odyssey and Iliad as we have them. I see no reason not to place their composition in the late 8th or early 7th centuries bc, though sufficient evidence (in type, quantity and variety) for their emergence into wider Greek consciousness only begins to appear in the middle of the 6th century; cf. West (1995).

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Let us begin with the fact that the Odyssey habitually uses passages of indirect speech for the heroic songs of Phemios and Demodokos (1.325–7; 8.73–83, 499–521).4 It would, thus, be far from inappropriate to use the same device for one of Odysseus’ performances, particularly given how often and thoroughly he is drawn in specifically bardic or quasi-bardic terms.5 Characters from Alkinoos (11.363–9) to Eumaios (17.518–21) remark on his true and false stories along precisely these lines, and the poet himself makes the link as Odysseus strings his bow (21.406–11), comparing that action with the bard stringing his phorminx (‘lyre’). Furthermore, though he does not sing, Odysseus uses in the Apologoi good epic technique––catalogues (11.235–332, 568–632), aporiai (11.328–9; cf. Il. 2.484–92), similes (9.51–2, 190–2, etc.), storm scenes,6 ring composition and doublets.7 He opens his performance to the Phaeacians with a proem8 conveying his identity (9.19–21; cf. Theog. 22– 34; cf. Hymn. Ap. 169–76), containing a rhetorical question about the order and content of his story (9.14; cf. e.g. Il. 1.8, 2.484–92, 11.299–300, 16.112–13; Hymn. Ap. 19 = 207, 25–7)9 and a topic statement at the beginning of the narrative followed by a transitional relative pronoun (9.37–8; cf. 1.326–7, 8.75–6; Il. 1.1–2; Od. 1.1; Theog. 1–2; WD 2–3; Hymn. Ap. 1–2; Hymn. Dem. 1–3; Hymn. Aphr. 1–2; Theb. F 1.1 Bernabé; Il. parv. F. 1.1 Bernabé). We even find the typical juncture between proem and narrative, that moment where archaic poets frequently provide a reinvocation or restatement of the topic (9.37–8; cf. Il. 1.6–7; Od. 1.10–11; Theog. 105–15). The analogy between the recapitulator and the poem’s professional aoidoi is, therefore, hardly a tremendous shock. Indeed, with the beginning of 4 By ‘indirect speech’ I mean the poet’s third-person narration of his characters’ performances without quotation. I have, therefore, excluded the song of Ares and Aphrodite (8.266– 367), because the poet includes direct quotation of the speeches delivered by the characters within the song (291–5, 305–21, 328–32, 334–43, 346–59), thus blurring the line between himself and Demodokos even further. Nonetheless, the same general principles still apply as for the first and third of the bard’s songs, in that the narrative begins from a purported thirdperson perspective, and closes with the formular τα&τ’ αXρ α#οιδY αHειδε περικλυτY (‘these things did the famous singer sing’ 8. 367 = 83 = 521). 5 A critical commonplace, though it has not to my knowledge been explored to the current purpose; cf. e.g. Fraenkel (1962), 11–15; Suerbaum (1968); Thalmann (1984), 170–3; Goldhill (1991), ch. 1; Segal (1994), 142–63; Clayton (2004), ch. 3; Beck (2005); Schlesier (2006); Minchin (2007), 21–3. 6 Cf. Fenik (1974), 143–4; de Jong (2001), 594–5. 7 For these last two, cf. e.g. Most (1989); Tracey (1997), 375–7. 8 Cf. Lenz (1980), 57–9; de Jong (2001) ad Od. 9.37–8, 229. 9 Cf. Krischer (1971), 102–4.

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Odysseus’ précis (Aρξατο ‘he began’ 23.310), compare the start of Demodokos’ Trojan horse story (Z δ# Eρµηθε2 θεο& Aρχετο, φα,νε δ# α#οιδ ν ‘and starting out from the god he began, and revealed the song’ 8.499), as well as the way in which a progression from a starting point into the narrative is achieved (23.310; cf. 8.500), and the repetition of the verb of singing or speaking within the narrative to reveal Homer’s guiding presence (23.321; cf. 8.514, 516). These similarities are above all a question of control; after allowing Odysseus to speak in his own voice throughout the Apologoi and the lying tales, Homer has decided to resume direct management of this most elusive and skilful of speakers. In doing so, he gives the external audience10 an opportunity to compare this ‘last telling’ (δετατον πο 23.432) with Odysseus’ earlier performance to the Phaeacians. Comparative strategies of this sort are typical of early epic poetry:11 when, for example, Akhilleus tells Thetis of his quarrel with Agamemnon, he makes it seem that Agamemnon had not agreed to give up Khryseis until Akhilleus himself had suggested it (Il. 1.384–6): αHµµι δ µα´ντι ε4 ε@δ[ α#γρευε θεοπροπα Kκα´τοιο. ατκ’ 0γ[ πρ%το κελµην θεν Lλα´σκεσθαι and to us the seer knowing well spoke the prophecies of the far-shooter. Straightaway I first bade him propitiate the god

This is not, strictly speaking, what happened; after Kalkhas announced the reason for the god’s anger (1.92–100), Agamemnon rose in a fury and abused him (101–20), but in the very same speech had conceded that he would have to return the girl to her father (1.117–18). Akhilleus’ representation of the story, especially his emphasis on its temporal sequence (ατκ’ 0γ[ πρ%το ‘straightaway I first’), fiddles with the truth a little bit. If Akhilleus can do this in ‘his’ poem, it is not surprising that Odysseus’ version of his encounter with Nausikaa, told to Alkinoos and Arete (Od. 7.290–307), should also show this manipulative quality. Here he deflects the blame directed by Alkinoos towards his daughter for not conveying the xeinos straight to the palace by telling an outright lie (7.303–6): 10 Reference from hereon in to ‘audience’ without further qualification denotes this external group. On the dynamics between the internal and external audiences, cf. Taplin (2003), esp. 33– 6, but also 23: ‘the internal audiences should not be treated as direct or “literal” evidence for the world of the external audiences––though that does not mean there is no relationship between them.’ Indeed, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, there is considerable and deliberate crossover between these groups; cf. also below, n. 39. 11 Cf. de Jong (1985) ~ (2001).

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Adrian Kelly \ρω, µ µοι τοIνεκ’ α#µµονα νεκεε κορην. ] µ ν γα´ρ µ’ 0κ.λευε σ)ν α#µφιπλοισιν ^πεσθαι, α#λλ# 0γ[ οκ θελον δεσα α@σχυνµεν τε, µ πω κα2 σο2 θυµ 0πισκσσαιτο @δντι Hero, do not for my sake find fault with the blameless maid. For she bade me follow with her attendants, but I was not willing out of fear and shame, lest somehow even your thumos become angered on seeing

In the poet’s narrative, however, it was Nausikaa’s concern for public opinion which led to her rather embarrassed suggestion that he enter the palace separately (6.258–96). Comparisons of this sort are not confined to Homer, for when Persephone retells the pomegranate episode to Demeter in the latter’s Homeric Hymn, her mother’s rather pressing question has revealed that Hades’ true purpose in offering the fruit was to keep her with him for a third of the year (398–400). Persephone’s version therefore adds an element of force to Hades’ action (αHκουσαν δ βηι µε προσηνα´γκασσε πα´σασθαι ‘but he compelled me against my will by force to eat’ 413) which was conspicuously absent from the poet’s own narrative (371–4). The Analysts used to see variations of this sort as evidence for different authors or recensions, the Neoanalysts as evidence for sources.12 There is, however, a poetic and rhetorical effect to the comparison, for it enables an external audience to see why a character would shape his or her tale in response to the requirements of the situation: Akhilleus is upset and attempting to enlist the aid of his mother, Odysseus is ingratiating himself with the Phaeacians in order to ensure his conveyance home, and Persephone has just realized, too late, the ramifications of her commensality––or whatever it was13 ––with Hades. One should not exclude other interpretations, for instance that Odysseus is motivated by kindly feelings towards Nausikaa, but the common element to all these cases is that they illustrate when and why speakers lie. Characters cannot be trusted, as they have reasons for the stories they tell, motives which may disrupt the direct transit of truth from Muse to mouth. In other words, the more we know of someone, the less reason we have to believe him. The Homeric poet, by contrast, gives his audience no such knowledge or details about himself. So a comparison between the poet’s narrative and a character’s version of it leads the audience into taking the 12

For the Analysts, cf. e.g. Kirchhoff (1879), 210 (on Odysseus’ falsehood to Alkinoos). Neoanalysts have directed less attention to the Odyssey than the Iliad, but the efforts of both groups are not confined to discrepancies of the current sort; cf. Fenik (1974), 105–30 for some examples, and Danek (1998), 23–8 for a review of recent scholarship. 13 The pomegranate, and the significance of its eating, has been the subject of much discussion; cf. Richardson (1974) ad loc., 376; Faraone (1990); also Suter (2002), chs. 3 and 4.

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former as the more believable one, and not only because they can compare the specifics of the tales in question. They do this faute de mieux, for the poet’s is the less obviously biased version. It becomes, in effect, the default narrative. The recapitulation is a slightly different case from those just discussed, for the audience is now comparing two (formally varied) versions of the same events delivered by the same character,14 yet the effect is much the same. In general, the reperformance shows (yet again) Odysseus’ abilities as a speaker, and his gift at shaping the tale to his audience, here Penelope. He omits any mention of the setback suffered against the Kikones, focusing solely on his initial victory (23.310). This presumably has something to do with the fact that he only brings in the hetairoi when absolutely necessary, as with the episode of Helios’ cattle (23.329–32), so that the story becomes ‘his personal tale of glory and woe’,15 but some omission around Thrinakia might have been possible or desirable (cf. 12.450–3) simply because this is the second time he has told her this part of his story. During their encounter in book 19, he had pretended that he had heard from the Thesprotian king of Odysseus’ mishap with Helios’ cattle (19.270–8), which then led straight into his encounter with the Phaeacians (279 f.).16 That earlier tale also reveals another side of Odysseus’ rhetorical skill, for ‘Aithon’ had omitted Kalypso, the episode bridging the gap in the ‘real’ story between Thrinakia and the Phaiakis. Such sexual prudence may also be seen in the recapitulation, for he makes no mention of Nausikaa despite his promise to pray to her always (8.463–8),17 and he only mentions Kirke’s trickery and deviousness (23.321), not the fact that he had to be reminded by his men to think once more of his return after an entire year had passed in her company (10.469–75). It is therefore entirely in keeping with this quality that, though Kalypso is mentioned, it is only to make clear Odysseus’ refusal to stay and be her husband (23.333–7). This does not contradict the situation depicted by the poet on the eve of Odysseus’ departure from Ogygia (5.151–8), but the fact that ‘the nymph no longer pleased him’ (153) shows that his determination to get away was not always so

14 The final element, the sojourn among the Phaeacians (23.338–41), is of course the compression of the poet’s own narrative from the end of book 5 to the start of book 13. In that sense, it may also be rather fitting that the recapitulation finally fulfils the principle of kata kosmon/moiran katalegein (‘in order/portion to recount’). 15 de Jong (2001), 563. 16 Penelope is thus placed in a unique circumstance for an internal audience, one almost analogous to that of the external audience, in being able to contrast Odysseus’ true and false narratives; cf. in general, Thornton (1970), ch. 10; Austin (1982), 200–38; Murnaghan (1987), ch. 4; Katz (1991); Felson-Rubin (1996); Clayton (2004). 17 Cf. also Nausikaa’s prior farewell (8.461–2), which elicited his promise.

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singleminded.18 In sum, the recapitulation is a combination of personal aggrandizement and strategic omission, a combination which aims to explain to Penelope the length of his absence, but also justifies her choice to wait faithfully for the return of such a worthy figure, who never lost sight of his nostos (‘return’). The contingent nature of this narrative is brought out not only by its content, but also its position, for the ‘lying tales’ fall between the Apologoi and its recapitulation.19 Thus the comparison between versions is only made after the poet has depicted a speaker uniquely able to adapt his own tales and experiences to the demands of his situation, and to do so in an explicitly false manner. It is as though Homer has prepared the audience for his resumption of control in the recapitulation by undermining Odysseus’ status as a truthful teller of tales, and well before he speaks to Penelope. But there is something more to this programme, for its scale has gone well beyond that of the usual comparisons (examined earlier).20 In fact, its full extent and purpose can only be revealed by an examination of these intervening tales.

2 . O DYS S E U S ’ R E PE RTO I R E I : T H E WA N D E R I N G B E G G A R When Odysseus or another character repeats or refashions a story, there are usually only one or two other versions to compare it with.21 But with the lying tales we watch a performer develop his story over several tellings. The external audience is placed in a uniquely well-informed situation, one very like that of the scholar studying several performances of basically the same tale delivered by an oral poet over a period of time before several audiences.22 18 Note that the poet explicitly connects his desire to return home with this fact (οδ. ποτ# Fσσε | δακρυφιν τ.ρσοντο, κατεβετο δ γλυκ)Y α@[ν | νστον /δυροµ.νωι, 0πε2 οκ.τι \νδανε νµφη ‘nor ever were his eyes | wiped dry from tears, but his sweet life flowed away | as he desired his return, since the nymph no longer pleased him’ 151–3). 19 There is an enormous bibliography on these tales; cf. e.g. de Jong (2001), 326–8 for a recent review––––adding Clayton (2004), ch. 3; Schlesier (2006); Minchin (2007), 23–6. I have found particularly useful Clay (1983), 86–9; Haft (1984); Goldhill (1991), 36–56; Reece (1994). 20 Cf. above, pp. 179–81. 21 One exception is the famous story of the shroud, told by Antinoos at 2.87–110, Penelope herself at 19.129–61, and then Amphimedon at 24.131–7; cf. Heubeck (1989) ad 24.128–46, 274–5 for bibliography. 22 The most interesting account of such a process remains Lord (1960), esp. ch. 5. The metapoetic function which I am about to suggest for these lying tales would complement very well the theory that the poet is also referring to previous or competing versions of Odysseus’ wanderings; cf. e.g. Reece (1994); Danek (1998), 269, 285–6, 364–5 (though he is very cautious). By putting these ‘versions’ into the mouth of someone who is very like ‘personalized’ epic poets (below, pp. 193–9), and when he is explicitly lying, the Homeric poet asserts their inferiority to his own story.

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Told on four occasions to different interlocutors in the second half of the poem, Odysseus’ fake wandering tales revolve around a basic story designed to explain his presence on Ithaka (Table 7.1).23 This is composed of recurring elements and, though none appears in every tale, the story as a whole is nonetheless recognizably the same from one telling to the next. Indeed, if one omits the third tale to Antinoos, which is the shortest by some way of all the examples, there are three universal elements: the Cretan identity, the presence of Idomeneus, and an involvement in the Trojan War. We are, I think, justified in talking of three typical elements, despite their omission in the speech to Antinoos in book 17, as there are good reasons for that absence. First, the beggar is providing an admonitory paradigm in fairly short compass, and so requires only the detail that he was once important enough to have led an expedition to Egypt, where he suffered his setback. So, he implies, Antinoos should beware of the mutability of human fortunes, and act accordingly. Secondly, any more precise detail than this might be dangerous; though the elements of Cretan identity and the famous Idomeneus are well beyond the heroic experience to be expected in the young man (Athene) on the shore in book 13, Eumaios in book 14 or even Penelope in book 19,24 they would be far from outré to the kind of knowledge possessed by someone like Antinoos. Remember that during his speech to the assembly (2.84–128) he gives a small catalogue of famous Greek women surpassed by Penelope (2.118–20), that he uses the paradigm of the Lapithai and Kentauroi (21.287– 310),25 and that he has a personal reminiscence of Odysseus (21.93–5). By a member of basileutic society, wherein the telling and hearing of heroic tales is an essential part of social interaction and acculturation,26 a Cretan identity and link with Idomeneus could be disproved, or at the very least questioned. A connection with Troy would be similarly dangerous, for this is a popular 23 The table draws extensively on de Jong (2001), 596–7 (with minor additions). I exclude Odysseus’ story of the cloak at Troy (14.459–506), which is obviously intended to be ‘read’ within the template as delivered to Eumaios, and I postpone discussion of the fifth tale to Laertes, which shows considerable divergence from this template; cf. below, pp. 191–3. 24 I shall return to this Cretan theme later; cf. below, pp. 192–3. Penelope’s reputation for intelligence is of course a fundamental theme in the Odyssey (above, n. 16), but her capacity to be deceived has already been foregrounded by Eumaios (14.122–32), who also speaks of his own deception by an Aitolian deploying the Cretan theme (14.378–85). 25 That he doesn’t use it well, i.e. not seeing that it is a story of inappropriate behaviour at a wedding feast where the wife is subject to seizure by those who have no right to her, is rather beside the point. Speakers who make use of mythical paradigms in Homer often fail to see the full range of their intimations, as e.g. Agamemnon in his reconciliation with Akhilleus (Il. 19.90–133). He does not recognize that his narrative, of a greater man (Herakles) subjected to a lesser man (Eurystheus), is obviously applicable to his own situation vis-à-vis Akhilleus; cf. in general, Alden (2000). 26 Cf. Olson (1995), esp. chs. 1 and 4.

Table 7.1. Odysseus’ lying tales (after de Jong (2001), 596–7) 13.253–86 (Athene)

14.192–359 (Eumaios)

17.419–44 (Antinoos)

19.165–299 (Penelope)

24.244–97/303–14 (Laertes)

Cretan identity (name)

256–7 (no name)

199–206 (no name)

–– (no name)

172–80 Aithon

–– Eperitos

Idomeneus

258–61 murdered son of

235–9 was leader with

––

180–5 is brother of

––

Troy

262–6 fought in

229/235–41 fought in

––

182–3 Idomeneus fought in

–– ––

Egypt

––

245–86 424–43 –– expedition to; defeated, stays expedition to; defeated, with King sold to Kypros

––

Phoenicians

272–5 conveyed honourably

287–98 conveyed with intent to sell him as slave

––

––

––

Slavery

––

293–300 Phoenicians intend to sell him as a slave; storm intervenes (cf. below) 334–59 Thesprotians also try to sell him; but he escapes

442–4 Egyptians sell him to Kypros

––

––

Storm

276–86 driven off course to Ithaka

299–313 shipwrecked

––

––

306–7 driven off course to Ithaka

Thesprotia

––

291–2/334–59 reception by King; journey to Doulikhion where Thespr. sailors try to sell him (above)

––

270–92 reception by King; journey to Doulikhion

––

Odysseus

––

321–3 –– hears from Thesprotian King that Od. is in Dodona

185–202/225–48 entertained Od. on his way to Troy 270–99 hears from Thesprotian King of Od.’s adventures, and that Od. is in Dodona

266–79/309–14 entertained Od. in Sikania

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theme with the suitors (cf. 1.325–7), among whom Amphimedon was xeinos to Agamemnon himself (24.105–19), for it could also lead to suspicion about the identity of the aged beggar.27 Apart from the three basic elements, therefore, all the others are used twice across the four tales, and on several observable principles––all of which are drawn from, and well exampled in, the poet’s own technique. The first is that of contiguity: the Egyptian element is deployed in his second and third tales, the Phoenician in his first and second, the slavery in the second and the third, and the storm in the first and second.28 Such deliberation on the part of the poet is a scholarly commonplace. Applied to Odysseus’ performances, however, it is almost as though we get a picture of him practising elements within his repertoire. The Phoenician theme, for instance, is deployed for the first time for the young man on the beach, where their involvement has an entirely honourable slant which reinforces the traveller’s status as someone worthy of their conveyance (13.272–86). But its most powerful deployment comes about when the Phoenicians become the evil slave traders in his second tale, to Eumaios, who had of course suffered this very fate when a child (15.415– 84).29 Odysseus cannot know when he uses the Phoenician theme for the first time that his most important use of the theme will come with his next audience, but the poet is allowing us to see from one tale to the next how Odysseus can use exactly the same theme in an almost completely different way. Accumulative sequencing of this sort may be observed in Homer’s use of hospitality scenes in the first half of the poem.30 As Reece has observed, the reception of Odysseus on Skheria combines the two receptions of Telemakhos into one scene: for instance, Odysseus is met by the royal child Nausikaa on the beach in the morning and arrives at the palace of Alkinoos at night, whilst Telemakhos is met by Peisistratos on the beach in the morning and arrives at Menelaos’ palace at night. The purpose of such contiguity may be defined both from the audience’s perspective, viz. in permitting a series of connections and comparisons between father and son,31 as well as from the poet’s, in that it helps him to keep track of the narrative from scene to scene. Odysseus does it again with the deployment of the Egyptian theme; in its 27 Note Odysseus’ caution in how to deal with Iros as the engagement begins, debating whether to kill him outright or just knock him senseless (18.90–4); he chooses the latter course ‘lest the Akhaioi recognize him’ (94). Behaviour too obviously heroic is to be avoided at all costs. 28 Furthermore, the theme of entertaining Odysseus is deployed in the fourth and fifth (to Laertes). 29 Though delivered after his own narrative, Odysseus obviously knew this story. 30 Cf. Reece (1993), 192–6. 31 In this case, undoubtedly magnifying the significance of the scene on Skheria and the capabilities and status of Odysseus.

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first occurrence in the second tale (14.245–86), Odysseus shapes the element so that he becomes a figure first of sufficient pathei mathos to have supplicated the Egyptian king after being caught raiding his land, and secondly of such respect that he was protected by that king and then honoured by all the Egyptians until an evil Phoenician persuaded the beggar to sail with him. This makes a protreptic point in the circumstance––you should protect and honour me as the Egyptian king honoured Zeus xeinios (14.283–4) and protected even an enemy––but it also shows Odysseus as a formerly important and impressive man. Now when he uses this theme in his story to Antinoos, he mentions only the fact of the expedition and that he was then given by the Egyptians to the ruler of Kypros, Dmetor the son of Iason (17.441–3). It has already been suggested that the omission of the three basic elements in this third lying tale was motivated by the desire not to arouse Antinoos’ suspicions. One may suspect the same motive in the use of the Egyptian element in this tale, for Odysseus does not wish to suggest to Antinoos that he was a figure of such enormous status to have warranted favourable treatment from both the Egyptian and then the Thesprotian kings, nor even the dubious honour of being thought worthy to kidnap, denude of material possessions, and then sell on for an enormous ransom. Moreover, in these two tales Odysseus even uses the same thematic progression of (a) Egypt and (b) slavery, but in a different way each time, depending on the interlocutor and the circumstance. In his third tale Odysseus moves straight from the first to the second element, because he only wants to focus on the fact of reversal of fortune and his lowly status (or, more accurately, not suggesting a more important status). However, in the second tale he inserts several events between the two stages: the Phoenician element and attempt to sell him into slavery (14.287–98), a storm (299–313), reception by the Thesprotian king (314–34), then another attempt to make him a slave (334–43) which is only thwarted when he escapes from his kidnappers on Ithaka itself (344–59). Once more, one can observe contiguous developments shaped to the individual requirements of the performance: Odysseus plays up the slavery element in order to appeal to Eumaios’ pity, because of the number of times people have planned this against him, and the similarity of their fortune; he plays down the intervening actions when speaking to Antinoos because he doesn’t wish him to reflect on the possibility that he was once a noble. The second principle is the progression in Odysseus’ identity from tale to tale, as he becomes a more important figure across his performances. In the first tale, he is the leader of a separate group of Cretans (13.265–6) hostile to Idomeneus and his son Ortilokhos; in the second, he is the bastard son of Kastor (14.199–204), and was chosen by the people as joint leader with

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Idomeneus of the Cretan contingent to Troy (237–9); in the fourth, he becomes Idomeneus’ brother (19.181–4) left behind to take care of the island when he went off to Troy. So he moves from being a separate leader hostile to Idomeneus, to a separate leader friendly to Idomeneus, to a related leader friendly to Idomeneus. In other words, the closer Odysseus gets to regaining his identity, the greater the heroic legitimacy of his character through the false tales; as he moves further into his own household (from beggar to tolerated guest, then honoured guest, and finally husband), so his character moves further into Idomeneus’ oikos. For this type of progression in the poet’s own hands, consider the three episodes in which the disguised beggar is struck by a suitor, first Antinoos (17.411–91), then Eurymakhos (18.349–411), and finally Ktesippos (20.291– 319).32 On every occasion a suitor becomes angry with the beggar and/or issues a threatening speech, hits or attempts to hit Odysseus with an item from the feast, the strike is ineffective, there is a negative reaction to the action, and then Telemakhos’ reaction is described. Note the several progressions linking these three episodes. First, the striking instrument becomes both less impressive and effective: initially a throne is used (17.462), then a stool (18.394), and finally a cow’s hoof (20.299–300); Odysseus is first hit but unmoved (17.463–4), then he’s missed and the stool hits a wine pourer (18.396–8), then the hoof harmlessly hits the wall (20.300–2). Secondly, Odysseus requires progressively less effort to cope with the missile: initially he’s hit and maintains his position, then he has to dodge the stool by sitting down rapidly, then he merely has to incline his head. Finally, note the change in Telemakhos’ reactions: first he is silent (17.489–91), then he issues a vaguely threatening speech to the suitors (18.405–11), then he openly threatens Ktesippos (20.303–19). In short, as the strikes become less effective, and Odysseus less troubled by them, Telemakhos becomes bolder. The third of our shared poetic principles in Odysseus’ wandering tales is the mirroring between the second and fourth tales, those delivered to Eumaios and Penelope. By far the largest examples, these two are also the only stories directed at the faithful members of his household with a personal knowledge of Odysseus (the youth on the shore was unknown to him, and Antinoos is hardly a faithful character). The second and fourth are also the only tales in which the beggar actually speaks of Odysseus himself, and so draws out the strength of feeling from an interlocutor whose participation and assistance is, in varying ways, absolutely crucial to his success. For such a deliberate allusion between two individual examples of an otherwise traditional sequence, compare the many ways in which Menelaos’ 32

Cf. Fenik (1974), 180–8.

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Table 7.2. The nostoi of Menelaos and Odysseus Menelaos

Odysseus

1. Detained on an island

Pharos (4.351–62)

2. Suffers from starvation 3. Assisted by water nymph 3a. Advised by female 3b. To consult an oracular figure 4. Journey to that figure 5. Oracular consultation 5a. about the end of his life 5b. told to go on another journey 5c. general conversation

4.363–9 Eidotheia (4.364–427) Eidotheia (4.364–427) Proteus 4.428–459 4.460–570 Elysium (4.561–9) Egypt (4.471–80) Proteus (4.485–537)

Ogygia (5.149 f.)/Thrinakia (12.325–6) 12.327–32 Ino Leukotheia (5.333–53) Kirke (10.487–540) Teiresias 10.542––11.22 11.90–151 death from the sea (11.134–7) inland (11.119–34) plures personae (11.152–634)

nostos is built as a doublet to the return of Odysseus (Table 7.2).33 As one can see, the similarities go well beyond the common inheritance of the basic nostos template,34 creating a constructive dialogue between the patterns, in which Menelaos becomes a less important version of Odysseus, his wanderings briefer, less complex and involved, his achievements less impressive. In that regard, note how several elements in Odysseus’ nostos are marked by an expansion of the parallel element in Menelaos’ tale: Odysseus is detained twice (Ogygia, Thrinakia) and Menelaos once (Pharos), while Menelaos’ single water nymph and adviser (Eidotheia) becomes two figures in Odysseus’ case (Ino Leukotheia, Kirke). Furthermore, in the second and fourth tales we note that Odysseus doubles one of his elements, the fourth of our poetic principles, and once more in response to the requirements of the situation. When speaking to Eumaios he doubles the element of slavery, for both Phoenicians (14.287–98) and then Thesprotians (334–59) attempt to enslave him. The increased focus is clearly designed to win over Eumaios’ sympathy, who had of course ‘only’ suffered the reversal once. Similarly, in the fourth tale he doubles the Odyssean element, for not only does he assert that he had entertained Odysseus on his way to 33

Cf. Powell (1970). Of course, two internal narrators here mirror one another’s stories, but the poet constructs the similarities between them in order to create a direct comparative dynamic between their events and their protagonists. For an example in the poet’s own voice, one could examine the similarities between Odysseus’ reception on Skheria and in his own house on Ithaka; cf. Reece (1993), ch. 5. In both places, the hero arrives in disguise, clashes with a group of young men led by a figure whose name is a compound of Ερυ- (Eurymakhos and Euryalos; cf. Louden (1999), ch. 1, whose pattern would include the hetairoi led by Eurylokhos), there is a latent/patent marriage contest (Nausikaa and Penelope) and the hero reveals himself to each group through a typical heroic achievement (athletic contests/storytelling and contest/ storytelling/lethal violence). 34 Cf. Foley (1999), ch. 5.

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Table 7.3. Odysseus’ final storm (Od.5.297–355/356–87; after Fenik (1974), 143–4) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Monologue Wave shatters raft Od. hangs onto the remnants Female deity aids him

First sequence 5. 297–312 313–23 324–32 333–55 (Ino Leukotheia)

Second sequence 356–64 365–70 370–5 382–7 (Athene)

Troy (19.185–202 ~ 225–48), but also that he then heard of Odysseus’ wanderings from the Thesprotian king (270–99). This time the increased focus is designed to elicit an emotional reaction from Penelope, whose affection for the absent figure is under the speaker’s spotlight in this speech. The poet’s own use of doublets has been well documented,35 as indeed has the fact that this is one way of increasing the importance and focus on the sequence so generated. Consider as merely one example the construction of Odysseus’ final storm experience (5.297–387) (Table 7.3).36 The duplication makes this example larger, more complex, and so more impressive, for it is the final time that Poseidon will be able to hamper Odysseus’ nostos. When Odysseus survives this storm, a swift return to Ithaka is assured. The relationship between the second and fourth false tales also leads nicely to the fifth poetic principle, omission, the way in which the speaker chooses to leave out elements inappropriate to the interlocutor and the circumstance (again). Aside from the most blatant case, the missing three basic elements in the speech to Antinoos, consider the fact that Odysseus doesn’t mention the slavery theme to Penelope, nor indeed any of the stories of plundering and pillage. To Penelope the slavery element would hardly serve the purpose it did with Eumaios, viz. eliciting sympathy because of the similarity in experience. Instead, he’s talking now to a noblewoman whose sympathy is best gained by focusing on his own nobility.37 Secondly, to a woman who has apparently lost her husband in a war of rape revenge, and is besieged by suitors in her household, it would hardly do to let slip his own history in plundering others’ resources and women. Again, it is not difficult to example omissions in Homer’s voice, for a great deal of ‘oral theory’ scholarship has concerned itself largely with identifying 35

Cf. Fenik (1974), 133–232. Cf. Fenik (1974), 142–4. 37 This also helps to explain the particular form of the Odysseus element between the two speeches; in the fourth it is constructed around an actual xeinos relationship, bestowing an elevated status on the beggar more appropriate to that of his interlocutor, but comprises the more remote form of simply having heard of him when he speaks to Eumaios in the second tale. Incidentally, the xeinos form of the element is then repeated in his fifth false tale, to Laertes in book 24 (cf. below)––another example of contiguity. 36

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narrative patterns and then showing how the poet varies them by, amongst others things, omission. Consider, for example, Patroklos’ famous failure to take Peleus’ ash spear in his arming scene (16.140–4; taken by Akhilleus at 19.387–91), though there the poet actually comments on his character’s omission. A closer parallel would be the way in which Hektor invokes the ‘wrath’ pattern when speaking to Paris at home in the Iliad (6.325–42); according to this pattern, a quarrel within his own community must motivate the hero’s withdrawal from the fighting.38 Here in Troy, however, Hektor can only speak obliquely of Paris’ kotos as the explanation for his absence from the fray (326), for there has been no neikos within the Trojan community to explain the withdrawal. In short, the inappropriateness of Paris’ actions is pointed out by the omission of the initial element from the pattern. In Odysseus’ wandering beggar tales, therefore, we see something very much like an oral poet developing a fixed tale over several performances. This tale is composed of repeatable elements and constructed in typical ways, all to the end of generating the most appropriate, sympathetic and meaningful story for its audiences within the poem.39 Furthermore, the structural principles by which Odysseus shapes his material are precisely those with which the Homeric poet works. So the bardic approximation goes beyond a couple of isolated compliments and the (relatively superficial) formal similarities outlined at the start of this article. Odysseus operates to all intents and purposes almost exactly like an oral poet recomposing in performance. Of course, though the analogy may not be exact in all its details (as we shall see below), any good teller must have more than one tale. He has to be able to respond to audience prompting, as Demodokos does to Odysseus’ request for a particular story (Od. 8.492–5). Indeed, the possession of more than one story cycle is something to which Phemios appeals (22.347–8) as a sign of his particular favour from the Muses. And, like any good performer, Odysseus does have another story.

3 . O DYS S E U S ’ R E PE RTO I R E I I : T H E T R AV E L L I N G N O B L E Odysseus’ narrative to his father Laertes (24.220–362) has caused many a headache, with scholars particularly wondering why so many of the basic details from his previous story should have been discarded, and more often 38 Cf. Lord (1960), 186–97; Nagler (1974), 131–66; Kelly (2007b), 97–8; contra Friedrich (2002), esp. 60–1, 61 n. 36. For a specific treatment of Paris’ story as an example of wrathful withdrawal, cf. Collins (1988), 27–35. 39 These audiences are internal for us, of course, but the direct recipients of Odysseus’ performances, and so analogous to the poem’s external audience; cf. above, n. 10.

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than not concluding that the change is a sign of interpolation.40 Though it is not my purpose to reopen here the famous case over the end of the Odyssey, the preceding analysis offers several good reasons as to why he should have a ‘reserve’ tale. First, of course, he is no longer pretending to be a beggar, but a man of some stature. After all, he has just killed the suitors and regained at least some measure of control over his house. Secondly, his beggar story was based on a Cretan character, and it was suggested earlier that such a famous Trojan War element might well have been known to an Ithakan of status. If the risk of premature recognition was great when Odysseus was speaking to the relatively inexperienced Antinoos, then it becomes tremendous when addressing his own father, an older man of no small experience himself (cf. his capture of Nerikos at 24.377–8). In Homeric epic, older men know more, as Odysseus famously asserts to Akhilleus in the Iliad (19.216–19), and are therefore frequently seen as authoritative speakers.41 One very important element in that authority is the knowledge of tales, for this is the kind of thing that mature heroes swap in one another’s presence, as one can easily example in the Odyssey (e.g. Menelaos and Nestor to Telemakhos), but also in the Iliad (e.g. the Meleagros paradigm) and the Kypria (Nestor’s stories to Menelaos; arg. 27–9 Bernabé). But the crucial parallel comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from Nestor when he reminds his audience of Peleus’ joy in such tales (Il. 7.125–8, esp. 128 πα´ντων Α # ργεων 0ρ.ων γενε ν τε τκον τε ‘asking the family and birth of all the Argives’). None of Odysseus’ other interlocutors, potentially, have had the same exposure to epic knowledge. The risks of revelation in this type of situation are made clear by Penelope herself, as she needs to use a ruse on her own husband to be sure of his identity because of her fear of precisely this sort of deception (23.215–17), yet she has not, according to Eumaios, always been so clever (14.122–32).42 This leads nicely into the third (and most interesting) reason for dropping the earlier persona, as a Cretan connection seems to have been a somewhat 40 Cf. e.g. West (1989). For passages in which the poet shows an interest in Laertes’ situation and fate, cf. 1.188–93, 4.735–54, 11.187–96, 15.353–7, 16.137–53, 22.184–6; also Gainsford (2003) on the entire scene, and above, n. 1. I am concerned here only with the significance of this second story for our understanding of Odysseus in bardic terms, and not with providing a new defence of the passage. 41 Cf. esp. Preisshoffen (1977); Alden (2000), 74–111; Roisman (2005). 42 Of course, Odysseus is in no danger from his father (hence the oft-repeated criticism that the testing of Laertes is insufficiently motivated), but the episode is simply another instance of the pattern in which the returned hero tests the various members of his household. One might perhaps remember that there is no ‘logical’ reason for Odysseus to test his wife with a false tale in book 19, since he had already been told by Athene that she was faithful (13.379–81); cf. e.g. Murnaghan (1987), ch. 4.

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well-worn theme for such wandering characters. Eumaios’ story of the Aitolian man who deceived him by saying that he saw Odysseus in Krete with Idomeneus (14.378–85), from which the swineherd has learned not to trust people speaking of his master in this way, is delivered in response to Odysseus’ rather similar deployment of the same themes (Cretan identity, link with Idomeneus, knowledge of Odysseus). More interestingly, the Aitolian also deploys another typical element in early epic, that of the metanast or ‘migrant’ who is forced to leave home because of a slaying or other trouble in his own community.43 This will become important later on, but for now note that other figures were using the same type of elements as Odysseus himself, in much the same way––as well as some others. If even Eumaios, with his limited experience, can provide such a serious check on Odysseus’ story, then all the more reason for him to be careful with this aspect of his self-presentation. There are, then, several good reasons for Odysseus to abandon the wandering beggar persona before speaking to Laertes, and so the analogy between the poet of the Odyssey and his main character continues. Like the Aitolian, Odysseus has a false tale which deploys similar elements; unlike him, but (once more) like the bards of the Odyssey, Odysseus even has a second story to tell when his first loses its appeal, before a potentially difficult or sceptical audience. Odysseus polytropos, polymêkhanos, polymêtis––and now polymuthos.

4 . P O E T I C C H A R AC T E R S : O DYS S E U S A N D H E S I O D Among all these examples of Odysseus––and possible rivals––deploying poetic techniques in false tales, there is one thing he does which Homer does not: he uses episodes from his personal experience.44 In his third tale, for instance, he weaves into the Phoenician attempt to enslave him a description of the storm preventing the unhappy circumstance very like that which he encountered after leaving Thrinakia: no land but sea and sky appears (14.301b–2 = 12.403b–4); a dark cloud appears (14.303–4 = 12.405–6); Zeus thunders and destroys the ship (14.305–7 = 12.415–17); all the companions are killed (14.308–9 = 12.418–19); Odysseus is saved by hanging on to a piece of ship’s equipment (histos 14.310–3 ~ histos and tropis lashed together 43

Cf. Martin (1992); also below, pp. 197–8 and n. 61. Of course there’s no telling whether the Homeric poet ever did this or not; the point is that he gives his audience no reason to believe that he is doing so. 44

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(12.420–5).45 Such personalization is perhaps unsurprising, because Odysseus’ stories are told to explain his present circumstance, and he is always speaking about himself. Yet we may add this to the several indications that, in spite of his skill with typical stories and their elements, Odysseus is not directly or totally analogous to a poet on the Homeric model. So, for instance, apart from the obvious difference between their first- and third-person narratives, Odysseus needs to resort to naming Kalypso as his source to explain how he knows of Helios’ conversation with Zeus (12.374–90, esp. 389–90); Homer of course has no such need.46 This is a function of his relationship with the Muses, and it is one very much like that enjoyed by both Phemios and Demodokos.47 In the Homeric model of self-presentation or, more accurately, self-abnegation, the distance of the bard from the events of which he sings increases his reliance on the Muses for their accurate representation.48 Demodokos in particular seems to enjoy the artistic benefits of that relationship, in that the truthful qualities of his first song are explicitly praised by someone who was there at the sack of Troy (8.487–91). Indeed, the whole performance is shaped as a test of the poet’s accuracy, for Odysseus prompts him with a promise to spread his repute among men ‘if you relate to me these things in order’ (496). By confirming the veracity of Demodokos’ performance, Odysseus confirms the Homeric poet’s own strategy of third-person narrative for, like Demodokos, Homer sings things of which he can have no personal knowledge.49 45 A less direct example is the way in which his arrival on Skheria (5.374–493) becomes his escape from the Thesprotians (14.350–9), for in both cases he swims to safety and is sheltered under some flora. Consider also how he deploys the theme of fruitlessly warning his men after an initial raiding success, first in the Kikonian episode (9.43–53) and then in the Egyptian theme in his tales to Eumaios and Antinoos (14.259–70 = 17.428–39). 46 Cf. esp. Suerbaum (1968), 154–61; Lenz (1980), 110–19. 47 The relationship between the Homeric poet and the Muse is obviously a large topic, and the following list is by no means exhaustive; cf. e.g. Minton (1960); Maehler (1963), chs. 1 and 2; Lenz (1980), 27–40; Murray (1981); Walsh (1984), ch. 1; Thalmann (1984), 78–56; de Jong (1987), 49–50; Finkelberg (1990); Bowie (1993), 8–20; Minchin (1995); Finkelberg (1998); Latacz (2003) ad Il. 2.484–93, 140–1. 48 This need not suggest a fundamental difference between poet and Muse(s), as has been argued by Finkelberg (1998) in terms of a poetics of ‘responsibility’ and ‘non-responsibility’. Instead, their relationship is precisely that which pertains for other figures in the epic world (‘double determination’), which means that any action’s causation can be explained simultaneously––and interconnectedly––on the mortal and divine planes. Notice how Odysseus’ praise of Demodokos’ accuracy combines the Muse and Apollo (488) with the idea of autopsy and source criticism (491) without apparently feeling a fundamental difference between the two. The same combination is to be found in Phemios’ famous claim ‘I am self-taught, but the god has put in my mind all sorts | of song paths’ (22.347–8). 49 The ancients would certainly agree that ‘in einem Sänger wie Demodokos dürfen wir das Spiegelbild des Odyssee-Dichters erkennen’ (Suerbaum (1968), 166); cf. Graziosi (2002), 138–63; Schuol (2006); also above, n. 5.

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So we are left with a partial analogy between Odysseus and the bard. On the one hand, Odysseus is like an Homeric oral poet working through his repertoire of stories in a manner closely paralleled in the work of Homer himself: choosing which stories to tell; adjusting them to his audiences; picking and choosing from typical elements within those tales; and so on. On the other, Odysseus is unlike such a figure in all sorts of important ways: his narratives are told in the first person; they use details from experience in poetic form; he relies on ‘real’ sources for his knowledge. So is there any purpose to the approximation, if it is eventually to founder on these rocks? One might contend that this is simply a more extended or sophisticated version of the strategy discussed above with regard to Odysseus’ story to Alkinoos.50 Yet the picture is too detailed, complex, and constant to be restricted in this way. In fact, the quasi-bardic qualities of Odysseus are so prominent that one must suspect another purpose to Homer’s construction of his performances. This motive, I suggest, has something to do with the fact that Odysseus’ individualized personae are very similar in form and function to the Hesiodic strategy of constructing his own persona from a series of epic or, more appropriately, ‘epicizing’ details. Like Homer with Odysseus, Hesiod uses these details to give us a background next to which we can measure that authority, but this time they serve that purpose directly. Note that he met the Muses and was given the ‘epic’ staff to symbolize his gift of speech (Theog. 30–1);51 that he competed and was victorious in a funeral contest (WD 650– 9);52 that he is involved in a neikos (‘quarrel’) with his brother for the family dasmos (‘division’) (WD 27–41);53 and that his father was a metanast (WD 633–40).54 All these are typical epic themes, but now applied to the figure of the poet himself, and not his characters. I hasten to add that I am not trying to reinvigorate an ‘Entdeckung des Geistes’ model of cultural development. Instead, as Griffith has noted, 55 . . . the techniques of self-reference in Hesiod belong to traditions much older than Homer himself and shared by other early Greek poets . . . Hesiod’s personal and autobiographical remarks always serve a specific and necessary function within the 50

Cf. above, pp. 179–80. Cf. West (1966) ad loc., 163–4. For the sceptre in heroic contexts, cf. e.g. Il. 1.234–7, 1.245–6, 2.100–9, 2.185–6, 18.505–6, 23.566–9; Od. 2.37–8, 2.80–1. 52 Though this is of course a contest specifically in song. For athletic contests apart from the Funeral Games for Patroklos, cf. Il. 5.802–8, 23.629–43, 23.678–80; Od. 8.94–256, 24.85–92; Kypria arg. 22–4 Bernabé. 53 For other neikea arising from the sharing out of goods or resources, apart from the quarrel between Akhilleus and Agamemnon in Iliad 1, cf. Il. 15.187–99, 23.540–65, 566–613; Od. 8.75–82, 11.543–64; 14.207–10; Aithiopis arg. 23–4 Bernabé; Thebais F 2.9–10 Bernabé. 54 55 Cf. below, n. 61. Griffith (1983), 37. 51

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contexts in which they occur, and should be viewed in these terms rather than as gratuitous self-revelation and reminiscence.

All of the so-called ‘personal’ details help to form and strengthen Hesiod’s qualifications as a source of wisdom and authority.56 Odysseus could, of course, rely on his greater age and wisdom (cf. Il. 19.216–19),57 but his authority also came from the usual heroic ability ‘to fulfil his word and action’ (Od. 2.272). A large part of his conciliar ability depends on his ethos (broadly defined), for in early epic poetry what matters above all is who you are, and not necessarily what you say.58 If you do not have the status to speak, you might as well shut up––or risk the kind of beating handed out to Thersites. In making his claim on an audience’s trust, Hesiod taps directly into this ‘ethical’ source, and his reasons for doing so explain the Theogony’s famous lying Muses (Cδµεν ψεδεα πολλα` λ.γειν 0τµοισιν Eµο,α, | Cδµεν δ’, ε4τ’ 0θ.λωµεν, α#ληθ.α γηρσασθαι ‘we know how to speak many lies like truth, | and we know, when we wish, how to sing truth’ Theog. 27–8).59 Scholars have seen in this extraordinary statement Hesiodic self-criticism, or an expression of intertextuality with Homer (cf. Od. 19.203), but I suggest that it is a riposte to the Homeric model of poetic self-presentation, which works, as we saw, by deflecting the audience’s attention from the poet and relying largely on the authority of the truth-speaking Muses. By contrast, Hesiod proceeds on the basis that the Muses can lie. A mortal can never fully know the divine intention, and they are thus a risky 56

Cf. Griffith (1983); Thalmann (1984), 152–3; Stein (1990), 8–12; Stoddard (2004), ch. 3. Cf. above, p. 193. 58 Status derived from birth is not an automatic source of conciliar authority or influence, for it must be reinforced by the individual’s own achievements. Consider, for example, Diomedes’ development as a speaker in the Iliad. He is first abused by Agamemnon in the Epipolesis for being good only in speech and not battle, unlike his father (4.364–400)––a comparison made again, though humorously, by Athene (5.799–813). Diomedes does not respond directly to this abuse, even silencing Sthenelos after the latter’s angry retort (4.411–18), but he spends the next two days of battle as the most prominent of warriors, and his is the first voice rejecting the Trojans’ offer of partial recompense (7.399–402) as well as rebuking Agamemnon’s serious suggestion of retreat (9.31–49). In both of these cases, his exuberant response is only partially suitable to the circumstance (i.e. refusing the peace offer and reproving Agamemnon), and another speaker (Agamemnon and Nestor) addresses a practical response to the situation (accepting the truce, fixing their military reversal). When Diomedes next speaks in the council of book 14 (leaving aside the Doloneia), the enthusiastic and angry response to another suggestion of retreat from Agamemnon is now delivered by Odysseus (82–102), whilst it is left to Diomedes to provide the practical measures required in the circumstance (109–32). From the youthful and abrasive speaker of books 7 and 9, he has become a practical advisor, but this is only possible because of his military exploits and the lessons learned from previous, and less successful, attempts at public speech. 59 The bibliography on the lying Muses is predictably large; cf. e.g. Verdenius (1972); Stroh (1976); Pucci (1977), ch. 1; Thalmann (1984), 146–9; Nagy (1990), 44–7; Arrighetti (1996); Stein (1990); Stoddard (2004), ch. 3; Tsagalis (2006). 57

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proposition as an unequivocal source of truth. He does not, of course, seek to replace the Muses; one can see from his invocation during the Nautilia, where he advises Perses on sailing despite his lack of personal experience (WD 618– 94, esp. 660–2 τσσον τοι νη%ν γε πεπερηµαι πολυγµφων· | α#λλα` κα2 _ 0ρ.ω Ζην νον α@γιχοιο· | Μο&σαι γα´ρ µ’ 0δδαξαν α#θ.σφατον bµνον α#εδειν ‘so far is my experience of much-nailed ships; | but even so I will speak the mind of Zeus who holds the aigis; | for the Muses have taught me to sing divine song’), that they remain an essential part of his poetic authority. Yet they are now to be augmented. If one cannot trust divine inspiration alone, then the believability of any poetic narrative is up for grabs, and the audience will trust the character they find most trustworthy. So, Hesiod’s sceptre suggests his authority and right to speak, as does his rather relevant triumph in the funeral games for Amphidamas. That he is involved in a neikos over a dasmos elevates his story, and of course his status, to that of an epic hero wrongfully deprived of his timê (‘honour’) or geras (‘prize’).60 Finally, that his father was a metanast summons to the contest the conciliar authority so often possessed by these figures, and underlines the mutual dependence in, or closeness of, the relationship between Hesiod and Perses.61 Yet again, these latter themes particularly make the protreptic of the Works and Days more powerful but, even in isolation, the Theogony’s Dichterweihe adds tremendously to Hesiod’s claim to know the divine genealogies and the origin of the cosmos. The further importance of metanasteia for my current purpose becomes 60 Given the likelihood of withdrawal by the epic hero who suffers this kind of derogation (above, n. 38), Hesiod’s continued attempts to persuade his brother back to the good side cast him as an even more sympathetic and authoritative speaker. In this, Hesiod also (suggests that he) avoids the particular loss usually suffered by the wrathful hero, due to his intransigence (e.g. Meleagros loses the timê, Akhilleus his friend), before his return to the community. 61 Cf. Martin (1992). He rightly focuses on the metanast’s conciliar authority, usually derived from the fact of their greater age (as e.g. Phoinix, Patroklos, Theoklymenos), yet attachment to another’s household needs also to be viewed in terms of the relationship between the speakers. Phoinix’s story of his departure from his father’s house focuses on his bond with Akhilleus, and so increases the persuasive power of his advice, in that Phoinix can have no other motive than Akhilleus’ benefit. He introduces his advice (Il. 9.496 f.) only after the long narrative of his subsequent attachment to Peleus’ household (434–95), which is opened by a personal statement of dependence (434–8, esp. 437–8 ‘how then, dear child, could I be left alone from you’) and closed by an admission of the purpose behind his careful tendance of the youthful Akhilleus (485–95, esp. 494–5 ‘but I considered you my son, Akhilleus, so that you ward dread destruction from me’). Similarly, Patroklos focuses on their close relationship in life as a paradigm for their relationship in death (Il. 23.82–92), as well as reason for Akhilleus to hurry his burial now (69– 81). Finally, Theoklymenos’ attachment to Telemakhos’ household is uncertain until he proves his goodwill through the interpretation of the omen on Ithaka (Od. 15.529–38). Before that interpretation, Telemakhos had been prepared to send him to the house of Eurymakhos (518– 24); after it, he entrusts him to the care of Peiraios (539–47), from whom he fetches him before even speaking at any length to his mother (17.52–6, 71–84). In all these cases, personal attachment is an integral part of the metanast’s conciliar authority.

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clear when we remember that the Aitolian wanderer had employed this theme when speaking to Eumaios, as the swineherd tells his disguised master (14.378–85). Metanasteia provides a strong motive for the establishment of a reciprocal link between the figures in question, in that protection of the fugitive is an index of the host’s power and authority, while the metanast himself is a useful as well as sympathetic figure.62 The Aitolian, one may surmise, had used the theme for precisely that purpose, i.e. to impose a favourable impression of himself on Eumaios and so increase the quality and quantity of his reception. Odysseus tries to do this, as we have already seen in his tales, but also in making explicit trial of his swineherd to get a cloak out of him (14.459–506, esp. 459–61).63 Hesiod is not trying to get a cloak out of anyone, of course, but he is trying to impose an authoritative persona on Perses, the basileis, and his external audience, and the metanastic theme provides him with the perfect tool to do so, for such a figure connotes the wisdom, conciliar ability, and personal connection required to make his song persuasive. It is another of his persona’s epicizing traits, and it underlines powerfully, once again, Hesiod’s similarity with the lying speakers in the Odyssey. The direction of the argument should be clear by now: Homer’s Odysseus is constructed in bardic terms so thoroughly and in so many ways precisely because he is intended to reflect contemporary epic singers of the Hesiodic stamp. Odysseus (not to mention the Aitolian) is a portrait of the personalized poets with whom Homer himself was competing, poets whose strategies of self-presentation depended on the ‘epic’ qualities exemplified in the work of Hesiod. I do not suggest here a direct intertextual reference from Homer to Hesiod or vice versa, for by the time we encounter the first extant constructions of the poetic persona in Homer and Hesiod, their strategies are already fully and sophisticatedly worked out.64 They are thus a part of the traditional inheritance.65 62

Cf. last n.; also Tsagalis (2006), 110–13. Cf. also 15.304–24, where he makes another trial of Eumaios, this time to test the strength of his commitment to his new guest. 64 Cf. Griffith (1983), 37 (above, pp. 195–6). One should not preclude a priori the (largely Neoanalytical) suggestion of the possibility of direct intertextuality (viz. references to a specific version of a traditional story or theme rather than simply that story or theme itself) at the earliest stage in the visible history of Greek literature, but I am unconvinced by the existing attempts; cf. Kelly (2007b), 12 n. 41. More fruitful in this regard may prove a combination of traditional Neoanalytical method with an oralist perspective; cf. esp. Reece (1994) and Danek (1998), and more generally Burgess (2001). 65 Another agonistic engagement of this traditional sort (which could be interpreted intertextually) is Hesiod’s reference to the fact that ‘beggar envies beggar and bard envies bard’ (κα2 πτωχY πτωχ%ι φθον.ει κα2 α#οιδY α#οιδ%ι WD 26). Given that the disguised Odysseus and the Aitolian are both of reduced position, I suggest, firstly, that a disguise of this sort was a 63

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Of course, Homer’s agonism is not entirely or simply hostile, for Odysseus is a carefully and lovingly crafted creation. One could not imagine an early epic poem whose main character is someone with whom the audience is intended to have no sympathy, or for whom no admiration. So Homer is concerned not to damn entirely these alternative models of poetic authority, just to advertise and assert his own superiority in that regard.66 Nor does the process only go one way. Hesiod’s pointed reference to lying Muses makes most sense within a similarly agonistic engagement, and it is no coincidence that he has them mention their ability to make ‘false things like true’ in terms very close to those in which Odysseus deceives his wife in their meeting (Cσκε ψευδ.α πολλα` λ.γων 0τµοισιν Eµο,α ‘he likened in his speaking many lies to truth’ 19.203).67 Again, this is not an intertextual reference, but a shared––if oppositional––participation in a traditional discourse of poetic presentation: Homer’s Odysseus deploys the qualities and elements on which Hesiod’s persona relies, while Hesiod appropriates that potentially deceptive skill and applies it instead to the Muses themselves.

C O N C LU S I O N : H O M E R ’ S O DYS S E U S Going far beyond the usual poetic strategies of comparison, Homer decided to draw the hero polytropos not merely as a foil for his own truthful exercise in poetry, but also as a pointed and detailed allusion to his competitors and their traditional persona, of the sort witnessed in Greek (and other) literature in the Archaic (Hipponax 24–5 Diehl = 32–4 West) and Hellenistic (Theokritos 16) periods, including the ‘potter’s song’ preserved in the Herodotean life of Homer (433–61 Allen); cf. Merkelbach (1952). It is a consistent topos in these poems that ‘die Muse des Vaganten nach Brot geht’, which theme Segal (1994), 156–9 amply parallels in the Odyssean context. Therefore, WD 26 is another part of Hesiod’s response to the (type of) criticism expressed by Homer, a response which associates the wandering beggar persona with the bard on equal terms; cf. Stein (1990), 28–9 for another interpretation. In this connection, Peter Wilson suggests to me that Eumaios’ inclusion of the (perhaps wandering) bard among the ‘workers for the people’ (δηµιοεργο Od. 17.383) may be closer to the Hesiodic paradigm; though it strikes me that the swineherd’s statement could apply to the Homeric model as well, it would be further evidence that Homer was familiar with this alternative strategy. 66 Max Kramer suggests to me the analogy of Vergil’s invocation of Gallus in his tenth Eclogue, viz. that Homer’s poetry can embrace the entire spectrum of poetic engagement and self-presentation, much as Vergil’s pastoral can recreate and appropriate the terms of Gallan love elegy; cf. Clausen (1994), 288–92. Though I find his approach too temporally predetermined, cf. also Tsagalis (2006), 124 (on the Nautilia): ‘the Hesiodic tradition . . . does not “condemn” the Homeric tradition to silence but uses it as the necessary background against which it will “issue” its poetical manifesto.’ 67 Cf. above, p. 196.

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methods. As Rutherford astutely remarks, ‘what matters for the Odyssey is that the hero’s persuasive falsehoods associate him with the art of the poet’,68 though the association between Homer and his hero is never absolute. It is certainly less thorough than Hesiod’s self-characterization in heroic terms, and deliberately so. When the poet moves in the recapitulation to reassert control over Odysseus’ narrative, it is the concluding stroke to the Odyssey’s suggestions of its superiority. The portrait of the hero as a rival has been on show long enough; it is time to put it back in the attic. The ‘metapoetic’ quality of the Odyssey (and, to a lesser extent, the Iliad)69 has long been noticed, and the recapitulation shows that it extends beyond musings about poetry and its delights to reveal Homer’s immediate and palpable desire to outmatch his rivals. A similar imperative drives Hesiod, but Homer stakes his claim to truth and credibility by contrasting the ideal performances of Phemios and Demodokos with the equally, if not more, enjoyable stories of the Odyssey’s main character. Yet its poet goes to extraordinary lengths to show us that you can never trust a character; a good tale is not necessarily a truthful one, a good teller not for that reason to be trusted. By his performances shall ye know him. 68

Rutherford (1992) ad 19. 203, 165; cf. also the works cited above, n. 5. Cf., e.g. Taplin (1980) ~ (2001); Taplin (2003), 33–6, esp. 36: ‘ . . . there are still metapoetic assumptions that it seems safe to transfer as aspirations to the world of Homer and his audience––in fact it seems unreasonable not to: the beauty of poetry, its skilled musical accompaniment, its sweet delight, the way it charms its audience, they way it reduces them to spellbound silence; and the poet as someone who is held in special esteem, someone who conveys some special kind of wisdom as well as pleasure.’ 69

REFERENCES Alden, M. (2000), Homer Beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad, Oxford. Arrighetti, G. (1996), ‘Hesiod et les Muses: Le don de la vérité et la conquête de la parole’, Athenaeum 80: 45–63. Austin, N. (1982), Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in the Odyssey, Berkeley. Beck, D. (2005), ‘Odysseus: Narrator, Storyteller, Poet?’, CPh 100: 213–27. Bowie, E. (1993), ‘Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry’, in C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter), 1–37. Burgess, J. (2001), The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Baltimore. Cauer, P. (1921–3), Grundfragen der Homerkritik, 3rd ed., Leipzig. Clausen, W. (1994), A Commentary on Virgil: Eclogues, Oxford.

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Clay, J. S. (1983), The Wrath of Athene: Gods and Men in the Odyssey, Princeton. –––– (1989), The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns, Princeton. Clayton, B. (2004), A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s Odyssey, Lanham. Collins, L. (1988), Studies in Characterisation in the Iliad, Frankfurt am Main. Danek, G. (1998), Epos und Zitat: Studien zu den Quellen der Odyssee,Vienna. Erbse, H. (1972), Beiträge zum Verständnis der Odyssee, Berlin. Faraone, C. A. (1990), ‘Aphrodite’s ΚΕΣΤΟΣ and Apples for Atalanta: Aphrodisiacs in Early Greek Myth and Ritual’, Phoenix 44: 219–43. Felson-Rubin, N. (1996), ‘Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot’, in S. Schein (ed.), Reading the Odyssey (Princeton), 163–84. Fenik, B. (1974), Studies in the Odyssey, Stuttgart. Finkelberg, M. (1990), ‘A Creative Oral Poet and the Muse’, AJPh 111: 293–303. –––– (1998), The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece, Oxford. Foley, J. M. (1999), Homer’s Traditional Art, Philadelphia. Fraenkel, E. (1962), Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums, Munich. Friedrich, R. (2002), ‘Oral Composition-by-Theme and Homeric Narrative’, in F. Montanari and D. Asheri (eds.), Omero: Tremila anni dopo (Rome), 41–71. Gainsford, P. (2003), ‘Formal Analysis of Recognition Scenes in the Odyssey’, JHS 123: 41–59. Goldhill, S. (1991), The Poet’s Voice, Cambridge. Graziosi, B. (2002), Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, Cambridge. Griffith, M. (1983), ‘Personality in Hesiod’, CA 2: 37–65. Haft, A. (1984), ‘Odysseus, Idomeneus and Meriones: The Cretan Lies of the Odyssey’, CJ 79: 289–306. Heubeck, A. (1989), in id. and A. Hoekstra, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey Volume II: Books IX–XVI, Oxford. Hölscher, U. (1989), Die Odyssee: Epos zwischen Märchen und Roman, Munich. Jong, I. de (1985), ‘Iliad 1. 366–92: A Mirror Story’ Arethusa 18: 1–22, reprinted with minor revisions in D. L. Cairns (2001) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford), 478–95. –––– (1987), Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad, Amsterdam. –––– (2001), A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, Cambridge. Katz, M. (1991), Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey, Princeton. Kelly, A. (2007a), ‘How to End an Orally-Derived Epic Poem’, TAPhA 137: 371–402. –––– (2007b), A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer Iliad VIII, Oxford. Kirchhoff, A. (1879), Die homerische Odyssee und ihre Entstehung, Berlin. Kirk, G. S. (1962), The Songs of Homer, Cambridge. Krischer, T. (1971), Formale Konventionen der homerischen Epik, Munich.

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Latacz, J. (2003), Homers Ilias, Gesamtkommentar: Band II: Zweiter Gesang (Β), Munich. Lenz, A. (1980), Das Proöm des frühen griechischen Epos, Bonn. Lord, A. B. (1960), The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass. Louden, B. (1999), The Odyssey: Structure, Narration, and Meaning, Baltimore. Maehler, H. (1963), Die Auffassung des Dichterberufs im frühen Griechentum bis zur Zeit Pindars, Göttingen. Maronitis, D. N. (1981), ‘Die erste Trugrede des Odysseus in der Odyssee: Vorbild und Variationen’, in G. Kurz, D. Müller, and W. Nicolai (eds.), Gnomosyne: Menschliches Denken und Handeln in der frühgriechischen Literatur (Munich), 117–34. Martin, R. (1992), ‘Hesiod’s Metanastic Poetics’, Ramus 21: 11–33. Merkelbach. R. (1952), ‘Bettelgedichte’, RhM 95: 312–27. Minchin, E. (1995), ‘The Poet Appeals to his Muse: Homeric Invocations in the Context of Epic Performance’, CJ 91: 25–33. –––– (2007), ‘Storytelling in Oral Traditional Epic’, in C. Cooper (ed.), Politics of Orality (Leiden), 3–38. Minton, W. W. (1960), ‘Homer’s Invocation of the Muses: Traditional Patterns’, TAPhA 91: 292–309. Most, G. W. (1989), ‘The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi’, TAPhA 119: 15–30. Murnaghan, S. (1987), Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, Princeton. Murray, P. (1981), ‘Poetic Inspiration in Early Greece’, JHS 101: 87–100. Nagler, M. N. (1974), Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer, Berkeley. Nagy, G. (1990), Greek Mythology and Poetics, Ithaca. Olson, S. D. (1995), Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in the Odyssey, Leiden. Oswald, R. (1993), Das Ende der Odyssee, Graz. Page, D. (1955), The Homeric Odyssey, Oxford. Powell, B. (1970), ‘A Narrative Pattern in the Homeric Tale of Menelaos’, TAPhA 101: 419–31. Preisshofen, F. (1977), Untersuchungen zur Darstellung des Greisenalters in der frühgriechischen Dichtung, Wiesbaden. Pucci, P. (1977), Hesiod and the Language of Poetry, Baltimore. Reece, S. (1993), The Stranger’s Welcome, Ann Arbor. –––– (1994), ‘The Kretan Odyssey: A Lie Truer than Truth’, AJPh 115: 157–74. Richardson, N. J. (1974), The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Oxford. Roisman, H. (2005), ‘Nestor the Good Counsellor’, CQ 55: 17–38. Rutherford, R. (1992), Homer: Odyssey XIX and XX, Cambridge. Schadewaldt, W. (1965), ‘Die Gestalt des homerischen Sängers’, in id., Von Homers Welt und Werk, 4th ed. (Stuttgart), 54–86. Schlesier, R. (2006), ‘Transgressionen des Odysseus’, in A. Luther (ed.), Geschichte und Fiktion in der Odyssee (Munich), 107–16. Schuol, M. (2006), ‘Sänger und Gesang in der Odyssee’, in A. Luther (ed.), Geschichte und Fiktion in der Odyssee (Munich), 139–62.

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Schwartz, E. (1924), Die Odyssee, Munich. Segal, C. (1994), Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey, Ithaca. Stein, E. (1990), Autorbewußtsein in der frühen griechischen Literatur, Tübingen. Stoddard, K. (2004), The Narrative Voice in the Theogony of Hesiod, Leiden. Stroh, W. (1976), ‘Hesiods lügende Musen’, in H. Gorgemanns and E. Schmidt (eds.), Studien zum antiken Epos (Meisenheim am Glan), 90–7. Suerbaum, W. (1968), ‘Die Ich-Erzählungen des Odysseus’, Poetica 2: 150–77. Suter, A. (2002), The Narcissus and the Pomegranate, Ann Arbor. Taplin, O. (1980), ‘The Shield of Achilles within the Iliad’, G&R 27: 1–21, reprinted with minor revisions in D. L. Cairns (2001) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford), 342–64. –––– (2003), ‘The Spring of the Muses’, in O. Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford), 22–57. Thalmann, W. (1984), Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry, Baltimore. Theiler, W. (1950), ‘Vermutungen zur Odyssee’, MH 7: 102–22. Thiel, H. van (1991), Homeri Odyssea, Hildesheim. Thornton, A. (1970), People and Themes in Homer’s Odyssey, Dunedin. Tracey, S. (1997), ‘The Structure of the Odyssey’ in I. Morris and B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden), 360–79. Trahman, C. (1952), ‘Odysseus’ Lies’, Phoenix 6: 31–43. Tsagalis, C. (2006), ‘Poet and Audience: from Homer to Hesiod’, in F. Montanari and A. Rengakos (eds.), La Poésie épique grecque: métamorphoses d’ un genre littéraire (Geneva), 79–130. Verdenius, W. J. (1972), ‘Note on the Proem of Hesiod’s Theogony’, Mnemosyne 25: 225–60. Walsh, G. (1984), The Varieties of Enchantment, Chapel Hill. West, M. L. (1966), Hesiod: Theogony, Oxford. –––– (1995), ‘The Date of the Iliad’, MH 52: 203–19. West, S. (1981), ‘An Alternative Nostos for Odysseus’, LCM 7: 169–75. –––– (1989), ‘Laertes Revisited’, PCPhS 35: 113–43. Woodhouse, W. J. (1930), The Composition of Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford.

8 Performing the Will of Zeus: The ∆ι βουλ and the Scope of Early Greek Epic* William Allan

In this contribution I aim to bring together two of the honorand’s central interests, Homer and performance, so as to illuminate a fundamental structural pattern of early Greek epic, namely the ∆ι βουλ or ‘will of Zeus’. By examining the epic bard’s manifold uses of the Dios boulê, we shall see how the phrase serves a variety of important functions in the early Greek tradition of oral epic poetry: first, as a means of claiming poetic authority; secondly, as a narrative device connecting the particular story to a larger continuum of heroic songs; and, finally, as an expression of a distinctive view of divine and heroic myth.

I. ONE PLAN OR MANY? THE CASE OF THE ILIAD By way of illuminating these functions, let us begin with the proem of the Iliad, which features not only the most prominent use of the Dios boulê in extant epic, but also the most controversial. ΜDνιν αHειδε, θεα´, Πηληϊα´δεω Α # χιλDο, ολοµ.νην, ] µυρ’ Α # χαιο, αHλγε’ θηκεν, πολλα` δ’ @φθµου ψυχα` eϊδι προfαψεν 9ρων, ατο) δ Kλρια τε&χε κνεσσιν ο@ωνο,σ τε πα˜σι, ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ , 0ξ οg δ6 τα` πρ%τα διαστ την 0ρσαντε Α # τρεδη τε αHναξ α#νδρ%ν κα2 δ,ο Α # χιλλε. (Iliad 1.1–7) * It is a great pleasure to offer this chapter to Oliver with thanks not only for his inspirational scholarship on Homer and Greek drama, but also for his unfailing support and wisdom over the years. I would also like to thank Adrian Kelly and Laura Swift for much helpful discussion and advice on this contribution.

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Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, the accursed wrath, which inflicted countless sorrows upon the Achaeans, and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of warriors, and made their bodies carrion for dogs and all the birds: and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled. Sing from the time when they first parted in strife, Atreus’ son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.

Scholars offer a variety of opinions on the exact reference of ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ (Iliad 1.5).1 In his insightful article on the proem, James Redfield analyses no fewer than five interpretations of the phrase.2 As he notes, most modern commentators follow Aristarchus’ lead in taking the fulfilment of the will of Zeus in this context as a reference to Zeus’s promise to Thetis (Iliad 1.508– 10, 522–30).3 But while this model suits a careful reader who can with hindsight connect the phrase to Zeus’s later promise, it makes little sense in performance, especially at the very start of an epic song, where (as we shall see: cf. §III below) the widest possible conception of the Dios boulê is essential. Thetis’ intervention on behalf of her son is undeniably crucial for the shaping of the Iliad, but the Achaean deaths that result from Achilles’ anger (which are the entire focus of the proem before we are told that ‘the will of Zeus was being fulfilled’) are merely one part, and not the whole, of Zeus’s plan for mortals. Redfield similarly rejects the traditional Aristarchean reading, yet he opts himself for an interpretation that is no less specific (and therefore problematic), since it associates the ∆ι βουλ with a particular prophecy of Troy’s destruction. Comparing Odyssey 8.73–82, Redfield sees a reference to Agamemnon’s mistaken interpretation of the oracle given to him at Delphi that Troy would fall after the best of the Achaeans had quarrelled (‘the best of the Achaeans’ being not, as Agamemnon imagined, Achilles and Odysseus, but Achilles and Agamemnon himself). He explains: ‘By this interpretation the words in lines 5 and 6 of the proem mean: “the will of Zeus [as foretold] was [finally] coming to pass from the time those two divided . . .”. The promise given long ago at Delphi when “the beginning of trouble was in motion” (Odyssey 8.81) was at last to be kept.’4 However, Redfield immediately points 1 Zenodotus, who read δα,τα for πα˜σι, athetized 4–5, but see West (2001), 173 for a cogent defence of the vulgate. 2 Redfield (2001), 470–4. 3 Cf. e.g. Kirk (1985), 53 ‘What is this plan of Zeus? Probably, as Aristarchus seems to have argued, that implied by Zeus’s promise to Thetis at 1.524–30 to avenge the slight on her son Akhilleus by favouring the Trojans.’ For the ‘internal prolepsis’ involved, see Latacz et al. (2002), 20. 4 Redfield (2001), 473. Tellingly, he translates Dios boulê in line 5 as ‘the word of Zeus’ (p. 457, ‘and the word of Zeus was coming to completion’); the need for such a gloss betrays the forced nature of the alleged reference itself.

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to the major weakness in his own theory: ‘This interpretation is subject to one mighty objection: no one in the Iliad ever speaks of the mênis as the fulfilment of a prophecy.’5 Although the epic tradition is familiar with a crucial prophecy involving Achilles, namely that given to him by Thetis concerning his own death at Troy (Iliad 9.410–16; compare Nestor’s suggestion (11.794– 5), taken up by Patroclus (16.36–7), that Achilles may be reluctant to fight again because he is trying to avoid ‘some oracle’ or because his mother has heard something from Zeus),6 this prophecy does not support Redfield’s position any more than does Odyssey 8.73–82, since it is nowhere connected to Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon. The final remaining interpretation to relate the Iliad proem to a specific plan of Zeus takes off from the use of the same phrase, ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ , in the post-Homeric Cypria (fr. 1.7 Bernabé), where Zeus takes pity on the earth and brings about the Trojan war to relieve her of her excessive human burden: οh δ’ 0ν2 Τροηι | \ρωε κτενοντο, ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ (‘So the warriors at Troy kept being killed, and Zeus’s plan was being fulfilled’, fr. 1.6–7).7 This connection has been repeatedly defended, from the perspective of Neoanalysis, by Wolfgang Kullmann,8 but his claim that Zeus’s desire to destroy the race of heroes pervades the Iliad cannot stand. Kullmann simply assumes that the Dios boulê equals the extermination of the heroes and then overreads a series of Iliadic passages in that light.9 Yet if the Iliad poet had wanted to make the destruction of the heroes a central theme of the poem, he would have mentioned it explicitly, which he nowhere does. Kullmann rightly observes that the Iliad proem foregrounds not only Achilles’ anger but also the fact that it fulfils the Dios boulê, thereby putting it in a larger context for the audience,10 but he is wrong to limit that context to one thing (i.e. Zeus’s plan to relieve the earth). Moreover, the typically Neoanalytic attempt to trace stemmata and influence, and so prove the priority of the Cypria’s version, is misguided;11 for the key point is not which version of the Dios boulê came first, but the prevalence and usefulness of this narrative pattern in early Greek epic (cf. §IV). Nonetheless, Kullmann argues 5

Redfield (2001), 473. Cf. also the prophecy (of Patroclus’ death) referred to by Achilles himself at Il. 18.8–11. 7 The original Cypria (i.e. as it was before it was incorporated, perhaps in the Hellenistic period, into an epic ‘Cycle’: cf. Burgess (2001), 12–33) ‘can hardly be earlier than the second half of the sixth century’ (West (2003), 13). 8 Kullmann (1955), (1956a), 21, 41, (1960), 227–9. 9 Cf. esp. Kullmann (1955), 170–5, 190–2, (1956b). 10 Kullmann (1960), 228. 11 Cf. Kullmann (1955), 187 ‘Wenn der––nachweislich alte––Mythos in der Ilias nur angedeutet, in den Kyprien bzw. deren Quelle hingegen ausgeführt ist, beide Male sich aber auf den troischen Krieg bezieht, sollte die Prioritätsfrage geklärt sein.’ 6

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that since the Dios boulê phrase is taken from an older Trojan poem,12 the Iliad must be striving to present, via the anger of Achilles and his quarrel with Agamemnon, a new human-centred perspective on the story of Troy, thereby giving the Dios boulê a new meaning.13 Yet a fundamental feature of the Dios boulê is that it always embraces all of these actions (human as well as divine), and the Cypria (like the Iliad) will have made clear the heroes’ responsibility for their own destruction as well as that of Troy. Finally, Kullmann is right to stress that the Dios boulê opens up connections to the wider song tradition; however, it does not close these connections off by referring to a specific plan and nothing else.

I I . VA R I O U S P L A N S , O N E ( C O S M I C ) W I L L The search for a single or specific plan of Zeus in the proem of the Iliad is unlikely to succeed, not least because the phrase can refer to the will of Zeus as a whole. Kullmann argues that boulê must be translated at Iliad 1.5 as ‘plan’, not ‘will’, since the latter is too general,14 but the Dios boulê is ever present and embraces all of the god’s plans, whether local or cosmic. Moreover, even if the phrase did refer to a single plan, this would still be merely one instance of Zeus’s overarching will. The generality and vagueness of the Dios boulê are useful, for they emphasize Zeus’s ultimate (but not entirely knowable) power over both gods and mortals. This wider perspective is further underlined in the Iliad proem by the imperfect 0τελεετο, which strictly means ‘was in the process of being fulfilled’.15 In other words, the Dios boulê here is not limited to the destruction of the heroes or even the myth of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is merely a particular embodiment of it, albeit one with (as we shall see) ramifications on a cosmic scale. Of course, the primary (local) referent of the Dios boulê is the plot of the Iliad itself, that is, Zeus’s plan to bring honour to Achilles by strengthening the Trojans (e.g. 1.508–9, 11.79, 13.523–5, 16.121, 17.331–2).16 Yet Achilles’ 12 Cf. Kullmann (1955), 187 ‘Dieser Plan kann nur der der Kyprien sein, es bleibt gar nichts anderes übrig.’ 13 Kullmann (1955), 189, (1956a), 42. 14 Kullmann (1955), 167–8. 15 Cf. Martin (1989), 190 ‘If we do discover the will of Zeus, it is only through the poem itself, and then, in a drawn-out fashion, for Zeus’ plan is always in process, as the proem of the Iliad makes clear, with its imperfect tense, ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ (1.5).’ 16 As Fowler (2004), 230 n. 40 observes, ‘the recurrence of the phrase [∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ ] at Od. XI.297 . . . makes one suspect it is a traditional equivalent to “the plot of this epic”.’

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anger has unforeseen consequences––the deaths of Patroclus and Hector–– that contribute to the last phase of the war and the fall of Troy, which is equally part of the Dios boulê (cf. esp. Zeus’s prophecy at 15.59–71). Indeed, these crucial events take place only after Achilles has announced that his initial anger has passed (16.60–3): the futility of this renunciation stresses even Achilles’ limited understanding of the mind of Zeus, despite his privileged access to the god via Thetis.17 Thus a seemingly simple plot of anger and its appeasement takes a surprising turn, and the Dios boulê announced at the start of the poem is fulfilled in ways that no mortal could have predicted, as Zeus’s initial promise to Thetis backfires tragically on Achilles, yet leads to Zeus bringing kudos to Achilles in the end (cf. 24.110–11 (Zeus to Thetis) ατα`ρ 0γ[ τδε κ&δο Α # χιλλDϊ προτια´πτω, | α@δ% κα2 φιλτητα τε6ν µετπισθε φυλα´σσων, ‘But I am going to grant this means of glory to Achilles [sc. the ransom for Hector’s body and the reputation for generosity that comes from accepting it], and so preserve your respect and friendship for the future’). However, although the Dios boulê is inscrutable to the mortal characters themselves, and although its wider ramifications are far from clear in the proem, the particular form it will take in this epic song is gradually revealed to the audience––as it is to Zeus’s fellow gods, though (it is important to add) the extent of this revelation is up to Zeus himself.18 At 8.469–83 Zeus addresses an angry speech to Hera, which offers ‘the first explicit and detailed declaration of the Dios boulê’,19 culminating in Patroclus’ death and Achilles’ re-entry into battle. And just as Zeus himself outlines the limits of his promise to Thetis, which cannot derail his larger plan for the fall of Troy (cf. 20.15– 30), so the narrator reveals the background of Troy’s ultimate destruction within which Achilles’ anger and its consequences must operate (13.347–50, 15.592–602). Thus one might say that the Iliad poet’s great innovation is to take the traditional wrath and withdrawal pattern applied (foremost) to Achilles20 and embed it within a localized narrative of the Dios boulê which has its own wider cosmic frame.21 17 For the Iliad poet’s use of the phrase ‘the mind of Zeus’ (∆ι νο), see Kelly (2007), 172–3, who stresses the importance of the god’s will to the development of the narrative. 18 Cf. esp. Il. 1.544–50, where Zeus reassures Hera that she will be the first to know whatever it is ‘fitting’ (0πιεικ.) for her to hear, adding that even she cannot hope to know all of his plans. For the gradual revelation of Zeus’s plan, see Schadewaldt (1966), 146–7, Taplin (1992), 136–43 (‘Reassertions of the Dios boulê’). 19 Kelly (2007), 63–4. 20 Cf. also Il. 6.325–41 (Paris), 8.477–82 (Hera), 9.524–99 (Meleager), 13.459–61 (Aeneas); Nagler (1974), 131–66. 21 For the dual nature of Zeus’s plan here (balancing the order of the world with the fulfilment of his obligations to Thetis), one might compare the creation of Pandora ∆ι βουλDισι βαρυκτπου (‘by the plans of deep-thundering Zeus’, Hes. WD 79), which serves both to punish men and to quell the nascent rebellion presented by Prometheus.

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As we have seen (§I), there is no explicit trace of the destruction of the race of heroes in Homer’s narrative (which is not to say it was unknown to both the poet and his audience).22 However, the Cypria’s deployment of the Dios boulê indicates its importance as a means of shaping the cosmic or divine frame of epic narrative.23 Moreover, the Cypria’s basic cosmological idea––the destruction of mankind to relieve the earth––is also found in Near Eastern literature24 and seems to have been combined, in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (fr. 204.95 ff. MW), with the heroes’ removal to a blessed existence elsewhere and humanity’s forced endurance of a life of toil.25 Indeed, even before the Cypria and the Hesiodic Catalogue, we find a poet presenting a cosmic pattern wherein both the creation and the destruction of humanity itself are part of the Dios boulê. For in Hesiod’s account of the five Races of Man, Zeus has not only created the third, fourth, and fifth races (the first and second being created by all the gods), but he will also, as Hesiod predicts, destroy the fifth (or iron) race of humans (cf. WD 180–1). So, given that the phrase ‘and the plan of Zeus was being fulfilled’ at Iliad 1.5 encourages the audience to think beyond this particular story to how it fits into the wider Trojan myth (cf. §I), they are free to think of the destruction of the race of heroes. Nevertheless, the phrase does not refer exclusively to that alone. Indeed, it is used in the Odyssey to refer to something else entirely (cf. §III). 22 After all the Iliad poet, like Hesiod (WD 161–5), knows of the war at Thebes, which, along with the Trojan War, ended the race of heroes (4.372–98, 405–8, 5.801–8, 10.285–90); cf. also Il. 12.23 for the 9µιθ.ων γ.νο α#νδρ%ν (‘race of men half-divine’) who died at Troy. Finkelberg (2004) explains Homer’s alleged ‘suppression’ of the myth of the heroes’ destruction with reference to a larger strategy that sought to establish a direct continuity between heroic age and historical Greece and so create a more positive image of the (post-heroic) present. However, if this were such a famous element of myth (present in so many different epics), one wonders how the poet could have suppressed it and why he would want to. A much simpler explanation is that the Iliad poet’s focus is elsewhere (so too with the poet of the Odyssey). Secondly, there is still a direct link and continuity with the heroic age even if the heroes are destroyed, since they had (fully mortal) sons and daughters whose genealogies connected them with the world of the audience. 23 In his summary of the Cypria’s plot Proclus uses the same phrase in reference to Achilles’ withdrawal from the fighting: κα2 ∆ι βουλ6 8πω 0πικουφσηι το) Τρ%α Α # χιλλ.α τD συµµαχα τD =Ελλ νων α#ποστ σα (‘and Zeus’s plan to relieve the Trojans by removing Achilles from the Greek alliance’, Argumentum p. 43 Bernabé; trans. West). Such a passage at the end of the Cypria is likely to be in preparation for the Iliad to follow: cf. Huxley (1969), 50, 129, Marks (2002). Of course, the Cyclic epics have in places been changed under the later influence of the Homeric texts (as when Proclus’ version of Paris and Helen’s voyage to Troy differs from the Cypria known to Herodotus (2.116–17), but is in agreement with Homer’s account); cf. Finkelberg (2000), 6, Burgess (2001), 19–20, 130. Yet even the post-Homeric poems of the Epic Cycle may still reflect the frame in which an archaic audience would have made sense of the events narrated. 24 Cf. Burkert (1992), 100–6, Burgess (2001), 149–50, 245. 25 Cf. West (1985), 119–21, (1997), 480–2.

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One scholar has recently contrasted Homer’s use of the phrase ‘and the will of Zeus was fulfilled’ with its use in the proem of the Cypria: ‘if its [i.e. the Cypria’s] predecessor is in the background here, Homer’s much profounder application of the formula is a very significant, and distancing, innovation, lying close to the heart of his poetic conception.’26 Yet, while one may accept that the focus on Achilles’ character and conduct leads to a ‘much profounder’ poem, one must also insist that there is a cosmic background to the Dios boulê in the Iliad as well as in the Cypria and other early Greek epics, and, moreover, that Homer’s narrative does not ‘distance’ the cosmic from the local interpretation, but integrates them so thoroughly that the latter cannot be separated from the former.

I I I . P RO E M S : F I R S T S T E P S A LO N G A PAT H O F S O N G A more productive approach may be to view the Dios boulê in a broader perspective, and as having, especially in the highly significant context of a proem, multiple or general reference. In other words, we should avoid attempts to make the Dios boulê refer exclusively to one specific event or plan (as do Redfield and Kullmann, for example), since it has a wider significance, as is clear when we consider that the Homeric characters themselves, depending on their circumstances and aims, deploy a wider and more flexible understanding of the will of Zeus (which includes the destruction of Troy: cf. e.g. Iliad 2.350–3, 4.160–8). It may help to illuminate this conception of the Dios boulê if we think of epic proems in general:27 as the bard begins––or, to use the Homeric metaphor, as the bard sets out on his chosen οCµη, or ‘path’, of epic song28 ––his words have the widest range of possible references; as he proceeds, the frame of his song is narrowed down.29 So, for example, the poet of the Iliad begins with the mênis theme and soon establishes that it is the 26

Fowler (2004), 229–30. For a survey of recent work, cf. Tsagalis (2006), 80–7 ‘The Proems: Beginning a Song, introducing a song-tradition’, though his own discussion is confined to Homer and Hesiod’s use of the Muses. 28 For this image of poetic creation (Od. 8.74, 479–81, 22.347–8), cf. Ford (1992), 40–8, esp. 41 ‘The stability and continuity of individual stories are metaphorically expressed as paths, and the tradition is figured as the great tract in which these stories may be joined end to end.’ Führer (2004) gives a full list of passages and detailed bibliography. 29 Redfield (2001), 473 stresses the expansive movement of the Iliad proem as it moves from the individual hero to the wider community of the living and the dead, culminating with the god and his plan. This is true, but from the perspective of the poet, the choice of a particular epic story from the many possible paths of song also represents a narrowing of focus (though not one that limits the Dios boulê to stories of the Trojan War). 27

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wrath of a particular hero; having established who the focus of his song is, he tells us when it takes place (0ξ οg, 1.6), pinpointing the quarrel with Agamemnon as the origin of Achilles’ mênis, but also looking forward, albeit in a deliberately vague manner, to the narration of its aftermath (‘Sing . . . from when . . .’).30 Thus by line five the narrative frame is still very wide and the plan of Zeus in question need not be confined to Achilles’ anger at Agamemnon. The Aristarchean interpretation sees the phrase ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ as essentially prospective, as if the audience must wait until Thetis’ successful request around 500 lines later to understand the true meaning of the phrase. However, even what one might call the ‘local’ interpretation (i.e. that which focuses on Thetis’ request for her son) cannot be separated from its cosmic context, since Zeus’s promise to Thetis is connected to her support in maintaining his supremacy among the gods (1.396–406).31 Zeus must balance his ‘local’ promise concerning Achilles with his wider cosmic role (including his debt to Thetis). Nevertheless, even if the Dios boulê can only be fully understood in cosmic terms, the proem does not explan this larger pattern in any detail (that is not what epic proems do) and the audience is not directed at this stage to think of any one specific event in the unfolding of Zeus’s plan. While the proemic references to the fulfilment of the Dios boulê in the Iliad and Cypria are an important means of stressing Zeus’s control over these particular epic stories and their worlds, it should also be noted that the phrase is not confined to proems and that it serves a similar function elsewhere.32 For Odysseus uses ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ to conclude his story of the prophet Melampus (Odyssey 11.287–97).33 Moreover, the deployment of this ‘familiar epic formula’34 in the Odyssey is no more an ‘allusion’ to the Iliad than is its 30 For a similar narrowing of focus, cf. e.g. Od. 1.1 (‘The man . . . who . . .’), 8.73–5 (‘the Muse inspired the bard to sing the famous deeds of men, from that path of song whose fame then reached broad heaven, the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus . . .’), Hymn. Dem. 1–5 (‘With Demeter my song begins . . . and her daughter . . ., whom Hades once abducted . . . as she played . . .’). Bakker (1997), 285–8, 291–4 analyses Homer’s characteristically paratactic style using Il. 1.1–7 as an example. 31 Cf. Slatkin (1991), 53–84, (2001). 32 The cosmic background to Zeus’s plan may be more obvious in the Iliad, but it is also present in the Odyssey, where Odysseus’ return and punishment of the suitors embodies a system of justice whose ultimate guarantor is Zeus himself: cf. Allan (2006), esp. 23–5. 33 Melampus’ eventually successful attempt to steal Iphicles’ cattle and so win Pero, the daughter of Neleus, is told elsewhere by the poet himself, when recounting the genealogy of the seer Theoclymenus (15.225–38). As Danek (1998), 296 shows, the Odyssey poet has probably manipulated the traditional genealogy of Theoclymenus in order to create a connection between him and the famous prophet. 34 Tsagarakis (2000), 85 on Od. 11.297.

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use in the Cypria.35 The burden of proof lies on those who argue for specific textual influence,36 not least because no such model is needed to make sense of the phrase ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ in these poems (when performed in an oral traditional context). We should therefore avoid talk of ‘intertextuality’, and a fortiori ‘quotation’,37 since the Dios boulê evokes a totality of stories characterized by Zeus’s dominance, but does so without referring to specific texts. It is a traditional narrative element that, as we shall see (§IV), not only offers a distinctive explanation of human history, but also helps the bard generate, and situate, his performance within the wider stream of epic song.

I V. T H E W I L L O F Z E U S I N PE R F O R M A N C E The occurrence of the phrase ∆ι δ’ 0τελεετο βουλ in separate poems does not, then, prove dependence or influence, but rather underlines the important narrative functions served by the Dios boulê throughout early Greek epic. Perhaps the most fundamental, from the perspective of the individual singer and his audience, is the Dios boulê’s role as a means of claiming poetic authority: the bard signposts his knowledge of the mind and will of Zeus in order to guarantee that what follows is true, since his particular account of the past is vouchsafed by his access to a divinely shaped pattern of events. But as well as ensuring accuracy and truth, the poet’s access to the will of Zeus, bolstered by his privileged relationship to the Muse(s), means that he can relate his song to the fundamental plan of the cosmos. Odysseus’ reference to the Dios boulê at Odyssey 11.297 thus represents another way in which he is like a poet (e.g. 35 Pace Ramersdorfer (1981), 272, who argues for the priority of the Iliad, the point is not which came first, but the prevalence and usefulness of the narrative pattern throughout epic. Even Usener (1990), 183, who is eager to present the Odyssey as composed in response to the Iliad, lists Od. 11.297 under ‘Nicht-signifikante Parallelen der Odyssee zur Ilias’. 36 Danek (2002), 3 sums up the sceptical position favoured here as ‘To put it simply: no texts, no intertextuality.’ 37 Currie (2006) uses three Homeric test cases to argue for (p. 31) ‘ “quotation” of a narrative sequence, rather than a specific phrase or motif.’ However, there is a marked slippage in his discussion between reference to other stories and actual quotation, as the scare-quotes in his use of the word ‘quotation’ themselves suggest (cf. e.g. p. 34 ‘the Homeric poems may “quote” earlier poems in some detail’). The bard can refer to a story without referring to a text. Danek’s looser definition of ‘quotation’ as ‘vielmehr vor allem die Evokation von Typizität’, (1998), 509 is less problematic. I agree with Danek (2002) that the spread of writing was crucial to the development of fixed texts, but would date the ‘Verschriftlichung’––Danek (2002), 19––of the epic tradition later than he does, and so doubt the viability of ‘quotation’ in the pre-textual stage of early Greek epic.

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11.363–9, 21.406–11), as he appropriates the bardic technique to strengthen the authority of his own narrative.38 Secondly, regardless of whether it is used at the beginning or the end of a narrative, the Dios boulê opens up connections to other heroic songs. The audience is primed to relate the particular story to the ongoing Dios boulê as they have experienced it in other performances of epic. Such ‘referential’ knowledge adds depth to the poet’s depiction of the heroic past and enables him to generate meaning through repetition and variation.39 Thus the Iliad poet uses the Dios boulê to connect his central hero’s angry withdrawal from fighting to the wider tradition of Troy’s ultimate destruction (cf. §II above). Finally, the wider cosmic frame evoked by the Dios boulê expresses a distinctive view of divine and heroic myth, and one that is fundamental to early Greek thought. Within it the Dios boulê is supreme and cannot be deflected, even by other gods (though it can be delayed). Of course, the other gods’ interests are legitimate expressions of their place within the divine hierarchy, but their schemes are always subservient to Zeus’s larger plan.40 This emerges most clearly when one considers that phrases of the Dios boulê type have a wide range of reference in early Greek epic, but always come back to Zeus and his control over the world.41 As we saw in §§I–II, the Dios boulê does not necessarily refer to one action or event, since it embraces a series of decisions and actions with cosmic ramifications. Moreover, even if it does pick out one action, as when Pandora replaces the lid of the storage jar ‘by the plans of Zeus the cloud-gatherer who bears the aegis’ (α@γιχου βουλDισι ∆ι νεφεληγερ.ταο, Hesiod, Works and 38 Danek (1998), 230–1 shows how Odysseus’ ‘Catalogue of Women’ in toto (11.225–330) serves a similar narrative function: ‘Odysseus zeigt sich damit als Held, der potentiell mit jeder dem Hörer bekannten Heldengeschichte in Verbindung gebracht werden könnte’. For a new perspective on Odysseus’ role as a quasi-bard, highlighting his rivalry with Homer himself, see Kelly in this volume. 39 The importance of ‘referential’ knowledge in the context of oral traditional poetry is well discussed by Kelly (2007), 5–9. 40 Cf. e.g. the failure of Hera’s scheme to deceive Zeus and aid the Achaeans (Il. 14.159– 15.79). On the prevalance of this pattern throughout early hexameter poetry, see Allan (2006), 18–20, 29. 41 e.g. ∆ι µεγα´λου δια` βουλα´ (Od. 8.82, with reference to the Trojan War as a whole; on the relationship of Demodocus’ first song to the Iliad, cf. Lentini (2006), 94–102), 9µετ.ρα δια` βουλα` (Hes. Theog. 653, Zeus on his own plan to defeat the Titans; cf. also 465, 730), ∆ι βουλDισι βαρυκτπου (Hes. WD 79, the creation of Pandora; cf. 71), Ζην φραδµοσνηισιν # Ολυµπου (WD 245, the unjust destroyed), ∆ι βουλDισι (Hymn. Dem. 9, Earth’s ensnaring of Persephone), ∆ι 0ννεσηισιν (Hymn. Dem. 30, Hades’ rape of Persephone), βουλDι ∆ι α@γιχοιο (Hymn. Aphr. 23, Kronos forced to vomit up his swallowed children). The fulfilment of Zeus’s will became a topos of epic too: e.g. µεγα´λου δ ∆ι νο 0ξετελε,το ([Hes.] Theog. 1002), describing the birth of Jason and Medea’s son, Medeios, king of the Medes, a passage unlikely to predate the late sixth century; cf. West (1966), 430 ad loc.

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Days 99), and so allows hope to remain among men as an antidote to their suffering, this single action is still clearly linked to Zeus’s larger plans and cosmic control. Mortal characters have only a limited understanding of the Dios boulê: thus Hector, for example, rejects Polydamas’ advice to retreat within Troy because he is certain that Zeus has granted him victory (Iliad 18.293–5), while even Achilles himself cannot predict the fallout from Zeus’s promise to defend his τιµ (note Thetis’ own bafflement at Achilles’ tears: 18.73–7). When he declares that the countless deaths caused by Achilles’ anger are part of the fulfilment of Zeus’s will, the Iliad poet’s prospective revelation may be chilling, but it is also (as we have seen) confirmed by the poem itself, whose plot is driven by, and presented as a particular embodiment of, the ongoing will of Zeus.

C O N C LU S I O N As our survey of the phrase’s epic usage has shown, the widest possible definition of the Dios boulê is best,42 because all events are seen to be part of that plan. Although the Dios boulê covers a range of actions, they all relate to Zeus’s power, both among mortals and his fellow gods. In short, the Dios boulê is nothing less than the rational articulation of history from the perspective of Zeus (as mediated by the the epic narrator). Moreover, such use of the Dios boulê is merely an extension of a fundamental structural pattern that runs throughout early Greek hexameter poetry; it is perhaps most prominent in Hesiod, but is no less important to Homer or the Homeric Hymns. Thus, for example, although Zeus may allow himself to be tricked by Prometheus, his will cannot be deflected indefinitely and his response results in the current world order.43 The importance and usefulness of the Dios boulê, both as a narrative strategy and as a theological concept, is largely a product of the divine society itself, in which gods have their favourites and their schemes, yet their competing wills are shown to result in an order which is identified with the will of Zeus.

42 This is especially true of a proemic passage such as Il. 1.5, since proems do not spell out detailed plans, but make clear what path of song among the κλ.α α#νδρ%ν (‘famous deeds of men’) will be sung: cf. §III above. 43 Cf. Theog. 613 _ οκ στι ∆ι κλ.ψαι νον οδ παρελθε,ν (‘Thus there is no way to deceive or elude the mind of Zeus’), WD 105 οbτω οI τ πηι στι ∆ι νον 0ξαλ.ασθαι (‘Thus there is no way to evade the mind of Zeus’), where each statement caps Zeus’s punishment of Prometheus.

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REFERENCES Allan, W. (2006), ‘Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic’, JHS 126: 1–35. Bakker, E. (1997), ‘The Study of Homeric Discourse’, in I. Morris and B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden), 284–304. Burgess, J. S. (2001), The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Baltimore. Burkert, W. (1992), The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, Cambridge, Mass. Currie, B. (2006), ‘Homer and the Early Epic Tradition’, in M. J. Clarke, B. G. F. Currie, and R. O. A. M. Lyne (eds.), Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin (Oxford), 1–45. Danek, G. (1998), Epos und Zitat. Studien zu den Quellen der Odyssee, Wiener Studien Beiheft 22, Vienna. –––– (2002), ‘Traditional Referentiality and Homeric Intertextuality’, in F. Montanari and P. Ascheri (eds.), Omero tremila anni dopo (Rome), 3–19. Finkelberg, M. (2000), ‘The Cypria, the Iliad and the Problem of Multiformity in Written and Oral Tradition’, CPh 95: 1–11. –––– (2004), ‘The End of the Heroic Age in Homer, Hesiod and the Cycle’, Ordia Prima 3: 11–24. Ford, A. (1992), Homer: The Poetry of the Past, Ithaca. Fowler, R. (2004), ‘The Homeric Question’, in id. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge), 220–32. Führer, R. (2004), ‘οCµη’, Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, Band 3 Μ–Π (Göttingen), 579–80. Huxley, G. L. (1969), Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge, Mass. Kelly, A. (2007), A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Homer Iliad VIII, Oxford. Kirk, G. S. (1985), The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume I: Books 1–4, Cambridge. Kullmann, W. (1955), ‘Ein vorhomerisches Motiv im Iliasproömium’, Philologus 99: 167–92, reprinted in id., Homerische Motive. Beiträge zur Entstehung, Eigenart und Wirkung von Iliad und Odyssee, (ed.) R. J. Müller (Stuttgart, 1992), 11–35. –––– (1956a), Das Wirken der Götter in der Ilias, Berlin. –––– (1956b), ‘Zur ∆ι βουλ des Iliasproömiums’, Philologus 100: 132–3. –––– (1960), Die Quellen der Ilias, Wiesbaden. Latacz, J. et al. (2002), Homers Ilias, Gesamtkommentar. Band I: Erster Gesang (A), Munich. Lentini, G. (2006), Il ‘padre di Telemaco’: Odisseo tra Iliade e Odissea, Pisa. Marks, J. R. (2002), ‘The Junction between the Cypria and the Iliad’, Phoenix 56: 1–24. Martin, R. P. (1989), The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad, Ithaca. Nagler, M. N. (1974), Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer, Berkeley.

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Ramersdorfer, H. (1981), Singuläre Iterata der Ilias (A–K), Königstein. Redfield, J. (2001), ‘The Proem of the Iliad: Homer’s Art’, in D. L. Cairns (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford), 456–77. Schadewaldt, W. (1966), Iliasstudien, 3rd ed., Darmstadt. Slatkin, L. M. (1991), The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, Berkeley. –––– (2001), ‘The Wrath of Thetis’, in D. L. Cairns (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford), 409–34. Taplin, O. (1992), Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad, Oxford. Tsagalis, C. C. (2006), ‘Poet and Audience: From Homer to Hesiod’, in E. J. Bakker, F. Montanari, and A. Rengakos (eds.), La poésie épique grecque: métamorphoses d’un genre littéraire. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique vol. 52 (Geneva), 79–130. Tsagarakis, O. (2000), Studies in Odyssey 11. Hermes Einzelschrift 82, Stuttgart. Usener, K. (1990), Beobachtungen zum Verhältnis der Odyssee zur Ilias, Tübingen. West, M. L. (1966), Hesiod: Theogony, Oxford. –––– (1985), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Oxford. –––– (1997), The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford. –––– (2001), Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich. –––– (2003), Greek Epic Fragments, Cambridge, Mass.

Part III Performance: Tragedy

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9 Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides Pat Easterling

This paper is about Furies as stage presences in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which may have been the first play to introduce them to the Greek theatre and certainly gave Greek literature some of its most influential images. I use ‘Furies’ as a convenient shorthand for Erinyes/Eumenides/Semnai Theai, without wishing to imply that their complex identity can be captured in a single English word.1 In concentrating on theatrical performance I am deeply indebted to Oliver Taplin’s inspiring work, and I want to use an approach akin to his in addressing a question central to interpretation of the Oresteia, namely how we are to understand Athena’s persuasion of the Furies and their ultimate acceptance of honours at Athens. Are they ‘transformed’? Are they ‘subordinated’? Are they ‘converted’? . . . and more importantly, what might this mean? Since the Furies are going to be associated for the future with the Areopagus, the question has some bearing on this institution, too. Recent scholarship has helped to clarify the issues, and I want to begin with an essay by Helen Bacon, who offers what seems to me a profoundly thoughtful approach to the final scene of Eumenides and its place in the whole Oresteia. The point of ‘homecoming’ in her title is to stress that the Athenians’ honorific reception of the Furies, to live and receive cult in their land, is the true culmination of the whole action, bringing together and illuminating two themes that have been dominant throughout the trilogy. From now on, by contrast with the sequence of violent acts figured as corrupted sacrifices, the Furies will be honoured in an annual sacrificial feast, and instead of being rootless outsiders, shunned by gods and men, they will have a permanent home in Athens, as respected metoikoi. The significance of this new home is to be understood in relation to their role as enforcers of Zeus’s laws governing 1

Or a single Greek one: cf. Sophocles, OC 42–3 ‘The people here [at Colonus] call them the all-seeing Eumenides; but other names are right in other places’. See Sommerstein (1989), 6–12; Lloyd-Jones (1990); Henrichs (1994), esp. 46–54.

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the fundamental relations on which social (and cosmic) order is built, that is, all such relations and not only those of blood: ‘The institutions of hospitality, suppliancy, marriage, kingship, which link people not related by blood, are throughout the trilogy given near equal weight with blood kinship’.2 Until the final scene of Eumenides the Furies have been manifesting violent rage at the repeated challenges to this order and to their own place within it, but the trial has averted a final ‘sacrifice’, the death of Orestes, and Athena has managed to clarify what their future role will be: Through the court, of which the Furies will be the guarantors, Athena and the Athenians recognize the Furies and their function, make them part of consciousness, bring them into the light. At each stage of this progression they have been not Zeus’ subordinates in the enforcement of the decrees of Moira but autonomous divinities acting first invisibly in concert with him and then in visible opposition to his disposition of Orestes’ case on the grounds that it violates the role assigned to them by Moira. In assenting to Athena’s clarification they do not submit as subordinates but voluntarily choose as autonomous divinities to join the sacrificial community of gods and mortals as fully visible members.3

One might, indeed, think Bacon’s discussion, which rightly attaches great importance to the final procession as the visible demonstration of this new dispensation, leaves few questions to be answered, but it is worth seeing first what other sorts of perspective have appealed to critics, and then whether there is room for more attention to be paid to Furies in performance. Cult Albert Henrichs uses the evidence for cult practice to offer a model in which the Erinyes are to be thought of as polar opposites of the group called Semnai Theai (in Attic cult) or Eumenides (their ‘Panhellenic’ title).4 The Erinyes qua Erinyes were not recipients of public cult––though they might be invoked in curses––and we should be thinking of two separate groups (or two separate aspects, at any rate), which are distinct enough for Aeschylus and his audience and only fully assimilated with one another in Euripides and beyond. Thus the logic of the Eumenides could be based on foregrounding first the functions of the Erinyes at 1–777, then the polarity between Erinyes and Semnai Theai/Eumenides from 778 to 1020, ‘played out in the alternation of curse and blessings they pronounce’ and ending with full focus on their capacity to bless.5 This is no doubt over-schematic as an analysis of the play,

2

3 4 Bacon (2001), 52. Bacon (2001), 57–8. Henrichs (1994). Henrichs (1994), 40. For Erinyes in connection with mystery cult in the Derveni papyrus see Henrichs (1984); Betegh (2004), 84–9. 5

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but I have found Henrichs’s elucidation of both the traditions and the cult practice relating to these beings helpful in trying to understand their dual nature.6 ‘Aetiology’ Another main preoccupation of critics has been in the direction of what (following Peter Wilson and Oliver Taplin)7 one might call aetiology, or the play’s implicit references to its contemporary theatrical, ritual, and political functions. Thus Elizabeth Belfiore8 has seen the antithesis between terror and blessing represented by the Furies, and particularly their masks, as having the same sort of function as the gorgoneion at the feast. The change in the audience’s perceptions effected by the persuasion of the Furies in the shift from maddening to constructive Fear can be understood as what effects catharsis, and the play as an image of the way tragedy works within the festival. Ruth Padel9 has a rather similar interest in the incorporation of Fear, as represented by the Furies, within the polis, which can be thought of as a model for the institutionalization of tragedy. Yopie Prins10 emphasizes the performative utterance of the choros, particularly in the Binding Song, seeing the Furies as the incarnation of speech acts––most particularly curses––and suggesting that the Eumenides derive their ‘tremendous theatrical impact precisely from the audience’s awareness of being in the theater’. Their words, she says, ‘are deeds performed in the very moment of utterance, deeds which undo the opposition between “play” acting and “real” action’. As Prins interestingly points out, there is also slippage, between words and action: words present themselves as action. Orestes is not ‘bound’ (i.e. maddened), despite the Binding Song, but the Furies also use language which turns out to be fulfilled, particularly when they describe themselves as semnai (383). Some of these points are taken up, with different emphases, by Henrichs in his Arion article,11 which stresses the ritual and theatrical self-consciousness of the performing choros in many plays, and by Wilson and Taplin, who give special weight to the well-known musical themes of the Oresteia and the way in which reference to song can be seen as reference to each play itself as it is performed, culminating in an aetiology for the ‘incorporation of tragic choroi into the life of the future city’.12 Such approaches are in principle very attractive to anyone who takes the view, as I do, that drama almost by definition exploits the audience’s 6

For the cult of the Semnai Theai close to the Areopagus see Henrichs (1994), 39–46; cf. Parker (1996), 298–9. 7 Wilson and Taplin (1993); see further Revermann (this volume). 8 9 Belfiore (1992), 26–30. Padel (1992), 162–92. 10 Prins (1991). The quotations are from 183, 184, and 190. 11 12 Henrichs (1995), esp. 60–5. Wilson and Taplin (1993), esp. 174–6 on Eumenides.

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awareness of the contradictory nature of the theatrical event––real and not real at the same time––and is therefore always potentially self-referential in this broad ‘aetiological’ sense, though any particular reading may of course be open to debate. There is also a feature of tragic performance which must have been entirely familiar to ancient audiences, but is easily forgotten by the modern reader, the fact that when the Furies materialized in Eumenides with all the lavish preparation for shock, thauma, that the text had given them, the audience knew that these terrifying roles were performed by chorusmen who were later going to play the parts of satyrs. These performers have already been old men of Argos and female slaves belonging to the house of Atreus, and now they are Furies––but they will be transformed yet again for the climactic Dionysiac performance of the tetralogy. This idea of choral transformability helps us think about the stability (or instability) of stage personae, and if we can feel comfortable with the thought that drama is able to enact contradictions of all sorts (indeed characteristically does so, which is a reason for its special appeal), we can perhaps approach the play with a readiness to accept the Furies as stage presences who do not have a settled and stable identity, although they have several clearly defined roles. Thus early in the play they can function as the Furies of Clytemnestra but later become a less specialized group of powers of retribution. At the same time, the fact that these avenging forces are now embodied and visible to the audience means that they can be represented as having quasi-human motivation, and their very contradictoriness can help to convey the seemingly intractable nature of the problems that the dramatist is making us confront.

SEEING THE INVISIBLE The issue of Mètis for 2006 offers as its thematic section (dossier) an interesting collection of papers with the overall title ‘Avez-vous vu les Érinyes?’. The emphasis here is on the problem of finding language to describe the invisible, or represent the unrepresentable, in the context of Greek theories of vision. The authors start from the assumption that the Erinyes are a limit case, so frightening that one would not know how to see or represent them, much less provoke or evoke them.13 The paper that bears most closely on the topic of stage representation in Eumenides is the one by Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux,14 who delicately traces the way in which the Furies are introduced to the imagination of the audience, through Orestes’ ‘hallucinations’ at the end of 13 14

Labarrière (2006), 9–10. Significantly entitled ‘L’Étoffe des spectres’; see esp. 31–42.

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Choephori, then the terrified reactions and speculations of the Pythia, the disgust of Apollo and the weird ‘dream space’ in which the apparition of Clytemnestra arouses her ‘hounds’ for the hunt. She makes a strong case for Aeschylus’ originality in gradually accustoming the audience to this extraordinary stage presentation of ‘une somatisation du vide’, an embodiment of something that has no stable physical characteristics, suggesting that after this elaborate preparation the woven substance of the costumes (and of the masks) could be used to work powerfully on the minds of the spectators in conjuring up this vision of the invisible. Less likely, I think, is her suggestion that the audience in 458 would have been unprepared for such effects and therefore as terror-stricken by the Furies as the famous story in the ancient Life implies.15 Without taking the story at face value, she suggests that ‘Furies appearing in the theatre could have had a terrifying effect on an audience ignorant of the dramatic code and up to this point familiar only with the images suggested by lyric and epic performance’.16 But would earlier Aeschylean plays not have given them some sense of a ‘dramatic code’ for the rendering of beings from outside the range of normal human experience?17 The most important point to bear in mind here is that Aeschylus was working in a theatrical tradition in which divine beings (including the Dionysiac thiasos) were regularly represented onstage. There is a logic in this kind of representation which enables divinities and powerful supernatural beings to be shown, seen and heard in action in the theatre, without prompting reactions of overwhelming fear. There was surely no more literal danger to an audience from seeing performers embodying Furies (admittedly of all supernatural beings the ones most likely to be alarming), or other such fearful powers as Thanatos in Euripides’ Alcestis, or Lyssa, Madness incarnate, in his Heracles, than from seeing an actor play Athena, though all such experiences would be utterly terrifying if they were believed to be full epiphanies of the deities themselves.18 This is where the dual nature of drama is functionally so 15

‘Some say that in his presentation of the Eumenides by bringing on the chorus in ones and twos he shocked the audience so greatly that children fainted and foetuses were aborted’, Life §9. 16 Frontisi-Ducroux (2006), 41: ‘L’apparition des Érinyes a pu produire un effet épouvantable sur un public ignorant du code dramatique et ne connaissant jusqu’ alors que la visualisation mentale produite par le chant et la recitation épique’. See now Frontisi-Ducroux (2007), 165–7 for a revised and slightly modified version of these arguments. 17 Frontisi-Ducroux (2006), 41 n.25 makes the fair point that the ghost of Darius in Persae and the ghost or dream image of Clytemnestra in Eumenides were potentially much less alarming than the Erinyes. But perhaps there had been enough Aeschylean experiments in embodying the uncanny to establish some sort of ‘code’. One might think of Psychagogoi, based on the summoning of shades in Odyssey 11; cf. Bardel (2005), 85–92. Psychostasia evidently had the weighing of souls as a central motif, though we know little about the original staging; cf. Taplin (1977), 431–3 . One wonders if Phineus had stage Harpies. 18 Cf. Easterling (1993a).

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important, just as when it prevents actual pollution from being a threat, in plays featuring Oedipus or Alcmeon, for example. Gods onstage are there to tell the spectators something about power, especially the dramatist’s power to shape the action, and we might expect divine choroi to have a special authority, too. * The process whereby the audience of the Oresteia is introduced to embodied Furies has been perceptively discussed by critics, and all that is needed here is a reminder of the main stages: the mantic Cassandra describes the alarming chants of the Fury-choros, drunk on human blood, which she sees ‘forever in the house and not to be driven out, bred in the family’ (Ag.1186–90). Orestes’ maddened state at the end of Choephori is precisely mapped in relation to his seeing Furies, unseen to others (1048–62). He does not name them, but he knows who they are, these gorgon-like creatures wearing dark garments and wreathed in snakes: the raging hounds of his mother! There is a large troop of them (πληθουσι 1057),19 their eyes dripping with blood. Then in Eumenides the Pythia is the first to encounter the sleeping Furies at 46–59: ‘It is here that unseen forces break into the action of the trilogy’ (Brown).20 Despite her special prophetic expertise, the Pythia is utterly terrified and bewildered: Are they gorgons? Are they harpies? There is no creature she can properly compare them with; all she can do is describe their dark and disgusting appearance, their horrible snoring, the stink of their breath and the ooze from their eyes. The Old Men of Argos in Agamemnon and the female house slaves in Choephori have had some sense––poetic and imagistic––of these unseen forces as agents of retribution,21 and now in Eumenides the chorus actually embodies them. This must give them enormous potential significance, but for a start what the audience sees and hears verges on the grotesque, as the dream image of Clytemnestra summons the Furies to wake up and pursue their prey, and with much moaning and groaning––Clytemnestra says they are barking like hunting dogs in their dreams (131–2)––they rouse themselves for action. When they are fully visible in the acting area22 and begin their first song and 19 Appropriate for a group that is to be represented onstage by 12 (or less likely15) chorusmen; cf. Sommerstein (1989) on Eum. 142. In Euripides and many later texts the now assimilated Erinyes/Eumenides are three in number. 20 Brown (1983), 23 n. 56 on Eum. 46–59. 21 A singular Erinys at Ag. 55–9 and 744–9, Cho. 400–4 and 648–51; plural Erinyes at Ag. 461– 8, in Cassandra’s vision at Ag. 1186–93, and in Orestes’ report of Apollo’s oracle at Cho. 275–96. 22 The staging of this entrance is a notorious problem. See Taplin (1977), 369–74; Brown (1982), 26–8; Rehm (1988), 290–301; Podlecki (1989), 12–13; Ewans (1995), 195–9 with n. 6; Ley (2007), 36–42.

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dance the emphasis is on their rage at being tricked of their prey, their outrage as old daimones being ‘ridden down’ by a young one, and their horror at Apollo’s pollution of his own shrine by allowing sanctuary to Orestes. Extreme as their language, and no doubt their appearance and actions, must have seemed––and for Apollo they represent everything that is disgusting and abominable (179–97)––the Furies at once have a serious challenge to make, questioning his right to order Orestes to kill his mother and go to Delphi for help. Although they have no answer to offer to Apollo’s counterchallenge, that they pay no respect to the bond of marriage (213–24), they are clearly more than bogey figures who can be chased away; they are the chorus of the play, and as they are seen and heard in action the impression of their strange collective persona becomes progressively more compelling. In what follows I suggest some of the ways in which their stage presence and behaviour help these mysterious beings to be understood. In each case what we see is the dynamic development in performance of the associations already made by the language and imagery of the two previous plays or of the earlier poetic tradition.

FURIES IN PURSUIT Like Ate in Homer, who is ‘strong and swift of foot’ (σθεναρ τε κα2 α#ρτπο Il. 9.505), these ancient beings are constantly on the move in pursuit of their victims. Even in their sleep at the beginning of the play they are dreaming of their prey, and as they wake up they tell one another to ‘kick away’ sleep (141); their function, they claim at 210, is to ‘drive mother-killers from their homes’, and as they leave Delphi they tell Apollo that led by the trail of his mother’s blood they will ‘go after this man to punish him, and hunt him down’ (230–1). Then they arrive at Athens in furious pursuit of Orestes, like hounds after a wounded fawn, following the trail of blood. They have been chasing him over land and sea, ‘in wingless flights, no slower than a ship’ (250–1). The combination of hunting-dog language and their uncanny ‘wingless flights’ marks them as both beastlike and godlike;23 their movements in performance may help to integrate these associations. 23 As they pick up the scent and catch sight of Orestes they talk of draining the ‘red drinkoffering from your limbs’; I resist the vampire image in some modern analysis and prefer the image of the hungry dogs and the blood-lapping jackals and wolves of epic similes (Il. 11.291–5, 474–81; 16.155–67), though the grisly Keres of the Hesiodic Shield 248–57 are probably also relevant here. In any case there are there are strong indications of supernatural power: the blood will be a pelanos, and the Furies talk of haling Orestes to the underworld. At 304–5 the god and beast language is combined in the idea that Orestes is their victim, fattened for sacrifice, but they will ‘feast on him alive’.

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In the Binding Song, for example, they draw pointed attention to what they are doing; at 306 the chorus leader tells Orestes that he will hear ‘this song, a spell to bind you’, and this desmios humnos (the words are echoed at 331–2 and 344–5) is usually imagined as a circular dance, with the Furies menacingly ‘weaving about him, as it were, an invisible net to put him in their power, drive him out of his mind and destroy him’.24 When they describe their allotted functions (λα´χη, 310) more fully, they make clear that their power to pursue goes on after the death of their victims: they ‘accompany’ the wrongdoer down below the earth (338–40; cf. their threats to Orestes at 267), and even those who were the proudest and most successful of men in their lifetimes wither away dishonoured, through ‘our black-garbed attacks (0φδοι) and the angry movements of our feet in the dance. Leaping high [or ‘from above’], I bring down the heavy weight of my foot; my legs make men fall however hard they run––an irresistible destruction’ (368–76).25 The Furies’ feet are for running after, catching up, tripping up, and doing harm to their victims. It is not difficult to see a reference in these verses to the menacing flapping of their black garments and the kicking, jumping, and stamping of the chorus as they dance round Orestes.26 But the fearsomely aggressive action mimicked by their dancing here can be replaced by a benign and stately procession, as it is when they join their Athenian escorts stepping out of the theatre at the end of the play. Hunting hounds are not the only aggressive creatures associated with the Furies. In his vision at the end of Choephori (1048–50) Orestes saw gorgon-like creatures wearing dark garments and ‘wreathed in thickly coiling snakes’ (πεπλεκτανηµ.ναι | πυκνο, δρα´κουσιν).27 In Eumenides there is no mention of snakes ‘wreathing’ the Furies,28 and the only direct reference to a snake 24 Sommerstein (1989) on 299–396. Cf. Henrichs (1995), 60–5 on the incantatory nature of the song and the sinister movements of the dance; Faraone (1985) on the language of curse tablets. 25 For a daimon ‘leaping with a heavy foot’ cf. Persae 515–16) and for an Erinys ‘fleet of foot’, cf. Septem 791. Sophocles uses a similar image, perhaps evoking Eumenides, at Ajax 837, when Ajax invokes the σεµνα` # Εριν& τανποδα, the ‘dread, long-striding Furies’. 26 See e.g. Sommerstein (1989) on 370, 371, 372–6. Satyr choruses sometimes draw attention to their (similarly energetic) dancing style, as at Soph. Ichn. 217–20; cf. Silenus’ remarks at Eur. Cyclops 36–40. 27 See Garvie (1986) ad loc. Scholars disagree over the earliest Furies in art: were they originally shown as serpents? Frontisi-Ducroux (2006), 39 n. 21, cites H. Sarian in LIMC s.v. Erinys, who rejects the hypothesis. Contrast Zeitlin (1996), 103 ≈ (1978), 164: ‘The Erinyes on stage embody the metaphorical allusions to them in the earlier plays, and also, as true primordial dragon figures, make visible the metaphors of serpentine female monstrosity that have been associated with Clytemnestra from the beginning of the trilogy’. For Furies in vase painting see most recently Lissarrague (2006). 28 κσµο at 55 surely refers to their dark garments, ‘inauspicious to wear when entering a temple’ (Sommerstein (1989) ad loc.), rather than to their snake-decoration (Frontisi-Ducroux

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(δρα´καινα) comes at 127–8, when the angry Clytemnestra, struggling to awaken the sleeping Furies, remarks that sleep and hard effort have ‘drained away the dread snake’s force’. But their chasing and dancing are not figured as snakelike movements (hardly surprising, as snakes don’t have feet). Of course in the original production the Furies may have been represented with snakes coiled round their masks or arms, but I suspect their most snakelike function as stage presences––which could equally well have been shown through words and gestures––was their capacity to poison their victims. Athena (476–9, 800– 3, 829–31) and Apollo, though he makes light of it (729–30), are both aware of the Furies’ weapon, which could be figured as their venom: their power, through their angry curses, to send blight and destruction on plants, animals, and human beings. After the verdict, the outraged Furies themselves sing in blood-curdling detail of what their poison can do: ‘And I am dishonoured! In my rage against this land I am discharging venom, venom from my heart in requital for my grief, to trickle in drops on the earth, unbearable; and from it a canker, blighting leaves, blighting children––O Justice, Justice!––spreading fast over the soil will cast contagion on the land, deadly to mortals’ (780–7 = 810–17). Clearly the imagery of blight and disease merges with the idea of shedding poison, but perhaps the aggressive agency of the Furies is given coherence by the implied comparison with snakes. Do descriptions of their deadly breath (53, 137–9, 840), their vomit (730), their power to wither their victims (333/346) and even the bloody ooze from their eyes (54) all relate to this idea?

W H O A R E T H E S E C R E AT U R E S ? By the time Athena encounters them and the suppliant Orestes at Athens and comments (politely) on their unfamiliar looks, the Furies have made themselves pretty well known to the audience, and the point can hardly be to introduce them yet again. But Athena goes into some detail: she is not afraid, she says, but certainly surprised, and she asks both parties who they are, ‘this stranger sitting as suppliant at my statue, and you: you are not like any race of begotten beings, nor are you among those goddesses seen by gods, nor again do you resemble human forms. But to speak ill of others who are blameless is (2006), 36). Pausanias 1.28.6, describing the sanctuary of the Semnai Theai, remarks that Aeschylus was the first to represent them with snakes in their hair, though this could of course be a reference to Cho. 1048–50. Euripides (El. 1255–7 and 1345, IT 286, Or. 256) uses snake language for Furies (or Keres) but none of the passages throws light on exactly how they were imagined.

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far from just, and propriety keeps away from it’ (406–14).29 The emphasis on different perceptions of their appearance may be designed in part to mark Athena’s calm dignity and her sense of how to behave justly towards xenoi, by contrast with the Pythia’s fear and Apollo’s disgust; this certainly wins her the Furies’ respect, but the detail also signals the dramatic importance of who they are. Here they identify themselves as children of Night and announce their names: ‘In our homes below the earth we are called Curses (Arai)’ (416– 17), although they have used ‘Erinyes’ of themselves at 331 and 344. At the end of the play they get new names from Athena and her people,30 at a highly significant moment when they are escorted in a torchlit procession to ‘places below the earth’, in Attica, now, not Hades. The matter of their identity, deeply relevant to their significance in the trilogy, could not be more pointedly presented. What else are we shown by their stage presence and self-presentation? They are old, grotesque female creatures with the performative power of youth. By contrast with the Prayers at Iliad 9. 503–7, another group of seemingly old and decrepit figures who have unexpected staying-power, the Furies are extremely quick off the mark. Their old age has two opposite significations. First, they are old has-beens contrasted with the younger generation of gods––but then Athena herself quotes their language of fear in her foundation speech for the Areopagus, and it turns out that they are after all to be given honour in the new dispensation. Secondly, they are primeval powers who embody the eternal logic of the way things are, namely that actions have their consequences.31 The performative aspect is important here, because the audience sees and hears energetic young chorusmen precisely enacting the power––and grotesquerie––of these ancient beings. The Furies’ frightening faces and dark garments––masks and costumes–– work in the same way. Darkness links them with Night and her fearsome associations; but as Night’s daughters (321–2, 416, 792/822, 844/878, 1033) they are sisters of the Moirai (961–2) and linked with the cosmic order (334– 6).32 As critics have often pointed out, Athena’s words at 990 stress the benefit 29 Reading λ.γειν δ# αHµοµφον Fντα το) π.λα κακ%, | πρσω δικαων iδ# α#ποστατε, θ.µι at 413–14. 30 On the most likely interpretation of the defective text in Athena’s last speech at 1020–31 see n. 41 below. 31 George Eliot had an acute perception of this logic: ‘ “It is good”, sing the old Eumenides in Aeschylus, “that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom––good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else, how should they learn to revere the right?” ’, Romola, ch. 11. 32 In Hesiod they are daughters of Earth, born from the blood of Ouranos’ severed genitals (Theog. 184–5); their new genealogy makes them more like Keres (Theog. 217–22) and (as they point out) sisters of the Moirai. For an influential interpretation of the significance of this change from the Hesiodic account see Zeitlin (1996), 102–3 (≈ 163–4).

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to be got for the city from their ‘frightening faces’ (πρσωπα). And the darkness of their appearance leads us to the Earth where they ‘properly’ belong: much of the fear generated by their presence is related to their being out of their proper ambience. Below the earth is their true home, whether it is seen as a terrifying place of punishment (as at 175, or 267–75) or as the sacred locus of their power to protect and bless as well as to punish, as at the end when they are hurrying below the earth (1007), to be located in Attic ground. Earth is thus redefined or reimagined as the play proceeds. The fact that the figures cut by the Furies are always recognizably female has been interpreted in many different ways. In performance it may have served as a constant reminder of their duality: they are virgins (68–9, 1033),33 but they can give fecundity as well as blight. They can be compared with other frightening female beings such as gorgons or harpies, or at the other extreme with powers such as the Moirai, and although they have started off as seeming champions of Clytemnestra, they have views on civic government which Athena turns out to share, and which a sophisticated modern city must take seriously.34 As beings with power to curse and (as it turns out) to bless,35 they are performers of song and dance, the most emphatic guise in which they manifest themselves to the audience and elicit their imaginative response. Wilson and Taplin persuasively suggest that Athena’s words at 990–1 (‘from these terrifying prosopa I see great profit for these citizens’) point forward to the institution of tragic choroi at Athens, which will enable ‘the alien and terrifying, all that the city attempts to block out and define itself against’ to ‘take place within a civic structure that can turn it all to its own benefit’.36 Part of this argument depends on the suggestion that the Binding Song, described by the chorus themselves as ‘our horrific muse (µο&σαν στυγερα´ν), which we have decided to display’ (307–8),37 is ‘in many respects the theatrical culmination of the Oresteia’s “corrupted music”, the embodiment at a theatrical–– and choral––level of negative mousike’.38 The strongest evidence in favour of this view is the Furies’ refrain describing their song as ‘binding the wits, 33

Cf. Sommerstein (1989) on 1033. Cf. Goldhill (1984), 281–3; Burian (2003), 22–8 on the ‘complex relation of gender and power in the Oresteia’. 35 0φυµνDσαι (902) and 0πεχοµαι (979) are both used here in a positive sense, but they can be negatively applied, as when the chorus at Cho. 386–8 wish to sing (0φυµνDσαι) an ololugmos at the killing of ‘the man and his wife’, and when Thyestes’ curse on the Pelopidae is reported at Ag. 1600 the verb is 0πεχεται. 36 Wilson and Taplin (1993), 176. 37 στυγερα´ν is better translated (with Sommerstein) as ‘horrifying’ or ‘horrific’ rather than ‘hateful’. 38 Wilson and Taplin (1993), 174; cf. Henrichs (1995), 63–4. 34

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unaccompanied by the lyre, withering to mortals’ (331–23, repeated at 344– 6), but the song also contains such important truths about the Furies as 381– 4: ‘This stands fast: we are resourceful, we carry things through, we remember evil deeds, we are awesome (semnai) and mortals cannot appease us’. Their ‘muse’ is certainly unlovely and alarming from their victims’ point of view, but brilliant for an audience, and I would prefer to see it as a combination, characteristic of the Furies’ whole performance (and, one might say, of tragedy as a genre), of negative and positive: horrifying, but also expressive of their lasting power, which although it includes actions of extreme violence, is ultimately confirmed by Athena (930–7, 950–55, 990–1). One might be tempted to take the fact that Orestes shows no sign of being affected by the Binding Song as indicating its futility or perversity; perhaps rather it sets out what they would potentially be able to do if they were not dealing with this exceptional case, and if Orestes were not already a suppliant at Athena’s statue.39

T H E F I NA L S C E N E It is time now to return to the question I started with and to ask whether we can find appropriate words for what happens when the Furies accept Athena’s offer and arguments (which crucially include her final point that they would not be acting justly in blighting her city, when they can have a home there justly honoured forever, 887–90). In terms of the plot, what happens is clear enough; they are persuaded, they pronounce blessings on the Athenians, they have new garments placed over their old ones,40 they join the procession with Athena, and at 1041 they are addressed as Semnai, or Semnai Theai, their name in Attic cult.41 How are we to characterize what happens? 39 Contrast Henrichs (1995), 64: ‘Still, the Erinyes ultimately dance and curse in vain. Their binding song is followed by the stage epiphany of Athena at the beginning of the next scene. Her intervention to save Orestes persuades the Erinyes to transform their curses into blessings, and, in the closing scene of the trilogy, magic is replaced by cult and bloodshed by the homicide court’. 40 This is the currently favoured interpretation of 1028–9, which (unless something has been lost between the two verses) implies that the Furies are to be honoured by being clad in ‘crimson-dyed garments’ ; following Headlam (1906) this has often been taken to evoke the procession at the Panathenaea, in which metics took part wearing red cloaks; for further discussion cf. Taplin (1977), 412–13; Macleod (1975/1983); Easterling (1993b), 17–19 with n. 31. 41 Many editors adopt Hartung’s supplement <θεα> at 1041, but Σεµνα alone would give the same message. It is also possible that the name Semnai Theai, or as some have thought, Eumenides, was announced in a lost line from Athena’s speech at 1021–31; see Sommerstein (1989) on 1027; Brown (1984), 267–76. Clearly the title that soon became attached to the play was Eumenides, but it does not follow that this name was used in the play.

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With the emphasis on change, many critics have used terms like ‘transformation’, often with interesting qualifications. In an influential article42 R. P. Winnington-Ingram saw the issue as relating to the relations between Olympian and chthonic deities: the Erinyes are reconciled ‘and in some sense transformed’, a transformation which depends on the coming together of Zeus and Moira. They have not ceased to be fearful or lost their punitive functions, but the power of peithô has made the transformation possible, allowing the trilogy to end with ‘confident faith in the victory of good’. Winnington-Ingram’s (broadly theological) discussion of the Oresteia is subtler than this bald summary suggests; he also makes the important point that (for Aeschylus) ‘If the world, human and divine, was to be understood, it must be understood as a whole, the dark with the light, the evil with the good. For this task tragic poetry, and perhaps tragic poetry alone is fitted . . .’, adding in a footnote that ‘tragedians are experts in the nature of evil and its place in the world order’.43 Another sort of change, relating more specifically to what the spectators see, is suggested by Frontisi-Ducroux, who takes the prosopa at 990 as certainly referring to the Furies’ masks,44 and thinks of them effecting a double process of ‘mutation’: from invisible to visible, in bringing the Furies on stage in the first place, and now from terrifying to beneficent. She combines this with the widely held view that benefit for the Athenians will be political and juridical, through the creation of the Areopagus, ‘which puts an end to the murderous chain of private vengeance’.45 Richard Seaford, too, sees the crucial change as coming ‘when the Furies accept both the verdict of the law court and for themselves an everlasting cult as settlers-from-abroad (µ.τοικοι) under the earth, and are thereby transformed from agents of intrusive (Argive) reciprocal violence into agents of permanent blessings and permanent concord for Athens’.46 Seaford sets this transformation in the context of changes in cult arrangements at Athens: ‘in accepting the court’s acquittal of Orestes the Furies lose their autonomy, but are granted their caveshrine, their cult, and power as awe-inspiring accessories to the judicial process’.47 ‘Transformation’, however, carries with it the idea of a change more radical 42

Winnington-Ingram (1954), esp. 21–3. Winnington-Ingram (1954), 22, with n. 39. For other approaches to a theological reading see Sommerstein (1989), 10, 21–5; Mikalson (1991), 214–17. 44 Wilson and Taplin (1993), 175–6 are cautious: ‘We cannot know whether the word πρσωπον had become established as the word for ‘mask’ by 458 bc, nor whether, if it had, it would have been familiar to the audience in that sense’. 45 46 Frontisi-Ducroux (2007), 176. Seaford (1994), 132 (omitting line references). 47 Seaford (1994), 96. 43

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than the stage presence of the Furies has suggested, and there is much to be said for the emphasis favoured by many critics on the idea of a new agreement between Athena and the Furies, arrived at by argument and persuasion. Simon Goldhill, for example, in a detailed analysis of the language of the final scene, points out that when the Furies put the questions at 892 ‘What kind of seat (^δραν) do you say I will have?’, picking up Athena’s own words at 805 and 855, and then at 894 ‘Suppose I accept?’ (κα2 δ6 δ.δεγµαι ) in answer to her injunction δ.χου (‘Accept’), ‘the Erinues have entered the process of exchange’, which opens the way to reconciliation.48 Bacon writes of their ‘assenting to Athena’s clarification . . . It is a change not of identity but of status––a new relationship, with fruitful possibilities for all creatures, human and divine, subject to the decrees of Moira’.49 The merit of such readings is that they allow all the new activities of the Furies in bringing blessings on the land, its people, animals, and crops to be of a piece with what the audience already know about them from their stage presence; as Michael Ewans puts it, ‘The Furies do not change their powers or their nature. Just as Athena, goddess of wisdom, can also bestow its opposite on mortals who offend her, so too the Furies, goddesses of blight, can also be goddesses of fecundity’.50 This accords well with the polarity of blessing and cursing, with the fact that Athena lays great stress on the continuing punitive powers of the Furies (930–7, 950–5, 990–1), and with the overall dynamic of the trilogy, seen, for example in the characterization of peithô as both restorative and destructive.51 Much has been written on the procession and its extraordinary atmosphere of joy and blessing. Bacon’s image of ‘homecoming’ echoes Taplin’s analysis of the way the Furies’ acceptance of Athena’s offer is to be understood as agreeing to stay in Athens for good: ‘. . . in her final speech (881–910) she can put the situation entirely in terms of staying or leaving . . . So the stage movement, departing or staying, will sum up the whole momentous decision’.52 In his concluding paragraph on the play Taplin stresses the symbolic importance of the procession in putting ‘into visible and concrete terms the reconciliation between Athena and the Erinyes’ and marking the fact that in their new home ‘they will have high honours, they will be favourable to the 48

49 Goldhill (1984), 269–70. Bacon (2001), 57–8. Ewans (1995), 220. Cf. Burian (2003), 20–1, who in a carefully phrased qualification of his remark that the ‘metamorphosis of Erinyes to Eumenides is but the most obvious and important of a whole series of transformations to bring dikê firmly into the world of the polis’, adds that ‘the transformations are best understood as revelations of new aspects, not complete negations of old identities. In the case of the Erinyes, it is well to remember that blessing is the other side of the coin from cursing’. 51 52 Cf. Buxton (1982), 105–14. Taplin (1977), 407–8. 50

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land, and their pact will be binding for ever’.53 One might add that it would be quite compatible with the complex way in which drama relates to offstage life for the procession to evoke both the Panathenaea, with its inclusive civic associations, as many scholars have believed, and the magnificent procession in honour of the Semnai Theai, organized by the genos Hesychidai, as Robert Parker has suggested.54 The value of such associations is that they link the stage action with the watching community’s present and future, by suggesting a continuity of ritual for the well-being of the city and a hoped-for continuity in order and prosperity. But despite what Taplin has called ‘an irresistible sense of enlightenment’,55 we must note that the Furies are not going to be neutralized or imprisoned, nor are they going to be domesticated or sanitized. They can continue to be generated by any individual or collective wrongdoing and will contribute to new acts of madness if provoked.56 Nor will they be rejuvenated or beautified. They will however be honoured, which is where cult and aetiology come in: ‘With their punitive role in abeyance, the dread goddesses are now perceived as Semnai Theai rather than Erinyes’.57 ‘Now’, of course does not necessarily mean forever. The terrifying aspect of the Semnai Theai is vividly evoked by Sophocles’ old men of Colonus, when they sing (at OC 125–33) of the grove of the ‘fierce virgins, whom we tremble to mention, and we pass by without looking, without sound, without words, moving our lips in mutely reverent thought’.58 Given their continuing potential for harm, perhaps one of the things that ought precisely to worry an audience is the future residence in their land of these beings. They can’t be tucked away in their cave for good––all one can do is try to placate, honour, please them. Suppose, as immortal beings, who can sometimes be seen embodied, as in Eumenides, but who are equally potent as invisible forces, they in some way represent the past and the implications of what you (or your family, or your city) have done in the past: you never know when they may catch up with you or where the blow will come from: they will continue to have the job of punishing those who do wrong, as Athena points out. ‘The person who experiences their weight does not know where the blows that fall upon his life come from. For the crimes from earlier 53

Taplin (1977), 415. Parker (1996), 298–9: ‘The great procession is doubtless evoked at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, though Aeschylus deliberately stresses the participation of the whole people and so neglects the specific role of the genos’. 55 Taplin (1977), 410. 56 Cf. Darbo-Peschanski (2006), esp. 15–20, for a persuasive reading of the ambivalence of the Erinyes/Eumenides through comparison with other groups, such as the Charites and the Maniai. 57 Henrichs (1994), 47. 58 Cf. Henrichs (1994), 33–4, and Parker (1996), 298–9 on the genos Hesychidai. 54

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generations arrest him and bring him to (the Furies) for judgement, and silent destruction wastes him away, for all his loud shouting, with hostile anger’ (932–7). Silent, unexpected, creeping up on one. Like Ate, the Furies are strong-footed59 and will not lose their essential characteristics. Actions have their consequences. And now in the Athenian civic context the most urgent prayers at the end of the play (976–87) are those to avert civil strife . . . I have found it useful in thinking about this imagery and its continuing power to compare some anthropologists’ findings on ways of relating to the past. Elizabeth Tonkin in her book on oral narratives has some interesting examples, such as the Cumbal Indians of Colombia for whom ‘history is in front of the observer, and moves backward toward the observer’.60 The Cumbales explain as follows: ‘although events occurred in the past we live their consequences today and must act upon them now. For this reason what has already occurred is in front of the observer because that is where it can be corrected. History is therefore most relevant to the present and is of the present’. Tonkin cites a television interview with Carl Jung in which he remarked ‘We are not of today, or yesterday––we are people of an immense age’.61 History is ‘of the present’, a valuable idea, perhaps, for the way tragedy works: tragedy, satyr play, dithyramb––and indeed to some extent epitaphioi––all find ways of enacting history. The immensely old Furies are also young, especially in performance; as valid, as powerful, for the watching audience as Silenus and his ‘children’ in the satyr play to follow. It is true, and (the text implies) continues to be true, that ‘the Lady Erinys has great power’ (the words of Athena at 950). So perhaps ‘Do the Furies change?’ is not a useful question to ask, and the only (makeshift) answer might be that they do and they don’t.62 I mentioned drama’s power to enact contradiction. One of the deepest contradictions is the tension between the ongoing plot, the storyline with a beginning, middle and end, and the symbolic meaning, which need not follow the same pattern: the familiar hermeneutic circle, in fact. Everything about the Furies in Eumenides (and the earlier plays) is relevant to understanding their meaning––the first part of the play as much as the final part. The special magic of performance is that it helps to deal with this tension by giving physical 59

Perhaps, too, soft-footed in their silent aggression, like Ate at Iliad 19.92–4? Tonkin (1992), 127. Referring to the past one says adelante ‘further on’, ‘ahead’ (like πρσσω in Il.1. 343 as opposed to /πσσω ‘hereafter’ for the future). 61 Tonkin (1992), 118, with n. 10. 62 As Elizabeth Irwin has pointed out to me, the same question could be put by contemporary spectators in relation to what has happened to the Areopagus, and the answer might be equally equivocal. 60

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embodiment which focuses our attention on the events in sequence, but through manifold visible and audible symbols with a coherence of their own makes us simultaneously aware of the other kinds of ways in which meaning is being created. 63 63 I am grateful to the Editors of this volume, and to Richard Green, Elizabeth Irwin, Barbara Kowalzig, and Laura Slatkin for help and advice.

REFERENCES Bacon, H. (2001), ‘The Furies’ Homecoming’, CPh 96: 48–59. Bardel, R. (2005), ‘Special Traces: Ghosts in Tragic Fragments’, in F. McHardy, J. Robson, and D. Harvey (eds.), Lost Dramas of Classical Athens: Greek Tragic Fragments (Exeter), 83–112. Belfiore, E. S. (1992), Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion, Princeton. Betegh, G. (2004), The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation, Cambridge. Brown, A. L. (1982), ‘Some Problems in the Eumenides of Aeschylus’ JHS 102: 26–32. –––– (1983), ‘The Erinyes in the Oresteia: Real Life, the Supernatural, and the Stage’, JHS 103: 13–34. –––– (1984), ‘Eumenides in Greek Tragedy’, CQ 34: 260–81. Burian, P. (2003), Introduction to Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian, Aeschylus: The Oresteia, Oxford. Buxton, R. G. A. (1982), Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho, Cambridge. Darbo-Peschanski, C. (2006), ‘La folie pour un regard. Oreste et les divinités de l’échange (Érinyes, Euménides, Charites)’, Métis ns 4: 13–28. Easterling, P. E. (1993a), ‘Gods on Stage in Greek Tragedy’, Grazer Beiträge Suppl. Bd. 5: 77–86. –––– (1993b), ‘Tragedy and Ritual’, in R. Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World, Ann Arbor. Ewans, M. (1995), Aischylos: The Oresteia, London. Faraone, C. A. (1985), ‘Aeschylus’ bµνο δ.σµιο (Eum.306) and the Attic Judicial Curse Tablets’, JHS 105: 150–54. Frontisi-Ducroux, F. (2006), ‘L’Étoffe des spectres’, Métis n.s. 4: 29–50. –––– (2007) ‘The Invention of the Erinyes’, in C. Kraus, S. Goldhill, H. Foley, and J. Elsner (eds.), Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature (FS Zeitlin) (Oxford), 165–76. Garvie, A. F. (1986), Aeschylus: Choephori, Oxford. Goldhill, S. (1984), Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia, Cambridge. Headlam, W. (1906), ‘The Last Scene of the Eumenides’, JHS 26: 268–77.

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Henrichs, A. (1984), ‘The Eumenides and Wineless Libations in the Derveni Papyrus’, Atti del xvii congresso internazionale di papirologia (Naples), 255–68. –––– (1994), ‘Anonymity and Polarity: Unknown Gods and Nameless Altars at the Areopagos’, ICS 19: 27–58. –––– (1995), ‘ “ Why Should I Dance?”: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy’, Arion III 3.1: 56–111. Labarrière, J-L. (2006), ‘Présentation’, Métis ns 4: 9–12. Ley, G. (2007), The Theatricality of Greek Tragedy: Playing Space and Chorus, Chicago. Lissarrague, F. (2006), ‘Comment peindre les Érinyes?’, Métis, ns 4: 50–70. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1990), ‘Erinyes, Semnai Theai, Eumenides’, in E. M. Craik (ed.), Owls to Athens (Oxford), 203–11. Macleod, C. W. (1975), ‘Clothing in the Oresteia’, Maia ns 27: 201–3, repr. in Collected Essays (Oxford, 1983), 41–3. Mikalson, J. D. (1991), Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy, Chapel Hill and London. Padel, R. (1992), In and Out of the Mind: Images of the Tragic Self, Princeton. Parker, R. (1996), Athenian Religion: A History, Oxford. Podlecki, A. J. (1989), Aeschylus: Eumenides, Warminster. Prins, Y. (1991), ‘The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus’ Furies and their Binding Song’, Arethusa 24: 177–94. Rehm, R. (1988), ‘The Staging of Suppliant Plays’, GRBS 29: 263–307. Seaford, R. (1994), Reciprocity and Ritual, Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (1989), Aeschylus: Eumenides, Cambridge. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford. Tonkin, E. (1992), Narrating our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History, Cambridge. Wilson, P. and Taplin, O. (1993), ‘The “Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39: 169–80. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. (1954), ‘A Religious Function of Greek Tragedy’, JHS 74: 16–24. Zeitlin, F. (1978), ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11: 149–84, repr. with revisions in Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996), 87–119.

10 Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Chronotopes, and the ‘Aetiological Mode’ Martin Revermann

There is no question that Oliver Taplin’s work on Aeschylus contains some of the best thinking done in the twentieth century on this eminent artist. Moreover, the methodology he developed in his seminal 1977 monograph for meeting some of the exegetical challenges this dramatist presents (or imposes?) on every generation of readers and spectators is foundational in the true sense of the word: subsequent residents of the house may, for better or worse, redesign the floor-plan, add an extension, update the kitchen or redecorate the bathroom (tasks which, in my domestic as well as my scholarly life, I myself have recently embarked on). But it is the soundness of the foundations and the sheer raw potential of the building as a whole that really matter. It is Oliver’s lasting achievement that the house he built is any real estate agent’s dream: a rock-solid structure, beautifully appointed, and in the right neighbourhood. At least since the time of Romanticism those who have been thinking about the theory of drama realized that there is something peculiar about the way time and space are represented in theatrical communication.1 Plays may be, and extremely often are, set at a place and in a time that is distant from the world of the audience. And even if a play is set in the contemporary surroundings of the world of the audience, there is still a distance generated by the very act of representation. That said, drama always and by its very definition 1 At the very beginning of their co-authored theoretical essay On Epic and Dramatic Poetry (1797) Goethe and Schiller establish as a crucial generic difference that epic poetry is totally past (‘vollkommen vergangen’) whereas dramatic poetry is totally present (‘vollkommen gegenwärtig’). In Some Thoughts on Playwriting (1941) T. Wilder contrasts drama with the novel: ‘The novel is a past reported in the present. On the stage it is always now. This confers upon the action an increased vitality [my emphasis] which the novelist longs in vain to incorporate into his work’ (in Wilder (2007), 702). There are, of course, attempts to create this dramatic kind of presence and vitality in the novel, notably Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Joyce’s Ulysses (which even explicitly adopts the format of a play in the long episode that takes place at Bella Cohen’s brothel).

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happens in a peculiar type of present that is shared between the characters and the audience: characters, even if they happen to talk in the past tense, but also props and stage sets are always communicating something immediately present with an audience who watch and listen, or read, as the play unfolds ‘here and now’ right in front of them. In addition, it has long been recognized that the handling of time and space is a fundamental act of creative artistic manipulation, a vital part of an artist’s toolbox.2 From the viewpoint of the analyst of theatrical communication this means that looking at how a play’s spatio-temporal structure is engineered provides a superb gateway into how meanings are generated. As far as the study of Greek drama is concerned, there has been considerable recent interest in space, both in the wake of performance criticism and a contextualizing ‘archaeology of performance’ as well as the continuing, if hardly uncontested, influence of structuralism.3 In its evasive continuity time, on the other hand, does not lend itself so easily to the kind of polarities (nature/culture, raw/cooked, up/down, left/right, inside/outside, vertical/ horizontal) that are so central to the structuralist project, and this may be one of the reasons why the study of time in Greek drama, and in fact of time in Greek literature, must be described as still being in its infancy.4 The shift from 2

An excellent analytical discussion regarding the handling of time and space in drama is Pfister (1977: 1988), matched in breadth and acumen by the remarks on dramatic time in Taplin (1977), 290–4. 3 In particular Wiles (1997) (heavily structuralist), Heuner (2001), Rehm (2002), Revermann (2003), Carter (2006) and, on comedy, Revermann (2006), 107–29. Earlier research includes, influentially, Hourmouziades (1965) (on Euripides) and Easterling (1988) (on gendered space). Goette (2007) provides the most up-to-date survey of the archaeological remains of the Athenian theatre of Dionysus. Most significantly, in the light of recent discoveries traditional estimates of the seating capacity of the fifth-century theatre have to be substantially revised, from c.15,000–17,000 to c.6000 (which is about the size of the fifth-century Pnyx). 4 The sole discussion exclusively devoted to the temporality of the Eumenides is Chiasson (1999), who argues (155) for ‘the Athenians’ conditional elevation to heroic status’ which ‘remains contingent upon the continuing piety and justice of Athena’s citizens’. Kennedy (2006) maintains that the geography invoked in the play is closely linked to Athenian imperialism and claims to cultural superiority. Hutchinson (1999) (on Sophocles) and Lee (1996) (on Euripides’ Ion) are other special studies. The most ambitious attempt at utilizing spatio-temporal features for the analysis not only of Trojan Women but (Euripidean) tragedy in general is Croally (1994), 163–248. Of earlier more general research, Fränkel (1931: 1960, on archaic literature) and de Romilly (1995, first published in 1967) are often-quoted but very much a product of their–– time. Easterling (1985) (on anachronism) is a classic. Very perceptive general remarks on mythological time as special time and tragedy’s treatment of it in Parker (2005), 140 f. and 375. Boman (1960), 123–83 is an intriguing comparison of Greek and Hebrew conceptions of time and space. Taxonomical work on chronology are the handbooks by Bickerman (1980) and Samuel (1972), see also Feeney (2007), 7–42. Dunn (1998) and (2007) explore the politics of time measurement in fifth-century Athens. Two articles by Purves, on temporality in Hesiod (2004) and the Iliad (2006), show the potential of putting this type of question to Greek literary texts, cf. also Bassi (2007).

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largely taxonomical work towards a cultural poetics of time has, in fact, been initiated by Latinists, in particular Jörg Rüpke and Denis Feeney.5 On the Greek side, the most wide-ranging discussion to date is an article by Eric Csapo and Meg Miller, who set out to understand the class bias of temporality in fifth-century Athens and argue for an ongoing opposition between aristocratic and democratic conceptions of time which manifest themselves in artistic narratives (literature as well as material culture).6 As much as Jack Bauer and his stressed co-workers from CTU Los Angeles might disagree, there is no such entity as ‘real time’, at least not in the rich, and often bewildering, realm of cultural practice.7 Both components, ‘real’ and ‘time’, are problematic here: can time ever be ‘unreal’ (if, for instance, this article feels long or short to an individual recipient, does this make the perception any more or less ‘real’)? And do we not all live not in ‘time’ but in a multitude of ‘times’, both at the individual and the communal level? Time can, to be sure, be ‘normative’––but whose norms are we talking about, and who accepts those norms, and not others, as binding under what kind of circumstances? Time, then, is a cultural construct (as, to a lesser extent, space is). Talking about time or measuring it are acts of definition and, as such, acts of power. This link between the measurement of time and the articulation of power is aptly expressed in the title of Denis Feeney’s monograph on Roman time conceptions which ended up being called Caesar’s Calendar. In what follows, however, I will be interested in the power not of the all-conquering Roman politician but the ever-fascinating fifth-century Greek playwrights, even if the politics of time and space will loom large. The road towards a cultural poetics of time and space, and of the interrelationship or (in Bakhtin’s words) the ‘intrinsic connectedness’ between the two (= chronotopes),8 in Greek drama, let alone Greek literature of the archaic and classical period, is a long, steep, and winding one. But first steps cannot hurt, provided they are (as I hope) in the right general direction. And Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I submit, provides an excellent point of departure. This is, I will argue, because the play is so fundamentally unlike any other known Greek play in its poetics of time and space, an eccentricity (for us) which highlights all the

5 Rüpke (1995), Feeney (2007). Also note the special Arethusa volume 44 (2007) on ‘Reshaping Rome: Space, Time, and Memory in the Augustan Transformation’. 6 Csapo and Miller (1998). 7 Combining an anthropological, sociological and historical perspective and critically discussing influential previous work (by, for instance, Eliade), Dux (1989) provides a stimulating account of time conceptions as cultural practice. Other work includes Leach (1961: 1980), Gell (1992), and, on Pindar, Theunissen (2000). 8 Bakhtin (1938: 1981), 84. Deutscher (2005), 133–43 fascinatingly analyses this intrinsic connectedness of ‘space-time’ from the viewpoint of comparative historical linguistics.

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more sharply the contours of an emerging field of inquiry (the main impact of which might well turn out to lie in the area of non-dramatic literature). At the beginning of the Eumenides the audience witness the first change of locale in the Oresteia. This change, prepared for by the departing Orestes in the final moments of Libation Bearers, marks a significant ideological shift in the trilogy. While the palace of Argos had provided a civic backdrop for the first two plays, the ritual space of Delphi (and, significantly, its ultimate failure to resolve the issues surrounding Orestes’ crime) articulates a new dimension in this horrid tale of reciprocal killing. Its overall significance notwithstanding, just how novel Aeschylus’ choice of displacement was is difficult for us to assess. Apollo’s assistance in Orestes’ trials and tribulations is found in Stesichorus (fr. 217.21–4 Page = Davies), lines spoken to Orestes in, one would assume, Delphi. The sparse and tricky evidence regarding connected trilogies strongly suggests that changes of locale between individual plays are exceptional (whereas significant lapses of time are not). The strongest candidate for such a change, it would appear, is Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, performed between 470 and 456 (possibly 463).9 If the case made by Rösler and Sommerstein in favour of inverting the traditional order of the first two plays is accepted,10 the trilogy featured a change of locale between the first play (Egyptians) and the second (Suppliants), from Egypt to Argos where the action was bound to remain not just for the third tragedy Danaides but also for the subsequent satyr play Amymone, which was set at least close to Argos.11 Leaving aside the question of how frequently such spatial shifts were deployed within connected trilogies, Aeschylus signals its importance by having the Pythia spend so much time (more than 30 lines) on it in her opening narrative. Its format, a prayer, not only picks up the mode of the preceding 9 This time frame for the production of the Danaid trilogy, now orthodox save for the exact terminus post quem, is challenged by Scullion (2002), 87–99, on which see Garvie (2006), ix–xi. 10 Rösler (1993), 7–11, Sommerstein (1995), 111–23 and (1996), 143–6, contra Gödde (2000), 4 n. 8, Sandin (2005), 9–11, and Garvie (2006), xviii–xix. Sicherl (1986) remains foundational for this debate and other central problems of the trilogy. In this scenario flight and supplication are the rationale for the change of locale, as they are in the Oresteia. 11 The (once very popular) area of establishing (Aeschylean) trilogies (connected and unconnected) and tetralogies is notoriously thorny, see Taplin (1977), 194–8, Gantz (1980: 2007), Sommerstein (1996), 53–70 as well as, on the question of a connected Trojan trilogy by Euripides in 415, Scodel (1980) and Collard, Cropp, Gibert, and Lee (1995–2004) vol. II 48 n. 10. Scullion (2006), 191–7 tries to re-establish Zielinski’s argument for a connected Macedonian trilogy by Euripides (consisting of Temenus, Temenidae, and Archelaus). On a Telepheia by Sophocles (the elder or the younger) see Radt (1977: 1999), 434 and Preiser (2000), 59 f. There is now a consensus on three more Aeschylean connected tetralogies (the Lycourgeia, the Oedipus plays (467), and the Danaid tetralogy) in addition to the Oresteia. On lapses of time and changes of locale, or rather the lack of the latter, within connected trilogies see the table in Sommerstein (1996), 70, who is rather optimistic in his grouping of plays into connected trilogies.

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two play-openings but, coming from the mouth of a priestess, crucially conveys a sense of appropriateness, functionality, and order. While spatial markers may have been deployed to indicate the Delphic environment,12 it is the temporal aspect of the localization that is extensively signalled and explored in the text. The Pythia’s aetiology of space is notable for its attempt at completeness of diachronic coverage and in particular for the acknowledgement of the role chthonic powers play in the establishment, legitimization, and upholding of this order. Prior to Apollo, according to the account of the priestess, Gaia, Themis, and Phoibe were the divine occupants of Delphi, ‘as they say’ (4: < λγο τι).13 But traditional tale, as documented in a variety of sources,14 is significantly altered in that violence is absent. On the contrary, the peacefulness of the transference of power is explicitly pointed out (5), with particular care devoted to emphasizing Zeus’ role in sanctioning Apollo’s local rule (17–19) as well as the Athenians’ personal rapport with Apollo and their capacity of civilizing transformation (12 f.). With the mention of Athena and Zeus (referred to, as ever so often in the Oresteia, as τ.λειο) the concluding part of the Pythia’s long prayer dwells on the two Olympians who feature most prominently in the trilogy as a whole, while Dionysus (whose destructive powers are not passed over) and the system of alternating resident deities serve as another example of the power of Delphi to integrate polarities and avoid, or at least manage, conflict. By situating (or rooting) the sacred locale so firmly within the matrices of ritual and mythological time,15 the final play of the trilogy therefore from its very beginning transcends the temporal dimensions within which its predecessors operated and establishes different planes, even conceptualizations, of temporal order within which the audience are invited to construe relevance and meaning. In addition, Delphi is launched as a prime locus of conflict resolution, without doubt in order to highlight more sharply the subsequent failure of Delphi to resolve the conflicts arising from Orestes’ matricide and to bring about a concomitant elevation of Athens.16 But before pursuing these trains of thought some additional introductory observations should be made. There are further early markers that single out 12 Sommerstein (1989), 79 suggests ‘models of the great tripods that stood in front of the Delphic temple’. 13 For a structuralist analysis of this Delphic succession myth as a bricolage expressing ritual tensions and symbolic oppositions see Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 217–43. 14 e.g. Hymn. Ap. 300–74, Pindar fr. 55 Snell-Maehler, E. IT 1234–83, cf. Sommerstein (1989), 80 f. and especially Sourvinou-Inwood (1991), 227–33. 15 On both concepts see most recently Easterling (2004) and Feeney (2007), 68–86 respectively. 16 The comparison with Euripides’ Ion is instructive: here Delphi ‘succeeds’ in the sense of restoring a son to his mother, with the aid of Athena (!).

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the spatio-temporal features of this play as peculiar, hence important. Oliver Taplin was the first to devote serious critical attention to the (for us) unique deployment of the empty stage (33/34) which punctuates the opening scene in a remarkable way: ‘This is unique in surviving Greek tragedy, which generally abhors a vacuum, and nearly always preserves continuity . . . The first half shows a pious routine which is the outcome of a peaceful Delphic tradition; the second vividly conveys the abhorrent and incomprehensible disruption which the Erinyes have brought into this orderly Delphic world.’17 Key visual markers related to costume and proxemics are used to generate spatiotemporal oxymora that juxtapose the oppositions ‘old’ and ‘young’: the Pythia, an old woman (38), may be wearing the robe of a maiden (Diod. 16.26.6); and she certainly crawls, like a child (α#ντπαι), out of the temple in horror (37 f.). Yet the clearest, as well as most permanent and significant, early indicator by which Aeschylus draws attention to the fact that the play meaningfully experiments with concepts of space and time lies in the choice and presentation of the choral persona. To begin with, the divine chorus, for all we can tell a rare choice among fifth-century tragedians,18 is by definition exempt from the kind of constraints that progression of time and the physical limitations of movement within space impose on humans. Not only does this ensure that the Erinyes will always be effortlessly close to Orestes, irrespective of how fast or far he might be moving. What is more, the Erinyes themselves point out that they are by nature ‘mindful of evils’ (382 f.: κακ%ν µνα´µονε). Collective identity and the impersonation of collective memory are, as Gould emphasized in a seminal article,19 essential features of tragic chorality. Being the designated survivor of tragic disaster––if the audience know one thing in advance of a tragic performance, it is that the chorus will both witness and outlast whatever catastrophes might unfold––the choral persona of the citizens in disguise comes to be invested with a specific kind of experience, wisdom and, ultimately, authority which transcends that of any other character on stage and bridges into the world of the fifth-century (and, in a sense, any) recipient. In the unusual case of a divine chorus, the citizen collective that constitutes the chorus adopts a role where one would assume those above-mentioned features to be magnified as befits divine agents. This is indeed rather straightforwardly the case with the Oceanids in the Prometheus 17

Taplin (1977), 362 f. Female deities are documented also for the Aeschylus plays Nereides and Toxotides, the Prometheus Bound, probably also Sophocles’ Mousai, whereas the Aeschylean Prometheus Unbound featured male deities (probably Titans, cf. fr. 190 and Radt (1985), 307), see Foley (2003), 26 f. 19 Gould (1996). 18

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Bound, the only surviving (probably non-Aeschylean) comparator, whereas in the Eumenides the very authority of the choral persona and the legitimacy of the claims it embodies are subject to sustained controversy. To articulate it, Aeschylus once again prominently resorts to spatiotemporal features. One of the distinct characteristics of the Erinyes is their liminality. On the spatial axis, this liminality manifests itself in their chthonic nature: the subterranean aspect of the ‘children of the night’, hammered home in the script by their adversaries at various strategic points20 and amplified by the visit of Clytemnestra’s ghost from the underworld, is vividly brought out by their black costume (52, 370, cf. Ch. 1049) and coexists with their swift and unimpeded movement on the surface. In particular, their Olympian opponents are keen to equate the liminality of the Erinyes with marginality. The charge of being displaced and not belonging is, in fact, immediately levelled at them the very moment they make contact with Apollo who relegates the Erinyes to places where barbarian modes of punishment such as castration and impalement are practised (179–190). Spatial liminality and attempts at displacing the chorus set aside, the way Aeschylus deals with the temporal liminality of the Erinyes commands, perhaps, even greater interest. The succession of various generations of divinity in the Greek religious imaginary, authoritatively codified by Hesiod, allows for introducing age differentials when talking about entities who are, in principle, ‘supra-temporal’ in the sense of being exempt from the adverse effects on the individual of the progression of time. Gods, that is, may grow up (like Hermes) or even be born as adults (like Athena), but once their have reached their appropriate age, which differs for each deity, none of them grows old and decrepit. Their Olympian opponent Apollo, consequently, refers to the Erinyes by way of oxymoron as ‘maidens in old age, ancient children’ (68 f.: κραι γρα,αι παλαια2 πα,δε) so ‘despicable’ (68: κατα´πτυστοι) that no immortal, mortal, or even beast would ever wish to mingle with them, while they are invoked as ‘children yet not children’ (1034: πα,δε αHπαιδε) by whoever delivers the final lines of the preserved script (probably female temple servants). This has been startling for critics21 and lies at the heart of the predominant conceptualization among scholars and directors of the Erinyes as ‘grotesque snake-infested old [my emphasis] women’.22 20 71 f., 321–4, 416, 745, 791 f., 821 f., 844, 878, 1034. There has been a lively recent debate, not of central concern to my present topic, about the usefulness of the distinction Olympian vs Chthonic and the precise nature of the transformation of the Erinyes at the end of the trilogy, see Henrichs (1991) and (1994), Scullion (1994a), Schlesier (1997), Geisser (2002), 377–98, and Easterling (this volume). 21 Sommerstein (1989), 95: ‘Nothing qualifies the Erinyes to be called κραι except their virginity.’ 22 Taplin (1977), 374 n. 4.

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But from the perspective of a fifth-century Greek audience the juxtaposition of these polar opposites constitutes, quite simply, no problem at all. For them the Erinyes, while being ‘old’ pre-Olympian supernatural forces, are as eternally present, so to speak, as any other Greek deity, a presence which is marked by their youthful, boundless vigour and ceaselessly energetic immediacy so characteristic of divine agency in general. As much as the Erinyes are spatially liminal by representing, and integrating, aspects of the world below and above the surface of the earth, they are temporally liminal qua being deities who are both ‘old’ and ‘young’.23 In addition, the possibility that Aeschylus brought the Erinyes on stage not as old and monstrous women but as young and beautiful, if terrifying, maidens should very seriously be considered (a topic which I hope to discuss in full elsewhere). Such a mode of representation would certainly be in keeping with contemporary and subsequent standard iconography, which depicts the Erinyes as, precisely, young and beautiful, hence dignified and commanding due respect (not wholly unlike Sirens).24 The passages in the trilogy pertinent to their looks (Ch. 1048–50, Eum. 34–59. 990) all support a frightening, but not necessarily ugly, appearance. I suspect that in addition to one possible way of interpreting the preserved performance script the standard view of the Erinyes as old and monstrous women has gained ground because of the famous anecdote, preserved in the Vita Aeschyli (1.30–2, cf. Pollux 4.110), about women (!) in the theatre having miscarriages upon seeing the Erinyes. Considerations of genre must also be brought into the equation. Possible occasional exceptions notwithstanding, the textual and iconographic evidence strongly supports the notion that beauty is a distinct visual marker of tragedy as a genre, which positions this form of dramatic art as distinctly different from both comedy (with its penchant for grotesque and distorted corporality) and satyr play (with its blend of the heroic protagonists’ beauty, the chorus’s semi-theriomorphic appearance and the grotesque physique of genre-typical ogres).25 Put differently (and with the appropriate caution), if Aeschylus chose to represent the Erinyes as old monsters, he would be deviating significantly from standard iconography and concomitant audience expectations (as he, it would seem, deviated by giving the Erinyes a black costume). If, on the other hand, the Erinyes of the Eumenides were young, 23 Easterling (this volume), while endorsing the orthodox assumption of the Erinyes’ old age and grotesqueness, also strongly emphasizes their vitality and ‘the performative power of youth’ as well as the power of drama to enact contradiction. 24 See especially Sarian (1986), cf. also Prag (1985) and Knoepfler (1993). 25 The subject is discussed, with an emphasis on comic ugliness, by Revermann (2006), 145– 59, cf. also 286 n. 64. On satyr play, especially the chorus, see Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker (1999), 17–23, Seidensticker (2003) and Griffith (2002), esp. 211–15 and 217–220.

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dignified, and beautiful, albeit terrifying with their snake-infested hair and black apparel, the legitimacy of their cause and the beneficial aspects which result from appeasing and integrating them would be given additional visual emphasis. ‘From Argos via Delphi to Athens’ is the spatial trajectory of the trilogy as a whole. As indicated earlier, a change of locale within a connected trilogy may itself be exceptional. The way it is handled in the Eumenides surely is, on two grounds. Athenian settings, for starters, appear to be extremely rare in tragedy. While much (though certainly not all) of fifth-century comedy is firmly rooted in an Athenian environment, tragic playwrights usually opt for scenarios that are not based in Athens (even though ‘Athenianness’ is constantly built in, not least through the local colouring of the dialect in spoken passages which is characteristic of this art form). There is, in other words, a spatial buffer in addition to the temporal one provided by resorting to events situated in mythical time. A variety of factors is likely to be involved here (including the relatively unimportant role Athens played at the formative stage of what was to emerge as Panhellenic traditional tale), but suspicions of strategic reasons underlying the habitual displacement of tragic disaster and dysfunctionality out of Athens have rightly been raised. Thus Zeitlin has argued that in fifth-century drama Thebes, the hostile neighbour with the stigma of medizing attached, often figures as an object of Athenian projection, not just a ‘non-Athens’ but even an ‘anti-Athens’.26 This obviously singles out all the more those few documented cases of tragedies that are set in Athens. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’ Heracleidae and Suppliants are all set in Attica, but the closest comparators to Eumenides are tragedies that unravel within the city: Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Aegeus plays, which dramatized the recognition of the city’s Über-hero Theseus as Athenian, were set in Athens (the latter either on the Acropolis or at the Delphinion), and the action of at least most of Euripides’ Erechtheus took place on the Acropolis.27 There is no indication in the evidence we have––and after all this does include some 80 or so known play titles (the Suda gives 90 as the total of plays)––that Aeschylus chose an Athenian setting anywhere else in his entire oeuvre.28 The second peculiarity is that the change of locale happens within the play 26

Zeitlin (1990), cf. Krummen (1993), Rehm (2002), and Carter (2006). For the Aegeus plays see Mills (1997), 234–45, for the location of the Erechtheus see fr. 370.3f. K. 28 The Eleusinians, while featuring a chorus of men from Attica, was set in Thebes (fr. 53a with Didymus’ remarks before his quotation from the play). This play, however, is closest to Eumenides in its explicit ‘Athenianness’ as embodied, most of all, by the central character Theseus, see Mills (1997), 229–34. 27

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(between 234 and 235), that it is so strongly marked as such, and that is comes with a considerable and painstakingly signalled lapse of time. The only comparators for a change of scene within a fifth-century tragedy are Sophocles’ Ajax (from the Greek camp to the shore, even though the details of this scene change have been subject to much debate29) and the Aeschylean tragedy, probably Aitnai (or Aitnaiai (Residents of Aitnai), performed in Sicily c.475), mentioned in the commentary preserved in POxy. 2257 fr. 1.30 The latter was set in different parts of Sicily (with two scenes being set in Aitna, while the other locales were Xouthia, Leontinoi, and finally Syracuse), hence featured a (for us) bewildering multitude of scene changes.31 Interestingly, the commentator may in fact have compared the spatial discontinuity of this play with that of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, even though the papyrus is frustratingly lacunose at the crucial point. But the comparison only goes so far, for Eumenides is still unique. The empty stage (brought about by the highly unusual departure of the chorus) in conjunction with the insistence of various characters that Orestes’ wanderings took a considerable amount of time to complete (Apollo: 75–9, Orestes: 235–41, 248–51, 451 f.) creates a sense of caesura unmatched in our evidence. It is, as Taplin acutely observes, ‘more like the break between the separate plays of a trilogy’:32 a new beginning. The Oresteia needs this fresh start, and it needs Athens as the venue for it. It is not surprising that Aeschylus should wish to present Argos, the place of Clytemnestra’s monstrosities and home to a recently committed royal matricide, as incapable of putting an end to the escalation of the vendetta, even though Argos is good and functional enough for the promise of a συµµαχα with Athens ‘for all time’, given by the departing and recently acquitted Argive ruler Orestes (762–74).33 This representation of Argos as a reliable and trustworthy partner of Athens is commonly, and surely correctly, considered to be a reflection of the recent drastic shift in Athenian foreign politics in the late 460s when anti-Cimonian forces prevailed to put an end to the twentyyear-old alliance with Sparta and had Athens move towards Argos instead 29

See Scullion (1994b), 89–128 with ample discussion of earlier literature. The text is also in Radt (1985), 126 f. and (with commentary) Bastianini (2004), 19–30, cf. also Poli-Palladini (2001), esp. 288–96. 31 Well discussed by Taplin (1977), 416–18, cf. also Taplin (1976) on scene changes in post-classical tragedy. An excellent case for seeing the play’s spatial trajectory as a means of celebrating Hellenizing colonial appropriation is made by Dougherty (1993), 88–90. 32 Taplin (1977), 377. 33 In Euripides’ Orestes, by contrast, the action is not only contained at Argos (with the prospect of a resolution in Athens at the end of the play), but it is the assembly of the citizens of Argos which condemns Orestes to death for matricide. On Argos as a tragic locale see Said (1993), cf. also Burkert (1998: 2001). 30

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(Th. 1.102.4). Similarly, there is nothing unexpected about the elevation of Athens as the city of institutionalized and divinely sanctioned conflict resolution. What is peculiar is the effort spent on illustrating the failure of Delphi to resolve the conflict. Why intercalate Delphi at all rather than transfer the problem from Argos to Athens directly, a strategy adopted by Euripides exactly fifty years later in his telling of the story in the Orestes (1648–51) as part of Apollo’s (!) resolving speech? The substantial problems and inconsistencies surrounding the issue of Orestes’ purification by Apollo in Eumenides need not be rehashed in detail at this point.34 What is clear is that irrespective of what Orestes says or would like to be the case, the ritual purification, closely associated with Apollo since the final moments of the Libation Bearers (1059 f.), is ineffective, for it has not proved fit to get the Erinyes off his back.35 Things start to make better sense once it is taken into account that for an Athenian audience in 458 Delphi comes with a considerable stigma: that of Medism, famously recounted by Herodotus (7.139–145.1) and a principle reason for what appears to be an increasing marginality of the Delphic oracle after the end of the Persian Wars.36 Athens, then, emerges by contrast as a place of unquestionable authority, legal and civic but also religious, and the move of the Oresteia from Argos via Delphi to Athens is one not just of progression but of progress: from chaos to order, from the vendetta-ridden dysfunctionality of the royal oikos to the institutionalized modes of conflict resolution in the polis, from the darkness of the watchman scene to the light of the torches in the final procession. It is the precise mode of how Athens is constructed as a place of lasting redemption that is of prime importance in the current context, for the construction is characterized by an intriguing spatio-temporal opaqueness. Orestes’ wanderings after the ineffective Delphi experience establish a pattern of such opaqueness: Orestes, the audience are vaguely being told, has been ‘at many houses’ (452), and rather than specifying what has happened a general sense is being conveyed that his wanderings have consumed a substantial amount of time, in fact the longest lapse of time in preserved drama.37 This spatio-temporal opaqueness becomes a pervasive artistic strategy for the rest of the play. The cult statue of Athena is launched early (79 f., by Apollo) as the 34

Sidwell (1996), Hoessly (2001), 121–31, Revermann (2006), 56–9, Liapis (2006), 212–15. The quick, unindicated, and inconspicuous exit of Apollo at some point at or after 753 is in keeping with Apollo’s peculiar role in the Eumenides; see Taplin (1977), 403–7. 36 Osborne (1996), 352–4. This is consonant with the representation of Delphi as the place of (attempted or accomplished) murder in Euripides’ Ion and Andromache respectively. 37 In the Euripidean Orestes (1643–5), by contrast, the duration of Orestes’ sojourn is precisely circumscribed: exactly one year’s stay (not wanderings) in southern Arcadia (Parrhasia). 35

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goal of Orestes’ wanderings, and it is clear that the Athenian sequence of the play starts just there (242), that is on the Acropolis. For the actual trial scene (566 f.), however, the setting is clearly the nearby Areopagus (note esp. 570). In the final scene, Aeschylus even takes liberties with Athenian topography: the closural procession is headed for the shrine of the ‘Revered Goddesses’ (Σεµνα2 Θεα) which Pausanias (1.28.6) locates in the vicinity of the Areopagus, while Aeschylus seems to be moving it closer to the Acropolis by having Athena promise the Erinyes a seat of honour ‘by the house of Erechtheus’ (855: πρ δµοι # Ερεχθ.ω).38 Along the temporal axis, too, there are noteworthy dynamics. Thus, for most of the play the Athenians seem to have no king (by contrast with all the other Attica-based tragedies mentioned earlier). There are only hints at a monarchy, themselves vague, sparse, and inconspicuous. They come from the mouth of Athena in the final sequence when she addresses the jurors, and with them the audience at large, as ‘children of Kranaos’ (1011) and ‘most precious part of the land of Theseus’ (1025 f., cf. 686).39 At the same time, this very sequence contains nomenclature which, while not intrinsically democratic, has a special ring to an audience in democratic Athens (1011: polissouchoi, 1039: pandamei, 854/991/1012: politai and the use of the term metoikos/metoikia (1011, 1018) for the symbiosis (916: xunoikia) between the Athenians and the Erinyes). Legal language, a feature that an audience of citizen jurors in democratic Athens is particularly sensitized for, further complicates the picture. There is a peculiar prominence of the use of thesmos instead of nomos in the play (391, 484, 490 f., 571, 615), the former term carrying with it for a fifth-century Athenian audience distinct connotations of both antiquity and sanctity.40 The sheer composition of the vote-casting jury, which includes both humans and the goddess Athena, is bound to strike any audience as extraordinary. Note, once again, the contrast with Euripides’ Orestes where there is a strict and explicit division between the all-human jury at Argos which condemns Orestes and the all-divine jury at Athens (1650) which will acquit him. At the end of the Oresteia, tragic justice has become not the justice of Athena, daughter of Zeus, or the justice of the people of Athens, but a peculiar mixture of both. There is an important anticipation of 38 Similarly, as Liapis (2006), 216 notes, Aeschylus at 762–74 (quoted on p. 249) allows himself licence when locating the prospective tomb of Orestes not, as usual, in the Peloponnese (Tegea or Sparta) but only in the vaguest terms, probably in or near Argos (and thus as close as possible to Athens, which is to benefit from him). 39 Also note, again, Athena’s reference to the Acropolis as the ‘house of Erechtheus’ (855). 40 Latte (1936). The noun, popular in Pindar, is used only once in Aristophanes (Birds 331), in a paratragic context. Significantly, the Athenians would often differentiate between Draco’s thesmoi and Solon’s nomoi (thus at And. 1.81–3), cf. Ar. Ath. Pol. 4.1 with Rhodes (1981) ad loc.

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hero cult41 and the notion of ritually suspended time which is iterative, cyclical, and emphatically ‘ever-present’ that comes with it (762–74): 0γ[ δ χρk τlδε κα2 τ' σ' στρατ' τ λοιπν ε@ αMπαντα πλειστ ρη χρνον Eρκωµοτ σα ν&ν αHπειµι πρ δµου, µ τοι τιν’ αHρη δε&ρο πρυµν την χθον 0λθντ’ 0ποισειν ε4 κακασµ.νον δορ. ατο2 γα`ρ 9µε, Fντε 0ν τα´φοι ττε το, τα#µα` παρβανουσι ν&ν Eρκµατα α#µηχα´νοισι φα´ρξοµεν δυσπραξαι Eδο, α#θµου κα2 παρρνιθα πρου τιθ.ντε, < ατο,σι µεταµ.λ7 πνο. /ρθουµ.νων δ κα2 πλιν τ6ν Παλλα´δο τιµ%σιν α@ε2 τ νδε συµµα´χ( δορ2 ατο,σιν 9µε, 0σµεν εµεν.στεροι. Now I will go to my home after I have sworn an oath to your land and people here, for the future, for the whole length of time, that no helmsman of my country will come to bring war against it, well-armed and equipped. Though we will ourselves be in our tomb by then, we will bar the roads with impossible disasters for those who transgress my oaths sworn now; we shall bring despair and ill omens to their passage, so that they repent of their effort; but if oaths are fully kept and if they always honour the city of Pallas with their army in alliance, we are to be more kind towards them.

Lastly, I would like to draw attention to a peculiar (and, for the little we know, unique) use of temporality which concerns the macro-structure not of the Oresteia trilogy but the tetralogy as a whole. The trilogy was followed by the satyr play Proteus (hyp. line 25). We know extremely little about this play,42 but it is certain that it dramatized the return home of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus after the capture of Troy. The thematic link of the nostos motif as well as the opposition between the deadly return of Agamemnon and the happy return of his brother are self-evident, so much so that one has to speak of a connected tetralogy (as Aeschylus’ Theban trilogy of 467 with its satyr play Sphinx forms a connected tetralogy). From the viewpoint of space and temporality we are dealing with an alternative parallel biography (‘alternate lives’), though not quite in the synchronizing sense and format which 41 Liapis (2006) explores the status of Orestes as a cult hero in Athenian popular religion, in particular arguing (215–17) that Aeschylus in the Eumenides seeks to obliterate common associations (activated in the Libation Bearers) of Orestes with the Underworld as part of an agenda ‘of elevating Orestes into an emblematic figure of a new era of democratic collectivity’ (215). 42 For discussions see Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker (1999), 179–81 and especially Griffith (2002), 237–50. The final satyr play is anticipated in the first play of the trilogy at Ag. 617–21 and 674–9.

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Plutarch will develop in his biographies centuries later. Another possible history, another path of events, unfolding in a way diametrically opposite to the tragic disaster that the audience have just watched unfold in the previous hours, is being explored. It anticipates, presumably, the place of polar opposition: Sparta. This handling of chronotopes, I submit, pervades Eumenides. Its persistence and polyphonic complexity set it apart from the two preceding plays save, in some respects, the Cassandra and ‘red cloth’ scenes in the Agamemnon and the kommos of Libation Bearers. One might be inclined to regard this technique as some kind of ‘blurring’, were it not for the fact that this nomenclature misses, I believe, the crucial point: the juxtaposition of various notions of space and time––civic, ritual, personal, communal and synchronizing, linear, cyclical––may strike ‘us’ as unintelligible and ‘blurred’ beyond recognition. But for the fifth-century audience they are not. Rather, I would propose to speak of ‘composite space’ and ‘composite temporality’ which in tandem generate a ‘composite reality’, the elements of which both the fifth-century playwright and his audience are culturally conditioned to keep conceptually apart while at the same time accepting them as meaningfully coexisting in their individual and communal construction of social, religious, and political order. On the level of public, synchronizing time, each Greek state had its own calendar in which years were identified with reference to an eponymous official serving an annual term (in Athens the archon, at least by the 420s).43 Attempts at synchronizing Panhellenic time were made, increasingly so, it would seem, by the second half of the fifth century: the sophist Hippias compiled a list of Olympian victors, but the most important figure is Hellanicus who not only sets out to write a history of Attica from mythical to the present time but also attempts to create synchronized Panhellenic time through reference to the Hera priestesses of Argos and the Spartan Karneafestival. Significantly, Thucydides dates the beginning of the Peloponnesian War by three points of reference, one Panhellenic and two local: the priestess at Argos, the Spartan ephor, and the Athenian archon (2.2.1).44 In addition, there is, of course, ritual public and synchronized time, in particular the festival calendar which closely follows the seasonal, hence both linear and cyclical, time frames of an agricultural society. Ritual connects the participant with mythological time, that illud tempus (to use Eliade’s coinage) which is invested with special cultural relevance by the community of the practising 43

Rhodes and Osborne (2003), xx f., Samuel (1972), ch. 3, cf. also Feeney (2007), 7–20. On the Athenian archon list dating from the 420s see Meiggs and Lewis (1988), 9–12. 44 On this passage see, most recently, Feeney (2007), 17 f.

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worshipper. Ritually reiterated and hence suspended time is, among other things, crucial for constructing a sense of future in such a society: within a system of public synchronized time where one cannot possibly single out any future year in particular because the name of the eponymous archon cannot be known for any subsequent year save, at best, the very next one, ritual time and the reassuring continuity provided by it are obvious, if very imprecise, vehicles for conceptualizing and expressing the future.45 It is surely no accident that in the Eumenides those frequent references to the future (538: 0 τ πα˜ν, 572: ε@ τν α@ανD χρνον, 670: 0 τ πα˜ν χρνου, 763 [the passage just quoted]: ε@ αMπαντα πλειστ ρη χρνον, cf. 890, 898) invariably occur in contexts that have particularly strong ritual connotations. If the manifoldness of ‘composite time’ and ‘composite space’ lie at the heart of the dramatist’s craft in the final play of the Oresteia, what is the point of this strategy in the Eumenides? At least two present themselves to me. One is that by explicitly evoking a whole range of possible and widely practised notions of time and space the relevance of the actions of the play, that is redemption of the individual Orestes and the polis Athens by the foundation of the Areopagus and the integration of the Erinyes as Semnai theai, is magnified.46 The play and its achievements are aggrandized by covering all possible temporal states: the ‘here and then’, the ‘here and now’, and the ‘here and forever’. In addition, I believe the composite nature of the play’s chronotopes authenticates the play’s vision of a functional, just and prospering Athens that has the goodwill of all divinities, Olympian and Chthonic, at all places and at all times. This all-comprehensiveness and the redemptive nature of the vision of a rescued Athens which Aeschylus develops coincides with a genreuntypical lack of emphasis (particularly in the closure) on the suffering of the human individual and reflections on the nature of the human condition. I therefore consider Eumenides to be the most ‘untragic’ of all preserved tragedies, and the expansive use of chronotopes in this play is but one marker of such lack of tragic compression and, if you will, ‘black-holism’. This peculiar kind of idealizing ‘Athenianization’––a transtemporal Athens 45 An excellent example is the temporality of Horace 3.30 (Exegi monumentum aere perennius), where the poet imagines himself to grow in fame ‘as long as a priest ascends the Capitol in the company of a silent virgin’ (dum Capitolium | scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex). Luckily for him, and for us, Horace was wrong! Significantly, Horace does not activate the (Republican) annalistic scheme by saying ‘as long as there will be a consul’, which he, in theory, could have done: the annalistic scheme assumes that there will be a consul (or archon), and therefore links the conceptualization of the future with the continuity of Rome’s (or Athens’) political system. 46 A somewhat reverse phenomenon occurs in Aeschylus’ Persae where the contemporary victory over the Persians is magnified by casting it within the very frame of tragic narrative which operates, usually, in mythological time. Taplin (2006a) attractively regards this exceptional choice by Aeschylus (6: ‘a “special issue” tragedy’) as generic self-assurance in an emerging Panhellenic ‘celebration culture’.

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that is, has been, and will be all at once––performs a transformative, integrating, and inspiring function. The play develops the notion of an Athens which is positioned within time and space with so much elasticity that any elite or sub-elite member of any potential Athenian audience can both subscribe and aspire to it. Aeschylus’ legacy to his home polis is a comforting one that, while exposing and enacting conflict, emphasizes social and ideological cohesion and the possibility of conflict resolution and redemption, both individual and collective, albeit not as something mechanical or intrinsic but in need of continuous effort that manifests itself in ritual remembrance and civic collaboration (which may or may not be rewarded by the supernatural powers in their unpredictability). Conceptually, much of this is made possible by a peculiar feature of ancient thought which I would like to brand the ‘aetiological mode’. That Eumenides is an aetiological play has, of course, not been lost on anyone, and there has been a substantial debate in particular about the political significance of Aeschylus engaging with the particular institution of the Areopagus at a time when we know it had been subject to considerable and contentious debate and reform.47 More recently, additional layers to the aetiology of the Eumenides have been proposed. Thus Zeitlin considers Eumenides to be an aetiology of patriarchy, while Taplin and Wilson see a metapoetic dimension, especially in the closure, and interpret the play as an aetiology of tragedy as an art form.48 I am interested in the meta-level, not what precisely the play is an aetiology of, but how the ‘aetiological mode’ of presentation operates, in particular with regard to chronotopes. Put simply, an aetiology is a narrative that provides reasons for why things are the way they are now by reference to events of the past. Aetiologies are, of course, a standard feature not just of Greek drama but a whole range of literature (prominent in Hesiod, Pindar, Herodotus, Callimachus, and so forth, but curiously absent––as is hero cult––in Homer). The recently discovered Salmakis inscription from Halicarnassus (dated to the late second or early first century bce) provides fascinating new evidence of how a public document utilizes local aetiology, of ritual and cultural nature and set in both mythological and historical time, to construct an image of the multi-ethnic polis Halicarnassus as a functional integrative community and a fertile breeding ground for Panhellenic artistic talent.49 47

See most recently Braun (1998), who also provides an extensive doxographical survey. Zeitlin (1978), Taplin and Wilson (1993). 49 The standard text (with commentary) of the inscription, which was first published in 1998, is Lloyd-Jones (2005), 211–32. The body of (excellent) literature on this exceptional document is growing. Note in this context Sourvinou-Inwood (2004) on the treatment of the Hermaphroditos myth and Gagné (2006) on the ideology underlying the spatio-temporal map generated by the inscription. 48

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Surprisingly, this central phenomenon of Greek cultural and social practice is under-researched at present, even though there are encouraging signs of increasing alertness.50 What sets Aeschylus’ Eumenides apart, and makes it particularly interesting to look at in the larger context of thinking about the ‘aetiological mode’, is that by contrast with other aetiologies in preserved drama this ‘aetiological mode’ is not confined to the closural sequence. The whole play Eumenides is itself is a sustained aetiological narrative, at least from that point onwards when the play is set in Athens. If my above arguments about composite chronotopes and the special nature of this sustained ‘aetiological mode’ are accepted, this gives the play as a whole a specific ontological status because it generates a particular type of ‘composite reality’ which is, in a sense, present, past, and future all in one. This sustained ‘aetiological mode’ appears to be unique in preserved Greek drama.51 The closest ‘known’ comparator might possibly be the lost Aitnai by Aeschylus (see p. 246 above) in which aetiology, it would seem, loomed large throughout.52 Thus, we are told, the poet celebrated the foundation of this Sicilian city ‘auguring (ο@ωνιζµενο) a good life for those who lived in the city’53 (as Eumenides celebrates the foundation of a functional Athenian justice system and therefore, in a sense, of the Athenian polis as such). Moreover, the only preserved fragment of notable length (fr. 6) is part of a dialogue concerning the aetiology of the local cult for the twin daimones called Palikoi which via etymology hellenizes and thus appropriates these autochthonous Sicilian deities.54 In addition to the Aitnai, Euripides’ only fragmentarily preserved Erechtheus comes to mind, which, similarly set in Athens, provided, among other things, an aetiology for the office of the priestess of Athena Polias, even though this particular aspect seems to have featured only in the closural sequence of this play.55 Another way of making this central point is by using the concept of

50

Most notably, for drama, Wolff (1992) (on the IT), Dunn (1996), Scullion (1999/2000) (on Euripides), Scodel (2006) (on Sophocles), Kowalzig (2006), (2007a), 242–5 and (2007b), 266–326 (on aetiology in Megale Hellas), Kavoulaki (this volume) p. 313, Taplin (2006a) on what he brands the ‘aetiopoeia’ of Aeschylus’ Persai as well as Taplin (2006b) on the comforting and metapoetic aspect of tragic aetiology. Our discipline is in dire need of sustained diachronic (and cross-generic) discussion of the topic both from a literary and a socio-historical perspective. 51 Outside of drama, the closest analogies of the sustained ‘aetiological mode’ are, marking both extremes of the scale, the Salmakis inscription from Halicarnassus (p. 252 above) and Virgil’s Aeneid rather than Callimachus’ Aitia with its lack of a single local focus. 52 Taplin (2006a), 2 similarly suspects an important role of aetiology in this play. 53 Vita Aeschyli 1.33 (in Radt (1985), 34). 54 Dougherty (1993), 88 f. 55 Euripides, Erechtheus fr. 370. 55 ff. with Collard, Cropp, Gibert, and Lee (1995–2004) vol. I 193.

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chronotopes more systematically.56 The following matrix illustrates how exactly chronotopes are an indicator of the handling of space and time individually and of the relationship between them.

In this matrix, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, to take a notorious example, would be located in the bottom left corner of Quadrant I. Chekhov’s Seagull, with its lapse of two years before the final act when Nina returns to the estate where the whole play is set, is a good example of a play that is situated in Quadrant II (as are, significantly, all of Chekhov’s major plays). The ‘realtime’ television series ‘24’ with its emphasis on relentless and inescapable temporal progression in conjunction with changes of place (though mostly within the LA area) is to be clustered in Quadrant III (although here the audience are constantly under the impression of a spatio-temporal compression that is typical of Quadrant I; the prime artistic means of achieving this impression is the regular use of the split screen which juxtaposes, and synchronizes, several––usually four––different situations that represent different threads of the complex narrative). In Quadrant IV a play like Brecht’s Mother Courage would be featured (spanning a period of 12 years and a multitude of locales), the point being that in Brecht’s conception despite the experience of years of wanderings and suffering the protagonist does not change. Applied to Greek tragedy in general and the Eumenides in particular, two points have to be made. The first is that, while all of preserved Greek tragedy The concept was first developed by Bakhtin for his (diachronic) historical poetics of the novel––Bakhtin (1938: 1981); see also Moellendorff (1995), 42 f.––and is known, though not at all widely used, in Theatre Studies; see Pavis (2003), 159–70. 56

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is to be located somewhere in Quadrant I, Eumenides stands out by being the only known play that surely belongs in Quadrant IV. The second point, however, is the more important one: given that Eumenides operates with a peculiar kind of ‘composite time’ and ‘composite space’, hence ‘composite reality’, its nature is such that the play is, in a sense, not chartable within the above matrix at all. Since in an important way standard definitions of time and space (which the matrix is based on) do not, or not wholly, apply, the very notion of chronotopes reaches its conceptual limits in this case. It is, ultimately, the ‘aetiological mode’ of the play which gives it this peculiar ontological status. What, to conclude, differentiates the dramatic ‘aetiological mode’ from the non-dramatic one? What is different in modality between Hesiod giving an audience his account of why the human race ended up in the possession of fire or Callimachus describing the origin of a particular ritual on the one hand, and Aeschylus providing his audience with a narrative of the foundation of the Athenian Areopagus on the other? The question, to be sure, merits an article (or book, rather) of its own, and I can only hint at what I perceive to be the big points. Any aetiological narrative provides a level of comfort and orientation for the collective constructing it. Rooting current social practice in the past and emphasizing its functionality for times to come gives direction, meaning, and an empowering sense of agency in a life environment that is fundamentally shaped by unpredictability and severely limited human control. The precise dynamics, however, of how any one aetiological narrative performs just these functions can only be uncovered by detailed individual analysis. How, for whom, and to what extent, for instance, do Callimachus’ Aitia construct cultural identity, and what kind of cultural identity? Turning from similarities to what sets the dramatic and the non-dramatic ‘aetiological mode’ apart, the differentiator that is, I believe, crucial leads me back to my opening remarks about the everlasting ‘presence’ of representation in drama as an art form. The Hesiodic or Callimachean aetiologies are mediated: they are told in the past tense and by a narrator who explicitly invokes the Muses as the source of inspiration (Hesiod) and information (Callimachus). Callimachus signals this element of mediation particularly strongly by giving at least the first two books of his Aitia the shape of a question-and-answer dialogue between the narrator and the Muses, and by regularly highlighting this format.57 By contrast, the drama Eumenides is 57 Callimachus, Aitia fr. 7.19 ff. (shift from Clio to Calliope), fr. 31b, fr. 43.56 f. (Clio), fr. 43.84 ff. (all according to Pfeiffer) as well as fr. 140 Asper (Erato). Note that the strongly aetiological Salmakis inscription (p. 252 above), written in elegiacs, is similarly framed (lines 1– 4) as a question-and-answer dialogue, this time between the narrator and Aphrodite, in whose sanctuary (shared with Hermes) the inscription was located.

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composed, as a script, in the unmediated present and is, as a performance, instantiated for the moment and in the moment. This im-mediacy not only conveys a particular vividness and intensity which encourages and invites, even though it cannot enforce, an especially strong emotional and cognitive response on the part of the watching or even the reading recipient. More importantly, there is something even more deeply comforting and reassuring about the presence conveyed by Eumenides as drama than what could be provided by a non-dramatic aetiological narrative. It is surely of crucial import in this context that aetiology is not found across all dramatic genres but is the preserve of tragedy. No aetiological narrative (or a parody thereof) is found in extant comedy: the closest instances are the parody of a cosmogony in the parabasis of Birds and Cratinus’ mythological burlesque Dionysalexandros, which also functions as an allegorical aetiology of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, despite the limited scope of the preserved evidence such aetiological narratives would almost seem out of place in this genre (apart from being difficult to integrate dramaturgically). Satyr play, for all we know, regularly embraces plots that centre around the achievement of a ‘first inventor’ (prôtos heuretês) as a bringer of culture (the Aeschylean Prometheus Pyrkaeus [‘Firekindler’], for instance).58 But this is a different kind of aetiology, notably because of its lack of a ritual component which is operative in the world of the audience. It is solely the gloomy world of tragic dysfunctionality which often, though by no means always, makes room––or should it be ‘calls for’?––such aetiological narratives which, usually within the closural sequence, console and reassure characters and audience alike by reminding them that there is life, order, meaning, and remembrance beyond the abyss. It is good for the Athenians to be told over and over again by their orators, politicians, and visual artists that the gods exist, and that at least some of them are, and (it is hoped) will continue to be, particularly fond of their city and proactive in generating and maintaining its social stability. But it is quite a different thing for all of this to happen after the Athenians have just witnessed the downfall of their mythical heroes, and to unfold directly before their eyes, in their ‘here and now’.59 58

Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker (1999), 30. I wish to thank Christoph Emmrich, Ingo Gildenhard, Domenico Pietropaolo, and Peter Wilson for stimulating criticism and engaging discussions on this and related topics. 59

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–––– (1995), ‘The Beginning and the End of Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy’, in Zimmermann (1995), 111–34. –––– (1996), Aeschylean Tragedy, Bari. –––– Halliwell, S., Henderson, J., and Zimmermann, B. (1993) (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, Bari. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1991), ‘Reading’ Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals and Myths, Oxford. –––– (2004), ‘Hermaphroditos and Salmakis: The Voice of Halikarnassos’, in Isager and Pedersen (2004), 59–84. Taplin, O. (1976), ‘Χορο& and the Structure of Post-Classical Tragedy’, LCM 1: 47–50. –––– (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (2006a), ‘Aeschylus’ Persai––the Entry of Tragedy into the Celebratory Culture of the 470s?’, in Cairns and Liapis (2006), 1–10. –––– (2006b), ‘Greek Tragedy, Chekhov, and Being Remembered’, Arion 3rd series 13: 51–65. –––– and Wilson, P. (1993), ‘The ‘Aetiology’ of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39: 169–80. Theunissen, M. (2000), Pindar. Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit, Munich. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1990), Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York. Vidal-Naquet, P. (1982: 1990), ‘Aeschylus, the Past and the Present’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990), 249–72. Wilder, T. (2007), Collected Plays & Writings on Theatre, New York. Wiles, D. (1997), Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, Cambridge. Wilson, P. (2007) (ed.), The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies, Oxford. Winkler, J. and Zeitlin, F. (1990) (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context, Princeton. Wolff, C. (1992), ‘Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians: Aetiology, Ritual, and Myth’, CA 11: 308–34. Yatromanolakis, D. and Roilos, P. (2004) (eds.), Greek Ritual Poetics, Cambridge, Mass. Zeitlin, F. (1978: 1996), ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’, in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago), 87–119. –––– (1990), ‘Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), 130–67. Zimmermann, B. (1995) (ed.), Griechisch-römische Komödie und Tragödie (DRAMA vol. 3), Stuttgart.

11 Star Choruses: Eleusis, Orphism, and New Musical Imagery and Dance* Eric Csapo

A dozen years have passed since Albert Henrichs gave a full description of a remarkable change in the imagery of tragic choral odes. Henrichs found a large increase in choral self-reference (i.e. choruses talking about their own performance) in the last decades of the fifth century, and especially in the late plays of Euripides. Henrichs fortunately did not limit his study to selfreference: late choruses also speak much more of other choruses dancing (a phenomenon he termed ‘choral projection’.) The fact is that late and especially late Euripidean choruses describe music and dance (whether their own or that of others) surprisingly often, and, when they do, this music or dance has a distinctly, usually expressly, Dionysiac quality, or if not Dionysiac, at least cultic. With the observation that choral lyric reveals (one might say ‘conspicuously advertises’) a conscious connection with Dionysiac ritual, Henrichs put a rather strong case for Euripides’ religious commitment: ‘Far from suppressing Dionysus, as Nietzsche claimed, Euripides takes advantage of every conceivable dimension of the god and deserves to rank as the most Dionysiac of the three tragedians.’1 A new Euripides emerges from this observation, one opposed to the more traditional (comedogenic) portrait of Euripides theomakhos, the sceptical if not atheistic child of the sophists (the Bacchae was sometimes described as a deathbed conversion, or a last cynical Pascal’s wager). But the phenomenon described by Henrichs goes beyond choral song and beyond Euripides. Henrichs’ arguments were confined to choral odes. Yet Euripidean monody also has a penchant for Dionysiac and cultic musical imagery (though in monody it is not a question of ‘self-reflexivity’, since Dionysian cultic dance

* My thanks to Atticus Cox and Peter Wilson for many helpful suggestions in developing the argument of this paper and to Robert Fowler for sharing his unpublished research. 1 Henrichs (1994–5), quotation p. 57.

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and music is by nature choral). Indeed musical projection of this sort goes beyond Euripides and beyond tragedy. It is highly characteristic of dithyramb from at least the time of Pindar and of the (largely dithyramb-inspired) ‘New Music’ (including nomes and other monodic performances).2 The efflorescence of Dionysian and cultic imagery in later fifth-century musical verse seems to me to indicate that New Musicians (including Euripides), despite a notoriety for innovation, conceived of their activity as an essentially conservative enterprise, namely the ‘recreation’ of an authentically Dionysian music. This is also an unorthodox claim. Like Euripides, New Music (sometimes more narrowly ‘New Dithyramb’) has, from Plato to Zimmermann, been characterized, and condemned, as the product of the fifth-century decline in religious faith, the growth of secularization, and an artistic surrender to empty aestheticism.3 In this essay I expand upon my earlier claim that a religious and particularly Dionysian revival played a large role in shaping the character of New Music and in shaping, through the New Music, much of the imagery we find in late fifth-century tragic odes. In earlier studies of New Music I argued that New Music responded in part to the general expansion of Dionysian cultic activity in Athens (and elsewhere) both through the reception in Central Greece of Bacchic/Orphic mysteries, and through the absorption of the ideas and imagery of such cults by the Eleusinian mysteries (and particularly through Eleusis’ absorption of ideas and images related to Dionysiac music and dance). In this tribute to Oliver Taplin, the fount and origin of performance studies in Greek drama, I hope to explore some of these broad, essentially ‘performative’ connections, but within the compass of a much more narrowly focused study of one recurrent pattern of projection in tragic choral odes, the chorus of stars. By late antiquity the image of the ‘chorus of stars’ had an unmistakable connection with mystery cult. Artemidorus adduces a ‘chorus of stars’ as a dream image thought particularly auspicious to ‘those who practice more mystery-like devotions’, presumably because of an acknowledged cultural connection between image and activity (1.3 γνεται . . . το, πα´νυ τα` µυστικτερα πρα´ττουσιν . . . εIσηµο α#στ.ρων χορ). Flavius Philostratus refers to the chorus of stars as ‘the mysteries above the earth’ (ep. 56). Dio draws a strict analogy between the dance of initiates ‘in a circle’ around the initiand at Eleusis and the chorus of immortal gods who perpetually dance around us in the form of stars (Or. 12.33–5).4 But the overall pattern of the image’s use 2 3 4

Csapo (1999–2000), (2003), (2004). See Csapo (1999–2000), 415, Csapo and Wilson (forthcoming). See esp. Hardie (2004), 22–5.

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would suggest that it had a mystical aura from the beginning. The citations, like the stars, come in clusters.5 If one follows the image through Archaic to Late Antique Greek literature then the densest cluster is, in prose, the tradition of Pythagorean/Platonic cosmology,6 and, in poetry, cultic hymns, and, for the most part, hymns connected to Dionysus, Eleusis, or mystery cult.7 But if one confines the search to the fifth century or even the Classical period, then by far the densest use of the image of star choruses is in the imagery of tragic choral odes.8 Tragic odes may seem at first an odd addition to the set, especially given the well-established (if not yet fully understood) connections between Pythagorean and Platonic cosmology, on the one hand, and Bacchic (or Orphic) and Eleusinian doctrine, on the other. But we will see that the tragic odes fully fit the mystical stamp of their congeners.

1 . P Y T H AG O R E A N S , O R PH I C S , A N D C O S M I C DA N C E The roots of ‘music cosmology’ run deep in Greek thought.9 The concept of cosmic dance first survives in Pythagorean texts.10 Petron used the metaphor of dance for the movement of the 183 worlds he ascribed to the universe (DK 16 A1). Philolaus spoke of the dance of the fixed stars, planets, sun, moon, earth, and counter-earth dancing around the ‘Hearth of the Universe’ which 5 In addition to the passages in the following notes, other literary uses of the image include: Argentarius AP 9.270.1; Anon. AP 9.504; Luc. Deor.Conc. 5; Eustath. Hysmine and Hysminias 5.160. Cf. Tib. 2.1.88, Pro. 3.4.36; Hor. Carm. 4.14.21; Manil. 2.118, St. Ach. 1.643; Hyg. Fab. 192.6; Censorinus c. 13. For astrological dances generally see Sachs (1937), 124–31; Miller (1986). 6 Philolaus DK 44 A16; Pl. Tim. 40c, Epin. 982e; Arist. fr. 11 Rose, De philosophia fr. 12b Ross; Dio Orat. 12.33–4; Philostratus ep. 56 etc. (the image is used some twenty-two times in Philo and is ubiquitous in Christian treatises (esp. John Chrysostom) where the patterned order of the chorus of stars is as in Plato and Aristotle generally invoked as proof of the existence of a demiurge). 7 FGrH 76 F 13 (ithyphallic hymn to Demetrius); Philodamus of Scarphea, Delphic Paean to Dionysus 8 πα´ντε δ# [α#στ.ρε α#γχ]ρευσαν (a less likely supplement by Weil (1895), 402); Mesomedes, Hymn to the Sun 17–18, Hymn to Isis 19, Hymn to Hadrian 10; Aelius Aristides, Hymn to Zeus 6 (vol. 1.7 Jebb); Heitsch (1963) fr. 10.6 (to Selene), fr. 14.15 (to Aphrodite). Cf. Nonnus 1.237, 2.228, 2.352, 9.238, 21.252, 25.241, 25.338, 25.449, 27.50, 32.7, 35.337, 38.311; Menander Rhet. Peri epideiktikon 446.2 (Russell and Wilson); Corpus Hermeticum 1.8.6, 2.13.3, 6.14.1, and the Christian hymnic tradition represented by Synesius, Hymn 5; Michael Psellus Poem. 17.6, 63.6, In Mariam Sclerenam 6; Manuel Philes, Carm. 3.14.290. 8 S. Ant. 1146–53; E. El. 365–7, Ion 1074–86, Phaethon 66; Critias TrGF 43 F 4; TrGF Adesp. 89a. 9 Franklin (2006a). 10 See Miller (1986), 45–55, It is clearly also known to Ionian cosmology: Diogenes, for example, wrote of currents of air providing the chorêgia that causes the heavenly bodies to revolve (fr. DK 64 A17).

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he also referred to as an ‘altar’ (DK 44 A16). Aristotle affirms that the Pythagoreans of Italy believed in a central fire around which the earth and stars revolved (Cael. 293a20–8). The dance of the stars was very early conceived as a cultic performance. The fullest account of cosmic music (the harmony of the spheres) and cosmic ‘dance’ appears in Plato. It is placed in the mouth of the Pythagorean Timaeus in Plato’s Timaeus where the demiurge is said to have made two circles, one outer circle of stars moving in perfect synchrony, and an inner circle of the planets, sun, and moon, less perfect and moving at different rates. Their movements constituted a ‘choral dance’ (χορεα) around a central earth. The Republic offers an analogous, but in detail quite different, picture: the centre of the cosmos is described as a great shaft of light (φ%) stretching through the earth and the sky called the ‘spindle of Necessity’ (616b). Around this spindle revolve eight concentric whorls which are turned by the Fates. The whole spindle moves in one direction (617a). The outermost whorl (containing the stars) Clotho turns with her right hand in the same direction as the spindle (617c). The inner seven whorls (the five visible planets, sun and moon) Atropos moves with her left hand slowly and at various speeds in the opposite direction, so that, even though, relative to the stationary observer, all the whorls move in the same direction as the spindle, the inner whorls move in the opposite direction relative to the spindle and outer whorl (617a-d). The choral nature of these revolutions is marked by the presence of a siren sitting on each of the whorls and singing a different note, together forming an eight-part harmony. The fully orchestrated cosmos has an eschatological side that is most fully explored in Timaeus and Phaedrus. In Timaeus Plato speaks of the demiurge’s creation of soul substance out of proportions that correspond to the intervals of an octave, a material embodiment of musical harmonia. Out of this soul substance he created the other gods who are the stars and planets. Their movements in heaven are a visual analogue of soul substance’s harmony. Particular gods used less perfect ‘soul stuff’ to create humans. Because of their more complex motions, humans risked falling out of step with original harmony but they were given ears and eyes to hear music and contemplate the cosmic dance, and a sense of rhythm to imitate it in human dance. It is by imitating the dance of the stars that we retune our souls, and it is by keeping our souls in good tone that we retain a hope that the divine substance within us will one day reconnect with the divine substance in heaven. In Phaedrus we catch a glimpse of the human soul that after leaving the body tries to regain the heights and rhythms of the cosmic dance. Each soul is said to follow after its own particular god as he circles the heavens. ‘Hestia alone remains in the dwelling of the gods’ while the other gods, referred to as a ‘divine chorus’, and

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‘choreuts’, fly up on feast days on their chariots to the apex of the vault of heaven. Here, they are carried about by its revolutions, as they gaze, like tourists in a revolving restaurant, into the outer cosmos at mystic visions of absolute Justice, Virtue, and Knowledge, a mystic revelation which conveys to each soul its immortality, its communion with divinity, and the laws governing its own destiny.11 In this mystic vision Plato manages a perfect harmony of his own, uniting Pythagorean music, mathematics, and astronomy with mystic eschatology.12 We cannot unfortunately say just how much of this vision belongs to Plato. The idea that the stars perform a circular dance, and a cultic dance around an altar, is, as we have seen, much older. The doctrine that linked the music of the spheres, the tuning of the lyre, and the eschatologically healthy human soul had enormous appeal for later Orphics, who found its early expression in Orpheus’ attempt to resurrect Eurydice with the power of the lyre.13 We can at least trace the concept of a ‘cosmic lyre’ to Skythinos in the fifth century.14 Moreover, Aristotle associates the linkage between the harmony of the lyre and the harmony of the stars/planets with Pythagorean, not Platonic thought (the Pythagoreans are said to take the seven notes of the scale, the sevenstringed lyre, the seven planets of the cosmos, and the seven Pleiades as all manifestations of the same numerical cosmic principle).15 Indeed John Franklin has recently shown that the connection between the strings of the lyre, the planets or stars, and universal harmony is deeply rooted in Greek and Middle Eastern thought.16 To anticipate a minor theme in this paper, I would dwell for a moment on the presence of the Pleiades in Aristotle’s list of cosmic coordinates. The mythological concept of the Pleiades as a chorus of dancers is widespread.17 So is their connection with cosmic order: in Babylonian mythology the seven gods are identified with the Pleiades.18 The Pythagoreans called the Pleiades the ‘Lyre of the Muse’, likening its seven stars to strings.19 In Greece the Pleaides were (usually) seven catasterized maidens, almost invariably linked with choral dance and even coming to be regarded as the inventors of choral dance.20 It may well be by chance that the very first reference in Greek literature to a chorus of stars is to the Pleiades. But it is possible that the chorus of Alcman’s Parthenion evokes its ‘rivals’ the Pleiades as the mythical dancers 11

Pl. Phdr. 247a–e. On the choral terminology, see D’Alfonso (1994), 26–7. For the mainly Pythagorean musical and mathematical background to Plato’s account, see most recently Barker (2005), 131–41. For the mystic language, see esp. Riedweg (1987), 30–69. 13 For the later Orphic ‘cosmic lyre’ see West (1983), 29–32. 14 Skythinos IEG fr. 1; West (1983), 29–32; Hardie (2004), 28; Wilson (2004), 289. 15 16 17 Arist. Met. 1093a. Franklin (2006a), (2006b). Gibbon (1972), 241–44. 18 19 Franklin (2006a), 380 n. 12. DK 58 C2, cf. B27. 20 Scholiast to Theocritus 13.25 (cf. Callim. fr. 693 Pfeiffer; Hygin. Astr. 2.21). 12

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par excellence, to which the mortal chorus of maidens can only compare itself unfavourably, just as the chorus later compares itself, unfavourably, to the archetypal mythical singers, the Sirens.21

2 . A N T I G O N E, I O N, A N D OT H E R E L E U S I N I A N S TA R S The chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone invokes Dionysus as ‘the chorus leader of fire-breathing stars and overseer of nocturnal utterances’; it invites him to come ‘along with your revolving Thyiads (σα, αMµα περιπλοι θυαισιν), who dance for you, Iacchus, their master, all night long’ (1146–53). There is little implicit connection between the performers and the dancers they invoke, whether in character (the performers are sober old men) on occasion (in council at midday). The point of comparison is sooner between the two embedded choruses both led by Dionysus: the Thyiads with their pine torches resemble the ‘fire-breathing stars,’ and like them ‘revolve . . . all night long’ with a circular movement. The word ‘revolving’ is the vox propria for the revolution of heavenly bodies.22 The chorus of stars authenticate the Thyiads, not Antigone’s chorus. Or, rather, both the choruses of Thyiads and stars are there to evoke the image of an authentic and original cultic performance, even at the cost of conflating Delphic cult (Thyiads) with Eleusinian (to which the address to Dionysus as ‘Iacchus’ unambiguously refers).23 The fire against the night sky when linked to Thyiads suggests the Dionysian rite of oreibasia, but when linked to Iacchus it alludes to the Iacchus procession from Athens to Eleusis that began the celebration of the Greater Mysteries on the 20th of Boedromion. The procession was led by an Eleusinian official called the Dadouchos (‘Torchbearer’) and ended with an all-night reception for Iacchus, which Attic art, in Robert Parker’s words, semaphores with ‘torches, torches, nothing but torches’.24 In literature Iacchus is frequently identified (or confused) with Dionysus, a fact that Parker attributes to the excitement, exhilaration, and rejuvenating qualities it ascribes to the procession.25 But as Sophocles’ words suggest, the Dionysiac quality of the Iacchus procession is 21 Atticus Cox draws my attention to evidence for a cultic parthenion with astrological symbolism in Proclus, Chrestomath. 74–8 Severyns. For the suggestion that Alcman, Parth. 1 plays upon the Pythagorean symbolism of Pleiades and Sirens, see West (1967), 11–14, 15 n. 6, West (1983), 32. 22 See LSJ s.v. περιπολε,ν and περιπλησι. Cf. Kamerbeek (1978) ad loc.: ‘“περιπλοι” may be regarded as adjective as well as noun (“attendants”)’. 23 24 Henrichs (1994–5), 77–8, (1996), 51–6. Parker (2005), 350. 25 Parker (2005), 349, 358 with further literature.

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also reinforced by the choral revolutions ‘all night long’ in which the procession finds its culmination. Circular dance is conceived to be primordially cultic and primordially Dionysiac. In Euripides’ Ion the chorus expresses shame at the thought that a foreign interloper (Ion) will witness the Eleusinian Mysteries. They imagine Ion at the nocturnal procession of Iacchus/Dionysus (1074–86): I feel shame before the much-sung god if [Ion], present as a spectator at the festival of the twentieth by the springs of the beautiful dances (καλλιχροισι παγα,), keeping the all-night vigil, will see the torch, when the starry-faced aether of Zeus has begun to dance and the moon dances and dance too the fifty daughters of Nereus on the sea and the eddies of everflowing rivers in honour of Kore and the golden crown of the reverend Mother.

As in Antigone the chorus draws a close analogy between the dance of the stars and the mythical dance of Nereids. Nereids are the archetypal Dionysiac dancers of myth, as Thyiads are of cult. They are invariably portrayed in art and literature as dancing in circles, and that is why they are said here to dance ‘on eddies’.26 Notwithstanding the slight difference in the astrological and choral personnel, the reference is to the same cultic performance as in Antigone (note ‘at the festival of the twentieth’). The language of song, ‘by the springs of the beautiful dances (καλλιχροισι παγα,)’, more specifically localizes the dance of the projected chorus at the Callichoron Well (‘Well of the Beautiful Dance’), also called ‘Parthenion’ (‘Well of the Maidens’), just outside the precinct at Eleusis.27 It is at this well, where Demeter ended her wanderings, that the Iacchus procession also culminates in dances performed by maidens in commemoration of the fact that ‘there the women of Eleusis first organized a chorus and sang to the goddess’.28 The dances at the Callichoron Well are also the subject of a choral projection in the wildly ‘dithyrambic’ third stasimon of Euripides’ Helen, though there it is Graces and Muses who dance, not Thyiads or Nereids. The second parodos of Aristophanes’ Frogs also refers to the same procession and dance.29 The chorus of initiates process into the theatre, carrying torches, and invoking Iacchus.30 Once arrived, the chorus leader (identified by Radermacher as the Dadouchos) exhorts the chorus to ‘dance in the circular motion sacred to the goddess . . . and I, carrying a holy light, will dance with the girls and 26

Nereids: Csapo (2003). Eddies: see also Csapo (1999–2000), 422–4. Thematic use of the adjective καλλχορο in choral projection: Henrichs (1996), 51–2. 28 h.Cer. 99, 270–2, 292–3; Paus. 1.38.6 (quotation); Apollod. 1.5.1; Callim. Dem. 6.15, fr. 611; Nic. Ther. 484–7; Mylonas (1961), 73; Graf (1974), 131; Richardson (1974), 362–3; Clinton (1992), 28. 29 30 Graf (1974), 40–50. Dover (1993a), 59–60, (1993b), 179–83. 27

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women, where they hold the all-night celebration for the goddess’.31 There should be no doubt about the identity of the all-night celebration: the chorus follows with a song that includes the directions ‘Let us go to the flowery meadow where roses abound, celebrating in our way the most Callichoron-like dance which the blessed Muses assemble’ (447–53).32 I see two possible reasons for the relative frequency with which the dance at the Callichoron well is invoked in dramatic odes. First that the Eleusinian dances were the most widely known still primordially cultic choral dance in Athens. The dance at the Callichoron well was not the only choral dance at Eleusis. The actual initiation dance, or thronismos, seems also to have been choral, and incidentally round.33 But the Iacchus procession and the dance at the Callichoron were the only Eleusinian rites that were sufficiently public (which is why Ion’s chorus may be ashamed that Ion will ‘be present as a spectator’) to be mentioned (and indeed imitated––see below) in a theatrical performance without risk of prosecution for revealing the mysteries.34 The second reason for the choice of this particular dance for choral projection is its connection with Dionysus: not only is it simple, ‘round’ and primitive as primordial Dionysiac dance was imagined to be, but it was in fact ‘Dionysiac’ because of the well-established syncretism of Dionysus and Iacchus.35 The scholiast to Sophocles’ Antigone 1146 (= Eustath. Comm. in Il. vol. 2, p. 9 van der Valk) reports that Dionysus was called ‘etherial’ (α@θ.ριο) and called ‘chorus leader of the stars in accordance with some doctrine of the mysteries’. If this was just a good guess, there is evidence enough to show that it was correct. For the particular mysteries in question one does not need to look beyond Eleusis or really to choose between Eleusinian and Orphic/ Bacchic sources. To the poetic imagination, at least, Dionysus’ aetherial and astral associations were shared by both. The chorus of initiates in Aristophanes’ Frogs address the god as ‘lightbringing star of the nocturnal rite’ (343). Eumolpus in the Bacchica is said to have called Dionysus ‘starshiner’ and ‘fiery-faced’ amidst beams of light (ap. D.S. 1.11: α#στροφαD ∆ινυσον 0ν α#κτνεσσιν πυρωπν). Philodamus of Scarphea, in his paian to Dionysus, asks the god to reveal his ‘starry form’ (21 Powell α#στε[ρεν δ].µα). Pindar’s reference to Dionysus as ‘pure light of the harvest’ probably 31 Ar. Frogs 440–7. The phrase χωρε,τ. νυν Lερν α#να` κκλον θεα˜ is usually translated as refering to a circular place, but α#να` κκλον is choreographic language used of circular dance: Ar. Birds 1379 [not tmesis]; Oppian Hal. 3.250; cf. Simon. fr. 148.9 B; Ar. Thes. 968. If the ‘circular place’ meant precinct, it would be redundant with what follows, and if it meant some other unspecified dancing place, it would be contradictory. 32 Lada-Richards (1999), 100. 33 See esp. Dio, Or. 12.33–5 for Eleusinian thronismos; Pl. Euthyd. 277d (Korybantic thronismos); Hymn. Orph. 7.4 Quandt. Further Burkert (1987), 90 n. 3. 34 35 Graf (1974), 50. Graf (1974), 51–8.

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has an astrological significance (fr. 153) as does his description of Ploutos, the divine child of Demeter, early identified with Iacchos /Dionysus, as a ‘brilliant star’ (O. 2.53).36 This astral imagery Dionysus shares with his worshipper. This, at any rate, is what Antigone’s chorus would seem to imply: the reference to Dionysus as ‘chorus-leader’ of the stars likens Dionysus’ dancing worshippers, not Dionysus, to the stars. Menander Rhetor ascribes the notion that Dionysus was a ‘leader of the stars’ to the Chaldeans, but in a context that suggests ‘leader’, hêgemôn, must be taken in its choral meaning.37 Somewhat closer to Eleusis are the allegorical explanations of the third-century bc Stoic Cleanthes who attempted a general explanation of the rites at Eleusis entirely in cosmological terms calling the sun ‘dadouchos’ and the cosmos ‘initiates’ and those possessed of the divine ‘initiands’. He also ‘called the gods mystika schêmata (?initiatory dance figures) and holy appellations’, apparently in a general attempt to link cosmology, theology, dance, and mystery ritual into a single universal system, which included a typically mystic (see below) etymology of Dionysus from διανσαι ‘to finish one’s course’, because ‘he completed a daily run in the sky from the rising to the setting day and night’, indicating that Cleanthes had already also equated Dionysus (along with Apollo) with the sun.38 Cleanthes’ allegorization was not unique. Dio, as we saw, directly compared cosmic dance with Eleusinian ritual (or. 12.33–4); Porphyry had cosmological interpretations of a different set of Eleusinian cult officials, claiming (ap. Euseb. Prep. Evang. 3.12.4) that the hierophant represented the demiurge, the daduch the sun, the altar priest the moon, and the Hierokeryx Hermes. This strain of mystic thought seems to posit not only a link between the dance of the heavenly spheres and the dance of mystic initiation, but also between the celestial dance and the cycle of life and death. The initiate of one of the gold leaves claims to have ‘flown free of the grievous, wearisome cycle and embarked upon the much-desired garland with nimble feet’ using what appears to be a metaphor for round dance, ‘the garland’, that is repeatedly found in Euripidean verse.39 It is at any rate on descent or rebirth from the stars that the initiates of the Orphic gold leaves insist when they describe themselves as children of Earth and of ‘Starry Sky’, or (as in the case of the 36 Cf. Seaford (1981), 256 n. 46. Note also the equation of Dionysus with aither in E. Ba. 292–3 with Seaford (1996), 176, 202. 37 Menander Rhet. Peri epideiktikon 446 Russell and Wilson. 38 Cleanthes SVF 1.123 fr. 538; Cleanthes ap. Macrob. Sat. 1.18; cf. Burkert (1983), 288, (1987), 90; Parker (2005), 353. 39 DK 1 B 18–69 = PEG 2.2 F 488.3–6. For the garland metaphor: Csapo (1999–2000), 422.

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garland dancer) as blasted by the ‘star-flinger’ with (or of) lightning, and, in one case the initiate lays claim to the name ‘Starry’.40 An ‘Orphic’ thirdcentury bc tombstone claims that the deceased is ‘descended from immortal fire’ and lives ‘elevated by his father among the heavenly stars’.41 We do not know (and for our purposes perhaps need not know) just how complicit Eleusinian cult was with the cosmological imagery of poets or the cosmological allegories of philosophers. It is however noteworthy that the only extant hymn known to have been performed in an ancient procession to Eleusis reproduces precisely this image of worshippers dancing like stars around Dionysus. The circumstances were extraordinary, but for that very reason it was desirable for the imagery of the hymn to match cultic requirements as closely as possible. For over sixteen years Athens had responded favourably to Demetrius the Besieger’s attempt to impose himself as a ‘New Dionysus’.42 His reconquest of Athens seems to have coincided with the Dionysia of 295 bc, a happy coincidence, perhaps, which stimulated a calendrical reform beginning the new year with the Dionysia, but also merging the Dionysia with a new festival, the Demetria, designed to commemorate his epiphany. Already publicly acknowledged as a ‘saviour’ god, Demetrius in 291 or 290 bc decided to press his connection to the supreme mysteries by ‘staging’ a return to Athens (from Corcyra) to coincide with the procession to Eleusis.43 In anticipation of his bodily appearance at the event, it was decreed ‘that Demetrius was to be received, whenever he came, with the honours due to Demeter and Dionysus’.44 Demochares reports that (FGrH 75 F 2): . . . the Athenians received him not only with incense, garlands, and libations of wine, but went to meet him with processional choruses and ithyphallic hymns accompanied by dance and song. And coming to a halt before him (0φιστα´µενοι) among the crowds (?) they danced and sang. And they sang to him that he was the only true god . . . etc.

Duris of Samos preserves part of the ithyphallic hymn sung in Demetrius’ honour on this occasion of which I cite only the ‘epiphany’:45 40 PEG 202 F 474.10, 475.12, 476.6, 477.8–9, 478.3, 479.3, 480.3, 481.3, 482.3, 483.3, 484.3, 484a.3, 488.4, 489.4, 490.5. 41 SEG 28 no. 528 = PEG 2.1 466 T. 42 Scott (1928), 222–37; Ehrenberg (1946), 179–98; Tondriau (1949); Chaniotis (1997), 241–2; Thonemann (2005). 43 For Demetrius as ‘Saviour’: Plut. Demetr. 10, cf. 13; Dem and Ant. 3, cf. Ant. 24.3–4; Vell. Pat. 2.82.4; Chaniotis (1997), 241–2. For Demetrius and the mysteries: Plut. Demetr. 26; Antiphanes, Twin, PCG, F 81. For the chronology of Demetrius’ appearance, see: Wehrli (1968), 178; Habicht (1979), 34–44; Green (1990), 127. 44 Plut. Demetr. 12.1; Thonemann (2005), 79. 45 FGrH 76 F 13. On the epiphanic language see: Weinreich (1926), 647; Scott (1928), 230–1; Ehrenberg (1946), 192; Slater (1988).

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We find the chorus of ‘friends’ (probably the ‘Athenians’) ‘danced and sang’, presumably in a circle around Demetrius/Dionysus, likening itself to stars and Demetrius to the sun. The equation of Dionysus with the sun, common in the literature and iconography of the mysteries in Hellenistic times,46 is here clearly attested for the first time,47 though unlikely to have been the invention of Hermocles, the poet of the ithyphallic hymn, and it soon appears in the mystic equations of Cleanthes (above). For the astral imagery, at any rate, Hermocles’ immediate source would appear to be Demetrius himself. Demetrius’ shield (inscribed ‘of King Demetrius’) has recently been unearthed at Dion: its front is decorated with a sunburst surrounded by seven stars. From literary sources, moreover, we learn that Demetrius urged his identification with Dionysus by wearing a kind of costume that must already have been common in mystic initiation,48 chlamydes embroidered with ‘an image of the kosmos and the heavenly bodies’, or ‘with golden stars and the animals of the zodiac’. Indeed, Demetrius’ cosmological (as well as imperial) ambitions were advertised by a painting on the proskenion of the Theatre of Dionysus which showed him riding on top of the world.49 The astral imagery would have had little point unless ‘stars’ and ‘star-choruses’ had already a well-established connection with the mystic Dionysus.

46

See e.g. Macrob. Sat. 1.18; Dio Chrys. 31.570 R; PEG 2.1 F 305, cf. F 323, Orph. fr. F 236–8 K. 47 The earliest attestation of the solar Dionysus is generally said to be Diod. 1.11.1–3, though some scholars would trace the syncretism to the fifth century: e.g. Guépin (1968), 266–79. West finds ‘traces of an Orphic solar cult as early as the fifth century [bc]’ ((1983), 12–13, 206 (quote) citing A. Bassarai; S. TrGF F 752, OT 660; Ar. Clouds 571–4). 48 Orph. fr. F 238 K, with Eisler (1910), 106, (1925), 283. Cf. E. Hel. 1358–9 (‘the all-dappled garments of fawn have great power’) and the mystic interpretation of the spots as stars: Orph. fr. 238 K; cf. D.S. 1.11; Powell ad Philod. Scarph. 27–8. 49 Duris FGrH 76 F 14 (cf. the sun and stars on Bacchic ceremonial robes, Orph. fr. F 238 K.); Plut. Dem. 41.

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3. PERITHOUS Euripides’ (or Critias’) Perithous is set in the underworld. The chorus invoke an unnamed masculine deity with the words ‘you, the self-generating, you who wove the nature of all things in the aetherial rhumbos (0ν α@θερ( nµβ(), about whom dance light, about whom dance perpetually dark variegated night and the indistinguishable throng of stars’ (TrGF 43 F 4). The chorus, residents of the underworld, are, judging from the way they speak, initiates. Snell and Kannicht guess that they are Eleusinian (TrGF 43 F 2: ‘mystarum Eleusiniorum mortuorum (?)’). This is partly based on a reference to a plêmochoê which is a vessel used, according to Athenaeus (496a), on the last day of the mysteries at Eleusis. But they were right to reserve judgement: the language and ideas seem Orphic, not Eleusinian.50 Satyrus was not the last to suppose that the rhumbos draws upon materialistic Ionian speculations such as we find in Anaxagoras, Diogenes, or Anaximenes about the aetherial whorl.51 But rhumbos is a most curious term for a circular motion, which is clearly what is required here. Rhumbos or, more usually, rhombos, refers to a lozenge-shaped figure, or a bullroarer, a normally lozenge-shaped instrument swung around the head on a string to produce an uncanny sound resembling thunder and favoured in initiation rites around the world. Except by analogy with the use of bullroarers, rhombos is an unnatural word for the movement of the heavens. It is paralleled, not in Presocratic philosophy but in the language of Euripidean choral projections. In the distinctly dithyrambic third stasimon of Helen, ‘whirling circular aetherial vibration of the rhombos’ (1362–5: nµβο θ’ εLλισσοµ.να κκλιο νοσι α@θερα) appears in a list of cultic accoutrements and instruments for dancers for Bromios and the pannychides of the Great Goddess. There is abundant evidence for the use of the bullroarer in fifth-century and later mystery rites connected with Dionysus, Cybele, but also Demeter: Helen’s third stasimon associates it with the rites of Bromios and the Great Mother.52 The apparent choice of ‘doctrinally charged’ language to describe the circular motions of cultic dance is one of the most typical features of Euripidean choral projection. Words of the διν- root (‘whorl’), such as dinê, dinein, dineuein, dineumata, are common only in two types of poetry: like references 50

The reference to the ‘self-generating’ demiurge alone might suffice to make the point: see Hymns 12.9–10; West (1983), 198, 231. 51 Sat. Vit. Eur. 37, col. 2. 52 Dionysus: Pindar fr. 70b Maehler (dithyramb); A. TrGF F 57.8–9.; AP 6.165.5; PEG 2.1 F 306. Cybele: Diogenes TrGF 45 F 1.3; A.R. 1.1139. Demeter: Epiphanius ap. Kern (1922), 110. See esp. West (1983), 155–7. Further passages and bibliography at PEG 2.1 F 306.

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to star choruses they are found abundantly only in the choral odes of tragedies (especially Euripidean tragedies) of the last two decades of the fifth century bc and in Orphic hymns or poetry influenced by the mysteries.53 It seems likely that the mystic derivation of Dionysus from dineuein was already known.54 Less rare, but especially common in Euripidean choral projections are words of the Kλικ- root (helix, helissein), so common that Wilamowitz declared helissein Euripides’ Lieblingswort.55 These are given added significance by the fact that helix also means ‘ivy’, the sacred, upward-spiralling plant of Dionysus. In tragedy and in poetry inspired by mystery doctrine both din- and helik/s-words frequently describe Dionysiac dance56 and the circular movements of the heavenly bodies.57 The use of etymology to link cult with cultic symbols and cultic symbols with cosmogony is especially characteristic of Orphic literature. The Orphic Hymn to the Sun, for example, offers ‘firerunner, circle-revolver driving with eddyings the path of the unbounded bullroarer’ (8.7, 11 Quandt: nµβου α#πειρεσου δινεµασιν ο1µον 0λανων . . . πυρδροµε, κυκλο.λικτε). Euripides’ (or Critias’) term aitherios also points in this direction. As we saw, the scholiast to Sophocles’ Antigone connected the word ‘with some doctrine of the mysteries’. There are various Archaic and Classical sources, literary and epigraphical (mainly tombstones), affirming that the soul rejoins the aithêr after separation from the body; some implying that this entails a(n evidently desirable) form of immortality.58 In the Chrysippos of Euripides, for example, we are told: ‘that born of earth goes back to earth, but that sprung from the aitherial seed goes back to the pole of heaven, nothing that exists dies. . .’.59 Orphic fragments abundantly confirm a belief not only in the birth of the gods from aithêr but also in the derivation of the soul from aithêr.60 Possibly because epitaphs often express a belief that the souls of the dead rejoin the aithêr, many scholars regard such notions as popular ideas, ‘folk

53

See Csapo (1999–2000), 419–24. Csapo (1999–2000), 424. Wilamowitz (1895) II 159. See Csapo (1999–2000), 419–24. 56 Din-words: E. Ion 1084, Phoen. 792, Or. 837, 1458; Ar. Thesm. 122 (reading with Bentley δινεµατα). Cf. Opp. H. 673–6. Helix-words: Csapo (1999–2000), 422; Csapo (2003). 57 E. Alc. 245, IT 192, Or. 983 (with Willink (1986) ad loc.); Ar. Clouds 380–1, Birds 697; Orph. fr. F 115.2, 236.1, 237.7, 238.13 K; Hymn. Orph. 4.4, 6.7, 7.4, 10.22, 19.10, 40.15 Quandt. Cf. Emped. DK B 115.11 and [A.] PV 1051 with Seaford (1986), 10–11. 58 See the passages cited by Bernabé at PEG 2.1 F 436. Add Alexis PCG F 163; IG II2 12599. Cf. Epicharm. PCG F 213, 254. 59 E. TrGF F 839.8–11. 60 Gods: PEG 2.1 F 65 (from E. Hypsipyle), 125, 126. Souls: PEG 2.1 F 436–7; West (1983), 99, 222–3. 54 55

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beliefs’, in Arnott’s words.61 The wide distribution of such ideas does indeed suggest that they are not (as is sometimes claimed) direct allusions to the theories of isolated philosophers like Anaximenes or Anaximander, but immediately derived from a more popular medium. It is interesting to note that the majority of the pre-Platonic references to human souls rejoining the aithêr come from Euripidean tragedy (where the aithêr is the usual ‘destination of Euripides’ deified mortals’62). For our purposes, still more interesting is the fact that the related but distinguishable notion that the souls of the dead become stars, whatever its ultimate source may be, is also present in Euripidean tragedy, and––more significantly––associated in the popular mind with dithyrambic poetry.63 Aristophanes’ Peace connects the notion that the souls of the dead float in the air after death with dithyrambic poets, while, through his sighting of the dithyrambic poet Ion, Trygaeus confirms the notion that after death, as ‘they say’, men become stars (826–41).

4. PHAETHON AND ELECTRA A fourth tragic reference to a chorus of stars depends on a likely supplement. The parodos of Euripides’ Phaethon (a play of c.420) begins: ‘Dawn rides over the earth, over our heads the chorus of the Pleiades has fled’ (63–6). The ode accompanies this choral projection with natural and primitive music: the nightingale sings a lament for her dead son (67–70), the drovers play their panpipes (71–2), the swan sings (73), and the winds bluster (80). Through it the imagery sustains a sinister tone. A reference to Dawn’s ride makes an inauspicious overture to a day that will see Phaethon fall to his death from the Sun’s chariot. The nightingale’s dirge, the swan that sings only at the approach of death, even the accompaniment of wind instruments (the normal accompaniment to funereal song) and the uncontrolled bluster of wind itself, all anticipate the choral lamentation that will end the performance. In this company the Pleiades are a particularly ominous chorus to project. In myth they were maidens catasterized while performing a lament for a male relative: in Aeschylus (TrGF F 12) their father Atlas; in a fragment of ‘Musaeus’ (DK B 18) a dead brother, Hyas, whom they lament eternally along

61 Arnott (1996), 477; Bernabé on PEG 2.1 F 436 ‘multi (non tantum Orphici) credebantur animam aetheri affinem esse’. 62 Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995), 191. 63 The evidence for belief in ‘astral immortality’ among early Pythagoreans is doubtful: Burkert (1972), 363.

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with the hemichorus of their sisters, the Hyades (the fragment is ascribed to an Eleusinian theogony, the Eumolpia).64 The evocation of the Pleiades seems still more ominous when we later find that Phaethon’s death was prompted by his failure to obey his father’s command to ‘keep directing your course towards the seven Pleiades’ (TrGF F 779.4). The image of the Pleiades also, however, has an auspicious side. As catasterized maidens the chorus partakes of a form of astral immortality, and the same may be true of Phaethon. Plutarch cites from Euripides two trimeters that with reason are frequently assigned to this play: ‘he whose flesh just now was in the bloom of youth was quenched like a falling star and he released his soul into the aithêr’.65 In any case a fragment of the play describes Phaethon enjoying an afterlife in an Elysium-like environment.66 Moreover, Euripides mentions the Hyades in the Phaethon, probably in the messenger speech.67 The context is unfortunately lost. Perhaps they are mentioned as another constellation, related to the Pleiades, as in Musaeus, and so, as a catasterized maiden chorus, entirely relevant to the train of imagery we have been following. There is a more interesting possibility. Pherecydes (c.465) identified the Hyades as nurses of the newborn Dionysus (fr. 90). Robert Fowler reconstructs a mythic tradition in which the Hyades extinguish the fire in the body of the newborn Dionysus (who was still in the womb when his mother was struck by Zeus’ thunderbolt) and suggests this function may be related to initiatory fire-purification rituals such as those performed at Eleusis.68 Phaethon shares with Semele and the Titans who swallowed Dionysus (hence with Dionysus at his birth and rebirth) the distinction of having been ignited by Zeus’ celestial fire. In light of Fowler’s argument, we might speculate that the Hyades were mentioned in the description of the rescue and recovery of Phaethon’s body. The fire is not completely extinguished, however, as the text of Phaethon preserves mention of an extraordinary ritual performed around the still smouldering Phaethon’s body. In the guise of a marriage hymn Clymene commands the maidens to sing hymns to all the gods, especially Hestia, while dancing in a circle inside the palace and, presumably, around the hearth (a ritual much like that presupposed by Philolaus and the Pythagorean

64 West (1983), 42–3. These epics are notoriously undatable: West guesses that the theogony was not composed until ‘about the second half of the fourth century’. 65 TrGF F 971 (Plur. Mor. 416e, 1090c); see Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995), 197. 66 TrGF F 782.; Diggle (1970), 179. 67 Σ Arat. 172; Diggle (1970), 174. 68 The discussion will be incorporated in the Commentary (vol. 2) to his Early Greek Mythography.

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description of cosmic dance, mentioned in section 1).69 In the hymn the chorus refer to Phaethon as ‘he whom you [Aphrodite] hide in the aithêr’.70 Like the Dionysus of the mysteries, humanity too was struck by lightning at its birth insofar as it was formed from the ash of the Titans. This is presumably part of the meaning of the gold-leaves from Thurii that announce that the initiates buried with them were struck by lightning, ‘tamed “by the star-flinger with lightning”.’ 71 Euripides’ Phaethon alludes liberally, if somewhat remotely, to this same complex of eschatological ideas bound up with the doctrine of the fall of humanity, the cycle of rebirth, and the prospect of reunion with the divine (whether through aetherial or astral immortality). We know that Eleusinian doctrine offered initiates a blessed afterlife. It is often claimed that this is incompatible with the doctrine of astral immortality. For our purposes it is enough to show that tragedy drew upon mystery cult, even if it collected incompatible ideas in an indiscriminate mix. But Euripides does seem to urge a specific link between astral immortality and Eleusis in the epilogue to his Erechtheus. Unfortunately this too survives only in tantalizing fragments. Athena announces her and Zeus’ dispensation for the invaders and defenders of Athens. The souls of the daughters of Erechtheus do not go to Hades but are ‘transferred to the aithêr’ and become the ‘brightness of the Hyakinthides’ which later in the same speech are explicitly equated with the ‘Hyades’.72 The constellation will receive sacrifice and the Athenians must ‘adorn it with the choral dances of maidens’. Athena then announces that the descendants of Eumolpus will become the hereditary hierophants of the Eleusinian mysteries. Though the papyrus here breaks down, the catasterism of the Hyades appears to be connected with the investiture of the Eumolpids. From the remainder of the speech there survive isolated but significant words like ‘Demeter’, ‘for the Hyades’, and ‘of stars’.73 A fifth tragedy with a star chorus, also Euripidean, and also presumably from about 420, is more elusive. In the first stasimon of Euripides’ Electra the chorus sing: ‘In the centre of the shield was shining down the gleaming circle 69 TrGF F 781.32–7. In an unnamed play of Euripides Earth (Γα,α µ τερ) is said to be called ‘Hearth’ (Hestia) standing ‘stable in the aethêr’ (meaning, at the centre of the cosmos, according to Macrobius, one of the authors who cites the fragment): E. TrGF F 944; Macrob. Saturn. 1.23.8. Gaia mêtêr is of course the mystic Earth Mother (Gê-mêtêr) who is equated with ‘Demeter, Rhea, Hestia, Deio’ in an Orphic hymn known to the Derveni commentator and written in Attic (col. XXII). The equation of Demeter and Hestia is already attested for Eleusinian theology by Sophocles’ Triptolemos (TrGF F 615). Cf. Philochorus FGrH 328 F 185; PHerc. 1428 fr. 2.21–2 (Philod. On Piety); Obbink (1994), 144–5; Burkert (1994), 47–8. 70 TrGF F 781.21. See Diggle (1970), 155–60; Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995), 235. 71 PEG 2.2 F 448.4, 489.5, 490.5. 72 E. TrGF F 370.107 with Scholiast to Aratus 172. 73 E. TrGF F 370.68–108.

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of the Sun upon winged horses, and the heavenly choruses of the stars (αHστρων τ’ α@θ.ριοι χορο), the Pleiades, the Hyades, repulsing the eyes of Hector’ (464–9). This is not the first projected chorus in the ode. The ode opens with an image of ‘choruses with Nereids’ and dolphins leaping to pipe music in circles around the ships taking Achilles to Troy (χορο) µετα` Νηρ ιδων pν’ E φλαυλο παλλε δελφ2 . . . εLλισσµενο). The image, as I have argued elsewhere, evokes primordial dithyramb, but also, despite apparently bright, escapist tones, it heads a series of images with distinctly funereal associatons.74 A brighter note, however, is struck by this image of Nereids and dolphins escorting Achilles, since it is their function in myth to guide his soul to a blessed afterlife in the White Isles. Achilles is, notably, described in this ode as ‘a light for Greece’ (449 =Ελλα´δι φ%) using the language of hymn. In cultic poetry, light imagery is used of the divine epiphany of a saviour god,75 and especially for epiphanies of Dionysus, whose mysteries bring ultimate salvation for the initiate.76 The presence of the sun and stars on Achilles’ shield is, of course, inspired by their presence in the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad (18.486). So, in part, is doubtless the confusion of the armour’s solar and astral luminosity with the dazzling brightness of Achilles.77 Indeed, it is likely that the language Euripides used to describe the imagery on the shield, the ‘signs wrought as fears for Phrygians’ (456–7 σ µατα δεµατα Φργια τετχθαι) are a direct echo of the Iliad’s ‘wrought as an evil sign’ (22.30 κακν δ. τε σDµα τ.τυκται) used to describe Sirius to which Achilles is compared.78 But though the Iliad places the sun, moon, Hyades, Pleiades and other constellations on Achilles’ shield, there is nothing in Homer to motivate Euripides’ description of the stars as choruses. Euripides’ word for ‘gleaming’ used to describe the circle of the sun at the centre of Achilles’ shield is phaethon and many have seen here an allusion to the myth of Phaethon.79 The epithet is given to the sun several times in Homer and Hesiod, but is also favoured in mystic texts and above all Empedocles’ description of the souls of the damned being cast from one 74

Csapo (2003) and (forthcoming a). Pfister (1924), 35; Richardson (1974) ad h.Dem. 188–90. 76 Dodds (1960), 213; Zeitlin (1989), 161; and, above all, Seaford (1996), 196–7, 200, 202. When light imagery is used of mortals it elevates them into the divine sphere: Slater (1988), 57– 8. The light imagery is applied to Orestes later in Electra, when he is identified as ‘a beacon for his city’ (587) and the hyperbolic ‘O light! O gleam of the sun drawn by four horses’ appears to be addressed to him by Electra at 866. For the implicit contrast and comparison of Orestes to Achilles in the play, see Mulryne (1977), 36–8; Walsh (1977), 284; Kraus (1992). 77 See esp. Hom. Il. 19.374, 19.381, 19.398, 22.25–33, 22.317–20; Hardie (1985), 12. The light imagery inspired Metrodorus to allegorize Achilles as the sun and Hector the moon (DK A 4). 78 King (1980), 204. 79 See Csapo (forthcoming a). 75

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element into another.80 Euripides’ interest here is not only eschatological but also cosmological as comparison with Electra’s second stasimon shows. Astrological imagery appears again in Electra’s second stasimon. The second stasimon is programmatically linked with the first, and shares something of its form and purpose.81 Like the first stasimon it opens with a choral projection: a sacrifice accompanied by a chorus, choral song, and the music of pipes (712, 717–18). The Argives attending the sacrifice come to see ‘apparitions, fears’ (711, φα´σµατα δεµατα). This is the golden lamb, which, surprisingly, Thyestes is able to produce as proof of his right to succession, but also as evidence that he seduced his brother’s wife. At the sight of it Zeus ‘turned around the shining paths of the stars and the light of the sun and the white face of dawn’ (727–30). The second stasimon’s ‘apparitions, fears’ (711, φα´σµατα δεµατα) deliberately echoes the first stasimon’s ‘signs, fears’ (456, σ µατα δεµατα),82 but with the difference that the signs designed to turn the eyes of Hector here succeed in turning the heavens. In consequence of the sun’s deviation there is a climatic reversal: the parts of the earth that were once lush now wither and those that were dry are drenched with rain. Euripides relates the myth of the golden lamb to a reversal of the movements of the sun and stars. In the third stasimon of Orestes (998–1010) the chorus declares that the sight of the golden lamb, the adultery of Aerope, and the banquet of Thyestes (cf. 1008–9) caused Strife to change the course of the chariot of the sun ‘and Zeus turned the running of the seven-wayed Pleiades in the opposite direction’, which presumably means that this chorus of stars reversed its circular dance (1005–6). (In Thyestes Euripides turned Atreus into an astronomer who secured his kingdom by predicting the change in the course of the sun.)83 The connection Electra’s second stasimon makes between the reversal of the course of the heavenly bodies and climatic change relates to a theory more fully explained by Plato. In Timaeus the Egyptian priests explain to Solon that periodically a parallaxis of the heavenly bodies affects the balance of elements on Earth, usually increasing fire, or water, and creating severe climatic changes from which Egypt, because of its unique conditions, alone is spared.84 For this reason they alone have accurate knowledge of a destruction by fire for which the Greeks had only the story of Phaethon’s ride. In Politicus the ‘Eleatic Stranger’ relates another such 80 Emped. DK B 15.11; PEG 2.1 F 125; Orphic Lithica 90 (Abel); Manetho, Apotelesmatica 1.296, 1.301, 2.253, 4.36, 4.148, 4.171, 4.201, 6.39, 6.66, 6.74, 6.94, 6.122, 6.303, 6.382. 81 Cropp (1988), 149; Csapo (forthcoming a). 82 The language seems to aspire to a mystic tonality: for phasmata and deimata see Riedweg (1987), 55, 60–9. Curiously, Plato also refers to the golden lamb as a phasma (Pol. 268e) 83 TrGF F 861; Strabo 1.2.15. 84 Pl. Tim. 22b–23b. Cf. Hdt. 2.142.

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parallaxis to the reversal of the direction of the sun and stars in consequence, as ‘they say’, of the dispute between Atreus and Thyestes. Plato equates these cycles of destruction to the Pythagorean theory of the World Year (cf. Timaeus 39d). Philolaus is said (by Aetius, DK A18) to have claimed that destruction of the world came from two sources, fire pouring from heaven and water from the moon. Cosmological interpretation of the Phaethon and Thyestes myths is also first attested in Pythagorean circles: Aristotle ascribes to Pythagoreans the belief that the ‘destruction at the time of Phaethon’ created the Milky Way either from the burning of one of the stars fallen from the heaven or because of a change in the orbit of the sun; Posidonius related that, among others, Oenopides (not certainly a Pythagorean) ascribed the Milky Way to the meal of Thyestes which caused the sun to change its course.85 Euripides drew upon the cosmological interpretations of both the Phaethon and Thyestes myths. Thus the choruses of stars in Phaethon and Electra, unlike their congeners, have no obvious connection with Eleusis or any Bacchic mysteries on a cultic level, though they do on the theological. In both plays the cosmic order, represented by the chorus of stars, is disrupted by the transgressions of mortals. Among all the stars said to dance in the heaven it is only the Pleiades (in Phaethon, Electra, and Orestes) and the Hyades (in Phaethon, Erecththeus, Electra) that are singled out, presumably because these constellations are particularly suited for choral projection. They are choruses of maidens and their movements to the Greek imagination suggested circular dance (independently of the revolutions of all heavenly bodies). They are also located close to one another, could be imagined as hemichoruses performing together, and, in myth, they are lamenting choruses, a fact that might seem especially suited to tragic projection. They were also associated with Dionysus. Mythically, the Hyades were his nurses and companions. Astronomically, Dionysus was associated with the constellation of Taurus, on the horns, chest, back or tail of which the Pleiades and Hyades are variously located.86

4 . N EW M U S I C A L DA N C E Cultic dance was regarded as the most primitive form of dance. When Hellenistic scholars accounted for the origin of the triadic form of Greek 85 DK 41 B 10; DK 58 B 37c. Oenopides’ relation to Pythogoreanism: Burkert (1972), 322. Oenopides’ possible influence on Euripides: Morrison (1970), 85–90; Willink (1986), 254–5; West (1987), 287–8; Cropp (1988), 151. 86 Dionysus as Taurus: Gundel (1927); Hopfner (1940), 2.161.

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choral dance and poetry they referred to worshippers dancing around an altar.87 First they circle an altar in one direction; this was called a ‘turning’ (strophe). Then they circle the altar in the other direction, this was called the ‘counter-turning’ (antistrophe). Then they stood still; this was called an ‘epode’. The cultic chorus circling an altar was even imagined to be the origin of the rhetorical ‘period’. It was the Urform of all artistic forms. Seven of the eight surviving accounts go on to claim that the triadic dance structure imitated the movements of the heavenly bodies, and to specify cosmological reasons for the change in movement from clockwise to anticlockwise. They are however in serious disagreement as to precisely which dance movements correlate to which celestial revolutions. The disagreement shows that these texts do not originate with ‘Ptolemy’s mindless Pythagorean symbolism’ as Crusius thought.88 Mullen thought more plausibly of some ‘astronomically preoccupied mystery religion’ which ‘exercised influence over ritual practices that shaped the choral ode in performance.’89 Dramatic choruses, however, were rectangular. At least such is the claim of another very different ancient scholarly tradition. It is this tradition that is accepted by modern scholarship.90 Not without reason. The rectangular formation of the dramatic chorus is confirmed by the terminology distinguishing the positions in the rank and file and by vase paintings, both of which can be traced back to the fifth and fourth centuries.91 (Only Triclinius on Euripides’ Hecuba 647, who follows the astronomical tradition, claims a round dance for dramatic choruses.) There is a risk, however, that the sources for rectangular dance are extrapolating from the parodos of the drama,92 possibly under the influence of a military model for choral dance that was current, in some circles, in antiquity (and that led Winkler to regard dramatic choral duty as a form of ephebic drill).93 Winkler’s claim, however, that ‘there is no evidence that tragic choruses ever took up a circular formation’ goes too far.94 87 Most of the relevant texts are conveniently collected by Färber (1936), pt. 2, 14–18, translated by Mullen (1982), 225–8, and treatment by modern scholarship summarized by D’Alfonso (1994), 20. 88 89 Crusius (1888), 14; cf. Reisch (1899), 2384–5. Mullen (1982), 229. 90 Pollux 4. 108–9; Prolegomena de comoedia Xa (Koster); Phot. s.v. tritos aristerou. The handbooks treat the rectangularity of the dramatic chorus as a bland truism: PickardCambridge (1968), 239–42; Lonsdale (1993), 92; Calame (1997), 58. The cliché is challenged by Ferri (1932–3) and Davidson (1986). 91 Cratinus PCG F 229; Arist. Pol. 1277a12, Met. 1018b26–9; Attic column krater in Basel (BS 415) and Attic lekythos in Munich (inv. 6025), both in Green (1991), 34–5 and pls. 6, 7b; two reliefs from the Agora (Webster and Green (1978), 118–19, AS 3–4); Pingiatoglou (1992). But see the new fragmentary scene published by Froning (2002), 72, which appears to depict a round dance. 92 Cf. Davidson (1986), 41. 93 Winkler (1990); for the military model, see Csapo (2004), 241–2. 94 Winkler (1990), 50.

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Since a rectangular formation is ascribed to the dramatic chorus generically, let us first deal with comedy. From the last quarter of the fifth century, (leaving ‘projections’ aside) self-referential remarks by comic choruses leave no doubt that they sometimes danced in the round. The parodos of Aristophanes’ Birds shows a change in formation from lyrics to tetrameters. While singing a strophic, polymetric song, the chorus attack the heroes of the play by circling around them (346 0πβαλε, περ τε κκλωσαι), but, the moment the antistrophe ends and the trochaic tetrameters begin, the chorus is brought into hoplite formation (353 πο& # σθ’ E ταξαρχο; 0παγ.τω τ δεξιν κ.ρα). In the final stasimon in Thesmophoriazusae the chorus of women first announce that they will dance in the manner required by the sacred mysteries of Demeter and Kore (947–8) and then describe their dance movements: ‘Come, move, light on your feet, form a circle and dance hand in hand, move with the rhythm of the sacred dance’ (953–6). The dance includes a change in direction. In one or both mesodes, the chorus incites itself to change the movement of the dance. In the first mesode it exhorts itself to ‘begin a new task’ and ‘set the noble pace of the well-circled dance’ (966–8).95 This may be restarting in the same direction, but in the second mesode the chorus exhorts itself unambiguously to ‘come, leap, turn in the other direction with a rhythmic foot’ (985–9 α#λλ’ ε1α, πα´λλ’, α#να´στρεφ’ ερθµ( ποδ).96 The final strophic pair is dedicated to Dionysus and ends with the familiar image of the ivy forming a circle (the ‘garland’) around him. In Thesmophoriazusae the circular cultic dance for Demeter (and Dionysus) is naturally suited to the chorus’s persona of celebrants at a festival of the goddess. Similarly in Frogs the chorus of Eleusinian initiates is enjoined to ‘dance in a circular motion sacred to the goddess’ (440–1). Indeed, Henrichs observed that ‘Circular dances mentioned self-referentially by comic choruses tend to be connected with the cult of Demeter’, though he is referring to choral projection as well as self-description.97 There is another round dance in Thesmophoriazusae which may draw upon 95 This is surely what εκκλου χορεα εφυα˜ στDσαι βα´σιν means. Rogers (1904) ad loc., Van Leeuwen (1904) ad loc., Sommerstein (1994), 111 and others take the words στDσαι βα´σιν to mean ‘stop’ the dance’, but Lστα´ναι χορν means to perform a dance (e.g. E. El. 178, Ar. Clouds 271 with Dover (1968) ad loc.). Thomsen (1973), 30–2 gives full arguments for taking Lστα´ναι βα´σιν as an exhortation to recommence the circular motion; cf. Pickard-Cambridge (1968), 239; Zimmermann (1985), 194 n. 22. 96 See LSJ s.v. α#ναστρ.φω and α#ναστροφ 2 ‘esp. of the reversal of a wheeling movement’. The following line, if Bentley’s emendation τρνευε is correct, continues the metaphor of a wheeling movement. According to D’Alfonso (1994), 24 n. 12 and others, the verb plays on the technical choral meaning of strephô/strophê. Note that the projected dances of the New Musical monodies in E. Tro. 331–4 and Phoen. 312–17 also describe round dances with a change in direction. 97 Henrichs (1994–5), 96 n. 38.

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Eleusinian cult. When the women celebrating secret rites of Demeter receive news of a male intruder, they search him out ‘in every direction’ (660 πανταχl) dancing in a circle (662 α#λλα` τ6ν πρτην τρ.χειν χρDν < τα´χιστ’ Aδη κκλ(). This appears to be part of the play’s extended parody of Euripides’ Telephus. Papyrus fragments of that play partially preserve the section in which the chorus of Achaean chieftains performs a search for the Mysian intruder.98 A similar round dance is played out in a choral search scene in Birds where the birds search for the divine intruder (Iris) ‘everyone look, searching in a circle (κκλ(), as the winged sound of the eddying (δνη) of an airborne god is nigh’.99 In another choral search, this time in tragedy, the text explicitly reflects on the choral movement and it is circular. In Euripides’ Orestes after Orestes and Pylades enter the palace to try to kill Helen (she gets transferred to the aithêr), Electra asks the chorus to watch out for the approach of Helen’s rescuers: ‘some of you circle about over here, others over there’ (1294 α#λλ’ αL µ ν 0νθα´δ’, αL δ# 0κε,σ’ Kλσσετε).100 A similar choral search in the round seems to be envisioned by the parody of New Musical monody in Frogs. The distraught woman, who is the notional singer, searching for a stolen cock, calls upon the Kouretes, ‘children of Ida’, to come to her aid and dance ‘shaking your limbs and circling around the house’ (1356–8 τα` κ%λα τ’ α#µπα´λλετε κυκλοµενοι τ6ν ο@καν). The scholiast tells us that the lines spoof Euripides’ Cretans, of which the chorus was composed of priests of Zagreus. All of the comic passages here spoof Euripides, though it may be that Aristophanes targets general trends in Euripidean choreography rather than the specific choreography of Telephus or Cretans. This pattern of circular search dances has an archetypal source, however, in cult. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter we are told that ‘for nine days Lady Deo kept wheeling around (στρωφα˜τ’) holding blazing torches in her hands’ looking for her daughter Persephone (47–8). Lactantius and Apuleius specifically mention Eleusinian rights mimicking night ‘searches’ with torches for Persephone.101 Riedweg is surely right to see here an allusion to a torch procession at Eleusis, possibly, I will add, connected with the round dances that mark the end of the Iacchus procession.102 Comedy and paratragedy give some evidence of round dancing and in most cases there is some connection with the mysteries and in many cases with New Music. If, however, one looks at choral projection as well as selfreference, Ferri (1932–3) and, more particularly, Davidson (1986) collect 98

Eur. TrGF F 727a with Kannicht’s comments. Ar. Birds 1196–8; cf. Ussher (1973), 143 on Ar. Ec. 488. Reading with the manuscripts and most editors. Van Gent, Willink (1986), 294 and Diggle (1994) prefer 0κε,σε λεσσετε. 101 102 Lact. Div. inst.ep. 18(23), 7; Apul. Met. 6.2. Riedweg (1987), 47. 99

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several passages where tragic choruses describe the round dancing of other choruses. Though these passages do not provide specific proof that the performing chorus danced in the manner of the projected chorus, they do provide more evidence that round dance in song, if not in actual performance, was commonly invoked whenever a playwright wished to enrich his music with primitive, cultic, eschatological, and Dionysian colours. The Dionysian/Eleusinian theme of Sophocles’ Antigone has, for example, been richly explored by Segal, Henrichs, and Seaford, with specific reference to the imagery of Antigone 1146–53, the passage with which we began this discussion of star choruses.103 But surely, given the New Music’s reputation for mimetic effects, tragic choruses sometimes danced in the round when they projected choral imagery relating to round cultic dance. Elsewhere I have focused on Nereids, dolphins, and the recurrent use in New Musical odes (both in tragedy and circular chorus) of mystically tinged words like helix/helissein, dinos/dineuein (more could be done with the rhombos imagery) discussed above.104 The very frequency of such words and imagery suggests that the preoccupation with cultic forms of dance extends beyond the lyrics to embrace the accompanying music and dance. (We find pointed references to dinê and helissein in the round dances of Birds and Orestes just discussed). But perhaps the best evidence that this imagery at least sometimes reflects the shape of its own performance comes from the presence of precisely these words, helix and dinos in the technical vocabulary of contemporary music and choreography. The fourth-century Hibeh sophist ridicules musicians who claim to produce melodies that move in a helix; the name dinos is multiply attested for a kind of dance associated with tragedy; and the Anonymous On Tragedy, who draws on a source highly critical of Euripides’ and Agathon’s New Musical experiments, refers to actual dance, not dance imagery, when he complains that ‘excessive eddying (τ λαν 0νδινεεσθαι) is unsuited to tragedy and unworthy of its dignity’.105

C O N C LU S I O N Modern scholars often contrast the ‘circular chorus’ performed at the Dionysia with drama’s rectangular chorus. But the term probably emerged in 103 Segal (1981), 180–1, 203; Henrichs (1990), 264–9; Seaford (1994a), 381–2; (1994b), 281–2; (1990), 87–8. 104 Csapo (1999–2000), (2003). 105 West (1992), 17; Apollophanes PCG F 1–2; On Tragedy 6, in Browning (1963).

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contrast to predominantly (but not exclusively) linear processional choruses who performed in the pompê of the Dionysia, including those who performed cultic dithyramb.106 Once a large theatre was built in Athens, towards the end of the sixth century bc, and choral contests were instituted, the dithyramb changed its shape, and its name, and became known officially as ‘the circular chorus’, though popular speech could still classify it as ‘dithyramb’. Like drama, circular choruses both absorbed the influence of other genres and developed their own conventions. Theatre audiences tolerated a more sustained, varied, and complex poetic form than could spectators at a procession. But at some point people complained that the theatrical genres had departed from their cultic roots and had ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’. New Music developed and spread from the circular chorus. It was partly a response to this perceived need to reinvigorate theatrical music with Dionysian form and content. Its remains are filled with the nostalgic imagery of cultic music and dance, especially mythically primordial music and dance. Nereids, dolphins, Kouretes, maenads, satyrs, and stars––all dancing in a circle. In the fifth century ‘circular dance’ came increasingly to be figured as the original form of all dance. This was not pure fabrication (even processional choruses seem to have ended with a dance around an altar or in a sanctuary, and in the Athenian pompê processions halted and performed in the Agora at the Altar of the Twelve Gods),107 but it was in any case a convenient representation of musical history for musical genres that were now only performed in a theatre orchestra: namely drama and ‘circular choruses’. Both the theory of ‘music cosmology’ and the theory of ‘astral immortality’ are deeply rooted in Greek thought and seem ultimately to come from the Near East.108 But it was not until the second half of the fifth century and especially the last quarter that the star chorus begins to appear with any frequency in Greek poetry. In the last decades of the fifth century we find recurrent use of the image in music, and all in the choral odes of Attic tragedy. In these odes the influence of Eleusinian mystery cult is explicit and the influence of Dionysian mystery cult palpable. In Attica the Euneidae probably produced the crucial link: they were a resident musical family that had connections with Orphism, with Eleusis and with the theatre (through Dionysus Melpomenos).109 Hypsipyle, perhaps Euripides’ most New Musical of plays, has Orpheus himself teach the founder of the clan, Euneus ‘the music of the Asian kithara’, and, in the all but lost epilogue, Dionysus ‘the Singer’ himself appears, doubtless to send Euneus to Athens to found his priesthood. 106

See D’Angour (1997), Csapo and Miller (2007a), and Csapo (forthcoming b). Was this the site of Pindar’s dithyramb ‘For the Athenians’ and if so was it performed, like a traditional cultic dithyramb, at the pompê? 108 109 Franklin (2006a); Burkert (1972), 350–68. See Burkert (1994). 107

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The impact of mystery cult on dithyramb is abundantly clear from the time of Pindar, whose dithyrambs are filled with Eleusinian and Orphic language, imagery, and ideas.110 For dithyrambic poets mystery cult had a special appeal from the beginning, both for the importance it accorded music and dance, and for the authentically cultic and Dionysian quality of its music and dance.111 Poets of circular choruses found an origin for the shape of their art in the dances of the mysteries (and liberally projected it back upon the dithyramb’s prehistory). By the 420s dithyrambic poets were identified as primary propagators of the doctrine of astral immortality (see above) and the dithyrambic poet Aristagoras was prosecuted for ‘dancing out the mysteries’.112 Tragedy developed an interest in round dance under the influence of dithyramb and for the same reason. Euripides in particular was prone to project cultic choruses, particularly cultic choruses of a Dionysian flavour, and most particularly the mythic archetypes of Dionysian cultic choruses. Among the latter, star choruses are supreme, because most mystical and most archetypal. According to a mystery doctrine cited by Pseudo-Lucian, but implicit already (as we have seen) in the Pythagorean/Platonic literature, the stars formed the first chorus and it was from them that gods and men learned the rhythm and harmony of music and dance.113 Indeed, given Plato’s reference to the gods as epoptai of the dance of the stars, it is not unlikely that Orphic myth had already established the first human imitation of the dance of the stars as the first mythical initiation, though the myth is not fully preserved until PseudoLucian. Rhea ordered the Phrygian Corybantes and the Cretan Kuretes to imitate the cosmic dance, and ‘she profited greatly from their skill, since they saved Zeus for her by dancing around him in a circle’. 110 See, above all, Lavecchia (2000), with supplements by Wilson (2002) on karux and kallikhoros in fr. 70b.24–5. 111 For the importance of music in mystery cult, see Hardie (2004). 112 ΣEVAr. Clouds 830. Cf. Alciphr. 3.72; Arr. Epict. 3.21.16; Luc. De salt. 15, Pisc. 38; Anon. Oxy. 411.25; Ach. Tat. 4.8. 113 Luc. De salt. 7; cf. Liban. Or. 64.12.

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–––– (1994a), Reciprocity and Ritual, Oxford. –––– (1994b), ‘Sophokles and the Mysteries’, Hermes 122: 275–88. –––– (1996), Euripides Bacchae, Warminster. Segal, C. (1981), Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles, Cambridge, Mass. Slater, W. J. (1988), ‘Pindar’s Pythian 3: Structure and Purpose’, QUCC ns 29: 51–61. Sommerstein, A. H. (1994), Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae, Warminster. Thomsen, O. (1973), ‘Some Notes on the Thesmophoriazusae 947–1000’, in Due et al. (1973), 27–46. Thonemann, P. (2005), ‘The Tragic King: Demetrios Poliorketes and the City of Athens’ in Hekster and Fowler (2005), 63–86. Tondriau, J. L. (1949), ‘Démétrios Poliorcète, Neos Theos’, Bulletin de la Société Royale d’Archéologie d’Alexandrie 38: 1–12. Ussher, R. G. (1973), Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae, Oxford. Van Leeuwen, J. (1904), Aristophanis Thesmophoriazusae cum prologomenis et commentariis, 2nd ed., Leiden. Varcl, L. and Willetts, R. F. (1963) (eds.), ΓDρα: Studies Presented to George Thomson on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, Prague. Walsh, G. B. (1977), ‘The First Stasimon in Euripides’ Electra’, YCS 25: 277–89. Webster, T. B. L. and Green, J. R. (1978), Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy, 3rd ed., BICS Suppl. 39, London. Wehrli, C. (1968), Antigone et Demetrios. Geneva. Weil, H. (1895), ‘Un Péan delphique à Dionysos’, BCH 19: 393–416. Weinreich, O. (1926) , ‘Antikes Gottmenschentum’, Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 2: 633–70. West, M. L. (1967), ‘Alcman and Pythagoras’, CQ 17: 1–15. –––– (1983), The Orphic Poems, Oxford. –––– (1987), ‘Problems in Euripides’ Orestes’, CQ 37: 281–93. –––– (1992), ‘Analecta Musica’, ZPE 92: 1–54. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U. von (1895), Euripides Herakles, Berlin. Willink, C. W. (1986), Euripides Orestes, Oxford. Wilson, P. (2002), Review of Lavecchia (2000), BMCR 2002.04.24. –––– (2004), ‘Athenian Strings’, in Murray and Wilson (2004), 269–306. Winkler, J. J. (1990), ‘The Ephebes’ Song: Trago¯idia and Polis’, in Winkler and Zeitlin (1990), 20–62. –––– and Zeitlin, F. I. (1990) (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in its Social Context, Princeton. Zeitlin, F. I. (1989), ‘Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self’, PCPhS 35: 144–97. Zimmermann, B. (1985), Untersuchungen zur Form und dramatischen Technik der Aristophanischen Komödien, Band 2: Die anderen lyrischen Partien (Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 166), Meisenheim am Glan. Zuntz, G. (1971), Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia, Oxford.

12 The Last Word: Ritual, Power, and Performance in Euripides’ Hiketides Athena Kavoulaki

I N T RO D U C T I O N Euripides’ Hiketides is one of the few extant plays for which Antiquity has bequeathed us an unequivocal critical assessment: τ δ δρα˜µα 0γκµιον Α # θην%ν (‘the play is an encomium of Athens’). As this categorically stated opinion, which seems to touch on the tone or even on the intentionality of the play, is included in the ancient hypothesis of the play,1 it has accompanied the transmission of the text of the Hiketides and has inevitably conditioned its reception. Although the ancient scholarly view may not have managed to persuade all modern critics of the encomiastic tone of the play,2 it has certainly managed to signal the representation of Athens and of Athenian issues as the central concern of the play. The adoption of such a critical angle has been facilitated by the fortunes of history and scholarship, as the surviving part of the hypothesis does not contain the date of production; internal

1 See Diggle (1981), 2 and Kovacs (1998), 3. For the text of the Hiketides I have used Diggle (1981). 2 The basically (though not superficially) patriotic character of the play has been supported by eminent scholars such as for example Wilamowitz (1919), i. 12 ff., Zuntz (1955), 3–94 and Collard (1972) and (1975) (followed by more recent studies e.g. Mills (1997), Toher (2001), 343). But in line with a trend to read Euripides as sceptical and revolutionary, modern scholars have been more inclined to detect dissonances, ironies, ambivalences (already Greenwood (1953), Conacher (1956), Gamble (1970)) or even satirical qualities (Fitton (1961), Smith (1966), 162 f.); echoing standard views, Hall (2001), xxvii–xxviii summarizes: ‘its patriotic bent has been a critical commonplace . . . yet the action and poetry of the play undermine its superficial status as Athenian panegyric’. Among other recent discussions see Burian (1985), Michelini (1991) and (1994), Scully (1996), Kuch (2005) and (more on issues of gender, philosophy, ritual/religion) Allan (1999–2000), Assael (1997), Bowie (1997), Jouan (1997), Mendelsohn (2002), Toher (2001). For an overview of the interpretative tradition of the play see Collard (1975), 23–31 and Mendelsohn (2002), 1–20. For a recent bibliography (until 2000) see now Heldmann (2005).

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criteria, however, bring it close to 424 bc,3 a year sealed at its end by Athens’ defeat at Delion and the Boeotians’ consequent refusal of the retrieval of Athenian dead (Thuc. 4.97–101). The theme of the retrieval of the dead features as a major issue in the Hiketides, too; in the play, however, the misfortune affects a non-Athenian community (namely Argos) and Athens is presented as the ‘saviour’ and mediator for the retrieval of the Argive dead. Despite these divergences and despite the lack of exact dating for the play, the general thematic affinity has impressed critics and has encouraged the assumption of temporal and topical relevance behind the various elements of the play. Seen from such a compositional perspective the play has been found to be characterized by looseness of structure and to be permeated by extensive anachronism.4 There is no doubt that Athens, represented by Theseus and his mother Aithra, plays a protagonistic role in the action which––unusually for tragedy––unfolds in Attic territory. The mythical framework of this action, however, is drawn from the Panhellenic epic heritage5 and involves a mythical incident (i.e. the aftermath of the war of the ‘Seven against Thebes’) which underlined Athenian contribution to this Panhellenic tradition and emphasized the bonds between Athenian heroic figures (namely Theseus) and the figures of the Panhellenic epic past. In the play even the collective terms Α # ργε,οι (throughout) or ∆αναfδαι (130), which are used for the suppliants, hint at Panhellenic (and not simply Argive) identity, as they usually refer to Greeks in general.6 This broader dimension which is connected with the theme of the ‘Panhellenic law’ (526) of the burial of the dead and which seems to underpin Athenian presence and action in the play is further highlighted by the choice of the setting which is none other than the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis (at the periphery of Attica, close to the borders with the Peloponnese). The Eleusinian mysteries, celebrated in this sanctuary and centring on a myth of birth, loss, and female roles, surpassed in international prestige any other festival included in the Athenian festive calendar. 3 The exact date is unknown but all indications point to the period 424–418 bc; see Collard (1975), i. 8–14. 4 The legacy of A. W. von Schlegel (Schlegel (1923), i. 121 f.), who considered the play as a ‘Gelegenheitsstück’ full of political allusions, is strong in this regard. Taking this idea to extremes, some scholars have even detected the historical protagonists of Athenian politics behind the heroes of the drama; see especially Delebeque (1951), 203–24. For a recent and thoughtful discussion of anachronistic or politically allusive features in the play see Bowie (1997), 45–56; more concise Toher (2001), 333–35. On anachronism in tragedy (generally) see Easterling (1985). 5 Such as the Argive and Theban legends recited in epics, as for instance the Θηβαf and the # Επγονοι (see Bernabé (1987), 20–32). 6 Said (1993) 170, 188 f. who stresses the vagueness of Argos and of Α # ργε,οι (Greeks generally, as well as Argive citizens) even in plays such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

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The temporal frame of the action is also important: the feast of the Proerosia (implied in lines 27–8) centred on a sacrifice offered by the Athenians ‘on behalf of all Greeks’.7 This context and background for the events of the play seem to defy attempts to interpret the action from a purely Athenocentric perspective. As will be argued below, the critical situation that is explored in the play does not affect the integrity of a single civic community but puts to test the relation between communities and the way in which relations are formed. Forging relations––within a wider or narrower context––would (in the ancient Greek world) normally require the contribution of ritual, and the Hiketides attests to this tendency. The ritual axis of the play seems to be particularly stressed: on the one hand, there is the religious centre in which the action is located; its significance runs as an undercurrent throughout the play.8 On the other hand, the events of the play are framed by ritual action. The play starts with a scene involving prayer, sacrifice, and supplication9 and progresses on the basis of supplication and reciprocity; it ends with a spectacular solemn procession leading to oath sacrifices (and eventually to the completion of the funerary procedures). The central part is occupied by the performance of funerary rites involving the laying-out and the carrying-out of the bodies, lamentation and eulogy, cremations and funerary escorts. This pronounced ritual dimension can hardly be overlooked. Its appreciation, however, is not uncomplicated.10 Ritual is basically action which involves language and body and which unfolds in space and time. Understanding ritual action in a tragic play is inseparably connected with the wider issue of reconstructing stage action. The foregrounding of the significance of stage action for the interpretation of a play is Oliver Taplin’s legacy to modern critical analysis of Greek tragedy.11 Anyone attempting to make sense of the action of a play can hardly avoid doing what Taplin named ‘the close reading of implied performance’ (1995). Even for Aristotle, whose high evaluation of 7

See Parke (1977), 72–5 and Parker (1996), 143 n. 85, 225. The Eleusinian backdrop and setting come up in every discussion of the religious, spatial, and performative aspects of the play; see e.g. Conacher (1956), Scully (1996), 70 f., Mendelsohn (2002), 135 ff. but also Krummen (1993), 203–4, Rehm (2002), 25, 30 f.; Sourvinou-Inwood (2003), 314 f. focuses on the continuity between the play’s setting and its content. From my own perspective it is important that the role of the chorus seems to interlock (as will be analysed later) with the wider Eleusinian pattern. 9 On this ritual Gould (1973) is a classic; cf. Burkert (1979), 44 f. Gould (1973), 89 f. notes that in tragic enactments of hiketeia (as in Aesch. Supp., Eur. Supp., and Soph. OC) political concerns merge with socio-religious concerns; this blending is the basis of recent discussions, e.g. Gödde (2000), Bernek (2004), of the supplication pattern in tragedy. 10 Sourvinou-Inwood (2003), 310–17 has emphasized the ritual density and religious problematization of this play, noting the complexities involved in attempts at understanding them. 11 Taplin (1977), (1978), (1995) prominently. 8

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the non-performative aspects of Greek tragedy has been the target of criticism by modern scholars (Taplin included), the logic of the σστασι τ%ν πραγµα´των (‘the structure of events’, Poet. 1450a15) cannot be grasped unless the action is inscribed in the text and is kept constantly πρ /µµα´των (‘before the eyes’ Poet. 1455a22 f.), so that the listener (or even the reader) can be ‘tranformed into a spectator’.12 The aim of the present paper, dedicated to Oliver Taplin, is to bring forward a dynamic and largely coherent pattern of relations, constituted through the vital role of the chorus, in Euripides’ Hiketides. The appreciation of this pattern, largely overlooked so far,13 seems to be much enhanced by the serious consideration of the action––and more particularly of the ritual action ––that the text seems to suggest. Special focus will be placed on the exodos of the play, yet since the final part of the play reverses, recapitulates or complements and illuminates issues and themes introduced already at the beginning of the play, it is necessary to view the action in the exodos in the light of the foregoing events.

12

Calame (2005), 107 (important on Aristotle’s opsis). This may be attributed to the assumption (mentioned above) that everything in the play has to do with Athens or even reflects Athenian practices. Methodologically this seems shaky, however (see generally Sourvinou-Inwood (2003), 15–66 on ‘zooming and distancing devices’ in tragedy). ‘Reflections’ may well be projections of Athenian practices on to the text despite major differences (see the analysis of the funerary rite below). It is worth noting that the differences would be observable in a more direct manner at the performance of the play, and Taplin’s theoretical stance for the value of the performance seems to find here full justification (for example, the funerary cortège of the children at 1123 ff., dressed in black, holding the ashes of their fathers and desperately lamenting, seems a far cry from the long parade of the orphaned ephebes dressed in armour and festively demonstrating their public nurture in the theatre in Athens). As soon as we distance ourselves from the above assumption, the picture changes. My attempt is to bring forward such a different picture by emphasizing (with the help of textual indications usually underestimated) the setting, the ritual action (supplication, pattern of funerary rites, processional exit and exchange of charis) and the role of the chorus. The chorus is commonly considered the static element and is usually charged with the pathetic tone of the second part of the play, as it continues to lament even after the retrieval of the corpses (an element often puzzling to scholars; Toher (2001), 332 f. explicitly differs in this point, emphasizing the restorative effect of funerary rites). Kovacs (1998), 6 echoes standard views when he writes: ‘the chorus respond to the news of their sons’ imminent burial not with joy but with renewed grief’. Joy, however, would be out of place in this context; intense lamentation and funerary honours are the γ.ρα θανντων (Hom. Il. 16.456, 675; 23.9; Od. 4.197; 24.190; 24.292; Pl. Leg. 947e). This is fundamental to traditional Greek culture; see Alexiou (2002), Seremetakis (1994). At the same time, the emotionally charged reactions of the other characters, as well as the wider sequence of developments, should also be noticed. The analysis below aims at offering a contribution in the direction of a reappraisal of these elements in the play. 13

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SETTING THE SCENE

a) Precarious issues, ritual efforts: the broader frame In contrast to other surviving Euripidean plays which start with a long narrative speech focusing on events of the past and giving the general background, in the Hiketides the opening words of the prologue have a clear future orientation: ‘may I and Theseus my son, as well as the polis of Athens and the land of Pittheus be prosperous’ (3–4).14 The present infinitive (3: εδαιµονε,ν) used for the formulation of this wish brings out the ‘now and ever’ aspect of the thing prayed for, which is here continuous and ever present well-being. The possible effect that such a bold opening may have had on the contemporary–– to the poet––audience needs hardly be mentioned, given the context in which the play must have taken place: the context of the Peloponnesian War and the ritually charged time of the Dionysia.15 The potential appeal to an Athenian audience does not seem to exhaust the force of this opening prayer, however. The orbit of the prayer embraces not only Athens and Athenians but also a different part of the Greek world, namely the land of Pittheus (l.4) that is the Argolid, and more particularly the polis of Troezen.16 Aithra, the person who utters the prayer, goes on immediately to justify her prayer relating it to the immediate dramatic situation, i.e. to the presence of a group of old women from the Argive land (9: Α # ργεα χθον). Later on in the play (263–4) the same group of women (who form the chorus of the play) will insist that they come from the same ‘Pelopian land’ as Pittheus and that they share the same ‘paternal blood’ with Theseus, Aithra’s son (264: Z Π.λοπο Oν πα,, Πελοπα δ’ 9µε, χθον | τατν πατρ%ιον αBµα σο2 κεκτ µεθα). The inclusion of the land of Pittheus in Aithra’s prayer seems, thus, to be important and to be embedded in the dramatic situation. At the same time it indicates that the theme of well-being (εδαιµονα), which is the main focus of the captivating opening lines, is connected in the play not only with Athens (and Athenians) but more generally with Greek communities and intracommunal relations.17 This theme 14 The introductory part of the play is exceptional in other respects too: see Hose (1990), 162, who terms the Hiketikes a ‘Chortragödie’. 15 On the ‘now and forever’ theme generally see Easterling (2004). 16 Troezen belonged to the south-east part of the Argolid called Akte. It enjoyed independence from Argos (though belonging to the same wider georgraphical area); see Tomlinson (1972), 8. 17 For the significance of the motif of safety and well-being for all human communities appearing in dramatic myths (Argos and Thebes included) see also Easterling (1989). 9–14. See also n. 21 below.

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which is stated as a wish and not as a given, recurs again and again in the course of the play (270, 289–90, 320 ff., 628 ff. etc) and receives a final reprise at the exodos through Athena’s divine intervention. The play which starts with an invocation to Demeter for prosperity (played against the background of the Eleusinian temple represented by the skênê) is concluded with an appeal to Athena for future security (1231: α#σφαλ% ο@κ σοµεν ‘shall live secure’) accompanied by a forward-looking unified movement (1232: στεχωµεν ‘let us go’).18 This compositional frame embraces all other events and turns them into test cases for the central issue of communal living. How can the prayer and wish for eudaimonia of people and cities, dependent on the inscrutable gods, be sustained under the present conditions of war, mourning, death, and defeat? The play does not offer an easy answer. It states the problem and plays out various different facets which make its solution so difficult; it seems, however, to suggest directions in terms of reciprocal relations and ritual action.

b) Female persistence The prospect of misfortune that threatens the well-being of Athens and triggers Aithra’s opening prayer19 is neither distant nor hypothetical. It constitutes the axis of the present in terms of space and time in the prologue: the tableau revealed at the opening of the play presents Aithra, the mother of Theseus, king of Athens, sacrificing at the altar in front of the temple of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis.20 It is the day of the Proerosia, the festival dedicated to the fertility of the land, of the Attic but also of the Greek land in general.21 All around the altar stand a group of mourning women, their state obvious from their clothes (97: πεπλµατ’ ο θεωρικα´, ‘clothes not for feasts’), flanking Aithra, pressing her with their supplicatory twigs and impelling her to remain; further away (104: 0ν πλαι ‘in the gateway’) a group of males in similar stance and appearance complete the picture and the circle of

18 Demeter and Athena are usually seen as polar opposites; e.g. Scully (1996), 72–7; Mendelsohn (2002), 216, 219–23. But this ‘polarity’ (if such) may be mediated (through the role of the chorus, as will be argued below). 19 Note the emphatic γα´ρ in l. 8. 20 See Rehm (1988) arguing for the use of the orchestra altar. 21 Χθον (28 f.: π ρ χθον α#ρτου προθουσα, ‘sacrifice for the fertility of the land’) is nicely vague; on the Proerosia see n. 7 above. Cf. Conacher (1956), 16 n. 20 who notes that the Eleusinian setting and the reference to the festival of Proerosia (27–34) make us see ‘the whole of the subsequent action as a kind of fertility ritual ensuring Athenian and Argive prosperity’.

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those making supplication: older generation (mothers of the ‘Seven’22), mature men (Adrastos), and children (boys, sons of the Seven).23 The place and time of supplication can hardly be chosen arbitrarily. A group of bereaved mothers, seeking comfort for the injustice done to them, deprived as they are of the corpses of their dead sons (11, 19, 44–6), take refuge at Eleusis, at the spot where Demeter, the divine prototype of the bereaved mother, had retreated seeking comfort for the unjustified loss of her daughter, before coming to terms with absence and restoring fertility to the land. The human mothers seek help from a female figure, a mother herself too, who performs a sacrifice (a ritual mediating between humans and gods) for her son and all Athens. These successive reflections of the motherly figure on different levels and its complicated connections with the issue at stake, i.e. the sustenance and prosperity of the human community, make it clear from the very beginning that the role of the mothers in the resolution of the crisis which involves the Argive community and threatens Athens will be of primary importance.24 The circle of the bereaved mothers around Aithra (distinct from the other Argives) is the symbolic focus for an imminent threat or for a promising future. The ambivalent position of the mothers’ chorus, realized and openly stated by Aithra at the end of the prologue (32–6), is further confirmed in the following scenes after the parodos, when Theseus arrives to face the challenge of the suppliants (87 ff.). The Athenian king engages in dialogue with Adrastos, the Argive tyrannos (166), who requests the help and intervention of Theseus and Athens on behalf of Argos (162–92). Theseus seeks a justification for his decision through logos, on the basis of political argumentation. The confrontation between Adrastos and Theseus in 110–261 proves, however, that the discourse between these two political figures fails. Athens cannot be drawn into an agreement with and plan of action for Argos. The rift is unavoidable and the results immediately apparent: Adrastos and the boys are ready to leave and they urge the mothers to do the same, i.e. to abandon their supplicatory spot and to invoke the gods (Demeter) for dire consequences upon Athens (252–63). At this critical moment when the male Argive representatives turn away failing in their mission and withdrawing from the foreground, the reaction of the chorus is of crucial importance (though often underestimated): contrary 22

The term is and will be used conventionally. As Collard (1975), i.18 notes ‘in the play the number [seven] applies both to the chorus and the bodies of their dead sons only as a symbol of their collective identity’. 23 On the children and their song in the play see Sifakis (2007), 85–106, on children in tragedy generally see Zeitlin (this volume). 24 In the play but also in the analysis below.

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to Adrastos’ exhortation and example, the mothers do not abandon their supplication but rather intensify it, turning to Theseus and enacting a most intense pattern of hiketeia which involves self-humiliation, grasping of the knees and entreaty (272: βα˜θι κα2 α#ντασον γονα´των πι χε,ρα βαλο&σα, ‘go and clasp him by the knees’; 278: αHντοµαι α#µφιπτνουσα τ σν γνυ κα2 χ.ρα δειλαα, ‘I implore you as I clasp your knees and hands’ 284–5: βλ.ψον . . .|γονασι πτνω, ‘see . . . I fall at your knees’). Paradoxically, by disempowering themselves, the mothers manage to exert power and affect both Theseus and Aithra. Theseus explicitly admits it (287 f.: δυστ νου γου| κλουσα τ%νδε, ‘you heard their piteous lamentation’; κα#µ διDλθ. τι, ‘something has shot through me, too’) and the queen openly manifests it (286 f., 289–92). Aithra has a key role in this scene,25 which seems to duplicate (or extend in a way) the role of the Argive chorus: as the mothers undertook to mediate between the Argive males and Theseus, so Aithra here undertakes to mediate between the mothers and the Athenian male community, represented by Theseus. Her mediating role is enhanced by her ritual role, i.e. by being still situated at the altar as a sacrificer to Demeter (this is acknowledged by Theseus in 289–90). Her whole rhêsis (297–331), uttered from her post by the altar,26 bears the weight of the communication with the gods (through prayer and sacrifice) and is sealed by her first and foremost appeal to the cause of the gods (301: τα` τ%ν θε%ν) as justification for support towards the Argive mothers. It is under the weight of both his mother’s mediation and of the Argive mothers’ supplication that Theseus accepts the Argive request and is ready to ask for the sanction of the Athenian people (346–58). From that moment Theseus enters into a relationship of reciprocity, of mutual benefit and action with the mothers and by extension with the dead. The first token of this positive mutual relationship (offered by the Argive side this time after Theseus’ request) is the release of Aithra by the mothers and her return to the community (359–61) after the crisis of the first part of the play. Ritual and stage action here are an indication, a precursor of a potential positive resolution that might be worked out through mediation and exchange of charis. The release of Aithra is χα´ρι 0 τ παραχρDµα (‘gratitude for this time’), but immediately after Aithra’s and Theseus’ exit the mothers’ chorus assume a broader responsibility on behalf of the Argive community (which they address and call upon in 365 ff. and which they seem to represent 25 See Mendelsohn (2002), 140–7, 162 ff. (who generally focuses on the heroines of the play and not on the chorus). 26 Here stage action and spectacle complement the rhetoric of the situation: Taplin (1995), 99.

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throughout the play27) and acknowledge a long-lasting obligation towards Athens if she completes εσεβ6 πνο (373–4: καλν <δ’> αHγαλµα πλεσιν εσεβ6 πνο | χα´ριν τ’ χει τα`ν 0 α@ε, ‘pious toil is a beautiful adornment to cities and it secures gratitude for ever’). This relationship that is gradually developed involves explicitly the Argive mothers and the polis of Athens (377: αHµυνε µατρ, πλι, αHµυνε, Παλλα´δο, ‘come to a mother’s aid, o city of Pallas’). The scene with the Theban herald that follows (381 ff.) brings forward and confirms the inseparable bond between the supplication of the Argive mothers (who remain at their supplicating post) and the retrieval of the dead by the Athenians. The herald’s claim to Theseus is summarized in the request to undo the ‘solemn mystery of the suppliant boughs’ (470) and avoid the retrieval of the dead, revealing in this way that a major force behind Theseus’ resolution to retrieve the dead is the supplication ritual taking place before the eyes of the internal and external audience. Although Theseus in his reply to the herald’s claim insists on the Panhellenic law for the burial of the dead, his concluding remark presents the law as ‘coming to him’ (562: ε@ 0µ 0λθ[ν . . .|νµο παλαι . . .), an expression which seems to pick up the force of the suppliants’ movement, rushing to and arriving at Eleusis, approaching and touching Theseus himself.28 The old nomos of the Greeks ‘has come’ to Theseus and the polis of Athens, and this statement acquires a literal dimension in the theatrical setting, with the group of suppliants in the orchestra exemplifying on the one hand the hybris which the Panhellenic law has suffered and on the other the pressing need for its restoration. The presence of the suppliants sustains the claim for action, and throughout the rest of the play the suppliant women (in contrast to Adrastos and the boys) will stick to their position, ambivalent, yet full of potential. They will not abandon it until they see that the ponos of Athens is fulfilled; and this comes only at the very end.

R E T R I EVA L A N D F U N E R A RY R I T E S –– Θ α´ ν α τ ο  π α ρ’ F µ µ α ( 4 8 4 ) In the first part of the play the mediating role of the female figures (chorus and Aithra) and the reciprocity between Athenian males and the Argive See especially 835 f. and 1079 ff. (echo of same motif). The chorus visualize their misfortune from a wider collective perspective which extends even to the whole polis. 28 ρχοµαι εC τινα is a synonym to Lκν.οµαι; on the force of verbs ‘to arrive’ in supplicatory contexts see Gödde (2000), 26. 27

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mothers succeeds in bringing about change and generates action. In a process of acting for and on behalf of the other, roles and codes are renegotiated and potentially enriched. The text seems to press the consequences even further in the direction of the acceptance of the other, by presenting Theseus as acting on the basis of an ethics of care and performing duties traditionally ascribed to mothers and female relatives in a funerary context (washing the wounds, laying out the biers, covering the bodies, in sum ‘showed affection for the dead’, 764: iγα´πα νεκρο).29 It is this context of assumed responsibility and reciprocity which seems to justify Theseus’ act of bringing the bodies back to Eleusis and restoring them to their familiar environment, since that was the explicit request of the mothers at the crucial moment of their supplication (273: τ.κνων κοµσαι δ.µα, ‘bring the bodies of our children’), a request echoing the expectations and entreaties of Adrastos and the (other) Argives.30 By bringing the bodies, Theseus responds to the mothers’ plea and serves at the same time the ritual logic that requires the special burial of a hieros nekros31 (i.e. Kapaneus, accompanied here by other eminent dead). Dramatically, this act serves as a signal of the exceptional status of these dead and in this way it prepares the ground for Athena’s revelation at the exodos (1185– 1212) about Athens’ benefit from the retrieval and symbolic burial of these (powerful) dead. At the same time, however, the return of the bodies to Eleusis and ultimately to their community initiates a different social dynamic that seems to give precedence to male members over the female chorus (which remains, nonetheless, in the foreground). This seems to be signalled in the text in an implicit but pointed way even before the entry of the dead bodies. The messenger who rushes in to announce the news of Theseus’ victory, is an Argive, a former companion of Kapaneus and member of the army led by Adrastos against Thebes. When he comes in, he directly addresses the women of the chorus (634: γυνα,κε), not even noticing or mentioning Adrastos and the boys who are on stage, as would be more appropriate. Adrastos seems to be invisible in stage terms32 and this ‘invisibility’ seems to correspond to a wider dramatic ‘invisibility’ for the greater part of the play up to this point. Since his original failure to persuade Theseus (261), Adrastos has withdrawn to the background of the action (although he remains on See Rehm (1994), 116; see also Mendelsohn (2002), 46 f., 170 ff. e.g. 25, 61, 69, 126, 273; see also Adrastos’ question in 754 (νεκρο) κοµζετε, ‘have you brought back the dead’), along with his surprise at hearing that only the bodies of the seven are brought back (756: π% φl; ), revealing expectations of a massive conveyance of bodies. 31 A logic shared by external and internal audiences, as explicitly mentioned in 935 (O χωρ2 Lερν < νεκρν θα´ψαι θ.λει; ‘do you want to bury him apart as a sacred dead?’). On the tradition of the hieros nekros see also Nagy (1979), 189 f. and n. 3. 32 Cowering in a corner and remaining apparently covered, cf. 104, 110–12. 29 30

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stage) attending but not contributing to developments.33 It is immediately after hearing the news from the messenger (734) that Adrastos resumes action, entering dialogue again and––most importantly––setting himself in motion in order to meet and receive the bodies of the dead (772–5). Adrastos’ reaction is significant and symbolic of further developments in a way: the return of the bodies seems to stir the Argive community to motion; Adrastos, Kapaneus’ wife (Euadne), her father (Iphis), and the boys of the Seven, absent or mostly silent up to now, come forward and fill the theatrical space with their movements and provocative actions, claiming thus a role and identity through their mourning performance for the Seven whose dead bodies activate the reflexes of their community. The bodily token of the dead heroes offers the opportunity to the Argives––and especially to the Argive males––to come to the foreground and side with the Athenians in the restoration of the dead. Although Theseus and Athens are in charge of the orchestration of the part of the death ritual that takes place in Eleusis, the burden of the mourning ritual falls upon the Argives. Their active participation shapes the character of honour paid to the dead conferring upon it a characteristic epic––aristocratic tone which suits the aristocratic profile of Argos in the play (ruled by a tyrannos34) and which consists in personal, eponymous eulogy in front of the dead, cremation with immense (human) offerings, and a final ekphora manifesting a determination for revenge. This sequence of actions which corresponds to the basic pattern of an epic-style burial unfolds in the play in three large-scale movements which are reflected in three subsequent episodes occupying the central part of the play. Contrary to an impression of structural looseness,35 the episodes seem to be held together on the basis of a pattern of an aristocratically styled burial.36 The first part of the dramatized mourning ceremonial seems to reflect the stage of the prothesis when the dead bodies (only of the distinguised dead) are brought into the midst of the human community and become the focus of all

33 For about 400 lines he is given just half a line at 514. He is only asked to follow Theseus to Athens in 354 (a possible echo of Aesch. Supp. 515 ff.). 34 As Adrastos is explicitly and repeatedly characterized in the play; see e.g. 166, 1189; on Athenian aversion to tyrannia in the play see 404–5. 35 That may result from an Athenocentric ‘reading’, i.e. if we try to identify the first part of the dramatized procedure with the final part of the historical funerary procedure, i.e. the epitaphios logos which takes place in Athens after the interment. Sourvinou-Inwood (2004), 185 has stressed that the funeral in the Hiketides ‘partly refracts’ the Athenian public funerary practice, and this refraction (if such) is ‘complex’. 36 On the aristocratic model of a funeral see Humphreys (1993), 85–7; the Geometric funeral vases and the descriptions of the funeral in the epics (mainly Hom. Il. bk. 23) are the major sources; both have been seen as grand-scale, not ordinary, funerals; see e.g. Ahlberg (1971), 300–1, Morris (1987), 47–8.

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eyes and all attention.37 Traditionally, a goos (individualized lament including eulogy) must take place;38 in the play, however, the female mourners, i. e. the mothers, do not desert their collective identity in order to fulfil the task of naming and eulogizing each dead individually. So Theseus intervenes and delegates this role to Adrastos, arranging, however, that the traditional eulogy39 is recast in the form of a paraenetic address. The result is a paradoxical epitaphios logos40 which is structured on eponymity and personal value (and not on anonymous collective feats as in the Athenian examples) and which takes place in front of the very bodies of the dead and not after the interment; in the Athenian Kerameikos, on the contrary, the epitaphios was delivered when all traces of the dead have been obliterated and only the beautified collective µν µη α#γ ρω (‘unaging memory’)41 is dominant in the air.42 With the conclusion of the prothesis the bodies are taken out to cremation. One of them, i.e. the body of Kapaneus, struck by Zeus’ thunderbolt, is to be cremated and buried within the sacred precinct, that is within the limits of the dramatic area. The heroic dimensions of his pyra are underlined not only by the exceptional burial place but also by an extreme form of offering, i.e. the self-sacrifice of Kapaneus’ wife Euadne (990–1071).43 The introvertedness and cohesion of the aristocratic oikos acquires here its extreme realization which is further amplified by the choice of self-annihilation on the part of the male members (here Iphis, Euadne’s father), unable to cope with death 37 Echoes of prothesis ritual or the ‘fusion’ of public and private funerary practices noticed e.g. by Collard (1972), 47, Whitehorne (1986), 68 f., Foley (1993), 123, Jouan (1997), 224, 232, Toher (2001), 337, who turn, however, to the association with the Athenian public funeral. 38 On ritual lament and its terminology see Alexiou (20022), 177 f. and 365 f. The female gooi in Hom. Il. bk. 24 are the most prominent examples. 39 On the tradition of praise in lament see for instance Hom. Il. 19.287–8, 295–300, 315–20, 24.729–30, 749–50, 771–2; Aesch. Pers. 647–56, 709–12; Cho. 345–62; Soph. Aj. 921–4, 996–7; Bion 1.71. For epic vestiges of funerary laudatory speech see e.g. Thebais fr. 10 Bernabé; and cf. Pind. Ol. 6.15 ff. with Σ ad loc.; Tyrt. fr. 12W; Pl. Phdr. 269d (cf. also Collard below). 40 Taken as a reflection of the Athenian public epitaphios, Adrastos’ speech provides the major ground for the satirical, ironical or at least pessimistic interpretations of the play (see e.g. Fitton, Smith, Burian n. 2 above); Grube (1961), 237 f. excised the speech. Differences in circumstance were noted by Zuntz (1955), 13 f. and Collard (1975) ad 857–917 but are usually overlooked. On the issue cf. also Pelling (1997), 230–3. 41 On the invisibility of the dead and the memory theme see Loraux (1986), 2–3. 42 I have stressed the dissimilarities with the Athenian public funeral and discussed the affinity of the scene with the prothesis ritual and its consequences in a forthcoming paper; see Kavoulaki (forthcoming). 43 Cf. the linguistic ‘play’ in 983–5: the chorus sees the ‘offerings for the dead’ (α#ναθ µατα νεκρο,) and Kapaneus’ wife, Euadne, ‘close by’ (π.λα). Human offerings at heroic burials: see Hom. Il. 23.22 f., 175 f.; for Euadne’s suicide (represented in art) ‘read’ as a sacrifice, see Philostr. Imag. ii.30. In this light Euadne’s sacrifice may be read as another example of ‘successful “control” of feminine power’ (to the regret of Mendelsohn (2002), 46–9, 210–15).

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(1104–7). In the third stage of the dramatized death ritual, i.e. the ekphora before the final interment, the genos prerogatives and tradition fall on the shoulders of the younger members who are ready to defend the claims of the oikos and take vengeance (1145 ff.). Such a burial––which points to a cult of the dead (mainly through the prominent example of Kapaneus)––creates the conditions for the activation of those powers which will form the basis for the alliance to be announced later by Athena (1183 ff.). At the same time, the burial with this distinct heroic colouring allows the Argive community to participate and thus reclaim its epic profile. This development, however, is ultimately owed to the mediation of the mothers who persisted in supplication and managed to ensure both Theseus’ involvement in the ponos and the special treatment of the bodies of their sons, for whom they explicitly implored. In the process of the death ritual the Athenian and the Argive males manage to come closer to each other, after the breach in the first episode, a proximity that must have been conveyed in stage terms through the various group movements in and out of the scenic space. Only the chorus stayed behind and witnessed the movements, without joining in and without interfering with the all-male character of the escorts.44

E XO D O S –– T H E M OT H E R S ’ L A S T WO R D In this atmosphere of general mobility and rapprochement the part of the burial carried out at Eleusis reaches its conclusion; the ashes of the eminent warriors can be taken back to Argos for final interment. In the short scene at the beginning of the exodos (1165–82) Theseus announces formally the completion of Athens’ task and is about to hand over the material remains of the dead. The verb he uses in order to denote this transfer is δωροµεθα (τοτοι σφε δωροµεθα ‘we grant these to them’ 1168), a loaded term which opens up the spectrum of gift exchange and reciprocity.45 In the first part of the play the issue of reciprocity was touched on by the chorus who acknowledged charis in 44 Generally at funerals male and female roles were distinct; see Sourvinou-Inwood (1995) and (2004). The play seems to stress the distanced or restricted role of the mothers in contrast to male involvement (interpreted variously from a gender perspective, e.g. Foley (1993), 118–25, Loraux (1998), 27–8; already Whitehorne (1986), 70; but see also Sourvinou-Inwood (2003), 429 f. on the need of complex ‘readings’ of women’s roles at funerals, and ead. (2004), 185 f. on the Hiketides). This distancing is important as a contrast to their initiative and involvement in the exodos (1232 ff.). 45 On the gift and gift exchange see Finley (1956), 70, Seaford (1994), 7–10, 13–25, Missiou (1998), 181 f., Gould (2001); on reciprocity more generally Seaford (1994) and Gill, Postlethwaite, and Seaford (1998).

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return for Athens’ ponos (373–5). At this climactic moment, however, when Athens is about to withdraw from the picture after the completion of her task, Theseus’ privileged interlocutor proves to be Adrastos and the recipients of his δ%ρον are the sons of the Seven. Juxtaposed to the situation in the first part of the play (after the breach between the Athenian and the Argive males and the successful mediation of the women’s chorus), this privileging of the male Argive members may seem to some extent unexpected.46 It constitutes a shift of focus in the pattern of reciprocal relations gradually shaped in the play, a shift, however, which can be explained in the light of the events of the burial procedure, in which the Argive males reclaimed a protagonistic role, in contrast to the mothers who participated as responding parts in the laments (798–801), were not included in the cortèges (947, 1114 f.), even refrained from their traditional prerogative of individualized lament, and persisted throughout in keeping a tone of (personal but) collective grief and wider (often gnomic) reflection (802–4, 826 f., 832–36, 1077 f., 1139–41).47 At the same time the shift of attitudes seems to be combined with a kind of asymmetry. Theseus is here granting a material token of Athenian charis to the Argives (i.e. the ashes of the dead), but in return he receives nothing concrete, only words acknowledging charis and promising future reciprocal action (α#ντιδρα˜ν).48 The contribution of the two parts in this mutual relationship appears to be rather uneven and the impression of asymmetry is strengthened, given the impasse of communication between Theseus and Adrastos in the first part of the play and the contradictory stance of the Argive males during the burial, with Adrastos denouncing all ponoi (948–54) and the boys looking forward to further ponoi and revenge (1149–51). Placed in this context, the benefit that Theseus manages to obtain for Athens seems to be undermined; as a result the programmatic wish for prosperity (εδαιµονα) seems to be ultimately suspended. Humans (even Theseus) cannot guarantee the conditions for communal well-being. At this critical junction of apparently ungrounded interstate alliance and relations, the goddess Athena enters unexpectedly as a dea ex machina

46 Or contradictory. The contrast of political ideas in the two parts of the play is widely analysed in the bibliography; scholars especially point out the contradiction between 306–31 and 949–54 (e.g. Smith (1966), 163 f., Burian (1985), 150). I focus on the contrasting features of the action but as I suggest, the relationship between Theseus and Adrastos fails; a new agreement is shaped through mediation and ritual. This does not imply Euripidean pietistic ideas; the play may simply propose a different pattern of action in a world where the political logos alone does not seem to suffice. 47 See n. 27 above and the analysis below. 48 This may reflect Periclean democratic ideology (cf. Thuc. 2.40.4 ) according to Valakas (2003), 29–31, drawing on Missiou (1992), 114–19.

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(1183).49 Given the dramatic circumstances, her intervention seems far from redundant. Athena does not appear ‘to cut a knot’ but she does appear to create a breach and reshape an ill-based agreement (in favour of Athens). If the exchange between Theseus and Adrastos at the exodos (1165–82) mirrors in a way and reverses their encounter in the first episode (116 ff.), then Athena’s intervention repeats and reflects the rupture in their relation. Similar to the pattern of action in the first part of the play, the rapprochment between the two communities can be achieved on the basis of ritual action which here must take the form of an oath accompanied by sacrifices and strengthened by the power invested in the tomb (or even symbolic tomb) of powerful dead (1183–212).50 The knife used at the sacrifice must be buried in the earth where the bodies of the distinguished dead were cremated and purified (1211: σµαθ’ 9γνσθη πυρ), so as to discourage any future invaders (1205–12).51 Seen from the perspective of the plan prescribed by the goddess, the heroic type of burial partly organized and enacted earlier in the play has created the preconditions for the activation of that (heroic or metaphysical) power (often embodied in tragedy by distinct but ambiguous heroes, such as Oedipus or Orestes)52 that could ensure a concrete benefit for Athens. Athena’s ritual plan discloses this potential which underpins the logic of the dramatic action (heroic cult foreshadowed by heroic burial) and which apparently links to historical traditions about the Seven in Attica (Eleusis).53 At the same time, however, the acknowledgment of the power of distinguished dead opens up other traditional perspectives upon heroes and more specifically that of their epic pedigree. It is this perspective which seems to be appreciated in the second part of Athena’s rhêsis which is addressed to the sons of the Seven (1214–26), the true (and traditionally acknowledged) heirs of their fathers’ epic heritage, a quality which is encapsulated in their traditional name # Επγονοι. The social dynamic that would allow the sons to take up the roles of their fathers has been generated again during the burial, but Athena here reveals its ultimate consequences. 49 Athena’s appearance is another vexing problem of the play. It hints at Theseus’ inadequacy (who usually stands as a surrogate deus according to Dunn (1996), 113 f.). If Valakas mentioned above is right, then Athena’s intervention is all the more necessary in order to restore the mythical dimension and to remind the audience that the epic tradition has vengeance in store (note the phlegmatic ‘it cannot be otherwise’ in 1254), a reality which necessitates the ritual ‘fortification’ of Athens through oath. 50 Heroic cult developed around a tomb (real or supposed); see Kearns (1989), 3 and compare Eur. Heracl. 1026–44. 51 The knife has a functional role in the oath ceremony: see Faraone (1993), 67 f. and n. 33. 52 Or even Eurystheus in the Heracl. 53 Hdt. 9.27.3; Lys. 2.10; Paus. 1.39.2; Plut. Thes. 29.4–5; Thuc. 29. 4–5; cf. Collard (1975), i. 5 and ad 1185.

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In retrospect, the enactment of the funerary rituals in the central part of the play shapes in a way the course of events in the exodos. The involvement of both Athenian and Argive males in the death ritual creates the conditions for the final exchange between Theseus and Adrastos (in contrast to the gap between the two in the first part of the play). In this first part of the exodos human planning comes to the foreground. However, the unsafe ground of positive reciprocity based only on words on the part of the Argives causes the intervention of Athena who impedes an uneven relationship and refashions the conditions of a mutual agreement, insisting on the performance of ritual, exploring the potential invested in distinguished dead in favour of Athens and projecting the other side (ie. the epic side) of the traditional perspective on heroes on to the Argives. This is an ingenious development which succeds both in fortifying Athens and in restoring Argos to the course of the heroic tradition. The fulfilment of Athena’s plan, however, presupposes the sanctioning of the human community. The goddess prescribes a certain course of action but it rests upon the humans to take it up and bring it to fulfilment. In this particular case the representatives of both communities must agree to reciprocate in the way pointed out by the divinity (and contrary to the previous human-directed way). At this final stage of the action the issues of welfare and interstate relations are put to the test once again. Theseus, speaking for Athens (which is favoured by Athena’s arrangements), responds straightforwardly and accepts the goddess’s suggestions, admitting human limitation (µ6 0ξαµαρτα´νειν, ‘so that I do not go astray’) and the need for divine direction (1228). After Theseus it is the turn of the Argives to endorse Athena’s plan; but the Argive side, and more particularly Adrastos––to whom both Athena and Theseus pointed with deictics (τνδε (1188), οgτο (1189), τνδ’ (1229))–– seems to stay mute. In Diggle’s text an empty space is added after Theseus’ short rhêsis, separating it from the last three (anapaestic) lines of the play which are not attributed but addressed to Adrastos. His inaction can neither be unnoticed (especially after the expectations that the previous rhêsis created) nor prolonged. As a result, the mothers, i.e. the chorus of the play, take the initiative to bridge the gap and take the lead, stirring him back into action: στεχωµεν, eδρασθ’, 8ρκια δ%µεν | τ'δ’ α#νδρ2 πλει τ’· αHξια δ’ 9µ,ν | προµεµοχθ κασι σ.βεσθαι (1234–7: ‘let us go,54 Adrastos, and take the oath for this man and his city; for their toil on our behalf deserves our respect’). This is an apostrophe full of import, especially as it comes at the very end of the play. 54 Besides ‘walk’, ‘go’, ‘depart’, στεχω used in the text denotes ‘march’, ‘march in line’ (cf. στχο, στο,χο) and this aspect of the verb combines with the anapaestic rhythm of the lines.

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The concluding lines of a play are conventionally attributed to the chorus, but they usually contain gnomic statements (which may recur from play to play as tailpieces), self-referential comments and farewell expressions (e.g. Hipp. 1463–6, Ion 1619–22, El. 1357–9, etc.); the chorus normally follows up and conforms to the exhortations or suggestions of the main characters (e.g. Hec. 1288–95, Tro. 1327–32, Heracl. 1050–8).55 It is particularly in the Hiketides that the roles seem to be reversed and the hero does not invite but is invited by the chorus to take action or rather to unite in action with all the other agents in the drama, one of whom is the chorus itself. By pronouncing this pointed performative utterance at this outstanding position of the play the chorus sets a seal on its role as an actor.56 Faced with Adrastos’ inaction and placed in a context which recalls the pattern of events in the first part of the play (in which the breach between Theseus and Adrastos could be healed through ritual action and mediation), the Argive mothers show the same readiness as before to intervene and draw Adrastos this time into a reciprocal relation with Athens, balancing in a way their earlier achievement to draw Athens (through Aithra and Theseus) into a reciprocal relation with Argos. It is positive reciprocity that is at issue here, the responsibility for which has been undertaken by the mothers already in the first stasimon (373–4: καλν <δ’> αHγαλµα πλεσιν εσεβ6 πνο | χα´ριν τ’ χει τα`ν 0 α@ε). The mothers have here the opportunity to repeat in deed what they had earlier promised in song, offering a concrete affirmation of Theseus’ πνο. On the contrary, Adrastos’ earlier promises of charis towards Theseus and Athens (1176–9) prove fruitless, as they are undermined not only by Athena’s appearance but even by his own contradictory attitudes, as he first effaced all distinctions and denounced πνοι in 948–54 and he later tried to assure Theseus of Argos’ appreciation of his πνο (1178–9). What is more, as the scenes of the death ritual and the second part of Athena’s rhêsis confirmed, the Argive males (and especially the younger ones) are not ready to come out of the circle of the epic tradition which endorses and glorifies negative reciprocity. In face of all that, the mothers’ role as mediators between Argos and Athens at this critical moment is all the more necessary and telling.

55 Barrett (1964) ad 1462–6 disputes the authority of almost all Euripidean endings (closing lines); he finds at least ‘nothing obviously suspect’ in the case of the Hiketides. 56 See Calame (1999), 129. More generally, for my reading of the chorus’s role in the exodos Gould (1996), Goldhill (1996), and Calame (1999) have proved important.

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Throughout the play the mothers seem to have retained a distinct stance which is made all the more apparent in the burial part of the play, when Adrastos returns to action and is explicitly credited with the weight of starting up mourning and lament (770, 772–4, 798–801).57 The chorus performs threnetic stasima (778–97, 955–79) but in antiphonal lamentation it is explicitly invited to join in only as respondent (799–801 ‘sing out your lamentation, mothers, in response to the lamentation you hear me [sc. Adrastos] sing’), a role that they adopt in both kommoi (798 ff., 1123 ff.), while retaining at the same time a differentiated tone. This is prominently made manifest in the contrast between Adrastos’ death wishes in lament (828–31) and the mothers’ reflective and distanced reply (833–6). This tone and motif are reiterated later in the play in the contrast between the self-destructive mourning attitude of a father (Iphis, 1104–13) and the reflective, macroscopic perspective of the mothers (1077–8). The chorus generally seems to retain an intermediary position as regards the burial: they never abrogate their collective identity in favour of an eponymous oikos tradition, they do not switch from anonymous, collective lamentation to epic-style goos and individualized eulogy,58 they explicitly react (1146–8) to the prospect of revenge wished for by the Argive boys during the escort of the dead’s ashes,59 and they steadily oppose extreme, self-destructive mourning stances. This last attitude of the chorus is most concretely and amply exemplified in the scene of Euadne’s death (980–1112), which seems to serve as a foil to the mourning stance of the mothers. Dressed as a bride, inspired by her bridal memories, unable to cope with her status as a widow and refusing in essence to change her status as a wife, Euadne arrives at Eleusis in order to attempt a reunion with her dead husband Kapaneus in Hades, jumping into the fire which consumes his body.60 Euadne’s decision to change her biological instead of her social status contrasts sharply with the stance of the chorus who initiated the action of the play on the basis of their altered status after the death of their sons. 57 In 771 Adrastos projects to the women the primary will for lamentation, in order to face the messenger’s admonition for restraint in mourning. The chorus, however, has been mostly silent during the scene (in 731–3 they express satisfaction and relief). Later on (799 ff.) they are called to respond. 58 Contrast Aesch. Pers. 955–1001 where the names of the dead form one of the most prominent parts of the oriental, aristocratic lamentation of the male chorus. 59 On attitudes of revenge traditionally manifested during the ekphora in historical times see [Dem.] 37. 69; cf. Poll. 8.7; Harp. s.v. δρυ. 60 A descent into Hades with echoes of Persephone’s descent; see 1022 (cf. Rehm (1994), ch. 8).

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This does not mean that the mothers do not express their concern with their social identity and role in the new circumstances. In the stasimon preceding Euadne’s entry the mothers sing of their shaken, unstable role, missing its sense and centre, missing the socio-religious references which gave it a definition (955–8), suspended as they are between life and death (968–9)–– the true state of mourning (971 ff.). The end of their song, however, is met with the spectacle of the burning fires which devour the bodies of the warriors (980–3, 1009–11). The lyric tableau of the women is thus contrasted with the elementary power of the fire which effects the alteration and transference of the dead to a different realm. The emphasis on the pyre of Kapaneus, the spectacular focus of the following scene (1010), points in the direction of a deep transformation. Kapaneus is exceptional in that he turns from a hybristic hero into a hieros nekros, who is granted burial in the sacred precinct. At the same time, however, the other dead also undergo transformation, since they similarly become purified (1211), entering a different status. Fixed at their supplicatory post in the orchestra, the female mourners are faced with the spectacle of alteration and transformation, the effect of which may be felt not only in their shock at Euadne’s reckless act (1072) or in the calm of their subsequent reflections on misfortune and death (1139–41: α@θ6ρ χει νιν Aδη, | πυρ τετακτα σποδ'· ποτανο2 δ’ Aνυσαν τν Α M ιδαν, ‘they dwell now in the sky, their bodies dissolved to ashes in the pyre; taking wings, they have gone all the way to Hades’), but also––and most importantly––perhaps in their ultimate readiness to mobilize Adrastos and the other Argives to move forward (στεχωµεν, eδρασθ’), to enter a new phase of life and attempt new positive relationships which may avert ––at least some––future deaths (1234–7). Throughout the play the mothers have not abandoned the orchestra, fixed at their supplicatory post and stationed at the same place where the goddess Demeter also stayed until she could come to terms with the loss and new status of Kore. The Eleusinian backdrop and the general setting of the play embrace and inform the spectacle of the mourning mothers who are thus turned into a kind of mirror image of the archetypical bereaved mother, i.e. the goddess Demeter. According to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter the divine mother restored the abundance of the fruit of the earth only after she was granted the charis to see her daughter (Hymn. Dem. 333: πρ2ν Cδοι /φθαλµο,σι K6ν επιδα κορην, ‘before seeing with her eyes her fair-faced daughter’, 338–9: Fφρα q µ τηρ | /φθαλµο,σιν @δο&σα µεταλ ξειε χλοιο, ‘so that her mother might see her with her eyes and desist from anger’) and after she could accept a different rhythm of things (Hymn. Dem. 398–403, 463–5), overcoming thus her desperate grief for her daughter (Hymn. Dem. 470–3). Likewise, the Argive mothers seem to come to terms with the reality of death

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through a process of charis, which allows them to see again their sons’ bodies (782: 0µο2 δ παδων µ ν ε@σιδε,ν µ.λη | πικρν, καλν θ.αµα δ’ εCπερ Fψοµαι, ‘for me to look on the bodies of our sons is painful, though a fair sight if I ever see it’) and an awareness of transformation and transition. This ‘Demetrian’ model of mourning seems to develop and emerge gradually in the play in juxtaposition to other patterns such as that of Euadne just mentioned, or that of Iphis, the male parent mourner, who reverts to his oikos and to himself and resorts eventually to death (1104 ff.),61 or even to that of the male surviving members of the Argive community, whose participation in the death ritual (the cremation and the all-male cortèges) allows them to reclaim to some extent their traditional epic profile and reassume their prescribed military roles.62 The chorus’ fixity in the orchestra which is both their supplicatory post and their ‘Demetrian’ station allows them to retain a betwixt-andbetween state until they are ready at the end to accept the altered state of life, reciprocate charis, and be reintroduced into the human community, contributing thus to its preservation. In this particular case, as the mothers represent and mobilize whole communities, the effects of such a stance can be wideranging and provide the premises for the ultimate goal of prosperity (wished for already at the prologue). Invested with this ‘Demetrian’ potential and rooted in their collective identity as Α # ργε,αι (Argive women), µητ.ρε (mothers), and at the same time Lκ.τιδε (suppliants), i.e. ritually potent but socially detached human beings, the chorus of the Mothers constitutes a distinct presence in the play, in juxtaposition to the eponymous heroes and at a distance from the main male agents of the action. The body of the bereaved mothers is presented as a distinct ‘other’ which claims an intermediary zone of its own, not in order to undermine or subvert a dominant order63 but so as to develop its complex and rich potential (sketched above), on the basis of which it can function as a mediatory force between male communities which appear to be different or even opposed64 but which are enabled in this way to preserve their distinct 61 Both Iphis and Euadne choose not to conform with the traditional patterns of mourning which set ‘socially constructed limits on the potentially unlimited, natural expression of grief’ (Seaford (1985), 320) and reach actual self-destruction (Iphis is, thus, hardly ‘Demetrian’). 62 The funerary rites thus serve as a mechanism of restitution of the social order, as Toher (2001) argues. 63 There is no doubt that tragedy is a product of a patriarchal society and that male power is ultimately reinstated. Yet, as Mendelsohn (2002), 49 notes (analysing the heroines of the play and not the chorus), Euripides’ tragic theorizing is striking ‘in its attempt to inflect patriarchy with the feminine’. Twice in the play, after the failed male attempts at agreement, the discourse achieved is presented as the outcome of a negotiation with the feminine. (On the mythical plane cf. Zeus’ negotiation with Demeter and her return to Olympus in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.) 64 The Athenian and Argive communities were presented as antithetical in the first part of the play (cf. Shaw (1982)), posing the question of a possible relationship.

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characteristics. The intermediary position of the chorus, rooted in social (largely mythico-ritual) traditions, allows the Argives mothers to mediate, so that the epically renowned Argos with its ambiguous heroes can relate to the democratically orientated Athens, ruled by Theseus, on a safe and long-term basis. The role of the women in the finale picks up their mediation in the first episode (253–364). At that early stage the women of the chorus persisted in and intensified their supplication which contrasted with Adrastos’ reaction and entailed their fixity in space throughout the play; at the final stage the ritual initiative of the chorus to move forward towards the performance of oaths and sacrifices (and eventually the burial of the remains of the dead) marks the success of their supplication which is conclusively signalled by the abandonment of the suppliants’ position. This development ultimately confirms the propitious character of Aithra’s prayers and sacrifices to Demeter and Kore (27–34) which were threatened at the beginning of the play. In this respect the atmosphere of the finale is marked by a potentially propitious tone which is strengthened by the distinct type of movement which concludes the play. In contrast to the divided, bidirectional movement of the initial (and failed) farewell scene (1165–82), at the conclusion of the play the movement is unified and directed towards the performance of ritual acts such as oath sacrifices and funerary honours (1188–1210). Combined with the fact that the goddess Athena is ultimately the organizer and supervisor of the whole action, these features confer upon the moving spectacle a solemn character which aligns it with processional rituals of fifth-century Athens.65 The cry for a propitious result (initiated by Aithra in the prologue) finds a concrete, theatrical expression in the finale.66 Echoes of ritual processions (especially funerary ekphorai, i.e. ‘carryingout’ of bodies) have reverberated throughout the play. This final processional movement, however, captures in a direct way the importance of the mediatory role of the women, as it is the only one which is joined by both Theseus and the mothers. In the enacted funerary rites Theseus and the chorus in a way exchanged roles. Theseus laid out the corpses, when the mothers could not, and participated in the ekphora when the mothers did not. At the final exit the Argive mothers and the whole Argive party follow Theseus in a

65

Present on all festive and generally ritual occasions; see for example Kavoulaki (1999). From this perspective the Hiketides reflects the common Euripidean pattern of a ritual solution to the impasses of the action at the end of many of his plays; see e.g. Foley (1985), 20–2 and passim. 66 Compare the end of the Oresteia, on which see also the comments below. For Fowler (1997), 15 a processional ending makes a ‘model ending’.

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movement of unique fullness in the play which gives a concrete theatrical expression to the enactment of charis.

‘MODEL ENDINGS’ In the Hiketides unification of movement is directly related to the socioreligious issues developed in the play. The ritual reflects in symbolic terms the alliance achieved on the human level, ending a play in which united action has been much debated. The procession sustains the potential of positive reciprocal interaction and strengthens the prospect of possible benefit from the incorporation of the dead heroes and their mourning. At the same time, an all-inclusive ritual formation must have exerted a great impact and created an impressive spectacle. In a unified movement the ritual focus is not split and the attention of spectators is more fully engaged in one particular direction. The focused movement and the hierarchical evaluation of unity in contrast to division may enhance the audience’s experience of a potential propitious conclusion. Since the Hiketides is a play (originally) staged in Athens within the context of a religious festival, a play in which Athens plays the protagonistic role and in particular the role of the ‘saviour’, the engaging conclusion may have encouraged an experience of potential positive effects beyond the world of the drama.67 This level of efficacy is not meant as part of a mechanical process of external action aiming at external results. Within the world of the play the enacted ritual suggests the possibility of some benefit for a future Athens to which the audience also belongs. With the engagement of the audience the ‘cry’ for a propitious effect, that the processional ritual seems to convey, can be extended to contemporary Athens as well. But this works on the level of experience, not on the level of a conscious mechanical procedure.68 It is efficacy which aims, as Lienhardt has suggested,69 at the alteration of the experience of events. This attempt at a transformation of negative experience into a wish for positive results may have seemed particularly

67 This possibility has been raised more positively by Krummen (1993), 216–17 who draws on Easterling’s suggestion (Easterling (1988), 109), and tentatively proposes that the Hiketides, along with the Herakleidai and Oidipous at Kolonos, may be meant to generate the goodwill and benediction of the gods and heroes by presenting ‘the good city’ to them. 68 Anthropology has shown that on a basic level ritual efficacy involves the experience of the participant, independent of the intention to achieve an external result; cf. Tambiah (1985), 43, 52–3; Ahern (1979), 15–16. 69 See Lienhardt (1961), 280.

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imperative in times of external dangers and difficulties, such as the years of the Peloponnesian War.70 Startlingly, however, this propitious effect is sought through a processional ritual which openly displays a funerary dimension, since the mourning black clothes and the urns with the bones of the dead must have conferred a distinct colouring to the whole formation. The procession, however, marks the point of departure from the betwixt-and-between place and state of the bereaved group and acts out the transition to a new phase which incorporates divinely sanctioned charis relations. From this point of view the procession in which Theseus, acting under the guidance of Athena, leads a protagonistic female chorus along with a male secondary chorus and a hero (whose πα´θη were honoured through the performance of tragic choruses in Sikyon according to Herodotos 5.67) towards Athens may be an attempt to suggest––at a deeper and less obvious symbolic level––the potential benefit deriving from mediated ‘death experiences’, such as those that tragedy explores. This potentially beneficial transformation and incorporation of deathrelated experiences is closely reminiscent of the end of the Oresteia. Critics have recognized Euripides’ debt to the Oresteia for the composition of his Hiketides and have noticed the similarity between the two endings.71 The similarity, however, may extend to the deeper level of the ‘aetiological’ function of the two endings. Such a function has been proposed as regards the Oresteia by Peter Wilson and Oliver Taplin.72 The analogies in the endings of the two plays may suggest a similar ‘aetiological’ dimension in the Hiketides. Here, however, the poet, instead of having Athena introduce the chorus, has Theseus lead on after Athena’s command; and, instead of having a chorus of ambiguous chthonic powers (symbolizing both the threat of death and its prevention), has a group of ambiguous human beings––women and mothers––struck by death but geared also towards life and charis. The differences in the analogy are all in the Euripidean mode. The importance of the analogy lies in the logic that seems to underlie both cases, i.e. that the incorporation of death may under certain circumstances become a means to ward it off.

70 Cf. Easterling (2006), 144 who suggests that in its own time Sophokles’ Oidipous at Kolonos could offer ‘images of hope and protection for the Athenians’. 71 See Zuntz (1955), 11–12 and Smith (1966), 165–7. 72 Wilson and Taplin (1993).

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–––– (1988), ‘Tragedy and Ritual: “Cry Woe, Woe but May the Good Prevail!”, Métis 3.1–2: 87–109. –––– (1989), ‘City Settings in Greek Poetry’, PCPhS 86: 5–17. –––– (2004), ‘Now and Forever in Greek Drama and Ritual’, in Yatromanolakis and Roilos (2004), 149–160. –––– (2006), ‘The Death of Oedipus and What Happened Next’, in D. Cairns and V. Liapis (eds.), Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and his Fellow Tragedians in Honour of Alexander F. Garvie, Swansea. Faraone, C. (1993), ‘Molten Wax, Spilt Wine and Mutilated Animals: Sympathetic Magic in Near Eastern and Early Greek Oath Ceremonies’, JHS 113: 60–80. Finley, M. (1956), The World of Odysseus, London. Fitton, J. W. (1961), ‘The Suppliant Women and the Herakleidai of Euripides’, Hermes 89: 430–61. Foley, H. P. (1985), Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Ithaca and London. –––– (1993), ‘The Politics of Tragic Lamentation’, in Sommerstein et al. (1993), 101–43. Fowler, D. (1997), ‘Second Thoughts on Closure’, in D. H. Roberts, F. M. Dunn, and D. Fowler (eds.), Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature, Princeton. Gamble, R. B. (1970), ‘Euripides’ Suppliant Women: Decision and Ambivalence’, Hermes 98: 385–405. Gill, C., Postlethwaite, N., and Seaford, R. (1998) (eds.), Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, Oxford. Gödde, S. (2000), Das Drama der Hikesie: Ritual und Rhetorik in Aischylos’ Hiketiden, Münster. Goldhill, S. (1996), ‘Collectivity and Otherness––the Authority of the Tragic Chorus: Response to Gould’, in Silk (1996), 244–56. –––– and Osborne, R. (1999) (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge Gould, J. (1973), ‘Hiketeia’, JHS 93: 74–103. –––– (1996), ‘Tragedy and Collective Experience’, in Silk (1996), 217–43. –––– (2001), Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture, Oxford. Greenwood, L. H. G. (1953), Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy, Cambridge. Grube, G. M. A. (1961), The Drama of Euripides, 2nd ed., London. Hall, E. (2001), ‘Introduction’, in R. Waterfield, E. Hall, and J. Morwood, Euripides: Ion, Orestes, Phoenician Women, Suppliant Women (Oxford), vii–xxxiv. Heldmann, G. (2005), ‘Euripides, Hiketiden 1970–2000’, Lustrum 47: 255–81. Hose, M. (1990), Studien zum Chor bei Euripides, Stuttgart. Humphreys, S. C. (1993), The Family, Women and Death: Comparative Studies, Ann Arbor. Jouan, F. (1997), ‘Les rites funéraires dans les Suppliantes d’ Euripide’, Kernos 10: 215–32.

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Kavoulaki, A. (1999), ‘Processional Performance and the Democratic Polis’, in Goldhill and Osborne (1999), 293–320. –––– (forthcoming), ‘Confronting the Dead: Euripides’ Hiketides 794–954’, in E. Karamalegou and E. Makrygianni (eds.), Studies in Honour of Prof. J.-Th. Papademetrion, Stuttgart. Kearns, E. (1989), The Heroes of Attica, BICS Suppl. 57, London. Krummen, E. (1993), ‘Athens and Attica: Polis and Countryside in Tragedy’, in Sommerstein et al. (1993), 191–218. Kuch, H. (2005), ‘Euripides und das Heroische. Reflexionen zu den Hiketiden’, AAAHung 45: 1–25. Lienhardt, G. (1961), Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka, Oxford. Loraux, N. (1986), The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. A. Sheridan, Cambridge, Mass. –––– (1998), Mothers in Mourning, trans. C. Pache, Ithaca and London. Mendelsohn, D. (2002), Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays, Oxford. Michelini, A. (1991), ‘The Maze of Logos: Euripides, Suppliants 163–249’, Ramus 20: 16–36. –––– (1994), ‘Political Themes in Euripides’ Suppliants’, AJPh 115: 219–52. Mills, S. (1997), Theseus, Tragedy, and the Athenian Empire, Oxford. Missiou, A. (1992), The Subversive Oratory of Andokides: Politics, Ideology and Decision-Making in Democratic Athens, Cambridge. –––– (1998), ‘Reciprocal Generosity in the Foreign Affairs of Fifth-Century Athens and Sparta’, in Gill, Postlethwaite, and Seaford (1998), 181–98. Morris, I. (1987), Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State, Cambridge. Nagy, G. (1979), The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Baltimore and London. Parke, H. W. (1977), Festivals of the Athenians, London. Parker, R. C. T. (1996), Athenian Religion: A History, Oxford. Pelling, C. (1997), ‘Conclusion’, in id. (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford), 213–35. Rehm, R. (1988), ‘The Staging of Suppliant Plays’, GRBS 29: 263–307. –––– (1994), Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Wedding and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy, Princeton. –––– (2002), The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy, Princeton. Said, S. (1993), ‘Tragic Argos’, in Sommerstein et al. (1993), 167–89. Schlegel, A. W. (1923), Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Critical ed. by G. V. Amorelli, V.I–II, Bonn and Leipzig. Scully, S. (1996), ‘Orchestra and Stage in Euripides’ Suppliant Women’, Arion 3rd series 4: 61–84. Seaford, R. (1985), ‘The Destruction of Limits in Sophocles’ Elektra’, CQ 34: 315–23. –––– (1994), Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State, Oxford.

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Seremetakis (Σερεµετα´κη), K. N. (1994), H Tελευταα Λ.ξη στη Eυρπη τα rκρα: ∆ιασθηση, Θα´νατο, Γυνακε, trans. N. Mastrakoulis (Mαστρακολη), Athens. Shaw, M. (1982), ‘The Oθο of Theseus in the Suppliant Women’, Hermes 110: 3–19. Sifakis, G. M. (2007), ‘Τα παιδια´ στην αρχαα τραγωδα’, in Μελ.τε για το Αρχαο Θ.ατρο, Heraklion. (Orig. in BICS 26 (1979), 67–80). Silk, M. S. (1996) (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, Oxford. Smith, W. D. (1966), ‘Expressive Form in Euripides’ Suppliants’, HSPh 71: 151–170. Sommerstein, A. H. et al. (1993) (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis. Papers from the Greek Drama Conference, Nottingham 18–20 July 1990, Bari. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1995), ‘Male and Female, Public and Private, Ancient and Modern’, in E. D. Reeder (ed.), Pandora: Women in Classical Greece (Baltimore), 111–20. –––– (2003), Tragedy and Athenian Religion, Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford. –––– (2004), ‘Gendering the Athenian Funeral: Ritual Reality and Tragic Manipulations’, in Yatromanolakis and Roilos (2004), 161–188. Tambiah, S. J. (1985), Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass. Taplin, O. P. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1978), Greek Tragedy in Action, London. –––– (1995), ‘Opening Performance: Closing Texts?’, Essays in Criticism 45: 93–120. Toher, M. (2001), ‘Euripides’ Supplices and the Social Function of Funeral Ritual’, Hermes 129: 332–43. Tomlinson, R. A. (1972), Argos and the Argolid: From the End of the Bronze Age to the Roman Occupation, London. Valakas (Bαλα´κα), K. (2003), ‘Πολιτικ. και τελετουργικ. εικνε τη µυθικ  Aθ να στην αθηναϊκ τραγωδα’, in Patrikiou (Πατρικου), E. (ed.), Oκτ δοκµια για το αρχαο δρα´µα (Athens), 13–45. Whitehorne, J. E. G. (1986), ‘The Dead as Spectacle in Euripides’ Bacchae and Supplices’, Hermes 114: 59–72. Wilamowitz, U. von (1919), Griechische Tragödien, vols. I–III, Berlin. Wilson, P. and Taplin, O. (1993), ‘The “Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 39: 169–180. Yatromanolakis, D. and Roilos, P. (2004) (eds.), Greek Ritual Poetics, Cambridge, Mass. and London. Zuntz, G. (1955), The Political Plays of Euripides, Manchester.

13 Intimate Relations: Children, Childbearing, and Parentage on the Euripidean Stage Froma I. Zeitlin

In Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae, produced in 411 bce, Euripides’ kinsman, who has infiltrated the women’s festival in transvestite garb has just been unmasked as a male impostor. In a desperate attempt to save himself, he snatches a baby from one of the women, threatening to kill the child at the altar if he is not released. The audience ought to recognize this as a parody of a scene from Euripides’ Telephus, even though produced almost thirty years earlier (in 438) because, if nothing else, Aristophanes’ fondness for this play throughout his career ensured its afterlife, at least in the comic theatre. The Telephus is parodied, quoted, or alluded to in eight of Aristophanes’ surviving plays, and in the Frogs, the character Euripides names it last and best in his own list of plays (863–4). Alan Sommerstein speculates that the fame of the Telephus may have been due to the fact that it was the first to introduce the long line of Euripides’ ‘ragged heroes’,1 but the novelty of its sensational plot surely also relied on the presence of an infant on stage and the ploy of taking it hostage. The runner-up for the number of parodic citations (7) in Aristophanic comedy of Euripidean tragedy was the Alcestis. It too is an unusual play in several respects, including a rather remarkable scene in which one of Alcestis’s offspring is allowed to voice a lament over his mother’s lifeless body that veers between the conventional forms and his childlike reactions.2 This experiment of allowing children a lyric voice of their own on stage is repeated twice more in the extant corpus of early Euripidean drama: Andromache (428–424 bce) in her small son’s duet with his mother (501–14, 523–36) in the drama of that name and the Suppliant Women, dated to about the same period (between 430 and 420 bce), which featured a subsidiary chorus of young boys who perform a lament for their fallen Argive fathers (1114–64 passim). Thereafter, as far as we know, with a few minor exceptions 1

Sommerstein (1994), 6.

2

Koonce (1962), 184–8, pace Sifakis (1979), 69.

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(such as the cries offstage of Medea’s little boys, Med. 1271–80), children will be silent presences on stage. But even without speaking parts, they play remarkably prominent roles in Euripidean tragedy, from Alcestis, the first extant play, to the last, Iphigenia in Aulis, in which the small Orestes appears at Aulis with his mother, and the doomed Iphigenia pleads with her little brother to help her in supplicating their father, Agamemnon (IA 465, 1241). Statistically, nine of the seventeen extant plays present one or more children on stage.3 Among the fragmentary ones, there are, besides Telephus, several others.4 But our list could extend much further, if we take into consideration the entire corpus, where children––born and unborn, the circumstances of their births, their fates, and their family relations––are the focal point of tragic action or reaction. Children are under constant threat of persecution and death, whether on stage or not. They are suppliants at altars, sometimes with their mothers, like the offspring of Heracles in the Heracles and the Heracleidae or that of Andromache. They are taken hostage, as we have noted, and along with women and old folk, they are the most vulnerable victims during war or in its aftermath: orphans as in the Suppliant Women, or sacrifices to the victors, like Polyxena in the Hecuba and Hector’s offspring Astyanax in the Troades. Their births may have been irregular, so from the start their unhappy mothers may have had to expose them or plead for their lives––generally from a male relative (Ion, Auge, Danae, Alope, Melanippe). Children too are the prey of other women, who may be rivals of their mothers or jealous for their own children (Ino, Phrixus I and II). They may be instruments of maternal vengeance, like the children of the Thracian king, Polymestor, in the Hecuba. As in the Medea, the mother herself may be the destroyer of her progeny, wittingly or not, like Agave in the Bacchae, or potentially so, as Creusa’s attempt on her yet unrecognized son in the Ion. Euripides also has a fondness for a very different kind of plot in which sons, separated from their mother at birth or in early babyhood, return as adults and eventually rescue her from a threatening situation. This scenario, involving a double anagnôrisis, so admired by Aristotle, in which neither recognizes the other, is exemplified in two plays (Hypsipyle and Antiope, known to us from extensive fragments)––the first set in Nemea near Corinth and the other in Eleutherae outside Thebes. In each case the mother has fallen on hard times, bound into service to another man’s wife (Eurydice, wife of King Lycus 3 Alcestis, Medea, Heracleidae, Andromache, Hecuba, Heracles, Suppliants, Troades, Iphigenia at Aulis. 4 Theseus 385 Kn. and 386 Kn. (parodied in Ar. Vesp. 312 and 314) and perhaps Alcmaeon B 84 Kn. For the inventory, see Menu (1992), 239–42. On children in tragedy, see more generally Deforge (1995), Sifakis (1979), and more briefly Kassel (1954), 33–55.

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of Nemea; Dirce, wife of Lycus in Thebes, respectively). Elsewhere I have proposed that this scenario of ‘lost ones safely found’ might have followed the mythic pattern of Dionysus’s descent into the underworld to rescue his mother, Semele, and to restore her to life and a proper position of honour.5 The complementary motif of a mother’s mistreatment at the hands of another woman (Eurydice, Dirce) is another theme, starting with the goddess Hera’s persecution of Zeus’ children, especially Dionysus.6 We might recall, in any case, that Agave’s sisters in the Bacchae are driven mad, precisely because they have slandered their sister in refusing to acknowledge the circumstances of her child’s divine conception and birth (26–34). Both Antiope and the Hypsipyle, for their part, are directly linked to Dionysus, whether in cult (Dirce is a maenad) or in myth (Hypsipyle’s children are descended from Dionysus, and his golden vine is the sign of their pedigree). Additionally, the latter play introduces perhaps yet another significant Dionysiac element, that of a child reared, not by a mother, but by nurses. Hypsipyle, in exile from Lemnos at Nemea, is now in service at the house of the local rulers (Lycurgus and Eurydice) as a nurse to their child Opheltes. We do not know whether this child too appeared on stage, but his activities are certainly described in a few of the play’s fragments, and it is his accidental death by snakebite beside a sacred spring, while in Hypsipyle’s care, that precipitates the dramatic crisis, which is resolved finally only by the appearance of her long-lost sons. In the Ino, an explicitly Dionysiac play, the heroine, a daughter of Cadmus, married to Athamas of Thessaly and mother of his two sons, had disappeared when she went as a bacchant to Parnassus. Athamas, thinking she was dead, married another woman (Themisto) who gave him another two sons. Discovering she was alive, Athamas brought Ino back incognito to his household where she was employed as a nurse to all four children. The rest of this complicated drama involves the respective fates of these two sets of children: Themisto’s plot to kill Ino’s children results in the death of her own by Ino’s cunning intervention. The play ends with the loss of these other children too, one by his father’s hand, who killed him when driven mad, and the other, who leapt with his mother into the sea to both their deaths.7 5 See Zeitlin (1993), 175–6. Other relevant Euripidean plays include Auge (Auge and Telephus), Cresphontes (Cresphontes and Merope), and Melanippe Desmotis (Melanippe and sons Aeolus and Boeotus). 6 Philip Slater (1968) makes much of Hera as persecutor of other women’s children. See also Hall (2006) on the babyhood of Dionysus in accounting for interest in childbirth. 7 In Euripidean drama, Ino oscillates between two roles: another woman’s victim (as in Ino) or her oppressor (this time, of Nephele), as in Phrixus I and II. His predecessors choose one or another of these alternatives.

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In the broader mythological tradition, Ino is generally associated with the child Dionysus as one of his nurses, but there are other instances in Euripidean drama, where the theme of a surrogate mother has nothing, as it were, to do with Dionysus at all. In the Phoenician Women, Jocasta, wife of Oedipus, is not only mother to her own children, Antigone and the two warring sons Eteocles and Polynices, but Creon’s son Menoeceus is also her fosterling. Orphaned of his own mother as a baby, he nursed, we are told, at Jocasta’s breast. It is to her he pretends he will now turn to save him in the face of the prophet’s decree that he die as a sacrifice in order to assure the city of Thebes’ salvation (986–9). And it is to her that Creon will subsequently turn to prepare the son’s body for burial in the aftermath of his self-immolation (1318–20). I will have more to say both about what one might call Jocasta’s hypermaternity and about his father’s resistance to the sacrifice of his son on behalf of the polis. I remark here only that no reason intrinsic to the plot requires Jocasta to have taken on this role. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the play, the Orestes in which Helen’s daughter Hermione had been entrusted to Clytemnestra’s care when her mother sailed to Troy. This is why she feels obligated to carry libations to the dead woman’s tomb in recompense for her trophê (64, 109).8 Finally, on a more institutional level is the foundling Ion. In reality the child of Apollo by his rape of the Athenian princess Creusa, he has been raised at Delphi by the Pythian priestess, who having discovered the nameless baby on the doorstep of the temple, took pity on him and reared him. The entire play, Ion, in fact revolves around questions of parentage, both mother and fathers, both actual and fictive. It deploys the motif of the child exposed at birth to explore the contributions of both nature and nurture to the self’s identity, political elements of genealogy and inheritance, the merits of adoption, along with the theme, so dear to Greek myth, of a tension between opposing maternal figures, one positive and one negative.9 Yet this list would not be complete without mention of Andromache’s remarkable statement in the play of that name, who declares to the angry Hermione, now co-wife to Achilles’ son, that when her late husband Hector strayed, she on more than one occasion offered her breast to his bastards as a 8 Although in the Oresteia and later versions Clytemnestra in the aftermath of slaying her husband turns against her own children as they against her, Hermione in this play is perhaps a surrogate daughter, who takes the place of Iphigenia, so much loved by her mother. This suggestion may be borne out by the subsequent threat of Electra, Orestes, and Pylades to take Hermione’s life in return for the dead sister. 9 See Zeitlin (1989: 1996) where I argued for the representation of Ion as a Dionysiac child. For the polarity of ‘good’ mother and ‘bad’ mother in respect of the birth stories of Dionysus and Apollo, see Zeitlin (2002).

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wet nurse, so as to retain his love (222–7). In Homer and elsewhere Hector and Andromache are emblems of the ideal conjugal couple, bonded in an exclusive relationship. If Andromache in Euripides’ play suggests otherwise, it is to enhance not only her love of Hector but also her capacious maternal feelings, all the more noteworthy because of the present circumstances. Her first child Astyanax was doomed to extinction with the fall of Troy (as in the Troades). The other, Molossus, as here in Sparta, although ironically the offspring of her husband’s slayer, is no less loved, but also no less threatened, even if he is saved at the end in a remarkable denouement. If Euripides dramatizes the solidarity of women among themselves, suffering common pain and supporting one another, especially when his female choruses are in league with female characters (Ion, Hippolytus, Medea), he also opens a window on to the jealous rivalries of women. These most often, in fact, revolve around the issue of children, whether in competition, as in the case of Ino and Themisto, or as here in the Andromache when one (Andromache) is a mother twice over and the other (Hermione) is barren. Infertility was, of course, a realistic concern among families. The gynaecological texts with their pronatalist outlook offer a number of remedies; women made offerings especially to Hera, and Demetrian festivals celebrated fertility at all levels. But Euripides is the first to introduce this theme into high literature by giving expression to these yearnings to women and, even more unusually, to men. In the Ion, Creusa and Xuthus have gone to the oracle at Delphi to consult about their childlessness, just as countless other anonymous folk did in real life. The oracle at Dodona was the destination of Temenus, son of Hyllus, in the lost play, Archelaus (fr. 2.19–21 Austin = 228a Kannicht) for the same purpose. Above all, there is Aegeus in the Medea who, arriving in Corinth from Delphi where he has received an oracle concerning his apaidia (childlessness), grants Medea a future refuge in Athens in return for her promise to grant him offspring (717–18).10 Erôs paidôn is a curious phrase, used more than once in Euripides to express this passionate desire for children. ‘Seeing others who had children, I had a passion for children and was lost in longing’, says the aged Iphis in Euripides’ Suppliant Women (1087–8) (cf. Ion 67, 1227), and this sentiment is echoed elsewhere.11 Perhaps the most rapturous expression of this sentiment is a fragment from the Danae, a play concerning the ill-fated mother of Perseus (fr. 316 Kn.): 10

On Euripides’ innovative deployment of the semantics of childlessness in both biological and institutional terms, see Barone (1987). 11 See Golden (1990), 90 and n. 43.

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Fair is the light of the sun, and fair to see the windless swell of the sea, and the earth blooming in the springtime and the wealth of water. I may speak the praise of many fair things, but nothing is as bright or as fair to see, for those who are childless and stung with desire (pothos), as the bloom (thalos) of new-born children in the house.

The theme of yearning for children leads to one of Euripides’ most brilliant innovations in his Electra. Living as an outcast from the palace in Argos, Electra has been forcibly married off to a peasant to forestall the possibility of a future child avenger, but out of respect for her noble pedigree, he has refrained from consummating their union. Hence she occupies the twilight position of a wife, who is no wife. But the ruse she invents to bring Clytemnestra to her humble dwelling, where Orestes awaits her, is none other than the news that she has just given birth. It is a clever move, designed perhaps to count on her mother’s anxiety about a future avenger. Yet in this fiction is also a remarkable psychological touch that expresses the depths of Electra’s longing, which arise counterfactually out of her barren and indeed fictional marriage.12 Philoteknos (fond of children) is also a special word in Euripidean drama. Before him, its use is only attested in Herodotus and then in describing the nature of Egyptian cats (2.66.9). But in Euripides, we hear the term again and again. Philoteknia is what one naturally expects from women. Their love of children is a commonplace, as one might expect in a society in which children, especially male children, give women status and legitimate their adult existence, and likewise the physical bond that unites them. ‘I love my children’, says Megara in the Heracles. ‘How could I not love those whom I bore and laboured for’ (265; cf Erechtheus, fr. 358 Kn.). But later when Heracles asserts his willingness to assume the homely tasks associated with the ‘nursery of children’, the therapeuma paidôn, he stresses the democratic principles of philoteknia, for mothers and for fathers, and indeed for all humankind. ‘Both the best of mortals and those who are nobodies love children; they differ in material things; some have property and some do not, but the whole race (genos) is child-loving (philoteknon)’ (633–6). The Phoenician Women also at first speaks of maternal nature, when referring to Jocasta’s intervention in the quarrel between her sons. As the chorus observes, ‘terrible are the pangs of childbirth for women, and yet somehow the whole race of women (pan gynaikeion genos) is philoteknon (356). But 12 Her situation is all the more explicable in that Clytemnestra, in this version, is again a mother of children, this time by Aegisthus. See the pertinent remarks of Hall (2006), 77–80.

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later it is Creon, who in refusing the demand for the sacrifice of his son, justifies his response by exclaiming: ‘For a life that is philoteknos is common to all human beings, nor would anyone give up his own child to be killed’ (965– 6). A speaker in a fragment from the lost play, Dictys, goes even further in extending the koinos nomos of loving the children not just to humankind (anthrôpoi) but to gods and beasts (346 Kn.). Andromache, in the throes of her dilemma––to surrender either herself or her child to death––laments at first that giving birth to Neoptolemus’s son has only doubled her misfortunes (And. 395–6). Nevertheless, in offering to sacrifice herself to save her little son (because for everyone their children are their life, psuchê), she insists on the paradox that ‘the childless who find fault with those who are not, may suffer less pain, but their happiness is a hollow misfortune’ (418–20). Others are less certain: Iphis in Suppliant Women, who had longed for children when he saw others begetting them, changes his mind in his grief. If he had known he would have the pain of losing them, he would never have come to this point of misery (1087–91). Admetus in the aftermath of Alcestis’ death has the effrontery ‘to envy the unmarried and childless among mortals’. The reason is ‘they have but a single soul, and to feel its pains is only a moderate burden, but diseases of children and wives snatched by death from their marriage beds are unendurable when one could live unwed and childless all one’s days’ (Alc. 882–8). Admetus’ lament, is, of course ironic, given his circumstances, but this self-centred expression of bereavement is a commonplace. Grief for another is a burden, but more generally, so are the risks attendant on bearing offspring altogether. The ode in the Medea, of course, is the most famous reflection (1090–111): . . . those who have never had children, who know nothing of them, surpass in happiness those who are parents. The childless, who never discover whether children turn out as a good thing or as something to cause pain, are spared many troubles in lacking this knowledge. And those who have in their homes the sweet growth of children, I see them always worn down by worry. First how to bring them up well and leave them something to live on. And then whether all their toil is for progeny who may turn out well or not remains unclear. Finally [I paraphrase here], even under the best of circumstances, death may still carry them off.

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We hear echoes of the same sentiments in a fragment of the Oenomaus, fr. 571 Kn., which deems even prudent children (sôphrones) a great woe, because it engenders still more parental anxiety for their welfare, an idea that recurs in yet another fragment from an unknown play (fr. 908 Kn.). More broadly, the topic must have been current in Euripides’ day, especially among sophists and philosophers. Antiphon is quoted as saying, ‘Suppose children are born; then all is full of anxiety, and the youthful spring goes out of the mind, and the countenance is no longer the same’ (end of F 49 Pendrick). In one of several quite lengthy statements on the subject, Democritus takes yet another turn to suggest that to avoid the risks of not knowing how children might turn out, it is better to choose offspring to one’s liking from the family of a friend (277 DK). Perhaps Hippolytus’s fanciful wish that one could buy children from the gods in the temples, each according to one’s own worth (618–24), is not quite as outlandish as it might at first seem. On the other hand, Democritus may be referring to the perfectly legal procedure of adoption (technically called poiêsis or eispoiêsis) as a remedy for childlessness, and the accepted means by which one might ‘make’ another man’s child one’s own. The issue of adoption is very much alive in the case of Ion. Child of a god (Apollo) and a mortal (Creusa, heiress of the royal house of Athens), he is not the son of her husband Xuthus. In the crisscrossing of identities in this complex plot (who is the father, who is the mother: what belongs to nature and what to nurture), the drama validates the two institutions of fosterage (the Pythia) in the first instance and (fictive) adoption in the second. A god may be his real father, but truth finally takes a back seat to civic realities, if Ion’s pedigree from his birth mother, Creusa, is to assure him of a place in the city. As Creusa declares at the end: Apollo gave his son as a gift to one who did not beget him, ‘as sometimes happens when a friend gives another friend his son, that he may be master of a house’ (1532–6).13 To accomplish this end, Apollo subverts the veracity of his own oracle to promise Xuthus that the first person he met would be his son, who turns out, of course, to be none other than the boy Ion. Just before the former emerges from the shrine, the chorus all unknowing prays to the goddesses Athena, Nike, and Artemis to grant that ‘the ancient race of Erechtheus win the grace of good children (euteknia), even if late in coming’. And they continue with the most conventional expression of the joys that one’s own children bring to a household and city (472–84): 13

See Zeitlin (1989: 1996) with further bibliography. Space does not permit the discussion of a third way of begetting children in the Ion: in addition to birth and adoption, there is autochthony. For a negative view of adoption, however, see Melanippe Desmotis fr. 491Kn.

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Virtually all the traditional norms are recorded here: the child is a guarantor of happiness and prosperity; he is an instrument for the transmission of property to future generations; he is a saving protection for the house, an anchor for the continuity of the genos, a patriotic defender of the city in time of war. Missing in this list is only a mention of the value of children as support for their parents in old age (gêrotrophia) and their obligation to attend to their parents’ burial rites, a favourite theme of Euripides elsewhere.14 The immediate context is ironic, but it validates in advance the compromise reached by the end of the play that gives Xuthus a son and Athens its true heir. None of these sentiments about children’s roles in family and society, whether positive or negative, are exclusive to Euripides, although he may express them more frequently and in poetic form. What is significant, however, is that Euripides provides such a great a quantity of sententiae about children that quotations from his work fill a large part of those sections in Stobaeus’ Anthology that deal with children, their value, their roles, and their relations to their parents (Anth. 4.24–30). But several features in particular seem to me to characterize Euripides’ dramaturgy when it comes to children. In the first instance, I earlier emphasized patterns of myth pertaining to Dionysus’s life story, from birth on, which may lie behind a number of plots or elements in those plots. These have the effect of drawing even those non-explicitly Dionysiac stories into the god’s orbit. Such correspondences would be entirely in keeping with the wealth of Dionysiac references in his drama, whether in fact or in metaphor, and with what some have attributed to the god’s influence in Euripides’ preoccupation with the ‘strength of the weak,’ especially women, children, and old folk.15 A second feature, more broadly speaking, is a striking tendency to establish an antithesis between two types of women––the good mother, demonstrating

14 The context generally is in the aftermath of war when mothers, now apaides and ateknoi, mourn their dead children. See e.g. Suppliant Women, Hecuba, and Troades. For discussion of these norms, see Raepsaet (1971). 15 Förs (1964).

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strong and protective maternal attachment,16 who is countered by a malevolent female figure, a potential if not actual child destroyer. I have given evidence of these diametrical oppositions and their variations in the plots I earlier described, and other examples might also be brought forward in support of this argument. Especially striking, however, is a situation where one female character embodies both sides. Let us return to Creusa in the Ion. In a single moment she ceases to be the sympathetic figure who shares a common loss with her unrecognized son Ion; instantly upon learning that her husband Xuthus has been named this boy’s father, she is ready to acquiesce in her old servant’s plot to kill the interloper by poison at a banquet. She carries as the family’s hereditary gift from Athena a vial with two drops of the Gorgon’s blood; one is the good, the nurturant drop, and the other is a lethal poison (1010–17). No symbol could better express the double-sidedness of woman’s nature, as represented in the Greek imaginary. Herself a victim of Apollo’s rape, remorseful at the loss of the child from that union whom she felt compelled to expose at birth, and in grief now at her own childlessness, Creusa is easily persuaded to turn against another child, even if she does so to protect the purity of her family line, the house of Erechtheus, from a foreign intruder, and in retaliation for her husband’s perfidy in claiming Ion as his own. Complicating Creusa’s psychology is also the fact that alone among her sisters she was spared sacrifice by her father Erecththeus who gave them up in order to save the city, because at the time she herself was a mere babe in arms (277–80). Hecuba in the play of that name also fits into this pattern. Passionately attached to her daughter Polyxena, who after the fall of Troy is led off as a sacrifice by the Greeks to appease the ghost of Achilles, and struck by a second blow in the discovery of her last remaining male child’s brutal murder at the hands of the Thracian king Polymestor and the theft of the Trojan gold she had sent with him for safekeeping, Hecuba takes her revenge by making him witness the deaths of his own children before she and her women blind him. This scenario, as I have observed elsewhere, follows a formal pattern, which goes as follows: ‘Men instigate the original offense; women retaliate, and the violence of the first is more than outdone by the savagery of their later reprisals. The women pass through three predictable stages that lead from grief to anger and from anger to a revenge. The form of this revenge plots a deception which ends in an assault on the body of the other, often a child, and some parodistic replay of the feminine, especially maternal, role.’17 Medea Such figures also include virginal elder sisters, as in the case of Iphigenia in the IT and IA. Zeitlin (1991: 1996), 210. See also Loraux’s discussion (1998), 76 for this threefold progression. 16 17

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too, to a large extent, undergoes the same kind of reversal, even though when we first encounter her, anger is already a dominant emotion. In this case, of course, the victims are her own children, but we detect the same ambivalence between her love for them and the motivations for their killing. Given the strong social bias in favour of paternal filiation, Medea and Hecuba are the best examples of women who can punish men precisely by destroying their children (and with them, the future of their genos), through their shift from nurturant to destructive mothers. Medea, in fact, throughout the play, exploits more than one man’s attachment to children in order to effect her ends: a son, her brother (Apsyrtus); a beloved daughter (Creusa), and the promise in return for sanctuary of curing infertility (Aegeus). Finally, of course, there is her revenge upon Jason, that weakest and most opportunistic of men, which deprives him both of his and Medea’s children as well as of any offspring he might have hoped to engender with his new wife. While the prominent role assigned to children is in keeping with the greater pathos of Euripidean theatre and its focus on the psychological state of individuals, the Medea and certainly the Ion also seem to challenge, or at least to problematize, the fact that every child has two parents, and to raise the question (that Aeschylus’ Eumenides thought it had resolved), to whom does the child belong––the father or the mother? This concomitant ascendance of maternity over paternity that demonstrates the power to wipe out a man’s progeny, and with it his future, also entails another side, that involves a certain reversal of roles. Hence Heracles, in killing his own children in his maddened state, when he had just announced that he valued his domestic responsibilities over his heroic exploits, can only be compared to deadly females, who retaliated against men: to the Danaids, who slew their bridegrooms and, more to the point, to Procne, who killed her only child (1016–22).18 This partiality to the oikos has its counterpart, as noted above, when Creon in the Phoenissae refuses to allow his son to be sacrificed on behalf of the city’s salvation. In Sophocles’ Antigone, he too had demanded obedience from a son––the other son, Haemon, whom he accuses of supporting his bride-to-be to the detriment of his father’s interests. There his error was to treat a filial relationship as a political one, on the analogy of ruler and subject, and he feels justified in his harsh treatment of Haemon in his desire to restore stability to the city in the wake of a fratricidal war. In both plays, however, Creon proves an inadequate leader, but for exactly opposite reasons. In the Antigone, he undervalues family relationships, and in the Phoenissae, we might say, he overvalues his 18 This, despite the fact that in Dionysiac myths men may also be driven mad and kill their children, as did the Thracian king Lycurgus.

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personal ties to the city’s potential ruin. Within that play, it is Jocasta, both an exemplary mother and the porte-parole for the correct political values, who dominates the proceedings. Foster-mother of Creon’s son, as we have seen, she also tries her powers of persuasion, in both her roles, to reconcile the two brothers, and when failing to do so, she kills herself over their corpses. While a fragment of the sixth-century poet Stesichorus indicates a likely precedent for Jocasta’s active, mediating role between the brothers (fr. 222b Davies), Euripides’ emphasis on the maternal qualities of Jocasta and the tragic consequences of her passionate devotion are surely his own elaboration. The play decisively shifts the mythic and dramatic perspective to spotlight the affective bonds between mother and sons at this, the last stage in the history of the paternal house of Laius, while at the same time, her actions only point up further the political inadequacies of her male kinsman Creon. The counterpart to Creon’s behaviour in the Phoenissae can be found in an equivalent reversal of roles in the figure of Praxithea, wife of Erechtheus king of Athens, who gives his name to the play. The city is threatened, like Thebes, by a foreign force, led by Eumolpus of Eleusis, and the city’s salvation, it is learned, also depends on the human sacrifice of a member of the ruling family. Creon’s Menoeceus was unusual in the roster of such victims, since the typical requirement is for a virgin daughter (whether Iphigenia in the Iphigenia at Aulis, or Macaria in the Heracleidae, or even Polyxena in the Hecuba). The Erechtheus returns to this primary model in the demand for a daughter to save the city. But it also reverses the typical gender roles. Now it is the girl’s mother Praxithea who supports the necessity of giving over her child to death in the face of danger to the city, by insisting that the rights of the birth mother yield to those of the polis. It is not that Praxithea loves her daughter any less, and indeed she grieves deeply over her losses (including the death of her husband). But for selfless devotion to the city’s welfare, she is rewarded by Athena in the establishment of new cults and new foundations for the members of her family. Euripides may be advocating a greater stake for women in the body politic, an idea parodied on the comic stage in this period. He might also be tweaking masculine pretensions to heroic virtue, a common theme in his theatre, in which more than one female character yearns for kleos or renown. Or by these unexpected inversions, he may also be reinforcing the efficacy of the customary norms. What conclusions can we draw after this all too brief survey? Why the prominence of children to such a degree in Euripidean theatre, whether on stage or not? Certainly, there is no simple explanation, nor could there be, considering the many different possible ramifications involved. From a psychological viewpoint, Euripides’ concern with maternal affect, the closeness of emotional bonds between mother and child, and the pathos of separation

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and loss, whether threatened or actual, felt by each, might suggest far more than the redress of official paternal authority in a new valuation of family ties and the promotion of a newly felt, or at least newly expressed, kind of intimate detail. Ion’s grief over his mother’s abandonment is voiced as regret that he was not held in her embrace (1375–7; cf. 1443–4). Likewise, although with sinister irony, Pentheus, on his way to wreak violence on the Theban women in the Bacchae, longs to be carried back in his mother’s arms (968–9). Euripides dwells on the sensuous features of childhood––the soft skin, the bright eyes, the babyish gestures, the smallness of form––in the Andromache, for example, but to an unparalleled degree in Hecuba’s great scene in the Troades, when preparing to bury the broken body of her grandson, Astyanax, who has been hurled from the walls of Troy. Certainly, too, the child is a staging ground for conflicts between public and private, between oikos and polis, between an expedient and often ruthless politics in which, for the most part, men’s brutal actions only highlight the moral failings of a demagogic system. This is especially the case in the Trojan plays, whether in the Troades or the Hecuba. In this last play, Polyxena’s noble courage as a sacrificial victim calls Achilles’ very heroic stature into question, now that a ghost demands the captive girl’s life in return for the Greeks’ safe passage home. It shames the Greek army, and Agamemnon’s capitulation to the clamour of the Greek army for Polyxena’s death is but an eerie reply of his willingness to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia at the start of the expedition to Troy some ten years before. If in a later play, the Iphigenia in Aulis, which returns us to that previous time, he at first resists the demand for her sacrifice, he is much the same Agamemnon with regard to his character and lowered standard of manliness. And once again a girl, a virgin sacrifice, points up the gap between her heroism and that of a male, in this case that of Achilles, her intended bridegroom. The old, the weak, and the young most often triumph in the end, despite the helpless pathos of their situations. Certainly, Euripides’ interest in children and in the domestication of civic values can be paralleled in other developments of the period. Studies of mourning rituals, both in the style and themes of polychrome white-ground lekythoi and in the drastic changes observed in funerary monuments, once they appear in the last quarter of the fifth century after a hiatus of almost fifty years, suggest new expressions of family intimacy. Previously, such monuments took the form of upright stelai, most often depicting the ephebe, athlete, or warrior in heroic guise, attesting to the power of aristocratic values. Now, in shape and iconography, the favoured types represented tableaux of private, daily, and affective life, which included images of children as integral members of the family circle, along with their mothers and other female figures of the household. Children themselves may be the objects of

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mourning by their loved ones, whether in these sculpted monuments or on white-ground lekythoi. More than one archaeologist offers the explanation that this new focus on children was the result of both the plague in Athens and the losses in the Peloponnesian War. What this meant, we are told, is that ‘the death of a child . . . must therefore have taken on even greater poignancy than heretofore and prompted a search for ways in which to more tangibly express the profound private grief suffered by so many.’19 I confess that I am deeply suspicious as to how to interpret these apparent shifts. The idea that children are more valued in the fifth century, first because of citizenship laws in the polis, as has also been suggested, and secondly as a reaction to depopulation in the face of catastrophe, remains pure speculation. Above all, such explanations flatten out the range and intensity of Euripides’ prominent focus on the child’s condition in his theatre and the psychology of human relationships. More convincing, it seems to me, that Euripides takes part in, and even advance a trend towards an increasing valorization of emotional expression, bordering on the sentimental, in the frame of private, individual experience, whether in literature or art. Yet, finally, Euripides deserves more than this.20 19 Beaumont (2003), 75. See too Oakley (2003), Decocq and Raepset (1987), Hirsch-Dyczek (1983). 20 I offer this modest essay in homage to Oliver Taplin’s pioneering role as a brilliant and innovative critic of Greek literature and life. His contributions in particular to our understanding of the dramatic arts, whether of tragedy or comedy, whether on the Athenian or the modern stage, never cease to inform and enhance our own sensibilities.

REFERENCES Auger, D. (1995) (ed.), Enfants et enfances dans les mythologies: Actes du VIIe colloque du Centre de Recherches Mythologiques, Chantilly 16–18 septembre 1992, Paris. Barone, C. (1987), ‘L’apaidia in Euripide’, MD 18: 57–67. Beaumont, L. (2003), ‘The Changing Face of Childhood’, in Neils and Oakley (2003), 59–83. Decocq, Cl. and Raepsaet, G. (1987), ‘Deux regards sur l’enfance athénienne à l’époque athénienne à l’époque classique. Images funéraires et choés’, LEC 55: 3–15. Deforge, B. (1995) ‘Les enfants tragiques’, in Auger (1995), 105–121. Förs, H. (1964), Dionysos und die Stärke der Schwachen im Werk des Euripides, Bamberg. Golden, M. (1990), Children and Childhood in Classical Athens, Baltimore and London.

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Hall, E. (2006), The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society, Oxford. Hirsch-Dyczek, O. (1983), Les représentations des enfants sur les stèles funéraires attiques, Warsaw and Krakow. Ingalls, W. B. (1998), ‘Attitudes towards Children in the Iliad’, Échos du Monde classique / Classical Views 42 : 13–34. Kassel, R. (1954), Quomodo quibus locis apud veteres scriptores Graecos infantes atque parvuli pueri inducantur describantur commemorentur, Meisenheim am Glan = Kleine Schriften, ed. H.-G. Nesselrath (Berlin and New York, 1991), 1–73. Koonce, D. (1962), Formal Lamentation for the Dead in Greek Tragedy, PhD University of Pennsylvania. Loraux, N. (1998), Mothers in Mourning, trans. C. Pache, Ithaca, NY. Menu, M. (1992), ‘L’enfant chez Euripide: affectivité et dramaturgie’, Pallas 38: 239–58. Neils, J. and Oakley, J. H. (2003) (eds.), Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past, New Haven. Oakley, J. H. (2003), ‘Death and the Child’, in Neils and Oakley (2003), 163–94. Raepsaet, G. (1971), ‘Les motivations de la natalité à Athènes aux V et IV siècles avant notre ère’, AC 40: 80–110. Sifakis G. M. (1979), ‘Children in Greek Tragedy’, BICS 26 : 67–80. Slater, P. (1968), The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family, Boston. Sommerstein, A. (1994), Aristophanes, ‘Thesmophoriazusae’, Warminster. Zeitlin, F. I. (1989: 1996), ‘Mysteries of Identity and Designs of the Self in Euripides’ Ion’, in Zeitlin (1996), 285–338. –––– (1991: 1996), ‘The Body’s Revenge: Dionysos and Tragic Action in Euripides’ Hekabe’, in Zeitlin (1996), 172–216. –––– (1993), ‘Staging Dionysus between Thebes and Athens’, in T. Carpenter and C. Faraone (eds.), Masks of Dionysus (Ithaca, NY), 147–82. –––– (1996), Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature, Chicago. –––– (2002), ‘Apollo and Dionysos: Starting from Birth’, in H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, H. W. Singor, F. T. Van Straten, and J. H. M. Strubbe (eds.), Kykeon: Symposium in Honor of Henk Versnel (Leiden), 194–218.

14 Character and Characterization in Greek Tragedy Bernd Seidensticker

Over the last three decades there has been a lively and controversial discussion––mainly among anglophone scholars––about the importance of character and characterization in Greek tragedy.1 Since it seems that a kind of communis opinio has been reached according to which character and characterization are of little, if any, importance for Greek tragedy, it may be the time to put together and review the arguments, which have been brought forward against a character-oriented interpretation.

I The natural starting point of the debate is given by Aristotle’s remarks about action and character and their interrelation. In the sixth chapter of the Poetics, Aristotle states (1450a15) that the most important of the six elements of tragedy is 9 τ%ν πραγµα´των σστασι (the arrangement of the different actions and events of a story into a cohesive dramatic plot) and goes on to substantiate his claim of the absolute priority of πρα˜ξι (action) above Oθο (character) by a long series of arguments (1450a15–17, 20–3): µ.γιστον δ τοτων 0στ2ν 9 τ%ν πραγµα´των σστασι. 9 γα`ρ τραγ(δα µµησ 0στιν οκ α#νθρπων α#λλα` πρα´ξεων κα2 βου . . . οIκουν 8πω τα` Aθη µιµ σωνται πρα´ττουσιν, α#λλα` τα` Aθη συµπεριλαµβα´νουσιν δια` τα` πρα´ξει· sστε τα` πρα´γµατα κα2 E µ&θο τ.λο τD τραγ(δα, τ δ τ.λο µ.γιστον α=πα´ντων. The most important of these elements is the structure of events, because tragedy is a representation not of people as such, but of actions and life . . . It is not, therefore,

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the functions of the agents’ action to allow the portrayal of their characters; it is, rather, for the sake of their actions that characterization is included. So, the events and the plot-structure are the goal of tragedy, and the goal is what matters most of all.

At the end of his argumentation he calls the plot α#ρχ (first principle) and ψυχ (soul, i.e. inner form) of tragedy (1450a38 f.). Many critics have pointed to the sixth chapter of the Poetics when they argue that character and characterization do not play a significant role in Greek tragedy––or no role at all. Quite apart, however, from the fact that the Poetics––as is agreed by now––cannot be used uncritically as a key to the interpretation of Greek tragedy,2 one must keep in mind that Aristotle does not ignore the importance of the tragic character and his characterization, but repeatedly––in various contexts––talks about different aspects of the dramatis personae and their representation. Thus in the thirteenth chapter of the Poetics Aristotle adds to his definition of the ideal hero a specification, the function of which apparently is to define the social position of the main characters. The ideal hero who, as a result of a ‘mistake’ (α=µαρτα), suffers the sudden reversal (µεταβολ ) from good to bad fortune, should belong to the class of those (1453a 10–12) τ%ν 0ν µεγα´λ7 δξ7 Fντων κα2 ετυχk, οBον Ο@δπου κα2 Θυ.στη κα2 οL 0κ τ%ν τοιοτων γεν%ν 0πιφανε, αHνδρε. who enjoy great esteem and prosperity, such as Oedipus, Thyestes, and outstanding men from such families.3

Aristotle, however, attributes greater importance to the moral quality of the tragic hero than to his or her social position. In the second chapter of the Poetics, in the context of his general remarks on the objects of artistic mimesis, Aristotle states that comedy tends to represent people worse than ourselves, whereas tragedy portrays people who are better than we are: 9 µ ν

2

Flashar (1984), 1–23. The high social position of the main characters of Greek tragedy has never been challenged by ancient dramatists or theorists. Already Plato in his criticism of poets and poetry in the Republic and in the Laws proceeds from the self-evident assumption that tragedy (like epic poetry) portrays gods and heroes; and the agon between Aeschylus and Euripides in the Frogs of Aristophanes shows that already in the fifth century the high social position of tragic heroes was considered a distinctive mark of tragedy. When Euripides criticizes the bombastic style of Aeschylus, the attacked master of old tragedy replies that such a high style is required by the high rank of his characters, whom he calls ‘kings and demigods’ (1013–17; 1058–61). In postAristotelian theory (and all the way down to the eighteenth century) social status is the only mark of the tragic hero. 3

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(sc. κωµ(δα) γα`ρ χερου 9 δ (sc. τραγ(δα) βελτου µιµε,σθαι βολεται τ%ν ν&ν (1448a17 f.).4 On the other hand, in the thirteenth chapter of the Poetics Aristotle explicitly says that the superiority of the tragic hero over the average member of the audience must not be too great. For the ultimate goal (τ.λο) of tragedy, namely to produce λεο and φβο (pity and fear), entails two conditions, which restrict the unspecified comparative in chapter 2 ‘better than us’. The hero, according to Aristotle, must not be ‘perfect’ (0πιεικ ),5 since the fall and ruin of a blameless man or woman would not arouse pity and fear, but rather shock and upset our confidence in a just and rational world order; and the tragic hero must be ‘similar to us’ (8µοιο), since only then his fate can create fear––for him and for us.6 The requirement of similarity means that the hero should be familiar and therefore intelligible for us, that his thoughts and feelings, words and deeds must remain in the realm of our own experience of life, if his fate is to move us.7 Patricia Easterling in this context speaks of the ‘human intelligibility’ of the dramatis personae.8 This does not mean that in the frame of this general similarity he could not be better than the audience. Indeed, she or he should be. The so-called ‘middle character’ (E µεταξ) αHρα τοτων, 1453a7), whom Aristotle in his definition of the ideal hero of tragedy has in mind, does not lie in the middle of the gliding scale from absolutely bad to perfectly good, but between the middle and the positive extreme. The short phrase, which Aristotle has added to his definition of the best tragedy, appears to stress just this: . . . + οpου εCρηται + βελτονο µα˜λλον + χερονο (‘. . . i.e. the sort of agent I described––or of one who is better not worse than indicated’, 1453a16 f.).9 4

Moreover, in the fourth chapter, where he sketches the origin of art and the development of different forms of poetry, he argues: ‘Poetry was split into two types according to the poets’ own character: the more dignified (σεµντεροι) made noble actions the object of their mimesis, while lighter (ετελ.στεροι) poets took the actions of base men’ (1448b25 f.). Again, this differentiation of poetic genres with regard to the aspect of the different moral quality of the people which they represent has not been invented by Aristotle: It can be found in Plato (e.g. Laws 816d–e) and already the Aristophanic Aeschylus attacks Euripides’ immoral women (Ran. 849 f.; 1043–56: πα´νυ δ6 δε, χρηστα` λ.γειν 9µα˜, ‘and what we preach should be useful and good’) on the apparently self-evident assumption that tragedy, in order to be able to educate the citizens, must present moral models. 5 1452b34–6; 0πιεικ  is a word of general, not very enthusiatic, approbation, and often indistiguishable from σπουδα,ο or χρηστ. In ch. 13, however, it must mean ‘outstanding, faultless’. 6 7 Cf. Arist. Rhet. 2.8 (1383a8–12). Halliwell (1986), 159 f. 8 Easterling (1977); contra: Gould (1978). 9 At the end of the fifteenth chapter Aristotle returns to this apparently important point and this time he uses a comparison to elucidate what he means by the potentially misleading combination of the two requirements that the tragic hero should be both ‘better than us’ and ‘similar to us’. The poet should work like a good artist: he should portray his objects as they are,

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To his definitions of the social status and moral quality of the tragic hero Aristotle in the fifteenth chapter of the Poetics adds four points, which a tragedian should keep in mind when he designs the dramatis personae of his play. Two of them we have already seen: the ethos of the heroes of tragedy should be good (χρηστν)10 and it should be similar to us (8µοιον).11 The two other requirements are given in the fifteenth chapter for the first time: Aristotle insists that the dramatic character must be appropriate (α=ρµττον),12 i.e. their attributes and qualities, their acting and thinking must match their sex, age, social origin, and standing. And to this principle of appropriateness, which is well known from rhetoric, he adds the requirement of unity and consistency (Eµαλν). In this context Aristotle stresses that the central poetic law of necessity or probability, which governs the unity of action, applies to the creation of the characters too. These general principles do not say anything, however, about the extent and form of characterization. None of the four requirements laid out in the fifteenth chapter demands a detailed characterization of the tragic heroes. And indeed, Aristotle in the sixth chapter of the Poetics goes as far as to assert that even tragedies without ethos, i.e. tragedies in which the dramatis personae are not developed as characters are possible (1450a24–6). But this exaggeration appears to be a rhetorical argument to stress the priority of action against character. The unnamed poets of the fourth century, whom Aristotle credits with this type of tragedy, certainly are not his ideal.13 As a matter of fact, the importance of characterization of the dramatis personae as an integral component of the mimesis of a dramatic action inevitably results from Aristotle’s concept of πρα˜ξι as a purposeful and as human beings with their strengths and weaknesses, i.e. as people like us, but at the same time he should idealize them, so that they are both better than us and yet remain true to life and representative of mankind (1454b8–11). Aristotle, of course, knows that the Greek tragedians did fulfil this requirement in quite different ways. He quotes a saying of Sophocles that he portrays human beings as ‘better than they are’, whereas Euripides tends to present them ‘as they are’ (οBον κα2 ΣοφοκλD φη ατ µ ν οpου δε, ποιε,ν, Εριπδην δ οBοι ε@σν, 1460b33 f.). 10 There are a number of different adjectives for good (σπουδα,ο, σεµν, 0πιεικ , χρηστ, α#γαθ, καλ) and for bad (φα&λο, µοχθηρ, πονηρ, κακ, 0υτελ ), all of which carry more or less clear social connotations, but Aristotle undeniably puts the emphasis on the moral meaning of the words. 11 The interpretation that 8µοιο in ch. 15 refers to likeness (= faithfulness) to the mythical prototype (cf. Hor. AP 120–4) is less likely; for it is obvious that Aristotle does not believe in the importance of the mythological or poetic tradition (cf. 1451b19–26). 12 Appropriateness is of special importance in rhetoric; cf. Arist. Rhet. II 12–14; III 7; Hor. AP 114–18; 153–78. 13 1450a39–b3 implies that Aristotle attaches considerable importance to the embellishment of the dramatic action by colourful characters. For though he stresses the superiority of outline (action) over colour (character), the superiority of a painting over an uncoloured drawing will have been self-evident for him; cf. Jones (1962), 31.

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ethically relevant human action.14 For the subjects of a meaningful action must have a certain quality which becomes evident in what they do and say and in the way they are doing and saying it, all of which invests the respective action with a certain character. From this premise Aristotle deduces in the sixth chapter the two elements of tragedy which, next to the plot, he considers the most important: δια´νοια (‘thought’) which signifies the intellectual quality of a person (and the ways it manifests itself in what they say) and Oθο (‘character’) (1449b38–1450a3): δια` γα`ρ τοτων κα2 τα` πρα´ξει ε1να φαµεν ποια´ τινα κα2 κατα` τατα κα2 τυγχα´νουσι κα2 α#ποτυγχα´νουσι πα´ντε. For it is through these (i.e. through ethos and dianoia) that we can also judge the qualities of their actions and it is in their actions that all men either succeed or fail.

As Gill, Easterling, and Goldhill have pointed out, ‘in the Greek tragic texts there are extensive and complex vocabularies for the explanation of behaviour in terms of human attitudes’;15 everywhere we find explicit accounts of motives and grounds for deliberate choice, in which the agent expresses his character,16 and the poets often explicitly call upon the audience to think about the motivations and feelings of the dramatis personae.17

II The second objection, however, against a character-oriented interpretation of Greek tragedy is not sufficiently countered by the argument that Aristotle does indeed pay attention to the character of tragic heroes. Critics stress the fact that the Aristotelian use of the term Oθο is considerably narrower than the modern concept of character, for which, at least since the nineteenth century, the notion of a unique and singular individuality as well as puzzling complexity are constitutive.18 Oθο, in contrast, signifies a moral disposition acquired and reinforced by education and repeated action, as the moral nucleus, which is the basis of all our wishes, intentions, and decisions.19 Thus 14 In ch. 2 Aristotle defines the object of mimesis as πρα´ττοντε (1448a1) and thus fuses action and agents (with their different characters). 15 Goldhill (1990), 114. 16 Gill (1990). 17 Easterling (1990), 96–9 (with further lit.). 18 Cf. Jones (1962), 32–8. 19 Cf. Schütrumpf (1970); Halliwell (1986), 150–3; it deserves to be stressed, however, that crucial elements of the modern conception of character––agency, rationality, responsibility, and psychological integrity––already underlie the Greek notion of Oθο; cf. Halliwell (1990a), 35 f.

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Oθο, indeed, does not point to the idiosyncratic uniqueness and colourful complexity of an individual, as most modern conceptions of character do, but to specific and general moral qualities.20 The modern psychological concept of character automatically leads to the view that each and every gesture or action of a real or fictitious person, be it ever so inconspicuous, and each and every remark, be it ever so incidental, allows inferences about his or her character. Aristotelian Oθο on the other hand ‘is without the ambition of inclusiveness’21 and manifests itself––in tragedy as in life––only and exclusively where and when actions and speeches indicate the moral quality of a decision, which leads to and determines the action of a person, and thus reveals his or her inner nature: στιν δ Oθο µ ν τ τοιο&τον Z δηλο, τ6ν προαρεσιν, Eποα τι (‘The mimesis of character is that [in the play] which makes plain the nature of the moral choices the personages make’, 1450b8 f.). Hence it follows inevitably that the characterization of the dramatis personae of tragedy for Aristotle cannot be an end in itself, but is a function of the dramatic action. At the same time, however, it follows that––at least in a good tragedy––the moral and, as his explanation of δια´νοια shows, the intellectual roots of the actions and reactions, which give rise to the dramatic structure of the play, must become recognizable. In the ninth chapter of the Poetics Aristotle elucidates the philosophic quality of poetry with a formulation that stresses the interdependence of action and character (1451b6–9): 9 µ ν γα`ρ ποησι µα˜λλον τα` καθλου, 9 δ# Lστορα τα` καθ’ ^καστον λ.γει. στιν δ καθλου µ.ν, τ' πο( τα` πο,α αHττα συµβανει λ.γειν + πρα´ττειν κατα` τ ε@κ + τ α#ναγκα,ον. Poetry tends to make general statements while those of history are particular. A ‘general statement’ (in this context) means one that tells us what sort of man would, probably or necessarily, say or do what sort of thing.

Apparently Aristotle insists on such a degree of characterization of the dramatis personae that the audience can understand that and why they act and talk in the way the dramatic action, as conceptualized by the poet, requires them to act and talk. We thus are dealing with a quantitative, and not with a qualitative difference (i.e. a difference in degree, not in principle) 20 Halliwell (1986), 164: ‘Aristotle’s understanding of character is essentially ethical, rests on a close relation between character and action, and interprets the behaviour of persons less in terms of individuality than by reference to a set of objective and common standards.’ Whereas ethos points to disposition induced by habit, physis is used ‘to present a person’s character as a matter of that, which is most intrinsic and integral to him’ (Halliwell (1990a), 46), ‘the natural innate temperament’ (Halliwell (1990a), 47). 21 Jones (1962), 32.

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between ancient and modern tragedy;22 and the fact that characterization in Greek tragedy is less detailed than in the drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not necessarily mean that it is less significant.

III The same can be said κατ# α#ναλογαν with regard to the third argument or rather series of arguments, which have been brought forward against the importance of character and characterization in Greek tragedy, arguments which are based on the conditions of the production and reception of classical tragedy. a) It is obvious that the Greek theatre imposes a number of restrictions on the dramatists which are of importance for the form and technique of characterization. The fact that male actors had to play all the female parts and that, in the course of a tetralogy, they had to slip into many different roles (and sometimes even share one role with another actor) is negligible.23 More important is the standardized costume of tragedy. Variations and modifications could point to origin, status, and situation of a dramatis persona; but, in general, costumes and accessories were not used––as they are used in modern drama, especially of the nineteenth century––to signify a unique individuality or indicate a certain quality of character or emotional disposition.24 Of even greater importance is the mask, since it excludes a potentially important means of characterization, i.e. the facial expression as mirror of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But the consequences of the mask should not be overestimated.25 It is misleading to say that ‘Aristotle’s stage figure is the 22 To be sure, individuality is a historical construction. Critics of Greek tragedy therefore, as Goldhill (1990), 101–5, has stressed, have to take into account the historical and cultural conditions for the biological, psychological, and social categories of the person, as the Greeks of the fifth century understood them, and the conventions, by which the tragedians represented the individuality of their heroes. 23 We do not know if and to what degree the actors adjusted their voices (and their body language and their gestures) to the different roles. Slight variations are probable (but cf. Gellie (1963), 245 f.); and as recorded readings of novels can show, slight modifications of the reader’s voice suffice to indicate different speakers. With Halliwell (1990b), 74, I believe that ‘actors would have adopted intonation and vocal colour to suit their roles’; for vocal mimicry cf. also Csapo (2002), 135–40. 24 Gould (1978), 50: ‘The stage dress of the characters of Greek tragedy, especially the full length elaborately patterned and sleeved “kaftan” of the late fifth century distances its wearer from the world of everyday persons and “real life” dress.’ It should not be forgotten, however, that the ‘kaftan’ may not have been introduced before the end of the century and that costumes may have been much more varied before. 25 Easterling (1990), 87.

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mask’, which ‘has no inside’;26 it is rather the masked dramatis persona, whose being is not ‘exhausted in its features’, as Jones claims. The mask cannot (as a human face) be used to reveal the character of the ‘inside’, but that does not mean that masks prohibit the exploration of the inner self by other means of the dramatis personae, especially by what they do and say. Gould is right when insisting that ‘in masking we lose the flickering procession of ambiguous clues to inaccessible privacy’.27 On the other hand the Greek tragedians, where they considered it of importance, could integrate into the text references to the facial expression of emotions and attitudes which the audience was supposed to ‘see’. Orestes’ pitiful reference to Electra’s appearance at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Choephori (16–18) not only points to the black mourning dress she is wearing, but also to the facial traces of what life after the murder of Agamemnon meant for and has done to her; and in the recognition scene of Sophocles’ Electra it is Orestes’ perception of Electra’s ‘destruction’ (1074–87) which opens him for the anagnorisis, which had not been part of his plan. It is evident (and most people who have seen productions of Greek tragedy using masks will have had this experience) that language can ‘animate’ the mask. The fact that Greek drama ‘excludes privacy’ is of less importance than Gould wants us to believe.28 To be sure there are no indoor scenes and the chorus is present (almost) all the time, but the chorus often consists of close confidants of the heroine or hero, and there are numerous scenes in which the feeling of intimacy is not seriously diminished by their presence, if at all (e.g. Eur. Ion 237–400) or by the fact that the scenes take place outdoors (e.g. Soph. Ant. 1–99). Finally there is the size of the ancient theatre. The mask deprives the actor (and thus the poet) of the almost infinite expressiveness of the human face. The distance of the audience forces the actors to an unambiguous, stylized, and conventionalized form of acting, which dispenses with the more subtle nuances of body movement and gestures, which can be such an important medium of characterization in modern plays.29 26

Jones (1962), 43, 45. Gould (1978), 49; it should, however, not be forgotten that also in modern theatres only a small part of the audience (those who sit in the front rows or are using theatre glasses) will be able to follow the ‘flickering procession’ of psychological clues on the faces of the actors. 28 Gould (1978), 46, 49 f. 29 The size of the theatre of Dionysus at the south-east slope of the Acropolis was not as large as one reads in most handbooks, see Goette (2007), 119 f. Before the final extension of the theatre in the fourth century it will probably have held 6,000–8,000 people, and if the orchestra in the fifth century, as I believe, was not yet circular, but trapezoid, the contact of a good part of the audience was much closer and more immediate than usually imagined. A certain distance is also established by the fact that (with few exceptions) the ‘figures on stage are not 27

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One should, however, not overestimate the consequences of these conditions and conventions of the ancient theatre for the extent and quality of characterization. They, indeed, do not allow a detail-loving realism, but result in simplification, abstraction, and stylization. On the other hand they do not prevent the mimesis of complex and individual dramatis personae. To concentrate on the essentials does not mean to dispense with individuality. Of crucial importance for the question whether a dramatis persona appears as type or as individual character is what he does, and especially what he says and what other dramatis personae say about them. And language as the means of unfolding in great detail and subtlety what it is that drives a person to act in the way he or she acts is not seriously limited by the special conditions and conventions of the ancient theatre. b) Still, critics in this context love to point out that the language of tragedy is a highly stylized and homogeneous medium, which is spoken by all dramatis personae alike. This, however, is also true of modern tragedy well into the nineteenth century and––as a brief look at Shakespeare or Racine, Goethe, Schiller, or Kleist can show––did not seriously impair the creation of psychologically complex individual characters. On the other hand, Easterling has rightly insisted that ‘one can detect some degree of characterization by style’.30 To be sure, a realistic mimesis of different registers of speech and of idiosyncratic diction or manner of speaking occurs only in small traces.31 But like Homer32 the tragedians did sometimes differentiate and individualize their characters not only by the words and images they use, but also by style and tone.33 Gould, in his criticism of Easterling’s ‘human intelligibility’, and Goldhill34 have stressed the fact that the language of the characters ‘is part of the (figural) language of the play’ and ‘does not merely express his “character”, nor contemporary, nor from the city of the audience nor of a similar status to the members of the audience’ (Goldhill (1990), 110); but this does not prohibit the empathetic identification of the audience and thus a strong interest in the kind of personalities they are. 30 Easterling (1977), 128. 31 The clearest examples can perhaps be found in the portraits of minor characters such as the watchman (Aesch. Ag. 1–39) or the nurse Cilissa (Aesch. Cho. 734–65). 32 Cf. Friedrich and Redfield (1978), 263–5; Martin (1989). 33 Easterling (1977), 128: ‘What I want to suggest is that Sophocles’ conception of the central character or characters influences his choices of words and images in a quite fundamental way.’ Easterling refers e.g. to Philoctetes (‘the poetry which defines him is uniquely his’). Ajax would be another prominent example, and an example which may show that Gould overstates his case when he affirms: ‘There is nothing, I would argue, like that self-analytical, self-exploring mode of language, which is the distinguished mark of Shakespeare’s soliloquies.’ To me the difference is rather a difference in degree than in principle. 34 Gould (1978), 59 f.; Goldhill (1990), 106–8.

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does it merely offer access to an “individual character” ’.35 ‘Not merely’, of course, but it can and often does give individual colour to a statement. With better reasons, critics of a psychological analysis of the characters of Greek tragedy have drawn attention to the fact that the utterances of the tragic heroes and heroines often––especially in Euripidean tragedy––seem to be governed more by the rules and commonplaces, thought patterns, language, and tone of rhetoric than by their individual character or by a particular mental or emotional state.36 Indeed, one has to be cautious: especially long monologues and the rheseis in many a dialogue bear the stamp of rhetoric. When reading or watching Greek tragedy one has to keep in mind that not every argument and not every formulation of an argument serves to illuminate the character of the speaker. Often the Greek tragedians use the dramatis personae primarily to unfold the various aspects of a dramatic situation or the different positions of a problem as clearly and comprehensively as possible. This is obvious in plays for which the individual quality of the dramatis personae is of little importance as in the two suppliant plays of Euripides (Heracleidae and Supplices). But we have to be aware of the pervasive influence of rhetoric also in plays where action and character are much more closely related as for example in Alcestis and Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae. Even if one concedes this, however, it should be clear that rhetoric and individual characterization do not necessarily exclude one another. Thus––to use one of Gould’s examples––the long captatio benevolentiae by which Medea in the first epeisodion of the play succeeds in winning the sympathy of the Corinthian women of the chorus is a masterpiece of rhetorical composition and argumentation––and at the same time the exposition of a crucial quality of the heroine. The sudden change from the storm of emotions by which Medea, as Euripides presents her indirectly in the prologue and in the parodos, is driven, to the cool rhetoric and analytic rationality of her first long speech should not be misunderstood as proof of Euripides’ lack of interest in the inner unity of Medea’s character. It rather is a first and forceful sign that Medea is able to subordinate her wildest emotions to her outstanding intelligence whenever it seems necessary for the achievement of her goals, and it is this ability to manipulate her male opponents and friends 35 Goldhill (1990), 108; he also rightly stresses the fact that the figures of drama cannot ‘be separated from the literary tradition in which they also inevitably play a part’. I wonder, however, whether his conclusion that the ‘awareness (sc. of the audience) of conflicting representations, conflicting traditions, challenges––fragments––the sense of a dramatic figure as a unique and bounded individual’ is true. I would rather see the intertextual play of the tragedians with the foil of earlier representations of the same character as a means of enriching ––by parallel and contrast––the complexity of their ‘portraits’ of the traditional figures. 36 Dale (1954), xxv; Garton (1957), 253; Gellie (1963), 245 f.; Gould (1978), 54–8.

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(Creon, Jason, and Aegeus) by her superior intelligence which enables Medea, who was thrown into a state of utter helplessness by Jason’s betrayal, to reach her triumphant victory over the traitor. At the same time the tension between emotion and rationality, which can be felt in her first long speech, prepares the audience for the deep tragic conflict, which is going to break out and almost destroy her in the great monologue before the murder of her children. The example shows that the rhetorical quality of an utterance does not mean that the passage is irrelevant for the characterization of the speaker. c) The same holds true for a third factor determining the form of the mimesis of individual characters in Greek tragedy: the conventional structures of verbal communication. On the one hand, when interpreting a stichomythia or an agon one certainly should keep in mind that the utterances of the dramatis personae often are determined to a higher degree by the formal rules and inner logic of the respective structure than by the character of the speaker. On the other hand it often can be shown (and has been shown, for example, by Schwinge37) that a seemingly irrelevant line or half-line of a stichomythia, which has been criticized as a mere stopgap, on closer inspection can indeed reveal the mental or emotional state or a significant character trait of the speaker. Moreover, the heated quarrels between Medea and Jason or between Creon and his son Haemon can show that the Greek dramatists could present an agon, despite its rather rigid conventional form and rhetorical flavour, as a vivid and dynamic interaction between two distinct personalities, whose character does have a significant influence on form and development of the discussion. Gould’s thesis that ‘it is the function of the existence and use of . . . such different forms of presentation as rhesis, stichomythia, lyric ode or amoibaion, that in a marked degree both the action and the stage figures should be seen and felt by us, the audience, as fragmented and discontinuous’38 is hardly convincing. He perceptively describes the difference in the dramatic styles of Sophocles and Euripides,39 but there will be few who feel, for instance, that Alcestis, as a result of splitting the dying scene into a lyrical and a spoken part,40 appears fragmented and discontinuous, or who will see Medea as ‘a fragmented, disjoint figure, abstractly seized’.41 The general assumption that the high degree of formal stylization by which Greek tragedy is characterized necessarily implies that the tragedians were not 37

38 39 Schwinge (1988). Gould (1978), 50. Gould (1978), 52–4. For the common ‘Bauform’, which juxtaposes the lyrical expression of how a character feels with the calm trimeter exposition of her or his thoughts, cf. Greenwood (1953), 131 ff. and Parker (2007), 103 f. 41 Gould (1978), 52; contra: Easterling (1990), 93 f. 40

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interested in the psychological truth and inner unity of the dramatic characters they created cannot be accepted. To sum up: neither the different notions of character nor the specific conditions and conventions of the Greek theatre seriously impair the mimesis of individual, coherent, and psychologically convincing dramatis personae. It is self-evident that the critic of Greek tragedy must be familiar with the multifarious dramaturgic and formal conventions which determine the literary forms and techniques in which character can be created and presented in Greek tragedy. Otherwise the critic may foster expectations and ask questions that are derived from naturalistic forms of modern theatre. But the size of the Greek theatre and its conventions, the sparing economy of the dramatic technique used by the Greek tragedians, the high degree of formal stylization and of rhetoric, and the unrealistic alternation of totally different forms of expression, reminiscent of the opera, do not necessarily prevent subtle characterization and the creation of complex characters. Thus extent, form, and function of characterization are not predicated on the outer conditions of production, but rather on the specific thematic intentions of the dramatist. Simple generalizations are therefore dangerous. The differences not only between the three tragedians of whom we possess complete plays, but also between the various plays of an author or between the dramatis personae of a single play are considerable. Nobody would want to reduce the enormous differences in the representation of the dramatis personae of, for example, Aeschylus’ Persae and Sophocles’ Philoctetes, or of the suppliant plays of Euripides and his Medea or Bacchae, to a common denominator. Like all literary figures the dramatis personae of a tragedy differ categorically from real people as we meet them outside the theatre. As poetic creations they exist only and exclusively in what they say and do; they live only for the duration of the play and only in the world of the play.42 This limitation of the dramatis persona (in contrast to the infinite openness and bewildering complexity of real persons) implies––as Garton43 has stressed––that we cannot know everything about them that we may want to know; but it also implies that within the boundaries drawn by the author we can know everything about them, whereas our knowledge of a real person is always less than complete. For the interpretation of Greek tragedy (as for all poetry) this means that we have to stay within the paradoxical confines of this ‘incomplete completeness’ and that we––in our search for the attributes and motivations 42 43

Gould (1978), 43 f.; Easterling (1990), 83 f.; Goldhill (1990), 111–14. Garton (1972), 17.

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of a character––should neither ask questions which the text does not allow, nor omit questions which the text appears to prompt.44 The rigorous economy of means with which the Greek tragedians operate as a rule limits the information about the nature and qualities, actions, and beliefs of the characters to what is essential for the understanding of the action. Many things we would like to know in addition remain in the dark, and all attempts to uncover them must lead to pure speculation. On the other hand, however, the texts do allow many more conclusions to be drawn about the character of the dramatis personae than the minimalists are ready to concede.

REFERENCES Bierl, A. (1994) (ed.), Orchestra. Festschrift für Hellmut Flashar, Stuttgart and Leipzig. Craik, E. (1990) (ed.), ‘Owls to Athens’: Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover, Oxford. Csapo, E. (2002), ‘Kallipides on the Floor-Sweepings: The Limits of Realism in Classical Acting and Performance Styles’, in Easterling and Hall (2002), 127–47. Dale, A. M. (1954), Alcestis, Oxford. Dingel, J. (1967), Das Requisit in der griechischen Tragödie, Diss. Tübingen. Easterling, P. E. (1973), ‘Presentation of Character in Aeschylus’, G&R 20: 3–19. –––– (1977), ‘Character in Sophocles’, G&R 24: 121–29. –––– (1990), ‘Constructing Character in Greek Tragedy’, in Pelling (1990), 83–99. –––– and Hall, E. (2002), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, Cambridge. Flashar, H. (1984), ‘Die Poetik des Aristoteles und die griechische Tragödie’, Poetica 16: 1–23, repr. in id., Eidola: Ausgewählte Kleine Schriften (Amsterdam, 1989), 147–69. Friedrich, P. and Redfield, J. (1978), ‘Speech as a Personality Symbol: The Case of Achilles’, Language 54: 263–88. Garton, C. (1957), ‘Characterization in Greek Tragedy’, JHS 77: 247–54. –––– (1972), Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre, Toronto. Gellie, G. H. (1963), ‘Characer in Greek Tragedy’, AUMLA 20: 241–55. Gill, C. (1986), ‘The Question of Character and Personality in Greek Tragedy’, Poetics Today 7: 251–73. –––– (1990), ‘The Character-Personality Distinction’, in Pelling (1990), 1–31. 44 Wilson Knight’s famous ironical question: ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ can be paralleled by many inadequate questions that have been posed to Greek tragedies or their heroes: for example Voltaire’s astonishment that Oedipus and Iocaste have not earlier talked about the deformed feet of the king, or Wilamowitz’s sarcastic aperçu, what will Alcestis, after her return from the dead, have said to Admetus at their next breakfast?

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Goette, H. R. (2007), ‘An Archaeological Appendix’, in Wilson (2007), 116–21. Goldhill, S. (1990), ‘Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics’, in Pelling (1990), 101–27. Gould, J. (1978), ‘Dramatic Character and “Human Intellegibility” in Greek Tragedy’, PCPhS 24: 43–67. Greenwood, L. H. G. (1953), Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy, Cambridge. Halliwell, S. (1986), Aristotle’s Poetics, London. –––– (1990a), ‘Traditional Greek Concepts of Character’, in Pelling (1990), 32–59. –––– (1990b), ‘The Sounds of the Voice in Old Comedy’, in Craik (1990), 69–79. Jones, J. (1962), On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, London. Martin, R. P. (1989), The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad, Ithaca, NY, and London. Parker, L. P. E. (2007), Euripides Alcestis, Oxford. Pelling, C. (1990) (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, Oxford. Schütrumpf, E. (1970), Die Bedeutung des Wortes Ethos in der Poetik des Aristoteles, München. Schwinge, E.-R. (1988), Die Verwendung der Stichomythie in den Dramen des Euripides, Heidelberg. Seidensticker, B. (1994), ‘Beobachtungen zur Sophokleischen Kunst der Charakterzeichnung’, in Bierl (1994), 276–88. Wilson, P. (2007) (ed.), The Greek Theatre and Festivals: Documentary Studies, Oxford.

Part IV Performance: Comedy

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15 Scenes at the Door in Aristophanic Comedy Peter Brown

In Brown (2000) I examined doorknocking and related scenes in fifth-century Greek tragedy, and I ended with a brief discussion of three Aristophanic door scenes with tragic colouring (Acharnians 1071–2, 1174–89, Peace 179–84, all discussed again below). It has long been recognized that such scenes (with or without tragic colouring) are particularly at home in comedy, often coming early in the play, and Revermann rightly observes that ‘the motif called for variation’:1 only thus could it be kept alive as a source of entertainment for the audience. This variation has not been studied in detail (as far as I am aware), and I hope it will be found helpful if I discuss each surviving Aristophanic example in turn. In many cases this will call for discussion of related issues such as what we are to envisage happening on the stage, whether doorknocking in fact takes place, and who answers the door. One element that sometimes contributes to the comedy is the rudeness of the character who answers, but there are other sources of entertainment and surprise as well. For comparison, I shall include discussion of some scenes where a character approaches a door, or summons another character to appear, without knocking; but I shall not discuss every scene that makes use of a door. As far as possible, I shall be scrutinizing the text for evidence of the actions on stage. Oliver Taplin has set us high standards for doing this without indulging in wild flights of fancy, and I hope I shall not fall too far short. Some general points will be made as we go along, but, since my main purpose is to advertise the variety of Aristophanes’ techniques, I shall conclude without a conclusion. Most of the translations that follow are substantially based on the editions of Sommerstein.

1

Revermann (2006), 184. See also the excellent remarks of Gelzer (1993), 64–5.

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Peter Brown 1 . AC H A R N I A N S 3 9 3 – 4 7 9

Dicaeopolis undertakes to defend himself for making a private peace treaty with the Spartans. In order to defuse the strong opposition he expects to meet, he decides to dress himself up to look as pathetic as possible and announces rather out of the blue that he is going to call on Euripides (394). Immediately he shouts ‘Boy, boy!’ (πα, πα,), and a slave answers, uttering at 396 ‘a typical Euripidean conundrum’.2 Dicaeopolis asks him to call Euripides out to see him (402; if he were not in the theatre he would perhaps more naturally have asked to be allowed indoors to talk to Euripides). The slave says that is impossible and shuts the door in his face;3 but Dicaeopolis insists, knocks at the door, and calls on Euripides by name (403–4). Since Dicaeopolis here says ‘I shall knock at the door’ (κψω τ6ν θραν), not ‘I shall knock at the door again’, that perhaps suggests that he had not knocked at 395 when he called ‘Boy, boy!’. In any case Euripides now replies through the door to say that he does not have time to see Dicaeopolis. But he does then agree (408–9) to be wheeled out on the eccyclema, an appropriate device for a tragedian since it was the platform used in tragedy for displaying tableaux of such things as corpses that were to be imagined as still lying indoors. Not surprisingly, Euripides speaks in tragic style in much of what follows, and there is a constant interplay of tragic and colloquial style in this passage of dialogue. Dicaeopolis starts by begging Euripides to give him ‘a rag from that old play’ (nα´κιν τι το& παλαιο& δρα´µατο, 415), and we then have to wait another 15 lines before Euripides finally manages to identify the ‘old play’ as his Telephus of thirteen years previously. Once he has been given the rags, Dicaeopolis asks for Telephus’ hat (439), and Euripides gladly gives him that as well. But Dicaeopolis starts to get more demanding, asking again and again for ‘just one little thing more’, while Euripides gets increasingly exasperated but nonetheless agrees. Repeatedly Euripides tries to drive Dicaeopolis away from the door,4 and Dicaeopolis does eventually start to move away but then twice (at 465–7 and 471–4) thinks of a further item to ask for. Only at 479 does Euripides’ patience finally give out: α=ν6ρ βρζει. κλDιε πηκτα` δωµα´των (‘The man’s insulting me! Close up the portals of the halls!’). By spinning the scene out, Aristophanes keeps us waiting for Dicaeopolis’ speech of defence, and he also makes it an important element in the play that Dicaeopolis 2 Olson (2002), 177: οκ νδον νδον 0στν, ε@ γνµην χει (‘He is at home and not at home, if you understand me’). 3 For the influence of this scene on the doorkeeper scene at Pl. Prt. 314d–e see Brock (1990), 47. 4 449, 456, 458, 460, 465.

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becomes a Euripidean tragic hero––an element echoed in the presentation of Lamachus at the end.5 It has been suggested that there may have been a doorkeeper scene in Euripides’ Telephus in which Telephus was rudely received by a slave. But there is no evidence for this; it has been suggested purely on the basis of this scene in Acharnians and of Thesmophoriazusae 39 ff. This has been discussed by Cropp,6 as well as the possible implication of a scholium on Clouds 922 that Telephus himself was offered the job of doorkeeper; Cropp suggests that this perhaps means that ‘he set himself up as a beggar at the doorway’, and perhaps (if this is right) there was some memorable scene at the door. But we can only guess.

2 . AC H A R N I A N S 7 4 8 – 5 0 Με. ∆ι. Megarian: Dicaeopolis:

0γ[ν δ καρυξ% ∆ικαιπολιν 8παι. ∆ικαιπολι, O λDι πρασθαι χοιρα; τ; α#ν6ρ Μεγαρικ; I’ll make proclamation for Dicaeopolis, to find out where he is. Dicaeopolis! Do you want to buy some porkers? What’s this? A Megarian?

According to Olson, ‘749 is addressed to the house; most likely the Meg. pounds on the door with his fist as he shouts’.7 However, if 8παι in 749 has been correctly interpreted to mean ‘to find out where he is’, it is more likely that the Megarian simply stands and shouts at the top of his voice, unaware that he is directly outside Dicaeopolis’ house.8 Dicaeopolis hears him from indoors and comes out: see Frost (1993) for a discussion of passages in later comedy where a character enters in response to a loud noise outside the house.9 The Megarian should perhaps register surprise at discovering that Dicaeopolis is so close at hand.

5 6 7 8 9

See Bowie (1993), 30–1, Olson (2002), lxi. Collard, Cropp, and Lee (1995), 19; cf. Preiser (2000), 79, 579–82. Olson (2002), 263. So Starkie (1909), 157: ‘Shouting in the manner of a huckster’. See also Lys. 430, 1106–7, Plut. 641, and (from tragedy) Eur. Heracl. 478–9, Soph. OT 634.

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Peter Brown 3 . AC H A R N I A N S 8 2 3 – 4

At this stage the Megarian knows that Dicaeopolis is indoors. He appeals to him for help against the Informer; Dicaeopolis hears him from inside his house and comes out in answer to his appeal. It is common in ancient drama for a character to be called out from indoors by name,10 and nothing more need be said about the situation here.

4 . AC H A R N I A N S 8 6 2 – 4 Θη. ∆ι. Theban: Dicaeopolis:

µ  δ’, 8σοι Θεβαθεν αλητα2 πα´ρα, το, /στνοι φυσε,τε τν πρωκτν κυν. πα&’, 0 κρακα. οL σφDκε οκ α#π τ%ν θυρ%ν; And all you pipers from Thebes who are with me, play the ‘Dog’s Arse’ on your bone-pipes! Stop, damn you! You wasps, won’t you clear off from the doors?

Dicaeopolis comes out of his house to protest about the noise being made by the pipers. It is not clear why the Theban told them to play the ‘Dog’s Arse’: since he complains at 868 that they have been playing all the way from Thebes, there is some attraction in the view of Rennie and Olson11 that his apparent request for a tune is really ‘an insult intended to quiet the pipers’ (Olson). It is Dicaeopolis who finally succeeds in making them stop, but it appears not to have been the Theban’s aim to summon him to appear with the noise of the pipes.12 Contrast Wasps 270–2, where the chorus-leader suggests to the chorus that they stand and sing to call Philocleon out from his house, in the hope that he will be delighted by their singing.

10 See Brown (2000), 13 for some examples from tragedy, Frost (1988), 9–10 for Menander, and Brown (1995), 86 n. 8 for Plautus and Terence. See also Eq. 1389, Nub. 1221 and 1485, Pax 111–13 and 255, Av. 665–6, Lys. 456–60. 11 Rennie (1909), 218–19; Olson (2002), 288–9. 12 The situation at Birds 859 (πα&σαι σ) φυσ%ν, ‘You, stop your blowing!’) is different, if Dunbar (1995), 502–3 is right to suggest that Pisetaerus has remained on stage since 950; in any case, he ‘comments not on the dreadful noise but on the unfamiliar sight’ (Dunbar (1995), 508).

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5 . AC H A R N I A N S 1 0 7 1 – 2 Αγ. Λα. Messenger: Lamachus:

@[ πνοι τε κα2 µα´χαι κα2 Λα´µαχοι. τ α#µφ2 χαλκοφα´λαρα δµατα κτυπε,; O toils, o battles, and o Lamachuses! Who bruiteth it abroad outside my bronze-embossed palace?

A messenger arrives at Lamachus’ house to summon him to come and fight. The messenger opens in declamatory style, and Lamachus’ words on entry are similar to those of Thoas at Euripides, Iphigenia Taurica 1307–8,13 except that Thoas refers explicitly to the messenger’s having knocked: τ α#µφ2 δ%µα θεα˜ τδ’ pστησιν βο ν, πλα α#ρα´ξα κα2 ψφον π.µψα σω; Who is it setting up a shout outside this house of the goddess, Smiting the door and sending a noise within?

Starkie was probably wrong to add the stage direction ‘He knocks vigorously at the door of LAM’s house’ here in Acharnians.14 But Aristophanes has clearly given tragic colouring to this scene of noise at the door. For similar colouring in another comic scene from the fifth century, Rau compares Teleclides fr. 37 K-A τ \δε κραυγ6 κα2 δµων περστασι; (‘What is this shout, this gath’ring at the doors?’), where again there is no reference to knocking (and perhaps the reference is to a group of people at the door, not to an individual).15 Olson says ‘Lam. enters from a wing’, in accordance with his discussion of staging on p. lxix of his Introduction.16 It is true that Lamachus was last seen exiting (almost certainly) into a wing at 622, and if this were a play by Menander we should expect him to return from the same direction. But each of Menander’s plays has a fixed setting, whereas the setting of Acharnians shifts from one scene to the next: Lamachus may well appear from indoors at 1072. However, Olson’s staging would certainly be possible––and perhaps a surprise for the messenger, who has come to Lamachus’ house to find him: 13

Discussed at Brown (2000), 9–10. Starkie (1909), 211. Horst-Dieter Blume reminds me that @ is an exclamation of lament (cf. Olson 2002, 221 on Ach. 566–7), different from u at IT 1304. 15 Rau (1967), 138. The fragments of Aristophanes’ contemporaries otherwise have little relevant to offer. Revermann (2006), 184 n. 10 cites Ameipsias fr. 25 and Pherecrates fr. 91 as possible candidates, but neither is at all certainly from a scene at the door. We learn from Ar. fr. 40 K-A that Aristophanes used the word nπτρον (‘doorknocker’) in his Amphiaraus. 16 Olson (2002), 331. 14

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the reverse of the surprise for the Megarian on finding Dicaeopolis at home at 748–50.

6 . AC H A R N I A N S 1 1 7 4 – 8 9 A second messenger arrives to announce that Lamachus has been wounded in the fighting. He starts by shouting instructions to the slaves in Lamachus’ house, his first line in tragic style, then rather less tragic as he instructs them to boil up some water, prepare bandages, and so on. At the end of his speech he orders the door to be opened, presumably because he expects Lamachus to be taken indoors (though that is not in fact what happens). At this point Starkie again has the instruction ‘knocking at LAM’s door’, and Olson says that the messenger ‘bangs on the door of the house’ at the beginning of the speech.17 I see no way of telling whether this happens at either point, but it does not greatly matter: as Mooney noted in general, ‘the calling may have been accompanied by knocking, even when the text says nothing of the latter’.18

7. KNIGHTS 725–9 Paphlagon and the Sausage Seller are deep in argument, and they decide to call on Demos to arbitrate between them. At 725 they summon him to come out, but at least one of them must also knock, because when he opens the door at 728–9 he says ‘You’ve knocked my harvest-wreath to pieces!’ (τ6ν ε@ρεσινην µου κατεσπαρα´ξατε). This may suggest that Paphlagon’s rather peremptory summons in 725 (? ∆Dµε, δε&ρ’ ξελθε, ‘Demos, come out here!’) was accompanied by particularly strong knocking––all the more noteworthy as he is summoning his own master to appear, and thus a sign of how completely Demos has been in his control. (In these circumstances Paphlagon naturally does not call for a slave to answer the door.) But the Sausage Seller immediately adopts a more ingratiating tone in 725–6,19 and Paphlagon follows suit with ? ∆ηµδιον ? φλτατον (‘My darling little Demos!’) in 726. Otherwise rather little seems to be made of what could have been a star moment in the play, the appearance of Demos himself, the figure whose 17 19

18 Starkie (1909), 233, Olson (2002), 352. Mooney (1914), 19. Cf. Dickey (1996), 61, 78–81 on πα´τερ (‘father’).

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favour they are trying to win, dressed as a poor old man.20 The action moves swiftly on, and his more spectacular entrance is reserved for 1331, after his rejuvenation.

8. KNIGHTS 1249 Πα. Paphlagon:

κυλνδετ’ εCσω τνδε τν δυσδαµονα. Roll me within, ill-starred one that I am!

Sommerstein has argued persuasively that this is an instruction to those behind the stage door to roll out the eccyclema, on which Paphlagon is then rolled in at 1263.21 The line is a quotation of Euripides fr. 311 Kannicht, with ‘roll me’ substituted for ‘take me’ (κοµζετ’), and Paphlagon’s address to his garland at 1250–2 parodies Alcestis’ farewell address to her bed at Euripides, Alcestis 177–82. It is appropriate that his final defeat should be marked by tragic language and a collapse on to the machine particularly associated with tragic displays.22

9 . C LO U D S 1 2 6 – 2 2 1 (a) 131–7

Strepsiades: Slave: Strepsiades: Slave:

20

Στ.

@τητ.ον· τ τα&τ’ χων στραγγεοµαι, α#λλ’ οχ2 κπτω τ6ν θραν; πα,, παιδον. Ο@. βα´λλ’ 0 κρακα. τ 0σθ’ E κψα τ6ν θραν; Στ. Φεδωνο υL Στρεψια´δη Κικυννθεν. Ο@. α#µαθ  γε ν6 ∆’, 8στι οτωσ2 σφδρα α#περιµερµνω τ6ν θραν λελα´κτικα, κα2 φροντδ’ 0ξ µβλωκα 0ξηυρηµ.νην. I must go to him. Why do I keep hanging back like this, Instead of knocking at the door? Boy! Here, boy! Go to hell! Who’s the man who knocked at the door? Strepsiades, son of Phidon, of Cicynna. An ignoramus, for sure, the way you’ve kicked so hard At the door without circumspect cogitation And made an idea abort that had been discovered.

135

135

21 Stone (1981), 360–1. Sommerstein (1980b), 53–4. Cf. Rau (1967), 170–3 on the tragic colouring of the whole passage from 1229 onwards; Rau believes the eccyclema was alluded to at 1249 rather than actually shown. 22

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Strepsiades wants Socrates to teach him how to avoid paying his debts, and he decides to enrol as his pupil at Thoughterhouse College. Evidently he shrinks from taking the plunge: there must be a certain amount of comic hesitation in his actions before he finally knocks at the door, and no doubt some comedy in his manner of knocking itself. The doorkeeper’s complaint that he has kicked it hard may be compared with the instruction to ‘kick the rock’ at Birds 54, with Heracles’ remark at Frogs 38–9 ‘He jumped at it just like a centaur, whoever he was’, and with Carion’s question ‘Was that you knocking so hard at the door?’ at Wealth 1101; see also Knights 725–9, above. Dunbar is surely right to deduce from this passage of Clouds that ‘kicking, instead of knocking, a door to attract attention was thought to be ill-mannered since overimpatient’.23 Such uncouth behaviour would no doubt be in character for the rustic Strepsiades, but the contrary view of Dover is also possible and also entertaining: ‘Probably the humour of the passage lies in the opposite direction; Strepsiades knocked timidly, and is now cowering before the hyperbolically expressed anger of the strange-looking person who has flung the door open.’24 The prevailing view, derived from the ancient commentators, is that the man who answers the door is one of the Thoughterhusian students, but it will be more entertaining if it is in fact a slave doorkeeper,25 the Head Porter of the College, who is as rude as Head Porters (and ancient doorkeepers)26 sometimes are, who turns out to have extraordinarily up-to-date information on what has been going on in the college, and who keeps the students pretty well in order himself. One feature of Euripides’ slave in Acharnians was that he addressed Dicaeopolis in Euripidean style at 396, and we find the same thing later with Agathon’s slave at Thesmophoriazusae 39–70; much the same effect will be achieved here if Socrates’ slave is portrayed as knowing all about the philosophical debates that go on inside. Against this, Willi argues that ατ (‘Himself’) at 219 should be taken as the language of a student referring to his teacher, not as that of a slave referring to his master, since in the latter case Strepsiades’ failure there to understand who is referred to would be inexplicable.27 But Strepsiades may be 23 Dunbar (1995), 153. Kicking at doors is also mentioned (to varying effect) at Soph. OT 1261, Callim. Hymn 2.3, Plaut. Stich. 311, Ter. Eun. 285, Hor. Carm. 1.4.13. On violent doorknocking in Plautus see Brown (1995), 83 with notes 41–3; cf. May (2006), 159–60 on Apul. Met. 1.22. 24 Dover (1968), 111. 25 Cf. Landfester (1975), Olson (1992), 310 n. 25. As Olson suggests, the status of this character may not have been clear to the original audience: Stone (1981), 284 remarks that ‘we cannot reach a clear conclusion on the matter of how slaves were distinguished from free men on the comic stage’. 26 27 See Brown (1995), 84 with n. 47. Willi (2003), 114. See below, p. 358.

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momentarily non-plussed by the appearance of a man flying in mid-air: his question τ ατ; (‘Who, “himself”?’) perhaps implies ‘Surely that can’t be your master’. (b) 138–221 As at Acharnians 393–479, we are kept waiting: this time it is the scene with the doorkeeper that is spun out, while he tells Strepsiades all the clever things that Socrates thinks of. Socrates himself does not appear for another 85 lines, and the surprise there (at 218) is that he does not come out of his door but swings into view in mid-air.28 In the middle of his discussion with the doorkeeper (at 181–3), Strepsiades says: αHνοιγ’ αHνοιγ’ α#νσα τ φροντιστ ριον, κα2 δε,ξον < τα´χιστα´ µοι τν Σωκρα´τη· µαθητι% γα´ρ. α#λλ’ αHνοιγε τ6ν θραν. Open up Thoughterhouse! Open it quickly, And show me Socrates as quickly as possible! I want a tutorial! Come on, open the door!

Evidently the doorkeeper has shut the door behind him in order to talk to Strepsiades outside the house, perhaps thereby reinforcing the impression that what goes on behind the doors is a great secret.29 Strepsiades’ words perhaps lead us to think that now at last we are going to see Socrates in person, and that we are going to see him displayed in some way. ‘Open the door and show me Socrates’ is not exactly the language of real life,30 but it is the sort of thing characters in tragedy sometimes say when they give urgent commands for the door to be opened for a display on the eccyclema, e.g. at Euripides, Hippolytus 808–10: χαλα˜τε κλDιθρα, πρσπολοι, πυλωµα´των, 0κλεθ’ α=ρµο, < Cδω πικρα`ν θ.αν γυναικ, \ µε κατθανο&σ’ α#πλεσεν. Open the doors that bar the portal, servants, Undo their fastenings, so that I may see the bitter sight Of my wife, who in dying has destroyed me.31

28

Cf. Fisher (1984), 70–1. By contrast, Revermann (2006), 186 sees ‘no dramatic or comic advantage’ in this. 30 Netta Zagagi has drawn my attention to Men. Aspis 303–4 µα˜λλον δ’ αHνοιγε τα` θρα, φανερν πει | σαυτν (‘Or rather open the door: show yourself!’), on which see Frost (1988), 30–1. Like Frost, I am not convinced that the eccyclema is used here: the effect of ‘Show yourself ’ is different in this context. 31 cf. Soph. Aj. 344–7, El. 1458–9; Eur. Med. 1314–15. 29

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The obvious way for Socrates to be displayed would be on the eccyclema, and an audience that had seen Euripides so displayed in Acharnians two years previously might well expect to see the same device again now. But Aristophanes is teasing us here, because what we see is not Socrates but a group of his extraordinarily pallid and sickly-looking students.32 The staging of their entry has been a matter of much debate; I think Revermann is right to argue for a ‘moving tableau’, not displayed on the eccyclema.33 In any case Strepsiades is astonished at the sight of them at 184, and he is astonished again at 200 when his eye is caught by figures representing astronomy and geometry, or instruments for use in those arts. The next thing he sees is a man swinging in mid-air (218–19): Στ. Ο@. Στ. Ο@. Strepsiades: Slave: Strepsiades: Slave:

φ.ρε, τ γα`ρ οgτο οπ2 τD κρεµα´θρα α#ν ρ; ατ. τ ατ; Σωκρα´τη. Here, tell me, who’s that man dangling from the hook? Himself. Who, ‘himself ’? Socrates.

I have suggested that we expected Socrates to make a grand entrance on one of the famous tragic machines, the eccyclema or platform; in fact he is swung into view on the other (the mêchanê or crane). Perhaps Aristophanes learnt this trick from the end of Euripides’ Medea, which had been put on eight years before, where Jason orders the palace doors to be opened so that he can see the corpses of his children, and immediately Medea appears with the corpses in a chariot on the roof, quite possibly getting there by means of the crane.34 Earlier, Strepsiades was very impatient to see Socrates. Now, he does not at first realize who he is: a man swinging in mid-air seems to be just another example of the sort of thing that goes on in this place, and very little is made of it (in contrast with other scenes in Aristophanes, where rather a lot is made of the use of the mêchanê).35 As Revermann says, ‘he by now has become used to so many oddities that Socrates’ spectacular mode of entry does not stir

32

Cf. Fisher (1984), 62–3, who believes that the students appear on the eccyclema. Revermann (2006), 185–7. 34 cf. Arnott (1973), 59, Mastronarde (1990), 264–6. See also Arnott p. 60 on Eur. Or. 1561 ff. 35 Cf. Taplin (1977), 444 with n. 3. Revermann (2006), 187–8 thinks the crane ought to have paratragic associations, here as elsewhere, but concludes that they may have been toned down in the revision of the play. 33

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feelings of surprise any longer’.36 Revermann is surely right that the effect on the audience is rather different.

1 0 . T W I C E L AT E R I N C LO U D S S T R E P S I A D E S C O M E S TO S E E S O C R AT E S (a) At 866, when he is bringing his son to be Socrates’ pupil, he simply calls through the door for Socrates to come out, and Socrates immediately does so; Strepsiades now knows that he is known to Socrates, and Socrates has been expecting him to return with his son since 803. (b) 1144–5 is a little more elaborate, in that Strepsiades again knocks and calls for a slave to answer; but this time Socrates immediately appears. Dover comments on 1145: ‘We might have expected a student to open the door, . . . but that would be dramatically inconvenient and time-wasting at this point.’37 This is surely right: Aristophanes has already extracted a great deal of comedy out of Strepsiades’ knocking at the door earlier in the play, and doubtless he does not want to repeat himself. Dover does not explain why Aristophanes has made Strepsiades knock and call for a slave at all at this point, rather than making him simply call out Socrates by name, as at 866. But there is perhaps a difference between handing his son over and coming to fetch him, and perhaps too the fact that Strepsiades has come to collect his son at the end of his course of instruction is underlined by the reminder that he knocked and called for a slave when he first came to offer himself as a pupil. There is no sign in the text that Strepsiades is surprised to see Socrates himself answering the door, or that any other sort of comic effect is created.

1 1 . C LO U D S 1 1 6 3 – 7 0 On the usual view, Strepsiades sends Socrates in to bring his son out from indoors at 1163–4, calls to his son through the doorway at 1165–6, and greets him enthusiastically when Socrates brings him out at 1167. This scene is well discussed by Revermann on this assumption.38 Konstan (2006) suggests that at 1145 Socrates had been accompanied by Phidippides as he emerged from 36

37 Revermann (2006), 193. Dover (1968), 232. Revermann (2006), 222–4. But on this view Phidippides is not on stage at 1154–66, as seems to be implied at the top of p. 224. 38

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his house but Strepsiades had failed to recognize him; at 1163–4 he addresses him as one of Socrates’ pupils, telling him to run in and fetch his son; Phidippides makes no move, so Strepsiades himself calls to his son at 1165–6; only then, ‘to the surprise of both Strepsiades and the audience’, does Phidippides identify himself as his son, considerably changed in appearance since Strepsiades last saw him. This is ingenious, but we might have expected some clearer indication in the text that 1164 was not addressed to Socrates, and some kind of reaction from Strepsiades to Phidippides’ failure to move at the end of 1164; above all, we might have expected 1167 (8δ’ 0κε,νο α#ν ρ, ‘This is that man’) to include a word meaning ‘but’, if Phidippides here corrects his father’s evident misunderstanding.

1 2 . C LO U D S 1 2 2 1 The first creditor summons Strepsiades to appear, and Strepsiades unusually interrupts him by coming out saying ‘Who’s this?’ (τ οτοσ;) in the middle of the creditor’s sentence. According to Revermann, ‘a joke is made of Strepsiades re-entering on cue, the very mention of his name, at 1221’ (after going indoors at 1213);39 the speed with which he appears perhaps reflects his new-found confidence in his ability to out-argue his creditor.

1 3 . WA S P S 1 5 2 Here we find a comic reversal of the norm, because Philocleon is locked inside and desperate to get out, and his slaves are outside trying to keep him in; so he bangs on the door from inside, calling on a slave (πα,) to open it for him.40 We find a similar reversal of the norm at Lysistrata 1216. To quote from Henderson: ‘Here Ar. works a comic reversal of the preceding action, where men had attempted to enter, not escape from, the Akropolis.’41 So we see someone charging out of the door, ordering the doorkeeper from inside to open it (αHνοιγε τ6ν θραν σ).

39 41

Revermann (2006), 275. Henderson (1987), 208.

40

So MacDowell (1971), 152.

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1 4 . WA S P S 2 7 0 – 2 See p. 352 above on Acharnians 862–4.

1 5 . WA S P S 1 4 8 2 – 4 Φι. Ξα. Φι.

τ 0π’ αλεοισι θραι θα´σσει; τουτ2 κα2 δ6 χωρε, τ κακν. κλDιθρα χαλα´σθω τα´δε.

Philocleon: Xanthias: Philocleon:

Who sitteth at the outer door? This really gets worse and worse. Let these doors be unbarred!

Again Philocleon speaks as if he were locked in and trying to get out, this time in clear tragic style.42 But since the door is probably standing open, and Philocleon has no difficulty in coming out into the acting area, his command for the door to be opened ‘merely shows how wrapped up he is in his drunken fantasy of being a great tragic actor and dancer: he uses the words of the tragic text he has in mind even though they are irrelevant to his actual situation’.43

1 6 . P E AC E 1 7 9 – 8 7 Trygaeus shouts at the door of Zeus, to find it opened by Hermes, who is initially even ruder to him than the doorkeeper in Clouds had been to Strepsiades. Trygaeus’ opening question in v. 179 (τ 0ν ∆ι θραισιν;, ‘Who is within Zeus’s doors?’) seems to have a tragic ring, reminding us particularly of τ 0ν πλαισι (‘Who is within the gates?’) at Euripides, Phoenissae 1067 and Bacchae 170, as commentators note.44 They also tend to agree that Trygaeus knocks as well as shouting; thus most recently Olson: ‘Although the text does not signal this explicitly, Tr. clearly walks up to the side-door and knocks, calling out for attention from within as he does so.’45 This could be right, though lines 180–1 suggest to me that Trygaeus may not even have dismounted yet from the dung beetle and could be shouting from mid-air: 42 44

See Rau (1967), 155. Cf. also Aesch. Cho. 654.

43

Sommerstein (1983), 245. 45 Olson (1998), 101, on line 179.

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Hermes exclaims ‘Lord Heracles! What is this awful thing?’ (?ναξ = Ηρα´κλει· | τουτ2 τ 0στι τ κακν;), and Trygaeus replies ‘A hippobeetle’ (Lπποκα´νθαρο). Hermes was not traditionally known as the doorkeeper of the gods, but his bust did stand at the entrance to many houses in Athens, symbolizing his function as protector of the household.46 That may have helped to give Aristophanes the idea, which must be a surprising variant on the routine of the slave-doorkeeper. Hermes is presumably instantly recognizable.47

17. BIRDS 54–9248 (a) 54–62

Πε. Ε. Πε. Ε.

α#λλ’ ο1σθ’ Z δρα˜σον; τ%ι σκ.λει θ.νε τ6ν π.τραν. σ) δ τDι κεφαλDι γ’, pν’ Oι διπλα´σιο E ψφο. σ) δ’ ο4ν λθωι κψον λαβν. πα´νυ γ’, ε@ δοκε,. πα, πα,. Πε. τ λ.γει, οgτο; τν ποπα πα, καλε,; οκ α#ντ2 το& παιδ σ’ 0χρDν 0ποπο, καλε,ν; Ε. 0ποπο,. ποι σει το µε κπτειν α4θι α4. 0ποπο,. Θε. τνε οgτοι; τ E βο%ν τν δεσπτην; Ε. eπολλον α#ποτρπαιε, το& χασµ µατο. Θε. οCµοι τα´λα, /ρνιθοθ ρα τουτω.

55

60

Pis: Eu: Pis: Eu:

But do you know what you should do? Kick the rock with your leg. You hit it with your head; that’ll make twice as much noise. 55 Well, then, you pick up a stone and knock with that. Certainly, if you want me to: Boy, boy! Pis: Hey, what are you saying? Are you calling the hoopoe ‘boy’? Shouldn’t you have called ‘Hoop-ho!’ instead of ‘Boy!’? Eu: Hoop-ho! You’ll force me to knock again, you know! Hoop-ho! Hoopoe’s slave: Who’s there? Who’s shouting for my master? 60 Eu: Apollo preserve us, the size of that gape! Slave: Oh no, I’ve had it! These are a pair of bird-catchers!

Pisetaerus and Euelpides are searching for Tereus, who has been turned 46

See Revermann (2006), 234; also Plut. 1153, where Hermes offers himself as Hermes Strophaios, the God of the Turning Hinge. 47 48 Stone (1981), 318. See Gelzer (1976), 3–4.

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into a hoopoe. They think they have come to the right place, and they now have to attract his attention. They are in the middle of nowhere, and of course there are no houses around. But twice the verb κπτειν is used (56, 59), which is one of the regular verbs for knocking at a door, and Euelpides in calling out ‘Boy, boy!’ at 57 clearly turns this scene of knocking at a rock into a standard doorknocking scene.49 It is of course absurd to suppose that the hoopoe will have a slave; that is why he changes his call. But this is a world in which the absurd comes true: when Tereus turned into a bird, so did his slave. So we get our familiar routine, in which the slave answers the door, but it is not presented entirely in the familiar way, first because Euelpides picks up a stone to knock with, secondly because we could not be sure when he knocked on the rock that it really would be the prelude to a door-opening scene; thirdly because the characters thought the knock would not be answered by a slave, but they were wrong; and fourthly because the slave turns out to be a bird, with an enormous beak. They are terrified to see him; he is terrified of them, assuming that they must be bird-catchers. (b) 92–106 The slave tells them that his master will be angry to be woken but nonetheless agrees to go and wake him for them; and at 92 the voice of the hoopoe is heard from inside, saying ‘Open the woodland, so that I can come out at last!’ (αHνοιγε τ6ν bλην, pν’ 0ξ.λθω ποτ.). Dunbar notes that the line ‘probably sounded grand and stiff’;50 bλην (‘woodland’) is of course a surprising word, no doubt suggesting πλην (‘gate’). This line might lead us to expect a grand entry for an angry bird, but that is not what we get. Instead the great Tereus appears as a particularly shabby hoopoe because it is the moulting season, and the sight of him (and of his beak at 99) reduces Pisetaerus and Euelpides to laughter.

18. BIRDS 1495 ΠΡΟΜΗΘΕΥΣ Πε. Prometheus: Pisetaerus:

πο& Πεισ.ταιρ 0στ’;

α, τουτ2 τ Oν;

Where is Pisetaerus? Hey, what’s this?

See below on Wealth 1171–2. Here, however, there is added comedy in the presentation of Prometheus.51 49 50

On the staging of this see Dunbar (1995), 16–17, 130, 153–4. 51 Dunbar (1995), 161. See Dunbar (1995), 693, 695.

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Although the men are keen to enter the Acropolis, we do not find a doorknocking scene as such. However, Revermann writes as follows: ‘Conceptually, the vital ingredients ‘door’ and (often) ‘knocking’ strongly invite sexual undertones of attempted penetration. This is evident on a large scale in the case of Lysistrata, where the doorknocking motif is skilfully elaborated at several points of a plot which is based on women ‘closing the door’ for men: the arrival of the male half-chorus, the magistrate scene as well as the Cinesias scene can be regarded as derivatives of the comic doorkeeping routine.’52 (a) 254–351 The male half-chorus arrives at 254, planning at first (266– 70) to burn the women to death on the Acropolis, but then (at 307–11) to charge the door of the Acropolis with lighted torches and if necessary set fire to them and smoke the women out. However, as Sommerstein says, ‘just as the torches are being lit the old women make their entry, the assault on the gates is never made, and the old men remain in the orchestra for the rest of the play.’53 The arrival of the women’s half-chorus at 319 could be seen as distantly related to the opening of the door by a rude doorkeeper, since insults are exchanged and the women succeed in thwarting the men’s plan; their leader on seeing the men at 350 exclaims ‘What’s this? Men! Wicked, wicked men!’ (τουτ2 τ Oν; αHνδρε πονωπονηρο), which may remind us of Hermes’ words at Peace 181–4 (‘What is this awful thing?’, followed by three lines of abuse).54 However, none of this has in fact taken place at the door, and these women have arrived by one of the side-entrances. They can be seen as a surrogate for the women behind the door on the Acropolis, but the doorkeeping routine is rather faintly evoked here. (b) 428–31 The routine is more strongly evoked in the magistrate scene, since the magistrate prepares to assault the gates of the Acropolis with crowbars but is instantly confronted by Lysistrata, who has clearly heard him giving instructions from inside. Again, Sommerstein is worth quoting: ‘this is the first of four entries through the stage-house door by Lysistrata, and each time she appears unsummoned (706, 1106, 1273), emphasizing her mastery of the situation and her control of the Acropolis. Cf. O. P. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1977), 299–300, 307, 324 for the employment of the same technique in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.’55 (c) 829–953 In the Cinesias scene, Lysistrata sees Cinesias approaching 52 54 55

53 Revermann (2006), 185. Sommerstein (1990), 169. Cf. also Birds 1495, Frogs 39 τουτ2 τ Oν; (‘What’s this?’). Sommerstein (1990), 176. See also above on Ach. 748–50.

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from the roof of the stage-house at 829 and takes the initiative in addressing him at 847. The situation is not unlike that at Plautus, Amphitruo 1018 ff., where Amphitruo knocks at the door of his house and is answered by Mercury from the roof playing very much the part of the rude doorkeeper. There is no sign in the text of Lysistrata that Cinesias knocks at the door of the Acropolis, though a director could of course make him do so before Lysistrata addresses him. Lysistrata is initially rude to Cinesias, telling him to go away at 848, but soon agrees to summon his wife Myrrhine to talk to him. Myrrhine appears on the roof at 870 and then comes down to join Cinesias on stage at 889. The following scene (916–53) is rightly characterized by Revermann (2006), 251 as ‘a virtuoso presentation of a cluster of props via carrier entries’. That is not precisely part of the doorkeeper routine, but Netta Zagagi has pointed out to me that this is in some ways a reversal of Acharnians 410–79: there, Dicaeopolis asked Euripides for a succession of objects; here, Myrrhine fetches out a succession of objects from the Acropolis, but all Cinesias wants is Myrrhine herself. (d) At Lysistrata 1106–7 it is explicit that Lysistrata comes out from the Acropolis in response to what is said on stage, without having been summoned; see above on Acharnians 748–50. (e) On Lysistrata 1216, see above on Wasps 152.

20. THESMOPHORIAZUSAE 25–265 In lines 25–30 much is made of the door of Agathon’s house as Euripides points it out to his kinsman.56 At 39 Agathon’s slave appears from the house; like the slave of Euripides in Acharnians, he turns out to be thoroughly steeped in his master’s style of diction. At 65–6 Euripides begs him to call Agathon out from indoors, and the slave assures him that Agathon will be coming out soon in any case. At 95–8 he does come out, not only unbidden but (more surprisingly) on the eccyclema and dressed as a woman. Euripides asks Agathon to infiltrate the women’s festival in disguise (176 ff.), and, when Agathon refuses, the kinsman borrows women’s clothes from him in order to carry out Euripides’ plan. Euripides’ request to Agathon is not unlike that of Dicaeopolis to Euripides himself in Acharnians, but in this case the man making the request does not actually knock or shout at the door to find himself confronted by a rude doorkeeper. Perhaps that would have made this scene too much like others that Aristophanes had already put on. 56

Cf. Nub. 91 ff., the door of Socrates’ house.

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Euripides plays the part of Menelaus dressed in rags in an extended parody of his own Helen, which had been put on the year before. At Helen 435–82 Menelaus knocks at the door of the palace, which is opened by an old woman who rudely tells him to go away; modern scholars have cited this scene as one of the clearest examples of the influence of comedy in Euripides’ play.57 Aristophanes, however, has constructed a situation in which there is no door to be knocked at. Euripides, like Menelaus, is dressed in rags,58 and in some ways Critylla, who stands guard over the kinsman, can be seen as the equivalent of the old woman in Helen; but the verbal echoes of the old woman’s utterances come in the mouth not of Critylla but of the kinsman at 874 and 886 (necessarily so, since it is Euripides and the kinsman who are re-enacting Helen, while Critylla reminds them repeatedly that they are really in contemporary Athens). The fact that ‘Helen’ (i.e. the kinsman) is on stage here marks a significant difference from Euripides’ play: as is well known, Aristophanes has telescoped the action of several Euripidean scenes into his one scene. Thus, although it contains much parody of Helen, it was not possible for it to include a doorknocking scene.

2 2 . F RO G S 3 5 – 4 6 At the beginning of this play we see Dionysus wearing the yellow tunic and boots that were associated with him, but also wearing a lion skin and carrying a club, attributes of Heracles. He is accompanied by his slave Xanthias on a donkey. After a certain amount of joking, Dionysus says (35–7): κατα´βα πανο&ργε. κα2 γα`ρ 0γγ) τD θρα Aδη βαδζων ε@µ2 τDσδ’, οB πρ%τα´ µε δει τραπ.σθαι. παιδον, πα,, iµ, πα,. Get down, you villain. I’ve nearly walked all the way To this door now, which was to be my first Port of call. Boy, boy! I say, boy!

We have no idea what to expect, because we have not been told where they are, why they have come here, or whose door it is that Dionysus is knocking 57 58

See Brown (2000), 5–8 for a discussion of this scene. See Austin and Olson (2004), 295–6.

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at. We are duly astonished when, instead of a slave, Heracles himself opens the door, asking (38–9) τ τ6ν θραν 0πα´ταξεν; < κενταυρικ% 0ν λαθ’, 8στι. Who knocked at the door? He jumped at it just like a centaur, Whoever he was.

How do we know that it is Heracles? Presumably because he too is wearing a lion skin, and perhaps also carrying a club. In other words, we see two Heracleses: Dionysus dressed as Heracles has the door opened to him by the real Heracles. As Sommerstein says in his stage direction, ‘He opens the door and is amazed to see his own double.’59 At Birds 92–106 Pisetaerus and Euelpides laughed at the appearance of the hoopoe. There is laughter again here in Frogs, but here it is the man who opens the door (Heracles) who does the laughing, unable to restrain himself at the sight of his half-brother in his ridiculous attire. Not surprisingly, Dionysus has not fooled Heracles into thinking that he himself is Heracles.

2 3 . F RO G S 4 6 0 – 9 Dionysus and Xanthias have arrived in the underworld, and Dionysus knocks at the door of Pluto’s palace. As elsewhere, it is not clear who answers, but again I think most probably a slave.60 The slave lets forth a torrent of abuse (echoing Hermes at Peace 182–4), takes Dionysus to be the real Heracles, berates him for having stolen the dog Cerberus when he was last down there, and in the following lines threatens him with the direst imaginable punishments. Here the humour lies not in the fact that the doorkeeper sees through his disguise (as Heracles naturally did earlier) but in the fact that he accepts it but is not remotely impressed by the thought that he has Heracles in front of him. The Gates of Hades were a familiar concept from Homer onwards,61 and Hades is three times in Homer called the ‘gate fastener’ (πυλα´ρτη).62 But this probably did not lead to a belief in any doorkeeper or guardian of the gate other than Cerberus; as West says: ‘The gates of Hades remain as a 59 60 61

Sommerstein (1996), 39. See Dover (1993), 50–5. Against this view, see Sommerstein (1996), 198. 62 See Sourvinou-Inwood (1995), 64–5. Il. 8.367, 13.415, Od. 11.277.

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conventional concept in later poetry. In Aristophanes they are provided with a janitor.’63 The domestication of the Gates of Hades is presumably an additional comic effect, as was the domestication of Zeus’ palace at Peace 179–87. At 460–1, it is a new element that Dionysus wonders about how he should knock: αHγε δ , τνα τρπον τ6ν θραν κψω, τνα; π% 0νθα´δ’ αHρα κπτουσιν οπιχριοι; Well then, how shall I knock at the door? How? How do the locals knock down here?

Dover remarks that ‘Dionysus’ nervousness is understandable, for the palace of the King of the Dead is necessarily intimidating, but the Greeks were also aware that the conventions of arrival at a house are not identical everywhere’.64 I suspect that the extension of this awareness to a belief in different local styles of knocking was more comic than Dover’s comment suggests;65 but Dionysus’ nervousness (which may be compared with that of Strepsiades at Clouds 129 ff.) helps to focus attention on the moment when he does finally knock and on the surprise both for him and for us when the doorkeeper answers.

24. ECCLESIAZUSAE 33–5 At the beginning of the play Praxagora scratches at the door of her neighbour, so as to attract her attention without waking her husband.66

25. ECCLESIAZUSAE 976–90 Towards the end of the play, when Epigenes has been singing to his girlfriend, urging her to open the door to him, he finds that the neighbouring door is suddenly opened by a considerably less attractive older woman (976–7):

63

West (1997), 157. Dover (1993), 253. Thus Plut. Mor. 239B tells us that it was the custom of the ancient Spartans not to knock on the outer doors but to call from outside. 65 Revermann (2006), 184 n. 10 sees it as ‘a metatheatrical joke on a routine device’. 66 For scratching at the door cf. Thesm. 481. 64

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Γρ. οgτο, τ κπτει; µ%ν 0µ ζητε,; Νε. πθεν; Γρ. κα2 τ6ν θραν γ’ Aραττε. Νε. α#ποθα´νοιµ’ αHρα. Old Woman: Hey, you! What are you knocking for? It can’t be me you’re looking for, can it? Epigenes: Of course not. Old Woman: Oh yes, and you bashed the door! Epigenes: I’m damned if I did!

This was not the door he expected to be opened, and it is quite possible that he had not even knocked at the other door, though he had urged his girlfriend to open her door to him at 974; the whole thing has perhaps been made up by the old woman.67 At 989–90 he says ‘I’ve got to knock on this one’ (τηνδεδ µοι κρουστ.ον, perhaps oddly expressed, if he has already knocked), and the old woman replies ‘Only when you’ve knocked at my door first!’ (8ταν γε κροσηι τ6ν 0µ6ν πρ%τον θραν), with clear sexual innuendo. Sommerstein discusses the possibility that Epigenes has an erect phallus;68 if so, he is visibly similar to Cinesias at Lysistrata 829–953.

2 6 . W E A LT H 2 2 7 – 9 Κα. κα2 δ6 βαδζω· τουτοδ2 τ κρεα´ιδιον τ%ν νδοθ.ν τι ε@σενεγκα´τω λαβν. Χρ. 0µο2 µελ σει το&τ γ’· α#λλ’ α=νσα τρ.χε. Carion:

Yes, I’m on my way. [Calling into the stage-house:] Will someone in there please take this bit of meat inside? Chremylus: I’ll see to that; just run, and get on with it!

Normally, when slaves are summoned to appear from inside, or to bring something out, or ordered to go inside to fetch something, they do so.69 Here Chremylus countermands Carion’s order,70 thus emphasizing his impatience.

68 Dover (1966), 16 = (1987), 265. Sommerstein (1998), 222, on line 969. See Ach. 805, 887, 1097–133; Eq. 1407; Vesp. 860–1; Pax 255; Av. 850; Lys. 199; Thesm. 238; Plut. 1194. Eccl. 734–44 appears to be another example of the same phenomenon. At Vesp. 1251, it is not clear whether the slave addressed by name is the one who subsequently appears. 70 On countermanded instructions in tragedy, see Bain (1981), 8–13; on the merely apparent instruction at Ran. 847, Bain (1981), 45–6. 67 69

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Peter Brown 2 7 . W E A LT H 6 4 1 τ 9 βο ποτ’ 0στν; (‘What on earth is this noise?’)

Chremylus’ wife comes out from the house in response to the chorus’s excited singing; see above on Acharnians 748–50.

2 8 . W E A LT H 9 6 4 – 5 Γρ. φ.ρε νυν 0γ[ τ%ν νδοθεν καλ.σω τινα´. Χρ. µ6 δDτ’· 0γ[ γα`ρ ατ 0ξελ λυθα. Old Woman: Well then, let me call someone from inside. Chremylus: No, don’t: I’ve come out myself anyway.

This is similar to Lysistrata 428–31, 1103–7, Wealth 1171–2. In this case we can imagine the old woman moving towards the door and perhaps preparing to knock at it. Sommerstein is no doubt right that Aristophanes wishes Chremylus, not Carion, to appear at this point, but there is presumably added humour in the fact that the old woman’s action is forestalled by Chremylus’ deciding to come out at just this point.71 Sommerstein argues for choral interludes at 958/9 and 1096/7;72 if he is right, it is interesting that both this and the next example come at the beginning of a new scene after an interlude.

2 9 . W E A LT H 1 0 9 7 – 1 1 0 2 Κα. Ερ. Κα. Ερ.

τ σθ’ E κπτων τ6ν θραν; τουτ2 τ Oν; οδε2 οικεν· α#λλα` δDτα τ θριον φθεγγµενον αHλλω κλαυσια˜ι. σ. τοι λ.γω, E Καρων, α#να´µεινον. οgτο, ε@π. µοι, σ) τ6ν θραν κοπτε οτωσ2 σφδρα; µα` ∆’ α#λλ’ µελλον· ε1τ’ α#ν.ωιξα´ µε φθα´σα.

1100

Carion: Who’s that knocking at the door? What’s this, then? No one, apparently. In that case it’s just the door Creaking for no reason; it’s asking to be given grief! 71

Sommerstein (2001), 199. On scenes where doorknocking is forestalled in later comedy, see Brown (1995), 75, 78–81, 82 with notes 36 and 37. 72 Sommerstein (2001), 199, 208–9.

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Hermes:

Hey, you, Carion! Wait! Carion: You there, tell me, Was that you knocking so hard at the door? Hermes: Certainly not; but I was going to. You opened it before I got there.

This comes almost at the end of Aristophanes’ last surviving play, and it is quite unlike any other example. As at Ecclesiazusae 977, the character alleged to have knocked at the door denies having done so, and there is certainly no sign in the text of any action before Carion’s question at 1097. Is this the ultimate reversal of our expectations, in which we not only have Hermes planning to knock instead of answering the door, but the door is opened in answer to his knock before he has even reached it? That would be strange; and perhaps the traditional view is correct, that there is a bit of dumbshow before Carion opens the door at 1097, in which Hermes enters, knocks at the door, and then runs away and hides, pretending not to have knocked at all. This too is unparalleled in our texts, and perhaps it shows that Aristophanes was by now trying a bit too hard to inject new life into this routine. Revermann sees this passage (like Frogs 460 ff.) more positively as a ‘metatheatrical joke on a routine device’.73 Whatever view one takes, Aristophanes is clearly still trying to entertain his audience by presenting a familiar routine in a new way.

3 0 . W E A LT H 1 1 7 1 – 2 ΙΕΡΕΥΣ Χρ.

τ αXν φρα´σειε πο& # στι Χρεµλο µοι σαφ%; τ δ’ 0στν, ? β.λτιστε;

Priest: Who can tell me precisely where Chremylus is? Chremylus (coming out from his house): What is it, my dear fellow?

As at 964–5, Chremylus appears instantly. This is similar to a number of scenes in tragedy in which a character (typically a messenger) arrives and asks, for example, ‘Where is Creon?’ and the character sought immediately appears.74

73

Revermann (2006), 184 n. 10. e.g. Soph. Ant. 384–6, Eur. Alc. 477–508, Hec. 657–66, Hipp. 1153–6. At Ant. 387 Creon asks τ δ’ 0στ; (‘What is it?’), as does Theseus at Hipp. 1160. The first five words of the Priest’s question are identical with those of the Athenian at Lysistrata 1086; cf. also Ar. fr. 130 K-A, and Birds 1495 above. 74

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Arnott, G. (1973), ‘Euripides and the Unexpected’, G&R 20: 49–64. Austin, C. and Olson, S. D. (2004), Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, Oxford. Bain, D. (1981), Masters, Servants and Orders in Greek Tragedy, Manchester. Bowie, A. M. (1993), Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy, Cambridge. Brock, R. (1990), ‘Plato and Comedy’, in E. Craik (ed.), ‘Owls to Athens’: Essays on Classical Subjects presented to Sir Kenneth Dover (Oxford), 39–49. Brown, P. G. McC. (1995), ‘Aeschinus at the Door: Terence, Adelphoe 632–43 and the Traditions of Greco-Roman Comedy’, PLLS 8: 71–89. –––– (2000), ‘Knocking at the Door in Fifth-Century Greek Tragedy’, in S. Gödde and T. Heinze (eds.), Skenika: Beiträge zum antiken Theater und seiner Rezeption; Festschrift for H-D. Blume (Darmstadt), 1–16. Collard, C., Cropp, M. J., and Lee, K. H. (1995), Euripides, Selected Fragmentary Plays, vol.I, Warminster. Dickey, E. (1996), Greek Forms of Address, Oxford. Dover, K. J. (1966), ‘The Skene in Aristophanes’, PCPhS 192: 2–17, reprinted in id., Greek and the Greeks (Oxford, 1987), 249–66. –––– (1968), Aristophanes, Clouds, Oxford. –––– (1993), Aristophanes, Frogs, Oxford. Dunbar, N. (1995), Aristophanes, Birds, Oxford. Fisher, R. K. (1984), Aristophanes Clouds: Purpose and Technique, Amsterdam. Frost, K. B. (1988), Exits and Entrances in Menander, Oxford. –––– (1993), ‘An Entrance Convention in New Comedy’, LCM 18.8: 125. Gelzer, T. (1976), ‘Some Aspects of Aristophanes’ Dramatic Art in the Birds’, BICS 23: 1–14. –––– (1993), ‘Feste Strukturen in der Komödie des Aristophanes’, in J. M. Bremer and E. W. Handley (eds.), Aristophane; Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 38 (Vandœuvres-Geneva), 51–90. Henderson, J. (1987), Aristophanes, Lysistrata, Oxford. Konstan, D. (2006), ‘“This is That Man”: Staging Clouds 1142–77’, CQ 56: 595–8. Landfester, M. (1975), ‘Beobachtungen zu den Wolken des Aristophanes’, Mnemosyne 28: 384–6. MacDowell, D. M. (1971), Aristophanes, Wasps, Oxford. Mastronarde, D. J. (1990), ‘Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama’, CA 9: 247–94. May, R. (2006), Apuleius and Drama, Oxford. Mooney, W. W. (1914), The House-Door on the Ancient Stage, Diss. Baltimore. Olson, S. D. (1992), ‘Names and Naming in Aristophanic Comedy’, CQ 42: 304–19. –––– (1998), Aristophanes, Peace, Oxford. –––– (2002), Aristophanes, Acharnians, Oxford. Preiser, C. (2000), Euripides: Telephos, Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York. Rau, P. (1967), Paratragodia, Zetemata vol. 45, Munich.

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Rennie, W. (1909), The Acharnians of Aristophanes, London. Revermann, M. (2006), Comic Business, Oxford. Sommerstein, A. H. (1980–2001), The Comedies of Aristophanes: Acharnians (1980), Knights (1981), Clouds (1982), Wasps (1983), Peace (1985), Birds (1987), Lysistrata (1990), Thesmophoriazusae (1994), Frogs (1996), Ecclesiazusae (1998), Wealth (2001), Warminster. –––– (1980b), ‘Notes on Aristophanes’ Knights’, CQ 30: 46–56. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1995), ‘Reading’ Greek Death, Oxford. Starkie, W. J. M. (1909), Aristophanes, The Acharnians, Macmillan. Stone, L. M. (1981), Costume in Aristophanic Comedy, New York, reprinted Salem, NH, 1984. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oxford. West, M. L. (1997), The East Face of Helicon, Oxford. Willi, A. (2003), The Languages of Aristophanes, Oxford.

16 The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy1 David Wiles

Oliver Taplin’s greatest contribution to the study of ancient theatre has been to establish that staging is an aspect of meaning, and in consequence that it can no longer be intellectually acceptable to talk about what the Oresteia, for example, meant in the fifth century without considering how the trilogy was represented in the theatre. In this paper I shall examine a particular aspect of staging, the comic mask, and I shall demonstrate how the mask may and should be interpreted in an integrated way as part of what the Aristophanic ko¯mo¯idia meant. It is impossible, in my view, to read a dramatic text without in some way visualizing it, creating a virtual performance in one’s head, and that visualization needs to be historically informed if the critical reading is to have historical weight. Comic Angels2 was a seminal work because Taplin demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that certain South Italian vase paintings, formerly marginalized under the mysterious label ‘phlyax vases’, actually represented Aristophanic scenes, and that other vases in the corpus presupposed a painter and purchaser familiar with specific plots of Old Comedy. My own doctoral thesis explored the sociological implications of master-servant role reversals, and took as its starting point The Frogs.3 With the benefit of Comic Angels, I would have been able to see that in performance Dionysus and Xanthias had similar bearded masks and distorted bodies, justifying confusion when each pretends to be the other. The staging of the masks has major implications for the distinction in the parabasis between good coinage and base coinage, upon which the argument of the play turns. I have analysed elsewhere4 the masks of New Comedy, where we see the beginnings of a dualist conception of the self. The body and mask of the dyskolos, the misanthrope, conceals a pathos that one had not expected, and an ethos more complex than one had suspected. We are invited to evaluate In its first version, this paper was given as a seminar paper at the ICS in 1997. My thanks to Nick Lowe and Michael Silk for their comments. 2 3 4 Taplin (1993). Wiles (1979). Wiles (1991). 1

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Knemon’s disposition within a milieu of decadent sacrifices and indisciplined urban slaves, and realize that the face of the ill-tempered misanthrope may belie his true worth; Knemon’s comic mask, like the satyric physiognomy of Socrates, may bear an inverse relationship to his ultimate moral value. The face, though it may mislead, is the starting point for the audience’s attempt to assess an individual’s e¯thos. In a world of arbitrary citizenship laws, the masks of New Comedy contained physiognomic clues that gave privileged access to a new dimension of personal identity. Masks isolated from bodies became emblems in both public and private spaces. In the post-classical age they reveal themselves on the floors of banqueting rooms, swinging in the breeze in doorways, or brought to life by the flames of an oil-lamp, indispensable components of Greek material culture. New Comedy was dualistic. Private life was separated from the political sphere, actors from dancers, mind from body, gods from mortals, Greek master from the natural slave, and mask from the body of the actor. The physical transfer of the actors to a high, shallow stage allowed New Comedy masks to reveal themselves in frontal or three-quarter position, so the facial coding could be deciphered. In contrast, Old Comedy may be described as a holistic form: gods interacted with mortals, slaves are confused with masters, actors flowed in and out of the choral group, use of the orchestral space helped incorporate the audience in the fictional world of the play, and there was little by way of a neck to dissociate head/mask from body. Stomach and phallus were a reminder of animal impulses driving the integrated human organism. Vase representations of Old Comedy make free use of profiles to exploit the energy of a jutting beard. Trendall and Webster, depicting terracotta figurines of c.400 bce, include photos of three figures from behind, demonstrating how eloquent the rear view of an Old Comedy actor can be.5 The holistic tendencies of Old Comedy make it hard for archaeologists to describe and classify that item of skeue¯ or kit which classical Greeks called the face (proso¯pon) and we call the mask. The great Athenian taxonomist of the second century ce, Julius Pollux, provided a foundation for later work when he compiled his catalogue of New Comedy mask types, but he made no attempt to do likewise for Old Comedy, whose masks, he thought, were simply ‘copied from the faces of those they ridiculed or were fashioned with comic distortion’. To make matters more complicated, Pollux noted that tragic masks like Drunkenness, Dread, and Envy could also be masks of Comedy.6 T. B. L. Webster, with the subsequent collaboration of Richard Green, nevertheless pursued his mission of placing order on Old Comedy

5

Trendall and Webster (1970), 126.

6

Pollux iv.142–3: Csapo and Slater (1994), 400.

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material, framing necessary data on date, provenance, and bibliography to his own classificatory system. Webster began with some twenty-four masks,7 but the list soon grew to become an A–Z of types with 17 supplementary subtypes. Green helpfully sketched the different types, but offered no additional clues as to how one old man or hetaira might have carried a different meaning to another in performance. In practice, vase paintings allow the depiction of textured straggly hair, while on terracotta models stripped of paint the hair can only be apprehended in block form; sculptors plainly delighted in creating bulging eyes, while painters delighted in the upward curve of a thin beard. The exercise undertaken by Webster and Green drew together heterogeneous 2-D and 3-D images, postulating common referents in the theatre. Classification became a task for the connoisseur, and literary critics were all too pleased to infer that their own energies were more profitably spent on analysing texts. The twelve or thirteen terracotta figurines found in a single Athenian grave (400–375 bce) and now in New York continue to provide the most powerful stimulus for researchers seeking to imagine the body of the Aristophanic actor, and we have many similar figurines from later in the century. Webster sought to cast an Old Comedy with a group of these figures, and concluded that three different roles in the comedy, in a convenient economy, used a single mask8 ––not in itself an absurd conclusion since experimental practice rapidly demonstrates that a mask given to a different actor will often look like a different mask. When Csapo and Slater labelled the male New York figurines, they attempted helpful distinctions: slave carrying a water-jar (missing); old man (or slave) clutching or opening money bag and seated on square altar; old man wearing a traveller’s hat (pilos) and drying his eye with his himation; old man wearing pilos in thinker pose seated on round altar; slave carrying basket . . . seated slave on ‘stump’ . . . slave seated on ‘stump’ in thinker pose . . .9

The method plainly relies on inference. Slaves are more likely to be carrying baskets or water, while free men are more likely to have hats and cloaks, the two identified as ‘slaves’ on stumps being cloakless. In the theatre likewise, Athenians must have identified masks on the basis of context. When the mask generalizes the human face, it becomes easier for the imagination of the spectator to project meaning on to it. The New York figurines proffer a universal comic face whose grotesque features are of a piece with the grotesque body, appropriate to the normative mature male from Dikaiopolis to Chremylos. If the mouth has different contours, this probably relates to the use of real hair for the beard. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of these 7

Webster (1970), 62.

8

Webster (1970), 70.

9

Csapo and Slater (1994), 71.

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masks appears most strongly in profile: the cleft between brow and nose, which inverts the straight line from brow to nose that seems, today, the most striking marker of the heroic Grecian face. From the perspective of today’s multicultural society, a future research project must be a diachronic tracing of how the slave face of a non-Greek came to be distinguished in the fourth century from the free face of an Athenian, and the Webster/Green catalogues will be an invaluable resource when that research is undertaken.10 Scholars are necessarily indebted to their patient work. There are no grounds, however, for projecting the slave/free distinction back on to the masks of the fifth century, when a slave might also be an evocation of Nikias the general. A further complication in the Webster/ Green taxonomic exercise lies in the ternary structure of the Greek dramatic festival. Whether grotesque masks belong to comic figures or satyrs is not always clear, unless one can see pointed horsey ears. Both genres distorted the classical face, but only comedy distorted the proportions of the classical body. Our earliest relevant Athenian vase representation illustrates the perils of fifth-century evidence. When a figure parodying Perseus dances on a stage in front of Dionysus, he wears a body suit and phallus as in comedy, but has the torso of a satyr and a mask that, though damaged, seems more reminiscent of satyr features. The vase painter was not documenting theatre history for the benefit of future scholars, but engaging in fantasy.11 The earliest vase considered by Taplin, the New York ‘goose play’ of c.400 bce, likewise plays with genre when a naked tragedian gazes at a comic mask.12 Vase painters had their own logic when they represented or alluded to theatre masks. Let us take another example from the end of the fifth century, a chous in St Petersburg. A lumpy youth in a body-suit extends a mask, seen in profile with aggressive jutting beard, towards the face of a similar lumpen youth in the centre. The image is framed by two elegant youths in the long Ionic chitons we associate with tragedy. Our central youth extends away behind him a pale mask that could be tragic, and another lumpy but cloaked youth behind him holds a rather grand mask. Also framing the grotesque figures are two other masks with mischievous features that could be satyric. This scene is as close as we ever come to seeing actors engaging with Old Comedy masks. To analyse each of these masks in isolation makes no sense when we are ignorant of the painter’s overall purpose. The middle youth, situated underneath the spout and thus about to be inundated with the wine of Dionysus, is the focus of the image. The babyish lumpiness of his body does not seem to be a function of 10

Wiles (1988) sketched an approach. See also Csapo (2002), 143 f. Webster (1978), AV4; Csapo and Slater (1994), 64 with Plate 4b. Varakis (2003), 31–75 offers a cogent critique of taxonomies and argues for the integration of mask with body. 12 Taplin (1993), 30 f. with Fig. 10.2. 11

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Fig. 16.1. Chous in St Petersburg. Drawing by Gayna Wiles.

padding. His nose-to-nose confrontation with the most energized of the masks may suggest that his natural physical being has been transformed by engagement with the genre of comedy. Masks and theatre are like wine, agents of mental and physical transformation, and attributes of Dionysus. How we represent masks in modern publications affects our mode of perceiving them. Normally the vase is represented by four discrete photographs, so the overall logic is effaced. In Pickard-Cambridge the plate is reproduced as part of the comedy chapter, and not amongst choes showing children and associated with the Anthesteria. My interest in the vase was rekindled when I looked at Jean Claude Carrière’s composite sketch of the whole image.13 Photographic and conceptual isolation of these masks led Trendall and Webster to infer that the pale mask, on account of its upturned eyes, belonged to a blind man; they did not conceive that the mask might have had a life of its own, looking up at the action of the scene.14 Taplin in The Stagecraft of Aeschylus lamented that ‘theatre history has almost invariably been regarded as a subject to itself, and hardly any connection has been made with the actual interpretation of the plays’. His own interest as a dramatic critic lay in ‘what is “seen” by the sensibility of a

13

Pickard-Cambridge (1968), Fig. 78; Carrière (1979), Fig. 6. Trendall and Webster (1970), 118. Bieber (1961), 45, using the same four Museum photos, took the holder of the pale mask for Zeus, the seated youth as his servant, and the left-hand figure as a woman. Webster (1978), AV 8 takes the figures as children with comic masks. 14

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captivated audience’.15 The study of Aristophanic masks has been doubly marginalized, as part of the lesser genre and of theatre history. Michael Silk, seeking to rescue the genre in Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, is representative in his dismissal of performance. Masks feature briefly in the prologue as part of the ‘context’ before the serious work of the book can begin, the ephemera of theatre history forgotten.16 The fact that Aristophanes and Menander had an identical performative context is adduced to separate performance from the quest for genre.17 In a vigorous chapter on characterization, Silk contrasts the ‘realist’ tradition with the ‘recreative’ protagonists of Aristophanes. The idea that an audience may react quite differently to masked and unmasked actors is not on Silk’s critical agenda. He draws Brecht and O’Neill into his argument, but only as creators of dramatic literature, passing over the fact that these theatre-makers experimented with masks when addressing issues of character.18 Silk’s argument about ‘recreative’ characters in Aristophanes could have been enriched by analysing how audiences project different expressions on to the same masked face, thus facilitating the rejuvenation of figures like Philocleon. Silk’s approach is symptomatic of an academic environment that permits insufficient dialogue between literary study, archaeology, and theatre studies. In an essay published in Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction 15 18

16 Taplin (1977), 4. Silk (2000), 8. See Wiles (2007), 84–8, 119–21.

17

Silk (2000), 68 f.

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of the Other in Greek Art, Helene Foley has made the most substantive attempt to date to link the Aristophanic mask to questions of theatrical meaning.19 Elaborating on a thesis of Jack Winkler that the comic body created an inverse image of the ideal citizen body, she argues that the comic body offered a male counter to the feminized body of tragedy. She discusses the mask as a function of the comic body, and arrives at a complex account of the Aristophanic performance as an aesthetic/political event, based on careful scrutiny of the iconography. I have two major reservations about a thesis that I broadly endorse. The first is a downplaying of the religious dynamic in fifth-century life. The comic body had a context in a Dionysiac festival which, in Robert Parker’s phrase, was ‘conducted under the presidency of the phallus’.20 Winkler argues that relating the phallus to ‘primitive’ fertility rites ‘has more to do with our own embarrassment at exposed genitality than with the authentic meanings of the male body to the original audience of Athenian drama’,21 but there is a counter-argument that we secularize Athenian drama today because of our greater embarrassment about religion. My second reservation concerns Foley’s conclusion that comic costume is self-referential, reminding us ‘both in the plays and on the vases, that we are seeing costumes in a performative context, and that another non-grotesque body exists beneath the padding, mask, and long phallus of the actor’. It is clear of course that we are systematically shown body-stockings and masks as signs of performative context, but it does not follow that we are invited to imagine the physique of the actor beneath. In the exceptional St Petersburg chous, what we see are not professional actors but beings whose bodies have already been transformed by their Dionysiac activity. Vase painters do not represent Old Comedy actors in propria persona, and there are important reasons why, in a genre devoted to anonymity and insult, performers needed to preserve anonymity.22 A double vision of actor and mask is something that Greek comedy, like Greek tragedy, denies us. When arguing that self-referentiality is a feature of comedy but never tragedy, Taplin considers the case of the mask and comments that there is in fact no self-referential mention of the proso¯pon in Aristophanes.23 He rightly identifies some allusion to masking in a much-discussed text of Knights: ‘Fear not: he has not been imaged. For out of fear none of the skeuopoioi was willing to image him. He will be quite recognizable. For the spectators are astute’ (Knights 230–3). The root word eiko¯n which I have rendered as ‘image’ 19

Foley (2000). 21 Parker (2005), 319. Winkler (1990), 34. The unique reference to Apollodoros in the third hypothesis to Peace is unreliable since there was no formal competition for actors: see Olson (1998), 66. 23 Taplin (1986), 170. 20 22

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does not specifically allude to the face, and the property makers or skeuopoioi had the job of creating a complete comic body. The text builds anticipation for the entry of Paphlagon/Cleon, and does not actually subvert the image before the audience’s eyes. Dario Fo, an experienced performer in grotesque commedia dell’arte masks, and a public figure who does not hesitate to foreground his own personality, lays down an overriding instruction for actors: ‘While worn the mask imposes one rule: it must never be touched. If touched, it disappears––self-destructs and becomes repulsive. To see an actor touch his mask while performing makes me shudder.’24 For an actor to refer to his proso¯pon would be like touching the mask, breaking the illusion that persists in the most anti-illusory or self-referential of dramatic forms. References to ancient masking are scarce. We know that in the phallic ceremonies of Delos, the men who wore erect phalloi also wore masks, clearly some version of the satyr mask. The bearer of the giant phallus pole transformed his identity with soot, while his companions wore no masks even though charged with insulting members of the audience.25 Masking was not, therefore, simply undertaken to protect actors from being beaten up by indignant Cleons. The deeper purpose relates rather to the phallus, and the engagement of citizens in base or animalistic behaviour. The bearer of the pole does not undergo a change of character because the phallus is not part of his body, but contact with the shameful festive object still means that his visible person needs to be obliterated or marked as defiled. Demosthenes refers to a man so accursed that he revels (ko¯mazei) without a mask in the processions, presumably those of the Dionysia.26 And Theophrastus pictures a shameless individual with so little self-respect that he dances the kordax, the archetypal lewd dance of comedy, ‘sober, even when wearing a mask in a comic chorus’.27 The axiomatic linkage of masking and drinking is particularly interesting because it suggests how entering the ambit of the wine god made engagement in comic performance acceptable. Masks may transform the mental state of the wearer as much as the mental state of the spectator.28 I have argued that the mask should be uncoupled from taxonomies derived from Pollux, and associated with the other elements of the comic body: the belly, the buttocks, and the phallus. The raised shoulders and large face unite head to body, and bent knees lend more emphasis to the roundness of the body. Whilst the heroic body measures itself on the vertical axis, the comic body operates on a horizontal axis, the head often craning forward, never 24

25 Fo (1989), 208. Athenaeus 622: Csapo and Slater (1994), 98. Demosthenes 19.287. 27 Characters 6.3. Accepted in Ussher (1993), 74, the phrase is often changed or deleted by editors unwilling to accept its logic. See Diggle (2004), 253 f. 28 See Wiles (2007). 26

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upwards. The figures of Aristophanes think with their bodies, not with their heads: fear is registered in the bowels, and desire in the stomach. In the New York figurines, it is the posture and particularly the set of the shoulders that tells us what the mask is thinking. Food, sex, and survival drive Aristophanic characters, not high principles, and the Peloponnesian War is a recurrent obstacle to the satisfaction of animalistic drives. By turning the head into an adjunct of the body, masks create the zo¯a or ‘creatures’ of Aristophanes’ world. These zo¯a are not always human, and the grotesque mask facilitated leaps in the imagination when stage figures slid across the boundary from human to animal or divine. Such masks could be attached to the bulbous bodies of wasps and create an aesthetic whole. There is a paradox here, for although the iconography emphasizes the theatricality of baggy tights and masks, the integration of a grotesque head with a grotesque body by means of the mask allowed the stage figure of the juror-wasp to be accepted as a satisfactory composite, not just a man who happens to wear wings and a stripy stomach. This crossing of boundaries is a fundamental feature of Aristophanes. Another example is the chorus of young women whom the audience must interpret as divinized clouds, and who then speak in the parabasis as the voice of Aristophanes. When the chorus liken this comedy to Electra at the tomb, and proclaim that this play relies on language and not upon the phallus or kordax, they invoke their own female attire devoid of phallus.29 There can be no question of performers removing masks for the parabasis, for the humour turns upon composite female bodies of the speakers. Taplin proposed and later withdrew the suggestion that the Attic ‘Birds’ krater acquired by the Getty depicts the contest of the Just and Unjust logoi from Clouds. The image depicts two fighting cocks, sporting large erect phalloi attached to satyr briefs.30 These cockerels’ faces seem fixed in one position, and it is hard to imagine this theatrical image sustaining the delivery of quite so much text as these roles are allocated, so Taplin’s later caution is probably justified. The point remains that the mask facilitates theatrical metaphors, allowing an abstraction like a logos to be presented in the theatre. A South Italian vase published by Taplin may perhaps evoke Euelpides and Pisthetairos from Birds.31 Two men with wings engage in a ritual at an altar, playing on pipes, and they perform on a stage that is symbolically elevated towards the sky since a protruding tree establishes ground level. The image does not fit the detail of Aristophanes’ text, for the two protagonists should be contrasted by wearing black and white,32 and the job of piping belongs to a raven––but the scene catches the idea of a ceremony performed by man-birds. The flouncy 29 31

30 Clouds 534–44. Taplin (1993), 101–4, citing the scholiast on Clouds 889. 32 Taplin (1993), Fig. 14.11. See Dunbar (1995), 487 f.

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Fig. 16.2. Calyx krater in Syracuse. Drawing by Gayna Wiles.

wings are obviously the work of a costumier, and sit comfortably on the standard comic costume. Particularly interesting is the way the actors create a sense of floating, harmonizing the jut of their beards with the movement of their legs. The mask is crucial to creating a composite stage figure: not an actor dressed up in wings, but a fantasy figure who inhabits a coherent fictive world. A further evocation of Aristophanes can be sensed in a calyx krater in Syracuse which depicts a see-saw.33 On the lowered end a woman carrying a tympanum is balanced on tiptoes, whilst on the other end a man bounces in the air in a vain attempt to lower the see-saw on his side. This image catches the essence of the contest between the poets, where a woman personifies the Muse of Euripides, performing lightweight lyrics about flying, and the verses of the two poets are weighed in a balance. The performance detail is different in the text, for the woman should be holding crude clay castanets, the weighing comes a little later, and the judge here looks more like Silenus than Dionysus, but the concept is captured by the image, its humour explained by knowledge of the play: the dancer who dances so lightly paradoxically demonstrates how much weight her performance has. The importance of the mask lies in the way it transfers our attention from character and human essences to material objects, as bodies become goods weighed in the balance. 33

Bieber (1961), Fig. 499; Cultrera (1935–6).

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Aristophanes works through visual metaphors, and language always serves the body. Where the naked face takes the spectator inward to a thought process, the comic mask takes one outward to the expressivity of the body. The force of the male mask here lies not in its revelation of character but in the alignment of the beard with the see-saw, so body and object are in harmony. Masks, then, are an integral part of the comic genre. Our difficulties in interpreting the comic mask may relate to our difficulties with the genre. Aristotle laments the lack of any satisfactory theatre-historical documentation for comedy, in respect of masks amongst other things, because the genre was not originally taken seriously.34 Although I have lamented Michael Silk’s uncoupling of ‘comedy’ from dramatic performance, his question remains an important one: how to take comedy seriously in its own aesthetic terms. Whilst most criticism either quarries Aristophanes for its information about Athenian cultural and social life, or identifies the importance of comedy in terms of its intervention in the democratic process, Silk wants to justify comedy as an art form. And while Taplin argued that Old Comedy defined itself in large measure by being the opposite of tragedy,35 Silk seeks to define comedy in more autonomous terms. In the remainder of this paper, I shall survey some of the major theories of comedy and laughter in order to suggest different ways in which we may conceptualize the generic logic of the comic mask. Most major theories of comedy can be unpacked from Aristotle’s comment on the comic mask in the Poetics: ‘The comic (geloion) is some error (hamarte¯ma) and ugliness (aischos), painless and not harmful, as instantly in the comic mask which is shameful (aischron) and distorted (diestrammenon) without pain.’36 Behind this remark lies the theory of art as imitation, and the proposition that comedy imitates phauloteroi, ‘rather horrid’ people but not wholly evil. Social categories of shame and social class are bound up in Aristotle’s vocabulary with the aesthetic category of ugliness, and no final distinction can be made between personal and public identities. This conflation is relevant to use of the mask. In the modern world the distinction between face and mask implies concealment, the mask hiding a face that is somehow more true than the mask, but in the pre-Socratic world, the person who is foul in mind is also foul in body, and Aristotle never fully frees himself from that cast of thought. The Greek ‘mask’ is semantically also the ‘face’; it is not a concealment of the face. The major theories of comedy are grouped around notions of superiority, incongruity, and release,37 and all can take sustenance from Aristotle’s brief 34 37

35 Poetics v.3. Taplin (1996). For this trilogy see e.g. Morreall (1983).

36

Poetics v.2.

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account of the laughable mask. The laughing audience feel superior to the ugly face of one who is in aesthetic, social, and moral terms phaulos. They laugh because they perceive incongruity between the ugly face and a pain-free situation––for example, Dionysus looking like a slave, tortured like a slave, but incapable of sustaining injury in the fictive world of the play. And we may surmise some equivalent to tragedy’s catharsis of the emotions when laughter is without pain or harm. Harder to discern, because the theory of mimesis requires a detached cognition to distinguish imitation from reality, are the seeds for a festive theory of comedy, where the audience is participant in the ritual process. Mimesis theory assumes that the mask is an imitation of a face, not a material ceremonial object. The locus classicus for ‘superiority theory’ is in the Leviathan, where Hobbes develops an Aristotelian account of the passions. Laughter involves ‘the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.’ Where Aristotle finds the deformed mask innocuous, Hobbes in the manner of Plato sees much harm in the ‘sudden glory’ that is laughter, for he claims that pusillanimous people of few abilities derive most joy from glorying in the imperfections of others.38 Hobbes’ mistrustful view of the human being relates to the anarchy of the English revolution. In Greek antiquity, Platonios offers a rather similar account of comedy in a world preoccupied with a raw contest for power. He argues that the demos ‘by nature has been opposed to the rich since time immemorial and that it rejoices in their discomfiture’, and the comic poets were protected as long as the democracy survived. He asserts that Old Comedy masks were therefore portraits, revealing the identity of persons mocked before any text was delivered; distorted and de-individualized masks are a feature of oligarchy and foreign occupation, when poets could not risk giving offence.39 Platonios is wrong in the emphasis he gives to the Aristophanic portrait mask, but the reasons for his error deserve our consideration. He imposes on the past a Hellenistic understanding of how portraiture worked, and we should be on our guard against likewise imposing on Aristophanes today’s realist understandings of how theatre communicates. When Platonios pictures comic laughter as a mode of attack, the counter-view is to see laughter as creating a sense of community.40 ‘Incongruity’ theories emphasize the cognitive dimension of laughter. For the analysis of performance, Henri Bergson’s Le Rire first published in 1900, remains compelling.41 He envisages the basis of comic incongruity as ‘the 38 39 40 41

Leviathan vi.21. See the discussion in La Fave, Haddad, and Maesen (1976). ‘On the Differences of the Comedies’, translated in Csapo and Slater (1994), 172–4. On Greek laughter as a mode of aggression see further Halliwell (1991), 286–9. Bergson (1956).

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mechanical encrusted (plaqué) on the living’. An audience laughs at Molière’s miser or hypochondriac because a human being who should be flexible and full of an élan vital functions like a machine, governed by an obsession. Molière’s comedy is rooted in the fixed masks of the commedia dell’arte, and Harpagon can be seen as Pantalone in bourgeois clothing. As the mask fixes a set of inescapable character traits, so likewise Molière’s script locks the miser into mechanical behaviour. This comic form, Bergson argues, offers the audience a social education. His theory works better for Moliére than for Shakespeare, and by the same token better for Menander’s comedy of manners than for Aristophanes. Bergson’s theory is premised on the uniqueness of the individual whose life can never be duplicated or repeated, and this is a difficult premise to apply to fifth-century Athens with its collectivist values and choral modes of performance. We can analyse New Comedy masks quite precisely in terms of the mechanical encrusted on the living, identifying how twisted brow lines, snub noses, or rubicund complexions are imposed on the normative classical face, but the same logic cannot be applied to Old Comedy. I would argue, rather, that in the context of orchestral performance in the Theatre of Dionysus the Aristophanic mask looked more alive and full of élan vital than the unmasked face would have done. Its power lay not in its rigidities and delimitations but in what Silk calls its ‘recreative’ character. If, for example, we take the face of the protagonist on the Würzburg vase which, as Taplin has demonstrated, represents a scene from Thesmophoriazousai,42 we see how this face is flexible enough to be read in relation to three interlocking identities, the woman at a sacrificial ritual, the shaven in-law of Euripides, and the hero Telephus. The eyes and mouth bespeak fear and threat in equal measure. Plato recognized some cognitive value to laughter in his Laws. Troubled by the moral problem of comic dancing which represents ugly and disreputable people, he envisaged a peace dance to counterbalance the graceful and upright bodies of the martial dance. He nevertheless acknowledged that it is impossible to understand what is serious without also understanding what is comic; we have to study laughable behaviour in order to avoid its pitfalls. Perhaps inspired by Spartan treatment of the Helots, his solution was to leave comic performance to slaves and foreigners, and ensure that citizens never ‘openly’ (phaneron) acquainted themselves with comic material.43 Plato plainly thought of the mask as part of the mimetic process, part of imitating misshapen bodies, and did not consider how the mask might relate to this problem of openness. He had no conceptual basis for conceiving how the proso¯pon might be a ceremonial object as well as a face, allowing buffoonery 42

Taplin (1993), Fig. 11.4.

43

Laws 816, see David (1989).

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to be cast off at the end of the performance without contaminating the performer. The father of modern ‘release’ theories is Freud, who argued that jokes work like dreams, allowing repressed sexual and aggressive impulses to bypass the censor. Freud had barely begun to conceive his theory of the Oedipus complex when he published his 1905 study of der Witz,44 but it is easy enough to extrapolate and see the protagonist of Aristophanic comedy as the eternal father figure, his limp phallus a sign of castration. Aristophanic old men have infinite energies except in the genital area, which distinguishes them from the figure of the satyr. If this theory is accepted, then it follows that the comedy functions as a kind of dream. The comic mask follows the techniques of the joke, and the normal features of the face are condensed, displaced, doubled, or inverted in order to foil the spectator’s superego. A real face would elicit feelings of guilt, but the comic mask allows repressed emotions to be vented and shared. Guilt was not an invention of the Freudian twentieth century, or indeed of the Christian era. Plato has a fascinating discussion of the gap between what people approve and what they enjoy when their innate and learned inclinations diverge. People may be ashamed to indulge in comic singing and dancing in front of respectable onlookers, yet ‘for themselves’ they enjoy it. You can enjoy watching depraved people, making a game of condemnation, perceiving your own degradation as in a dream; if you take pleasure in depravity in this way, even though shame curbs your approval, you will end up becoming depraved.45 Plato’s reference to a dream state invites comparison with Freudian thought. Aristotle famously countered Plato’s charge that pity in the theatre weakens the moral constitution of the spectator with his theory that tragedy induces a purgation of pity and fear. Since Plato claimed that laughter works in just the same way as pity, Aristotle’s reference to a comic mask causing no pain may turn on a similar theory of comedy as catharsis.46 Yet any such theory must have been heavily qualified, given Aristotle’s remarks about the scurrility of Old Comedy in the Ethics.47 We are left with an open question: does the comic mask bypass the intellect in order to permit pleasures that would otherwise be censored, or does it bypass the emotions so we are more aware of moral incongruities? Modern audiences tend to experience cognitive dissonance when confronted by a theatrical mask, but I surmise that ancient audiences found the mask rather an aid to enjoying forbidden pleasures. Foucault’s riposte to Freud has appealed to the postmodern sensibility. For 44 46

45 Freud (1957). On Freud, see Kline (1977). Laws 655–6. Republic 606c. On catharsis in comedy see Reckford (1987), 55–62.

47

Ethics iv.8.

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Foucault there is no unconscious, and what Freud generates is a discourse about sexuality, linked to techniques of the body.48 Foucault is useful in directing us to social processes, and recognizing that in Athens relationships in the gymnasium may have outweighed relationships in the home, but he fails to give any adequate account of the emotions. Men of certain proportions who presented themselves in the gymnasium must have felt shame, and comedy may have permitted catharsis of such emotions. Winkler points out that in Greek art, satyrs excepted, there ‘seems to have been a sort of practical ban on showing unbecoming bodies unless it was made perfectly clear that their fatness and slackness was artificial’. In terracotta figurines, for example, the size of the head indicates the artifice of the mask.49 Given this cultural taboo on representing ugly bodies, the mask has a critical role in freeing men from constraint. Henderson’s Freudian account of Aristophanic language suggests that the Greeks were less inhibited about their genitalia than we are today, but he fails to see how the Greeks simply had a different set of constraining rules.50 The mask had a function in releasing men from some of those constraints. We may call that function therapeutic, albeit within a maledominated social order. Theories of superiority, incongruity, and release emphasize the processes of the individual who laughs, and we must also consider approaches which take laughter as a collective phenomenon. Citing a remark of Socrates that Aristophanes’ Clouds was like an expanded symposium, Halliwell refers to ‘the special character of laughter in festive contexts’.51 A symposium, like a play, comes within the remit of the wine god, and the religious context of comedy is a source of difficulty for both Plato and Aristotle, who were respecters of tradition, yet wanted to keep the Olympian gods outside their intellectual frameworks. Aristotle refuses to allow obscene statues or paintings except ‘in the precincts of those gods for whom custom permits even scurrility’, and goes on to consider how the same gods may be honoured in performances, concluding that men may attend comedies only when they reach the age of participation in symposia.52 Performance in the context of the wine god, it seems, allows suspension of normal rules for decorum and moderation. Aristotle explains why a certain level of maturity will prevent the spectator being harmed by comedy, but cannot say why exposure to obscenity is valuable for those who are sufficiently mature. Plato, while restricting the public performance of comedy to aliens, creates a special category for satyr plays, which he describes as representations of drunken persons performed at purification and initiation rites. This kind of performance, he says ambiguously, should be 48 51

49 Foucault (1978). Winkler (1990), 34. Halliwell (1991), 290, citing Plutarch, Moralia 10c–d.

50

Henderson (1991). 52 Politics vii.17.10–11.

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left to rest as apolitical––not politikon.53 Plato identifies here a species of comedy which belongs to the sphere of Dionysus, and seems to be a necessary part of human life, yet which his philosophical discourse gives him no means of rationalizing. The best he manages is a statement that gods like Dionysus gave men festivals as relief from a life of pain, and these festivals ‘set straight again men’s trophai’ (their ‘upbringings’).54 The phrasing leads him to privilege the upright dancing of tragedy over the distorted dancing of comedy. In the sphere of literary criticism, Bakhtin justifies the phenomenon of laughter in a festive context. In the obscene and scurrilous comic forms of Greece, he finds a bilingual consciousness that anticipates the sophistication of the modern novel, linked to a different mode of viewing. On ‘the plane of laughter’, he argues, ‘one can disrespectfully walk around whole objects; therefore the back and rear portion of an object (and also its innards, not normally accessible for viewing) assume a special importance. The object is broken apart, laid bare (its hierarchical ornamentation is removed): the naked object is ridiculous . . .’55 This accords with my insistence that the Aristophanic mask is part of a three-dimensional naked body, not a face viewed from in front so one can surmise what is hidden. In his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin defined the grotesque body of Aristophanes and his successors more precisely. It was the natural antithesis of the ‘classical’ body, of which he declares: ‘All signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were removed, its convexities (signs of new sprouts and buds) smoothed out, its apertures closed . . . The accent was placed on the completed, self-sufficient individuality of the given body . . . The individual body was presented apart from its relation to the ancestral body of the people.’56 Bakhtin points us towards a semiotics of the mask, whereby the jutting beard, bulging eyes, and gaping mouth belong with the bulging stomach and folds of skin to create a body that is not hermetically sealed into its own individuality, but opened to a regenerative organic world that incorporates common humanity. In his combat against Stalin’s appropriation of the classical body for the idealized Soviet worker, Bakhtin appropriates and reworks the old ideas about fertility cult. Paradoxically, Bakhtin emphasizes the materiality of the comic body in his covert contest with Marxist materialism. He offers us a useful starting point when we consider how the comic mask sits at the intersection of ritual and politics. Kenneth Reckford begins his festive account of viewing Acharnians with the statement: ‘A person comes onstage. His face is hidden by a large grotesque comic mask.’57 This apparently common-sense assertion is misleading 53 56

54 55 Laws 815d. Laws 653d. Bakhtin (1984), 23–4. 57 Bakhtin (1984), 29. Reckford (1987), 63.

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for its implication that an actor ‘onstage’ is somehow inferred beneath the concealment of the mask. Reckford posits an ultimate truth beneath superimposed layers of deception when he writes of how ‘We have an actor (who might be Aristophanes) who is playing a comic figure, Dicaeopolis, surnamed ‘Just City’, who is playing the Mysian prince Telephus, who is pretending to be a Greek beggar.’58 In a subtle account of the carnivalesque in Aristophanic comedy, owing much to the inspiration of Bakhtin, Simon Goldhill draws upon Reckford’s analysis.59 Goldhill considers and sensibly rejects the theory that the chorus removed their masks for the parabasis because this would oversimplify complex shifts from one voice to another,60 but otherwise gives less attention than Reckford to performance values. The mask should in fact be central to his concerns when he examines passages like this (Acharnians 496–500): Don’t begrudge me, gentlemen of the audience, If I am as a beggar when speaking to the Athenians. My concern is with the polis, composing a trugedy [lit. ‘vine song’]. Trugedy knows about justice.

Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony and dialogism in the novel was posited on the idea that there should be no privileged authorial voice, and by the same token there must be no author’s or citizen’s face behind the mask. The mask removes any authority of Dicaeopolis or the chorus to pronounce on justice, but rather by its outward orientation fosters a dialogic relationship with the spectators––who already in this passage have a double identity constructed for them in the theatre and the assembly. Bakhtin conceived carnival as a form of theatre that does not distinguish actors from spectators, for ‘Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance.’61 The grotesque Aristophanic mask belonged to a theatre that in fact flourished without footlights, for the audience were part of the festival. We must beware of imposing ‘footlights’ through our modern taxonomic systems, through the photos we put in handbooks, and through visualization of Old Comedy in terms of modern unmasked performance. Theatre history, like literary criticism, is always interpretive. I have attempted to sketch here a number of approaches that allow us to interpret both mask and text as part of that crucial historical entity, the performance event.

58 59 60 61

Reckford (1987), 179. The passage above is cited in Goldhill (1991), 193 n. 90. Goldhill (1991), 196, 203–5. Bakhtin (1984), 7. McCaw (2003) explores the relevance of Bakhtin for dramatic theory.

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REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1984), Rabelais and his World, tr. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington. Bergson, H. (1956), ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (New York), 61–190. Bieber, M. (1961), The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, Princeton. Carrière, J. C. (1979), Le Carnaval et la politique: une introduction à la comédie grecque, suivie d’un choix de fragments, Paris. Csapo, E. (1997), ‘Riding the Phallus for Dionysus: Iconology, Ritual and Gender-Role De/construction’, Phoenix 51: 253–95. –––– (2002), ‘Kallipides on the Floor-Sweepings: The Limits of Realism in Classical Acting and Performance Styles’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Oxford), 127–47. –––– and Slater, W. J. (1994), The Context of Ancient Drama, Ann Arbor. Cultrera, G. (1935–6), ‘Cratere con scena fliacica di giuoco d’altelena’, Dioniso 5: 199–205. David, E. (1989), ‘Laughter in Spartan Society’, in A. Powell (ed.), Classical Sparta (London), 1–25. Diggle, J. (2004), Theophrastus Characters, Cambridge. Dunbar, N. (1995) (ed.), Aristophanes: Birds, Oxford. Fo, D. (1989), ‘Hands Off the Mask !’, New Theatre Quarterly 55 : 207–9. Foley, H. (2000), ‘The Comic Body in Greek Art and Drama’, in B. Cohen (ed.), Not the Classical Ideal : Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art (Leiden), 275–311. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, tr. R. Hurley, New York. Freud, S. (1957), Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, tr. J. Strachey, London. Goldhill, S. (1991), ‘Comic Inversion and Inverted Commas’, in id., The Poet’s Voice (Cambridge), 167–222. Green, J. R. (1994), Theatre in Ancient Greek Society, London. Hall, E. (2006), The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society, Oxford. Halliwell, S. (1991), ‘The Uses of Laughter in Greek Culture’, CQ 41 : 279–96. Henderson, J. (1991), The Maculate Muse, New York. Kline, P. (1977), ‘The Psychoanalytic Theory of Humour and Laughter’, in A. J. Chapman and H. C. Foot (eds.), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour (Oxford), 7–12. La Fave, L., Haddad, J., and Maesen, W. A. (1976), ‘Superiority, Enhanced Self-Esteem and Perceived Incongruity Humour Theory’, in A. J. Chapman and P. Foot (eds.), Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Application (London), 63–91. McCaw, R. (2003), Bakhtin’s Other Theatre, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway University of London. Morreall, J. (1983), Taking Laughter Seriously, New York. Olson, S. D. (1998) (ed.), Aristophanes: Peace, Oxford. Parker, R. (2005), Polytheism and Society at Athens, Oxford.

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Pickard-Cambridge, A. (1968), The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, revised by J. Gould and D. M. Lewis, Oxford. Reckford, K. (1987), Aristophanes’ Old-and-New Comedy, Chapel Hill. Silk, M. S. (2000), Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy, Oxford. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, JHS 106: 163–74. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama through VasePaintings, Oxford. –––– (1996), ‘Comedy and the Tragic’, in M. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford), 188–202. Trendall, A. D. and Webster, T. B. L. (1970), Illustrations of Greek Drama, London. Ussher, R. G. (1993), The Characters of Theophrastus, Bristol. Varakis, A. (2003), The Use of Masks in the Modern Staging of Aristophanes in Greece, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway University of London. Webster, T. B. L. (1967), Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr Play, London. –––– (1970), Greek Theatre Production, London. –––– (1978), Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy, revised by J. R. Green, London. –––– (1995), Monuments Illustrating New Comedy, revised by J. R. Green, London. Wiles, D. (1979), The Servant as Master: A Study of Role Definition in Classical and Renaissance Popular Comedy. PhD thesis. University of Bristol. –––– (1988), ‘Greek Theatre and the Legitimation of Slavery’, in L. Archer (ed.), Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour (London), 53–67. –––– (1991), The Masks of Menander: Sign and Meaning in Greek and Roman Performance, Cambridge. –––– (2007), Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation, Cambridge. Winkler, J. J. (1990), ‘Phallos Politikos: Representing the Body Politic in Athens’, Differences 2 : 29–45.

Part V Performance: Iconography

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17 Putting Performance into Focus Robin Osborne

Oliver Taplin has, over the last thirty years, been instrumental in bringing some crucial aspects of Greek culture into focus. He brought the stagecraft of Greek tragedy into sharper definition when in the hands of other classical scholars the issues and the evidence had been left at best in very soft focus.1 He stressed the contrast between tragedy and comedy, once more by thinking hard about how in performance the actors related to the audience.2 And he brought the nature of scenes relating to drama on Athenian and on South Italian pots into close-up, insisting that differences in representational strategy should not be confused with differences in what was, in variously different senses, (re)presented.3 All of that without reference to Oliver’s transformation of the focus of Homeric studies or his pioneering work on the reception of Greece.4 If this has been Oliver’s contribution to the public understanding of classics, I, like others, owe a still greater debt to Oliver for the ways in which he has made me see why the classical scholar needs a wideangle lens, taking into his or her gaze so much more of the classical world than has traditionally been the case, and has shown me how education and outreach must always be at the centre of our scholarly priorities. I offer in return the contribution of a historian of material culture towards focusing our understanding of the material on which Oliver has himself worked so long.5 As Oliver long ago pointed out, there is indeed evidence within Greek tragedies and comedies themselves for the way in which they were staged, but that evidence is indirect and inexplicit. The closest we get to explicit evidence on the staging of Greek drama comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, which gives an outline history of the development of scene painting and other elements of the physical environment of the theatre, but that evidence too is short on detail––it is anything but a manual for producers! When it comes to 1 4 5

2 3 Taplin (1977), (1978). Taplin (1986). Taplin (1993). Taplin (1992) and the ‘Greek Fire’ television series (first aired in 1990). I write this in anticipation, though not entirely in ignorance, of Taplin (2007).

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envisaging what a tragedy or comedy looked like in performance we have to resort to material evidence, to the remains of theatres, to figurines of actors in costume, and to pictures, on various media but above all on pots, which more or less certainly and explicitly depict events on stage.6 Given the importance of their evidence, it is hardly surprising that pots with scenes relevant to the performance of Greek tragedy and comedy have been sought out, collected together, and treated as a class apart. The practice of doing so goes back to Séchan’s pioneering work of 1926, but had greatest impact in Trendall and Webster’s Illustrations of Greek Drama of 1971, which remains the best-illustrated of all discussions of pots and drama.7 The result of this work, reinforced, indeed, by Oliver’s own contributions, has been to treat the pots which certainly illustrate or may illustrate Greek drama as a class apart from other pots. The extent to which this has long been true is well illustrated by Webster’s own work. In the year following Illustrations of Greek Drama, Webster produced Potter and Patron in Classical Athens, some of the conclusions of which (notoriously that Athenian pots got to South Italy via an otherwise unattested second-hand market) were taken for granted in the earlier book.8 After the first chapter on potters, Potter and Patron, which is not limited to fifth- and fourth-century material but also includes black-figure pottery of the sixth century, divides its remaining nineteen chapters between different subjects––wedding and funeral scenes, symposion and komos scenes, dances, cult scenes, victorious athletes, concerts etc. Webster does not devote a chapter to scenes connected with the theatre at all, but discusses them partly in the chapter on ‘Special Commissions’, where he has a section on ‘pictures of unique events: satyr play, tragedy, dithyramb’ etc. and partly in that called ‘Some Special Stories’ where he treats ‘vases made to celebrate dramatic victories’.9 So Webster the literary scholar thought of vases illustrating Greek drama as sufficiently separate as to devote a book to them, but Webster the classical archaeologist thought of them as sufficiently part of the whole corpus of painted pottery that he saw them simply as illustrating particular phenomena within pot painting. My concern in this paper is to draw attention to what happens if the two sides of Webster’s divided personality are put together. What happens, that is, if we take ‘vases illustrating Greek drama’ and view them in the context not of 6 Webster (1956/1970) well represents what our understanding of theatre production was like before Oliver got to work. The catalogues of monuments illustrating Old, Middle, and New Comedy begun by Webster and updated by J. R. Green remain indispensable compilations of terracottas and masks in particular; see Webster and Green (1960/1969/1978), Webster, Green, and Seeberg (1995). 7 8 Séchan (1926), Trendall and Webster (1971). Webster (1972). 9 See below n. 50 for further comment on this chapter.

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Greek drama but of Greek painted pottery? What difference does it make to our understanding of these scenes on pots that the pots on which they are painted were themselves subject to fashions that affected both what shapes and what sorts of scenes were popular when? What is the implication for the relation of scenes on pots to what is seen on stage of the ways in which pot painters at different periods related in their painting more generally to the world of which they were part?10 I make three separate types of approach to these issues. First I examine the phenomenon of ‘pre-dramatic’ scenes, looking in particular at the place of such scenes in the overall repertoire of one painter. Next, I address the scarcity of representations with clear dramatic reference in Attic red-figure by considering the range of iconographic choice made by redfigure artists, and how that range changed over time. Finally I consider the overall shape of the repertoire of Apulian, Campanian, Lucanian, and Sicilian pot iconography and the place of explicitly dramatic scenes there.

1 ‘ P R E - D R A M AT I C ’ R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S I begin with what Webster called ‘pre-dramatic dances’. This is the name he gave to scenes on pottery which show a more or less elaborate group dance, where the elaboration indicates that we cannot be dealing simply with the representation of spontaneous dancing after a symposion.11 Trendall and 10

The manoeuvre I make here is related to the manoeuvre I made in discussing so-called ‘Lenaian’ vases (Osborne (1997) ), where I emphasized the way in which that group of images bleeds into images which have never been included within the group. For my failure to persuade in that case cf. Hamilton (2003), 50 ‘the Lenaia vases . . . are a coherent, distinctive and exclusive entity’. 11 For Green, Webster was much too coy in using the name pre-dramatic, since for him there is no doubt at all that what these pots show is the chorus of a comedy: ‘Scenes that concern Comedy go back as early as the middle of the sixth century and run as a continuous series, without break or change in approach, past 486, the stated date of the official introduction of Comedy at the Dionysia . . . Certainly the vase-paintings make it clear that Comedy was a preexisting genre, and they exhibit no change in style of presentation, such as might suggest a modification in the nature of Comedy at that date [i.e. 486]’ (Green (1991), 21, 22). Quite apart from what I shall suggest below, Green’s statement makes very odd reading in the face of his catalogue of the twenty pots showing what he considers to be such scenes (cf. (1991), 22 n.19 ‘I attempted to collect and illustrate all the surviving scenes of this type in “Birds” ’) where of the eight examples dated by him after 490, five are dated 490–480, two c.480, and only one is dated to the second quarter of the fifth century. Indeed Green himself noted in 1985 that ‘The Getty vase [which for him dates to 414] stands very much at the end of this series’ (and then equivocated as to whether a bell krater in Heidelberg of the early fourth century should be thought to belong to the series or not) ( (1985), 103). On this showing the ‘invention’ of Comedy at the Dionysia correlates pretty closely with the end of the series, as Taplin (1993), 8 observed without further comment.

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Webster include in their section of ‘pre-dramatic monuments’ some pots where, on their own admission, the dancing of the komos may be all that is at issue, remarking of the scene on an early sixth-century Corinthian column krater in Paris that ‘the pictures may represent preparations for a party and the aftermath of a party’.12 The criteria for the inclusion of such scenes seems to be the presence of what may be a mask (‘. . . large bearded head, probably correctly interpreted as a mask’ p. 19), or the application to the figures of names that ‘are not the names of ordinary men . . . the beings represented . . . are, therefore, closely akin to satyrs, and the names must have been quoted in the song’.13 Cook, reviewing the book in Classical Review referred the reader to Seeberg’s Corinthian Komos Vases, remarking that Seeberg was ‘much more circumspect in interpreting them’, but Trendall and Webster’s lack of circumspection is actually good to think with.14 The relationship between so-called ‘padded dancers’ (dancers who appear to have costumes padded on the buttocks and perhaps belly) and satyrs in Corinthian vases has long been discussed. Satyrs appear only in late Corinthian pottery, where Attic influence has been suspected,15 but, as Seeberg pointed out, a middle-Corinthian pot in the shape of a satyr’s head shows that satyrs ‘emphatically were not strangers in Corinth’.16 Whether Corinthians used for satyrs the same sorts of names as Athenians did is an open question since only one Corinthian satyr name, Simos, survives.17 But the important issue is whether allusion to satyrs means allusion to some world of ritual and performance, or not. Here the vital observation seems to me to be that satyr names link not to particular stories, as the names of mythical characters do, but to particular sorts of activities, and especially particular sorts of pleasure. Trendall and Webster themselves translate the komast names that they identify as linked to satyrs as ‘Lordios (back-bender), Vhadesios (pleasureseeker), Paichnios (plaything?), Komios (reveller), Loxios (side-bender)’.18 We are not transported into a world of story but into a world of pleasure-seeking. The satyr is a ‘figure of fun’, and the painter who associates dancers with satyrs, whether here by naming or in another example by collocation, is asking the viewer to spot the difference between the fun of the reveller and the fun of the satyr.19 A stroke of the pen could convert a dancer to a satyr, give a dancer a satyr’s 12

(1971), 19 on Louvre E632, their I, 6. (1971), 18 of a scene on a Corinthian skyphos in Paris, Louvre CA3004, their I,5. 14 15 16 Cook (1974), 108. Amyx (1988), 620. Seeberg (1971), 4. 17 18 Amyx (1988), Inscription no. 118, p. 590. (1971), 18. 19 Berlin 4509, Seeberg (1971), no. 229. For a related manoeuvre where representation of satyrs on an aryballos asks the athlete using it whether his fun is like the fun of the satyrs, or not, see Osborne (2007). 13

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name, or convert an ordinary face into a face that seems to wear a mask. All these strokes carry the viewer out of the immediate context of use of the pot, whether in the symposion, the gymnasium, or elsewhere, to link with other worlds. But those other worlds may be worlds of imagination and of story, not merely other parts of the world of men. The Corinthian pots which Trendall and Webster separate off to figure as ‘pre-dramatic monuments’ are completely at home in the wider Corinthian explorations of the drinking and revelling. But how far is this true of the Athenian black-figure pots which form the core of Trendall and Webster’s ‘pre-dramatic’ representations? The crucial ‘pre-dramatic’ scenes are a dozen or so black-figure and one red-figure scene in which a group of men are shown who are more or less identically kitted out, with equipment or costumes which do not relate to daily life, and who are often accompanied by a pipe player.20 In Potter and Patron, having given a list largely consisting of the pots shown in Illustrations, Webster remarks that ‘It is not easy always to draw the line between predramatic dances and other dances’.21 But if we look closely at the work of one of the artists responsible for these scenes we can see that the problems are considerably greater than that. Whether we take the criterion of uniformity or whether we take the criterion of the aulos player, the oeuvre of the Swing Painter offers us a wide range of scenes in which uniformity or aulos-playing feature. The Swing Painter pot which Trendall and Webster feature is an amphora showing five men on stilts, where the uniformity of the actions and of the unusual headgear and costumes qualifies it as ‘pre-dramatic’ (Figure 17.1).22 Two other of his amphoras show aulos players and groups of more or less uniform men walking or running.23 One shows five bearded men in himatia and chitons, their bodies all facing right but the middle of the five with his head turned to the left, headed by a similarly dressed pipe player, marked out by the brilliant white of his chiton. The other shows three men in similar himatia, but with the left-most figure wearing his differently, moving right towards a similarly bearded pipe player who stands facing them. What are we to make of these scenes? The first step to make is to put them in the context of other scenes by the same artist, rather than of scenes by other artists which share particular elements. How peculiar are these scenes in the Swing Painter’s oeuvre? The Swing Painter works with a relatively limited

20

For recent lists see Green (1985), with two further additions at Green (1991), 22 n. 19. (1972), 116. Logie collection of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, 41/57, Trendall and Webster (1971), 1.10. 23 ABV 305.26 and 306.31; these are nos. 8 and 9 in Böhr (1982). 21 22

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Fig. 17.1. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc (Paralip. 134 31bis). Fig. 17.2. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc (ABV 306.42).

range of compositions, and these scenes involving an aulos player can be compared with scenes in which one group of characters do something more or less uniform for a single figure to one side. On an amphora in Rome two near identical naked runners head towards a beardless man in brilliant white chiton and himation, and with a standing bearded male figure behind them.24 On an amphora in London (Figure 17.2) three men, two beardless and one bearded, carry on their shoulders three younger men and face a bearded man sitting on a stool, with whom they are playing ball.25 An amphora in New York with three women, similarly dressed and in similar standing posture facing right and a man with a kithara in front of them, moving right but looking back at them, redeploys a similar composition in a scene scholars identify as the Judgement of Paris.26 A different sort of uniformity is combined with performing for an individual in a scene where two pairs of naked men dance, crowned with ivy wreaths, facing inwards towards a lyre player 24 25 26

Böhr (1982), no.64. Compare Böhr U8, a similar composition with three runners. ABV 306.42, Böhr (1982), no.75, with a parallel in ABL 216.2. ABV 308.65, Böhr (1982), no.115, identified as the Judgement of Paris.

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dressed in a himation and seated on a stool.27 Uniformity without observer is on display in a scene in which the painter tries out a number of slight variations, in which five or six uniformly naked men, bearded and beardless mixed together, dance across an amphora, most facing one way, one or two facing the other way, striking various postures (Figure 17.3).28 What these scenes suggest is that the relation of figures to a musician, the interaction between uniform groups and a leader or observer, and the ways in which individuals form or do not form groups were all grist to the Swing Painter’s artistic mill. No reference to ‘pre-dramatic’ activities, whatever they may be, is required to make sense of these scenes. Questions of uniformity and difference, of the manner and nature of leadership, of individual and corporate activities are in these scenes variously explored. Myth, as in the scene of the Judgement of Paris, and the gymnasium, as with the runners and perhaps the ball players, are alternative sources for inspiration here, as is the komos, its presentation of similarity without uniformity emphasized by the decision to show the men naked. The same is true of pipe players. Pipe playing was a feature of numerous aspects of Athenian life, and caught the attention of Athenian vase painters in many different circumstances, including sacrifices and other cult occasions, athletic competition, and the less formal activities of symposion and komos.29 A painter close in time and style to the Swing Painter, the painter of Munich 1410, for instance, showed (Figure 17.4) a beardless player of the aulos, wearing a himation but no chiton, surrounded by four similarly attired standing men with one further smaller beardless male in himation sitting at one side on a stool. Beazley labelled this ‘concert’, but although the aulos player is picked out by his centrality and by his wearing a wreath we have no basis for associating this scene with any particular occasion.30 Observation and imagination mix together in these scenes as the painter explores the theme. The Swing Painter shows soldiers mostly in armour, but he can also show them naked. Their nudity does not depend upon some men actually fighting naked, but merely upon the possibility of male nudity in certain circumstances, and no more does the nudity of dancers provide evidence that men would dance naked.31 The use of stilts by the Swing Painter should be seen similarly; it certainly guarantees that stilts were used by some men on some occasions, but not that there was a particular occasion when

27

ABV 305.22; Böhr (1982), no.38. ABV 304.7, Paralipomena 133.22 ter, and unpublished (Amsterdam Allard Pearson Museum, 1877); Böhr (1982), nos. 65, 67, 68. 29 30 Wilson (1999). ABV 311.2 (for an illustration see Böhr (1982), plate 183). 31 For an example of naked warriors see Para. 134 35bis, Böhr (1982), no. 44. 28

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Fig. 17.3. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c.530 bc (ABV 304.7). Fig. 17.4. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to Painter of Munich 1410, c.530 bc (ABV 311.2).

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stilts were used in the manner depicted.32 What these painted scenes show is not what daily life looked like, but the resources which daily life gave to painters to think with and through. Analysis of these scenes offers a second insight also. The Swing Painter’s scene of men sitting on the shoulders of other men, playing ball, is iconographically very close to the famous scene (Figure 17.5) of three ‘knights’ sitting on the shoulders of men wearing horse costume and facing an aulos player. This scene appears on a black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, active more or less contemporaneously with the Swing Painter, and it is combined with a scene (Figure 17.6) on the other side showing a row of five alternating naked ithyphallic satyrs and maenads wearing short tightfitting tunics facing right, facing a further satyr who holds double aulos, the case of which dangles from his erect phallus.33 The ‘knights’ feature prominently in considerations of ‘pre-dramatic’ monuments: ‘The vase shows that the chorus of Aristophanes’ Knights, produced 424 bc, had an ancestor more than a century before. . . We must . . . reckon this chorus of Knights as one of the traditional elements which the later comic poets could reintroduce’, write Trendall and Webster.34 But both the parallel scene on the reverse of the pot and the Swing Painter’s ball-players scene should make us wary of this move. If men can ‘horse around’ on each others’ shoulders, how in other respects do they compare with horses? How this issue plays itself out can be seen by comparison with the context of another ‘piggyback’ scene. In the middle of the fifth century the Niobid Painter will decorate a calyx krater with a scene (Figure 17.7) of satyrs on each other’s shoulders once more engaged in a ball game.35 That scene both suggests the association between ‘riding’ and the horsiness of satyrs and juxtaposes this riding to scenes (above) of women dancing to the music of a fancily attired beardless male aulêtês, and, on the reverse, of the crowning of Pandora and men in satyr shorts dancing to the playing of the aulos by a beardless male wearing an ordinary himation. While reading back a juxtaposition of 32 For the sort of problems that arise if one does not allow sufficiently for painterly imagination see Green (1991), 26: ‘the Dolphin-Riders . . . fail to show how the costume actually worked in the orchestra. One assumes that the players’ legs must have come down within and below the dolphins and that the legs we see were artificial, just as the intended feet of the London Birds were at the players’ knees but there shown literally. In these cases the painters were to this extent persuaded by the characters created’. 33 Berlin 1697, ABV 297.17. 34 (1971), 20–1. For the most recent discussion see Rothwell (2007), 37–8, who, having noted that we cannot tell whether the satyrs on the reverse are satyrs or men dressed as satyrs, bizarrely concludes (38) that ‘At the very least the propinquity of these two images on one vase points to the knights being part of an actual performance, not a purely imaginary scene’. 35 ARV 601.23 (London, British Museum GR 1856.12–31.1).

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Fig. 17.5. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, c.530 bc (ABV 297.17).

Fig. 17.6. Athenian black-figure amphora attributed to the Painter of Berlin 1686, c.530 bc (ABV 297.17).

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Fig. 17.7. Red-figure krater attributed to the Niobid Painter c.460 bc (ARV 601.23).

ideas over three-quarters of a century is potentially problematic, the associations made here by a red-figure artist do seem highly significant. Just as men who dance to the aulos effectively put on the satyr (and can be shown by an artist literally to have done so), and just as the gods’ adornments convert Pandora into an irresistible woman, so when men ride upon each others’ shoulders they convert themselves into horse-like men, and can be shown by an artist to have become satyrs––raising the question of what women who dance to the aulos, even in a festal context, should be thought of as becoming (how do we read the sakkos here? It isn’t what women dancing in religious contexts normally wear, as comparison with ‘Lenaian’ scenes reveals.) One further extension of view beyond the Swing Painter will further bring in context the ‘chorus’ of men on stilts. The single most popular ‘animal chorus’ is of dolphins. Csapo has recently conducted a wide-ranging survey of representations of dolphins in archaic Greek art and literature, revealing the presence of dolphins in Dionysiac contexts turning into men not only on

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Attic (Figure 17.8) but also on Corinthian and Etruscan pots––with further close parallels on east Greek pots.36 Csapo is able to show that dolphins are ‘symbolic dancers from their earliest appearance in Greek art, myth and literature’ and are associated exclusively with choral dancing and first and foremost with Dionysus.37 Dolphins’ capacity to dance makes them plausible ‘explanations’ for choral dancing––but this does not mean that dancers had to dress up as dolphins for artists to enjoy the possibility of presenting them as an actual chorus. Where texts have only simile and metaphor available, artists can literalize comparisons. They can choose to do so completely, or they can choose to reveal what they are doing by making the transformation from human to animal partial.38 But just as the man dressed up as a satyr could be shown in circumstances with no real-life counterpart, so too could men dressed up as dolphins––or knights, or decked out with stilts.39 Csapo in his paper is keen to stress that we cannot understand the dolphins of art and literature simply with references to other art and literature.40 I wish to emphasize that before we invent real-life situations to explain images, we must first understand the supposedly ‘pre-dramatic’ monuments of art without reference to other art.

I I W H Y A R E R E D - F I G U R E A RT I S TS ( A L M O S T ) U N I N T E R E S T E D I N S H OW I N G D R A M A ? Almost all the scenes collected by Webster and Green as showing choruses that were painted at Athens are in the black-figure technique. Red-figure pot painters were not, on any account, enthusiasts for scenes related to drama. In terms of representations of choruses, in addition to one ‘pre-dramatic’ dolphin chorus on a psykter ascribed to Oltos, two ‘mannerist’ scenes (one ascribed to the Leningrad Painter and showing satyrs and an aulêtês, the other 36

Csapo (2003). See also Lissarrague (1990), 115–22, Rothwell (2007), 58–71. Csapo (2003), 94. 38 See above n. 32. Cf. Rothwell (2007), 62–3: ‘as Csapo and Slater have pointed out, the painter [of Boston 20.18, ABV 617] seems unsure whether to depict the illusion of men riding dolphins or the reality of performance. On this vase the first and third riders from the right are clearly shown to have legs and are straddling the dolphins; the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth are shown without legs so that their torsos end where they meet the dolphin. This inconsistency perhaps betrays its origins in a performance’. 39 The crucial case here seems to me to be the image not of a man but of a woman dressed up in satyr shorts, on the interior of a cup attributed to the Q painter. I have discussed this in Osborne (1991), 259–60. 40 Csapo (2003), 95. 37

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Fig. 17.8. Black-figure lekythos attributed to the Theseus Painter, c.510 bc.

showing three pairs of men dancing with hands raised in front of a figure crouching on a tomb), two bell kraters from the third quarter of the fifth century from the hands of Kleophon and Polion showing an aulêtês with a set of more or less uniform men or satyrs, the aulêtês flanked by two actors dressed as fighting cocks known, from Green’s original identification, as the ‘Getty Birds’ krater, the Pronomos krater, and a very fragmentary fourthcentury chous.41 If we ask about explicit depictions of actors the pickings are equally meagre: a fragment of an oinochoe from the Athenian Agora showing a naked male holding a tragic mask, a fragment ascribed to the Painter of Heidelberg 211 which may show a comic actor, the chous that is the name vase of the ‘Group of the Perseus Dance’ which shows (Figure 17.9) a stage, and a cup and a bell krater with figures holding masks.42 Given the interest of artists in e.g. showing men in satyr shorts and in other forms of ‘dressing up’, to which I have alluded above, and given the interest certain South Italian vase painters show in the stage, as I shall discuss below, the question of why Athenian red-figure artists are so little interested in the stage becomes a pressing one.43 41 Oltos’ psykter: ARV 54.7bis; Leningrad Painter’s kalpis ARV 571,75; mannerist column krater, Basel Antikenmuseum BS 415; Kleophon’s bell krater: ARV 1145.35; Polion’s bell krater: ARV 1172.8; Getty Birds: Green (1985), (1991), (not a chorus in the view of Taplin (1987), (1993), 101–4); Pronomos’ krater ARV 1336.1; chous: Benaki 30895, published by Pingiatoglou (1992). This list does not exhaust the suggestions of possible depictions, but adding even more dubious items would not affect the overall picture. 42 Athenian Agora P11810; ARV 945.28; ARV 1215.1; Ferrara 20299; Dresden. 43 Cf. Taplin (1997), 89–90 ‘the shortage of Attic theatre-related vase-paintings is not a coincidence or merely bad luck but systematic abstinence . . . the question of what subjects are

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Fig. 17.9. Red-figure chous, name vase of the Group of the Perseus Dance (ARV 1215.1).

Explaining a negative is in many ways a fool’s game. However many possible reasons there may be for someone doing what they do, and however hard it is to distinguish the reason in any particular case, we can at least confidently believe that there is always necessarily some explanation. But we might often think that people fail to do something for no reason––or at least that the reason may be that it had never occurred to them to do it. The list of things that people don’t think of doing may be variously psychologically revealing, but hardly helps us to understand the thing which they don’t think about. However, the situation with red-figure pot painters is not quite so desperate. It is important that a painter of the Perseus Dance Group did think of depicting a stage, that the Pronomos painter did think of showing the chorus of a play, and that other painters were attracted to showing actors with masks or groups dancing in what are at least plausibly dramatic chorus contexts. We and are not welcome in Athenian vase-paintings has not had the attention it deserves . . . it would seem to be roughly true to say that religious and domestic subjects were welcome, while more directly ‘political’ subjects were not . . . This leads me to the tentative thesis that tragedy (and comedy) was perceived as part of the ‘political’ life of Athens . . .’.

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can’t simply say that red-figure pot painters never thought of showing actors and drama. Individual artists did show actors, but the idea never caught on. One or two painters may have tried it more than once (there is a second Leningrad painter fragment held to show an aulêtês with a chorus of Persians44) but the stage never becomes a regular resource of any painter. This absence of explicit allusion to drama is particularly striking given that pot painters certainly didn’t have ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’.45 The god himself appears on his own on more than seventy red-figure pots; he appears as an idol in all those supposedly ‘Lenaian’ representations; he appears with maenads, with satyrs, with satyrs and maenads, with women, and at the symposion. A solo satyr appears more than two hundred times, as well as satyrs appearing in all sorts of groups both on their own and with maenads. Maenads likewise appear with each other, with Dionysus, with satyrs, and with satyrs and Dionysus. Although there are changes in the nature of the Dionysian imagery, so that scenes of the solo Dionysus predominantly date to the period down to about 460, scenes of Dionysus in the context of Thracian myth fade at about the same date, and the representation of satyrs becomes less rumbustious with satyrs less employed for satiric purposes, the attraction of painting scenes in which Dionysus, satyrs, and maenads are involved continues strong throughout the history of Attic red-figure. To this interest in the explicitly Dionysiac, which continues from blackfigure,46 we must add that red-figure painters were also interested, and indeed to a greater extent than their black-figure forebears, in scenes that related to real life (as opposed to the ‘imaginary Greece’ of myth47). Turning the pages of La cité des images reveals what their text largely conceals, that this city of images is largely a red-figure city; except in the areas of hunting and sacrifice, where black-figure scenes figure prominently, it is red-figure scenes which dominate the various stories of social and ritual life which are told. Beyond the parts which La cité des images reaches the same would remain true. Athletes attract red-figure painters far more than they ever attracted blackfigure painters, so do weddings (along with scenes that show men and women doing nothing in particular), the pouring of libations, and scenes variously related to education. At first glance red-figure is capacious. One could be forgiven for thinking that painters painted whatever their eyes had happened to fall on or their imaginations had happened to conjure up. All sorts of individual actions are shown––a woman playing with a spinning top, a baby sitting on a high chair, a man making a herm, a warrior cutting a lock of hair as a trophy. But for all 44 47

45 46 ARV 571.74 See Carpenter (1997). On which see Carpenter (1986). Imaginary Greece is brilliantly explored and exploited by Buxton (1994).

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the individual touches, these vivid scenes are all generic, an individual instance of an oft-repeated action.48 It is true that from time to time painters show combinations of actions that cannot have been observed with any regularity: the scene (Figure 17.10) which gives the ‘Clinic Painter’ his name combines a bearded man apparently having blood let from his arm, a seated man with his arm in a bandage, and a man with spots, with a naked bearded dwarf carrying a hare over his shoulder; one can hardly imagine every Athenian doctor’s waiting room to have contained such figures.49 Nevertheless, for all its oddity, there is little temptation to imagine that this scene alludes to any particular occasion. The real one-off, the particular event, is very hard indeed to trace––if the Pronomos krater does show a particular event then it comes into a very small class. Webster was keen to find other examples in this class, but it is not clear that he was successful.50 Red-figure’s interest is not documentary. There are indeed two ‘history’ scenes, both on pots painted in the early fifth century––the scene of Croesus on the pyre on an amphora by Myson and the murder of Hipparchus shown

Fig. 17.10. Red-figure aryballos, name vase of the Clinic Painter (ARV 813.96).

48 Note that even Panathenaic amphoras, which show the events of the Panathenaia, did not necessarily show the events for victory in which they were awarded. 49 ARV 813.96. For representation of dwarves more generally see Dasen (1993). 50 Webster (1972), ch. 2 assembles a series of claims for ‘special commissions’, but in all cases apart from the Pronomos vase it is relatively easy to explain the particular features of a scene without the assumption that it was made for a particular occasion. The assumption that if a figure is named then the viewer is expected to identify the figure with a particular individual and the occasion with a particular occasion will not stand up to scrutiny: artists use names in all sorts of different ways. The weakness of Webster’s assumptions becomes clear when he has to assume that since a figure named Kydias is bald in one case and youthful in another ‘One of these painters did not know what Kydias looked like’: ‘They were presumably both bespoke vases, but the instructions to one painter were inadequate’ ( (1972), 54).

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on a stamnos attributed to the Copenhagen Painter.51 This absence of an interest in particular events of the past is at first sight surprising. After all, myth and history ran together in the Greek imagination, being distinguished only in the course of the fifth century, and pot painting had a very strong interest in myth at least from the seventh century.52 But the value of myth lay precisely in its paradigmatic value: the murder of Hipparchus would be talked about by Thucydides (6.54) as the product of a very particular set of circumstances, whereas the murder of Aegisthus was the murder of a lover who had infiltrated the household during a husband’s absence doing military service. Croesus, although historical, was for Athenians so far away, in space, time, and cultural distance, that his story actually worked just like a myth (as Bacchylides’ and Herodotus’ treatments of it well show). Setting the paradigm case against possible real life examples was something viewers of a pot, whether at a symposion, at a grave, in a sanctuary, or in other circumstances of use, could do for themselves. What viewers needed pots to do was to offer paradigms.53 Considered in this light, it is possible to see the attractions for red-figure pot painters not only of mythological scenes but also of scenes relating to life. The arming, departure, or military activity of a warrior, the exercise of a young man in the gymnasium, the act of hunting and the use of the beasts captured or killed, the carrying out of sacrifices and the division of the sacrificial meat, all these activities shown on pots could be mapped against the activities of individuals in life and the decisions made in life further scrutinized in the light of the features brought into particular focus by the painter. As the concerns of those who looked at pots changed, so the scenes shown on pots changed. The sixth-century public who found the heroics of warfare and death in battle fit subjects for fantasy in an Athenian world where military activity was rare, found little appetite for such scenes in the world of the Athenian empire with its constant military activity and long lists of actual war dead. The public who found their passions roused by scenes of bearded men attempting to fondle the genitals of youths and boys in the sixth century ARV 238.1, 256.5; see Boardman (1975), 222 for the best that can be done to find ‘historical figures’ in red-figure (Boardman (1989) does not even find material for the category in the parallel chapter). 52 Detienne (1986) for the distinction of myth and history. 53 Compare my discussion in Osborne (1998). Similar points could be made about other types of pictorial representation, including the sculpture on temples. Eric Csapo’s ongoing work on choregic and other theatrical dedications emphasizes the generic quality of those images, and the same is true of the reliefs on lists of war dead. There were, however, situations in which specific allusion does seem to have been desired, and large-scale wall painting may have been one such case––compare the paintings of the Stoa Poikile or the painting that lies behind the Alexander Mosaic. 51

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preferred the more oblique courtship methods of those who presented gifts once it came to the fifth century. Whatever changes occurred over time in the precise sorts of scene which those who bought the pots found ‘good to think with’, there is no reason to think that the way in which pots were thought about altered. The specifics of a particular myth enabled the thoughts of a viewer to be directed in a particular direction––as towards issues of immortality through the unique scenes of Glaucus and Polyidus on a cup by the Sotades Painter deposited in a grave.54 The specifics of a particular historical incident drew attention only to the contingency of real life. The very fact that an event had occurred meant that the actual feelings and motivations of the actors involved must in principle be recoverable, and debate on possible historical circumstances would always dissipate the impact of a scene. These reflections on the sorts of factors that are likely to have determined the range of scenes painted on Athenian pottery offer some insight into Athenian pot painters’ relations to dramatic performances. The issue of performance itself, the issue of becoming someone else, was an issue pot painters could very well find themselves interested in. That issue arguably lurks behind every representation of a satyr; it certainly lurks behind every representation of a man turned into a satyr by satyr shorts. We have already seen the ways in which that can be held to be what is being explored in the predominantly black-figure pots which have been supposed to show animal choruses. It now becomes possible to understand why it is that the animal choruses disappear from pots at just the point when comedy, complete, we suppose, with actual animal choruses, becomes part of the festival of the Dionysia. While there were no actual animal choruses, images of men becoming animals in various ways promoted comparison of human and animal behaviour (long a literary trope, most famously in Semonides 7). However, once animal choruses existed the possibility of such a scene being interpreted as ‘illustration’ of particular reality, of its meaning somehow being exhausted by its particular reference, threatened the freedom of image and viewer alike. We are observing here exactly the phenomenon long puzzled over in the case of Scythian archers on Athenian pots––that in the late sixth century Athenian artists introduced Scythians into all sorts of scenes of soldiers; once Scythians became a familiar and permanent part of the scene at Athens, as its riot police, in the early fifth century, painters ceased to depict them. Once more, when what was a useful cue to fantasy turned into a cue that would be read as giving a reference to particular circumstance, the Athenian painter dropped it.55 Memories of particular performances threatened to narrow the discourse 54

Hoffmann (1996), 120–6.

55

See Osborne (2005) with further references.

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which a scene on a pot could provoke. Although painting a scene from a myth known from a stage version had the advantage for a painter that those who talked about it could extend their discourse to particular stagings if they so wished, explicit allusion to staging offered no further advantage and only the disadvantage that those who had not seen that myth staged would feel themselves in some sense debarred from the discussions. Readers of Taplin will have spotted that the argument offered above is simply culled from his work. Where Oliver observed the complete contrast between ready self-reference in comedies and almost complete absence of self-reference in tragedy, and explained this in terms of the needs of tragedy to keep itself in the viewers’ imagination rather than reminding them of its place before their eyes,56 so I have observed the almost complete absence of stage reference in scenes on pottery, and explained this in terms of the needs of pots to keep the field of reference imaginative rather than historical. This enables me to modify a further observation made by Oliver. When discussing precisely the absence of dramatic scenes on Athenian pottery Oliver suggests that the absence of comic scenes is due to their indecorousness––‘comedy was somehow too “cheap” for pottery painters’.57 It seems to me relatively unproblematic for a painter to idealize the comic stage much as he idealized the rest of life, including the satyr. If pornography could, as Oliver himself suggests, be made ‘rather tasteful’, then it is hard to see why comedy should not be made equally tasteful.58 The problem seems to me rather to be that comedy, far from transcending its particular performance, as tragedy did, actually revelled in and made much of the particularity. Jokes depend on context and the jokes of comedy depend upon the particular context established in the particular comedy. There was nothing a pot painter could do to distil any general force from comedy while retaining any allusion to the comedy itself. Comedy was not so much ‘low’ as distinctly and necessarily ephemeral. Repeated stage performances could re-establish the ephemeral moment, but just as scholarly analysis ruins jokes so too would a pot painter’s exposing them to the atemporal gaze: you needed to have been there.59

56

57 58 Taplin (1986). Taplin (1993), 10. Taplin (1993), 10. The terracotta comic actor figurines whose cheapness seems to Taplin to confirm that the problem with representing comedy on Attic vases was that it was too ‘cheap’ seem to me simply to operate in a very different way. What an individual actor figurine does is to encourage the imaginative re-enactment, or just enactment, of a comic sketch. Given that comic actors come in types, rather than as representations of particular figures in particular plays, the viewer, or better ‘user’, of the figurine is free to replay or play whatever comic sketch s/he wishes. Once a number of actors are shown together, as they would necessarily be shown in any comic scene on a pot, the viewer’s freedom becomes dramatically reduced. For an introduction to the terracotta figure ‘playsets’ see Csapo and Slater (1995), 55, 70–3. 59

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I have neither the expertise nor the space to offer the sort of analysis of South Italian and Sicilian pottery that I have offered of Athenian pottery. What I wish to do here is to make some preliminary moves towards understanding what sort of company dramatic scenes keep in the Greek west. The pot production of the west is dominated by Apulian production, which accounts for over 10,000 items, with Campanian producing less than half that, and Sicilian, Lucanian, and Paestan production between them producing not much more than Campania.60 But the interests of painters working in different places and at different times varied. Athletes, for example, are proportionately much more heavily represented in Lucanian pot painting than in any other production centre.61 Dancers too are particularly popular in Lucania, attracting Apulian artists only late, and Sicilian artists hardly at all. Sympotic scenes, on the other hand, feature predominantly on Campanian pottery, with modest representation on Lucanian and Apulian, and a complete absence from Sicily though both Lucanian and Apulian painters like to include kottabos-stands in their Dionysiac scenes. Campania is also the place where warriors proved most attractive to painters, who showed them in all sorts of situations and combinations; Apulian painters showed them much less often and then predominantly in scenes with women and allusions to pouring libations. If we turn away from scenes connected with life and ask about Dionysiac scenes, what is most notable is that Apulian painters show very much less interest in Dionysus and in maenads, who are popular in Lucanian and Campanian pottery and, with satyrs, also in Sicilian. Scenes related to drama come in three overlapping categories: there are scenes which show the stage, scenes which show figures who are clearly comic actors (scenes regularly connected with ‘phlyax’ plays by Trendall and his followers), and scenes which show masks, either on their own or in the hands of figures. The stage does not appear on Campanian pottery and there is just one very odd example in Lucanian pottery with a schematic stage with a huge mask above, but no actor.62 In Sicilian pottery the stage appears only in pots from Trendall’s Lentini-Manfria group. In Apulian 60

Cf. Taplin (1993), 18. This and subsequent claims are based largely on the indexes to Trendall (1967), (1983) and Trendall and Cambitoglou (1978), (1991–2). There are consequently distinct weaknesses in the coverage and completeness: Trendall is, for example, disinclined to identify youths with strigils as ‘athletes’, so that his athlete numbers could be significantly increased. 62 Trendall (1967), 175 no. 1021. 61

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vases it is largely a feature of early Apulian, with a small showing in middle Apulian and none in late. This distribution is largely matched by the distribution of comic actors: they too are virtually absent from Lucanian pottery, appear in Sicily only in the Lentini-Manfria group, and in Apulia are most frequent in early Apulian and almost absent from late Apulian. The difference in this case is that Campanian painters, who do not show the stage, quite frequently show comic actors. Masks appear only rather infrequently on Lucanian and Campanian pots but are relatively common on early and middle Apulian pottery. My point is simple. Drama can be thought of as a kind of performance, comparable to dancing or athletics––a matter of spectator sport. Or it can be thought of as a night out, going to the theatre as an alternative to going to a symposion, or even, encouraged by the end of Xenophon’s Symposion, as more or less continuous with the acts put on at a symposion. What the distribution of scenes with dramatic connection suggests is that those who painted or acquired pots with scenes linked to drama were not those who painted and acquired pots decorated with scenes of athletes or scenes of dancing. There is a little more overlap with the painters and customers of sympotic scenes, though this is not true of Sicilian painters and customers, who showed no interest in the symposion but were interested in actors and the stage, and even in Apulia interest in the symposion itself, as opposed to its accoutrements, was relatively slight. In seeking to understand what we might learn from scenes related to drama on South Italian and Sicilian pottery it is important to note this contextual information. The stage and the actors who appeared on it were not just a phenomenon of life which any artist might think of painting on a pot; painters produced and customers acquired pots which were good to think with in their particular situation. The customers who liked to gaze and think upon the dancer or the athlete evidently had no interest in gazing on actors. Those who chose to gaze on the symposion were more inclined also to think about the stage. But what early and middle Apulian pots and Sicilian pots of the Lentini-Manfria group arguably have most in common is their interest in giving scenes to which the viewer has to write his or her own caption. Many pots, and particularly pots of the most popular shapes––bell kraters and pelikai––attracted scenes of encounter, involving two or three figures or two figures and spectator(s).63 Some such scenes encouraged the viewer to make a particular identification, to tell the ‘story’ of the pot, but many did not. Mythological scenes, well represented in Lucanian pottery and so much a Spectator figures have just begun to attract the attention of scholars, but not yet of those working on western Greek pottery. See Stansbury-O’Donnell (2006). 63

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feature of later Apulian pottery, work on precisely such an identificatory basis. But allusions to the stage do not focus on myth but upon scenes where there is a heavy hint that the action should be taken as funny; modern viewers of these scenes are at a loss to provide a plot––hence the creation of the whole ‘phlyax’ category. The viewer of scenes with stage or mask is not, I would suggest, being asked to recall a particular experience in the theatre, any more than the viewer of a sympotic scene is being asked to recall a specific moment in an evening’s entertainment. Rather the theatre is being used as a way of flagging up the challenge to view encounters differently, to stand back and watch them staged, to view both life and story at one remove.

I N A C L A S S O F H I S OW N Archaeologists are by nature classifiers, but for all the Foucauldian revolution and intense concentration elsewhere on the consequences of putting things in an order, archaeological classifications are rarely afforded the scrutiny they need. In this paper I have suggested in three different forays that scenes on painted pottery that have been linked to drama will be viewed differently if the classificatory process is looked at more carefully. I have tried to show what happens if we break down the classificatory boundaries surrounding ‘predramatic’ scenes. I have looked at how examining more generally what actions are represented can help us understand the absence of representations of drama in fifth-century Athenian pottery. And I have taken the categories that have been used to classify South Italian and Sicilian pottery and have shown that scenes of the stage and of actors are not found in all places and periods but are concentrated in local schools at particular times––schools and times which distinguish themselves by being not so very keen on scenes of life or particular scenes of myth but keen on making the viewer create their own contexts for understanding encounters. If this paper has done anything to alert the reader to the importance of classification, I hope it will be seen as an appropriate contribution to the celebration of a scholar who, in so many respects, is in a class of his own.64

64 I am very grateful to the editors of this volume for their initiative and their invitation, and to them and to Caroline Vout for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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REFERENCES Amyx, D. A. (1988), Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period, 3 vols., Berkeley. Bérard, C. et al. (1984/9), La cité des images / A City of Images, Paris /Princeton. Boardman, J. (1975), Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period, London. –––– (1989), Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, London. Böhr, E. (1982), Der Schaukelmaler, Mainz. Buxton, R. (1994), Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology, Cambridge. Carpenter, T. H. (1986), Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art, Oxford. –––– (1997), Dionysian Imagery in Fifth-Century Athens, Oxford. Cook, R. M. (1974), ‘Illustrations of Greek Drama’, CR 24: 107–9. Csapo, E. (2003), ‘The Dolphins of Dionysus’, in E. Csapo and M. Miller (eds.), Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth, Word and Image in Ancient Greece. Essays in Honour of William J. Slater (Oxford), 69–98. Csapo, E. and Slater, W. J. (1995), The Context of Ancient Drama, Ann Arbor. Dasen, V. (1993), Dwarves in Ancient Greece and in Egypt, Oxford. Detienne, M. (1986), The Creation of Mythology, Chicago. Green, J. R. (1985), ‘A Representation of the Birds of Aristophanes’, Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum 2: 95–118. –––– (1991), ‘On Seeing and Depicting the Theatre in Classical Athens’, GRBS 32: 15–50. Hamilton, R. (2003), ‘Lenaea Vases in Context’, in E. Csapo and M. Miller (eds.), Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth in Ancient Greece (Oxford), 48–68. Hoffmann, H. (1996), Sotades: Symbols of Immortality on Greek Vases, Oxford. Lissarrague, F. (1990), The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual, Princeton. Osborne, R. (1991), ‘Whose Image and Superscription is this?’, Arion 3rd series 1: 255–75. –––– (1997), ‘The Ecstasy and the Tragedy: Varieties of Religious Experience in Art, Drama, and Society,’ in C. Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford), 187–212. –––– (1998), ‘Inter-Personal Relations on Athenian Pots’, in P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. von Reden (eds.), Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge), 13–36. –––– (2005), ‘Images of a Warrior: On a Group of Athenian Vases and Their Public’, in C. Marconi (ed.), Greek Vases: Images, Contexts and Controversies (Leiden), 41–54. –––– (2007), ‘Sex, Agency, and History: The Case of Athenian Painted Pottery’, in R. Osborne and J. Tanner (eds.), Art’s Agency and Art History (Oxford), 179–98. Pingiatoglou, S. (1992), ‘Eine Komödiendarstellung auf einer Choenkanne des Benaki-Museums’, in H. Froning, T. Hölscher, and H. Mielsch (eds.), Kotinos: Festschrift für Erika Simon, Mainz. Rothwell, K. S. (2007), Nature, Culture and the Origins of Greek Comedy: A Study of Animal Choruses, Cambridge.

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Séchan, L. (1926), Études sur la tragédie grecque dans ses rapports avec la céramique, Paris. Seeberg, A. (1971), Corinthian Komos Vases. BICS Supplement no. 27, London. Stansbury-O’Donnell, M. (2006) Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens,. Cambridge. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1978), Greek Tragedy in Action, London and Berkeley. –––– (1986), ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, JHS 106: 163–74. –––– (1987) ‘Phallology, Phylakes, Iconography and Aristophanes’, PCPhS 33: 92–104; also, with, minor additions, Dioniso 57: 95–109. –––– (1992), Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad, Oxford. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Tragedy Through Vase-Paintings, Oxford. –––– (1997), ‘The Pictorial Record’, in P. E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge), 69–90. –––– (2007), Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Paintings of the Fourth Century, Los Angeles (Getty Museum Publications). Trendall, A. D. (1967), The Red-Figured Vases of Lucania, Campania, and Sicily, 2 vols., Oxford. –––– (1983), The Red-figured Vases of Lucania, Campania and Sicily. Third Supplement (Consolidated). BICS Supplement no. 41, London. Trendall, A. D. and Cambitoglou A. (1978), The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, 3 vols., Oxford. –––– (1991–2), Second Supplement to The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, BICS Supplement no. 60, 2 vols., London. Trendall, A. D., and Webster, T. B. L. (1971), Illustrations of Greek Drama, London. Webster, T .B. L. (1956/1970), Greek Theatre Production, 2nd ed. 1970, London. –––– (1967), Monuments Illustrating Tragedy and Satyr Play, 2nd ed. 1967, BICS Supplement no. 20. London. –––– (1972), Potter and Patron in Classical Athens, London. Webster, T. B. L. and Green J. R. (1960/1969/1978), Monuments Illustrating Old and Middle Comedy, 2nd ed. 1969, BICS Supplement no. 9/no. 23/no. 39, London. Webster, T. B. L., Green, J. R., and Seeberg, A. (1995), Monuments Illustrating New Comedy, 3rd ed. revised and enlarged by Green and Seeberg, 2 vols., BICS Supplement no. 50, London. Wilson, P. J. (1999), ‘The Aulos in Classical Athens’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge.

18 The Greek Gem: A Token of Recognition Alfonso Moreno

Recognition through tokens, according to Aristotle in the Poetics, is the most artless kind of anagnôrisis.1 Reliance on a birth mark, a scar, or a necklace as a device to trigger recognition usually reflects an uninventive author, incapable of creating a more artful dramatic narrative.2 For Aristotle this is not only an aesthetic judgement, but also a matter of technical classification. Artless tokens are to be understood as his poetic equivalents of the inartificial proofs (πστει αHτεχνοι) described in the Rhetoric, i.e. ‘proofs which have not been furnished by ourselves but were already in existence’, of which Aristotle gives the three ancient courtroom examples of witnesses, tortures, and contracts.3 It is perhaps paradoxical, therefore, that the conjunction of anagnôrisis and tokens in the classical period produced masterpieces of τ.χνη fully equal to our honorand. These tokens of Greek glyptics may fall outside Aristotle’s remit, but they are (as I hope to show here) certainly artful and poetic, and (in particular) dramatic. My enquiry departs from, and tests, two Taplinian postulates, which as far as I can tell are interconnected. The first is that ancient productions of Greek drama made powerful and focused use of tokens, ‘stage properties which are so imbued with dramatic significance that it would do positive harm to the play in performance if they were not straightforwardly represented’.4 The second is that a significant amount of Greek narrative iconography relates closely to the texts of Greek (and particularly Athenian) tragedies, not in the 1 Under the classification in the Rhetoric (see n. 3 below), this paper is the artless testimony of Oliver’s extraordinary qualities as a scholar, colleague, and mentor by a grateful Magdalen witness. I would like to thank Bill Allan, Adrian Kelly, Peter Wilson, and Caspar Meyer for their invaluable comments and help on this paper. The reader should be aware that the illustrations in this contribution are not to scale. Technical description of the objects has been omitted, but can easily be found by following up the references. 2 Arist. Poet. 1454b19–30: εCδη δ α#ναγνωρσεω, πρτη µ ν 9 α#τεχνοτα´τη κα2 y πλεστ7 χρ%νται δι’ α#ποραν, 9 δια` τ%ν σηµεων. On anagnôrisis generally see Cave (1988), 37–40. 3 Arist. Rh. 1355b35–7 (Loeb trans.); see Cave (1988), 246. 4 Taplin (1977), 36–8; see also (1978), 77–100.

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sense that it illustrates actual scenes from the texts, but in being informed and enriched by the viewer’s recollection of those texts, especially when performed as plays.5 This description of a process of essentially visual recognition seems to me to be inescapably correct, since it assigns to the reading of Greek narrative iconography a kind of process of anagnôrisis very similar to that well attested by Aristotle for Greek poetic narrative. To render satisfying the narrative of Eurycleia’s recognition of Odysseus, to take an example of anagnôrisis from the Poetics, Homer relies equally on the visual token of identity (the scar), the apparent visual difference between the itinerant beggar and the king of Ithaca, and the established familiarity of the nurse with the latter since childhood.6 Just so, the process of recognition of a tragic-related picture could be seen as the interplay between certain visual ‘signals’ or ‘clues’, the illusion of an otherwise uninformed and uninformable picture, and the live response of the long-acquainted viewer.7 In short, once we accept that Greek dramatists were visual artists, as Taplin has shown, it seems likely that other visual artists would have employed similar semiotic strategies, including anagnôrisis through tokens. In the following pages I propose to ask whether classical Greek gems and finger rings (i.e. intaglios) have a similar relationship to classical Greek drama as that which Taplin has shown for vases. One obvious caveat is that the topic is huge and highly specialized, so that my answer can only be sketchy and speculative in the extreme, and done without any claim to comprehensiveness.8 A second is that there are important ways in which intaglios differ from pottery, and it is well to mention the chief of these at the outset. The number of such objects surviving is comparatively meagre,9 even if the tens of thousands of different impressions preserved on clay seals leave no doubt that the

5 See Taplin (1993) and (2007); cf. the iconocentrist and, in my view, over-sceptical criticism of his approach by Small (2005), 106–9. On the very different relationship of comedy and vase painting, see Taplin (1993), 20: ‘As soon as a tragedy-related and a comedy-related painting are juxtaposed, it is evident that we are dealing with two radically divergent phenomena. With the tragedy it is not at all clear how or how far the painting reflects the play, if it does so at all; with the comedy the vase captures a particular moment of the particular play in performance’; see also (2007), 26–8. 6 On this example, see Cave (1988), 42–3. 7 On clues and signals, see Taplin (1993), 21–9; (2007), 37–43. 8 Possibly useful motifs that go unexplored here are the discovery by Theseus of his father’s sword under the stone (e.g. Martini (1971) nos. 1–3); or the anagnôrisis of Orestes and Iphigenia (e.g. Boardman (1971) no. 33; cf. 32: Iphigenia and the stag). 9 See Boardman (2001), 16, on numbers surviving: ‘. . . we have perhaps an average of five or six per annum. Compare, for a moment, our knowledge of Athenian figure-decorated vases of the sixth and fifth centuries bc which we know to be all from the potters’ quarter of one city. For an average figure of surviving examples 300 per annum is modest, and often more than a hundred works can be attributed to a single artist.’

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number actually produced was huge, and that, like Greek pottery, intaglios were objects of mass circulation and use (we will return to this point below). Their minute size (twenty mm, on rough average, across the widest part of the face) makes them an inappropriate medium for the representation of group scenes and thus (to some extent) narrative.10 Furthermore, they are usually difficult to date with much precision and very often impossible to provenance.11 They are, however, intensely personal and easily portable objects, qualities which make them particularly valuable potential indices of the transplantation and familiarity of Greek drama across vast stretches of time and space in antiquity.12 Most important for my purposes, however, is the fact that Greek intaglios were used to seal and thus identify objects.13 Their use as tokens of recognition in the ‘real’ world makes it very tempting to guess that their iconography would have gravitated towards and drawn upon narratives of anagnôrisis. Hypothetically, we should be able to find a surface sequence of recognition associated with motifs on these intaglios (‘whose seal?’ and ‘what narrative?’), while any narrative of recognition encoded in the seal’s iconography would introduce further and deeper sequences. Such an interrelationship of object and literary device, seal and recognition, has its earliest poetic counterpart in the famous passage of Theognis: For me, a skilled and wise poet, let a seal (σφρηγ), Cyrnus, be placed on these verses. Their theft will never pass unnoticed, nor will anyone take something worse in exchange when that which is good is at hand, but everyone will say: ‘They are the verses of Theognis of Megara, and he is famous among all men.’14

Here, whatever purpose the use of the word ‘seal’ is intended to serve in these lines (a famously long-disputed question), we can already see the concept of a seal-mediated recognition employed by a poet of the sixth century.15 Indeed, 10 A limitation on group scenes is, of course, a characteristic of Greek drama itself, which has only a few characters on stage at any one time. 11 See further Boardman (2001), 16–17. 12 On the individuality of seals see Diog. Laert. 1.57 (attributing to Solon a law that δακτυλιογλφ( µ6 0ξε,ναι σφραγ,δα φυλα´ττειν το& πραθ.ντο δακτυλου); see Robinson (1941), 133, on bronze rings (one worn on the third finger of the left hand) in the Olynthus necropolis. 13 Diehl (1938), 9–12; Boardman (2001), 446–7. 14 IEG 19–26 (Loeb trans.); see the fifth-century interpretation of this passage by Critias in Plut. Alc. 33.1 with Woodbury (1952), 28–9. 15 For a sampling of interpretations of these lines, see Immisch (1933), 299 (taking the sphrêgis literally); Woodbury (1952), 23 (metaphorically ‘as a certificate of ownership’, with bibl. on 35 n. 3); Allen (1950), 137–40 (as genius or style); Ford (1985), 89 (as ‘the codification and authorization of a body of gnomological poetry as representing the accepted standards and values of the agathoi’); Pratt (1995) (as ‘writing itself’) (I include these references merely as acknowledgement: the different interpretations do not affect my point above).

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the motif of the sphragis, the metaphorical seal of the author placed at the beginning and the end of his work, becomes a commonplace in Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman literature.16 We may therefore usefully compare the process of acknowledging an author to that of discovering the owner of a seal. Both processes are in turn analogous to the type of anagnôrisis through tokens discussed in the fourth century in the Poetics. For Aristotle anagnôrisis is technically a narrative device of epic and tragedy, but its manifestations in Greek literature are clear and manifold, from the comic use of seals as tokens of identity, to the far more serious (though directly comparable) identification of warriors by their shield blazons as appears in extenso in Aeschylus’ Seven.17 Our task is to examine whether such pronounced literary interest in tokens crosses over into the iconography of the tokens themselves, and whether this iconography interests itself with literature and narrative, and particularly with narratives of recognition. The influence of epic narrative on classical iconography makes for a useful point for departure. Aristotle famously sums up the Odyssey as ‘recognition throughout’ (α#ναγνρισι γα`ρ διλου), a reading well validated by the discussions of scholiasts and scholars since.18 Abandoning his blessed but obscure existence on the island of Calypso, Odysseus returns to reclaim his own position at the heart of his oikos, gradually trading disguise for recognition as he furnishes proofs of his identity and tests the loyalty of his addressees.19 The classic recognition of Odysseus by Eurycleia is perhaps the best example of the treatment of Odyssean anagnorisis on a gem, even if only attested on a piece of late Hellenistic date (Figure 18.1(a) ).20 Appearing much more frequently in classical iconography generally is the recognition of Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, by his old dog Argos.21 On two intaglios a bearded man wearing a pilos bends over his staff while standing over a dog. The pilos is not the only clue to the man’s identity. While the fourth-century finger ring from Tarentum has the heroically proportioned torso of the ‘beggar’ almost totally

16 Kranz (1961), 45 n. 58; Johansen (1996), 14–18. On the related question of signed seals, see Furtwängler (1900), iii. 80, 136 (pl. 7.64, 66); Pohlenz (1932), 419–20; Kranz (1961), 45 n. 58; Boardman (2001), 236–7. 17 Ar. Eq. 951–9; Av. 1213–15; Men. Epit. 387–90 Sandbach; Aesch. Sept. 375–652. See Boardman (2001), 446–7 for many further literary references to seals. 18 Arist. Poet. 1459b15; Cave (1988), 40–6; Murnaghan (1987), 16; Richardson (1983). 19 See Hom. Od. 13.344–52; 16.202–12; 19.221–48; 19.395–466; 21.217–21; 23.26–31; 23.70– 9; 23.113–16; 23.181b–204; 23.209–30; 24.331–44; see Emlyn-Jones (1984), 7 (‘Odysseus gives a sign [σDµα] as a proof of identity’); Gainsford (2003), 43 (‘The protagonist gives evidence’); on σDµα as token/tomb, see Murnaghan (1987), 17 n. 30. 20 Vienna Kunsthist. Mus. IXB 705, in LIMC Odysseus 214 (around second or third quarter of the 1st c. bc). 21 Hom. Od. 17. 290–327; see Brommer (1971– ), vol. 3, 273 for a list of related depictions.

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concealed and the dog looking forward (Fig 18.1(b) ),22 the other piece (the gem) has this musculature completely revealed and the dog, accordingly, looking up at his man (Figure 18.1(c) ).23 Neither example corresponds verbatim to the passage in the Odyssey, but (to repeat) this is not the point, as it is clear that neither stops simply at showing a generic ‘man with dog’. Indeed, both pieces seem clearly informed and enriched by a knowledge of the Odyssey’s particular (and, from a strictly plot-driven perspective, unnecessary) emphasis on this recognition scene, the literary appeal of which is enhanced by not requiring the use of tokens. For Argos the presence of his master is proof enough, and paradoxically it is this decrepit but loyal animal that is able to perform the most immediate recognition in the entire epic.24 Significantly, like Argos, the ancient viewer of this scene on a seal was prompted to a sequence of recognitions: to see through Odysseus’ disguise, to decipher the scene and its relation to the famous poem, and of course to recognize the owner (or ‘master’) of the object that made the impression.25 This example notwithstanding, the relationship between epic and the glyptic iconography of the classical period is extremely tenuous. For the archaic period, to be sure, there are isolated instances of intaglios that relate to heroic narratives, but the relationship of these works to Homeric poetry is

Fig. 18.1. (a) Odysseus and Eurycleia (cornelian, 2nd or 3rd quarter of 1st cent. bc); (b–c) Odysseus and Argos: (b) gold ring, late 5th cent. bc, from Tarentum; (c) agate scarab, Etruscan, early 4th cent. bc. Boardman (2001), pl. 757 = Richter 228. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in Zazoff (1983), pl. 60.5; cf. ibid. pl. 52.2; Martini (1971) no. 169. 24 Cf. Nagy (1983) on the mind (νο&) as the vehicle of recognition in Homer. 25 For another iconographic motif of the (thinly veiled) disguise, see the ‘cross-dressing’ Omphale in Boardman (2001) fig. 228 and pls. 635, 766, and compare with Aesch. Ag. 1040–1; Soph. Trach. 252, 356; Plut. Per. 24.9. 22 23

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nowhere clear.26 On one example, Heracles in his lion skin has defeated the shape-changing river god Achelous and lifts his broken horn as he is greeted by Deianeira (Figure 18.2(a) ).27 On another, Ajax is impaling himself on his sword (Figure 18.2(b) ).28 Neither of these instances, pregnant as their narratives are with the possibilities of anagnôrisis exploited later by fifth-century tragedians,29 makes anything like the sort of sophisticated self-reference to anagnôrisis that appears in the case of our two ‘Odysseus and Argos’ intaglios. It is surely significant that such self-referential use of anagnôrisis on the iconography of gems is a distinctively fifth-century phenomenon, and (perhaps more significantly) one that draws on the thematic repertoire of tragedy far more than that of epic. The best explanation for this observation seems to lie in the development of fifth-century tragedy into the most popular vehicle for the handling of Greek myth. There appears to be, in other words, a direct correlation between tragedy and gem iconography. This of course runs totally against arguments that see the Greek iconographic tradition as self-sufficient; but it is not to say, once again, that fifth-century glyptic iconography simply ‘illustrates’ scenes from Greek tragedy.30 Rather, like the Greek vases studied by Taplin, these objects should be studied for iconographic signals that their artists had identifiable features, either narrated or acted, of those tragedies in mind.31 Particularly promising examples include a gem showing Hephaestus chaining Prometheus (Figure 18.2(c) ),32 or a series of intaglios featuring Oedipus speaking with the Sphinx (Figure 18.2(d) );33 the death of Ajax (Figure 26

This point has already been made for other media down to c.530 bc by Cook (1983); see further Snodgrass (1998), 145–50; cf. Burgess (2001), 35–44, 53–94 (stressing, instead, the iconographic influence of the Epic Cycle); on the continuing influence of the Cycle, see Hatzi-Vallianou (1996) and n. 67 below. 27 British Museum 489, in Boardman (1968a), 75 (pp. 46, 48). Compare the scene in Soph. Trach. 9–29. 28 New York, MMA 42.11.13, in LIMC Aias I 110 (from Perachora, second half of 7th c. bc); cf. Aj. 815–65; this motif from the Epic Cycle is common as a device in the archaic period: see Burgess (2001), 185–6. 29 Sophocles has Deianeira use a ring as a way to identify her baneful ‘gift’ to Heracles: Trach 614–15; for the suicide of Ajax cf. n. 42 below. 30 For a summary of the ‘iconocentrist’ and ‘philodramatist’ polarity, and ways to break it, see Taplin (2007), 22–6. 31 See n. 7 above. 32 See, with Aesch. PV 1–87, Furtwängler (1900), iii. 204 n. 2, fig. 131 (cornelian in an Odessan collection; dated c.400 bc): ‘Die Szene entspricht so sehr der Dichtung des Aeschylos und ist so sehr verschieden von den älteren archaischen Darstellungen, dass kein Zweifel an der Abhängigkeit von jenem grossen Tragiker aufkommen kann.’ Compare in vase painting Trendall and Webster (1971), iii. 1,27 (which they connect with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Lyomenos). 33 LIMC Oidipous 25 (fourth century bc) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1936.5); Martini (1971), pl. 19.2,3; on the iconography of Oedipus and the Sphinx, see Moret (1984).

Fig. 18.2. (a) Herakles, Acheloös, and Deianeira (plasma scarab, 6th cent. bc); (b) the death of Ajax (steatite, 2nd half of 7th cent. bc, from Perachora); (c) Hephaestus and Prometheus (cornelian scarab, c.400 bc); (d) Oedipus and the Sphinx (cornelian scarab, Etruscan, 4th cent. bc); (e) the death of Ajax (scarab, early 4th cent. bc); (f ) Orestes slays Clytemnestra (silver ring, early 4th cent. bc, from Kerasa).

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18.2(e) );34 an Orestes who has stabbed the bared breast of Clytemnestra (Figure 18.2(f) );35 or the infant Telephos being suckled by a hind (Figures 18.3(a–d) ).36 Of course, even given such examples, it is impossible iconographically to identify a single ‘tragic gem’ with total confidence. The kind of ancillary iconographic detail that allows the analysis to be performed on vases is simply not to be found on intaglios. Yet this should not lead to immediate aporia, because it is possible to see clearly that, in selecting and crafting their scenes, some gem engravers were guided by an awareness of the device of anagnôrisis in Greek tragedy. In such cases the tragic ‘signal’ can be said to be the artist’s very reliance on anagnôrisis as a compositional and narrative device. Representations of Philoctetes afford a good example. Two Hellenistic gems present a haggard Philoctetes reclining on the floor of his cave while flies swarm around his fetid bandages; Odysseus, wearing his pilos, meanwhile sneaks up behind a rocky outcrop to steal his bow (Figure 18.3(e) ).37 The theme of ambush and plotting, as well as the detailed emphasis on the revolting nature of the bandages, may point to Sophocles’ treatment of the story, as Taplin has noted in his analysis of comparable iconography on a Sicilian vase of around 380 bc.38 Another example from the classical period shows Philoctetes sitting on a stone as he dejectedly touches and stares at his injured foot (Figure 18.3(f) ).39 The bow, the token by which he is principally recognized in classical iconography, is conspicuous by its absence. This seems a sufficiently significant deviation from convention to signal some relation with Sophocles’ Philoctetes, where the lamentation of Philoctetes for his bow is given generous treatment by the poet. Until this moment in the play, the wounded hero had failed to recognize the young Neoptolemus as an accomplice of Odysseus. The gem recalls in particular Philoctetes’ lonely and mournful address of his foot: 34 Paris, Cabinet des Médailles 1820 bis, in LIMC Aias I 116, where a connection is suggested with Soph. Aj. 833–4 in the arrangement of the limbs. 35 Boardman (2001), 224–5 (fig. 230): a fourth-century silver ring from Kerasa (inscriptions name them both); cf. Aesch. Cho. 896–8. See also the trial of Orestes on a cameo of the first century bc: Neverov (1971), 36. 36 a) Munich, Münzslg. A1474, in LIMC Telephos 6 (East Greek c.480 bc); b) Rhode Island School of Design, 25.097, in LIMC Telephos 7 (east Greek, c.450 bc); c) Getty Museum, 81.AI.17, in LIMC Telephos 7a (= Spier (1992), 46 no. 84 [iron ring; mid fourth century bc]); d) Boardman (2001), pl. 569 (Boardman thinks the child looks like a later addition); compare the bronze coin from Tegea (LIMC Telephos 8, c.370 bc). 37 Boston MFA 13.237, in LIMC Philoktetes 66 (see also Furtwängler (1900), ii pl. 21.27) (late third or early second century bc); the other, almost identical, example is in the British Museum (Walters (1926), 962 = Martini (1971) 105). On rocky arches as signals of Greek tragic iconography, see Taplin (2007), 39. 38 Taplin (2007), 98–100. 39 Athens, Nat. Mus., in Boardman (2001), pl. 540.

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Alas, alas, my fate, my fate! I am lost, poor man. O foot, foot, what shall I do with you in my remaining life, poor wretch?40

It is unlikely to be coincidental that Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in which anagnôrisis and the sustained meaning and recollections triggered by a token (the heirloom-like bow originally bequeathed by Heracles) play a particularly central narrative role, would seem to find acceptance and translation in glyptic terms.41 Here, as in our ‘Odysseus and Argos’ examples, the viewer is invited to recognize. Ideally, he will perceive the token (the bow) within the token (the seal), and thus become a participant in a kind of metanarrative of recognition. The same analysis serves to account for the depictions on classical gems of Ajax and his sword (see e.g. Figure 18.2(e) ). As Taplin has shown, Sophocles makes the sword of Ajax into a token of recollection and sustained meaning throughout his version of the tragedy, until in the end (as Teucer recognizes) it is this gift of Hector, fixed in Trojan soil, that kills the Greek hero (‘You see how Hector dead was to kill you?’).42 And even in the case of narratives that involve no tokens it may be argued that it is the inference of dramatic anagnôrisis that informs iconographic details and relates them to a tragedy. To return to our earlier examples, Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra may be a manminded (α#νδρβουλο) woman, but she is ultimately also a mother who cannot recognize her own child, who has returned home in disguise to kill her and her lover (Figure 18.2(f) ).43 Sophocles’ Oedipus is the man clever enough to solve the Sphinx’s riddle, but who cannot discover his own identity until it is too late (Figure 18.2(d) ). His Telephus seems to undergo a comparable fate, lost in the wilderness and found by a hind (and subsequently, in some versions of the myth, by Heracles), but unaware of his own identity as he fulfils the oracle foretelling his murder of his uncles (Figure 18.3(a–d) ).44 An important iconographic tradition on classical seals seems to embody a predilection for depicting characters in disguise from themselves and failing to meet the Delphic exhortation to self-knowledge, or being deceived by others.45 While their own recognition fails, it is the viewer who is privileged 40

Soph. Phil. 1186–9 (Loeb trans.); the lamentation extends over lines 1081–217. See Taplin (1978), 89–93, on the bow as ‘the most integrally incorporated of all material objects in the Greek tragedy we have’. 42 Soph. Aj. 1026–7 (Taplin’s trans.); see Taplin (1978), 85–8. 43 Aesch. Ag. 11; Cho. 653–718. 44 The subject of Sophocles’ Aleadai; see TrGF IV, F 89: ‘And a grazing horned deer came down from the high hills . . . lifting its nostrils . . . and the tines of its horns it went safely . . .’ (Loeb trans.). The recognition of Telephus by Heracles, perhaps also mentioned in this passage, appears on a gem from the second century ad (LIMC Telephos 23). 45 On tragic hamartia as misperception of identity see Murnaghan (1987), 71; for the maxim, see Paus. 10.24. 41

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Fig. 18.3. (a–d) Telephos and the hind: (a) chalcedony, c.480 bc; (b) chalcedony, c.450 bc; (c) iron ring, mid-4th cent. bc; (d) 4th cent. bc; (e) Philoctetes and Odysseus (sard, late 3rd/early 2nd cent. bc); (f ) Philoctetes (chalcedony scaraboid (Archaic shape), late 5th cent. bc).

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and invited to recognize, not only the characters and their relation to tragedy, but also the owner of the gem which ‘produced’ them. Sophocles’ version of the anagnôrisis of Orestes by Electra adds a further dimension to these sequences of recognition. Orestes is finally recognized through the token of the seal of Agamemnon, which he produces for his sister at the climactic moment of their encounter: ‘Look at this seal (σφραγ) that was my father’s, and learn whether I speak the truth’.46 Sophocles’ treatment of the scene is particular.47 The seal (presumably a ring) is the proof that finally persuades Electra that Orestes is not dead, that his remains are not contained in the vessel (acting as the tomb) of Orestes, to which Sophocles makes his two characters devote so much attention.48 It is at any rate the tomb of Agamemnon himself around which the anagnôrisis of the siblings and their plan for revenge takes place.49 Three gems dating from the classical period to the first half of the third century bc seem to be making this very connection between tomb, seal, and anagnôrisis. On the earliest, a female sits on a grave besides what appears to be a funerary vessel (Figure 18.4(a) );50 on the second, a female sits on a large vessel and mourns (Figure 18.4(b) );51 on the third, a young male meets a female who sits on what appears to be a grave (Figure 18.4(c) ).52 Comparison with contemporary vase painting clarifies the nature of the setting, the characters, and the objects (Figure 18.4(d) ).53 Our three gems are undeniably informed and enriched by Sophocles’ particular treatment of the Electran anagnôrisis, effectively recognition through a gem, and this arguably forms the strongest link to the play. 54 46

Soph. El. 1222–3 (Loeb trans.). Cf. Aesch. Cho. 225–34, where the anagnôrisis is triggered by Orestes’ lock of hair, his tracks, and a piece of embroidered cloth; Eur. El. 524–44, which in allusion to Aeschylus rejects these same tokens as inadequate, and 573–4, where the anagnôrisis is triggered by a scar next to Orestes’ eyebrow, gained in childhood as he and Electra chased a fawn in Agamemnon’s house. See Perrin (1909), 394: ‘The abrupt, mechanical appeal, by way of direct proof of his identity, which the Orestes of Sophocles makes to his father’s signet-ring, is the sole imperfection in the recognition scene;’ and p. 395 for a comparison of all three scenes; also Taplin (1977), 337–8, and Cave (1988), 247–8 (who address Fraenkel’s proposed modifications to the texts of Aesch. Cho. and Eur. El.). In this connection, it may not be far-fetched to relate several examples of footprint or sandal motifs on gems (see e.g. Boardman (2001), nos. 513, 524, and cf. p. 443 n. 881) to their theatrical use as tokens of recognition. 48 See Soph. El. 1113–226. In Homeric terms it is the token (σDµα) that brings Orestes back from the grave (σDµα): see Nagy (1983); Murnaghan (1987) 17, 23, 141, 174; cf. n. 19 above. 49 Soph. El. 893, 931. 50 Olympia Mus. M. 842, in LIMC Elektra I 28 (Bronze finger ring from Skillous, c.400 bc; the association with Sophocles’ Electra has been made by Kolonas). 51 Boardman (2001), 225 (fig. 229) (fourth century bc). 52 Munich, Münzslg. o. Nr. Sr., in Martini (1971) no. 81 (pl. 17.1) (ring, first half of the third century bc). 53 Naples, Mus. Naz. 82338 (H 1761) = LIMC Elektra I 12. 54 In addition, on the third gem, the backdrop is a structure that might be identified as a ‘stagy’ portico, one of Taplin’s signals of tragic iconography: see Taplin (2007), 38 f. 47

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Fig. 18.4. (a) Electra at the grave of Agamemnon (bronze ring, c.425–400 bc, from Skillous); (b) Electra mourning (gold ring, 4th cent. bc); (c–d) Electra and Orestes at Agamemnon’s grave: (c) sardonyx ringstone, 1st half of 3rd cent. bc; (d) volute krater, Lucanian red figure, c.350–340 bc.

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Gems that possibly depict Agave and Pentheus introduce another variation on the theme of anagnôrisis. There is a good example on a gold ring from the second half of the fifth century, on which a dancing maenad holds a severed head in her right hand and a sword in her left (Figure 18.5(a) ).55 The sword strongly tells against relating the picture to Euripides’ Bacchae, where the women tear Pentheus limb from limb with their bare hands, and this particular maenad is far from recognizing the nature of her spoils as she lifts her head in ecstasy.56 Nevertheless, the gem is arguably theatrical if it exploits an iconographic ambiguity between the mask and the severed head, as seen in another classical example, where a female figure equipped with a thyrsus holds a head (or, ambiguously, a mask) and looks into its eyes (Figure 18.5(b) ).57 The motif of ‘actor and mask’ is strikingly widespread on classical and later gems (e.g. Figure 18.5(c) ).58 It should not be taken literally, as we also have nonactors (like Pan on a gem in the Ionides collection) doing the gazing (Figure 18.5(d) ).59 An interesting local appropriation of it is perhaps another, extremely common depiction of mutilation (µαχαλισµ) on Etruscan gems, in which warriors gaze at the severed heads of their defeated enemies (see e.g. Figure 18.5(e) ).60 My reader will by now have recognized that I would go as far as to interpret all of these examples in relation to anagnôrisis. Indeed, it is principally in this way that I take our Agave and Pentheus (if it is indeed them) to have a clear relationship to Greek drama, and perhaps to a particular Greek dramatization of the story, even if not that by Euripides. Perhaps even more important in triggering recognition of the theme of anagnôrisis is the motif of the mask alone. This begins from the earliest years of the fifth century and grows vastly in popularity thereafter, with many classical and Hellenistic pieces in a variety of designs (e.g. Figures 55 Paris, Bibl. Nat., de Luynes 521, in Boardman (2001), 219, pl. 673 (= LIMC Pentheus 46) (from Syria); see LIMC Pentheus 47 and 51 for comparable (but post-Classical) examples. 56 On the mutilation of Pentheus, see Eur. Bacch. 1125–43; 1209–10. 57 British Museum 517, in Boardman (2001), pl. 608; cf. Furtwängler (1900), ii. 64 (pl. 13.21): ‘Eine Nymphe mit dem Thyrsos (daran Bänder) hält eine unbärtige Maske und betrachtet sie.‘ 58 Getty Museum 85.AM.276, in Spier (1992) no. 55 (= Boardman (2001), 226, pl. 745) (a ?man holding a mask; late fourth century bc); the diffusion of this theme is impressive (e.g., see the glass intaglio found in an excavation context of c.ad 80–120 at the Roman fort at Kirkbride, Cumberland, showing a playwright, holding a mask and pedum and sitting on a chair, in Henig (1978), 287, pl. xxiv App. 7). 59 Boardman (1968b), 31 (no. 36) (late Hellenistic or Roman). 60 Getty Museum L87.AN.114, in Spier (1992) no. 140 (early fourth century bc); see Martini (1971) nos. 32, 63, 66, 69, 74, 91, 127, 139, 142, 157, 166, 181, 182, 213, 263, 266, 327, 328, 329; cf. 84, 85, 138, 273 (lifting and gazing at a helmet); we may even find a more recent dramatic example in the staging of the famous graveyard scene in Hamlet (‘Alas, Poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio . . .’): Hamlet, v.1.172–3 (on this see Taplin (2007), 25 f.).

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Fig. 18.5. (a) Maenad holding a head (gold ring, late 5th cent. bc, from Syria); (b) maenad holding a head/mask (black jasper scaraboid, mid-4th cent. bc, from Greece); (c) actor and mask (gold ring, late 4th cent. bc, from Greece); (d) Pan with mask (cornelian ringstone, 1st cent. bc); (e) Etruscan mutilation (makhalismos) (banded agate scarab, Etruscan, early 4th cent. bc).

18.6(c–d).61 The earliest example I could find shows a mask in three-quarters frontal view (Figure 18.6(a) ); while another piece in the same style may show a grizzly mask in profile (Figure 18.6(b) ).62 But perhaps the most interesting instances come from the rare find of thirty-five preserved clay seals on a group of papyri discovered intact at Elephantine in Egypt, each seal having 61 c) Munich, Münzslg. A2531, in Boardman (2001) 800 (who compares it to the Hellenistic example in Furtwängler (1900), i pl. 26.40); d) Hermitage Ж 812, in Neverov (1976) no. 73 (second to first centuries bc). See generally Furtwängler (1900), i pl. 26.37–83 for masks and grotesques into the early Roman period; Neverov (1971) nos. 33, 34: cameos of cupids with masks. 62 Fossing (1929), 4, 5; cf. Furtwängler (1900), ii. 42 (pl. 8.71), who has: ‘Sehr merkwürdiger Kopf eines bärtigen Demons.’

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Fig. 18.6. (a–d) Masks: (a–b) cornelian scarabs, c.500 bc; (c) bronze ring, late 5th/ first half 4th cent. bc; (d) cornelian, 1st cent. bc; (e–h) the mask motif on the Elephantine Papyri: (e) seal impression of Polycrates of Arcadia (Pap. II); ( f ) seal impression of Epinikos of Chalcis (Pap. III); (g) seal impression of Rhodokles of Aigina (Pap. IV); (h) seal impression of Euphronios (Pap. X); (i) sealed Elephantine Papyrus II.

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three or four impressions (Figure 18.6(i) ).63 The various documents are dated to specific years of the end of the fourth century and the early Hellenistic period, providing a secure terminus ante quem for the intaglios. Of the thirtyfive seal types fourteen are of heads, among which are at least four examples appearing to be masks. Here the modern student is finally allowed the welcome recognition of the persons behind the masks, for each seal is placed besides its bearer’s name in the genitive. Polycrates of Arcadia witnesses the will of Dionysius of Temnos (dated 285/4: Figure 18.6(e) ); Epinicus of Chalcis and Rhodocles of Aegina witness two separate contracts for the ‘dowry’ of a concubine (both dated 284/3: Figure 18.6(f) and (g), respectively); the bureaucrat Euphronius based in Diospolis Magna seals his official correspondence with a mask (223/2: Figure 18.6(h) ).64 Even a century ago it was already clear that the prevalence of mask devices at Elephantine was compatible with another large sample of seals discovered in the mid thirdcentury bc destruction layer at Selinus.65 But the evidence that most strikingly demonstrates the mass and universal prevalence of the motif comes from Delos and is a more recent discovery. In 1974 and 1975, in a building on Delos destroyed by a pirate raid in 69 bc, French excavators unearthed the remains of a massive archive of commercial documents entrusted (in lieu of a public notary) to a συγγραφοφλαξ, probably a trusted and wealthy merchant and banker operating on the island.66 The total is of approximately 15,000 clay seals bearing 26,000 impressions from around 12,000 different intaglio matrices.67 Of these examples (all dating from the second and first centuries

63 Rubensohn (1907), 12 (no. 9), who notes (‘Ähnliches ist bisher nur aus bedeutend späterer Zeit bekannt’); for the context of this rarity, see Vandorpe (1996), 231: ‘Barely 180 papyri with one or more seals attached are preserved according to the editions.’ 64 See Rubensohn (1907), 12–13, 15, 17, 22–6, 27–31, 34–5, 43–5; on the contract of 284/3 see Gryzbek (1989) with Isae. 3.39. 65 Rubensohn (1907), 15: ‘Masken spielen wie in unserm Fund so auch im Fund von Selinunt eine große Rolle.’ The Selinus sealings, in 431 types, of which 107 are heads (CXXX–CCXXXVI: and many of these clearly masks), come from an archive in Temple C with a terminus ante quem (through destruction by fire) of 249 bc: see Salinas (1883), 481, pl. 4–12; Furtwängler (1900), iii. 130; updating Salinas, Zoppi (1996), 329 gives the terminus post quem for the archive as 325 bc. 66 See Siebert (2001), 93–5, on the site and date; Vandorpe (1996), 232–37 on sealing and witnessing practice. 67 See Boussac (1992) xi–xii; Stampolidis (1992), 23, 35–6; (1996), 199. The vast majority of the trove is still unpublished, but work is ongoing and proceeding along thematic lines, with Boussac (1992) containing the public seals and those showing Apollo, Helios, Artemis, and Hecate, and Stampolidis (1992) containing the cycle of Eros and Aphrodite (1,969 impressions from 1,263 matrices). In a preliminary publication, Hatzi-Vallianou (1996), 222, 224–5, already notes the influence of the Epic Cycle on the seals, suggesting references to Classical adaptations of the Cycle in tragedy, satyr plays, and comedy. Boussac is due to publish the seals of actors and masks (see following note).

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bc), 100 represent actors and more than 1,000 represent masks (including actors holding masks).68 The use of the seal of the Greek mask in such diverse locations, by people of such diverse origins, settlers in Ptolemaic Egypt, Sicilians, merchants on Roman Delos, reflects the astounding currency that Greek drama enjoyed outside of Athens in the classical period, a conclusion much stressed in Taplin’s work.69 Especially in light of the evidence of these clay seals the numbers and availability of intaglios in the classical and Hellenistic world appears to have been vast. Although some sources speak of these objects as exotic or pretentious,70 recorded prices are relatively cheap,71 and their ownership extended even to the most modest members of the population.72 Cut into a wide range of materials (from gold and ivory, semi-precious banded or translucent stones, glass, and so on down to wood), there clearly existed prized and fabulous pieces that only an elite few could afford, but the mass popularity of these objects to individual owners of all social classes is beyond doubt.73 However, it is the appreciation of these objects by their individual users that really concerns us here. The numbers reinforce the impression derived from the intertextual reference of Aeschylean anagnôrisis by Euripides: namely that of audiences capable of understanding and appreciating the narrative device itself.74 The same motifs on Hellenistic and Roman gems in turn reflect the continued and popular use of anagnôrisis throughout New Comedy from Menander to Plautus and Terence, as well as in what survives of Hellenistic and Roman tragedy.75 The user of these gems effectively becomes a

68 Boussac (1997), 146–7, for the numbers and dates; hers is a preliminary publication, where she describes and illustrates some examples. 69 The observation of Boussac (1997), 147, is vital: ‘Les diverses composantes de la population communient donc dans la même amour du théâtre et de ce qu’il incarne, mais il s’agit là de choix individuels qui n’ont rien à voir avec les activités des propriétaires: les usagers des archives déliennes sont avant tout des gens de l’emporion.’ 70 Hdt. 1.195 on Persians (σφρηγ,δα δε ^καστο χει κα2 σκDπτρον χειροποητον); Ar. Nub. 331 on rich fops (σφραγιδονυχαργοκοµ τα), Eccl. 632 on the rich (τ%ν σεµνοτ.ρων . . . κα2 τ%ν σφραγ,δα 0χντων), with discussion in Boardman (2001), 447. 71 One drachma for one ring, three obols for a forgery: Ar. Plut. 884; Athen. 3.123b; Ar. Thesm. 425–8. 72 Vandorpe (1996), 237–8, 263–5 on sealed receipts from the Zenon archive, the Fayum, Thebes, and Memphis, on one of which three Egyptian workmen in a vineyard acknowledge receipt of their wages with their own intaglios; see also n. 12 above on Olynthus. 73 This conclusion (a picture analogous to the market in wristwatches today, from the handcrafted commission to the mass-produced digital) seems true even given the example from Elephantine (Rubensohn (1907), 13–17), where three people (Bacchius of Temnos, his brother Heracleides, and third, possibly one Hermagoras) share use of the same instrument; see Stampolidis (1992), 32 for the same phenomenon on Delos. On materials, see Boardman (2001), 373–9. 74 See above n. 47. 75 Cave (1988), 255–60; see e.g. Sen. Thy. 1004–5 and Tarrant (1978).

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reader (α#ναγνστη) both of the mythic narratives represented on them and of the notion of anagnôrisis itself. These objects, in short, are evidence of the wide reception and disseminated understanding of one of the fundamental building blocks of Greek narrative.76 Their chronology marks this remarkable recognition of anagnôrisis as a phenomenon of the classical period, during which theatres enabled tragedy to speak to mass audiences, thus giving a new and universal appeal to mythological narrative. These tragic gems show, above all, the appreciation of the specifically performative and visual elements in Greek theatre of which Taplin has, before all others, made us aware. 76 Here I sharply part ways with Cave (1988), 260: ‘The history of the term anagnorisis shows clearly enough that, as a notion in poetics, the transference of recognition from character to reader and spectator is a modern development. We are nowadays very preoccupied with readers and their responses, and with the extent to which each reading is a remaking of the work in question.’

REFERENCES Allen, T. W. (1950), ‘Theognis, ed. Diehl 1936’, RevPhil 24: 135–45. Boardman, J. (1968a), Archaic Greek Gems: Schools and Artists in the Sixth and Early Fifth Centuries bc, London. –––– (1968b), Engraved Gems: The Ionides Collection, London. –––– (1971), The Danicourt Gems in Péronne, Paris. –––– (2001), Greek Gems and Finger Rings: Early Bronze Age to Late Classical, 2nd ed., London. Boussac, M.-F. (1992), Les sceaux de Délos, Paris. –––– (1997), ‘Masques et acteurs de théâtre sur les sceaux de Délos’, in B. Le Guen (ed.), De la scène aux gradins : théâtre et représentations dramatiques après Alexandre le Grand, PALLAS 47 : 145–64. –––– and Invernizzi, A. (1996) (eds.), Archives et sceaux du monde hellénistique. BCH Supp. 29, Paris. Brommer, F. (1971– ), Denkmälerlisten zur griechischen Heldensage, vol. 3, Marburg. Burgess, J. (2001), The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle, Baltimore. Cave, T. (1988), Recognitions: A Study in Poetics, Oxford. Cook, R. (1983), ‘Art and Epic in Archaic Greece’, Bulletin van de Vereeniging tot Bevorderung der Kennis van de Antike Beschauing (BABesch) 58: 1–10. Diehl, J. (1938), Sphragis: Eine semasiologische Nachlese, Gießen. Emlyn-Jones, C. (1984), ‘The Reunion of Penelope and Odysseus’, G&R 33: 1–10. Ford, A. (1985), ‘The Seal of Theognis: The Politics of Authorship in Archaic Greece’, in T. J. Figueira and G. Nagy (eds.), Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore and London), 82–95.

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Fossing, P. (1929), The Thorvaldsen Museum: Catalogue of the Antique Engraved Gems and Cameos, Copenhagen. Furtwängler, A. (1900), Die antiken Gemmen: Geschichte der Steinschneidekunst im klassischen Altertum, 3 vols., Leipzig and Berlin. Gainsford, P. (2003), ‘Formal Analysis of Recognition Scenes in the Odyssey’, JHS 123: 41–59. Gryzbek, E. (1989), ‘Die griechische Konkubine und ihre “Mitgift” (P.Eleph. 3 und 4)’, ZPE 76: 206–12. Hatzi-Vallianou, D. (1996), ‘Thèmes homériques sur les sceaux de Délos: une première approche à partir du cycle troyen’, in Boussac and Invernizzi (1996), 205–29. Henig, M. (1978), A Corpus of Roman Engraved Gemstones from British Sites (BAR Brit. Ser. 8), 2nd ed., Oxford. Immisch, O. (1933), ‘Die Sphragis des Theognis’, RhM 82: 298–304. Johansen, H. F. (1996), ‘A Poem by Theognis, Part III’, C&M 47: 9–43. Kranz, W. (1961), ‘Sphragis. Ichform und Namensiegel als Eingangs- und Schlußmotiv antiker Dicthung’, RhM 104: 3–46, 97–124. Martini, W. (1971), Die etruskische Ringsteinglyptik, Heidelberg. Moret, J.-M. (1984), Oedipe, la sphinx et les Thébains: essai de mythologie iconographique, 2 vols., Rome. Murnaghan, S. (1987), Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, Princeton. Nagy, G. (1983), ‘Se¯ma and Noe¯sis: Some Illustrations’, Arethusa 16: 35–55. Neverov, O. (1971), Antique Cameos in the Hermitage Collection, Leningrad. –––– (1976), Antique Intaglios in the Hermitage Collection, Leningrad. Perrin, B. (1909), ‘Recognition Scenes in Greek Literature’, AJPh 30: 371–404. Pohlenz, M. (1932), ‘Jacoby, Theognis’, GGA 194: 410–32. Pratt, L. (1995), ‘The Seal of Theognis, Writing, and Oral Poetry’, AJPh 116: 171–84. Richardson, N. J. (1983), ‘Recognition Scenes in the Odyssey and Ancient Literary Criticism’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 4: 219–35. Richter, G. (1968), Engraved Gems of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, vol. 1, London. Robinson, D. M. (1941), Excavations at Olynthus, Part 10. Metal and Minor Miscellaneous Finds, an Original Contribution to Greek Life. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Archaeology 31, Baltimore. Rubensohn, O. (1907), Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Kgl. Museen in Berlin: Griechische Urkunden; Elephantine-Papyri, Berlin. Salinas, A. (1883), ‘Selinunte’, Not. Scav. 11: 473–500. Siebert, G. (2001), L’Îlot des Bijoux, L’Îlot des Bronzes, La Maison des Sceaux, 1. Topographie et architecture, vol. 1, Paris. Small, J. P. (2005), ‘Pictures of Tragedy?’, in J. Gregory (ed.), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford), 103–18. Snodgrass, A. (1998), Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art, Cambridge. Spier, J. (1992), Ancient Gems and Finger Rings, Malibu.

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Stampolidis, N. Ch. (1992), Ελληνογαλλικ. .ρευνε (Recherches Franco-helléniques II), Τα σφραγσµατα τη ∆ λου 2 (Les Sceaux de Délos 2). Ο Ερωτικ κκλο, Α, Paris. –––– (1996), ‘The Study of the Seals of the Erotic Cycle from Delos: An Example’, in Boussac and Invernizzi (1996), 199–204. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1978), Greek Tragedy in Action, London. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama through VasePaintings, Oxford. –––– (2007), Pots and Plays: Interactions Between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century b.c., Los Angeles. Tarrant, R. J. (1978), ‘Senecan Drama and its Antecedents’, HSPh 82: 213–63. Trendall, A. D. and Webster, T. B. L. (1971), Illustrations of Greek Drama, London. Vandorpe, K. (1996), ‘Seals in and on the Papyri of Greco-Roman and Byzantine Egypt’, in Boussac and Invernizzi (1996), 231–91. Walters, H. B. (1926), Catalogue of the Engraved Gems and Cameos, Greek, Etruscan and Roman, in the British Museum, London. West, M. L. (1974), Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin and New York. Woodbury, L. (1952), ‘The Seal of Theognis’, in M. E. White (ed.), Studies in Honour of Gilbert Norwood (Toronto), 20–41. Zazoff, P. (1983), Die antiken Gemmen, Munich. Zoppi, C. (1996), ‘Cretule di Selinunte’, in Boussac and Invernizzi (1996), 327–40.

19 Image and Representation in the Pottery of Magna Graecia* François Lissarrague

Oliver Taplin’s recent book Pots and Plays1 has revisited in masterly fashion the vase painting of Magna Graecia as it is related to the tragic theatre. It has moved the debate on from the entrenched positions of two scholarly camps in radical opposition. On one side the ‘philodramatists’,2 who see a strong link between pottery and theatrical representation––an approach from classical philologists’ attempt to reconstruct lost tragedies with the aid of images, and reaching its climax in the already outdated collection of Trendall and Webster, with the significant title Illustrations of Greek Drama.3 On the other side the iconocentrics who deny any relationship between these two types of representation, and preserve the universe of potters and painters as a world apart.4 In this debate, it is as well not to confuse Attic production with that of the workshops of Magna Graecia; to be sure there are initial continuities between Attic and Lucanian pottery, for example, and people have sometimes confused the Niobid and Pisticci Painters,5 but the traditions diverge very quickly, and the Apulian and Campanian repertoires do not exactly follow those of Athens. The recent expansion of material evidence––over half the vases examined in Taplin’s book were unknown in 19706 ––has transformed our perception of * The editors are grateful to Leofranc Holford-Strevens for translating this chapter. 1 (Los Angeles, 2007). I had the pleasure of discussing these questions with Oliver Taplin and reading his fine work in proof. 2 Taplin, Pots and Plays, 22 describes this debate very well, though he makes the divisions a trifle starker for clarity of exposition. 3 A. D. Trendall and T. B. L. Webster, Illustrations of Greek Drama (London, 1971). 4 I have tended to adopt this point of view, though without taking it to extremes; I hold that, so far as satyric drama and Attic pottery are concerned, not every image of a satyr in a mythological context need reflect a satyr play. Cf. Taplin, Pots and Plays, 33. 5 See e.g. Martine Denoyelle, ‘Attic or Non-Attic: The Case of the Pisticci Painter’, in W. Coulson, J. Oakley, and O. Palagia (eds.), Athenian Potters and Painters (Oxford, 1997), 395–405. 6 Taplin, Pots and Plays, p. vi.

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the problem and incited him to discuss it on new foundations. By insisting on the notion of ‘signals’, graphic indicators within an image, elements marking a relation between connected spheres without making one, the vase, a pure reflection of the other, the scene in the theatre, he allows the field of enquiry into the figural stock to be broadened so as to yield a better understanding of visual culture in Magna Graecia.7 It seems to me that further progress is possible in this direction, and that we may look into the relation of painted images not only with the theatre, but with other forms of representation, pictorial, plastic, or more broadly all visual experiences. From this point of view the pottery of Magna Graecia (not to be called South Italian8) exhibits numerous innovations by comparison with the Attic repertoire, which are worth dwelling on. Within the bounds of this article, there can be no question of studying these phenomena in depth as a whole, but I should like, with the aid of a few specific examples, disparate as they are, to illustrate this type of device. Let us begin with a bell krater now in New York, attributed to the Tarporley Painter (Figure 19.1).9 We see a young, beardless Dionysos, holding a thyrsos in his right hand and an actor’s mask in his left. Facing him, a young satyr holds a torch in his left hand, and dips an oenochoe into a bell krater in the centre of the composition. This vase stands on a base that monumentalizes it. What is more, on the belly of the krater, the painter has taken the trouble to depict in silhouette a scene in which we can make out two wrestlers or two dancers, at any rate a scene full of movement that contrasts with the calm of the encounter round the krater. Thus we have, in the axis of the image, emphasized by the base holding up the depicted vase, a series of significant objects:10 a mask, an oenochoe, a krater, all referring to different aspects of Dionysiac cult. Social activities on the one hand: the theatre, the symposion, both Dionysos’ domain; but also visual practices involving fiction: theatrical spectacle, vase painting. By the emphasis on two particular objects, a mask and a krater, vehicles for two types of representation––the mask for the stage, the vase for painting––two visual experiences are linked in a single complex that implicitly sets them in competition. Dionysos is not only the god who presides over the pleasures of wine and the theatre: he is associated with that of the imagination, of which this 7

See the lexicon of ‘signals’ proposed by Taplin, ibid. 37. Taplin rightly insists on this point, ibid. 15. 9 New York 63.21.5; Cambitoglou-Trendall, RVAp I, p. 46, no. 3/2, pl. 13; Trendall, RFVSIS, fig. 102. It is also fig. 1 in Taplin (p. 10). 10 On this notion of the significant object in an image, see F. Lissarrague, ‘De l’image au signe: objets en représentation dans l’imagerie grecque’, Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historique, 37 (2006), 11–24. 8

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Fig. 19.1. Apulian bell krater, New York 63.21.5; Tarporley Painter.

painted scene brings out several aspects all at once. On the ‘real’ krater is depicted a fictive one, and on each there is an image, in accordance with a classic mise en abîme already explored by Attic vase painters.11 The stand supporting the krater brings out the vessel’s twofold quality: as a functional object, it serves for mixing the wine, and allows the satyr to serve it; as an aesthetic object, it is the bearer of an image and a window on a world of fiction. One might try to construct narrative scenarios on the basis of the scene’s

Cf. Lissarrague, Un flot d’images (Paris, 1987), 92–8 and the methodical study by W. Oenbrink, ‘Ein Bild im Bild-Phänomen: Zur Darstellung figürlich dekorierter Vasen auf bemalten attischen Tongefäßen’, Hephaistos 14 (1996), 81–134. 11

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components and imagine a feast after a victory in a theatrical competition.12 But it will be preferable, since the particular circumstances escape us and are not closely or certainly defined by the image itself, to be content with a more general, non-narrative understanding and see in it the interplay of various modes of representation accumulated and intensified by the painter, who presents us, under Dionysos’ gaze, with a subtle blend of theatre, wine, and image. Making images of the theatrical is a recurring interest of the Tarporley Painter’s. As Taplin recalls in the opening pages of his book, he has treated relations at every level between painted image and theatrical representation. On one krater, in Sydney, he portrays a chorus of actors in satyr masks dancing and on another, in New York, he explicitly displays the comic stage.13 Lastly, on a krater formerly in Melbourne, he represents a mythological theme, the purification of Orestes by Apollo, that was taken up in the theatre, but in his version shows not the slightest sign of theatricality.14 For this painter, then, what matters is transforming into images various levels of visual experience, sometimes by way of direct reference to the theatre, sometimes in a more complex manner that transcends compartmentalized categories and relates them to each other. The opposite blend may be found on a Campanian oenochoe in the British Museum (Figure 19.2).15 On the belly stands a comic actor with white hair, leaning on a club. He faces right towards a base with on it a small gilded statue: a standing male figure, likewise leaning on a club, therefore Heracles. Above the actor can be read, from right to left, an incised inscription: Xantias, in Oscan lettering, as Trendall points out;16 it probably indicates the role rather than the actor’s name. Whatever the case, we see here an actor beside a statue, two forms of figuration in parallel.17 Whereas on the krater just mentioned the theatre was merely suggested by a sign, the mask, we have here a 12 Banquet scenes with masks have sometimes been interpreted as banquets of this type. On the proliferation of masks in the Apulian repertoire, see A. D. Trendall, ‘Masks on Apulian Red-Figured Vases’, in J. H. Betts, J. T. Hooker, and J. R. Green (eds.), Studies in Honour of T. B. L. Webster, ii (Bristol, 1988), 135–54. 13 Sydney 47.05; RVAp i. 48, 3/15; RFVSIS, fig. 104. New York 24.97.104; RVAP i. 46, 3/7; RFVSIS, fig. 105. These two vases rightly head the discussion in Taplin, Pots and Plays (figs. 4–5). 14 Melbourne, private collection, afterwards Sotheby’s sale, New York, 12 Dec. 2002; A. D. Trendall in J.-P. Descœudres (ed.), Eumousia. Ceramic and Iconographic Studies in Honour of Alexander Cambitoglou (Sydney, 1990), 211–15; D. Knoepfler, Les Imagiers de l’Orestie (Zurich, 1993), 74–5, fig. 56. Taplin is right to ignore this vase. 15 London F 233; LCS 238|94; A. D. Trendall, Phlyax Vases2 (London, 1967), 61, no. 111. 16 Ibid. 61. 17 On the representation of statues in pottery, see W. Oenbrink, Das Bild im Bilde: Zur Darstellung von Götterstatuen und Kultbildern auf griechischen Vasen (Frankfurt, 1997); M. De Cesare, Le statue in immagine: studi sulle raffigurazioni di statue nella pittura vascolare greca (Rome, 1997). For the oenochoe London F 233, see Oenbrink, G4, p. 390; De Cesare 242, no. 99 (= 490), and 85, fig. 37.

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complete figure of an actor. Two modes of representation confront each other in the image, two types of copy: the statue that lends presence to an absent hero and the actor who gives flesh to a fictitious character. All the same, in this arrangement, it is not only the image, but the scene to which it refers that plays on this confrontation of copies and these competing figurative modes. The two figures, actor and statue, mirror each other, and the fact that each holds a club reinforces this echo effect. Finally, the actor’s gesture of stretching out two fingers, as if to underline that he is taking part in a dialogue, is taken up by the inscription running from the statue to the old man. It is just as if the masked figure were directly engaging with the statue standing before him.18 It is hard to go further and specify more closely the nature of the relation between these two figures, which are both, as it were, copies or representations,

Fig. 19.2. Campanian oenochoe, London F 233. 18

The situation seems comic, as Heering notes (cit. Oenbrink 150).

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without falling in our turn into fiction. Others have taken the risk, but we shall hesitate to follow M. Bieber, who thinks that Xanthias is claiming to be as great a hero as Heracles,19 or P. Ghiron-Bistagne, who holds that Xanthias is the sculptor.20 But the explicit interplay between two modes of being present is clear, and we must not neglect the painter’s insertion of another sign, to the actor’s left: a cup, which to be sure may refer to Heracles’ capacity as a toper, as Bieber thinks, but may just well refer to the sympotic context in which the oenochoe bearing this image is used. We may in any case compare with this scene that on a volute krater in New York,21 where Heracles is surprised to discover a craftsman gilding his statue, watched by Zeus. There is no hint at the theatre, but an explicit play on the relation between the image and its model, the represented and the representer. Heracles’ astonishment at his effigy is an amusing way of exposing fiction; it may also be a way of playing on his double nature, mortal and divine. Another vase, from Campania, presents a particularity all of its own, as Trendall emphasizes, but especially relevant to this discussion. It is an aryballesque lekythos (Figure 19.3)22 portraying three female characters, Athena on the right, Nike on the left. They frame a figure in relief, appliquéd to the vase and covered with a white slip, now worn off. It is clothed and holds an object that according to Trendall might be a kind of lute. Thus female musician stands in contrast to the goddesses framing her by her materiality and the volume given her by the use of relief technique. She detaches herself from the surface of the vase in order to enter the third dimension; the white slip emphasizes the material distance separating her from the other two characters. Furthermore, she stands on a pedestal, painted and not in relief, that belongs to the realm of two-dimensional drawing while this musician figure, in three dimensions, steps out of the plane of the image in order to accentuate the statue-like effect of this representation. In thus playing on the mixture of techniques, graphic and plastic, red-figure and moulded relief, the painter makes explicit the artificiality of the central figure. In this unique scene we observe the mark of a more than merely formal study that implies empirical reflection on the nature of drawing the relation to relief. Even if this 19

M. Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton, 1961), 145. P. Ghiron-Bistagne, ‘La messa in scena della comedia attica illustrata nelle arti figurative’, in Atti del IV Congresso internazionale di studi sul dramma antico. Il problema del dramma antico oggi: teatro antico e arti figurative = Dioniso 45 (1971–4), 231–50, esp. 249, cited by De Cesare, 87. 21 New York 50.11.4; RVAp I, 10|47; Oenbrink G3, p. 389 and pl. 44; De Cesare, 177 (=391, 494), p. 254 and fig. 52a, p. 104. 22 London, BM, G 21; LCS 542, no. 806, pl. 213. 3, Branicki Painter, c.330 bc. This vase does not seem to be mentioned in the works cited in n. 17. 20

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Fig. 19.3. Aryballesque lekythos, London G21; Branicki Painter.

experiment led nowhere, it reveals inquiries within the studios of Magna Graecia, and (it seems to me) of a powerful awareness, not theoretical but practical, of the problems of the image. The beginnings of Lucanian pottery exhibit a remarkable example of such elaboration. It is a large calyx krater, attributed to the Dolon Painter, now preserved in Paris, in the Cabinet des Médailles (Figures 19.4 and 5).23 The vase is very well known, with many studies of one or other of its two sides––a Judgement of Paris and Odysseus sacrificing to the dead––but rarely the two together. In my opinion, besides a narrative content heavily influenced by the epic tradition, this krater gives us a catalogue of images, an inventory of all the ways of looking and representing available in Greek culture. On one side, the scene of the Judgement of Paris is organized around the central figure of the young Trojan prince. Armed with a spear, clad in a chlamys, shod in calf-length boots, on his head he wears a Phrygian bonnet on which can be made out a winged lion. Below him, an elegant greyhound reminds us that Paris is a shepherd. In front of him, Hermes, leaning on a tree, points the plain end of his caduceus at him. Behind Paris, as if he were not 23

Paris, BnF, Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, 422; LCS 102, no. 532, c.400 bc.

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Fig. 19.4. Lucanian calyx krater, Paris BnF 422; Dolon Painter. Side a: the Judgement of Paris.

Fig. 19.5. Lucanian calyx krater, Paris BnF 422; Dolon Painter. Side b: Odysseus questioning Teiresias.

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looking at her, sits Aphrodite, lifting her veil, accompanied by a young Eros who adjusts her bracelet as if to put the finishing touch to her finery. At her feet is a young doe. The other two goddesses are on the left of the composition, behind Hermes. In the upper register, Hera is seated; with a movement similar to Aphrodite’s, she lifts her veil and looks at herself in a mirror that shows her own reflection.24 Beneath her, Athena is at her toilette. She has taken off her helmet and shield, and leans towards a small kiosk on three columns. She reaches towards the water running from spouts in the shape of gorgon heads. This little fountain is also a sacred place, at which offerings have been laid;25 there are two statuettes, one lying on the ground, the other leaning, and two plaques, one probably inscribed, the other painted, hang from the wall. Two of these figures (the leaning statuette and the painted plaque) are female, echoing the trio of goddesses.26 In this judgement scene, we thus find a whole series of artefacts ranging over the variety of figurative modes: reflection in the mirror, gorgoneion on the shield and on the spring, painted plaque, statuette. In this scene the painter, with his taste for picturesque detail, multiplies the references to the image, thus reinforcing the narrative power of the episode, which is above all an aesthetic judgement, a visual experience of great importance, since Paris must nominate the most beautiful of the immortal goddesses. The three in their actions share out the three essential components of constructing beauty (kosmêsis): toilette, mirror, jewellery. They thus produce the loveliest possible image of their immortal bodies, and Paris must choose. We know that he chooses Aphrodite, precisely her on whom he turns his back on this krater. Beyond sight, desire too carries him away in this judgement, as we are reminded by the presence of Eros beside the goddess who will prevail. None of the material details that we have noted, such as reflection in the mirror and above all offerings, imposes itself on this episode, and only the Dolon Painter makes so open a show of them. But it is no chance fantasy; we can see there the sign of a broader reflection on what an image is. The other side of the krater is apparently unrelated to that just described. We see Odysseus seated, a bloody sword in his hand, framed by two standing comrades, once leaning on his spear, the other holding a dagger. Between 24 See F. Frontisi in F. Frontisi, J.-P. Vernant, Dans l’œil du miroir (Paris, 1997), 85 and fig. 2; L. Balensiefen, Die Bedeutung des Spiegelbildes als ikonographisches Motiv in der antiken Kunst (Tübingen, 1990). 25 This detail is frequently used as an illustration in handbooks of religious history; e.g. A. Rumpf, Die Religion der Griechen: Bilderatlas zur Religiongeschichte (Leipzig, 1928), fig. 5; Anneliese Kossatz-Deissmann, in Thesaurus cultus et rituum antiquorum, iv: Representation of Cult Places (Malibu, 2006), 126b. 26 One thinks of the evocation of a place like this e.g. in Plato, Phaedrus 230b.

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Odysseus’ feet lies a ram with its throat cut, its blood running out on the ground and overflowing the frame of the image. Another ram’s head, upside down, throat upwards, is visible behind Odysseus’ right foot. It is the Nekyia scene from the Odyssey: to learn about his way home, on Circe’s advice Odysseus questions the dead, in particular Teiresias, whose head is to be seen here emerging from the ground at Odysseus’ feet.27 This detail is not always easy to see on reproductions, but it is essential, and its want of obviousness makes sense. It is not easy for Odysseus to converse with Teiresias, just as it is not easy for us to see this blind man emerge from the world of the invisible. Only by looking carefully towards the vase’s left handle can one see Teiresias’ white head, with closed eyes, in the jumble of stones, Odysseus’ feet, and the dead rams’ heads. At this point, marginal in the composition but central in the narrative, high and low converge, the living and the dead meet, Odysseus’ wide-open eyes are turned towards the blind man’s face. Teiresias is simultaneously a blind man and a seer, one who does not see the present material world but does see and know what ordinary mortals cannot know through their eyes. The connection in Greek between knowing and seeing, oida/idein, is familiar; the occasion of the Nekyia, in this composition, gives clarity and explicitness to this dimension of the Greek experience. Other painters have portrayed this episode; a krater in Boston attributed by Beazley to the Lycaon Painter, already shows a remarkable confrontation between Odysseus, a living person, accompanied by the god Hermes, and the shade of Elpenor, emerging from the world of Hades.28 The image renders it possible to make present and visible in the same plastic space, without a break in continuity, the gods, the living, and the dead. Like the theatre, the image creates a universe of fiction and representation that transcends the categories of social life as lived by the spectators. One can now better understand what it is that allows us to bring together the two sides of the Cabinet des Médailles krater. It is not only the fact that they are related to a set of epic themes: before the Trojan War, the Judgement de Paris; after the Trojan War, the return of the heroes; or before the Iliad and during the Odyssey. That is a general linkage and not very enlightening. But there is a deeper link: on the one hand, Paris’ gaze on the lustre of the goddesses, on the other, Odysseus’ gaze upon the world of the dead. In both cases, we have the imaging of an exceptional visual experience––that of the goddesses’ beauty and that of the invisible world, of Hades––a visual experi27

Odyssey 10. 469–540, 11. 90–149. Boston 34.79; ARV 2 1045/2; see the fine analysis by Richard Neer, ‘Imitation, Inscription, Antilogic’, Métis, 13 (1998), 17–38. 28

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ence that interests painters and we are invited to share with the characters in their images. The examples rapidly analysed here do not form either a continuous history or a methodically elaborated system; they come from different studios and are attributed to different (though close) painters.29 Nevertheless they indicate, explicitly enough, that the field of references between theatrical representation and painted image may be extended outside this framework, that painters have played, sometimes with great skill, on various figurative modes, graphic, plastic, theatrical, seeking to combine these themes in ever new ways, for the greater pleasure of the eyes. 29 The Dolon Painter probably worked with the Tarporley Painter; cf. Trendall, LCS 97; RFVSIS 57.

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Part VI Performance: Reception

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20 Wagner’s Greeks: The Politics of Hellenism Simon Goldhill

This chapter will enter some painful territory: painful for classicists, painful for me as a Jew, and painful for anyone who cares about the development of the twentieth century and the place of Hellenism in it. It might seem therefore misplaced and even somewhat churlish to offer it in celebration of the work of Oliver Taplin of all people, who has done so much to bring ancient Greek theatre to a wider audience in a wholly positive manner, and who has worked so productively and generously at the interface between modern literature and the ancient world. But my subject, if not its painfulness, is deeply indebted to his work. For this study of Wagner’s Hellenism is, first of all, an exercise in performance history: I will be essaying a brief analysis of two contrasting Bayreuth productions of the Ring, two self-consciously epochmaking performances in the same theatre, the first directed by Richard Wagner in 1876, the second by his grandson, Wieland Wagner in 1951. (My title perhaps should have been ‘Wagners’ Hellenism’). ‘Performance’ has in recent years come to be a buzz word in contemporary classical studies, linking the orator’s strutting, the Emperor’s dining, the philosopher’s posing, to the language and institutions of theatre;1 and ‘performance studies’ has a long history (which would inevitably involve J. L Austin’s theories of performative language, Irving Goffman’s sociology of behaviour as scripts and performances, Turner’s analysis of ritual, as well as Schechner’s use of such theorizing in the theatre).2 But there can be no doubt that Oliver Taplin’s Stagecraft of Aeschylus and Greek Tragedy in Action inaugurated a powerful new model for understanding ancient tragedy for classicists and for scholars beyond the discipline of classics. This chapter aims to offer a performance analysis (complete with images),3 which puts a performance into a developed historical and cultural context in order to ask the question: what makes a performance significant as a cultural event? 1 2 3

See Goldhill and Osborne (1999) for the idea of ancient Greece as a ‘performance culture’. Austin (1975); Goffman (1969); (1975); Turner (1969); (1982); Schechner (1988). See Taplin (1993).

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Second, however, this essay is a reflection on how Hellenism––a passionate love of the Greek past––has become part of the politics as well as the aesthetics not just of opera but also of twentieth-century culture. Oliver Taplin has been involved throughout his career as a critic, collaborator, and enthusiastic champion of a string of poets and theatrical artists who have found in the classical world a major source of inspiration: Tony Harrison, Michael Langley, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, and many others. This chapter deals with the power of Hellenism in the transition between German Idealism and the Third Reich (and beyond). But again there is a general point which I am hoping to underline. Although it is always tempting in reception studies to focus on the single author’s response to the ancient word (Wagner’s reading of the Greeks as it were),4 I want to suggest here that a comprehension of the impact of Wagner’s Hellenism requires a more complex model, where reception involves multiple frames of response––the audience as well as the artist, the audience’s expectation of the artist and the artist’s of the audience, the critic as guide to the audience, and the critic as enemy of the audience, and, of course, the multiform nature of an audience in all such engagements, especially in the case of Wagner who was supported and loathed with equal intensity by the audiences of Victorian Europe, and recognized as ‘a unique figure distorted out of all recognition by the factions of hatred and partiality’5 during his own lifetime and beyond. Reception––as a cultural moment–– becomes thus a more diffuse and contestatory space than many literary critics have allowed. In looking at how theatrical performance comes to have an effect in culture, and in looking at how reception of the classical world through literature is integral to some of the most influential art of the modern era, I hope to make a contribution to the areas Oliver Taplin has inhabited in so distinctive and distinguished a way throughout his career. It is offered as a small homage for all I have learnt from him over the years. Now there can be no doubt that Wagner was deeply engaged to the point of obsession with Hellenism. The first sentence of his first theoretical work is a direct statement of a Hellenizing ideal: ‘In any serious investigation of the essence of our art today we cannot take a step forward without being brought face to face with its intimate connection with the art of ancient Greece.’6 From that opening credo, Wagner constantly explored this intimate connection both in his continual commentary on his own music and in his relentless self-promoting mythologizing of his own life. Wagner’s passionate and public 4

This linear engagement of text with text, as it were, has been most developed in Latin studies: see Martindale (1993); Conte (1986); (1994); Hinds (1998). 5 6 Fricke (1990), 94. Wagner (1892–9), i.32.

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engagement with an ideal of Greece makes him an extreme example of Greece’s tyranny over the German soul––and the German culture hero’s formation through Greekness. Wagner’s life is the most written of all composers, and it all started with his own self-portrayal as revolutionary hero and artist of the German Geist.7 ‘No boy could have had a greater enthusiasm for classical culture than myself’,8 he declares, although he actually never got to read Greek tragedy in Greek comfortably, despite trying several times to learn the language. None the less, through translations he idealized at full throttle: ‘the only way I seemed able to gain a breath of freedom was to plunge into this ancient world’.9 In one famous passage he describes the power of Aeschylus on his artistic inner life. It is worth quoting in full as it sums up so vividly Wagner’s self-dramatizing love of Greek: For the first time I now mastered Aeschylus with real feeling and understanding. Droysen’s eloquent commentary in particular helped to bring before my imagination the intoxicating effect of the production of an Athenian tragedy, so that I could see the Oresteia with my mind’s eye, as though it were already being performed, and its effect on me was indescribable. Nothing, however, could equal the sublime emotion with which the Agamemnon trilogy inspired me, and to the last word of the Eumenides I lived in an atmosphere so far removed from the present day that I have never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature. My ideas about the whole significance of the drama and the theatre were, without a doubt, marked by these impressions.10

It is through a German translation, Droysen, that Wagner has these overwhelming feelings. It is not the power of the Greek language itself, which so moved Hölderlin, Goethe, and other great German Romantics. His Greeks are already German, or rather the link between the German language and Greek, which many asserted in the pursuit of a genealogical link between antiquity and contemporary society, here enables Wagner to avoid any worries about authenticity in his response.11 It is a response full of archetypal Romantic expression. He reaches for the sublime, that peak of Romantic aesthetic experience. It is his imagination that is overwhelmed with ‘real feeling’ and ‘intoxicating effect’, emotions which are, however, so deep as to be ‘indescribable’ (of course). The sublime takes him to his true home: he is removed from the sordid and mundane world of the present day. As he writes elsewhere, ‘I felt myself more truly at home in ancient Athens than in any condition which 7

8 Wagner (1911). Foerster-Nietzsche (1921), 125. 10 Foerster-Nietzsche (1921), 126. Wagner (1911), 415. 11 Lincoln (1999) and Hall (1997) have good background on German and Greek links. See also Butler (1935). 9

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the modern world has to offer’.12 It is typical of the Romantic artist to express his alienation from contemporary society in a longing for the ancient past conjoined with a fervour for a revolutionary future––a Weltanschauung epitomized by his friend and admirer, Nietzsche.13 It is this revelatory encounter with Aeschylus which determines for Wagner his sense of the significance of theatre. It was a revelation Wagner liked to share, too. In her diary, his wife Cosima describes how in 1880, in the Villa Angri near Naples, Wagner read aloud to the assembled guests the whole of the Oresteia on three successive evenings–– playing all the parts himself. Cosima recorded ‘I have never before seen him like this, transfigured, inspired, completely at one with what he is reading’.14 Paul Joukovsky, a Russian poet and artist in the admiring audience, wrote some fifty years later, that the cry ‘Apollo, Apollo’ still echoed in his ears from those magical nights. (Joukovsky designed the first production of Parsifal in 1882, although he had no previous experience of set design.)15 Wagner’s flair for self-dramatization is taken up and spun into the myth of the Master by those around him. Aeschylus does indeed have a profound influence on the Ring, as has been noted by scholars since the turn of the nineteenth century.16 The Ring is, like the Oresteia and like the Prometheia (as Wagner knew it from contemporary reconstructions), built out of three serious works, and a lighter shorter piece, the Rheingold, which comes before rather than after the trilogy as the ancient satyr play would have. There is no other opera in the repertoire with such a trilogic structure. The Oresteia is concerned with a vast intergenerational narrative where conflict between the genders and between the generations is central to its narrative, as is the Ring. The Prometheia, even more than the Oresteia, is a divina commedia, a drama where divine forces on the largest possible scale are struggling over the structure of the universe. Here too Wagner’s work goes well beyond the norms of the operatic genre in the nineteenth century (and it was recognized as such from the first performance). In these grandest lines of mythological narrative, the parallels between the Aeschylean trilogy which Wagner advertises, are evidently integral to the structuring of the Ring. Scholars have gone further in drawing out more detailed parallels between Aeschylus’ writing and Wagner’s libretto (though it is sometimes hard to 12

Wagner (1911), 412. See Silk and Stern (1981); Ruehl (2003); Foerster-Nietzsche (1921). 14 15 Wagner, C. (1977), ii.551–2. Mack (1976), 16–17 with plates 60–7. 16 Standard work is Ewans (1982); for earlier accounts see Braschowanoff (1910); Wilson (1919); and Schadewaldt (1999), which is discussed below; also Lloyd-Jones (1986), 126–42; Magee (2000), 83–101. 13

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know how far to press apparent similarities, such as the superficial similarity of the chorus of the Prometheus Bound and the Rhinemaidens, watery nymphs, both).17 The ‘widespread cult of Prometheus in Romantic literature’18 as a figure of artistic creativity and a struggle for freedom against tyranny is certainly important to Wagner’s revolutionary aspirations, but the intertextuality between the Oresteia and the Ring seems more directly insistent. Take, for example, the end of Götterdämmerung, where Brünnhilde processes to her death and to the destruction of Valhalla accompanied by a torch. Although the destructive final image may recall the earthquake at the end of the Prometheus Bound, the torchlit procession most strikingly recalls the end of the Oresteia, though there it is a procession of women to the centre of the city, the Acropolis, Athene’s house, celebrating the potential of the city as a source of order and control, whereas Brünnhilde is a lone figure, marching into a self-immolation and the destruction of the house of the gods. Wagner draws out the meaning of this ending in telling terms when he describes it is ‘the surrender of the gods’ direct influence, faced with the freedom of human consciousness’.19 At one level, this may look towards the discourse of power and control in Aeschylus’ Prometheus––and certainly the triumphant freedom of human consciousness is a typical Romantic understanding of the importance of Prometheus. But more importantly, in stagecraft as in concept, it destroys the sense of hierarchical order that the end of the Oresteia proclaims. This theodicy is profoundly in opposition to any Greek sense of divine system, and reveals how much Wagner was committed to his modernism, even and especially in moments which seem to draw on the theatre of the Greeks. There can be little doubt, then, that Wagner’s self-dramatization as an artist is deeply involved with a German idealization of the Hellenic past; nor can there be any doubt that Wagner’s masterpiece, the Ring, owes much in its structuring and in its more detailed focus to an engagement not just with the Oresteia, but also with what he thought he knew of the Prometheia. I have travelled very quickly though this material, which is one base of what follows, partly because it is has been extensively discussed in the scholarly literature, and partly because I have already offered a brief treatment in my book Who Needs Greek?.20 But with this base, I wish here to take the argument in a different direction, and for this we will need to enter into the world of Wagner’s prose writing rather than his operas. There is a vast number of his prose works to wade through, on everything from revolution to the climate, 17

18 Most detailed is Ewans (1982). Baldick (1987), 41. Lloyd-Jones (1986) notes well (140–2) how alien this is to any sense of Greek tragedy’s idea of the gods. 20 Goldhill (2002), 160–6. 19

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and each treatise presents its case at numbing length and in a numbingly turgid style (and I take the word ‘numbing’ from John Deathridge, a scholar who has spent more time with them than most).21 I will start with three early works, Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1849), and Opera and Drama (1850), a period when Wagner was committed to a quasi-Hegelian spirit of revolution. Greek drama is the foundation of Western art as an ideal. The ideal is of a society where art is fully integrated into a fully political sense of citizenship, where art and life are not disassociated. He goes so far as to suggest that the Spartan state was ‘a purely human communal artwork’ (an expression which weirdly anticipates some of Baudrillard’s wilder claims).22 Tragedy holds a special place: ‘This flower was the highest work of Art, its scent the spirit of Greece; and still it intoxicates our senses and forces from us the avowal that it were better to be half a day a Greek in the presence of this tragic Art-work, than to all eternity an––unGreek God!’.23 As Achilles in the underworld would rather be the humblest workman and alive than king over all the dead, Wagner (in his typically overheated expressiveness) would rather be a Greek at a tragedy for half a day than an unGreek god for eternity. But––and this is where the Hegelian side comes to the fore––while Greek is an ideal and its spirit must be preserved, at the same time it must be annulled in order for progress to happen. There is a dialectical process of Aufhebung, whereby Greek will be absorbed, transcended, and finally reappear as the Zukunftskunstwerk, the Art Work of the Future. ‘We do not try to revert to Greekness’, he writes in Art and Revolution, ‘only revolution not slavish restoration can give us back the highest art work’.24 And in Opera and Drama, which gives the full teleological history of the development of opera towards Richard Wagner, he takes Antigone as his model of this process: ‘ Holy Antigone! On thee, I call! Unfold thy banner to the winds that we may march beneath it––to destroy but still redeem.’25 It is important to note the phrase, ‘to destroy but still redeem’ [vernichten und erlösen]: it sets an agenda that will be followed through in more disturbing terms elsewhere in Wagner’s project, as we shall shortly see (the translator’s ‘but still’ for Wagner’s ‘und’ reflects a desire to turn Wagner’s extreme expression into a more manageable paradox). For Wagner, as for Hegel, then, Antigone becomes a prime model, specifically as a figure who 21 Lloyd-Jones (1986), 126, Deathridge (1992), and Magee (2000), 96 go for ‘turgid’ (Magee blames Hegel for the rise in incomprehensible prose). In general, see Grey (1995) for a more positive engagement. 22 Wagner (1892–9), i.168: I have changed Ashton Ellis’s translation from ‘communistic’ to ‘communal’: the importance of community in Wagner’s prose here needs emphasizing. 23 24 Wagner (1892–9), i.35. Wagner (1892–9), i.53. 25 Wagner (1892–9), ii.190.

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stands against the repression of the State.26 It is only in such a revolutionary narrative that the full significance of Antigone can be appreciated: so ‘Never since the rise of the political State, has any step forward in history occurred without tending in some way to the State’s downfall [Untergang]. . .The State, considered in the abstract, has always been in the act of falling.’27 Here too we see how important it is for Wagner that his aesthetics always has a strong political importance. Art and revolutionary politics go together. ‘Public art’ was for the Greeks ‘the expression of the deepest and noblest principles of the people’s consciousness’; this has been lost in contemporary bourgeois society. ‘Greek tragedy’ was ‘the entry of the artwork of the People upon the public arena of political life’, and it ‘flourished for just so long as it was inspired by the spirit of the People’.28 Again we should note the phrasing: the Volksgeist, the spirit of Das Volk is integral to tragedy’s political and aesthetic power. How will the current state of things be changed? By a revolutionary commitment to the artwork of the future, the Kunstwerk der Zukunft (a phrase that anti-Wagnerians repeatedly used to mock the Master’s music). This new form of art will be, in a striking phrase, ‘conservative afresh’––that is, a new form which looks back to the great days of Greece. It will come hand in hand with a new society, where ‘each man will . . . become in truth an artist’.29 It will put back together the disassociation of modern society. It is against this political ideal that Wagner’s famous ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, resonates. The festival theatre of Bayreuth was designed to recreate the institutional frame of the Great Dionysia in Athens, that is, a shared place where the Ring could be produced over several days, for a collective audience of the people, where art and politics were linked in the total experience of the opera. It is a minor irony that Wagner’s socialist ideals of Volkskunst, Art imbued with the Spirit of the People for an audience of the People, should have ended up with the most exclusive and expensive seats in the operatic calendar. It was in 1850, the same year as Opera and Drama, that Wagner also published an essay called ‘Judaism in Music’. He published it under a pseudonym (‘Mr Freethinker’), and it caused a small rumpus. He republished it as a pamphlet in 1869, under his own name, when he had become extremely famous, with a self-serving introduction, justifying and intensifying his commitment to the ideas of the piece. It is an attack on what Wagner sees as the undue influence of Jews in the musical world. It begins from what he calls 26 ‘Brünhilde is the Antigone of the Ring of the Niebelung. She acts from a feeling which is not quelled by the consciousness of what she will have to suffer as a punishment from the representative of the state for disobedience’, Irvine (1897), 182. 27 28 Wagner (1892–9), ii.191–2. Wagner (1892–9), i.135–6. 29 Wagner (1892–9), i.58.

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‘The involuntary/instinctive revulsion we possess for the nature and the personality of the Jews’.30 This is physical, both the ‘outward appearance’ and ‘in particular the purely physical aspect of the Jewish mode of speech repel us’.31 But it is also moral and spiritual. The Jews, the wandering Jews, can never be connected with the Volk, the soil of the nation, and thus can never produce true art, which, as we already have seen, must be inspired by the Volksgeist. This leads to a general statement about Jews in relation to the human: ‘ For the Jew to become human together with us is tantamount to his ceasing to be a Jew’32 (‘Gemeinschaftlich mit uns Mensch werden, heißt für den Juden aber zu allernächts so viel als: aufhören, Jude zu sein’). Jews are, for Wagner, dehumanized: that is, they can only join in the human race in so far as they stop being Jews. Hence he continues with an apostrophe to the Jews: ‘ Join unreservedly in this self-destructive and bloody battle (‘an diesem selbstvernichtenden, blutigen Kampfe’), and we shall all be united and indivisible’.33 In 1869, he significantly changed the sentence to read ‘Join unreservedly in this work of redemption that you may be reborn through the process of selfannihilation’ (‘Nehmt rücksichtslos an diesem, durch Selbstvernichtung wiedergebärenden Erlösungswerke theil, so sind wir einig und ununterschieden’)––adding that expression which we saw with his discussion of Antigone, redemption through destruction (‘vernichten und erlösen/ Selbstvernichtung. . . . Erlösungswerke’). But with either reading it is clear that destruction is the note with which he wishes to end. For the last sentence of the work is: ‘But remember that one thing alone can redeem you from the curse that weighs upon you: the redemption of Ahasuerus––destruction!’.34 That last word, ‘der Untergang’, rings as a grim prophecy of Wagner’s power in Hitler’s Germany. In which light, it is fascinating to see what the Wagner Handbook, a seminal critical volume, makes of this passage. The distinguished Wagner scholar Dieter Borchmeyer writes that ‘To quote this sentence out of context and to read into it an idea of genocide. . .is completely misleading’. ‘It has nothing in common’ with such ideas. The issue here, argues Borchmeyer, is just a ‘quasimystic transubstantiation of the Jew, enacted in a realm remote from sociohistorical experience . . . [which is] the effect which will be produced by the . . . artwork of the future.’35 ‘Destruction’, that is, is for Borchmeyer a symbol or a metaphor (though it is not quite clear what it is a metaphor for . . .). This moved the editor of the English version of the Handbook to add a section to 30 32 34 35

31 Wagner (1892–9), iii.80 Wagner (1892–9), iii.82–3. 33 Wagner (1892–9), iii.100. Wagner (1892–9), iii.100. Wagner (1892–9), iii.100. Borchmeyer (1992), 174; see also in general Borchmeyer (1991).

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his essay on Wagner scholarship disassociating himself from such a stance: he points out that you cannot place Wagner’s aesthetics in a world view conditioned by anti-Semitism and exonerate those aesthetics from such a charge in the same breath.36 Wagner’s ideological purpose includes the so-called redemption of the Jews through their destruction as Jews. Wagner saw his politics as one with his artistic output, and it seems an all too obviously motivated move to attempt to separate his operas from his aesthetics. Early commentators did not make such a strategic move: indeed, they insisted on the unity of Wagner’s thought and music, in support of the Master. David Irvine, one of Wagner’s most committed supporters in England, wrote in 1897: ‘Those who go to the Ring of the Niebelung thinking they can detach its music from its sources of inspiration, to cheer or applaud it without committing themselves to an opinion . . . had better either keep quiet or join the ranks of ragged anti-Wagnerism’.37 Bernard Shaw revelled in Wagner’s linking of politics and art, as one might expect.38 There was an equal and opposite reaction from those who despised his politics. It is only since the Second World War that the move to separate Wagner from the implications of his political stances has become a standard and perhaps necessary gesture. So, where many contemporary critics are prepared to assert that ‘Wagner’s music has nothing to do with blond Aryans’,39 Hanisch bluntly reminds us that Wagner’s political effect was so powerful in part precisely because ‘The image of Siegfried, the young golden-blond hero, caused the breasts of German youth to swell with the elation of male glory’––as it was intended to.40 It is simply not true to Wagner’s own agenda to retreat to a musical pleasure separate from what we should recognize as the darker forces in his aesthetic programme. What is most surprising to me, however, is how little critics have linked Wagner’s evident anti-Semitism with his Hellenism. It is surprising because it became a central plank of his writing in what we might call the second phase of his response to the Greeks through the 1860s, with a long series of essays collected together under the title German Art and German Politics. As the title of this work suggests, Wagner becomes more stridently nationalistic through these years, and more blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-French. The bare lines of Wagner’s argument are clear enough and run as follows. The Greeks were the origin of what can truly be called Art. What modernity needs (and history has been leading towards) is a rebirth of this true spirit of art. But––and here comes the nationalistic twist which he learned in part from Fichte ––it is only 36

37 38 Deathridge (1992), 223. Irvine (1897), 32. Shaw (1906). Magee (2000). For such strong denials of anti-Semitism in the music or dramas, see also Borchmeyer (1991) and (1992). 40 Hanisch (1992), 189–90––he is quoting Thomas Mann. 39

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the German race which can achieve this rebirth, and only by returning to its primordial language, cleansed of all Jewish and French influences, that this true German art will arise from the German nation. This is the Sonderweg, the unique fate of the German people. The Artwork of the Future is thus integrally linked to German music. There are, as John Deathridge has neatly captured, three strident claims Wagner is making. First, the individual citizen will be ‘ennobled through a dramatic art based in part on the Greek ideal and borne on the wings of German music’. Second, ‘it will stipulate the creation of a purified and hence unified culture of the kind once supposedly possessed by the Greeks’. Third, it will ‘underwrite the integration of the German race, not with debilitating criticism or scientific reasoning, but with a mystical belief in the supremacy of the racially pure but yet-to-be-created German nation-state’.41 What distinguishes this second phase of Wagner’s aesthetics from the first stage of the 1850s is the addition of this utopian image of German nationalism, the belief that only a purified Germany can provide the conditions for true art and true political fulfilment. It is against this background that Wagner inscribed his dedication on the score of the Ring. The frontispiece of the first printed score records that Wagner’s masterpiece is ‘dedicated in trust to the German spirit’. The inherent link between German nationalism and Hellenism in Wagner’s thinking is pervasive. A single example from Was ist Deutsch will have to suffice here: ‘Through its inmost understanding of the Antique the German spirit has arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom, not employing the antique forms to display a certain given “stuff”, but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique concept of the world’.42 It is by understanding antiquity––and here, as always, Wagner primarily means Greek antiquity––that German art progresses. The German spirit is specified and what it strives for is the ‘purely human’ (‘reinmenschliche’): it will be remembered both how the Jews were barred from the human by virtue of their Jewishness, and also how important the values of purity (‘Reinheit’) are for this discourse. It is not imitation of the past Wagner seeks, however, but a fully classical world view, from which the revolutionary artwork will emerge. So Wagner in another of his apostrophes writes: ‘Hail Winckelmann and Lessing, ye who beyond the centuries of native German majesty, found the Germans’ real ancestors (‘Urverwandten’) in the divine Hellenes!’.43 The Greeks are genealogically linked with the Germans, as those archetypal German Hellenists, Winckelmann and Lessing 41 43

42 Deathridge (1999), 136. Wagner (1892–9), iv.155–6. Wagner (1892–9), iv.43. Cf. v.331.

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discovered. Jonathan Hall has nicely analysed the ideological force of German claims to be the ‘New Dorians’.44 Here is Wagner’s aesthetic and racial equivalent. Wagner’s ideology of German nationalism is based, then, on two mutually implicative claims: on the one hand, the foundation of a ‘homogenized, idealised, unified, purified, communalized, culturally deified’45 Greece; and on the other, the exclusion of the Jewish and the French, which are defined as The Other in this pursuit of national culture. The destiny of the German spirit depends on the destruction of the Jewishness and Frenchness which threaten its purity. Wagner’s Hellenism and his anti-Semitism are integrally connected. We are now in a position to look at what happens to this ideology in performance, and how the history of performance reflects on this ideology. I will focus first on the first performance of the Ring, which took place in Bayreuth in 1876.46 The performance attracted a huge international audience, larded with 18 critics from London, 18 from Paris, 14 from New York, 20 from Berlin, 15 from Vienna, as well as a sprinkling from Italy and Holland.47 Wagner was involved in the production from beginning to end, ‘his hand was everywhere’.48 He directed the action from a desk on stage, with his score propped up against a crate, on which an oil lamp stood (Figure 20.1). (The desk had to be screwed to the floor, because of Wagner’s excited gestures during rehearsals, to prevent the danger of fire.)49 Heinrich Porges gave a typically hagiographic picture of rehearsals in the house journal Bayreuther Blätter: ‘He stood before us as if he were the one total actor (‘Gesamtschauspieler’) of the whole drama . . . [He] literally embodied it [truth to nature] in every movement, facial expression, sound or word’.50 The genial Richard Fricke, the choreographer of the production, who spent every evening in the tavern, Angermann’s, drinking and carousing with his friends (as he itemizes in his diary), was more directly engaged and considerably more acerbic: ‘It really was very amusing and funny watching Wagner trying to emphasize and stress every single word by means of his animated movements and constant waving of his hands . . . It is difficult working with Wagner because he soon loses interest in what he is doing . . . He will insist on being his own producer (‘er will sein eigner Regisseur sein’) but he is, as it were, totally lacking in the qualities needed for such detailed work’.51 44

45 Hall (1997). Deathridge (1999), 137. The best short general account of the production is now found in Carnegy (2006), 69–106. 47 48 Spencer (1976), 230. Skelton (1976), 10. 49 As told by Gustav Adolph Kietz: Barth, Mack, and Voss (1975), 228–9. 50 Porges (1880), 142. 51 See Fricke (1906), 40, translated in Fricke (1990), (1991). Fricke (1991), 27 found Wagner’s attempts to direct kissing particularly funny: ‘the diminutive composer suddenly hanging from 46

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Fig. 20.1. A contemporary sketch of Wagner conducting a rehearsal of the Ring.

Alone with Fricke after the exhausting first production Wagner confessed ‘Next year we will do it all differently’; after the first night ‘he sat in his room, beside himself with fury, hurling abuse at the performers’.52 There were technical disasters––a stagehand raised the backdrop at the wrong moment revealing people standing around in shirtsleeves and the back wall of the theatre; the dragon had not completely arrived from Britain where it was being made, and the final scene was ‘beneath contempt’.53 None the less, Cosima Wagner––constructing and preserving the myth as always––later wrote dismissively to Chamberlain: ‘The Ring was produced here in 1876, and therefore there is nothing more to be discovered in the field of scenery or

the neck of the much taller Niemann, so that the latter could scarcely keep his balance, while Wagner’s toes were barely touching the ground’. For the development of Wagner as Regisseur in the 19th-century context, see now the excellent Carnegy (2006); see also Srocke (1988). 52 Fricke (1991), 42. 53 Fricke (1991). Fricke thought the Dragon scene ‘as arranged by Wagner . . . is bound to look ridiculous’ ( (1991), 41; but when he actually saw the Dragon he ‘whispered to Doepler: “Hide the thing away, where no one will ever find it! Get rid of it. This dragon will be the death of us.” ’ (1991), 42).

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production.’54 (The Parsifal scenery completed in 1882 was still in use in 1912: thanks to the Bayreuth team, the radical Wagner became his own monument to conservatism.)55 And although some critics disliked the ‘shoddy pantomime magic’,56 others revelled in the spectacle: ‘From beginning to end the stage effects were splendid . . . Nothing more terribly real was ever put down upon the stage . . . a series of representations unequalled for scenic truth and grandeur’.57 The sets (for which a landscape painter, Hoffmann, was hired, though they were built by the Brückner brothers) and costumes (by Doepler) embodied Wagner’s ideals of Germanness.58 Figure 20.2 is a wonderful photograph of Frantz Betz as Wotan. He is dressed as a Nordic icon. From his winged helmet, to his cuirass, from his torques on his belt, armlets, and studded leg bindings, he steps straight out of the casting manual for Norse kingly warriors, and he captures one stereotype of Wagnerian production values all too precisely. Equally telling are the sets. Figure 20.3 is a design for Götterdämmerung, the Hall of the Gibichungen on the Rhine from Act I. It shows a medieval German house, idealized, and made especially grand in scale. The wooden frame is designed to leave a hole in the roof for the smoke of the fire to escape. The carvings on the walls reflect medieval German craft traditions. The shields leaning against the wall remind us of the manly militarism which is embodied in the hero centre stage in his armour, and the dark youth leaning on his spear. The lauding of early German history, for which Tacitus’ Germania plays a special role, is crucial for this imaging, and it would be interesting to set this interest against the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s similar penchant. Although Norse myth may not have been especially popular nor even well-known in German culture before Wagner’s championing of them, his ability to latch on to and to mould public taste is particularly canny. The set design is a picture, and was not built exactly as depicted here. The 54 Quoted in Skelton (1976), 130. In fact, her diary reveals her to be particularly unhappy with Doepler’s costumes, especially in their first forms: ‘I am much grieved by [Doepler’s models], revealing as they do an archaeologist’s fantasy . . . it is all mere pretence’, and then, when he baulked at her suggestions, ‘The costumes are reminiscent throughout of Red Indian chiefs and still bear, along with their ethnographic absurdity, all the marks of provincial tastelessness’ (Wagner, C. (1978–80), i.915, 917). 55 See Ashman (1992); Mack (1976). It is particularly telling to compare Appia’s eventually influential response to Wagner: see now (with further bibliography) Carnegy (2006), 175–207. 56 Möhr (1876), 65. 57 Bennett (1877), 79. Bennett, whose reviews were first published in the Daily Telegraph in 1876, was one of the first critics to compare the Ring to the Oresteia. He did not like the spectacle of the Rheingold (97): ‘It is the vulgar bustle and glare of a pantomime “opening” ’. For a full range of audience response, see Großman-Vendrey (1977–83). 58 On the sets see Baumann (1980); Bauer (1982); Mack (1976). On the costumes see Zeh (1975).

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Fig. 20.2. Franz Betz as Wotan in the first production of the Ring, 1876.

closest we have to a photograph of the set is from a production by Angelo Neumann in Leipzig in 1878, which was based on Hoffmann’s designs for the first performance (Figure 20.4)––and which gives some sense of the practical negotiations with the ideal in making a piece of theatre. Here, however, (Figure 20.5) is Hoffmann’s representation of a woodland scene by the Rhine. As one would expect, the hero is clothed and armed, the females by whom he is faced––here the Rhinemaidens––are naked, at least on their upper bodies. They certainly were not naked in production, though there was a fine swimming machine for their river scenes (Figure 20.6).59 But it is the Romantic love of the woods––die Wälde––which is most strongly evoked by this set–– and the German obsession with the woods as part of the symbolic topography 59

See Baumann (1980), 188–91.

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Fig. 20.3. Hoffmann’s design for Act 1 of Götterdämmerung (1876).

of Germany is well known.60 Those that made drawings of the production (Figure 20.7) may not have represented the stage set with photographic accuracy, but certainly seem attuned to this High Romantic imagery. Even after the set builders’ negotiations with the real, the spectators can view with idealizing eyes. This setting, however, is all very unclassical: ancient Greeks don’t do the woods, and certainly not like this.61 But why should we expect to see Greek imagery here? Wagner may have celebrated Bayreuth as a Greek festival for his revolutionary art of the future, but, as we have seen, Germany’s Geist inherently, naturally recalls its genealogy in Greece. This pure German art is the endpoint of a Sonderweg that started in ancient Athens. If we are attuned to Wagner’s aesthetics we will be able to see the values of Hellenism in these resolutely non-Greek-looking stage sets and costumes. So in-house critics encouraged the viewer to see ‘the idealism of classical tragedy’ (fused with the 60

Schama (1996). None the less, in the second scene of Das Rheingold at least, one critic did see ‘a serene Greek landscape’––the Musikalisches Wochenblatt quoted by Srocke (1988), 77. 61

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Fig. 20.4. Neumann’s set for Act 1 of Götterdämmerung, Leipzig 1878.

Fig. 20.5. Hoffmann’s design for the Rhinemaidens.

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Fig. 20.6. The Rhinemaidens in the first performance at Bayreuth, 1876.

Fig. 20.7. A contemporary drawing of the Rhinemaidens from the first performance at Bayreuth, 1876.

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realism of Shakespeare).62 The Ring’s spectacular paean to Germanness relied on the cultural appeal to Hellenism––its history and destiny. In the decades after this performance, Wagner’s circle at Bayreuth was increasingly taken up with the development and promotion of Wagnerism. They published journals, most notoriously the Bayreuther Blätter, dedicated to spreading the most aggressive and nasty anti-Semitism, conjoined with anti-French feeling and Wilhelminian imperialism. Apart from Cosima, who always tended the shrine of the Master (even when he was alive), the two leading players here were Ludwig Schemann who was the translator and biographer of Gobineau, the founder of racial theory in France, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, from England. I have written elsewhere about Chamberlain whose great work, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts, was a founding work of racism.63 He put racial theory at the centre of German cultural life, and Bayreuth at the centre of racial theory. Chamberlain is one direct link between Wagner and Hitler. When Chamberlain died in the 1930s, Hitler came and publicly kissed his hands in obeisance. Hitler says he discovered Wagner in 1901, when he attended his first performance of Lohengrin aged 12. ‘I was captivated at once’, he writes, ‘My youthful enthusiasm for the Master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was drawn to his works . . .’.64 There are as many self-serving, exaggerated, and fictional stories circulating of Hitler’s engagement with Wagner as there are of Wagner’s own life.65 But Hitler did as a young artist sketch stage sets for imagined performances of Tristan and Lohengrin. As he rose in power, he became close friends with the Wagner family, with an especially close bond with Winifred, Siegfried’s wife (who ‘could not understand why, in the final years of the war, Hitler only wanted to hear Götterdämmerung’).66 As Chancellor, Hitler designed performances which were staged. He loved to go to Bayreuth, where he was particularly at home with the Wagner family and felt especially at ease and happy. It became known in Berlin that one way to get an appointment with Hitler, which might otherwise take months, was to let it be known you had photos of a new staging of a Wagnerian opera. Wagner was a defining hero for Hitler (along with Luther and Frederick II). ‘After coming to power’, he wrote, ‘my first thought was to erect a grandiose monument to the memory of Richard Wagner’.67 62

63 Porges (1880), 144. Goldhill (2002), esp. 94–8. See Field (1981). Hitler (1972), 17. 65 See Spotts (2002), 223–63, who singles out A. Kubizek (1954) as particularly egregious. 66 Wagner, N. (1998), 157. See also Magee (2000), 367 for a brief account of Winifred’s relationship with Hitler, which started long before his rise to power: she provided him in prison with the writing materials with which Mein Kampf was composed. For a full and fine account, see Hamann (2005). 67 To Arno Breker, as recorded by Breker (1970), 123 and cited by Spotts (2002), 255. 64

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Hitler attended each Bayreuth Festival from 1933 to 1940. It made a major impression on the public association of Hitler and Wagner. The town was filled with swastika banners, and the whole entourage of Hitler’s government followed the Führer, filling the town. Brecht called Hitler ‘Führer of the Bayreuth Republic’. Hitler even developed a plan, which was stopped only by the outbreak of war in 1939, to encase Wagner’s concert hall in a neo-classical shell. Figure 20.8 shows Hitler greeting and being adored by the Bayreuth audience in 1934. Bayreuth became deeply associated with Hitler, Wagner with the agenda of National Socialism. The programme for the 1938 Ring chillingly makes the connection between Wagner’s music and racism. A conductor, it declares, must be aware that Wagner’s music ‘brings to our consciousness with unexampled clarity in the Ring the terrible seriousness of the racial problem’. So the question was: what to do with––or at––Bayreuth after the war? Financially crippled, with damaged buildings, and a morally bankrupt legacy, it was not clear which route the Bayreuth team could go. The operation was led by Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, the two sons of Siegfried (as Winifred was moved aside as part of her denazification process). But Wieland himself had been given a Mercedes when he graduated from high school by Hitler himself, and been personally exempted from military service by him, as well as designing sets for performances during the Third Reich (as Thomas Mann sardonically pointed out).68 In terms of the German denazification programme, Bayreuth was a special case. And it took a fascinating route. It raised money by setting up an International Friends of Bayreuth Organization, and by 1951 was ready to open with its new set of shows. It decided to take the high ground of an opposition to politics in art. Figure 20.9 shows one of the quite extraordinary posters that festooned the opera house. ‘In the interest of a smooth progression of the festival production we ask that there is kindly an avoidance of discussion and debate of a political type at the festival theatre site. The aim here is Art.’ The catchphrase, ‘Hier gilt’s der Kunst’, was taken from another poster that Siegfried Wagner had used back in the 1920s to assert Bayreuth’s separation from political influence. But the poster is still absolutely bizarre for 1951 (or any other year). It looks like an administrator’s version of Basil Fawlty’s famous cry ‘Don’t mention the war’. Nike Wagner––the next generation––in her rather charmingly bitter memoirs 68 ‘Strange to say, it was not considered that there could be a more honourable occupation than designing Wagner sets for Hitler’s Bayreuth’, quoted in Wagner, N. (1998), 107. There is an absolutely damning account of Wieland’s engagement with Hitler and the Nazis, along with a stirring treatment of Winifred, in the excellent Hamann (2005).

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Fig. 20.8. Hitler celebrated at Bayreuth, 1934.

Fig. 20.9. A poster from the first performance of the Ring at Bayreuth after the Second World War.

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reveals her carefully nuanced sense of the audience’s response to the poster: ‘In the strongly depoliticised context of post-war Germany, art that was non-political––even anti-political––was in the ascendancy . . . Wagner would never again seem so free from ideology’.69 This poster captures the truly amazing attempt of Bayreuth to depoliticize itself. This was a wholly conscious decision. ‘No more German gods’, was Wieland’s motto, or, as he told the conductor Cluytens in 1956 how to play, ‘anything but German, you know’.70 The New Bayreuth, as it became known, ‘endeavoured to let this subject [Wagner’s racism and the war] . . . be forgotten’.71 The productions themselves tried to follow this through in a remarkable way. They cut out all the clutter of medieval German or Norse mythology: no woods, no huts. By 1953, as the action became ‘ever more Attic’,72 the set was dominated by a large bare disk on the floor, which was explicitly said to be a version of the Greek orchêstra. The costumes reverted from the winged helmets and leather studs to simple Greek dress. Figure 20.10 is Wotan, played by Hans Hotter, with Brünnhilde (Martha Mödl). Their costumes are explicitly designed as Greek. Where the costumes in the thirties were specifically modelled on the sculptures of Strasburg Cathedral, these are fashioned from generic Greek sculptures (‘wie griechischer Statuen’).73 Figure 20.11 is the Awakening Scene from Siegfried, which was one of the production’s most famously sublime moments. You can see the circular stage mirrored by the circle of the backdrop. The clutter-free stage is deliberately ‘timeless’. The simple lines and the basic costumes again deliberately evoked a Greek ideal. Figure 20.12 shows how the circle of the Greek orchêstra also had walkways for the heroes to enter––as in the Greek theatre. In 1956, Curt von Westernhagen wrote a piece for the Bayreuth programme linking the Meistersinger to Greek tragedy, and it proved highly significant that in 1962 Wieland Wagner invited Wolfgang Schadewaldt, with whom he had had long discussions in the development of the Ring, to deliver at Bayreuth a set of lectures on Wagner and the Greeks. Schadewaldt, a very distinguished classicist, himself had been associated closely with Nazi academic politics.74 (‘The festival accepted the return of former Nazis as a 69

70 Wagner, N. (1998), 236. Wagner, N. (1998), 112. 72 Wieland Wagner, quoted in Wagner, N. (1998), 13. Carnegy (2006), 290. 73 Zeh (1975), 87––words of a critic of the production. 74 It was Oliver Taplin who first told me the story of how Schadewaldt had cut off Fraenkel in 1934 before the war because Fraenkel was Jewish, and tried––and spectacularly failed––to regain his friendship after the war. Schadewaldt sent a gift of a book to Fraenkel with the inscription that he was memor of their former association. Fraenkel returned it with the two words et ego. See also the apologetic account of Flashar (2005a), (2005b). 71

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Fig. 20.10. Wotan (Hans Hotter) and Brünnhilde (Martha Mödl) from Wieland Wagner’s Ring.

matter of course’75). In his lectures he wholly ignores the connection between Wagner’s Hellenism and his German Nationalism and anti-Semitism. It is a series designed to surround the Wagner project with a new, safe Hellenic idealism, a Hellenism untarnished by the foulness of Wagner’s politics. And almost all critics since have followed this separation of Wagner’s Greeks from Wagner’s Jews. Almost no scholar who discusses Wagner’s anti-Semitism discusses his Hellenism in that connection, and almost no scholar who works on 75

Wagner, N. (1998), 233. Her story of the New Festival is neatly told (233–59), though strongly coloured by her ambivalent feelings about her parents. Spotts (1994), 200–47 preserves more distance.

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Fig. 20.11. The awakening scene from Siegfried, in Wieland Wagner’s Ring.

Fig. 20.12. The walkways from Wieland Wagner’s set for the Ring.

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his Hellenism mentions his anti-Semitism.76 Schadewaldt’s rhetoric seems to have worked. The audience reacted to the New Bayreuth with a mixture of shock, horror, and on occasion delight. One angry spectator upbraided the conductor and claimed he thought he had been at a rehearsal and wondered whether the sets and costumes would arrive later. Most saw the turn away from the past as strongly pointed and divided along predictable but passionate lines around such a marked gesture. What is crucial for my purposes in this chapter, however, is the staggering irony that it is to Greece that Bayreuth turned in order to depoliticize its plays, when we have seen the absolutely essential place of Greece in the construction of Wagner’s own political and theatrical ideals. Where Greece was integral to Wagner’s nationalism, now it is Greece that enables a move away from the baggage of nationalism. As Wieland put it, they endeavoured to forget. This is what makes Wagner’s Greeks such a fascinating case for performance history and reception studies. For Wagner, Greece was essential to his nationalism, but when he came to stage his works, Greece remained immanent in a wholly Germanic staging. Physically invisible, but everywhere a grounding. Part of the politics of theatre, but not part of the staging of theatre. For those that had eyes to see, Hellenism was fully part of the Wagnerian nationalist project. When Bayreuth wanted to escape from the burden of the past, however, it did so by making explicit a new Hellenism: now, central to the staging, but with any political import resolutely silenced. Wagner’s Greeks take a different shape over time, locked into different narratives and different structures of forgetting, different politics and different senses of their own history. The forgetting seems as important as the sense of history. In this history of performance and reception, where we see the Greeks, and what we make of what we see, is a complex question indeed. The complexity stems from three vectors: first, from the diffused, shifting, and historically dynamic sense of Hellenism, as it is promoted, forgotten, and repromoted as an ideal for productions of the Ring; second, from the self-consciousness induced in us by the political positions of the story’s major players: Richard and Wieland Wagner (and their teams) manipulate Hellenism in different ways (explicitly and implicitly), demanding different strategies of distance and complicity from us as critics; third, from the contrasting and conflicting 76

One notable exception is Weiner (1995); compare Rose (1992) or the otherwise balanced Katz (1986), who do not mention Hellenism. Typical in (shocking) silence is Lee (2003). Weiner (1995), 16 gives a list of major Wagnerians of the twentieth century who ignore Wagner’s antiSemitism––where he notes the exceptional case of Zelinsky, and offers a history of the issue. Magee (2000) and Borchmeyer (1991) are paradigmatic when they keep their chapters on Greek tragedy and on anti-Semitism far distant from each other. Adorno (1981) is seminal here.

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responses of critics and audiences to both productions––which makes reception a scene of contest. For a modern Hellenist, it is not a comfortable position to dwell between Richard Wagner’s linking of the Greek ideal to racism and nationalism, and Wieland Wagner’s injunction to leave politics out by turning to Greek idealism. An uncomfortable place, but one where a sharp light is thrown on why theatre history needs to consider in the broadest terms the social and intellectual significance of its performances.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1981), In Search of Wagner, trans. E. Livingstone, London. Ashman, M. (1992), ‘Producing Wagner’, in Millington and Spencer (1992), 166–85. Austin, J. L. (1975), How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., Oxford. Baldick, C. (1987), In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and NineteenthCentury Writing, Oxford. Barth, H., Mack, D., and Voss, E. (1975) (eds.), Wagner: A Documentary Study, London. Bauer, O. (1976) (ed.), 1876 Bayreuth 1976: 100 Jahre Richard-Wagner-Festspiele, Munich. –––– (1982), Richard Wagner: Die Bühnenwerke von der Uraufführung bis heute, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Vienna. Baumann, C-F. (1980), Bühnentechnik im Festspielhaus Bayreuth, Munich. Bennett, J. (1877), Letters from Bayreuth Descriptive and Critical of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, London. Borchmeyer, D. (1991), Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. S. Spencer, Oxford. –––– (1992), ‘The Question of Anti-Semitism’, in Müller, Wapnewski, and Deathridge (1992), 166–185. Braschowanoff, G. (1910), Richard Wagner und die Antike, Leipzig. Breker, A. (1970), Paris, Hitler et moi, Paris. Butler, E. (1935), The Tyranny of Greece over the German Imagination, Cambridge. Carnegy, P. (2006), Wagner and the Art of the Theatre, New Haven and London. Chamberlain, H. S. (1900), Richard Wagner, trans. G. Ainslie Hight, London. Conte, G. (1986), The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, ed. C. Segal, Ithaca, NY. –––– (1994), Genres and Readers, trans. G. Most, Baltimore. Deathridge, J. (1992), ‘A Brief History of Wagner Research’, in Müller, Wapnewski, and Deathridge (1992), 202–23. –––– (1999), ‘Wagner, the Greeks and Wolfgang Schadewaldt’, Dialogos 6: 133–40. Ewans, M. (1982), Wagner and Aeschylus: The Ring and the Oresteia, London. Field, G. G. (1981), Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, New York.

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Flashar, H. (2005a), Schadewaldt, Wolfgang, in Neue Deutsche Biographie. Bd. 22: 495–6, Berlin. –––– (2005b), ‘Biographische Momente in schwerer Zeit’, in Szlezák (2005), 151–69. Foerster-Nietzsche, E. (1921) (ed.), The Nietzsche–Wagner Correspondence, New York. Fricke, R. (1906), Bayreuth von dreissig Jahre, Dresden. –––– (1990), ‘Bayreuth in 1876’, trans. S. Spencer, Wagner 11.3: 93–109; 134–150. –––– (1991), ‘Bayreuth in 1876’, trans. S. Spencer, Wagner 12.1: 25–44. Gildenhard, I. and Ruehl, M. (2003) (eds.), Out of Arcadia, BICS Supplement 79, London. Goffman, E. (1969), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth. –––– (1975), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience, London. Goldhill, S. (2002), Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, Cambridge. –––– and Osborne, R. (1999) (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, Cambridge. Grey, T. (1995), Wagner’s Musical Prose, Cambridge. Großmann-Vendrey, S. (1977–83), Bayreuth und die deutschen Presse, 4 vols., Regensburg. Hall, J. (1997), Ethnic Identity in Greek Identity, Cambridge. Hamann, B. (2005), Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth, trans. A. Bance, London. Hanisch, E. (1992), ‘The Political Influence and Appropriation of Wagner’, in Müller, Wapnewski, and Deathridge (1992), 186–201. Hinds, S. (1998), Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Cambridge. Hitler, A. (1972), Mein Kampf, trans. R. Mannheim, London. Irvine, D. (1897), Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs and the Condition of Ideal Manhood, London. Katz, J. (1986), The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism, London. Kubizek, A. (1954), Young Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship, trans. E. Anderson, London. Lee, M. O. (2003), Athene Sings: Wagner and the Greeks, Toronto and Buffalo. Lincoln, B. (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship, Chicago. Lindemann, D. (1983), Intellectual Roots of Nazism: A Study of Interpretations, Ann Arbor. Lloyd-Jones, H. (1986), Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London. Mack, D. (1976), Der Bayreuther Inszenierungsstil, Munich. Martindale, C. (1993), Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, 1993. Magee, B. (1968), Aspects of Wagner, New York. –––– (2000), The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy, New York. Millington, B. and Spencer, S. (1992) (eds.), Wagner in Performance, New Haven and London.

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Möhr, W. (1876), Richard Wagner und das Kunstwerk der Zukunft im Lichte der Bayreuther Aufführung betrachtet, Cologne. Müller, U. (1992), ‘Wagner and Antiquity’, in Müller, Wapnewski, and Deathridge (1992), 227–35. –––– Wapnewski, P., and Deathridge, J. (1992) (eds.), Wagner Handbook, Cambridge, Mass. Pateman, R. (2002), Chaos and Dancing Star: Wagner’s Politics, Wagner’s Legacy, Lanham. Porges, H. (1880), ‘Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876’, Bayreuther Blätter, May 1880: 141–4. Rose, P. L. (1992), Wagner: Race and Revolution, London. Ruehl, M. (2003), ‘Politeia 1871: Nietzsche contra Wagner on the Greek State’, in Gildenhard and Ruehl (2003), 61–86. Schadewaldt, W. (1970), Hellas and Hesperien, Zurich. –––– (1999), ‘Richard Wagner and the Greeks’, Dialogos 6: 108–40. Schama, S. (1996), Landscape and Memory, London. Schechner, R. (1988), Performance Theory, revised and expanded ed., London and New York. Shaw, B. (1906), The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring, London. Silk, M. and Stern, P. (1981), Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge. Skelton, G. (1976), Wagner at Bayreuth: Experiment and Tradition, 2nd ed., London. Spencer, S. (1976) (ed.), Wagner 1976: A Celebration of the Bayreuth Festival, London. Spotts, F. (1994), Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, New Haven. –––– (2002), Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, London. Srocke, M. (1988), Wagner als Regisseur, Munich and Salzburg. Szlezák, T. A. (2005) (ed.), Wolfgang Schadewaldt und die Gräzistik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Spudasmata, Bd. 100, Hildesheim. Taplin, O. (1977), The Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1978), Greek Tragedy in Action, London. –––– (1993), Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vase Painting, Oxford. Turner, V. (1969), The Ritual Process, Chicago. –––– (1982), From Ritual to Theater, New York. Wagner, C. (1977), Die Tagebücher, ed. M. G. Dellin and D. Mack, Munich. –––– (1978–80), Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 2 vols., ed. G. Dellin and D. Mack, trans. G. Skelton, London. Wagner, N. (1998), The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty, trans. E. Osers and M. Downes, London. Wagner, R. (1892–9), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols., trans. W. Ashton Ellis, London. –––– (1911), My Life, London. –––– (1913), Opera and Drama, trans E. Evans, London.

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Weiner, M. (1995), Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, Lincoln and London. Wilson, P. (1919), Wagner’s Dramas and Greek Tragedy, New York. Zeh, G. (1975), Das Bayreuther Bühnenkostüm, Munich Zelinsky, H. (1976), Richard Wagner––ein deutsches Thema, Frankfurt.

21 Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi Germany––the Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936 Erika Fischer-Lichte

On 3 August 1936, Lothar Müthel’s production of Aischylos’ Oresteia premiered as a festive performance at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Its audience consisted exclusively of invited guests. Among them the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (4 August 1936) listed Prime minister Generaloberst Göring and his wife, the ministers of the Reich Dr Frick, Dr Goebbels, Generalfeldmarschall von Blomberg, Freiherr von Neurath, Darré, Schacht, and Schwerin Krosigk, mostly accompanied by their wives. In addition, the members of the International Olympic Committee were present. Moreover, many German as well as foreign dignitaries from politics, cultural life, economics, and sports were among the guests. The president of the Reichsbank, Dr. Schacht, was accompanied by the governor of the Bank of France, Labeyrie. Other guests of the festive performance included the ministers of the Reich Rust, Elz von Rübenach and Seldte, Reichsführer SS Himmler, the Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, the Reichstatthalter Ritter von Epp and Meyer, the Bavarian Prime minister Seibert, the secretaries of state Lammers, Meißner, Fink, Pfundner, and Krohn. The corps diplomatique was represented by the ambassadors of France, England, Poland, Turkey, Japan, Chile, Brazil, and the Soviet Union, by the envoys of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Argentina, Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, Haiti, Peru, Latvia, Hungary, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia as well as by the chargés d’affaires of all the other countries participating in the Olympic Games.1

This list was also published in other newspapers (such as the Berliner Morgenpost, Völkischer Beobachter, Der Angriff) and indicates the enormous importance accorded to the performance by the National Socialist

1 Cited in J. Eicher, B. Panse, H. Rischbieter (2000) (eds.), Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’: Theaterpolitik, Spielplanstruktur, NS-Dramatik (Salze-Velber, 2000), 37.

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government. I intend to argue that the production of the Oresteia was meant to support the implicit claim of the Berlin Olympic Games, to have Nazi Germany regarded by an international audience as the legitimate heir of, and actual successor to, Ancient Greece. Müthel’s production of the Oresteia can be properly judged and evaluated only within this context. For it was the context of the Olympic Games that bestowed on the performance a particular political topicality without requiring any corresponding changes in the text or staging devices. I will therefore begin by establishing the context within which the performance worked before describing and discussing the production in more detail. The National Socialists were initially strongly opposed to the idea of holding the Olympic Games in Berlin (agreed upon years earlier) because they did not believe in any kind of internationalism. Yet they soon understood that the Games would grant them a unique opportunity to sketch a particularly favourable picture of Nazi Germany to be sold to the international audience. They decided to fully exploit the particular relationship between ancient Olympia and Germany as established by Ernst Curtius. By the end of the eighteenth century texts dealing with the agônes olympikoi were already much discussed among advocates of a bourgeois physical education in Germany. Even earlier, Winckelmann had planned an archaeological expedition to Olympia. His untimely death in 1768 terminated the project. British and French archaeologists started the first excavations in Olympia around 1800. In 1820, Lord Stanhope mapped its topography and Albert Blouet excavated parts of the Temple of Zeus in 1828/29 and transferred fragments of the Heracles metopes to the Louvre. In 1875, Ernst Curtius systematically began to unearth Olympia. A year earlier he had come to an agreement with the Greek government. While the German side would bear all costs and leave all finds to Greece (a novel provision at a time when most archaeologists felt entitled to take artefacts home), the Greek side granted the Germans the exclusive excavation rights in Olympia. Curtius succeeded in bringing Olympia to the attention of a broader public. Between 1875 and 1881, the German government contributed to the popularization of Olympia by publishing annual reports on the various finds by Curtius and his team. Consequently, Curtius’ own reports were eagerly awaited when they finally appeared between 1890 and 1897. Curtius’ findings were taken into account as regards the design of the Reichssportfeld, the site of the Olympic Games. It was decided to replicate the topography of ancient Olympia in many respects, thus reviving ancient Olympia in Berlin. However, the Hall of Langemarck was placed on the site where the Temple of Zeus would have stood. In this hall, the ‘Youth of Langemarck’ was worshipped. During World War I a group of very young

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Germans walked straight into enemy artillery fire at Langemarck singing the German national anthem despite the enemy’s overwhelming superiority. From this derived the myth of the ‘Youth of Langemarck’, celebrating the selfsacrifice of the young people for their fatherland. Soil from Langemarck was buried––indeed enshrined––under the floor of the hall. The hall was meant as a place for the cult of the dead preparing another German youth for its sacrifice in the war to come. Thus, the replica of the topography of ancient Olympia set the tone for the Olympic Games in Berlin and introduced the theme of sacrifice. The special relationship between ancient Olympia and Germany was also emphasized by a new element added to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games which had so far been designed by Pierre de Coubertin. The Olympic flame, which had first been ignited on a tower erected for this special purpose during the opening ceremony of the Games in Amsterdam in 1928, was now lit in the sacred precinct of ancient Olympia by a group of virgins, choreographed by Leni Riefenstahl. It was brought into the stadium in Berlin by runners in a relay race. In places where the torch was handed over, festivals were celebrated. The last runner ignited the Olympic flame in a so-called sacrificial bowl, a tripod bowl, reminiscent of the cauldron in which the sacrificial meal was prepared at the altar of Zeus in ancient Olympia. On the one hand, the torch relay was intended to symbolize a bond between ancient Olympia and Berlin as a modern Olympia. On the other, it was meant to point to the particular relationship between Germany and Olympia established by Curtius and his excavations. And finally––if not foremost––the torch relay sought to proclaim Nazi Germany as the genuine heir of and successor to ancient Greece. This idea is also suggested by the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s film on the Olympic Games of 1936, Fest der Völker; Fest der Schönheit (‘Festival of the Nations; Festival of Beauty’). It is, however, somewhat doubtful whether the athletes and spectators, particularly those from abroad, did in fact accord these meanings to the torch relay. In any case, the moment when the last runner brought the torch into the stadium and ignited the Olympic flame in the ‘sacrificial bowl’ placed at the so-called Marathon Gate seems to have been experienced as a powerful one, not just symbolizing but actually establishing a bodily, living bond between ancient and modern Olympia. The lighting of the flame caused an upsurge of emotion––similar to that experienced during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games to come in later years, such as in Athens in 2004 or in Sydney in 2000. A new element had been introduced at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932––a pageant of scenes from the history of the United States which served the process of nation building for the American athletes and spectators. In general, the pageant marked a shift from the conventionally solemn

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atmosphere of the opening ceremony to the more festive, joyful mood of the Games to follow. In Berlin, the opening ceremony ended instead with a Festspiel or festive play by Carl Orff entitled Olympic Youth. First, it highlighted the carefree and happy life of children by focusing on romantic aspects such as boys assembled around a campfire, playing the guitar and singing. It then presented two opposing groups of warriors, the leaders of which met in an agôn. This was followed by a so-called weapon dance by Harald Kreutzberg and the former Kurt Joos disciple Werner Stammer, which ended with the death of both agôn leaders. The agôn was preceded by the following words of the speaker: ‘The holy meaning | of all play | is the highest achievement | for the Fatherland. | The highest commandment of the Fatherland | in need: | sacrificial death.’ Lastly, a lament for the dead was performed, choreographed by Mary Wigman. In accordance with Coubertin’s wishes, the lament was followed by the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, including Schiller’s Ode an die Freude (‘Ode to Joy’): ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen. . .’ (‘Be embraced, ye millions . . .’). Thousands of torches and a sea of fire were ignited on the upper rails of the stadium to the sounds of the symphony and before the background of the night sky. Flak spotlights formed a cathedral of light. The experience undoubtedly made many participants shudder and thus aroused particular emotions in the masses present. Instead of moving away from the solemn atmosphere of the opening ceremony as the pageant in Los Angeles had done, the Festspiel emphasized and strengthened it. It linked the subject of the agôn, which anticipated the agônes olympikoi of the next day, with the theme of sacrifice and thus pointed back to the Olympic flame ignited in the ‘sacrificial bowl’ as well as to the Hall of Langemarck where the youth who sacrificed themselves for the ‘fatherland’ was worshipped. Moreover, Berlin was clearly marked as modern Olympia. The site of the Olympic Games in Berlin was not only linked to ancient Olympia by a living bond but even claimed to resurrect it. In this context, it could be expected that the first night of the Oresteia would be scheduled for the next evening. Instead, on 2 August, Wolfgang Eberhard Möller’s Thingspiel Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel (‘The Frankenburg Game of Dice’) was performed on the Dietrich-Eckart Stage adjacent to the Reichssportfeld. The Dietrich-Eckart Stage was built as a Thing site, an open-air theatre to a large extent modelled on ancient Greek theatres but emphasizing the vertical axis. Ludwig Moshammer, architect of several Thing sites, described the architecture and the possible effects of such sites in the journal Die Bauwelt (1935) as follows: On the one hand, the site for the Thing plays has a ranked auditorium criss-crossed with broad aisles running from side to side and from top to bottom. On the other

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hand, it has a performance area layered like a terrace, with different areas––front, middle, upstage and side––linked to each other by steps. These performance terraces reflect the pattern of the aisles in the auditorium and together they create an architectonic whole, in which there is no separation. The performers and the chorus can pour out into the performance areas from among the spectators; alternatively, the play can be carried by the performers into the audience so that the spiritual tension of the spectator rises towards a feeling of total communion with the play and full participation.2

Undoubtedly, the architecture of the Thing sites was also inspired by the spatial arrangements developed by Max Reinhardt in the Circus Schumann where he had staged King Oedipus (1911) and the Oresteia (1912).3 Thing plays are choric plays, performed by masses for masses.4 The Volk community which they presented to the masses and, it was hoped, created from the actors and spectators proved to be a largely self-organized and selforganizing community without a leader. Therefore, the government that had initially hailed the movement withdrew its support by the end of 1935. However, it did not let the Thingspiel movement die but allowed it to survive as a weakly flickering flame that was supposed to blaze up one last time before slowly dying away. Such a blaze was planned for the Olympic Games. Here, a Thing play was to be performed which would suggest that Nazi theatre in Germany followed Greek models which they could even rival, and that the Thingspiel movement could be regarded as a modern version of ancient Greek tragic theatre. The Thing play––officially no longer referred to as such for reasons I shall explain later––commissioned by Goebbels for the Olympic Games differed from those performed in the past in that it did not deal with recent German history from World War I to the seizure of power by the Nazis. Instead, it was a play set during the peasants’ wars. The play re-enacted the historic event as a tribunal held against the Emperor and his advisors, Maximilian of Bavaria and Count Herbersdorf, who are accused and judged guilty of having abused ‘the trust of the people, the honesty of the peasants, and the courage of their leaders’.5 Apparently, the critics from the foreign press understood well the claim of having created a new theatre, even if they judged it differently. The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant highly praised the spatial and acoustic effects made 2 Regarding these productions see E. Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York, 2005), 46–68. 3 Cf. ibid., 122–58. 4 W. E. Möller, ‘Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel’, in G. Rühle (ed.), Zeit und Theater, Diktatur und Exil, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1974), iii.335–78, p. 341. 5 Cited in H. Eichberg, M. Dultz, G. Gadberry, and G. Rühle (eds.), Massenspiele, NSThingspiel, Arbeiterweihespiel und Olympisches Zeremoniell (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 1977), 52.

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possible by the particular architecture of the site and this form of choric theatre; however, ultimately, the critic judged the play a failure: ‘The art contained within the play is not new, and that which is new, is not art’.6 Le temps considered the course of the action too static but was also impressed by the spatial and acoustic effects. It concluded: ‘Despite its weaknesses, the play is a success for it shows the readiness of the audience to accept new forms of art’.7 The English critic and scholar of German literature Geoffrey Evans was enthusiastic about the performance: ‘It is impossible to give an idea in words of the effectiveness of the staging: those who have seen our Tattoos know the peculiar emotional effect that is evoked by sheer magnitude, mass movement, flooding colour and reverberating sound . . . For in it for the first time all these means were welded together into a dramatic and artistic whole. That is why I see in this piece the seeds of something new.’8 It is difficult to evaluate whether the spectators and critics from abroad also recognized that the new phenomenon they had discovered in the Thing play was meant to relate back to ancient Greek theatre. Even if this was not the case, the foreign guests might have become aware of the dramaturgy underlying the succession of the three performances of choric theatre on three successive nights––the Festspiel Olympic Youth at the end of the opening ceremony within the stadium, the Thing play The Frankenburg Game of Dice at the Dietrich-Eckart Stage, adjacent to the Reichssportfeld, and the ancient Greek trilogy Oresteia at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt. The first performance, openly referring to the agônes olympikoi, introduced the subject of sacrifice for the fatherland, thus vaguely connecting sports and violence, sports and death for the fatherland. Here, an ideology dear to the Nazis, represented in the Hall of Langemarck, sailed in under the flag of Olympism. The second performance presented unjust German rulers from the past facing tribunal in the form of choric theatre and in a performance space invoking ancient Greek theatre. The political statement made by the unambiguous condemnation of the unjust rulers went hand in hand with the ‘invention’ of a new theatrical form derived from the ancient Greeks. The third performance, now of a Greek tragedy––the ‘Ur’-form of choric theatre and originally performed in an open-air amphitheatrical space––brought the spectators back to a traditional theatre building and unmistakably referred back to ancient Greek theatre in the choice of the play. The bond between the three performances seems apparent. 6

7 Ibid. Ibid. G. Evans, ‘Towards a New Drama in Germany: A Survey of the Years 1933–1937’, in German Life and Letters (Oxford, 1937/8), ii.188–200, p. 203. 8

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Moreover, the link between the three was explicitly stated in the programme notes of the Oresteia. Here, the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens was depicted side by side with the Dietrich-Eckart Stage; photographs of Greek sculptures of the archaic and early classical period featured alongside those of the monumental sculptures on the Reichssportfeld. On the other hand a continuity was suggested between the German Empire, the times of Curtius and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and the ‘Third Reich’. In the programme notes, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s speech on the occasion of ‘His Majesty the Emperor’s and the King’s birthday celebration’ in 1898 and entitled ‘Volk, Staat, Sprache’ (‘People, State, Language’) was reprinted under the title ‘German Confession by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’: We, as German men and citizens of the German Empire, considering the whole and not a single party or social class, will look not without satisfaction and with the confidence of a healthy national strength at what has been achieved so far and at what is still to come . . . New life demands new forms. New strata and classes of society, in the healthy feeling of their own strength and significance, demand a proper place . . . For we see life’s spiritual reflection, art, struggle in an honest and ardent endeavour to make appear the Today, the only living thing, as opposed to what is eternally of Yesterday, to make appear the Eternal that has never come into being as opposed to the banality of everyday life.9

This relationship was further strengthened by using WilamowitzMoellendorff’s translation of the Oresteia for the performance. The same translation had spurred a performance history of the Oresteia in Germany. In the nineteenth century, it was mainly Sophocles’ tragedies that were performed on German stages, among them most prominently King Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, which were often regarded as a trilogy. As early as 1868, the Meininger had performed a shortened version of the Oresteia entitled Orest (translation by Wilhelm Rossmann). Somehow, this performance went almost unnoticed by the broader public and did not inspire other productions. This is small wonder considering that in the German-speaking countries of the nineteenth century the image of ancient Greek culture as first sketched by J. J. Winckelmann prevailed. In his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755) Winckelmann maintains that masterpieces of Greek sculpture are not only to be regarded as an imitation of most beautiful nature, but as more than nature, a kind of ideal beauty of nature. He regards as their general characteristics ‘noble simplicity and a quiet greatness’ (‘eine edle 9 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Reden und Vorträge (Berlin, 1901; 4th ed. 1925), 19–20.

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Einfalt und eine stille Größe’). The Oresteia could by no means be reconciled with this image. In his Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche painted quite another picture by incorporating the Dionysian, even to a certain extent prioritizing it over the Apollonian. For Nietzsche ancient Greek theatre originates in the Dionysian principle, which is manifested in and enacted by a chorus of satyrs, the dithyrambic chorus. It is this principle which annuls individualization, transports individuals into a state of ecstasy, and transforms them into members of a dancing, singing community––a community in which any boundaries separating individuals are dissolved. This idea was nothing less than a slap in the face to an age in which there was a cult of the individual. The shock it caused was not even softened by the idea of the Apollonian principle, the principle of individualization that has to be included when the tragic theatre comes into being. It is from the collision of both principles that tragic theatre arises. This collision not only aims to annul individualization but is emphasized by another scandalous statement: Greek tragedy in its oldest form dealt with the sufferings of Dionysus . . . all the characters of the Greek tragedy––Prometheus, Oedipus and so on––are merely masks of that original hero . . . this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, the god who himself experiences the sufferings of individualization . . . This suggests that dismemberment, the true Dionysian suffering, amounts to a transformation into air, water, earth and fire, and that we should see therefore the condition of individualization as the source and origin of all suffering and hence as something reprehensible.10

Nietzsche thus connected the origin of Greek theatre with an archaic sacrificial ritual: the ritual of dismemberment. The educated middle classes were not willing to follow Nietzsche’s vision that was so favourable with regard to the Oresteia. Wilamowitz’s translation was written out of protest against Nietzsche’s vision. It introduced numerous Christian terms like ‘sin’, ‘hell’, or the exclamations ‘God in Heaven’ and in this way ‘christianized’ the ‘Dionysian’ tragedy. It seems that this made it palatable for the audiences of his time. The translation of the Oresteia was published in 1900. The same year it was performed at the Theater des Westens, Berlin (Hans Oberländer) and the Burgtheater Vienna (Paul Schlenther). In the following years it was performed in Bremen, Straßburg (1901), Bromberg, at the Hof- und Nationaltheater Munich (1902), in Bonn (1904), Coburg (1906), Düsseldorf (1907), and again at the Burgtheater (1909). In most cases, Wilamowitz’ translation was used in Oberländer’s adaptation, accompanied by music composed by Max Schillings. Not until Max Reinhardt’s production of the Oresteia first in 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, tr. from the first German edition of 1872 by Shawn Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (London, 1993), 51 f.

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the Festhalle Munich as part of the Munich Volksfestspiele (1911) and later in the Circus Schumann in Berlin (1912) did this series come to an end. Reinhardt succeeded in getting Nietzsche’s vision accepted on stage––as he had already done with his Oedipus production the previous year.11 It seems rather strange that Lothar Müthel used Wilamowitz’s translation. For, as one can gather from the reviews, his staging of the first two parts of the Oresteia conveyed the image of an archaic, savage, bloody Greece much more in line with Nietzsche’s vision. He made only slight changes to the translation by removing many of the Christian terms and other expressions which sounded outdated or too slanted.12 It seems, then, that the most important reason for using Wilamowitz’s translation grew from the need to construe a certain kind of continuity between the pre-war German Empire and the ‘Third Reich’. However, the changes and cuts made by Müthel do not suggest any ideological or political statement.13 In this sense, the critics seemed to be right when praising the production as ‘true to the text’.14 11 It is therefore worthy of note that critics who still adhered to the Winckelmann-Goethean image of ancient Greek culture dismissed these performances as un-Greek. Reinhardt’s London production of King Oedipus was accompanied by similar criticism. Gilbert Murray, who had translated the play, referred to the scene which had received particular criticism in order to challenge such views: ‘Professor Reinhardt was frankly pre-Hellenic (as is the Oedipus story itself). Partly Cretan and Mycenaean, partly Oriental, partly––to my great admiration––merely savage. The half-naked torch bearers with loin cloths and long black hair made my heart leap with joy. There was real early Greece about them, not the Greece of the schoolroom or the conventional art studio’ (cited in J. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge, 1982), 85). Obviously, Reinhardt’s Greece was quite in line with the ideas of the Cambridge ritualists. 12 The version of the text which Müthel used can be found in the archives of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Universität Berlin. All the changes were made in Müthel’s handwriting. 13 This is not to say that Müthel (1896–1965) did not share National Socialist ideology. He, in fact, very much did. In May 1933, Müthel had joined the National Socialist Party. A year prior, in an article in Der Montag (6.6.1932), he had already declared himself a convinced National Socialist, but at the same time stated that his National Socialism was not much different from what he called Stalin’s National Socialism (he accordingly emphasized his good cooperation with the communist actor Hans Otto, who was later murdered by the Gestapo). But while there can be no doubt about Müthel’s own National Socialist leanings, it seems that as far his production of the Oresteia is concerned it was not so much his own political convictions but the whole context that gave it its particular meaning. Müthel’s post-war career is instructive: in 1947 he was ‘denazified’ (entnazifiziert) and appointed chief director at the Nationaltheater Weimar, where he worked until 1950. From 1951 to 1956 he served as chief director at the Schauspielhaus in Frankfurt am Main. 14 Otherwise the reviews have to be treated with due scepticism, for there were certain guidelines that theatre, art, music, and literary critics had to follow carefully. Kunst- and Theaterkritik, i.e. art and theatre criticism, was to be replaced by so-called Kunst- and Theaterbetrachtung––art and theatre contemplation or viewing of art and theatre. For Müthel’s production as well as productions of Greek tragedy on German stages at the time of National Socialism see also H. Flashar, Inszenierung der Antike. Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne der Neuzeit (München, 1991), 164–80.

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Fig. 21.1. Agamemnon: Cassandra (Maria Koppenhöfer), Clytaimnestra (Hermine Körner), Agamemnon (Friedrich Kayssler).

The stage was set by Traugott Müller. He did not try to copy the conditions of a Greek amphitheatre. Instead, he relied on the possibilities of the very spacious box set stage. For the first part, Agamemnon, he erected a monumental palace which could be reached by some steps. In the second part, The Libation Bearers, the stage was dominated by the huge tomb of Agamemnon. The third part, The Eumenides, was performed in front of a two-storey columned structure divided in two by a gigantic statue of the goddess Athene. Its pedestal rose so high that the actors barely reached its upper border and the spectators in the upper galleries could see no more of the goddess than her feet and the hemline of her robe. The stage design was generally appreciated, even praised, by the critics although some argued that Agamemnon’s palace in the first parts was ‘too Periclean’ (Karl-Heinz Ruppel, Kölnische Zeitung (Nr. 396/397), 7 August 1936). The music, which was considered ‘austerely primitive’ by one critic (Otto Ernst Hesse, Berliner Zeitung (Nr. 187), 5 August 1936), was composed by Mark Lothar. It seems that most critics deemed it appropriate to the staging. To judge by the reviews Müthel placed a particular emphasis on the shift

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Fig. 21.2. The Libation Bearers: Orestes (Hannsgeorg Laubenthal) swears on Agamemnon’s tomb.

brought about by Athene. While in earlier productions of the Oresteia the final play was radically shortened or completely left out––as was most prominently the case in Reinhardt’s production in 1912––Müthel made almost no cuts to the play. It seems that at the centre of his interest lay the sudden shift from the principle of revenge and counter-revenge that is linked to the curse affecting the house of Atreus to the principle of the polis, which investigates the motives of the deed, evaluates the arguments, and follows the result of a voting process. The emphasis on this shift seems to be most strongly suggested by the particular intensity of the actors’ performances, in particular those of Hermine Körner as Clytemnestra, Friedrich Kayssler as Agamemnon, Maria Koppenhöfer as Cassandra, and Hans Georg Laubenthal as Orestes. The above-cited critic Ruppel writes (ibid.): The first two parts [. . .] emphasize the archaic through a force that captivates, frightens, and deeply stirs the spectators. Müthel does not shy away from Dionysian ecstasy. When Cassandra runs across the steps of the Atridae’s palace in the ecstasy of prophecy, sniffing blood like an animal; when Clytemnestra, stained with blood, holding up the murderous axe in her hand, transgresses the threshold; when Orestes drags her up the steps while she screams horribly out of fear of death, and then

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himself is whipped into madness by the rising goddesses of revenge––then the elemental effects of a passionate theatre are achieved in which at the same time the shudders of a religious emotion tremble. Müthel stages the end of the heroic era. The terror of the end of the world accompanies it.

All the critics agree on the enormous impact that the first two parts had on the spectators, differing only in the particular details they chose to describe. Several critics use the term ‘Dionysian’ in order to capture their particular quality. Accordingly, the passage from the second to the third part is characterized as ‘the passage from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from mythos to history, from the lineage to the state’.15 The critics disagree in their evaluation of the third part. Ruppel (loc. cit.) continues his review with a sharp critique that seems to be directed more at the tragedy than at the stage director: The scene of Orestes’ atonement before the Areopagus, which is summoned by Athene, lacks this elemental effect. Instead of mythical proceedings we witness a historic custom (the voting with voting stones). Instead of a ritual conjuring up of a spirit, as was the case with the sacrifice at Agamemnon’s tomb, we see a representative ceremony. Instead of passions, arguments fight. Even here one admires the organization of language, the structure of the choruses of the Eumenides, the bouncing tension in speech and response of the argument between Apollo and Athene on the one hand and the revenge demons on the other. Müthel’s sensibility for diction, his faculty for a lively rhythmical organization of language . . . is quite astonishing. It is not his fault when the end of the ‘Oresteia’ leaves behind the first two parts in terms of immediate effect.

Not all critics agree with Ruppel in their assessment of the third part. The critic of the Düsseldorf newspaper Der Mittag, for instance, writes: ‘The style of the first two parts is justified only by the final part, which, quite rightly, is entitled “The Reconciliation”. The Erinyes are not driven to a naturalism which might stimulate fear. However, before the great, festive solution in the Parthenon one senses Attica to be great and filled with festivity’ (5 August 1936). This critic seems to feel that the transition from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from the ‘darkness’ of the first two parts to the light of the third, from the atrocities there to the argument here, from the curse on the house of Atreus to the ‘festival’ of democratic voting in the polis was performed successfully in the production. If we follow the critics in their judgement that the emphasis lay on the transition, it proves difficult to discover any links between the production and National Socialist ideology. However, given the context of the production

15

Münchener Neueste Nachrichten (Nr. 214), 6 August 1936.

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it becomes apparent how it could be monopolized by the Nazis. This is demonstrated and spelled out by several reviewers. In the newspaper Deutsches Wollen (23 August 1936) we read: ‘Ancient drama today is not alien to us. While at the turn of the century it was a colourless educational experience, today it is a vivid, living experience. We know and honour the power of blood so that an Orestes and an Oedipus from the distant past have become close to us’ (Kuno Feldner). The critic of the Münchner Zeitung (11 August 1936) spells out the parallels between Aischylos’ and his own time: ‘The Oresteia is born out of the clash of two Weltanschauungen. In it, there lives the enormous tension that always shakes the earth when the old is doomed to fall and something new is born––as we experience it today.’ And the critic of the newspaper Germania (Berlin, 6 August 1936) stresses how true Müthel’s production is to the text because it succeeds in depicting these ‘changing times’ from ‘the law of revenge’ to the new doctrine that the ruler and the leader of the community even stand above the bonds of blood and that the duty of loyalty between husband and wife matters as much as the bond of blood between mother and son. Almost nowhere in antiquity does the yearning for redemption through a new ethics come to the fore so strongly and with such depth of emotion . . . In the monumental course of the Oresteia we see the roots of many a problem that occupied the thoughts and feelings of so many great minds in later centuries. The battle between light and darkness, between law and violence, the tragic clash of duties, the rootedness of the great work of art in the spirit of a people and in its religion . . . Here, in the immediate bonding to the divine and völkisches working of fate lies the mystery and the uninterrupted effect of the tragedy.

The review abounds in National Socialist terminology aimed at demonstrating the topicality of Aischylos’ Oresteia and its staging by Müthel in the time of National Socialism. By staging the transition from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from an ‘archaic’ to a ‘classic’ Greece, Müthel’s production enabled it to be understood and interpreted as a representation of the Zeitenwende (changing times) brought about by the Nazis. Müthel’s production of the Oresteia could therefore be understood as a portrayal of Germany’s ‘rise’ from the bloody battlefields of World War I, the ‘betrayal’ through the Versailles treaty and the ‘darkness’ of the Weimar republic to the ‘light’ brought about by the National Socialists’ seizure of power. This exactly corresponded to the (hi)story as told by many Thing plays. Most prominent among them was Richard Euringer’s Deutsche Passion 1933 (‘German Passion 1933’), which served as a model for most Thing plays written between 1933 and 1935. These plays referred quite unambiguously to the pattern of Christ’s torture and death, his descent to hell, and his

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resurrection. Accordingly, the seizure of power by the Nazis was interpreted in these plays as the resurrection of the German nation.16 Hence it is remarkable that in many reviews a relationship is established between Müthel’s production and the Thingspiele. This holds true in particular when discussing his work with the chorus. Müthel was quite experienced in staging choric theatre. He staged not only Schiller’s Braut von Messina (‘Bride of Messina’), in which Schiller reintroduced the chorus into modern tragedy in order ‘to declare war on naturalism’, as he explained in the foreword to its publication. Müthel also staged a Thing play. In June 1935, the Thing site Heiligenberge near Heidelberg was inaugurated in celebration of the summer solstice. Kurt Heynicke’s Thing play Der Weg ins Reich (‘Path to the Reich’) was performed there on the occasion of the Heidelberg Reichsfestspiele in July the same year. Lothar Müthel directed the performance. His work was praised not only by theatre critics of different newspapers but also by Wolf Braumüller, a Thingspiel expert from the Rosenberg faction that fundamentally opposed the Thingspiel movement as too Christian, too Catholic. He judged that ‘for the first time since the National Socialist revolution, a truly pioneering attempt and venture towards the future shape of the Thing play has taken place at the Thing site at Heiligenberg. The performance marks an attempt at a declaration of belief in a certain Weltanschauung. It has been carried out successfully and has made a lasting impression.’17 Beside the Zeitenwende (changing times) Müthel focused on in his production of the Oresteia; his work with the chorus stressed a certain relationship with the Thing play. Many critics explicitly related Müthel’s chorus work to that in The Frankenburg Game of Dice. The critic of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (6 August 1936) opens his paragraph on the chorus in the Oresteia by referring to the Thing play performance the night before: Never before after returning home from the living experience at the Dietrich-Eckart Stage did we grasp so fully how the dynamics of this tragedy explode the frame of a box set stage. But it was just admirable how Müthel nonetheless forced an event of such dimensions into the narrow given space without minimizing its full force and impact. The most difficult task was the inclusion of the chorus in this frame. For the chorus is not only the Dionysian mirror of what is happening. However, it is also not simply to be understood as the eternal voice of the people as is the case in The Frankenburg Game of Dice. Müthel left it its double role of action and reflection on the stage and in the interruptions of the action performed in front of the curtain. The

16 Cf. E. Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York, 2005), esp. pp. 122–57. 17 W. Braumüller, ‘Kurt Heynicke: “Der Weg ins Reich”, in Deutsche Bühnenkorrespondenz 58 (1935), 1–3, p. 2.

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stylized creation and dissolving of groups created an image of the strongest possible force which deeply inscribed itself into memory.

With the exception of one or two critics, all others are full of praise for Müthel’s work with the chorus which they do not understand simply as one possible way of dealing with a choric theatre but as an experiment leading to a new choric theatre. This aspect becomes clear in many reviews. The critic of the Münchner Zeitung (11 August 1936), Friedrich Märker, begins his review with a reflection on the significance of choric theatre in the present: The problem of the chorus today, in the highest sense, affects our time. For in the new drama, which is meant to express the thoughts and living experiences of the Third Reich, the chorus will play the decisive role. This became obvious just the other day when The Frankenburg Game of Dice was performed. The choice of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus to present to the Olympic guests Aischylos’ Oresteia as a festive performance surely results not just from the rather superficial reason that the Oresteia as well as the idea of the Olympic Games originates in Greece.

It is striking, then, that some critics discuss the Oresteia production in terms of its possible contribution to the creation of a ‘new’ German national theatre. They argue that ‘for us, Greek theatre and its tragedians today are no longer a mere educational resource or even philological object. In our striving for a national theatre and drama we understand them in some sense according to the motto: exempla docent’ (Berliner Börsenzeitung, 5 August 1936). In this context, the production of the Oresteia is once again related to the Thingspiel movement.18 In the newspaper Die Tat we read that ‘in our struggle for a German national theatre that affect our time, Greek tragedy plays an important role. One has only to be reminded of the Dietrich-Eckart Stage, which in its architecture is closely modelled on Greek theatre.’ It seems that Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia and the performance of The Frankenburg Game of Dice can be regarded as two sides of the same coin. They both contribute to the proclaimed birth of a new German national theatre out of the spirit of ancient Greece. Also at stake here is a new image and idea of ancient Greek culture, suitable 18 However, the Thingspiel label was no longer used by then. It was expressly avoided by maintaining that the newly erected open-air theatre had in recent years ‘mistakenly’ been labelled Thing sites. After the Olympic Games, the status of Reichswichtigkeit (‘importance to the Reich’), providing substantial state subsidies, was withdrawn from the Thingspiel movement. As early as October 1935, it was decreed that the word Thing should no longer be used. ‘Thing site’ was to be replaced with the term open-air theatre. The Thingspiel movement fell out of line with the official idea of theatre because it enabled self-organized communities. Instead, Greek tragedy with its heroes was hailed and discussed as the model for a new heroic drama.

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Fig. 21.3. Athene (Hilde Weissner) in front of her statue.

for being employed in the service of National Socialist propaganda. This is suggested by the repeated proclamation of a close affinity, even kinship, between the Hellenic and the German spirits. In many reviews, Athene is labelled the ‘Nordic goddess’; moreover, the success of the performance was traced back to this kinship. The critic of the Westfälische Landeszeitung Dortmund (6 August 1936) writes: ‘Lothar Müthel’s directing succeeded astonishingly in bringing the old Hellenic cultic play so close to us that one forgot its separation by many centuries. In his manner of directing he realized a perfect empathy with the Hellenic spirit and therefore came closer to the essence that connects us eternally to the ancient Greek despite our separation in time, because of our spiritual and racial kinship.’ And another critic describes the aim of Müthel’s production by saying that ‘not only is the ancient Greek world supposed to emerge in German form, but the deep

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kinship of our Nordic spirit with that of the ancient Greeks is also to reveal itself. No other Greek tragic poet is more Nordic in his deepest being than Aischylos.’19 Since Goethe’s times there existed a tradition among German intellectuals of proclaiming a close affinity between the Greek and the German spirits.20 The educated middle classes modelled their cultural identity on the image of ancient Greek culture with which they identified. In fact, the image changed from Winckelmann’s times to the Weimar Republic. As stated earlier, there was quite a radical change from the image Winckelmann had evoked to that sketched by Nietzsche (which was still followed by Reinhardt in his productions of King Oedipus and the Oresteia in the Circus Schumann). Most productions in the 1920s would use Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations of Greek tragedies. These were understood as emphasizing the archaic-mythical dimension, the sacred as the encounter of man and god, excluding more or less any political dimension (despite Hölderlin’s stress on the Vaterländische, the ‘fatherlandish’). Quite another picture, then, of ancient Greece was being painted. Yet, despite these changes, the image of ancient Greek culture always remained a desirable model. The critics who adhered to National Socialistic ideology reinterpreted it on a racial basis. The question is not whether Müthel directed the Oresteia in such a way that the spectators reached similar conclusions. Neither the version of the text used by the director, the descriptions in the reviews of staging devices and of the acting, nor any remarks on the spectators’ behaviour would justify such a view. Regarding the latter, we are only told that the spectators were ‘enthusiastic’;21 that ‘the necessary relationship between stage and auditorium established itself immediately’;22 that, ‘when the curtain came down the spectators, deeply affected, maintained silence for a while before breaking the spell which had enveloped their hearts at this great event’;23 and that the spectators gave the actors and the director standing ovations. Whether they had similar ideas to those articulated by the quoted reviews cannot be determined. It seems futile to examine whether the director adapted the Oresteia with respect to National Socialist ideology or whether, on a more subtle level, the staging devices and the acting implied such conclusions. The very context in which it was performed insinuated strategies of this sort. The context of the Olympic Games was defined by the design of the Reichssportfeld as a replica of 19

National-Zeitung Essen, 6 August 1936 and Schleswiger Nachrichten Schleswig, 10 August 1936. 20 Cf. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Boston, 1958). 21 Westfälische Landeszeitung Dortmund, 6 August 1936. 22 Berliner Tageblatt, 5 August 1936. 23 Westfälische Zeitung Bielefeld, 7 August 1936.

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the topography of ancient Olympia, the igniting of the Olympic flame in the sacred precinct of Olympia, the opening ceremony with the Festspiel Olympic Youth, and the festive performance of The Frankenburg Game of Dice. Each of these elements set the stage for a particular reception of the Oresteia. Its performance and the elements listed above were intended as special ‘revivals’ of ancient Greek culture in Berlin that, in sum, aimed at presenting Nazi Germany as the genuine heir of and actual successor to ancient Greece. Those addressed consisted both of the international audience and the German public, particularly the educated middle classes, who were thus able to reconcile their traditional identification with ancient Greek culture with National Socialist ideology. There can be no doubt that Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia––‘truthful to the text’ as it may be––played an important part in this mission.

22 Can the Odyssey Ever be Tragic? Historical Perspectives on the Theatrical Realization of Greek Epic Edith Hall

In one of the modern senses of the term, the most ‘tragic’ reading to which the Odyssey has ever been subjected was that of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. It formed a central thesis of their collaborative Dialektik der Aufklärung (The Dialectic of Enlightenment), first published in North America in the dark days of 1944. They saw the world as increasingly irrational, and sought to activate every resource made available through philosophical reasoning, but simultaneously identified the deadly role played by reason in the creation of humankind’s problems, at least in the form of means-end calculations and the specious objectivity of ideologically motivated science. When they mapped out the genealogy of the dark underbelly of Western rationality, it was the voyage of Odysseus which they selected for their allegorical case study, thus tracing the destructive potential of reason to the Odyssey, one of the earliest charter texts of Western identity and culture. They argued that this ‘Odyssean’ rationality inevitably represses singularity and difference, symbolized by (amongst other things) the mistreatment of the Cyclops.1 Reason offers humans unhoped-for success in dominating nature through scientific and intellectual advancements, but inevitably leads to the domination of some men by others, and of most women by most men. The Frankfurt School, then, in identifying the Odyssey as the founding text of imperialism, capitalism, and fascism, certainly allocated it an incomparably tragic role within cultural history. Other, equally cheerless readings emerge from time to time. In a notorious book published in 1990, Fidel Fajardo-Acosta argued that the Odyssey has always implicitly condemned violence, since it possesses what is called ‘a 1

Adorno and Horkheimer (1997), 67.

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tragic vision’. Fajardo-Acosta insisted that the poem is, like the Iliad, an elegiac lament ‘for the tragic self-destruction of a set of specific individuals and a whole civilisation that they represent’. The destruction, beginning with the deaths of Odysseus’ crew, culminates in the bloody execution of the suitors. Crucial to his argument was the comparison made between the sound of the bowstring when Odysseus tests it prior to the slaughter, and the song of a swallow (21.404–11). Fajardo-Acosta stresses that the swallow’s cry was sometimes associated with barbarism, sadness, and especially with the opening of the sailing season in the spring, which he thinks must have had tragic connotations.2 Yet in other ancient sources the springtime associations are positive: the swallow is the emblem of regeneration and marital harmony. For the ‘tragic’ undertow that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Fajardo-Acosta have detected does not, in fact, chime with the dominant patterns of reaction to the epic in any period of cultural history, ancient or modern. Even though Odysseus’ activities at Troy were often presented negatively in Greek and Roman sources (and consequently in post-Renaissance responses to those sources), the actual frame narrative related in the Odyssey was in antiquity invariably seen as a success story––an upbeat tale of hardship overcome through heroic valour and cunning intelligence.3 Book 22 was a favourite with ancient audiences; when Socrates interviews a professional performer of Homer in Plato’s dialogue Ion, its opening moment, when ‘Odysseus appears leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his arrows at his feet’, is selected as one of the three most emotive passages in the epics (the other two, one of which is the violent showdown between Achilles and Hector, are both from the Iliad). Ion says that when he recites passages to do with horrors, his hair stands on end and his heart throbs, while his audiences respond not only with pity but ‘awe and sternness stamped upon their faces’ (535b–e). This ‘positive’ reading of Odysseus’ return––most people’s intuitive if arguably childish reaction to the story––was even rehabilitated by the German philosophical Left just fifteen years after The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Between 1952 and 1959 Ernst Bloch published his Principle of Hope, the classic Marxist expression of humanity’s capacity for utopian thinking, and our drive to transcend the limitations imposed by any particular phase of society, through a longing for an imaginary community where such repressions do not apply. Bloch argued that the wanderer Odysseus symbolized not the history of the abuses and misuses of science, technology, and reason, but man’s upbeat, questing, utopian impulse. This discussion appears under the 2 3

Fajardo-Acosta (1990), 117, 243–4. Post (1951); Cook (1995), 149; Wilson (2002), 141.

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subheading ‘Wishful images of the fulfilled moment’, which captures Bloch’s conception of myth as a clue to the perfected social order for which humankind universally longs. Any desired mythical destination, Ithaca or otherwise, is thus, philosophically speaking, ‘a hypostatised utopia’.4 Bloch’s identification of the Odysseus myth as offering an eternally evolving notion of human potentiality is extremely suggestive for anyone trying to understand the longevity and continuing appeal of the Odyssey in different eras and types of society. Since Joyce and the other great Modernists seized on the Odyssey in the early twentieth century, there have of course been versions of the epic that have been consonant with both philosophical readings, and indeed others that have occupied all the varied ground that lies between them. The nekuia has played an exceptionally important role, often a bleak one, since Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Pound’s Cantos (the first of which were published in 1930), and certainly since Primo Levi’s identification of the Underworld with the concentration camps of the Holocaust.5 But it is not in fiction nor in poetry but in adaptations for the theatre and the opera house that by far the most new works derived from the Odyssey have been produced.6 Some have been generally in accordance with the Frankfurt School reading of the Odyssey in being either self-styled tragedies, or functionally tragic (see further below), in dramatizing an instance of suffering that is historically inevitable but metaphysically inexplicable; a far larger number, however, whether actually comic or not, have been fundamentally cheerful, edifying expressions of the triumph of one human spirit over adversity. In Oliver Taplin’s review of a recent adaptation of the Odyssey as a radio drama by the popular British poet Simon Armitage, he stressed, indeed, that there is more than one way to make good theatre out of the Odyssey. While Derek Walcott’s powerful The Odyssey: A Stage Version (first performed in 1992 and published the year after) has the stature of ‘epic theatre’, with all the honorific Brechtian reverberations which that implies, Armitage’s ‘is more like an adaptation for a teenage drama workshop––and as such it is pretty good. This is not a surge-and-thunder Odyssey, crashing its breakers on a rugged Aegean coast, it is more like a big swimming-pool complex with a wave-machine. And you can have a lot of fun with a wave-machine.’ Far from dismissing Armitage’s jaunty radio realization because it belongs ‘to the rattling good yarn school of Homeric retellings’, Taplin insists that the shade of Homer himself would be gratified by it: ‘He would surely be happy 4 5 6

Bloch (1986), iii.1025 f. See further Falconer (2005); Hall (2008), ch. 15. For a fascinating discussion of some twentieth-century examples, see Hardwick (2004).

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to have his poem of the man of many twists and turns told in yet another form.’7 Taplin speaks from the heart about the susceptibility of the Odyssey to being created anew by every generation, a theme he developed eloquently in the popular radio series and book An Odyssey Round Odysseus, produced in 1989 in collaboration with his future wife Beaty Rubens.8 He also speaks from direct personal experience about the versatility and power of the Odyssey in contemporary performance. The translations that appeared in that book, distinguished by their sensitivity to the aesthetic and emotional effect of the Homeric caesura, showed that his ear for the flexible rhythms of the poem was just as much that of a poet as of an academic. The translations developed into the text that was used at one of the most successful productions ever staged at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, a semi-staged reading entitled The Wanderings of Odysseus (1992) (see Figure 22.1). This used Taplin’s own rendering of about a third of Homer’s text, and was directed by Rush Rehm.9 Here is Taplin’s translation of one of the passages of the epic which undoubtedly contains tragic reverberations, the description of Odysseus’ response to Demodocus’ account of the wooden horse at Troy (8.521–31): So the poet told the story. But Odysseus dissolved; The tears trickled down and drenched his cheeks. As a woman might weep as she clasps the body of her beloved husband, who has fallen before the eyes of his whole people, trying to keep off the cruel day from his land and its children, she sees him in his death throes, and twining herself around him shrieks in keening lament. But her captors come up behind her, and beat her across the back and shoulders with their spears, as they seize a slave for a life full of grief and labour; and her face is wasted, her cheeks wracked with pitiful streaks: so Odysseus shed tears, drops of the water of pity.

Few readings or stagings of the Odyssey are so rooted in the simple power of its rolling rhythms; the insistence on preserving and exploring the impact of the hexameter to a large measure explained the success of the Malibu performance, which has been preserved in just a few still photographs. But along 7

Taplin (2006); the radio script is published as Armitage (2006). Rubens and Taplin (1989). Taplin’s own translations were performed for the radio programmes by the actor Brian Glover. A list of all the passages that appear in translation in tbe book is provided on p. 168. 9 Extracts from his translation are reproduced in Taplin (1994) and (1999) and anthologized in Steiner (1996). Most of the typescript, a copy of which is now housed in the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford (APGRD), remains unpublished. 8

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Fig. 22.1. Programme cover design for Oliver Taplin’s The Wanderings of Odysseus (1992), incorporating an engraving ‘Odysseus escapes Polyphemus’, after Fuseli, in Francis du Roveray, Illustrations to Homer’s Odyssey (1806).

with Derek Walcott’s stage version, it was one of the first and most influential of the very large number of performances of the poem that over the last fifteen years have used actors. This renaissance is remarkable and in itself deserves a separate investigation. Yet the poem’s relationship with the theatre goes back a long way in its history. Indeed, the underlying affinity of many of the Odyssey’s key episodes with theatre was sensed in antiquity, above all in

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the figure of the archetypal shape-shifter, Proteus.10 Proteus’ own repertoire of physical presentations, his daughter Eidothea tells Menelaus, includes water and fire as well as every beast on the earth; when Menelaus and his men did finally apprehend this slippery old being, he responded by turning into a lion, a snake, a panther, a giant boar, running water, and a huge leafy tree (4.417–18, 455–9). There were other shape-shifters in this league to be found in early Greek epic poetry, such as Periclymenus (the son of another seadivinity, Nereus), and the females Nemesis and Mestra.11 But the Odyssey provides the only extended account of serial metamorphoses in archaic Greek literature, which explains why Proteus achieved his archetypal status. Proteus is emblematic of the whole Odyssey because of the central position it gives to transformation and disguise––indeed to acting of parts. For postRenaissance theorists of theatre, as well as ancient ones, Proteus became an enduring metaphor for the actor’s mutability.12 Odysseus himself had always been an accomplished actor: Helen remembers how, long ago at Troy, Odysseus had entered the city on a reconnaissance mission: he had disguised himself as a household slave by inflicting blows on his own body and wearing rags (4.244–8). He was to revive this role a decade later on the stage of his Ithacan homeland. He lived in a world in which it was half expected that visitors might to turn out to be gods play-acting, a possibility of which the other suitors try to warn Antinous (17.483–7). Yet the prize for best actor in the Odyssey must surely go to its presiding deity Athena, from the moment that she appears on the threshold of the Ithacan court disguised as a ‘leader of the Taphian people’ (1.103–5). When she assumes her second disguise, as the sensible senior Ithacan Mentor, ‘she seemed identical to him both in looks and in voice’ (1.268). She is not only a great actress en travesti (even Odysseus is not required to perform transvestite parts), but her roles include the youthful Telemachus (whom she impersonates at 2.383), can be sustained at length (she keeps up her Mentor disguise throughout the voyage to Pylos and the first part of Telemachus’ encounter with Nestor), can deceive even best friends (in the case of Nausicaa, 6.22), and include several avian forms (1.320; a vulture at 3.371–2). At the poem’s close she again wears the form and voice of Mentor, in order to create peace between the families of the suitors and of Odysseus (24.548). Indeed, the 10 See above all Libanius Or. 64.117, where the dancer of mythological mime (pantomime), who took several roles sequentially in the course of his performances, is said ‘repeatedly and speedily to undergo a change in the body into whatever you like. Each one of them is almost Proteus the Egyptian’. 11 For Periclymenus and Mestra see Hesiod frs. 33 and 43 in Merkelbach and West (1967), 23, 31. For Nemesis see Cypria fr. 10 in West (2003), 89–91. 12 See Lada-Richards (2002), 411.

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concluding formula of the entire poem is ‘having likened herself in form and body [to Mentor]’.13 Even the stage actor’s power to affect his audience psychologically seems prefigured by the way that such appearances are connected with the Odyssey’s interest in emotional change. The first visit of the disguised Athene to Telemachus leaves him ‘full of spirit and courage’, a change that astonishes him because he can feel it in his heart (1.320–3). The ageing actor’s ability, in a mask, to impersonate a beautiful young person also seems strangely foreshadowed by the de-ageing makeover that Athena offers Odysseus whenever he needs to maximize the impact of his looks and virility. On Phaeacia, Athena ‘made him look taller and stronger, and made his locks hang in curls from his head, like hyacinth petals.’ As a craftsman inlays gold on silverware, she ‘poured pleasing grace on his head and shoulders’ (6.229–35). With such divine assistance in his toilet, it is scarcely surprising that Nausicaa conveniently helps him because he seems to offer promising husband material. Nor is it any surprise to find Libanius saying that the actors of pantomime, who took many different roles in the course of their performances, seem to have been transformed over and over again by the same ‘wand of Athena which transforms the shape of Odysseus’ (Or. 64.117). The Odyssey’s fascination with transformations and disguises is undeniably greater than that of the Iliad, which contains no serial shape-shifter equivalent to Proteus and no humans turned into animals at all. Indeed, the only surviving rival of either Proteus or Circe in archaic literature is the god Dionysus, one of whose own so-called Homeric Hymns (7.38–53) relates the myth of his escape from pirates who had abducted him in his true shape –– that of a handsome youth. Dionysus first made the ship sprout vines and ivy, and then himself changed into a lion and a bear, before turning his adversaries into dolphins. It is no coincidence that this shape-shifting god, once theatre was invented at Athens in the sixth century bce, became its tutelary deity and the patron of the acting profession. Nor is it any coincidence that theatre was invented in Athens at the same time that it was first enjoying regular, formal recitals of the Homeric epics at public festivals. In this historical context, the Odyssey looks heavily pregnant with the art of theatre, a condition brought to fulfilment by the innumerable dramatic works that it has subsequently generated. And the Odyssey was adapted into all three genres of drama––tragedy, satyr play, and comedy––invented in classical Athens. In the case of tragedy, Odysseus’s catalogue of dead women in Hades (11.225–332), who include Tyro, Oedipus’ wife and mother Epicaste (later known as Jocasta), Leda, Phaedra, Ariadne, and Eriphyle, reveals another facet 13

On disguise and role-play in the Odyssey, see above all Murnaghan (1987).

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of the Odyssey’s relationship with theatre: these women are included because their genealogies and marriages were distinguished and their fates memorable––the features that subsequently made them so attractive to tragic poets, even if only the ancient Greek plays about Phaedra (in Euripides’ Hippolytus) and Jocasta (in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Euripides’ Phoenissae) survived. Yet in antiquity the Odyssey itself does not often seem to have been felt particularly suitable material for tragedy. There is scant evidence for ancient tragedies called anything like Odysseus or Ithacans in the way that the Theban epics produced Oedipus Tyrannus, Seven against Thebes, Phoenissae, and Antigone, or the Heracles epics produced Heracles Mad and Women of Trachis. This is not to say that no attempts were made, however. The city that heard regular performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey at the Panathenaea also enjoyed plays deriving from both epics by its first surviving great tragedian, Aeschylus. His Achilleis (Nereids, Myrmidons, and the Phrygians or Ransom of Hector) dealt with a good deal of the story told in the Iliad, from the stand-off between Agamemnon and Achilles in book 1 to the ransoming of Hector’s corpse in book 24. This trilogy seems to have made a profound impact on fifth-century Athenian culture; it is reflected in vase paintings and discussed in Aristophanes.14 Aeschylus did also compose a few plays dealing with material derived from the Odyssey, yet the shortage of surviving information about them is possibly a result of the lack of impact made by Aeschylus’ theatrical Cimmeria or Ithaca relative to Aeschylus’ Troy. The latter, of course, set the stage for the whole tradition of Trojan War tragedies developed so fruitfully by Sophocles and Euripides, including not only plays about the Greek camp at Troy and Trojan royal family but Iphigenia in Aulis, in which Myrmidons was an important undertext.15 In the fourth century, there was a revival of interest in Iliad-related themes;16 besides the Rhesus attributed to Euripides, Aeschylus’ own great-grandson Astydamas composed a famous Hector, discussed by Taplin in a fine article.17 Yet there is little sign of an Aeschylean retelling of the Odyssey making such an impact on subsequent generations of dramatists. Two of his Odyssey plays were certainly satyr plays––the type of drama that Euripides’ Cyclops might imply was the natural fifth-century theatrical home for at least the ‘wanderings’ books of the Odyssey.18 One was Circe (fragments 113a to 115 TrGF) and the other Proteus (frs. 210–15), the most unfortunately missing last play of the Oresteia tetralogy. If it had survived it is 14 On Myrmidons see Taplin (1972), 60 and Michelakis (1999), 37–9; on Phryges see Aristophanes fr. 696B.3 KA and Hall (1989), 133. 15 16 Michelakis (1999), ch. 4. See Hall (forthcoming). 17 18 Taplin (forthcoming). See Hall (2006), 165 f.

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possible that it would have provided even more grist to the mill of the persuasive argument, developed by Taplin in collaboration with Peter Wilson (one of the editors of this volume), that the Oresteia stages an aetiology for tragic theatre itself.19 In the late nineteenth century, perhaps stimulated by the extraordinary success of Max Bruch’s heroic oratorio Odysseus (1873), itself a product of the philhellene euphoria that followed the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian war,20 Wilamowitz dreamed of an Aeschylean tetralogy consisting of the attested titles Psychagôgoi, Penelope, Ostologoi, and the satyric Circe.21 In this he was followed by August Bungert’s vast project for Die Odyssee, a musical ‘tetralogy’ (as it was entitled in a self-conscious allusion to the Greek tragic tradition), recasting the epic on a Wagnerian scale, and one part of which was performed in a lavish Dresden production in 1896.22 More soberly, Wilamowitz’s proposal has been approved by many eminent scholars.23 Yet their proposed monumental Aeschylean theatrical Odyssey is little more than a fantasy. Only one fragment is attributed to Penelope, ‘I am a Cretan, of most ancient race’ (187 TrGF), which implies a context on Ithaca after the return, and an interest in disguise and lies. It must have been spoken by Odysseus himself, and may or may not imply a satyr drama. The title Ostologoi (Bone-Collectors) is mysterious; possibly it may refer to beggars outside the palace, or the suitors’ families performing burial rites, or satyrs involved in one of these occupations.24 It may or may not have been the same play as Penelope; the only two fragments (179 and 180 TrGF) both seem to be complaints laid by Odysseus against Eurymachus and possess what has been called a ‘vulgar’ tonality, since one refers to being made a target of the game of kottabos and the other to a chamber pot. Thus far the evidence for the Aeschylean Odyssey plays can be interpreted in a way that yields two or perhaps three examples of satyr drama, a medium for which Aeschylus was famous (with justification, if the quality evinced by the substantial fragment of his Net-Fishers is anything to go by).25 But his Psychagôgoi––although its remains are deeply controversial––does seem to have been a tragedy. It is also fairly certain that it treated the dialogue between Tiresias and Odysseus; the chorus may have been natives of the area around the descent to the Underworld, if it is they who spoke fragment 273 TrGF, and 19

20 Taplin and Wilson (1993). See Fifield (2005), 131; Hall (2008), ch. 5. See Wilamwitz-Moellendorff (1884), 194 n. 36. 22 See Hust (2005), 301 f., with fig. reproduced at 340. 23 Mette (1963), 127–9; Gantz (1980), 151–3, Grossardt (1998), 294–310 and (2003), 158 n. 15. See also the very speculative Katsouris (1982). 24 For a recent discussion see Grossardt (2003), 156. 25 See Pausanias 2.13.6; Menedemus quoted at Diog. Laert. 2.133; Hall (2006), 158–60. 21

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the (very tenuously attributed) papyrus fragment describing the route by which he can descend (fr. 273a TrGF). Aeschylus liked staging scenes involving prophecies and prophets, as his Persians and Phineus (produced in the same group as Persians in 472) attest.26 The loss of an Aeschylean tragedy based on the nekuia in Odyssey book 11 is therefore particularly hard for enthusiasts of Greek literature to bear. Moreover, it is not remotely possible to determine what was the cause of tragic pain and suffering in this play–– whether it was primarily focused on the misery of Odysseus’ former companions and colleagues, such as Elpenor, Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles, or on his own horror at the news that even after arriving home another journey still awaits him (Od. 11.119–36). The case of Sophocles is curious. His biographical tradition reports that he ‘drew on the Odyssey for many of his dramas’ (Vita 20), but does not seem to know enough about such plays to substantiate this claim with anything more than an unplaced fragment including an etymology of Odysseus’ name (TrGF fr. 965). One Sophoclean play the biographer could have mentioned here is his Nausicaa or Washerwomen (TrGF frs. 439–41); tradition had it the tragedian had himself taken the leading role, which required that he play a ball game (T 25–30 TrGF). But as an arguably light-hearted and certainly erotic tale, taken from the poem’s ‘wanderings’, this play may well have been satyric.27 The two other Sophoclean titles with Odyssean associations are interesting, on the other hand, precisely because they dealt with stories that are not included in the Odyssey itself. Sophocles’ Odysseus Mainomenos (TrGF frs. 462–7) concerned the madness which Odysseus feigned in order to try evading military service––something which precedes the action of both the Iliad and the Odyssey and is mentioned in neither.28 It was an incident subsequent to the action of the Odyssey that was dramatized, however, in Sophocles’ lost Odysseus Acanthoplêx (‘Odysseus SpineStruck’, TrGF frs. 453–461a), apparently also known as Odysseus Wounded (Aristotle, Poet. 14.1453b33), adapted by the Roman Pacuvius in his Niptra (which may suggest that the mysterious Sophoclean title Niptra was an alternative name for Odysseus Acanthoplêx). In this, Sophocles dealt with adventures after the end of the Odyssey, involving Odysseus’ son by Circe, Telegonus; but the play took, it seems, the opportunity for characters to retell famous episodes from the epic,29 perhaps in response to Aeschylus’ nekuia play, Psychagôgoi. But this exception may nevertheless help to prove the general rule that Odysseus’ activities and personality did not easily qualify 26 28 29

27 Hall (1996), 10 f. Sophocles frs. 439–41 TrGF. Sophocles frs. 462–7 TrGF. Sophocles frs. 453–461a TrGF. See further Marshall (2000).

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him as a tragic hero, since Odysseus Acanthoplêx was, in Aristotelian terms, less one of action or character than one of pathos (Poet. 18.1455b34–5): both the Greek play and its Roman adaptation were remembered for scenes in which Odysseus lamented the intense physical agony caused by a wound (see especially Cicero, Tusc. Disp. 2.21.48). The fragments of Pacuvius’ tragedy include several striking lines where Ulixes strongly expresses his physical agony.30 There are one or two Odyssean titles amongst the remains of minor fifthcentury tragedians. Aristias’ Cyclops was certainly satyric (fr. 4 TrGF), while Ion wrote a play called Phrouroi which dramatized a meeting between Helen and Odysseus within Troy (frs. 43a–49 TrGF). There is no way of knowing whether the Penelope attributed to Philocles by the Suda was a tragedy or a satyr play (Sud. Ph. 378 = T 1 TrGF). In the fourth century, we know nothing about the Odysseus of either Apollodorus (a tragedian who won several victories at Athens in the 370s) or Chaeremon, although one of them may be the same Odysseus that the didascalia records was performed at an unknown date, along with a Telephus, by an unknown actor.31 More interestingly, one of these is probably the intriguing tragedy that Aristotle entitles Odysseus the False Messenger (Pseudangelos). Since this was clearly, for once, a dramatization of a plot directly related to the Odyssey, indeed to the climactic contest of the bow in book 21, its loss is particularly annoying: Aristotle is interested in its complicated anagnôrisis, which required the audience to draw a mistaken inference involving the bow (Poet. 16.1455a12–14). Making a tragedy out of at least a part of the Odyssey, therefore, seems to have been something that Aeschylus, possibly Sophocles, and at least one fourth-century tragedian attempted, but the idea does not seem to have generated a tradition that was set to become particularly significant or influential. An important factor must be Euripides’ apparent lack of interest in Odysseus as a potential tragic hero, especially since Euripidean tragedy played such a crucial role in the dissemination of the medium across the Greek-speaking world and internationally. And although his Cyclops shows that Euripides saw in this epic fertile material for satyr play, there is virtually no evidence whatsoever for any tragedy by Euripides based on any episode in the Odyssey, although many of the lost plays, including Palamedes, must have featured Odysseus prominently without making him the tragic sufferer.32 For Odysseus does of course make important appearances in Euripidean as 30

See especially frs. 280–91 in Warmington (1936), 270 f. Apollodorus: Suda α 3406 = T 1 TrGF. Chaeremon: F 13 TrGF. Adespota: F 7a TrGF. 32 The best discussion of Euripides’ Palamedes and its relationship with the other plays produced in the Trojan Women group, remains Scodel (1980). 31

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in all Athenian tragedy, since he was identified by the fifth-century tragedians as the type of ruthlessly effective public man, driven by motives of expedience, whose actions necessarily cause tragedy in the lives of others (Ajax, Philoctetes, Iphigenia, Hecuba, Polyxena). The way he was configured in Athenian tragedy had much to do with the fact that he was not an Athenian hero. Moreover, he was a supporter of the Peloponnesians at Troy, and it was the Peloponnesian Spartans against whom the classical Athenians waged their longest war in the fifth century. Odysseus plays a significant role in three surviving tragedies, Euripides’ Hecuba and Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes. All use his reputation for brilliant rhetoric (indeed, he becomes the symbol of the master-sophist/demagogue) and his ability to think up cunning strategies in order to achieve his goals. His political instinct and genius are played up far more than in the Odyssey, where he is not shown operating in contexts such as the assembly or the management of open war. An advocate of callous Realpolitik and force majeure, the tragic Odysseus always argues that the more powerful party must win, and that resisting this inevitable outcome is a futile, sentimental waste of time.33 In every single case he proves effective. Odysseus always gets what he wants, while creating the tragedies for other people to suffer. This is Odysseus inspected from the point of view of the fifth-century democratic citizen–– what role does a man with his particular ‘skillset’ play in a democratic polis where the good of the group is placed higher on the agenda than the good of the individual aristocrat? In Hecuba (as later in Iphigenia in Aulis, where he does not physically appear, but operates as a terrifying unseen presence), two new features appear: ruthlessness in the face of the suffering of the completely innocent, and a disregard for personal loyalties previously acquired. In Ajax he is both humane and cynical, the winner who can afford to be charitable; in Philoctetes his role is complicated. He behaves appallingly in any human, moral sense, and yet there is a level on which he is right: getting the war over and done with has become a priority for the entire Greek community, and it would be irrational to allow Philoctetes’ personal pride and grudge against the Greeks to jeopardize the greater good.34 But why did Odysseus, who offers such rich potential as a stage character who causes or witnesses terrible tragic suffering, not apparently offer the prototype of a particularly convincing tragic protagonist himself? One obvious reason is that he neither kills kin nor commits incest. He is also, famously, destined to die peacefully in old age. Moreover, his pragmatism, 33

On Odysseus in Greek tragedy the succinct discussion ‘The stage villain’ in Stanford (1968), 102–17 has yet to be superseded. 34 See especially Nussbaum (1976).

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self-discipline, unerring intelligence, and, above all, his invariable achievement of successful outcomes in all forms of conflict, have always militated against the development of plot lines that offer theatre spectators tragedies entailing either Fall or Error. His biggest mistake in the Odyssey is his unnecessary, boastful revelation of his name to the blinded Polyphemus, a tactical error that results in the deaths of many of his comrades. Yet the nature of the Cyclops as supernatural giant, and the childlike tenor of much of the way that the story is told,35 made it difficult to present Polyphemus’ tale in a tragic mode, although there were satyr plays on the theme (including Euripides’ Cyclops), and several comedies. For when it comes to ancient and more recent comedy, the picture looks different: indeed, the Odyssey’s scenes between husband and wife, or young adult and slave, lie at the foundations of the whole genre of domestic comedy as practised by Menander, Terence, and Molière, of televised sitcom, and of romantic comedy from As You Like it to Hollywood.36 But actual episodes from the epic were dramatized comically in Theopompus’ Odysseus, in which the returning Odysseus described the fine texture of a tunic that he has been brought to wear;37 the same poet also composed a Penelope and a Sirens. Philyllius’ titles include The Washerwomen or Nausicaa. One of the saddest losses in the history of Odyssey reception must be The Odysseuses by Cratinus, Aristophanes’ brilliant rival. This comedy, indeed, inaugurated an important new trend in the ancient comic theatre by relying entirely on the humour to be derived from burlesque rather than jokes at the expense of contemporary individuals. The burlesque stage version of the epic had a chorus of Odysseus’ Ithacan comrades, and seems from its outset to have featured Odysseus’ ship as a dominant part of the stage design; the main focus was on the Cyclops, portrayed as an expert cook.38 Since the Renaissance, there have been dozens of stage versions of the Odyssey aiming at laughter.39 This tendency is related to the pervasive habit of relocating its plot to lower-class echelons of society, a procedure that seems to have been felt to be natural ever since Petronius’ burlesque novel Satyrica.40 One of the earliest truly comic Odysseys in modern times is the ballad opera Penelope by John Mottley and Thomas Cooke (1728). Penelope sets the story of the Odyssey in a London working-class tavern. Mottley, as a Grub Street pamphleteer and the son of an absentee Jacobite soldier, was equipped to write about abandoned women and the seedier underside of London life. Penelope’s maid Doll suggests that she seek comfort in the bottle, but neither 35 38 40

36 37 See Austin (1983). Lord (1977), 94 f. Theopompus fragment 34 KA. 39 Cratinus fragments 143–57 KA. See Reid (1993), ii.724–54. See further Hall (2008), ch. 10.

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gin nor whisky can help. The chief suitor is Cleaver the butcher, who is evil but engaging, and wittily sends up the Homeric archetype. He is a butcher, and therefore asks, ‘Shall I my Fame with whining Sorrows stain, | Whose Arms have Hecatombs of Oxen slain?’41 But the opera ends as satisfactorily as the Odyssey, and with far less bloodshed. Perhaps the funniest of all straightforwardly comic versions of the Odyssey is Odysseus from Vraa by the Danish poet Jess Ørnsbo, a dark satire on the seedier corners of post-war Danish society. When Odysseus turns up disguised in sunglasses to the dingy boarding house run by his wife in Vraa (a faded seaside resort with a reputation equivalent to that of the English Morecombe), she tells him that her husband, although not very bright, ‘was good with dogs’.42 Their son Telle is a delinquent teenager obsessed with cars. He kills everyone in the boarding house with rat poison to make room for his errant father. But until the twentieth century, although there were tragedies created by recasting individual episodes, such as Goethe’s Nausikaa, written in Sicily in 1787,43 there were no successful versions of the Odyssey as a whole that can be regarded as tragic in either the ancient or any more recent sense of the term, certainly not in the definition of tragedy that I find most useful––as a dramatization of an instance of human suffering that asks philosophical questions about its causes and effects.44 Perhaps the Renaissance literary theorist Giraldi Cinthio was correct when he named the Odyssey the classic example of ‘happy tragedy’––tragedia di fin lieto.45 Perhaps Aldous Huxley was right when he declared, in ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’, that Homer in the Odyssey ‘refused to treat the theme tragically’, because he insisted on telling the Whole Truth: men in the Odyssey who have been terribly bereaved still attend to the cooking of their supper.46 As Milton perspicaciously remarked, Odysseus is sad––but does that make him unhappy?47 These profound insights into the essentially untragic conception of the Odyssey are contradicted by neither Giovanni Falugi’s self-styled tragicommedia in terzine entitled Ulixe patiente (circa 1535), an adaptation of books

41

Quotations are taken from Mottley and Cooke (1728). 43 Ørnsbo (1996), 43. On which see Trevelyan (1981), 163–7. 44 This working definition of tragedy, on which see further Hall (forthcoming), has been much informed by the brilliant study of Eagleton (2003). 45 46 Giraldi Cinthio (1554), 225. Huxley (1949), 3 f. 47 At a Vacation Exercise in the Colledge (1645); he refers to tales of heroes, 42

Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn songs at king Alcinous’ feast, While sad Ulysses’ soul and all the rest Are held, with his melodious harmony, In willing chains and sweet captivity.

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16–23 of the Odyssey,48 nor Giambattista della Porta’s Counter-Reformation Penelope (also styled a tragicomedy) of 1591. This was one of the few poetic works attempted by this titan of Renaissance science and natural philosophy, and in a spirit of Christian didacticism presented the heroine as a veritable marvel of chastity and constancy.49 In the same year as the publication of della Porta’s Italian Penelope, William Gager’s Latin Ulysses Redux was performed at Christ Church, Oxford. Styled a Tragoedia Nova, it ends in cheerful triumph, with little ethical, metaphysical, or psychological depth, to the accompaniment of much ordering of food for the reunion festivities. The atmosphere is clouded only to a minimal degree by the prospect of the suitors’ vengeful families.50 Even that master of pathos, the early eighteenth-century tragedian Nicholas Rowe, found it difficult to produce a tragedy out of the Odyssey; indeed, he ultimately failed. Rowe resorted not only to allowing Penelope to be psychologically tortured by sadistic suitors into attempting suicide (see Figure 22.2), but to adding depressingly gloomy metaphysical ruminations for Ulysses to utter at the end, simply in order to cloud the joy of the final moments: Like thee the Pangs of parting Love I’ve known, My Heart like thine has bled.––But oh! my Son, Sigh not, nor of the common Lot complain, Thou that art born a Man art born to Pain, For Proof, behold my tedious Twenty Years All spent in Toil, and exercis’d in Cares. . .51

It is not surprising that the stage of the eighteenth and indeed the nineteenth century transferred its interest from Odysseus and Penelope to the more exciting scenes of youth encountering supernatural beauty offered by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon’s novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699). This novel inspired dozens of operas, burlettas, and stage plays from Télémaque ou Calypso, a five-act lyric libretto by Simon Joseph Pellegrin, set to music by André Cardinal Destouches (1714), through to the longstanding staple of the English popular theatre, the extravaganza Telemachus, or the Isle of Calypso by J. R. Planché and Charles Dance, first performed in 1834.52 This ‘Telemachus’ theatrical tradition of staging Calypso’s island also, paradoxically, underlies the earliest Odyssey movie, George Méliès’ spectacular L’Ile de Calypso: Ulysse et le géant Polyphème (1905), a copy of which can be consulted in the Library of Congress. 48 50 51

49 Unpublished MS in Florence, see Clubb (1965), 91 f. n. 8. Clubb (1965), 97–9. Gager (1592), Act V. See the translation in Henley (1962), 246–60. 52 Rowe (1706), 64. For the original English text, see Planché and Dance (1835).

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Fig. 22.2. Penelope in Nicholas Rowe’s Ulysses. Engraving by J. Thornthwaite of Mrs Hunter (published 1778).

Yet the second half of the Odyssey had also provided material for a few later nineteenth-century musical burlesques such as Francis Cowley Burnand’s Patient Penelope (1863), a mildly risqué piece involving much transvestism and no tragedy whatsoever (even the suitors are forgiven), and for elaborately costumed and staged tableaux linked by dialogue and songs in George Warr’s The Tale of Troy. This was staged in London in 1883 and 1886, in both ancient Greek and in English-language performances.53 In the aftermath of 53

Hall and Macintosh (2005), 461–87. Warr (1887), vol. i.

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Schliemann’s digs at Troy, it offered lavish spectacle informed by archaeological research––seven tableaux were selected for their glamorous or violent content (they included illustrations of ‘Calypso parting from Ulysses’ and ‘The retribution of Ulysses’)––but it certainly was not tragedy. Nor was Stephen Phillips’ portentous verse drama Ulysses (see Figure 22.3), which opened on February 1st 1902 at His Majesty’s Theatre (then the most prestigious venue for Shakespearean productions), directed by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who starred as Ulysses. It ran for a lucrative 132 performances,54 and was revived at the Garden Theatre in New York the following year, where Tyrone Power Sr played Ulysses. Tree’s production was as lavish and spectacular as all his work, making much of ‘the summit of Olympus, an amphitheatre of marble hills in a glimmering light of dawn’, a scene of the suitors ‘dancing in abandonment with the handmaidens’ in front of the palace ‘richly decorated in the Mycenaean style’ in Act I, and an extended nekuia complete with flitting ghosts and much wailing in Act II.55 Phillips’ Ulysses was an elegant attempt to render the Odyssey suitable for a bourgeois audience that liked Shakespearean blank verse, staged splendidly.

Fig. 22.3. Ulysses at sea with his crew. Illustration, by Charles Buchel, on the cover of the original programme for Stephen Phillips’s verse drama Ulysses (1902).

54

For an account see Whittington-Egan (2006), 130 f.

55

Phillips (1902), 11, 26, 88.

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Phillips was pleased that the set and costume design reflected ‘recent discoveries of the Mycenaean age’, rather than the ‘conventional classical costumes and familiar building styles of later Greece’.56 But the ethical interest of the play lies in its very blandness and inability to face up to the level of violence and brutality of the homecoming. The Odyssey, it seems, can only be converted into tragedy by radically rewriting it. This point comes over very clearly by comparing Phillips’s anodyne adventure drama with a play published just five years later in Poland. Stanisław Wyspianski can legitimately make claim to having written the first thoroughgoing Odyssey tragedy to have survived. The Return of Odysseus (Powrót Odysa), published in 1907 and first staged in 1917 (it is still highly regarded and indeed revived in Poland), is blatantly revisionist. This Odysseus’ violence against both the suitors and their concubines is needless and lawless savagery. The new approach coincided with the first psychoanalytical readings of Odysseus’ character resulting from the Europe-wide impact of Freud’s work. Wyspianski’s Odysseus is suffering from manic depression, and knows that he is murderously disturbed: ‘I have found hell in my own country. I have come into a cemetery, and I am the gravedigger. It reeks of carrion flesh’.57 ‘Oedipal’ struggles with both Odysseus and Laertes were here developed more subtly than in the Freudian readings of Greek myth associated with Eugene O’Neill two or three decades later. Wyspianski’s hero is recognized not by the scars that he has suffered, but by those he inflicts on others. He kills Eumaeus, leaves a trail of other corpses across Ithaca, has a nervous breakdown when Laertes turns up to stop his merciless slaughter of the suitors, and the play ends as he runs into the sea to join ‘The boat of the dead! it is sailing into the hereafter, into oblivion’.58 A similar approach was taken in Gerhart Hauptmann’s much better-known German play The Bow of Odysseus (1914), where the slaughter assumes a Dionysiac level of manic brutality:59 these angst-ridden central European Odysseuses, psychotically wedded to violence for its own sake, are incapable of assuming the roles of responsible father, husband, or leader. They also inaugurate the line of thinking that led directly to the Frankfurt School reading in Dialectic of Enlightenment. One deadly serious––but not tragic––English-language version of the Odyssey was given a British performance as a radio drama during the Second World War. Edward Sackville-West’s The Rescue was subtitled A Melodrama for Broadcasting based on Homer’s Odyssey: Sackville-West used the term melodrama in its old sense, as designating a serious drama with music, provided in the form of an orchestral score by Benjamin Britten. It was broadcast 56 58

Phillips (1902), 178. Wyspianski (1966), 71.

57

Wyspianski (1966), 63. See Riedel (2000), 267.

59

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in November 1943, when Greece was under occupation, and the author drew attention to the painful parallels between the situation there and the Ithacan palace, occupied by the suitors. But this grave reassessment of the epic also allowed some criticism, placed in the mouth of Telemachus, of the irresponsibility of the upper-class Odysseus: his father’s absence has caused incalculable suffering to the ‘people of Ithaca’, who have lost ‘homes and goods and lands and even their children and relations––through starving and ill-treatment’. In Sackville-West’s hands, the Odyssey not only addressed the class tension that was to prove explosive at the general election two years later, but became a call to its British listeners across the class spectrum to take arms and assume responsibility for liberating all the lands threatened by Nazi ‘suitors’.60 Even before this, a tradition of politically charged Odysseys had been established in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s El retorno de Ulises, which developed the equation of Odysseus with political exiles.61 But his reading was turned on its head by the radical Republican Antonio Buero Vallejo’s La tejedoro de sueños (1952), a powerful tragedy which not only depicts Penelope as subversively in love with one of the suitors, but their execution by Odysseus as a treacherous, politically motivated mass execution by firing squad. Buero Vallejo was himself imprisoned and sentenced to death (a sentence eventually commuted) for his efforts on behalf of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, and his ancient warrior is elided with the repressions of the Franco regime. The conclusion of the play, although superficially representing the triumph of the aggressor Ulises, undermines it by stressing his failure to win the object of his desire. Penelope, coerced into reunion with a husband whose narcissism and violence she despises, remains defiantly faithful in spirit to her assassinated lover. The patriarchal monarch of Ithaca has become a twentieth-century totalitarian dictator.62 Another powerful rewriting was constituted by the presentation of the episode in Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version, first performed in 1992. Odysseus kills Antinous, who has simply asked for his turn with the bow, and Eurymachus, who is begging on his knees for his life. The slaughter of the rest of the suitors follows, in the form of a terrifying dance that at the play’s première Taplin himself found ‘completely gripping’,63 before Odysseus becomes deluded, convinced that he has gone back in time to the beginning 60

61 Sackville-West (1945), 89 f. For the text see Torrente-Ballaster (1981). For the text see Buero Vallejo (1983). On his politically motivated readings of myth see O’Leary (2005), ch. 5. 63 Unpublished review held at the APGRD at Oxford. 62

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of the Trojan War. He tries to kill even the singer, Billy Blue, and is struggling with insanity when Penelope enters with the curt question, ‘You had to wade this deep in blood?’ She rebukes Odysseus for turning the house into an ‘abattoir’, demanding to know whether it was for such a scene that she kept her ‘thighs crossed for twenty years’, and forbids him to hang the maids.64 Walcott’s implication that Odysseus is suffering from psychosis––even posttraumatic stress syndrome––taking the form of flashbacks, delusions, and a failure to distinguish past situations from present ones, harks back to Wyspianksi and forward to the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s fascinating reading of the Odyssey in the light of the experiences of returning war veterans in North America.65 From Odysseus as Freudian depressive to Odysseus as Franco or crazed war veteran, we come to Odysseus the asylum seeker. This socio-political interpretation is the most recent to have been explored repeatedly in dark theatrical responses to the Odyssey. Ariane Mouchkine (herself the daughter of a Russian immigrant to France) subtitled as Odyssées the Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (2005), her theatrical exploration of the ordeals undergone by refugees, in order to suggest the epic scale of the production as well as ironically to frame the struggle of the world’s eleven million displaced persons.66 A year later, Naomi Iizuka’s Anon(ymous) was performed by The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Iizuka, as a Japanese American dramatist, has specialized in the experiences of mixed-race societies; but she studied Classics at college, and wanted to fuse her social agenda with a reading of the Odyssey. Her hero Anon, a teenaged immigrant to the USA from an unspecified war-torn South-East Asian country, is searching for his mother, a sweatshop worker. David Farr’s stage version of the epic premiered in Bristol in 2005, and reached a wider audience at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 2006 (see Figure 22.4).67 It began with Odysseus being washed up on a beach, carted off to a detention centre, and interrogated by immigration officials. The Cyclops’ single eye was a sinister spotlight. But Odysseus was not the only exile: the production emphasized that the unfortunate Trojans could never return to their homelands again. The programme invited spectators to make a connection with asylum seekers by publishing a Human Rights lawyer’s impassioned article on the injustices being committed under the terms of the UK asylum law,68 along with an invitation to contact relevant charities. The result that emerges from this rather cursory exploration of the role played by the Odyssey in the theatre is that this epic, unlike the Iliad, has only become sufficiently dark to make it susceptible to tragic realization as a result 64 67

65 Walcott (1993), pp. 146–56. Shay (2002). Farr’s The Odyssey is included in Farr (2005).

68

66 See Choate (2006). Francis (2006).

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Fig. 22.4. Programme design for David Farr’s The Odyssey at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2006).

of radical retopicalization involving extensive surgery on the psyche, politics, and motivations of its hero. The happy reunion with child, wife, and father must be comprehensively undermined, or tragedy imported from an extrinsic socio-political context. There will inevitably always be theatrical performances––comic, tragicomic, musical, danced, poetic––based on the Odyssey; there have already been many staged Odysseys in the third millennium, in several continents.69 69 The more interesting include the Assamese adaptation by The Kohinoor Theatre, a venerable mobile troupe based in Pathsala; Jatinder Verma’s Tara Arts Theatre Company production 2001: A Ramayan Odyssey, which staged an intercultural collision between the Indian and Greek epic heroes––but only after developing his ideas about the Odyssey in An Asian Song-Line

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Tom Wright’s Melbourne Festival version of 2005 resonated with the terrible Australian experience of World War I at Gallipoli. The Croatian production Odyssey 2001 (actually 2006), with its unmistakeable satirical critique of American foreign policy, was performed in Egypt as well as southern Europe. Other versions, like Simon Armitage’s, have been far less political and belonged to what Taplin so aptly called ‘the rattling good yarn school of Homeric retellings’ (see above). This category certainly includes the large number of stage versions aimed primarily at children.70 Yet the very generic diversity of the Odyssey’s legacy in the theatre––its limitless promise of new resonances, its infinite potential for renewal––is surely further evidence of what Bloch regarded as its expression of humankind’s utopian impulse, and Huxley as the actual text’s inherent, humane, doggedly sensible resistance to wholesale tragic interpretation. (1993), an encounter in North-West Australia between Aboriginal, British, and Asian performers. In Winnipeg, Rick Chafe’s psychologically intense and physically experimental Odyssey play was performed outdoors in the ruins of a Benedictine monastery in 2000. Indefinite Article’s retelling of the Odyssey with the help of sand poured on to an overhead projector intrigued the audience at the Lyric Studio in London in January 2004. A few months later, Leszek Bzdyl’s Polish ODY-SEAS was billed as ‘a wandering event/performance’ created jointly with the visual artist Robert Rumas. The audience was taken on foot and by boat through the historical Gdansk shipyard, during which it experienced the myth of Odysseus through visual and performing arts. This production also toured to Baltic ports in Lithuania, Russsia, and Latvia. See further Hall (2008), ch. 3. 70 These include Tom Smith’s wisecracking The Odyssey (2002), in which Polyphemus is a myopic schoolgirl, and John Murrell’s exciting Canadian version of the travelogue, performed in June 2005 at the Ottawa International Children’s Festival.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by J. Cumming, London and New York. Armitage, S. (2006), Homer’s Odyssey, London. Austin, N. (1983), ‘Odysseus and the Cyclops. Who is who?’ in Approaches to Homer, ed. by C. A. Rubino and C. W. Shelmerdine (Austin), 3–37. Bloch, E. (1986 [1952–9]), The Principle of Hope, trans. by N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight, 3 vols., Oxford. Buero Vallejo, A. (1983), La tejedora de sueños: drama en tres actos, 6th edition ed. L. Iglesias Feijoo, Madrid. Burnand, F. C. (1863), Patient Penelope; or, The Return of Ulysses: A Burlesque in One Act, London. Chafe, R. (2001), The Odyssey: A Play Adapted from Homer,Toronto.

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Choate, E. T. (2006), ‘Le dernier caravansérail (Odyssées) (review)’ Theatre Journal 58: 95–9. Clubb, L. G. (1965), Giambattista della Porta: Dramatist, Princeton. Cook, E. (1995), The Odyssey in Athens: Myths of Cultural Origins, Ithaca and London. Eagleton, T. (2003), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Oxford. Fajardo-Acosta, F. (1990), The Hero’s Failure in the Tragedy of Odysseus: A Revisionist Analysis, New York. Falconer, R. (2005), Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945, Edinburgh. Farr, D. (2005), Plays One, London. Fifield, C. (2005), Max Bruch: His Life and Works, 2nd ed., Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY. Francis, R. (2006), ‘UK: Safe Haven?’, programme essay for David Farr’s The Odyssey: A Trip based on Homer’s Epic at the Lyric, Hammersmith, London. Gager, W. (1592), Ulysses Redux. Tragoedia Nova, Oxford. Gantz, T. (1980), ‘The Aischylean Tetralogy: Attested and Conjectured Groups’, AJPh 101: 133–64, reprinted in Lloyd (2007), 40–70. Giraldi Cinthio, G. (1554), Discorsi . . . intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie, e di altre maniere di poesie, Venice. Grossardt, P. (1998), Die Trugreden in der Odyssee und ihre Rezeption in der antiken Literatur, Bern. –––– (2003), ‘The Title of Aeschylus’ Ostologoi’, HSPh 101: 155–8. Hall, E. (1989), Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy, Oxford. –––– (1996), Aeschylus’ Persians. Edited with a Translation and Commentary, Warminster. –––– (2006), The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society, Oxford. –––– (2008), The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, London. –––– (forthcoming), ‘Trojan Suffering, Tragic Gods, and Transhistorical Metaphysics’, in S. Annes Brown and C. Silverstone (eds.), Tragedy in Transition, Oxford. –––– and F. Macintosh (2005), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, Oxford. Hardwick, L. (2004), ‘ “Shards and Suckers”: Contemporary Receptions of Homer’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge), 344–62. Henley, E. F. (1962) (ed.), William Gager: Ulysses Redux (1592). A facsimile edition and an English translation, Ph.D. Diss. Florida State University. Hust, C. (2005), August Bungert: Ein Komponist im deutschen Kaiserreich, Tutzing. Huxley, A. (1949), ‘Tragedy and the Whole Truth’, in Music at Night: And Other Essays (London), 3–18. Katsouris, A. (1982), ‘Aeschylus’ “Odyssean” tetralogy’, Dioniso 53: 47–60. Lada-Richards, I. (2002), ‘The Subjectivity of Greek Performance’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek & Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge), 395–418.

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Lloyd, M. (2007) (ed.), Oxford Readings in Aeschylus, Oxford. Lord, G. deForest (1977), Heroic Mockery: Variations on Epic Themes from Homer to Joyce, Newark, NJ, and London. Marshall, C. W. (2000), ‘The Point of Sophocles, fr. 453’, Eranos 98: 1–8. Merkelbach, R. and West, M. L. (1967) (eds.), Fragmenta Hesiodea, Oxford. Mette, H. J. (1963), Der verlorene Aischylos, Berlin. Michelakis, P. (1999), ‘The Spring Before It Is Sprung: Visual and Non-Verbal Aspects of Power Struggle in Aeschylus’ Myrmidons’, paper delivered at an Open University conference, available online at www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/ Conf99/michelakis.html. Mottley, J. and Cooke, T. (1728), Penelope: A Dramatic Opera, London. Murnaghan, S. (1987), Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey, Princeton, NJ. Nussbaum, M. (1976), ‘Consequences and Character in Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, Philosophy and Literature 1: 25–53. O’Leary, C. (2005), The Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo: Ideology, Politics and Censorship, Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY. Ørnsbo, J. (1996), Odysseus from Vraa: A Traditional Comedy, trans. H. Matthews, in H. C. Andersen (ed.), New Danish Plays (Norwich), 29–123. Phillips, S. (1902), Ulysses: A Drama in a Prologue and Three Acts, New York and London. Planché, J. R. and Dance, C. (1835), Telemachus, or, The Island of Calypso: A Classical and Mythological Extravaganza, London. Post, L. A. (1951), From Homer to Menander, Berkeley. Reid, J. (1993) The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts. 2 vols, New York and Oxford. Riedel, V. (2000), Antikerezeption in der deutschen Literatur, Stuttgart and Weimar. Rowe, N. (1706), Ulysses. A Tragedy, London. Rubens, B. and Taplin, O. (1989), An Odyssey Round Odysseus: The Man and his Story Traced through Time and Place, London. Sackville-West, E. (1945), The Rescue: A Melodrama for Broadcasting based on Homer’s Odyssey, London. Scodel, R. (1980), The Trojan Trilogy of Euripides [=Hypomnemata 60], Göttingen. Shay, J. (2002), Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, New York. Smith, T. (2002), The Odyssey, New York. Stanford, W. B. (1968 [1954]), The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed., Oxford. Steiner, G. (1996) (ed.), Homer in English, London. Taplin, O. (1972), ‘Aeschylean Silences and Silences in Aeschylus’, HSPh 76: 57–97. –––– (1994), Extracts from ‘The Wanderings of Odysseus’, Dialogos 1: 77–80. –––– (1999), Extracts from ‘The Wanderings of Odysseus’, AGENDA 36: 210–15. –––– (2006), ‘Homer’s Wave-Machine’, The Guardian: Books, Saturday May 20th. –––– (forthcoming), ‘Hektor’s Helmet Glinting in a Fourth-Century Tragedy’.

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–––– and Wilson, P. (1993), ‘The “Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPhS 29: 169–80. Torrente-Ballaster, G. (1981), El retorno de Ulises, in Teatro II, 115–89, Barcelona. Trevelyan, H. (1981), Goethe and the Greeks, 2nd ed, Cambridge. Walcott, D. (1993), The Odyssey: A Stage Version, London. Warmington, E. H. (1936), Remains of Old Latin, vol. 2, London and Cambridge, Mass. Warr, G. C. (1887), Echoes of Hellas: The Tale of Troy & The Story of Orestes from Homer & Aeschylus, with introductory essay and sonnets by George C. Warr; presented in 82 designs by Walter Crane, London. West, M. (2003) (ed.), Greek Epic Fragments. From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries bc, Cambridge, Mass. Whittington-Egan (2006), Stephen Phillips: A Biography, High Wycombe. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von (1884), Homerische Untersuchungen, Berlin. Wilson, D. F. (2002), Ransom, Revenge and Heroic Identity in the Iliad, Cambridge. Wyspianski, S. (1966 [1907]), The Return of Odysseus: A Drama in Three Acts, trans. with an introduction by Howard Clarke [Indiana University publications. Russian and East European series, 35], Bloomington.

23 An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus Fiona Macintosh

I N T RO D U C T I O N Between 2000 and 2003 numerous stories ran in The New York Times promising a rare theatrical gem––Al Pacino as Oedipus. We learned that the acclaimed actress, Estelle Parsons, then working as director of the Actors’ Studio, was to direct a star-studded cast. Public readings took place in 2001 but there was in the end no full performance. This, however, was never interpreted as any kind of failure, nor indeed with much disappointment, because we always heard how it was the experience of working on the project that mattered more than any commercial realization: developing this Oedipus was valued ‘for the fun of it, like working out in a gymnasium.’1 This piece of ‘luvviedom’ may seem like jetsam on the waves of theatre history. But it gathers in significance when it emerges that the version chosen for this thespian ‘work-out’ is one that began its life some hundred years previously––Yeats’s Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage. Although not staged until 1926, and only first published in 1928, the story of Yeats’s version dates from the first decade of the twentieth century and it continues to this day. The Yeats version has inspired at least one opera (Harry Partch’s King Oedipus––a Music-Dance Drama [premiered in 1952]);2 and it provided a potent vehicle for Laurence Olivier’s celebrated tour de force, when he performed in an evening double-bill as Oedipus and Puff in 1

The New York Times, 3/2/2000. Partch’s King Oedipus, using the Yeats version as libretto, was first performed in 1952 at Mill’s College, Oakland. Partch had met Yeats in 1934 in Dublin, when he had already begun planning his opera. It was Yeats’s writing on the union of words and music (e.g. ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, E&I (1907), 13–27 and more recently, the Preface to the 1928 published text of Yeats’s King Oedipus) that impressed Partch. However, the Yeats estate did not grant Partch permission to release the recording of the 1952 première, and so the 1954 recording used Parch’s reworking of Jebb’s translation instead. For details, see Grove (2001), s.v. Oedipus. 2

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Sheridan’s The Critic at the New Theatre in 1945. No less a theatrical triumph was the internationally renowned film of Oedipus Rex (1956), directed by Tyrone Guthrie, which similarly used Yeats’s version (indeed the Guthrie Theatre, Stratford, Ontario still treats Yeats’s text as definitive, as a production there in 2005 demonstrates). When Michael Cacoyannis directed Oedipus Tyrannus in Dublin in 1973, it was again with the Yeats text, which provided him with his most intensive and productive training ground on which to develop his theories of Greek tragedy. And the Yeats version remains to this day the Oedipus of choice for most small-scale theatre companies who lack the resources to commission a new script.3 Whilst there has been serious work done on the manuscripts of the translation and some work on its inception,4 there has been no previous attempt to account for its extraordinarily wide-ranging production history nor its very considerable impact on twentieth-century tragic theory (especially via Francis Fergusson’s seminal Idea of a Theater [1949], which draws upon it extensively). Indeed, since translations for the stage are rarely considered to have a shelf life in excess of ten years, this chapter seeks to explain what is unique to the Yeats translation, over and beyond the obvious claim that Yeats still matters. And this is a point worth pondering because there has only been one other subsequent Irish version of Oedipus Tyrannus––Derek Mahon’s Oedipus (2005). Mahon’s Oedipus is not just a very loose adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy––it conflates both the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus––it belongs (like Mahon’s Bacchae) to what one might term the parodic line of Irish Greek adaptation (in which one would put, of course, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Joyce’s reworkings of myth, and much of O’Casey).5 The absence of new ‘serious’ Irish Oedipuses is a notable one, when there have been so many Irish adaptations of ancient plays generally––there is already need to update the extensive 2002 listing in McDonald and Walton’s collection of essays, Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, which with its title’s debt to the Yeats version, itself forms part of the text’s reception. In many ways this absence of other Irish Oedipuses is not unrelated to the broader question of what has happened to the figure of Oedipus post-Freud. 3 In the 1973 production Cacoyannis made a number of changes to Yeats’s text, notably restoring many cuts to the choruses with the help of the poet, Richard Murphy. A notable, more recent, Irish production which used the Yeats text was Gary Hynes’s Druid Theatre Company staging in Galway in 1987, with Maria Mullen as Oedipus. For full details of the productions mentioned here, see the APGRD database, edited and maintained by A. Wrigley, at . 4 See especially, Clark and McGuire (1989), but also Grab (1972), Dorn (1984), Arkins (1990), Liebregts (1993), Macintosh (1994). 5 For a good analysis of the parodic elements in Mahon’s Bacchae, see Perris (2007).

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After some decades of unparalleled prominence on the stage in the first part of the twentieth century, Oedipus has gone on to experience a new form of ostracism in the last forty or so years: the ignominy of being linked with imperialism, and the repressive and oppressive powers of the bourgeois state by his anti-Freudian adversaries in France (notably by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) ). If Oedipus continues to enjoy a place in the repertoire, it is often only secured by making him more East End than West End (as in Berkoff’s Greek (1980) ); more representative of a minority than a majority voice (in, say, the post-colonial reworking of Ola Rotimi, The Gods are Not to Blame (1968), or the African-American version of Rita Dove, Darker Face of the Earth (1994) ). Other interesting changes have been the tendency to find in Oedipus a more sentient than cerebral man (as in Pasolini’s film, Edipo Re (1967)); or perhaps even to make Oedipus into a woman (as with Gary Hynes’s 1997 Druid Theatre Company’s production and the Cambridge Oedipus of 2004, directed by Annie Casteldine); or, as with Martha Graham’s pioneering ballet, Night Journey (1945), it is by radically rewriting the Sophoclean text in order to allow the mother figure, Jocasta, to come centre stage.6 If Oedipus has largely taken to the wings in the second half of the twentieth century, it becomes all the more pertinent to ponder the survival of Yeats’s text. By combining close textual evaluation of Yeats’s version together with an account of its performance reception and its position within the history of ideas, we will perhaps begin to see how this quintessentially Modernist Oedipus, in defiance of the odds, has managed to persist and to endure within a much more cynical postmodern world.

T H E G E N E S I S O F T H E T E XT ( 1 9 0 4 – 1 9 1 2 ) That the Irish national theatre movement from the end of the nineteenth century onwards should have had a history that involved Greek drama is not surprising: the performance history of Greek drama since the 1880s in Britain had been driven by Irish expertise and enthusiasm. Oscar Wilde claimed, perhaps with only a grain of truth, that he had been involved in the pioneering ancient Greek production of the Agamemnon in 1880 at Balliol College, Oxford.7 Yeats, with rather more veracity, looked back to the play, Helena in 6

For some of these new Oedipuses, see Macintosh (2004) and (2007). Ellmann (1987), 101–2. This claim seems, however, unlikely (see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 452–3). 7

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Troas by the Irish doctor/playwright, John Todhunter (performed at Hengler’s Circus in 1886 in the first Greek-inspired theatre space in London) as a turning point in theatre history.8 When the Abbey Theatre opened, just a few months after the Barker-Vedrenne management took over at the Royal Court in London in early 1904, the repertoires of both theatres very often ran in tandem.9 These two theatres were leading the way in the New Drama in the English-speaking world, and the New Drama was very much allied to the Greeks. The repertoire of the Court included Euripides in Murray’s translations; and very soon it was felt that the repertoire at the Abbey should include Greek plays, as Synge said, in order to throw light upon their own work.10 Whilst it was understood that in the Abbey’s first season, at least, Irish plays upon Irish themes should provide the subject matter, there was never any sense that the Greek corpus was alien. Yeats had written to Gilbert Murray in 1903 about his plans for the ‘Theatre of Beauty’, suggesting an Oedipus be played with Murray’s Hippolytus.11 Since the comparative studies by Celtic scholars in the last part of the nineteenth century had suggested that the figures of Irish mythology had their Greek counterparts (Deirdre was the Irish Helen; Cuchulain, both a Heracles and an Achilles), close theatrical associations in the minds of playwrights and spectators were inevitable. Lady Gregory had a serious interest in comparative folklore, to which she introduced Yeats; and Synge had actually attended lectures by the leading authority on Celticism, Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville at the Collège de France in Paris, where the connections made between the Celts and the Greeks were systematic and thorough.12 But it wasn’t just the content of Greek tragedies that was of interest; as with the 1880s revivals, it was their form that made them important models for the Abbey playwrights. Just as the Symbolists in Paris had turned to Greek tragedy, especially the plays of Aeschylus, in order to find ways of conveying other layers of consciousness, so now Greek drama was to provide a way of exploring alternatives to theatrical naturalism. By the end of the first year, there were political reasons too for staging Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus in particular. In 1904 Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree––inspired by Mounet-Sully’s performance with the Comédie Française––was unsuccessful in his attempt to secure a licence from the Lord Chamberlain to stage the play in London. Tree’s informal inquiry led to a 8 Yeats (1989), 36. Yeats did not actually see the production, but he was correct about its importance. See Hall and Macintosh (2005), 458 f. 9 Indeed the Court has even been dubbed London’s outpost for the Abbey by Ben Levitas in a recent (unpublished) paper at a conference at the National Portrait Gallery in June 2005. 10 Synge to Lady Gregory, 13 December 1906 in Saddlemyer (1982), 178. 11 Letter to Murray, 17 March 1903 cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 6. 12 Kiberd (1993), 32–3.

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number of attempts to stage the play. First and most significantly, Yeats seized the opportunity to use the ban as a means of putting the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the theatrical map of the English-speaking world when it opened at the end of the year. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office had no jurisdiction in Dublin; Ireland now had a chance to expose English philistinism for what it was. When Yeats announced the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, he added: Oedipus the King is forbidden in London. A censorship created in the eighteenth century by Walpole, because somebody has [sic] written against election bribery, has been distorted by a puritanism which is not the less an English invention for being a pretended hatred of vice and a real hatred of intellect. Nothing has suffered so many persecutions as the intellect, though it is never persecuted under its own name.13

The banning of Sophocles’ tragedy in England now enabled the Irish to side with the Greeks as champion of the intellect against the English/Roman tyrant. In late 1904 and early 1905, Yeats seems to be attempting to commission both Gilbert Murray and Oliver St John Gogarty for a translation of Sophocles’ play. Murray was working on Euripides at the time and had been since the late 1890s; he found Sophocles conventional in comparison. He had deep misgivings, in particular, about Sophocles’ handling of the incest theme in the Oedipus Tyrannus. He wrote to Yeats, declining his invitation on the grounds that the play was ‘English-French-German . . . all construction and no spirit’ with ‘nothing Irish about it’.14 Gogarty, however, seems to have begun a translation, although Yeats was privately concerned about the archaizing touches––the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’.15 Even though he had solicited Murray, whose translations used poeticizing archaisms in abundance, Yeats was looking for a contemporary, speakable text from the outset. In 1906, Yeats got his friend, William Magee, who wrote under the pseudonym John Eglinton and who was a classics graduate from Trinity, to produce a version. Again, Yeats was worried about the style–– this time it was too ‘elaborate’ for him.16 Magee’s text, along with Robert Gregory’s translation of Antigone, was being regularly reviewed at this time by the Abbey directorate, and both plays were intended for production early in 1907. In the event, however, it was only the Abbey’s parodic Oedipus, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, that opened on 26 January 1907. Later that year on 29 October, Yeats joined other prominent opponents of 13 14 15

Yeats (1962), 131–2. Murray to Yeats, 27 Jan. 1905 in Finneran, Harper, and Murphy (1977), i.145 f. 16 Clark and McGuire (1989), 10. Ibid. 11.

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the British Censor including Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, Synge, and Murray, as a co-signatory to a letter to The Times, in which they highlighted the absurdities of the system of theatre censorship. However, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus was not just invoked in relation to the censorship debate at this time. It also became embroiled in a wider public debate concerning consanguineous sexual relations, which culminated in the passing of The Punishment of Incest Act (1908). Prior to 1908––with the exception of the interregnum years, and in marked contrast to Scotland where incest had been a crime since 1567––incest in England and Wales had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, despite numerous attempts to make it a criminal offence. When a Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons was set up to investigate the state of theatre censorship in Britain, the anxieties concerning incest and the opposition to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office came together in the discussions of Sophocles’ proscribed play.17 From 1907 to 1910, two actors were lined up for the lead role at the Abbey––first in 1907, Ben Iden Payne (already associated with Greek plays in London and shortly in Manchester as well);18 and then late in 1909, Murray Carson was billed to appear as Oedipus in February 1910. Detailed discussion of the set took place at this time: first, concerning the use of Gordon Craig’s screens, which Craig himself vetoed on the grounds that more practice would be needed before they were used in production; and then plans were drawn up to remove the front rows of the stalls to accommodate the chorus.19 All of this activity at the Abbey was played out against a similarly frenetic series of attempts to stage the same play in London. Finally in November 1910 Murray’s translation was granted a licence for performance in England. This, however, did not draw a halt to Yeats’s plans for an Oedipus at the Abbey (indeed the prospect of a tour now made it in some ways more of an option, despite Yeats’s concerns about the quality of the acting). In 1911, Yeats began working with Nugent Monck on the Oedipus; and in the summer, he began making cuts to Jebb’s translation by himself. That it was Jebb’s text he used was not surprising: it was Jebb’s translation that had provided the parallel text for the Cambridge Greek Play production of Oedipus Tyrannus in 1887; and it was available in a convenient edition for the Abbey actors to work with. The quality and clarity of Jebb’s commentary would also have been of genuine value to Yeats as he worked on the translation. Finally, Yeats no doubt felt some natural affinity with Jebb, who was also a Dubliner; and a 17

For further discussion, see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 534–8. Payne went on to join Annie Horniman’s company at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, the first repertory theatre in England, where he staged a number of Greek plays. 19 Clark and McGuire (1989), 16–7. 18

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close look at Yeats’s translation shows that the affinity manifests itself lexically too.20 When Max Reinhardt’s celebrated Oedipus Rex of 1910 was staged at Covent Garden in January 1912 in Murray’s translation, Yeats continued with his own plans and his work on Jebb’s text; and one of Monck’s friends from Norwich, Dr Rex Rynd, who was over in Dublin, helped him with the Greek together with a young Greek scholar named Charles Power. Yeats saw the London production and thought it was ‘wonderful’.21 But this again did not deter him because his project was, after all, very different in conception: his text was to be sparse, whilst Murray’s was languid and beautiful. Shortly after this, it seems, the Abbey project was abandoned. Clark and McGuire mention some rivalry over the lead role; but they don’t identify any one particular reason for this change of heart. There is no mention of an Abbey Oedipus after 18 March 1912, when Yeats wrote to Monck of the possibility of rehearsals starting in May. It seems certain, however, that the May tour of Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex to Dublin’s Royal Theatre scotched the Abbey project. Yeats, together with Lady Gregory and Mahaffy, was among the dignitaries on the first night.22 Dublin had now had its Oedipus, albeit in Murray’s Alma-Tadema-esque translation and in Reinhardt’s Nietzschean-inspired production; and 1912 was patently not the time to mount a ‘speakable’ Oedipus in the narrow confines of the Abbey, where the Dionysiac collective would be well and truly marginalized in the orchestral pit, leaving the Apolline figures to tower over them on the tiny stage above.

T H E 1 9 2 0 s T E XT By 1912, then, Yeats had made changes to Jebb’s text both in terms of its length and its style. He had done little with the odes, except having set them into rough, unrhymed verse; but they were by no means finished. In the early 30s he famously said it was his wife, George, who discovered his text and

20 Ibid. 18 contra Grab (1972). A second edition of the Cambridge Greek Play with Jebb’s prose translation (with verse translations of the odes by Verrall set to music by Stanford) appeared in 1912. For a discussion of the pioneering nature of Jebb’s translation and commentary, see Easterling (2005). 21 Yeats to Lady Gregory, postmark 31 Jan. 1912 cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 33. For an account of the Reinhardt production, see Hall and Macintosh (2005), 522–54. 22 Era, 18/5/12 in the Martin Harvey Papers, Theatre Museum, London.

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suggested he work on it again.23 In some ways, this is misleading because the mythological figure of Oedipus had become increasingly important to Yeats during the course of the 20s. As Bernard O’Donoghue has pointed out, Yeats’s theatrical activity was secondary in many ways to his prose in the 20s ––especially to his work, A Vision which first appeared in 1925 and later, much revised, in 1937.24 Oedipus enjoys a central role in the second edition of A Vision, acting as a kind of counterweight to the figure of Christ: Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus to the wood’s heart until amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, ‘riven by love’, and he sank down soul and body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body . . .25

These parallels between the pagan and Christian worlds were being worked out by Yeats literally during the mid 20s during the composition of his Dionysiac/Christian play, The Resurrection, which he worked on at the same time as he revised Sophocles’ King Oedipus. If Oedipus is elevated by Yeats to the level of Christ in the second version of The Vision because of the manner of his death––horizontal rather than vertical, in the ground rather than in the sky–– his privileging of Oedipus in general is also due to the manner of his leaving Thebes. In Yeats’s version of the Oedipus Tyrannus we find precisely what Yeats designates the ‘heroic act’: . . . an act done because a man is himself, because, being himself, he can ask of other men but room among remembered tragedies; a sacrifice of himself to himself almost . . . So lonely is that ancient act, so great the pathos of its joy.26

The imprint of Lewis Farnell’s Greek Hero Cults and Ideals of Immortality (1921) can be felt here in Yeats’s claim that by ‘being himself’ the hero ‘can ask of other men but room among remembered tragedies’––in other words, gain ‘room’ as a hero among heroes as he attains cult status.27 And when Yeats goes on to describe this elevation to heroic status as ‘a sacrifice of himself to himself almost’, we detect the much longer-standing influence of the Cambridge ritualists on his work––notably Jane Harrison’s Themis (1912),

23 First broadcast on BBC Radio Belfast immediately before the play was broadcast on 8 September 1931, published in Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, 12 Sept. 1931, cited in Clark and McGuire (1989), 4 f. 24 25 O’Donoghue (2006), 110. Yeats (1937), 27. 26 Yeats (1966), 569–70. See Dorn (1984), 63–82 for connections between Oedipus the King and The Resurrection 27 Liebregts (1993), 367.

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and especially Murray’s appended ‘Excursus’, in which the ancient rite of the Year Daemon is held to be the controlling tragic principle. Blindness was always a source of true wisdom for Yeats––the blind poet, Anthony Raftery appears in his work from the 1890s. Now Oedipus’ blindness is a mark that he has acknowledged, in true wisdom, the limits of human knowledge: Those men that in their writing are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupified hearts.28

And in A Vision (1937) Yeats writes of the importance of Oedipus’ mind: [He] knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing and his cursing.29

As a truly cerebral figure (‘[he] knew nothing but his mind’), and equally importantly one who ‘speaks his mind’ and changes kingdoms in the process, Yeats cannot but admire and identify intensely with the Oedipus of the Colonus. Indeed in his rage against his sons, Oedipus becomes a powerful persona for Yeats during the turbulent 20s, when he too raged against developments in the public arena in the newly independent state. The ambiguity of Oedipus––both sinner and saint, swordsman and saint, hunter and hunted––make him the perfect exemplar of the Yeatsian antithesis of mask and anti-mask.30 If Yeats begins to define his public self in the 20s with the assistance of the mask of Oedipus, he was aware of other exciting parallel attempts to do the same in Paris. Indeed, on 19 February 1928 he writes to his wife about Ezra Pound’s assistance to Cocteau with the 1927 revival of his version of Antigone. He suggests that Cocteau’s Antigone would be a perfect third play in a trilogy at the Abbey to accompany his two Oedipus versions.31 What is significant about the Cocteau Antigone (1923) and the Cocteau Oedipus (not La Machine Infernale of 1934 but the libretto for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927) which was subsequently performed as a play in 1937) is that they were both very condensed texts. It was Cocteau’s pared down Antigone which attracted Stravinsky, and which led him to invite Cocteau to write the French version of the libretto for his opera (this was subsequently translated into Latin by Jean Daniélou).32 This is not to say that Yeats was consciously 28

29 Yeats (1957), 370. Yeats (1937), 28. For the duality of Oedipus and its importance to Yeats, see Arkins (1990), 127. Liebregts (1993), 369–71. 31 Clark and McGuire (1989), 14 n. 29. Yeats’s OC dates from Dec. 1926; for the 1927 première, see below pp. 533–4. 32 For details of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, see Walsh (1999). 30

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following Cocteau’s example––on the contrary, both he and Nugent Monck had been determined from the outset to make cuts to Jebb’s translation; and Yeats (in direct imitation of Pater) had advocated condensation and contraction as early as 1899 in ‘The Autumn of the Body’.33 Instead, Yeats’s high Modernist aesthetic at this time, as was the case for Cocteau in France, demands a highly concentrated and streamlined text: one in which the form is so rigid that nothing is allowed to escape its sharply defined, angular contours. As Yeats pointed out, a ‘Greek play, unlike a Shakespearian play, is the exposition of one idea; in the case of King Oedipus, fate closing in upon one man.’34 In 1926 the cuts he makes are even more marked, in line with this lean high Modernist aesthetic: ‘I want to be less literal and more dramatic and modern . . . bare, hard and natural like a saga.’35 When the King Oedipus opened in 1926, it played for one and a half hours, against a set by the director Lennox Robinson, with two Craig-inspired square pillars and curtains (see Figure 23.1). The chorus of five men sang their odes to music by Dr J. F. Larchet from the orchestral pit, whilst the leader (played by J. Stevenson) appeared on stage with the actors. Like Shaw before him, Yeats claimed that he felt that he only understood a Greek chorus after he had attended a Salvation Army meeting in Dublin; and his chorus, unable to dance, sang like liturgical singers and enabled audiences to ‘sit back, and relax . . . [their] strained attention . . . our attention is no longer concentrated upon a single spot, a single man’.36 When we look at the 1928 published text in some detail, the effects of this division between chorus, leader, and Oedipus can be noted absolutely. But as Dorn and Grab have pointed out, the major effect of the staging was to enhance the Yeatsian conception of the hero as one embarked upon a tragic path, in which ‘so lonely is that ancient act, so great the pathos of its joy.’37

T H E 1 9 2 8 P U B L I S H E D T E XT Following the première in 1926, there were further revisions, all working towards cutting away any remaining slack in the text. By the time of the 1927 revival (when it appeared with Oedipus at Colonus), Lady Gregory had 33

34 Watson (2006), 48. Yeats (1987), 197. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear, 7/12/1926 in Foster (2003), 338. 36 Yeats (1987), 197. Cf. Yeats’s comments in the Preface to the play (1928), repr. Clark and McGuire (1989), p. 104: ‘The main purpose of the chorus is to preserve the mood while it rests the mind by change and attention.’ For Shaw, see Preface to Major Barbara. 37 Grab (1972), Dorn (1984), Yeats (1966), 570. 35

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Fig. 23.1. Set for the 1926 Abbey Theatre production of Yeats’s King Oedipus, from Theatre Arts Monthly, March 1927, 216.

worked with Yeats (with the aid of Paul Masqueray’s 1922 French translation) to give ‘more direct speech and better sound’.38 As Yeats commented, happily acknowledging Augusta Gregory’s role, ‘with your help I have made the Edipus a masterpiece of English prose.’39 When we turn to the published text, we find (in the words of Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch, who worked on it for a number of years for their production in Stratford, Ontario in the 50s): ‘a very aristocratic, but austere and uncompromising document, it treads barefoot over steep sharp rocks.’40 However, for all its lapidary quality, Yeats’s version is also lithe and supple like a well-tuned athlete; capable of flexibility as well as taut muscular contraction. The sense of movement comes about in large measure because of the brevity of the sentences (where Jebb will use a subordinating clause, Yeats will favour a new sentence). Consider this example, which contains that wellknown phrase ‘amid our troubles’. It occurs in the scene with Creon, when Oedipus asks why nothing was done to find Laius’ killers immediately. Creon replies in the Yeats version: Such things were indeed guessed at, but Laius once dead no avenger arose. We were amid our troubles. 38 39 40

Lady Gregory’s journal entry for 2 Feb. 1927 in Clark and McGuire (1989), 37. Reported in Lady Gregory’s journal, 11 Feb. 1927 in Clark and McGuire (1989), 38. Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch (1955), 120.

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[Cf. Jebb: Such things were surmised; but Laius once slain, amid our troubles, no avenger rose.]41

We see here one important way in which Yeats works. By shortening sentences, and avoiding hypotaxis, he alters the pace and direction of the exchange: the trajectory of Jebb’s sentence (and the long breath that it would require of an actor) is broken by Yeats into smaller units, as he translates Jebb’s line into what is roughly a trimeter, a tetrameter, and a concluding trimeter. As Vendler points out, Yeats’s adoption of the half-epic hexameter line in his poetry ‘became one of his most powerful poetic symbols of a natural Irish aristocracy’; and with the trimeters comes pace.42 Even in Yeats’s prose, it seems, the line is working in rhythmically analogous ways to his poetry; and it is undoubtedly this regular loose trimeter substructure that makes this prose translation feel so poetic. But the major change effected by Yeats in this sentence is, of course, the change in emphasis, which shifts Jebb’s subordinating clause to the end of the speech. Without this simple alteration, the phrase ‘amid our troubles’––now in a sentence on its own and resonant not only because of its topicality but also because of its new positioning–– would never have gained prominence. Another reason why Yeats’s text feels lean, fit, and active in comparison with Jebb’s is because it is verb-based. Often Yeats takes a noun clause from Jebb and turns it into a verb clause. A simple but effective verb-based sentence appears in the scene between Creon and Oedipus: King Laius was our king before you came to pilot us [Cf. Jebb’s: Laius, king (o¯nax), was lord (he¯ge¯mo¯n) of our land before thou wast pilot (apeuthynein).]43

By removing the honorific title from Creon’s address to Oedipus, and by making the noun clause into a verb clause (‘you came to pilot us’), Yeats has managed to confer upon his Oedipus an increased sense of purpose and dynamism. Sometimes the latent performability of the text comes about from Yeats’s use of a single arresting verb, as when the Priest announces that: . . . the city stumbles towards death, hardly able to raise up its head.

41

Yeats (1952), 478; Jebb (2004), 29; OCT 126–7 (my emphases). Vendler (2006), 79. The Athenaeum, 26/4/1884, 531–2 considered Jebb’s translation ‘clear, racy, idiomatic’. For comment on how Jebb would have reacted to this extraordinary claim, see Easterling (2005), 31. 43 Yeats (1952), 477; Jebb (2004), 25; OCT 103–4 (my emphases). 42

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[Cf. Jebb’s: For the city, as thou thyself seest, is now too sorely vexed (saleuei), and can no more lift her head from beneath the angry waves of death].44

Yeats has contracted a complex nexus of images in Sophocles, which combine emotional and physical turmoil and drowning in the sea, into a single landbased image which achieves speakability and cries out for performance: the suppliants are almost urged to embody the drooping, dying city as they enact its faltering gait. A similarly effective condensation and reordering of Jebb’s text appears in the Priest’s appeal to Oedipus for his assistance: . . . whether you find it by your power as a man, or because, being near the gods, a God has whispered you. [Cf. Jebb: . . . whether by the whisper of a god thou knowest it, or haply as in the power of man.]45

What Yeats has done here is to convert ‘the whisper of a god’ into the more active ‘a God has whispered you’ (note too the perfect elision of the preposition ‘to’, which allows the sibilance of the line to echo to the end uninterrupted). As with the previous example, the important part of Yeats’s sentence is reserved for the end, for emphasis. Although these examples come from the first part of the play, the sense of movement and action persists throughout Yeats’s text and is very often a result of his putting the verbs to the test. Another very important feature of Yeats’s style, and one that has undoubtedly contributed to its durability, is the combination of a lack of specificity in general, together with an occasional specificity at particular points in the text, which serves to make the text very concrete and immediate. As Guthrie and Moiseiwitch so readily relished and exploited, Yeats’s version is set in neither Thebes nor Dublin; we are nowhere in particular, and this enabled them to transport Oedipus into a mythopoeic sphere absolutely. But alongside this sense of being everywhere and nowhere in particular is the kind of detail that Guthrie and Moiseiwitch imply in their description of a text that ‘treads barefoot over steep sharp rocks’. One such specificity is almost Homeric in its effect: when Jocasta tells Oedipus of Laius’ binding of their child’s feet, she says he ‘had it thrown by sure hands upon a trackless mountain.’ The ‘sure hands’ calls to mind the fossilized Homeric epithet and replaces Jebb’s literal translation of Sophocles’ text ‘by others’ hands’ (allo¯n chersin).46 The Homeric echo is, perhaps, not 44

Yeats (1952), 475; Jebb (2004), 15; OCT 22–23 (my emphasis). Yeats (1952), 476; Jebb (2004), 17; OCT 42–3 (my emphasis). 46 Yeats (1952), 495; Jebb (2004), 101; OCT 719. On specificity in Homeric simile, see Silk (2004), 61–9. 45

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surprising given Yeats’s deep admiration for Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), with its own evident, though probably unconscious, debt to Lang, Leaf, and Myers’s translation of the Iliad.47 As with the Homeric epithet, Yeats’s adjective conveys seemingly redundant detail. Yet those ‘sure hands’ by their very specificity draw attention to themselves and invite multiple meanings: first the sense of parents’, and especially a mother’s, shocking indifference to the act of abandoning their child; but also, because of the dramatic irony here, the realization that these hands are both ‘sure’ (because they convey the baby to another pair of hands rather than abandon it) and ‘not sure’ because that other pair of hands will lead the child ultimately to his downfall. Jebb’s frequent adoption of the term ‘mouth’ in this middle part of the play is readily borrowed by Yeats;48 and is taken further by him when Jocasta is on her way to leave offerings on Apollo’s altar she tells us that Oedipus is at the mercy of every mouth that speaks terror. [Cf. Jebb’s: . . . is at the will of the speaker, if he speaks terrors].49

As Jebb’s literal translation is replaced by Yeats’s surprising, but very powerful, metonymical substitution of the source of the sound for its subject, we have another example of how Yeats makes his text vivid, even graphic here, almost conjuring to the mind’s eye and into the Theban context the subject of Edvard Munch’s Scream (1893). It would seem that a prominent feature of Jebb’s style in general has led to this sharply delineated image of an off-stage haunted Oedipus at this precise point in Yeats’s text. The power and resonance in Yeats’s version come frequently, as in his poetry, from effective use of repetition and echo, and very often repetition of the verbs; and this undoubtedly brings a sense of formal patterning, almost incantatory in effect on occasions, to his prose as well as to his verse. The famous alliterative Yeatsian interpolation in the parodos is representative in this respect: ‘For death is all the Fashion now, till even Death be dead.’50 But the ritual potential in Yeats’s play is not confined to his odes alone. Listen too to the final words of Oedipus’ tirade against Tiresias: Were you not an old man, you had already learnt how bold you are and learnt it to your cost!51

Oedipus’ hauteur is caught here in the ‘aristocratic’ six-syllable units with 47 49 50 51

48 Lang, Leaf, and Myers (1889). Cf. Jebb (2004), 89, 113, 129. Yeats (1952), 500; Jebb (2004), 125; OCT 917. Yeats (1952), 480. On repetition in the poetry generally, see P. McDonald (2002), 35–50. Ibid. 486.

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their echoing verb (‘Were you not an old man, you had already learnt . . . and learnt it to your cost’) which frame the third implied ‘trimeter’ with its silent third foot (‘how bold you are’) that is hammered home in his vehemence. But Oedipus’ ire is no match for Tiresias’ rhetorical skill; he too knows how to make verbal repetition work; and as the ending of his counterblast so amply demonstrates, he does so with a sleight of hand that Oedipus can’t match: . . . for no one of living men shall be crushed as you will be crushed.52

The major change effected by Yeats to Sophocles’ and in turn to Jebb’s text, as Dorn and Grab have pointed out,53 is to isolate Oedipus from his Theban context altogether. This was dictated in part by the confines of the Abbey stage, which meant that the chorus of five were down in the pit and only the Leader remained on stage. However, the fact that this limit worked in accordance with Yeats’s conception of Oedipus is more than evident from the text itself. This is an Oedipus who commands the stage through self-referential language––a language that is deictic, gestural, and highly performative. Yeats’s Oedipus uses the first person where Sophocles generalizes: ‘You are minded to betray me and Thebes?’ (cf. Jebb ‘. . . art minded to betray us (he¯mas) and to destroy the state’).54 Like Yeats’s Cuchulain, Oedipus pronounces himself hero of men from the outset: How can I being the man I am, being King Oedipus, do other than all I know?55

This is pure Yeats not least with its strict framing six-syllable units (‘How can I being the man . . . do other than all I know?) and its centrally important and metrically irregular octosyllabic unit (‘I am, being King Oedipus’). But it is also more literally ‘pure’ Yeats as interpolation, with its insistance upon the hero’s accession to heroic status in his first speech in the play. When Yeats’s Priest goes on to describe Oedipus as ‘being near the gods’ (another decidedly non-Sophoclean interpolation) the hero’s special status is being amplified yet again. Whilst Yeats’s choral odes are generally detached from the previous episodes––cuts are made to any reference (often in the Sophoclean epode) to events in the previous scene56 ––when the chorus do refer to Oedipus, and they do so indirectly in the third and fourth stasima, their comments serve to 52

53 Ibid. 486 (my emphases). Grab (1972), Dorn (1984). Yeats (1952), 483; Jebb (2004), 55; OCT 331. For third-person address in tragedy and Irish tragedy generally, see Macintosh (1994), 105–25. 55 Yeats (1952), 475. 56 e.g. in the first stasimon, the reference to Oedipus is omitted; and at the end of the third, the reference to Laius is similarly absent, 54

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enhance his heroic status. Yeats introduces ‘an ambitious man’ into Sophocles’ generalizing comments about civic life: Yet an ambitious man may lift up a whole State And in his death be blessed, in his life fortunate.57

And in his fourth, very truncated stasimon, he interpolates: A famous man, deep-thoughted, and his body strong, Be honoured in dance and song.58

With the wonderfully Yeatsian (almost Hopkinsian) compound ‘deepthoughted’, combined with the ‘body strong’, (note again the hexameter and the trimeter), the chorus bring absolutely into their midst a physically forceful, theatrically real, and intensely cerebral hero. This is Oedipus as mind and body; saint and swordsman. We have therefore a magnification of Knox’s Sophoclean hero––intransigent, yes; monomaniacal and elevated beyond mere mortal status from the outset. This is not an Oedipus who regrets his life: no Yeatsian hero could, and so the Chorus, instead of Oedipus, are given the line in the kommos: ‘It had indeed been better if that herdsman had never taken your feet out of the spancel or brought you back to life.’59

A F T E R L I F E I N T H E T H E AT R E But how did this version work in theatres beyond the Abbey, theatres where there was no need for the chorus to be reduced to five members and to be confined to the orchestra pit? We have seen how its deictic, gestural language and its muscular syntax cry out for performance. Additionally, it is important to stress how the very bareness of the text has enabled actors to work upon it: as the metaphor of the text as a ‘workout’ from The New York Times, with which I began the chapter, implies. One very good example of this potentiality inherent in the pared-down script is the cry of recognition in Yeats’s version. Yeats takes his cue from Jebb and translates the Greek as ‘O! O!’; but Jebb had included the exclamatory spelling of ‘oh!’ with the ‘h’ (compare the Watling translation, ‘Oh God’).60 Simple as this difference between Yeats and Jebb is, in practice it makes a very big difference. By omitting the ‘h’, Yeats is implying pure sound: an open, hollow, primal scream rather than a desperate 57 60

Yeats (1952), 499. Ibid. 510.

58

Ibid. 506.

59

Ibid. 514, Knox (1964).

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cri de coeur of any potentially self-pitying kind. Yeats makes very extensive cuts to the kommos at the end of the play because his Oedipus must not show self-pity or be pitied on any account. This magnificent potentiality of the Yeatsian ‘O, O!’ was precisely what Laurence Olivier appreciated when he took the part in 1945 at the New Theatre, under the direction of Michel Saint-Denis. Olivier gave a consummate performance as the lonely hero pushed beyond the bounds of normal human endurance. When Olivier’s Oedipus discovered the truth about himself, he emitted his (now famous) primal scream (in direct imitation, we are told, of the wailing of ermine entrapped by the barbarous practices of huntsmen). He says: After going though all the vowel sounds, I hit upon ‘Er’. This felt more agonised and the originality of it made the audience a ready partner in this feeling.61

This cry has gone down in the annals of British theatre history and it is no doubt the sparseness, and very openness, of Yeats’s text that made that possible. For the critic Kenneth Tynan, Olivier’s Oedipus cried ‘a new born baby’s wail’;62 and in many ways Olivier was offering audiences Freud’s Oedipus, now in 1945 being crudely wrenched anew from his mother’s womb. Olivier, like Tyrone Guthrie, had regularly consulted Ernest Jones on matters of psychology in relation to Hamlet and Othello.63 Now it seemed his Oedipus was being subjected to Freudian insights. That it was this moment from the production in particular that entered the annals of British theatre history, is perhaps not surprising. For Olivier’s ‘wail’ not only anticipates the Beckettian scream; it also recalls Kleinian psychoanalytical theory, in which the first and crucial trauma occurs on the departure from the birth canal. Yeats’s text permitted this psychoanalytical reading in part because of its unerring focus upon Oedipus and its marginalization of the chorus which allows Oedipus in Olivier’s interpretation to become Everyman. But it was also sufficiently flexible, and as we have seen sufficiently patterned, to become an archetypally ritualistic drama under Guthrie’s direction as well. In this sense the Yeats text was subjected equally effectively to the two most influential theoretical approaches in the twentieth-century readings of Sophocles’ play: the Freudian and ritual readings respectively. Olivier’s performance marks both the climax and the end of the Freudian tradition in many ways. Since Francis Fergusson used the Olivier production as the starting point for his The Idea of a Theater (1949), the 1945 production may be said to have 61

Olivier (1982), 154.

62

Shellard (1999), 3–5.

63

Forsyth (1976), 165.

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guaranteed the popularization in the English-speaking world of the ritual reading of tragedy as well. In many ways, Fergusson’s theory of the tragic hero as ritual scapegoat extended Murray’s ritual readings of Euripides’ plays to Sophocles; and, as his preface makes clear, his theory came out of watching Olivier play Oedipus using Yeats’s text.64 If Fergusson popularized the ritual theory of tragedy (and provided an agonistic partner against which Raymond Williams was later to spar),65 when Guthrie’s production of Yeats’s text appeared in Stratford, Ontario, in 1954, audiences saw the main tenets of the Cambridge ritualists fully realized on the stage. Indeed, it would seem that Guthrie was more than aware of Fergusson on tragedy (or should we say, Fergusson on Yeats’s version of Sophocles’ tragedy). He writes: The theater is the direct descendant of fertility rites, war dances and all the corporate ritual expressions by means of which our primitive ancestors, often wiser than we, sought to relate themselves to God, or the gods, the great abstract forces which cannot be apprehended by reason, but in whose existence reason compels us to have faith.66

Guthrie refers to Oedipus in particular as ‘the sacred drama of Oedipus Rex . . . [in which the actor] impersonates a symbol of sacrifice.’67 Both Guthrie and Moiseiwitch had been to see the Old Vic Company’s Oedipus Rex in 1945––Guthrie himself would have directed had he not objected to Olivier’s suggestion to play Puff in The Critic the same night in the double bill. On seeing Olivier in the final scene with realistic blood pouring down his face (see Figure 23.2), Guthrie was determined to direct the scene himself and to do it differently. According to Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch, ‘the audience must be prepared to enter into a world of symbols exactly analogous to the experience of dreaming.’68 The film version of the production of 1956 begins with a narrator explaining how the play the audience is about to witness re-enacts the sacrifice of a king, just as the priest re-enacts in symbolic mode Christ’s Last Supper during the eucharist. In an overtly metatheatrical gesture, the actor picks up his mask and invites the audience to imagine the studio lights as the sun, the camera as ‘eyes’, and he conjures before their eyes a smoke-enshrouded set from which the moaning suppliants emerge. In Guthrie’s stridently anti-realistic production, the masked Oedipus 64 Fergusson (1949), 10: ‘They must have been moved by the perennial vitality of the great role itself, which Olivier discovered . . . If the chorus, the other characters, and the rhythms of the play as a whole had been equally well understood, we might have enjoyed a direct perception of Sophocles’ play: i.e. the performable rhythm of life and action which may still touch us though originally realized in the customs, beliefs, and ritual forms of antiquity.’ (Fergusson’s emphasis) 65 66 67 Williams (1966). Guthrie (1960), 314. Ibid. 313. 68 Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch (1955), 154.

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Fig. 23.2. Laurence Olivier as Oedipus in the Old Vic Company production at the New Theatre, 1945.

doesn’t change his mask in the final scene but merely wears a gauze veil over it; and when the daughters come, they wrap themselves round him in a ritual dance, ‘symbolically washing in his blood, [in . . . ] a purification of ritual.’69 Yeats’s blinded Oedipus has only just emerged from the palace proudly announcing to the chorus that it . . . was my own hand alone, wretched that I am, that quenched these eyes.70

With Yeats’s inspired choice of the verb ‘quench’––with its multiple connotations of extinguishing something on fire and cooling with liquid and thus soothing and satisfying––we see how Guthrie’s image of Oedipus’ daughters bathing in their father’s blood is also suggested on the lexical level as well. For Yeats, as for Guthrie (and we could add Fergusson and all those for whom tragedy is a ritual enactment of the Year Daemon), death in tragedy is really 69

Davies (1955), 35.

70

Yeats (1952), 513.

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Fig. 23.3. Douglas Campbell as Oedipus with chorus in the film of the Stratford (Ontario) Festival production, dir. Tyrone Guthrie, 1957.

no death at all: it is a sacrifice of the individual which brings about renewal for all. When Guthrie’s mythopoeic production, with its striking, vast masks and kothornoi, and occasionally measured and deliberate pace, was put on film in 1957, it guaranteed that Yeats’s Oedipus became international property (see Figure 23.3). Guthrie’s Oedipus, in marked contrast to Olivier’s piercing scream, gives out a low moan (interestingly also finding sufficient freedom in Yeats’s ‘O, O!’ to emit ‘Ai––eee’) before withdrawing in the fading light. The final scene is played out in half-light as the audience participate and share in Oedipus’ new, deeper insight into reality. Departing from both the Sophocles and Yeats texts, Creon orders Oedipus to ‘Go!’. There is no room here for mere pity: the chorus retreat into the shadows, leaving Oedipus to fumble his way down the steps towards the camera, heavily obscured, almost blotted out as if in silhouette, by the half-light, before disappearing out of sight entirely. This is a far cry from the 1928 text, where Oedipus (as with Sophocles) is sent back into the palace, followed by Creon and the children. Guthrie is offering the audience not only a greater magnification of the Yeatsian isolated

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Modernist hero; he has also translated Sophocles/Yeats’s tragic character into the (Senecan) ritual scapegoat absolutely.

C O N C LU S I O N Yeats’s text would seem to have endured even when the figure of Oedipus has become marginalized on the modern stage. There is a real sense in which the figure of Oedipus, especially in the post-Freudian world, has proved problematic in just the way that Modernism and Yeats himself have often proved problematic in the postmodern world: all are identified in varying ways with dubious politics and dangerous ideas of heroism.71 The dictat in Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music that the Dionysiac must ‘finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it’, explains the composer’s obsession with form in his neoclassical period.72 In many ways, Yeats’s text made the Dionysiac of his earlier work ‘submit’ to Apolline law here; and Guthrie’s production exploits the Apolline dominance absolutely in designs that are strikingly evocative of those by both Theodore Stravinsky and later Cocteau for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex.73 But Yeats’s Oedipus has clearly endured in part because he is not Apolline enough; the poet’s own identification with the figure of Oedipus meant that high Modernist formal distancing was ultimately impossible to achieve in this case, even if it had ever been entirely desirable. The ‘speakability’ of the text is certain; so too is its inherent theatricality. It has also endured because of its minimalist nature: its denial of a Theban context has allowed it to lend itself most readily to universalizing interpretations of tragedy, such as Guthrie’s in Stratford, Ontario; and its marginalized chorus has also enabled Freudian readings of the hero to be projected upon the text, as was the case with the Olivier/Michel Saint-Denis production. Pared down, gaunt even on occasions, Yeats’s text has turned out to be prescient rather than problematic, gesturing in the direction of Beckett, of Pinter even, but without resorting to their demotic counterpoints. For this reason, it can remain the Oedipus of choice even at a time when heroes have no place; it is ‘modern’, yet distanced, ‘amid our time’ rather than ‘of’ our time. Indeed, this chapter could have borrowed for its title the preposition and the 71

McCormack (2005). Stravinsky (1947), 80–1. It is generally held that this work was in fact ghostwritten and not by Stravinsky himself. 73 Walsh (1999), 35 f. The 1960 Santa Fe Production, conducted by Stavinsky, with Paul Franke as Oedipus and Mary MacKenzie as Jocasta, appears to have copied Moiseiwitsch’s designs absolutely (see the photo in Stravinsky (1947), 35). 72

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possessive pronoun (‘amid our’) from that resonant phrase, with its uncharacteristically specific application to the 20s troubles in Ireland. As a text that is ‘amid ’ rather than ‘of ’ our time, it remains ‘out of time’––an adopted anachronism; a kind of virtual otherworld, where heroes are permissible because aspirational and conceptual, but resolutely not of the here and now.* * Earlier versions of this paper were given as papers at UCD and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 2007. I am most grateful for comments from members of the audience on both occasions. Especial thanks to both Bill McCormack and Michael Silk for their support and criticisms.

REFERENCES Arkins, B. (1990), Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats, Gerards Cross. Clark, D. R. and McGuire, J. B. (1989), The Writing of Sophocles’ King Oedipus, Philadelphia. Davies, R. (1955), ‘King Oedipus’, in Davies et al. (1955), 31–43. –––– Guthrie, T., Neel, B., and Moiseiwitsch, T. (1955), Thrice The Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d: A Record of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Canada 1955, Toronto. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane, Minneapolis. Dorn, K. (1984), Players and Painted Stage: The Theatre of W. B. Yeats, Brighton. Easterling, P. (2005), ‘ “The Speaking Page”: Reading Sophocles with Jebb’, in C. Stray (ed.), The Owl of Minerva: The Cambridge Praelections of 1906. PCPhS Suppl. 28: 25–46. Ellmann, R. (1987), Oscar Wilde, Harmondsworth. Farnell, L. (1921), Greek Hero Cults and Ideals of Immortality, Oxford. Fergusson, F. (1949), The Idea of a Theater, Princeton. Finneran, R. J., Mill Harper, G., Murphy, W. M. (1977) (eds.), Letters to W. B. Yeats, London. Forsyth, J. (1976), Tyrone Guthrie: The Authorised Biography, London. Foster, R. (2003), W. B. Yeats: A Life II. The Arch-Poet, Oxford. Grab, F. (1972), ‘Yeats’ King Oedipus’, Journal of English and German Philology 71: 336– 54. Grove (2001) = The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 29 vols, 2nd ed., London. Guthrie, T. (1960), A Life in the Theatre, London. –––– and Moiseiwitsch, T. (1955), ‘The Production of King Oedipus’, in Davies et al. (1955), 111–78. Hall, E. and Macintosh, F. (2005), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914, Oxford.

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Harrison, J. (1912), Themis, Cambridge. Howes, M. and Kelly, J. (2006) (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, Cambridge. Jebb, R. C. (1885) (ed.), Sophocles. The Oedipus Tyrannus, Cambridge. –––– (1887), The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles performed at Cambridge November 22–26, 1887. With a translation in prose by R. C. Jebb . . . and a translation of the songs in verse . . . by A. W. Verrall, Cambridge. –––– (1912), The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles as performed at Cambridge, November 22–26, 1887, 1912. With a translation in prose by the late Sir R. C. Jebb . . . and a translation of the songs of the chorus in verse . . . by the late A. W. Verrall, Cambridge. –––– (2004), Sophocles: Plays. Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. P. E. Easterling and J. Rusten, London. Kiberd, D. (1993), Synge and the Irish Language, 2nd ed., Dublin and London. Knox, B. M. W. (1964), The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Lang, A., Leaf, W. and Myers, E. (1889), Iliad, London. Liebregts, P. Th. M. G. (1993), Centaurs in the Twilight: W. B. Yeats’ Use of the Classical Tradition, Amsterdam and Atlanta. McCormack, W. J. (2005), Blood Kindred: W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics, London. McDonald, M. and Walton, J. M. (2002) (eds.), Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, with an Introduction by Declan Kiberd, London. McDonald, P. (2002), Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill, Oxford. Macintosh, F. (1994), Dying Acts; Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama, Cork. –––– (2004), ‘Oedipus in the East End: from Freud to Berkoff’, in Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (eds.), Dionysus Since 69 (Oxford), 313–28. –––– (2007), ‘Filicide versus Parricide: Medea and Oedipus on the Modern Stage’, in S. Annes Brown and C. Silverstone (eds.), Tragedy in Transition, Oxford. Mahon, D. (2005), Oedipus: A Version of King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus. Old Castle, Co. Meath, Rep. Ireland. O’Donoghue, B. (2006), ‘Yeats and the Drama’, in Howes and Kelly (2006), 101–14. Olivier, L. (1982), Confessions of an Actor, London. Perris, S. (2007), ‘Dionysus the Leprechaun: Genre, Identity, and Parody in Derek Mahon’s Bacchae’ (forthcoming). Saddlemyer, A. (1982) (ed.), Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge, Gerards Cross. Shellard, D. (1999), British Theatre Since the War, New Haven, CT, and London. Silk, M. (2004), Homer The Iliad, 2nd ed., Cambridge. Stravinksy, I. (1947), Poetics of Music: In the Form of Six Letters, Oxford. Vendler, H. (2006), ‘The Later Poetry’, in Howes and Kelly (2006), 77–100. Walsh, S. (1999), Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934, London.

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Watson, G. (2006), ‘Yeats, Victorianism and the 1890s’, in Howes and Kelly (2006), 36–58. Williams, R. (1966), Modern Tragedy, London. Yeats, W. B. (1926), A Vision, London. –––– (1937), A Vision, 2nd rev. ed., London. –––– (1952), Collected Plays, 2nd ed., London. –––– (1957), The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by P. Allt and R. K. Alspach, London. –––– (1962), Explorations, London. –––– (1966), The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by R. K. Alspach, London. –––– (1987), ‘W. B. Yeats’ Unpublished Talk on his Version of King Oedipus Broadcast from the BBC Belfast Studio on 8 September 1931’, ed. K. Dorn in W. Gould (ed.), Yeats Annual No. 5 (London), 196–9. –––– (1989), Letters to the New Island, eds. G. Bornstein and H. Witemeyer, New York.

List of Oliver Taplin’s Publications M O N O G R A PH S 1. The Stagecraft of Aeschylus. The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977; reissued as a Clarendon Paperback in 1989). 2. Greek Tragedy in Action (London and Berkeley, 1978; 2nd ed. London, 2003). Translations: Greek (Athens, 1988); Japanese (Tokyo, 1991); Polish (Warsaw, 2005); Chapter 10 reprinted in E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1983), 1–12. 3. (with B. Rubens), An Odyssey Round Odysseus (London, 1989). 4. Greek Fire (London and New York, 1990). Translations: Dutch (Utrecht, 1990); Portuguese (1990); French (Paris, 1990); German (Stuttgart, 1991); Greek (Athens, 1993). 5. Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford, 1992; reprinted in paperback in 1994). 6. Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Tragedy through Vase-Paintings (Oxford, 1993; reprinted in paperback in 1994). 7. Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Paintings of the Fourth Century (Los Angeles, 2007).

( C O - ) E D I T E D WO R K S 8. OMNIBUS, issues 1–3 (Founder Editor), 10–11, 18–19, 28–29, 37–38. 9. The Collected Essays of Colin Macleod (Oxford, 1983). 10. Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds. A New Perspective (overall editor and contributor of ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–17 and ‘The Springs of the Muses: Homer and Related Poetry’, pp. 22–57) (Oxford, 2000; reissued as two paperbacks in 2001). 11. (with E. Hall and F. Macintosh), Medea in Performance, 1500–2000 (Oxford, 2000). 12. (series editor, with R. Smith and S. Price), Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation (Oxford, 2004– ). 13. (with F. Macintosh, P. Michelakis, and E. Hall), Agamemnon in Performance (458bc to ad 2004) (Oxford, 2005). 14. (with A. Wrigley) (forthcoming), Pronomos: His Vase and Its World (Oxford).

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A RT I C L E S 15. ‘Significant Actions in Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, Greek, Roman & Byzantine Studies 12 (1971), 25–44. 16. ‘Aeschylean Silences and Silences in Aeschylus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972), 57–98. 17. ‘The Title of the Prometheus Desmotes’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 95 (1975), 184–6. 18. ‘Χορο& and the Structure of Post-Classical Tragedy’, Liverpool Classical Monthly 1 (1976), 47–50. 19. ‘Did Greek Dramatists Write Stage Instructions?’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 23 (1977), 21–32. 20. ‘Yielding to Forethought. Sophocles’ Ajax’, in W. Burkert et al. (eds.), Arktouros [Festschrift for Bernard Knox] (Berlin/New York, 1978), 122–9. 21. ‘The Shield of Achilles within the Iliad ’, Greece & Rome 27 (1980), 1–21; reprinted in Homer (Wege der Forschung) II: Die Dichtung und ihre Deutung (Darmstadt, 1991), in I. McAuslan and P. Walcot (eds.), Homer (Oxford, 1998), 96–115, and in D. Cairns (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford, 2001), 342–64. 22. ‘Tragedy and Trugedy’, Classical Quarterly ns 33 (1983), 331–3. 23. ‘Sophocles in his Theatre’, in Sophocle, Entretiens Hardt vol. 29 (Geneva, 1983), 155–83. 24. ‘Lyric Dialogue and Dramatic Construction in Later Sophocles’, Dioniso 55 (1984/5), 115–22. 25. ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986), 163–74; German version, with minor additions, in WJbb nf 12 (1986), 57–71; reprinted in E. Segal (ed.), Oxford Readings in Aristophanes (Oxford, 1996), 9–28. 26. ‘Homer’, in J. Boardman (et al.) (eds.), The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford, 1986), 50–77. 27. ‘Homer’s Use of Achilles’ Earlier Campaigns in the Iliad ’, in J. Boardman and C. Vaphopoulou-Richardson (eds.), Chios: A Conference at the Homereion in Chios (Oxford, 1986), 15–19. 28. ‘Phallology, Phlyakes, Iconography and Aristophanes’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 33 (1987), 92–104; also (with minor additions) Dioniso 57 (1987), 95–109. 29. ‘The Mapping of Sophocles’ Philoctetes’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 34 (1988), 69–77; Italian version in Scena e spettacolo nell’antichità (Florence, 1989), 165–78. 30. ‘Satyrs Re-Erected at Delphi’, in III and IV International Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama (Athens, 1989), 165–9. 31. ‘Agamemnon’s Role in the Iliad ’, in C. Pelling (ed.), Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1990), 60–82.

550

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32. ‘The Earliest Quotation of the Iliad?’, in E. Craik (ed.), Owls to Athens [Festschrift for Sir Kenneth Dover] (Oxford, 1990), 109–12. 33. ‘Auletai and Auletrides in Greek Comedy and Comic Vase-Paintings’, NAC Studi Ticinesi 20 (1991), 31–48. 34. ‘Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Derek Walcott’s Homer’, Arion 3rd series, no. 2 (1991), 213–26; reprinted in K. King (ed.), Homer (New York and London), 1994, 311–23. 35. ‘Satyrs on the Borderline: Trackers in the Development of Tony Harrison’s Theatre Work’, in N. Astley (ed.), Tony Harrison (Newcastle, 1991), 458–64. 36. ‘The New Choregos Vase’, Pallas 38 (1992), 139–51. 37. (with P. Wilson), ‘The “Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39 (1993), 169–80. 38. ‘Do the “Phylax Vases” Have Bearings on Athenian Comedy and the Polis?’, in A. Sommerstein (ed.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, 1993), 527–44. 39. ‘Paratragedy in Comedy and in Comic Vase-Paintings’, in E. Pöhlmann and W. Gauer (eds.), Griechische Klassik (Nürnberg, 1994), 111–14. 40. ‘The Beauty of the Ugly’, in A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman (Malibu, 1994), 15–27. 41. ‘Opening Performance: Closing Texts?’ (F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture), Essays in Criticism 45 (1995), 93–120; translated in Ινδικτο 5 (1996), 141–78. 42. ‘Greek Theatre’ = Chapter 1 of J. Russell Brown (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre (Oxford, 1995), 13–48. 43. ‘Comedy and the Tragic’, in M. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford, 1996), 188–202. 44. ‘The Pictorial Record’, in P. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997), 69–90. 45. ‘The Chorus of Mams’, in S. Byrne (ed.), Tony Harrison, Loiner (Oxford, 1997), 171–84. 46. ‘Narrative Variation in Vase-Paintings and Tragedy: the Example of Dirke’, Antike Kunst 41 (1998), 33–9. 47. ‘Spreading the Word Through Performance’, in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999), 33–57. 48. ‘Greek With Consequence’, Classical Association Presidential Address (London, 1999). 49. ‘The Rebirth of Ancient Tragedy in the Modern Theatre’, in P. Mavromoustakos (ed.), Productions of Ancient Greek Drama in Europe in Modern Times (Athens, 1999), 37–42. 50. ‘Contemporary Poetry and Classics’, in T. P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2002), 1–19. 51. ‘An Academic in the Rehearsal Room’, in J. Barsby (ed.), Greek and Roman Drama: Translation and Performance, Drama Band 12 (Stuttgart, 2002), 7–22. 52. ‘A Word of Consolation in Iliad 24. 614’, Studi italiani di filologia classica 21 (2003), 24–7.

List of Oliver Taplin’s Publications

551

53. ‘Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney’s, and Some Other Recent Half-Rhymes’, in E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley (eds.), Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millenium (Oxford, 2004), 145–67. 54. ‘The Harrison Version. So Long Ago That It’s Become a Song?’, in Agamemnon in Performance (= no. 13 above), 235–51. 55. ‘Greek Tragedy, Chekhov and Being Remembered’, Arion 3rd series, no. 13 (2006), 51–65. 56. ‘Aeschylus’ Persai––the Entry of Tragedy into the Celebratory Culture of the 470s?’, in F. Cairns and V. Liapis (eds.), Dionysalexandros [Festschrift for A. F. Garvie] (Swansea, 2006), 1–10. 57. ‘A New Pair of Pairs: Tragic Witnessess in Western Greek Vase-Painting’, in C. Kraus, S. Goldhill, H. Foley, and J. Elsner (eds.), Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature (Oxford, 2007), 177–96. 58. ‘Some Assimilations of the Homeric Simile in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry’, in B. Graziosi and E. Greenwood (eds.), Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (Oxford, 2007), 177–90.

S E L E C T F U RT H E R P U B L I C AT I O N S 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

Today’s Oresteia, published for Channel 4 (October, 1983). ‘The Place of Antigone’. Omnibus 7 (March, 1984). Introduction to a new Japanese translation of Aeschylus (Tokyo, 1990). Programme notes for The Thebans, RSC (Stratford, 1991; London, 1992). Extract from ‘Wanderings of Odysseus’, in Dialogos 1 (1994), 77–80; also in G. Steiner (ed.), Homer in English (London, 1996), 339–41. ‘Putting on the Dog (Les Atrides, dir. by A. Mnouchkine, Vincennes (1991)/Bradford (1992)’, Arion 3rd series, no. 4 (1996), 210–15. Programme notes for The Oedipus Plays (dir. Peter Hall) at The National Theatre (London, 1997). ‘Forum’, Arion 3rd series 6, no. (1998), 155–8. Extracts from ‘The Wanderings of Odysseus’, in Agenda 36 (1999), 210–15. ‘2002: A Sleep Odyssey’, Ordia Prima 1 (2002), 147–151; also in Omnibus 44 (2002). ‘Introduction’ to ‘Ancient Greek Tragedy on the Stage (M. Hart, O. Taplin, P. Hall, P. Sellars, P. Stein, L. Koniordou)’, Arion 3rd series, no. 11 (2003), 127–33. ‘Homer’s Wave Machine’, The Guardian: Books, Saturday May 20th, 2006.

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List of Oliver Taplin’s Publications T R A N S L AT I O N S

71. The Wanderings of Odysseus, produced by the Mark Taper Forum at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California, Sept.–Oct. 1992. 72. ‘Andromache’, passages from Homer and tragedy adapted for recitation by Fiona Shaw at the Oxford Literary Festival, April 2004. 73. The Swallow Song, a sequence of Greek poetry and drama, performed by a company of six Greek actors, directed by Lydia Koniordou, designed by Dionysis Fotopoulos, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 2004. 74. The Troy Trilogy (a dramatization of the Iliad in three plays), in preparation. 75. The Plays of Sophocles, commissioned for Oxford World’s Classics, in preparation.

R A D I O A N D T E L EV I S I O N 76. An Odyssey round Odysseus: devised and presented on Radio 4 in November 1989 (4 × 45 mins.). 77. Greek Fire: Classical consultant to Transatlantic Films for documentaries (10 × 30 mins.) on Channel 4, March–May 1990, also broadcast in USA, Holland, Portugal, Greece, and Australia. 78. ‘The Old Bard Weaves New Songs’ (45 mins.) on Radio 3, June 1992. 79. Metamorpheus: Television film for BBC2 made with Tony Harrison, tracing the journey of the singing head of Orpheus through Bulgaria to the northern Aegean, broadcast December 2000.

Index Locorum Achilles Tatius 4.8: 286 n. 112 Aelian Nature of Animals 7.16: 130 n. 5, 131 n. 9 Varia Historia 1.27: 138 n. 28 2.41: 118 n. 172 10.18: 81 n. 72 Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 25: 95 n. 35 76: 109 n. 126 154: 109 n. 122 176: 91 n. 12 Against Timarchus 21: 91 n. 12 43: 115 n. 158 183: 91 n. 12 On the False Embassy 19: 106 n. 105 151: 115 n. 158 Aeschylus Agamemnon 1–39: 341 n. 31 11: 427 n. 43 55–9: 224 n. 21 461–8: 224 n. 21 617–21: 249 n. 42 674–9: 249 n. 42 744–9: 224 n. 21 1040–1: 423 n. 25 1186–93: 224 and n. 21 1186–90: 224 1600: 229 n. 35 Choephoroe 16–18: 340 225–34: 429 n. 47 275–96: 224 n. 21 345–62: 302 n. 39 386–8: 229 n. 35 400–4: 224 n. 21 648–51: 224 n. 21 653–718: 427 n. 43 654: 361 n. 44 734–65: 341 n. 31

896–8: 426 n. 35 1048–62: 224 1048–50: 244 1048–9: 226, 227 n. 28 1049: 243 1057: 224 1059: 247 Eumenides 4: 241 5: 241 12: 241 17–19: 241 33–4: 242 34–59: 244 37: 242 38: 242 46–59: 224 52: 243 53: 227 54: 227 55: 226 n. 28 68–9: 229 68: 243 71: 243 n. 20 75–9: 246 79: 247 127–8: 227 131–2: 224 137–9: 227 141: 225 175: 229 179–97: 225 179–90: 243 210: 225 213–24: 225 230–1: 225 234–5: 245–6 235–41: 246 242: 248 248–51: 246 250–1: 225 267–75: 229 267: 226 304–5: 225 n. 23 306: 226 307–8: 229

554 310: 226 321–4: 243 n. 20 321–2: 228 331–23: 229–30 331–2: 226 331: 228 333: 227 334–6: 228 338–40: 226 344–6: 230 344–5: 226 344: 228 346: 227 370: 243 381–4: 230 382: 242 383: 221 391: 248 406–14: 227–8 413–14: 228 n. 29 416–17: 228 416: 228, 243 n. 20 451: 246 452: 247 458: 223 476–9: 227 484: 248 490: 248 538: 251 566: 248 570: 248 571: 248 572: 251 615: 248 670: 251 686: 248 729–30: 227 730: 227 745: 243 n. 20 753: 247 n. 35 762–74: 246, 248 n. 38, 249 763: 251 780–7: 227 791: 243 n. 20 792: 228 800–3: 227 805: 231 810–17: 227 821: 243 n. 20 822: 228 829–31: 227 840: 227 844: 228, 243 n. 20

Index Locorum 854: 248 855: 231, 248 and n. 39 878: 228, 243 n. 20 881–910: 231 887–90: 230 890: 251 892: 232 894: 231 898: 251 902: 229 n. 35 916: 248 930–7: 230, 231 932–7: 233–4 950–5: 230, 231 950: 234 961–2: 228 976–87: 234 979: 229 n. 35 990–1: 229, 230, 231 990: 228–9, 231, 244 991: 248 1007: 229 1011: 248 1012: 248 1018: 248 1020–31: 228 n. 30, 230 n. 41 1025: 248 1028–9: 230 n. 40 1033: 228, 229 1034: 243 and n. 20 1039: 248 1041: 230 and n. 41 Persae 515–16: 226 n. 25 647–56: 302 n. 39 709–12: 302 n. 39 955–1001: 308 n. 58 Prometheus Bound 1–87: 424 n. 32 366–9: 145 n. 55, 146 n. 61 1051: 274 n. 57 Seven against Thebes 375–652: 422 n. 17 791: 226 n. 25 Supplices 515: 301 n. 33 frs. 6–11: 67 n. 25 fr. 6: 253 fr. 12: 275 fr. 53a: 245 n. 28 fr. 57.8–9: 273 n. 52 fr. 59.8–9: frs. 113a-15: 506

Index Locorum fr. 179: 507 fr. 180: 507 fr. 187: 507 fr. 190: 242 n. 18 frs. 210–15: 506 fr. 273: 507 fr. 273a: 508 fr. 281: 146 n. 61 Life of Aeschylus 1.30–2 (Radt): 244 1.33 (Radt): 253 n. 53 1: 131 n. 9 4: 130 n. 3 8–10: 130 n. 4 8: 142 n. 44 9: 67 n. 25, 129 n. 2, 223 n. 15 10–11: 130 n. 5 10: 130 n. 5 11: 130 n. 3, 151 Aethiopis arg. 23–4 (Bernabé): 195 n. 53 Agathon fr. 2a: 67 and n. 26 Alciphron 3.72: 286 n. 112 4.18.10: 102 n. 74 Alcman fr. 1: 267 n. 21 Alexis PCG fr. 98.13: 102 n. 80 PCG fr. 163: 274 n. 58 Amipsias PCG fr. 25: 353 n. 15 Ammonius De adf. voc. diff. 247: 115 n. 160 Anacreon fr. 2 (West): 171 And o cides 1.81–3: 248 n. 40 Anecd ota Graeca (Bekker) 1.214.3: 115 n. 159 1.240.28: 91 n. 12 1.280.1: 115 n. 160 1.304.27: 115 n. 160 Anonymous On Tragedy 6: 284 n. 105 Antholo gia Palatina 6.165: 273 n. 52 6.214: 142 n. 42 7.39: 130 n. 5 7.40: 130 n. 5

9.270: 264 n. 5 9.504: 264 n. 5 Antio chus of Syracuse FGrH 555 F 5: 145 n. 58 Antiphanes PCG fr. 81: 271 n. 43 PCG fr. 189: 42 Antiphon 6.13: 111 fr. 49 (Pendrick): 325 Ap ollonius of Rhodes 1.1139: 273 n. 52 Ap ollophanes PCG frs. 1–2: 284 n. 105 Apuleius Metamorphoses 6.2: 283 n. 101 Archilo chus fr. 120: 132 n. 11 fr. 322: 132 n. 11 Aristias fr. 4: 509 Aristides Hymn to Zeus 6: 264 n. 7 On Rhetoric 2: 102 n. 74 fr. 10.6: 264 n. 7 fr. 14.15: 264 n. 7 Aristophanes Acharnians 9–11: 109 n. 122 377–82: 21 393–479: 350, 357 394: 350 395: 350 396: 350, 356 402: 350 403–4: 350 408–9: 350 410–79: 365 415: 350 439: 350 449: 350 n. 4 456: 350 n. 4 458: 350 n. 4 460: 350 n. 4 465–7: 350 465: 350 n. 4 471–4: 350 479: 350 496–500: 390 499–500: 21–2

555

556 501: 38 598: 52 622: 353 628: 22 n. 28 633–42: 50 and n. 49 748–50: 351, 354 749: 351 805: 369 n. 69 823–4: 352 862–4: 352 868: 352 886: 22 n. 28 887: 369 n. 69 1071–2: 353 1072: 353 1097–133: 369 n. 69 1174–89: 354 Birds 54–62: 362–3 54: 356 56: 363 57: 363 59: 363 92–106: 363, 367 92: 36 99: 363 331: 248 n. 40 346: 282 353: 282 665–6: 352 n. 10 697: 274 n. 57 850: 369 n. 69 859: 352 n. 12 1196–8: 283 n. 99 1213–15: 422 n. 17 1379: 269 n. 31 1495: 363, 364 n. 54, 371 n. 74 Clouds 91: 365 n. 56 126–221: 355–9 129: 368 131–7: 355–6 138–221: 357 181–3: 35 184: 358 200: 358 214–16: 48 218–19: 358 218: 357 219: 356 271: 282 n. 95 296: 22 n. 28 331: 435 n. 70

Index Locorum 380–1: 274 n. 57 520: 19 522: 19 525: 19 526: 19 530–2: 19 534–44: 382 547–59: 19 571–4: 272 n. 47 866: 359 1144–5: 359 1163–70: 359–60 1163–4: 359, 360 1164: 360 1165–6: 359, 360 1167: 359, 360 1221: 352 n. 10, 360 1485: 352 n. 10 Ecclesiazusae 33–5: 368 488: 283 n. 99 581–2: 23 632: 435 n. 70 734–44: 369 n. 69 974: 369 976–90: 368 976–7: 368–9 977: 371 989–90: 369 Frogs 35–7: 366 38–9: 356, 367 39: 364 n. 54 45–7: 50 60–2: 49 343: 269 357: 25 367–8: 103 n. 84 390–4: 25 440–7: 268–9 and n. 31 440–1: 282 447–53: 269 460–9: 367 460–1: 368 849: 335 n. 4 863–4: 318 1013–17: 334 n. 3 1036–8: 25 n. 39 1043–56: 335 n. 4 1058–61: 334 n. 3 1063–4: 28 1109–18: 19–20 1181: 26

Index Locorum 1214: 27 1227: 27 1356–8: 283 Knights 230–3: 380 232: 107 n. 112 313: 120 n. 178 525–30: 19 537–9: 19 725–9: 354, 356 725–6: 354 725: 354 726: 354 728–9: 354 951–9: 422 n. 17 1249: 355 and n. 22 1250–2: 355 1263: 355 1329: 104 n. 89 1331: 355 1389: 352 n. 10 1407: 369 n. 69 Lysistrata 199: 369 n. 69 254–351: 364 254: 364 266–70: 364 307–11: 364 319: 364 350: 364 428–31: 364, 370 430: 351 n. 9 456–60: 352 n. 10 706: 364 829–953: 364–5, 369 829: 365 847: 365 848: 365 849: 52 861–3: 48 869: 52 870: 365 889: 365 916–53: 365 1086: 371 n. 74 1103–7: 370 1106–7: 351 n. 9, 365 1106: 364 1124: 22 n. 34 1216: 360 1273: 364 Peace 111–13: 352 n. 10

173–6: 109 n. 124 179–87: 361–2, 368 179: 361 180–1: 361–2 181–4: 364, 367 255: 352 n. 10, 369 n. 69 734: 109 n. 123 762: 107 n. 112 775: 171 Thesmophoriazusae 25–30: 365 39–70: 356 39: 351, 365 65–6: 365 95–8: 365 122: 274 n. 56 176: 365 238: 369 n. 69 425–8: 435 n. 71 466–520: 23 481: 368 n. 66 660: 283 662: 283 785–845: 23 871–927: 366 874: 366 886: 366 903: 24 947–1000: 23 947–8: 282 953–6: 282 966–8: 282 and n. 95 968: 269 n. 31 985–9: 282 1136–59: 23 Wasps 64–6: 19 152: 360 270–2: 352, 361 312: 319 n. 4 314: 319 n. 4 650–1: 22 650: 22 n. 28 860–1: 369 n. 69 1251: 369 n. 69 1482–4: 361 1537: 22 n. 28 Wealth 227–9: 369 641: 351 n. 9, 370 884: 435 n. 71 958–9: 370 964–5: 370, 371

557

558 1096–7: 370 1097–102: 370–1 1097: 371 1101: 356 1153: 362 n. 46 1171–2: 370, 371 1194: 369 n. 69 PCG fr. 40: 353 n. 15 PCG fr. 130: 371 n. 74 PCG fr. 156.9: 22 n. 28 PCG fr. 160: 109 n. 124 PCG fr. 192: 109 n. 124 PCG fr. 347: 22 n. 28 PCG fr. 488: 18 PCG fr. 575: 110 n. 134 PCG fr. 696b.3: 506 n. 14 Aristotle Athenaion Politeia 4.1: 248 n. 40 16.2–4: 137 n. 23 47.2–4: 109 n. 130 47.4: 93 n. 23 56.3: 112 n. 147 56.4: 98 n. 57 60.3: 101 n. 67 Ethics 4.8: 387 Metaphysics 1018b26–9: 281 n. 91 1093a: 266 n. 15 [Oeconomica] 2.2.6: 121 n. 183 1344a: 107 n. 112 On the heavens 293a20–8: 265 On philosophy fr. 12b Ross: 264 n. 6 Poetics 5.2: 384 5.3: 384 1447b21–3: 67 n. 27 1448a1: 337 n. 14 1448a1–18: 59 1448a16–18: 334–5 1448a29-b3: 63–4 1448b25: 335 n. 4 1448b34–49a6: 59 1449a10: 63 1449a15: 59 1449a20: 61 n. 8, 63 1449b2: 121 n. 184 1449b5–9: 16 1449b5–7: 64

Index Locorum 1449b30: 63 1449b38–50a3: 337 1450a15–17: 294, 333 1450a20–3: 333–4 1450a24–6: 336 1450a38: 334 1450a39-b3: 336 n. 13 1450b8: 338 1450b20: 107 n. 112 1451b6–9: 338 1451b19–26: 336 n. 11 1451b19: 67 n. 26 1452b34–6: 335 n. 5 1453a7: 335 1453a10–12: 334 1453a16: 335 1453b33: 508 1454b8–11: 336 n. 9 1454b19–30: 419 n. 2 1455a12–14: 509 1455a22: 294 1455b34–5: 509 1456a25–32: 44 n. 23 1459b15: 422 1460a2–3: 67 n. 27 1460b33: 336 n. 9 Politics 1267b: 109 n. 130 1277a12: 281 n. 91 1329b8–22: 145 n. 58 7.17.10–11: 388 Rhetoric II 12–14: 336 n. 12 III 7: 336 n. 12 1355b35–7: 419 1383a8–12: 335 n. 6 1384b16–17: 151 n. 77 1417a13–15: 177 n. 2 fr. 11 (Rose): 264 n. 6 fr. 12b (Ross): 264 n. 6 fr. 630: 112 n. 149 Arrian Lectures of Epictetus 3.21.16: 286 n. 112 Artemid orus 1.3: 263 Athenaeus 1.3f: 118 n. 172 3.109a: 138 n. 28 3.111b: 115 n. 161 3.123b: 435 n. 71 6.231f-2d: 142 n. 42 8.345d: 104 n. 92

Index Locorum 10.416c: 138 n. 28 10.426e: 118 n. 172 10.436f: 118 n. 172 10.455c: 132 n. 11 11.459–60: 162 11.496a: 273 13.608e: 67 n. 27 14.617b-c: 108 n. 116 14.618d: 138 n. 28 14.622: 381 n. 25 14.624e-f: 132 n. 11 14.647a: 138 n. 27 14.656c-d: 143 n. 47 15.688f: 118 n. 169 16.647a: 138 n. 29 Aulus Gellius 10.18.5: 68 n. 30 11.9: 106 n. 106 Bacchylides 3.1–8: 132 n. 12, 135 n. 17 3.7: 141 n. 41 3.17: 142 n. 42 4.13: 141 n. 41 5.35: 141 n. 41 Bion 1.71: 302 n. 39 Callimachus Hymn to Apollo 3: 356 n. 23 Hymn to Demeter 15: 268 n. 28 fr. 7.19: 255 n. 57 fr. 31b: 255 n. 57 fr. 43.56: 255 n. 57 fr. 43.84: 255 n. 57 fr. 64.4: 141 n. 40 fr. 140: 255 n. 57 fr. 611: 268 n. 28 fr. 693: 266 n. 20 Censorinus ch. 13: 264 n. 5 Chaeremon frs. 9a-11: 67 n. 27 fr. 13: 509 n. 31 Chariton 1.1.11–12: 80 1.4.1: 80 1.4.2: 80 2.37: 80 5.8.2–3: 80 6.3.6: 80

Cicero Against Verres 4.49.110: 146 n. 65 4.53.119: 144 n. 52 4.57.128: 144 n. 52 De opt. gen. orat. 1: 59 n. 2 Tusculan disputations 2.21.48: 509 Cleanthes fr. 538: 270 n. 38 Comica Adespota PCG fr. 806: 94 n. 27 Cornelius Nepos Timoleon 4.2: 143 n. 48 Corpus Hermeticum 1.8.6: 264 n. 7 2.13.3: 264 n. 7 6.14.1: 264 n. 7 Cratinus PCG frs. 143–57: 511 PCG fr. 229: 281 n. 91 PCG fr. 342: 17, 18 n. 11 Critias frs. 1–14: 75 fr. 2: 273 fr. 4: 264 n. 8, 273 fr. 19: 74–5 Cypria arg. 22–4 (Bernabé): 195 n. 52 arg. 27–9 (Bernabé): 192 arg. p. 43 (Bernabé): 209 n. 23 fr. 1.6–7 (Bernabé): 206 fr. 10 (West): 504 n. 11 Demetrius On Style 128–89: 76 129–30: 76 132: 76–7 140–3: 76 146: 76 148: 76 162–3: 76–7 166: 76 168–9: 76 168: 77 FGrH 228 F 5: 115 n. 159 Demo chares FGrH 75 F 2: 271 Demo critus D-K 68 B277: 325

559

560

Index Locorum

Demosthenes Against Leochares 37: 95 n. 34 Against Leptines 18: 115 n. 160 Against Meidias 8: 111 n. 142 10: 111 n. 142 17: 94, 115 n. 154 53: 91 n. 12 55: 102 n. 74 63: 102 n. 74 175: 111 n. 142 178–9: 111 n. 142 282: 94 Against Neaira 86: 91 n. 12 87: 91 n. 12 Against Pantaenetus 69: 308 n. 59 Against Timocrates 26–9: 90 n. 8 On the crown 28: 92 n. 20 120: 109 n. 122 262: 106 n. 102 On the false embassy 84: 119 n. 176 200: 106 n. 102 287: 115 n. 158, 381 Philippics I 35: 119 38: 94 n. 31 Didymus p. 312 S: 94 n. 26 Dinarchus Against Demosthenes 56: 111 n. 144 Dio Chrysostom 12.33–5: 263, 264 n. 6, 269 n. 33, 270 31.11 (31.570 R): 272 n. 46 33.63.6: 99 n. 59 66.11: 106 n. 106 Diod orus Siculus 1.11: 269, 272 n. 48 1.11.1–3: 272 n. 47 4.84.2–4: 81 n. 72 5.2.3: 135 n. 17 5.4.1: 138 n. 27 5.4.6: 138 n. 27 5.5: 145 n. 55 11.23.4: 137 n. 22 11.24.1: 141 n. 41

11.25.2–4: 139 n. 35 11.25.5: 137 n. 22 11.26.2: 136 n. 21 11.26.4: 137 n. 22 11.26.7: 136 n. 21, 142 n. 42 11.26.8: 141 n. 40 11.38.4: 144 n. 53 11.49.1–2: 129 n. 2 11.66.4: 145 n. 57 11.67.2–4: 143 n. 47 11.67.2–3: 137 n. 22 11.76.3: 145 nn. 55 and 57 14.63.1–2: 139 n. 31, 144 n. 52 14.77.4–5: 139 n. 31 16.26.6: 242 19.5.4: 139 n. 33 20.7: 139 n. 32 Dio genes Laertius 1.57: 421 n. 12 2.1.25: 94 n. 27 2.133: 507 n. 25 3.3: 112 n. 148 Dio genes of Ap ollonia D-K 64 A17: 264 n. 10 Dio genes Tragicus fr. 1.3: 273 n. 52 Diomedes Grammaticus Ars grammatica 3.9.3: 68 n. 29 Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.12.2: 145 n. 58 7.1.3–22.1: 135 n. 18 9.25: 135 n. 18 12.1: 135 n. 18 Duris of Samos FGrH 76 F 13: 264 n. 7, 271–2 FGrH 76 F 14: 272 n. 49 Emped o cles D-K 31 B115.11: 274 n. 57, 278–9 Epicharmus fr. 213: 274 n. 58 fr. 254: 274 n. 58 Etymolo gicum Magnum s.v. α#σκοφορε,ν: 115 n. 159 Eup olis PCG fr. 254: 120 n. 178 Euripides Alcestis 177–82: 355 245: 274 n. 57

Index Locorum 477–508: 371 n. 74 882–8: 324 Andromache 222–7: 321–2 395–6: 324 418–20: 324 501–14: 318 523–36: 318 Bacchae 26–34: 320 170: 361 248–51: 50 and n. 48 292–3: 270 n. 36 968–9: 330 1125–43: 431 n. 56 1209–10: 431 n. 56 Cyclops 35–40: 226 n. 26 Electra 178: 282 n. 95 356–7: 264 n. 8 449: 278 456–7: 278 456: 279 464–9: 277–8 524–44: 429 n. 47 573–4: 429 n. 47 587: 278 n. 76 711: 279 712: 279 717–18: 279 727–30: 279 759: 29 866: 278 n. 76 1255–7: 227 n. 28 1345: 227 n. 28 1357–9: 307 Hecuba 657–66: 371 n. 74 1288–95: 307 Helen 435–82: 366 1049–56: 28–9 1358–9: 272 n. 48 1362–5: 273 1419: 29 Heraclidae 478–9: 351 n. 9 1026–44: 305 n. 50 1050–8: 307 Hercules furens 265: 323 633–6: 323

1016–22: 328 Hippolytus 618–24: 325 808–10: 357 1153–6: 371 n. 74 1160: 371 n. 74 1463–6: 307 Ion 67: 322 237–400: 340 277–80: 327 472–84: 325–6 1010–17: 327 1074–86: 264 n. 8, 268 1084: 274 n. 56 1227: 322 1375–7: 330 1443–4: 330 1532–6: 325 1619–22: 307 Iphigenia in Aulis 465: 319 1241: 319 Iphigenia in Tauris 192: 274 n. 57 286: 227 n. 28 1234–83: 241 n. 14 1304: 353 n. 14 1307–8: 353 Medea 717–18: 322 1090–111: 324 1271–80: 319 1314–15: 357 n. 31 Orestes 64: 321 109: 321 256: 227 n. 28 837: 274 n. 56 983: 274 n. 57 998–1010: 279 1005–6: 279 1008–9: 279 1294: 283 and n. 100 1458: 274 n. 56 1592: 29 1643–5: 247 n. 37 1648–51: 247 1650: 248 Phoenissae 312–17: 282 n. 96 356: 323 751–2: 29

561

562 792: 274 n. 56 965–6: 324 986–9: 321 1067: 361 1090–199: 29 1318–20: 321 Supplices 3–4: 295 8: 296 n. 19 9: 295 11: 297 19: 297 25: 300 n. 30 27–34: 296 n. 21, 311 27–8: 293 28: 296 n. 21 32–6: 297 44–6: 297 61: 300 n. 30 69: 300 n. 30 87: 297 97: 296 104: 296, 300 n. 32 110–261: 297 110–12: 300 n. 32 116: 305 126: 300 n. 30 130: 292 162–92: 297 166: 297, 301 n. 34 252–63: 297 253–364: 311 261: 300 263–4: 295 270: 296 272: 298 273: 300 and n. 30 278: 298 284–5: 298 286: 298 287: 298 289–92: 298 289–90: 296, 298 297–331: 298 301: 298 306–31: 304 n. 46 320: 296 346–58: 298 354: 301 n. 33 359–61: 298 365: 298 373–5: 303–4 373–4: 299, 307

Index Locorum 377: 299 381: 299 404–5: 301 n. 34 470: 299 514: 301 n. 33 526: 292 562: 299 628: 296 526: 292 634: 300 731–3: 308 n. 57 734: 301 754: 300 n. 30 756: 300 n. 30 764: 300 770: 308 771: 308 n. 57 772–5: 301 772–4: 308 778–97: 308 782: 310 798–801: 304, 308 798: 308 799–801: 308 799: 308 n. 57 802–4: 304 826: 304 828–31: 308 832–6: 304 833–6: 308 835: 299 n. 27 935: 300 n. 31 947: 304 948–54: 304 and n. 46, 307 955–79: 308 955–8: 309 968–9: 309 971: 309 980–1112: 308 980–3: 309 983–5: 302 n. 43 990–1071: 302 1009–11: 309 1010: 309 1022: 308 n. 60 1072: 309 1077–8: 308 1077: 304 1079: 299 n. 27 1087–91: 324 1087–8: 322 1104–13: 308 1104–7: 302–3

Index Locorum 1104: 310 1114–64: 318 1114: 304 1123: 294 n. 13, 308 1139–41: 304, 309 1145: 303 1146–8: 308 1149–51: 304 1165–82: 303, 305, 311 1168: 303 1176–9: 307 1178–9: 307 1183–212: 305 1183: 303, 304–5 1185–1212: 300 1188–1210: 311 1188: 306 1189: 301 n. 34, 306 1205–12: 305 1211: 305, 309 1214–26: 305 1228: 306 1229: 306 1231: 296 1232: 296, 303 1234–7: 306, 309 1254: 305 n. 49 Troades 210–29: 147 331–4: 282 n. 96 1327–32: 307 fr. 84: 319 n. 4 fr. 228a: 322 fr. 311: 355 fr. 316: 322–3 fr. 346: 324 fr. 358: 323 fr. 370.3: 245 n. 27 fr. 370.55: 253 n. 55 fr. 370.68–108: 277 n. 73 fr. 370.107: 277 n. 72 fr. 385: 319 n. 4 fr. 386: 319 n. 4 fr. 483: 22 n. 34 fr. 491: 325 n. 13 fr. 571: 325 fr. 727a: 283 n. 98 fr. 773.63–6: 275 fr. 773.66: 264 n. 8 fr. 773.67–70: 275 fr. 773.71–2: 275 fr. 773.73: 275 fr. 773.80: 275

fr. 779.4: 276 fr. 781.21: 277 n. 70 fr. 781.32–7: 277 n. 69 fr. 782: 276 n. 66 fr. 839.8–11: 274 fr. 861: 279 n. 83 fr. 908: 325 fr. 944: 277 n. 69 fr. 971: 276 fr. 1114: 18 Life of Euripides 1: 149 n. 73 5: 77 n. 59 Eusebius Praeparatio evangelica 3.12.4: 270 Eustathius Comm. Odyssey 3.68: 143 n. 49 Eustathius Macrembolites Hysmine and Hysminias 5.160: 264 n. 5 Ezekiel Exagoge 60–7: 70 83–9: 70 112–31: 70 Firmicus Maternus Error of profane religions 7.4: 146 n. 65 Frontinus Strategemata 3.2.6: 151 n. 77 Harpo cration s.v. α#π µισθωµα´των: 109 n. 130 s.v. δρυ: 308 n. 59 s.v. θεωρικα´: 95 n. 33, 96 n. 39 Hephaestion Enchiridion 53: 132 n. 11 Hermippus PCG fr. 63: 120 n. 180, 135 n. 17 Herod otus 1.195: 435 n. 70 2.66.9: 323 2.116–17: 209 n. 23 2.142: 279 n. 84 5.67: 313 6.67–8: 65 6.91: 140 n. 36 6.114: 130 n. 3

563

564 6.134: 140 n. 36 7.139–45: 247 7.141: 140 n. 36 7.153: 133 n. 14 7.154–6: 137 n. 22 7.154: 133 n. 14 7.156.3: 137 n. 22 7.158: 133 7.162: 134 7.166: 141 n. 41 7.200: 140 n. 36 8.62: 148 n. 69 8.65: 140 n. 36 9.27.3: 305 n. 53 9.57: 140 n. 36 9.62: 140 n. 36 9.65: 140 n. 36 9.97: 140 n. 36 9.101: 140 n. 36 Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr. 204.95 (West): 209 Shield 248–57: 225 n. 23 Theogony 1–2: 178 22–34: 178 27–8: 196 30–1: 195 105–15: 178 184–5: 228 n. 32 217–22: 228 n. 32 465: 213 n. 41 613: 214 n. 43 653: 213 n. 41 730: 213 n. 41 1002: 213 n. 41 Works and Days 2–3: 178 25–6: 172 26: 198 n. 65 27–41: 195 71: 213 n. 41 79: 208 n. 21, 213 n. 41 99: 212–13 105: 214 n. 43 161–5: 209 n. 22 180–1: 209 245: 213 n. 41 618–94: 197 633–40: 195 650–9: 195 660–2: 197

Index Locorum fr. 33: 504 n. 11 fr. 43: 504 n. 11 Hesychius s.v. =Ερµινη: 132 n. 11 s.v. θεωρικα` χρ µατα: 95 n. 34 s.v. Θυωνδα: 99 n. 59 s.v. κρεια: 138 n. 27 s.v. µισθ: 102–3 s.v. σκαφηφροι: 115 n. 160 Hipp onax frs. 32–4 (West): 199 n. 65 Homer Iliad 1.1–7: 204–5 1.1–2: 178 1.4–5: 205 n. 1 1.5: 204–14 passim 1.6–7: 178 1.6: 211 1.8: 178 1.92–100: 179 1.101–20: 179 1.117–18: 179 1.234–7: 195 n. 51 1.245–6: 195 n. 51 1.343: 234 n. 60 1.384–6: 179 1.396–406: 211 1.508–10: 205, 207 1.522–30: 205 1.524–30: 205 n. 3 1.544–50: 208 n. 18 1.595–604: 164 2.100–9: 195 n. 51 2.185–6: 195 n. 51 2.350–3: 210 2.484–92: 178 4.160–8: 210 4.364–400: 196 n. 58 4.372–98: 209 n. 22 4.405–8: 209 n. 22 4.411–18: 196 n. 58 5.799–813: 196 n. 58 5.802–8: 195 n. 52, 209 n. 22 6.325–42: 191, 208 n. 20 6.326: 191 7.125–8: 192 7.399–402: 196 n. 58 8.367: 367 n. 62 8.469–83: 208 8.477–82: 208 n. 20 9.31–49: 196 n. 58 9.186–94: 164

Index Locorum 9.410–16: 206 9.434–95: 197 n. 61 9.434–8: 197 n. 61 9.437–8: 197 n. 61 9.485–95: 197 n. 61 9.494–5: 197 n. 61 9.496: 197 n. 61 9.503–7: 228 9.505: 225 9.524–99: 208 n. 20 10.285–90: 209 n. 22 11.79: 207 11.291–5: 225 n. 23 11.299–300: 178 11.474–81: 225 n. 23 11.794–5: 206 12.23: 209 n. 22 13.347–50: 208 13.415: 367 n. 62 13.459–61: 208 n. 20 13.523–5: 207 14.82–102: 196 n. 58 14.109–32: 196 n. 58 15.59–71: 208 15.187–99: 195 n. 53 15.592–602: 208 16.36–7: 206 16.60–3: 208 16.112–13: 178 16.121: 207 16.140–4: 191 16.155–67: 225 n. 23 16.456: 294 n. 13 16.675: 294 n. 13 17.331–2: 207 18.8–11: 206 n. 6 18.73–7: 214 18.293–5: 214 18.486: 278 18.505–6: 195 n. 51 19.90–133: 183 n. 25 19.92–4: 234 n. 59 19.216–19: 192, 196 19.287–8: 302 n. 39 19.295–300: 302 n. 39 19.315–20: 302 n. 39 19.374: 278 n. 77 19.381: 278 n. 77 19.387–91: 191 19.398: 278 n. 77 20.15–30: 208 22.25–33: 278 n. 77 22.30: 278

22.317–20: 278 n. 77 23.9: 294 n. 13 23.22: 302 n. 43 23.69–81: 197 n. 61 23.82–92: 197 n. 61 23.175: 302 n. 43 23.540–65: 195 n. 53 23.566–613: 195 n. 53 23.566–9: 195 n. 51 23.629–43: 195 n. 52 23.678–80: 195 n. 52 24.110–11: 208 24.729–30: 302 n. 39 24.749–50: 302 n. 39 24.771–2: 302 n. 39 Odyssey 1.1: 178, 211 n. 30 1.10–11: 178 1.103–5: 504 1.188–93: 192 n. 40 1.268: 504 1.320–3: 505 1.320: 504 1.325–44: 166 1.325–7: 178, 186 1.326–7: 178 2.37–8: 195 n. 51 2.80–1: 195 n. 51 2.84–128: 183 2.87–110: 182 n. 21 2.118–20: 183 2.272: 196 2.383: 504 3.371–2: 504 4.197: 294 n. 13 4.244–8: 504 4.417–18: 504 4.455–9: 504 4.735–54: 192 n. 40 5.151–8: 181 5.151–3: 182 n. 18 5.153: 181 5.297–387: 190 5.374–493: 6.22: 504 6.229–35: 505 6.258–96: 180 7.290–307: 179 7.303–6: 179–80 8.62–92: 165 8.73–83: 178 8.73–82: 205, 206 8.73–5: 211 n. 30

565

566 8.74: 210 n. 28 8.75–82: 195 n. 53 8.75–6: 178 8.81: 205 8.82: 213 n. 41 8.83: 178 n. 4 8.94–256: 195 n. 52 8.246–9: 165 8.256–366: 166 8.266–367: 178 n. 4 8.291–5: 178 n. 4 8.305–21: 178 n. 4 8.328–32: 178 n. 4 8.334–43: 178 n. 4 8.346–59: 178 n. 4 8.367: 178 n. 4 8.461–2: 181 n. 17 8.463–8: 181 8.479–81: 210 n. 28 8.482–535: 165 8.487–91: 194 8.488: 194 n. 48 8.491: 194 n. 48 8.492–5: 191 8.496: 194 8.499–521: 178 8.499: 179 8.500: 179 8.514: 179 8.516: 179 8.521–31: 502 8.521: 178 n. 4 9.5–11: 165–6 9.14: 178 9.19–21: 178 9.37–8: 178 9.43–53: 194 n. 45 9.51–2: 178 9.190–2: 178 10.469–540: 448 n. 27 10.469–75: 181 11.90–149: 448 n. 27 11.119–36: 508 11.187–96: 192 n. 40 11.225–332: 505–6 11.225–330: 213 n. 38 11.235–332: 178 11.277: 367 n. 62 11.287–97: 211 11.297: 207 n. 16, 212 11.328–9: 178 11.363–9: 178, 213 11.543–64: 195 n. 53

Index Locorum 11.568–632: 178 12.374–90: 194 12.403–4: 193 12.405–6: 193 12.415–17: 193 12.418–19: 193 12.420–5: 193–4 12.450–3: 181 13.265–6: 187 13.272–86: 186 13.344–52: 422 n. 19 13.379–81: 192 n. 42 14.122–32: 183 n. 24, 192 14.199–204: 187 14.207–10: 195 n. 53 14.237–9: 188 14.245–86: 187 14.259–70: 194 n. 45 14.283–4: 187 14.287–98: 187, 189 14.288–98: 187 14.299–313: 187 14.301–2: 193 14.303–4: 193 14.305–7: 193 14.308–9: 193 14.310–13: 193 14.314–34: 187 14.334–43: 187 14.344–59: 187, 189 14.350–9: 194 n. 45 14.378–85: 183 n. 24, 193, 198 14.459–506: 183 n. 23, 198 14.459–61: 198 15.225–38: 211 n. 33 15.304–24: 198 n. 63 15.353–7: 192 n. 40 15.415–84: 186 15.518–24: 197 n. 61 15.529–38: 197 n. 61 15.539–47: 197 n. 61 16.137–53: 192 n. 40 16.202–12: 422 n. 19 17.52–6: 197 n. 61 17.71–84: 197 n. 61 17.264–71: 166 17.290–327: 422 17.383: 199 n. 65 17.411–91: 188 17.428–39: 194 n. 45 17.441–3: 187 17.462: 188 17.463–4: 188

Index Locorum 17.483–7: 504 17.489–91: 188 17.518–21: 178 18.90–4: 186 n. 27 18.349–411: 188 18.394: 188 18.396–8: 188 18.405–11: 188 19.129–61: 182 n. 21 19.181–4: 188 19.185–202: 190 19.203: 196, 199 19.221–48: 422 n. 19 19.225–48: 190 19.270–99: 190 19.270–8: 181 19.279: 181 19.395–466: 422 n. 19 20.291–319: 188 20.299–300: 188 20.300–2: 188 20.303–19: 188 20.345: 168 21.93–5: 183 21.217–21: 422 n. 19 21.287–310: 183 21.404–11: 500 21.406–11: 168, 178, 213 22.184–6: 192 n. 40 22.347–8: 191, 194 n. 48, 210 n. 28 23.26–31: 422 n. 19 23.70–9: 422 n. 19 23.113–16: 422 n. 19 23.181b-204: 422 n. 19 23.209–30: 422 n. 19 23.215–17: 192 23.310–43: 177 23.310: 179, 181 23.321: 179, 181 23.329–32: 181 23.333–7: 181 23.338–41: 181 n. 14 23.432: 179 24.85–92: 195 n. 52 24.105–19: 186 24.131–7: 182 n. 21 24.190: 294 n. 13 24.220–362: 191 24.292: 294 n. 13 24.331–44: 422 n. 19 24.377–8: 192 24.548: 504

Herodotean Life of Homer 433–61: 199 n. 65 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 1–2: 178 23: 213 n. 41 Homeric Hymn to Apollo 1–2: 178 19: 178 25–7: 178 169–76: 178 207: 178 300–74: 241 n. 14 Homeric Hymn to Demeter 1–5: 211 n. 30 1–3: 178 9: 213 n. 41 30: 213 n. 41 47–8: 283 99: 268 n. 28 270–2: 268 n. 28 292–3: 268 n. 28 333: 309 338–9: 309 371–4: 180 398–400: 180 398–403: 309 413: 180 463–5: 309 470–3: 309 Homeric Hymn to Dionysus 38–53: 505 Horace Ars Poetica 114–18: 336 n. 12 120–4: 336 n. 11 153–78: 336 n. 12 220–50: 75–6 226: 76 239: 76 242: 76 243: 76 Odes 1.4.13: 356 n. 23 3.30: 251 n. 45 4.14.21: 264 n. 5 Hyginus Astronomica 2.21: 266 n. 20 Fabulae 192.6: 264 n. 5 Hy perides Against Demosthenes 26: 95 n. 34, 111 n. 144

567

568 Ibycus fr. 282: 171 Ion frs. 43a-9: 509 Iso crates Antidosis 166: 104 nn. 89 and 90 Areopagiticus 29: 97 and n. 44 Peace 82: 120 n. 178 Trapeziticus 33–4: 109 n. 128 Justinus Epitome 22.2: 139 n. 33, 143 n. 48 22.6: 139 n. 32 Lactantius Divinae institutiones 18(23).7: 283 n. 101 Letter of Aristeas 187–300: 167 n. 16 Libanius 64.12: 286 n. 113 64.117: 504 n. 10, 505 Little Iliad fr. 1.1: 178 Livy 2.34.3–7: 135 n. 18 4.12–13: 135 n. 18 4.25.4: 135 n. 18 4.52.4–8: 135 n. 18 24.22: 139 n. 35 Longinus 9.15: 63 n. 14 Longus 1.4: 80 1.7–8: 80 2.24–34: 80 2.37: 80 4.39: 80 Lucian Deorum concilium 5: 264 n. 5 Icaromenippus 29: 106 n. 106 Piscator 38: 286 n. 112 De saltatione 7: 286 n. 113 15: 286 n. 112

Index Locorum Lysias 2.10: 305 n. 53 12.20: 115 n. 160 19.29: 113 19.42: 113 21.1: 113 21.2: 113 21.4: 113 32.21: 116 fr. 8b (Medda): 113 fr. VI 2 (G-B): 109 n. 122 Macrobius Saturnalia 1.18: 270 n. 38, 272 n. 46 1.23.8: 277 n. 69 5.19.17: 129 n. 1 Manetho Apotelesmatica 1.296: 279 n. 80 1.301: 279 n. 80 2.253: 279 n. 80 4.36: 279 n. 80 4.148: 279 n. 80 4.171: 279 n. 80 4.201: 279 n. 80 6.39: 279 n. 80 6.66: 279 n. 80 6.74: 279 n. 80 6.94: 279 n. 80 6.122: 279 n. 80 6.303: 279 n. 80 6.382: 279 n. 80 Manilius 2.118: 264 n. 5 Menander Aspis 303–4: 357 n. 30 Epitrepontes 387–90: 422 n. 17 Menander Rhetor Peri epideiktikon 446: 270 Manuel Philes Carmina 3.14.290: 264 n. 7 Mesomedes Hymn to Hadrian 10: 264 n. 7 Hymn to Isis 19: 264 n. 7 Hymn to the Sun 17–18: 264 n. 7

Index Locorum Metrod orus D-K 61 A4: 278 n. 77 Musaeus D-K 2 B18: 275–6 Nicander Theriaca 484–7: 268 n. 28 Nonnus 1.237: 264 n. 7 2.228: 264 n. 7 2.352: 264 n. 7 9.238: 264 n. 7 21.252: 264 n. 7 25.241: 264 n. 7 25.338: 264 n. 7 25.449: 264 n. 7 27.50: 264 n. 7 32.7: 264 n. 7 35.337: 264 n. 7 38.311: 264 n. 7 Oenopides D-K 41 A10: 280 n. 85 D-K 58 B37c: 280 n. 85 Oppian Halieutica 1.673–6: 274 n. 56 3.250: 269 n. 31 Orphica Hymns 4.4: 274 n. 57 6.7: 274 n. 57 7.4: 269 n. 33, 274 n. 57 8.7: 274 8.11: 274 10.22: 274 n. 57 12.9–10: 273 n. 50 19.10: 274 n. 57 40.15: 274 n. 57 Lithica 90: 279 n. 80 fr. 115.2: 274 n. 57 fr. 236–8: 272 nn. 46, 48–9 fr. 236.1: 274 n. 57 fr. 237.7: 274 n. 57 fr. 238.13: 274 n. 57 Pacuvius frs. 280–91: 509 Papyri PHerc. 1428 fr. 2.21–2: 277 n. 69 POxy. 411.25: 286 n. 112

569

POxy. 2382: 69 n. 32 POxy. 2618: 169 POxy. 2742.3–19: 109 n. 124 POxy. 2257 fr. 1: 246 Pausanias 1.8.4: 104 n. 89 1.14.5: 130 n. 3 1.28.6: 227 n. 28, 248 1.29.16: 99 n. 58 1.38.6: 268 n. 28 1.39.2: 305 n. 53 2.13.6: 507 n. 25 6.19.7: 142 n. 43 10.24: 427 n. 45 Petron D-K 16 A1: 264 Pherecrates PCG fr. 91: 353 n. 15 Pherecydes fr. 90: 276 Philo chorus FGrH 328 F 33: 94 n. 30 FGrH 328 F 171: 117 n. 168, 119 n. 173 FGrH 328 F 181: 99 FGrH 328 F 185: 277 n. 69 Philodamus Paean to Dionysus 8: 264 n. 7 21: 269 Philolaus D-K 44 A16: 264–5 D-K 44 A18: 280 Philostratus Letters and Discourses 56: 263, 264 n. 6 Lives of the sophists 549: 118 n. 172 Philostratus Junior Imagines 2.30: 302 n. 43 Philoxenus PMG 819: 67 Photius s.v. /βελα αHρτο: 115 n. 161 s.v. τρτο α#ριστερο&: 281 n. 90 Pindar Nemean 1.13–18: 132 n. 12, 135 n. 17 Olympian 2.53: 270 6.15: 302 n. 39 6.93–6: 132 n. 12 6.94: 135 n. 17

570 Pythian 1.25–8: 145 n. 55, 146 n. 61 1.58: 141 n. 41 1.71–80: 141 n. 41 1.79: 141 n. 41 2.15–17: 132 n. 12 2.18: 141 n. 41 12.1: 139 n. 34 fr. 55: 241 n. 14 fr. 70b: 132 n. 11, 273 n. 52 fr. 70b.24–5: 286 n. 110 fr. 70c: 132 n. 11 fr. 76: 104 n. 89 fr. 105: 145 n. 56 fr. 153: 269–70 fr. 157: 108 n. 115 fr. 307: 108 n. 115 fr. 346: 132 n. 11 Life of Pindar 1.1.16: 104 n. 89 Plato Cratylus 425d: 109 n. 124 Epinomis 982e: 264 n. 6 Euthydemus 277d: 269 n. 33 Ion 535b-e: 500 Laches 183b: 105 n. 96 Laws 653d: 389 655–6: 387 659c: 143 n. 49 815c-d: 78–9 815d: 388–9 816c-e: 78, 386 816d-e: 335 n. 4 817a-c: 78 947e: 294 n. 13 Letters 7.347b: 112 n. 148 Phaedrus 230b: 447 n. 26 247a-e: 265–6 269d: 302 n. 39 Politicus 268e: 279 n. 82 Protagoras 314d-e: 350 n. 3 338a: 109 n. 123 338e-347a: 26

Index Locorum 347c-348d: 26 Republic 568c: 105 n. 96 606c: 387 n. 46 616b: 265 617a-d: 265 617a: 265 617c: 265 Timaeus 22b-23b: 279 39d: 280 40c: 264 n. 6 Plato Comicus PCG fr. 65.3: 52 n. 52 Plautus Amphitruo 1018: 365 Stichus 311: 356 n. 23 Pliny Natural History 10.3.7: 130 n. 5 13.2.6: 118 n. 169 34.59: 146 n. 61 37.31: 149 n. 72 Plutarch Alcibiades 33.1: 421 n. 14 Alexander 29: 106 n. 105 Antony 24.3–4: 271 n. 43 Aristides 1.4: 112 n. 148 Cimon 8: 130 n. 5 Coriolanus 16.1: 135 n. 18 De cupid. divit. 527d: 99 n. 59, 102 n. 77 De exilio 604f: 130 n. 5 Demetrius 10: 271 n. 43 12.1: 271 n. 44 13: 271 n. 43 26: 271 n. 43 41: 272 n. 49 Demetrius and Antony 3: 271 n. 43 Dion 17.5: 112 n. 148 56: 138 n. 27

Index Locorum 57: 139 n. 33 Lives of the Ten Orators 848b: 106 n. 106 Lysander 18.7–8: 104 n. 92 Moralia 10c-d: 388 239b: 368 n. 64 348d: 102 n. 73 348f-9a: 88 416e: 276 n. 65 818f: 95 n. 34 842a: 101 n. 70 852b: 99 n. 58 1090c: 276 n. 65 Nicias 29: 151 n. 77 On Music 1141d: 108 n. 116 Pericles 9.1–3: 94 n. 30 24.9: 423 n. 25 Phocion 30.2–3: 111 n. 143 Quaestiones convivales 1.10: 102 n. 79 665e: 72 711e-712e: 72 n. 41 748c-d: 71 n. 41 Quomodo adul. poet. audire 30d: 18 Reg. et imp. apophthegmata 175a: 137 n. 23 Themistocles 5.5: 148 n. 69 24: 148 n. 69 24.7: 148 n. 69 32.2: 148 n. 69 Theseus 29.4–5: 305 n. 53 Timoleon 34: 143 n. 48 38: 143 n. 48 Polyaenus Strategemata 5.1: 139 n. 34 Pollux 1.37: 138 n. 27 2.47: 107 n. 112 4.88: 106 n. 105, 109 n. 122 4.108–9: 281 n. 90 4.110: 244

4.111: 30 4.115: 107 n. 112 4.142–3: 375 n. 6 6.75: 115 n. 161 7.78: 107 n. 111 8.7: 308 n. 59 8.104: 114 n. 152 10.190: 107 n. 112 Pratinas PMG 708: 66–7 Pro clus Chrestomathia 74–8: 267 n. 21 Prolegomena de comoedia I: 385 Xa: 281 n. 90 Psellus In Mariam Sclerenam 6: 264 n. 7 On Tragedy ch. 1: 94 n. 27 ch. 12: 108 n. 114 Poemata 17.6: 264 n. 7 63.6: 264 n. 7 Σ Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 24: 94 n. 30 On the False Embassy 19: 106 n. 105 Σ Ap ollonius of Rhodes 1.211–15: 146 n. 61 Σ Aratus 172: 276 n. 67, 277 n. 72 Σ Aristophanes Acharnians 11: 109 n. 122 243a: 99 n. 59 504: 120 n. 178 637: 104 n. 89 Birds 1403: 132 n. 11 Clouds 299: 104 n. 89 332a: 104 n. 87 335b: 104 n. 87 386: 99 n. 59 830: 286 n. 112 889: 382 n. 30 922: 351 Ecclesiazusae 102: 103 n. 84

571

572 Frogs 357: 102 n. 76 367: 103 n. 84 585: 104 n. 87 1028: 130 n. 4 Peace 73: 129 n. 1 697: 103 n. 84 835: 118 n. 172 Wasps 660: 103 n. 84 1312: 107 n. 111 Wealth 290: 68 Σ Demosthenes Meidias 180 (= 617 Dilts): 115 n. 158 On the false embassy 287 (= 504a Dilts): 115 n. 158 Σ Euripides Orestes hyp. II: 29–30 1521: 29 n. 52 Hecuba 647 (Triclinius): 281 Supplices hyp.: 291 Σ Pindar Nemean 1.17: 139 n. 34 Olympian 2.15d: 139 n. 34 2.29c-d: 142 n. 42 6.15: 302 n. 39 6.158a: 132 n. 12 6.160d: 132 n. 12 6.160g: 138 n. 27 Pythian 1.152b: 142 n. 42 1.153: 142 n. 45 2.27b: 132 n. 12, 133 n. 14 12.3a: 139 n. 34 vol. III, p. 89 (Drach.): 104 n. 91 Σ Plato Apology 19c: 18 Protagoras 338a: 109 n. 123 Σ Sopho cles Antigone 1146: 269 Σ Theo critus 1.65–6: 145 n. 55, 146 n. 61

Index Locorum 8 arg.: 81 and n. 71 8.93a: 81 and n. 71 13.25: 266 15.14: 139 n. 33 Satyrus Vita Euripidis fr. 37 col. ii: 273 n. 51 fr. 39 col. iv: 16 fr. 39 col. xix: 151 n. 77 Scymnus 300: 145 n. 58 Scythinus fr. 1 (West): 266 Seneca Thyestes 1004–5: 435 n. 75 Servius Comm. Virg. Eclogues 8.68: 81 and n. 71 Seutonius Tiberius 74: 144 n. 52 Simonides epigr. 27 (Page): 102 n. 76 fr. 148.9 (Beckby): 269 n. 31 PMG fr. 234: 146 n. 61 PMG fr. 552: 145 n. 55, 146 n. 61 PMG fr. 563: 146 n. 61 Solon fr. 13.51–2: 105 n. 97 fr. 26: 170 Sopho cles Ajax 344–7: 357 n. 31 815–65: 424 n. 28 833–4: 426 n. 34 837: 226 n. 25 921–4: 302 n. 39 996–7: 302 n. 39 1026–7: 427 Antigone 1–99: 340 384–6: 371 n. 74 387: 371 n. 74 1146–53: 264 n. 8, 267, 284 Electra 893: 429 n. 49 931: 429 n. 49 1074–87: 340 1113–226: 429 n. 48 1222–3: 429 1458–9: 357 n. 31

Index Locorum Ichneutae 217–20: 226 n. 26 Oedipus Colonus 42–3: 219 n. 1 125–33: 233 Oedipus Tyrannus 22–3: 535–6 42–3: 536 103–4: 535 126–7: 534–5 331: 538 634: 351 n. 9 660: 272 n. 47 719: 536 1261: 356 n. 23 Philoctetes 1186–9: 426–7 Trachiniae 9–29: 424 n. 27 252: 423 n. 25 356: 423 n. 25 614–15: 424 n. 29 fr. 89: 427 n. 44 frs. 323–7: 149 n. 71 frs. 439–41: 508 frs. 453–61a: 508 frs. 462–7: 508 frs. 596–617a: 145 n. 58 fr. 598: 145 n. 58 fr. 600: 145 n. 58 fr. 604: 149 fr. 615: 277 n. 69 fr. 752: 272 n. 47 fr. 965: 508 Life of Sophocles 20: 508 Sositheus fr. 99: 81 Statius Achilleis 1.643: 264 n. 5 Stesichorus fr. 102: 81 n. 72 fr. 210: 170–1 fr. 217.21–4: 240 fr. 222b (Davies): 329 fr. 279 (Campbell): 66 n. 21 fr. S148: 169 Stesimbrotos of Thasos FGrH 107 F 3: 148 n. 69 Stobaeus Anthology 4.24–30: 326

Strabo 1.2.15: 279 n. 83 6.1.5: 138 n. 27 6.2.3: 145 n. 57 10.5.4: 118 n. 169 Strat tis fr. 1: 30, 106 n. 102 fr. 4: 109 n. 124 Suda s.v. Α@σχλο: 130 n. 5 s.v. Α # πολλδωρο (tragic poet): 509 n. 31 s.v. α#σκοφορε,ν: 115 n. 159 s.v. δραχµ6 χαλαζ%σα: 95 n. 33 s.v. 0πιµελητα: 115 n. 154 s.v. Θ.σπι: 66 s.v. καθα´ρσιον: 114 n. 152 s.v. nαβδο&χοι: 109 n. 123 s.v. Σιµωνδη (σ 441): 141 n. 40 s.v. Ταυροφα´γον: 102 n. 76 s.v. φαλλο: 99 n. 59 s.v. ΦιλοκλD (tragic poet): 509 s.v. Φιλξενο (φ 393): 68 n. 28 Synesius Hymn 5: 264 n. 7 Teleclides PCG fr. 37: 353 Terence Eunuchus 285: 356 n. 23 Thebais fr. 1.1: 178 fr. 2.9–10 (Bernabé): 195 n. 53 fr. 10 (Bernabé): 302 n. 39 Theo critus Idylls 1.1–3: 81 1.7: 81 1.61: 81 1.133–5: 81 7.74–5: 81 n. 72 11.3–4: 81 11.80–1: 81 Theo gnis 19–26: 421 Theophilus fr. 12: 95 n. 32 Theophrastus Characters 3.3: 117 n. 167 6.3: 381 and n. 27 Laws fr. 6b (S-M): 115 n. 159

573

574 Laws fr. 16 (S-M): 94 n. 26 fr. 103: 91 n. 12 Theop ompus FGrH 115 F 104: 91 n. 12 FGrH 115 F 193: 142 n. 42 FGrH 115 F 213: 96 n. 42 FGrH 115 F 344: 91 n. 12 Theop ompus Comicus PCG fr. 34: 511 Thucydides 1.102.4: 246–7 1.136.1: 148 n. 69 2.2.1: 250 2.13.4: 99 2.15.2: 91 n. 12 2.20.2: 119 n. 175 2.38: 120 n. 180 2.40.4: 304 n. 48 2.70.2: 119 n. 175 3.86.4: 148 4.97–101: 292 5.53.3: 148 n. 68 6.54: 411 6.75.1: 144 n. 52 7.3.3: 144 n. 52 7.33.5–6: 148 n. 70 7.35: 148 n. 70 7.57.11: 148 n. 70 Tibullus 2.1.88: 264 n. 5 Timaeus FGrH 566 F 102b: 139 n. 30 FGrH 566 F 936: 142 n. 42 Tragica Adespota fr. 7a: 509 n. 31 fr. 89a: 264 n. 8 fr. 646a: 74 n. 50 fr. 655: 74 n. 50 fr. 656: 74 n. 50: fr. 675: 74 n. 50

Index Locorum fr. 679a-b: 74 n. 50 fr. 681: 74 n. 50 Tyrtaeus fr. 12 (West): 302 n. 39 Tzetzes Comm. Ar. Frogs 357: 102 n. 76 Ulpian On Demosthenes 1.1: 94 n. 30, 95 n. 38 Valerius Maximus 9.12 ext. 2: 130 n. 5, 131 n. 9 Velleius Paterculus 2.82.4: 271 n. 43 Vitruvius On Architecture 5.6.9: 77–8 Xenophanes fr. 1 (West): 171 Xenophon Anabasis 5.3.7–13: 109 n. 130 [Athenaion Politeia] 2.9: 96 n. 42 Cavalry commander 1.26: 111 n. 146 3.2: 115 n. 157 Hiero 9.7–8: 137 n. 23 Memorabilia 3.4: 111 n. 146, 113 Oeconomicus 20.27: 135 n. 17 Zenobius Proverbs 3.27: 95 n. 33 3.44: 99 n. 59

General Index Page numbers in italics are figures. Page numbers with n. followed by a number show the note number on that page. Page numbers with ‘t’ are tables. Abbey Theatre 527–30, 534, 538 Achaeus of Eretria 73, 74 Acharnians (Aristophanes) 16, 16 n. 3, 18, 20, 21–2, 27 door scenes 350–4, 356 and politics 51, 52 Achilles 179–80, 183 n. 25, 278, 330 in the Odyssey 164, 165, 174, 500, 506, 508 and the will of Zeus 204, 207–8, 211, 214 actors: at the City Dionysia 106–8 Hellenistic era 71 and masks 377, 380–1 on seals 435 and their pay 106, 107 in vase painting 407–9, 408, 442, 443 in Yeats’ Oedipus 524, 529, 540, 541, 542 Aeschylus (Aischylos; Aiskhylos) 66, 237–61 and Eleusis 131 and Euripides 25 and Odyssey plays 506, 507–8, 509 and satyr drama 73 and Sicily 129–30, 149, 151 and Wagner 455, 455–6 see also Aetnae; Eumenides; Libation Bearers; Persians; Prometheus; Proteus Aetnae (Aeschylus) 67, 253 afterlife 277, 279, 285 Agave 319, 320, 431 agriculture 131–7, 145, 147, 150–1 Aitnai, see Aetnae Akharnians, see Acharnians Akhilleus, see Achilles Alcestis (Euripides) 17 Andromache (Euripides) 321–2 Andromeda (Euripides) 23 animals 116 bulls 102 choruses of 406, 412 hounds 266 oxen 97–8, 102 see also dolphins anti-Semitism 459–63, 474, 476 Antigone (Sophocles) 267–8, 269

Aphrodite 78 n.63, 144 n. 54, 166, 446, 447 Areopagus 219, 231, 248, 251, 252 Aristophanes: and comedy 25 n. 39, 49 door scenes 349–71 and Euripides 17–18, 26–7 and generic boundaries 17–27 style 19 and women 23 see also Acharnians; Birds; Clouds; Ecclesiazusae; Frogs; Knights; Lysistrata; Peace; Plutus; Thesmophoriazusae; Wasps; Wealth Aristotle 59–60, 265, 266 on comedy 384 on history of tragedy 63, 66, 67 n. 26, 67 n. 27, 333–6, 338, 419 Athena 247–8 and the Furies 227–8, 230, 232, 233–4 in Hiketides 304–6 in the Odyssey 504–5 Athens 245, 247, 251–2, 291–4, 301 n. 35, 331 audiences 26, 38, 42–5 and democracy 52–3 external 179, 182 and fiction 39–45, 41, 42, 43, 55 and Homer 164, 179 and poets 118–19 and sympotic poetry 163 auloi 71 n. 38, 171, 399–400, 401, 402, 403, 404–5, 405 autism 45–6 Bacchae (Euripides) 30, 33, 50 Bacchic choruses 78–9 Bakhtin, Mikhail 239, 389–90 Bakkhai, see Bacchae Banquets, see feasting Bayreuth 459, 471–6, 472 beauty 244 binary drama 59–63, 83 Binding Song 221, 226, 229–30 Birds (Aristophanes) 20, 52 n. 52, 362–3 ‘Birds’ krater 382–3

576

General Index

black-figure vase painting 399–403, 400, 402, 404, 406, 407, 409 Boscoreale wall paintings 77–8 boundaries (generic) 5, 17–27 Brecht, Bertolt 44–5 bullroarers 273 bulls 102 burial of the dead see funerals burlesques 16, 27, 62, 62 n. 11, 76 n. 57, 256, 511, 514 Byzantium 64 n. 15, 81 n. 74 calendars 250–1, 271 censorship 528, 529 Chamberlain, Stewart 470 character and characterization 333–45 children: childlessness 322–3, 325, 325 n. 327 and Euripides 7, 318–31 lost 319–20 choral projection, see dancing choruses 111–14, 115, 242, 307 animal 406, 412 circular 284–6 and comedy 15, 282 cults 78–9, 281 dancing 262, 265, 266–7, 274 dramatic 281, 284 in Frogs 25 Furies 242–5 in the Hellenistic era 71 in Hiketides 7, 318 and masks 390 of mothers 296–9, 306, 307, 308–12 Odyssey 166 satyr 226 n. 26 star 6–7, 262–86 transformability of 222 Christian symbolism 493–4, 531 chronotopes 6, 239, 250–5 circular choruses 284–6 circular dance 268, 269 n. 31, 270–1, 272, 276–7 and comedy 282–4 City Dionysia 16, 75, 88–91, 105, 121, 380, 381 actors 106–8 costumes 107–8 feasts 96–8 general expenditure 109 pay and prizes 100–11 private sector money 111–19, 113t processions 98–100

public sector money 91–111 theatre of Dionysos 91–6 tributary income 119–21 class (social) 59–60, 78, 239 Cleon 18 n. 14, 19 Clinic Painter 10, 410 Clouds (Aristophanes) 19–20, 48, 355–60, 382–3 Clytemnestra: Electra 323 n. 12 in the Eumenides 223, 224, 227, 243 gems 425, 426, 427 in Müthel’s Oresteia 491 comedy 16 Aristotle on 334 bodies as 381–2 and boundaries 16–17, 20, 22, 24–5 characteristics of 15, 23 choruses 282 and circular dancing 282–4 and the City Dionysia 121 demagogue 20 and democracy 385 as didactic 25 and emotion 38, 45–50 and Euripides 28–33 history of 60–1 language characteristics 28 n. 48 Odyssey as 63 and politics 52–3 and satyr drama 77 and social class 59–60, 78–9 Taplin on 7–8, 15, 37–8, 380 and tragedy 32–3, 53–5 and universality 50–4 and vase painting 413, 420 n. 5 Comic Angels (Taplin) 8, 374 comic dancing 386–7 competitions 18, 20 ‘composite reality’ 253, 255, 256 contiguity 186–7 Corinthian vases 398–9 cosmic dance 6–7, 264–7 costumes 79, 80, 115, 223, 339 comedy 380 cost of 107–8 of Furies 226 n. 28, 243, 245 critics 26, 27, 29–30, 76–7, 490, 491–2 cults 286 choruses 78–9, 281 of the dead 303, 483 Delphi 267

General Index Demeter and Kore (Eleusinian Mysteries) 150, 263, 267–70, 277, 282–3, 285 and democracy 133 n. 15 Dionysus 263, 267, 285 Eumenides 220–1, 231 fertility 389 Orphic 266, 273–4 Cumbal Indians 234 curses 132n. 13, 220, 226, 227, 229, 230 n. 39, 491 Cypria 206–7, 209, 211 Danae (Euripides) 322–3 dancing 71, 71 n. 41 choral 265, 266–7, 274 choruses 262 circular 268, 269 n. 31, 272 comic 386 cultic 282–3 Furies 226 New Music 280–4 in vase painting 398–9 Deinomenids 136, 139–42, 149 Delphi: cult of 267 and the Eumenides 240, 241–2, 245, 247 and Ion 321, 322 demagogue comedy 20 Demeter: and agriculture 131–7, 145, 147 and the Deinomenids 136, 139–42, 149 and Hiketides 309–11 and performance in Syracuse 137–9, 143–5 see also Eleusinian Mysteries Demetrius 76–7 Demetrius the Besieger 271–2 democracy: and audiences 52–3 and comedy 385 and costing the Dionysia 105, 121 and cults 133 n. 15 and Syracuse 137, 139, 149 and tragedy 131 Demodocus 165–6, 194 Dionysus: in Antigone 267 and comedy 388–9 cult of 263, 267, 285 in Frogs 24, 27 ivy 274 as landowner 110 and star choruses 269–70 and the sun 270, 272

577

theatre of 91–3 in vase painting 409, 440–2, 440 disguises 15 Clytemnestra 427 Eumenides (Aeschylus) 242 Frogs (Aristophanes) 367 Odysseus 188, 189 n. 33, 198, 198 n. 65, 422–3, 423, 504–5, 507, 512 Thesmophoriazusae (Aristophanes) 365 Dolon Painter 445–6, 446 dolphins 278, 284, 285, 403 n. 32, 405–6, 505 donations 110–11, 112, 115, 116–17 door scenes 8 Acharnians 350–4 Birds 362–3 Clouds 355–60 Ecclesiazusae 368–9 Frogs 366–8 Knights 354–5 Lysistrata 52, 364–5 Peace 361–2 Thesmophoriazusae 365–6 Wasps 360–1 Wealth 369–71 doubles 189–90 Duris of Samos 271–2 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes) 20, 23, 368–9 eccyclema 355, 357 n. 30, 358, 365 Electra 429, 430 Electra (Euripides) 28, 29, 277–80, 323 Eleusinian Mysteries 263, 267, 268, 269, 270, 277, 282, 285 Eleusis 92 n. 15, 131, 292, 293 n. 8, 309 emotion 7, 38, 42–5, 45–50, 55–6 epic poetry 5, 163–4, 165 n. 14, 179, 196, 237 n. 504 see also Homer Epigenes of Sicyon 66 Erechtheus (Euripides) 329 Erinyes, see Eumenides escape tragedies 23, 27 Eschilo d’Oro 128, 129 Euadne 308 Eumenides: and Athena 227–8, 230, 232, 233–4 cult of 220–1, 231 in Müthel’s production 492 portrayal on stage 222–9, 244 transformation of 231–2, 233, 234–5 Eumenides (Aeschylus) 6, 17, 219–35, 237–56 Euripides 7, 16, 28–33, 66, 68, 77, 277 n. 69 and Aeschylus 25

578

General Index

and Aristophanes 17–18, 26–7 as a character in Acharnians 350–1 as a character in Thesmophoriazusae 365–6 and children 318–31 and comedy 28–33 and Odysseus plays 509–10 and satyr drama 74–5 and women 23 see also Alcestis; Andromache; Andromeda; Bacchae; Danae; Electra; Erectheus; Hecuba; Helen; Hiketides; Ion; Medea: Orestes; Phaethon; Phoenissae; Telephus; Trojans Ezekiel 69, 70 Fates 265 feasting 96–8, 116, 225 n. 23 festivals 60, 62, 73, 163 actors 106–8 costing 3, 88–122, 89–90 Great Panathenaia 90, 96 Little Panathenaia 109 Peiraieus Dionysia 105 n. 95 poets at 101 Proerosia 293, 296 Thesmophoria 138 see also City Dionysia fiction 39–45, 41, 42, 43 Fo, Dario 380–1 Foucault, Michel 387–8 Frankfurt School 499, 501, 516 Freud, Sigmund 387–8 Frogs (Aristophanes) 8, 16, 19, 24–5, 33, 366–8 humour in 49, 50 in South Italian vase painting 27 funerals 292, 299–304, 306, 309, 326, 330 Furies 6, 226, 231, 242–5, 251 Furies, see Eumenides Gela, Sicily 130, 132–3 Gelon 13, 132–4, 135 n. 18, 136, 141–2, 142 n. 43 gems 9, 420, 435–6 and tragedy 420–1, 423, 423, 424–31, 425, 428, 430, 433 Germany: Frankfurt School 499, 501, 516 Langemarck 482–3, 486 nationalism 462–3 Nazis 11, 481–98 and Wagner 453–77

gods 15, 223–4, 243 see also Aphrodite; Athena; Hermes; Zeus Goffman, Erving 453 gold 99, 110, 135, 270 leaves 270, 277 rings 423, 430, 431, 432 Gorgias 39 grain production 134–7 Great Panathenaia 90, 96, 98, 102 ‘Greek Fire’ (TV series) 10 Greek Tragedy in Action (Taplin) 1–2 guilt 387 Guthrie, Tyrone 540, 541–4 Gyges drama 69–70 happy endings 68 Hecuba (Euripides) 327 Helen (Euripides) 23–4, 28, 32 Helen (Gorgias) 39 Hellenism 11, 143, 150, 453–77 Hellenistic era 69–71, 71, 75, 108 Heracles 328, 424, 425, 442, 443, 444 Hermes 361–2, 371 Herodotus 69, 132–4, 136, 247 heroes 209 n. 22, 334–6 Hesiod 195–9, 209, 214 hestiatores 116 Hieron 129, 132, 135, 136, 141, 143 Hiketides (Euripides) 7, 291–314, 318, 322, 324 Himera 141 historical drama 68 Hitler, Adolf 470–1, 472 Hobbes, Thomas 385 Homer: and audiences 164, 179 Iliad 164–5, 168, 204–12 and Odysseus 177–82, 193–5, 213 n. 38 Odyssey 161–75, 199–200 and truth 180–1 Horace 76–7, 251 n. 45 hounds 226 humour 45, 47–9 and satyr drama 76 see also comedy; laughter Hyades 276, 278 Iacchus 267–8 ideology 55–6 Iliad (Homer) 63, 164–5, 168, 204–12 Iliad––Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad (Taplin) 4 incongruity theory 384–5, 388

General Index infertility 322 Ino (Euripides) 320–1 instruments (musical): aulos 71 n. 38, 171, 399–400, 401, 402, 403, 404–5, 405 bullroarers 273 lyre 68 n. 28, 165–6, 168, 171, 178, 266, 400, 400–1 intaglios, see gems Ion of Chios 73, 74, 118 Ion (Euripides) 28, 42, 44, 268, 321, 322, 325, 327 Isokrates 97 Italy, see Southern Italy jewellery, see gems; gold Jews 11, 459–63, 473 n. 74, 474, 476 Judgement of Paris 400, 445–7, 446, 448 khoregoi 110–14, 113t Knights (Aristophanes) 19, 20, 354–5 Kore 132, 138, 139, 139 n. 33, 180, 309, 311 see also Eleusinian Langemarck 482–3, 486 language 340, 341–2, 343 laughter 38, 44, 49–50, 76–7, 384–6, 389 law 292, 299 Laws (Plato) 78, 386 Leviathan (Hobbes) 385 Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) 17 light 247, 265, 268–9, 273, 278, 278 n. 76, 282 Little Panathenaia 109 logic 42, 55 Lycourgan period 93–6, 121 lying: Muses 196–7, 199 Odysseus 179–80, 182–91, 184–5t, 200 lyres 68 n. 28, 165–6, 168, 171, 178, 266, 400, 400–1 lyric poets 170 Lysias 112 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 23, 30, 48, 52, 364–5 machinery (stage) 30, 355, 357 n. 30, 358, 365 Magna Graecia see South Italy masks 8, 9, 15, 80, 115, 339–40 and choruses 390 comedy 374–5, 374–90, 386 Eumenides 223, 231 grotesque 382 on seals 431–5, 433

579

slaves 377 on South Italian vase painting 415 Mausolus (Theodectes) 68 Medea (Euripides) 322, 324, 327–8, 342–3 Menelaos 188–9, 189t messenger speeches 21, 26, 29, 276, 300, 308 n. 57 metatheatre 28, 37, 39–45, 43 metics 112 n. 147, 115, 118 n. 170, 230 n. 40 middlebrow drama 59–83, 63, 79–83 mimesis theory 385 mirroring 188–9 mirrors 9 mixed-media drama 67 n. 27 Modernism 12, 457, 501, 526 mothers 320–2, 326–7 choruses of 296–9, 306–7, 308–12 murders, of children 327–8 Muses 196–7, 199, 383 music 67–8, 71, 72–3, 72 n. 43, 73 n. 44 see also instruments; musicians musicians 101 n. 69, 104 n. 86 pay at the Dionysia 108 pipers 108–9 in vase painting 400–1, 400, 401 Müthel, Lothar 11, 481, 489–98 mystery cults see cults National Socialists, see Nazis Nausicaa 168, 174, 179–80, 181, 186, 505 Nazis 11, 482, 485, 486 Neoanalysts 180, 206 Nereids 268, 278 New Comedy 38, 374–5, 386 New Music 6–7, 67, 71 n. 38, 263, 280–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 456, 488–9, 497 Niobid Painter 403, 405, 405 novels 64, 64 n. 15, 69, 75 n. 54, 79–80, 81 nudity 401 Odysseus: and Homer 193–5, 213 n. 38 lying 179–80, 182–91, 184–5t, 200 omission 190–1 recapitulation 181–2 storms 190, 190t and tragedy 510–11 and travelling nobles 191–3 in vase painting 447–8 Odyssey (Homer) 4, 11–12, 199–200 cantos in 167–8, 173–5 as comedy 63

580

General Index

performance history of 501–3, 507–20, 514–15, 519 as performance poetry 161–75 and recognition in 422–3, 423 Oedipus 427, 428 Oedipus Tyrannos (Sophocles) 12, 524–45, 534 Old Comedy 8, 15, 28, 60, 80, 284, 374–90 Olivier, Laurence 524, 540, 541, 542 Olympia 482 Olympic Games 11, 482, 483–4, 497–8 Oreithyia Painter 146–7, 147 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 5, 6, 248–9 and Hiketides (Euripides) 313 Müthel production 11, 481, 482, 489–94, 490–1 and the Ring (Wagner) 456–7 Wilamowitz translation 488–9 Orestes 429, 430 Orestes 28, 29–30, 32, 321 Orestes, tomb of 248 n. 38 Orestes (Euripides) 28, 29–30, 32, 321 Orphic cults 266, 274 oxen 97–8, 102 oxymorons 243–4 Painter of Berlin 403, 404 Painter of Heidelberg 407, 408 Pandora 208 n. 21, 213, 213 n. 41, 403 Panhellenism 139–42, 150 parabasis 15, 19, 19 n. 16, 20 paratragedy 2, 16 n. 17, 21, 26 parody 21, 23 n. 35, 26 n. 45, 28, 30, 283, 318 Pausanias 227 n. 28 pay 100–11, 106, 107, 108 Peace (Aristophanes) 20, 361–2 Peiraieus Dionysia 105 n. 95 Penelope Painter, vase painting 172 Pentheus 431 performance: and the Odyssey 4–5 Odyssey 166 and the Ring (Wagner) 453–77 and Syracuse 140–5 performance poetry: and the Odyssey 161–75 see also symposion performance studies 5 performances, of Oresteia (Wilamowitz’ translation) 488–9 Perikles 94, 95 n. 32, 99 Perithous (Euripides or Critias) 273–5 Persephone see Kore

Persians (Aeschylus) 5, 67, 67 n. 23, 67 n. 24, 130, 140, 142, 150, 251 n. 46 Phaethon (Euripides) 277, 278, 280 phalloi 99–100, 117, 375, 380, 381 Phemius 166, 194, 194 n. 48 Philoctetes (Sophocles) 426–7, 428 Philokhoros 99 philoteknos 323–4 Philoxenus 67 Phoenissae (Euripides) 29, 30, 323–4, 328–9 Phrynichus 16, 66, 67, 68 Pindar 104, 141, 269–70 pipers 108–9 Plato 78, 105, 265, 386–7 Platonios 385 Pleiades 266–7, 276, 278, 279 Plutus (Aristophanes) 20 poetic authority 212–13 Poetics (Aristotle) 66, 333–6, 339, 384, 419, 422 poetry 335, 335 n. 4 epic 5, 163–4, 165 n. 14, 179, 196, 237 n., 504 sympotic 161–3, 166–7 poets: at festivals 101 giving refreshments to the audiences 118–19 and Homer 198 lyric 170 payment 103–5 tragic 64–6 poison 227, 327, 512 politics: and Acharnians (Aristophanes) 52 and comedy 52–3 Deinomenids 136, 139–42, 149 Nazis 11, 482, 485, 486 and theatre 143 Pollux 30, 30 n. 56, 244, 375 Pots and Plays (Taplin) 8–9, 439–40 Pratinas 64, 66–7, 71, 73, 75 ‘pre-dramatic’ vase paintings 397–406 private sector finance of City Dionysia 111–19, 113t, 121 prizes: actors 106, 121 City Dionysia 100–3, 103 n. 82, 112–14, 113t Great Panathenaia 98 processions: City Dionysia 98–100, 115 in Eumenides 232, 233

General Index in Hiketides 293, 313 Iacchus 268, 269 proems 210–12 Proerosia 293, 296 progression 187–8 Prometheus (Aeschylus) 457 Pronomos Vase 78 prophecy 205–6, 491 Protagoras (Plato) 26 Proteus (Aeschylus) 249 public sector finance of City Dionysia 91–111 rags 28, 350, 366, 504 ‘real time’ 239 reality 6, 40, 168–9, 222, 543 ‘composite reality’ 253, 255, 256 recapitulation 177, 178, 181–2, 200 reception studies 10, 11 reciprocity 298–9, 303–4, 306, 307 recognition 9, 419–20, 422–36 Libation Bearers 28 red-figure vase painting 403, 405, 406–13, 409–11, 410 ‘referential’ knowledge 213 release theory 384, 387, 388 reversals 15, 43 n. 18, 61, 334 Odyssey 187, 189 star choruses 279–80 Wasps 360 rhumbos 273 Ring (Wagner) 453–63 first performance 463–70, 464, 466–9 post-war performance 473, 474–5 ritual 7, 293, 305, 311–12, 330 Roman era 69, 71–2, 77–8 romantic drama 70, 75 n. 54, 79–83 sacrifices 96–7, 102, 116, 117 St Petersburg chous 377–8, 378–9, 380 satyr drama 16, 60–1, 66 n. 21, 67–8, 73–9 choruses 226 n. 26 masks 377 and the novel 81 overlapping genres 17 Proteus (Aeschylus) 249 in vase painting 398, 403, 405, 405 scenery change 67, 246 Schechner, R. 453 seals 421–2 masks on 431–5, 433, 435 seating capacity 109, 109 n. 126, 110, 238 n. 3, 340 n. 29 self-consciousness 24, 37

581

self-referencing 195–6, 222, 262, 282, 380 and audience engagement 39 in intaglios 424 Yeats’ Oedipus 538 Semnai Theai see Eumenides sexual themes 364, 369, 529 shape-shifters 504 Sicilian vase painting 9, 414–16 Sicily: and Aeschylus 129–30, 149 Athenian tragedy in 145–51 Deinomenids 131–7 Gela 130 and grain production 134–7 tragedy in 3–4 vase painting 9, 414–16 singers, Odyssey 165, 169 Sirens 267 slaves: in Acharnians 350–1, 354, 356 in Birds 363 in Clouds 356, 359 terracotta figurines 376–7 in Wasps 360 snakes 226–7, 245 Socrates 26, 356–60, 388, 500 Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (Yeats) 524 Sophocles (Sophokles) 66, 148–9, 429, 508, 509 Antigone 267–8, 269 Philoctetes 426, 428 and satyr drama 73 souls 265–7, 274, 274–5, 278–9 South Italy 3–4, 8, 9, 414–16, 439–49, 441, 443, 445–6 see also Stesichorus souvenirs 117–18, 118 n. 169 space 6, 237–56, 240–1 speeches, of messengers 29 stage machinery 72, 94 Stagecraft of Aeschylus, The (Taplin) 1–2, 6, 7, 378–9 stages 71 empty 242, 246 machinery 30, 355, 357 n. 30, 358, 365 in vase painting 407, 408, 442 star choruses 6–7, 262–86 Electra (Euripides) 277–80 Phaethon (Euripides) 277, 278, 280 status 191–3, 334, 336 Stesichorus 66, 81, 169–70, 240, 329 stilts 400, 401–2

582

General Index

storms 190, 190t Strattis 16, 18 n. 13, 27 n. 46, 30 sun 270, 279 superiority theory 384, 385, 388 Suppliants, see Hiketides Swing Painter 399–403, 400 symposion 162–3, 388, 397 sympotic poetry 161–3, 166–7 synoikism 137, 145 Syracuse 128–9, 137–9, 142–5, 149 Taplin, Oliver 1–12 on Aeschylus 5–6, 140, 237 on audiences 55 on choruses 44 on comedy 7–8, 15, 37–8, 380 Comic Angels 8, 374 and empty stages 242, 246 and the Eschilo d’Oro 128–9, 129 on the Eumenides 229, 232, 233, 252 Greek Tragedy in Action 1–2 Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad 4 and iconography 8–9 and the Odyssey translation 501–2 on the Oresteia 221 Pots and Plays 8–9, 439–40 and reception studies 10–11 Thessaly 149 The Stagecraft of Aeschylus 1–2, 6, 7, 379 The Wanderings of Odysseus 502–3, 503 Tarporley Painter 440–2, 441 Telephus 427, 428 Telephus (Euripides) 21, 318, 351 terracotta figurines 376–7, 388, 413 n. 59 theatres 72, 144–5 Abbey 527–30, 534, 538 Bayreuth 459 Dionysos 91–6 of Hieron II 144 and politics 143 and reality 222 scene changing 67 seating capacity 109, 109 n. 126, 110, 238 n. 3, 340 n. 29 and vase painting 4, 8, 146 see also stages Themistokles 148 Theodectes 68 Theoric Fund 95, 118 ‘Theory of Mind’ (TOM) 46–7, 49, 55 Theron 132, 141 Theseus Painter 406, 407

Thesmophoria 138, 139 Thesmophoriazusae (Aristophanes) 16, 22, 23, 318 circular dance 282–3 door scenes 365–6 and South Italian vase painting 27 Thesmophorion 132, 135, 136, 140 n. 36 Thespis 60, 66 Thingspiel movement 11, 484–6, 494–5 ‘three cuckoos’ 52–3 three-actor convention 29 Thucydides 99, 148 Thyiads 267 time 6, 237–56, 239, 241 Timotheus 67 tragedians 64–6 tragedy 15, 31 aetiology of 256 Aristotle and 334–5 and beauty 244 characteristics of 15 and comedy 32–3, 53–5 and democracy 131 and emotion 38 escape 23 function of 25 and gem iconography 423, 424–9, 424–31, 425, 428, 430, 433 and happy endings 68 in Hellenistic era 69 history of 63, 64–6, 66 n. 27, 67 n. 26 Illiad as 63 language characteristics 28 n. 48 overlapping genres 17 in Sicily 3–4, 130, 145–51 and social status 59–60 in South Italy 3–4 universality 50–4 women in 7 tragicomedy 31–2, 61, 62 n. 11, 66, 79 n. 67, 82 transformability of choruses 222 translation 12, 82, 497 see also Taplin; Wilamowitz; Yeats travelling nobles 191–3 tributary income 119–21 Triptolemos 145–7, 146, 147, 149 Trojans 147 Trojans (Euripides) 147 truth, and Homer 180–1 trygedy 2–3, 8 Turner, V. 453

General Index underworld 273 universality 50–4 vase painting 9, 172–3, 330–1 actors in 407–9, 408 ‘Birds’ krater 382–3 black-figure 399–403, 400, 402, 404 calyx krater in Syracuse 383–4, 383 Clinic Painter 410, 410 comedy 413, 420 n. 5 Corinthian 398–9 Dionysus 409 Dolon Painter 445–6, 446 dolphins 405–6 Italy (South) 9, 27 and masks 376–7 Niobid Painter 403, 405, 405 nudity 401 Odysseus in 447–8 Oreithyia Painter 146, 147 Painter of Berlin 403, 404 Painter of Heidelberg 407, 408 painter of Munich 401, 402 Penelope Painter 172 Pots and plays (Taplin) 8–9 ‘pre-dramatic’ 397–406 Pronomos Vase 78 red-figure 403, 405, 406–13, 409–11, 410 St Petersburg chous 377–8, 378–9, 380 Sicilian 9, 414–16

583

South Italian 414–16, 439–49, 441, 443, 445–6 stilts 401–2 Swing Painter 399–403, 400, 402 Tarporley Painter 440–2, 441 theatre and 4, 8, 146 Theseus Painter 406, 407 ‘Würzburg Telephus’ 8 Vitruvius 77–8 Wagner, Cosima 456, 464 Wagner, Richard 11, 453–77 Wagner, Wieland 11, 453, 471, 473, 476–7 wandering beggars 182–91, 198 n. 65 Wanderings of Odysseus, The (Taplin) 502–3, 503 Wasps (Aristophanes) 18, 20, 22, 360–1 Wealth (Aristophanes) 369–71 wealthy elite, donations 112 wheeled platforms 355 will of Zeus 204–14 women 7, 22–3 see also mothers ‘Würzburg Telephus’ 8 Xenophanes 171 Yeats, W.B. 12, 524–32 style of the text 533–9, 544–5 Zeus 204–14